The Day After

What a night.

To be honest, I was so overwhelmed by everything last evening that I just couldn't post anything. So, today, here are my thoughts.

The president's reelection is significant for several reasons. First, it essentially made Citizen's United irrelevant which is a good thing. Old, rich, white douches spent millions to get rid of him and it didn't work...which brings me to my second thing. Folks, the country has changed and the GOP better get with the program. They can start by chucking the American Taliban element of their party (which has now cost them the Senate...again!) and focus on the rising demographic of Latinos. The hard line on immigration won't cut it anymore and they are going to have to change. The Andy Griffith Show America (which never existed in the first place) is gone.

In fact, the hard line on many things are going to have to change...gay marriage (past in three states yesterday and a ban defeated in my home state), women's reproductive rights (no more old white men with two dollar haircuts talking about rape) and an acceptance that people do want some form of federal government. The most important thing of all they are going to have to realize is this country is diverse and, if they are going to survive as a party, they need to embrace this.

Mitt Romney lost because he was an Etch-A-Sketch candidate. He took these hard line positions, realized he would get walloped in the general if he didn't moderate and then proceeded to be on three sides of every policy point. I am very thankful we did not elect this man. He may have had principles at one time but not any longer. As Erick Erickson said, he would do or say anything to get elected.

Younger voters...the ones that supposedly weren't going to turn out...did so in greater numbers than in 2008 (by one percentage point). This brings up my message today to some of my posters and other friends: GET OUT OF THE FUCKING BUBBLE. Stop reading the Drudge report, watching Fox news, and frequenting right wing blogs. The things they say are happening simply don't exist in reality. No problem if you want to continue to play make believe but I would hope that this election has starkly illustrated that these folks are lying and the American people now know it.

This new certainty was a long haul. Most liberals and Democrats feel a profound sense of doubt and insecurity (preyed upon by the Right) after 2000 and 2004. Now that we will four Democratic won elections to the GOP's 2 in the last 20 years to the executive branch, that doubt BS is fucking over. The Democrats have built a powerful coalition that can continually get over 300 EVs with a good candidate. The GOP hasn't done that since 1988. Perhaps they need to finally realized that they can't be the party of old, white men any longer.

I was happy to see pot made legal in three states...fire up the bong!

Gay marriage was also made legal in three states (Maine, Maryland, and Washington). It's only a matter of time for the rest of the nation.

Looks like my predictions for the Senate were accurate. They haven't called it for Tester and Heitkamp yet but they are both ahead. 55-45, with the two I's caucusing with the Dems.

As I suspected in the House, the Dems will pick up a couple of seats but still stay under 200.

Elizabeth Warren takes back the Kennedy seat....hands down, one of the best moments of the night.

In my home state, Michele won again, just like I said she would. Oh well. It will be nice to have her around to say moonbat shit and win more elections for the Democrats. Both the gay marriage ban and the voter ID amendment were defeated. Better, the Democrats took back the State House and Senate and we have an all blue state for at least two years. This is another great example of how the Right fucks everything up in going to far over to their side of the field.

It looks like Tea Party favorites Joe Walsh and Allen West will be sent packing (the latter's race hasn't been called but Murphy is ahead). That, along with the loss of both of the Rape Boys (Todd Akin and Richard Murdock) begs the question: is the Tea Party dead? I think this election says that it is. They might still be able  to win some House seats here and there but not the Senate nor the presidency. That's what happens when you are obsessed with ideological purity, see compromise as weakness, have a fundamental belief in scriptural literalism, deny science, are unmoved by facts, undeterred by new information, have a hostile fear of progress, demonize education, have a need to control women's bodies, have severe Xenophobia, have a tribal mentality, are intolerant of dissent, and have a pathological hatred of the US government.

You lose election after election.

So what will the president's second term look like? Well, if I were him, I'd play hardball. He was more weight in the Senate now and a few more seats in the House. I'd reach out to the moderate GOP folks in the House and get a grand bargain on our government's finances. Hopefully some of them have seen the writing the wall: moderate or else. I'd also look to move on immigration, climate change, and education. What's going to be fun about this second term is that now the president doesn't have to worry about reelection. He can get to work on those issues he really wanted to tackled from the first term but couldn't because of how long health care took.

We are going to get see what the president really wants now for the country, unfiltered and backed by political capital. I know this makes the Right shit themselves but when the economy starts to improve, they aren't going to be able to say much. Perhaps they'll admit they were wrong.

It sure would be nice.

2012 Election Predictions

Well, I suppose it's that time for me to make my final predictions for tomorrow. First up, the presidential election.

President Obama will win 303 electoral votes to Romney's 235 electoral votes. The states that Romney will take back from the Obama 2008 victory will be Indiana (obviously), North Carolina (very much more than likely) and Florida. With that last one, I'm going to have a caveat and that's this recent report from the Times.

The lawsuit was filed after a stream of complaints from voters who sometimes waited nearly seven hours to vote or who did not vote at all because they could not wait for so long to do so.

Seven hours? I thought turnout for the Obama side was going to be low. I can't quite bring myself to say that Florida will go for Obama, even though Nate Silver has it at 46% chance that we will win it, but the momentum there has shifted to the president over the last week and he might eke it out. With Silver showing the popular vote to be 49.9 Romney, Obama 46.9 anything is possible but I'm sticking with no Florida for the president. I just don't feel it.

The Senate will hold for the Democrats largely because of the Tea Party and their purity tests. It doesn't help that they seem to want to nominate old, white men with two dollar haircuts who like to talk about rape (and people wonder why we call them the American Taliban.) I think they Dems are actually going to gain two seats (on Obama's coattails in the deep blue states) and we will be at 55-45 (with Angus King caucusing with the Dems). Winners (from the Swing States): Tester, McCaskill, Donnelly, Heller, Fischer, Flake, Heitkamp, Warren, Murphy, Kaine, Baldwin and Brown. I'd say that's pretty great considering that they really had no chance earlier in the year. Carmona might have had a chance in Arizona but then he showed that he has the same attitude about women that Todd Akin and Richard Murock have.

The House will not be kind for the Democrats. Up until last week, I thought the would pick up around 12-15 seats. Now, I think it will be around 5. Guys like Joe Walsh in Illinois will go because Tammy Duckworth rocks the shizzle but many of the other candidates just don't have the power to upset guys like Steve King from Iowa. And, though I am loathe to admit it, Michele Bachmann will win her seat in MN-6 again. The media has said it's tight but it's not at all, folks. The people up there are hard right wing and will never vote for Democrat even if their lives depended on it (actually, they do, but we've been over this ground before:)) Final tally? 237 Rs, 198 Ds.

For my own home state, we have two ballot issues. The first is the Double Secret Anti-Fag Protection amendment that says that marriage should be only between one man and one woman. I think it will be defeated as I know many Republicans (including the ever venerable last in line) who will be voting NO. The second ballot issue is the Photo ID amendment and I think it will pass, although it will be struck down at the State Supreme Court as being in violation of the US Constitution.

As will likely be the case, feel free to ignore all of my accurate predictions and act like a 12 year old boy on the ones I get wrong:)

The Republican Mafia

Paul Ryan was in my state the other day, saying that a Romney administration will be bipartisan. The statement is preposterous on the face of it, given how inflexibly partisan and doctrinaire most of the Republicans in Congress have been for the last four years. Most of those who actually did have bipartisan tendencies have been summarily executed by Tea Party hacks during the 2012 primaries.


Congressional Republicans' only goal, stated by Jim DeMint, was to make sure that Obama was a one-term president. Under his leadership Republicans sabotaged nearly all action in the Senate by threatening filibusters on nearly every piece of legislation and appointment except for a brief seven-week period between the time that Al Franken was seated on July 7, 2009, and Ted Kennedy died on August 25.

The health care bill, which Obama compromised on in order to get Republican support, was passed in that brief window. It was based on Romney's Massachusetts health care plan, a plan the Republican Heritage Foundation put forth. Yet most Republicans obstinately refused even to negotiate and have been trying to destroy it ever since in order to peevishly deny Obama a victory. After vowing to party faithful for years to dismantle Obamacare in its entirety, "more-moderate-just-in-time-for-the-election" Romney is now saying that he would keep all the good stuff, but get rid of the mechanism that pays for it. Which Romney knows would gut it, leaving millions without health insurance.

Obama spent months and months trying to elicit Republican compromise. He was rejected on almost every point by Republicans like Ryan who insisted not only on keeping the Bush tax cuts--cuts that were intentionally made temporary to obscure their true long-term cost--but demanded even greater tax cuts for the wealthy. This despite a mammoth deficit caused by fighting in two wars on credit. The tax cuts and wars alone gave us the biggest deficit ever, and was made even worse when the economy collapsed after the banks screwed us over and Bush bailed them out. Obama compromised with the Republicans on the bailout while still a senator.

But when it came time to compromise with Obama over the debt ceiling, House Republicans instead chose to behave like Mexican and Colombian drug gangs who kidnap innocent victims for ransom, and held the country hostage with their demands for huge tax cuts for the wealthy. Their refusal resulted in a sequester agreement that was supposed to be too terrible for anyone to contemplate, yet Republicans continue to this day to demand more budget-busting tax cuts for their wealthy donors.

Obama wants to extend tax cuts everyone except those who make more than a quarter million bucks, which is compromise with the Republican position. Romney's and Ryan's no-compromises plan calls for cutting taxes by 20% for the richest and getting rid of some capital gains taxes, which will only make the deficit that much worse. Plus they want to drastically increase defense spending, which of course goes to giant defense companies whose lobbyists sit on Romney's campaign committee.

The fact is, the only sense in which a Romney administration would be "bipartisan" is that he would be able to count on some Democratic support on key issues. And that's only because Democrats are not madmen willing to bankrupt the entire country to get what they want.

With Romney in the White House, and the status quo of a Republican-controlled House and only a slight majority of Democrats in the Senate, House Republicans would never compromise on anything. Because all money bills must originate in the House, House Republicans would continue to hold the country hostage to their special interest groups, cutting taxes for the wealthy, gutting the health care law, eliminating insurance coverage for birth control and access to abortion, destroying unions and dramatically expanding the income gap.

If Obama wins and House Republicans continue their sabotage and let the country fall off the fiscal cliff, it will become obvious to all who's working for compromise and who's in the pockets of the special interests. It'll be a rough two years, but maybe some Republican representatives will change their tune before the 2014 election.

The Republican Party has stopped being a political party and has become a mafia, complete with offshore tax havens and money laundering, secret operatives scaring up money from billionaires for their PACs, dirty trick squads throwing out Democrats' voter registrations and calling people in hurricane ravaged areas and telling them the election has been delayed until Wednesday.

Ryan's claim of "bipartisanship" is actually an implicit threat, like a mafia protection racket. If Obama is reelected Ryan and the House Republicans are threatening to continue their economic sabotage, using extortion, kidnapping and blackmail to hold the country hostage for Sheldon Adelson's tax cuts.

Now THAT is an endorsement!

God given right...no shit. That's EXACTLY why they hate the president as much as they do.

Ah, Now I Get It

At first I thought Mitt Romney's trip to Pennsylvania (billed as "expanding the map," according to his campaign) was a head fake to try to give off the perception of momentum. Now, I think that he knows that Ohio is unlikely and needs to make up those EVs another way. Obviously, Pennsylvania is a long shot for Romney but the last couple polls have been within the margin of error so perhaps he's hopeful that something can happen.

Remember, though, that a couple of polls don't tell the story. It's always the average of all of them.

Whither Erick Erickson

Erick Erickson is pretty much the polar opposite of myself but I couldn't agree more with him when he said, last year.

Mitt Romney, on the other hand, is a man devoid of any principles other than getting himself elected. As much as the American public does not like Barack Obama, they loath a man so fueled with ambition that he will say or do anything to get himself elected. Mitt Romney is that man. 

I've been reading the 200 pages of single spaced opposition research from the John McCain campaign on Mitt Romney. There is no issue I can find on which Mitt Romney has not taken both sides. He is neither liberal nor conservative. He is simply unprincipled.

Wow. And people are voting for this guy? Their emotions about the president are obviously so irrational that an unprincipled man is preferred.

Interestingly, he wrote this yesterday...

When I wake up on Wednesday morning, I'm still going to have my wife. I'm still going to have my kids. I'm still going to have my family. And I'm still going to have my God. So will you. I'm not going to think the end of the world is upon us if my side loses.

Does he know something the rest of us don't? If he doesn't, Karl Rove surely does, as Andy Tannenbaum notes.

In a Washington Post interview, Republican strategist Karl Rove had his Mene mene tekel upharsin moment when he blamed Romney's loss on the storm, even before the results are known, when he said: "If you hadn't had the storm, there would have been more of a chance for the [Mitt] Romney campaign to talk about the deficit, the debt, the economy." He seems to have forgotten that Romney has been saying all those things for 2 years. Surely 3 more days didn't matter. What he meant was the storm gave Obama a Commander-in-Chief test and he passed.

Personally, I think people should ignore all this and continue to act as if it's razor thin. It would be bad if people think the president is going to win and then stay home.

Now about that poll and the independents...

Any poll that show the president ahead in any of the swing states has to be wrong because the Democrats aren't going to turn out like they did in 2008 and Mitt has all the momentum. All the independents are flocking to Romney.

Oh, and there are more Republicans than Democrats so the polls are skewed.

That's the conventional wisdom coming from the Right going into the last two days before the election. The good news is that if they are wrong, they'll just stomp their feet, make something up, and act like adolescents.  More good news: if they are right, every pollster is wrong, including NBC.

Let's take a look at that poll. First of all, it's not just NBC. The Wall Street Journal was also responsible for the poll and they aren't exactly a bastion of liberalism.The poll is of 971 likely voters more of whom identified as Democrats. This is why the poll is +9 identification in favor of the Democrats. What the Right fails to understand is that they aren't skewing the polls. This is how the people answered the question and, honestly, this is great example of how facts simply bounce off the bubble.

But Mark Murray, Senior Political Editor at NBC, decided to cut the Democratic sample in half just for shits and giggles. Guess what happened? Obama by three...which is the average of all the polls from Ohio and what I think will be right around the margin the president is going to win by on Tuesday. So, dudes on the Right, enough already.

Now as far as that independent claim goes...Newsmax-Zogby shows the president now up 2 points among independents, PPP shows the president up 49-44, ABC-WaPO and Politico show the two candidates tied. These numbers show a trend towards the president.

Overall, Rasmussen still has the race tied at 49-49. I consider that great news for the president.

Good Grief...

If the president wins, I shudder to think what some of these folks will do.

Whither the Polls

It's interesting to hear conservatives whine about how the polls are all biased and figuring Republican turnout to be too low and, conversely, Democratic turnout to be too high. The Democrats are not enthusiastic, they say, and won't turn out like they did in 2008. One has to wonder if they are trying to prey upon Democratic nerves and psych them out...nah, can't be.

Of course, the other way to look at this is more positive. By continuing to say (as many in the media are) that voter turnout is going to be lower on the Democratic side, doesn't that motivate more people to vote? Even out of nerves? I think it will.

Personally, I'd much rather be Barack Obama right now, leading by an average of 2.9 percentage points in Ohio right now, than Mitt Romney and his supporters whining about polling bias. I am, however, willing to admit that there is a 16 percent chance that I am wrong about Ohio:)

Either Way

Most of my regular readers know that I have been friends with the all too rare author on here, John Waxey. Many also know that Mr. Waxey is the owner of a manufacturing firm in Wisconsin that does between 20 and 30 million dollars a year in business. In a discussion regarding Tuesday's election, John said

"Well, either way I win so..."

When I questioned his perceived gusto for Mitt Romney, he chuckled.

"Obviously, I'd rather have the president win because that's better for everyone. But if Mitt happens to win, all of his policies will help rich people like me so my life is going to be better."

Yep.

Barack Obama, Job Creator

With the last jobs report released today, the evidence is quite clear: President Obama is a net job creator. From February 2009 through October 2012 4.62 million jobs were lost and 4.81 million jobs were gained, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That's a net gain of 190,000 jobs.

Of course, that's assuming that all those job losses for the first few months were the president's fault. Obviously, they weren't but I'm including them here so folks don't go into anaphylactic shock about "Blaming Bush."

So, the president has clearly done a good job. He has led the country out of the red, jobs wise, and back into the black. Many are saying that it's not enough but considering our economy was in the worst contraction since the Great Depression, I'd say it's great. That took us over a decade to get out of and that was largely because World War II began and the War Department needed...well...everything. I'd say that it's going to take another 2 years or so to get us back to a normal job market...normal for the new global economy, that is:)

Bloomberg Endorses Obama

Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York endorsed President Obama for reelection in a surprise announcement. This wasn't a sure thing: Bloomberg endorsed neither candidate in 2008, and he seriously considered Romney this time around:

At the same time, Mr. Bloomberg said he might have endorsed Mr. Romney, a former Massachusetts governor, except for the fact that the Republican had abandoned positions he once publicly held.

“In the past he has taken sensible positions on immigration, illegal guns, abortion rights and health care – but he has reversed course on all of them, and is even running against the very health care model he signed into law in Massachusetts,” the mayor said of Mr. Romney.

The main impetus for Bloomberg's endorsement was Hurricane Sandy. The hurricane made clear the difference between Obama and Romney: Obama's stance on climate change and the size and role of the federal government makes it clear that Obama and the Democrats will do a better job running the government.

Bloomberg's critics will call him a RINO and a closet Democrat. But the truth is, the Republican Party has been hijacked by socially conservative demagogues like Richard Mourock and Todd Akin, wealthy casino magnates and oil barons like Sheldon Adelson and the Koch brothers, who don't think they owe anyone in this country a damned thing, and emotionally stunted political operatives like Karl Rove and Grover Norquist.

I, and probably a quarter to a half of the Democratic Party, would probably still be Republicans and independents to this day had the Republican Party not abandoned science, logic and reason. The Republican Party has forgotten that individual liberty consists of more than the right to shoot anyone you feel afraid of.

Thirty years ago Republicans pasted the label "conservative" on their party, and then constantly redefined rightward the meaning of the word. They have forced their candidates to adopt more and more radical positions or face execution by Tea Party death squads in Republican primaries, as Dick Lugar (Dick Lugar!) did. Republicans have in effect made their form of "conservatism" a matter of religious duty, and defined themselves the arbiters of the orthodoxy.

Consider what "Mr. Conservative" himself, Barry Goldwater, said upon his retirement in 1994:

When you say "radical right" today, I think of these moneymaking ventures by fellows like Pat Robertson and others who are trying to take the Republican party and make a religious organization out of it. If that ever happens, kiss politics goodbye.

Goldwater, with his beliefs in personal privacy, support for abortion and gays in the military, would be called a RINO and summarily drummed out of the party if he were still alive today.

The State of the Race

The last couple of days have not been good for Mitt Romney. First we had the pants on fire car ad that has now been denounced by Chrysler CEO Sergio Marchionne. How anyone can think that this guy has a handle on business is beyond me. He looks like he knows what he is doing but then he says things are patently false.

Then Hurricane Sandy hit and Romney pretended to hand out canned goods, as Nikto noted yesterday. Worse, the Right looked like complete morons when the president demonstrated (yet again) that he is a capable leader in a crisis. Fictional Obama is just that.

And then there are all those new polls.

The president is now up by an average (according to the right leaning RCP) of over two points in Ohio, Iowa, and Nevada. The latter has been more or less ceded to the president by the Romney campaign. The president has made gains in Virginia, Florida and even North Carolina in the latest polls so that's where Romney has to go now if he wants to hold those states. For the most part, one can always tell where the polls really are by where the candidates go and Romney is in Virginia this morning.

If the president wins all the states that Democrats have won in the last five elections plus New Mexico (where he is way ahead now), Nevada, Iowa, and Ohio he has 277 electoral votes and he wins the election.  All of the polls out of Ohio have the president ahead by 2-5 points except Rasmussen who doesn't poll cel phone users.

Nate Silver had an interesting piece up the other day about past elections and candidates that have been up (on average) by more than two percentage points. In short, they win. The only time that hasn't happened in the last 30 years is when George HW Bush beat Bill Clinton in 1992 in Texas. Even though the polls showed Clinton up by 3.5 points, Bush won. But we didn't a poll to tell us that Bush would win Texas.

Silver has another piece which shows all the state by state polls which all basically say the same thing: the president is going to win on Tuesday. What I found most interesting about this piece is the admission that if Silver and all the other pollsters are wrong, it's going to be a monumentally bizarre occurrence and they should all, perhaps, find a new line of work!

All these polls of likely voters are the basis for my prediction next week. The president will win 290 electoral votes and Mitt Romney will win 235 with Virginia being a giant WTF, although it has been trending the president's way in the last couple of days. Even Florida has been moving back towards the president and is essentially tied. I still think Romney will win North Carolina.

Five days until the election and things are looking great for the president!

Wrong Guys for the Job

Apparently Mitt Romney thinks that hurricane relief consists of sending canned goods to the victims. There's nothing wrong with canned goods, except that it takes a herculean effort to collect them, and repackage them, and put them on a truck or a plane, which then have to make their way across country over roads that have been inundated by heavy rains and storm surge, where they then need to be distributed. The amount of gas and effort required to move those canned goods dwarfs the actual value of the contributed items.

It turns out that relief organizations like the Red Cross would much rather we contribute blood and money, which can be used to pay for things like gas, vehicles, emergency equipment like generators and to resupply prepositioned relief depots around the country. Romney's campaign even bought $5,000 worth of stuff as props to prevent his relief truck from being empty. That's $5,000 the Red Cross could have used for real relief.

Romney's response to people dying, thousands losing their homes, and millions losing power was a cynical photo op at a repurposed campaign rally. It exemplifies why he's the wrong guy for the job.

Small-scale canned food drives are great for supplying food shelves for the homeless, but for a devastatingly huge catastrophe that spans almost the entire eastern seaboard, Romney's ideas are quaint, inadequate and quite wrong. Hurricane Sandy requires a nationwide response, coordinated by a federal agency that has expertise in dealing with such colossal emergencies. In other words, FEMA. An agency that Romney refuses to answer questions about these days, though he said he would cut its funding to it in 2011.

Romney isn't the only Republican to think small. Former FEMA director Michael "Heckuva job Brownie" Brown, had the gall to criticize President Obama for responding too quickly to the hurricane. This is the same guy who dragged his feet and totally botched the federal response to Katrina under Bush. The guy who wrote emails back to Washington pleading, "I'm trapped now, please rescue me." That anyone would ever hire this guy again boggles the mind, but that someone would actually give him a radio show is really incredible.

Republicans insist small government is better than big government. But the fact is, we need a government that is equal to the magnitude of the problems we have to deal with. New York is the financial capital of this country. If a hurricane wipes it out, we're dead in the water until it gets going again. A nationwide response is needed to restore the financial markets, and we need to get all the people that work in those markets back to work ASAP. That means helping New York and New Jersey (and Chris Christie) get the trains running again.

If massive hurricanes, tornadoes and droughts hit the Gulf Coast, Southeast, Midwest and Texas, threatening oil and gas and grain and livestock production, the rest of the country needs to help them get back on their feet as fast as possible. Because we need the food and energy they produce. If an earthquake hits California and disrupts Internet traffic—the central nervous system of this country—a nationwide response is necessary to get us back online as quickly as possible.

Every state in this country is dependent on other states for something. We're all in this together. The idea that everyone can be totally self-reliant and do everything by themselves is sentimental hankering for a time that never existed. The only truly self-sufficient humans were cavemen—the rest of us need other people to build our roads, grow our grain, bake our bread, butcher our meat, manufacture our tools and cars and computers, write our software. John Donne wrote "No man is an island" four hundred years ago.

Republicans express nothing but contempt for government. Does it make any sense to put people in charge of something they totally despise? For the same reason you don't make an Greenpeace activist CEO of Exxon, you don't put Grover Norquist and his Republican pawns in Congress in charge of the federal government.

Republicans make excellent mad dogs biting at the heals of government, calling attention to inefficiencies and problems that inevitably crop up. But putting Mitt Romney and the Republicans in charge of FEMA again would inevitably result in another Katrina-scale Brownie screwup.

Romney is running for president with the same policies and the same cast of characters from the Bush administration. With Katrina, Iraq, the financial meltdown, massive tax cuts during a massive wartime buildup that resulted in huge deficits, these folks have demonstrated that they are not competent to run this country.

Speaking Your Mind

You really have to hand it to Chris Christie. The guy says what's on his mind and doesn't care who he offends. Either way, he's a straight shooter.



The president's done a great job, you say? Well, that's because he is a good president and has shown these last few days what kind of a leader he is in a crisis.

Who was it again that said they wanted to shut down FEMA?

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And it's not just him. Imagine what would happen if we had another crisis like this and emergency management was done by states and private corporations.  Part of me almost wishes we could try it out for just one disaster so the right wing blogsphere would be put down for rabies once and for all.

Joss Whedon "Endorses" Mitt Romney (Perfect For Halloween)

Insurance Company Takes Climate Change Seriously

As corporations go, insurance companies are some of the most conservative. So when a company like Munich Re, one of the world's biggest reinsurers, issues a press release that says climate change is real and is causing the droughts, massive hurricanes and snowstorms that have hit the United States in the last few years, it's not just some scientist scrounging for more grant money.

Munich Re's release, published two weeks ago, directly addresses the question of whether climate change is causing hurricanes like Sandy this year and Irene last year:

Nowhere in the world is the rising number of natural catastrophes more evident than in North America. The study shows a nearly quintupled number of weather-related loss events in North America for the past three decades, compared with an increase factor of 4 in Asia, 2.5 in Africa, 2 in Europe and 1.5 in South America. Anthropogenic climate change is believed to contribute to this trend, though it influences various perils in different ways. Climate change particularly affects formation of heat-waves, droughts, intense precipitation events, and in the long run most probably also tropical cyclone intensity. 

A big insurance company is saying specifically that all the droughts, massive snowstorms, downpours, tornadoes and hurricanes we've been having the last few years are caused by us burning too many hydrocarbons.

Sandy is almost a thousand miles wide, more than twice the size of Katrina and four hundred miles wider than Irene. The exact mechanism for why climate change is making Sandy so huge is well known: the jet stream is funneling air south as hot tropical air is coming north. The unprecedented melting of the arctic ice cap is the direct cause of  that shift in the jet stream. A high pressure area over Greenland is also contributing to the problem.

Because climate change is making storms bigger, millions more people are being flooded out of their homes and losing electricity than would have been otherwise. Areas along the coast are densely populated and filled with lots of expensive infrastructure (ports, military bases, etc.) and critical services (like the stock market in New York). Storms that would have been relatively minor inconveniences will now kill dozens or hundreds of people and inflict tens of billions of dollars of damage.

And that's why insurance companies are taking climate change seriously.

On Stiglitz, Part Four

Spend just a few minutes on the internet and you can see Joseph Stiglitz everywhere.

A recent article on how public sector belt tightening has made inequality worse.

These reductions, economists say, act as a drag on the economy. Former park employees, clerks, and firefighters such as Lykins are buying only the necessities. Cities are deferring road work, which means contractors aren't hiring people to pour concrete. By far, the largest impact is on school systems, which are laying off teachers, counselors, and janitors.

The latest BLS data on the working poor.

In 2010, there were 10.5 million individuals classified as "working poor" (persons who spent at least 27 weeks in the labor force—that is, working or looking for work—but whose incomes still fell below the official poverty level); the number of working poor was little changed from 2009.

Yet another report on the widening income disparity.

The divergent fortunes of Reyes and Hemsley show that the U.S. has gone through two recoveries. The 1.2 million households whose incomes put them in the top 1 percent of the U.S. saw their earnings increase 5.5 percent last year, according to estimates released last month by the U.S. Census Bureau. Earnings fell 1.7 percent for the 96 million households in the bottom 80 percent -- those that made less than $101,583.

So, Chapter 4 of The Price of Inequality by Joseph Stiglitz, aptly titled "Why It Matters" could never be more relevant.

Stiglitz begins by illustrating a very simple fact.

When the wealthiest use their political power to benefit excessively the corporations they control, much needed revenues are diverted into the pockets of a few instead of benefiting society at large. But the rich do not exist in a vacuum. They need a functioning society around them to sustain their position and to produce income from their assets. The rich resist taxes, but taxes allow society to make investments that sustain the country's growth.

This echoes Nick Hanuer and his pointing out of the obvious: he (and other wealthy people) don't buy 5,000 pairs of pants. They buy 5 pairs. If people are buying less pairs of pants, the economy doesn't grow and that's why it matters. But it gets worse.

As Stiglitz notes, moving money from the bottom to the top lower consumption because the wealthy save more of their money rather than spend it. In fact, they save 15 to 25 percent of their income whereas those at the bottom spend all of theirs. Why does this matter?

The result: until and unless something else happens, such as increase in investment or exports, total demand in the economy will be less than what the economy is capable of supplying-and that means there will be unemployment. 

So, what can be done? Well, the wealthy are going to have to give up some of the money they are saving if they want to continue to have a society in which to enjoy their wealth. Stiglitz thinks that this should be done through taxes and government spending. Certainly, that's going to happen in some form or another but I question to what degree and, I have to admit, I question the mechanism. Relying completely on government is not the answer. As Stiglitz himself admits, they are running the government with their money and it's going to be enormously difficult to break out of that cycle, if not impossible. I think the president is trying to do this and having a tough time of it. Mitt Romney will make it worse.

That doesn't change the fact that the wealthy of this country are going to have to ALL do what Bill Gates does in Africa but do it here. It can't just be a few of them and the sooner they realize the necessity of this to their own livelihoods, the better. Stiglitz has a simple way to solve it.

The top 1 percent of this country earns 20 percent of the income. If they shifted just 5 percent of that income to the poor or middle class who do not save (through a combination of taxes, private charities, grants, and higher wages a la Henry Ford), this would increase aggregate demand by 1 percentage point and still leave them obviously quite wealthy with 15 percent of the nation's income. This is what we saw from post WWII to about 1980 and it wasn't socialism, folks, there was still inequality...just not enough to inhibit growth in our economy like there is right now.

This increase of one point would have a cascading effect. As the money recirculates, output would actually increase by 1.5 to 2 percentage points. Unemployment would go down considerably, likely around 6 percent. Stiglitz notes that a broader redistribution (from the top 20 percent, as opposed to the top 1 percent) would lower this unemployment even further.

Right around now is when the mouth foamers blow a bowel and starting screaming about socialism and/or communism. Paying higher taxes, as Stiglitz is suggesting, isn't socialism. Morever, I'd be more than happy if the wealthy of this country saw the need to do this voluntarily and simply did it for their own sake's. If we continue down this path of increased inequality and stagnation (likely worse, eventually), they will not have a choice. I think things are moving in the right direction, though, and we are already seeing some signs of this possibly happening and I am certainly optimistic.

Stiglitz goes on to discuss how the government's response to weak demand from inequality led to a bubble and even more inequality. He cites inadequate regulation and dishonest/incompetent banking as large contributors to this problem but this has been gone over many times.

He then lays out exactly how inequality makes for a less efficient and productive economy by looking at lowering public investment (as we see in the CSM link above), underinvestiment in the common good like education that directly leads to economic mobility, rent seeking and the financialization of our economy (the oil market is a great example of this...filled with people that don't actually buy oil but speculate on it), and the issue of consumerism.I'm going to turn this final point of consumerism into a stand alone post at some point as it is worthy of special attention. 

The rest of Chapter 4 is devoted to the alleged inequality efficiency trade off which, again, deserves its own post and honestly is separate from the issue of why inequality matters.  Suffice to say, Stiglitz has shown thus far that not only are we failing in equality of outcome but we are failing in equality of opportunity. People simply don't have the income mobility that leads to greater opportunity and our society is sorely lacking in closing this gap and increasing these types of opportunities.

Worse, as Stiglitz previews for the next chapter, this inequality is imperiling our democracy.

And this is the guy that is going to do a better job with our debt and deficit?

Picking Health Care Winners and Losers

When my wife and I quit our corporate jobs we had to go out and buy our health insurance directly. We called Blue Cross Blue Shield, but were told that you can't buy insurance directly, you have to go through an agent. They gave us a list of agents, we called one and signed up.

Now, what does that agent do for us? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. He collects a percentage of the health insurance premium we pay each month, but when we see doctors or get statements or put money in the health savings account we have nothing at all to do with the agent. The agent is a worthless leech on the system.

If this were the end of the story, it would be just another typical instance of the bloated health care system where dozens of useless middlemen sucking on the health care teat. But there's more.

I live in Minnesota, and my state senator is David Hann. He serves on the Health and Human Services committee. In that position he has been working hard to prevent Democratic Governor Mark Dayton from implementing the health insurance exchanges required under the new health care law. The exchanges would allow health care to enter the 21st century and let you sign up for health insurance directly instead of having to deal with worthless middlemen, providing for easier comparison of benefits, more competition and elimination of overhead.

What's Hann's main concern about exchanges?

In recent discussion about the health insurance exchange, he said, "The people I hear mostly from are people who are selling insurance and insurance agents who are very concerned about this because they see it as a direct threat to their business."

What does David Hann do for a living? Until recently, his web site said he was a "business process consultant." According to that article on the Fox affiliate website, Hann now works for Boys and Tyler Financial Group, which sells health insurance. It turns out that Hann's Republican counterpart in the House committee also started working the same company just after the session ended this past year.

Now, there's nothing wrong with legislators serving on committees where they have expertise (Hann was an exec at Deli Express before joining the legislature). It only makes sense for doctors and nurses to serve on health care committees, teachers on education and farmers on agriculture. If everyone knows what you do and you don't stand to profit directly from legislation, there's no conflict of interest.

But Hann has been pushing legislation that would replace Minnesota's Medicaid system with a voucher program that would require recipients to buy health insurance through insurance agents like he is now.

This raises a lot of questions. Why is he more concerned about the jobs of few insurance salesman than cheaper and more efficient health care for all? Is his employment by this company a quid pro quo for his actions in the legislature? And why did Hann keep his new employer secret until the media revealed it?

And finally: why would a Republican who always rails against big government and excessive regulation sponsor legislation that would lock us into an archaic and bureaucratic system of health care that mandates guaranteed income to insurance agents who provide no useful function?

In short, why is David Hann using his position in government to pick winners (insurance salesmen like himself) and loser (health care customers like me)?