The Iran Deal

It's a good one.  It rewards good behavior and punishes bad behavior.  It is infinitely preferable to no deal at all.

Senator Huckleberry Closetcase is hyperventilating over the deal, which should mean nothing in a sane world.  He is no doubt trying to run his own version of the Trump songbook, with a neo-con backbeat.

We don't want Iran to have a nuclear weapon.  This is the only way to make that happen.  No deal means a nuke.  Period.

Iran is not Nazi Germany.  No one is Nazi Germany except Nazi Germany.  The people who run Iran want a prosperous (religious) Iran.  They want trade and they want national greatness.  The sanctions worked, because it sacrificed trade and economic wellbeing in pursuit of national greatness.

In the end, this is a very good deal.  And the hyperventilating from the neo-cons is as good an endorsement as exists.

Walker, Wisconsin Dumbass

This is a good take on Walker's character liability that is exposed by his lack of a college degree.

Walker has that perverse combination of some intelligence and a total lack of curiosity that was so troubling in George W. Bush.  Education, it has been said, is primarily about learning what you don't know.  Walker couldn't be bothered with stuff that didn't fit his pre-ordained world view.  So he basically wrote off college until there was an opening on the Right Wing Gravy Train.

That's not stupid, but it's not the sort of wide-ranging curiosity and engagement with big questions that a President of the United States should have.  Even Reagan - who is referenced towards the end - had an engagement with Big Questions.

Walker will be a placeholder for the 0.1%.  Our transition to a rentier state would be complete.  And he's still my ultimate favorite to win the GOP nomination.

(Be back later to discuss the Iran deal.)

An Abusive Relationship

This Greece-EU(Germany) drama is beginning to feel like an abusive relationship.  Germany and the EU beat the shit out of the Greek economy.  Then when Greece starts talking about leaving, they soften a bit.  As soon as Greece makes noises about staying, they start getting the shit kicked out of them again.

And I don't say this to denigrate actual abusive relationships, because the people of Greece are undergoing real trauma.

The Greeks need to get the hell out now, before the Austerians destroy their country entirely.

Smelling the Barn

Getting close on the move.  While we will probably still be unpacking some things in October, we are close to putting the old house on the market and the new house is painted.  Slowly, order is creeping out from under chaos.

One thing I've re-discovered about moving is how much shit we accumulate for no real good reason.  It's a damned travesty.

What's Next?

The fight for health care has been going since the Roosevelt administration.  The Teddy Roosevelt administration.  And it's close to being won:

Twelve percent is still too high, but the trend line is encouraging.  And each percentage point is about 3 million people.  So, not nothing.  Costs are coming under control, health care inflation is slowing...pretty much everything universal health care advocates believed - simply by looking at the rest of the world - is coming to pass.

So what comes next?

First priority should be to revisit the public option.  ACA works, but it's a patchwork.  Ultimately, hopefully, it's a transition to single payer, and by creating a public option, we can begin the process of unifying health insurance under a single, governmental entity.

The second priority is probably both bigger and smaller.  America needs to rethink and retool its mental health establishment.  One of the tragedies of the Reagan Era was the decimation of mental health hospitals.  This - combined with social spending cuts - is what created the homeless problem in America.  While there are always people at the bottom of the economic ladder moving in and out of homelessness, the endemic shelter population is overwhelmingly populated with the mentally ill and the addicted.

As of now, because few insurers cover mental health and few providers accept what insurance is available, mental health care is similar to what health insurance used to be: something the well-off could afford and something the poor fell into.  Those with resources could afford good treatment from excellent professionals and those at the bottom fell into certain social services that had rudimentary mental health abilities.

Personally, I believe the world is crazy and we make it crazier every day.  The clock, for instance, is about 200 year old.  It's not something we evolved with, yet it dominates our day.  We evolved in small, kin-based groups, now we live in cities with thousands...millions of people.

We have become a world of stress and depression and self-medication.  Stress evolved to help you find resources so you wouldn't be eaten by a lion of to scramble up a cliff.  It's not supposed to be an everyday occurrence.  And yet it is, and we are made sick by it.

So simply expanding mental health coverage to the general population is the small part.  Changing our culture is going to take a lot more work.

You Are Your Party

As Republicans line up to defend the Confederate flag in Congress and Donald Trump continues to make racist, asinine statements about Mexicans, the GOP further cements its brand, notes Josh Marshall.

Trump is currently - unbelievably - the front runner in polls of the GOP electorate. Given that the GOP is more or less a sustain tantrum against the 21st century, it's fitting that Trump has become a standard bearer of the 27%.  And it's fitting that the House GOP could move to defend the CSA battle flag even as Southern governors and legislatures are moving away from it.

The removal of the flag from state grounds is a direct result of the Dylann Roof shootings and the grace that the families of the slain showed.  It is a moment of healing for the South, as modern conservatives rethink the symbol of secession and Jim Crow.  But the reflexive opposition of the GOP - Cleek's Law - means that even GOOD ideas from the Democrats are opposed by Republicans.
And before anyone says, "Both sides do it" just note that Obamacare was proposed as a Republican alternative to single payer and was signed into law by Mitt Romney in Massachusetts.

It's early and it's doubtful Trump wins the nomination.

But hooooooboy, if he did....

This Should Go Over Well

Jeb "JEB!" Bush has a suggestion for Americans who work minimum (or close to minimum) wage jobs: Work longer.

In a nation that has no universal child care or after school programs, this suggestion so obviously reeks of entitlement, that it's hard to see past that one salient point. Americans work harder and longer than any other developed economy in the world.  Bush's suggestion that people just "work longer" hours is the same tone-deaf blindness to the actual plight of working class Americans that Mitt Romney exhibited.

The issue with Romney wasn't his OWN wealth but rather his view of other people's lack of wealth.  That isn't restricted to Romney, that's the GOP's central problem.

Clinton Rules

I have my ambivalence about HRC.  I wonder if she fully appreciates the leftward swing of the electorate or if she ascribes to the centrist nonsense that derailed her husband.  Is she too close to Wall Street, and would she weaken Dodd-Frank?  How bellicose will her foreign policy be?

But I do think she's more liberal generally than her husband, and Bernie Sanders is making her be honest on those issues.  Frankly, the difference between the Sanders wing of the party and the Clinton wing isn't so much WHAT they want to happen as the speed and depth of that change.

However, there is no doubt that Clinton is taking body blows in the press.  And if you want to know why, and if you want to know why most of them strike me as unworthy of comment, you really need to read this piece.

Allen admits to what we instinctively know.  The press has a special animus towards the Clintons, Hillary in particular.  The reference to the royal family (now that the Kennedys seem to have shuffled off the national stage) is an interesting one.  The Bush family is much more dynastic than any since the Adams family, but the Clintons have a certain tabloid allure.

So, when my parents brought up concerns from Clinton's Cash, my first response is that most of it is probably tendentious bullshit.  Jeb "JEB!" Bush paid his wife $200K to be his wife.  (How hard must THAT job be?)  But whatever...Clintons blah blah blah.

In 2008, one reason I supported Obama was because I didn't want to return to the drama of the Clinton years.  But after 7 years of Reverend Wright, birth certificates, non-stop filibusters, complaints about Michelle's travel and lies about ACA, I'm prepared to be convinced that Democrats could elect the risen Christ and it wouldn't matter to the scandal obsessed media.

"Christ Walks On Water, Can He Not Swim?"

Not The Party of Jackson

Jon Chait hits upon something important.  The Democratic party is not the party of Jackson anymore.

It is the party of Franklin Roosevelt.  Jackson was a small "d" democrat, but mostly he was a populist.  And populism is a fascinating hybrid of liberalism and conservatism.  The Populists were broadly liberal in their goals, but conservative in their motivations.  Jackson himself represented a naive, backwards looking vision on economic matters, and his followers represented the provincial prejudices of their day.  So, too, did the Populists.

Jackson is represented by the likes of Jefferson Davis, Strom Thurmond and the other bulwarks of the Solid South.  But he isn't really the forerunner of Roosevelt, Kennedy, Johnson or certainly Obama.

After Gore's "defeat" in 2000, some Democratic strategists harkened back to the Southern Democrats of Jackson's lineage, groups that Clinton has somewhat captured in his presidential runs.

But Obama has finally managed to leave the Deep South and white Southerners behind.  He has assembled a coalition of college educated whites (from Jackson's Era: Whigs), African Americans, Hispanics, Asians and single women.

I suppose there is a question as to whether HRC can recapture some white Southern votes.  I'm guessing not many.  That ship has sailed and the realignment is complete.

With Friends Like These...

The defenders of the Confederate flag are argument enough to remove it from public grounds.

Grexit

So, the Greeks have turned down the IMF and ECB's terms.

Frankly, now is the time for the EU to kick Greece out.  It will be better for the Greeks and better for the EU.  It might be bad for the Euro, but the Euro is turning out to be a stupid freaking idea anyway.

Happy Fourth

Try not to shoot anybody in the face, unless you're Dick Cheney.  In which case, that's just what you do before lunch.

Inside Out

Just spent two hours with the kids watching my wife bawl her eyes out.... Thanks, Pixar.

(Actually, seriously... thanks.  That was a masterpiece.)

The Donald

Donald Trump is now pretty much running second for the GOP nomination.  He's second in the polls in Iowa and New Hampshire.

A substantial part of the Republican Party is really nothing more than a sustained tantrum against the 21st century.

Marriage Equality

There was a touching moment when the SCOTUS legitimized same sex marriage across the country.  S.E. Cupp, a conservative talking head on cable news, was near tears when she said that the GOP had to get on the right side of history, because the people advocated for marriage equality were "patriots."  Indeed, the movement for marriage equality was in many ways a conservative movement, as LGBT people were simply asking to join a fairly conservative institution.  And - if you're under 50 - chances are you feel pretty great about this, or at least you don't care.

But the problem Cupp was touching on is real for the GOP.  They have to cater to a narrow (and narrow minded) group of aging religious conservatives.  It's noteworthy that many young evangelicals supported same sex marriage.  The GOP is aging itself out of competitiveness in national elections.  Because cities are overwhelming younger and browner than the country side, the GOP will continue to control the House beyond their popular vote count.

When the GOP runs against marriage equality and immigration and Obamacare, they are quickly alienating huge swaths of the population.  That will not win them the White House.