brainiac conspiracy

Slaves, Southerners and Psychotics

This heartwarming quote has been circulating like mad all over the Interwebs this weekend, and I thought it a good jumping-off point for a post today.

In this country, we had slavery for God knows how long. And now we look back on it and we say "How brave were they? What was the matter with them? You know, I can't believe, you know, four million slaves. This is incredible." And we're right, we're right. We should look back on that with criticism. It is a crushing mark on America's soul. And yet today, half of all black children are aborted. Half of all black children are aborted. Far more of the African American community is being devastated by the policies of today than were being devastated by the policies of slavery. And I think, What does it take to get us to wake up?

Now, I'm not sure this guy, and other Fetus for Jesus™ concern trolls like him, really has a really coherent political strategy here. I mean, more dead unborn Negro babies = fewer future ACORN volunteers = fewer future registered Democrats. So why discourage the coloreds from aborting even more babies?

Unless he's proposing we bring back slavery instead, that is.

On a related note, Doug J at Balloon Juice links to this insightful essay by Jon Rauch, which argues that the emergence of Sarah Palin as a national leader confirms that the GOP has transformed itself from the Party of Goldwater to the Party of Wallace:

First, with the important exception of race, not one of Wallace's central themes, from his bristling nationalism and his court-bashing to his anti-intellectualism and his aggressive provincialism, would seem out of place at any major Republican gathering today.

Second, and again leaving race aside, any Republican politician who publicly renounced the Wallace playbook would be finished as a national leader.

Third, by becoming George Wallace's party, the GOP is abandoning rather than embracing conservatism, and it is thereby mortgaging both its integrity and its political future. Wallaceism was not sufficiently mainstream or coherent to sustain a national party in 1968, and the same is true today.

Conservatism is wary of extremism and rage and anti-intellectualism, of demagoguery and incoherent revolutionary rhetoric. Wallace was a right-wing populist, not a conservative. The rise of his brand of pseudo-conservatism in Republican circles should alarm anyone who cares about the genuine article.

I think this is generally spot-on, though I think we should recall that a fair amount of Barry Goldwater's appeal lay in his own peculiar "small-government" philosophy, which differed from that of Northern Republicans in its objections to federal enforcement of civil rights legislation, the passing of so-called "open housing" laws, and (later, as was the case with Wallace), court-mandated school desegregation---all latent appeals to white resentment. It's no accident, I think, that the only states that Goldwater won outside of his home state of Arizona were all former members of the Old Confederacy. George Wallace may have risen to prominence and power by blatantly appealing to the racist vote in the early '60s, but Goldwater's brand of conservatism simply provided a kinder, friendlier branding to the same noxious message: post-Goldwater conservatives weren't racists, and objected violently to discrimination based on race, color, or creed. They simply objected to empowering the government to actually do anything to correct the institutional biases that racism engendered and perpetuated. It was a rhetorical stance that differed from Wallace's only by degree, and it's one that to which Republicans still hew closely today. Wallace himself took the cue as well, and soft-pedaled the race-baiting in '68 and '72 in favor of railing against Eastern cultural elites who sought impose their egalitarian ideals on an unwilling populace.

Besides, how else is a party that has been as thoroughly dedicated to waging, and repeatedly losing, an ideological war against modernity---as the Republicans have since Franklin Roosevelt's time---to continue to exist as a relevant political organism in a post-industrial age, other than to eventually resort to a baser, less sophisticated politics of class-based, race-based, and culture-based populism? When you've lost one substantive policy debate after another over the past 75 years---over Social Security, over civil rights, over collective bargaining, over the United Nations, over Medicare, over environmental and worker safety laws---how can you continue to resort to policy-based arguments to advance your party's agenda? When several consecutive generations of Americans have repeatedly rejected your most dearly held policy prescriptions, what other political card in the deck do you have to play? When appeals to reason repeatedly fall on deaf ears, what else to fall back on but a politics based on anger, fear and resentment?

Hence the rise of Palin and a Teabagged GOP, a hopeless philosophical muddle of pseudo-Reaganite populism, Randian economics, social Darwinism, and Christianist-neocon foreign policy. The way I see it, the party of Goldwater is the party of Wallace is the party of Palin. There is no ideological dichotomy at play here: the current state of Republican politics in America is the inevitable by-product of a conservative movement that sees the American ideal preserved in amber in the form of Tocqueville's long-vanished agrarian paradise; which has worked laboriously to convince itself that such an original state of American exceptionalism can somehow be restored; and which as a result has now descended into a kind of collective psychosis at the unconscious realization that most Americans' perceptions of government, and of its role in people's everyday lives, has largely passed them by. Standing athwart history, yelling for a return to the 19th century for the last fifty years while denying the utter impossibility of the recurrence, will do that sort of thing to you.

Put it this way: You could just as well plead for the return of the Victrola, the surrey and the kerosene lamp as symbolic means to promote a simpler, more virtuous life. Which might be perfectly fine in theory, but you'll drive yourself crazy waiting for it to ever happen. And when it doesn't, you're going to start looking for people to blame. That's today's GOP in a nut: A dying institution looking for scapegoats to account for its myriad historical failures.

---Vitelius

Jim Crow Laws Were Exceptional, Too

Via Matt Yglesias, a case study in the intellectual bankruptcy the lies at the heart of modern conservatism.

The Left’s search for a foreign template to graft onto America grew more desperate. Why couldn’t we be more like them —- like the French, like the Swedes, like the Danes? Like any people with a larger and busier government overawing the private sector and civil society? You can see it in Sicko, wherein Michael Moore extols the British national health-care system, the French way of life, and even the munificence of Cuba; you can hear it in all the admonitions from left-wing commentators that every other advanced society has government child care, or gun control, or mass transit, or whatever socialistic program or other infringement on our liberty we have had the wisdom to reject for decades.

Where do these lunkheads think the Europeans got the inspiration for their wretched mass transit systems? Benito Mussolini?

The origin of the tramway can be traced back to the plateways used in mines and quarries to ease the passage of horse-drawn wagons, but the first street tramway in a city was the New York and Harlem line of 1832, coining the American term still used today, street railway. Remarkably the world's second horse tramway, in New Orleans (1835), is still in use for electric cars today, after over 150 years of continuous service.

American promoters brought the tramway to Europe, Paris in 1853 and Birkenhead in England in 1860, followed by London in 1861 and Copenhagen in 1863.

You really have to wonder what these American exceptionalists like Ponnuru and Lowry would have made, had they been alive at the time, of such costly public works projects such as the Transcontinental Railroad or the Erie Canal. Actually, we don't have to guess at all:

[W]e can hardly appreciate the duties of the early builders. The nation was young and its monetary resources small. Our whole state had but one-eighth of the population of New York City to-day. To the great majority of the people canals were only a name. Engineering was an unknown profession in America, and of contractors there were none. Excavating machinery was still to be invented, and the track of the canal was an unbroken forest or a miasmal marsh. To add to the difficulties, sectional prejudices were developed, the older and more influential East fearing to compete with the developing grain industry of western New York. The men to champion this cause were necessarily of a strong and determined character, and such as to incite the political antagonism which arrayed itself against the project. The conservative, as ever, were fearful lest it were, as Jefferson said, a century too soon, and lest the State should become bankrupt by the undertaking.

Say, wasn't the Interstate Highway System inspired by . . . Hitler's autobahn? Oh, the tyranny!

[T]he autobahn provided an opportunity for what today would be called a European scanning tour. The tour was inspired by reports that the autobahn's concrete pavements were superior to those in America. To determine the truth of such claims, Chief MacDonald dispatched two of his top engineers, F. H. Jackson and Harold Allen, to Germany. Their goal was to determine how the pavements were superior and "what features of German design and construction practice, if any, can be adopted with profit by American engineers."

In partitioned post-war Germany, they needed help from the Road Research Laboratory of Great Britain in making arrangements for their 28-day study tour July 15 to August 11, 1947). Ten days were taken up with securing clearances, making arrangements, and conducting interviews. But in the remaining 18 days, they traveled 1,600 kilometers of autobahn motorways, mostly in the American and British Zones. Driving speeds averaged about 55 km/hr with frequent stops to examine soil conditions, the quality of concrete, and structural failures.

Jackson and Allen found that the concrete pavements were generally free of structural defects but that comparisons with concrete pavements in the United States were difficult because of the "comparatively small amount of heavy truck traffic" on the German roads and Germany's comparatively mild climate. Nevertheless, Jackson and Allen recommended research into ways of reducing the maximum size of coarse aggregate and compacting pavement concrete by mechanical means, as well as how concrete is affected by variations in the chemical composition of cements and the methods of manufacturing cements.

As this early scanning tour suggests, post-war America was in no mood to settle for second best in the highway war. In 1956, America finally claimed victory with the launching of the Interstate Highway Program under President Eisenhower. The United States appeared to have a permanent claim to victory in the highway war with Europe. This coup de grace was, after all, the greatest public works project in history.

In retrospect, that was a rather "exceptional" achievement, wouldn't you think?

Damon Linker provides the takedown of this Exceptionalist crap at TNR:

If Lowry and Ponnuru merely wished to trace the origins of several influential strands of economic and political thinking in American history—--the strands that the modern conservative movement has woven into a politically potent ideological tapestry—--the story they tell would be unobjectionable, if a little quirky in its emphases. But that is not their aim at all. What Lowry and Ponnuru want to accomplish is something far more pernicious--—namely, to relegate contrary voices in our national narrative to the periphery of our history, and perhaps even to read them out of our history altogether.

It’s a very old ideological trick--—one that conservatives have mastered over the past several decades. From Allan Bloom blaming the campus violence of the 1960s on Heidegger’s Rektoratsrede to Sarah Palin’s twangy tributes to the folksy wisdom of average Americans, it has been deployed in various idioms for various purposes over the years. But the picture it presents is always the same. On one side of an unbridgeable divide stand true Americans, devoted to God and country, liberty and virtue; on the other is an insidious assortment of liberals, leftists, radicals, secularists, and foreigners. Yes, foreigners. At its most effective, the narrative has always traced the origins of national corruption not to an aspect of American history or culture but rather to the influence of harmful foreign ideas.

Ironic, isn't it? that this excoriation of foreign ideas is coming from someone whose father was a Hindu? Even more awesomely:

After graduating from Shawnee Mission East High School at the age of 15, he went to Princeton University, where he earned an B.A. in history and graduated summa cum laude.

Which I guess is proof that you can receive a first-rate, Ivy-League education in America, and still emerge from the experience as dumb as a rock. Now that's exceptional.

---Vitelius

Lies, Damned Lies, and Suskind Syndrome

I didn’t watch the healthcare summit yesterday. Like many bloggers, I have a regular day job that unfortunately doesn't allow me the time or resources to stream eight hours of video from my workstation, and I’m not sure I would have had the stomach for it, even if I’d had the time. Ezra did, however, and he sums up its underlying significance this way:

[W]hat you can say today is demonstrating is that there's a sharp contrast in the philosophies on display: Democrats believe the federal government is capable of writing and implementing legislation that will take a big step forward on a hard problem. Republicans believe government doesn't have that capability, and shouldn't try. There's no real compromise available between those two position, but they're philosophies that the American people can choose between.

I think Ezra’s being a bit too kind here. Republicans actually do believe in the power of government to solve all sorts of hard problems---like relieving the tax burden of wealthy Americans, or deciding to invade a foreign country that poses no threat to us, or deciding to intervene in the private affairs of terminally ill/brain-dead medical patients---when they’re in charge of the government. They really don’t believe, as much as they say they do, that “government is the problem.” To Republicans of the post-Reagan era, government is only a serious problem (a) when government is actually trying to undertake an initiative to promote the general welfare of its citizens, as with Congressional Democrats' healthcare proposals, or (b) when Republicans don’t have the power to steer government policy in a direction to their liking. Which is, primarily, transforming the federal bureaucracy into giant money-laundering operation to reward your friends, and using the police power of the state to punish enemies.

A bit later, a reader of Ezra’s blog wonders if he isn't confusing philosophy with politics.

From a policy perspective, Republicans really shouldn't like this plan. If you leave decision-making in the hands of the patient (through deductibles, copays, unregulated insurance, increasing uninsured) health care costs will slow and free choice will prevail. Mortality will increase, but that's because the purchaser valued something higher than the treatment. It's a horrible, heartless argument, but more coherent than acknowledged.

Exactly. Why shouldn’t Republicans---and deficit hawks of all stripes, for that matter--like the GOP alternative? It pretty much sums up Republican legislative strategy of the past 30 years. Package something with a catchy phrase or talking point that sounds empowering to consumers---like, say, “empowering” patients by “unleashing the creativity of the private sector” ---then watch them cobble up legislation that disempowers the majority of patients and rewards monopolistic business practices. That’s how they’ve pretty much rolled since Ronaldus Magnus was Pope president. And why would Republicans care about increasing mortality rates, anyway? To the greatest extent, most people in America who die from lack of healthcare coverage, or under-coverage, are poor people---a voter demographic the Republican Party hasn’t given a shit about since Theodore Roosevelt was president. More prematurely dead poor people = bad for ACORN voter registration drives = awesome for America!

And just to prove that Republicans don’t really believe in leaving any important decision in the hands of patients: yes, I know they placed a big emphasis on the primacy of “patient-centered” over “government-mandated” healthcare policy in the summit yesterday, but what do these same Republicans have to offer to those same “patients” who wake up one morning after undergoing surgery to discover a pair of forceps floating around in their stitched-up abdominal cavity, or who become permanently maimed or disabled as a result of botched surgeries, or who die on the operating table from an overdose of anaesthesia, or an infusion of infected blood? Tort reform. I did manage to catch a few minutes of Tom Coburn's spiel on the radio yesterday morning, and I swear, this guy digressed in only five minutes from discussing the urgency of delivering "patient-driven" healthcare to the urgent need to prevent patients from ever seeking redress from negligent physicians, HMOs or pharmaceutical companies under the banner of "malpractice reform," and nobody seemed to notice the obvious contradiction.

Which speaks, I think, to a less obvious, but equally pervasive, condition of the contemporary conservative psyche, a certain cognitive disorder we might refer to as Suskind Syndrome, in honor of the reporter whose famous New York Times essay from 2002 in which he quoted this anonymous Bush White House staffer on the current make-up of reality and consistency in Republican Party politics:

The aide said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." ... "That's not the way the world really works anymore," he continued. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."

I think that's key to what's not only happening in the healthcare debate, but in the greater collective psyche of American conservatives right now. Think about it: conservatives have devoted so much mental and rhetorical energy over the past ten years creating and re-creating alternative realities on the fly for the benefit of Drudge, Fox News, the ring-wing radio auxiliary, and their millions of acolytes---sometimes contradicting themselves on a daily basis simply to score political points over a nightly news cycle---they just don't realize on a conscious level anymore when they're making shit up. It has become almost reflexive with these people, an unconscious defense mechanism they employ when confronted by cold, hard and immutable facts that don't conform to their own ever-changing perceptions of reality---the kind of facts that President Obama continually hurls back in their faces, sometimes compassionately and sometimes dismissively. It's one thing to pull this kind of manipulative flimflam for a two-yar election cycle or two on folks whose votes you're seeking, but when you start to believe your own self-contradicting bullshit and can no longer differentiate yourself psychologically from it because it's become a full-time, ever-shifting method of interpretation you use to imbue meaning to the political events of the day, you end up with what passes for conservative leadership in this country: A bunch of seemingly sensible policymakers who can't see to help but utter the most incomprehensible and self-negating gibberish every time they open their mouths. These guys have spent so much time lying to the voters for the last ten years, they can no longer tell when they're lying to themselves.

Either way, while we can agree that Republican obstructionism isn't really rooted in any kind of coherent philosophy of governance, I really wonder at this point if it isn't as much a function of psychopathology as of politics.

Of course, this is not to say that this form of collective disconnect isn't good news for conservatives anyway, because in our current Beltway media culture, it almost always is.

---Vitelius

Random Thought of The Day

Amazing, isn't it? How our Wise Men in Washington can get so excised over an automaker whose business practices might have led to a few people getting killed, yet they can't seem to summon the strength to ruffle the feathers of another company whose business practices have literally ruined the lives of millions. Priorities, baby.

---Vitelius

But Does He Read The Protocols of Zion?

This is totally awesome: the rubber-hose brigade over the The Corner is about to run one of its strongest candidates for a US Senate seat this fall right out of the California Republican primary:

When asked his opinion on the status of Jerusalem, Campbell opined that both Israel and Palestine should claim Jerusalem as their capital.

“Jerusalem is the capital of Israel, but it’s wrong to say it can’t also be the capital of Palestine.”

Alluding to President Bill Clinton’s comment that he is considering moving the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem, he stated, “In order to be helpful to the peace process, an intermediary shouldn’t criticize just one side” . . .

“The people of Palestine should have a nation and they should be able to trade with Jordan and I voiced this opinion on the House floor,” he said. “Conditions in Gaza are dehumanizing, particularly the cattle runs Gazans must walk through to exit or enter Gaza.”

The horror! To suggest that Israel abide by longstanding UN resolutions. To put it into perspective here in California:

If the election were held today, no GOP candidate could defeat Boxer, the poll shows. Campbell is closest, 10 points behind the three-term Democrat.

In the wake of Brown's upset victory Tuesday over Democrat Martha Coakley in Massachusetts, the California poll appears to indicate the influence of the 1 in 5 California voters who are independents.

"A moderate candidate like Campbell ... could actually cut into the support that Boxer gets among nonpartisans to a greater extent than Fiorina or DeVore," Field Poll director Mark DiCamillo said of the findings. "And if that's where the battle is going to be waged, he'd be the stronger candidate."

Already, however, the knives are out:

Campbell told Arafat He Was the
"First American to have shed blood in your country"

You know what that really means . . .

Stop Tom Campbell: Pan-Jihadist in
California U.S. Senate Race (Support Chuck DeVore)

And of course, no policy discussion that involves Israel can escape the notice of the perspicacious pundits at Podhoretzland:

I am hard pressed to remember any member of Congress who targeted Israel’s aid to cut, voted the wrong way in an overwhelming bipartisan vote on Jerusalem, supported Hamas terrorist Sami Al-Aryian and others convicted of supporting Islamic Jihad terrorists – even appearing at rallies with Al-Aryian and others as the spewed their anti-Israel bile, took campaign cash from them, wrote letters on Al Ariyan’s behalf, spoke at CAIR events – a group notoriously hostile to Israel and which is at the heart of the Muslim Brotherhood’s efforts in America, and publicly supports Alison Weir – lately a purveyor of the organ harvesting blood libel against Israel. That is quite a public record. Now maybe Tom Campbell has become more pro-Israel than the Chief Rabbi on Minsk, but that would truly be the world’s most miraculous conversion. The facts are the facts. Mr. Campbell’s record speaks for itself and no amount of lipstik [sic] can pretty up this pig.

Got that? One of the few California Republicans who has demonstrated any ability to draw votes from independents and Democrats statewide, i.e., to win statewide elections, is about to get himself royally Bagged, and possibly defeated in the upcoming June primary, over his insufficient fealty to the expansionist policies of the government of Israel. I know a lot of these crazies have got themselves convinced that they're on the cusp of a conservative renaissance only a year into Obama's first term, but you really have to wonder, when they're devoting so much time sandbagging proven vote-getters within their midst like Tom Campbell and Charlie Crist, if they're not really setting themselves up for 1964 redux a couple of years hence. But they, and we, will find out soon enough.

---Vitelius

Why Does The Surge Architect Hate America?

Okay, which wingnut will be the first to go ballistic today over the Stan McChrystal Apology Tour?

The commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan went on national television Tuesday to apologize for a deadly airstrike, an extraordinary attempt to regain Afghans' trust while a mass offensive continues against the Taliban in the south.

Two U.S. Marine battalions, accompanied by Afghan troops, pushing from the north and south of the insurgent stronghold of Marjah finally linked up after more than a week, creating a direct route across the town that allows convoys to supply ammunition and reinforcements.

In a video translated into the Afghan languages of Dari and Pashto and broadcast on Afghan television, a stern Gen. Stanley McChrystal apologized for the strike in central Uruzgan province that Afghan officials say killed at least 21 people. The video was also posted on a NATO Web site.

"I pledge to strengthen our efforts to regain your trust to build a brighter future for all Afghans," McChrystal said in the video. "I have instituted a thorough investigation to prevent this from happening again."

Whoever goes off first will likely blame it on the hidden hand of Obama, or Rahm, or the Chicago Way™. And while I still think that these targeted strikes are still a highly questionable tactic to win any kind of war (let alone Afghan hearts and minds), I suppose McChrystal's mea culpa is the best way to limit the fallout that's bound to ensue. Chalk one up for good intentions, whatever they're worth in a theater of combat.

---Vitelius

Maybe That Was a Pygmy Pony I Saw

Andy Sullivan assesses this survey from attendees of the 2010 CPAC conference, and sees the mother of all Trojan Ponies in the room:

No one -- sorry, Maggie -- put forcibly divorcing me and my husband as their first choice. And why the hell should they? It's an absurd priority in a country facing this level of crisis. I think they're too glib about the healthcare crisis in this country and too callous with respect to those facing real distress or bankruptcy or neglect in their health. But overall, a GOP devoted above all to reducing the role of government and attacking government spending through cutting entitlements for wealthier seniors, and ending an unaffordable empire, would bring me back into
the fold . . .

This is the next generation. They give me hope.

One wonders exactly what conference Andy was watching last weekend: A thoughtful and nuanced series of panel discussions on the conservative response to the challenges of globalization, post-industrialization and climate change in a post-American century? Gee, I must've missed that one.

What I saw was a series of rabid and inchoate speeches that railed for Obama to produce his birth certificate, declared progressivism a "cancer" in need of excising from the body politic, and cheered for torture when an old-line libertarian conservative (Bob Barr) dared speak out against it. Of course these people are in favor of shrinking the size of government. Why? Because Democrats are running it. Of course they want to reduce government spending---because Glenn Beck tells them it's the only way to bankrupt ACORN, that's why.

Does Andy think these people are really so laissez-faire about marriage equality simply because the "gay marriage" line-item ranks so low on the Bircher priority list? Put it this way: when these people get done "shrinking the size of government" and decide to abolish the civil rights division at the Justice Department as an intolerable infringement on states' rights, who's going to be around to defend his gay brothers and sisters when the Southern states decide to start passing anti-sodomy laws again? Who's going to sue in federal court if Mississippi or Alabama decides to start indefinitely quarantining people with AIDS? It had better be the ACLU, because it sure as hell won't be the federal government----or a lot of state governments too, for that matter, if the Birchers ever ascend to the pinnacles of power.

I swear, Sullivan seems so desperate sometimes in his search for principled American conservatives that he fails to recognize that in this day and age, in our country and culture, the terms "principled" and "conservative" are mutually exclusive by definition. Does Andy really think this crowd contemplates the policy particulars of "cutting entitlements for wealthier seniors"? These people want to abolish Social Security altogether. As well as the Department of Education, the Department of Energy, the Department of Health and Human Services, the federal food stamp program, the federal school lunch program, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. And they have wanted to do these things for decades.

The take-away from CPAC? Know insanity.

Oh, and this photo must have been from another conference also too:

---Vitelius

And You Thought A Confederacy of DuncesWas Only a Work of Fiction

The battle for Florida's Eighth Congressional District should by all measures be a bellwether election this fall. Charlie Cook rates it a red-leaning toss-up, and one would think that the voters of an rural-trending-exurban district that went solidly for Bush in 2000 and 2004 would be unlikely to re-elect their freshman firebrand Democratic representative, the irrepressible (and irreplaceable) Alan Grayson, who narrowly won election in 2008 on the strength of Obama's landslide win in Florida.

But that was then---before the Teabag Ascendency. Here is Alan Grayson's likely opponent come November. Note the meticulous and thoughtful articulation of issues related to the economy and health care, and the masterful command of policy. Also too:

Totally, like amazingly, utterly awesome.

And yes, somehow I know this is sad, unfortunate, very bad news for Democrats.

Now, suburban and exurban districts, even in solid Blue states, have been known to elect sheer imbeciles to Congress in the recent past (see: Bachmann, Michelle), so taking nothing for granted, you can donate to Alan Grayson here.

---Vitelius

This Ought to Make Beck's Head Explode

Again . . .

Yes people, it's another example of socialist tyranny. One they ever-so-slyly tried to glide beneath the radar last Friday: it's . . . it's . . . a government takeover of our supermarkets!!!

The Obama Administration today released details of an over $400 million Healthy Food Financing Initiative, which will bring grocery stores and other healthy food retailers to underserved urban and rural communities across America. The initiative was announced today in Philadelphia by Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack. The two cabinet members appeared with First Lady Michelle Obama, who recently launched the Let's Move! campaign to solve the epidemic of childhood obesity within a generation. The initiative is a partnership between the Departments of Treasury, Agriculture, and Health and Human Services.

The Healthy Food Financing Initiative will promote a range of interventions that expand access to nutritious foods, including developing and equipping grocery stores and other small businesses and retailers selling healthy food in communities that currently lack these options. Residents of these communities, which are sometimes called "food deserts" and are often found in economically distressed areas, are typically served by fast food restaurants and convenience stores that offer little or no fresh produce. Lack of healthy, affordable food options can lead to higher levels of obesity and other diet-related diseases, such as diabetes, heart disease, and cancer.

Through this new multi-year Healthy Food Financing Initiative and by engaging with the private sector, the Obama Administration will work to eliminate food deserts across the country within seven years.

A seven-year plan, hmmmm? An Obama version of the Great Leap Forward? Why, pretty soon, people, they're going to be mandating arugula consumption. And banning Big Macs. And double-double animal style? Punishable by imprisonment. And once they've taken away all your guns, people, what's to stop them? This is the Chicago way, folks, wake up!

• The Treasury Department will support private sector financing of healthy foods options in distressed urban and rural communities. Through the New Markets Tax Credit (NMTC) and financial assistance to Treasury-certified community development financial institutions (CDFIs), Treasury has a proven track record in expanding access to nutritious foods by catalyzing private sector investment. The Healthy Foods Financing Initiative builds on that track record, with $250 million in authority for the NMTC and $25 million for financial assistance to CDFIs devoted to helping finance healthy food options. Treasury's CDFI Fund has a long history of supporting these kinds of investments, including: providing funding for the landmark Pennsylvania Fresh Food Financing Initiative that has brought 68 grocery stores to underserved communities; the Roberts Fresh Market, a full-service supermarket in an underserved area of New Orleans that was devastated by Hurricane Katrina; and a new Super Giant in Washington, D.C., the only grocery store in the Anacostia neighborhood and now one of Giant's most successful stores.

• The Department of Agriculture specializes in improving access to healthy foods through nutrition assistance programs, creating business opportunities for America's farmers, and promoting economic development in rural areas. USDA's proposed funding level of $50 million will support more than $150 million in public and private investments in the form of loans, grants, promotion, and other programs that can provide financial and technical assistance to enhance access to healthy foods in under-served communities, expand demand and retail outlets for farm products, and increase the availability of locally and regionally produced foods. USDA has a solid track record of supporting successful farmers markets, and has also invested in grocery stores and creating agricultural supply chains for them, such as in the People's Grocery project in Oakland, CA.

Now, now . . . wait a minute. Did you catch that, folks? The People's Grocery project? Hmmmm, now where have we seen that kind of labeling before? I'm just sayin'.

• The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) specializes in community-based efforts to improve the economic and physical health of people in distressed areas. HHS will dedicate up to $20 million in Community Economic Development program funds to the Healthy Food Financing Initiative. Through the CED program, HHS will award competitive grants to Community Development Corporations to support projects that finance grocery stores, farmers markets, and other sources of fresh nutritious food. These projects will serve the dual purposes of facilitating access to healthy food options while creating job and business development opportunities in low-income communities, particularly since grocery stores often serve as anchor institutions in commercial centers. HHS has supported fresh food projects in the past, such as the Plaza del Valle in Panorama City, CA.

Snark aside, while $400 million for a project this ambitious is really just a drop in the salad bowl---and it's a tiny faction of what we dole out in subsidies to culinary crapmasters like Smithfield and Cargill every year---it's still a laudable first step. I'm only surprised to see a guy like Geithner taking time out from his regular job buying up worthless mortgage-securities at face value at Treasury to make an appearance on behalf of such a tangentially relevant project. Maybe he's been marginalized within the administration, or maybe he's on the way out? One can only hope.

Meanwhile, if you want to find out if you live in a "food desert," click here to access this cool interactive map. And read that Heritage report I linked to above. It's a few years old, and while the statistics may have changed somewhat, the reality underlying its findings hasn't changed much at all. It may be the first and last time I ever link to an essay from them, but it's well worth pondering because basically, they're right. Federal farm subsidies are horribly misplaced, and another example of a government-enabled, supply-side solution that simply doesn't work. A few billion more dedicated to stimulating the demand (consumer) side would be a most welcome tonic, but at least the administration has recognized the problems of inadequate and unequal food distribution in America, and has started to do something about it.

And be sure to watch the usual wingnuts going berserk over the prospect of an Obama "food czar."

---Vitelius

Gonna Party Like It's 1899

There's nothing like a little eliminationist rhetoric to gird the loins of the Bagger faithful:

Glenn Beck, a hero of the political right and the closing speaker at a conference of political conservatives here, offered a sweeping denunciation of progressivism on Saturday, calling it a cancer that must be cut out of the nation’s political system.

Blaming President Obama for the nation’s problems was “too simple an answer,” Mr. Beck, a popular conservative talk show host, told thousands of cheering supporters at the annual meeting of the Conservative Political Action Conference. The real problem, he said, is progressivism, scrawling the word with chalk on a portable blackboard, a prop from his television show. “This is the disease in America,” he said.

This really is rich. A guy who claims to defend the Constitution, which allows for freedom of political speech and association, simultaneously argues that certain types of political speech and association must be abolished to save the Constitution. From what, exactly---itself?

One wonders, as I have for years, what elements of the so-called "progressive agenda" people like Beck find so objectionable.

We pledge ourselves to work unceasingly in State and Nation for:

Effective legislation looking to the prevention of industrial accidents, occupational diseases, overwork, involuntary unemployment, and other injurous effects incident to modern industry;

The fixing of minimum safety and health standards for the various occupations, and the exercise of the public authority of State and Nation, including the Federal Control over interstate commerce, and the taxing power, to maintain such standards;

The prohibition of child labor;

Minimum wage standards for working women, to provide a "living wage" in all industrial occupations;

The general prohibition of night work for women and the establishment of an eight hour day for women and young persons;

One day's rest in seven for all wage workers;

The eight hour day in continuous twenty-four hour industries;

The abolition of the convict contract labor system; substituting a system of prison production for governmental consumption only; and the application of prisoners' earnings to the support of their dependent families;

Publicity as to wages, hours and conditions of labor; full reports upon industrial accidents and diseases, and the opening to public inspection of all tallies, weights, measures and check systems on labor products;

Standards of compensation for death by industrial accident and injury and trade disease which will transfer the burden of lost earnings from the families of working people to the industry, and thus to the community;

The protection of home life against the hazards of sickness, irregular employment and old age through the adoption of a system of social insurance adapted to American use;

The development of the creative labor power of America by lifting the last load of illiteracy from American youth and establishing continuation schools for industrial education under public control and encouraging agricultural education and demonstration in rural schools;

The establishment of industrial research laboratories to put the methods and discoveries of science at the service of American producers.

So, let's see: Government funding for scientific research, an eight-hour work day, worker safety and compensation laws, the abolition of child labor, and a federal minimum wage. And, oh yeah, Social Security. Pretty subversive stuff, if you ask me.

We favor the union of all the existing agencies of the Federal Government dealing with the public health into a single national health service without discrimination against or for any one set of therapeutic methods, school of medicine, or school of healing with such additional powers as may be necessary to enable it to perform efficiently such duties in the protection of the public from preventable diseases as may be properly undertaken by the Federal authorities, including the executing of existing laws regarding pure food, quarantine and cognate subjects, the promotion of vital statistics and the extension of the registration area of such statistics, and co-operation with the health activities of the various States and cities of the Nation.

National health insurance?!? The horror!!

We therefore demand a strong National regulation of inter-State corporations. The corporation is an essential part of modern business. The concentration of modem business, in some degree, is both inevitable and necessary for national and international business efficiency. But the existing concentration of vast wealth under a corporate system, unguarded and uncontrolled by the Nation, has placed in the hands of a few men enormous, secret, irresponsible power over the daily life of the citizen?a power insufferable in a free Government and certain of abuse.

This power has been abused, in monopoly of National resources, in stock watering, in unfair competition and unfair privileges, and finally in sinister influences on the public agencies of State and Nation. We do not fear commercial power, but we insist that it shall be exercised openly, under publicity, supervision and regulation of the most efficient sort, which will preserve its good while eradicating and preventing its ill.

To that end we urge the establishment of a strong Federal administrative commission of high standing, which shall maintain permanent active supervision over industrial corporations engaged in inter-State commerce, or such of them as are of public importance, doing for them what the Government now does for the National banks, and what is now done for the railroads by the Inter-State Commerce Commission.

Such a commission must enforce the complete publicity of those corporation transactions which are of public interest; must attack unfair competition, false capitalization and special privilege, and by continuous trained watchfulness guard and keep open equally all the highways of American commerce.

Thus the business man will have certain knowledge of the law, and will be able to conduct his business easily in conformity therewith; the investor will find security for his capital; dividends will be rendered more certain, and the savings of the people will be drawn naturally and safely into the channels of trade.

We favor strengthening the Sherman Law by prohibiting agreement to divide territory or limit output; refusing to sell to customers who buy from business rivals; to sell below cost in certain areas while maintaining higher prices in other places; using the power of transportation to aid or injure special business concerns; and other unfair trade practices.

A federal commission to guard against "false capitalization" of markets? There certainly hasn't been a need for anything like that kind of liberal tyranny lately, huh.

Putting this "cancerous" movement into perspective:

Although Republicans of the day cast the Progressives as radicals, in truth they were teachers and lawyers, farmers and small-town folk, urban reformers of every ilk, crusaders for peace and women's suffrage, champions of the little guy. They were less a movement than a catch basin for civic-minded men and women impatient with politics as usual but a bit frightened of Eugene V. Debs and his Socialist Party. While many Progressives could not see past their pet causes, [Theoodore Roosevelt] managed to bring them together in a big tent held aloft by the idea that the government, which ought to serve the people, had been hijacked by special interests. "To destroy this invisible government, to dissolve the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics is the first task of the statesmanship of the day," the Progressive platform declared.

A brief for a strong Federal Government, the Progressive platform was so far ahead of its time on many points (Social Security and the minimum wage, for example) that it would take a generation and another Roosevelt, T.R.'s fifth cousin Franklin, to bring them into being. In hopes of protecting the investing public from swindlers, the Progressives called for federal regulation of stock offerings and fuller disclosure of corporate financial transactions, ideas that found their way into the creation of the Securities and Exchange Commission in 1934.

Just once, I'd love to see people like Glenn Beck be just a little bit honest with their audience, and remind them of all the freedoms, perks and privileges they've earned over the past 75 years that they'd have to give up if they really wanted to eliminate all vestiges of the progressive agenda from the American political landscape. Then again, that would be asking people like Glenn Beck to treat their audiences as if they were mature adults who are capable of rational thought. One suspects that Beck has come to the conclusion that such gestures of honesty would be a fool's errand, that a great deal of his audience is utterly, even willfully ignorant of its nation's history, and proud to stay that way as long as people like Glenn Beck continue to provide them with the assurance and vindication that their fragile white-male egos so desperately crave in the face of an increasingly diverse and multicultural Republic. The hungry Bobos get their slabs of raw meat, the Republican Party gets a fresh infusion of party activists, and cranks like Glenn Beck laugh all the way to the bank. How any of these developments work to the benefit of the commonweal in the long run, I am at a loss to explain.

---Vitelius

Another of Life's Mysteries Explained

Q: When is a guy who uses an airplane as an incendiary device to blow up a building as an act of political resistance not a suicide bomber, i.e., a terrorist?

A: When he's a white guy who's got a beef with the IRS.

And even more awesomely, you can even bust a gut over the whole darn thing while they're still clearing away the rubble in Austin!

At the CPAC conference, Human Events editor Jed Babbin introduced Grover Norquist, the top anti-tax conservative activist in the country. During his introduction, Babbin joked about the recent airplane attack on an IRS building in Texas, which reportedly killed both the alleged perpetrator and a person who was in the building.

"And let me just say, I'm really happy to see Grover today," said Babbin. "He was getting a little testy in the past couple of weeks. And I was just really, really glad that it was not him identified as flying that airplane into the IRS building."

Classiness, thy name is Baggery. Also too.

---Vitelius

The Bipartisanship of Torture

Republicans perpetrate, and Democrats enable. Kinda like everything else that went down for the last ten years. The Friday-night news dump, Obama-style:

Justice Department lawyers showed "poor judgment" but did not commit professional misconduct when they authorized CIA interrogators to use waterboarding and other harsh tactics at the height of the U.S. war on terrorism, an internal review released Friday found.

The decision closes the book on one of the major lingering investigations into the counterterrorism policies of George W. Bush's administration. President Barack Obama campaigned on abolishing the simulated drowning technique of waterboarding and other tactics that he called torture, but he left open the question of whether anyone would be punished for authorizing such methods.

Well, now it's official. Nobody will.

An initial review by the Justice Department's internal affairs unit found that former government lawyers Jay Bybee and John Yoo had committed professional misconduct, a conclusion that could have cost them their law licenses. But the Justice Department's top career lawyer reviewed the matter and disagreed.

"This decision should not be viewed as an endorsement of the legal work that underlies those memoranda," Assistant Deputy Attorney General David Margolis wrote in a memo released Friday.

Margolis, the most senior nonpolitical Justice Department lawyer and a veteran of several administrations, called the legal memos "flawed" and said that, at every opportunity, they gave the interrogators as much leeway as possible under U.S. torture laws. But he said Yoo and Bybee were not reckless and did not knowingly give incorrect advice, the standard for misconduct.

Yoo is now a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and Bybee is a federal judge. The decision spares them any immediate sanctions, though state bar associations could independently take up the matter.

The memos authorized CIA detainees to use waterboarding, keep detainees naked, hold them in painful standing positions and keep them in the cold for long periods of time. Other techniques included depriving them of solid food and slapping them. Sleep deprivation, prolonged shackling and threats to a detainee's family were also used.

But slapping, waterboarding and sleep deprivation, all acknowledged as acts of torture under US law, are not even signs of "professional misconduct". Now, I know there's a legitimate reason why (a) I am a registered Democrat, and (b) why I voted for Obama, but at the moment, I am at a loss to explain what that reason exactly is.

And I guess poor Eric Holder merely misspoke at his own confirmation hearings. Either that, or he lied under oath. What other explanations can there possibly be?

We will rue the day we allowed this to happen in our name. If not today, then sometime down the road. Proud to be an American? Not so much today, I'm afraid.

---Vitelius

The Awesomeness of Austerity Programs

The spiral continues ever downward:

Under pressure to act decisively, the Los Angeles City Council reversed itself on Thursday and ordered the elimination of 4,000 municipal jobs.

The proposal, approved on a 9-3 vote, surprised and dismayed some union leaders because it moved beyond Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa's call for 1,000 layoffs this year, and his warning that 2,000 additional jobs could be cut next year.

The council had previously resisted Villaraigosa's calls for immediate action. However, it faced new pressure Wednesday when a Wall Street rating firm lowered its view of the city's financial outlook.

"I think people got the sense of urgency," said Councilman Bernard Parks, who chairs the Budget and Finance Committee and has supported Villaraigosa's call for job cuts. "We finally have a date and time in which to take action."

The council instructed its staff to begin identifying the jobs - which could include police and fire personnel - to be vacated to help Los Angeles tackle its financial problems.

The city faces a $212 million shortfall by June 30 and a projected $484 million deficit in fiscal year 2010-11 . . .

On Wednesday, Moody's Investor Services cautioned it was moving Los Angeles from a stable to negative outlook as it watches to see how the city addresses its budget problems.

Villaraigosa, at an event before the council vote Thursday, continued to press for action.

"The Moody's letter speaks for itself," Villaraigosa said. "It is not a downgrade, but it is very clear that if we don't work quickly and decisively to make the tough decisions to reduce our payroll, we will be downgraded."

God forbid we wouldn't to be downgraded by these impartial arbiters of financial rectitide:

Since the subprime mortgage troubles exploded into a full-blown financial crisis last year, the three top credit-rating agencies — Moody’s, Standard & Poor’s and Fitch Ratings — have faced a firestorm of criticism about whether their rosy ratings of mortgage securities generated billions of dollars in losses to investors who relied on them.

The agencies are supposed to help investors evaluate the risk of what they are buying. But some former employees and many investors say the agencies, which were paid far more to rate complicated mortgage-related securities than to assess more traditional debt, either underestimated the risk of mortgage debt or simply overlooked its danger so they could rake in large profits during the housing boom.

A Moody’s spokesman, Anthony Mirenda, said the company would not change ratings without substantive reasons. “As a matter of policy, Moody’s is obligated to reconvene a rating committee if there is new information put forth by an issuer that could have a material impact on a security’s creditworthiness,” he said, “and our policies prohibit changes to ratings for anything other than credit considerations.”

He added that “Moody’s knows of no instances in which a reconvened rating committee resulted in improper changes to ratings on Countrywide securities.”

Riiiiiiiiight.

And on and on it goes. Windfall profits and record bonuses for the purveyors of toxic loan-backed securities and the agencies they pay to rate their investments, and union-busting austerity programs for the rest of us. But Naomi Klien doesn't know what the hell she is talking about, and the The Shock Doctrine is just a bunch of hateful anti-capitalist cant. We might as well be living in Athens today.

---Vitelius

Truth is Booty. Booty is Truth

In honor of today's totally awesome CPAC Conference, an at-a-glance Guide to Galtism. The entire Web page is equally hilarious, but if you've ever read---or, like me, struggled to get through the first 100 pages of---The Fountainhead or Atlas without laughing out loud or tossing the book in the trash-masher, this pretty much sums it up.

---Vitelius

Odds and Ends

Today at the Post, the normally steadfast and resolute EJ Dionne gets little panicky:

The two immediate causes for this state of affairs are a single election result in Massachusetts and the way the United States Senate operates. What's not responsible is the supposed failure of Obama and the Democrats to govern as "moderates." Pause to consider where we would be if a Democrat had won the Massachusetts Senate race last month. In all likelihood, health reform would be law, Democrats could have moved on to economic matters, and Obama would be seen as shrewd and successful.

But that's not what happened, and Republican Scott Brown's victory revealed real weaknesses on the progressive side: an Obama political apparatus asleep at the switch, huge Republican enthusiasm unmatched by Democratic determination, and a focused conservative campaign to discredit Obama's ideas, notably his economic stimulus plan and the health-care bill.

Okay, what if a Democrat had won the special election in Massachusetts? We'd have 60 votes instead of 59, and Presidents Lieberman,Nelson, Baucus and Lincoln would have merrily continued the process of spaying and neutering an already-bad healthcare reform bill in a joint conference---just as they did during the procedural wrangling that led up to the passage of the all-too-sucky Senate bill. Is there any guarantee that the more liberal House would have agreed to the final conference report? Is there any guarantee that a 60-vote Democratic Senate would have passed a palatable secondary reconciliation bill to fix up the mess they created the first time around?

From what I can see, the election of Scott Brown changed absolutely nothing. Yes, it was an electoral slap in the face to a lazy and complacent Democratic Party in Massachusetts, and yes, it revealed a White House caught uncharacteristically off-guard and lacking a Plan B to deal with the setback. But Democrats still have the biggest Congressional majorities in three decades, and the process known as budget reconciliation to pass any bills they damn well like with only 50 Senate votes plus Joe Biden at the gavel. The Scott Brown fiasco simply gave an already-eviscerated and weak-kneed Senate Democratic leadership a ready excuse to shrug their shoulders and say, "We can't do anything folks, 'cuz we can't find 60 magic ponies in the barn. And what was that you said about 'budget reconciliation' again?"

Democrats aren't losing because of Republican obstructionism, or because of tea Party insurgencies---Democrats are losing, if indeed they are at all, because their appointed leaders are refusing to lead. If you sat on the board of a Fortune 500 company, and your CEO complained that your corporation was losing market share because all of your competitors were taking market share away from him and he was powerless to do anything about it, what would you do? You'd fire his ass for failing to produce. And that's what the voters will do in November if our Democratic CEOs on Capitol Hill try pulling the same self-explicating stunt. Voters, like shareholders, expect results, and when they don't get them, they change executive leadership. It's simple as that. Now pass. The. Damn. Bill, and show the shareholders some tangible results instead of cobbling up convenient excuses du jour like Scott Brown to rationalize away your own passivity.

Also too, apparently a group of Tier 1 bloggers were invited to a private confab at he White House the other day (for some reason, the Baron is still not on the A-list). Much of the discussions revolved around the success (or perceived lack of same) of the stimulus package. Atrios, who was there, notes:

Anyway, they're trying to turn around public opinion on the stimulus bill. They see it as a good thing, which obviously it was, and think the public should see it that way too. The thing is, while the stimulus was a very good thing relative to a world without a stimulus, it's hard to do much happy talk about it when their own estimates have unemployment remaining very high for quite some time. And they're not willing to make the case that they'd like to do, or would've liked to do, more but political reality wouldn't let them.

Jesus. That's a winning strategy for sure.

Didn't the last eight years teach these people anything? You want political reality? Simple---create one of your own that you can manage, and manipulate, to sell the rightness of your agenda to the American people. Rightly or wrongly, that's just how the game is played nowadays.

What that means is fewer of ultimately bloodless videos like this (though it's perfectly fine, for what it's worth) and more of the Unitary Salesman rolling up his sleeves and hitting the road, selling the benefits of the stimulus package, one shovel-ready project at a time, in every damn Congressional district that's gotten federal stimulus dough. Just imagine the political and PR gains to be reaped by sending out the Obamas on a two-week whistle-stop tour, state by state, project by project, by passenger rail---just like Woodrow and FDR and Give 'Em Hell Harry used to do. And come to think of it, it might even make a perfect vehicle to extol the benefits of high-speed rail, too.

---Vitelius

The Day I Became a Republican Apparatchik

Like anyone else who tries to maintain a blog, sometimes it's a challenge to come up with fresh material every day.

Other times, though, rich and ripe material shows up on your doorstep. Or, in my case today, my mailbox. The Baron actually received a mail-in survey from the National Republican Congressional Committee! How awesome is that?

Now, I have no freaking idea in the world how these guys managed to pick my name out of their push-polling hat. With a direct-mail operation that's as finely tuned as this one, maybe that's why they're a minority party these days.

The survey came in a very official-looking envelope with the words "National Referendum" printed on its front. Inside was a letter addressed to "Dear Fellow American" on Minority Leader Boehner's letterhead, along with a two-page survey, which I am happy to share with you now.

1. Should Nancy Pelosi be replaced as Speaker of the House?
º Yes
º No
º Undecided

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: no single word in the English language gets these people foaming at the mouth more quickly than "Pelosi." Not even "Obama."

2. As a representative of Los Angeles, do you think Nancy Pelosi's liberal views are out of step with the majority of voters?
º Yes
º No
º Unecided

God, are these people stupid. I live in Los Angeles, not Pelosi. My Congressman's Henry Waxman, who frankly would make an even better House Speaker than Pelosi, but I digress.

3. Would you prefer to see a conservative Republican as Speaker of the House, with a new House Republican Majority for the final two years of President Barack Obama's term in the White House?
º Yes
º No
º Undecided

4. In general, do you oppose the way President Obama has governed during his first year in office?
º Yes
º No
º Undecided

5. Do you believe that the Democrats' proposals for a government takeover of our health care system would make things worse for you and your family?
º Yes
º No
º Undecided

They're not too keen on nuance, these guys, are they.

6. Speaker Pelosi forced legislation for a national energy tax (called "cap and trade") through the House of Representatives on a narrow vote. White House studies show this would drive up energy costs more than $1,700 for families in Los Angeles. Do you oppose the new energy tax?
º Yes
º No
º Undecided

Hey, wait a minute. I thought it was more like three grand for every family. Oh well, guess a dollar doesn't buy what it used to back in '09.

7. The Democrats' own budget projections indicate we will have annual deficits of one trillion dollars for several years. Do you believe that one-party Democrat rule in Washington has led to too much federal spending?
º Yes
º No
º Undecided

Man oh man,amnesia's a bitch, ain't it?

8. Do you agree with Obama's plan to reduce unemployment by crating government jobs which will only add to the taxpayer burden and result in continued economic struggles?
º Yes
º No
º Undecided

9. Many states are suffering from 10% unemployment rates or above, and we need small businesses to lead the way in job creation. Do you think Democrat proposals to raise taxes on small businesses would do even more damage to job creation?
º Yes
º No
º Undecided

The tenth question is a donation hustle. This is followed by a Bonus Question ("for NRCC members only"), in which we are asked to rate the following issues as suitable talking points for the upcoming mid-terms:

º Abortion
º Border security
º Budget/spending
º Terrorism/security
º Energy/environment
º Health care
º Jobs/economy
º Judges
º Second Amendment
º Lower taxes
º Other

What, no Homosexual Agenda? Who forgot that one?

And what about Intelligent Design? Ya slippin', Johnny.

Boy oh boy, if John Boehner and the NRCC are the least bit worried about a Tea Party putsch, you sure couldn't tell from this survey. Perhaps they see it as their ticket to reclaiming both houses of Congress next year. And while it might indeed accomplish that, it could also claim a fair amount of collateral damage and finally finish the job, begun by the Birch brigade 50-odd years ago, of transforming the Party of Lincoln into the National Front. At which point it becomes everybody's headache.

Still, I am sending back the survey, appropriately marked: Pelosi = Obama = ACORN = Al Qaida. But no donation, sorry to say, Mr. Boehner. See, I've been unemployed for the last four years since Katrina washed my small business away, and a tax cut for a guy makin' zero dollars a year is still zero, and that's my story and I'm stickin' to it.

---Vitelius

Gotta-Read of the Day: Rodeo Clown Edition

Over at Hullabaloo today, Tristero channels Drum on the Tea Party movement:

If you think these folks have a serious chance at building a movement, this piece is pretty scary. But if you think they're such obvious cranks that they'll never be able to organize beyond the PTA level, it's actually a bit of a relief. I'm mostly in the latter camp. What's more, if writer David Barstow is right, their energy is largely driven by hard times. Once the recession starts to abate, they're going to lose a lot of steam.

Tristero responds:

What I would give for Kevin's optimistic personality and his lack of paranoia!

But I see no signs that this will go away. What I see is that the so-called Tea Party movement has enabled hitherto marginalized extremists - the militia crazies, the Birchers, the New World Order freaks - to move much closer to the center of public discourse.

Now, for what it's worth, I tend to gravitate toward Kevin's side of the argument here, that much of the Tea Party rage currently roiling through flyover country is largely a symptom of economic discontent that will dissipate to a great degree when the jobs return, and I've written as much in the recent past. I've also noted the ultimate futility of a political movement that lacks any discernible leadership structure:

You can build a personality cult with a Facebook page, but you can't run a serious campaign for national office that way.

On the other hand, there's one name that keeps popping up in the Barstow piece in the Times today that gives me reason for pause:

Mrs. Stout said she awoke to see Washington as a threat, a place where crisis is manipulated--even manufactured--by both parties to grab
power . . .

Worried about hyperinflation, social unrest or even martial law, she and her Tea Party members joined a coalition, Friends for Liberty, that includes representatives from Glenn Beck’s 9/12 Project, the John Birch Society, and Oath Keepers, a new player in a resurgent militia movement.

And again here:

They are frequently led by political neophytes who prize independence and tell strikingly similar stories of having been awakened by the recession. Their families upended by lost jobs, foreclosed homes and depleted retirement funds, they said they wanted to know why it happened and whom to blame.

That is often the point when Tea Party supporters say they began listening to Glenn Beck. With his guidance, they explored the Federalist Papers, exposés on the Federal Reserve, the work of Ayn Rand and George Orwell.

And again here:

Until the recession, Mr. Stevens, 33, had poured his energies into his family and his business installing wireless networks. He had to lay off employees, and he struggled to pay credit cards, a home equity loan, even his taxes. “It hits you physically when you start getting the calls,” he said.

He discovered Glenn Beck, and began to think of Washington as a conspiracy to fleece the little guy. “I had no clue that my country was being taken from me,” Mr. Stevens explained. He could not understand why his progressive friends did not see what he saw.

He felt compelled to do something, so he decided to start a chapter of Mr. Beck’s 9/12 Project. He reserved a room at a pizza parlor for a Glenn Beck viewing party and posted the event on Craigslist. “We had 110 people there,” Mr. Stevens said. He recalled looking around the room and thinking, “All these people — they agree with me.”

This is what should give us at least some cause for concern: The apparent fact that a significant plurality of self-styled Tea Party members seek enlightenment and guidance not in the deranged rantings of, say, an easily marginalized character such as Richard Butler, but in the occult revelations of a guy who hosts a nightly news show on a national cable TV network. This ain't Alex Jones, whose audience demographic skews heavily towards insomniac conspiracists who lay awake at night brooding over the dastardly workings of the Trilateral Commission---this is a guy who slots into the same respectable time spot as Brian Williams and Anderson Cooper and Chris Matthews: Just another newsman or talk-show host, in other words, with a slightly different slant on the events of the day---but certainly no kook, since kooks, after all, don't merit the kind of prime-time TV exposure that Glenn Beck merits.

Which is what makes the Tea Partiers, if not worrisome, at least a force to be watched, and closely, for as far into the future as we can see. I still believe that much of their anger is temporary and fleeting, class- and race-based, and that much of it will abate when the economy picks up, but Tristero's basically right---as long as these people have a permanent prime-time fixture upon which they can anchor their moorings, they're going to have a political life that supercedes their muddled and incoherent ideology. Of course, a dirty fucking hippie might argue that the very existence of a demagogue such as Glenn Beck on prime-time TV is prima facie evidence for the urgent need to reinstate the Fairness Doctrine, but that's a view that is apparently irrelevant in the new millennium, to be relegated forever to the annals of dirty fucking hippiehood: A relic of the forever-discredited, politically correct, liberal fascist '60s generation of acid, amnesty and abortion that didn't place its ultimate trust in the Free Exchange of Ideas®, brought to you as a public service by the guardians of corporate capital. Silly us for believing a new generation of Democratic leadership would dare to challenge the status quo.

---Vitelius

Unemployment Rates We Can Believe In

One of the most utterly bitchin' things about being on the White House mailing list is all these daily updates I receive telling me about how awesomely our new administration is doing at leading our economy out of the Great Recession and onto the Road to Recovery®. Today's happy talk was highlighted by this progress chart.

How awesome is that? "We Suck Less Than Bush Did" is sure gonna look good on bumper stickers this fall.

For some reason, they haven't sent us this other chart, which kinda like reminds us that the economy "only" shedding 40,000 jobs, or even gaining 4,000 jobs, is still a bad case of net suckiness since the greater economy needs to gain around 150,000 jobs per month just to keep pace with the average monthly increase in the eligible working-age population. So dude, like, where's our WPA?

Okay, we'll settle for a measly Jobs Bill. So where is it, and how awesome is its scope?

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office recently concluded that reducing Social Security taxes for companies that add workers would be among the most efficient ways for the government to create jobs. However, in showing how difficult it is to create jobs through tax policy, CBO estimates that such a tax break would generate only eight to 18 full-time jobs per $1 million in tax breaks.

The Senate proposal, which is more narrow than the one analyzed by CBO, is estimated to cost about $10 billion. That would add 80,000 to 180,000 jobs over the course of a year. The U.S. economy, meanwhile, has lost 8.4 million jobs since the start of the recession.

Nonetheless, supporters say it is cheaper, simpler and less vulnerable to abuse than Obama's plan, which would give a $5,000 tax credit for each new worker that employers hire and cost $33 billion.

Either way, Obama and lawmakers in both parties still could claim tangible accomplishments in addressing high joblessness and the inability of Republicans and Democrats to work together to solve problems, both top issues among voters early in 2010 midterm election season.

Sigh. Still more Republican supply-side solutions, co-opted by deficit-hawk Democrats in an incrementalist gesture of bipartisanship. That approach worked so well for Bill Clinton in the mid-'90s, I'm really glad we're trying it all over again. I realize that the Washington GOP is a Bagged-up mess right now, but I am girding my loins for the distinct possibility of Majority Leader McConnell presiding over the Senate a year from now. And how much fun that's going to be. All in the name of getting a jobs bill passed that won't offend 41 members of the Senate.

---Vitelius

The Awesomeness of False Equivalencies

From normally reliable McClatchy today:

Senate Republicans are using the filibuster to limit and often derail Democrats' initiatives, paralyzing the Senate and making it nearly impossible to accomplish even the most routine matters.

The filibuster strategy "makes the Senate dysfunctional," said Mark Strand , the president of the Congressional Institute , a nonpartisan research group. That, in turn, blocks the Obama administration's agenda, but it also sours public opinion on Washington, with polls showing clear public disdain for Congress in particular. Republicans think voters will reward them for that in November.

However disruptive it is to governance, their extensive use of the filibuster — extended debate to block a decisive vote — could prove to be a valuable campaign asset this fall. Democrats used similar tactics in 2006 and won enough seats to gain a Senate majority. Now Republicans hope it's their turn.

Uhhhh, really?

You don't suppose in any way that Democrats' electoral successes in 2006 had anything to do with Republican attempts to privatize Social Security, a war in Iraq that was spinning hopelessly out of control, or a sitting president fiddling while New Orleans drowned?

Nah, me neither.

Sure, cloture invocations ticked upward during the 2005-2006 Congressional session, but the comparison between what happened then and what is happening now as a simple case of "similar tactics" is sort of like saying that a handful of Predator missile strikes on Taliban strongholds in Waziristan employ "similar tactics" to the fire-bombing of Dresden in World War II. Hey, they were both bombs aimed at our enemies, and they both blew shit up. Same difference, eh?

The fact of the matter is this: Republicans in Congress, unlike any other minority party at any other time in the history of the Republic, are using the filibuster threat and the cloture rule not merely as a lever to influence the course of legislation, but as a substitute for legislation itself. It's a systemic intent to render the institution of the Senate, and the entire federal government, ungovernable by pursuing an agenda of willful inertia. It's not merely about putting the brakes on a few dozen judicial or executive nominations, it's about breaking the federal government itself by preventing the majority party from enacting any legislation whatsoever that the majority of the electorate favors. And there has never been anything like it in the history of the Republic. Not even close.

Sadly, this report all to vividly illustrates the "Democrats do it too" mentality of false equivalencies that has permeated much of the collective psyche of our mainstream political newsmedia. John Cole sums it up:

The weirdest thing about my shift to the left is that as aright-winger, I never felt there was anything to the charges of media bias. I thought the media was relatively fair, and if anything, lazy and insulated. Nowadays, my viewpoint has changed completely. I consistently see one side of the debate shut out and overwhelmed, by both systemic and intentional bias.

---Vitelius

The Fruits of Bipartisan Outreach

Evan Bayh: Quitter.

“For some time, I have had a growing conviction that Congress is not operating as it should,” he said. “There is much too much partisanship and not enough progress. Too much narrow ideology and not enough practical problem solving.”

How to resolve this? If you're a sensible centrist like Evan Bayh, that means you cast your lot with the same bunch of people who don't want to solve any problems at all.

According to analysis by The Times of Mr. Bayh’s voting history, he has voted with a majority of the Democratic caucus roughly 71 percent of the time during the 111th Congress — the lowest percentage of his career. (He has also been the Senate Democrat least likely to vote with the party this Congress.)

Naturally, such a sensible centrist can only be motivated by the high calling of selfless public service. What better way to show it than by quitting on the evening of election season?

"To put it in words most Hoosiers can understand: I love working for the people of Indiana, I love helping our citizens make the most of their lives, but I do not love Congress," Bayh said in the statement he read in Indianapolis announcing his decision.

He also lambasted the acid divide between Democrats and Republicans in Washington, saying, "I am not motivated by strident partisanship or ideology."

Neither is Barack Obama, you son of a bitch. Way to show your support by bailing on his moderate agenda instead of fighting to get it enacted.

Okay, okay. One can only imagine what kind of high-minded business ventures Evan Bayh might pursue down the road:

Yesterday, Sen. Evan Bayh joined his colleague Joe Lieberman in suggesting that he may oppose health-care reform, citing concerns about the deficit. Bayh has long been one of the more conservative members of the Democratic caucus. But is his stance also affected by the fact that his wife has reportedly earned at least $2 million over the last six years as a member of the board of a major health insurer?

Susan Bayh's affiliation with Indianapolis-based WellPoint isn't news. But a new report on TheStreet digs into the details. It also finds that last year, Susan Bayh sat on four other corporate boards, in addition to WellPoint's. She received over $656,0000 in cash and stock for all her board work, around half of which came from WellPoint.

As the site puts it: "Susan Bayh's corporate directorships provide a significant chunk of the Bayh family income."

It's also worth noting that Susan Bayh was a mid-level attorney at Eli Lilly before joining WellPoint's board in 1998, while her husband was governor. That suggests that the company, at least, may have felt that her value lay more in the access she offered to Evan Bayh than in her own accomplishments.

Well, at least a man so dedicated public service such as Evan Bayh will leave his party's rank and file with plenty of time to select a sensible centrist successor:

Because signatures to qualify for the ballot are due Tuesday, no Democrat will formally file -- leaving the seat vacant and allowing the state party apparatus to choose the candidate.

So, to recap: a Democratic trust fund baby thinks that Democrats have become too polarized and too unconcerned with process. So he votes with Republicans more frequently, which makes the process of passing legislation even more unlikely. A guy who'd likely never have gotten elected to anything if his name wasn't Bayh decides he no longer loves the institution that has made him a powerful and influential man. A man whose family has made millions off the suffering and sickness of others feels that he can no longer nobly serve his constituents' interests by voting in favor of healthcare-insurance reform. And a man who is so concerned for his party's future direction, he drops out before any other interested Indiana Democrats can work out their rhetorical chops in a primary season, or raise funds for a general-election battle against a well-known GOP opponent. I'll refrain from using the word "traitor" as I think it's inflammatory and overused, but "creep," "coward" and "amoral sack of shit" seem apropos of the moment. I cannot think of any other Democratic political figure in recent memory not named Lieberman who's ever done anything so underhanded and so obviously intended to undermine his own party's chances for success in the next Congress.

And memo to Obama and Harry Reid: stop wasting time chasing down 60-vote phantoms by catering to a bunch of self-serving and unserious centrists such as Max Baucus and Joe Lieberman and Evan Fucking Bayh. Pollster extraordinaire Nate Silver, on your reward for doing so:

[E]lecting someone slightly to the left of center is usually a win for the liberal party in a slightly-to-the-right-of-center jurisdiction. (Democrats may have gotten somewhat spoiled by the elections of 2006 and 2008, during which they were winning virtually every competitive seat, but that environment no longer holds.) Although Democrats have every reason to continue to fight for Indiana, the odds in the current environment are that a Republican will prevail in the race to replace Bayh and Democrats will go from having an uncertain vote for their agenda to one who almost never aligns with them.

Now is the time to show your respect to Evan Bayh's long years of public service by offering up the proper one-finger salute while you pass. The. Damn. Bill. Now.

---Vitelius