Let's Try This Again

Elaborating on a few notes from last night:

1) I watched the Gold Cup final - some of it.  Chichirito is a  the real deal.  He gave up a stat padding goal.  He's a top Ten international player for me.

2) The Gold Standard - which has enjoyed a resurgence under Ron Paul - is a manifestation of one person's lack of faith in another.  I could never figure out why anyone would want the gold standard back.  It's like manifesting a belief that cavemen rode dinosaurs.  Or maybe a return to monarchy.

But in reading The Lords of Finance I found that the reason the gold standard was so revered - even in the face of compelling arguments by monetarists like Keynes - was that the gold standard was an absolute.  It could not be tinkered with by politicians, like the way the Germans blew up their currency in the early 1920s. A belief in the gold standard, in other words, is a belief that humans cannot manage their own affairs properly.

New York, New York

UPDATE:  A few obvious conservative voices - given that it's New York, they are mostly Catholic - have come out talking about the dire consequences for the state GOP for "allowing" this to pass.

But this is why they are so scared.  There will be no dire consequences arising from marriage equality.

Congress....

If Congress ran Pizza Hut, they'd have to take this sign down.

There is a reason why people hate Congress.  They are on display today.

First, you have Cantor walk away from bipartisan negotiations because Democrats want to get something from these negotiations, too.  If you're going to cut spending, you'd better raise revenues, too.  Especially on the rich who aren't going to get gauged by the spending cuts.  Only fair.

Cantor says, "Screw fair, I'm out of here."  Behaving, in effect, like a six year old, over-privileged brat.

You also have Jim DeMint saying that any Republican who votes to increase the debt limit - in other words, any Republican who votes to ward off economic armageddon - is "toast".

These people are children.  And not especially bright ones.

Finally, you have the House vote NOT to approve of the Libyan air war but NOT to defund it.  A purely symbolic, impotent vote.  John Cole got there first, but I was thinking the same thing.  If you were Obama and had to deal with this Congress, you wouldn't ask them permission either.

When the GOP won the House, I thought, Good, now these bomb throwing a-holes will have to govern.

But they haven't.  They have spent what little time they have actually been in Washington mostly trying to restrict abortion.  They have not fulfilled their fiscal duties, they have blocked the executive branch's ability to staff itself and have done NOTHING to create jobs - when that is the primary concern of Americans.  Instead they have strutted and postured about the deficit, when defaulting on the debt for even a few days will  likely cost the US over a trillion dollars in the long run.

In Congress, you have too many inflated egos without the real power to DO anything.  All they can do is stop other people from doing things apparently.

We Are All Mayans Now

Amuuuricaaaaa!

For whatever reason there has been a lot of stuff coming out in the past 24 hours about the dynamics of the GOP primaries.

Matt Taibbi launched one of his verbal napalm attacks on the prospects of Michelle Bachmann becoming president, a possibility he finds troublingly real.

There is a poll that finds Obama leading the GOP field in Tennessee of all places, despite Obama topping out at 38%.

Rick Perry continues to play Cuomo/Thompson with pursuing the GOP nod.

The dynamics as I see it are roughly this, and I don't think this is much of a stretch.

1) Mitt Romney is the quintessential GOP frontrunner.  He came in second the time before, it's his turn, he has the money behind him and he's probably the "most electable" Republican in the field.

2) The Tea Party is feeling their oats from 2010.  Despite the fact that the actions of Tea Partisans are roundly condemned by the public at large, whether in the Midwest governorships or in Paul Ryan's budget plan, the Tea Party wants a "pure" candidate.  (In that sense, they are similar to the FDL crowd on the Left that wants to primary Obama with, I dunno, Kucinich and Cornell West.

3) The competition for the GOP nomination in 2012 will largely come down to Romney and Not Romney, in much the same way 2008 was about Clinton and Not Clinton.  When Obama (mercifully) beat out Edwards to be Not Clinton, the race was on.  At some point, a GOP Winger will emerge to become Not Romney.  I've stated that if Perry gets in, it will be him.  But Bachmann is increasingly plausible as the Not Romney.

4) If the Not Romney candidate wins the GOP nomination, Obama will almost certainly win re-election.  This is why Karl Rove has thrown his support behind Romney.  He understands this.  Rove always knows to put the best face on the odious GOP policies.  Of course, I don't think anyone wants to "have a beer" with Romney.  Especially not if he's an observant Mormon, because that near-beer stuff sucks.

Thrown into the hopper is the terrifying possibility that the GOP really will blow up the economy in August by not raising the debt ceiling.  Cantor abandoned the Biden meetings today and Boehner says that if there are any additional tax revenues, he won't support the debt limit increase.  He already has 40 members of his caucus saying that they won't sign on to an increase without ridiculous concessions.

The GOP has also backed away from supporting tax cuts - TAX CUTS - to stimulate the economy, because they are counting on a bad economy to help them in 2012.

It is still possible for the GOP to win in 2012.  It is also possible that they lose the Presidency and the House.

This July will be especially interesting, with the debt limit issue.  As always, the American public is woefully misinformed about a complex economic issue -  in this case the debt limit.  But this fight will largely determine the future of this country and both sides know it.

Stay tuned...

Stewart

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/post/like-the-new-england-patriots-of-lying/2011/03/11/AG184CgH_blog.html

Stupid Is As Stupid Does

http://www.balloon-juice.com/2011/06/22/being-a-xenophobic-bigot-has-costs/

John Cole notes the idiocy of the GOP in action, this time in my native state of Georgia.

When the GOP is elected, their policies - especially in the past 30 years - have been objectively bad.  Measurably bad.

And yet they continue to win elections...

The War Pig

Budget cuts are looming for the Pentagon's elite Hot Pink Fern Brigade.

I am starting to read Ahamed's Lords of Finance.  I'm in that tricky phase of a good but challenging book where I'm having trouble getting that inertial mass going that will propel me through the lives and world of pre-Depression era central bankers.  You know, a beach read.

Ahamed gives a good description of what has commonly been called the first age of globalization from roughly 1870-1914.  He has a quote from the spring of 1914, whereby one wise European says that continental war was unthinkable because it was too damned expensive.

It occurs to me that little has changed.  We have hidden some of the costs well.  A professional, well trained volunteer army backed by the world's most extraordinary military infrastructure means that the human cost in lives is lessened and hidden and the cost in maiming and wounding can also be obscured.

And the orgy of Bushonomics, whereby tax cuts always pay for themselves and "deficits don't matter" until a Democrat gets elected, we have hidden - to some degree -  the financial costs of the war, too.

Which is just another way of saying, we have to stop fighting wars, especially the never-ending ones.

Afghanistan will never be what we want it to be.  Best case scenario is a nuke-free, smaller Pakistan: a country in name only, riven by tribal factions and held together by a dictatorship of the elite.  Same goes for Iraq.

The compelling reasons for staying there are lost on me.

After shooting bin Laden in the face (Update: still dead), we needn't light bonfires of US tax dollars and sacrifice the cream of our youth because we worry about "emboldening" anyone.

The idea behind the surges was to create a security window for civic institutions to blossom.  Under that logic, we will NEVER leave.  And if the choice is between NOW and NEVER.  I choose NOW.

We no longer have an obligation to the people of Iraq and Afghanistan.  We did, at one point perhaps, have an obligation not to leave Iraq in chaos, after we destroyed their state.  We've paid our debts.  Time to go.

I know Obama won't go for it.  I know we will only see a small draw down in Afghanistan.  But it's nice to dream.

(Oh, and I won't count Libya as a war until we have ground troops there.)

Obama is rightly called the "only adult in the room" when it comes to DC politicians.  But just this once, I'd like to see him cut to the chase and make a bold call rather than a reasoned, judicious decision.

Reality Based Community

Alan Blinder - no doubt a socialist, communist Muslim - who is an Econ professor at Princeton (with Krugman, so there!), former member of the Fed Board and author of one of the most popular Econ textbooks as something to say:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303635604576392023187860688.html

Basically, he takes on the Republican "idea" that government spending kills jobs.  To be fair, it's an idea so patently absurd that a high school Econ student should be able to refute it, but still, zombie ideas must be decapitated.  Whether with a baseball bat or an RPG, they must be put down.

More broadly, this speaks to the GOP's blind obeisance to ideas that are simply fanciful.  And while there is a lot to be said about the complete falsity of, say, Neo-conservative foreign policy, the economics of the GOP are just baldly, fundamentally wrong.

You take any of the basic tenets of GOP economics and subject them to a reality test, and they fail.

Take cuts for the wealthiest produce jobs.  No, they don't.  They put more money into investors' hands, true.  And in a sane equities market, that additional investment capital would be used to fund the next Apple or Google or whatever.  But in the brave new world of Wall Street, all of this investment capital is used to create bubbles and chase after short term gains.

Government spending kills jobs.  You really should just read Blinder's piece to see how absurd that idea is.

Any rise in taxes will kill growth and jobs.  Taxes can be so high that they stifle growth.  We are so far from that level that it's laughable.  When Clinton and the Democrats raised taxes in '93, the GOP came out and talked about how the American economy was doomed.  What followed was the longest post-war peacetime economic expansion in history and budget surpluses to boot.

This isn't - or shouldn't - be a big mystery.  Grover Norquist, the great tax cut mandarin of the GOP, demands fealty to his flat earth, flat tax ideology.  Cross him and you're done as a GOP politician.  And he has openly said that his preference is to shrink government to the size where you can drown it in a bathtub.

That is the goal of the modern GOP: a return to the Gilded Age era of laissez faire economics.  They are pretty close, as wealth inequality has exploded since the Age or Reagan began.  But the social safety net created by people like FDR, LBJ and, wait for it, Richard Nixon has managed to put a floor under most American's economic hardship. Not all, as homeless shelters are overflowing and people go hungry here in America every night.  But if we had a modern day Jacob Riis cataloguing how the other half lives, it would not be near so dire.

So the GOP has succeeded in creating the economic inequality of the Gilded Age, and now they are setting their sights on the welfare state.  Not the "welfare" state of "t-bones for big black bucks" but the welfare state of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, ACA, food stamps, public schools, public works projects and any and all regulation.

This manifests itself not only in what the troika of Walker, Snyder and Kasich  are doing in the Midwest, but also in Shelby's killing Peter Diamond's nomination to the Fed or holding the debt ceiling hostage.

As Blinder notes in his opening, ideas shape the world.  And one of the two major parties has adopted a set of ideas that could destroy this country.  First by defaulting on the debt and then by destroying whatever protections Americans have against the machinations and mastications of mercenary capitalism.

God help us if they win power in 2012.  I really mean that.

UPDATE: Tom Levenson does a much better job on this theme than I did.
http://www.balloon-juice.com/2011/06/21/in-the-integer-based-community/#more-72905

Stalingrad In Summer

Life at our house...

There is an old saw that the three best things about teaching are June, July and August.  Today, I mowed the lawn, did some laundry and did my single favorite thing in the world.  Read a little.  Fall asleep.  Wake up.  Read a little.  Fall back almost asleep.  Start awake and read a bit more.

Paradise.

(And also, according to neuroscientists, the best way to remember what you read.)

Of course, it is all punctuated by the Civil War re-enactors known hereabouts as Thing One and Thing Two.  Today, they were re-enacting Bull Run, probably Second Bull Run, with Thing Two as Pope and Thing One as Stonewall Jackson.

The next two and half months will witness a low level of combat during all waking hours.

June, July and August...

Healthy Living

Interesting read here.

When ACA was being debated, I commonly asserted that it was health insurance reform, not health care reform.  That what was being reformed was the way that we pay for health care, rather than how we treat people.

I guess that was wrong.  In a good way.

ACA has a lot of pilot programs designed to improve the health and health care delivery in American people's lives.  But one of the interesting ideas is to promote wellness.

Too often, medicine looks at health as illness.  "Health" is the maintenance of illness through treatment - drugs, surgery and so on.  In fact, a lot of illness can be avoided through wellness.  And it's a helluva lot cheaper.

Is it cheaper to pay the treatment costs to get someone to stop smoking at age 30 or to treat their emphysema, lung cancer and heart disease when they are 60?

While fee-for-service is a big problem in our health care costs, so is the unhealthy lifestyles of many Americans.

During the AP reading, I sat at a chair for about 8 hours a day.  We started at 8am, had 15 minute breaks in the morning and afternoon and an hour lunch.  The rest of the time, we sat and read.

I still have heartburn from that.  I literally have heartburn.  If I did that every day...

I realize that this is the way many Americans work every day of their adult lives.  If you could find a way to change that, a way to add movement or exercise to people's lives, you could make America healthier.

That strikes me as good policy, though I realize Republicans see it as the living incarnation of Nazism.

Take Me Out To The Ballgame

Thing Two, being an inveterate Red Sox fan, and I are headed to Boston for the Sox-Brewers game.  We bought the tickets for an afternoon game, but the stupid Bruins went and won the Stanley Cup, so the game got moved to accommodate a bunch of drunken, toothless hockey goons.

Married to a Whalers fan, this just gives me another reason to hate on the Bruins.

That, and the people of Vancouver are creative as hell.

Who else turns a hockey riot into a makeout opportunity.  (To be fair, the dude is Australian, which explains a lot.)

Damn It's So Hard To Be A Dadster

Look what happened when we elected Reagan and Bush II...

I'm not poor.  I'm not working poor.  I'm not working class.  I don't know if I'm Upper Middle Class, because I don't know what that means anymore.  Arbitrage guys on Wall Street call themselves Upper Middle Class.

But I know that in the vast scheme of things in America, we're doing pretty OK.  Both parental units have jobs that earn us a better than average wage.  The kids have a decent enough school system and plentiful green spaces to play in.  Our own parents are very generous with us.

But still...

We need a new roof.  The kitchen cabinets are falling apart.  The downstairs bathroom smells like decades old piss.  Frankly, we never should have bought a house, but we did and now I have no idea how to make ends meet.  College?  Let's hope Thing One's soccer career takes off and Thing Two gets a nice aid package.  Retirement is for other people.  Luckily the only heavy lifting we have to do is mental so we can work later into our sixties if we have to.

There's something wrong with that.

As two professional educators at a prestigious school, we should not be wondering how to keep the roof from flying off our house.  We should not begin and end conversations about college with "And then a miracle occurs."

The GOP wrested control of the government by noting that "your tax dollars were going to buy t-bone steaks for big bucks on welfare."  While racist, it was also classist.

Right now, the middle class has to look at its economic status and wonder "How did this happen?"

Short answer: "Your tax dollar are going to buy third homes in the Hamptons for bond traders on Wall Street."  We are gutting all sorts of programs in order to funnel money to the richest people in the world.  And that's classist, too.

And it's not out of the question that we could do the same thing again, if we elect some dipweed like Tim Pawlenty (ok, no chance of that) or Mittens Romney.  Combine a man with the spine of Romney with the ideological fanaticism of Paul Ryan and the machiavellian machinations of Mitch McConnell and before you know it, we will be looking at Mexico as a model of more equitable wealth distribution.

Exit The Weiner.

Our political press unleashes its kung fu on an unsuspecting populace.

So Weiner resigned today.

I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around the multiple levels of idiocy.

First, Weiner's idiocy.  He was a rising attack dog in a party that needed one.  And then... did he not know how the internet works?  You can't erase this crap.  There are no secrets.

But then, what the hell happened?

OK, Weiner's a cad.  That term may seem too tame, but it really fits him to a tee.  Maybe there was information about him having ACTUAL sex with someone out there, but I never saw it.  Josh Marshall thinks it was precisely because he was a rising young star whom Pelosi trusted that he had to go down.  Maybe.

But David Vitter actually, you know, BROKE THE LAW.  He frequented prostitutes, one of whom apparently diapered him like a baby.  He's still in the Senate!  Ensign lasted for months after his sex scandal and BRIBERY scandal.

Pardon the pun, but Weiner's a dick.  Still, I think he should run again in 2012.

If it doesn't involve breaking the law, the decision about whether a politician's personal foibles are important should be left to the electorate.  Not the pearl clutching mandarins of DC high society.

Your Daily Moment Of Campandering

Tim Pawlenty releases his tax cut plan.

Recently (like two hours ago) I said that I wondered if being a GOP Congressperson was a mental illness.

Now, we have Tim Pawlenty's tax plan to contend with.

http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2011/06/chart-of-the-day-tim-pawlentys-tax-cuts-are-bushs-on-steroids----lots-of-steroids.php?ref=fpa

Basically, he ends government as we know it.  He reduces taxes on the rich to Andrew Mellon levels and increases the budget deficit by $11,000,000,000,000 this decade alone.  In order to compensate for this, basically, you would have to end... well, everything.

I am waiting for David Brooks to explain to me how this is good Burkean conservatism.

Honestly, is there any reality left in the GOP?  Is there any line that a GOP candidate can cross that is too far?

Pawlenty's toast anyway after Mitt Romney mounted him on the debate stage the other night.

Is this a desperate last gambit from Pawlenty?  Or simply business as usual in the GOP nominating process?

Your Daily Moment Of Legislative Depravity

Today, Montana Rep. Denny Rehberg - who is running for Senate and must need campaign contributions - introduced legislation that would:

immunize the tobacco industry against many FDA regulations preventing them from making tobacco more addictive and marketing it to children.

At this point, I'm half convinced that being a Republican member of Congress is a mental illness.