brainiac conspiracy

War of The Gargantuas

The green one is good, the brown one is bad, but sometimes you still can't see much difference in them:

Only 38 percent of those up-for-grabs Americans have favorable views of Obama's economic plans, with a majority (54 percent) disapproving. The good news for the embattled president? They aren't much more impressed by Romney's economic ideas---47 percent rate his approach unfavorably, with just 35 percent in favor.

Now I know both campaigns relish the opportunity of framing the upcoming battle for the White House as a clash between starkly opposing visions of the role of government in our lives, and in the case of certain cultural/social issues, that's certainly true more often as not. But on the greater matters of macroeconomic policy---like, where all of our money goes and who gets to keep it---the voters in their wisdom haven't bought into the apocalyptic bullshit. Can't say I can blame them because, frankly, neither have I.

---Vitelius

Spamizens United

Has anyone else been absolutely, absurdly inundated with e-mail requests for money this election year? I mean, fundraising pitches were abundant in 2010, and also in '08, but the amount of mail I've gotten over the past 12 months practically begging me to send people money is just off the charts. I must receive at last six to 10 every day from people representing the President alone, let alone all the various House and Senate candidates---Darcy Burner, please stop---and activist groups like MoveOn and Act Blue, etc. (The activists are getting my share of coin this year, not individuals, unless they happen to have names like Grayson and Grijalva.) Just to cite one example, the number of requests I got to have dinner with Clooney in Fryman Canyon last month, I stopped counting after 50. Even though I knew I stood no chance in hell of ever having dinner with Clooney---even though I could walk to house from where I live, inside of an hour---because I don't live in a swing state that the administration has got to win in November.

So, I guess this is residue from Citizens United that is now part of the natural order of things . . . or is Team Democrat having a little more difficulty shaking money out of the faithful this time around? My contribution level is way down from where it was four years ago, or even two years ago. Part of which is due, admittedly, to having endured a nine-month stretch of unemployment, but also, frankly, to a gut feeling that the return on my investments in 2008 and 2010 basically, well, sucked. Anyone else having that same feeling this time around? Just curious to see what the consensus is.

---Vitelius

I'll Take "Impeachment Hearings" For $800, Alex

If history is any guide, that is.

I'm only half-joking here. Every second-term administration since Eisenhower's has been largely defined by scandals (Watergate, Iran-Contra), pseudo-scandals (Lewinsky), or general all-pupose fuck-ups (Katrina, the imploding housing bubble). On the other hand, Reagan had Reykjavik, Clinton had Dayton, and even Dubya had The Surge™, so if anything at all can be realistically expected from our current chief executive through 2017 (assuming he gets the chance), I'd be willing to wager it will be in the realm of foreign policy---to which we'll include generic warmongering because (a) he's good at it, and (b) it improves our odds.

---Vitelius

#BrandManagementWeCanBelieveInFAIL

Okay, I'll concede the point here:

“Throughout his campaign, President Obama was clear that he would bring every stakeholder to the table in order to pass health reform, even longtime opponents like the pharmaceutical industry,” Dan Pfeiffer, the White House communications director, said Friday. “He understood correctly that the unwillingness to work with people on both sides of the issue was one of the reasons why it took a century to pass health reform.”

Perhaps, but to cite a precedent, I don't recall reading about Franklin Roosevelt inviting the captains of Wall Street to the White House to discuss future best practices in bank regulation. Either way, the protocol of "bringing the stakeholders to the table" is not the same thing as letting the stakeholders write the fucking law, particularly when the stakeholders stand to earn countless billions off the suffering of the sick and elderly. So, to fix a health-care system that fewer and fewer people could afford to use, the administration thought it was a good idea to let Big Pharma continue charging whatever the hell they wanted for their products, which would increase costs to the insurance companies, who would in turn pass them on to consumers. And as the piece de resistance, they'd mandate that everyone purchase this needlessly expensive insurance. I realize that some of the President's defenders see the Affordable Care Act as his signature legislative accomplishment, and while I won't minimize the importance of codifying into law (for a season, at least) the principle that health care is a right, not a privilege, I'd still argue that forcing people to overpay for health insurance so they obtain life-saving drugs that they really should be given for free is not a right at all, but a burden.

And you know what? I think they knew they'd cobbled together a bad bill. Why? Because they felt like they needed to sell it to the voters, like so much Cialis or Lipitor.

Considering the verdict the target audience rendered a year later, can we agree that this might, just might, have been the worst PR/marketing campaign ever? Or at least since New Coke. I'll stop grousing about the subject for now, but all I can stay is I won't lose much sleep if the Supreme Court decides this month that the ACA isn't constitutionally kosher because James Madison didn't write about it in the Federalist Papers. It would serve the administration right for placing the concerns of "stakeholders" over the needs of millions of people who are one illness away from bankruptcy.

---Vitelius

Hate, Just Hate to Admit This

But if I worked for Team Republican, I'd be advising this guy to give this speech every day from now until Election Day. The tone's a bit strident, and of course his policy proposals are even worse than the incumbent's, but sad to say, the primary talking points are not easily rebutted:

Mitt Romney called President Barack Obama's handling of the economy a "moral failure of tragic proportions," suggesting he's failed the American people by enacting policies that have been "muddled, confused and simply ineffective."

Speaking at a campaign event in St. Louis, the Republican nominee said it is "painfully obvious" that Obama was "inexperienced" and "simply not up to the task" of leading the country out of this "great economic crisis."

"We have waited, and waited and waited for recovery, and enough time has passed to pronounce judgment on the economic policies of this administration: They have not worked," Romney told supporters at a campaign event in St. Louis. "Your government has failed you."

I think the moral of this story for future Democrats is: Don't waste two years of your time and precious political capital playing into the hands of people who want to destroy you because they will, uh, destroy you. Just trying to be helpful here.

---Vitelius

At Least We Know We're Free

Sure would like to know what useful purpose this serves:

At 5:30 a.m. on May 10, armed men broke into the bedroom of Kirk Kyle Farrar’s 12 year-old daughter and shook her awake. The men led her downstairs at gunpoint and forced her to lie on the floor next to her mother and father, with her hands behind her head. Another armed man took Farrar’s two-year-old son from his crib, and would not let his parents hold him. “My son screamed for his mother for what seemed like an eternity,” Farrar wrote in an email to friends, obtained by Reason. “I will never forget the hopeless feeling of not being able to comfort my son or daughter.”

The armed men who broke into Farrar’s home were officers with the Meridian, Idaho, Police Department and the Drug Enforcement Administration. They were executing a federal warrant for Farrar’s arrest for the crime of selling bongs.

Farrar’s wasn’t the only family traumatized that morning. Agents from the Drug Enforcement Administration, the U.S. Marshals Service, the Idaho National Guard, and four Idaho police departments raided the homes of 13 other headshop owners and employees on May 10. All of the headshops had their inventory seized. One shop lost more than $80,000 worth of merchandise (bongs and pipes marketed as “tobacco water pipes”). Another headshop owner had his and and his employees' vehicles seized.

The investigation into these 13 shops and their employees (two of which are still at large) for selling drug paraphernalia was led by U.S. Attorney Wendy J. Olson, a Barack Obama appointee.

When it comes to law enforcement, it's assuring to know we've gor our priorities straight.

You know, sometimes it's easy to understand how the Ron Paul people and all the other Unserious Persons who don't deserve to be taken seriously could form the worldview that our entire Democratic-Republican duopolistic system of government is just an elaborately bedecked Punch-and-Judy show designed to distract us from our rulers' true intentions, which are to gradually strip away what's left of our civil liberties and make us servile slaves to a police-state enforcement arm of multinational capital. Because, well, it sure seems like that to me sometimes too. Sure would be nice if our leaders would prove me wrong every once in a while.

---Vitelius

Give The Voters What They Want

And you can spare yourself no end of grief:

Phil was a letter carrier in the neighborhoods around the Serb Hall for nearly 40 years, but he retired last year when his days were cut back to three a week as part of the fiscal crisis forced upon the USPS by Republican legislators who would like to see it go away entirely.

"A friend once told me, 'Well, we only need mail three or four days a week,'" Phil told me. "I politely told him, 'Dave, we're gonna have to agree to disagree.' I could have told him, 'Dave, you know, maybe at that engineering place where you work, they only need you three days a week, and then you could come help us.'

"The politicians, I think, it's a tough call, because if you don't keep the postal service in business — you and I will both agree that there's nothing more personal than taking pen in hand to write to your mother, sister, or brother. Until June of last year, I gave my heart and soul to my job. I worked right through lunch most days."

Eventually, I asked him why he was here, at the Serb Hall, supporting Scott Walker, whose politics were far more in tune with the people who are trying to strangle the postal service than they are with the people who still work there. Phil told me that it was about his sister-in-law. "The problem is that, when you start handing out free health care out to teachers, that annoys me to no end," he said. "I never got free health care. My brother's wife is a teacher and I once asked her, when I was getting my teeth worked on, what it cost her and she said, 'Nothing.' It should never get to that point where somebody's getting free health care. Something's way out of whack there."

One can only wonder how many more votes Team Democrat could have won by simply giving everyone free dental care under Medicare For All instead of forcing voters to patronize a for-profit medical insurance-industrial complex that's the cause of our health care crisis in the first place. Put another way: You want to put an end of the politics of resentment, stop giving people more reasons to be resentful. Just a thought.

---Vitelius

Copulating the Rodent

I've never been big on political dirty tricks, or ticket-splitting to weaken the opposition, but honestly, this looks too good to pass up. I'm going out to vote in a couple of hours. Should I punch her number?

---Vitelius

Carpe The Diem

Sorta, maybe, kinda like, yeah:

President Barack Obama told campaign donors in Chicago and Minnesota that Europe’s sovereign debt crisis is largely to blame for the slowest month of U.S. employment growth in a year, seeking to counter an issue weighing on his re-election bid.

“We’re not where we need to be; we’re not there yet; you saw that in today’s jobs report,” the president said at a Chicago fundraiser, the fourth of six yesterday in the Midwest. “A lot of that’s attributable to Europe and the cloud that’s coming over from the Atlantic. The whole world economy has been weakened by it, and it’s having an impact on us.”

Fair enough---now. But that was not the case in 2009 and 2010, when a more ambitious signature jobs and infrastructure program could have been floated before an all-Democratic Congress and pitched to the American people; and when all available evidence suggested at the time that the Recovery Act was (a) too small, (b) too diffuse, and (c) larded with useless tax cuts to curry the favor of people in Washington who were already intent on destroying the Presidency. Also too in 2009 and 2010, attempts to hold the institutions responsible for causing the recession in the first place were never made in good faith, and the guilty parties still continue to loot the economy to this day. This looting could be stopped at any time via extant legal remedies, but instead the looters have been given a free pass to continue their looting for a nominal broker's fee. This is not the fault of Europe, or the Republicans, or anyone else but an administration that believes that its "little ball" solutions can be sold to the public as a grand-slam home run by its persuasive and charismatic pitchman.

But a word of warning: When it comes to persuasive pitchmen, Billy Mays is dead. And so will this administration next November, too, if it doesn't start prescribing some more effective solutions than a simple re-branding campaign.

---Vitelius

Know Your Adversary

It's an inviolable rule of warfare. That is, if you want to win:

President Obama said today that if he wins a second term the GOP “fever” of opposition to tax hikes for deficit reduction may break.

He said the Republican Party would, in effect, be forced to embrace “cooperation” and “common sense” which, he suggested, John McCain embodied on some issues four years ago.

“A lot of the tussles that we’ve had over the last three and a half years have had to do with this difference in vision, and it will be coming to a head in this election. We’re going to have as stark a contrast as we’ve seen in a very long time between the candidates. I mean, 2008 was a significant election, obviously. But John McCain believed in climate change. John believed in campaign finance reform. He believed in immigration reform. I mean, there were some areas where you saw some overlap,” Obama told a group of donors in Minneapolis.

“In this election, the Republican Party has moved in a fundamentally different direction. The center of gravity for their party has shifted,” he said. He discussed Republican refusal to accept any revenue increases to reduce the debt and deficit as a case and point.

“I believe that if we’re successful in this election---when we’re successful in this election---that the fever may break, because there’s a tradition in the Republican Party of more common sense than that,” he said.

Earth to Obama: You've had three and a half years to figure these people out, and you still don't get it? They're not going to work with you after November---they're going to shut down the government.

Assuming the President is re-elected---and frankly, I wouldn't bet more than even money on it at this point---the overarching wingnut narrative, as it was four years ago, will be that they lost the election not because the voters found Republicanism abhorrent but because they failed to nominate a "true" conservative. Which will, as it did four years ago, provide them with the justification for moving even further to the right than they are right now. The only thing that might---repeat, might---throw a wrench into the machinery would be some massive 45-state blowout a'la Goldwater or McGovern, with Democratic supermajorities elected to both Houses of Congress, but no one in his right mind believes that's even a remotely possible outcome.

Scary to think, but absent any evidence to the contrary, I think it's safe to assume that a second Obama term is likely to feature an even more unhinged opposition than he has now, and the fact that the President is still envisioning unicorns of bipartisanship in the Beltway barnyard, at this late date, has me wondering for the first time if he's really got the political smarts to win this thing. Right now, I'm having my doubts.

---Vitelius

Winning Hearts and Minds

Honestly, people, this is not how it's done:

Bill Clinton had his Sista Souljah Moment during the '92 primary season, and by showing our media watchdogs that he could be tough on uppity colored people and other Democrat interest groups, he was able to claim the mantle of sensible centrist going into the convention. The Obama administration, by contrast, has already staked out the political center and has done so for years. Why they still feel the need to stage a Sista Soujah Moment at least once every month, I have no idea. But they do seem to be quite adept at it. I'm still not sure how pissing off your most ardent supporters translates into a winning electoral strategy, though.

---Vitelius

Can't Blame Them Entirely

Granted, there's likely to be some quantity of racist slop in these numbers, but I think it all boils down to "Are you better off now than you were, etc." And the fact of the matter is, for many millions of people the answer is unequivocally no, and those people, in the aggregate, will tend to vote out incumbents, regardless of party. It's been the case for the last three election cycles, and I can't see any reason why things would be different now. It only illustrates, really, just how long our crappy economy has been, uh, crappy, and why the hell won't our leaders consider doing something substantive to make it less so.

---Vitelius

Lazy Colored People

Will basically vote for whichever party gives them the most welfare. They flocked to Republicans during Reconstruction because they got to take over whole state legislatures even though they were illiterate and unfit to govern, and they flocked to Democrats in the 1960s so they could get more food stamps and disability checks that they could spend on liquor and T-bones. They have no loyalty to anything other than their own selfish natures, and the fact that they can't see how enslaved they've become by Democrat welfare only goes to prove how preternaturally stupid and childlike they are. Offensive? Sure, but that's the subtext to this racist nonsense, and really, there's nothing more that needs to be said about it. At least it reminds me that for all the philosophical problems I'll ever have with Barack Obama and Congressional Democrats, the only viable alternatives to them are completely fucking nuts.

---Vitelius

Something Different: Good News

One down, one to go.

Guess the cheese-eating surrender monkeys decided that jobs and money were more important than punishing immigrants.

Snark aside, I probably wouldn't read too much into this particular election result except for the fact that people are in a pissy mood everywhere (and justifiably so), and if their elected leaders don't give them what they want, well, they'll show them the door and traditions be damned. That's the way it's been in this country now for the last three election cycles, and it's probably why I'm not too terribly optimistic over Team Democrat's prospects this fall. Our Kenyan-in-Chief may well survive, but I wouldn't be surprised to see an All-Teabilly Congress that's ready to schedule an impeachment vote next year. Right now, I'd lay even money on it.

---Vitelius

Welcoming Their Hatred

It's fair enough to say that it's an overly simplistic corrective to our leaders' perceived shortcomings. But another cold truth is, the Obama administration spent way too much time, particularly in its first two years, offering up unilateral concessions on a raft of legislation to the racists and misogynists, only to receive nothing in return. At least Franklin Roosevelt knew where the low-hanging fruit was, and how it could be peeled away. I guess what I'm trying to say is, when it came to lobbying for bank reform, we didn't need a more forceful rhetoritician (though it wouldn't have hurt), we needed a smarter tactician. The administration finally seems to have wised up in this regard, but it's probably too late in the game now to expect any more landmark legislation from them, even if they win a second term. And I don't think it's particularly unrealistic to see their achievements in the aggregate as a bit of disappointment considering that, well, our corrupt and criminal financial system is still criminal and corrupt.

---Vitelius

More on May Day

Didn't take time to post any observations on the Occupy rally the other day (was pretty pooped after miles of marching and spent most of yesterday recuperating), but for what it's worth, it damn near restored my faith in our people to fix all the myriad shit that seems irreparably broken in this country. First, the numbers: Huge attendance, with four separate but coordinated marches that all converged on Pershing Square at roughly the same time. Hard to estimate crowd size, but each parade easily had thousands of marchers.

Second, who showed up: A diverse reflection of the City of LA. Plenty of Millennial kids as at the original rallies but also an appreciable number of their parents and grandparents, and big contingents of gays and lesbians, union workers wearing orange work vests, African-Americans, Koreans, the usual smattering of anarchists and Trotskyites, and most of all, Latinos. They easily made up the largest demographic---I'm guessing roughly half the people in attendance---and judging by the slogans they shouted and the placards they waved, they are severely pissed off over immigration policy, both the Arizona and Obama versions. It certainly reminded me what a third-rail political issue it is for those of us Out West, and how Latino voters can (and probably will) force some big-time political realignments over the course of the next half-century. More power to them.

Also too for what it's worth, the cops were polite and professional, at least along the route I marched. Nice to see from the LAPD.

Anyway, echoing the sentiments here, I'd have to say the Occupy movement has matured quite a bit over the last six months. I still think their lack of public leadership and scattershot political agenda blurs their potential impact (was hard to tell at times whether the LA rally was over Wall Street corruption, marriage equality, immigrant rights, the war in Afghanistan or a combo of all), but it has caught the fancy of a much broader swath of the public than the mostly young white males who started it all with their camp-outs at City Hall last summer. Personally, I think they should hold more of these General Strikes closer to the election, and I'd politely suggest Labor Day for one. Whenever it happens, I'll be there.

---Vitelius

Fingers on The Scale

Can't say I'm as upbeat as this inventory of someone's re-election prospects. Yes, the polling numbers are promising and future demographics are almost all bad for the whackadoodles, but, well, Team Democrat is gonna need to rustle up several million extra votes around the country to make up for the ones the Real Americans won't be counting. Put another way: if you think this was a serious cluster, we ain't seen nothin' like what we'll likely see come November. Just a hunch.

---Vitelius

President Kravis

Lot of bandwidth devoted to this lately, much of it twaddle, but I think what's really important about it has been overlooked:

It's not worth moving heaven and Earth, spending billions of dollars just trying to catch one person.

Mitt may be many things, but he's not a stupid man, so I don't quite buy Daniel Larison's argument that his conflating Hamas and Hezbollah and Al Qaeda betrays a reckless ignorance of Middle east politics; personally, I think he was just barking out all the usual neo-con dog whistles as a means of promoting his warmonger cred.

What I think we really get a glimpse of in the exchange cited above is not the decision-making processes of Romney the Foreign Policy Hawk, but the decision-making processes of Romney the Bain Capital guy---the executive money manager who measures nearly every social transaction in terms of efficiencies, costs-versus-benefits, and returns on investment: which is to say, applying the rationality of capital markets to formulating public policy. This is dangerous shit, for obvious reasons, but it doesn't mean Mitt is out of his league on foreign policy: it only means he's a man without a moral compass, and that should scare the bejeezus out of everyone.

---Vitelius

Apples and Oranges

If this bit of armchair analysis is accurate, then I hate to say it, but it's a bad case of wishful thinking. Lyndon Johnson spent a quarter of a century in Washington, learning and working (and often gaming) the system, and acquiring all the personal skills he would need---flattery and bullying chief among them---to massage and manipulate the egos of all the legislators and lobbyists whose support he'd require on that day when he finally reached the peak of the power pyramid. Barack Obama spent four years in Washington, half of those running for President, and unlike Bill Clinton, had never run a government bureaucracy before. It would take him two full terms at least before he'd begin to acquire the Stradivarian levels of expertise to "play" lawmakers the way LBJ could. And we're not even considering the myriad bureaucratic nightmares the previous administration left behind for him to clean up.

Besides, one of the reasons Obama got President elected at all was because he was cool and unemotional, because he was everything John McCain was not (i.e., an impetuous hothead), which voters rightly perceived as an essential quality for any future President who'd be confronting the most dire financial crisis in the last 70 years. There are plenty of things that I don't care about Obama, but his alleged "aloofness" and "reserve" are not among them. One of the things I most admired about him four years ago was his refusal to pander to cheap sentiment or to manipulate the emotions of his supporters, and for the most part, he's managed to stay on that course throughout his Presidency. (Regrettably, though, a fair number of his national-security pronouncements have been spelled out in stale Cold-War boilerplate). But either way, we can forget about trying to use the powers of persuasion to turn BHO into a latter-day LBJ---the personality types and experiential qualifications between the two are just too disparate. Besides, what the nation needs right now---and has for years---is another FDR, not another LBJ. Obviously, Obama's not that kind of leader, and regardless, when his term in office has expired, we'll have to judge him based on how much of his campaign vision he managed to translate into actual nuts-and-bolts policy. On that score, the jury is still out.

---Vitelius

Scenes From The Struggle

Occupy May Day, downtown Los Angeles, 3:00 p.m. In case you were wondering what I've been doing all afternoon.

---Vitelius