So I just spent 1.25 hours with my sister trying to help her decide her local election choices. It's an off year, so generally only those of us who are Hard Core about voting bother to do so. That just makes our votes that much more powerful. I appreciate the irony of someone like me, frequent Doomsayer on the sad state of our video poker voting reality, talking about good voting. But I'll do so anyway, cause part of me wants to Hope. /scampers away from Lambert/

Anyway, if you're voting tomorrow, are there any online resources that have helped you make your choices? Please, post them here if so. My sister and I agree that one of the really sucky things about off-year local level voting is how hard it is to find useful information about the candidates. And that problem is getting worse. Judge 4 Yourself is one resource she and I found, but it appears to be regional. I really wish there were more, and if I were an Al Gore elected official, I'd be expanding mandated government websites to include more pages about people's records in government, and also those trying to be so. A pipe dream, I'm sure, but voting blogging is one of the aspects of the blogsphere I'm most proud of and hope grows. Brad remains the intertube's own god when it comes to vote blogging.

At first, I was barely interested in the whole "birther" debate, but now, after the last week's reactions to Obama's bland-as-a-mayonnaise-sandwich-on-enriched-white-bread-with-crust-cut-off sandwich speeches, I've come to a hypothesis I would like to share.

Is it possible that the reaction to Obama (as mainstream, unconfrontational and bland as he is) - in the form that he "deserves no respect as a valid President" - is a logical outcome of the desire by a segment of the political spectrum for a Unitary Executive President?

In this mindset, a legitimate Unitary President is all-powerful and so must be faithfully obeyed. Anything else is treasonous at worst, disloyal at best. For these folks, only if the President is NOT legitimate, can he be freely dissented from. So the only legitimate way for a person who believes in the Unitary Exectuive to dissent from the President is for that person to first not agree that individual is a legitimate President.

Put this down as one more bad legacy of the Cheney administration.

Before the primary it had been so long since Democrats held power I never noticed how much Democratic philosophy and policy advocacy had changed.  But during the primary I started to note what I would call a split in the Party between those who sought economic justice for the middle class, and those who sought social benevolence for the poor.  I'm always on the side of helping the poor, but in policy terms, I've always thought what helps the poor most is to empower the middle class.  Policies that target only the poor through subsidies and welfare programs, and sort of ignore the plight of the middle class over the last several decades, don't leave those on the bottom with anywhere to move up to.  Further, often the needs of the poor can only be met throu

blindpig

The American Middle Class no longer has the Red Army to defend it.

So long as there was this big scary alternative to capitalism those bastards had to play nice, produce concrete reasons to support capitalism.

With that problem out of the way, with the socialists and communists who caused the New Deal to happen crushed by the post war Red Scare, it's back to bidness as usual, circa 1900.

Ain't no corporatism, or predatory capitalism, it's just capitalism.

Those of us who happily gulped down the bright anti-red Kool-Aid are not happy with this realization.

What's left?

From commenter Jackybird to Taunter's excellent post:

"I paid for individual insurance for most of twenty years until it became prohibitively expensive. All that time, I always had the sneaking suspicion it was a scam but I was told it was the responisible thing to do. Now I know it was a scam.

The other day Krugman referred to young people who don’t buy insurance as “gaming” the system, or something to that effect. But is it gaming the system to decline to buy into a Ponzi scheme? If you think that the insurance won’t be there when you need it why buy it in the first place?"

Hmmm? Good question!

Anyone? Bueller? Bueller?

The health care bill dies.

Well, reports of its death may be premature. But Matt does a bang-up job laying out just why we haven't been able to get real reform even with [FK]D's owning the White House, Senate, and House of Representatives.

Oh boy. Where to start?

I guess the best place to start is with an apology? No, that's not right. An acknowledgement is probably better.

I totally fucked up. I didn't listen to Lambert et. al. before voting in the 2008 Presidential Election. I thought I knew what I was voting for. I didn't. I thought I knew what I would get? I didn't. OMG!

WTF do we do now?

I'm sufficiently contrite. What's my penance?

Jeff

Mike Lux:

Bong traders have a huge amount to say about whether interest rates are lowered and raised.

UPDATE: Dang, someone fixed a great typo... or an inadvertently revealed truth!

A screen shot for posterity:

E-mail from Joe Biden:

Even the Times is noticing. Carl Hulse:

Mr. Obama did not mention that the measure he was signing, the Helping Families Save Their Homes Act, was missing its centerpiece: a change in bankruptcy law he once championed that would have given judges the power to lower the amount owed on a home loan.

[Cramdown] had been stripped out three weeks earlier in a showdown between Senate Democrats and the nation’s banks, including many that are getting big government bailouts.

Getting fucked over by the banksters is one thing. Paying them to fuck you over is quite another.

From the msnbc.com home page:

I would say the "mounting evidence" is quite clear about who's the "bottom."

[via PNHP]

Statement of Uwe E. Reinhardt, Ph.D., James Madison Professor of Political Economy and Professor of Economics and Public Affairs, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey

Testimony Before the House Committee on Ways and Means

April 22, 2009

My name is Uwe E. Reinhardt. I am Professor of Economics and Public Affairs at Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey. My research work during the past several decades has been focused primarily on health-care economics and policy.

If you thought Black's truthtelling with Bill Moyers was incendiary, read his latest interview in Barrons. Just like his interview on Moyers, it's about as easy to excerpt as, say, an artillery barrage (and quite a contrast to spread-the-blame-around weak tea like this.) Herewith:

The Lessons of the Savings-and-Loan Crisis
So you aren't a fan of the recently announced plan for the government to back private purchases of the toxic assets?

[BILL BLACK]... The current law mandates prompt corrective action, which means speedy resolution of insolvencies. [Geithner] is flouting the law, in naked violation, in order to pursue the kind of favoritism that the law was designed to prevent. He has introduced the concept of capital insurance, essentially turning the U.S. taxpayer into the sucker who is going to pay for everything. He chose this path because he knew Congress would never authorize a bailout based on crony capitalism.

Geithner is mistaken when he talks about making deeply unpopular moves. Such stiff resolve to put the major banks in receivership would be appreciated in every state but Connecticut and New York. His use of language like "legacy assets" -- and channeling the worst aspects of Milton Friedman -- is positively Orwellian. ...

His plan essentially perpetuates zombie banks by mispricing toxic assets that were mispriced to the borrower and mispriced by the lender, and which only served the unfaithful lending agent [See here on agency issues].

We already know from the real costs -- through the cleanups of IndyMac, Bear Stearns, and Lehman -- that the losses will be roughly 50 to 80 cents on the dollar. The last thing we need is a further drain on our resources and subsidies by promoting this toxic-asset market. By promoting this notion of too-big-to-fail, we are allowing a pernicious influence to remain in Washington. The truth has a resonance to it. The folks know they are being lied to.

I keep asking myself, what would we do in other avenues of life? What if every time we had a plane crash we said: 'It might be divisive to investigate. We want to be forward-looking.' Nobody would fly. It would be a disaster. ...

Summarize the problem as best you can for Barron's readers.

Oh wait, it was a muslim woman.

And she was beheaded.

By her husband.

For daring to seek a divorce.

In New York.

And the media didn't cover it.

I have been reading and observing a lot of hate for the last week, and that is utterly necessary to my work. But I need a break, and this topic is something of a tonic for me. So I want to go back to a conversation on nonviolence Lambert and I had earlier this week, and see if I can offer some clarity. This will be a very long post.

I’m thinking about how to make use of the suggestions offered in the comments to my previous post. First I want to elaborate on something I said here and try to give you a little insight into what I’m up to.

When I mentioned high standards, I was not talking about how well you use grammar, punctuation, imagery and tropes. I was talking about a standard of intellectual discourse. You folks are the best group of bloggers that I know when it comes to calling bullshit when you see it. A lot of you make it seem like an art form. You don’t sugarcoat anything, and you don’t care whether it’s primary season or not. You say fuck when you see something that ought to make decent people say that. I’m amazed by how well you’ve kept this up over time. That sort of honesty is in my mind the most important element that is missing from our public discourse. It’s a big part of what’s wrong with the media. We need more of it if we’re ever going to get to the point where enough people are willing to put bodies on the line to change this country, and I am afraid that is exactly where we’re gonna have to go before we’re done.

My hesitation to post here doesn’t have anything to do with my confidence as a writer. I’m sure I can hold my own with most people in that department. I identify myself primarily as a writer, no matter what job I happened to be doing at any given time. I’ve been a writer since I wrote my first poem in 1984. It only took one to get me hooked, and when I look back on my life up to this point, the most miserable times were the times when I wasn’t writing anything. The hesitation I expressed is more about my confidence as a thinker and my confidence in my ability to put it on the line and let the chips fall where they may. Lucky for me, that gets easier with practice.

Wonderful man, Paul Krugman, but he's way too mild-mannered in times shrillness is called for. I've been reading James Galbraith's The Predator State, which Leah got me, and I can across this passage, which ought to nail the coffin shut on the incompetence dodge once and for all:

In the corporate Reoublic that presides over the Predator State, nothing is done for the common good. Indeed, the men in charge do not recognize that public purposes exist. For this reason, the concept of competence has no relevance: to be incompetence, you must at least be trying. But the men in charge are not trying; they have friends, and enemies, and as for the rest -- we are the prey. Hurrican Katrina illustrated this perfectly....

Predation is the enemy of honest and independent and especially of sustainable business, of businesses that simply want to sell to the public and make a decent living over the long run. In a world where the winners are all connected, it is not only the prey (who by and large carry little political weight) who lose out It is everyone who has not licked the appropriate boots. Predatory regimes are, more or less exactly, like protection rackets: powerful and feared but neither loved nor respected. They cannot reward everyone, and therefore they do not enjoy a broad political base.*

[T]o tolerate the Predator State is a formula for eventual national economic failure ... [Where] the worst polluters, the flagrant monopolists, the technological footdraggers are given control over the system and capital markets reward them, their more progressive counterparts will eventually give up, disappear, or move away. Bad business practices will drive out good. ...

And equally, the predators suck the capacity from government and deplete it of the ability to govern. In the short run, again, this looks like incompetence, but this is an illusion. Predators do not mind being thought incompetent; it obscures their actual agenda. Failure [on the scale of Katrina] is not due to incompetence. Rather, it is intended. There is a wilful indifference to problem of competence. Inside the government, no one cares. The attention of the people in charge is focused on other goals.

Now read Krugman's column today through the lens of the Predator State, as provided by Galbraith:

Leah gave me a copy of James Galbraith's The Predator State, which contains the best description of the Social Security "debate" that I've seen. Pages 138 -139. It's long, but it's good, good, good:

The financial crisis argument rests on the large numbers of baby boomers set to start retiring -- on the fact that eventually payroll tax receipts will start to fall short of benefits due and that at some point in the middle distance, the bonds accumulated in the trust fund will have to be retired. Yet the reality is that this was the bargain established by the 1983 Greenspan Commmission. The baby boom was old news when this commission convened; it understood the demographics perfectly well, and nothing that has happened since has made the situation worse. On the contrary, the labor force has grown more rapidly in the years since 1983, thanks to higher levels of immigration than were foreseen and the recovery of productivity growth in the late 1990s, generating a larger economy from which projected benefits could be paid. If the Greenspan Commission, notwithstanding the reactionary deal it made, dealt effectively with the need to match tax receipts to the stream of benefits due, then the finances of the system are actually better today than they were expected to be back then. And therefore if the Greenspan Commission resolved the crisis, there can be no crisis now. And there is not.

Seen this way, efforts to cut benefits to the impending baby boom retirees are a way, simply put, of taking back the 1983 bargain. If they were enacted, the very same people who overpaid their payroll taxes to "prefinance" their Social Security benefits would find that they had been given a dishonest bargain. Having paid a lifetime of higher payroll taxes, subsidizing the income tax cuts enjoyed by the investor classes of the 1980s and 1990s, they would come to the end of the rainbow and find the pot of gold empty.

Except for their 410(k)s, of course. Not.

For some odd reason, the name of the article has been changed, but it originally read "Obama-Backed Sheila Bair shakes up Washington, Wall Street". Anyway, just found it funny that the AP is trying to make her a pawn of Obama, or give him credit for her. You know, the same Sheila Bair that the Obama financial circle couldn't seem to stand, because she dared to have an opinion counter to Geithner's.

Heh, I'd write "sittin in a tree..." but I don't think he'd go for that. Diss me all you want, but just try to take down the Mighty Glennzilla:

Those claiming that Obama has masterfully depicted the Republicans as arrogant obstructionists by extending the hand of compromise should review this latest Rasmussen Reports poll, which finds the public split almost evenly on whether they support the Obama/Democratic economic recovery package, with a clear trend towards increased opposition.
This is what happens every single time: the Democrats do everything possible to "accommodate" the Republican position and then get attacked anyway (they voted in large numbers for the Iraq War in and then got attacked for being soft on Terror in 2002; they voted for virtually every Bush "Terrorism" policy and the same thing happened, etc.). Here, they did everything possible to change their bill to please Republicans and nothing is happening except full-scale GOP opposition accompanied by a constant barrage of GOP attacks against them as big-spending, reckless, wealth-transferring liberals.
Ultimately, the success of this program will be measured by whether it produces successful results, so why shouldn't Democrats use their majority to enact the policy they think is most likely to achieve that? That's true on this issue and in general.

H/T and hugs to Bo.

But were you too busy raging too notice the game?

Did Dems pull the health care football, like chicago dyke says, à la Lucy et Chucky Brown? Or did Obama just leave all you Obamabots and Obamaholics your marching orders?

1. Clyburn says the ultimate stupid. A stupid so surreal that not only does it go against what Obama promised, put Daschle in place for, but it also goes goes against H.R. 676 that Clyburn has signed onto in support of.

2. Backlash is unreal. (I am waiting Obamamaniacs... Where is you efin' rage?)

3. Obama and Pelosi (Maybe even the doltish Reid?) statement: We must have single payer NOW! NOW! NOW!

Now, it is not odd to hear a politician speak in the first person. It's even less odd to hear a president speak in the first person. And, it makes me good to see my president growing a backbone. What betrays all of his talk of "we", though, is when our president speaks of Democratic wins in November in the first person as if they were all his own when his party's leadership is literally seated. right. next. to. him:

At one point in Friday's meeting in the White House's Roosevelt Room, GOP Sen. Jon Kyl of Arizona objected to a proposal to increase benefits for low-income workers who do not owe federal income taxes.

[Nobody seems to have noticed this, so I'll sticky it. I think the "Stellar Wind" story is interesting for many reasons, one of which is that it merges two stories we've followed for some time: warrantless surveillance and The Big Shit Storm. -- lambert]

A throwaway paragraph in Spiky's scoop:

[Under the secret and illegal "Stellar Wind" program of domestic warrantless surveillance,] NSA was also able to access, for the first time, massive volumes of personal financial records—such as credit-card transactions, wire transfers and bank withdrawals—that were being reported to the Treasury Department by financial institutions. These included millions of "suspicious-activity reports," or SARS, according to two former Treasury officials who declined to be identified talking about sensitive programs. (It was one such report that tipped FBI agents to former New York governor Eliot Spitzer's use of prostitutes.) These records were fed into NSA supercomputers for the purpose of "data mining"—looking for links or patterns that might (or might not) suggest terrorist activity.

Now, that's very, very interesting, isn't it?

Since posting on Fav-whatever-his-name-is is all the rage, I thought I'd throw my own two cents into it.

Favvy boy*, it seems, is not an Obama campaign or Obama supporter apparition. It's part of a perception, IMO, of Hillary Clinton among most of the rabid Obama supporters and campaign folks I've encountered. And it seems to permeate to the highest levels of Obama advisers and prominent supporters. It's not so much a rape fantasy I see in these pics, its a general disrespect and disregard to Hillary Clinton as a human being. Its a view of her as less than human, or just unworthy of humanity. Ya know, just like the GOP of yore.

Now I could make a long documented list detailing all the incidents, but I won't. Most of us have our own personal anecdotes about the overzealous Obama supporter getting a little too, um, "eager" to trash Hillary or her supporters. I have plenty of my own, for fuck's sake I was called a racist--ME!! We've all heard that Hillary is a "bitch" a "witch" or someone so consumed with ambition that she will "say or do anything to win" (even though we now know that is not the case!).

These are the low level, on the street supporters saying many of these things. What about the "big shots" you ask.

Peter is talking about you, kidz! There's plenty to chew over, and suss out. This part caught my attention:

How does this affect the triangle of media, political establishment, and online community? For the press and punditry, an important reversal: their agenda-setting role is eroded and they are now compelled to partner with the online commentariat for validation and legitimation. For the political establishment, the standard methodology - where strategists and pollsters conjure and test messages to be disseminated by media teams and press shops through traditional channels - is inadequate. Politicians and public officials must now contend with higher levels of risk and uncertainty that confound traditional communications strategies. They must posses the awareness and agility to navigate a churning ocean of opinion where every word, every press release, every policy paper, every speech, every document, every surrogate remark is recorded, magnified and repurposed by the online community. Image making and message crafting, enduring political arts once the back-room purview of a select few, are now in the public domain.

Our very own Shystee has done some brilliant work on this topic, and has a slightly different take on it, I think. But to me the best part of the Daou piece is "risk and uncertainty." I like chaos, I don't like top-down flow of information models. Daou wants your thoughts, leave them here or at his place.