The Question

According to the Hollywood Reporter, Bristol Palin's latest foray into television, the reality show Life's a Tripp, was less than stellar: its premiere had a 0.2 rating, much less than the 0.8 rating its lead-in, Dance Moms, drew on the Lifetime cable network.

It's not surprising. The Palins are old hat. Everyone is buzzing about Ann Romney's horse being in the Olympics. Who cares about the trials and tribulations of a has-been Dancing with the Stars contestant and her illegitimate child?

I missed the show Tuesday night, but based solely on the title I can imagine that it's all about the wonderfulness of her choice to bear Tripp to term, and to not have an abortion. I'm guessing she goes on and on about how little Tripp has brightened her life and made everything worthwhile and more meaningful. And, just like all the conservatives who constantly posit what Obama must really believe, I'm under no obligation to find out what she really said.

But there is a Question at the heart of this show, the same Question that abortion opponents always throw in your face during arguments: what if your mother had aborted you?

It's a pointless existential Question. If my mother had aborted me I wouldn't be here, and you wouldn't have asked me that question. It's like asking, what if your mother had miscarried? What if you had been creamed by a bus this morning? What if Stalin's father had strangled little Iosif in the cradle? What if the star of Bethlehem that the wise men followed was an asteroid that hit the earth and killed all the water buffalo in the manger? What if that little girl hadn't beat up Karl Rove when he said he would vote for Nixon in 1960?

The Question is a psychological trick to elicit a personal revulsion against abortion in the listener. It's a shameless gimmick to remove attention from the real issue, which is women exercising control over their own bodies, to promote a me-first mentality.

But if you're going to ask the Question, why not ask Tripp Palin, "What if your mom hadn't fornicated?"

Conservatives are always talking about abstinence, but here we have Bristol Palin on national television telling us how Trippy it is to have a child out of wedlock.

Looking at this more closely, we actually see that fornication is good because it creates life. Like abortion, abstinence is bad because it denies life. Like abortion, abstinence is bad because starts with "ab."

Fornication gave Bristol Palin a wonderful child and a fulfilling relationship with him. Fornication got her on Dancing with the Stars, it got her memoir published, it got her dozens of $15, 000 to $30,000 speaking fees, and it got her a TV show. Fornication made Bristol Palin rich. Fornication also made Levi Johnston rich, but he's already blown his wad and is living the life of a pauper with his mom.


Fornication is fabulous. Fornication is fun. And like fornication, adultery and rape are also pro-life, at least when it's guys on girls. That's why we must oppose abortion, even in cases of incest and rape.


We must still condemn Jerry Sandusky and all those priests who fornicated with boys. But we should slyly wink and give a prayer of thanks to all those men who fornicated with girlfriends, committed adultery with mistresses, hooked up with hookers, cavorted with drunk girls at parties, consoled female parishioners and forced themselves on stepdaughters. They're doing their part to create more life! Down with condoms and the morning after pill! Up with Viagra!


Maybe the Lifetime network will get all those impregnated unmarried women their own TV shows, like Bristol Palin. Or at least get them a webcam so they can follow in Octomom's footsteps.

Yay For Them

You really have to hand it to the Republicans sometimes. There are moments when they can really be quite clever.

Take, for example, yesterday's contempt of Congress vote for Eric Holder which spurred an executive privilege order from President Obama regarding the "remaining documents" that the GOP led committee is claiming must be produced. Either way, they win on this one.

Now they can run around, stomp their feet, and  foam at the mouth about how the president and the AG are hiding something. If they end up releasing the documents....documents which certainly contain sensitive law enforcement information...they can point and laugh and say that the Obama administration truly doesn't know what it is doing and are bumbling fools. Yay! It's a pretty ingenious plan but will it work? 

Perhaps not. To begin with, no one (save for gun bloggers) really cares about this issue. And someone who really doesn't care is Mitt Romney who considers this a distraction from his central message on the economy (yes, we are the ones who dumped rats, bugs and other assorted pests in your house to fuck it all up but now here we are four years later as exterminators who promise to clean it up). The Romney campaign knows that this is the best way to beat the president and, with the monumentally low approval rating of Congress, this whole thing could backfire.

By "thing," I mean a whole lot of juvenile payback. The GOP is still smarting from all of the ethics investigations during the Bush Administration. Of course, back then, there was a lot more evidence as they really were breaking the law. So, when Darrell Issa took over the Oversight Committee, he promised "seven hearings a week times forty." This without any investigation having even commenced. Clearly, we know what the motivation is here.

As always, the Cult of Both Sides has already popped out and the people that are paying attention see the Democrats as being just as guilty as the Republicans even though that is completely false. Some of you might like Holder to release all the documents and pin the fallout on Issa and his goons on the OC.

But then would mean that more operations would be jeopardized and some people would likely die. I guess I'm pretty thankful that the adults are in charge and that won't happen.

The Third Party Delusion

Tom Friedman is at it again: he's wishing wistfully for a gallant knight to come loping out of the wilderness to become a moderate third-party candidate who would magically force the presidential campaigns to discuss substantive solutions to our problems.

Dana Milbank realized how silly this idea was last month when his Americans Elect pipedream evaporated. Jonathan Bernstein pointed the problems with third parties in his PostPartisan piece, "Elections are about the party, not the man."


The fact is, third-party candidates do indeed affect the election. But not the way you want them to. Generally, they steal the election from the candidate they're most similar to and give it to their opponent. In modern politics the party is more important than the candidate.

In the last four Minnesota gubernatorial elections a third party candidate has received a substantial number of votes. In 1998 Jesse Ventura won running as an independent. He remained in office for a single term, deciding not to run again because media jackals were hounding him and his family. But the real problem was that he had no base of support in the legislature and had a devil of a time getting anything passed because neither party was obligated to help him.


People like to think that governors and presidents can somehow make things happen through sheer force of personality. But the structure of our government requires that all laws originate in the legislatures. Unless a governor or president has the support of a party in the legislature, he can accomplish nothing. That's why Obama had only a very short window in 2009 to accomplish his agenda -- the few weeks after Al Franken was seated and Ted Kennedy died. Basically, only enough time to get the health care law passed. Before and after then Republicans in the Senate could stop any Obama initiative cold by threatening a filibuster.


In Minnesota, the Democrats generally worked with Ventura, but he had no permanent sway over them. Democratic and Republican governors can always count on the party to introduce their bills, and to deliver a certain number of votes for them, but Ventura had to depend on members of other parties to get his legislation drafted. That made his job much harder and, I imagine, very discouraging. Ventura was in many ways a jerk, but in office he mostly seemed to want to make things run well. After his term as governor Ventura bugged out on the Independence Party, fled to Mexico and grew a squidgely beard.


In 2002 a former Democrat running as an independent delivered the 2002 election to Tim Pawlenty, a Republican, by siphoning off votes from the Democratic candidate. In 2006 another former Democrat ran under the same independent banner and got Pawlenty reelected. And in 2010, a former Republican ran as an independent in that same party, giving the election to Mark Dayton, a Democrat.

And we all remember how Ralph Nader delivered Florida into the hands of George Bush, by taking hundreds of thousands of liberal votes from Gore, and helping make the Florida ballot that much more confusing, with the zillion candidates and all the idiotic manual hole punching that was involved. Bush won by some 500 votes, only after the U.S. Supreme Court stopped a state recount on a 5-4 decision.

Twenty or thirty years ago, when most Republicans in Minnesota were still reasonable, it was possible to split the ticket and vote across party lines. I voted for many Republican candidates like Al Quie, Dave Durenberger and Arne Carlson, and things worked out. These men were reasonable, but more importantly, the Republican Party was still reasonable. They wanted things to work smoothly, not wage endless ideological battles to score political points. No longer.

The Republican Party is now a wholly owned and operated subsidiary of Koch Industries and Sheldon Adelson's worldwide casino empire, dedicated solely to promulgating their power and wealth. Many people feel George Bush was just a figurehead and that Dick Cheney really called all the shots. If elected, Mitt Romney will be in even less control than Bush was.


Romney likes to pretend you can run a country like you run a corporation. Romney would be the "CEO of America." But CEOs don't answer to the employees or even the shareholders, they answer to the board of directors. And the Republican Party's board of directors consists of the Koch brothers, Sheldon Adelson, Grover Norquist and all the other wealthy fatcats we've never heard of who've been donating tens of millions of dollars to Republican Super PACs.


You see, no one in the Republican Party actually likes or trusts Romney: they only picked him because they believed he was the candidate independent voters would find least objectionable in a race against Obama. They hate everything that Romney did as governor, they hate that he's from Massachusetts, they hate that he's a rich elitist who's totally clueless about normal people live their lives, they hate that his wife rides dressage, they hate that he's a Mormon. But they knew full well the guys they actually liked (remember Gingrich, Cain, Paul, and Santorum?) were too far off the deep end to beat Obama.


By choosing Romney, the Republicans have made it eminently clear that it's all about the party and not about the man. But if Republicans have to hold their nose when they vote for Romney, why would anyone else want to vote for him? We won't be putting a rich Mormon businessman in the White House if we elect him, we'll be installing the party of Bush that brought the current recession down us with lax oversight over greedy and incompetent bankers, locked-in profits for big pharmaceutical companies, huge tax cuts for the richest people, needless and bungled wars in the Middle East, and hundreds of thousands of veterans with serious medical problems that will haunt them for the rest of their lives -- as well as cost us trillions of dollars over the next sixty years.

Sore Winners

One of Kevin Baker's commenters?

They, like me, are relieved that the state I grew up in (and where my mom still lives) was saved from those teachers and civil servants who make 30K a year who were poised to ruin hard working Wisconsinites lives. Thank goodness that the victims of this monumental attack (the Koch Brothers and other billionaires) are now free to live their lives!

Embrace

Last week, President Obama announced that the children of illegal immigrants would no longer be deported and would be allowed to have work permits to stay in this country. It may not be the Dream Act but it is an important first step in recognizing that the complexities of illegal immigration have to be managed in a nuanced way.

These children had no control over whether or not they came into this country legally and they shouldn't be punished for it. Now that they are here and especially if they want to work and make a life here, they need to be embraced. No doubt, the president is doing the right thing.

Even Republican darling Marco Rubio thinks so.

Today’s announcement will be welcome news for many of these kids desperate for an answer. There is broad support for the idea that we should figure out a way to help kids who are undocumented through no fault of their own, but there is also broad consensus that it should be done in a way that does not encourage illegal immigration in the future. This is a difficult balance to strike, one that this new policy, imposed by executive order, will make harder to achieve in the long run.

Of course, he didn't want to be ex-communicated from the Cult so he threw in mouth foaming about the Constitution and Barack X just to keep them happy.

Still, Rubio himself has put forth a very interesting first step himself regarding immigration.

The bill would offer 50,000 new visas so that US-educated foreign students achieving a master’s degree or PhD in so-called STEM fields – science, technology, engineering, or mathematics – can receive green cards. It likewise offers 75,000 visas for entrepreneurs who have legally immigrated to the US to stay in the US for up to three years. Both options also include a path for the visa recipients to become permanent residents or American citizens.

This is the answer that was offered a few years ago by Jim Manzi in regards to investment in human capital vis a vis immigration. It's a fantastic plan that needs to be acted upon immediately. Why?

The nation is getting grayer. The labor force is expanding at a meager 1 percent per year while the median age continues to rise, meaning that in the absence of more immigration the US will have to wring more and more productivity out of a steady number of people in order to grow its economic output. That's a tall order, economists say.

Right. And what sort of effect will they have on our economy?

Research shows that immigrants provide important fuel to America's economic engine. The line of thinking goes like this. Between 1980 and 2005, startups (businesses less than five years old) created an average of 3 million jobs per year and accounted for nearly all net job creation during that time. Immigrants, research suggests, are disproportionately likely to be in the entrepreneurial mix.

Of the current Fortune 500, more than 40 percent were founded by a first- or second-generation American. While immigrants are 12 percent of the US population, they account for a quarter of the nation's Nobel Prizes and patent applications, according to the Partnership for a New American Economy survey. Nearly half of the top 50 venture capital-backed companies in the US last year had at least one immigrant among their founders. 

And the outcome? A study by Partnership for a New American Economy and the American Enterprise Institute found that every immigrant with a graduate degree from a US university working in a STEM field creates 2.62 subsequent American jobs.

We need to embrace these people and encourage them to become the future innovators of our country. That's why the president's unilateral action  was necessary. It's yet another illustrative example of how he wants to actually solve the problems of our nation in a competent and effective way.

Well done, Mr. President!

I'm Shocked, I Tell You, Shocked!

Well, I'm stunned.Truly.

36 percent of very conservative Americans think it's more important to stick to your guns while 37 percent of very liberal Americans think it's more important to compromise. So much for the Cult of Both Sides.

Who are the juveniles again?

The Same-Sex Parents Tautology

People have been debating whether same-sex couples should be "allowed" to raise children for years, and the issue of children is one of the biggest slams against gay marriage. Mitt Romney has said gays should be able to adopt, and  when his right flank grumbled he backtracked, saying he only meant it was legal.

A recent study by Mark Regnerus claims that children of parents who have had a same-sex relationship (usually extra-marital) fare more poorly than children in stable heterosexual families. Writers in Slate and Scientific American have found fault with this study, as have many others, for methodological reasons.

In essence the study found that kids whose parents who commit adultery have more problems than kids whose parents don't. Well, duh. That goes without saying. But why did Regnerus have to do the study this way, instead of comparing same-sex and heterosexual families straight-up?

Well, there just aren't numerically enough children of stable same-sex parents to make an apples-to-apples statistical comparison. Previous studies of children of lesbian parents have found them to be more well-adjusted than children of heterosexual parents, but the results have been questioned because those families were well-off financially and their numbers were so tiny that the statistical significance of the conclusions was questionable.

So let's take the following hypothetical, a common situation that has occurred innumerable times throughout human history. A woman's husband dies in Afghanistan, leaving her a widow with two children. The only other person is her life is her husband's sister. The aunt has been especially close to the children, since her brother had to serve three tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. The aunt has actually spent far more time with the children than their father ever could, because he was serving his country since before his first child was born, up until the time of his death.

This is an age-old pattern: when men die in war, their wives and sisters are left to pick up the pieces and raise the children.


The two sisters-in-law move in together, sacrificing their own romantic goals in order to provide a stable environment to raise the children. All other things being equal, the kids would almost certainly turn out better with these two women as their parents, than if their mother went through a series of relationships with various men and was lucky enough to eventually find one who wasn't a jerk.

Now replace the aunt with a lesbian spouse who was a mother to the children from birth. There is no material difference in the relationships between the members of such a same-sex family unit and the first example, except that the bond of love between the parents is romantic rather than familial.

The real difference between the two situations is the way society responds. The children of same-sex parents are treated differently than children of heterosexual parents. Any trauma the children suffer does not derive from the quality of parental love, because all parents can love their children equally well regardless of gender or sexual orientation. Trauma the children might suffer  from question of "who's my daddy" is caused by society when it forces the kids to confront that question on a daily basis.

The argument against same-sex parents is thus a tautology: same-sex parents are bad because society thinks they're bad, and will treat their children badly.

It's exactly the kind of logic the Taliban uses to force women to wear head-to-toe burqas: don't show your face or ankles to us, or we will be forced to rape you for tempting us. In the minds of bigots the victims of their intolerance are always the responsible party.

Opponents of same-sex marriage are saying, "We don't like what you are and what you're doing and we will instruct our kids to ostracize and taunt your children because of it. Don't force us to torment your kids."

Nice family folks, huh?

Health Care A Go Go

In the next two weeks, we should be hearing what the Supreme Court of the United States thinks about the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. Will they overturn all of it or just parts of it? The political world and, indeed, many others are anxiously awaiting the verdict.

My inkling is that they vote against the mandate but keep the rest of it. But what then? Andy over at eletoral-vote.com has the answer.

If the mandate is struck down, the Democrats have an easier path if they choose to take it. The Court's argument in striking down the mandate will no doubt be something like the government does not have the power to compel people to engage in commerce (like buying insurance) if they don't want to. The solution is simply to structure the mandate differently. Congress could amend the internal revenue code to say everyone has to pay a tax of $1000 to cover the costs generated by uninsured people getting treated at hospital emergency rooms (because Congress has mandated this). However, to help people who are not part of the problem, the same change to the law could give a $1000 credit to anyone who can prove they have health insurance. In effect, this is almost the same as a mandate except that failing to have insurance is no longer a violation of the law. It simply means you lose out on one of the myriad of credits the tax law provides. There is little doubt Congress has the power to tax, so such an approach is likely to be acceptable to Justice Anthony Kennedy, who seems to have acquired the power to veto laws singlehandedly, even though he never campaigned for the job. 

And what of the Republicans?

Be careful what you wish for, you might get it. If, as Republicans are hoping, the Supreme Court strikes down some or all of the Affordable Health Care Act later this month, they will cheer for a week. Then Democrats will pound them on what they plan to replace it with. An answer like "Nothing. The current system works well" is not likely to get many votes among the 50 million people currently uninsured. But despite the real possibility that the Court may strike down part or all of the law, the GOP does not have a plan of its own. 

The problem for the Republicans is that coming up with a minibill that just includes the popular features of the ACA would be a disaster. Allowing young people up to 26 to stay on their parent's plans until 26 would be easy to do--in fact some health insurance companies may do it voluntarily because it means more customers. The tricky part is the provision that allows anyone to sign up for health care regardless of any preexisting conditions. A bill that included that but did not have a mandate for everyone to get health care would bankrupt all the insurance companies in short order since many people would wait until they were seriously ill before getting insurance. Every country in the world that requires insurance companies to take everyone also has a mandate in one form or other.

If this happens, it would be a great example of what I mean when I say that one can win the argument and still lose.

The more I think about this, the more I realize that I'd rather have SCOTUS strike down parts or all of the law so it be changed for the better. The GOP has signaled that they are going to keep the more popular provisions anyway so raising taxes and/or offering tax credits seem much more likely now. Even the public option could make a bold reappearance and pass. It would simply be Medicare for all and that is perfectly legal under the Constitution.

Here is a handy dandy flow chart to help you with all the possible outcomes.

The Oblong Zeppelin Toss

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The Loud, Shouty Guy

Apparently, it's the new normal to yell out at Barack X when he is trying to speak.  Take a look at this ass hat.

It took me all of a millisecond to realize that the loud, shouty guy was a right wing blogger. Sadly, it seems that this breed of human is breeding like gremlins these days. All it takes is an adolescent power fantasy and a perpetual belief that "Dad" is fucking up their shit.

Certainly, there is no shortage of that sentiment!

McCain Says Corporations Are Not People

After the 2008 election and his reelection campaign in 2010, I thought John McCain had lost every shred of honesty and integrity. But, doggone it, he's making me reevaluate my opinion of him.

In an interview with PBS McCain criticized my favorite billionaire whipping boy, Sheldon Adelson, for bringing foreign cash into US elections:

SEN. JOHN MCCAIN: Mr. Adelson, who gave large amounts of money to the Gingrich campaign. And much of Mr. Adelson's casino profits that go to him come from this casino in Macau. 

JUDY WOODRUFF: Which says what? 

SEN. JOHN MCCAIN: Which says that, obviously, maybe in a roundabout way, foreign money is coming into an American campaign -- political campaigns. 

JUDY WOODRUFF: Because of the profits at the casinos in Macau? 

SEN. JOHN MCCAIN: Yes. That is a great deal of money. And, again, we need a level playing field and we need to go back to the realization that Teddy Roosevelt had that we have to have a limit on the flow of money, and that corporations are not people. 

That's why we have different laws that govern corporations than govern individual citizens. And so to say that corporations are people, again, flies in the face of all the traditional Supreme Court decisions that we have made -- that have been made in the past.

McCain also said:

[Citizens United is] the most misguided, naive, uninformed, egregious decision of the United States Supreme Court I think in the 21st century. 

To somehow view money as not having an effect on election, a corrupting effect on election, flies in the face of reality. 

and

Look, I guarantee you, Judy, there will be scandals. There is too much money washing around political campaigns today. And it will take scandals, and then maybe we can have the Supreme Court go back and revisit this issue.

It's not just that the Supreme Court's is naive about the realities of money in campaigns: Justice Clarence Thomas immediately cashed in on it by having his wife set up a Tea Party lobbying organization. Why hasn't Thomas been impeached for such an egregious conflict of interest?

Perhaps I'm giving McCain more credit than he's due, given his oblivious comments about Romney and regulation in the first part of the interview. McCain is more like the conservative who used to be a liberal who was mugged, or the liberal used to be a conservative whose job was outsourced to China.

McCain experienced first hand the corrosive and corrupting influence of huge amounts of cash is in the hands of political operatives like Karl Rove. McCain was the victim of one of the worst whispering campaigns in the 2000 Republican primary, when push pollsters called voters in South Carolina and asked, "Would you be more likely or less likely to vote for John McCain if you knew that he fathered an illegitimate black child?"

McCain had adopted a child from Bangladesh, but Bush's campaign operatives turned this into a blot on McCain's honor, much as they Swift Boated John Kerry four years later for his service in Viet Nam (George W. Bush had cowered on a National Guard airbase during the war, only to disappear for the last year of his service on a coke binge or political campaign, depending on what you want to call it). The South Carolina primary was probably the biggest reason McCain saw the light and sponsored McCain-Feingold in the first place.

What's even crazier is how such huge sums of money can change directions in so short a time. Adelson and his family had given Newt Gingrich's PAC more than $10 million just a few months ago, used mostly to smear Romney, and now Adelson has just given Romney's PAC $10 million.

And now Adelson says he'll spend up to $100 million of his dirty casino money to beat Obama. I can just imagine what kind of campaign that cash will pay for.

Oops!

RNC Latino Site Features Stock Photo of Asian Children

Ah, they are all brown so what's the dif?

Wow

Whether it’s done through the Affordable Care Act or done separate from that with Congress and the states — I think that things that allow you to go over state lines, certain things in terms of guaranteed issue and things of that nature. I think there are good elements. I just don’t think you need the federal government to do most of those things.---Governor Scott Walker on the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act

And he's not the only one. So much for repealing Obamacare.

Out of Control, As They Should Be

A temporary truce has been called in the conservative war on women on orders from the High Command, but some men are still on the attack.

Today Gretchen Carlson walked off the set of Fox & Friends after co-host Brian Kilmeade said, "Women are everywhere. We’re letting them play golf and tennis now. It’s out of control." Yes, Brian, it's out of control. And it should be.

Did this guy say this by accident, or was this whole thing a setup? Is this just "entertainment" for the cavemen that watch Fox & Friends, or this guy's real attitude? Carlson didn't seem particularly peeved, but what's the deal? It amazes me that there are still men to whom ideas like this even occur, must less say aloud. In front of TV cameras. And millions of viewers.

Women are everywhere? Duh. They're 50.8% of the population. At age 65 and older, there are only 74 men for every 100 women. Among 2011 high school graduates, 72.3% of women and 64.6% of men are in college. Overall, 57% of college attendees were women in 2009. Currently in 40% of married couples the wife outearns the husband, even though women in general still only make 81% of what men earn. Given the college stats, these numbers are only going to increase over time.

We're "letting" them play golf and tennis? It's such a tragedy that all those women are tying up all the good tee times. And Bobby Riggs really showed Billie Jean King in 1973, didn't he?

Is the real reason so many conservative men are opposed to gay marriage is that they're afraid women would marry each other, rather than put up with this kind of crap all the time?

It makes me wonder how often Kilmeade unshackles his wife from her washboard and butter churn.

Blame Bush

A new Gallup poll shows that a majority of Americans still blame President Bush for our economic and financial woes. 68 percent of those surveyed place the blame on W while only 52 percent blame President Obama. 83 percent of that 52 percent are Republicans so that makes sense.

The interesting number is that 49 percent of the 69 percent that blame Bush are also Republicans. That gives me some hope that at least some folks on the right are willing to admit fault. Of course, on my list Bush and the GOP are number 2 as far as blame goes. The fault really lies with the financial sector of this country and their insatiable greed.

So, for those of you who whine about "blaming Bush," well...you are in the minority.

Test Scores...Improving?

Despite the continued and lazily convenient narrative that our schools are falling apart and our students are all getting horrible educations, test scores in science are improving. Not only are they improving overall but the gap between Latino and black students and their white and Asian peers is narrowing.

Hispanic students made the largest gain, to 137 from 132 (out of 300), while the average score for black students increased to 129 from 126. That might seem small but believe me, it's enormous from a statistical standpoint when you consider that it was a sampling of 122,000 students from all 50 states and the District of Columbia.

More interesting are the notes in the report that indicated that students do a better job if they have hands on activities rather than just reading or watching. Those who work in teams showed better and more enduring understandings. Differentiation is key here, folks, especially in today's short attention span society. Students need to be doing things and not listening to lectures for entire blocks at a time.

I'm heartened by this and many other stories I have seen from around the country since the president took office and Arnie Duncan became Secretary of Education. There is no doubt in my mind that their education initiatives are the best this country has seen since the mid point of last century.

A Profile In Courage

Ronald Reagan would have, based on his record of finding accommodation, finding some degree of common ground, as would my dad - they would have a hard time if you define the Republican party - and I don't - as having an orthodoxy that doesn't allow for disagreement, doesn't allow for finding some common ground.---Jeb Bush, 11 June 2012

A hard time? Try...he wouldn't have even made it through a GOP primary. Like the fiction they create regarding Obama, the Gipper has become a mythical figure that bears no resemblance to what he actually did in reality. I will give Mr. Bush credit, though, for having the guts to admit what most conservatives will not.

Government Created Wealth

A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of watching a documentary about the Grand Coulee Dam. It was part of PBS's American Experience series that I have enjoyed for many, many years. Here is the program in its entirety and I recommend watching the whole thing before you comment on the rest of this post.  

Watch Grand Coulee Dam on PBS. See more from American Experience.

My initial awe at what went into this project and the enormously positive outcome gave way to a profound sadness because a project like this could never happen today. Why? Because "the GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.." (Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein)

Before the dam's construction, the likely ancestors of the Tea Party behaved in a similar fashion as described by Mann and Ornstein, shouting all too familiar cries of dissent. Proponents of the dam were called "crackpots" and "Coulee Communists." Big private power interests fought fiercely against it. Collier's magazine downgraded Grand Coulee and, as the structure rose higher, it was labeled as "socialistic, impractical dam-foolishness." Even experts, engineers and geologists debated its usefulness. The president of the American Society of Civil Engineers branded Coulee as "a grandiose project of no more usefulness than the pyramids of Egypt." A Spokane paper sneered. "Baron Munchausen," it said, referring to the legendary liar, "thou wert a piker."

They were all wrong.

The Grand Coulee Dam, a taxpayer funded, government project, resulted in millions of dollars for the defense industry (60,000 planes and the creation of plutonium-239 were built using the power from the dam) and an explosion of agriculture in the state of Washington due to irrigation of a once arid, massive area of land in the Northwest. In fact, it provides irrigation to 2,000 farms in the area. The Grand Coulee Dam is one of the top produces in the country of hydro-electric power.Entire towns...economies...grew up around the building of the dam as thousands of people and a massive amount of materials were needed in its construction. The entire region was changed and became very prosperous as a result of the dam.

So, the Grand Coulee Dam is an example of how the government can create wealth. I realize this is sacrilege  for the right wingers out there but the facts are the facts. So, why again can't we do something like this today?

Looking deeper than the reasons I listed above, one becomes even more confused. Economic conditions were worse back in the 1930s. Unemployment was higher. The private sector had been shown to be a collection of greedy buffoons who were, in essence, addicted to gambling and using the nation's (really, the world's) economic structure as collateral. People put their faith in government and it paid off. The same thing should be able to happen today, right?

No. Because the last 30 years have seen a systematic attack on the institution of government that is so egregious...so profoundly inaccurate...that I fear the national perception is forever changed. Even as little as two years ago, I have caught myself saying (in derision), "Well, this must be a government operation." It's become part of our zeitgeist to hate the government and yet we so desperately need its structure and organizational principles right now to get ourselves out of this sluggish funk. Combine this with near worship we have of the real Gordon Gekkos of our country and our federal government doesn't stand a chance.

Yet, it's terribly obvious that the private sector is not going to be able to improve our economy on its own. Their motivation is for profit. That's great when you are exclusively operating in the free market. As we have seen far too many times, the free market isn't a universal panacea for all things economical. This is especially true because the government...our government and the governments of the world...are partners in the economy. They have to be because governments can sometimes improve market outcomes. And the Grand Coulee Dam is an excellent example of exactly how this works.

President Obama has been trying to do this for the last 3 1/2 years and has been massively derided for it. He's a "big government liberal" who wants to blah blah blah...have any of the people who say this ever taken the time to see the results of a project like Grand Coulee?

In truth, we don't even have to do something as massive as the Grand Coulee Dam to get our economy moving again. We could simply start with a massive repair plan for our nation's highways and bridges. That would put people to work which would, in turn, generate revenue for the government and the private sector. In essence, I'm talking about the president's jobs plan. 

Of course, the Republicans will never pass anything that could signal a success for the president in an election year. To put it simply, they, like the detractors of the Grand Coulee Dam, have a vested interest in the failure of such policies which essentially means they have a vested interest in the failure of our economy.

And, since the perception of our government is not what it was in 1933, they may very well succeed.