Senator Brown (not that one, the good one)

I met with a representative from Sherrod Brown’s campaign last Thursday evening. They’re starting early because they anticipate a tough race. I appreciate that she contacted me, and allowed me to play expert on my little neck of the woods. I hope I was helpful. I have all sorts of directives I must deliver, as we all do, here at Balloon Juice. She was able to eat dinner while I was haranguing her and I suspect she works constantly, so that’s good. Not a complete waste of time for her.

First, some background on Sherrod Brown and the state of the race:

Brown is a liberal populist, and has been his entire career in Congress. From speaking with local people here, I know he emphasizes trade issues and middle class concerns when he meets with them. That’s a good fit for this county, because the median income is 32k and we (still, barely) have a manufacturing-based local economy. My personal feeling is that Brown’s long commitment to those issues puts him in a good position in 2012. He didn’t change. The county came around to his way of thinking:

Rep. Sherrod Brown became the first Ohio Democrat elected to the Senate since 1992. He had vowed to campaign as a progressive and not move to the center, confident that voters dissatisfied with the economy and Republican leadership would respond.
In defeating two-term incumbent Mike DeWine®, Brown emphasized the frustrations of the middle class. He criticized free-trade agreements and accused DeWine of doing the bidding of big business on issues of health care and energy policy. Brown, who voted against the Iraq war and the USA Patriot Act, charged that DeWine was ineffective on the Senate intelligence committee.
Brown, 54, was first elected to the Ohio legislature at age 21, straight from Yale. A seven-term member of Congress, he says the Senate is his final stop. During the campaign, he crisscrossed the state with his wife, Connie Schultz, a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for the Cleveland Plain Dealer.

I have gotten very good feedback on Brown’s attention to constituent services. We have a local manufacturer who does his own DC lobbying: he or his wife lobby on trade issues that are specific to their family business. They both told me that Brown and his staff were well prepared when they arrived, had clearly researched their company and the specific trade issues that apply to their company. They were impressed. They compared Brown favorably to Voinovich, and they voted for and supported Voinovich. They felt Brown was more responsive to their concerns than Voinovich was, and more knowledgeable about their business.

The top-tier challenger to Brown is Mandel. Mandel is currently the Treasurer of the state of Ohio. Mandel is raising a lot of money.

When northern Ohio businessman Benjamin Suarez makes a big campaign contribution, few people are surprised. He owns a direct marketing company that does $100 million annually in sales, and he has a history of giving to Republicans. But in the current election cycle, a large number of his employees and their wives—many of whom have never before given to federal campaigns—have contributed to two specific congressional candidates: Ohio Treasurer Josh Mandel, a Republican running for U.S. Senate, and U.S. Rep. Jim Renacci (R., Wadsworth), who represents Ohio’s 16th District

The company’s spokesman, Lauren Capo, said the company did not reimburse employees or provide money for the contributions, though she later emphasized that she couldn’t “speak on the behalf of anyone, other than our brand and products.” Federal campaign finance law prohibits a corporation from providing bonuses or salary increases to employees to reimburse them for political contributions. Among the employees who gave, many of them are managers, directors, or executives, according to federal election filings. Some of them, however, list their occupation as “writer,” “copywriter,” or merely “marketing.” Campaign finance experts said it was especially surprising to see individuals with those titles giving such large amounts.

“A $5,000 contribution from someone who makes $300,000 a year is completely normal,” said Paul S. Ryan, an attorney with the Campaign Legal Center in Washington. “A $5,000 campaign contribution from someone who makes $30,000 a year strikes me as unordinary”.

Unordinary. That’s all he’s saying.

What’s interesting about this research on Mandel donors is that Ohio Republicans have a history here . In 2005, there was a huge GOP scandal in Ohio regarding (among other things) “conduits”. Conduits are people who make a donation and then are reimbursed by another party for that donation. The Toledo Blade is not alleging that these generous donations going to Mandel are illegal or improper. They’re simply raising the question of why someone who makes (perhaps!) 30k a year might donate 5k to a GOP Senate primary race. Given the recent GOP history in Ohio, it’s a fair question. It’s unordinary.

In any event, I was able to make suggestions for how Brown might approach a campaign in my little corner of the state. He’s very popular among local Democrats. On the other side, I honestly have not heard any real vitriol directed at him from local Republicans. Right now, this far out, he has strong support from our base (here, anyway) yet has somehow managed to not inflame and enrage local Republicans. Not a bad place to be.

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Stranger in a Strange Land

I’m not saying Mitt Romney won’t be the Republican nominee next year—though if I were a betting man, I’d lay a small wager (pizza scale, not rent money) that he’ll fall short.

But I do believe that planners at DOD see Romney’s ear as the US Strategic Tin Reserve—and that can’t be good for either a potentially (faux) populist-dominated primary battle, nor for a general election against someone who has some experience in running against the clueless rich.

The latest gaffe? Romney, like McCain, has a housing fetish:

The San Diego Union-Tribune broke the story of Romney’s California plans this weekend:

“Romney has filed an application with the city to bulldoze his 3,009-square-foot, single-story home at 311 Dunemere Dr. and replace it with a two-story, 11,062-square-foot structure. No date has been set to consider the proposed coastal development and site development permits, which must be approved by the city.”

Three years ago, Romney bought the “oceanfront manse in La Jolla” for $12 million. His campaign says the house on the property is too small for Romney’s large extended family…

Oh, and one more thing:  what’s up with a resident (and former governor of) Massachusetts plunking down hogsheads of cash to buy sand in La Jolla in the first place?  Must be that old sailor-down-to-the-sea thing:

SanDiego.com reports Romney said last year that the oceanfront property stirred up memories of his (also fabulously wealthy) childhood:

At a book signing in nearby University City last year, Romney explained why he bought the house.

“I wanted to be where I could hear the waves,” he said. “As a boy, we spent summers on Lake Huron [in his native Michigan] and I could hear the crashing waves at night. It was one of my favorite things in the world. Being near the water and the waves was something I badly wanted to experience again.’”

Ah.  The soul of a Romney.

One thing, though.  Last time I checked, Massachusetts had a pretty nice coastline.  Waves too, and tides, and oysters—and even famous rich people with compounds and all.

The moral of this story: it’s not that Romney has more scratch than you and me—and all our friends—  and that this makes him suspect.  It’s that he’s rootless, a citizen not of a place but of a class.  His passport is green, issued by the sovereign meta-state of Richistan.

And fine—he’s a wealthy man; it’s a truism that this fact does not of necessity render him a bad person (though it does amplify his capacity for evil if he swings that way, of course).  But there’s rich and rich, and for some, Romney clearly included, an utterly secure material condition renders the experience of most of those the former one-term governor would seek to govern simply inaccessible. And that’s not good, either for a candidate or the country.

Image:  Titian and workshop, The Vendramin Family, venerating a Relic of the True Cross, before 1576.  Bonus points to those who spot the Romney-specific family reference in the grouping.

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Open Thread – Delusions of Grandeur

One of my favorite bloggers, Lance Mannion, has up a lovely post about Andrew Sullivan.

I haven’t had a credit card for years, because I actually live like a fiscal conservative.

We’re sure you do, Andrew. But you know what else you live like?

A man with a six-figure income and no children.

Getting a little tired of being told by the well-to-do strolling down Park Avenue that the rest of us hoi polloi need to share in some more sacrifice and tighten our belts another notch.

Sullivan also thinks we need to raise the age of retirement. Again not advice we want to hear from someone who can go on vacation for weeks at a time seemingly whenever he wants and who has a job he can do and do well until he’s 90, if his health allows.

One of the things that drives us nuts about Sullivan is that it’s all so personal with him. I don’t mean he thinks it’s all about him. I mean that sometimes—-a lot of times—-he doesn’t seem able to imagine that not everybody in the United States is a gay ex-pat Brit living in Washington, D.C. whose big disappointment in life recently was being turned down for a mortgage on a second home.

Yeah. Sullivan didn’t get to buy a summer house in Provincetown. The heart heart bleeds.

Because Lance is a much nicer person than I am, his post doesn’t end there and it has some interesting ideas about why many of us keep reading Sullivan (despite Sullivan’s frequent wrongheadedness, weird man-crushes on people who would set him on fire if they could (Paul Ryan, anyone?), inexplicable belief that Margaret Thatcher was anything but a vile and termagant harridan who should have been murdered in a ditch with “Section 28” engraved on her forehead with a stanley knife, and the fact that when he goes on holiday he apparently turns his entire blog over to the tender mercies of a room full of particularly flatulent monkeys).

ETA: H/t to commenter Arundel

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Great Lakes Restoration

I’ve talked about the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative here before, but that was in the context of Ohio Governor John Kasich, who is a close friend of Rupert Murdoch, by the way. I’m troubled by that relationship. I’m concerned. I would even go so far as to say that Kasich’s passionate defense of Murdoch in major media raises more questions than it answers.

In any event, the Great Lakes Restoration project continues, despite Rupert Murdoch and John Kasich:

The Great Lakes Restoration Initiative is the largest investment in the Great Lakes in two decades. A task force of 11 federal agencies developed a plan to put the president’s historic initiative into action. This action plan covers fiscal years 2010 through 2014 and addresses five urgent focus areas:
Cleaning up toxics and areas of concern
Combating invasive species
Promoting nearshore health by protecting watersheds from polluted run-off
Restoring wetlands and other habitats
Working with partners on outreach.

Which is good, because we have some issues with Lake Erie:

A huge bloom of potentially toxic microcystis algae, which has reared its ugly head almost annually since 1995 after more than a 20-year absence, has been visible from space since at least July 22. European Space Agency satellite photos given to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory in Ann Arbor show how it formed in the Monroe area, grew, and has fanned out to the Lake Erie islands.

This problem has gone unaddressed since 1995, so it’s going to be a long haul.

The algae, though, wouldn’t be there if not for the region’s ongoing battle with controlling both storm water and agricultural runoff. It is likely to be a topic of discussion when President Obama’s chief adviser on Great Lakes issues, Cameron Davis, visits the University of Toledo’s Lake Erie Center in Oregon tomorrow with U.S. Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D., Toledo) and UT President Dr. Lloyd Jacobs, according to an aide for Miss Kaptur.

Mr. Davis is to unveil the latest round of Great Lakes Restoration Initiative grants, a program that has brought the Great Lakes region a historic amount of new money to combat pollution. Although its anticipated funding of about $300 million is down significantly from its first-year allocation of $475 million, the program is in response to Mr. Obama’s 2008 campaign pledge to infuse the Great Lakes region with at least $5 billion for cleanup during his administration. More than $20 billion worth of needs, mostly sewage spills that helped algae grow, have been identified.

I went to a Great Lakes water forum in 2005 or thereabouts and Marcy Kaptur was a speaker at that one, too. She’s genuinely knowledgeable on water issues. I learned a lot.

During the Q and A session a 9-11 Truther stood up and delivered a screed poorly disguised as a question. Kaptur responded with her concerns about our dependence on foreign oil, her fuel efficiency agenda for the US auto industry, and a completely irrelevant anecdote about her brother, who is a machinist. She then tipped her head, smiled, and said, “I hope that answers your question”. She’s a pro.

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There is no future in England’s dreaming

The British are learning just how awesome Hooverism is right now too:

A slowdown in Britain’s growth in the second quarter means that the economy is weaker than thought and has no chance of meeting its official growth target this year.

The eagerly awaited preliminary GDP estimate for April to June showed the economy growing by 0.2%, rather than contracting. Although this was better than some of the gloomier forecasts, it is still slower than the 0.5% growth seen in the first quarter, which came after a 0.5% decline in the fourth quarter of last year. City economists and thinktanks warned that the Office for Budget Responsibility would have to revise down its 1.7% growth forecast for this year.

Will Straw, associate director of Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR), estimates the UK will grow by just 1.2% this year.

The weak growth is fuelling fears that Britain could lose its AAA credit rating unless the economy picks up sharply in the third quarter

(h/t tomvox1)

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Exciting News! Well, it was expected, but still

The next step:

SECRETARY OF STATE HUSTED CERTIFIES SIGNATURES FOR REFERENDUM ON SENATE BILL 5
Petitioners have met Constitutional requirements to place issue on November ballot
COLUMBUS – Secretary of State Jon Husted today certified that petitioners seeking a referendum on Senate Bill 5 have collected 915,456 valid signatures, meeting the necessary requirements to place the issue on the 2011 November ballot. Petitioners needed 231,147 signatures or six percent of the total vote cast for Governor in 2010.

As part of the total number of signatures needed to place the measure on the ballot, petitioners also needed to collect signatures from at least 44 of Ohio’s 88 counties, and within each of those counties, to collect enough signatures equal to three percent of the total vote cast for governor in the most recent gubernatorial election, 2010.. Senate Bill 5 petitioners met this requirement in all 88 counties

Having met the requirements to place the issue on the ballot, the next step in the process is for the Ballot Board to convene to approve the ballot language that voters will consider in November. The Ballot Board is expected to meet in early August

This is good:

Senate Bill 5 petitioners met this requirement in all 88 counties

The fact that we met the 3% requirement in all 88 counties rather than the (minimum) of 44 counties that were required is good news, because the thinking is that indicates a working coalition in place all over the state to actually get the repeal passed. We’ll see.

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Vermont and Washington are also far apart

I’ve been looking into Vermont’s brand new single-payer health care law.(pdf). I’ll just pick out some highlights:

As provided in Sec. 4 of this act, upon receipt by the state of necessary waivers from federal law, all Vermont residents shall be eligible for Green Mountain Care, a universal health care program that will provide health benefits through a single payment system. To the maximum extent allowable under federal law and waivers from federal law, Green Mountain Care shall include health coverage provided under the health benefit exchange established under chapter 18, subchapter 1 of Title 33; under Medicaid; under Medicare; by employers that choose to participate; and to state employees and municipal employees.

The board shall negotiate payment amounts with health care
professionals, manufacturers of prescribed products, medical supply
companies, and other companies providing health services or health supplies in order to have a consistent reimbursement amount accepted by these persons.

Read the whole thing or just the good parts. It’s like liberal policy porn.

Maybe we can do a group analysis of the law here, because we don’t hear a lot from (sitting) liberal governors. There are apparently four available lots for rent on the valuable real estate that is commercial news, and those lots are reserved for Mitch Daniels, Scott Walker, John Kasich or Chris Christie.

The state-level policy debate stretches all the way from far Right in Indiana to far Right in New Jersey. In terms of geography it’s broad, I guess. Can anyone deny that Indiana is many miles from New Jersey? There you go. The media defense rests.

Reading the Vermont law, I think of Bernie Sanders. When I think of Bernie Sanders I think of community health centers. I’ve described my great experience with a community health center before. But I relied on a county community health center for affordable, sliding-scale fee pre-natal care (a long time ago). Mine wasn’t a federally qualified community health center. At the time I knew nothing of these distinctions, but I did know this was the only primary care provider that would take me because I looked.

This is the definition of a federally qualified community health center:

non-profit, community-directed providers that remove common barriers to care by serving communities who otherwise confront financial, geographic, language, cultural and other barriers. Also known as Federally-Qualified Health Centers (FQHCs), they: are located in high-need areas identified as having elevated poverty, higher than average infant mortality, and where few physicians practice; are open to all residents, regardless of insurance status or ability to pay; tailor services to fit the special needs and priorities of their communities, provide comprehensive primary and other health care services; provide high quality care, reducing costly emergency, hospital, and specialty care, and saving the health care system $24 billion a year nationally.

40% of the low-income uninsured in Vermont rely on a federally supported non-profit community health center for basic health care, now, today. Compare with Texas (12%), or Ohio (14%) or California (25%). Then compare with Washington. 47%. Take a look at all the states.

Is an existing non-profit or public primary care delivery system a good prerequisite to a universal single-payer payment mechanism? Or, does an existing non-profit or public primary care delivery system make a transition to a universal single-payer mechanism more likely?

I’d add the caveat I began with: federally supported community health centers are not the only non-profit or public health care provider. Looking at the percentage of uninsured who rely on this provider may be misleading. Perhaps Texas, for example, has a great network of county health department centers that aren’t (directly) established at the federal level. Of course we know that all health care delivery in the U.S., public or private, is federally supported one way or another, despite the persistent libertarian fantasies of media and conservatives.

Here’s where you can find a federally-funded community health center, if you’re looking for one.

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In the bag

Is any US outlet other than the Times doing original reporting on the News Corp. scandal? The Times has it wrapped like a mummy, and I can’t help but wonder if WaPo and other outlets have ties to News Corp. (for example, Charles Lane of the WaPo Editorial Board is a regular on Bret Baier’s Special Report) that make it unlikely they will cover the story seriously.

Sullivan is so far in the bag for his paymasters at News Corp. that he’s making “the Guardian is shrill” jokes.

For shame. He is dead to me.

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This world belongs to them (now they can keep it)

Murdoch is dead:

The media titan Rupert Murdoch sought to stanch damage to his News Corporation empire from a deepening phone-hacking scandal on Thursday by sacrificing the mass-circulation British weekly The News of the World, even as the arrest of one of the paper’s former editors, Andy Coulson, appeared imminent. The paper will publish its final issue on Sunday.

The saga turned yet more disturbing Thursday with suggestions that the paper had broken into the voicemail not only of a 13-year-old murder victim but also of relatives of soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, and that the paper had paid tens of thousands of dollars in bribes to police officers for information.

Long live Murdoch:

In the past 10 days, Fox has run more than 30 segments calling for the nonprofit group to be stripped of its tax-exempt status. Its Fox Nation website has even provided a link to pre-completed complaint forms against Media Matters to send to the Internal Revenue Service.

How long until the heavily doctored Breitbart tapes of pimps in Media Matters offices hit? How long until the Washington Post ombudsman scolds the librul media for failing to pay sufficient attention to these doctored tapes?

Future historians will wonder why the United States and United Kingdom allowed an Australian eccentric to take control of their political systems. Some contemporary bloggers will never address this question.

When I saw this yesterday, I assumed it was serious.

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Of no party or clique

There’s at least one prominent English expatriate blogger who doesn’t seem much interested to have told his minions to show much interest in whether or not his paymasters condone hacking into the voicemail of kidnap victims and deleting all the messages.

Update. As many of you have pointed out, Sullivan himself is on vacation. I still find it odd that the guest bloggers there haven’t taken the topic up at all.

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Well, So Much for the “Republicans Are Turning Dovish” Conventional Wisdom

I don’t know if we can really believe this Wall Street Journal op-ed by Club for Growth founder Stephen Moore, but it’s pretty much what I’ve been thinking:

The Republican nomination for president is completely up for grabs, but there’s a lot of agreement on who the vice presidential pick should be: Marco Rubio, the freshman senator from Florida. My contacts in the Mitt Romney camp are boasting: “Doesn’t a Romney-Rubio ticket sound great?” One senior Romney advisor told me: “We think that could be a dream ticket.” Operatives from the pack of other wannabes are thinking ahead to the same Rubio marriage with their candidate….

I’ve thought for a while that the Republican VP nominee isn’t going to be a white male, and I think that means Rubio unless (and I think this is a remote possibility) it’s South Carolina governor Nikki Haley, with Bobby Jindal (choked in his one shot at the national spotlight) and Cain, Bachmann, and Allen West (too extreme) as the real longshots.

But think about it: If the nominee picks Rubio, what does that say about the recently popular notion that the GOP is going dovish and wobbly and isolationist?

Recall what Ross Douthat wrote about Rubio a couple of days ago:

Rubio is the great neoconservative hope, the champion of a foreign policy that boldly goes abroad in search of monsters to destroy. In the Senate, he’s constantly pressed for a more hawkish line against the Mideast’s bad actors. His maiden Senate speech was a paean to national greatness, whose peroration invoked John F. Kennedy and insisted that America remain the “watchman on the wall of world freedom.”

... Rubio has argued that we should be striking harder against Qaddafi….

... the story Rubio tells, with eloquence and passion, is … the story of a great republic armed and righteous, with no limits on what it can accomplish in the world.

If you lurk in the right-o-sphere, you encounter a lot of people appalled at the prospect that the presidential nominee might be Jon Huntsman, or Mitt Romney. A lot of righties are horrified at the prospect of nominating a “RINO.” If there were really a serious anti-interventionist, isolationist, small-government-extends-to-foreign-policy-too movement on the right, you’d hear just as much howling about the prospect that Rubio or a similar neoconservative type might be on the ticket.

But you’re not hearing that. And you won’t hear it. Because, apart from a handful of sincerely Paul-ish teabaggers, most on the right don’t have any problem with interventionism and bellicosity, as long as it’s on right-wing terms and under a right-wing Daddy. Right-wing reticence about power has an expiration date: the day the next Republican president gets sworn into office.

(X-posted.)

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What’s in a name?

I don’t want to beat this Sully-saving-conservatism thing into the ground, and I really will stop posting soon, but Guster makes a good point:

Sully’s idiotic brand of ‘conservatism’ is thriving in the right wing of the Democratic Party. He just refuses to see it.

I’d argue more generally that there is almost no difference between Andrew Sullivan’s views and those of “liberal” commentators like Joe Klein or Jacob Weisberg (or anyone else at Slate, I pick him because he’s the head of the operation). They all supported the Iraq War (Klein more ambivalently than the others), they all had major man-crushes on George W. Bush, they all think Michael Moore and Paul Krugman smell funny, they all think Paul Ryan is a great patriot, they’re all skeptical that the American middle-class deserves Social Security and access to health care. Sure Sullivan took longer to fall out of love with the cowboy king, but he’s also louder in his condemnation of torture, less reflexively pro-establishment, and more socially liberal (aside from reproductive rights).

I just can’t see why the political philosophy that most American media “liberals” espouse needs some kind of saving. In the United States, we have one party whose policy positions are comparable to those of European right-center parties and another that functions as a confederacy of nihilistic insurgents. So what if the first party is called “liberal” and the second is called “conservative”? We’re Americans, honey, our names don’t mean shit.

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Village shuffle

I’ve explained, probably too many times, how I think the modern conservative mind works on most issues, say climate change. It’s not happening, if it is happening it’s not because of human activity, if it is happening because of human activity there’s nothing we can do about it, if there is something we can do about it, that something isn’t what Democrats are proposing. Also too: Al Gore is fat (right-wing blogosphere), climate change doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of things, civility is more important (Bobo/Chunky Bobo).

With the Village things are slightly different, but much the same. The Democrats caused a huge deficit that is killing us, even if Democrats didn’t cause the deficit, it is killing us, if the deficit isn’t killing us we should still pretend it is so that we can use it as a pretext to make “tough choices”, even if the deficit isn’t killing us and the “tough choices” are all nonsense, it’s what voters believe. Also too, remember Walter Mondale, you don’t want to end up like him, and Greg Mankiw has some wonky stuff that supports something I said about this economically, I think.

You see the full range of this in just one exchange between newly minted Villager David Von Drehle and the angry, vituperative Michael Grunwald on Swampland. Von Drehle says the “debt warnings” from the bond vigilantes mean that Republicans are right to hold up the debt ceiling vote and possibly end Medicare. Grunwald points out that threatening to default on debt will make “debt warnings” that much more credible and dire. Von Drehle says “but 12 trillion dollars is a lot of money so Republicans are right”. Grunwald points out that most of the deficit problems were caused by Republican policies 2000-2008. Von Drehle says “so what, moderate voters don’t believe that”.

Notice Von Drehel’s shift from “I have THE math, so suck it hippie” to “maybe I don’t have THE math, but the people at the Applebee’s Salad Bar agree with me, so suck it hippie”.

In my view, a brief reign of terror would be well worth the costs right now.

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Do not go gentle under that good bus

Gin and Tacos asks and answers:

Even among the unpopular solutions, why would they propose something like Medicare cuts – let’s be honest, even the GOP knows this is political suicide – before tax increases, defense spending cuts, and so on?

The answer is pretty obvious: because when the chips are down, they will stab you in the back at the drop of the hat. They don’t care about you, regardless of party. You are not important. They would rather try to ram Medicare reform down your throat than to bite the Pentagon and Wall Street hands that feed them or raise taxes on their own income bracket. The choice between cutting Social Security and lifting the payroll tax cap (without which Social Security would be solvent in perpetuity) is no choice at all. The default solution is always, always to throw you under the bus.

Here’s the thing though: in most cases, Very Serious People don’t benefit much from fucking over the poor and middle-class. Some of them get wingnut welfare gigs for serving as mouth-pieces for David Koch, but most don’t. Increasing the highest marginal rate by 4 percent isn’t going to put David Von Drehle in the poor house. Fiscal austerity is bad for the economy and that doesn’t help Fred Hiatt’s 401K anymore than it helps anyone else’s. What’s really in it for billionaire Pete Peterson to end Social Security? Why is he doing it? How much better can he eat? What could he buy that he can’t already afford? (The future, Mr. Gittes?)

Part of it might be that everything is relative, that it’s not enough for the rich to prosper, they must also be allowed to watch the middle-class starve. It might be that there’s a powerful Village omerta at work, that Richard Cohen would rather live with declining pageview and investments than rat out his cohorts. Or maybe they honestly believe that destroying the middle-class is the right thing to do—they don’t want to do it, they feel they owe it to us.

We already knew that David Brooks cares more about comity among elites than safety and health among the general population. But I didn’t know until this day that he thought that World War I—which killed a particularly high proportion of English elites—was a big bipartisan success. Maybe it too was the right thing to do.

I’ve said before that fiscal austerity is the new Iraq War, unsupported by facts and data, but unquestionably a worthy, morally serious undertaking that only a hippie could oppose. Maybe that’s wrong, maybe fiscal austerity is the new World War I.

Speaking the truth about austerity isn’t “class warfare”, it’s a battle against the kind of insanity that destroys civilization and benefits no one.

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Here’s another clue for you all

Galtian overlord Jack Davis deserves some credit too, I suppose, but mostly this is on Paul Ryan.

Hotline this morning:

It’s clear now that the Medicare issue will be the defining issue in the race, and so far Corwin has tried to turn the message back to jobs and the deficit. This is an early test for how the Democratic message will play, but the DCCC still isn’t in; though with Corwin forced to go on the attack, it could be better if they wait it out and force her hand. On the flip side, the NRCC has already begun phone-banking for Corwin, but especially if they’re forced to send resources and go up on air for her, it’s an even surer sign that they’re worried about how a loss could play into their 2012 plans

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