Month: June 2012

Demographic tidbits from Wisconsin

by David Atkins

Public Policy Polling has published some interesting details about its poll showing Scott Walker up by three in Wisconsin. The most relevant is this:

Walker has a 51/47 approval rating. He’s up with men (55-42), whites (52-46), seniors (58-39), and especially voters in the Milwaukee suburbs (70/29).

Barrett has a 46/46 favorability rating, improved from 43/46 on our first poll after the primary. He’s winning with women (52/46), minorities (58-36), young voters (53-39), those in Milwaukee County (61-35), and ones in greater Madison (59-37).

Of course, It’s incredibly important that Barrett defeat Scott Walker in Wisconsin, and the DNC’s decision-making in refusing to help is baffling. I’m sure the President and his team feel that throwing their weight into this arena only to lose would be seen as a rejection of the President himself. This is typical shortsightedness: Republicans will spin it as a defeat for Obama whether the DNC is involved or not, even as tea party types everywhere rub their hands in glee at the prospect of ending collective bargaining rights across the country.

Still, the numbers here are striking. The current Republican regime is predicated on a single demographic constituency: old white males. The Fox News demographic. A demographic that is literally and figuratively dying. At a certain point, the weight of decline of the Republican-leaning segments of the population will shift on the fulcrum far enough that it will become very difficult to continue in their current direction. Like a cornered animal, that will be when they are at their most dangerous. The reflection of their imminent decline is part of what fuels their current extremism: a desperate grasp at locking down power while they still can.

But there’s another set of numbers, too, that should be disturbing to the labor movement: the fact that Scott Walker has been ahead in in most non-partisan polls by a range of 3 to 8 points, while President Obama maintains an average 5-point lead in the state. In other words, a significant portion of Wisconsin voters are willing to vote for Walker, but unwilling to vote for Romney. My own theory is that these are probably not so much centrist, Simpson-Bowles friendly voters, but people who are mostly otherwise more or less progressive but have become convinced by the anti-public employee arguments of the right. If that’s accurate and Walker wins despite the major counterpush, it may be necessary for the labor movement to spend more time aggressively expanding into the private sector, than increasingly doubling down on defending the public sector, which is intrinsically a more difficult argument.

Time will tell, but now isn’t the moment for pontification and retrospection. Sign up today to help Tom Barrett beat Scott Walker on Tuesday. Every single vote counts, and the momentum is shifting our direction.

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The Wild Wild East

by digby

“Stand your ground” in action:

In the most comprehensive effort of its kind, the Tampa Bay Times has identified nearly 200 “stand your ground” cases and their outcomes. The Times identified cases through media reports, court records and dozens of interviews with prosecutors and defense attorneys across the state.

Among the findings:

• Those who invoke “stand your ground” to avoid prosecution have been extremely successful. Nearly 70 percent have gone free.

• Defendants claiming “stand your ground” are more likely to prevail if the victim is black. Seventy-three percent of those who killed a black person faced no penalty compared to 59 percent of those who killed a white.

• The number of cases is increasing, largely because defense attorneys are using “stand your ground” in ways state legislators never envisioned. The defense has been invoked in dozens of cases with minor or no injuries. It has also been used by a self-described “vampire” in Pinellas County, a Miami man arrested with a single marijuana cigarette, a Fort Myers homeowner who shot a bear and a West Palm Beach jogger who beat a Jack Russell terrier.

• People often go free under “stand your ground” in cases that seem to make a mockery of what lawmakers intended. One man killed two unarmed people and walked out of jail. Another shot a man as he lay on the ground. Others went free after shooting their victims in the back. In nearly a third of the cases the Times analyzed, defendants initiated the fight, shot an unarmed person or pursued their victim — and still went free.

• Similar cases can have opposite outcomes. Depending on who decided their cases, some drug dealers claiming self-defense have gone to prison while others have been set free. The same holds true for killers who left a fight, only to arm themselves and return. Shoot someone from your doorway? Fire on a fleeing burglar? Your case can swing on different interpretations of the law by prosecutors, judge or jury.

• A comprehensive analysis of “stand your ground” decisions is all but impossible. When police and prosecutors decide not to press charges, they don’t always keep records showing how they reached their decisions. And no one keeps track of how many “stand your ground” motions have been filed or their outcomes.

Wow. Read the whole thing to see the details. It would appear that if you want to murder someone, Florida’s the place to do it.

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Soros speaks

by digby

Here’s something worth reading this afternoon, even if you’re at the beach.

The eurozone is now repeating what had often happened in the global financial system. There is a close parallel between the euro crisis and the international banking crisis that erupted in 1982. Then the international financial authorities did whatever was necessary to protect the banking system: they inflicted hardship on the periphery in order to protect the center. Now Germany and the other creditor countries are unknowingly playing the same role. The details differ but the idea is the same: the creditors are in effect shifting the burden of adjustment on to the debtor countries and avoiding their own responsibility for the imbalances. Interestingly, the terms “center” and “periphery” have crept into usage almost unnoticed. Just as in the 1980’s all the blame and burden is falling on the “periphery” and the responsibility of the “center” has never been properly acknowledged. Yet in the euro crisis the responsibility of the center is even greater than it was in 1982. The “center” is responsible for designing a flawed system, enacting flawed treaties, pursuing flawed policies and always doing too little too late. In the 1980’s Latin America suffered a lost decade; a similar fate now awaits Europe. That is the responsibility that Germany and the other creditor countries need to acknowledge. But there is no sign of this happening.

The European authorities had little understanding of what was happening. They were prepared to deal with fiscal problems but only Greece qualified as a fiscal crisis; the rest of Europe suffered from a banking crisis and a divergence in competitiveness which gave rise to a balance of payments crisis. The authorities did not even understand the nature of the problem, let alone see a solution. So they tried to buy time.

Usually that works. Financial panics subside and the authorities realize a profit on their intervention. But not this time because the financial problems were reinforced by a process of political disintegration. While the European Union was being created, the leadership was in the forefront of further integration; but after the outbreak of the financial crisis the authorities became wedded to preserving the status quo. This has forced all those who consider the status quo unsustainable or intolerable into an anti-European posture. That is the political dynamic that makes the disintegration of the European Union just as self-reinforcing as its creation has been. That is the political bubble I was talking about.

He has a unique point of view that’s well worth listening to. He says the Germans have three months and then it will be too late.

*It must gall the Masters of the Universe to no end to hear him talk about what really drives markets. Let’s just say it isn’t their ineffable brilliance. And that’s coming from a real Master of the Universe.

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It’s All About Taste


by tristero

What is it about we Americans that makes eating for pleasure such a doggone difficult concept to wrap our little Cotton Mather heads around?

In the case of this article, the issue is framed completely wrong. It may very well be the case that too little salt will harm you. And it may very well also be the case that too much salt will harm you. The studies are all pretty inconclusive and who on earth knows what the next one will say, when they control for some brand-new confounding variable?

Meanwhile, there’s a very simple way to get exactly the right amount of salt in your diet.

Make and eat real food, not processed garbage, and salt it until it tastes good to you. That’s it. You’ll get  as much salt as you need and no more. Because the real issue at play here is that too little salt often leaves good food tasting bland while too much salt makes good food taste terrible.

In fact, with all real food, it’s about how it tastes, not whether it’s “good”for you. All that most of us really need to know about nutrition was neatly summarized in the first sentence of Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food, namely:

But for some reason, Americans still insist on “eating for health” instead of for pleasure. And that all but provokes an inevitable reaction: too many of us keep on mistaking pleasurable foods for processed garbage with lethal amounts of salt, sugar, and who-the-hell-knows-what-else in them. It creates a deadly dichotomy. One side leads to deadly dull meals; the other is simply deadly.

The fact we gorge on garbage and the fact we think the alternative is to focus on health – both of these strike me as very weird. As I see it, it’s all about taste and understanding what “tastes good”means. It’s an attitude that puts pleasure first, not Puritanism and its opposite.

Village denial

by digby

If you need proof that the Village consensus exists, just ponder the fact that this is the only Sunday show that has booked these two highly respected, establishment political theorists:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

These aren’t crazy partisan bloggers or talk radio hosts flogging ghost written books. These are people who are usually all over the TV with their projects talking to the likes of Andrea Mitchell and Fareed Zakaria and Charlie Rose and Wolf Blitzer. They have sterling reputations and have always been taken seriously.

This time: crickets. They can’t get booked.

Anyway, the above discussion is good, as is this piece by Chris Mooney who is getting much the same reaction from the Villagers for his new book The Republican Brain: The Science of Why They Deny Science–and Reality. He explains:

The so-called “mainstream” media—the CNNs of the world—have shied away from the subject.

What’s up with this? Well, a book with conclusions closely related to mine—Norman Ornstein’s and Thomas Mann’s It’s Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided With the New Politics of Extremism —seems as though it is being handled similarly by some in the press. And perhaps there’s a reason: Centrist (aka “mainstream”) journalists might well prefer that the findings of these books not be true.

You see, if I’m wrong, then the press can happily go on doing what it has always done: Splitting the difference between the political left and the political right, and employing “on the one hand, on the other hand” treatments that presume we’re all equally biased, all equally self-interested…just in different directions.

The trouble is, I’ve presented a substantial body of scientific evidence suggesting that this simply isn’t the case. More specifically, the science I’ve presented suggests that the political right and left are quite different animals; that they perceive the world differently and handle evidence differently; and most importantly, that the polarization and the denial of science in modern American politics are fundamentally the fault of the authoritarian right. (Mann and Ornstein argue something very similar about today’s Republican Party.)

In other words, if my book is right, we have to discard much that we thought we knew about politics. If the science of political ideology is right, then the ground shifts beneath us.

It is very natural, then, that a lot of people—centrist journalists perhaps most of all–don’t want to accept what I’m saying. The problem is, where is the scientific counterargument to what I’m saying?

There isn’t one, I’m afraid. And that makes the he said/she said/both sides do it Villagers very uncomfortable. So uncomfortable, in fact, that they are figuratively putting their fingers in their ears and singing “tell me lies, tell me lies, tell me sweet little lies”.

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Next stop Mt Rushmore

by digby

by digby

Here’s a fascinating piece by Ryan Louis Cooper about the failure of the elites. He features this mindblowing video of Paul Krugman and some British conservatives (you should watch the whole thing) and observes:

I’m reminded of 2010-2011, where Obama and his team made a “pivot” to concentrating on debt and deficits that was, from an intellectual or political standpoint, utterly boneheaded.

The whole political discourse these days is strongly reminiscent of the Great Depression years. Herbert Hoover presided over three years of disastrous economic failure, but went round saying things like:

Nothing is more important than balancing the budget with the least increase in taxes. The Federal Government should be in such position that it will need issue no securities which increase the public debt after the beginning of the next fiscal year, July 1. That is vital to the still further promotion of employment and agriculture. It gives positive assurance to business and industry that the Government will keep out of the money market and allow industry and agriculture to borrow the monies required for the conduct of business.

It wasn’t just an institutional problem with Hoover. All the institutional incentives were lined up for him to fix the depression; he didn’t, and as a result was utterly crushed at the polls in 1932. He was captured by an ideology that prevented him from operating in his own political self-interest. The same goes for most of the political elites in Europe, and Obama to a lesser extent. (Hoover deserves a bit more of an excuse, I suppose, in that there wasn’t much of an economic consensus back in his day, but given how conservatives are prone to quoting his ideas nearly verbatim today I reckon even if Paul Krugman had been around back in 1930 Hoover would have done the same things.)

Oh, you know it. In fact, it seems as though the elite consensus response to this lesser Depression is to try to vindicate him.

The whole piece is good and I agree with him. There is something about the groupthink among elites that makes them at the very least, hidebound if not just plain dumb. But I do have to take small exception to one thing. There was no pivot, at least in the sense that it was something they hadn’t planned well before.

January 11, 2009, 9 days before the inauguration:

I asked the president-elect, “At the end of the day, are you really talking about over the course of your campaign some kind of grand bargain? That you have tax reform, healthcare reform, entitlement reform including Social Security and Medicare, where everybody in the country is going to have to sacrifice something, accept change for the greater good?”

“Yes,” Obama said.

“And when will that get done?” I asked.

“Well, right now, I’m focused on a pretty heavy lift, which is making sure we get that reinvestment and recovery package in place. But what you described is exactly what we’re going to have to do. What we have to do is to take a look at our structural deficit, how are we paying for government? What are we getting for it? And how do we make the system more efficient?”

“And eventually sacrifice from everyone?” I asked.

“Everybody’s going to have give. Everybody’s going to have to have some skin the game,” Obama said.

I know I keep saying this, but I think it’s important. The problem wasn’t that the administration was undisciplined. It was that it was too rigid and refused to change course when the economy didn’t respond as they had hoped. They just carried on with the plan, I’m assuming because they believed it would be Morning in America by 2012 and the country would be thrilled with the grown-ups in the room who revived the economy and “fixed” entitlements all in one term. Next stop Mt Rushmore.

That didn’t happen, obviously. And if President Obama wins re-election (which I am now convinced is not entirely assured) I can see little evidence that we’ll get off this merry-go-round. We are unfortunately still in an economic trough (much of it because of the “pivot” to spending cuts at all levels of government) and headed for yet another Grand Bargain negotiation after the election. If Romney is elected I assume they’ll speed up the ride.

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Imagine

by tristero

Ross Douthat has an op-ed today entitled “Imagining a Romney Recovery.” Hmm… That’s mighty hard to imagine. About as hard to imagine as Ross Douthat writing a sensible op-ed.

Snake handlers

by digby

First they reversed the ban on guns in houses of worship. Now this. I’d say it’s getting downright life threatening to go to church:

Andrew Hamblin’s Facebook page is filled with snippets of his life.

Making a late-night run to Taco Bell.

Watching SpongeBob on the couch with his kids.

Handling rattlesnakes in church.

Hamblin, 21, pastor of Tabernacle Church of God in LaFollette, Tenn., is part of a new generation of serpent-handling Christians who are revitalizing a century-old faith tradition in Tennessee.

While older serpent handlers were wary of outsiders, these younger believers welcome visitors and use Facebook to promote their often misunderstood — and illegal — version of Christianity. They want to show the beauty and power of their extreme form of spirituality. And they hope eventually to reverse a state ban on handling snakes in church.

Since the early 1900s, a handful of true believers in East Tennessee and other parts of Appalachia have practiced the so-called signs of the gospel, found in a little-known passage in the King James Version of the Gospel of Mark:

“And these signs shall follow them that believe; In my name shall they cast out devils; they shall speak with new tongues; They shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them; they shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover.”

While other churches ignore this passage or treat it metaphorically, serpent handlers follow it literally. Their intense faith demands sinless living and rewards them with spiritual ecstasy — the chance to hold life and death in their hands.

Brother Micah Golden felt it first while standing in the parking lot with other worshippers, waiting for church to start during a three-day revival in early May. It began with a tingling in his hands that spread over his body. Then he began to moan and pray.

“There’s still an anointing from heaven. … Glory to God,” shouted the 22-year-old convert, holding the first syllable of “Glory” out for 10 or 12 seconds and stomping his feet. “He’ll still let you do the signs of God.”

Then he flipped the lid of a small wooden box by his feet and pulled out three Southern copperheads, all entwined together.

Golden lifted them about his head, then swung them back and forth in front of him before handing them to Hamblin, who took the snakes in one hand and lifted the other in prayer.

Other men took out timber rattlers, putting one hand by the midsection, the other by the head and neck. They held the serpents up in front of their faces, almost staring them in the eyes for a moment, then lowered them down and up in a gently swinging motion. The snakes began winding and unwinding in their hands, forked tongues tasting the air, trying to get their bearings.

Women standing nearby raised their hands in prayer and wept.

Hamblin began to preach about Jesus: “The same man that walked upon the water, he said, ‘They shall take up serpents.’… There’s a realness in the signs of God.”

That led to a cascade of prayers as the whole crowd began to speak in tongues. Then the shouts died down and Hamblin and other worshippers started a procession toward the door.

“Come on, people, let’s go have church,” he said.

Hamblin and other handlers say the Bible tells people to obey the law. So he wears a seat belt while driving, obeys the speed limit and files his taxes on time.

But he won’t give up serpent handling, which he says is a command from God — even though Tennessee outlawed it in 1947 after five people died of serpent bites at churches in two years.

Breaking the law can lead to a fine of $50 to $150 or up to six months in jail. The ban is rarely enforced, unless someone dies in a church.

Read the whole article. It delves into the history of this religious rite and it’s quite interesting. I’m inclined to think these people have a right to kill themselves with snake bites if they want to, although it would seem wrong to put kids in harms way since they don’t have any choice in the matter. But I wonder if the Religious Liberty lobby will take up for them. It seems to me that this is much more of a reasonable case than demanding that hospitals owned by religious institutions not be required to allow insurance companies to offer contraception. This goes right to the heart of their worship rituals. Somehow I don’t think the Catholic Bishops are quite as interested in this sort of religious liberty, however. They seem to be specifically concerned with vaginal-Americans and the alleged misuse of their wombs. Odd religious practices such as this one don’t really interest them.

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Infuriating centrists

by David Atkins

Being immersed in politics can be a difficult thing. It can be very easy to fall into the trap of believing that the ends justify the means, particularly when so much is at stake. Politicians can become dehumanized by activists, seen only as the tools for effectuating public policy, rather than as the mix of good and flawed people they really are. Good-natured political discussions with less politically savvy people start to become increasingly impossible. I felt that DougJ at Balloon Juice was channeling my feelings exactly when he wrote last night of his inability to maintain social protocol when confronted at a party with a typical centrist gasbag:

About halfway through dinner, he started in on politics, about how the two sides didn’t talk to each other enough and how Obama was an idiot, though he didn’t like Romney either, both sides do it. He was a bit aggressive and asked how many of us had actually watched the Republican debates enough to judge the candidates, were we just repeating stuff we heard in the big hippie echo chamber (he didn’t use those works, obviously). I told him I had watched nearly all of them, so I had some evidence to back up my opinion—that Romney’s not a great politician, so Obama may win even in a weak economy. Then he said something about extremists on both sides. I turned and said to my friend, I think under my breath, but people might have heard “see, I knew this guy was an idiot” (he’d already said a lot of stupid, verifiably untrue things about wine and American history which I’d disproved to him via my Wikipedia earlier in the evening).

This happens to me a lot, where I act in a socially inappropriate way when people say really dumb things about politics. It’s not a right/left thing, mind you, I probably lose it more with Burkean moderates than with anyone else.

How do you people deal with this? I feel like I’ve tried everything, from leaving the room to cool off, to having another drink, to trying to change the topic, but nothing works. Either I do something inappropriate or I sit there stewing all night.

It paralleled an experience I’ve had in the last couple of days with a person who happens to be the editor in chief of the local Ventura County “alternative weekly,” the VC Reporter. This weekly trends liberal on most social issues (especially the drug war, as most alt weeklies do) but on economics and the horserace of politics it tends to be decidedly centrist or even libertarian. Its chief editor is a woman named Michael Sullivan, her editorial instincts tending distinctly toward that center-left-leaning pseudo-intellectual plateau of the NPR tote bag wearing crowd, the sort who view Thomas Friedman as a profound thinker, respect David Brooks as a “reasonable” conservative, and believe wholeheartedly that the problem with modern politics is that it is too “hyperpartisan.” The sort of people who sigh in condescension at Rachel Maddow and Rush Limbaugh alike, as if they were somehow equivalent crazies at polar ends of some artificial political spectrum bounded purely by the arbitrary sensibilities of American politics.

You may recall my writing about local centrist austerity-friendly candidates before, including oil, tobacco, and insurance-backed State Senate candidate Jason Hodge, and former Republican “independent” candidate for Congress Linda Parks. Well, the VC Reporter, our “alt weekly,” endorsed Jason Hodge (prompting the local firefighter union to falsely claim he had been endorsed by the local paper of record, the VC Star), and its editor Michael Sullivan has been quite friendly to Linda Parks, including writing a blog post decrying how very mean local Democrats were being to her, closing thus:

Linda, you must be bold in who you are and what you represent or you will throw this race to the dogs.
Ventura County Democrats sending out those mailers, take the higher road for once this election and knock off the bullying tactics. It’s not only not working, but I think it is working against you. And it’s shameful that a political party that I thought watched out for the underdogs of society are actually being the ones to attack them.

It takes a special kind of delusion to believe that an ambitious, former Republican, austerity-obsessed County Supervisor making six figures a year with a healthy pension is somehow the “underdog of society”, as opposed to, say, the actual underdogs of society whose meager benefits Linda Parks would cut. As I responded to her:

That said, the VCReporter’s journalistic integrity is certainly an open question. This week all the letters to the editor about the race were pro-Parks, a clear attempt to sway the election. There is a near weekly column from conservative Paul Moomjeam, with no real counterbalance from the left. Hyper-libertarian Shane Solano is given space to rant with a lengthy LTE almost every week, beyond rhyme or reason.

I’m sure the VC Reporter’s audience would find it very curious that in a Congressional race, the “alternative weekly” supports a centrist candidate who supports the Bush tax cuts for the rich, raising the retirement age for Social Security, and focusing on cutting $4 trillion from the deficit on the backs of the middle class to please Wall Street. Opposing such a centrist austerity candidate is the very definition of standing up for the underdogs of society.

Linda Parks isn’t an underdog of society. The people whose meager benefits she wants to cut are.

Ventura County deserves an alternative weekly that represents the views and interests of its readership, not the delicate sensibilities of its editors.

Now, I suppose that in most polite circles this sort of response would make me an asshole unfit for the cocktail party circuit, an ideologue who doesn’t care about the nice media people’s personal feelings. And she played it accordingly, with lines such as:

Politics shouldn’t be based on how you can hurt others and put others down, but rather, how you and your candidates can stand on their own achievements and ideas. It’s all about integrity…My blog, though I am on staff at the VCReporter, is my PERSONAL opinion (I write in all caps only to emphasize my point). It’s not representative of the VCReporter. And per this post, you can see this is about MY personal experience in life. Not as an editor, not as a writer, but as a human being. Somehow, this race has taken the human out of being.

So sometimes I step back and ask myself, like DougJ did: am I out of line? Am I losing my humanity? But then I remember the millions of Americans out of work, the disaster that austerity has become on the European continent, and horrid consequences that will befall millions more if candidates like Hodge and Parks win office. And I recall that, despite the sharpness of my language, I haven’t told a single lie or verbally abused anyone.

And then I realize it. No, I’m not crazy, and I’m not an asshole. The people who sit comfortably in their upper middle-class existences, drinking wine and eating brie while pontificating about how politicians should just play nice with each other on the road to “sensible shared sacrifice”–those are the assholes. And they always will be, no matter how delicately phrased and sugared their words may be.

And in many ways they’re worse than Republicans, because at least with a Republican one knows what one is dealing with, and one can fight them toe-to-toe. But the pearl-clutching centrist, on the other hand, is actually worse: they’re the ones who actively marginalize the champions of the dispossessed and allow the rapacious Right to continue its pillage unimpeded while calling for greater civility from the victims.

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