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Romney Redux? Don’t count on it

Sunday, February 16, 2014

Mitt Romney's minions are pushing to get him nominated once again, apparently, with Mitt himself playing the no doubt calculated role of the reluctant bride. Apparently they think the guy who connected so well with the American people the last time will triumph in 2016, given a second chance to get people to vote in line with how the “unskewed” polls said they should.

In fact, there is good reason for the Republican Party to be turning to Mitt, though it is proof of the depth to which mainstream Republican thought has fallen from what is acceptable (when presented unvarnished) to the American people. The stable of “moderate” Republicans is virtually empty. In fact, it has been empty for a while; ;though our punditry would no doubt place Koch funded Scott Walker in a stall. It is a mark of Republican desperation that they may have nowhere else to turn but to the despised Mitt. Even before his fall, Christie was an unlikely savior; he is a thoroughly unpleasant man who is constitutionally incapable of projecting even the wooden soulessness that got Romney through the process in 2012.

But my advice to Mitt is that he stand by his protestations. Despite recent events (debt ceiling votes, etc.) the inmates are more fully in control of the asylum than they have ever been. 2016 will be their year; they will not settle for another moderate, Romney in particular. His foes in the primaries will eat him alive.

Which means we sane people have a lot to fear. It is by no means a sure thing that Hillary can beat Ted Cruz, or another of his ilk. The Democratic Party appears, at least at this point, to have accepted the inevitability of a Clinton candidacy, with all that implies: more Wall Street coddling, paying lip service and nothing more to any steps to actually reverse what truly is a road to serfdom.

In 2002 the Democrats did quite poorly in the mid terms. I would argue that was because they presented no alternative to Bush; in particular they failed to oppose his projected Iraq War, which was deeply unpopular with the Democratic base. Elections were lost not because our voters went with Republicans, but because they did not vote at all, and who could blame them. The same fate, I believe, awaits us in 2016. There is a pervasive belief in this country that something is deeply wrong. Republicans deal with these feelings by playing to resentments against the powerless. Cruz is quite capable of that. Democrats, to be successful, must appeal to resentments against the powerful while proposing ways to reduce that power. (There was this guy whose initials were “FDR”…what was that he said about “welcom[ing] their hatred”?) Clinton will run on warmed over Clintonomics. That's what got us here in the first place; people sense that and, for many, the choice between a Cruz and a Clinton will be best made by simply not voting. Cruz and his ilk, one of whom will be the candidate, may be so crazy that he will drive us to the polls holding our noses, or may lose despite reduced turnout, but we have much to fear.

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Friday Night Music, a Strange Double Header

Friday, February 14, 2014

We are currently celebrating the 50th anniversary of the arrival on these shores of the greatest popular music group that ever existed. I hesitate to call them the greatest rock ‘n roll group, because their range was so much broader, so in that narrow category we will let the Stones reign supreme. But no one beats the Beatles for all around musical versatility. I’ve been listening to their entire catalog as I go back and forth to work. I created a playlist on my iPod and sorted the songs by length, so as I go the songs trend toward the later stuff, but lots of the early stuff pops up as well. It’s truly incredible. It’s all great, even the stuff you hardly ever hear.

Almost everyone alive back then remembers where they were a few months before, when JFK was killed. Those of us of a certain age also remember that first Ed Sullivan show, when the band that only recently hit the airwaves appeared live on television. I am ashamed to confess that I opposed watching the Beatles, not because I didn’t want to (I did), but because I wanted to torture my older sister. We insisted on watching Walt Disney, which, as I recall, was running what we would now call a miniseries about a character named the Scarecrow. Thankfully, I lost that argument. Unfortunately, there are no complete songs from the Sullivan show on youtube; no doubt because the Sulllivan franchise prefers to have us buy its DVDs.

So, I think these videos represent the next best thing; a couple of videos from a Beatles concert in DC in 1964.

Their own songs were great, and if they covered a song, it was always better than the original.

Now for the strange part. Shirley Temple was by no means a musician,but I feel I must pause to pay tribute. Her movies were played repeatedly on television in those more innocent years way back even before the Beatles. I saw them all, I’m sure. Back then I would have impatiently sat through dance scenes like the following (I would want to get back to the story), in which she takes a turn with Bill Bojangles Robinson (Mr. Bojangles, himself)who appeared with her in quite a few flicks. Apparently, poor Mr. Robinson had most often to play addle brained characters, as was only fitting for a black man, but I understand Ms. Temple herself was genuinely fond of him as a human being. She herself was certainly flawed, inasmuch as she grew up to be a Republican, but we must remember she did so when one did not have to be certifiably crazy to make that choice. And, give her credit, given the weird life she lived as a child, she grew up to be a pretty sane individual. Anyway, here she is dancing with Mr. Bojangles.

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Once again, New England Rules

Friday, February 14, 2014







Yet another national map plotting out the stupid versus the…well…not so stupid. This one maps out the rate at which people have signed up for insurance since Obamacare went into effect. This map does not fit comfortably within the typical pattern, mostly due to the fact that some of the Northern states have right wing governors (think Wisconsin and poor Maine, which suffered again from its propensity to vote for independents). But the pattern is nonetheless broadly consistent, with three New England states (including Connecticut) in the top five. Massachusetts was excluded from the sweepstakes, because Romneycare has been in effect there for years, so people were already signed up.

One surprise, the state of Kentucky, which led the league in one area of stupid (smoking), scores in the top five. Again, this has to do with the governor involved, because the people of Kentucy had the (for them) unusual good sense to elect a Democratic governor, who has enthusiastically embraced the law and signed up massive numbers of people. By the way, this means that McConnell must navigate his way through a right wing anti-Obamacare minefield in order to get renominated, and then, if the Democrats have any sense, a barrage of commercials featuring Kentuckians complaining that McConnell wants to take away their health care.

On a slightly different note, but still on the subject of right wing stupid, Paul Krugman notes that the same math whizzes that brought us the Romney presidential victory are proving mathematically that people are not signing up for Obamacare. With enemies like them, who needs friends?

Caveat: All of this does not mean I think that Obamacare is a good system. It is better than what we had, but it is yet another example of taking a Rube Goldberg approach to solving our problems, always with the unspoken objective of shoving money toward the 1%. No that's not fair to .99 percent of us. Make that shoving money toward the .01%.


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Billionaire derangement syndrome

Wednesday, February 12, 2014

Maybe Jeff Bezos made a mistake buying the Washington Post. It's entirely possible he could have spread his particular brand of propaganda far more cheaply by buying airtime on PBS. That's what a billionaire who made his money scamming people at Enron has done:

On December 18th, the Public Broadcasting Service’s flagship station WNET issued a press release announcing the launch of a new two-year news series entitled “Pension Peril.” The series, promoting cuts to public employee pensions, is airing on hundreds of PBS outlets all over the nation. It has been presented as objective news on  major PBS programs including the PBS News Hour.

However, neither the WNET press release nor the broadcasted segments explicitly disclosed who is financing the series. Pando has exclusively confirmed that “Pension Peril” is secretly funded by former Enron trader John Arnold, a billionaire political powerbroker who is actively trying to shape the very pension policy that the series claims to be dispassionately covering.

In recent years, Arnold has been using massive contributions to politicians, Super PACs, ballot initiative efforts, think tanks and local front groups to finance a nationwide political campaign aimed at slashing public employees’ retirement benefits. His foundation which backs his efforts employs top Republican political operatives, including the former chief of staff to GOP House Majority Leader Dick Armey (TX). According to its own promotional materials, the Arnold Foundation is pushing lawmakers in states across the country “to stop promising a (retirement) benefit” to public employees.

Despite Arnold’s pension-slashing activism and his foundation’s ties to partisan politics, Leila Walsh, a spokesperson for the Laura and John Arnold Foundation (LJAF), told Pando that PBS officials were not hesitant to work with them, even though PBS’s own very clear rules prohibit such blatant conflicts. (note: the term “PBS officials” refers interchangeably to both PBS officials and officials from PBS flagship affiliate WNET who were acting on behalf of the entire PBS system).

To the contrary, the Arnold Foundation spokesperson tells Pando that it was PBS officials who first initiated contact with Arnold in the Spring of 2013. She says those officials actively solicited Arnold to finance the broadcaster’s proposal for a new pension-focused series. According to the spokesperson, they solicited Arnold’s support based specifically on their knowledge of his push to slash pension benefits for public employees.

via Pandodaily to which I was directed by Firedoglake

I'll leave it to David Sirota at Pandodaily and the good folks at Firedoglake to lambaste PBS. I want to return to a theme that has been well worn in this blog. This is yet another example of something I've noted before. Mr. Arnold's fortune is not threatened by public employee pensions, just as Pete Peterson will remain rich whether or not he is successful at destroying social security. Yet another example that to many billionaires, it “is not enough that [they] succeed, everyone else must fail”. There is probably a category in the DSM that applies, but if you're rich enough its okay to be a sociopath.

Filed in Corporate Crime | | Comments (0)

Brooks: All you need is to believe.

Tuesday, February 11, 2014

I have made a number of sacrifices for the sake of this blog, but today I perhaps Above and beyond; I read a David Brooks column. Yes, I know somewhere there's probably a blog that offers to read David Brooks so I don't have to, much like the folks at Newshounds masochistically watch Fox for my benefit. Nonetheless, today I read Brooks myself, since the teaser on the Times website was so tempting that I overcame my aversion and dismissed the certainty that the process would be more painful than the results would warrant.

Actually, the teaser led me to conclude that Brooks thesis of the week is that upward mobility is a thing of the past because we no longer believe in the American Dream. But no, it's not quite as bad as that, though my guess is that Brooks would endorse that premise too. Rather, Brooks advances the notion that the decline in geographical mobility is caused by a lack of faith in the American Dream; i.e., young men are no longer “going West” for opportunity, because they (and young women too) no longer believe that opportunity beckons from other quarters.

It never occurs to Brooks that there may be no opportunity beckoning, and one by one he dismisses such trivialities as the facts that homeowners are stuck with underwater mortgages and labor markets have become, as he puts it “homogenous”. Nor does he mention the fact that the job market sucks everywhere, unless you count Texas, which claims its economy isn't doing so bad, since they have managed to reduce nearly everyone to the minimum wage. (Oh, on second look it's doing terribly, but it is chock-a-block full of minimum wage jobs that I'm sure Brooks feels should make any red blooded American not named Brooks ready to pull up stakes and migrate to the land of crazy.)

Brooks will have none of these liberally biased facts:

No, a big factor here is a loss in self-confidence. It takes faith to move. You are putting yourself through temporary expense and hardship because you have faith that over the long run you will slingshot forward. Many highly educated people, who are still moving in high numbers, have that long-term faith. Less-educated people often do not.

via The New York Times

Brooks is befuddled. He can't seem to understand how things could come to this sorry pass:

Thirty years ago, a vast majority of Americans identified as members of the middle class. But since 1988, the percentage of Americans who call themselves members of the “have-nots” has doubled. Today’s young people are more likely to believe success is a matter of luck, not effort, than earlier generations.

Whatever could have induced those young people to come to the conclusion that success in this country is a matter of luck. Oh, right, because it is. But don't confuse Brooks with the facts, much less expect him to inquire into said facts. If there is any empirical evidence that effort in this economy leads to success then maybe Brooks should cite us to it, rather than assert it as dogma. As one small but incredibly important example of where luck plays a part, consider the difference it makes, effort or not, if a person can emerge from our educational system unburdened by mountains of student loans. That is a matter of luck, in that it is almost solely a function of the parents one happens to have. Brooks, in his pseudo-Burkean way, is just joining in the usual Republican game of blaming the victims.

When I first saw the above noted teaser the first thing that came to mind was Peter Pan (the play, not the cartoon or book). In one scene poor Tinkerbell is dying, and the only way for her to survive is for the audience to join Peter in affirming an absolute belief in fairies. Brooks is asking the young people of America to do precisely the same thing. The American Dream, if it was ever a reality, has been destroyed by the people for whom Brooks carries water twice a week. You might as well believe in fairies. At least in the play Tinkerbell survived, but it's really unlikely that the upcoming generation in this country will live in a nation where they are better off than their parents or grandparents, no matter how hard they try. Brooks and his ilk have taken care of that.

Update: As Dean Baker documents here, there is ample reason for both those with only high school degrees and those with college degrees to be pessimistic.

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A Mystery

Friday, February 7, 2014

Here's something that has me completely bolloxed. I learned today that:

Medicare is paying “grossly excessive” amounts for vacuum erection systems, informally known as penis pumps, which are generally used by men who fail to cure their erectile dysfunction problem with drugs such as Viagra.

via Talking Points Memo

This actually has me bolloxed on two fronts. First, I thought that penis pumps were fictional devices that only existed in spam emails. This truly is an age of miracles and wonders.

But my bolloxment on that front, on a scale of 1 to 10, is a mere 1, while it is a full 10 on another front.

Read the quote again. Our tax dollars are going to pay for devices that serve only one purpose. As Mike Huckabee should be saying: “These men are helpless without Uncle Sugar coming in and providing for them a prescription for penis pumps because they cannot control their libido or their reproductive system without the help of government.”

The thing is I'm sure that Huckabee is saying such things, and I'm sure that the entire right is similarly outraged about taxpayer dollars being shelled out in massive amounts just so men can-not to put too fine a point on it-fuck. Not only that, these are men who are directly opposing the will of god, since if he wanted them to “stand to” as the Bard put it, He would have stiffened their resolve, so to speak, quite naturally.

The thing is, I'm sure the right is incensed about these sex crazed men who are trying to frustrate god's will. Why is the liberal media refusing to cover their complaints about this shameful and immoral waste of taxpayer dollars? It's a mystery, for sure.

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Utah: Stupid and proud of it

Thursday, February 6, 2014

Yesterday I noted that Utah was in the anomalous position of leading the nation in one measure of sanity: it has the lowest smoking rate in the country. This is an example of the stopped clock effect. It's a state controlled by a religious sect, so for the most part the people there are bat shit crazy, but they don't believe in smoking, so like a stopped clock…

Anyway, Utah has now proven beyond doubt that the smoking measure was an outlier; that it does indeed belong firmly in the camp of the stupid. It has done this not just statistically (we'll get to that later), but in a legal brief filed in a federal court, opposing gay marriage.

In their opening brief in support of Utah’s appeal of a ruling that the state’s ban on same-sex marriages is unconstitutional, the Beehive State’s lawyers argued Monday that one reason to avoid marriage equality was the “correlation between genderless marriage and lower birthrates.” […]
It is also striking that fertility and birthrates tend to be markedly lower in nations and states that have embraced same-sex marriage. For example, the birthrate in states (and Washington, D.C.) that have adopted a genderless marriage definition is significantly lower than the national average. In fact, the six lowest birthrate states have all adopted that redefinition, while none of the nine highest birthrate states have done so.
In a footnote, the attorneys reference the Centers for Disease Control’s National Vital Statistics Reports – Births: Final Data for 2012, which identified the six states with the lowest birthrates in that year were Connecticut (10.2 live births per 1,000 estimated population), Maine (9.6), Massachusetts (10.9), New Hampshire (9.4), Rhode Island (10.4), and Vermont (9.6). The states with highest birthrates in that report Texas (14.7) and Utah (18.0).

via Daily Kos

Now, I think we can all concede that it is vitally important that people be born, but it is not at all clear that they should be born at quite the rate at which they are born in Texas, particularly because the people born in Texas, for the most part, grow up to be Texans. But even the Texans are outdone by the people of Utah, who are inflicting new Mormons on the world at a pace that is truly worrisome.

Once again, we sane people lead the way. We are replacing ourselves, but prefer not to inflict surplus people on the world, and those we do inflict are likely to be …well….smarter than those inflicted on a long suffering world by the people of Texas and Utah.

It should come as no surprise that, while the correlation Utah's lawyers cite exists, it is not at all clear it has anything to do with whether gay marriage is legal or not. It once again appears to more closely correlate along red state/blue state lines, with our fair New England once again at the top of the sanity pack. Why am I not surprised?

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The pattern persists

Wednesday, February 5, 2014

This morning we learned that CVS will stop selling cigarettes in October. In the course of the article in the Times, some statistics:

Some 18 percent of American adults smoke, down from 42 percent in 1965. In places like New York City, which has used a combination of steep taxes on cigarettes and bans on smoking in most places to discourage smokers, the decline is even greater, down to 14 percent.

via New York Times

So this got me thinking. “Gosh”, I thought, “I wonder if there's a disparity among the states so far as smoking goes, and I wonder if it fits the typical pattern of the South leading the pack in dumbness”. Well, okay, I confess, I didn't really put it that way, because once I posed the question I knew what the answer would be, but there are some surprises.

First of all, neither Alabama nor Mississippi lead the pack in dumbness, though, of course, they're close. Somewhat surprisingly, the winner is Kentucky, not usually at the top of the pack (though close to it, I'll concede) in dumbness.

Also, continuing a disturbing trend that first appeared in our discussion of schools teaching creationism, Indiana and Ohio repeat as Northern outliers in the ranks of the stupid.

Some surprises among the leaders. Utah is number one, presumably because the state is well stocked with Mormons. They have to believe a lot of absurd things, but they do have the benefit of a smoking ban. So, although they do lead the pack on this one, it's not because they're smarter, it's because they're brain dead, but in a good way in this one small respect.

It's no surprise that New England has four states in the top ten, with our fair state pulling in at number 10. (We really should be doing better)

There may be some way in which the red state crazies beat us in something we can all agree is a good way. I'll keep looking, but I don't really expect to find anything.

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All Hail, FDR

Wednesday, February 5, 2014

If I had to summarize my problems with Barack Obama, I think it would boil down to this:

He had the chance to be an FDR and chose to be a Herbert Hoover.

If I had to summarize my problem with the modern Democratic Party it would boil down to this:

The Democratic Party takes every opportunity to distance itself from its own alleged beliefs and refuses to actively advocate for a government role in addressing social and economic problems. This one needs a little unpacking. It's not that they are against using government, it's that they are apologetic about it rather than upfront and aggressive. That's no way to win an argument, especially against the modern Republican Party.

FDR, the guy who “welcomed their hatred”, didn't back down and didn't apologize. We need more like him. But, as Beverly Bandler at Consortium News Points out (read the whole thing), the Democrats have largely abandoned FDR, though historians have not:

These days, the Democratic Party acts more like an enabler of the Republican Party as it seeks to poison the memory of the 32nd president and bury the significance of what FDR accomplished. Instead of highlighting Roosevelt’s remarkable legacy, today’s Democrats seem afraid to argue the point that government is vital to a successful society. They shy away from that debate despite the fact that the lessons of Roosevelt are central to solving the problems that the nation faces in 2014.

Besides the mainstream Democrats and their timidity, many average Americans suffer from “terminal historical amnesia” and appear oblivious of the history of FDR’s era. Too many who came of age in the years of Ronald Reagan (and after Reagan) bought into his idiom that “government is the problem” and his prescription of ”trickle-down economics” (giving massive tax cuts to the rich and trusting that their investments and spending will spill over to raise the living standards of working- and middle-class Americans).

For some Americans, it doesn’t even matter that Reagan’s nostrums have failed miserably, as today’s rich have amassed huge wealth – and the power that goes with it – while pretty much everyone else has stagnated or lost ground.

Still, an appreciation of FDR’s accomplishments and a recognition of Reagan’s mistakes are alive among serious historians. When 238 participating presidential scholars took part in the Siena College Research Institutes Survey of U.S. Presidents in 2010, Franklin Roosevelt ranked as the top all-time chief executive. Ronald Reagan was not even in the top ten.

If only that awareness could penetrate Official Washington’s conventional wisdom. Though President Barack Obama has highlighted the problem of income inequality, which Roosevelt ameliorated and which Reagan exacerbated, Obama has shied away from making the forceful argument that Reagan was just a skillful front man for the same forces of “organized money” that Roosevelt fought.

Obama also has failed to dislodge the resistance to activist government that is represented by Republicans, the Tea Party and the Right – and some analysts wonder if Obama and the Democrats really want to do so.

Economics professor Richard D. Wolff says ”Obama and most Democrats are so dependent on contributions and support from business and the rich that they dare not discuss, let alone implement, the kinds of policies Roosevelt employed the last time U.S. capitalism crashed.”

via Consortium News

Amen to all that. No one ever said that the best defense is a good defense, but that's what we always play. Regrettably, there are no FDRs out there. If there was a god, I'd be praying for relief from a Hillary Clinton candidacy, but it appears that our doom is sealed on that front. Far preferable would be an Elizabeth Warren or a Sherrod Brown, but the stars are not properly aligned. We have, at best, another seven years of Democratic spinelessness to endure.

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Everything is the opposite of what it is, isn’t it?

Wednesday, February 5, 2014

Only the American media can turn good news into bad, and it comes as no surprise that in doing so they are carrying water for Republicans. The CBO says that as a result of the Affordable Care Act, some ordinary Americans will have the opportunity to work less and still have health insurance, to the tune of 2.6 million job equivalents.

Now, most people with even an elementary grasp of economics would think somewhat along these lines. If an elderly person in poor health can retire early because he or she doesn’t have to work in order to maintain health insurance then that frees up a job for some presently unemployed worker to fill. After all, we must assume that elderly person was performing a needed function and the employer will want that function filled. Given our present oversupply of unemployed, isn’t this a good thing.

If enough people choose not to work, then it may even put some upward pressure on the wages being paid to all of us peons, and it might, in some microscopic way, reverse or at least slow the flow of money to those at the top.

So, this is really all good news, but the media spins it as bad news. Doing so is in the interest of only one group in this country, or make that two: Republicans and corporate fat cats, the latter of which still run the Republican Party.

I swear I came to these conclusions before I read Dean Baker’s post to similar effect, but I was glad to get confirmation of my initial reaction.

By the way, I stole the title of this post from John Lennon, who stole it from Harry Nilsson.

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