brainiac conspiracy

The United States of Somalia

Nobody---well, almost nobody---like to think that this is our Republic's likely future, but when an armed mob can run off a government agency performing its legally appointed rounds . . . well, with a liberal policy establishment that seems so frightened of scaring the sensibilities of a group of insane people, you really have to wonder if things in this country aren't going to get a helluva lot worse before they start to take a turn for the better. I'd love to be proved wrong here, but looking back over the last decade or so, putting your chips on worst-case scenarios has been, as a rule, the least risky play.

---Baron V

Can Sort-Of Understand Why They Did What They Did

I mean, it's a potentially explosive situation out there, and they can't afford to keep an Interstate highway shut down forever, but I still think it's problematic to appease a bunch of right-wing bullies, even if they are packing firepower . If the last five years have taught us anything, it's that giving them what they want is only going to encourage more bullying!

Put another way: these people have been spilling for a fight with Washington since Barack Obama was sworn into office. They want a fight? Give it to them, then, because they will never stop agitating for armed revolt until they have been ground into dust and their lands sown with salt.

---Baron V

Reverse Secession

Your humble blogger will admit to having vicariously booted a number of Southern states---and few out West, too---out of the Union for various awful offenses. Turns out we once threatened to secede from them, but it's not reasonable to think we could do it now, even if we unanimously agreed upon it. See, they have a lot of military bases in those states with lots of shiny hardware, and lots of contractor gravy because their Congressional representatives generally have secure jobs for four or five decades. You can get a lot of looting done given that much time! But the point is, the Southerners will federalize their states' bases, conscript all the enlisted men who are stationed there, and we'd have Civil War 2.0 on our hands, with much more lethal weaponry. We'd probably be capable (as we were before) of starving them to surrender over a period of years, but we'd all likely agree in the end that the war wasn't worth provoking in the first place.

---Baron V

Answering My Own Stupid Question

Not to wax morbid on it, but if something ever happened in this country on the scale of Nairobi, and the decision had been made to call out the heavy artillery and the Special Forces guys, I was wondering if there would be enough Special Forces guys in this country to assist, or are they all stuck over in the Middle East and Africa. Then I remembered that the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 likely precludes them from doing that (engaging in combat on U.S. soil, after all!), and that's a big reason why police forces all over America are becoming increasingly militarized instead. That's unfortunate on two fronts, but the one most relevant here is that the Special Forces guys are specifically trained to deal with terror-hostage scenarios, and most (presumably) are already battle-tested. Most police SWAT teams, on the other hand, have not been battled-tested under such scenarios, so there's real predicting how well they'd handle one. Chances are they'd vary widely from city to city. But the military option would be much wiser if the law allowed it.

(As an aside, police SWAT teams aren't the only available option as we do have a National Guard. But as a practical matter their main mission for years has been evacuation and relief assistance, with some occasional street patrols thrown in. Doesn't inspire much confidence as a fighting force.)

---Baron V

Today's Worst Persons

The Nevada Public Health persons:

A new lawsuit filed by the city of San Francisco on behalf of the state of California alleges that over the past five years, the state of Nevada has dumped 1,500 mental patients onto other states by putting them them on Greyhound busses and sending them over state lines with no prior arrangements with families or other mental hospitals once they arrive.

According to the federal class action lawsuit that the city of San Francisco is spearheading, nearly all of the patients bussed to California need continuous medical care---none of which Nevada state arranged, and all of which cost the city of San Francisco at least $500,000.

---Baron V

Don't Give Them Any Money

Okay, I know our President has got to be, you know, presidential, which of course means being conciliatory and magnanimous in the wake of tragedy, but honestly, don't you wish sometimes that these small-government assholes were treated to a dose of their own medicine? I mean, it's terrible what happened to all those people in Oklahoma yesterday, but nobody forced them to live in a place that's prone to frequent tornado strikes. Perhaps if they'd exercised better judgment and made their homes in a safer location, they wouldn't be in such desperate straits today, and besides, why should my tax dollars in California be going to support people in another state who made poor lifestyle choices, and everyone knows that FEMA is an example of massive government overreach, and states can always solve their problems better than our bloated and wasteful federal government.

Yeah, I know it'll never go down that way, but if the President ever wants to indulge in a Bulworth moment, he's free to borrow this blog post anytime he wants.

---Baron V

Off The Mark

It's good to study the raft of transformative liberal social legislation---and there was a lot of it!---that was enacted by Congress during the Civil War years, but this misses the point entirely:

Prior to secession, every one of these acts got bogged down in sectional politics after being debated for years. Two of them, the Homestead and Morrill acts, passed Congress only to be vetoed by President James Buchanan. All of them have proved crucial to economic growth since the Civil War.

So, regardless of your sectional preference, it is worth raising a toast on Appomattox Day.

To be accurate, "sectional politics" actually means "Southern Senators" who feared---correctly---that these laws would open up vast new tracts of non-slave territory; so they filibustered them, sometimes over many years, which retarded westward expansion and stunted economic growth. In turn, since none of these laws could be enacted until the South seceded, it should remind us what a ball and chain the Southern states were to the nation's progress during the antebellum era---and if we're going to honest with ourselves, they're still a ball and chain on the Republic now. If you ask me, the only reason for raising a toast on Appomattox Day would be mourn the folly of our leaders for allowing them to re-join the Union in the first place. Think of all the nice things we could've had already if they still weren't around. Just sayin'!

---Baron V

Nobody's Racist Anymore

That shit is sooo 19th Century, bro'. And that flag, you know, it's just a fashion statement:

May we not, therefore, look with confidence to the ultimate universal acknowledgment of the truths upon which our system rests? It is the first government ever instituted upon the principles in strict conformity to nature, and the ordination of Providence, in furnishing the materials of human society. Many governments have been founded upon the principle of the subordination and serfdom of certain classes of the same race; such were and are in violation of the laws of nature. Our system commits no such violation of nature's laws. With us, all of the white race, however high or low, rich or poor, are equal in the eye of the law. Not so with the negro. Subordination is his place. He, by nature, or by the curse against Canaan, is fitted for that condition which he occupies in our system. The architect, in the construction of buildings, lays the foundation with the proper material---the granite; then comes the brick or the marble. The substratum of our society is made of the material fitted by nature for it, and by experience we know that it is best, not only for the superior, but for the inferior race, that it should be so. It is, indeed, in conformity with the ordinance of the Creator. It is not for us to inquire into the wisdom of His ordinances, or to question them.

Snark aside, it never ceases to amaze me how people can simultaneously cling to their "heritage" as a symbol of free expression/freedom of association when the very heritage they're celebrating was completely antithetical to those principles---and in fact, suppressed them using genocidal means. It would be like some Russian energy oligarch flying the hammer and sickle outside his dacha on the Caspian. I mean, besides betraying an abject ignorance of history, it just makes no damn sense. Then again, perhaps they'd rather not study their own history because if they did, they'd have to find something other than their ancestors to celebrate. Hey, there's always football!

---Baron V

Tribalism 2 Economic Boogaloo

Great discussion on the Gun Crazies at TPM this week:

While I agree that there’s a distinct rural/urban split in attitudes toward guns, it seems to me that there’s been a big change in the rural attitudes over the last 30 years or so. The Bushmaster “man card” ads typify it for me . . . I don’t have an explanation for why that has changed and so many gun advocates seem to have their manhood tied up in their guns, but I could make a couple of guesses. Marketing is one. The GOP playing heavily to the gun mythology of the US is another. But those things don’t seem to be enough to cause what I’ve seen. It’s puzzling and disturbing.

This touches exactly on what I blogged about yesterday, but first: yes, dude is right that rural attitudes have changed---more accurately, hardened---over the past generation. Back in the mid '80s I worked for a publishing company that produced specialty publications whose readerships trended heavily rural and white. These folks were conservative then as now, and while they were leery of big government, guns were considered primarily as a recreational means to an end (i.e., hunting), and the "Hitler's coming for my guns" mentality was largely absent from them. I noticed this start to change in the first half of the 1990s, and I think it was a confluence of several events that sparked the attitudinal shift, in order: (1) The L.A. riots, which the NRA leveraged into a massive marketing and advertising campaign aimed at convincing Americans to arm themselves as protection against "those people," most of whom, naturally, were urban and colored; (2) the election of a charismatic young Democrat to the Presidency who had dodged the draft and smoked weed while his peers were getting shot up in Asian rice paddies and who proudly bore the moniker of our "first black President"; (3) the rise of Limbaugh as a political-media celebrity (perhaps his was but one voice, but his influence in shaping white opinion can't be overstated); (4) the twin disasters of Waco and Ruby Ridge; and (5) the first major gun control legislation to be enacted by Congress since the 1960s. At this point, the NRA's cynical marketing campaign, in many people's minds, now had the ring of prophecy: Big Government---the government of draft dodgers, pot smokers and urban dwellers/"those people"---was literally gunning for rural Americans, as at Waco and Ruby Ridge, and intended to disarm them before they could defend their way of life.

But of course, that "way of life" had been slipping away from white rural America for a couple of decades, and it has continued slipping away since then, as Wal-Marts and 7/11s displaced local businesses; small industries were put out of business by cheaper foreign competition and/or relocated elsewhere to be closer to their customers (i.e., the suburbs); industrial agricultural practices squeezed out family farms; their best and brightest young people left for better-paying jobs in the city; and income was continually redistributed upward, from rural farmers and merchants to city bankers and speculators. All of these cultural/demographic shifts help to explain, among other things, why rural states---and particularly the South---fare so poorly versus urban-heavy Blue states in so many socioeconomic indicators: per capita income, life expectancy, obesity, infant mortality, etc. What I'm trying to get at here is that the kind of economic dislocation that shattered the Republic four years ago has been happening in the hinterlands, in drips and drabs, for decades, and in that kind of economic climate, it should be no surprise that a white-populist politics of resentment has taken root and flowered. It happened in the last decade of the 19th century, and it happened again in the last decade of the 20th.

In other words; Yeah, there's a cultural/racial component to rural America's meaner outlook, but forty years of economic malaise has played a part in it, too.

How to solve? No easy answers at this point, probably, but I still believe something like a Second New Deal would have helped, and still would. Everyone likes to beat up Big Government, but when that very same government electrifies your home, replaces your backyard septic tank with a modern sewer system, and pays you a livable wage to do the work, it makes government-bashing a bit harder to push. It also helps to bridge the class divide between working-class rural dwellers and affluent urbanites, as the latter group bears the higher tax burden for funding these kinds of public-works projects; and this, in turn, just might reduce tensions between the rurals and the urbans. I realize there have always been cultural and class divisions between North and South and between city and country, and that a sizable plurality of the population has been driven literally insane by a number of factors over the last twenty years. Most of these people can probably never be reasoned with, but a few might be if they saw a brighter economic future in store for them, for their kids and grandkids and communities. The private sector hasn't been able to offer it; maybe it's time someone suggested the government step in and give it a shot.

---Baron V

Not Expecting Much

K-Thug, stating the obvious:

[I]t’s not clear whether Democrats realize how things have changed. But maybe yesterday’s horror will provoke some fresh thought, and they’ll realize that this does not have to go on.

But it will go on for the foreseeable future. There are too many members of Team Democrat whose Teabilly-state Senate seats are up for re-election next year (see the list for yourself), and fearing a replay of 1994, they'll clutch their pearls but otherwise do nothing of substance, having concluded that holding onto the Senate is of greater importance for the short term than any legislation aimed at massacre prevention. It's kinda depressing, but if that's the conclusion they draw, they'd probably be right. Wouldn't mind seeing someone propose some big tax increases, though---not that it would stand any chance of passage right away, but it would aim the debate in a more constructive direction.

---Baron V

QE4: Now With State Capitals

Always hard to know how much of this is for real or just posturing, but since it's being leaked by (mostly) Teabilly Congressional aides, I am assuming much of it can be taken at face value because (a) they're professing their usual irrational outrage at proposals that are (b) utterly rational:

Republican aides said they were surprised that Obama is also demanding that dividends be taxed as normal income and that the estate tax be raised and expanded to estates worth as little as $3.5 million---policies for which the Democratic Senate was unable to win approval earlier this year.

The rest of the tax increases and the entitlement savings would come next year, through congressional deliberations.

The offer also seeks funding for a new infrastructure bank, starting at $50 billion in 2013. But the most startling demand, Republicans said, was Obama’s request for sole authority over the level of the nation’s indebtedness, which is currently controlled by Congress.

Instead of letting Congress set the debt limit---currently $16.4 trillion---and seeking an increase when necessary, GOP aides said Obama is proposing to continue procedures adopted in 2011, which permit the White House to propose an increase in the debt limit which Congress can then vote to disapprove.

However, the president can veto that vote and, unless Congress musters two-thirds of each chamber to override the veto, the debt limit increase is approved.

Not keen on the quasi-Unitary Executive method being employed here, but the debt ceiling is a stupid game that should be permanently waived. The rest of the ideas are sound, too, though I've never understood the need for a "bank" for infrastructure spending when there's no reason why (so far as I know) that the Federal Reserve couldn't offer the same deal to each of the States that they made to the banks: Zero-interest loans ($1 billion worth of Treasury bonds, precisely) that can be sold back at a net profit when the bonds mature and the collateral securities regain value. Maybe there's some Separation of Powers issue (or Fed By-Law, perhaps) that I'm not aware of, but absent one, I don't see why it couldn't be done. Of course many of Team Teabilly's brighter bulbs will turn down the money, and that's fine---all the more for the rest of us. Some of us could do some really awesome things with that money!

Put another way: If the time to start spreading the wealth around isn't now, then when?

---Baron V

Time to Reach Across The Aisle

Because we knew they'd be more reasonable once the President was re-elected.

This oldie was spot-on four years ago, and it's still spot-on now:

I really don’t understand how bipartisanship is ever going to work when one of the parties is insane. Imagine trying to negotiate an agreement on dinner plans with your date, and you suggest Italian and she states her preference would be a meal of tire rims and anthrax. If you can figure out a way to split the difference there and find a meal you will both enjoy, you can probably figure out how bipartisanship is going to work the next few years.

---Baron V

States' Rights For Me But Not For Thee

Nobody forced them to lend out all that money:

CalPERS is being challenged by bond insurers of Stockton’s debt, who are upset that the city has asked them to take haircuts on its USD 285m of unsecured debt, even as CalPERS avoids the scalpel. Attorneys for National Public Finance Guarantee and Assured Guaranty filed objections to Stockton’s Chapter 9 filing, saying that because the city had not negotiated in good faith with creditors, it was not eligible for bankruptcy. (Emphasis added.)

Note "unsecured debt," which is essentially the same grade as credit-card/liar's loan debt. Which basically means they didn't perform due diligence and kept lending the city money since "municipalities never default," after all, and they could always repackage the bonds into some exotic debt instrument that they could peddle to investors as fail-safe since, well, "muni bonds are fail-safe investments since munis never default." Of course, they guessed wrong, which would normally be the end of the story if we actually had a free-market version of capitalism in this country, i.e., where people who make poor investment decisions lose money. But we don't, and they won't, because job creators good, lazy government workers evil.

---Baron V

Turning Shit to Gold

Literally:

This coming ski season, the resort, Arizona Snowbowl, will become the first ski resort in the world to use 100 percent sewage effluent to make artificial snow.

“It’s a disaster, culturally and environmentally,” said Taylor McKinnon of the Center for Biological Diversity, one of the plaintiffs. He worries about the impact on the delicate alpine tundra and to human health should skiers fall into the treated sewer-water snow and ingest it [...]

Catherine R. Propper, a scientist and professor at Northern Arizona University . . . found that Flagstaff’s water contains endocrine-disrupting chemicals, or EDCs, including hormones, antibiotics, antidepressants, pharmaceuticals and steroids.

“We don’t know what effect freezing and thawing is going to have on the chemical compounds,” she said. “We don’t know what UV is going to do to them. Some of the compounds will bind to the soil; some will get into the aquifers. It is a very complicated system that we know very little about.”

Guess we'll find out a year from now.

I honestly do not know how any conscientious person could, or would, conduct any kind of business with any commercial interest headquartered in that awful state---at least, as its political leadership is currently constituted. And I'd really like to know what the conservators of our public lands are thinking by giving a thumbs-up to this nonsense. Yes, I realize the forest Service is, strictly speaking, not a conservation outfit like the Park Service, that they're a division of the Agriculture Department and are therefore charged with resource management rather than, say, habitat preservation---but come on, you cannot tell me that this doesn't present a potential health risk to some group of people sometime down the road. And for what---so some affluent urbanites can avoid the crowds at Aspen and Vail? But I guess it's par for the course for a place like Arizona, where shitting on ethnic minorities has become a cottage industry. This latest example is just a more literal repetition of the dominant social paradigm.

---Vitelius

One of These Days

You'd think a greater number of our citizens would come to the realization that no, we are not the Greatest Nation in the History of Civilization™, or even right now:

About 40 percent of U.S. workers, or more than 55 million Americans, don’t get paid when they take vacation or sick days, the government reported.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics said in a report yesterday that leave policies by U.S. employers tend to be a patchwork of individual arrangements that favor healthy, well-educated professional employees.

The report underscores how the U.S. is lagging on such policies. It’s the only advanced economy without a national leave policy guaranteeing a break for employees, said John Schmitt, a senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington. Austria guarantees as many as 43 paid days off, and a young German worker can take as many as 40.

“Of the 15 most economically developed countries, 14 have sick and vacation time off,” Schmitt said in a telephone interview. “We’re the outlier.”

Out here in the Marxist Dystopia, we do at least have a paid leave law, or at least I think we do since every job I've ever held here came with some paid personal time-off/vacation days after accruing so many months/years on the job. My last corporate gig was actually pretty generous (Euro-like five weeks paid time off each year), but of course the rub was that I rarely could find the time to take more than two weeks vacation time per year so a lot of vacation days went unused. On the other hand, it was nice to know that I could take a sick day or two if I actually got sick without it hurting my paycheck, and I suppose you can say that's a stress-reducer for the employee and a net positive for the employer since it cuts down the risk of sick workers infecting everyone else in the office. So why can't we have a national version of this?

---Vitelius

De-Funding Their States Might Work, Too

These people want to be free from the burdensome yoke of the federal government? Good. Just stop sending them any more federal money:

Around midnight on June 1, 2007, Tina Hall was finishing her shift in a place she loathed: the mixing room at the Toyo Automotive Parts factory in Franklin, Ky., where flammable chemicals were kept in open containers. A spark ignited vapors given off by toluene, a solvent Hall was transferring from a 55-gallon drum to a hard plastic bin. A flash fire engulfed the 39-year-old team leader, causing third-degree burns over 90 percent of her body. She died 11 days later.

After investigating, the Kentucky Labor Cabinet’s Department of Workplace Standards cited Toyo for 16 “serious” violations and proposed a $105,500 fine in November 2007 [...]

The violations didn’t stick. Every one of them went away in 2008, as did the fine, after Toyo’s attorney vowed to contest the enforcement action in court. Last month, however, in a move thought to be unprecedented in Kentucky, the Department of Workplace Standards reinstated all the violations because, it said, the company hadn’t made promised safety improvements.

The case was another black eye for state-run workplace health and safety programs nationwide. In all, 26 states administer their own programs under federal supervision. Several have been criticized in recent years for performing subpar inspections and shutting out accident victims’ families.

Officials in Kentucky didn’t tell Harville and Hall’s husband that the Toyo violations had been dismissed. They found out in 2010 only because Ron Hayes, a fellow Alabamian who runs a nonprofit advocacy group for families of fallen workers, had taken an interest in the case.

Hayes---whose son, Pat, died in a Florida grain-elevator accident in 1993---lodged a formal complaint against Kentucky with the U.S. Department of Labor’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration, which concluded in 2011 that the state had erred.

“Deleting citations in their entirety sends a signal to employers that they need only contest to alleviate the burden of history,” OSHA’s regional administrator in Atlanta, Cindy Coe, wrote to Hayes [...]

Under the Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970, states that choose to regulate workplace health and safety must ensure that their programs are “at least as effective” as the federal one. OSHA pays up to half the costs of such programs and is supposed to keep tabs on them.

If I ran the zoo, there'd be no federal money---revenue sharing, grants-in-aid, transportation funds, Medicare/Medicaid disbursements, etc.---to be released to these assholes until they finally decided to stop waging the fucking Civil War and get in compliance with the 20th Century, let alone the 21st. There's more than one way to starve a beast, you know.

---Viteluus

No Good Deed, Etc.

If the administration ends up drawing the short straw next November, one hopes that amid all the what-if post-mortems, they'll acknowledge in retrospect the utter futility of reaching across the aisle to accommodate the demands of the outlaw gang of cranks and psychotics that currently constitutes the Republican Party. Try being their worst nightmare next time, guys.

---Vitelius

That's What Executive Orders Were Made For

Still don't really see this is an unavoidable problem. Just sign a statement directing the Secretary of HHS to release the necessary funds, set up the exchanges, boom, it's done. You don't need to physically be in Iowa, or Wisconsin, or Florida or wherever to create the exchanges---some tech dweeb in the District could do it from his laptop so long as he's got firewall access and so forth. Money's not there? Just tell the Treasury to print up some more. Okay, so maybe it's not so simple as all that, but the only way I see this becoming a bonafide "problem" next year is if (a) the Serious Persons manage to convince the President that enforcing a constitutionally sound law would be needlessly partisan and shrill, or (b) Republicans win control of the White House, in which case you ca forget about the expansion since Medicaid is going to be fucked in general. So let's not lose the election, okay?

---Vitelius

Our Failed Liberal Media

I really used to enjoy Ezra Klein's work when he was blogging at the Prospect, but there must be something in the Post's water cooler that lowers its employees' political IQ points. I mean, this has got to be one of the stupidest bits of analysis I've read in some time:

Even if you disagree with every one of Mitt Romney’s policies, there’s a chance he’s still the best candidate to lift the economy in 2013.

That’s not because he has business experience. For all his bluster about the lessons taught by the private sector, his agenda is indistinguishable from that of career politician Paul Ryan. Nor is it because he’s demonstrated some special knowledge of what it takes to create jobs. Job growth in Massachusetts was notably slow under Romney’s tenure. It’s because if Romney is elected, Republicans won’t choose to crash the economy in 2013.

The Congressional Budget Office estimates that if Congress gridlocks this year---if it simply gets nothing done---the economy will take a $607 billion hit in 2013 as the Bush tax cuts expire, the payroll tax cut expires and assorted spending cuts kick in. Falling off that “fiscal cliff,” they predict, will throw us back into recession.

But it’s worse even than that: Speaker John Boehner has said he wants another debt-ceiling showdown. We’re not expected to hit the debt ceiling until February or March, and so the only scenario in which the debt ceiling matters is one in which Congress has already pushed us over the fiscal cliff. So as bad as the last debt-ceiling crisis was---and Gallup’s polling showed it did more damage to consumer confidence than the fall of Lehman Bros---this one would be worse.

Miles Nadal, CEO of the marketing and communications firm MDC Partners, says that at a recent event with executives of more than 100 companies, the business leaders, panicked about this possibility, agreed on the best outcome for the economy: “a Republican landslide.” Why? “Because anything that breaks the logjam is positive,” he says. “The quality of the leader is less relevant than the ability to break gridlock.”

Jesus, where to begin.

First, we might as well agree that this is tantamount to saying that government-by-blackmail is somehow preferable to the stalemated arrangement we have now. The problem with this argument, of course, is that it fails to hold the people responsible for the stalemate, well, responsible for the problem they've created and perpetuated. The government isn't deadlocked because of some holistic dysfunction that's baked into the Constitution: It's deadlocked because one party no longer respects the legitimacy of the opposition party---which is to say, in our form of liberal democracy---and is using every parliamentary device to prevent it from acting. Any attempt to discuss breaking up institutional gridlock in Washington that fails to mention the words "unprecedented filibuster abuse" is frankly hard to take seriously as a piece of objective analysis.

In other words, if the economy craters next spring because a debt-ceiling agreement isn't reached, it won't be due to some intractable "deadlock," it will due to willful sabotage inflicted by one party against the President and his party. This really is not difficult to call out, and if all those worried businessmen want to ensure this problem doesn't play out next year, they should all be putting the screws to the GOP Congressional leadership and pressuring them to behave like grown-ups, not fretting over the existential danger of divided government. Heaven forbid we actually let the voters have the kind of government they want.

Second, I think the logical fallacy at work here is the assumption that a lot of Serious Persons in the Beltway media make about the political leadership on Capitol Hill, i.e., that when the dust settles after November, President Romney and an all-Republican Congress will come to their senses and not blow another huge hole in the deficit with tax cuts for rich people and escalations in military spending, and paying for it all by phasing out Medicare, turning Social Security into a private-equity fund, and axing entire government agencies like the EPA and the Energy Department because doing so would yield obviously disastrous outcomes. Which is to say, we should not expect Republicans to do what they say they will do because, well, at heart they're rational actors who will act rationally when they're handed the reins of power and not start needless wars, bankrupt the Treasury, turn the federal bureaucracy into a party patronage machine, and drive the American economy into the ground while blaming liberals for everything. Even though the last time (ahem) Republicans controlled the House, the Senate, and the White House, they started needless wars, bankrupted the Treasury, turned the federal bureaucracy into a party patronage machine, and ran the economy into the ground while blaming liberals for everything.

Congressional Republicans have not shown an ability to govern rationally in any discernible way since 1994. Why Ezra Klein or anyone else who isn't working for Murdoch would believe for a second that they'll somehow moderate their positions after the voters hand them control of all three branches of the government---which they will interpret as a mandate for scorched-earth policy-making---is beyond my ability to explain. Anyone care to attempt an interpretation? I'm stumped.

---Vitelius

The Longsuffering Entrepreneurs

They're the perfect bookend to The Undeserving Poor:

The world’s richest people lost a combined $24.4 billion this week as concerns over Spain’s rising borrowing costs and the sputtering American job market caused global markets to tumble.

Casino mogul Sheldon Adelson lost $2.2 billion. Shares of his Nevada-based Las Vegas Sands Corp. (LVS) fell 10.3 percent during the week. On Friday, Macau casinos reported gambling revenue rose 7.3 percent in May, its slowest pace since July 2009. Adelson, 78, is the 22nd richest person in the world, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

Also too, tax evasion:

The Commonwealth pays landowners valuable tax credits for donating easements. A landowner submits an appraisal for the property’s pre-easement value and post-easement value (typically about 40 percent lower than the pre-easement value) to come up with a value for the easement being donated. The state then issues a tax credit worth 40 percent of this easement value (Virginia says it has the most generous such program in the country). Donors can also claim the full value of the easement as a charitable contribution on their federal taxes.

There are now more than 400,000 acres under easement in Virginia, an accomplishment that has cost the state $1.3 billion in tax credits over the past decade. Critics complain that the program has been a windfall for owners of large country estates or exquisite townhouses in Alexandria who had neither the inclination nor the zoning leeway to develop their properties anyway.

---Vitelius