Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

No one could have predicted…

Reality always lies in wait for … Democrats.

Hot air and ill-informed banter

Our job is not to persuade republicans but to defeat them.

Too inconsequential to be sued

I swear, each month of 2020 will have its own history degree.

Fuck these fucking interesting times.

It was down to kool-aid drinkers and next of kin at the trump White House

I’d like to think you all would remain faithful to me if i ever tried to have some of you killed.

I’m only here for the duck photos.

The cruelty is the point; the law be damned.

All your base are belong to Tunch.

I’d try pessimism, but it probably wouldn’t work.

It’s the corruption, stupid.

Usually wrong but never in doubt

So it was an October Surprise A Day, like an Advent calendar but for crime.

Is it irresponsible to speculate? It is irresponsible not to.

I can’t take this shit today. I just can’t.

Saul Alinsky is my co-pilot.

Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Let there be snark.

When I decide to be condescending, you won’t have to dream up a fantasy about it.

It’s not even safe to go out and pick up 2 days worth of poop anymore.

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Kay

Consider yourselves on notice

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Angry customers conducted a successful campaign to persuade several giant business entities to stop supporting voter suppression laws, among other laws that harm the public interest, so this group of well-paid hacks have stepped up to sell the absolute reeking garbage that is the “voter impersonation fraud” scam:

Shortly after the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) announced it was dropping voter identification laws from its agenda, another conservative group is stepping in to fill the void. The National Center for Public Policy Research announced this week it had formed a “Voter Identification Task Force” to continue ALEC’s “excellent work” in “promoting measures to enhance integrity in voting.” Describing itself as a “conservative, free-market, non-profit think-tank,” the group was established in 1982.

I love the spittle-flecked rage in this statement:

“We’re putting the left on notice: you take out a conservative program operating in one area, we’ll kick it up a notch somewhere else,” Amy Ridenour, chairman of the National Center for Public Policy Research, said in a statement. “You will not win. We outnumber you and we outthink you, and when you kick up a fuss you inspire us to victory.”

Corporate CEOs who “cower in the face of liberal boycott threats need to understand that the left never gives up,” Ridenour said. “If these corporations do not reverse course and immediately grow enough of a backbone to say no when the left tells them what to do, conservatives may as well consider them part of the organized left. It doesn’t matter if corporate executives have free-market sentiments hidden deep inside them if they continually surrender to the left’s Trotskyite strategy of making relentless demand after demand in public.”

In public, even! Barbarians.

Because the National Center for Public Policy Research knows lobbying is best conducted by professionals, in quiet rooms, behind closed doors.

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Just feel free to say whatever. It’s not like it’s important.

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Meet Jim Webb:

Senator Webb’s roots lie in Southwest Virginia, a region that covers nearly a quarter of the Commonwealth, ranging from as far north as Highland County and as far west as Lee County. Originally settled by the Scots-Irish people, who populated the hills and valleys of the Appalachian Mountain Range, Southwest Virginia became an initial stopping point as these new Americans pushed west to settle throughout the South and Mid-West. A fiercely independent people, the Scots-Irish embraced democratic values and recoiled from elitism and the aristocracy that was so prevalent around eastern cities at the time. They also were deeply patriotic and willingly served in all of our nation’s wars. They held values that still today characterize the region: patriotism, an abiding faith, a sense of service, and a determination to work hard.

That’s part of his personal narrative. Here’s his political narrative, in his own words:

The overwhelming majority — 95% — migrated to the Appalachians in a series of frontier communities that stretched from Pennsylvania to northern Alabama and Georgia.

Why are the 30 million Scots-Irish, who may well be America’s strongest cultural force, so invisible to America’s intellectual elites?

The Democrats lost their affinity with the Scots-Irish during the Civil Rights era, when — because it was the dominant culture in the South — its “redneck” idiosyncrasies provided an easy target during their shift toward minorities as the foundation of their national electoral strategy.

The decline in public education and the outsourcing of jobs has hit this culture hard. Diversity programs designed to assist minorities have had an unequal impact on white ethnic groups and particularly this one, whose roots are in a poverty-stricken South. Their sons and daughters serve in large numbers in a war whose validity is increasingly coming into question. In fact, the greatest realignment in modern politics would take place rather quickly if the right national leader found a way to bring the Scots-Irish and African Americans to the same table, and so to redefine a formula that has consciously set them apart for the past two centuries.

Here he is again:

“I’ll be real frank here,” Webb said at a breakfast organized by Bloomberg News. “I think that the manner in which the health-care reform issue was put in front of the Congress, the way that the issue was dealt with by the White House, cost Obama a lot of credibility as a leader.”

Okay, whatever. But what about health care? (pdf)

This is a partial breakdown of the uninsured in Virginia:

The nonelderly uninsured are from diverse racial/ethnic backgrounds: about half are white, non‐Hispanic (47.3 percent); 24.3 percent are black, non‐Hispanic; 19.7 percent are Hispanic; 6.5 percent are Asian/Pacific Islander; and 2.0 percent are of other or multiple racial/ethnic backgrounds

These are the Appalachian counties in Virginia:

Virginia: Alleghany, Bath, Bland, Botetourt, Buchanan, Carroll, Craig, Dickenson, Floyd, Giles, Grayson, Henry, Highland, Lee, Montgomery, Patrick, Pulaski, Rockbridge, Russell, Scott, Smyth, Tazewell, Washington, Wise, and Wythe

And this is the Uninsured Rate Among Nonelderly (0-64) in Virginia by Area. Scroll down to the last slide and look at the map.

Every Appalachian county in Virginia has an uninsured rate higher than the state average, sometimes dramatically higher. In the wealthier parts of Virginia, about 9% of people are uninsured. In many parts of Jim Webb’s beloved Appalachia, it’s 17, 18, 19, 20%.

I’m going to kick Jim Webb’s question right back at him:

Why are the 30 million Scots-Irish, who may well be America’s strongest cultural force, so invisible to America’s intellectual elites?

Why indeed, Jim? What about health care? Remember that?

You know, Jim’s “tribe” may not vote for Obama, but they will damn sure benefit from Obama’s health care law. If you’re in the “interest group” that ranges from below poverty level to 400% of poverty level you will benefit from this law.

I don’t have any particular problem with Webb having a personal or political narrative that is grounded in some romantic idea of a tribe, it’s not my thing, but it’s obviously important to him. However. It looks to me like +/- 20% of the people in his tribal region are probably going without basic health care, because they can’t pay for it.

They can’t pay for it, and I feel as if none of us can afford this anymore. We can’t afford romantic narratives that have nothing to do with reality. We can’t afford Justice Scalia musing idly about broccoli to a rapt, adoring, and ass-kissing audience or Barney Frank reflecting aloud on how poor people are political poison or Jim Webb denouncing Obama because Jim Webb was hoping for Andrew Jackson and Americans elected Barack Obama instead. Webb believes, in his heart, that Obama could have gotten Republicans to make a deal on health care? Really? Is he living in a novel?

The point of the health care law was to expand access to health care to those who aren’t getting any. The people who might benefit from that have been completely lost in all this ego-driven, self-aggrandizing bullshit.

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What it looks like from here

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We had an Obama office opening close to here last night, so I’ll give you my impressions and you may then extend my remarks about this office opening out to the entire country.

This is how you know you’re at the right address, when you see cars like this one:

First, it was a good turnout, with solid representation of what I believe are the main “groups” of Democrats and liberals and allies that we have here. I think that is mostly due to the work of the Obama organizer who is on the ground here and has been for about six weeks. She works really hard. She gave an intro speech last night and lost her train of thought in the middle. That has happened to me, and I like her, so I was very sympathetic. I was nearly holding my breath during what seemed like a very long, fumbling-for-words silence as she tried to remember where she was and what she had just been saying. It went on long enough for me to consider rescuing her by creating some kind of distraction. Luckily for everyone there who might have had to suffer through any lame, clumsy attempt to give her a little breathing room, she regained her composure. I think she was so tired she had reached that point we’re all familiar with where there are long spaces between phrases and transitioning from one topic to the next is like slogging through mud.

Second, I think the Issue Two fight in Ohio was good for national and local Democrats. I know the conventional wisdom nationally is that all union members and all public school teachers are rabid Democrats, but that is not true in this very conservative area. Nate Silver is the only national political person who has addressed the fact that union members in states like Ohio are not, actually, 100% Democratic voters, but perhaps there are others who do, and I just don’t read them:

More tangibly, Republican efforts to decrease the influence of unions — while potentially worthwhile to their electoral prospects in the long-term — could contribute to a backlash in the near-term, making union members even more likely to vote Democratic and even more likely to turn out. If, for instance, the share of union households voting for Democrats was not 60 percent but closer to 70 percent, Republicans would have difficulty winning presidential elections for a couple of cycles until the number of union voters diminished further.

In any event union members here are coming off a win because they succeeded in repealing SB5, and they are very optimistic and engaged, so John Kasich’s Issue Two is probably good for Barack Obama in 2012. Mitt Romney did his customary coin toss on Issue Two and the coin landed on the wrong side when it stopped spinning, when the smarter choice was probably to rely on his other two brilliant market-honed tactics, which are not answering the question at all, or making something up. Romney supported Kasich’s law, no matter which Romney shows up when he gets here.

A day after he refused to endorse an Ohio ballot measure that limits public employee union rights, Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney said today that he is “110 percent” behind the effort.
While he was in Ohio yesterday, Romney seemed to distance himself from anti-union measures that have lost popularity in recent months. Campaigning a day later, the former Massachusetts governor told reporters that he supports the ballot measure aimed at restricting collective bargaining rights for state employees.

Third, we have a local challenger for a safe Republican statehouse seat, and the fact that the challenger is a union member at a manufacturing facility is good for the whole ticket. Winning aside (because he is a long shot) union members here know him and they like him, personally. I think it will make a difference in enthusiasm and interest in the 2012 election as a whole. He got the United Food and Commercial Workers endorsement last night. They have 2300 members in his district. It’s been really interesting helping him with his race, because he operates in this wholly union-centric political world. We have had lots of union involvement in elections here, and I was a union member at one time, but they do have their own unique culture and priorities and political approaches and he’s very much immersed in that.

Finally, I noticed, again, that Sherrod Brown is extremely popular with Democrats here. Sherrod Brown is a liberal, and this is a conservative area. Republicans win here. If Brown wins, and I think he will, someone or other needs to seat a round table on that, pronto, because he isn’t a conservative on social issues, and he isn’t a hawk on war(s) or a peacock on deficits, but he is very well-liked among rural, red-county Democrats. They’re either bravely bucking the conventional wisdom here, or the conventional wisdom is wrong.

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A (provisional) win for democracy enthusiasts

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Republicans have to count the votes:

A federal appeals court ruling Monday cleared the way to count some 300 disputed ballots in the razor-close election for Hamilton County juvenile court judge, which took place 17 months ago.
The decision does not end the long court battle over the ballots, but it requires county election officials to count the ballots, declare a victor and seat the winning judge while the legal fight continues for months, or even years, in the federal courts.

The dispute involves provisional ballots cast in the 2010 juvenile court election between Democrat Tracie Hunter and Republican John Williams. Williams leads by 23 votes, but Hunter could surge ahead when the disputed ballots are counted because they were cast in predominantly Democratic precincts.

Voters cast the provisional ballots at the correct polling places but at the wrong precinct table, an error known as “right church, wrong pew.” Hunter and the Democrats have argued it is unfair to exclude the ballots because evidence suggests poll-workers mistakenly directed voters to the wrong tables. Williams and the Republicans say the ballots were miscast and Ohio law does not allow them to be counted.

U.S. District Judge Susan Dlott ordered the Board of Elections to count about 300 of the provisional ballots. The reason, she said, was the board’s decision to count disputed ballots cast at the board’s downtown office while excluding disputed ballots cast at other locations. Dlott said that decision violated federal election law because it treated one set of ballots differently than another.
In its decision Monday, the U.S. 6th Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati backed Dlott and ordered the county to count the ballots. The three-judge panel rejected the Republicans’ request to halt the counting while it continues to challenge Dlott’s ruling, concluding that their argument “has not shown a likelihood of success on the merits.”

It’s a good result, and they’re finally going to count the votes that came from predominantly Democratic precincts, but what this absolute mess of an election shows is that the provisional balloting process is flawed and really unreliable. People are trying. They’re just not getting it right.

The federal judge reviewed poll worker and voter testimony and that testimony made it clear that the provisional balloting rules (which are complicated, and change constantly) are not applied with any consistency or predictability. Some voters were given provisional ballots when they should have been given first class ballots, and many people were directed to the wrong precinct within a polling place as a result of the provisional balloting process itself, which involves being pulled out of the line and sent off to use a whole different process. Because there is more than one precinct within a polling place, chaos ensues.

Provisional balloting is a false assurance that voting rights will be protected. In that sense, it’s more unfair to voters than a straight denial, because it gives the appearance of a rational, predictable process that protects voting rights, when that simply isn’t true, real-world. With a straight denial of the franchise, at least the voter knows her vote isn’t being cast or counted and she can act on that knowledge in the future and hold politicians who support additional barriers to voting accountable for their denial of her right. Understand, the poll workers who testified weren’t acting maliciously. This wasn’t a conspiracy. They simply didn’t understand the process, or arbitrarily modified the process to be “on the safe side”, depending on their own judgment. Their own judgment always seemed to lean toward “provisional ballot”. I think that kind of “belt and suspenders, better safe than sorry” attitude is common among even well-intentioned people who are confronted with a new or unfamiliar or constantly changing set of rules. Voters didn’t know enough about the provisional balloting process to object. They simply wanted to vote. They followed poll worker directions.

As voter ID laws push more and more people onto provisional ballots, expect many, many more of these lawsuits in close elections.

Still, counting all the votes is much better than counting just the votes that are more likely to be Republican votes, so this one is a win, no matter which judge ends up on the bench.

Here’s the order (pdf)

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A different kind of ad man

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Inside the other prison system:

A 12-year-old in his cell at the Harrison County Juvenile Detention Center in Biloxi, Mississippi. The window has been boarded up from the outside. The facility is operated by Mississippi Security Police, a private company.

On any given night in the U.S., there are approximately 60,500 youth confined in juvenile correctional facilities or other residential programs. Photographer Richard Ross has spent the past five years criss-crossing the country photographing the architecture, cells, classrooms and inhabitants of these detention sites.
The resulting photo-survey, Juvenile-In-Justice, documents 350 facilities in over 30 states. It’s more than a peek into unseen worlds — it is a call to action and care.
“I grew up in a world where you solve problems, you don’t destroy a population,” says Ross. “To me it is an affront when I see the way some of these kids are dealt with.”
The U.S. locks up children at more than six times the rate of all other developed nations. The over 60,000 average daily juvenile lockups, a figure estimated by the Annie E. Casey Foundation (AECF), are also disproportionately young people of color. With an average cost of $80,000 per year to lock up a child, the U.S. spends more than $5 billion annually on youth detention.
Ross thinks his images of juvenile lock-ups can, and should, be “ammunition” for the ongoing policy and funding debates between reformers, staff, management and law-makers.

Ross makes use of data visualizations and statistics on his site to engage viewers in the issue, but the images themselves must be compelling. He brings all his photography skills to bear in order to lure the viewer. “These flows of information are great little sound bites but how do you visualize them? How does a person see? All of good advertising seduces you in first and then you can analyze the message,” says Ross.

The pictures are hard to look at, but go take a look at his work anyway, and be hopeful, because it really is changing:

Following repeated abuse scandals in California Youth Authority (CYA) facilities in the ’90s, the Golden State carried out the largest program of decarceration in U.S. history. Reducing its total number of facilities from 11 to 3 and slashing the CYA population by nearly 90 percent, California simultaneously witnessed a precipitous drop in crime committed by under-18s. The AECF identifies this as a common trend.
“States which lowered juvenile confinement rates the most from 1997 to 2007 saw a greater decline in juvenile violent crime arrests than states which increased incarceration rates or reduced them more slowly,” says the report.
“In 2004, it was reported that over one thousand youth had been sexually assaulted by staff in the Texas juvenile justice system,” says Krisberg. “It was the emergence of legislation and scandals simultaneously that had people realizing these systems were unfixable.”

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I like a series of skirmishes better than a war, turns out

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We made some Obama organizing calls last Tuesday night, before pundit-gate, so I’ll go ahead and give you my take on the war on women because I haven’t seen it anywhere. Maybe I’m alone in this, who knows.

We had five callers Tuesday. Four were women. All of the women mentioned the war on women. We were all smiling benevolently and constantly at this guy, too, in a mildly creepy way that might have made him uncomfortable, because, you know, he’s helping us. He was not actually there to do that, help women win the the war on women, specifically. For all I know he came because he’s concerned about marginal tax rates but we just collectively decided he was there for us:

I think the response to the onslaught of commands targeted at women was one of those things that bubble up. It had the slow-build feel to me of authentic anger that comes from ordinary people, slowly but surely. That’s why it was so heartening (and really interesting) to watch it develop, here locally, on the site and elsewhere. In purely practical terms, I think the state-by-state nature of the thing helped. Women were watching this crazy single-minded focus in state after state after state, where they live, for close to two years. When it blew up nationally, with Komen and then Obama versus the council of clerics and Rush Limbaugh, they, we, a lot of us, were already halfway there. I know that Democrats and political pros saw it and named it and pushed it, I recognize all that, but I think that was a collateral assist to something authentic that was actually happening “on the ground”. Too, female congressional Democrats are constantly talking about these issues, and they’re usually completely ignored. This was different.

There are some comparisons that fit, I think. One that comes to mind is Issue Two in Ohio, where a really massive majority rejected gutting collective bargaining. Unions ran a great logistical campaign, but all they did is focus what was already there. That’s not nothing, what unions did, it doesn’t matter how many grim and determined people one has if they don’t have a path to translate that into something productive, but the union organizing and spending on ads was tapping into what was there. I passed petitions and held events, but I wasn’t doing any persuading. I was quite literally just collecting signatures and holding events.

The Culture of Corruption (2006) was another one that felt this way to me. The GOP Congress that year was really corrupt, and people really did know that. The state issue here in Ohio, the thing that bubbled up from below, was that the state-level Republicans were ALSO incredibly corrupt in 2006. By the time Culture of Corruption was national, big majorities here were wholly convinced. National Democrats named and pushed something that already existed.

These issues had a nice, us against them, underground feel to me, talking to people here. It’s like there’s this “national conversation” (everyone hates unions, rightfully, because everyone knows unions suck; women are whiny sluts and most people will side with the bishops; Tom Delay isn’t THAT corrupt, both sides do it) and then there’s this whole other conversation going on. I love when that happens, because those issues are ours, they belong to us, if only for the time before the professionals grab them and frame them. When that happens, when we become pundit-fodder, they’re all but proclaiming that hostilities have ended and they’re pushing us back into some boring, comfortable groove that they love like The Mommy Wars, something safe and familiar, because, Jesus, talking about mandated trans-vaginal ultrasounds and aspirin between our legs is uncomfortable. That’s a little too…real. It couldn’t last.

The war on women was over for political media the moment Mitt Romney’s handlers came up with a strategy, and Ann Romney and professional pundits then began discussing, framing, defining and then redefining the issue. They’re done with ordinary women and what I believe was our authentic anger on this. It’s now in the hands of the pros and it will be put into context and watered down and explained away. I think it was inevitable. It was just a matter of time and the right opportunity. It doesn’t necessarily mean the authentic ground-level energy goes away, but I was still sad to see it happen.

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There is bullying going on here, all right

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It’s so unfair when there are two sides in a fight:

It’s been a week since a coalition of liberal and civil rights groups went public with a campaign to undermine the American Legislative Exchange Council, which has advocated stringent voter-identification and “stand your ground” laws around the U.S. Seven corporations — Coca-Cola, Pepsi, Mars, Kraft Foods, McDonalds, Wendy’s and the software maker Intuit — say they have dropped their memberships in ALEC. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation said it won’t give ALEC any more grants, though one already under way will continue.
Rashad Robinson, director of ColorofChange.org, a civil rights organization in the coalition, says they are trying to put ALEC’s corporate members on the spot. “They’ll be making a choice, that they’re going to stand with an organization that works to suppress the vote and support shoot-first legislation, and they won’t be able to do that in private,” he says.
ALEC says it’s being targeted because of its free-enterprise agenda. “The groups attacking ALEC and its members are the same activists who have always pushed for big-government solutions,” said Kaitlyn Buss, the council’s spokeswoman. “And those groups will use any excuse to intimidate and bully.”

Attacking! Bullying! One wonders how itty-bitty Kraft Foods will survive this sort of intimidation. I keep waiting for someone to ask one of these paid hacks at ALEC just what in the heck voter suppression laws have to do with “free enterprise”, but no one ever does.

The coalition campaign is based partly on an archive of ALEC-drafted legislation — documents leaked last spring to the Center for Media and Democracy, a watchdog group in Wisconsin “People for the first time could really connect the dots between which corporations were involved in ALEC and what the legislative agenda was of ALEC,” said Lisa Graves, the head of the center. “And people could look in their statehouses and see that agenda moving.”

She’s right, but the other factor was this, from 2010:

Although attention has focused on GOP gains in Congress and Governor’s mansions, the worst part of the night for Democrats probably came in state legislative seats. The National Conference of State Legislatures estimates that Democrats had the worst night in state legislative seats since 1928. Republicans have flipped at least 14 chambers, and have unified control of 25 state legislatures. They have picked up over five hundred state legislative seats, including over 100 in New Hampshire alone.

It was just the sheer VOLUME of the ALEC-drafted legislation that drew attention.

But if leaked documents provide the information, something else helps to raise the stakes: Citizens United, the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that lets corporations spend freely in political campaigns. Legally speaking, Citizens United has absolutely nothing to do with ALEC, but corporate CEOs remember what happened soon after the Citizens United decision came down: The retail chain Target gave $100,000 in support of a Minnesota state candidate who opposed gay marriage. The move was at odds with Target’s hip, urban image, and the blow-back from customers was fierce. “The sensitivity level in corporate America went up, particularly among retail corporations, appreciably,” says Ken Gross, a lawyer who advises corporate clients on campaign finance issues. “It set off alarm bells in many quarters.”
David Primo, who teaches political science and business administration at the University of Rochester, says the corporations are boxed in. He says it’s not fair to hold the ALEC corporate members responsible for everything the council does, but with tinderbox issues such as voter ID and “stand your ground,” he says, the corporations can’t afford to have a debate. “What gets picked up on that is race, money, politics,” he says. “And you need to try to deal with that message and not have that message tarnish your brand.”

By all means. Protect the brand. If that means we protect voting rights, we all win.

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