Monday Reads
Posted: April 11, 2011 Filed under: 2012 presidential campaign, Civil Liberties, Civil Rights, Federal Budget, Foreign Affairs, Libya, morning reads, Republican presidential politics, SCOTUS, Surreality, Team Obama, The Bonus Class, U.S. Economy, U.S. Politics, unemployment, Voter Ignorance, We are so F'd | Tags: African Union, Black holes tearing apart Stars, Brother leader Ghadifi, Christina Romer, Donald Trump: crazy or just brain damaged from too many bad hair days?, Eric Cantor's latest delusions, grand wizards of the kleptocracy, Guantanomo detainees, INET, Koch Brothers, Larry Summers, magic mushrooms, Obama injustice department, Tea party crazies, unemployment 25 Comments
Good Morning!
Well, today I’m starting with a quote from Robert Kuttner for The American Prospect about Larry Summers’ appearance at the INET conference. INET is the acronym for the Institute for New Economic Thinking. It was created with a $100 million grant from George Soros and no, I wasn’t invited and I didn’t attend. Mark Thoma and Brad De Long did. You can read their blogs if you want other views.
Larry Summers, now back at Harvard, was the after-dinner entertainment, interviewed by the prodigious Martin Wolf of the Financial Times, the world’s most respected financial journalist.
Summers was terrific, acknowledging that the stimulus of February 2009 was too small, that the idea of deflating our way to recovery is insane, that de-regulation had been excessive, and that much of the economics profession missed the developing crisis because its infatuation with self-correcting markets.
If only this man had been Obama’s chief economic adviser!
He’s referring to this:
Also worth mentioning is this op-ed by former Obama economist Christina Romer on why we have abysmal unemployment. If you read and listen to both of them, it’s going to be obvious that Obama must not have listened to either of them. No wonder they quit so early on. That leaves Timothy-in-the-well Geithner holding the bag for this miserable recovery, imho. Evidently, the two of them thought what most economists were thinking for several years now but it just wasn’t evident from policy. I guess if I heard this austerity crap was coming down the hopper during this miserable recovery, I’d have bailed before my professional credibility went to the crapper too. Guess Timothy always has the shadow banking industry to keep him warm. Meanwhile, Summers continues his apology tour and Romer clarifies the unemployment situation.
Strong evidence suggests that the natural rate of unemployment actually hasn’t risen very much. Instead, the elevated unemployment rate appears to reflect mainly cyclical factors, particularly a lingering shortfall in consumer spending and business investment.
Okay. The important phrase here is “lingering shortfall in consumer spending and business investment”. That means none of these idiotic tax cuts worked. It also means the stimulus was woefully small and ill-directed. It also means that it’s absolutely no time to worry about austerity unless you want yet another recession. Frankly, I think the Republicans are secretly trying to bring one on and Obama is just not that informed about economics and more concerned about chasing the mythical bi-partisan unicorn to wake the frick up.
Since BB knows that I’m a wannabe astrophysicist (or Egyptologist depending on the day of the week), she sent me another kewl science link about a star torn apart by a blackhole! NEATO!!!
On March 28, 2011, NASA’s Swift satellite caught a flash of high-energy X-rays pouring in from deep space. Swift is designed to do this, and since its launch in 2004 has seen hundreds of such things, usually caused by stars exploding at the ends of their lives.
But this time was hardly “usual”. It didn’t see a star exploding as a supernova, it saw a star literally getting torn apart as it fell too close to a black hole!
The African Union’s been chatting up their “Brother Leader” Whacko Ghadafo and have announced the possibility of an end to the fighting in Libya. And, raise your hand if you’d like to buy the Crescent City connection because I’m entertaining offers since the Brooklyn bridge sold so well last week.
“We have completed our mission with the brother leader, and the brother leader’s delegation has accepted the road map as presented by us,” Jacob Zuma, the South African president, said.
The AU mission, headed by Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz, the Mauritanian president, arrived in Tripoli on Sunday.
Besides Zuma and Abdel Aziz, the delegation includes Amadou Toumani Toure, Denis Sassou Nguessou and Yoweri Museveni – respectively the presidents of Mali, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda.
Gaddafi made his first appearance in front of the foreign media in weeks when he joined the AU delegation at his Bab al-Aziziyah compound.
The committee said in a statement that it had decided to go along with a road map adopted in March, which calls for an end to hostilities, “diligent conveying of humanitarian aid” and “dialogue between the Libyan parties”.
Speaking in Tripoli, Ramtane Lamamra, the AU Commissioner for Peace and Security, said the issue of Gaddafi’s departure had come up in the talks but declined to give details.
Why is it I want to sing I wanna zooma zooma zooma zooma zoom every time I read something about South Africa these days? Well, as long as it’s not one of those horn thingies that ruined the world cup this last time out.
More crap from Crazy Republicans via Think Progress: Cantor Sees Current Medicare and Medicaid Programs As A ‘Safety Net’ For ‘People Who Frankly Don’t Need One’
Today on Fox News Sunday, host Chris Wallace questioned House Majority Leader Eric Cantor’s (R-VA) support for a plan in which Americans “pay more out of pocket.” Defending the proposal, Cantor argued that these programs sometimes provide a “safety net” for “people who frankly don’t need one” and that the shift of the burden from the government to the beneficiary will teach government “to do more with less”:
CANTOR: We are in a situation where we have a safety net in place in this country for people who frankly don’t need one. We have to focus on making sure we have a safety net for those who need it.
WALLACE: The Medicaid people — you’re going to cut that by $750 billion.
CANTOR: The medicaid reductions are off the baseline. so what we’re saying is allow states to have the flexibility to deal with their populations, their indigent populations and the healthcare needs the way they know how to deal with them. Not to impose some mandate from a bureaucrat in washington.
WALLACE: But you are giving them less money to do it.
CANTOR: In terms of the baseline, that is correct…What we’re saying is there is so much imposition of a mandate that doesn’t relate to the actual quality of care. We believe if you put in place the mechanism that allow for personal choice as far as Medicare is concerned, as well as the programs in Medicaid, that we can actually get to a better resolve and do what most Americans are learning how to do, which is to do more with less.
Actually, 99% of Americans are doing less with less. One percent of Americans are doing more with the corporate and rich people’s welfare that folks like Cantor have handed them on a golden platter for the last ten years. If you have the stomach for it, the link to the TV interview is over at TP too. Frankly, I’ve been sick enough recently and don’t need to see anything that just makes me sicker.
I don’t know about you, but watching Donald Trump–the man who lost his father’s billions and then ran through government subsidies and finally made some money as a really bad reality TV star–as a potential presidential candidate has been sort’ve a surreal trip. James Polis at Richochet says that Trump is Final Proof that the Political Class Has Failed. Trump’s potential candidacy is like an extension of his reality show with gobs of opportunism, self-promotion and narcissism. It’s bad hair gone wild.
There are two main theories cooperating to explain the Trump phenomenon:
- Donald Trump is today’s best self-promoter and professional opportunist.
- The Republican field of presumptive candidates for president is lame.
But neither of these, nor even both together, can adequately explain what’s going on. We can’t even turn for supplemental help to subtheories that emphasize the rise of celebreality culture, the fall of Sarah Palin, or The Continuing Story of Bungling Barry. These variables all appear somewhere in the equation that has produced the Trump phenomenon. But none of them explain it.
Trump is suddenly “winning” as a political figure because the political class has failed. The authority of our political institutions is weak and getting weaker; it’s not that Americans ‘lack trust’ in them, as blue ribbon pundits and sociologists often lament, so much as they lack respect for the people inside them.
My theory is that he’s just a summer replacement, along with Michelle Bachmann, that will set the stage for fall when the blue suited, pompadour-sporting set take over to bore us to death with talks of tax cuts and subsidies ala President Dementia. Other Republican Presidential wannabes must be thinking we’ll be tired of self-promoting, idea-less hacks by then and that they’ll look refreshing by comparison in a few months. Oddly enough, the P woman is keeping a low profile in all of this. Maybe she’s finally figured out that discretion is the better part of valor for a change or it could be she just has enough money for an excellent summer vacation and has decided to exercise her options.
Okay, so I’m going to move on to something light (weirdly, spinning light, emanating from the patterned Chinese lantern covering the naked bulb in my dorm room while a John Lennon album plays Power to the People on my old turntable … oops, wrong flashback) from New Scientist. Thought mushrooms were just for old hippies and 
Native American Shaman? Think again. Here’s the headline: Earliest evidence for magic mushroom use in Europe.
EUROPEANS may have used magic mushrooms to liven up religious rituals 6000 years ago. So suggests a cave mural in Spain, which may depict fungi with hallucinogenic properties – the oldest evidence of their use in Europe.
The Selva Pascuala mural, in a cave near the town of Villar del Humo, is dominated by a bull. But it is a row of 13 small mushroom-like objects that interests Brian Akers at Pasco-Hernando Community College in New Port Richey, Florida, and Gaston Guzman at the Ecological Institute of Xalapa in Mexico. They believe that the objects are the fungi Psilocybe hispanica, a local species with hallucinogenic properties.
Like the objects depicted in the mural, P. hispanica has a bell-shaped cap topped with a dome, and lacks an annulus – a ring around the stalk. “Its stalks also vary from straight to sinuous, as they do in the mural,” says Akers (Economic Botany, DOI: 10.1007/s12231-011-9152-5).
This isn’t the oldest prehistoric painting thought to depict magic mushrooms, though. An Algerian mural that may show the species Psilocybe mairei is 7000 to 9000 years old.
What a long strange ride it’s been ever since.
More on Obama-style Justice for Guantanamo detainees as the Supremes decline to clarify their rights.
The Obama administration has fought all attempts by lawyers for detainees to have the Supreme Court review those rulings. And while the news was overshadowed by the administration’s concession that alleged Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed and his co-defendants will be tried by a military commission rather than federal jury — a separate issue — the court last week turned away three detainee challenges arising from Boumediene.
One group active in representing the detainees, the Center for Constitutional Rights, decried what it called the court’s refusal “to defend its Boumediene decision and other precedents from the open defiance of the D.C. Circuit.”
The government told justices that there is no reason for them to believe anything other than “lower courts have properly performed the task that this court assigned them in Boumediene v. Bush.”
“Open defiance” may go a bit far in describing the D.C. Circuit’s rulings, but there is no doubt that the court’s action in Boumediene — and its inaction since — has left few happy.
While detainee advocates complain about the court’s timidity, D.C. Senior Circuit Judge A. Raymond Randolph has received wide attention for a speech he gave last year in which he compared the justices to characters in “The Great Gatsby,” who have created a mess they expect others to clean up.
You don’t need me to start in on the Supremes this morning since BB did such a great job last night. Please go read her thread on just exactly how bankrupt our government has become. Believe me, it’s not an article on the deficit either.
Here’s an important information on the Koch Brothers, grand wizards of the kleptocracy. Alternet says they’re worse than you thought and they’re the astroturf beneathe the Tea Party’s wings.
Then look at a recent position pushed by Americans for Prosperity, the Tea Party-allied astroturf group founded and funded by David Koch (and whose sibling organization, the Americans for Prosperity Foundation, he chairs):
Similarly, Americans for Prosperity supports the House continuing resolution that cuts spending by $61 billion. Those cuts would reduce the budget for the CFTC by one-third. Make no mistake: Gutting the CFTC or limiting its authority would be a boon to Wall Street businesses that use complex financial instruments. But while the result is more profits for oil companies, it means everyone else pays more at the pump.
Okay, now have a look at the Kochs’ recent direct contributions to political candidates:
The Kochs donated directly to 62 of the 87 members of the House GOP freshman class…and to 12 of the new members of the U.S. Senate.
Don’t look now. It’s Atlas Shrugged, the Movie. Bad fiction just refuses to die when it gives erections to obsessive white men. I’m just waiting for next year’s Razzies. It’s the tale of a businessman obsessed. No, not the movie …the making of the movie …
It has taken businessman John Aglialoro nearly 20 years to realize his ambition of making a movie out of “Atlas Shrugged,” the 1957 novel by Ayn Rand that has sold more than 7 million copies and has as passionate a following among many political conservatives and libertarians as “Twilight” has among teen girls.
But the version of the book coming to theaters Friday is decidedly independent, low-cost and even makeshift. Shot for a modest $10 million by a first-time director with a cast of little-known actors, “Atlas Shrugged: Part I,” the first in an expected trilogy, will play on about 300 screens in 80 markets. It’s being marketed with the help of conservative media and “tea party” organizing groups and put into theaters by a small, Salt Lake City-based booking service.
I think I’ll pass. I prefer those nice little British films. I’m anxiously awaiting the redo of Upstairs, Downstairs. I never could make it through that silly John Galt speech even when I was young and my mind was an open book. Now, where are those lights on the ceiling when you need them?
What’s on your blogging and reading list today?
Throwing People to the Wind and the Dogs of Profit
Posted: April 4, 2011 Filed under: 2012 presidential campaign, Economy, Voter Ignorance, We are so F'd | Tags: budget, Federal Budget, Paul Ryan 24 Comments
Dennis "Paul Ryan" Moore: Stealing from the Poor and Giving to the Rich
Paul Krugman has a disturbing blog post up. Republicans have been moving to throw the public interest to their corporate masters for some time while collecting their own federal subsidies and benefits. Their privatization fetish is doing in all kinds of things. They’ve been turning prisons, schools, and a bevy of national resources to businesses who are only in it for the short-run boost to their bottom line. These decisions are being made on a purely ideological basis. They have nothing to do with the safety and solvency of the assets involved or the fact that things like national forests belong to the country and the country should have some say in what happens there. Krugman links to articles discussing the privatization of Medicare and then links to an op-ed that argues that the real test of Obama’s meddle will be how well he stands up to these privatization schemes.
The funny thing is that the entire arguments made for this kind of thing are how much more efficient the private sector supposedly is at service delivery and cost containment. This is a charade. We’ve seen everything from the botched student loan program that thankfully, just got pulled back into the Department of Education. This can be observed is in Medicare Advantage where we’ve had private companies enrich themselves more than provide benefit. We keep subsidizing inefficient private corporations with no demands they cut cost and deliver things as asked efficiently. Medicare Advantage was set up to enrich Republican constituencies.
Privatizing and voucherizing Medicare does nothing whatsoever to control costs. We’ve seen that from the sorry history of Medicare Advantage. I’m sure that the Republicans will claim savings — but those savings will come entirely from limiting the vouchers to below the rate of rise in health care costs; in effect, they will come from denying medical care to those who can’t afford to top up their premiums.
Ryan is calling for draconian changes that have no basis in anything other than ideology. His obsession with starving the beast in the name of fiscal discipline is insanity. The man should be declared a public menace and put on an island some where. If Ryan’s way were the correct one, we’d have never had most of the major assets and infrastructure that made 20th century America a powerhouse. That would include things like the interstate system, Hoover Dam, rural electrification, and World War 2. All of these projects were huge, have paid off tremendous benefits in the long run, and were done on borrowed money. I guess World War 2 would’ve not be worth fighting–had Ryan been around–or farmed out to mercenaries because little Paul’s had such a bad life over the last 4 decades due to the debt burden which we still carry in many ways. This is insanity. People actually believe him too. This is exactly how dumbed down and selfish many of our citizens have become. The propaganda campaign on efficient private businesses has been so effective that many don’t seem to notice that their lives have been made much worse off by the excesses put into law over the last ten or so years. I have yet to meet any one–other than a fat cat–employed by a private business that doesn’t have nightmare stories about stupid and bad management practices. They’re more plentiful in the private than public sector. I’ve seen and heard many of them in my years working and consulting with both sectors.
Notice that Ryan is avoiding the wrath of the senior citizen vote with the trick of letting every one 55 and over go into the current program. He’s only throwing certain people to the Dogs of Profit. Ryan’s hypocrisy knows no bounds. As long as your part of the Republican base, you get to keep your government largess. He’s out to delivery windfall profits to insurance companies, not efficient health care delivery to people.
Recognizing the political risk of significant changes in Medicare and Medicaid, the health care program for poor Americans, Mr. Ryan emphasized that such spending would continue to rise under the Republican budget plan, just not as sharply as it would have otherwise.
He also sought to clarify that any Medicare changes, which would include requiring more affluent Americans to pay a larger share of their Medicare costs, would not amount to a voucher program — an approach that has been heavily criticized by Democrats.
Mr. Ryan said his plan was more like the Medicare prescription drug program and would allow patients to pick from a menu of insurance plans. The federal government would direct the subsidy to the plan, not to the consumer.
“It doesn’t go to the person, into the marketplace,” Mr. Ryan said. “It goes to the plan. More for the poor, more for people who get sick, and we don’t give as much money to people who are wealthy.”
Americans who are now 55 or older would go into the current program to prevent a sudden change in their health insurance coverage, he said.
There are some Democratic politicians still fighting against these unnecessary and draconian budget and program cuts. It doesn’t look like a robust fight, however and the President has been slow to engage. Senator Chuck Schumer did the Sunday news talk show circuit yesterday arguing the idiocy of throwing people off programs that work and keep them out of much more expensive trouble. Not only do these things work to keep people out of desperate situations, they create jobs. Many small population states actually rely heavily on state and federal jobs for revenues and services. I’d hate to live someplace like Wyoming if Republicans have their way. The Republicans want to cut the people programs and the programs that invest and sustain our resources. It’s all about delivering short term profits to whatever business pops up over night to abuse the program. Republicans still balk at cutting war programs, corporate welfare programs, and the types of subsidies and tax loopholes that line their own pockets.
Mr. Schumer said Democrats were urging Republicans to consider reducing some of the automatic annual spending in Agriculture, Treasury and Justice Department programs to reach a target of about $33 billion in cuts rather than insisting that it all come out of what is known in budget parlance as discretionary accounts.
A Democrat involved in the negotiations, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said alternative spending cuts from the White House and Senate Democrats would range up to $8 billion. But to the Democrats’ dismay, not only were Republicans resisting those cuts, they were also proposing more spending than the Pentagon wants for military and homeland security programs.
“If you just cut from domestic discretionary, you’ll have to cut things like helping students go to college; you’ll have to cut scientific research, including cancer research,” Mr. Schumer said on the ABC News program “This Week.” “These things have created millions of jobs through the years.”
It’s completely disingenuous but they don’t care. They’re willing to ax the meager federal spending on Planned Parenthood
which covers basic reproductive health for poor people to give farm subsidies to Tea Party Buddy Michelle Bachmann. Why keep pouring money into inefficient private sector ventures other than they turn around and donate to your campaigns? This leads me to the other link provided by Krugman to an op ed E. J. Dionne JR at WAPO.
This week, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) will announce the House Republicans’ budget plan, which is expected to include cuts in many programs for the neediest Americans.
The Ryan budget’s central purpose will not be deficit reduction but the gradual dismantling of key parts of government. Remember that Ryan wants both to preserve the Bush tax cuts and, over the long run, to enact more breaks for the wealthy, including the elimination of the capital gains tax.
Ryan’s plan reportedly will include steep Medicaid cuts, disguised as a proposal to turn the program into a “block grant” to the states. The net effect would be to leave even more Americans to the mercies of the private insurance market.
In deference to the GOP’s success in turning last year’s health-care law into “Obamacare,” let’s call this proposal Ryancare — and let’s make sure we look carefully at its impact on the elderly and the disabled, the main beneficiaries of Medicaid.
Put the two parts of the Ryan design together — tax cuts for the rich, program cuts for the poor — and its radically redistributionist purposes become clear. Timid Democrats would never dare embark on class warfare on this scale the other way around.
Paul Ryan is the anti-Robin Hood. He steals from working Americans and subsidizes the already rich. Who is going to stand up to this complete disconnect between Ryan’s dogma and the reality that was the healthy US economy prior to all this enabling of inefficient oligopolies and monopolies at the cost of the Treasury? Both Krugman and Dionne are correct in this assessment. The President kicked off his re-election bid today. Whose side will he be on? Will he mouth his campaign themes from 2008 while doing the Republicans’ worst for them? From Krugman:
This will be Obama’s defining moment. Will he stand up for the principle that society takes care of those in need? Or will he cave in? I wish I had confidence in the answer.
I’d say the odds on favorite is that we’re going to continue to give away every one’s American Dream to the bonus class. The Republicans may be removed from reality, lying, and bat shit crazy, but what do you say about Democratic officials that enable them?
The Vision Thang
Posted: March 17, 2011 Filed under: 2012 presidential campaign, Domestic Policy, House of Representatives, president teleprompter jesus, U.S. Politics, Voter Ignorance, We are so F'd, WE TOLD THEM SO, Women's Rights, worker rights | Tags: Democratic politics, Democratic values, No drama Obama 18 CommentsI wrote a few days ago that I find it odd that Democrats don’t seem to be able to articulate a clear vision with specific
Dear Liberal Democrats:
programs and agendas they’d like to support given the absolute fanaticism articulated by Tea Party extremists. The voting populace seems eager to listen at this point. You would think in the obvious Republican war against Women, Family Planning, Collective Bargaining, and economic recovery that certain Democratic politicians known for their speeches would be able to find some fighting words. It’s not happening. It’s a pattern. It’s time for other Democratic leaders to stand up and fill the void.
It was interesting to read similar thoughts expressed by NY Congress Critter Anthony Weiner who is quickly becoming my favorite outspoken liberal. He was interviewed recently by Amanda Terkel writing for HuffPo.
“On our side is this weird squishy affirmative sense of what government should do and how we’re opposed to this cut and that cut, rather than saying, ‘Here are the things: Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, environment and education. We’re not cutting those. Those are off the table. That’s non-negotiable,'” said Weiner, adding, “We haven’t really done that very well. That’s because the president fundamentally — he’s not a values guy. He wants to try to get the best deal for the American people and that’s virtuous in its own right, but it becomes very difficult to make a strategy. There’s been much greater global strategy thinking on [progressive media] outlets, frankly, than at 1600 Pennsylvania.”
When asked by The Huffington Post whether what’s happening at the state and local level with labor unions and budget battles would rise to the national stage, Weiner said that the leadership of national officials — including the president — will be essential to push the issue forward.
“We’ve spent a lot of time waiting for Godot when it comes to the Obama White House, and we kind of — to some degree — have to internalize the idea that, you know what? That’s probably not the way to go,” Weiner said. “We have to start initiating some of this.”
Continued Weiner: “It is now pretty clear to me — I’m not saying this is pejorative — the president, he doesn’t animate his day by saying, ‘All right, what is the thing that has me fired up today? I’m going to out and try to move the ball on it.’ He kind of sees his job as to take this calamitous noise that’s going on on the left with people like us and on the right on Fox News, and his path to being a successful president, in his view, is taking that cacophony and trying to make good, level-headed, smart policy out of it and moving it incrementally down the road. That’s nice. That’s a good thing. We need that, obviously. The problem is there’s no substitute for someone really leaning into these values questions. “
The wall of reality between campaign rhetoric, action, and policy has become so noticeable now that even the most loyal partisans see the complete disconnect. The problem is that they’re standing around waiting for the President to do something. I contend that’s not going to happen.
Republicans on the right wing are now making political hay of the presidential preoccupation with March Madness and the endless dithering on the no-fly zone over Libya, further efforts to encourage job creation in the country, and the lack of engagement on basic Democratic base issues like the assault on collective bargaining happening in states like Wisconsin. Obama isn’t even standing up for Big Bird. (Unless you count this just released press ‘statement’.) Maybe our old yellow friend needs to dress up like a Jay Hawk to get some attention these days. Terkel finds other Democratic pols with similar views that are willing to go on record. I’m hoping this is the start of a few brave souls finding their voices and spines. It seems some of them are still in some form of denial.
Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) was also at the gathering and later added, in reference to labor and budget battles, “The only regret I have is that the White House isn’t fighting back against this. It’s one thing to say, ‘Well, I stand behind the workers — how far behind, I don’t know.’ It’s another thing to say, ‘I stand with them and in front of them to protect their rights.’ And I’m waiting for that to happen.”
Frankly, I think Kucinich is going to be waiting for Godot. I have a lot of problems with Kucinich who caved into White House pressure on health care reform after a few flights on air force one. I also think that he’s still in denial that the President shares Democratic values. Defazio of Oregon appears to have a bit more of a realistic perspective.
DeFazio added that he hopes Obama stands with congressional Democrats rather than agreeing to a compromise with the Republicans, as he did a few months ago on the tax cuts.”The problem is the negotiator-in-chief and where he’ll end up, and whether we can put some steel in his spine,” he said. “I assume he caved in on taxes in December because he was blackmailed on the treaty with Russia with nuclear weapons, which was absolutely critical. But that’s pretty pathetic also.”
We’re beginning to see voices critical of the President coming from within the party itself. This is something that has been seriously missing for years. I’m not sure that any amount of steel spinal fortification is what’s at issue here. No-Drama Obama shows a lot of enthusiasm when the topic suits him. He lights up like a christmas tree when speaking about himself or the Chicago Bulls. He just isn’t enthusiastic about basic human rights and Democratic values. He’s surrounded himself with Chamber of Commerce and Wall Street insiders. This alone should signal his priorities.
The Republicans definitely are a divided party right now. The budget battle is highlighting the struggle between Tea Party purists and the wheeling dealing business enablers on the right. Boehner’s the one that’s herding cats right now. The 2012 election appears to be shaping itself towards a Democratic resurgence. Polls show significant buyer’s remorse for the recent crop of Republican governors and legislators. This is at least true on the local level. But, they’ve blown it before. Just look at the legislature that came out of the pre-lameduck congress. It was loaded with business deals like tax cuts and business subsidies instead of expansion of middle class and main street priorities. Each bill started from the negotiation process from a center right perspective and moved farther right. Liberal Democratic senators didn’t even fight to get an optimal stating position.
The biggest problem is that the President is more than just the titular leader of the party and has a responsibility to provide the Vision Thang. Obama’s vision only seems to go as far as his personal interests and whims. Any one interested in social justice or economic justice issues has to be increasingly disturbed about this. I don’t want to fall into the Republican meme machine that’s using this opportunity to create yet another urban myth around Obama. Yet, it does seem to me that Obama is giving them far too much material to grease the wheels of their machines. There’s an angry electorate that just eats that up if they’re not given substantive things to think about.
We need more Democratic politicians that are willing to articulate Democratic values and an agenda that forwards issues that concern most Americans. If the President doesn’t appear interested in doing it, then I wish we could put people like Anthony Weiner in better positions to articulate the vision thang to the public and to the press. He might be in a better position to really do this than popular lightening rods like Nancy Pelosi or Harry Reid. I think they have to stop waiting for the President to “steel” himself or say something. By now, it ought to be obvious that it’s not going to happen.
Backlash
Posted: March 15, 2011 Filed under: 2012 presidential campaign, Barack Obama, collective bargaining, Democratic Politics, Domestic Policy, Elections | Tags: polls, republican politics, tea party overreach 34 CommentsThe only positive thing to come out of the Tea Party, its John Birch Society Roots and funding sources, and its election
of right wing reactionaries is the amount of backlash that is coming as a result of imposing their extremist policies. Their agenda is obvious. Many of the states that are suffering at the hands of governors and legislators that are more interested in ideology than solutions for their state’s problems are looking at recalls. It seems there’s a huge amount of blow-back now. Just check out some of these polls.
Public Policy Polling reports on “brutal numbers” for Ohio’s John Kasich. Not only do independents and nonunion households support a recall of his collective-bargaining killing bill, they don’t support him. They want him gone.
Ohio Senate Bill 5 may not be in effect for very long…54% of voters in the state say they’d repeal it in an election later this year while just 31% say they’d vote to let the bill stand.
The support for repealing SB 5 is reflective of a high level of support for unions and workers in Ohio, more so than we saw in Wisconsin a couple of weeks ago. 63% of voters in the state supportive collective bargaining for public employees to only 29% who oppose it. 52% of voters think public employees should have the right to strike, to 42% who think they should not. And 65% think public employees should have the same rights they do now- or more- while only 32% believe they should have fewer rights.
There are two things particularly notable in the crosstabs on all of these questions. The first is that non-union households are supportive of the public employees. 54% support their collective bargaining rights to 36% in opposition and 44% say they would vote to repeal SB 5 to 38% who would let it stand. Obviously that level of support is not nearly as high as among union households but it still shows that the workers have even most of the non-union public behind them.
The other thing that’s worth noting is the independents. A lot of attention has been given to the way what’s been going on in Ohio and Wisconsin is galvanizing the Democratic base, but it’s also turning independents who were strongly supportive of the GOP in the Midwest last year back against the party. 62% of independents support collective bargaining for public employees to 32% opposed and 53% support repeal of SB 5 to 32% who would let it stand.
All of this is having an absolutely brutal effect on John Kasich’s numbers. We find him with just a 35% approval rating and 54% of voters disapproving of him. His approval with people who voted for him is already all the way down to 71%, while he’s won over just 5% of folks who report having voted for Ted Strickland last fall. Particularly concerning for him is a 33/54 spread with independents.
The site calls this “significant buyer’s remorse”. This is the pollster for DKos that has polled on the Wisconsin effort to recall at least 8 Republican State Senators.
Three Republican incumbents actually trail “generic Dem”: Luther Olsen, Randy Hopper, and Dan Kapanke. Two more have very narrow leads and garner less than 50% support: Rob Cowles and Sheila Harsdorf. And one more, Alberta Darling, holds a clear lead but is still potentially vulnerable. (Two recall-eligible senators, Mary Lazich and Glenn Grothman, sit in extremely red districts and look to have safe leads.) These numbers suggest we have a chance to make five and possibly six recall races highly competitive.
David Weigel–now of Slate--reports on similar trends for Rick Scott and Scott Walker. Rasmussen has Governor Walker hanging in there with a 43% approval rating. It’s interesting when you get the same results from a less liberal-affiliated polling company.
Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker won his job last November with 52% of the vote, but his popularity has slipped since then.
A new Rasmussen Reports telephone survey of Likely Wisconsin Voters finds that just 34% Strongly Approve of the job he is doing, while 48% Strongly Disapprove. Overall, including those who somewhat approve or disapprove, the new Republican governor earns positive reviews from 43% and negative reviews from 57% of voters statewide.
In addition to the usual partisan and demographic breakdowns, it’s interesting to note that Walker, now engaged in a budget battle with unionized state workers, receives a total approval rating of 46% from households with private sector union members. However, among households with a public sector union member, only 19% offer their approval. Among all other households in the state, opinion is nearly evenly divided—49% favorable and 51% unfavorable.
It’s also interesting to note that among households with children in the public school system, only 32% approve of the governor’s performance. Sixty-seven percent (67%) disapprove, including 54% who Strongly Disapprove.
Wiegel writes that Democratic strategist believe the blowback will have signficant positive effects for the re-election of Obama come 2012.
I was talking the other day to a Democrat who’d been battle-scarred by the 2010 Florida campaign, in which Democrats lost everything. Everything. Alan Grayson’s career died quickly. Kendrick Meek became a trivia question. One of the people Palin endorsed, Pam Bondi, actually won. And Rick Scott pipped Alex Sink, the most talented statewide Democratic candidate since Lawton Chiles, to become governor.
This Democrat’s spin was that Sink’s loss wasn’t so bad after all. Scott was pissing off too many people — the Orlando-Tampa train he’d killed was popular — and Democrats could win back independents in 2012, saving the state for Barack Obama.
Further evidence of the extremist elements in both the Tea Party and the current incarnation of the Republican party show up in other polls. A CNN poll shows that most people do not want the government shut down over budget issues. The folks that object are basically tea party-affiliated.
Nearly six in ten people questioned in the poll say that it would be a bad thing for the government to shut down for a few days because Congress did not pass a new spending bill, with 36 percent saying it would be a good thing for the country. And if a government shutdown lasted a few weeks, that figure would rise to 73 percent.
“But Republicans think a shut down that lasts a few days would be a good thing. And a majority of Tea Party supporters approve of a shutdown even if it lasts several weeks,” says CNN Polling Director Keating Holland. “That puts pressure on House Speaker John Boehner and other GOP leaders to take a step which might hurt their standing with independents as well as some Republicans.”
The survey indicates wide partisan differences on the issue, with only 21 percent of Democrats saying a shutdown for a few days would be a good thing. That figure rises to 35 percent for independent voters, 53 percent for Republicans, and 62 percent for Tea Party supporters.
Couple this with a Gallup poll that shows that Huckabee and Bachmann have the most intense followers in the field of GOP presidential wannabes. There is definitely a crazy side to the Republican Party and it’s showing signs of taking the party into extreme positions supported by very few Americans. I personally can’t imagine voting for either of this people for dog catcher let alone president. I don’t think they’re qualified to flip hamburgers, frankly.
Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee leads the field of possible GOP presidential candidates in “positive intensity” among Republicans nationwide with a score of +25 among Republicans who are familiar with him, followed by Rep. Michele Bachmann of Minnesota with a score of +20. Huckabee is recognized by 87% of Republicans, compared with Bachmann’s 52%. A number of other possible Republican presidential candidates trail these two in Positive Intensity Scores, including Sarah Palin, who is the best known of the group.
With these kinds of people rising to the top in party politics of one of the major parties, it’s no wonder we also have an ABC News-WAPO poll that shows Americans are not very confident in their system of government.
Only 26 percent of Americans in a new ABC News/Washington Post poll say they’re optimistic about “our system of government and how well it works,” down 7 points since October to the fewest in surveys dating to 1974. Almost as many, 23 percent, are pessimistic, the closest these measures ever have come. The rest, a record high, are “uncertain” about the system.
The causes are many. Despite a significant advance, more than half still say the economy has not yet begun to recover. And there’s trouble at the pump: Seventy-one percent in this poll, produced for ABC News by Langer Research Associates, report financial hardship as a result of rising gas prices. Forty-four percent call it a “serious” hardship.
People are desperately unhappy with the results of the two party system. It doesn’t even appear that voting for party gridlock works much any more. The Republican notion of big government is a white daddy government that restricts women’s rights, worker’s rights, and transfers wealth to the already rich and powerful. What exactly is the Democratic notion these days? While this backlash will work to the benefit of the sitting President and the Democratic politicians, will they just ride the backlash or actually articulate and run on some kind of vision for a change? Let me be more specific. How about some actions that match those fancy speeches for a change?
We now seem stuck the worst features of the two party system We try for gridlock but get bugfug crazy from the Republicans. We try for social justice but the Democratic Party never seems to be able to coalesce around a vision or agenda that does much other than respond to Republicans by caving-in and playing up to party donors. I’m not sure that I see that changing much given we can’t even get this current President off his historical position of voting present.
The challenges that we’re facing today seem as severe as those we faced during the Bush years. There’s a melt down in strongman governments in the MENA area, we’ve had two major energy-related disasters, and we’ve still got an economy that’s barely sustaining a recovery with high unemployment. If there ever was time for leadership and vision from some corner of national politics, it would be now. Voters keep turning the reigns of government over to the Dubyas, the Walkers, and the Kasichs because they can’t get what they want from Democrats. They emerge from each party’s rule appalled. It seems like some one reasonable could take advantage of that situation. Why do I feel that the Democratic Party will just blow this opportunity away too?
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