Rewarding Bad Behavior

Israel and Hamas have agreed to yet another truce after the Hamas terrorists who run Gaza unleashed a barrage of missiles on Israel and Israel retaliated with targeted assassinations of Hamas leaders and bombings of terrorists who hide their missile launchers among Palestinian civilians. The toll after this latest skirmish was 161 Palestinians and five Israelis.

The ostensible reason Hamas started this conflict, which would be Rocky XLII if we numbered them like movie sequels, is the five-year blockade of Gaza. The blockade has left residents of the tiny strip of land starving and without any means to generate income. Israel imposed the blockade to prevent terrorists bringing missiles into Gaza. But as the daily rain of missiles upon Tel Aviv proved, the blockade is an abject failure.

Ironically, this outburst of terrorism has empowered Hamas, raising their status among Palestinians, and has opened the door to ending the blockade.

Meanwhile, President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian National Authority, which controls the West Bank, has been trying peaceful means to move Israel towards a two-state solution. Hamas and the PA have been competing for the devotion of the Palestinian people for years now. Europe and Abbas have been using diplomatic means, trying to get the UN to recognize Palestinian statehood, but American UN Ambassador Susan Rice has vigorously blocked it as the Israelis demanded. Despite Republican assertions that the Obama administration is Israel's worst enemy.

Again and again, Israel has stymied all peaceful Palestinian attempts at resolving the issue, but has caved to terrorist demands. Every time Palestinians kidnap an Israeli soldier the Israelis ultimately cave in and release hundreds of Palestinians from prison to get one guy back. They'll even do it for a corpse. Admittedly, most of the Palestinians the Israelis release are innocent schmucks "arrested" for just this purpose. But, still...

For years now Israel has stiffed the peaceful Abbas, but now it looks like Israel will again reward terrorist Hamas by cutting a deal on the blockade. What message does this send to the Palestinians? Violence works. Terrorism works. Kidnapping works. Negotation and diplomacy? Not so much.

You have to wonder why Israel chooses to proceed this way. Are they just that stupid, or is there a more cynical reason? Do Bibi Netanyahu and the conservative Likud Party have a symbiotic relationship with Hamas? Do Likud and Hamas constantly rekindle these deadly conflicts solely to prop up their own popularity?

If so, Hamas and Likud are trading human lives for political power. To be sure, Hamas is far more disgusting in the treatment of its own people as human shields. But Israel does the same thing by having its citizens to build illegal settlements on Palestinian territory, intentionally placing themselves in grave bodily danger, which then requires the Israeli military to protect settlers on that stolen land, requiring further assimilation of Palestinian land as "buffer zones."

While Hamas is using human shields to launch attacks on Israel, Israel is using human swords to carve up Palestinian lands.

In the end, there appears to be no incentive for Likud to agree to peace. As long as Israel can portray Palestinians as dangerous terrorists like Hamas, they can avoid a diplomatic solution that would require them to give up land. It'll only cost a few Israeli lives each year to keep the conflict going, maybe even fewer if they can get all the bugs out of Iron Dome. And a random bus bombing every few months will remind Israelis how much they really need Likud in power to protect them from random bus bombings.

The status quo allows Israel to continue to slowly expand its borders every year, and allows Hamas to gain popularity among Palestinians. It's win-win for everyone. Except the millions of Palestinians who live in abject poverty, the hundreds of Palestinian children who die from malnutrition and the dozens of Israelis killed by terrorists each year.

The irony here is that if America saw more photos like this of Mitt Romney, he may have gotten a few more votes.

Giving Thanks

I am thankful for...

My beautiful children who amaze me every day...
My wife who gets better and better looking as she gets older (love that bubble butt:))
My students who hit me with a metaphorical shovel to the head on a consistent basis...
My family who, despite all the crabbiness, are damn fine people to spend a life with...
My friends who make me laugh...
Comic books which stoke my inner geek...
Music which soothes my soul in ways that nothing else can...

And finally, the American people, for not believing the lies and electing the right man for president!

The Productivity Dividend

Getting back to Stiglitz.

Many years ago Keynes posed a question. For thousands of years, most people had to spend most of their time working just to survived-for food, clothing, and shelter. Then, beginning with the Industrial Revolution, unprecedented increases in productivity meant that more and more individuals could be freed from the chains of subsistence living. For increasingly large portions of the population, only a small fraction of their time was required to provide for the necessities of life. The question was, How would people spend the productivity dividend?

This is that quote from Chapter 4 that I wanted to pull out and examine on its own. The reason for this is that it ties directly into our economy. In the United States, people spend that productivity dividend on consumption and, as Stiglitz notes, their consumption relative to others. This is where that whole "Keeping up with the Jones'" comes into play. In particular, he notes that Europe opted for more goods AND more leisure while America opted for less leisure and more goods.

So, are we really working harder and harder "for the family?" Or are we simply playing a continual game of catch up with no end regarding consumption? No doubt that our economy is heavily based on consumption but is that a good thing? Should we consider more leisure time and less of keeping up with the Jones'? As we  consider how to mend our economy, we should examine the basic question of the productivity dividend.

Another idea that came out of this quote was the issue of fear and anxiety about the future. There are many on the Right that believe America is going to end soon because of the president and the Democrats. Would they be worried about this if they had to provide the basics (food, clothing, shelter)? Further, would anyone worry as much about all the silly stuff we fret over if this were the case?

I doubt it.

I Guess That Settles That

Analysis: Tax Cuts Don't Lead to Economic Growth, a New 65-Year Study Finds

The paper is a good reminder to be humble about taxes as a tool for growing the economy. They remain, above all, a tool for collecting revenue and tweaking incentives for specific economic behavior. Congress has cut tax rates repeatedly over the last 60 years, while the country and the global economy have undergone considerable changes that probably had a greater effect on growth.

Yep, pretty much. And what did the GOP do when they saw this?

Nonpartisan Tax Report Withdrawn After G.O.P. Protest

Stomped their feet and stormed down the hallway...yelling at dad the whole way!!!

A Bubble That Has Burst

From Andy, over at electoral-vote.com

Older, male, white voters are having a lot of trouble understanding the election results. They and everyone they knew just assumed that the country would never re-elect a tax-and-spend liberal. Fox News told them this was impossible. Now reality is beginning to kick in--things have changed and are not likely to go back to the way they used to be. They are also flummoxed by the voters accepting same-sex marriage and legalization of marijuana in some states. Many of them see the country as Mitt Romney does, with makers and takers and the takers are taking over. 

This is a fundamentally different situation than in the past. Then, a loss was just a loss--maybe the other side had a better candidate or ran a better campaign. Even after George McGovern and Michael Dukakis' massive defeats, Democrats didn't think this was the end of the America that they had always known. It was simply a lost election and they could try again in 4 years. The difference now is probably that way back then, everyone watched one of the three television networks and read the same newspapers. Now it is possible to live entirely in a bubble of your own choosing and simply have no idea of what is really going on in the country. 

Someone who watches only Fox News and listens to talk radio and reads redstate.com on the Internet is going to be completely detached from reality, so an election result like this comes completely out of the blue for them. For Democrats, this is not true. Someone who watches only MSNBC, reads the New York Times and follows Websites like Huffington Post, Talking Points Memo, and Daily Kos, knew that it would be a fairly close election but that Obama and the Democrats had a small, but consistent, lead. The electoral vote predictors at all those places as well as here were pretty close to the final result. The new reality is that when you hide in a virtual cave of your own making, emerging out into the sunshine can be frightening.

When people look back on this election, they will note that this was the moment that the bubble burst. If you get your information from Drudge, Fox, other right wing sources and spend time frequenting places like Kevin Baker's site, The Smallest Minority, you likely think that Americans are stupid for voting for the president and the Democrats. Of course, this is not true. It's not really a question of intelligence. As I have said all along, it's a question of willful ignorance brought on by insulation. This election showed that they can't do that anymore. People saw that what they were saying wasn't real and what they were advocating was truly awful. Can you blame them with garbage like this?

Barack Obama has repeatedly circumvented the laws, including the Constitution of the United States, in ways and on a scale that pushes this nation in the direction of arbitrary one-man rule. 

Now that Obama will be in a position to appoint Supreme Court justices who can rubber stamp his evasions of the law and usurpations of power, this country may be unrecognizable in a few years as the America that once led the world in freedom, as well as in many other things. 

This "transforming" project extends far beyond fundamental internal institutions, or even the polarization and corruption of the people themselves, with goodies handed out in exchange for their surrendering their birthright of freedom.

Have you noticed how many of our enemies in other countries have been rooting for Obama? You or your children may yet have reason to recall that as a bitter memory of a warning sign ignored on election day in 2012. 

What on earth is he talking about? A country that may be unrecognizable? What enemies are rooting for him? Good grief...

Their shock (and sadly with it, their behavior) is about to get worse. The economy is improving and things are getting better, despite the dire predictions of all of America becoming like Detroit. What will they do then? People will stop paying attention to them in droves and they will go back to being a small group of people playing make believe around the 21st century equivalent of a short wave radio: the internet.

In today's world...indeed.

I've been meaning to point out this post over at The Moderate Voice for several months but lost track of it as election season heated up. The first paragraph grabbed me right away for obvious reasons.

There are myths proclaimed by some right-wing partisans and Ayn Rand acolytes that “rugged individualists” working alone have been responsible for America’s great accomplishments and that government is the enemy of progress. In their quest to reduce taxes, particularly for the wealthy, and cut the size of government, this myth has been promulgated by ideologues to gain support from the middle-class, needed to elect legislators who share their vision.

Yeah, and the American people recognized those myths for what they were 12 days ago.

Businesses could not function without the nation’s infrastructure (though it currently needs work). Building the interstate highway system, bridges and tunnels and maintaining them, was and is a federal concern. The integrity of America’s ports and airports, and air traffic control, all comes under the aegis of federal agencies. Products and people could not move if it were not for the government. Apportioning the broadcast spectrum for TV, radio, cell phone companies and so forth, insuring the safety of transmission lines, pipelines, and so forth, are all functions of the federal government. 

In short, they didn't build that. Not that the government isn't completely wonderful, though.

The federal government is inefficient in many of its operations, but its expansion has occurred during both Democratic and Republican administrations. Those who rail against the government should focus on fixing it and not just making it smaller so they can pay less in taxes. And the money saved should go to paying down the deficit. For different reasons, both the weak and strong among us need a robust federal government in today’s world. 

In today's world...indeed.

The Way Forward on Gun Violence

Police have arrested a man for plotting another movie murder spree:

A southwest Missouri man accused of plotting to shoot up a movie theater during the new "Twilight" film was charged Friday after his mother contacted police, telling them she worried her son had purchased weapons similar to those used during the fatal Colorado theater shooting.

I realize that the Twilight films are bad, but are they that terrible?

This incident shows us a new way to reduce gun violence. Forget FBI background checks and waiting periods: anyone who buys a gun should be required to have a note from their mom.

It's win all the way around: it would promote traditional family values and respect for parents. It would put a big dent in the illegal gun market; straw buyers would have to explain to their mothers why they need to buy a fifth Glock semiautomatic pistol in a month. And all those gangstas in the hood would never get their mommas to sign off on gun purchases, because those women know exactly what happens to young men with guns.

Of course, this is tongue-in-cheek. But it's clear this problem is only growing worse.

In the last 15 years hundreds of people have died at the hands of mentally unstable people who should never have been able to get firearms. From Columbine, to Tucson, to Aurora, to Oak Creek, to Minneapolis, where this September a guy who was just fired shot eight people and leaving five dead, including himself a UPS man who was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. Every other week another five or ten people are killed by some nut with a gun, who then kills himself or is shot by a cop.

I agree that we don't need a nanny state watching over our every move. Maybe we just need a nanny.

What David Said

Most of the media agree that the behind closed door testimony of former CIA Director, David Patraeus, still leaves much in doubt about what happened in Benghazi last September 11th. I disagree. In fact, I'd say it confirms what I have been saying all along: the administration withheld information they had on the attacks for reasons of national security.

But he said the administration initially withheld the suspicion that extremists with links to Al Qaeda were involved to avoid tipping off the terrorist groups.

There's absolutely nothing wrong with this so the Right's mental meltdowns over Benghazi strike me as odd. They're saying that the administration purposefully misled the public on whether or not the attack was Al Qaeda linked and, instead, kept talking about the movie trailer. This seems odd to me for two reasons. First, since when did the Right embrace Julian Assange and call for more openness when it comes to military intelligence? It seems to me that they are now acting just the way he does which, in my view, is dangerous on a number of levels. The reason why we win and lose wars is due to intelligence and some government secrets, in particular with the military.

Second, throw a dart somewhere and you're likely to hit a conservative pundit bitching about how we announce things to our enemies (pulling out of Iraq, Afghanistan etc) and how that's bad. So why should we announce, mere days after the attack when an investigation is still under way, that we know it's Al Qaeda and we're coming to get them? This would be a terribly stupid thing to do.

I also don't get why there is all this bile being heaped upon Susan Rice. The Patraeus testimony confirms that when she made her remarks, she was going on what the intelligence said at the time...the intelligence that was not classified, mind you. Besides, she's the US ambassador to the UN, not a member of the CIA or the State Department. The attacks on her are tremendously unjustified.

Petraeus also said some early classified reports appeared to support Susan Rice, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, when she said five days after the deadly raid in Libya that it had grown out of a protest that was hijacked by extremists — comments that some Republicans contend were meant to downplay the significance of the attack before the presidential election. Even now, the intelligence community has evidence that some attackers were motivated by protests earlier that day in Cairo over an anti-Islamic video, sources familiar with the intelligence said.

I realize that there are still a lot of sour grapes after the complete incompetence pre and post the 9-11 attacks regarding the Bush Administration. But Benghazi isn't even in the same ballpark, folks. And we aren't even done with the investigation yet on what exactly went wrong and why. Obviously, the Right's not going to be patient about this and have even more sour grapes about the election.

Perhaps they might want to learn a thing or two about what happened on November 6th and withhold further comment until we hear more testimony from the people who were more actively involved.

We Have a Winner!

In the last 20 years we have seen a dozen Mitt Romneys parade across the landscape. There was the greedy young man with money coming out of his ears. There was the pro-choice Mitt Romney who ran against Ted Kennedy. There was Mitt Romney the gubernatorial candidate who supported gay rights. There was the severely conservative Mitt Romney who would instantly sign any and all anti-abortion bills that came across his desk. There was the self-sacrificing Olympics-saving Mitt Romney. There was the one-percent Mitt Romney talking sneeringly to wealthy donors behind closed doors about the lazy 47%, quickly followed by the candidate-of-the-100%-in-the-last-few-weeks-of-the-campaign Mitt Romney.

Now that the election is over and the Etch a Sketch has been shaken for the final time, we have a winner! Ding ding ding! The envelope please...

The sneering 1% Mitt Romney!

In a conference call with 400 wealthy donors Romney said that Obama won by promising gifts to the 47%: blacks, Hispanics, young women and college students. Some of his comments include:

With regards to the young people, for instance, a forgiveness of college loan interest was a big gift. Free contraceptives were very big with young, college-aged women. And then, finally, Obamacare also made a difference for them, because as you know, anybody now 26 years of age and younger was now going to be part of their parents’ plan, and that was a big gift to young people. They turned out in large numbers, a larger share in this election even than in 2008.

You can imagine for somebody making $25,000 or $30,000 or $35,000 a year, being told you’re now going to get free health care, particularly if you don’t have it, getting free health care worth, what, $10,000 per family, in perpetuity — I mean, this is huge.

These comments demonstrate Romney's utter lack of empathy and total inability to  imagine the lives of somebody making that $30,000 a year. Such people often have to work multiple jobs because employers intentionally limit their hours to avoid having to pay full-time benefits such as health care. A single mom with two kids who works two jobs for 56 total hours a week at Walmart and Papa Johns Pizza at $10 an hour will still only make $29K and get no benefits. $29K is not enough to pay for a car, gas, rent, food and clothing, much less any kind of preventive health care for the kids.

How can such a person ever get ahead in Romneyworld?  Every waking hour of every day is spent working, sleeping, taking care of kids or driving them to grandma's for daycare.

The time when just anyone with gumption could open a pizzeria or corner store to get a start in business is gone, destroyed by the ilks of Sam Walton and "Papa" John Schnatter and their nation-wide chains that wiped out millions of mom-and-pop operations across the country.

John Schnatter gained notoriety this past summer when he said that his pizzas would cost more because of Obamacare. Exactly how much? Less than a nickel a pizza.

Hundreds of thousands of independent small businesses have been destroyed by giant corporations like Walmart and Papa John's. Yes, big companies are more efficient and sell stuff cheaper. That's because they employ fewer people than the competitors they destroy and don't pay their workers a living wage.


Romney thinks America is still the way it was in Forties, Fifties and Sixties when S. Truett Cathy (Chick-Fil-A), Ray Kroc (McDonald's) and Sam Walton founded their empires. But more and more money and power are concentrated in the hands of fewer and fewer businesses, and those businesses have monopolies on vast sectors of the economy. Companies like Chick-Fil-A, McDonald's and Walmart have locked out the majority of small entrepreneurs.

Go to any mall in the suburbs in any part of the country and you'll see the same set of 30 chain stores selling products made in Asia. Sixty years ago you would have seen dozens of independent small businesses selling American-manufactured goods in the downtown of every small city. These days most suburbs don't even have downtowns.
 I hope the 1% Mitt Romney isn't the last one we'll see. Maybe one day he'll realize the reason he lost the election was because wealthy supporters like John Schnatter and the Walton heirs created all those people who need the things Obama is fighting for.

A Hypocritical Pile of Poo

If you skip a meeting on classified intelligence on Benghazi to bitch about how the administration missed key intelligence points, you are a weenis. Furthermore, I've had it with the Right bitching about Benghazi. Where do they get the stones to bitch about intelligence failures after 9-11 and Iraq? Condeleeza Rice was handed a report that said "Al Qaeda determined to attack in US" in August of 2001. President Bush was briefed on this report. A month later 3,000 innocent civilians died and the sound from the Right?

Crickets.

Yet when three members of our armed forces and a highly trained ambassador who knew the risks being in what was essentially a war zone were killed, the Right acts as if all of our nation's women and children were raped and slaughtered. What a hypocritical pile of poo...

Great Economic News

The United States has exported 187 billion dollars worth of goods-an all time high and up 3.1 percent-for the month of September. This narrows the trade deficit to its lowest point in two years, at 41.5 billion.

Driving this uptick was the sale of the iPhone 5 as well as oil exports. A recent article in the New York Times (highlighting an IEA report) show the US is set to become the world's top oil producer in five years. In fact,

The United States will overtake Saudi Arabia as the world’s leading oil producer by about 2017 and will become a net oil exporter by 2030, the International Energy Agency said Monday.

Wow. Imagine how different a world that is going to be. It's going to give me an enormous amount of satisfaction to have the power shift in the way it is going to do so. So how has this happened?

That increased oil production, combined with new American policies to improve energy efficiency, means that the United States will become “all but self-sufficient” in meeting its energy needs in about two decades.

Hmm...

Avoiding Innocent Victims: 10 Rules for Affairs

The Petraeus affair may have claimed an innocent victim in the person of Gen. John Allen, the man who was expected to be the next head of NATO. He claims he was never alone with Jill Kelley, and I'm inclined to believe him.

This highlights a serious problem ushered in by the Internet.  Because anyone can send you email, a crazy person can become infatuated with you and inundate you with gushing and suggestive emails. If that person happens to be important in your social circles, as Jill Kelley was in Gen. Allen's, you may feel obligated to respond cordially to their incessant barrage of spam. According to reports, they exchanged 20-30,000 emails, though that number is almost certainly inflated.

If you're completely innocent, even an apparently benign cyberstalker like Kelley can cause you major grief. A malicious and competent one can destroy your life by setting up dummy email accounts that look like they belong to you and filling them with all sorts of false evidence.

This problem isn't really new. In the past a delusional admirer could flood your mailbox at home and at work with love letters suggesting all manner of liaisons. But at least you could burn the evidence; in the age of the Internet nothing ever goes away--except that spreadsheet you were working on when your computer crashed.

If Allen's career has in fact been trashed, the blame can be squarely placed on Paula Broadwell's insanely jealous crusade against the flirtatious Jill Kelley, and Petraeus' foolish decision to engage in an affair with a loose cannon.

This has prompted me to draw up 10 rules for high-ranking officials looking to have an affair.

10: Don't communicate via email, Twitter, Facebook, or Dropbox (though MySpace is probably safe by now). In fact, don't use the Internet at all. 

9: Don't use your normal cell phone or landline to contact your paramour. Get a burner cell phone and don't use your credit card to buy it. 

8: Don't have suggestive conversations at work or at home. 

7: Do choose paramours of equal rank and social standing: that is, people who have as much to lose as you do if the affair becomes public. 

6: Don't wear cologne, perfume, lipstick or makeup, or anything that will leave a strange scent on your paramour, and shower after trysts (but don't go out with wet hair!). 

5: Don't do the deed in public, in your home, at your office, or in your car. 

4: Don't change your daily routine, don't go anywhere out of the ordinary, and don't be seen in public with your paramour, especially kissing or touching in any way. 

3: Don't have an affair with a jealous clingy person, or someone who would cheat on you. Which is sort of an oxymoron, isn't it?

2: Don't leave bodily fluids on blue dresses. 

And the top rule:

1: Don't have an affair with someone who's already written one book about you, and will stand to make millions selling a second book about an affair with you.

Looking over this set of rules, it reads more like a set of contact protocols for a CIA agent than a prescription for romantic liaisons. You'd think our master spy would be more adept at this sort of thing...

Site Update

Hey folks, quick site update. We've started getting comments that are making it through the spam filter so I had to change the settings so you have to register to comment. I'm truly sorry about this but I can't stand seeing anymore comments selling xanax and cleaning them out every hour on the hour. So, no more anonymous posters.

Petraeus Falls off the Pedestal

The most amazing thing about the whole Petraeus affair, now spilling over to Gen. John Allen, is how utterly unamazing it is.

These men, at the pinnacle of power in the military and the intelligence community, turn out to be regular schmoes just like the rest of us. The story is sounding more and more like a bunch of teenage kids having a war on Facebook.

It goes like this: Petraeus starts an affair with Paula Broadwell, using Dropbox to get around the email trail. Allan starts an affair with Jill Kelley, exchanging thousands of emails. Broadwell sees that Kelley is also emailing Petraeus daily and sends Kelley threatening emails. Kelley complains to an FBI friend about the emails. Mr. FBI becomes obsessed the case and with Kelley, and sends her shirtless photos of himself.

What is it about using the Internet that makes everyone's IQ drop 100 points? How can people using government computers and who are constantly surrounded by aides and guards and secret service protection details possibly think they can keep these affairs secret?

You'd think we'd learn to expect this sort of thing after Tiger Woods, Anthony Weiner, Chris Lee, John Edwards, John Ensign, Newt Gingrich (two or three times), Bill Clinton, Larry "Wide Stance" Craig, David Vitter, Ted Haggard, Mark Sanford, Mark Foley and half the Republican House leadership during the Clinton impeachment debacle, and on and on and on and on.

And that's just in the last several years. The history books are full of sordid stories of presidents, prime ministers, princes, priests, popes and prophets undone by their inability to keep their penises in their pants.

Looking on the bright side, at least Petraeus and Allen weren't having affairs with subordinates.

The takeaway, for the nth time, is that it is a colossal mistake to put men like Petraeus on a pedestal. Yeah, he's a smart guy. But he's just a guy, like anyone else.

Nobody—nobody—is worthy of the adulation that we're so eager to heap upon them. Not Petraeus, not the pope, not the president, not Mohammed. Their work can and should be praised on its merits, but their persons deserve no worship. They're all just human beings, every bit as flawed as the rest of us.

Regular schmoes have affairs too, but no one is watching them. They have little to lose and will only disappoint their families and friends if they get caught. 

So the question is, why do these important men keep doing this? Does our elevating them to godhood make them lose perspective, buy into the hype and think they can do no wrong? Or do they consider themselves regular schmoes just doing a job, unworthy of the attention lavished upon them and therefore under no particular compulsion to lead an exemplary life?

I don't know. Maybe it's having their brains pickled in testosterone for fifty years...

Crickets

I'm quite curious these days as to why many on the Right are so quiet on the whole Patraeus affair, especially since it has now spilled over into other areas of the Defense Department. Even more puzzling is how they continue to focus the blame on the president when we are now finding out that there was obviously something really off between the CIA, the DOD and the State Department in terms of Benghazi and David Patraeus.

Is the Defense Department such a sacred cow that any improprieties can be conveniently ignored? Patraeus?

I never thought I'd link a Brietbart article on this site but when the source of much of their Benghazi meltdown is the woman who brought down the Director of the CIA, I guess I don't really have a choice. 

This article reveals a very key point that throws a giant wet blanket on the cover up wank fest going on with the Right. If the attackers were trying to get into some sort of CIA secret holding facility, wouldn't it make sense to keep this issue quiet because of national security? After all, the Right continually reminds us how people like Julian Assange and his commie buddies are traitors. So, why is it now OK and absolutely necessary to find everything out about Benghazi?

Oh, yeah...so they can win the argument and prove the president wrong.

The Real-Life John Galt

Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged is the story of John Galt, a titan of industry who refuses to be exploited by the tyranny of a government that taxes him too much. President Obama's reelection has purportedly prompted a real-life John Galt to action, in the person of Robert E. Murray, CEO of Murray Energy.

The day after the election Murray read a prayer in front of staff members and fired 150 workers from two of his coal mines because, he says, Obama will destroy the coal industry. (The fictional John Galt is an atheist, by the way.) But the fact is, Murray's coal mines are losing money not because of taxation and environmental regulation, but because his filthy and inefficient nineteenth-century product is losing market share to a much cleaner and more efficient twentieth-century product.

Many companies have force-fed employees pro-Romney propaganda in this election cycle, a tactic Romney promoted. Other CEOs besides Murray threatened to fire workers if Obama won, though it's not clear how many have carried through. One nameless Las Vegas businessman claims to have done so, but David Siegel, the Florida timeshare billionaire who threatened mass firings, has instead given employees a raise.

Murray, however, delivered on his threat. He has long used the threat of firings to blackmail employees to donate to Republicans. He set up a PAC and "encouraged" employees to contribute to it with payroll deductions, which have totaled $1.4 million since 2007.  The tactic is a nifty way to get around campaign finance laws, which limit how much money Murray can personally give to candidates. Murray is also the CEO who shut down a mine in Ohio and forced employees to attend a Mitt Romney speech without pay. Not all employees donate voluntarily:

The Murray sources, who requested anonymity for fear of retribution, came forward separately. But they painted similar pictures of the fund-raising operation. “There’s a lot of coercion,” says one of them. “I just wanted to work, but you feel this constant pressure that, if you don’t contribute, your job’s at stake. You’re compelled to do this whether you want to or not.” Says the second: “They will give you a call if you’re not giving. . . . It’s expected you give Mr. Murray what he asks for.”

Murray Energy is in financial trouble, to be sure, but it's not because of excessive regulation or any "war on coal." It's due to competition from cheap, clean-burning natural gas obtained from fracking.

As I've written before, the price of gas has been so low recently that energy companies are losing their shirts, according to none other than the head of Exxon, Rex Tillerson.

Because of that, more and more utilities are turning to natural gas turbines instead of coal-fired power plants. Natural gas is cheaper and safer to produce, easier to use, more flexible, and cleaner. It can generate electricity, heat homes and cook food. It doesn't cause mercury pollution or acid rain. It emits less CO2 per kilowatt hour produced. It's more easily transported through pipelines or in liquid form. It doesn't produce filthy coal slurry that poisons rivers and streams, as has happened at least seven times with Murray's coal operations. It doesn't leave toxic clinkers after burning. Coal mining requires miners to work in filthy conditions a mile underground, or decapitate entire mountaintops to expose coal seams. Natural gas turbines can be turned off and on almost at will, and don't have long startup times like coal-fired plants. And gas turbines use much less water than coal to produce the same amount of electricity, which is important as the nation is still in the grip of a drought with no end in sight.

By switching electricity generation from coal to natural gas the United States has reduced CO2 emissions to what they were 20 years ago.

I'll be the first to admit that natural gas fracking has its problems. In their rush to exploit the new technology many operators have taken shortcuts that have spilled toxic fracking fluids, polluted groundwater and even caused earthquakes. But by slowing down, developing better regulations and licensing only conscientious operators, the problems with fracking can be minimized, all while making natural gas profitable again. And of course, we should be working hard on developing twenty-first century technologies that eliminate the problems of fracking.

But instead of acknowledging the reality of technological and competitive forces that have undermined his antiquated business model, Murray blames his losses on the president and the laws that keep Americans safe and healthy.

It's a blatantly dishonest bait-and-switch argument by a greedy coward. And that's all these John Galt wannabes really are.

A Sunday Dedication

Today I am thinking about Army Cpl. Andrew Wilfahrt who died on Feb. 27, 2011, in Kandahar, Afghanistan, when an improvised explosive device blew his 31-year-old body apart. Andrew was gay and DADT  hadn't quite been repealed when he slipping the surly bonds of earth on that day. But it was soon after.

Andrew was from Minnesota and the election last Tuesday also saw a defeat the marriage amendment. I can't think of a better way to honor his memory than to have hundreds of thousands of Minnesotans stand up and say no to something that would have limited individual rights.

Rights that he died defending.

Though you have made me see troubles, many and bitter, you will restore my life again; from the depths of the earth you will again bring me up. You will increase my honor and comfort me once again. (Psalm 71:20-21)

Still Missing the Point

Tuesday's election results have conservative Christians wondering what went wrong, with Romney losing and so many states embracing gay marriage:

“Millions of American evangelicals are absolutely shocked by not just the presidential election, but by the entire avalanche of results that came in,” R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, in Louisville, Ky., said in an interview. “It’s not that our message — we think abortion is wrong, we think same-sex marriage is wrong — didn’t get out. It did get out.

“It’s that the entire moral landscape has changed,” he said. “An increasingly secularized America understands our positions, and has rejected them.”

These guys are still missing the point. The problem is not that everyone who voted against them rejects their moral positions. We just believe it's wrong for religious groups to use the power of state and federal government to force their moral beliefs on the whole of society. That "we" includes atheists, agnostics, Catholics, Protestants, Muslims, Democrats and even libertarian Republicans.

Personally, I think it's best for kids to have a father and a mother who are married. Alcohol and marijuana are a stupid waste of money, time and brain cells. Anal sex can spread venereal disease, hepatitis and E. coli infections. Oral sex is unsanitary and disgusting. Cheating on your spouse is wrong. I would never encourage my wife or sister to have an abortion. But these things, done properly, are not automatically detrimental to society or the people who do them


Though the folks bemoaning their losses on Tuesday refuse to acknowledge it, their campaign to legislate their beliefs on abortion, gay marriage, contraception and other sexual practices is no different than the Taliban enforcing strict Sharia law in Afghanistan.

Once we go back down the road of legislating religious morality, eventually that power will be used to undermine other religions, even those that currently consider themselves to be allies in the fight against gay marriage. After all, just 50 years ago many believed John Kennedy's Catholicism disqualified him to be president.

People came to this country to escape the endless bloodshed that swept Europe in the pogroms of Christians against Jews, Catholic inquisitions against heretics, and wars between Protestants and Catholics.

And it's why the First Amendment was added first.

They Have Been Failing You

One of the main "story behind the story" bits of this election was how the conservative media completely failed. Dick Morris predicting a landslide? Karl Rove whining to the other Fox anchors about how we shouldn't rush to judgment on Ohio, even though their guys in the backroom just called it? It was really a sad thing to watch.

Conor Fridersdorf pretty much nailed it.

Before rank-and-file conservatives ask, "What went wrong?", they should ask themselves a question every bit as important: "Why were we the last to realize that things were going wrong for us?"

Because they live in a bubble.

It is easy to close oneself off inside a conservative echo chamber. And right-leaning outlets like Fox News and Rush Limbaugh's show are far more intellectually closed than CNN or public radio. If you're a rank-and-file conservative, you're probably ready to acknowledge that ideologically friendly media didn't accurately inform you about Election 2012. Some pundits engaged in wishful thinking; others feigned confidence in hopes that it would be a self-fulfilling prophecy; still others decided it was smart to keep telling right-leaning audiences what they wanted to hear.

But guess what? You haven't just been misinformed about the horse race. Since the very beginning of the election cycle, conservative media has been failing you. With a few exceptions, they haven't tried to rigorously tell you the truth, or even to bring you intellectually honest opinion. What they've done instead helps to explain why the right failed to triumph in a very winnable election.

So why do you keep putting up with them?

My only hope now is that readers of Kevin Baker's site (and other right wing blogs) will realize that all the talk of impending Armageddon is failing them as well.

Amnesty Amnesia

The day after the election I opined that demographic shifts would require the Republicans to change their policies in order to remain politically viable. The shift took exactly one day, and on Thursday Republican pundits began to concur with my analysis in droves.  Sean Hannity endorsed immigration amnesty. Charles Krauthammer, in a piece in the Washington Post, wrote:

[Hispanics] should be a natural Republican constituency: striving immigrant community, religious, Catholic, family-oriented and socially conservative (on abortion, for example).

The principal reason they go Democratic is the issue of illegal immigrants. In securing the Republican nomination, Mitt Romney made the strategic error of (unnecessarily) going to the right of Rick Perry. Romney could never successfully tack back.

For the party in general, however, the problem is hardly structural. It requires but a single policy change: Border fence plus amnesty. Yes, amnesty. Use the word. Shock and awe — full legal normalization (just short of citizenship) in return for full border enforcement.

This sounds reasonable enough. But it's going to be hard for the Republican Party to do a full 180 on amnesty, because it's more than just changing a bullet point in a party platform.

For decades Republicans have depended on the Southern Strategy for victory. That strategy, often credited to Richard Nixon, involves stoking racial prejudice among certain southern whites. Prior to the 1960s the south was reliably Democratic (because Republicans were the party of Lincoln), but by using racist code words and "dog whistles" like "states rights" Nixon was able to end the Democratic Party's hold on the Solid South. Reagan did the same in the 1980s, when he talked about "welfare queens." Romney was still doing it when he said "Obama gutted welfare reform."

But over time, with increasingly positive images of blacks in popular culture (Denzel Washington, Morgan Freeman, Halle Berry, Will Smith, Ice Tea), and the total devotion to hip hop by white teens, African Americans were becoming more mainstream and non-threatening. Conservative blacks like Clarence Thomas, Herman Cain and Alan West further eroded the efficacy of the Southern Strategy.

So, in the 2000s Republicans morphed the Southern Strategy into anti-immigrant and anti-Latino sentiments. These foreign invaders who can't even speak English are stealing our jobs! Never mind that we would never consider doing those jobs ourselves because they are too dangerous, or back-breaking, or degrading and don't pay enough.

In states like Arizona, Georgia, and Mississippi, Republican state legislatures have enacted (or tried to enact) tough new immigration laws, intruding into questionable legal territory. The Republican Party embraced these attitudes nationally, leaving only a few outliers like Rick Perry. Mitt Romney, whose own Mormon church has a long history of racism, tore into Perry for breaking the party line on immigration.

Now, the people persuaded by the Southern Strategy are not some abstract them situated south of the Mason-Dixon line. They include my dad, who lives in Minnesota. When my sister M got engaged to a Hispanic American my dad disowned her. When my sister S went to M's wedding in Texas, he refused to speak to S for years. When my sister J's daughter, N, got pregnant by a Latino boyfriend, my father had a two-fer: he disowned them both.

I am therefore one of the millions of people who are directly affected by this stupid, senseless and divisive racism that the Republican Party has been perpetuating and exploiting to their political advantage for decades.


And the word that most disgusts my father, the word that caused him to despise John McCain as much as he loathed Ted Kennedy? Amnesty.

How are people like my dad going to react to a Republican Party that embraces amnesty for illegal immigrants, in what is undeniably an openly cynical political ploy just to gain more votes? Republicans like Mitt Romney and the Heritage Foundation invented the health care insurance mandate, but as soon as Obama accepted the compromise that included it, they decreed the mandate to be the end of freedom and democracy.

Will people like my father develop instant amnesty amnesia on command from the Republican Party, like they forgot that they supported the health care mandate? Or are their attitudes on race so deeply ingrained that they will stay home on election day? I'm sure Krauthammer thinks that since they have nowhere else to go, they'll just blindly continue voting Republican.

But is Krauthammer right in blithely assuming that my dad is a Republican patsy who will sit down, shut up and do what he's told? Or will people like my dad join third parties and vote for candidates like George Wallace, as my dad did in 1968?

In other words, is the Republican coalition of big business, stubborn tribal whites, NRA gun enthusiasts and anti-abortion and anti-gay crusaders about to come apart?

A Gerrymandered Mandate

Republicans love to talk up their "mandate" when Republicans win, and deny that Democrats have one when Democrats win.

So it is this year. Republicans say President Obama's victory is no mandate because he only won 50.4% to 48% of the popular vote. In the electoral college the difference is much more marked. If Florida is decided for Obama he'll win 332-206 (or 303-235 if Florida goes to Romney).

When George Bush "won" in 2000 he actually lost the popular vote 47.9% to Gore's 48.4%. Electorally he barely squeaked by, winning 271-266, and doing that only because the Supreme Court stepped in with a 5-4 decision to prevent Florida from conducting a recount. Yet Republicans claimed a huge mandate for their programs of military spending increases and tax cuts for the wealthy.

When George Bush won in 2004 he took the popular vote by 50.7% to Kerry's 48.3%, with a 286-251 electoral advantage, a lead that hinged on Ohio which had very serious irregularities in the computer voting system built by Diebold, a company with ties to the Republican Party. Republicans again claimed a huge mandate for Bush.

When Barack Obama won in 2008 he won the popular vote by 52.9% to McCain's 45.7%, with a 365-173 electoral shellacking. Yet Republicans claimed that Obama had no mandate whatsoever, that he was wrong to pursue the stimulus programs and the health care and financial reforms he promised during the election and that he was too "partisan."

Republicans say Obama's 2012 victory is not a mandate because it's the worst performance a sitting president ever had, because he "only" beat Romney 50.4% to 48%, or a margin of 2.4%. This is a lie of course: Bush beat Kerry by the identical 2.4% margin in 2004.  And they somehow forget that George H. W. Bush lost his reelection bid in 1992 to Bill Clinton. 

Now some Republicans are saying voters gave them a mandate for lower taxes by returning Republicans to the House. This is completely false.

Republicans kept the House because congressional districts across the country are gerrymandered so that incumbents retain their seats. The gerrymandering lock was strengthened in this cycle because Republicans held so many state legislatures after the 2010 census when the entire country was redistricted. That situation has already been reversed in Minnesota, which gave Democrats commanding majorities in both houses of the legislature on Tuesday. But redistricting allowed Michele Bachmann to keep her seat this year; she won by a mere 4,207 votes while outspending her Democratic challenger 12 to 1. Most of the $23 million she spent on the campaign was raised from contributors outside Minnesota.

Because of the way congressional districts are gerrymandered, a status quo House result doesn't tell us what "the people" really want. You have to look at the results a little more closely. The fact is, six Tea Party House freshmen in swing districts lost their bids for reelection. Tea Party rape fantasizers Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock lost their Senate bids in Indiana and Missouri, which should have been gimmes for Republicans. Barack Obama won the presidency. And Democrats held on to the Senate, even though 21 of the 33 Democratic seats were up for election.


The election definitely tilted in favor of the Democrats, but the only mandate they have from "the people" is that they do their jobs, come to a reasonable accommodation with the Republicans and get the economy moving again. The mandate for the Republicans is the same, with additional provisos that they stop sabotaging all legislation and appointments, and abandon their tactic of running out the political clock in the vain hope of some Rovian electoral magic in 2016.

Perhaps it will be easier for Republicans now that their number one priority is no longer making sure Barack Obama is a one-term president.

What Needs To Done?

If there is one thing that has left a very bad taste in my mouth about the election this year, it's the low voter turnout. As of this post, we are over 10 million short of the last election. I realize that 2008 was an historic election but I feel an enormous amount of dismay at the fact that out of the 210 million or so people that are eligible to vote, only 120 million voted (130 in the last election).

Folks, this sucks. What needs to be done to get those extra 90 million people in the voting booth?

Was Hurricane Sandy God's Vote for Obama?

Republicans love to invoke God's will at the slightest hint of meteorological catastrophe. For people like Pat Robertson, every flood, drought, hurricane and tornado is evidence of God's displeasure with a gay pride parade or an abortion clinic.

Karl Rove said that Hurricane Sandy was Obama's October Surprise, and Dick Morris blamed the hurricane and Chris Christie for Obama's victory.

But would God really hammer millions of people on the east coast, in mostly Democratic states, merely to drive home the point that the country would be better off with a Democrat running FEMA? Or was God punishing those Democrats with a hurricane, hoping that the infrastructure in the cities would be destroyed and urban dwellers wouldn't be able to cast their votes, allowing rural and suburban Republicans in those states to stage an electoral coup and win one for the Mitter?

If so, God would be guilty of the largest election tampering scheme in history, dwarfing the fevered Republican dreams of ACORN operatives running around impersonating dead people at the polls. Since natural disasters hurt everyone equally, perhaps the right will stop pretending that God actually has anything to do with them. After all, if God has been siccing earthquakes and hurricanes on us lo these many millennia, he's the largest mass murderer in the history of the world.

Now, I'd be the first to agree that Chris Christie threw Mitt Romney under the bus when Hurricane Sandy hit. Christie was never enthusiastic about Romney, whom he barely mentioned when he addressed the Republican national convention in August. But the truth is, no Republican wanted Romney: he was everyone's third or fourth choice, even among other money men like Sheldon Adelson. Most Republicans would have preferred someone like Rick Santorum or Newt Gingrich or Herman Cain, but they knew the rest of the electorate considers those guys to be incompetent or nuts. So they settled on the guy who likes like a generic Central Casting president.

Besides, what's good for Chris Christie is not what's good for Mitt Romney. First and foremost, Christie needs to make sure his state recovers from the hurricane. Second, Christie is governor of a mostly Democratic state, and he needs to work with Democrats (something Romney might appreciate). Third, Christie may have presidential aspirations, and a Romney presidency would effectively close him out of the running in 2016.

But despite any cynical speculation about Christie's motives for embracing Obama after the hurricane, putting our differences aside and working together to make this country better is the right thing to do. Partisans like Rove and Morris complain bitterly about Christie, but that's what the people of this country want to see. Even John Boehner is also making some encouraging statements, in his own gruff way.

If guys like Chris Christie can lead the Republican Party out of the wilderness and back into the light, more power to him.

The Times, They Are a-Changin'

For years it's been obvious that long-term demographics predict the demise of the Republican Party as currently constituted. The question has been when that would kick in. Now we have the answer: 2012.

President Obama won reelection largely on the strength of support from women, minority and younger voters. Those voters turned out for him in droves in 2008, and the question was whether that could be sustained.

Many commentators talk about how Obama "lost" the white vote, implying that there was some kind of racial bias of whites against the president. I'm not so sure. The president won in "white" states like Minnesota and Wisconsin (Paul Ryan didn't even pull in his own state). Yes, some whites who voted for the president in 2008 didn't vote for him this time around. That would have happened to any president faced with an obstinate Congress and the lackluster recovery, regardless of race.

But racial (and sexual) politics does have a lot to do with why Romney, Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock lost. The Republican Party banked on conservative religious folks to win the election for them. But the social tide is turning: gay marriage was approved in three states, and Minnesota voted down a constitutional amendment to ban it.

In Minnesota Republicans controlling both houses of the legislature did an end-around the governor to put an anti-gay marriage amendment on the ballot, hoping that it would fire up turnout among Catholics and religious conservatives. That tactic backfired. Instead, young people came out in droves to vote against it and a voter suppression bill that would have disenfranchised both younger and elderly voters. And at the same time they elected significant Democratic majorities in both houses.

Now, I'll be the first to say that this demographic shift does not mean the Democratic Party has a permanent lock on the electorate. The Republican Party can stage a comeback if they drop racially motivated policies on immigration, stop opposing gay marriage and military service, and stop incessantly attacking the reproductive rights of women.

It's doubtful they'll do all these at once. Because they're so dependent on the the religious right for turnout they'll most likely stop opposing immigration reform first, hoping that they'll be able to peel off conservative Hispanic Catholics. This will alienate many of the racially motivated Southern whites, but since they have nowhere else to go it's a safe bet. Immigration reform will also please business-oriented Republicans who've been clamoring for more cheap foreign labor to help bust the unions.

It's hard to see how the Republicans can back down on abortion and gay marriage at this point; they've been dependent on conservative Catholics for the last several elections. But since Catholics generally are more sympathetic to Democratic policies of justice and social welfare, any Republican retreat on those issues will cede the field completely.

But continued opposition to gay rights will inevitably cost them the support of libertarians and younger generations. For that reason, Republicans will ultimately have to drop opposition to gay marriage and military service.

In the end the money men like Mitt Romney, Sheldon Adelson and the Koch brothers will decide the direction the Republican Party will take. Romney has shown he will take any position on social issues he needs to win. Adelson and the Kochs want results, and if that means jettisoning the conservative social agenda they'll do it.

Cynicism aside, I would love for the Republican Party to make these changes. I used to be a Republican myself. I want to again be able to vote for candidates based on their individual qualifications, rather than voting against them because of their lockstep devotion to their party's narrow self-serving agenda.

Six Billion Dollars Down the Drain

It looks like we spent at least $6 billion on this election, and nothing really changed. We've got the same president, the same House and the same Senate. And that $6 billion doesn't even count an unknowable amount of "dark money" spent to influence the election, but estimates are in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

Much of that money was spent on countless misleading TV ads. Shouldn't we be spending our money on something more constructive, instead of giving it to the lamestream media to harangue us with stuff no one wants to see?

The Supreme Court's Citizen's United decision may be catastrophically wrong, but because of that there's little to be done to directly limit the amount of money being spent. What we can do is require more openness in the process: all ad buys should be reported on the web within 24 hours and dark money "social welfare" groups should be required to disclose all large donors on the web.

ProPublica has been working on a series of stories about dark money organizations. The weirdest part of the story is that they found a bunch of financial documents for one of these "social welfare" organizations in a meth house in Colorado. The documents seem to show coordination between Montana political campaigns and Western Tradition Partners (WTP), a dark money organization. Such coordination is illegal even under Citizen's United.

Without full disclosure of donors to such organizations it has become obvious that we cannot meet the Citizen's United's low standard. WTP's shenanigans show how easily the current system could be corrupted, or at least present the appearance of corruption.

If we know who's behind these ads then we can make a better decision about the reliability of the message, and hold them responsible for their actions.

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!