We Are Ohio, sure, but we’re not always happy about that

We had a petition drive here yesterday to put a repeal of Ohio’s SB 5 on the ballot in November.

The gentlemen pictured ran the public event, which was held at the Steelworkers meeting hall.

Here’s We Are Ohio on what we’re doing:

Republican Legislators have passed Senate Bill 5 and Governor Kasich has signed the bill effectively eliminating collective bargaining rights. A coalition composed of working families and concerned Ohioans have already begun a referendum process which will prevent this legislation from taking effect and place the issue on the November 2011 ballot for a vote of the citizens of Ohio. Here is some information on the referendum process:

•231,149 – Signatures needed to place a referendum of the law on the ballot.
•44 – Minimum number of different counties where the petition signatures need to be collected.
•June 30 2011 – Final date for signatures if SB 5 is signed and filed with the Secretary of State by April 6.
•July 20, 2011 – Final day by which the Secretary of State must determine if there are enough valid signatures to place the referendum on the ballot.
•91 – If no referendum petition is filed, SB 5 goes into effect 91 days after it was signed and filed with the SOS. If a referendum is filed, the law does not go into effect until and unless Ohioans vote to allow the bill to become law.

If you’re a registered Ohio voter and would like to sign a petition, you may still do so. Either follow the link and search for your city or county, or email me, and I’ll try to find you a petition that’s still out there to sign.

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Toledo

I went out to Toledo yesterday to see the people who came out to see the President.

TOLEDO, Ohio — If the 2012 election is about the economy, as most people think, then President Obama’s visit on Friday to this struggling manufacturing city on the Ohio-Michigan border captured as well as any day could the complicated campaign he is likely to face — playing both offense and defense, taking credit and deflecting blame.“Thanks for saving my job,” one young man told him at shift change. On the assembly line a woman spun around, to show the words “Thank you” on her T-shirt’s back.

I intended to wander around near the plant and see what I could see there, but I met up with the nice people pictured and instead took part in a “visibility event”. This gathering involved standing with members of the UAW at an intersection near the action and holding signs and smiling a lot. I met members of this group during the SB 5 protests. I’ve been meaning to pal around with these loathed and feared community organizers anyway and a street corner welcoming of Obama sounded like a good idea. The objective of gatherings like this one is to be seen and garner local press attention, and we were successful in both.

The New York Times piece on the President’s visit is good. Just straight reporting of events, with Friday’s poor job numbers as context, which absolutely belongs in there. Unfortunately, I listened to CNN’s intro to the facts of the visit in the car on the way in and immediately went into fight mode. The President was visiting Toledo to “brag”; US car companies can’t “stand on their own two feet”. I had to turn it off, or I was going to go into adrenalin shock

I’m an advocate. I recognize the language of advocacy. Word choice as a tool is not new or mysterious or subtle to me. That tool is not new, I would assume, to a news channel. It sticks out. Can they not hear themselves? I heard these words CNN chose and immediately felt that the CNN newsreader was on the other side. If the speaker is choosing to use words in the intro to a piece that impart a view before we get to facts, I am inevitably going to conclude that the speaker, too, is an advocate, but, unlike me, they’ve chosen not to reveal that to listeners or readers.

One final thing. I was asked to take pictures and video at Netroots Nation. I am not the person in any group who takes pictures, because I’m impatient with the whole process. I’m the whiner who sighs and won’t stand still and asks if you’re through taking my picture yet, 5 seconds in. I used this event as sort of a test run to determine if people dislike having their picture taken as much as I dislike having my picture taken. The answer is “no, they don’t”. I asked first, and they were more than happy to have their pictures taken. We had a lot of fun with it.

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How can you not mock this latest bit of nonsense

After months of a laser like focus on capture and control of every uterus in America, the Republican Party decided to pretend to talk about jobs with a word salad garnished with pretty pictures. Nothing in it was new. In fact it was just a re-tossing of the same “tax-cuts solve everything” talking points that have become the Golden Calf of wingutopia.

Look at it and marvel at how silly it is:

It is being widely mocked. Last night Rachel Maddow had some fun with it. Steve Benen, Paul Krugman, Ezra Klein and many, many others are pointing out that it is a bad joke—devoid of any new ideas. It is a plan that will explode the debt while killing jobs. It is a plan that has been tried over and over again and one that has failed every time. The last time it was tried was in the Bush years and the economy has yet to recover.

And yet, this is all they have to offer. The shock is that anybody treats this as a “serious” document. I know that IOKIYAR is the rule for media coverage, but the way some folks treat these stale word salads as “ideas” is really getting silly.

This should be mocked and anybody who defends it should be celebrated as a fool.

Cheers

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Jimmy Carter invented public schools. No, really. He did.

I wrote about for-profit elementary and high schools in Ohio here. This is a follow-up.

First, Gail Collins:

This exciting new plan, which seemed to have been inserted into the state budget bill by a magical invisible hand, would also reduce oversight. It got a rave review in The Columbus Dispatch from an op-ed contributor named Thomas Needles, who cheered legislators for trying to end the “drip-drop of wrongheaded regulation” of charter schools. Needles is a consultant for White Hat Management, the largest company currently managing charter schools in Ohio. The owner of White Hat is a gynormous donor to the state Republican Party. Not that that would make any difference. Just saying.

Remember: this is about the children. Currently, many children are spending up to 8 hours a day in a non-profit environment.
This is a lost opportunity. It’s vitally important that children generate profits for someone, from birth, because that’s the way that the world goes ‘round.

Second, former Fox News personality Ohio Governor John Kasich is running away from the whole corruption/ for-profit school issue, so we can assume it’s politically damaging for conservatives.

Third, I don’t even know what to think about this latest development.

An exclusive 5 On Your Side investigation revealed a federal probe into Ohio charter schools involving a money trail of illegal immigration fees, as well as other payments to individuals living overseas.

Concept Schools operate 16 Horizon Science Science Academies across Ohio. The program was founded in Cleveland by Turkish educators in 1999 and now includes schools in Ohio and four other states.”Our schools are public charter schools. They’re not Turkish schools, they’re not Islamic schools. They provide a high quality education,” said Salim Ucan, Vice President of Concept School

Auditors found immigration fees and legal fees for school officials’ families and others living in Turkey. In some cases, auditors found payments were made to individuals who were never employed by any of the schools.Auditors found 19 Turkish immigrants were paid nearly $13,000 for what they called “illegal immigration fees.” A Horizon Science Academy school in Dayton signed a lease agreement that sends $600,000 over five years to the property’s owner living in Turkey.

Huge conundrum for conservatives. Their xenophobic immigration stance, coupled with their bigotry toward a certain religion, up against the mad rush to union-bust and turn public schools into religious entities and/or profit centers. I don’t know how that inner battle shakes out. No telling.

Finally, this is an excerpt from the original Ohio Constitution:

That no law shall be passed to prevent the poor in the several counties and townships, within this State, from an equal participation in the schools, academies, colleges and universities within this State, which are endowed, in whole or in part, from the revenue arising from donations made by the United States, for the support of schools, academies and universities, shall be open for the reception of scholars and students and teachers, of every grade, without any distinction or preference whatever, contrary to the intent for which said donations were made.

And the rewrite, 1851:

The general Assembly shall make such provisions by taxation, or otherwise, as with the income arising from the school trust fund, will secure a thorough and efficient system of common schools throughout the State, but no religious or other sect or sects shall ever have any exclusive right to, or control of, any part of the school funds of this State.

Public schools. What a radical idea.

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I wonder who will win this fight…

Steve Benen has pointed out that the AARP has responded to Paul Ryan’s attack on the organization as being a “a left-leaning pressure group.” The GOP’s Austerity Czar had hurt feefees because the association representing over 40 million members did not like his galtian fantasy budget. And so Ryan attacked the AARP as corrupt group that opposes his RyanCare because they only want to make money through selling branded health insurance plans mandated by the ACA.

Turns out that the AARP took exception to Ryan’s smear and pushed back (emphasis added):

“We make decisions on policy based on what we believe will be in the best interests of Americans over age 50. A recent attack on AARP from a political action committee erroneously suggests otherwise. The truth is that the budget plan passed by the House probably would present more opportunities for AARP to strengthen its finances, since every older American would be forced into private Medicare plans, including those that AARP brands.

“But we opposed the legislation nonetheless because we believe the goal should be to strengthen Medicare, not upend it, just as we’ve expressed concern about alternative plans that could use unelected boards to cut Medicare benefits. That has been AARP’s long-stated position, and the well-being of those who need Medicare is the only ‘interest’ we have in this debate.”

In the fight between wingnutopia and the AARP, I’ll put my money on the latter group. The AARP has a lot of credibility with their members and in one sentence they pretty much destroyed RyanCare. That should get some wingnuts nervous when they have their occasional lucid moments.

OTHO, it will encourage most of the nutters just to double down on attacks of AARP as they try to turn it into the new ACORN. I sense a nifty Breitbart/O’Keefe hit job coming down the pike. This should be fun. I wonder who will win…

Cheers

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Calling out word strings of stupidity…

This was brilliant—Kthug came out with an excellent explanation of RyanCare:

Here’s an analogy: think of Medicare as a footbridge that is deteriorating and will eventually become unsafe. You could propose structural repairs to fix its faults; Ryan doesn’t do that. Instead, he proposes knocking the bridge down and replacing it with trampolines, in the hope that pedestrians can bounce across the stream. And the Post declares that he deserves credit for pointing out that the bridge is falling down, and proposing a solution. Um, we knew that the bridge was in bad shape — and his solution is a fraud.

It was all in response to yet more dubious work over at the Washington Post in defense of defending Republican lies with a narrow parsing of this or that word while overlooking the meaning in context, the policy and objective reality. While many see this as par for the course I’m always disappointed to watch a once great paper sink in a soup of pure bullshit and offer fact-like word stings of no meaning in defense of said bullshit.

Kthug keyed off some pretty decent take downs of Hiatt and company by Jonathan Chait and Jamelle Bouie. Both are also well worth a look.

And with that, let’s have an Open Thread.

Cheers

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It takes a nation of millions to hold them back

Jimmy P gives Republicans the worst political advice ever (via Steve M):

Since Democrats are determined to hang Ryan’s bold “Path to Prosperity” budget plan around the neck of every Republican running for office in 2012, why not have its author and best salesman advocate for it directly vs. President Obama?

If you want to get an idea of how an issue plays in Peoria—rather than Georgetown and Bethesda—pay attention to how it gets used in advertisements in Congressional races. The DCCC and NRCC aren’t infallible but their decisions are based on polls of local residents, not on who David Brooks wants Obama to have lunch with. From what I can tell, Democrats didn’t like their chances in the NY-26 special election before the Ryan plan dropped. Now the DCCC is putting money into it with ads focusing on the Ryan plan.

If the 2012 election is anything like a referendum on the Ryan plan, Democrats will control the White House, Senate, and the House of Representatives in 2013. Andrew Sullivan and Rick Klein will be sad that we’re putting off the “adult conversation” we need to have about letting the letting the poor and elderly starve and die the way Galt intended. Bobo will mourn the damage done to Paul Ryan’s fee fees. But nobody out here in flyover country gives a fuck what these idiots think. They are simply errand boys, sent by Galtian overlords, to destroy the middle class. They have a loud megaphone, but it’s not loud enough to drown out the voice of the rest of the country.

I said I’d post videos readers sent me of local protests of the Ryan plan. Here’s one from reader L.

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Republican voters discover bold and courageous cuts in school funding means less money is sent to their schools

The angry crowds are back, but this time they aren’t wearing silly hats:

Battered by angry crowds at suburban school district meetings in recent days, House Republican lawmakers will offer up changes Thursday limiting the budgetary pain inflicted on schools by Gov. John Kasich’s budget proposal.

House Finance Chair Ron Amstutz said many changes to the $120 billion, all-funds budget proposed by Kasich are coming, including tweaks to a controversial blueprint for funding schools over the next two years authored by the Republican governor. “We are looking to take the edge off of this problem across the spectrum of school districts—not just for the upper” property wealth districts, said Amstutz, a Wooster Republican shepherding the budget through the GOP-controlled House.

Many changes. Many. That austerity budget was really less a budget and more a road map, turns out. I also love how he issues a preemptive denial that he’s planning to restore funding only to these well-off suburban districts. NOT just for the upper property wealth districts. Did anyone suggest that’s what he was going to do? Well, he’s not. In case anyone was thinking that.

Taxpayers from those districts, many in traditional Republican territory, are also concerned—and downright angry. Hundreds of them have been giving GOP lawmakers an earful at recent community meetings.

How fast can Republicans in the legislature run from former FOX News personality Governor Kasich? Should be fun to watch the stampede.

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Savaged By A Dead Sheep

[update: sorry for the double post—I hit publish on a pre-finished version…]

That would be James Fallows, suffering the blistering assault of one Megan McArdle over this piece, the one John lauded here.

The reference to the deceased quadraped is one I’ve had occasion to return to more than once—it comes from the ferocious Labour Party debater and then-Chancellor of the Exchequer Dennis Healey, describing the experience of oratorical combat with the his successor in that post, the Tory Sir Geoffrey Howe.  It may well be too kind when applied to the Business and Economic Editor of the Atlantic.

Seriously:  Fallows is a seasoned and deeply knowledgeable reporter, one who actually does what folks used to do with more frequency—study, seek real sources, talk to lots of folks, master a literature, stay with a story over decades and all the rest of the things real journalists of the first rank actually do.

McArdle…

...is McArdle.

A contest of wit, literary skill, and especially knowledge and or wisdom is no fair fight…except for this:

Fallows is not one for ‘tube wars.  I’ve read his stuff for a long, long time, and he says his piece and then almost always moves on to the next issue.  If you check out his blog since he wrote on the piece that has offended McArdle you’ll see a great piece putting GOP Sen. Inhofe’s disastrously dangerous flying and “safety-is-for-little-people” attitude in proper context; an analysis of the non-event of the Michelle Obama waved-off landing, memories of Tim Hethering and the like.  I can’t imagine that it pleases him when McArdle calls him colleague before attempting to dress him down, but life is short, and people with actual talent have better things to do with their time.

Which leaves it to me to take note of a post that once again demonstrates the axiom:  Megan McArdle Is Always Wrong™.

In this case, I rather think she knows she’s wrong—or rather she has to argue an obviously false case.  I say has to, because for all her grand title, her function at The Atlantic seems to be to come up with some argument-like word string that provides cover for known failures of policy, argument, and ideas.

The give away starts with her first substantive paragraph.  She writes:

...they [Standard and Poor’s] do spend a great deal of time analyzing government finances, much more than James or I do.

Ahhh…the argument from authority again, one of McArdle’s favorites.

The question, as Fallows pointed out, is not whether S & P analyzes government or private financial instruments.  Here’s Fallows:

S&P knows nothing more about U.S. budget prospects than you or I do. [Italics his.  Bold mine.]

I’m sure you can catch the trick McArdle hopes to play here.  Fallows said nothing about anything technical to do with US government bond market operations.  He’s arguing that S & P is making a judgment that they are ill-prepared to make, on the politics of the budget.

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Ain’t no doubt about it, we were doubly blessed

The box office figures are in and it’s clear that, despite rave reviews from all the right people, the Ryan plan just won’t play in Peoria. Republicans are going to have to spend the next 18 months defending their decision to try to end a wildly popular social program. Yes, our current crazed political/media dynamic many mean that this doesn’t amount to outright suicide; normally their asses would be dead as fucking fried chicken, but they happened to pull this shit while we’re in a transitional period. When seniors swarm Republican town hall meetings, they’ll be portrayed as angry America-haters—not patriots like the gun-toting, gubmint-scooter-riding Medicare recipients who shouted down Democratic Congressmen in August 2009—but the overall effect will still be extremely negative for Republicans in Congress.

How did this come to pass? First, the GOP inexplicably decided to let a politically tone-deaf Randoid design its fiscal plan. Then it mistook the applause of innumerate Beltway sociopaths for public support.

Things are generally terrible for social democrats like me right now. There are no important liberal institutions, Roger Ailes has mastered the art of fleecing oldsters, the Supreme Court rulings have given our Galtian overlords free rein to anonymously propagandize. Even with all these disadvantages, we should be able to fend off the apocalypse for another two years, with the help of Paul Ryan and his fluffers.

Thank you, Paul Ryan. Thank you, Joe Klein, David Brooks, Andrew Sullivan, and Jacob Weisberg. Your ignorance and cowardice have served a greater cause.

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Shared Sacrifice

This is what it looks like:

The Ryan plan that the GOP just passed in the House has a problem with the number on the right. They think they should receive more tax cuts while ending Medicare.

Very serious.

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Mr. President! We Must Not Allow a Gemeinschaft Gap!* (David Brooks Agonistes.)

Plenty of ink has been spilled on David Brooks channeling of poor little Paulie Ryan’s bruises. All of the scorn and ridicule is fair.  David Brooks is an innumerate hack propelled by some actual skill, but lots more good luck and well timed sychophancy into a position of influence in which he can do real damage.

But I don’t want Brooks’ jaw-dropping:”let’s do lunch” inanity to obscure the fact that the column as a whole is almost a type specimen of the kind of fundamental intellectual dishonesty that characterizes his work pretty much across the board.

My usual response to something like this would be roughly 4,000 words of high dudgeon.**  Real life intervenes however, to everyone’s benefit, so I’ll just hit a few of the high spots in a column so full of wrong it could power Sarah Palin’s teleprompter for a year.

The first, and in some ways the most significant failing in this piece actually does emerge in that “why won’t mean Obama coddle some guy who’s trying to kill everything his administration has done.”  The high Broderism is obvious—did anyone ever doubt that Brooks was going to grab for Broder’s mitre with all the ravenous zeal of a hyena in an abbatoir?

But the deeper problem lies with what Brooks reveals here of how he views his relationships with sources.

For many reasons I share with our own Aimai a reverence for I. F. Stone.  As she and I have discussed him off-line, one of Stone’s most significant attributes was his view of sources.  They were tools, in the neutral sense of the word…not friends, never people whose regard for you mattered.

Here’s Stone himself on how he did his job of conveying a world-view through facts:

My idea was to make the Weekly radical in viewpoint but conservative in format. I picked a beautiful type face, Garamond, for my main body type, and eschewed sensational headlines. I made no claim to inside stuff—obviously a radical reporter in those days had few pipelines into the government.  I tried to give information which could be documented so the reader could check it for himself. I tried to dig the truth out of hearings, official transcripts and government documents, and to be as accurate as possible. I also sought to give the Weekly a personal flavor to add humor wit and good writing to the Weekly report. I felt that if one were able enough and had sufficient vision one could distill meaning, truth and even beauty from the swiftly flowing debris of the week’s news.

For Brooks—not so much. More »

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Give The Man One White Chip*

Via the NYT we learn what constitutes “big” to a Republican congressman.  (No, children…don’t go there.)

(Hell.  This is the internet.  Go there if the spirit moves you.)

By now, just about everyone with a pulse and an interest in politics knows that the budget debate produced much more kabuki than actual cuts.  Rather the reverse in fact:

According to a Congressional Budget Office comparison, the bill would produce only $350 million in tangible savings this year, in part because cuts in domestic programs were offset by an increase of about $5 billion for Pentagon programs.

When projected emergency contingency spending overseas is figured in by the budget office, estimated outlays for this year will actually increase by more than $3 billion.

There are longer term effects that restrain spending.  Albert Einstein is said to have said that the only true miracle in the universe is compound  interest.  That’s apocryphal, of course, but it is true that cuts in baseline expenditures in discretionary spending will propagate through the years to come:

The agreement does put the brakes on what had been a steady growth in spending by federal agencies. Future savings would be greater as the cuts took hold — a point Republican aides emphasized by noting that the plan is estimated to cut spending by $312 billion over the next decade.

Sounds like a lot of money.  At least, so says those members of the GOP, who quail before the wrath of the pitchfork brigade that they’ve turned into their base.  Hence nonsense like this:

“Big stuff,” said Representative Tom Price, a Georgia Republican and leading conservative.

Yeah, I know.  A billion here and a billion there and pretty soon you’re talking real money.

 

Except that $312 billion, for all that it could buy is …

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Steve Pearlstein is shrill

Give that man a Moore Award:

One of the more comical features of the budget debate is to watch the ways in which Republicans refuse to engage on the issue of economic fairness.

When pressed, they deny, dissemble and throw out poll-tested phrases such as “class warfare” and “opportunity society.” And if that doesn’t work, they begin to spin an elaborate fiction about the absolutely devastating impact that any tax increase will have on international competitiveness and job creation, as if that settles the issue completely.

[....]

I don’t know about you, but I’m having trouble deciding whether this neverending budget saga should be filed under comedy, tragedy or farce. It’s looking less and less, however, like Paul Ryan will emerge as the hero.

It’s no accident that the the most shrill criticism of Paul Ryan comes from Pulitzer-prize winning business columnists and Nobel laureate economists, while the most effusive praise comes from Bell Curve believers, high-school math flunkees, and dupes of Pete Hoekstra.

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True lies

Andrew Sullivan still hasn’t corrected his addition errors or put 4 percent of GDP in context, and he’s still pretending Paul Ryan is a courageous truth-teller.

I remain of the view that he deserves credit for being the first American with real political accountability to tell the truth about the depth of our fiscal predicament

Projecting 2.8% unemployment is telling the truth? Cutting social programs and giving the savings to the rich in the name of deficit-reduction is telling the truth? What exactly was truthful about Paul Ryan’s plan? Oh, I know, it’s brave because its barbarism annoys liberals. Was it Winston Churchill or Edmund Burke who defined courage as grace while punching hippies?

I’ve always been ambivalent about Daily Dish. I like the cute videos and the quality of the writing. For a time, I admired Sullivan’s, admittedly self-important, attempts to cast himself as the Orwell of the internets. No more. Sullivan’s lazy, incurious, simplistic cheerleading for RyanCare has diminished him and his place in the blogsophere (for what it’s worth). I see him now as just another glib, shallow Brit carpetbagger, the same as John Derbyshire or Tunku Varadarajan.

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