A Note on the Ads

This is the obligatory post where I note that I don't pick the ads on my site.  AdSense picks them based on some sort of word search algorithm.  I write "The Tea Party is full of morons" and it sees "Tea Party" and pops in a political ad.  Most of those ads are bought and paid for by conservative groups.

At this point there's so much coin flowing into these conservative groups that they don't know how to spend it apparently.

CAPITALISM!

Politics Ain't Beanbag

Being a Falcon's fan in New England means that you don't get to see many Falcons' games.  You are dependent on ESPN highlights and the occasional national game.

Since I am home with Heffley (the new pooch) I settled down to watch ESPN's NFL Primetime.  I figured that they would want to show highlights from a very entertaining game between Atlanta and Tampa Bay - teams that both sat at 5-2 with the winner taking the lead in the NFC South.

I had to wait until the very end of the show.

Much of the beginning of the show was the firing of Wade Phillips and there were a number of entertaining games on the day.  But ultimately, games that involve Brett Favre or the Cowboys or New England...They lead.

The games between good teams who don't have a built in media narrative don't get the same attention.  The Giants blow out of the Seahawks came before the Falcons-Bucs game.

Here's where I pivot to politics...

There is practically no difference between the media's obsession with Brett Favre or Mike Vick than there is with the media narratives in Washington DC.  The fact is, there are narratives out there that are written in the press box before the kick off, and the game itself almost doesn't matter.

Case in point, Nancy Pelosi will not be back as Minority Leader in the House.  Fox especially was pushing this letter from whatever is left of the Blue Dogs asking her to step down.  The media narrative is that she is a failure and should go.  She couldn't possibly be a good minority leader after losing the speaker's chair.

The facts are different.  A) There is no letter, or if there is no one has signed it.  B) Pelosi was actually a strikingly successful Speaker, passing several landmark pieces of legislation in tandem with the Senate and a ton more legislation that the Senate never acted on.  C) She was minority leader in 2006.  That worked out OK for the Democrats.

Nancy Pelosi is a lousy interview and a lousy orator.  But she did an exceptional job shepherding complex legislation through a fractious caucus.  Maybe there would be some merit in bringing in new blood, but if your idea of new blood is Steny Hoyer... Pardon me if I don't follow.

As Nate Silver articulated in the column linked below, the problem was that Democrats didn't vote in the numbers they did in 2008 and the economy drove many independents to the GOP, perhaps entirely as a protest vote, since there doesn't seem to be much consensus on what policies the GOP will pursue.

Putting Steny Hoyer into the Minority Leader's post was something that reinforces the DC narrative that America is a Center-Right nation.  And the only way to succeed in American politics is to move right, constantly and relentlessly Rightwards.

Eventually, if we keep moving right, we wind up where Texas is today, threatening to "secede" from Medicaid and Social Security.  A position so bat-shit insane, it's difficult to even argue against.  You're left sputtering..."Wha... Wha... How... Are you mad?"  But that's where the Rightward shift in the GOP logically ends up: nullification and secession.

America is a much more complicated entity than the Center Right Nation meme of the DC press corps.  DC itself is in many ways a Center Right Town, more responsive to power than to policy, politics to governance.  And it is in power and politics that the GOP excels.

But I'm supposed to care about the 1-7 Dallas Cowboys because someone decided they were "America's Team" thirty years ago.  And I'm supposed to accept that we're a Center Right Nation because those that genuflect before the powerful in DC and Wall Street say it's so.

Instead, I think I'll get GoogleTV and see if I can get Falcons games in New England.  I think I'll pursue my own stories instead.

The End of The World As We Know It, And I Feel Fine

So, I read the whole Der Spiegel piece (in the original English) which you can read here:
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,726447,00.html

It very concisely lays out - in clear Prussian logic - why America is DOOOOOOOMED.  And, yeah, we probably are sort of doomed.  No, not probably.  We're DOOOOOOOOMED.

Basically, we have an unsustainable way of life.  We value the wrong things and then pursue those wrong things through dubious methods.  And it's not ACORN's fault, or Clinton's, or Greenspan's, or Bush's, or Fannie Mae's.  It's all of us.  (Although our future Teutonic overlords put a larger share of the blame on the Right.)

The broader question is: Are we OK with that?  Is American Exceptionalism so ingrained in us that we might as well swallow the business end of a shotgun if we slip to number two?

Britain fell pretty far down the ladder of awesomeness, but it doesn't suck to be British.  Except for the weather, but with global warming the weather will suck for all of us anyway.

What would it mean if we forfeited our (atypical) place at the top of the ladder?  China's going to supplant us economically at some point anyway.  Can we live an a multipolar world?

I find myself strangely ambivalent about not being Top Dog anymore.

Where will the new Teddy Roosevelt come from?

We live in the new Gilded Age.

There are ample examples of the extraordinary inequality present in our country today.  The Citizens United case was perhaps the slap in the face that the media needed to pay attention to the new predominance of money.  Or maybe it was TARP for Wall Street and no mortgage cramdown for Maple Street.  Or maybe the evidence just became too much to ignore.

A slow understanding crept into America towards the end of the 19th century that the presence of great wealth in America had a corrosive effect on the very institutions of democracy.  The Populist movement, in the words of Mary Ellen Lease, tried to "raise less corn and more hell."  They were routinely written off by the Eastern press, and they were equal parts Dirty Fucking Hippie and Tea Party Patriot.

In the election of 1896, the issue of wealth took the forefront in the Presidential campaign.  The divisive issue of the day was monetary policy, namely would the currency expand and allow debtors a chance to escape their debts or would it remain contracted and serve existing wealth.  William Jennings Bryan and the Democrats ran on free silver and an inflationary currency.  William McKinley ran for the restrictive gold based currency favored by the wealth.

McKinley won and it wasn't close.  Despite his appeal to the debt ridden farmers, Bryan was too scary for people in the East to welcome into power.  Industrial workers were told that if Bryan won on Tuesday, don't bother coming to work on Wednesday.  Bryan would continue to run for President and lose, because he was just too radical for the middle class, too associated with the raging Populist farmers.

When McKinley - fresh off his victory over Spain - ran for re-election in 1900, Senator Platt of New York wanted to get rid of his new crusading reformist governor, Teddy Roosevelt.  Roosevelt, having won laurels in Cuba, had been swept into power in Albany and proved to be beyond the control of Platt and the Republican Party bosses.  Platt figured the perfect place to hide away this brash reformer was in the office that has been described as a "bucket of warm piss": The Vice Presidency.

Enter, Leon Czolgosz.  An anarchist, Czolgosz met McKinley at an Exposition in Buffalo and shot him.  Suddenly, hiding Teddy Roosevelt in the Vice Presidency was not that smart a move for power players like Platt.

Roosevelt was such a powerful and charismatic figure, his exploits so much larger than life, that he succeeded where Bryan and the Populists had failed.  While his reform were not of the same quality or quantity as either Wilson's or Franklin Roosevelt's, the fact is, Teddy Roosevelt made everything else possible.

He changed the office of the Presidency, making the President an advocate for the people and insuring them a "Square Deal".  He also changed the scope of what the government would consider "its business."  Grover Cleveland had said, "The people should support the government; the government should not support the people" in response to a drought that cried out for governmental relief.  Teddy created the Food and Drug Administration and broke up the occasional trust in his efforts to provide a more even playing field for the American people.

He was so popular that just a few years after his death, he was already being enshrined on Mount Rushmore next to Lincoln, Jefferson and Washington himself.

But we forget that it was all because of Leon Czolgosz, his demented ideas and his pistol.

The party of Wilson, FDR, Harry Truman and LBJ has recently elected Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.  They have not been - to this point at least for Obama - transformational Presidents the way that Teddy and Franklin were.

It is pointless at this point to hope that the GOP would ever return to its Rooseveltian roots, so we'll just leave them out of it.

To be a transformational President, you have to transform things, ya know?  And to transform things, you have to have the marriage of charisma, ability and boldness that Teddy Roosevelt possessed.  Clinton and Obama possess immense charisma and ability, but boldness isn't perhaps their defining attribute.  Veteran Hillary people admit that she would have dropped Health Care Reform early in favor of jobs and the economy.  She would have muted the losses in 2010, perhaps, but lost the opportunity at fundamentally changing America.

Maybe Obama IS transformational, and I'm simply too close to see the transformation.  But I don't think so.  I think he's an important pivot point, perhaps.  But I worry that being able to win election and being able to transform the nation are mutually exclusive.  Teddy became President because of an accident.  Wilson became President because Teddy split the vote with Taft.  FDR became President because the global economy collapsed.  LBJ signed Civil Right legislation by the light of the eternal flame on Kennedy's grave.  Reagan needed another economic collapse and an unprecedented hostage crisis (and a near miss assassination) to transform the government.

From where will the circumstances arise that give us someone who can truly change America?

Obama has said he is opposed to extending the Bush tax cuts for millionaires.  But he will.  He will have to in order to keep the ones for the middle class.  It's perfectly pragmatic and reasonable to do so. But it will further cement the idea that America has a government of the wealthy, by the wealthy and for the wealthy.

And so the rich will continue to thrive while the middle and working class continue to suffer and decline.  And we will wait for the day when circumstances finally deliver us from the New Gilded Age.

Update:
http://www.balloon-juice.com/2010/11/07/new-vocabulary-word-plutonomy/

Update II: The Germans Weigh In
You should read the whole thing (there's a link).  Here's an excerpt about the Idiocracy, but it also touches on the unsustainablility of the American way of life.
The country is reacting strangely irrationally to the loss of its importance -- it is a reaction characterized primarily by rage. Significant portions of America simply want to return to a supposedly idyllic past. They devote almost no effort to reflection, and they condemn cleverness and intellect as elitist and un-American, as if people who hunt bears could seriously be expected to lead a world power. Demagogues stir up hatred and rage on television stations like Fox News. These parts of America, majorities in many states, ignorant of globalization and the international labor market, can do nothing but shout. They hate everything that is new and foreign to them.
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,726447,00.html

Somehow, we have a dog

I took Thing 1 and Thing 2 up for a Cub Scout overnight on the USS Salem, come back and before I know it, we have a new dog.

Her name is Heffley, after The Diary of a Wimpy Kid books that Things 1 and 2 are reading voraciously.

We put down our Lab, Garp, right before school started and now we have Heffley, a black lab/something mix.  She's very skittish, but very affectionate.  She also has a nice soft Lab mouth, which is nice, because Thing 2 gets skittish himself around nippy dogs.

The missus is top dog trainer.  I hope she brings her A-game.

On The Road

Me and Dean Moriarty (and Thing 1 and Thing 2) are going hit the road man...and Go Go Go!  Just feel the road beneath our wheels as the speed and the good open air flow over us like a baptism.

Yeah, we're going on a Cub Scouts overnight.

If I survive this, I have something for Sunday.

But frankly it's even money that I'm still alive on Sunday....

Go Read Nate Silver

http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/11/04/enthusiasm-gap-was-largest-in-presidential-swing-states/?hp

Want to know why the midterms turned out that way?  The evidence is pretty clear.

The Idiocracy Has It's New King

Banana Slug Impersonator Mitch McConnell, holder of a 45 seat minority majority in the Senate, has recently said he will not raise the debt ceiling until he gets Health Care repealed and other Things Which Will Not Happen.

What does that mean?

Global economic meltdown. This isn't government shutdown territory, this is an absolute collapse of the global and American economies, the end of America's role as the stable center of global commerce and the destruction of everyone's savings and retirement plans.

To repeal something that hasn't even been given a chance to work.

Every year when we start learning about Alexander Hamilton's debt financing plan, my students always want to know why we can't just walk away from all that debt.  "Hey, we owe the money to ourselves, so let's just give ourselves a pass."

But US debt is the foundation for much of the world's currency reserves, much of the world's liquidity and effectively acts as the world's holding currency.  That's why the Saudis and Chinese own so much of it.  Default on that...Have you watched the Mad Max movies recently?

Everyone wants Obama to compromise with the GOP.  But I have watched him try and reach out to members of the GOP, changed legislation like the stimulus to win their support and then they don't vote for it anyway.  Now they are saying, do what we want or we'll destroy the whole economy.

It hasn't been 48 hours since the polls closed and already they are talking about defaulting on the US debt.

Hopefully (I guess) this is just Mitch puffing his chest out to subvert a right wing challenge from Jim DeMint for Minority leader.  He's going to talk Tea Party crazy and then return to sanity once he retains his post.

But it chills the hell out of me that he really is that stupid.

This Stuff Writes Itself

Exit polls asked people about what they wanted to see from the government over the next two years and gave them three options: cut taxes, reduce the deficit or more government spending to create jobs.

About 39% of voters identified the deficit as their top priority.  The GOP captured 72% of those voters.

Only 19% claimed tax cuts were their primary issue and the GOP took home 64% of those.

About 37% wanted the government to spend more to create more jobs (I guess the rest were worried about victory mosques).  The GOP won 30% of those voters

Now, I think history has shown the GOP to be pretty poor stewards of the national debt, but they talk about it enough (hence the term "deficit peacock" instead of "deficit hawk").  So, that makes sense.  Even though the GOP has yet to identify a single budget cut of any substance - even after the election is over.  Have they not thought about?  Is there a plan?  When will they bother to share it with people?  However, they said they would bring down the deficit, so people believed them ("Why would a politician lie?") and voted for them.

But how does someone who wants to see the government spending  increase job growth vote for the GOP?  I mean 3-5% would cover people who misheard the question.  But 30%?

There is no one with a functioned cerebral cortex and access to ANY information who can reconcile the GOP with Keynesian stimulative spending.

Hmmm, I wonder what electricity tastes like.

Welcome to the Idiocracy

It's frustrating times to be a teacher.  On a fundamental level, you believe in the ability to shape minds into powerful tools that will enable your students to enjoy fruitful, productive and creative lives.  You hope to instill in them an appreciation for nuance and the importance of understanding the world as it is, rather than as it would be in their imagination.  You are trying to create people who will revel in the life of the mind.

In the end you just hope they don't stick their tongue in a wall socket to see what electricity tastes like.

I often see former students at reunions.  They are fresh out of college and full of energy, optimism and cash.  Because they are working for hedge funds.  The young men are fat from sitting behind a trading desk all day and drinking all night.  The young women seem to be emaciated.

Is that what you were working towards?

And these are some of the best and brightest kids in the country.

It's been the Worst Fall Ever in our household.  We started the school year off by putting down the dog.  The missus's team is struggling.  Thing 1 had trouble adjusting to a new school.  The missus and I have been struggling to fight off illness and I've recently come down with a case of poison ivy so severe that the CDC is monitoring it to make sure it's not leprosy.

But mostly, we just wonder why we teach sometimes.  That's not fair to hang that on the missus, so let's just say, I've really started to wonder why I teach.

It's a hard job, and despite the architecture reminiscent of Yale, we're not well compensated.  We're not poor, but we've resigned ourselves to the fact that we will always struggle a bit to make ends meet.

But the students who shuffled through our courses with adequate grades and adequate effort are working on Wall Street and coming up with winner ideas like CDOs and CDSs and printing their own money.

Today, one of the Wall Street Smart Guys who helped crash the economy landed his helicopter on campus to visit his granddaughter.

Bully for him.

But apparently last night was a reminder that America is - if not a "center right nation" that the pundits talk about - a "fuck you, I got mine nation".

Poor kids want health insurance?  Fuck you, I got mine.

People with underwater mortgages want to rewrite the terms of the loan to stay in the house?  Fuck you, I got mine.

Unemployed for two years?  Fuck you, I got mine.

Oil spills devastating the Gulf Coast?  Drill, baby, drill, and fuck you, I got mine.

We have lost our ability to think and act as a community, in which we value everyone.  The missus had a discussion with a sweet elderly lady who talked about "those people".  There will always be a "those people". It helps you know who your people are, I guess.

But great things are only done when we think in terms of "our people".  That means progressive taxes to fund common goals.  That means a return to civic virtue.  That means no more "Fuck you, I got mine".

Obama wandered around trying to get us to see "our people" instead of "those people".  He failed.  Anyone would have.

Because we live in an Idiocracy.  We blind ourselves to the world as it is, and insist on the world of our imaginations.  We can balance the budget with tax cuts.  Obama raised taxes when he actually cut them.  There are death panels.  Obama, not Bush, bailed out the banks.  And trying to make a case based on the evidence is pointless, because fuck you, I got mine.  The "mine" in this case are my opinions.

And in an intellectual climate like that, it's hard to get out of bed everyday and teach.  It's hard to tell yourself that you're making a difference.

So, yeah, Tea Party guy.  That Hope thing isn't working out real well right now.

But I'll be there tomorrow.  In the front of the class.  Because even though we live in the Idiocracy, I ain't no quitter.

Update from Esquire:
If all the polls are correct, and if Chuck Todd is right to have turned up the Orgasmatron to eleven in his happy place, then we are all going to be complicit in a massive exercise in empowered heckling, a national free-for-all over the one microphone in the hall. It has been a remarkable two years for that sort of thing, and that’s where Jon Stewart went off the rails the other day, when he traded sense for sensibility. The problem is not that we don’t play nice enough with each other. The problem is that one side plays by its own rules in a universe of its own devising, with its own physical laws, its unique economics, and its own history and theology, and that universe is now devouring the real one.

Ohhhh, What does it all mean?

Well, probably not what Cokie Roberts says it means.
Things you will hear about the midterms that are probably not true.
1) Democrats were too liberal.
Most of the losers last night were the Blue Dogs, the most conservative Democrats.  Some of them were doomed by the changing landscape, some were swept in on the 2006 and 2008 elections were bound to lose.  Pelosi routinely let the Blue Dogs vote against the party.  It didn't work.  They got hammered.

2) Democrats weren't liberal enough.
Popular with the FireDogLake crowd, this argument says that if only Obama had delivered the magical sparkle pony of the public option/DADT repeal/nationalizing the banks then Democratic losses wouldn't have been so bad.  In fact, some of the most progressive candidates (Grayson, Perriello, Feingold) lost.  But again, they lost in swing districts.

3) The Tea Party won.
Uh, no. Democrats retained control of the Senate thanks to the Tea Party.  Delaware, Colorado, Nevada...Those are races the Democrats won because they were facing Tea Party candidates.  Where Tea Party candidates DID win was in the House.  Because no one was paying attention.  Joe Miller, Rand Paul, Sharon Angle and Christine O'Donnell tried to hide from the press.  House candidates didn't have to.  It will be interesting to see how the public reacts when these guys start trying to follow through on their agenda.

4) This was a repudiation for Obama who is now toast in 2012.
Partially true, in that this was a clear message that people are freaked out by the economy.  And while the crisis wasn't Obama's fault, his response has been a bit tepid.  (Thank YOU, Larry Summers!)  I did hear a commentator on NPR say that Obama has to explain himself and his policies better.  And that once Tea Party people start holding hearings on Health Care, it could probably become MORE popular once people find out what's in it.  Finally, the GOP will nominate a Tea Party candidate in 2012.  It seems inevitable.  Whether it's Palin or a Palin Pretender like Gingrich.  Remember, Clinton was left for dead in 1994.

5) It was Old White Guys who defeated the Dems last night.
Actually, that one is true.  The GOP has a demographics problem, and if they go full metal hater on brown people, it will only get worse.  Immigration could be the double edged sword that comes back to cut the GOP.

Yeah, I'm an idiot.

I was thinking 4 Senate seats and 40 House seats.

Old White Guys had other plans....

Looking more like 6 and 60.

The Sestak loss (apparently) was hard.  I had high hopes for the Admiral's closing abilities.

We'll see what California does at the House level.  Maybe Prop 19 (or whatever the pot prop is) will bring out enough young people to offset Old White Guys.

Welcome to gridlock... Population All of Us

One Trend I'm Noticing

Whenever the Democrats don't have a strong candidate at the state level, they're getting killed at the House level.  Indiana, Virginia and Florida spring to mind as places where the Democrats either had not statewide candidate (VA), had a weak one (IN) or had a split decision (FL).  Whether this depressed turnout or not... who knows.

If PA House Dems ride Sestak's coattails, then I may be on to something.

The Deluge?

Well, the polls are closed in Indiana and fittingly enough Dan Burton is the first race called.  Fittingly, because we can all anticipate the Burtonesque (and not in a cool, Edward Scissorhands kind of way) hearings that will swamp the House for the next two years.  Burton was the Guy who investigated everything about Bill Clinton.  I don't know if he'll be the Guy this time, but you know that there's a Guy waiting to start hearings on birth certificates, ACORN (just filed for bankruptcy), the New Black Panther Party, health care, BP oil spills, stimulus money, Shirley Sherrod, underwear bombers, Guantanamo Bay, Afghanistan, Iraq, Bo's "accidents" in the Roosevelt Room, Michelle's right to bare her arms, Sasha's homework habits and Obama's Islamic tendencies.

Eating with my friend Kathleen on Saturday, she said that she hoped we DID get a crazy-assed GOP Congress, just to remind people once again how dysfunctional the GOP is when it's in power.

Maybe, but I can't say I'm sanguine about spending the next two years with a government unable to address substantive problems for fear of upsetting the torch carrying yahoos in the Tea Party.

Keeping Fear Alive

DougJ has a post over at Balloon Juice about the state of civil discourse in America as compared to 150 years or so ago.
http://www.balloon-juice.com/2010/11/01/pure-self-indulgent-wankery/

One animating principle of my study of history is that we tend to overestimate the current crisis.  I know I'm guilty of it even while being aware of it.  We tend to see in the current issues significance that makes all other past crises pale in comparison. Or we tend to try and inflate the current crisis with the only other crises in our history that overshadow the current one: The Revolution and World War II.

The Tea Party numbskulls are running around with their Don't Tread On Me flags and stickers and wearing their tri-corner hats, because...fuck if I know why.  Apparently they are the world's first anti-establishment group made up of entrepreneurs and middle management.  And when they're not comparing Obama to King George, apparently he's Hitler.  I would have gone with Oba-Mao, but that's perhaps too subtle for people who get their political news from Fox.

So we either take a non-crisis (OMG, people will get health care!) and make it as bad as Nazism, or we look at a real crisis and assume that it's so awful that no one has ever faced anything like it before ever a million times infinity.

Obviously September 11th was an awful, catastrophic event.  It left a searing memory in the American mind.  Last Saturday, I got to see Graydon Parrish's allegorical painting of 9/11.

It's extraordinarily powerful, even disturbing.  As the day itself was.

But it was more disturbing what we DID with 9/11.  We turned it into the Worst Day Ever.  And there have been worse days, sadly.  Not for the people of New York and its surrounding communities, but worse days.  Cold Harbor was worse.  Antietam was worse.  D-Day was worse.  The Battle of the Somme.  Borodino.  Cannae.

And Pearl Harbor was pretty awful, too.  Pearl Harbor brought us into an existential conflict with ideologies bent on global domination.  And so when 9/11 fell into the hands of those who would exploit it, bin-Ladenism became the new Fascism.  When really, it's the ideology of a lunatic fringe living in dirt huts and caves in Afghanistan.  Al Qaeda controls exactly nothing but the fear of those who would make themselves afraid.

Al Qaeda gave us something to fear.  A true crisis that would enable the manchildren to live up to their fathers who had beat Hitler.

Only Al Qaeda gave us something less and something more.  It wasn't Hitler.  It was a social condition in a part of the world we can't apparently understand.  It's drugs.  It's poverty.  How are the wars on those two things working out?

But the fearmongering brought on by 9/11 has proved impossible to turn off.  Now, health care is national socialism.  Obama is a muslim.  Nancy Pelosi (Nancy Pelosi!?) is the Antichrist.

I think that's largely the point Stewart and Colbert were trying to get across.  Yes, Crossfire tried to make us care about Clinton's oral sex proclivities, and when we didn't give a shit, they just ratcheted up the volume.

Then 9/11 gave the media a ratings winner and the fearmongers a ticket to power.  And so it goes.

We've been down this road before.  The Federalists told you that Jefferson would burn your Bible, while the Republicans said that Adams wanted to be a king.  The secessionists said that Lincoln would free your slaves.  The plutocrats said that unions would bring in anarchism and communism.  The Old Guard said that FDR was a Red.  The Birchers and McCarthyites said the Commie infiltrators were everywhere. The segregationists equated equal rights with the rape of white daughters.

Somehow we keep shuffling onwards and generally upwards.  We make slow, unsteady progress in face of fear and division.

It's awful.  It really is.  It's enervating and unpleasant.  I don't want to do it anymore.  I just want to kick Linda McMahon in the groin and be done with it.

But it's nothing new.  And we shall get through it somehow.

Because we always do.