brainiac conspiracy

All Downhill From Here

Sure, two years is a lifetime in politics, but we can predict already that the next Presidential election will be the worst one ever, to be surpassed every four years by another worst election ever. That's because 90 percent of the candidates' time will be spent making promises to the oligarchs in exchange for their money, to the point where the only choice that we the voters will have come November between Corporatist A and Corporatist B, the only salient difference between them being that one will be clinically insane, and the other one won't. That's not a lot to look forward to, but absent new campaign-finance legislation---or a new Supreme Court---it's all we're going to be allowed.

---Baron V

Term Limits

It bears repeating that they were a Republican idea in the first place so Americans could never again elect the same Democrat to the Presidency four times in a row. Besides being vindictive and profoundly antidemocratic, like most Republican ideas, it was---and still is---a spectacularly bad idea that transforms the executive power of the Presidency into an academic exercise the day after a President is re-elected. In other words, the lame-duck period doesn't begin the year before the President leaves office, it starts the minute he's a certified two-termer. There's a reason why so little gets done in second terms anymore---if you're the opposition party in Congress, or a foreign head of state, what incentive do you have to make any deal with a President who you know will be gone four years from now, and someone who may be more to your liking is holding the office?

All I can say is, our state government in Sacramento has been subject to terms limits for the last 25 years, and it's much more ineffectual than it used to be when guys like Jesse Unruh and Willie Brown ran the place. No surprise, really: by the time legislators learn how to perform their jobs well, they have to leave. What workplace in America would work efficiently this way?

---Baron V

Credit Where Due

I've always been lukewarm on the idea of filibuster reform, but given what they've been up against the last four years, I'm not sure Team Democrat could have done anything differently. So, good on them.

---Baron V

Vote Early, Vote Often

It struck your humble blogger as an odd occurrence last month that a city with a population that's 80-percent African-American and that hadn't elected a white guy mayor since 1970 suddenly voted to elect one who was running as a write-in candidate. Well, anything's possible, I thought, since we do live in a post-racial America now. But of course, we don't live in any such nation, so we shouldn't be surprised to learn that they didn't vote for the white guy after all. Someone might want to look into this!

---Baron V

Don't Bet on It

Seems like just about every year, someone in the establishment commentariat predicts the imminent demise of the crazy people, and yet it never seems to happen. Sure, there may be some dust-up at present between the House crazies and the Senate crazies, or between the Speaker of the House and his crazies, but in the end, it doesn't matter. If the Speaker gets out of line, they'll primary him, and replace him with another crazy person. They've been doing this, incrementally, for decades. Two reasons for this: (1) An unlimited supply of free money for them, and (2) a credulous D.C. media apparatus that mistakes their delirious rants for informed opinion. Also too, because there are still a lot of white people.

What will eventually spell their demise, of course, are changing demographics and rejection by voters. Not just once, but in several successive cycles. The only question is whether we will have a liberal democracy worth saving from them by the time this happens, or whether we'll have run out of time to be delivered from the felicities of strongman government. Right now, I'd say it's a toss-up.

---Baron V

Malaise Era 2 Misanthropic Boogaloo

At the risk of sounding like an Old Fart, something that's changed noticeably---or seems to---in this country since your humble blogger was a wee sprout has been an attitudinal shift in the minds of many Americans: A coarsening of the psyche and an antisocial meanness that I don't honestly recall encountering that often a generation ago. Mostly, it manifests itself in the perception that our Republic is not really a multi-celled organism of interconnected parts but just a piece of real estate inhabited by 300 million individuals who have no obligations to each other for absolutely anything ever: And beyond that, an active hostility, bordering on violence, against other Americans who have been victims of misfortune and who are dependent upon others for assistance. I suppose there are a number of reasons how the Angering of America---and we're really taking about white America, mostly---came to pass, and persons more knowledgeable than I are best left to explain it . . . but there's a real sickness that's infected the minds of many Americans over the last 30 years or so. Just check out the comments thread for any Yahoo! news article and you'll see what I mean. One thing that might---repeat, might---help quarantine, if not cure, the ailment would be for the people who are charged with guiding our political discourse to stop allowing the carriers of the disease to keep spreading it unchecked.

---Baron V

AIn't Talkin' 'Bout Love

It's like this: if Hillary Clinton runs for President in 2016, your humble blogger will probably vote for her, not out of any great feeling of affection for her or because we should expect her to deviate much from the current Third Way/DLC/neoliberal corporatist agenda. My vote, like many others' on Team Democrat, will likely be grounded in simple pragmatism, i.e., as a practical desire to keep the crazy people out of the White House until the middle of the next decade while demographic shifts in the population turn the Republic a deeper shade of blue. If there's been a big take-away from the Obama administration, it's that we still don't have anything close to a progressive governing majority, and we won't until we get more leftist candidates for office elected at the state/district level because truly transformative national politics---and policy---just won't emanate from the top down anymore as they did in Franklin Roosevelt's time. The old farmer-labor alliance that provided FDR's base of support simply doesn't exist anymore, having been replaced by pro-choice hedge-fund managers and gay-friendly Silicon Valley CEOs. It's not the power structure that most of us lefties would like, but it's the one that we have, so the best we can do at the national level is to collaborate with them when they're doing good works, criticize them when they're not, and work on building a new governing coalition that won't need to rely on Wall Street money to win elections. It could still happen, couldn't it?

---Baron V

Got an Easy Answer II

The food's no great shakes, but the money is awesome!

The only way anyone could surprise shock or surprise at this is if you believe that the guy has some core set of principles to which he steadfastly adheres. Obviously, he doesn't, so, no surprise.

---Baron V

Priorities

Lawbreaking deserving of punishment:

Comedienne/actress Roseanne Barr, who ran for president in 2012, may not be laughing at this: the Federal Election Commission has fined her campaign $550 [...]

The FEC fine is for failing to file her financial reports on time.

Meanwhile, not lawbreaking.

Yes, it's apples to oranges, but our political leaders' ability to manufacture outrage over stuff that doesn't matter while ignoring stuff that really does is a marvel to behold. Too bad millions of people end up being rendered homeless because of it, though. But things don't have to be this way!

---Baron V

Glad I'm Not Alone on This

Elaborating on an earlier post, one hopes that Team Democrat will take away from today's Voting Rights debacle the realization that it was a problem, at least in part, of its own making:

I wonder how all those Democrats in Congress who chickened out on ACORN feel right about now?

You see, when the other side of the aisle is populated with nothing but crazy white people, you need to enact legislation that will preempt future acts of crazy whiteness. Especially when you have plenty of votes! But that didn't get done, so now it's time for our side to roll up our sleeves and recapture some state legislatures so we can draw up the new Congressional districts for 2022. That's what it's going to take to forge a working majority in the lower House again; until then, it's all about damage control.

---Baron V

Got an Easy Answer For That

Of course not.

Because it's all just a numbers game. What they actually say doesn't matter.

---Baron V

Not Completely Unexpected

And truth to tell, it's not the worst thing that could have happened since they acknowledged the necessity and legitimacy of pre-clearance, i.e., federal oversight of local elections. That's a big fucking deal! And given that voter disenfranchisement scams have gone nationwide and are no longer confined to the Old Confederacy, the pre-clearance protocol really needs to be extended to every county in every state. So the next time Team Democrat has a working majority in both Houses of Congress, they should consider writing a new Voting Rights Act that does exactly that. In the meantime, of course, the other side will do everything in its power to keep de colored folks from exercising their citizenship rights, but they can be expected to keep doing that anyway. That's just how they roll.

Either way, however, it's another gentle reminder that when the voters give our side a mandate to govern, we should do our best to, you know, actually govern, and not waste our time kvetching and moaning about not having 60 votes.

---Baron V

Making it Plain

In case it wasn't earlier, they never gave a damn about terrorism. What they did care about was having the ability to spy on their political opponents:

Here's the big one ... this was in summer of 2004, one of the papers that I held in my hand was to wiretap a bunch of numbers associated with a 40-something-year-old wannabe senator for Illinois. You wouldn't happen to know where that guy lives right now, would you? It's a big White House in Washington, D.C. That's who they went after, and that's the President of the United States now.

But I'm shocked, shocked I tell you, said absolutely no one who's familiar with the ratfucker provenance of the previous administration's political team. It's also the reason why this surveillance regime has to be subjected to the strictest civilian oversight and the most clearly defined application if not abolished altogether: Because the ratfuckers are still in our midst, and if given the requisite tools, will commence ratfucking again at the first available moment. Our current President's morals might never allow him to engage in Rovian ratfuckery (giving him the benefit of the doubt), but even so, he won't be President forever. Team Democrat needs to stop carry water for the administration on this surveillance crap---unless they want to grant President Rubio the power to ratfuck them four years from now.

---Baron V

Forest or Trees?

You wouldn't know what to make of this, just taken at face value:

A report released Tuesday by the Justice Department’s inspector general found the department’s voting rights section mired in deep ideological polarization and distrust, in some cases harming its ability to function over the past two administrations.

The 258-page review by Inspector General Michael E. Horowitz found “numerous and troubling examples of harassment and marginalization of employees and managers.” The unprofessional behavior included racist and other inappropriate e-mails, Internet postings, blogs, and personal attacks by voting rights lawyers and staffers.

The report found no evidence that enforcement decisions were made in the George W. Bush administration or the Obama administration based on race or partisan considerations.

Those of us with longer memories, however, can more easily parse the meaning of this report. Because, basically, this:

In our prior investigation of improper hiring and other improper personnel actions in the Civil Rights Division, we concluded that former Deputy Assistant Attorney General Bradley Schlozman explicitly stated his desire to remove attorneys from the Voting Section because of their political views. As we outlined in our earlier report, as part of an e-mail exchange with a former colleague in 2003, Schlozman described Voting Section attorneys as “mold spores” and wrote, “My tentative plans are to gerrymander all of those crazy libs right out of the section.” We determined that the Voting Section was typically staffed with approximately 35 attorneys at the time, and that a total of 20 attorneys left the Section during Schlozman’s tenure. Our prior report did not include an investigation of the reasons for the departure of each individual attorney during that period.

In a nut, the report reminds you of what happens when you assign a gang of political operatives who want to prevent de colored folks from voting to head up a government agency dedicated to ensuring equal ballot access to de colored folks: A fractious and demoralized workplace that pitted loyal Bushies against career prosecutors who took pride in their jobs, which caused no end of arguments and recriminations. Naturally, as soon as the loyal Bushies were our of office, they went running to cry butthurt to the Inspector General, and now you can read how they were victimized by all those big bad boogity liberals.

Considering how much lawless behavior went on in the Bush Justice Department, you'd think the Attorney General's office would have more productive things for his Inspector General to do than to take depositions from people who blog for Pajamas Media. Unfortunately, because so much of this lawless behavior is now official government policy, I am guessing we won't see any accounting for these and sundry other misdemeanors, now or in the future.

---Baron V

Silver Linings

If the Roberts Court, as everyone seems to expect, strikes down the pre-approval clause of the Voting Rights Act, it might not be the end of the world. Personally, I think the Act needs to be rewritten, anyway, to cover every single state. Let's face it---the Southern states haven't been any worse in their attempts to disenfrachise minority voters than many Northern states have in recent years, and a revised and more expansive Voting Rights Act could resolve a lot of the legal disputes over bogus "voter fraud" challenges that have clogged up court dockets and wrought havoc at polling places nationwide on Election Day. Among other things, a new Act could replace the patchwork of 50 state voter-registration laws with one overarching federal standard, to include (perhaps?) motor-voter and same-day registration. A revised Act could streamline the mishmash of voting-machines and tabulation methods the states use---and which have often been so frequently problematic---by imposing, again, a single standard (like, say, open-source software) to be enforced across all 50 states. A new Voting Rights Act could resolve conflicting state eligibility requirements, and set up uniform standards for recounts and appeals. Frankly, it's hard to think of a single snafu that's occurred on Election Day somewhere in this country that couldn't be remedied by a new Voting Rights Act.

If this all sounds like some nefarious federal power-grab, it really isn't. The Constitution empowers Congress to set pretty much any voting standards it pleases to ensure ballot access for all; it's only delegated much of that authority to the states over the years as matter of courtesy, not as a matter of law. Don't expect to see any movement anytime soon on this, but it wouldn't be a bad idea for Team Democrat to run on sometime.

---Baron V

Entitlement Reform

One element of the various reform initiatives that the "reformers" don't often mention is the fact that most of them see these programs as simply another extension of welfare, which means lazy blah people taking from the makers, and since no civil society can long endure its lesser orders mooching off their betters, they must be administered some tough love, shown their bootstraps, taught lessons in fiscal probity, etc. It may be bullshit, but it's been a pretty effective argument for them!

Better yet, the argument can be extended to just about any policy item where de colored folks be demandin' ta git free stuff from whitey:

There were audible gasps in the Supreme Court’s lawyer’s lounge, where audio of the oral argument is pumped in for members of the Supreme Court bar, when Justice Antonin Scalia offered his assessment of a key provision of the Voting Rights Act. He called it a “perpetuation of racial entitlement.”

The comment came as part of a larger riff on a comment Scalia made the last time the landmark voting law was before the justices. Noting the fact that the Voting Rights Act reauthorization passed 98-0 when it was before the Senate in 2006, Scalia claimed four years ago that this unopposed vote actually undermines the law: “The Israeli supreme court, the Sanhedrin, used to have a rule that if the death penalty was pronounced unanimously, it was invalid, because there must be something wrong there.”

Now that's a strict constructionist argument! Of course, he's citing 7th Century B.C. Mosaic Law instead of founding legal documents of more recent provenance, but hey, he's just following it to the letter--and by the time he and his friends get done trashing the court system, we will probably need to sacrifice sheep and make burnt offerings on the courthouse steps before we're allowed to argue our cases before the Supreme bar of nine robed priest-kings. At least we'll be able to own slaves, though!

---Baron V

The Magic Number

Nothing is certain in American life but death, taxes, and 27 percent:

The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that just 17% of Likely U.S. Voters believe it is now too hard to vote in the United States. Twenty-seven percent (27%) think it's too easy to vote in America today, while 50% feel the level of difficulty is about right. (Emphasis added.)

It's easy to mock them, true, but it's more sobering to realize that any birther neofascist crackpot who runs for national office in this country has fully a quarter of the electorate in his/her hip pocket. That's a big voter base! Not quite enough for them to get elected absent the support of non-crazy voters, but until they die off---and it will eventually happen---they're going to pose a challenge to what's left of our liberal democracy.

Then again, perhaps I'm worrying needlessly becasue they'll come to their senses now that the President's been re-elected. Wouldn't count on it, though.

Update (8:50 am): Neither, apparently, should we expect our Washington press corps to stop mindlessly channeling the crackpothood. Doesn't exactly foster an intelligent debate!

---Baron V

Old Habits Are Hard to Break

Particularly if they're done in the name of defending our God-given liberties:

The rule of the black voter was always to line up in solid column at voting time. This was very distasteful to the white man.

Many means were resorted to to break up this custom. Sometimes the whites came to the polls with their cannons on the ground, booming them once in awhile while the white men stood 'round, and some of them occasionally fired off pistols or guns. There was nothing said to the negroes about not voting as they might please, and no intimidation whatever, but all the same the cannons were boomed and guns and pistols fired, and the negroes ran off and left the polls and never came back to vote.

But both sides do it, so a pox on all their houses.

---Baron V

It's a FrankenParty Now

Seems as though we've heard this narrative (or some variant of it) for the last four or five election cycles: Specifically, that the responsible members of the GOP "establishment" are rushing in to regain control of the sandbox and save the party from the crazy people who Republican voters keep nominating for office. Even if true, however, it's hard to see how it succeeds when the party's core beliefs are, well, crazy. Yes, non-crazy Republicans can sometimes win elections for high office (Romney, Christie), but they are the outliers; after spending five decades cultivating a voter base that firmly believes that a clump of embryonic stem cells is the same thing as a baby, that creationism is as scientifically valid as evolutionary biology, and that Democrats employ a private army of black militants and undocumented immigrants to steal elections, they simply can't execute a volte-face and expect the rubes to follow them unquestioningly. The fixers might do Realpolitik, but that won't play with a group of people who have been taught to embrace the party platform as Holy Writ. I mean, how do you convince your supporters to compromise with Democrats when you've sent the last 50 years claiming that they're the agents of the Antichrist? The Machiavellian pragmatists like Rove and Armey may wring their hands in dismay, but in the end, they'll go wherever the grifting is the most lucrative---and generally, that's the camp that's marketing the most intoxicating snake oil.

---Baron V

Compromising With Crackpothood

At this point in our history, I'll never understand how anyone still believes this shit:

Doesn’t compromise mean setting aside one’s principles? It can, but it need not. The core responsibility of every representative is to support only those initiatives that he or she conscientiously believes will promote the good of the country. During times of deep division, compromise is especially hard: it will require each individual to endorse a package that includes elements that he or she regards as bad public policy. A compromise becomes possible when all parties conclude that despite its defects, it represents an improvement over the status quo and helps solve a pressing problem.

That is the core of the change of new attitude we need among committed partisans of all stripes: it is not unprincipled, but on the contrary honorable, to accept a hard compromise that promotes the national interest and the common good.

If you can tell me how you can compromise with people who believe that a zygote is the same thing as a baby, that the planet is less than 10,000 years old, that global warming is a liberal hoax, that rapists are incapable of impregnating their victims, that Barney Frank and poor black people caused the housing bubble crisis, that public schools are socialist indoctrination camps, that single-payer health care promotes euthanasia, that the solution to mass shootings is to hand every American an AR-15 at birth, and that the President of the United States is a closet Muslim who is conspiring with the United Nations to confiscate all of their guns so he can impose a North Korean-style dictatorship upon them, well, fine, just tell me how it's done and we'll try to cut a deal. There's just one caveat: our current President has been trying to do exactly that for the last two years. It hasn't gone over well.

Honestly, I don't know what it is with these American Unity Theater 3000 types---why they can't bring themselves to acknowledge that one of our major political parties in Washington has gone collectively insane over the last four decades and can never be bargained with rationally as it is currently constituted because it is not being run by rational-thinking people. There is an alternative, of course, and that is for the non-crazy people to ignore the crazy people altogether when formulating policy. No, it would not be "bipartisan"---if bipartisanship means consulting crazy people for bad advice---but it would promote smarter policy. And isn't that what serious persons like Bill Galston want?

---Baron V