Month: November 2014

Privilege, what privilege?

by digby

The redoubtable Charles Murray reminds us all of the value of having a wife:

I have a beef with the tunnel vision that accompanies the conversation about women staying at home, as if it’s a balancing act between income and child care.

“What’s your schedule today?” I asked my wife a few minutes ago. Today, it starts with a trip into the nearby small city to do volunteer work for the local Literacy Council, which provides free English instruction for immigrants. That’s today. Tomorrow, it will be one of a half-dozen other civic obligations she has chosen to take on. She’s not unusual. In that crucially important reality—she’s not unusual—is something that needs to be front and center when we talk about women who “stay at home.” Better parental care is one of the benefits, but I think the effects on America’s social capital are even more important.

“Social capital” is the academicians’ term for the resource that makes American civil society work. It is organized things like teaching English to immigrants or serving on the town council. It is also the guy who shovels snow from the sidewalk of the old lady who lives alone across the street. It is parents at PTA meetings, church-goers organizing Christmas plays, candy stripers at the local hospital, and neighbors keeping an eye on each other’s houses when no one is home.

The point is that many of the important forms of social capital take more time than a person holding a full-time job can afford. Who has been the primary engine for creating America’s social capital throughout its history, making our civil society one of the sociological wonders of the world? People without full-time jobs. The overwhelming majority of those people have been wives.

Every aspect of family and community life gets an infusion of vitality and depth from wives who are not working full time. If you live in a place that you cherish because “it’s a great community,” think of the things you have in mind that make it a great community (scenery and restaurants don’t count), and then think about who bears the brunt of the load in making those things happen. If you live in a place that is not a community—it’s just a collection of unrelated people, living anonymously, without social capital—think of the reasons why it is not a community. One of the answers will be that no one has spare time for that kind of thing.

I’m not knocking the importance of stay-at-home moms for raising children. I just want us to realize that stay-at-home wives are one of the resources that have made America America.

He does admit that some wives might have to fail their communities and the nation as a whole by going to work. Some will selfishly do it for their own egos. And he mentions in passing that a few silly men might choose to stay home to take the library books back and volunteer at the soup kitchen or the museum with the ladies but notes that almost all of those who will do their duty will be wives, not husbands.

He thinks we should celebrate the stay at home wife. By that he means we should celebrate the upper classes. No surprise there.

By the way, there’s a rather large group of people who don’t work full-time job that do a whole lot of this stuff. They’re called retirees. The group that Murray and his pals always condemn for being on a “30 year vacation”. Maybe we could celebrate them instead.

Just an old fashioned Republican

by digby

If there’s one thing conservatives truly revere and respect, it’s tradition. And nobody is more traditional than Sam Brownback:

The two mad-dog Willie Horton-style killers are still in jail, by the way, they didn’t get “off the hook.” They got life without parole.

This is as bad as it gets. But when a Republican is in trouble, this is their go-to theme. It works with their base. beautifully.

Also note the use of the word “liberal” which is another perennial. Recall this little historical factoid from 1996:

Republican strategist Arthur Finkelstein’s style has been compared to Hollywood’s villainous character, Sose, who was so secretive that some doubted whether he really existed. There has only been one photo of Finkelstein to surface during 20 years of consulting Republican candidates. Even his Westchester County, N.Y., office doesn’t bear his name.

Says Stephen Rodrick of Philadelphia Magazine, “It’s almost to the point of whether or not he really exists. He has all this impact, but no one has ever seen him.”

Sen. Al D’Amato (R-N.Y.) is one who has seen Finkelstein. D’Amato has tapped the mystery man for what may be Finklestein’s biggest challenge yet: helping direct Republican strategy in the 33 Senate races this year.

“Arthur Finkelstein is probably one of the brightest, cutting-edge political scientists I’ve ever met,” said D’Amato.

Scientist, strategist or mystery man, Finkelstein has orchestrated stunning upset victories for many of his clients including Sens. D’Amato and Jesse Helms (R-N.C.), and New York’s Republican Gov. George Pataki. His unseen hand also helped Benjamin Netanyahu oust Shimon Perez in the Israeli elections earlier this year.

Finkelstein’s signature style emerges through the ads he creates. Two recent adds brand Democrats as liberals: “Call liberal Paul Wellstone. Tell him it’s wrong to spend billions more on welfare,” one ad states.

“That’s liberal,” says another. “That’s Jack Reed. That’s wrong. Call liberal Jack Reed and tell him his record on welfare is just too liberal for you.”

“That’s the Finkelstein formula: just brand somebody a liberal, use the word over and over again, engage in that kind of name-calling,” said Democratic consultant Mark Mellman.

Sam Brownback is just an old fashioned Republican. The kind of Republican every gasbag on TV over the past few weeks has been extolling as the kind of Republican we’d like to see in government again.

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Maybe a sort of bluish purple after all

by digby

A tiny piece of hopeful news:

Republican candidate Cory Gardner’s lead over Sen. Mark Udall (D-CO) has shrunk significantly in the final days of the Colorado Senate campaign, a new poll found.

The Quinnipiac University poll released Monday put Gardner up by 2 points, 45 percent to 43 percent. That is down from the 7-point Garnder lead, 46 percent to 39 percent, that the pollster found last week.

Early voting has been underway for weeks and Colorado is undertaking its first all mail-in ballot election. Most polling has found Gardner with a slight edge, and another new poll on Sunday from Democratic firm Public Policy Polling gave him a 3-point lead, 46 percent to 43 percent, over Udall.

The Quinnipiac poll, conducted Oct. 28 to Nov. 2, surveyed 815 likely voters. Its margin of error is 3.4 points.

Colorado is a real purple state and it’s going to swing back and forth, but Udall is a good Senator and it would be nice to see him pull this one out. Civil libertarians are few and far between and we can’t afford to lose them, especially to people who are willing to declare that women don’t have the freedom to control their own reproduction.

We’ll keep our fingers crossed on this one.

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Disqualifying narrative

by digby

So everybody’s pretty well writing Iowa off now, which is too bad:

Just three days before Election Day, Republican Joni Ernst has surged to a 7-point lead in the final Des Moines Register poll of the hotly contested U.S. Senate race in Iowa.

Ernst broke the critical majority threshold in the survey, winning 51 percent to Democrat Bruce Braley’s 44 percent among likely voters, outside the margin of error of plus-or-minus 3.7 percentage points.

I guess we’ll find out in a few hours.

Joni Ernst is right up there with Sharron Angle for Tea partying lunacy but since the Republicans got in there to shape her campaign they’ve managed to keep that under wraps. And I have to agree with Norm Ornstein about why:

Those who follow election coverage in the Post would know something more about Ernst’s opponent, Democratic Representative Bruce Braley. They might know two things, actually, neither of them related to his record in Congress or his positions on vital issues: that Braley and his wife have had run-ins with a neighbor over the neighbor’s chickens coming onto their property, and that Michelle Obama, on a campaign visit for Braley, referred to him as “Bruce Bailey.”

There were no stories saying that references to Agenda 21 might be “disqualifiying.”

A Nexis search shows that the Post has had four references to Ernst and Agenda 21—all by Greg Sargent on his blog from the left, The Plum Line, and none on the news pages of the paper. But there have been dozens of references to Braley’s spat over the neighbor’s chickens, including a front-page story. The New York Times had zero references to Ernst and Agenda 21, but seven, including in a Gail Collins column, to Braley and chickens. The Post did have a fact-check column by Glenn Kessler devoted to the Cotton claims on Mexican drug lords and ISIS terrorists—Cotton did not fare well—but no news stories. The Times did not mention it at all.

Of course, this does not mean that the press has a Republican bias, any more than it had an inherent Democratic bias in 2012 when Akin, Angle, and Mourdock led the coverage. What it suggests is how deeply the eagerness to pick a narrative and stick with it, and to resist stories that contradict the narrative, is embedded in the culture of campaign journalism. The alternative theory, that the Republican establishment won by surrendering its ground to its more ideologically extreme faction, picking candidates who are folksy and have great resumes but whose issue stances are much the same as their radical Tea Party rivals, goes mostly ignored. Meanwhile, there was plenty of coverage of the admittedly bonehead refusal by Kentucky Democratic Senate candidate Alison Lundergan Grimes to say she had voted for Obama—dozens of press references to NBC’s Chuck Todd saying it was “disqualifying”—but no stories saying that references to Agenda 21 or talking about terrorists and drug lords out to kill Arkansans were disqualifying.

Cynical gasbags and Villagers have always loved to mock bloggers and their ilk for their obsession with MSM “narrative” but now that Norm Ornstein’s taken it up maybe they’ll give it some thought. He’s right.

All you have to do is think about the fact hat the host of Meet The Press said it was disqualifying for Alison Lundgren Grimes to dodge the question of whether she voted for Obama while nobody gave a damn that Joni Ernst is an unreconstructed wingnut conspiracy theorist. It wasn’t “nutty Republican” year — they’re tired of that theme and they hate it when the Republicans say they’re in the tank. This year it was “the grown-ups are back” and “everyone hates Obama.” There was no escaping it.

It’s probably the case that the Senate would have changed hands anyway. But it’s less likely that a full blown nutball like Ernst would have become a US Senator. We’ve already got enough of them from the deep red states. Iowa should at least produce a semi-sane Republican.

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You know what you have to do


by Tom Sullivan

It’s Election Day, people. You know what you have to do.

Midterms matter.

Lady Parts Justice

“Everybody but the media is ok”

by digby

What was that they were saying about freedom of the press again? I forgot:

The U.S. government agreed to a police request to restrict more than 37 square miles of airspace surrounding Ferguson, Missouri, for 12 days in August for safety, but audio recordings show that local authorities privately acknowledged the purpose was to keep away news helicopters during violent street protests.

On Aug. 12, the morning after the Federal Aviation Administration imposed the first flight restriction, FAA air traffic managers struggled to redefine the flight ban to let commercial flights operate at nearby Lambert-St. Louis International Airport and police helicopters fly through the area — but ban others.

“They finally admitted it really was to keep the media out,” said one FAA manager about the St. Louis County Police in a series of recorded telephone conversations obtained by The Associated Press. “But they were a little concerned of, obviously, anything else that could be going on.

At another point, a manager at the FAA’s Kansas City center said police “did not care if you ran commercial traffic through this TFR (temporary flight restriction) all day long. They didn’t want media in there.”

FAA procedures for defining a no-fly area did not have an option that would accommodate that.

“There is really … no option for a TFR that says, you know, ‘OK, everybody but the media is OK,’” he said. The managers then worked out wording they felt would keep news helicopters out of the controlled zone but not impede other air traffic.

The FAA insists that it didn’t have a clue. For 12 days.

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And just like that


by Tom Sullivan

Seems like we visited this just this morning …

And just like that, James O’Keefe convinces more rubes they’ve seen proof of a crime wave when they have not:

North Carolina election officials repeatedly offered ballots last week to an impostor who arrived at polling places with the names and addresses of ‘inactive’ voters who hadn’t participated in elections for many years.

No fraudulent votes were actually cast …

Again.

Professional voter fraud frighteners like Hans von Spakovsky and James O’Keefe expect Real Americans™ to believe that while they’re having their Election Day coffee, “Others” are headed to the polls not to do their patriotic and civic duty, no, but to participate in a nationwide crime spree unparalleled in the annals of American criminology.

The Frighteners expect you to believe that thousands, tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of these Others – you know who they mean – go to the polls on Election Day determined instead to commit felonies punishable by up to 5 years in prison and a $10,000 fine for each offense by impersonating dead or fictitious voters. With nothing, nothing to stop them.

Makes you want to rush right out and run stop lights, doesn’t it?

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QOTD: Ben Stein

by digby

Ben Stein:

“What the White House is trying to do is racialize all politics and their especially trying to tell the African American voter that the GOP is against letting them have a chance at a good life in this economy, and that’s just a complete lie. I watch with fascination — with incredible fascination — all the stories about how the Democratic politicians, especially Hillary, are trying to whip up the African-American vote and say, ‘Oh the Republicans have policies against black people in terms of the economy.’ But there are no such policies.”

“It’s all a way to racialize voting in this country. This president is the most racist president there has ever been in America. He is purposely trying to use race to divide Americans.”

You know, Stein has a point. Until Barack Obama came along race never divided this country. We’d better not have any more black presidents. Look what they do …

Working class heroes in their own minds

by digby

If you’re tired of reading about the election (and who isn’t?) here’s a little story I wrote for Salon today about the two greatest working class heroes of our time:

Is there anything more fascinating that listening in on a conversation between a couple of middle aged white millionaires (is there any other kind?) telling each other how wonderful they are? I didn’t think so, which is why I wanted to draw your attention to this scintillating back and forth in Philadelphia Magazine between a couple of men who like to think of themselves as just two regular guys, ex-Governor Ed Rendell and MSNBC’s Chris Matthews.

They first knew each other when Matthews was working for Jimmy Carter and Rendell was backing Teddy Kennedy back in 1980:

CHRIS: Teddy came to town, and he was eating Philly pretzels and meeting with the Cardinal. You could do that in those days. And Carter was in his Rose Garden because of the [Iranian] hostages. And I’m handling Philly. These guys rolled us over.

ED: But we only won by 7,000 votes statewide. It was almost a Pyrrhic victory. Because by the time [the nomination battle] reached New York and Pennsylvania, it was over.

Good times. These two guys adore one another. Which is nice. Except for their politics.

ED: I think you’re gonna have a divided government no matter who wins in ’16. But I would say there are two people in the field who have the ability to maybe bring the Congress together: Hillary on the Democratic side, and Jeb Bush on the Republican side. Part of it, Chris, is just the interpersonal skills. I had a Republican legislature for six of the eight years [I was governor], and yet everything I talked about in the 2002 campaign, we made significant progress on. Because I knew how to sit down and horse-trade.

Villagers and cynics love to mock liberals for “Green lantern-ism” — the notion that the president has more power than he actually does — but the truth is that this centrist twaddle qualifies just as easily. Oddly, Rendell and company rarely get criticized for insisting that the president could have just gotten everyone in a room and knocked some heads together to solve everything once and for all. It’s fair to say that this myth is just as pervasive as the so-called silly liberals’ and it’s believed in much more powerful circles than the comment section of Daily Kos.

Read on for bonus kvelling over Jeb Bush and Mitt Romney. One’s a great conciliator (I don’t know why) and the other is a fine gentleman from old money.

Candy Crowley turns it around

by digby

… on James “divaaahhhn the intent of the voters” Baker*:

CROWLEY: When you look at everything that is pushing against the Democrats at this point — history shows that the party that’s in the White House takes a hit during the midterms, a president with really low approval numbers, they are defending much more territory than Republicans are in the Senate, and much more hostile territory than Republicans are — can an argument not be made that Republicans should be doing a lot better, and why aren’t they?

And look at him sputter:

BAKER: Well, we don’t know how well they’re doing yet.

I mean, the returns — we won’t know that until Tuesday night. They may be doing very well. The polls would indicate that they are. All I’m saying is, you can’t count your chickens until they hatch. And until you know what the turnout’s going to be, you really don’t know.

We really did get beat on the ground in 2012. The Democrats had a far better turnout program than we did, mostly based on social media. So I don’t think that you can take anything for granted.

And I have to tell you, it was my experience in the five presidential campaigns that I led or participated in, the worst thing in the world you can do is assume that you’re going to win and — and not have your ducks in a row.

So I think we have to wait until — until Tuesday night, but I do think we have an excellent chance of picking up the net gain of six seats.

It’s interesting when you spin the narrative in the opposite direction, isn’t it? More reporters should do that.

*For those too young to remember, Baker is famous for saying this about a thousand times during the Florida recount, which makes his comment above all the more interesting:

“How do you divine the intent of the voter on that voting card … with those little punch holes? You’re divining the intent of the voter with respect to whether it has two chads hanging down or whether it’s punched or whether it has an indentation?”

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