Wow

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/07/31/funny-how-gender-never-came-up-during-bernankes-nomination-or-greenspans-or-volckers/?wprss=rss_ezra-klein

That piece above should be read by every journalist, politician, and hell, while we're at it, every American.

That is some weapons grade rhetoric there.

Oh, and the correct answer is that Larry Summers shouldn't be Fed Chairman because he's a dick, not because he has one.

Not The Way It's Supposed To Work

http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2013/07/the-next-nuclear-test-obamas-judicial-nominees.php?ref=fpblg

It would be nice if the electorate held the Senate Republicans accountable for basically abdicating their role in governing this country.  Same goes for the House, but gerrymandering being what it is, I'm not seeing that happen.

I'd love to see Democrats actually pick up a few seats this cycle, though it's unlikely to happen.  They have reasonably strong candidates in Kentucky and Georgia.  It would be nice to see the good people of Maine chuck out Susan Collins for someone who actually represents the interests of their state.  But South Dakota, Montana, Arkansas, Alaska, West Virginia, Louisiana and North Carolina will all be hard to hold.

UPDATE: More on the GOP's dysfunction.

Immigration Reform

All the bigots in the GOP who just don't like brown people may be one thing, but I do think a lot of the GOP Congresscritters realize that passing immigration reform isn't going to win them many votes in the short run.

Which is true.

But killing immigration reform - which looks like the outcome - will make sure that the GOP simply won't be competitive among Hispanics for a very, very long time.

Awesome

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2013/07/fear-of-a-female-fed-chief.html

Two Things

http://www.salon.com/2013/07/29/fast_food_strikes_intensify_in_seven_cities/

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/survey-4-in-5-in-us-face-near-poverty-no-work.php

Read those two stories.

In 1980, Ronald Reagan won the White House and commenced to undermine unions and rollback programs to help people get ahead.

In 1989, the Berlin Wall came down and soon everyone believe in Capitalism!

After a while, we replaced a market economy with a market society, where things like cost efficiency went beyond pricing goods to valuing human beings.  And as this market society took hold, we were given some real benefits.  For instance, NAFTA and other free trade agreements significantly cut the cost of many goods.

But as the economy as a whole benefited from declining prices for many goods, the real benefits went to the top of the economic ladder. The resulting focus on shareholders' claims to maximizing their returns at the expense of paying your employees a fair wage has created a perverse and unsustainable economy.

The Great Recession of 2008 should have been the summons that called us to look at the problems in the market society.  The ethos of the market society turned homes - that place where you are always welcome - into just another commodity to be flipped, traded, turned into CDOs... and the results of this we all know.

The single most important issue facing us is global warming.  But the second is the profound inequalities in our economy.

And for what it's worth, the GOP has no intention of solving either.

Well... Shit

When the Egyptian military turned out Morsi, it could have gone basically two ways.

It could have gone back to a Mubarak style military rule.

Or it could have been a Turkish-style check on Islamist nonsense in government.

Looks like it's headed back to Mubarak style repression.

Things could change, but unlike Syria, there is a role for the US to play here.  We need to get the military to stop killing people.  That's, like, a really good rule.  It doesn't have to be Philadelphia in 1787, but it can't be Tiananmen in 1989.

Well, That's Interesting

http://www.salon.com/2013/07/27/why_the_right_hates_detroit/

This is what is best called a "thought piece".

Encouraging Signs, But....

http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2013/07/gop-to-conservatives-stop-acting-crazy-over-obamacare.php?ref=fpa

It looks like we now have a "Gang" in the Senate of reasonable Republicans led by Minority Minority leader John McCain.  They moved the President's nominations past the filibuster rather than gut it.  Some of them even seem open to confirming judges.  They were the group that helped write immigration reform.

There has been more consistent pushback from the conservative think tank apparatus.  Norm Ornstein works for AEI, but I'm not sure he qualifies as part of the "conservative movement" anymore. But Ponnuru is no apostate.  And anyone who looks at the numbers has to understand the problems facing the GOP long term if they continue with their current behavior.

The House is - of course- a different beast.  And Tom Cole is among the more realistic and intelligent members of the House leadership.  It is notable this call did not come from Boehner.

So while there have been signs that the GOP wants to return to the old Washington traditions of log rolling and legislating, horse trading and pork barreling that made our country great, until I see real movement among the Crazy Caucus or efforts by Boehner to rein in the Crazy Caucus, I'm not holding my breath.

Still, it means that there is room to avoid the coming government shut down or at least make it brief.

But even those inside the GOP are saying that government by temper tantrum is ridiculous.

I Think We're Done Here

Alex Pareene turns Groundswell and the overall conservative think tank environment into a smoldering rubble pile.

The Death Of The Southern Strategy

Not enough of these guys left...

In 1968, Richard Nixon won the White House with a considerable assist from George Wallace.  From there on out, Republicans have used what Nixon's strategist Kevin Phillips called the Southern Strategy: pick off conservative white Southern Democrats with racial appeals.  It's why Reagan launched his 1980 campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi, why George HW ran the Willie Horton ad, why Romney decried the 47% and why the GOP has freaked the fuck out over "that one" in the White House.

But it looks like the efficacy of the Southern Strategy may have come to an end.

Obama fashioned a coalition of urban voters (not just African American, but predominantly so), young people, Hispanics, Asians, the non-religious and liberal whites.  And he rode that coalition to pretty convincing wins.  The 2008 election may have been a referendum on Bush, but 2012 showed that this coalition was not simply opposed to Bush.

Since November, the GOP gave some half assed lip service to "minority outreach".  Since then they have gutted the Voting Rights Act, probably killed Immigration Reform and introduced a slew of abortion restrictions in the state legislatures.  Outreach!

Josh Marshall puts it thusly:

At the moment we’re moving toward one party that is genuinely multi-racial in composition and another that is increasingly a white persons’ party, albeit having limited minority representation and a small number of non-white officeholders. There’s a small but substantial minority of the population that finds a new America where whites really aren’t the overwhelmingly dominant group, simply in numbers, very frightening. I’d put the number at somewhere between 20% and 25% of the population.* And they are overwhelmingly in the Republican party or they’re right-leaning independents who vote Republican.

But the problem, for the GOP, I think, goes deeper than that.

Barack Obama - I think the evidence shows - significantly under-performed among white voters.  In the "Cultural South", especially Appalachia, he performed much worse than John Kerry did among white voters.  There was not a lot happening between 2004 and 2008 to make white voters suddenly less likely to vote Democratic, except perhaps the attrition of the New Deal generation.

There was no "Bradley Effect" in the polling, but I think quite a few white people just didn't feel right voting for that Barack Hussein Obama fella.

As the story above notes, Hillary Clinton is well positioned to pick up some of those votes Obama lost, especially among white women.  Did you note how the GOP has started to swoon a little over Bill Clinton these days? Bubba was undoubtedly more "centrist" - especially on economic issues - than Obama.  The Clinton "brand" is still pretty strong in certain parts of the country.

What should have the GOP shaking in its boots (and I think is why smarter Congressional Republicans like McCain, Collin and Cole are bucking the Tea Party) is that Hillary Clinton could put an epic beat down out there in 2016.  If that happens, ACA gets implemented properly, which creates millions of potential new Democratic voters.  If that happens, the Supreme Court likely flips to the Democrats, with impacts on election law, commerce and all sorts of issues.  If that happens, the roadmap to a GOP White House gets very, very fuzzy, especially with Texas facing a demographic flip in the next decade.

Being the party of obstruction is not going to work.  Being the party of white people is not going to work.

* It's 27%.  It's always 27%.

Death Is Not An Option

If you had to listen to a bunch of stories on the Royal Spawn or Weiner's wiener, which would you listen to.

Death, as I mentioned, is not an option.

USMNT setting records

The US Men's National Soccer Team is kicking ass and taking names.

If you have time, watch the finals of the Gold Cup on Sunday.  It has been really entertaining.

Hilarious

Or as the Germans would say, Ausgelassen.

I took German for seven years and all I got was sprained vocal chords and a creeping sense of my multitude of inadequacies.

Predictions Are Hard, Especially About The Future

First the prologue from TBogg:

As you may have heard, Nate Silver, who is the Punxsutawney Phil of electoral prognosticators, emerging  from his Fortress of Gay Mathmagic every four years to choose our president for us so that we have more time to devote to eating Hot Pockets, watching reality teevee shows, and developing diabetes foot, has taken  leave from the New York Time to join ESPN where he will explain wins against replacement (WAR) and Defense-Independent Component ERA to Skip Bayless until he explodes in a flash of blue smoke that smells like fried Slim Jims.

Then the story.

http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2013/07/nate-silver-predictions.php?ref=fpa

Silver's political analysis is better than his sports analysis.  The reason is pretty simple.  Every sports contest can be subject to random chance or flukes.  But every election has dry runs in the form of polling that show us the lay of the land.

Put another way, it is impossible to predict the outcome of a game, because there is no data that tells you what will happen in any particular game, whereas elections come with polling and polling CAN tell you what will happen if you read it right.

All Silver did was read it right.

But then again, so did a number of other people.  Silver is not the Gay Wizard, he's just the highest profile practitioner of using polling averages.  Blumenthal, Wang, Moulitas, Cohn and plenty others called the election the same way.

This wasn't Silver vs. the Old School, it was Numbers vs. the Old School.  And Numbers won, with or without Silver.

The South Is The Problem

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/22/business/in-climbing-income-ladder-location-matters.html?hp&_r=0

The South has been different from the rest of the country since there was a country.  In order to placate the Lords of the Lash, we wrote a ridiculous clause into the Constitution giving states representation for 3/5s of a specimen of human chattel.  This allowed slave owner Thomas Jefferson to usher in an era of rule by these Lords of the Lash.  For Jefferson the only possible model of economic growth was agrarian.  He failed to see the possibilities of manufacturing, because outside of some people like Adam Smith and Alexander Hamilton, the idea of manufacturing benefiting the worker was too new to be understood.

And so the South remained stuck in an economic model of slave labor.  This was roughly the same economic system that built the pyramids and staffed the households of Rome.  Meanwhile, the North nurtured a bourgeois middle class of merchants, shopkeepers and manufacturers.  When the two sides came to blows, the economic system of the North overwhelmed the economic system of the South.

Despite some half-hearted attempts to re-order the Southern economy after the war, the South simply shifted from chattel slavery to debt peonage.  Debt peonage tied agrarian workers not to an "owner", but to their debts.  This meant that the South again depended on what we would now call a dysfunctional labor market.  Rather than price labor according to the demand for it, demand was managed by simply tying it up in sharecropping and tenant farming.

Efforts to unionize nascent industries in the South were quashed.  Efforts by the Populists to integrate poor whites and blacks into a cohesive political movement failed.  Populists like Tom Watson went from noting the economic similarities that poor whites and blacks faced to becoming a virulent racist.  Education was never a priority in a system dependent on poor agrarian workers.

Under the New Deal coalition, the South became a giant hog sucking on the public teat.  As a Democrat, FDR knew the value of Southern votes and as someone trying to reinvigorate the economy, he knew that "the South is the country's number one economic problem."  And so the Sunbelt was created.  It was created with cheap TVA energy and defense industries.  Eventually, the cheap labor and the effect of air conditioning opened the South to 20th century industries.

But in some crucial ways the South remained as it always was: suspicious of outsiders, hostile to the rights of the poor and fractured along racial lines.  It still clung to the old caste based system that informed chattel slavery and then Jim Crow.  Poor whites had suffered almost as much as blacks under this system, but they had benefited from being not-black and so tolerated the system.  Federal attempts to dismantle Jim Crow were as much an assault on them as on the old Bourbon elite.

Therefore, to be a white Southerner was to be suspicious of progress.  If you were in the elite, well it obviously worked well enough for you.  If you were poor, at least you weren't black.

And all of the efforts to create a social democratic system foundered on this basic fact.

The South was not interested in public education.  It was not interested in worker's rights.  It was not interested in racial equality.

The Pilgrims are often seen as the precursors to the United States, the first "Americans" (ignoring the people who already lived there).  We prefer our origins to be the authors of the Mayflower Compact and not the indentured servants and slaves toiling in the tobacco fields of Virginia.

But the South grew up fundamentally different from much of the rest of the country.  And the article above should surprise exactly no one.