Saturday Reads

Good Morning!!!

File this one from The Hill under no surprises!  Sean J Miller’s headline says it all: ‘Hillary voters’ abandon Democrats”. I even voted for a blue dawg congressman to become a blue dawg senator, it did no good whatsoever.  I think when every one was told they didn’t need the votes, a lot of people took them seriously.

The blue-collar voters who supported Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential run deserted her party in droves on Tuesday, according to a new poll.

Democrats’ support from white, non-college-educated male voters dropped 12 percent from 2008, according to a survey Greenberg Quinlan Rosner conducted Nov. 2-3 for Democracy Corps and Campaign for America’s Future.

Only 29 percent of blue-collar men support Democrats in 2010, down from 41 percent last cycle, according to the survey of 1,000 2008 voters, of which 897 voted on Tuesday.

“These are gigantic losses,” Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg, whose firm conducted the survey, said on a conference call with reporters Friday.

Greenberg said President Obama and the Democratic leadership failed to articulate a clear economic message.

The process surrounding the healthcare bill, which passed in March, reinforced the perception voters’ had that the Democrats were spending too much time bickering with the GOP, increasing federal spending and listening to lobbyists instead of average people on major legislation.

I’ve been writing about one or another version of it’s the jobs stupid or it’s the economy stupid for about around two years.  You’d have to really be deaf not to understand how folks are hurting for a decent wage and a decent job these days.

The more conservative side of Politico has this headline that’s a grabber too: ‘The ego factor: Can Obama change?’ I guess one of the reasons that I want to quote this some is that it interviews two Louisiana folks; James Carville and Douglas Brinkley.

“Humility is a great quality, and it’s one that people will respect,” said historian Douglas Brinkley, who teaches at Rice University. “Ronald Reagan could be seen as a polarizing presence, but he also knew how to play humble when it was necessary. Where is President Obama’s self-deprecating humor? Kennedy and Reagan could both be very self-deprecating. People liked that.”

“The worst thing that happened to Obama is he’s lost a lot of his aura. Even his friends think he’s thin-skinned and a bit highfalutin,” he said.

It’s the sort of complaint that comes to the fore in background conversations with lawmakers, lobbyists and veterans of previous administrations who interact with Obama’s West Wing staffers: that they’ve created a cult of personality around Obama, having followed their boss on his rapid and improbable ascent to the presidency. Many of these devotees do, indeed, feel that he is the political equivalent of NBA phenom LeBron James. The view is based on a belief that Obama’s outsize political skills and uncommon personal poise make him different than conventional politicians and immune to conventional political laws of gravity.

One Obama insider said it is a view that starts at the top. Having triumphed over an early perception by political insiders and many journalists that he could not defeat front-runner Hillary Clinton, Obama, this person said, frequently invokes the 2008 experience and what he believes was its lesson — always stay the course, don’t be distracted by ephemeral controversies or smart-set importuning for a change of direction.

Some believe this is an admirable instinct carried to a dangerous degree.

“Obama would sort of say, ‘Look, I’m smart. I know what I’m doing. You’ll just have to trust me,’” said Democratic strategist and commentator James Carville. “It was kind of beneath him to explain the reasons behind his actions to people — how TARP really worked, how the stimulus was helping. … You had a lot of signs — New Jersey, Virginia, Scott Brown — but they thought what they were doing was going to turn out all right.”

If you don’t read James K. Galbraith at New Deal 2.0, you really should.  He’s got a great piece up over there that says Obama has to ‘break his devil’s pact with the banks to succeed’.

The original sin of Obama’s presidency was to assign economic policy to a closed circle of bank-friendly economists and Bush carryovers. Larry Summers. Timothy Geithner. Ben Bernanke. These men had no personal commitment to the goal of an early recovery, no stake in the Democratic Party, no interest in the larger success of Barack Obama. Their primary goal, instead, was and remains to protect their own past decisions and their own professional futures.

Up to a point, one can defend the decisions taken in September-October 2008 under the stress of a rapidly collapsing financial system. The Bush administration was, by that time, nearly defunct. Panic was in the air, as was political blackmail — with the threat that the October through January months might be irreparably brutal. Stopgaps were needed, they were concocted, and they held the line.

But one cannot defend the actions of Team Obama on taking office. Law, policy and politics all pointed in one direction: turn the systemically dangerous banks over to Sheila Bair and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. Insure the depositors, replace the management, fire the lobbyists, audit the books, prosecute the frauds, and restructure and downsize the institutions. The financial system would have been cleaned up. And the big bankers would have been beaten as a political force.

The job market figures were released yesterday and they definitely had an impact on the financial markets. This is from Bloomberg.

Treasuries fell, with five-year note yields rising for the first time in seven days, while U.S. benchmark equity indexes gained to two-year highs and the dollar strengthened as jobs growth bolstered optimism in the economy

The 5-year Treasury note’s yield rose six basis points to 1.09 percent at 4 p.m. in New York, rebounding from a record low this week. The Standard & Poor’s 500 Index advanced 0.4 percent to 1,225.85, its highest level since Sept. 19, 2008. The Dollar Index, which tracks the U.S. currency against six peers, snapped a three-day drop to climb from its 2010 low. Commodity indexes rose to the highest levels since October 2008 as copper surged to a 28-month high amid a mining strike in Chile.

The jobs market data itself wasn’t great but it certainly wasn’t bad.  Economist Mark Thoma explains the wishy washy view.

I’ve seen some people calling this a strong report. It’s certainly better than lower job growth numbers, so it could have been worse, but in past recoveries we’ve had job growth of hundreds of thousands, far more that this. So let’s try to put it in perspective. Many people estimate that 7.5 million jobs have been lost since the start of the recession (and some people estimate it’s even more than this). Suppose it takes 100,000 jobs per month to keep up with population growth. I think it’s a bit more than this, but let’s take an estimate that is generous in terms of making up lost ground. With a net gain of 50,000 jobs (rounding from 51,000), how long would it take to reemploy the 7.5 million who need jobs? The answer is (7.5 million)/(50,000) = 150 months = 12.5 years.

Iraqi prisoners were not only abused by Americans but also by the UK.  This is a horrifying report at The Guardian.

Evidence of the alleged systematic and brutal mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners at a secret British military interrogation centre that is being described as “the UK’s Abu Ghraib” emerged yesterday during high court proceedings brought by more than 200 former inmates.

The court was told there was evidence that detainees were starved, deprived of sleep, subjected to sensory deprivation and threatened with execution at the shadowy facilities near Basra operated by the Joint Forces Interrogation Team, or JFIT.

It also received allegations that JFIT’s prisoners were beaten, forced to kneel in stressful positions for up to 30 hours at a time, and that some were subjected to electric shocks. Some of the prisoners say that they were subject to sexual humiliation by women soldiers, while others allege that they were held for days in cells as small as one metre square.

Michael Fordham QC, for the former inmates, said the question needed to be asked: “Is this Britain’s Abu Ghraib?”

I can’t even think up a response to the video or information shared in that article.

Okay, so I’m going to end with another ‘no surprises here’ post.  Ozzy Osbourne is actually a mutant. No really.

A study of the hard-partying rocker revealed he actually has several genetic mutations that may explain how he’s lived so long, scientists say.

Some of them “we’ve never seen before,” said geneticist Nathaniel Pearson, who was part of the team that sequenced Osbourne’s DNA for Massachusetts lab Knome Inc.

“I’ve always said that at the end of the world there will be roaches, Ozzy and Keith Richards,” the Prince of Darkness’ wife Sharon Osbourne said.

“He’s going to outlive us all. That fascinated me – how can his body endure so much.”

The 61-year-old “Black Sabbath” singer is as famous for his colossal intake as he is for his voice. He once said he did LSD every day for two years and he drank booze like water.

No surprisingly, many of the anomalies scientists discovered had to do with how he processes drugs and alcohol.

Ozzy was just here in town for voodoo fest.  I imagine he left DNA samples all over the place if the scientists still are looking for more.  Since it’s still the morning, I’ll treat you to some mellow Ozzy.

So, that’s my contribution today.

What’s on you reading and blogging list?