Four Family Tableaux

There's been a firestorm of artificial outrage in conservative circles since Hilary Rosen said that Ann Romney hasn't worked a day in her life. Rosen said this in the context of Mitt Romney asserting that he understood the average woman's concerns about the economy because his wife tells him what to think.

The point isn't really whether Ann Romney worked, but whether she has had to make the family and economic decisions and sacrifices that the average woman does. So let's have a reality check with a common situation in modern American families. Here's the initial conversation, followed by the discussion that follows in four different types of families:

Son: Mom, I need $2,000 for soccer club.
Mom: I'll talk it over with your father.

Traditional nuclear family, stay-at-home mom:

Mom: Our son needs $2,000 for soccer club.
Dad: Two thousand bucks? We can't afford that kind of money for soccer. And isn't the soccer season over?
Mom: Yes, but that's high school. He's really good, and he might be able to get a college scholarship if he sticks with it. Without the club he'll never get noticed by college coaches.
Dad: But two thousand bucks. That's impossible. I'm already working two jobs.
Mom: I could get a job...
Dad: And who'll take care of the kids? Do you know how much day care costs? I'm sorry, but we just can't afford it. He'll have to get a part-time job or do without.

Typical family, both parents working:

Mom: Our son needs $2,000 for soccer club.
Dad: Two thousand bucks? We can't afford that kind of money for soccer. And isn't the soccer season over?
Mom: Yes, but that's high school. He's really good, and he might be able to get a college scholarship if he sticks with it. Without the club he'll never get noticed by college coaches.
Dad: But two thousand bucks. I'd have to get a second job. Can't he work part-time?
Mom: Between school and soccer practice he already has no free time.
Dad: Okay, okay. I think I saw an opening at Walmart.

Divorced parents:

Mom: Your son needs $2,000 for soccer club.
Dad: Two thousand bucks? I'm already paying you a ton for child support. And isn't the soccer season over?
Mom: Yes, but that's high school. He's really good, and he might be able to get a college scholarship if he sticks with it. Without the club he'll never get noticed by college coaches.
Dad: But I already have another family to support.
Mom: Who's fault is that? If you hadn't knocked up your secretary we wouldn't be in this mess.
Dad: Tell him to get a job.
Mom: You're so out of it. He already works 20 hours a week at Burger King. Between that and soccer practice, he's just barely able to keep his grades high enough to stay on the team.
Dad: Then you get a job. I'm tired of paying to sit on your fat ass all day, you lying bitch!
Mom: What?! Taking care of six kids is a full-time job! And do you know how much day care costs? And if you had let me use birth control we wouldn't have six kids all under the age of 17!
Dad: The answer is no! (slams the phone down)

Romney family, Son #1:

Mom: Tagg needs $2,000 for soccer club.
Dad: (takes out wallet, counts out cash) Here.

Romney family, Son #2:

Mom: Matt needs $2,000 for soccer club.
Dad: (takes out checkbook, writes check) Here.

Romney family, Son #3:

Mom: Josh needs $2,000 for basketball club.
Dad: Didn't I just write a check for that the other day?
Mom: That was Matt, and it was soccer.
Dad: Okay, then. (writes out check) Here.

Romney family, Son #4:

Mom: Ben needs $2,000 for lacrosse club.
Dad: I left my checkbook in my other suit. Take it out of your pin money.

Romney family, Son #5:

Mom: Craig needs $2,000 for swim club.
Dad: Do you think I'm made of money?
Mom: Yes, I saw that picture of you with your Bain pals. Just buy another company, fire half the workers, then make the survivors take out a loan to repay you. Reap twice your original investment, walk away and let it go bankrupt.
Dad: Ha, ha, very funny. (writes out check)

The point isn't really whether Ann Romney worked, but how her perspective on average women's lives could possibly illuminate Mitt's thinking in any useful way. She has lived her entire economic existence in his shadow, completely dependent on him for all income, never wanting for anything.

My mom was a real stay-at-home mom, what Mitt Romney pretends his wife was. My mom raised six kids all by herself, while caring for her ailing father the last 20 years of his life. My dad was a janitor, real estate agent and bus driver, and worked all kinds of long and weird hours. When Ann Romney was having her first child, my mom was manually running clothes through a wringer washer (also known as a button-crusher and hand-masher), and then hanging them on the clothesline to dry. When we had pancakes for supper we kids thought it was a treat: little did we know it was because we didn't have any money. My mom had none of the nannies and cooks and maids and gardeners that people in Ann Romney's position can have.

Ann Romney has certainly had her trials and tribulation, and I have nothing bad to say about her. But worrying about whether she could afford the things her kids needed was never one of them. She's never had to make economic tradeoffs, favoring one child over another because she couldn't afford to give them all what they needed. She never had to sacrifice her time with them in order to make money to pay for the things they needed.

In other words, she's never had to face any of the hardest decisions that the vast majority of mothers in America have to face. That doesn't mean she can't sympathize or understand the trouble they have. But for Romney to claim that his wife has some kind of first-hand experience that would give her some kind of special insight to council him on the lives of average women is flat-out nonsense.

The truth is, average conservative women were already thinking what Hilary Rosen said about Ann Romney. And that seed of truth has to be ripped out and burned with the sharpest vitriol by the right-wing chattering classes as fast as possible, lest it take root and spread among the Republican base that already doesn't trust Mitt Romney for exactly this reason.

We Really Don't Know

The case of Trayvon Martin has been discussed quite a bit in the hallways and classrooms for the last 6 weeks. A recent article in the Christian Science Monitor is typical of the points of view that one would overhear in most any school that contains people of color.

"You name it … walking, in stores, in my car, in malls, getting ice cream," says Mr. Powell, who grew up in Compton, Calif., and now also coaches high school football. "I'm always being racially profiled – by the police or women on the street who give me looks and clutch their purses tighter when they see me coming." He says police pull him over four or five times a month on average, for "driving while black." Officers "go through my trunk, my glove compartment, look under and behind the seats," he says. 

Most people that are white, including myself, just don't really know what this is like. When you live with this sort of prejudice, day in and day out, it takes its toll. It's easy for people to throw out how they think people should act but until you've lived, you really don't have a clue.

Moreover, the following is something I hear frequently right around the time the driver's license is issued.

Powell says his parents, like many parents of black boys, gave him the "talk" when he was growing up: how to dress, walk, act, and speak in situations from shopping in stores to being stopped by police. "They said to be polite. Look people straight in the eyes. Tell them exactly what they want to hear without attitude. Always carry items out of the store in a bag." 

Instead of shopping, though, it's how to act when a policeman pulls you over. Keep both hands at 10 and 2 O'Clock, look right at the officer, smile, answer in shortly worded sentences etc. Imagine having to add this talk in to all the other ones that you have to have when a teenager starts to dri

So, Mr. Powell's situation is quite common and this is easily seen if you take the time to read the other testimonials.  Perhaps after you read them,  I'm hoping that you will see what Trayvon Martin was likely dealing with before he was shot. 

Of course, we will never really know. 

Flaunting the Founding Fathers?

Today I'm wondering where exactly in the Constitution, The Bill of Rights, or the subsequent amendments does it say that one must present a photo ID to vote. I've been assured by my buddies on the right that they know the Constitution better than anyone and will, under any circumstances, most definitely adhere to to it.

After all, they wouldn't want to be accused of flaunting the founding fathers like Barack X, would they?

The Perils of Pop, or Why Our Economy is Killing Us

A while back Markadelphia asked why everyone is down on soda. Here are some reasons.

Empty calories: 12 ounces of sugar- or corn syrup-sweetened soda can contain 140 or more calories. If a person drinks only 3-5 cans a day, that's a quarter to a third of the recommended daily caloric intake for an average sedentary American. This provides absolutely no nutritional value, which means that its either displacing real food, or people are consuming that many additional calories from real food that provides protein, fiber, vitamins and minerals.

Artificial sweeteners: sugar-free diet sodas may not be any better. Studies have shown an insulin reaction to aspartame in rats, and while this may or may not carry over to humans, it's quite likely that artificial sweeteners promote overall increased caloric intake, as aspartame appears to cause carbohydrate cravings. Sweeteners like cyclamates and saccharine have also been linked to cancer, and aspartame is a serious hazard for those who have phenylketonuria. It has also been linked to severe headaches in some people. Breakdown products of aspartame include phenyalanine, methanol, formic acid, and formaldehyde, which is stored in fat cells and is probably carcinogenic.

Thus, both diet and sugared soda are linked to weight gain and diabetes, which both lead to heart disease, stroke, and a whole host of other medical problems.

Phosphoric acid: many soft drinks contain phosphoric acid, which causes calcium excretion and bone loss, especially in older women who are already predisposed to osteoporosis. Some researchers believe this is simply due to the replacement of milk in the diet; in either case it means women soda-drinkers are more prone to broken bones.

Citric acid: citric acid, which is present in many types of soda, including Mountain Dew, erodes tooth enamel. A popular high school experiment is to place a tooth or mouse in citric acid, which then dissolve away in a couple of weeks. Someone who sits at a keyboard all day sipping Dew — regular or diet — is not doing their teeth any favors.

Caffeine: caffeine is an addictive substance which is generally considered harmless. But it's a full-fledged drug addiction: withdrawal symptoms include headache, muscle pain, stiffness, vomiting and depression. There are also many instances of people dying after consuming too much caffeine. France outlawed Red Bull after an Irishman died from drinking four cans. A fourteen-year-old Maryland girl recently died after drinking two Monster energy drinks over a 24-hour period.

In short, soda consumption has absolutely no positive benefits.

When I was a kid soda was a treat, like a cookie or a piece of cake. But over the last forty years people have begun treating soda as a staple food, replacing juice and milk. This is especially problematic for women and children, who need that calcium. Milk has its own problems with BGH and excessive antibiotic use, but soda is the worst possible replacement. Plain water is far superior in every way.

Going to a fast-food place like McDonald's used to be a treat as well: we would eat there a few times a year, when out shopping or on a long road trip. Today many pork out on pizza, burgers, fries and sodas every day. Even worse, parents regularly bring that stuff home to feed their kids. This diet is the main cause of the epidemic of obesity that is sweeping across the world, but is hitting the United States particularly hard.

When I was a kid, you either brown-bagged a sandwich to school or you ate the school lunch, which was an institutional version of the square meal you got at home. You drank government-subsidized milk for 2 cents a carton. These days most schools have pop and candy machines and some even have fast-food outlets on campus.

The truly awful part is that our economy requires this. Investors demand high returns, and businesses that don't experience at least 5-10% annual growth are viewed as losers and hammered on the stock market. Companies like Coca Cola, McDonald's, Burger King, Pepsi, etc., have experienced growth for years, mostly at the expense of sit-down restaurants and grocery stores.

The push for growth in profits has forced these companies to adopt tactics of relentless advertising, callous indoctrination of the young, increased convenience and ubiquity, and product reformulation to maximize addictiveness. In the process they have completely altered our behaviors and degraded the health of the nation.

But for that kind of domestic profit growth to continue, Americans have to increase their consumption of products that are bad for their health (costing us hundreds of billions more in medical costs), or our population has to increase (unlikely, since that will only happen through immigration), or the price of these products has to increase (unlikely, since the main draw is the cheapness of fast food).

The economic model of endless growth in consumption — and our waistlines — is literally killing us.

Grab Bag Of Irritation

I thought I'd take a break from politics today and put up a Grab Bag. It's been far too long since I've done one and I'm honestly in the perfect mood today.

Soda Popped!

What is it with virtually everyone I know these days completely freaking out about soda?

Somehow, all of the conversations I've had about health and/or food recently have all gone the same way. One of my friends will say something like, "And soda...OH MY GOD, Soda is just the worst thing in the world. It's SOOOO bad for you" followed by semi-violent head shakes and then something like..."Horrible...it's just so horrible for you" as if they were talking about Chernoyl or something.

Yes, I know that soda is bad for you if you drink 89 cans a day but having one on occasion is not the same thing as smoking two packs a day, for pete's sake. It's as if you are instantly going to get diabetes if you have one can of a regular, sugar filled Coke. The descent into anaphylaxis is nearly instantaneous whenever the subject comes up and is blown so far out of proportion that it's driving me completely nuts.

Speaking of which...

The Land of Exaggeration 

I know that being Minnesotan means taking some small thing that happened to someone once and turning it into an everyday occurrence that now happens to everyone everywhere is par for the course. But, seriously, I just can't take it anymore.

The other day I was talking with a friend of mine about how I talk about sex quite a bit and in great detail. "You can't do that, Mark. People just don't like it," she pleaded with me. "But why? So what?" I asked.

"Well, you can't go around raping people either," was her reply.

WTF???!!!

So, talking about sex is the gateway to rape? Seriously?!!?

But it's not just with such a touchy subject...it's with fucking everything! I was telling a parent of one of my son's friends that I was going to celebrate my birthday in Nord East (a tres hip area of Minneapolis). She, being the TOTAL suburban mom, commented, "Oh, that's an awful section of town. Back when I was 18 (20 years ago) someone I dated stole a car there once."

To this day, she has never gone back there!

Even smaller things like...it takes me five minutes to drive from my house to pick up the kids at school. They are out at 410pm so I usually leave at 405pm. Yet my wife is constantly on me about leaving at 350. Why?

Or in the past few years (and for some inexplicable reason), people have started freaking out about snow here in Minnesota. The weather douches issue warnings if it is going to snow more than an inch and tell everyone that it is literally going to be the most awful storm in the history of the earth. Again, why?

Because we live in a land of gross exaggeration. This isn't simply true of politics, mind you (Barack Obama is a socialist or Hitler). This is true of just about everything and it seems more prevalent in the Midwest. People that talk about sex are rapists, a car robbery in NE Minneapolis means that it's now East St. Louis, it takes an 20 minutes to get somewhere that's 5 minutes away, and the world is going to end when it snows a few inches in Minnesota. IN FUCKING MINNESOTA!!!

AHHHHHH!!!!!!!!

Please, enough, people....

A Titanic Obsession

Alright, enough already with the Titanic shit. I realize it's the 100th Anniversary and all but has anyone else noticed that our obsession with this profoundly sad and tragic event is perpetual whether it's the anniversary or not? Seriously, there's something emotionally....well....just fucked about it.

And James Cameron's underwater explorations (which, b to the w, have been waayyyyy over reported) aren't helping. He made a movie about 14 years ago that made a lot of money...big fucking deal. I hated it. The dramatic hysteria literally made me sick to my stomach. It just wasn't that good, folks.

Yet, he continues to revisit it with documentary after documentary and re-release after re-release. Now, it's out in 3D. Whoopee! The only film the guy has made since Titanic was Avatar. How about exploring some new territory there, Jimbo and, oh, I don't know, make a film every five years or something rather than continuing to revisit that awful fucking film every other month.


Whew, I feel much better now that I have gotten all that out!

Amen, Michelle

And Speaking of Paranoia, Fear and Shit Your Pants...

Right after I put up the post below, I saw this come up on my dashboard in Blogger.

Good. Lord.

What's sad about this faux intellectualism and truly awful understanding of political theory and history is how perfectly it fits Boaz Point #1.

1. Panic Mongering. This goes one step beyond simple fear mongering. With panic mongering, there is never a break from the fear. The idea is to terrify and terrorize the audience during every waking moment. From Muslims to swine flu to recession to homosexuals to immigrants to the rapture itself, the belief over at Fox (and the right wing blogsphere, for that matter) seems to be that if your fight-or-flight reflexes aren't activated, you aren't alive. This of course raises the question: why terrorize your own audience? Because it is the fastest way to bypasses the rational brain. In other words, when people are afraid, they don't think rationally. And when they can't think rationally, they'll believe anything.

And if they'll believe anything, they will certainly plunk down their money to buy books with "Get Ready For Armageddon" in the subtitles (hence the main reason why these things keep coming out:)). I used to have, at least, some respect for Kevin. No longer. He's completely given himself over to what amounts to a Doomsday Cult. Ironically, the science of climate change doesn't phase him (it's a liberal plot) illustrating just how completely back-asswards minds like his truly are.

Further, I'm still wondering how Kevin and his regular commenters (some of whom post here) would have made it through the truly tough times in our nation's history...the times of rugged individualism of which they so often lament and pine for...I mean, there weren't antibiotics back then. There's no way a group of such hysterical old ladies would have lasted...crying the end of the world every other day. They would've spontaneously combusted in a fit of anger, hate and fear.

I'd really like to know when the end is coming. What's the time frame? He's been saying it for over 9 years now, according to his writings. I'd like a ball park so when the date that is the furthest away comes and goes, they will perhaps see that they were mistaken. Likely, this will not be the case as they can always point to something bad that happened as evidence of the coming end.

When the only tool in your tool kit is the Apocalypse.....

Check, Check, and Check!

So, Mitt Romney addressed the NRA  yesterday at their big convention in St. Louis, Missouri in what was billed as "a celebration of American values." The day before the convention, this piece from AP caught my eye. Here was the quote that made me chuckle.

Although Obama has virtually ignored gun issues during his term, the NRA considers him a foe and plans to mount an aggressive effort against him.

What I truly don't understand here is that President Obama is acting with the exact benign neglect when it comes to gun laws that gun rights folks have so vociferously argued that they want to see from the federal government. And yet...

We need a president who will stand up for the rights of hunters, sportsmen and those who seek to protect their home and family. President Obama has not; I will.

Uh...huh? That's not what happened. Gun rights have never been looser and violence around the country has continued to drop. What the fuck is he talking about?

In a second term, he would be unrestrained by the demands of reelection. As he told the Russian president last month when he thought no one else was listening, after a reelection he'll have a lot more, quote, 'flexibility' to do what he wants. I'm not exactly sure what he meant by that, but looking at his first three years, I have a very good idea.

Ah, I see.

Paranoia...
Fear...
Shit your pants...

Check, check and check!

Ah, Well...

I guess that hopey changey stuff is working out after all...just not for her. I seem to recall DJ from Kevin's blog muttering something about her scaring the hell out of me.

I'm shivering with fear, dude.

Voices in My Head

It's been a while since I did one of these and some discussions in comments have inspired me to return to one of my favorite topics. But first, some clarification.

I have been told that the conservative views that I take issue with are not, in fact, accurately portrayed. Nor are they necessarily the views of my commenters who migrated over from Kevin Baker's site. No, oh no, these are "voices in my head" with whom I am arguing.

It's my view that the former point is complete horse hockey as I am simply relaying the message. I know it must be embarrassing to have to be associated with people that aren't well mentally but I have to live with Dennis Kucinich and Buck Johnson so you're just going to have to lump it. However, I should be a little extra considerate, I know, because there are far more on the right who are simply nuts. So, I will, at least try:)

Regarding the latter point, I also call bullshit because, although it may not be exactly the view of some of my commenters, it sure does sound an awful lot like it. And some of you aren't doing anything to formerly denounce such silliness so you really can't blame me for ascribing it to you. In fact, part of me think that you really do think this way and are (surprise surprise) engaging in a combination of faux outrage and the innocent babe in the woods routine.

Now, I think there is a way we can tell if I am right or not. Take a look at this video.




This is Florida Congressmen Allen West, a Republican and Tea Party favorite. He is also the favorite of Kevin Baker, proprietor of The Smallest Minority gun blog. He believes that there are 79 to 81 members of the Communist Party in the Democratic Party. He states it very clearly in this video which, incidentally, was released by his campaign. So, it's straight from him and not a liberally biased source.

Do you agree with him? If so, why. If not, why not.

Let's see if this is truly a "voice in my head."

In A Visual Mood

I'm in a visual mood today so here are some images I've snagged over the last few days. First one is dedicated to those of you who think the president has done a bad job with the economy...

...for my Tea Party friends...

...and this one just made me cackle...

Taking Candy from a Baby

I don't know how much stock I put in studies like this, but I found this article in Scientific American. The study found that wealthy people are significantly less considerate of others, and are much more likely to cut you off with their luxury cars. Yeah, I know this fits into the "well, duh..." category.

But the following part was especially humorous:

In order to figure out whether selfishness leads to wealth (rather than vice versa), Piff and his colleagues ran a study where they manipulated people’s class feelings. The researchers asked participants to spend a few minutes comparing themselves either to people better off or worse off than themselves financially. Afterwards, participants were shown a jar of candy and told that they could take home as much as they wanted. They were also told that the leftover candy would be given to children in a nearby laboratory. Those participants who had spent time thinking about how much better off they were compared to others ended up taking significantly more candy for themselves--leaving less behind for the children.

Yes, the study shows that rich people will take candy from a baby. Shades of Montgomery Burns!

Now, we all know that some rich people are quite generous. Andrew Carnegie and Bill Gates have contributed much of the their time and money to worthy causes. When I was a kid I spent many hours at one of the libraries built by Carnegie throughout the United States and Britain. Gates has spent billions of dollars vaccinating kids in third-world countries.

But we also know that these people are by far the exception to the rule. Most of  today's wealthy are nameless brokers, bankers, hedge fund managers, CEOs and heirs who will never make any significant contribution to society.

But this isn't some abstruse academic question. Republicans are on record against compassion and empathy. When President Obama nominated Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court he mentioned the importance of those qualities and was roundly derided by Republicans.

Why does this matter? If the people who make policy are wealthy, compassionless men like, say, Mitt Romney (who told us he likes to fire people and doesn't care about the poor), they're going to make decisions that benefit the privileged few and damn the consequences for the majority.

Everyone in this country understands this basic fact. It's one of the biggest reasons that many Republicans don't trust Romney, though they don't frame it that way. They usually characterize him as a closet liberal, but the real knock against him is that he is actually a soulless husk and will simply say anything to get elected. He doesn't really stand for anything except money and power. They know he can't relate to them and just doesn't care about them.

And when Romney endorsed the Paul Ryan budget that would give even more tax cuts to the wealthy while cutting spending for everything else but defense, he almost literally declared his support for taking candy from babies.

As the Republican nomination process cycled through the various Romney challengers, Santorum, Cain and Gingrich, the main draw wasn't the tirades about contraception and 9-9-9 and invented Palestinian peoples. No, it was these candidates' middle-class roots that so many Republican voters were attracted to. They knew the non-Romneys could better understand their lives than a guy whose wife drives a couple Cadillacs and whose only knowledge of football and NASCAR comes from his friendships with team owners.

Santorum ultimately did the best against Romney, but finally had to throw in the towel against the rising tide of cash. He represented the average Republican hope that you could start from scratch and make it to the top (though Santorum has distorted his own family history, implying that they were all destitute coal miners: in reality Santorum has always been well off, his father was a psychiatrist at VA hospital and his mother was nurse).

Romney represents the death of that hope: the Republican realization that only massive amounts of cash from Romney's cronies and multinational corporations can unseat a president who started out where where most American did and truly represents the American success story.

An Excellent Job!

Two years ago, during his SOTU address, Barack Obama promised double American exports in the next five years. So far, the first two years of that time period has seen an increase of just under 30 percent or an increase from 140 billion a month to 180 billion a month. At this pace, the president will get close to or achieve his goal. Why is this happening and why is this a cause for optimism?

Tyler Cowen has the answers in his fantastic new piece, "What Export-Oriented America Means."

First, it is the United States that is leading the way in high tech machines that populate the manufacturing industry worldwide. Countries from around the world need to buy them and we make the best ones. But it's not as simple as that.

The more the world relies on smart machines, the more domestic wage rates become irrelevant for export prowess. That will help the wealthier countries, most of all America. This logic works on both sides. America is using less labor in manufacturing, but China is too, even as its manufacturing output is rising. The fact that Chinese manufacturing employment is falling along with ours means that both our higher wages and their lower wages are becoming less relevant for the location of manufacturing decisions. The less manufacturing has to do with labor costs and relative wage levels, the greater the comparative advantage of the United States.

Bingo. But won't this hurt American jobs?

You’ll hear the word “insourcing” more, too, to join the far more familiar “outsourcing.” For instance, in one manufacturing survey from November 2011, almost one fifth of North American manufacturers claimed to have brought production back from a “low-cost” country to North America. The corresponding number from early 2010 was one tenth of those companies, partly because of rising labor costs in developing nations, and partly because labor costs don’t always matter so much anymore.

The core political truth about this, however, is a little awkward: So many of the jobs vulnerable to foreign imports have already vanished that there is little left for voters or less powerful manufacturing-based labor unions to fear from free trade. The new job growth has been in health care, education, services and government, areas that are largely insulated from foreign competition and that will themselves seek out export markets. American higher education is in demand around the world, too, and has little to fear from foreign colleges trying to expand offerings in the United States.

This would be why I constantly harp on education. If you are a low skilled laborer in this country, learning how to operate high tech manufacturing machines should be your number one goal in life-stat! Developing countries of the world will need you to train their workforce.

Second, as I have discussed previously, the US may become the new Saudi Arabia in terms of energy exports. With the shale and natural gas industry starting to boom due to recent discoveries, we are poised to be able to take advantage of world demand and truly become a dominant, energy power.

This demand isn't just limited to energy. The third cause for optimism is that the developing countries themselves As BRICS, for example, continues to develop, their demand for our products to help them in their development is going to grow exponentially.

The leading categories of American exports today—civilian aircraft, semiconductors, cars, pharmaceuticals, machinery and equipment, automobile accessories, and entertainment—are going to be in the sweet spot of growing demand in what we now call the developing world.

That's right. Put all of this together and what do you get?

Export success will resurrect the United States as a dominant global economic power. America will be wealthier, its products will have greater global reach, and it will largely cure its trade imbalance with China. The fear of American foreign policy being determined by Beijing, or constrained by the financial resources of the Chinese central bank, will be forgotten. No one will view the United States as the borrowing supplicant in the U.S.-China economic relationship, and, all else equal, our exports to China will increase friendly feelings toward that country.

No more boiling pit of sewage. Thank goodness!!

All of this shows that we are well on the way to achieving the president's goal and promise that he made. In light of all of this information, saying that he is "destroying free enterprise," is simply not true. In fact, he has shown that his method of governing (the combination of  government partnership and knowing when to stay out of the way) has clearly produced positive results.

When it comes to the issue of helping to increase exports, the president has done an excellent job!

The Wall Street Journal?

I have to echo Joe Scarborough in his recent piece for Politico and go even further by wondering if the editorial staff at the Wall Street Journal has started doing bong hits.

The paper's lead article showcased a study declaring that U.S. companies were emerging stronger from the Great Recession than they were even before the 2008 financial meltdown. The Journal quoted Wells Fargo's former chief economist who said the last few years have made U.S. companies "leaner, meaner and hungrier." That positive sentiment was backed by a WSJ analysis that showed sales, profits and employment higher among the Standard and Poor's companies than in 2007.

This article details how US corporations have returned to pre-recession profits. 

An analysis by The Wall Street Journal of corporate financial reports finds that cumulative sales, profits and employment last year among members of the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index exceeded the totals of 2007, before the recession and financial crisis. 

Deep cost cutting during the downturn and caution during the recovery put the companies on firmer financial footing, helping them to outperform the rest of the economy and gather a greater share of the nation’s income. The rebound is reflected in the stock market, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average at a four-year high.

In addition to hiring overseas, companies have been squeezing more productivity out of their employees. In fact, “in 2007, the companies generated an average of $378,000 in revenue for every employee on their payrolls,” while last year, “that figure rose to $420,000.”

Scarborough goes on to mention an article by Walter Russell Mead whom I've recently started perusing at the insistence of regular commenter, juris  imprudent. His piece, "The Myth of American Decline," offers a very different perspective of how our country is doing in comparison to what Mitt Romney and the Republicans claim is happening.

The United States isn't in decline, but it is in the midst of a major rebalancing. The alliances and coalitions America built in the Cold War no longer suffice for the tasks ahead. As a result, under both the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations, American foreign policy has been moving toward the creation of new, sometimes difficult partnerships as it retools for the tasks ahead.

I agree. He goes on to discuss the changes in the Trilateral system over the years which echoes many things I have said on here. He concludes on a very upbeat and like accurate note.

Despite all the talk of American decline, the countries that face the most painful changes are the old trilateral partners. Japan must live with a disturbing rival presence, China, in a region that, with American support, it once regarded as its backyard. In Europe, countries that were once global imperial powers must accept another step in their long retreat from empire.

For American foreign policy, the key now is to enter deep strategic conversations with our new partners—without forgetting or neglecting the old. The U.S. needs to build a similar network of relationships and institutional linkages that we built in postwar Europe and Japan and deepened in the trilateral years. Think tanks, scholars, students, artists, bankers, diplomats and military officers need to engage their counterparts in each of these countries as we work out a vision for shared prosperity in the new century.

The American world vision isn't powerful because it is American; it is powerful because it is, for all its limits and faults, the best way forward. This is why the original trilateral partners joined the U.S. in promoting it a generation ago, and why the world's rising powers will rally to the cause today.

This is why Mitt Romney (along with various right wing pundits) don't seem to get and it was evident in their childish criticism of the president's conversation with Russian president Dmitry Medvedev. In the final analysis, the American system is the best way forward and because the world is set up the way it is now (liberal economies and free trade), countries will have little choice but to embrace our way of doing things if they want to remain a player in the global marketplace.

Given all of this, how can the right continue to say that America is falling apart and it's all Barack Obama's fault? Now, even the Wall Street Journal (gasp!) seems to be saying that Barack X simply doesn't exist.

The Reasonable Middle Ground on Climate Change

It has become Republican dogma that climate change isn't happening. That it's impossible for puny humans to change the climate of this huge planet. That God wouldn't let it happen because, as James Inhofe says, he made a promise to Noah.

The press, afraid of being accused of siding with liberals, still gives conservative climate change deniers a fair hearing, often referring to climate change as a "controversial theory." The idea is that they have to give equal credence to both "sides" of the debate to be fair.

The problem is that the press has fallen into the Republican trap and let the conservatives define a false equivalence between the hard evidence of all serious climate scientists on one side, and a few hand-waving cranks funded by oil companies who say "we couldn't possibly hurt a planet this big" on the other.

The reality is that acknowledging anthropogenic climate change is the reasonable middle ground. Climate change deniers are on the rightmost extreme, and radical anti-humanists are the leftmost extreme. I was reminded of this by an essay that appeared in the Huffington Post. In it, Peter Jay Brown wrote:

We humans are merely passengers on the spaceship Earth. We produce nothing important for a healthy planet, but certainly spare no expense at taking what we need and then some. We are the ultimate planetary narcissists.

Guys like Brown are just as wrong as Inhofe. They whine when wind turbines kill a few birds. They romanticize nature, implying that animals are somehow nobler than men. The truth is, animals behave like the brutes they are. When random fluctuations in environmental conditions happen to favor one species they drastically over-reproduce and lay waste to the land and other species. Just like we do. The difference is that they're not self-aware and can't stop to think about what they're doing before it's too late. We are. And we need to take responsibility for the problems that we're causing. Now.

As the only intelligent tool-using species on the planet, we have become the owners and operators of planet Earth by default. Short of total thermonuclear war, any ecological damage we inflict on the planet will probably only result in our own demise, and not the end of all life on Earth. Life has flourished with high concentrations of CO2 in the past, and would likely flourish again, albeit after migrations and die-offs of certain species. The biggest effects of anthropogenic climate change will likely be inland droughts and flooding of coastal cities, starvation, widespread plagues, world-wide wars over declining agricultural, water and energy resources, and the decline and collapse of human civilization as we go the way of the dinosaurs.

However, if a big enough asteroid or comet smacked the Earth all life would perish, This has likely occurred at least once in the past. Similarly, when the Siberian Traps (volcanoes) erupted perhaps 90% of all species were killed.

If a comet chucked out of the Oort cloud takes a bead on Earth, only a technologically advanced space-faring human race will be able to prevent the destruction of this lovely blue planet. Countering a repeat of the Siberian Traps would be much harder, but in the long run the human race is the Earth's only hope of saving the planet from total destruction. 

One could argue that the Earth evolved humans as protection against the larger threats that it was vulnerable to in the past. It is thus our responsibility to further develop our technology to a point where we can save the Earth — and ourselves — from certain doom.

But the truth is, right now we are hurting the planet — and ourselves — with our excesses. The 2000-2009 decade was the warmest on record, and this past March was the warmest in history. Tornadoes struck Arkansas, Tennessee and Mississippi in January. They hit Nebraska, Kansas, Missouri, Indiana and Tennessee in February. In March and April tornadoes hammered the nation's midsection again, and Texas too.

Inhofe's invocation of God's promise to Noah is especially striking because Inhofe so completely missed the point. Noah didn't sit around waiting for God to build his ark. Noah built it because a flood was coming.

Climate change — including floods — is coming. The seven billion humans burning billions upon billions of tons of coal, gas and oil are mostly to blame for that change. We can't just sit around and expect God to clean up our mess.

Dedicated To Kevin Baker

Most Pesky

Expect this story to have legs as the general election marches onward.

Why Romney's 'dog on car roof' story makes him unfit to be president 

In addition to being another WTF moment considering the source, I think this story is going to be most pesky for Mitt Romney. Personally, I'm not a pet person so I could give two shits that he put the dog on the roof of his car for a trip. But as Mr. Davis notes, dog owners (and pet people in general) are a BI-PARTISAN and fiercely steadfast lot who do not tolerate this sort of treatment.

It will be interesting to see what happens with this one.

A....What?

Now that the general election has more or less started, I'm trying to figure out how Mitt Romney wins with stories like this.

Romney's plan to renovate his La Jolla, California beach house has been known for months.  But documents first discovered by Politico, which broke the story Tuesday, show that Romney also plans to add a 3,600-square-foot basement, an outdoor shower, and a car elevator. 

Seriously,  a car elevator? Nothing says "I know the struggles of every day Americans and can help" like a car elevator in a 12 million dollar home.

I have to give him credit, though, because there some people that are going to buy the fact that someday this is going to be them if only they continue to vote Republican. The haves and the soon-to-haves....

Party of Fiscal Irresponsibility

Ironically, the self-styled party of fiscal responsibility in Minnesota is unable to pay the rent. As mentioned in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Politico has called the Minnesota GOP a disaster. The state GOP is more than a million dollars in debt only a year and a half after engineering a takeover of the Minnesota House and Senate and only narrowly losing the governor's office.

This comes on top of another story from a few days earlier: fired Senate staffer Michael Brodkorb is suing the GOP-controlled Senate for half a million bucks for defamation of character:

Brodkorb's new claim is that Senate Secretary Cal Ludeman defamed him when he told the press that Brodkorb was trying to "blackmail" and "extort payment from the Senate" through his legal case for wrongful termination. Brodkorb was fired in the wake of Senate Majority Leader Amy Koch's resignation from the leadership after senators confronted her about the affair she was having with him.

Brodkorb was terminated after his affair with former Senate majority leader Amy Koch came to light (both are married to other people), and she resigned under pressure. He's also suing the Senate for wrongful termination and gender discrimination because he claims women who had affairs with male legislators in the past retained their jobs. And he's suing some of the senators for "invasion of privacy" for outing his affair. This is that same "right to privacy" that Brodkorb and other Republicans don't think women have when they're seeking contraceptives and abortions.

Brodkorb made his name for creating the infamous "Minnesota Democrats Exposed" blog. Now he's threatening to expose Minnesota Republicans as well, by airing their dirty laundry in court, bringing into evidence previous affairs that had been uncovered in the Senate (the blackmail and extortion that Ludeman was talking about).

This is exactly the sort of lawsuit that Republicans keep telling us is the absolute worst kind of welfare for trial lawyers. Somehow it's bad for us regular joes to file class action lawsuits against giant oil and gas companies that poison our drinking water, but it's perfectly fine for a Republican to sue his former colleagues in the state senate for getting caught boinking his boss.

The worst part of it is that Brodkorb's lawsuit will cost the state of Minnesota a ton of money in lawyers' fee, even if the state wins. Also quite irksome is the fact that Ludeman refuses to say how much state money he's spending on these lawyers: he's claiming lawyer-client privilege. The way I see it, the state taxpayers are the clients; we should at least have the privilege of knowing how much we're forking out for litigating this ludicrous infighting among Republicans.

Meanwhile, the Republicans are pushing a minority voter suppression amendment to the state constitution thinly veiled as "voter ID," and an amendment to ban gay marriage. Somehow Republicans think that gays marrying will "destroy" marriage, when it's clear that Republicans like Brodkorb (and Gingrich and Limbaugh) are well on their way to destroying marriage all by themselves.

I Should Start Charging Copyright Fees

Well, now Krugman has hopped on the "Cult" bandwagon.

what’s interesting is the cult that has grown up around Mr. Ryan — and in particular the way self-proclaimed centrists elevated him into an icon of fiscal responsibility, and even now can’t seem to let go of their fantasy. 

The Ryan cult was very much on display last week, after President Obama said the obvious: the latest Republican budget proposal, a proposal that Mitt Romney has avidly embraced, is a “Trojan horse” — that is, it is essentially a fraud. “Disguised as deficit reduction plans, it is really an attempt to impose a radical vision on our country.” 

I should start charging copyright fees.

The rest of his column is quite informative, though.

The reaction from many commentators was a howl of outrage. The president was being rude; he was being partisan; he was being a big meanie. Yet what he said about the Ryan proposal was completely accurate. Actually, there are many problems with that proposal. But you can get the gist if you understand two numbers: $4.6 trillion and 14 million..

So, what do those two numbers mean?

Of these, $4.6 trillion is the revenue cost over the next decade of the tax cuts embodied in the plan, as estimated by the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center. These cuts — which are, by the way, cuts over and above those involved in making the Bush tax cuts permanent — would disproportionately benefit the wealthy, with the average member of the top 1 percent receiving a tax break of $238,000 a year.

Gosh I'm shocked.

What about the 14 million?

Meanwhile, 14 million is a minimum estimate of the number of Americans who would lose health insurance under Mr. Ryan’s proposed cuts in Medicaid; estimates by the Urban Institute actually put the number at between 14 million and 27 million.

And that would be why I say that Paul Ryan's budget isn't serious. Of course, he can continue to throw out these sorts of dog whistles because he knows that they will never actually be implemented.

It's fine and dandy to play make believe but when you actually have to govern...well...that's a different story.

Quick, Like A Bunny!

Happy Easter!

Who Will Take That First Step?

When someone like John H. Cochrane, a professor of finance at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and an adjunct scholar of the Cato Institute, says the following

Austerity isn’t working in Europe.

We should ALL listen.

His recent piece for Bloomberg  offers some rare flexibility from the right that is worth noting. He begins by noting a very basic reality.

As incomes decline, tax revenue drops, and it becomes harder to cut spending. A downward spiral looms.

This is the crux of why we should all be concerned about flat lining middle class incomes.

He goes on to point out that spending more (something that I have also said) is not the answer.

Where will the money come from? Greece, Spain and Italy simply cannot borrow any more. So, say the Keynesians, Germany should pay. But even Germany has limits. The U.S. can still borrow at remarkably low rates. But remember that Greece was able to borrow at low rates right up to the moment that it couldn’t borrow at all. There is nobody to bail out the U.S. when our time comes. What should we do then?

Also, a very good point. So what's the solution?

Let’s call it “Growth Now.” Forget about “stimulating.” Spend only on what is really needed. We could easily stop subsidies for agriculture, electric cars or building roads and bridges to nowhere right now, without fearing a recession.

Yep.

Rather than raise taxes further on the “rich,” driving them underground, abroad, or away from business formation, fix the tax code, as every commission has recommended. Lower marginal rates but eliminate the maze of deductions.

I could live with that. It has to be done anyway. Of course, there are difficulties.

“Structural reform” is vital to restore growth now, not a vague idea for many years in the future when the stimulus has worked its magic. It’s also a lot harder politically than the breezy language suggests. “Reform” isn’t just “policy” handed down by technocrats like rules on the provenance of prosciutto; it involves taking away subsidies and interventions that entrenched interests have grown to love, and have supported politicians to protect. They will fight it tooth and nail.

That includes D's, R's and everyone in between.

So, we know what we need to do. Who will be the first person to lead on doing it?

No Fucking Shit

Comparing Pundits

Two dueling op-eds in today's Washington Post are on basically the same topic: how much the other guy is lying. The difference between them is telling.

Dana Milbank's piece describes how Romney tells multiple whoppers one after the other at every appearance, completely mischaracterizing Obama's record, his speeches, and the state of the economy, and the reality of the world as we know it. Milbank also acknowledges that many politicians, including Obama, say things that they know aren't true. In particular, Milbank criticizes Obama's incorrect statement that it would be "unprecedented" for the Supreme Court to strike down the health care law.

George Will begins with the following statement:

Barack Obama’s intellectual sociopathy — his often breezy and sometimes loutish indifference to truth — should no longer startle.

And then goes on to criticize Obama for the same statement about the Supreme Court knocking down unconstitutional laws. For the record, I agree that Obama is wrong on this.

But Will's selective criticism is quite telling. Where Milbank takes a reasoned and honest look at politics and the things both sides say, Will is in full propaganda mode. He doesn't make the slightest nod to the horrific Republican record of lies, from Richard Nixon's "I'm not a crook," to Reagan's "we don't negotiate with terrorists," to George Bush linking Saddam to 9/11, to the litany of misstatements, inaccuracies and outright lies categorized by PolitiFact that Bachmann, Cain, Gingrich, Santorum and Romney have spouted throughout the Republican primary. Ron Paul is the exception to the Republican rule: his misstatements and exaggerations are in line with your average Democrat's, easily attributable to zeal rather than a hypocritical effort to rewrite history and warp reality. His acknowledgement of Republican errors is laudable, though I still disagree with pretty much everything he says. So do most Republicans, but usually for the opposite reason.

Will also says:

Obama flagrantly misrepresented the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, which did not “open the floodgates” for foreign corporations “to spend without limit in our elections” (the law prohibiting foreign money was untouched by Citizens United) and did not reverse “a century of law.”

and

[Obama's] defense will be his campaign because he cannot forever distract the nation and mesmerize the media with such horrors as a 30-year-old law student being unable to make someone else pay for her contraception.

which is an intentional lie about Fluke's testimony in service to perpetuating the Limbaugh/Republican lie that contraceptives are all for fun and games and not real health problems.  Menstrual cramps can be agonizing and some women who never have sex use the hormones in the pill to prevent the pain (no, painkillers just don't cut it). Fluke's testimony wasn't even about that: it was almost in its entirety dedicated to a friend who will never be able to have children because she was denied medication to prevent uterine cysts. That medication just happened to be in the form of birth control pills, and therefore the employer thought she was lying just to have sex.

Will is flagrantly denying reality and displaying the utmost hypocrisy here. He casually calls the president a liar, and then goes on to breezily discuss who would be best qualified to perpetuate Will's Republican hypocrisy.

His take on Citizen's United is a prime example. While it's true that the law against foreign contributions is still in place, many of the organizations spending money on our elections have no requirements to report their donors. Without that information, there is no way to know whether foreigners are funneling cash through dummy shell corporations and then into the electoral process, and thus utterly no way enforce that law. (And we already know there are plenty of people motivated by foreign interests donating money to candidates.)

When there is the appearance and possibility of corruption, and there is no way to even detect that a law is being violated, the presumption must be that corruption is occurring. This is the standard that judges are held to in cases of conflict of interest. It is the standard that Republicans use when they propose laws that require all voters to show ID at the polls, even when there's no evidence of voter fraud. To do otherwise would cause us to lose faith in the integrity of the system, they say. Similarly, Republicans insist that we need to force all workers to prove that they have the right to work in this country to prevent illegal aliens from taking jobs away from real Americans.

Preventing foreign contributions to political campaigns is in exactly the same category as stopping non-citizens from voting and working. Requiring full disclosure of campaign donors' identities (not just their dummy shell corporations) would be a good first step. Yet Republicans oppose this simple and straightforward solution because they say they believe that corporations have right to free speech, that money is speech, and that corporations have a "right to privacy" to prevent them from being unjustly attacked. A right that Republicans don't believe that individuals have when they wish to obtain an abortion or contraception.

Republican are fine with forcing doctors to harangue women, wasting their time and (our) money on useless tests, making them listen to fetal heartbeats and violating them with ultrasound wands. Republicans are completely fine with embarrassing and intimidating women who were raped or can't afford to support another child, but they don't want to embarrass multinational corporations by making them admit they're supporting Mitt Romney.

I used to be a Republican, but this sort of outright hypocrisy drove me out of the party. I was an independent for many years, voting for numerous Republican candidates for the state legislature, governor and congress. But as the years went by the Republican Party has ejected everyone I've ever voted for. They're even going after long-time conservative stalwarts like Dick Lugar. Dick Lugar!

The Republican Party has gone so far off the rails it's no longer safe to vote for any Republican. The enforced loyalty to parochial ideology prevents individual Republicans from voting their own consciences for fear of being stabbed in the back, like Lugar. This lock-step central-committee dictatorship simply doesn't exist in the Democratic Party, which is why I've gravitated there. Democrats, like the Blue Dogs, can still vote their own minds, but individual Republicans can no longer make their own decisions; their votes are dictated by the Powers That Be.

And Grover Norquist is the man that many believe is that Power. He's famous for having said that he wants to shrink the government until it's small enough to drown in a bathtub. By enforcing a tighter and more restrictive notion of what it is to be a Republican, and coercing Republicans at every level of government to kowtow to his demands, Norquist may eventually find himself able to fit the entire Republican Party into that bathtub.

Energy Question

I follow Gallup polls pretty closely as they are usually the best indicator of where people are at on various issues. This one on energy and the environment caught my eye for its apparent dichotomy.

Americans Split on Energy vs. Environment Trade-Off

So, while 47 percent say that energy production should be prioritized, 44 percent say that environmental protection should be prioritized. Basically, we want to have both. This is a closer margin than last year when it was 50-41 for energy production. Both of these numbers mark a shift from the early 2000s when it was flipped in favor of environmental protection.

The good news is that most Americans (by a margin of 59-35 percent) favor alternative energy to oil and coal. So why aren't our leaders taking us there?

And Reality Wins Again!

I hope we see a lot more of these types of videos!

More Like This, Please

I'm hoping that the media runs more stories like this as the election kicks into high gear this year. While I know that nearly all of the base will always believe whatever their leaders tell them, the swing voters need to see the facts and make a more informed decision. The first example is precisely what I am talking about.

ROMNEY: "The president's attention, it was elsewhere, like a government takeover of health care and apologizing for America abroad." 

THE FACTS: Obama's law keeps the private insurance industry at the heart of the health care system and avoids a single-payer government system like Canada's. It seeks to achieve universal coverage by requiring insurers to accept people regardless of medical history, subsidizing costs for many in the middle class as well as the poor, establishing new markets for those who don't get insurance at work and requiring most Americans to obtain coverage, with penalties if they don't. 

That's precisely what Romney did, first, as Massachusetts governor. 

Romney argues that states have the right to establish an individual insurance mandate and Washington doesn't — a question the Supreme Court is deciding. But whether the federal law is found constitutional or not, it does not add up to a government takeover. 

Even when fully implemented, if the court allows that, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates that 58 percent of working-age Americans and their families will be covered through employer plans — about the same as now. 

In his world travels, Obama has said at times that the U.S. acted "contrary to our traditions and ideals" in its treatment of terrorist suspects, that "America has too often been selective in its promotion of democracy," that the U.S. "certainly shares blame" for international economic turmoil and has sometimes shown arrogance toward allies. 

Obama's statements that America is not beyond reproach in its history usually come balanced with praise, and he is hardly alone among presidents in acknowledging the nation's past imperfections. But these were not apologies, formal or informal.

This last bit I will never understand. President Obama has not gone around the world apologizing for the United States. It's just an absolute lie.  I wonder how today's GOP would react to Ronald Reagan formally apologizing to the Japanese-Americans interred during World War II. One more example of how he would be labeled a commie traitor today.

Of course, the president is not above criticism either. As the article notes, SOME Republicans (not all) supported the idea of a mandate. And the president himself was against it as a candidate, although that was because he wanted a public option at the time.

Take note of the contrast here. Romney, a Republican? Out and out lying. The president? Spinning and not telling the full story. This is a great example of what I mean when I say that, while the Democrats are not above fault, they certainly do not engage in absolute fabrication with the intent to magnify hate, anger, and fear.

It's Mitt!

After last nights primaries, it's now very clear that Mitt Romney is going to be the GOP nominee. This means that a conservative will not win the White House in 2012.

All of this makes me wonder how and why people are going to vote for Mitt Romney over Barack Obama. I suppose I would understand if it's purely out of spite or high emotions. Perhaps some have even deluded themselves into thinking that Mitt Romney is actually going to do what he says he is going to do. I had someone tell me the other day (actually, I've had a few people tell me this) that he LOOKS LIKE a president and Barack Obama doesn't. I guess looking the part is of paramount importance.

But these are the only reasons I can think of that would drive people to vote for him. He's not a small government guy at all. More importantly, he's not going to create jobs. His track record shows that he's exactly the type of leader that caused the collapse of 2008. He says he wants less regulation, permanent tax cuts for the wealthy, and trickle down economics. Those policies have been shown to be failures.

Last night, he said that the president doesn't know anything about private sector job growth and has, in fact, been poor at it.

Really?

Sadly, there is no doubt in my mind that this campaign is going to be filled with "inside the bubble" statement and thinking just like this. Take a look at how the president's policies affected job creation with this interactive page. 

These are the facts on job growth during the Obama administration. Add in the stock market gains (perhaps RECORD gains) and 3 percent real GDP growth in Q4 of 2011 and Romney's statement is just plain wrong.

So, why would he be a better economic president?

I Agree....With Rush Limbaugh?!!???

Well, not really him but his explanation of the theory is quite insightful:)

 

Messing with the Constitution for Partisan Gain

Minnesota is one of several states that either has or is enacting voter ID laws, all pushed exclusively by Republicans. These require that you have a current picture ID, such as a driver's license, in order to vote. Some states accept other forms of ID, such as a gun license, but disallow other forms of identification with pictures, such as student IDs.

Proponents of such laws, exclusively Republicans, claim that there's an epidemic of voter fraud. During the Bush administration Karl Rove and Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez demanded that US attorneys push the prosecution of these sorts of cases. The episode resulted in both Rove's and Gonzalez's resignations.

In 2010 the house and senate in Minnesota were won by Republicans, but a Democrat was elected governor. To get around a certain veto of voter ID legislation, the Republicans are trying to add a constitutional amendment to require photo IDs at the polling place.

This is a spectacularly stupid idea, as it's always a bad policy to monkey with the constitution for partisan hot-button issues, as well as clutter the constitution with picayune details of law enforcement that will certainly change as technology improves in the future. And it's completely unnecessary, because it's already illegal to commit voter fraud.

The ACLU, which opposes the amendment on the basis that  it's a form of poll tax because it would deny poorer citizens the basic right to vote if they don't drive or have a photo ID, challenged proponents of the law to find cases of voter fraud that would have been stopped by picture IDs at the polls. So far none of the submissions have panned out. The supposed strongest case submitted involved a mother who used an absentee ballot to vote in her daughter's name, while the daughter voted at her school. But no IDs are checked when you fill out an absentee ballot--that's the whole point of absentee ballots.

Basically, the number of people who commit voter fraud in Minnesota by walking into a polling place and claim to be someone who they're not is zero. Think about it: how many people have the gall to lie to an election judge's face, sign the roster with someone else's signature and face a felony charge? How will they know that the person they're pretending to be hasn't already voted? How can they know that the election judge won't know that person? In most jurisdictions, election judges are older people from the community who've worked at the polls for years if not decades. They pretty much know everyone who votes. If someone's trying to impersonate a dead man, the election judge may well have attended his funeral.

In Minnesota, election judges have the responsibility to challenge suspected fraudulent voters. Under certain circumstances the roster at the polling place will already have a notation requiring that the election judge check the voter's ID. If they don't have ID there's already a form to fill out and several questions to answer and they fill out a provisional ballot instead of a regular one. Similar rules apply to people who register to vote at the polls.

To prevent further skulduggery, critical processes performed by election judges are required to have judges from two different parties. Such activities include initializing voting machines, signing the totals at the end of the day, taking results to city hall, assisting voters who need help filling out their ballots, etc.


Now some of you will say, "Wait a minute. If you've got an inside man at the polling place, you can commit fraud on a massive scale." And, yes, that's true. But photo ID does absolutely nothing to prevent that, and would perhaps make it easier because of the false sense of security that photo ID provides.

Furthermore, any kind of organized and sophisticated voter fraud scheme involving impersonation of individuals wouldn't be slowed down by photo ID; fake IDs are ubiquitous. How could an election judge possibly tell a valid license from a good fake? It's trivial for teenagers to get forged IDs to buy booze and get into clubs. All you really need to forge drivers licenses is a supply of blank cards, a computer, a printer and a laminator. You can do it all in the back of a van outside the polling place.


The current system in Minnesota has worked well for decades, and was improved after the close contest between Franken and Coleman 2008. Suggestions Democrats made in reaction to voter ID would actually provide more security than the ID would. It would put the burden on the state to validate the voter's identity by giving the election judge a picture of the voter with an electronic roster. A person registering at the poll would have their picture taken, which would be a solid deterrent against those attempting fraud. The Republican constitutional end-run around the governor smells like voter suppression and an attempt to avenge Coleman's loss.

To be sure, significant voter fraud has taken place in other states, and I have no doubt that a small amount of voter fraud is taking place in Minnesota. But not by people impersonating others at the polls, and it wouldn't be stopped by the voter ID amendment. Real electoral fraud involves absentee ballots and voting in the wrong jurisdiction or in multiple jurisdictions, most often by people who think they have the right to vote everywhere they own property. People like, say, Ann Coulter, who has had brushes with the law because she voted in Connecticut while being registered to vote in New York.

The biggest potential for voter fraud in Minnesota is not at the polls, but with absentee ballots. These are most often used by the elderly (who move to warmer climes in the fall or are too infirm to vote in person), military personnel, people who travel extensively and students. Because there is no photo ID requirement whatsoever for absentee ballots and no one to check that ID, there's no way to know who filled out an absentee ballot. There's a signature check, but in most jurisdictions that's against the form you filled out to request the absentee ballot in the first place. And who's to say the actual voter filled that form out, or that the people who check those forms actually are competent at comparing signatures?

There are likely hundreds of thousands of elderly Americans who are no longer mentally competent whose children or nursing home attendants are voting two or more times by filling out absentee ballots with their own choices. And there probably thousands of students whose parents are voting twice, and thousands of military personnel whose spouses are voting twice. And thousands of retirees and people who own vacation homes who are voting in multiple jurisdictions.

In short, Republicans are locking a technical solution into the constitution to fix problems that don't exist, wasting taxpayer money and creating needless bureaucratic hurdles for people who don't drive or are too poor to afford a car. They are trying to deny the rights of the poor by pretending to prevent an unlikely crime by a few, all the while blithely ignoring the real potential for rampant fraud by the many with absentee ballots.

To really stop absentee ballot, voter impersonation and dead-man voter fraud, we would need a nationwide computer network that linked all jurisdictions, and we would need to assign a unique voter ID to each person, and we would need to ensure that each person only had one ID, and we would need a national registry of all births and deaths based on that ID. Most Republicans would claim this is government overreach and Big Brotherism at its worst. And then we'd have to ensure that this computer network couldn't be scammed by hackers and fraudsters trying to manipulate election results from the top down.

Because that's the real threat: why commit electoral fraud by impersonating people one at a time, when you can buy elections wholesale by controlling the private companies who run the computers that count the votes?

A Cheezy Update

It's been a while since I talked about Wisconsin and Scott Walker and, with all the latest news, it's time for an update. The recall election has been set for June 5th with a Democratic primary on May 8th. Tom Barrett, the Milwaukee mayor and Democratic challenger in 2010 whom Walker ultimately defeated, will run again. Kathleen Falk, former Dane County leader, will compete with Barrett in the primary.

Recall that Barrett made national news when, as the mayor of Milwaukee, he intervened in a dispute, at the Wisconsin State Fair,  to try to protect a woman being attacked and ended up being beaten by a tire iron while defending her.

I think that Barrett is a much better candidate than Falk who strikes me as too much of a contrast with Walker. Barrett only lost by 124,000 votes and, with nearly 1 million signatures gathered for Walker's recall, seems a better challenger.

The recall election itself is going to be tight because neither side can really claim that Walker has done a good job or a bad job. Take a look at this graphic.

While Scott Walker certainly hasn't lived up to this promise, he hasn't exactly done anything that is deeply disastrous. The Wisconsin jobs reports for March, April and May will have quite the level of scrutiny leading up to the election. If they show any sort of job loss, he's toast. Any job gains and he might squeak it out.

The latest polls show an even 48-48 split on Walker and a Democratic challenger so it may simply come down to turnout. But remember that 2 GOP Senators were recalled last year and Walker isn't the only one being recalled in this election. The Lieutenant Governor Rebecca Kleefisch and GOP Senators Scott L. Fitzgerald, Van H. Wanggaard, Terry Moulton and Pam Galloway are also being recalled. Fitzgerald is safe but Galloway has already resigned her seat for family health reasons which leaves it totally open. She won by only 3,000 votes in the last election. Wanggaard won by the same margin in 2010 with Moulton winning by a couple thousand more. Any of these three seats could flip which means that even if Walker wins, he won't be able to push through any sort of agenda.

So, it's going to be interesting to see what happens in Wisconsin. Oh yeah, there's a primary there tomorrow. Mitt is going to win and pretty much sew up the nomination.

Sunday Reflections