Mitt’s Minimal Effort

The Marquis de Mittens and Larry Kudlow get their monocles and harrumphing on over the soshulist redistribution ploy known as “minimum wage”.  Now, Kudlow’s bad enough by himself…

“A lot of conservatives led by the Wall Street Journal editorial page were horrified when you said you want to index the minimum wage for inflation,” CNBC host Larry Kudlow said. “They said, look, that’s just going to raise the minimum wage. That’s going to raise the unemployment rate, especially for young people, especially for minorities. Why do you want to raise the minimum wage?”

Yeah, let’s pause here for a sec.  In Kudlow’s world, raising the minimum wage equals more unemployment, because really jobs exist out there where $7.25 an hour is just too awful.  Why, if we cut that in half, we could hire twice as many people and lower unemployment, especially for minorities (because hey, menial labor is all those people are good for.)  Heck, we eliminate the minimum wage, we could have zero unemployment!  Utopia accomplished!  Sure, it’s not like $3.50 a hour is a living wage or anything, but we can call it “workfare”.

Meanwhile Mittens devours his own foot again.

Romney responded by noting that as governor, he had vetoed a bill to raise the minimum wage in Massachusetts.

“I vetoed it and I said, look, the way to deal with minimum wage is this: On a regular basis, I said in the proposal I made, every two years, we should look at the minimum wage, we should see what’s happened to inflation, we should also look at the jobs level throughout the country, unemployment rate, competitive rates in other states or, in this case, other nations,” he said.

“So, certainly, the level of inflation is something you should look at and you should identify what’s the right way to keep America competitive,” Romney continued. “So that would tell you that right now, there’s probably not a need to raise the minimum wage.”

If we got rid of the minimum wage, we could be more labor-price competitive with countries like Haiti, Somalia, China and Tonga.  So, there’s that.   This is how President Bain Capital here would solve America’s problems.  We don’t have working poor.  They’re making $7.25 an hour!  How can you be poor if you’re making that much money?  Heck, we cut that minimum wage, have states compete for corporations by seeing how low wages they can offer to enslave their workers,and that profit will trickle down to the working stiffs automatically!  It’s the Laffer Curve of wage pricing, cut wages by enough and total incomes will skyrocket and lift all boats and stuff.  Boom, competition creates winning.

What utter nonsense.   But the most striking thing is that once again, Mitt can’t help himself.  He honestly believes this stuff because to him, $7.25 isn’t an hourly wage, it’s a breakfast tip amount.  In America, you can get that waiting tables.  How can there be poor people in America when that happens?  So why raise the minimum wage?  You guys making $11,500 a year?  You’ll be fine.  Just get a better job.  This is America.

Just look at Mitt Romney.

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At Least Have The Grace To Oil Up…Again

So last time we talked supply and demand and oil/gasoline prices in the US, there was quite a bit of disagreement about whether or not US demand for gasoline makes any difference in gas prices at the pump at all.  There was agreement that gasoline price increases are pretty elastic (they respond to oil supply cuts and demand increases) but are obnoxiously inelastic when it comes to price decreases (reduced demand doesn’t lower the price of gas.)

We’ve now got evidence that increasing domestic oil production also does not lower the price of gasoline at the pump, because hey, we’re producing more oil domestically under this President.

The United States’ rapidly declining crude oil supply has made a stunning about-face, shredding federal oil projections and putting energy independence in sight of some analyst forecasts.

After declining to levels not seen since the 1940s, U.S. crude production began rising again in 2009. Drilling rigs have rushed into the nation’s oil fields, suggesting a surge in domestic crude is on the horizon.

The number of rigs in U.S. oil fields has more than quad­rupled in the past three years to 1,272, according to the Baker Hughes rig count. Including those in natural gas fields, the United States now has more rigs at work than the entire rest of the world.

“It’s staggering,” said Marshall Adkins, who directs energy research for the financial services firm Raymond James. “If we continue growing anywhere near that pace and keep squeezing demand out of the system, that puts you in a world where we are not importing oil in 10 years.”

There are doubts that energy independence is that close. But many say the booming shale oil fields in Texas and North Dakota and the growth of deep-water drilling in the Gulf of Mexico will allow the nation to cut its reliance on oil imports significantly over the next couple of decades.

But wait…Republicans have told us that increasing oil production now will lower gas prices now.  Certainly Johnny Volcano and Moose Lady ran on a platform like this in 2008.  And yet…gas prices are now going up.  People keep forgetting that President Obama has, on several occasions, said he would increase domestic energy production and work to get technologies on the road to decrease consumption.  Certainly one of the very, very minor bright spots in the Great Recession is that it lowered demand for gasoline in the US.

“Drill baby drill”?  Hey, that’s what we’re doing.  And yet we’re facing $4 gas this summer.  Not only do we have decreased demand, we have increased supply brought on line.  But gas prices are still high.  Here’s another example of President Obama’s policies doing what the Republicans said we should be doing but of course the President not getting any credit for it.  But the big money continues to be put down on long positions.

Hedge funds and other large speculators boosted their net- long position in crude futures to the highest level in nine months, according to the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission. Managed-money bets that prices will rise, in futures and options combined, outnumbered short positions by 233,889 contracts in the week ended Feb. 14, the Washington-based regulator said in its report on Feb. 17. Net-long positions rose by 28,180 contracts, or 13.7 percent, from a week earlier.

And lo and behold, the long positions are again driving prices up.  But we’re told speculation is “a scapegoat”.  Well, it’s not demand, and now it’s not supply.  Either we can’t do anything about gas prices by affecting production and demand in the US so the Republicans should shut it, or we need to have a little talk about rampant commodities speculation.

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European Austerity Is Working? O R’yleh?

The Elder Keynesian Krugthulu arises from the depths of Lost Decade, shrill but dreaming, not to bring madness, but to end it!  Ia! Ia ftaghn stimulus!

Last week the European Commission confirmed what everyone suspected: the economies it surveys are shrinking, not growing. It’s not an official recession yet, but the only real question is how deep the downturn will be.

And this downturn is hitting nations that have never recovered from the last recession. For all America’s troubles, its gross domestic product has finally surpassed its pre-crisis peak; Europe’s has not. And some nations are suffering Great Depression-level pain: Greece and Ireland have had double-digit declines in output, Spain has 23 percent unemployment, Britain’s slump has now gone on longer than its slump in the 1930s.

Worse yet, European leaders — and quite a few influential players here — are still wedded to the economic doctrine responsible for this disaster.

For things didn’t have to be this bad. Greece would have been in deep trouble no matter what policy decisions were taken, and the same is true, to a lesser extent, of other nations around Europe’s periphery. But matters were made far worse than necessary by the way Europe’s leaders, and more broadly its policy elite, substituted moralizing for analysis, fantasies for the lessons of history.

Specifically, in early 2010 austerity economics — the insistence that governments should slash spending even in the face of high unemployment — became all the rage in European capitals. The doctrine asserted that the direct negative effects of spending cuts on employment would be offset by changes in “confidence,” that savage spending cuts would lead to a surge in consumer and business spending, while nations failing to make such cuts would see capital flight and soaring interest rates. If this sounds to you like something Herbert Hoover might have said, you’re right: It does and he did.

Now the results are in — and they’re exactly what three generations’ worth of economic analysis and all the lessons of history should have told you would happen. The confidence fairy has failed to show up: none of the countries slashing spending have seen the predicted private-sector surge. Instead, the depressing effects of fiscal austerity have been reinforced by falling private spending.

Just as the financial crisis, the housing depression, and the Great Recession should have doomed Laffernomics and the notion that tax cuts cause growth through, you know, bloody reams of empirical evidence, so should the notion of austerity as a solution to the problem be laughed out of this universe and every other.  Of course, austerity was never the “solution” to the problem of the 2008 crash, it’s the “solution” to the New Deal and the decades of classic liberalism that followed.  Republicans want to “solve” it.  The stimulus was too small to fix the problem fully, but it certainly saved our asses.  The GOP says “we’re on the path to Greece!”  We would be on the path to Greece now under them, and that’s what they want.  Makes it so much easier to cut, cut, cut.

And so to the Mountains of Economic Madness the Austerians head, hoping to take all of us with them for “shared sacrifice”.  But Mighty Krugthulu knows the way through…

The point is that we could actually do a lot to help our economies simply by reversing the destructive austerity of the last two years. That’s true even in America, which has avoided full-fledged austerity at the federal level but has seen big spending and employment cuts at the state and local level. Remember all the fuss about whether there were enough “shovel ready” projects to make large-scale stimulus feasible? Well, never mind: all the federal government needs to do to give the economy a big boost is provide aid to lower-level governments, allowing these governments to rehire the hundreds of thousands of schoolteachers they have laid off and restart the building and maintenance projects they have canceled.

Look, I understand why influential people are reluctant to admit that policy ideas they thought reflected deep wisdom actually amounted to utter, destructive folly. But it’s time to put delusional beliefs about the virtues of austerity in a depressed economy behind us.

The evidence against austerity keeps piling up, but of course austerity for the 99% to benefit the 1% is the point in and of itself, and it always has been.  That’s the abyss they want to throw us into.

Madness, indeed.

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Marry, Marry, Why Ya Buggin’?

The NY Times has a very interesting article this morning on the socioeconomics of women and child-bearing.  It states that evidence (that goes along with women having children later in life now) points to women under the age of 30 who do have children are now more likely to have them outside of marriage rather than in one.

It used to be called illegitimacy. Now it is the new normal. After steadily rising for five decades, the share of children born to unmarried women has crossed a threshold: more than half of births to American women under 30 occur outside marriage.

Once largely limited to poor women and minorities, motherhood without marriage has settled deeply into middle America. The fastest growth in the last two decades has occurred among white women in their 20s who have some college education but no four-year degree, according to Child Trends, a Washington research group that analyzed government data.

Among mothers of all ages, a majority — 59 percent in 2009 — are married when they have children. But the surge of births outside marriage among younger women — nearly two-thirds of children in the United States are born to mothers under 30 — is both a symbol of the transforming family and a hint of coming generational change.

One group still largely resists the trend: college graduates, who overwhelmingly marry before having children. That is turning family structure into a new class divide, with the economic and social rewards of marriage increasingly reserved for people with the most education.

“Marriage has become a luxury good,” said Frank Furstenberg, a sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania.

Now this has some proclaiming that Charles Murray’s latest screed on the decline of White America is now “vindicated” along with conservative scolding of women in general, but it seems to me that the actual theory one can take away from this is anything but.

Having children as a single parent is tough on both the parent and the child.  There’s plenty of evidence that there is a definite socioeconomic effect here.  But please note that Republicans are running on removing the most obvious options societies can use in order to prevent that from becoming more widespread.

Republicans are increasingly against birth control.  Republicans are increasingly against same-sex marriage.  They are against adoption by same-sex couples.  They are against changing laws that would give the legal and economic benefits of marriage to same-sex couples and civil unions.  They are against changing deportation laws that would break up families.  They are against strengthening domestic violence and abuse laws.  They are against the notion that the government should ensure men and women are paid the same for the same job.  Oh, and yes, Republicans aren’t real fans of abortion, either.

So you tell me, which party actually wants to do something about the income inequality that’s caused by this?  All the evidence I see is that Republicans want to perpetuate this mess, if not completely reverse what progress has been made.

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Next You’ll Tell Me The Sun Is Hot And Made Of Fusion

The National Journal’s latest poll on the federal safety net finds the shocking news that the more money you make, the less you believe America needs as much federal spending on the poor, but not all of the responses were of the Allow Them To Consume Sweet Baked Comestibles variety, either.

The survey found a generally receptive audience, especially among whites, for intensifying arguments from Romney and other GOP leaders that too many Americans now rely on benefits from government programs. The Census Bureau recently reported that nearly 49 percent of American households contained at least one person receiving benefits from a government program as of late 2010.

In the poll, 53 percent of those surveyed said they were most concerned that “the government taxes workers too much to fund programs for people who could get by without help,” while only 38 percent said their principal concern was that “federal programs … don’t provide enough of a safety net for people who need help to get by.”

That question produced a moderately sized racial split: 56 percent of whites, compared with 44 percent of nonwhites, said they were most concerned about government taxing workers too much. Republicans, young people, independents, and those earning more than $75,000 annually also tilted most sharply toward concern about excessive taxation, rather than an inadequate safety net. White independents, by nearly 2-to-1, worried more about taxes than holes in the safety net.

That’s the bad news.  There is actually some good news.

But on other fronts, those polled leaned more toward positions held by Democrats. Another question noted that since the recession began, the number of Americans receiving federal benefits like food stamps and housing vouchers has significantly increased. Asked why those rolls have swelled, a 54 percent majority said it was because “high unemployment has left more people in need of government assistance.” Just 41 percent agreed that “government is providing benefits for too many people who don’t actually need them.”

This question generated a much wider racial split. While 45 percent of whites said these programs are growing because government is dispensing too many benefits, just 33 percent of minorities agreed; more than three-fifths of nonwhites said the programs are growing mostly because of high unemployment. On this question, a narrow majority of independents blamed the economy, not overly generous government policies, for the growing caseloads.

As important, the survey found Americans unconvinced that safety-net programs represent a major source of the deficit problem. When asked to identify the biggest reason the federal government faces large deficits for the coming years, just 3 percent of those surveyed said it was because of “too much government spending on programs for the elderly”; only 14 percent said the principal reason was “too much government spending on programs for poor people.” Those explanations were dwarfed by the 24 percent who attributed the deficits primarily to excessive defense spending, and the 46 percent plurality who said their principal cause was that “wealthy Americans don’t pay enough in taxes.”  While minorities were more likely than whites to pin the blame on the wealthy avoiding taxes, even 43 percent of whites agreed.

So Americans may believe that too many people are on programs, but they also know the reason why these programs are straining the country’s budget are the Bush tax cuts.  That message is getting through to people too, which is why allowing the Bush tax cuts to expire on the wealthy is a no-brainer for the President and the Dems, on top of being popular policy, it’s going to be economically necessary to do to ever get the budget under control.  They might even actually do it, too.  If we make them, that is.

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Number Crunchers And Green Eyeshades

The President unveiled his 2013 budget plan today, and the details and priorities are very interesting, to say the least.

President Barack Obama would almost double spending on the U.S. infrastructure over the next six years and would pour $350 billion into a jobs plan while shrinking the budgets of most other domestic agencies.

The blueprint for the fiscal 2013 budget released today would spend $476 billion through 2018 on highway, bridge and mass transit projects, funded in part by winding down the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It cuts some energy programs, farm subsidies and federal workers’ retirement plans, while bulking up the Securities and Exchange Commission and creating a new panel to investigate unfair foreign trade practices.

Investing in the nation’s transportation grid is a fresh attempt to create jobs for a president facing re-election this year amid voter concern about the economy and unemployment at 8.3 percent in January. In addition to gasoline tax revenue, transportation spending would come from a $38.5 billion-a-year transfer from the fund that now goes to war spending.

“Most Americans understand that a crumbling infrastructure is not the way to build an economy that can last,” White House Chief of Staff Jack Lew said on CNN’s “State of the Union” program. “We need to make sure we have a manufacturing base in this country” and workers with appropriate skills, said Lew, the former White House budget director.

Obama’s proposals for discretionary spending must adhere to August’s Budget Control Act, which imposed spending caps that the administration estimates will generate about $1 trillion in deficit reduction over the next decade.

Less bombs, more bridges.  Makes sense to me.

With a Republican-controlled House of Representatives, the document has little chance of becoming law. Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell said “no,” when asked yesterday on CBS’s “Face the Nation” if Obama’s budget had any change of passage in that chamber.

Please note that this was technically saying no the day before the plan came out.   We need MOAR CRAZY HOSTAGE TAKING if we’re going to have a real budget.  Issue one is the GOP most likely attaching the Blount Amendment to exempt all employers from covering any icky woman part maintenance things in insurance to the payroll tax cut extension sometime this week.

Won’t that be a fun fight.  Republicans pitting workers vs. women and expecting to win, either, or, or both.

[UPDATE] I stand humbly corrected on the GOP attaching the Blount Amendment to the payroll tax cut, as Orange Julius folded his cards and now wants a clean extension for the rest of the year.  What the Blount Amendment will now get attached to, I don’t know.  It can’t possibly pass a stand-alone vote.

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High In The Middle And Round At Both Ends

So if you want to know what LEROOOOOOY NNNNNEWTON! was doing while he was drowning in flop sweat and Santorum last night, he was too busy playing for Ohio by attacking the President (and Mitt Romney) here in heavily Catholic Cincinnati yesterday.

Republican presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich today brought his talk of family, jobs and God straight to where he hoped it would resonate – Cincinnati’s West Side.

And it did. The popular Price Hill Chili was packed with 200 people who cheered and clapped as Gingrich promised he’d put people on unemployment into job training and cut corporate taxes. “Large-scale” change is needed, he said, and he’s the man to bring it.

“It is fundamentally wrong to give people 99 weeks of money for doing nothing,” he said, prompting the crowd to yell, “Newt! Newt!”

He must hate anyone who’s on Social Security for more than two years then.  Oh wait, he pretty much does.

He drew his biggest cheers when he talked about oil and said, “No American president will ever again bow to a Saudi king.”

He said he doesn’t want to run just a Republican campaign, but one that unleashes “the American people so they can go out and rebuild the America we love.” A woman shouted, “Yes! Yes!”

When someone in the crowd yelled, “Lead us back to the Bible, Newt!” he didn’t miss a beat: “What I want is to lead you back to the Declaration of Independence… The fact is, in America, we believe that power comes from God to each of you personally” and you loan it back to the government.”

Newt went on to attack Obama’s War On People Who Were Never Going To Vote For Him In The First Place, and the crowd ate it up.

Jim Ferneding of Montgomery wanted the chance to shake Gingrich’s hand, and he got it. He told him: “You’re the one with the strength. Just concentrate on condemning Obama and you will win.”

Because in the end, that’s all that matters to a hell of a lot of folks around here.  They don’t want someone to beat Obama, they want him so thoroughly and utterly destroyed that nobody “like him” dares to run for President again in their lifetimes.  He must be broken.

Don’t forget that little goal even for a second.

 

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Greek Fire: Burninating The Countryside

As the EU drops the hammer on Greece this weekend saying that the country has to go along with brutal austerity measures including minimum wage and pension cuts or else no bailout and and a default, Irish economist David McWilliams offers this clever 10-minute explanation of the European debt crisis.

Please note that the EU’s approach to what Greece needs to do: massive social cuts, forced austerity, balanced budgets enforced by law at the sovereign level, getting rid of the minimum wage, etc. is what Republicans say we have to do here now because our “debt crisis is even worse”.  And as McWilliams points out, the real winners are the banks and the one percent.

After all, none of them get government money.  All that goes to those various Others: welfare queens, crony capitalists, moochers and looters.  Certainly none of that money goes to people who need it, and absolutely not any of it goes to the one percent.  Nope.

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Clearly We Need Laws To Protect Us From Republican Voter Fraud

Next time somebody says DEMOCRAT VOTER FRUAD ACORN BLAH BLOOGITY BLAH please calmly direct them to Indiana’s GOP Secretary of State Charlie White being convicted on six of seven voting fraud felony counts while being the state’s top election official.

Indiana Secretary of State Charlie White was convicted of six felonies early this morning, and consequently lost his job.

But the Republican could get it back soon.

White, 42, Fishers, plans to ask a judge to reduce his convictions – all class D felonies – to misdemeanors at sentencing. It’s uncertain whether that move would allow him to reclaim his job.

“We don’t know the right answer to that,” White said. “This is all very new.”

Shortly after White’s verdict was read, Gov. Mitch Daniels announced in a news release shortly before 3 a.m. that he has appointed Jerry Bonnet, White’s chief deputy, as interim secretary of state.

“I have chosen not to make a permanent appointment today out of respect for the judge’s authority to lessen the verdict to a misdemeanor and reinstate the elected office holder,” the Republican governor said in the news release. “If the felony convictions are not altered, I anticipate making a permanent appointment quickly.”

Now, if all of these players were Democrats, what would your reaction to this be, conservatives?  And what is “law and order moderate” Mitch Daniels thinking, allowing to keep a man convicted of voting fraud as the state’s top election official if the charges get reduced to misdemeanors?  If any Democratic party governor tried that, it would be national news about the “corrupt Dem voting fraud machine”.   What it means is Daniels is just as corrupt as the rest of them and always has been.

But reports on the actually corrupt Republican voting fraud machine that exists to the point of a Secretary of State being convicted on voting fraud crimes?  Doesn’t count.  Meanwhile, New Black Panther Party BLAAAAAAAAAARGH!

It’s Okay If You’re A Republican™.

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The Evil That Men Do

Charles Murray is pimping a new book, alas. TBogg and Roy have already taken a couple of whacks at the most risible bits of his latest attempt to promote the natural order of things.

It’s hard to see this one making much of a splash, outside the usual quarters.  In it, Murray looks specifically at pale America, and he argues that white folks here divide along class lines. That’s a phenomenon he sees separating the effete, smart, rich folks living in enclaves unclear on the concept of real Amerigeist (See! Ha! You knew I was one of those, didn’t you!), and the Nascar loving, not-so-smart, Applebee eating (truly—see the two posts linked above), meth sucking (I made that up) folks who don’t have passports that let them into Prospect Park or SoMa.

Leaving aside that David Brooks already botched this one, albeit in more facile prose, Murray’s key move is to declare that whatever else may construct class in America, it ain’t income, or more precisely, income inequality.

Which is of course what this always outcome-oriented writer needs to say.

His public-intellectual career, vapid though it may seem anywhere actual rigor is demanded,* turns on finding some kind of essentialist reason to preserve current social hierarchies and racial privilege. Here, abandoning a genetic tack, he can be seen to perform one of David Brooks patented’ double backflips, to land on what he claims are deeply rooted differences in culture.

The cleverness there is that such arguments evoke the kinds of responses most likely to be palatable to his and our overlords.  Or, in the words of one reviewer—a more famous man than Murray, yet equally certain of assumptions not in evidence—the authoritative prescription for the Republic runs like this:

What the country needs is not an even larger federal government but a kind of civic Great Awakening—a return to the republic’s original foundations of family, vocation, community, and faith.

That’s from Niall Ferguson, whose review captures the bad faith that runs through Murray’s enterprise—really, one of the original that runs through the whole right-wing culturedammerung. More »

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A Texas-Sized Surrender

Now this is very good news if it plays out the way The Hill seems to think it will:  Texas Republicans are basically looking to settle their redistricting case with the DoJ, which would have to include approval by the minority representation groups that are the plaintiffs, that would give the state a number of new districts that would be won by Dems.

“They’re backed up against the wall and have to come to some agreement and it’ll be awfully favorable on our end,” said one of the plaintiffs in the case.

Another plaintiff agreed.  “It’s clear they know they’re in a vulnerable position and that’s why they want to settle,” he said.

Any settlement would need to get the multiple minority group plaintiffs on board, and would create more majority-Hispanic and majority-African American congressional districts. Two of the plaintiffs predicted that an agreement will be reached early next week.

That’s pretty much a massive capitulation by Republicans in the state, who purposely drew the four new districts in the state legislature to favor Republicans precisely by splitting Latino and African-American neighborhoods across district lines and using pencil thin lines to connect them to overwhelmingly red districts, assuring that at least three of the four new districts would be safe GOP seats for the next decade.

But the DoJ gets ultimate veto power over this sort of thing for states like Texas, and that decision by a three-judge panel is expected soon.  Texas Republicans are apparently so terrified of this that (especially after the Supreme Court punted the map back to Texas to work it out as a state issue) they are begging for a settlement before the DoJ takes them out back with a two by four and a grim expression.

If the state of Texas and the plaintiffs in the case reach an agreement it would solve a drawn out process with two separate lower court battles and a Supreme Court opinion already on the books.

Texas is gaining four seats in Congress and will have 36 total House seats next election.  Most of the state’s population growth has come from African Americans and Hispanics, but the Republican state legislators who drew the maps gave the groups few new opportunities in the state.

Any agreement would lead to a minimum of 13 Democratic-leaning seats, and possibly a fourteenth seat depending on how the districts in Fort Worth are drawn.

With conservative former Rep. Nick Lampson (D-Texas) running for a Galveston-area seat, Democrats could win as many as 14 or 15 seats in the state, up from the nine seats they currently hold. Republicans would hold 21 or 22 seats, down from the 23 they currently have.

Dems picking up 5 to 6 House seats in Texas would go a long, long way towards regaining the House in 2012.  Republicans know this and they’re looking to settle anyway, which shows you just how bad they think their position is in respect to the three-judge pre-clearance panel.

On the other hand, the districts that Texas is gaining is coming at the expense of states like Ohio and New York, and ultimately one of the reasons that I think the GOP is looking to take the settlement here is that they know redistricting Dem districts out of existence in other states they control like Missouri and Louisiana (and in Ohio especially) will make Texas into a wash at best for the Donks, especially given that GOP-controlled SC and Georgia are getting a new district and Florida two.  They were going for all the marbles in the redistricting pile, and they’ll have to settle for merely half as a losing proposition, which was the point of the entire exercise given the level of state control handed to the GOP in 2010.

And once again we come back to the fact that voters picked a really awful time to give the Republicans more power by deciding President Obama and the Dems hadn’t moved fast enough in Operation Ponycorn With Sprinkles.  The repercussions of that nonsense will be felt for, well, a decade.

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In The Business Of Giving You The Business

Kind of a depressing WaPo piece here about America’s House of Not So Commons and politics increasingly being a rich person’s game:

Between 1984 and 2009, the median net worth of a member of the House more than doubled, according to the analysis of financial disclosures, from $280,000 to $725,000 in inflation-adjusted 2009 dollars, excluding home ­equity.

Over the same period, the wealth of an American family has declined slightly, with the comparable median figure sliding from $20,600 to $20,500, according to the Panel Study of Income Dynamics from the University of Michigan.

The comparisons exclude home equity because it is not included in congressional reporting, and 1984 was chosen because it is the earliest year for which consistent wealth statistics are available.

The growing disparity between the representatives and the represented means that there is a greater distance between the economic experience of Americans and those of lawmakers.

That particular understatement could power multiple suns.  Being a career politician is, well, a very lucrative career.  Combine this with the fact that maybe 10-15% of House districts are ever truly competitive in an election by design and you start to understand just how depressing the chore of fixing Congress is.  Some 90% disapproval for the institution, majorities now saying that their own Representative needs to be tossed, but maybe 60 out of 435 seats will change hands, at most, 80.  The other 350 or so are in zero danger of losing their seat even in an election year where the House has roughly the same approval rating as breeding velociraptors down the hall from a hospital neonatal ICU.

The Senate fares no better of course and is actually in many ways far worse, but if you should still somehow be wondering why it seems like everyone with “Rep.” in front of their name has no idea how the 99% actually lives, there’s a distinct, structural reason for that.  Also, good luck ever getting these clowns to agree to term limits, which would be a vital component of any fix.

For the one percent, by the one percent.  Could you imagine more than one percent of Congress ever consisting of pipe-fitters, school teachers, auto mechanics, computer engineers, or nurses?  It might be good for America.  It would be slightly less good for people with a net worth of $725,000 or more, which is why it wouldn’t happen.

All the kvetching about the Presidency is one thing, but until we strip mine the professional grifters out of Congress, ain’t nothin’ gonna change, bro.

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Another Worst Kasich Scenario

Ohio Republican Gov. John Kasich is bound and determined to drive his approval numbers down into the dirt, it seems.  This week, he’s given Ohio women a lovely holiday gift: banning Ohio’s state insurance exchange from offering any plans that cover abortion.

House Bill 79, which would prohibit insurance plans participating in a yet-to-be created state health exchange or marketplace from providing abortion coverage, was among 13 bills Kasich signed this morning. They were passed last week during the legislature’s final session days of 2011.

“Ohio is witnessing historic gains in legislation that protects mothers and saves unborn babies,” said Mike Gonidakis, executive director for Ohio Right to Life.

The new federal health-care law requires states to have an exchange in place by 2014 to give consumers and small businesses a place to shop and compare policies. Gonidakis said the federal health-care law allows states to opt out of abortion coverage.

Ahh, but there’s a catch: the ACLU is eager to challenge the law, based on Issue 3 that passed in the state last month:

But the ACLU of Ohio has said the constitutional amendment that Ohio voters overwhelmingly approved last month was a message in opposition to the mandated insurance provisions of the federal health-care law and can now be used to block measures to restrict abortion access.

Issue 3 says that no state law shall “prohibit the purchase or sale of health care or health insurance” or “impose a penalty for the sale or purchase or health care or insurance.“

In other words, the same legal mumbo-jumbo that Kasich and the GOP used to “eliminate” the individual insurance mandate is now the same legislation that the ACLU will use to fight this anti-abortion measure.

And make no mistake, this is a bill that will eliminate insurance providers from covering abortions, making them all but unaffordable to women.  That’s the point…and there’s probably going to be a number of court battles in states over this as well as a Supreme Court fight eventually.

Let’s keep in mind the GOP plan is to have as many blatantly unconstitutional bans on abortion as possible to make it de facto unavailable for any woman.  After all, court battles can take far longer than pregnancies.

One of the other things that really bothers me is that Ohio Republicans seem to think there’s no reason to even try to create a state insurance exchange right now.  Pretty much every red state out there is ignoring the exchange requirement, or passing legislation now that does everything possible to assure that the state exchanges, which are supposed to be online in 2014, simply don’t work because of all the silly bans on everything.   Even if you think that “Hey, this exchange thing has nothing to do with me” right now, it’s soon going to.  And GOP states are simply digging an early grave for it.

Even if the court battles are resolved in the favor of the Democrats here, the GOP is assuring that in dozens of states, insurance is going to be a nightmare to obtain.  I guess that’s the eventual goal: a Republican party in change of government so that they can assure it can never work.

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When honesty informs history…

The Atlantic Magazine has come out with a special issue to commemorate the 150 Anniversary of the Civil War. TNC has been working on a piece for that issue and it is up online. It is excellent, honest and challenging. Here is a taste:

The Civil War marks the first great defense of democracy and the modern West. Its legacy lies in everything from women’s suffrage to the revolutions now sweeping the Middle East. It was during the Civil War that the heady principles of the Enlightenment were first, and most spectacularly, called fully to account.

In our present time, to express the view of the enslaved—to say that the Civil War was a significant battle in the long war against bondage and for government by the people—is to compromise the comfortable narrative. It is to remind us that some of our own forefathers once explicitly rejected the republic to which they’d pledged themselves, and dreamed up another country, with slavery not merely as a bug, but as its very premise. It is to point out that at this late hour, the totems of the empire of slavery—chief among them, its flag—still enjoy an honored place in the homes, and public spaces, of self-professed patriots and vulgar lovers of “freedom.” It is to understand what it means to live in a country that will never apologize for slavery, but will not stop apologizing for the Civil War.

The journey that Ta-Nehisi Coates has been on to explore the Civil War has produced some exceptional work. This piece is another on that journey. It is one of the best things I’ve ever read on the reasons for—and the meaning of—the Civil War. I encourage you to take a moment and read it.

Cheers

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Pardon The Interruption

Dafna Linzer’s year-long ProPublica investigation into the factors surrounding supposedly color-blind presidential pardons from 1998 to 2008 is certainly one of the more important articles of the year. The bottom line is that white pardon seekers were four times more likely to be granted a pardon than blacks.

ProPublica’s review examined what happened after President George W. Bush decided at the beginning of his first term to rely almost entirely on the recommendations made by career lawyers in the Office of the Pardon Attorney.

The office was given wide latitude to apply subjective standards, including judgments about the “attitude” and the marital and financial stability of applicants. No two pardon cases match up perfectly, but records reveal repeated instances in which white applicants won pardons with transgressions on their records similar to those of blacks and other minorities who were denied.

Senior aides in the Bush White House say the president had hoped to take politics out of the process and avoid a repetition of the Marc Rich scandal, in which the fugitive financier won an eleventh-hour pardon tainted by his ex-wife’s donations to Democratic causes and the Clinton Presidential Library.

Justice Department officials said in a statement Friday that the pardon process takes into account many factors that cannot be statistically measured, such as an applicant’s candor and level of remorse.

“Nonetheless, we take the concerns seriously,” the statement said. “We will continue to evaluate the statistical analysis and, of course, are always working to improve the clemency process and ensure that every applicant gets a fair, merit-based evaluation.”

More »

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