Obama's Budget--A Sliver of Progressive Taxation

It looks like taxation is going to be a little more progressive under President Obama.

While the budget would keep the breaks that benefit middle-income families, it would eliminate them for wealthy taxpayers, defined as families earning more than $250,000 a year. Those tax breaks would be permitted to expire on schedule in 2011. That means the top tax rate would rise from 35 percent to 39.6 percent, the tax on capital gains would jump to 20 percent from 15 percent for wealthy filers and the tax on estates worth more than $3.5 million would be maintained at the current rate of 45 percent.

Fortunately, there aren't any wealthy people left to pay these top tax rates--at least according to Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN).

The American Right: Back To Terrorism?

Today, firebrand Alan Keyes was calling Barack Obama a "radical communist," claiming Obama had "usurped the presidency," and holding up the specter of "chaos, confusion and civil war."

Does this mean that the right is going back to forming militias, fighting it out with the FBI, and bombing federal buildings a la Timothy McVeigh?

In other words, are the right going back to terrorism?

White Supremacy Made Jefferson Davis Stupid

There's never been much comment on the stupidity of white racism--how white supremacy leads racists to see nothing but stereotypes when they encounter African-Americans, how racists are willfully blind to the complex humanity of others.

One example of racist stupidity was Jefferson Davis, the President of the Confederacy. Viewing his slave coachman, William Jackson, as "a piece of furniture," Davis apparently thought nothing of talking about Confederate plans in Jackson's presence.

"Because of his role as a menial servant, he simply was ignored . . . So Jefferson Davis would hold conversations with military and Confederate civilian officials in his presence.

[Ken] Dagler has written extensively on the issue for the CIA's Center for the Study of Intelligence .

In late 1861, Jackson fled across enemy lines and was immediately debriefed by Union soldiers. Dagler said Jackson provided information about supply routes and military strategy.

"In Jackson's case, what he did was ... present some of the current issues that were affecting the Confederacy that you could not read about in the local press that was being passed back and forth across local lines. He actually had some feel for the issues of supply problems," Dagler said.

Dagler goes on to comment on the often prodigious memories of the African-Americans who spied for the Union during the Civil War.

If they had been smart enough to recognize the intelligence of the black people around them, the Confederates might have done better.

Of course, if they had been smart enough not to be such determined racists, the Confederates wouldn't have seceded in the first place.

Bank Nationalization Might Be Looming

In a series of posts, Talking Points Media reports that sentiment is shifting toward nationalization banks like Citibank and Bank of America.

Perhaps, but I beg to differ on one point.

Josh Marshall is convinced that any bank nationalization by the Obama administration would be short and sweet like Sweden.

But, right now there is no private sector roadmap for financing the $14 trillion dollar economy in the U.S. Before last September, private sector financing of the economy was built at least partly out of leveraged buy outs, CDO's, and the market for credit default swaps.

It's largely agreed that these approaches to private sector financial operations have failed disastrously.

The question is whether the private sector can develop viable alternatives.

And nobody knows the answer to that yet.

If the NY Post Doesn't Like Al Sharpton,

they shouldn't run racist depictions of black people. In the case of the now famous cartoon of the cops shooting the maniac chimp and commenting about rewriting the stimulus package, the cartoon is racist on two grounds. First, it associates Barack Obama with the pervasive stereotype of black people as "monkeys" or "chimps." Second, it represents blacks as targets of official violence and conveys a sense of being "shot by the police" as something natural for black people.

What does this have to do with Al Sharpton?

Since he acquitted himself well in his two presidential campaigns, Al Sharpton has become a go-to person and media arbiter on issues of racism. Sharpton himself had a highly questionable involvement in the Tawana Brawley case, but his strong media presence, articulateness, and smarts and definiteness about racism all combine to make him an ideally "controversial" spokesperson from the media point of view for the "black" or the "politically correct" side of the Don Imus, NY Post, and other controversies.

What makes Sharpton ideal from the mainstream media point of view is that he just oozes sleaze into the television screen and thus allows the media to project a prejudicial view of black people while representing the "black side."

But Sharpton also acts to overcome the effect of that prejudicial projection by representing the "black side" in a smart and articulate that drives the point home about racism.

Conservatives univerally despise Sharpton and conservative outlets like the NY Post consider him to be an enemy. But the best thing the NY Post can do to end Sharpton's career as a "racism arbiter" is to stop being putting out racist stuff like the chimp cartoon.

It's that simple.

Some Honest Discussion of Race

Eric Holder wants some honest talk about race. So, I thought I'd offer up up some comments about my perspective on race in the United States.

In my case, talking honestly means have the courage of my optimism and idealism.

I believe that the fundamental racial issue in the United States is the need for people to "embrace" each other across racial lines.

It's not enough to "tolerate" other people. The political theorist Wendy Brown is very much correct in arguing that toleration is just the willingness to be around people that you can still stigmatize as the "other," the "inferior," the "sick people," or the "oppressor." What is needed is for people to value, enjoy, and be interested in the people "across the lines." I'm a white, rural, heterosexual, and middle-aged guy. I should be able to reletavize my own whiteness and enjoy the whiteness, blackness, hispanicness, gayness, and heterosexuality of others.

And I try to do so.

I should also follow the example of Gandhi and seek to recognize the blackness, hispanicness, gayness within myself.

People internalize other cultures as they come into contact with them and we should embrace that internalization. In the United States, white people and black people have internalized a great deal of each other's patterns even as they've stigmatized each other.

We should embrace the "other within" as well as without.

That is precisely what I've internalized from my reading in African-American thought over the last fifteen years--the writing of Boston King, David Walker, Frederick Douglass, W.E. B. DuBois, Martin Luther King, and others.

And I couldn't understand my own identity is I didn't understand that these authors are not only the African-American heritage. They're also part of my heritage.

The America Harvard Didn't Ruin

Kevin Hassett argues in a fun article for Bloomberg that "Harvard Narcissists with MBA's" killed Wall Street.

When Wall Street was run by people randomly selected from the population, it was able to survive everything. After the best and brightest took over, it died the first time real-estate prices dropped 20 percent. Are the two facts related? In other words, did Harvard kill Wall Street?

Well, there was plenty of Harvard and other Ivy Leaguers.

The statistics are striking. Back in the 1970s, it was typical for about 5 percent of Harvard graduates to work in the financial sector, according to a recent study by Harvard economists Claudia Goldin and Larry Katz. By the 1990s, that number was 15 percent. It probably climbed since then.

And the narcissism of the MBA types was plenty destructive.

What do you get from an MBA? One recent study found that MBAs acquire an enormous amount of self-confidence during their graduate education. They learn to believe that they are the best and the brightest.

This narcissism has a real career impact. Psychologists at Ohio State University studied the behavior of 153 MBA students, who were put in groups of four and asked to orchestrate a large financial transaction on behalf of an imaginary company. The psychologists observed that the students who had the strongest narcissistic traits were most likely to emerge as leaders.

According to Amy Brunell, the lead author, the results of the study had large implications for real-world settings, because “narcissistic leaders tend to have volatile and risky decision- making performance and can be ineffective and potentially destructive leaders.”

But if "Harvard narcissists with MBA's" were ruining Wall Street, that means they weren't ruining the rest of society.

If Hassett is right about the destructive narcissism emanating from Harvard, there were dozens of fields that did better because the Ivy's weren't so involved. Politics, education, the arts, medicine, engineering, architecture, urban planning, international organization, and diplomacy would have all been better off because the "best and the brightest" weren't that involved.

Wall Street might be dead, but American society as a whole would have been a gainer.

Maybe it's a good thing the Ivy's are so hostile to the military.

Kristen's Guns

What's Sen. Kristen Gillibrand going to do with the guns she was keeping under her bed--shoot the monsters lurking in her closet.

Wait a minute!

Gillibrand put the guns somewhere else "for security purposes" now the big secret of their location has been revealed.

Now Gillibrand's monsters can return to their natural habitat.

Talking About Chris Brown

As the father of two daughters, I would say without hesitation that Chris Brown is at the dead bottom of the my vision of the human scumpile--worse than Dick Cheney and George Bush, al-Qaida in Iraq, or even the Blackwater (Oops, I mean Xe) mercenaries.

That's what Brown gets after biting, choking, and threatening to kill his girlfriend, pop star Rihanna. Talk about role modeling, Brown's a pop star himself and you have to wonder what kind of example he's setting for Kentucky guys desperate to prove their manhood

In other words, the kind of guys who could end up dating my daughters.

Asshole.

I did take the opportunity to talk with Miss Teen RSI about the fact that the guys who pose the most dangers to women are husbands, boyfriends, friends, and acquaintances.

But it makes me all the more disgusted with assholes like Chris Brown that I have to talk with my daughters about the dangers of being beaten and sexually assaulted.

Which reminds me--who's going to be the first commentator to say it was "her fault."

Stimulus Battle Over Despite Sniping

According to HuffPost, the battle over the stimulus package is in John Paul Jones territory. The politicians have "not yet begun to fight" as the Obama administration and the Republicans line up to fight over the impact of the stimulus legislation.

President Obama's advisers are betting that the historic legislation he will sign tomorrow will bear fruit quickly, and they plan to do everything they can to highlight evidence of it creating the jobs he has promised. That public relations effort kicks off tomorrow as a two-day swing through the West begins.

But the Republican Party has made its own bet: that the stimulus package that Democrats rushed through Congress will have been deemed a failure by the time the 2010 elections arrive, leading voters to rebuke Obama and reward the GOP with much-needed victories.

Of course, the parties will keep fighting. That's what the Republicans and the Democrats do and there's actually no way they can stop fighting with 24 hour news reporting, partisan blogs like this one, and more than 16 years of the permanent campaign under their belts.

But Obama has already won the battle. What lies ahead is only the usual sniping.

The idea that the stimulus package has to be a big success or the Dems will lose in 2010 is mistaken. Contrary to conventional wisdom, Obama is on a long leash with the public and is given considerable benefit of the doubt. The bottom line is that a majority trusts Barack Obama as the best leader for the current economic crisis and President Obama confirmed that trust through his conduct during the battle over the stimulus legislation.

Obama needed to prove that he could "get things done." After the election, Obama and his people kept saying that they needed a $750 billion economic stimulus package.

They ended up with a $789 billion package. That's "getting things done."

Obama needed to show that he wasn't engaged in the same old partisan bickering. And that's exactly what he did. In meeting with conservative columnists, going to Capital Hill to listen with Republican lawmakers, and adjusting the package to meet Republican demands over spending on things like contraception, Obama "changed the tone." That's why 81% of voters viewed Obama as acting in a bipartisan way in a CBS poll.

The fact that Republicans did not accept the gesture was seen as their problem and that's why "disapproval" ratings for the Republican leadership are between 50% and 62%.

Most important of all, Obama needed to prove that he's a "strong leader." Here, he has the GOP Republicans to thank. By pushing so hard against the stimulus package, the Republicans teed up an opportunity for Obama to get tough with them and that's exactly what Obama did when he denounced the "same tired ideas and worn ideas" in his speech to the House Democrats.

The outcome of the stimulus battle was a clear victory for President Obama. He emerged as a "strong leader" who "gets things done" while carrying through on his promises of "reaching out to Republicans." The public had considerable confidence in Obama's leadership ability with 3/4ths of voters rating him as a strong and decisive leader back in December. In this context, Obama's performance during the stimulus battle "justified their trust."

Obama and the Democrats were already in a strong position to make further gains in 2010 and the stimulus battle showed that they could play a strong hand well. If the Republicans want to keep up, they'll have to do more than play to their shrinking base.

Needed: Space Trash Entrepreneurs

In today's column, Thomas Friedman gets all gushy about a couple of American women--Caroline Howe and Alexis Ringwald--he met at a conference in New Delhi who were driving a solar-powered car around India.

Howe and Ringwald thought the best way to do that might be a climate solutions road tour, using modified electric cars from India’s Reva Electric Car Company, whose C.E.O. Ringwald knew. Between Jan. 1 and Feb. 5, they drove the cars on a 2,100-mile trip from Chennai to New Delhi, stopping in 15 cities and dozens of villages, training Indian students to start their own climate action programs and filming 20 videos of India’s top home-grown energy innovations. They also brought along a solar-powered band, plus a luggage truck that ran on plant oil extracted from catropha and pongamia, plants locally grown on wasteland. A Bollywood dance group joined at different stops and a Czech who learned about their trip on YouTube hopped on with his truck that ran on vegetable-oil waste.

Good for Howe and Ringwald.

And cudos to Friedman for writing about the conference instead of basing his entire column on the cab ride from the airport.

Now Friedman can turn his attention to the 12,000 pieces of space junk--old satellites and other man-made space refuse--circling the earth.

There must be an entrepreneur out there somewhere with an idea for cleaning it up.

The Workingmen's Movement.--No. 1

As some readers might know, I'm currently working on the chapter on the Workingmen's movement for my manuscript on the cultural change in Philadelphia between 1785 and 1850. I thought I would occasionally quote some material from the Mechanics Free Press that bears on contemporary political debates.

Aug 29, 1829.

From an "Address" by the Standing Committee of the Republican Political Association of Working Men of the City of Philadelphia

"To promote the happiness of the laboring man, to secure to him the possession of that wealth he so abundantly creates, has been no more the object of our legislators, than it has of the legislators of China, of Russia, or of England.”

Into Deep Red Territory

There's a lot of talk about the Republican Party becoming a regional party based in the South.

But it's actually worse than that.

The Republicans don't dominate any region the way that the Democrats dominate New England, the Middle Atlantic States, or the industrial Midwest. The GOP is strong in the Great Plains wheat belt where it's tough to see a Democratic presidential candidate doing well in Oklahoma, Kansas, or South Dakota. But McCain lost the Omaha electoral vote in Nebraska and came close to losing North Dakota. The Republicans are also losing ground in the Mountain States where Idaho and Utah are still safe states, but Colorado and Montana went for Obama.

The Republicans are strongest in the Old Confederate states, but are far from being dominant over the whole South. Obama won Virginia, North Carolina, and Florida, and Georgia was in toss-up status almost until the end. That means that South Carolina was the only safe state for the Republicans in what might be called the "Atlantic South."

Where the Republicans really dominate is in the "Deep, Deep" Southern sub-region of Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana where the hangover from the segregation era is still strong.

Perhaps one idea of the strength of the "segregation hangover" comes from reports (via the African-American Political Pundit) on the death of Billey Joe Johnson, a highly recruited football player.

Johnson, age 17, died from a shotgun wound at a traffic stop by local police officers outside the town of Lucedale in George County, Mississippi on Dec. 8, 2008. The police claim that Johnson shot himself while the police officer was returning to his car to run a license check.

The George County Sheriff’s Department claims that on that fateful morning, Billey Joe attempted to break into the home of an on-again, off-again girlfriend in the nearby city of Lucedale. According to the sheriff’s department, he left the scene and ran a red light at 5:34 a.m. After a 1½-mile pursuit, Billey Joe got out of his truck, met sheriff’s deputy Joe Sullivan and handed over his license. Then Billey Joe returned to his truck, put a 12-gauge shotgun he used to target deer to his head and committed suicide. It was 5:40 a.m.

Perhaps the police story will eventually pan out after all the investigations. But it doesn't look like there's any more chance of Billey Joe Johnson committing suicide than there was of Steve Biko bashing his head against the wall in his prison cell in South Africa.

Certainly Johnson's father doesn't buy the story and he's keeping the truck his son was driving in the hope that it will provide evidence--“They must have tortured my baby,” he says.

Neither is the NAACP which claims to have determined that the death was not suicide.

Oh yeah, Johnson's girlfriend was white.

According to one of Johnson's friends, there was some racial hostility over Johnson's relationship.

“It’s George County, it’s a little Southern town,” said Bradley, who is white. “You’ve got a bunch of racist people down here. You have people who hated on them because it was black and white.”

It's not just that George County is racist, it's the likelihood of that racism exploding into official murder when a young black man crosses many of the lines bounding in his behavior within a white supremacist community.

This is the kind of place where the Republicans domination has retreated as the Republicans are increasingly driven out of the cities and suburbs. McCain beat Obama 82.5 to 16.4 in George County. McCain had huge margins in nearby counties as well.

In "Deep, Deep South" areas like George County, Republican politics is closely connected to racial oppression. One of my brothers-in-law lives in Breau Bridge, LA along the Gulf Coast and claimed that whites there maintained such a climate of fear that there wasn't a single Obama sign in town even though almost half the population was black.

It will be interesting to see if anything comes up in the state investigations.

Bonus Limits Good for Wall Street

Congratulations to Chris Dodd for sneaking a provision limiting Wall Street and big bank bonuses into the final language of the stimulus package. According to the New York Times:

The restriction with the most bite would bar top executives from receiving bonuses exceeding one-third of their annual pay. Any bonus would have to be in the form of long-term incentives, like restricted stock, which could not be cashed out until the TARP money was repaid in full . . .

The decisions of certain Wall Street executives to enrich themselves at the expense of taxpayers have seriously undermined public confidence,” Mr. Dodd said Friday. “These tough new rules will help ensure that taxpayer dollars no longer effectively subsidize lavish Wall Street bonuses.”

Dodd's bonus restrictions and the Obama administration's salary restrictions ($500,000) will both contribute to restoring the financial industry to health. It's unfortunate that Dodd posed his bonus restictions in terms of public anger over companies using government money for enormous bonuses (i. e.. "public confidence"). Bonus payments of millions and tens of millions were a big part of the self-destructive dynamic with Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, and Merrill Lynch. The possibility of landing such high bonuses was a huge incentive for Wall Street executives to inflate the CDO and credit default swap bubbles that created the crisis. If the market is going to be re-established on a healthy basis, the huge bonuses have to go.

Restricting Wall Street salaries and bonuses is not only just, it gives financial companies an opportunity to reestablish themselves on a firmer foundation.

My Real Opinion of that Tina Fey Impersonator

A commenter on my last post challenged me to give my "real" opinion of Sarah Palin:

Go ahead and admit it, you think Sarah is kinda hot, in a wolf killin you betcha kind of way.

Actually, I think Sarah Palin is about as cold a cold fish as you can get. Still, I have to admit that I feel sorry for Palin now that she has to go through the rest of her life as a Tiny Fey impersonator.

Sarah Palin: Agent of Liberalism?

According to campaign manager David Plouffe, Sarah Palin was a dream come true for the Obama campaign.

Here is Plouffe on Gov. Sarah Palin: "Vice presidential picks rarely but sometimes make an electoral difference. Our view was it probably wasn't going to matter that much . . . . This was the one exception to that. It did have an effect."

"She was our best fundraiser and organizer in the fall."

Given that Sarah Palin was as an inspiration for the Democrats, it may turn out that she was a double-agent all along. In other words, Democratic leaders might have surrepticiously promoted Sarah Palin for the vice-presidential nomination and steered her toward the worst sort of "red-meat" conservatism as a way to motivate Democratic voters.

If they did, it was brilliant. Sarah Palin was Obama's biggest asset over the final six weeks of the campaign.

Obama vs the Root Canal Party

The 789 billion dollar stimulus package passed the House and Senate today.

Basically a victory for the Obama administration. They haven't been in office a month, but they've passed a major piece of legislation to go with S-CHIP.

That's getting things done and that's why Obama's approval ratings are high and Congressional approval is rising.

Obama also got credit for reaching out to the Republicans.

Republican spinners like Karl Rove claim that the GOP was able to seize the narrative. The Republicans exercised enough influence over the process to turn the whole process into the political version of a root-canal.

And that's pretty much where the Republicans are right now. They aren't going to be able to win much, but they can take all of the fun out of winning for the Democrats.

In other words, the Republicans have become the Root-Canal Party.

More Right-Wing Wars

I don't know why the right gets upset when people call them "war-mongers." After all, they're currently waging war on the Obama administration and the Democratic Congress. There's also the various on-going wars against liberals, immigrants, gay people, and racial minorities.

And that's not to mention that the wars against popular culture and science.

Maybe the right should "bundle" all their wars together and just call it the "Eighty Percent War," or the war against non-conservative America.

Oh yeah, Bill O'Reilly just declared war against the New York Times for referring to him as a white supremacist.

Hard to see where the Times came up with that.

The Republican Party's Long War

Andrew Sullivan is somewhat surprised that the GOP has launched "total war" against the Obama administration.

I don't know why.

The Republican Party has been waging total war against the Democrats ever since Newt Gingrich first announced that "politics is war by other means."

Of course, it should be mentioned that the Republicans are losing the war.

Killing The Favre Legacy Project

Don Banks of SI.com wonders in Brett Favre's one year jaunt with the New York Jets was worth it.

The answer is Yes! Yes! Yes!---a thousand times yes.

Thanks to Brett's end of the year melt down with the Jets, there will be a lot less Favre idolizing among football writers.

And that will be a major blessing for sports fans.

Gates and Lincoln: The Pictures Tell the Tale

The 200th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln's birth is this Thursday. I'm not nearly as big a fan of Abraham Lincoln as Barack Obama. Presidents and big-time political leaders are much less interesting and important to me than the people I see in the street, meet in the store, or have contact with on the internet. My students and the people I encounter on the internet are a lot more interesting than either George Bush or Barack Obama. The same's the case with historical figure. I'm far more fascinated with the workshop drinking, street scenes, and volunteer fire companies of 19th century Philadelphia than I am with Lincoln or any of the political figures of the time.

But although I'm not super-fascinated by either Obama or Lincoln, I have to admit that I am interested in Obama's fascination with Lincoln. That's especially the case in relation to the questioning of Lincoln's image as "the Great Emancipator" that has come up in relation to Obama. Henry Louis Gates, jr. argues (via the African-American Political Pundit) that Lincoln is a more complex figure than was indicated by the popular black idolatry that he saw toward Lincoln as a youth in West Virginia.

I first encountered Abraham Lincoln in Piedmont, W.Va. When I was growing up, his picture was in nearly every black home I can recall, the only white man, other than Jesus himself, to grace black family walls. Lincoln was a hero to us.

Gates goes through several vignettes showing Lincoln's evolution from the white supremacy of his 1858 Senate campaign to the 1865 speech in which he suggested that black soldiers and other exemplary African-Americans should be able to vote.

That was the speech that spurred John Wilkes Booth to murder Lincoln three days later.

For Gates, as for Frederick Douglass and W. E. B. DuBois, much of Lincoln's greatness lay in his ability to wrestle with his white supremacy and come to view support for the African-American cause as the right thing to do. As a result, Gates believes that Lincoln is more interesting than the idolizing pictures on the walls of black homes suggest.

I'd like to suggest that it's really the pictures on the walls of those black homes that are the important thing in considering Lincoln and that Gates should have paid more attention to them.

What the pictures of Lincoln in those black homes accomplish is to conquer Abraham Lincoln on behalf of black history. In those pictures--"the only white man other than Jesus"--the black families of Piedmont, WV represent Abraham Lincoln as the Great Emancipator. Whether Lincoln himself knew it or liked it, he ended up allied in the great cause of abolition with David Walker, Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, and William Lloyd Garrison. Moreover, the pictures on those walls portray the Emancipation Proclamation as the most significant dimension of Lincoln's career and prioritize the ending of slavery as the most important issue face by Lincoln or any politician of the time.

It's also important to understand that the pictures Gates saw were also contemporary to the African-American families who put them on their walls. Lincoln's emancipation of the slaves in the past was part of the contemporary struggle against segregation. Just as the pictures portrayed Lincoln's past in terms of Walker, Garrison, Douglass, and Truth, they portrayed Lincoln's post-humous future in terms of W.E. B Du Bois, Thurgood Marshall, Martin Luther King, and Malcolm X. From the perspective of the pictures, Lincoln was a crucial figure in the history of the African-American struggle for racial justice and the African-American struggle was the most important thing about Lincoln.

Why is this a conquest? Lincoln himself might have thought of "preserving the union" as his primary task. Others might view Lincoln in terms of his efforts to conciliate the white South or in terms of his leadership of the war effort. But the theme of Lincoln as the Emancipator won out as the primary focus of our nation's questions concerning Abraham Lincoln. For more than a century, Lincoln's role as Emancipator was more black history than anything else, but the black historical interpretation of Lincoln has become the dominant interpretation. The pictures Gates saw on those walls have conquered.

Gates sees a little bit of this when he emphasizes the need to "hear Lincoln’s words through the echo of the rhetoric of the modern civil rights movement, especially the “I Have a Dream” speech of Martin Luther King Jr."

But if Gates had understood that the modern civil rights movement is the primary lens through which we now understand the historical significance of Abraham Lincoln, he might have had more appreciation for the pictures he saw as a kid.

Contra Bill Clinton--Victory Not Yet Here in Culture Wars

One of the questions that has arisen concerning the election of Barack Obama is just how far the U. S. has come on all the issues connected with the culture war that's been going on from the late 1960's to the present.

According to Bill Clinton, victory has arrived:

Former President Bill Clinton told Virginia Democrats Saturday that the party has won America's long-running culture war but has to make sure not to squander
it with partisanship.

Clinton told more than 3,000 people at a party fundraiser that the nation's natural political base shifted back to Democrats for the first time since 1968, thanks to protracted Republican mistakes and the belief that President Barack Obama represented the solution.

He said Obama's election shows Americans at last are welcoming diversity and accepting differences, the opposite of the political dynamic he said Richard Nixon first used in 1968 to lock in a white, conservative voting bloc that kept Virginia and
the South reliably Republican for two generations.

My own thought is that we actually haven't come that far.

Yes, Obama was elected but what exactly did that mean in terms of race relations. My guess is that white supremacy has thawed enough that a Magic Johnson/Colin Powell type black guy could get elected president at a time when white elites were thoroughly discredited (even in their own eyes).

It also means that there's a larger middle-class pool of African-Americans out of which leaders like Obama can emerge.

That's certainly something, but Obama's election doesn't mean that African-Americans still aren't stereotyped or subject to police violence and arbitrary arrest. It doesn't mean that larger parts of the African-American population are no longer isolated in urban ghettos or racist areas like the rural South. It also doesn't mean that African-Americans are no longer followed in stores or discriminated against in hiring or promotion either.

The election of Obama is important, but the "race war" isn't going to be won until African-Americans enjoy the full benefits of American society.

The same could be said in relation to gender and sexual orientation. Gay people have made a lot of progress over the last 40 years, but the culture war over homosexuality won't end until lesbians, gays, bi-sexuals, and transexuals have full marriage rights and are fully mainstreamed into American society. In relation to gender, the situation is probably worse in 2008 than it was in 1988. Women have more opportunity but the religious right, the porn industry, and sexual violence seem to have grown faster than the opportunities.

It's fair to say that progress has been made in the various culture wars, but "victory" is a lot further off than Bill Clinton's comments would indicate.

The Traitor Republicans

HuffPO has a "GOP Senators Face Party's Wrath For Supporting Stimulus Bill" headline for the three Senate Republicans lining up behind the stimulus package. They would be Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe of Maine and Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania.

But I don't see a lot of wrath yet.

Ron Paul spoke against the Republicans "caving" and Fox ran an interview with Collins in which she indicated that Republicans might be unhappy with her.

But I don't imagine that there will be a whole lot of talk about "treason" from offical Republican circles.

After all, Collins and Snowe could just as well declare themselves independents.

Snowball Effects in Houston

How does the recession squeeze? In Houston, the bankruptcy of the LyondellBasell Chemical company means that the company can't pay property taxes to local school districts. The San Jacinto College district could lose up to 4% of its budget for example.

But that's not the only source of pressure on school budgets.

Also facing pressure from the state to cut spending, district officials are looking at ways to trim the budget without affecting students. Among the possibilities are eliminating vacancies in noncritical positions and curtailing travel and professional development, Lynn said.

The affected Houston school districts aren't in a "state of crisis," but the recession pushes schools in that direction by multiplying the financial pressures on them.

Racist Hate Crimes Continuing

One of the things that African-American blogs do is track racial crimes like racial attacks and police assaults on African-Americans with tasers. The progressive blogger Digby has started picking up on the taser story (Here's some of my posts on tasers as well), but African-American blogs have been on it for more than a year.

Following up on Post-Racial Blog and Antoinette's Point of View, the African-American Political Pundit has a story on the arrest of seven white males for beating an African-American guy names Brandon Manning of Richmond, California.

Manning couldn't believe it:

"I don't understand how somebody could do that in this day and age," Manning said Sunday. "I never, never thought it would happen to me."

Unfortunately, this is easier to believe in Kentucky. Our local school system had a nasty incident involving threats against black students about a year and a half ago. Police shootings of African-Americans in Louisville and the Cincinnati riot are still in the memory as well.

It's important to highlight these kinds of incidents to understand the continuing current of racial violence against African-Americans. The big progressive blogs like HuffPo should start picking up on these stories.

Stimulus Package--Not Enough

I've long stopped hoping that the current stimulus package would be big enough to fully address the current economic decline.

Still, many of the cuts in the Senate compromise were extremely disappointing. I'm especially thinking of the whole $40 billion in state fiscal stabilization that was cut out by moderate negotiators like Susan Collins (R-ME), Arlen Specter (R-PA), and Ben Nelson (D-NE). State and local governments are huge employers (about 5% of the total work force) and state government expenditures also support a lot of private business (mostly education and construction in Kentucky). In his first response to the Senate bill, Paul Krugman rightly emphasizes what would have been the stimulative value of helping the states.

In particular, aid to state governments, which are in desperate straits, is both fast — because it prevents spending cuts rather than having to start up new projects — and effective, because it would in fact be spent; plus state and local governments are cutting back on essentials, so the social value of this spending would be high. But in the name of mighty centrism, $40 billion of that aid has been cut out.

However, I'm not sure why Krugman and liberal bloggers like Digby are so despairing about coming back to Congress for another stimulus package. Digby is especially pessimistic in thinking that the game is rigged so that conservatives can blame the government if the stimulus package fails and not credit the government if the package succeeds.

My own view is that the current economic and political situation is too fluid for foreordained outcomes of any kind. Instead of seeing a game that's already lost, I view the current economic crisis more as a test of the viability of the American political system. It's evident that the American political system as a whole is not flexible enough at the present time to produce an adequate stimulus package in the first go-round. Free-market sentiment among politicians and media elites is too strong, filibusters give the Republicans have too much leverage in the Senate, and the Obama administration hasn't realized the extent to which they'll have to fight to get reasonable policies enacted. As a result, the Senate version of the stimulus is 50-75% of what's needed.

But there's no reason to think that the political climate will stay the same if the economy continues to deteriorate as rapidly as it has been. Massive layoffs by big business have been announced but have yet to settle into the unemployment numbers, consumer numbers, housing numbers, and other measures of economic decline. The same with the layoffs from state and local government that will be coming through the pipeline.

Given that big unemployment numbers and the even larger symbolic impact of large-scale unemployment is likely to have a tremendous impact on American politics, it's highly possible that the Obama administration will come back for another stimulus package.

The question is whether the American political system has enough flexibility to go through another stimulus battle. My own guess is that it does.

Sarah Palin's Natural Constituency

One hundred and fifty people had to be rescued from a breakaway eight-mile ice floe on the Western end of Lake Erie. One died.

Unprecedented numbers of fishermen have taken to the ice this winter because thicker ice allowed them to go farther out onto the lake, according to the Cleveland Plain Dealer. But Saturday's unseasonably high temperatures apparently melted chunks of the ice.

Ice fishermen towing trailers with snowmobiles and all-terrain vehicles filled the parking lot of Catawba Island State Park on Friday, the newspaper reported.

Given that the weather was warming up, it was pretty stupid for all the ice fishers to be out on the ice. They even built "a makeshift bridge to get from one section of the ice to the other" so they could get farther out on the lake.

And then the ice broke off and they all had to be rescued, with one fatality.

Sounds like Sarah Palin's natural constituency.

The Downward Slide

This chart on the unemployment trend is from Nancy Pelosi's office and shows how steeply the U. S. economy is falling during the current recession.

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The top two lines illustrate what relatively mild recessions look like. The blue line is the 1990 recession in which employment losses stopped falling after 11 months and totaled 1.6 million jobs. During the 2001 recession, the economy lost most of its 2.7 million jobs during the first 12 months and then sank more gradually for another 15 months.

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The difference between the current recession and the other two is stark. Where the sharpest rise in job losses were over after 12 months in the previous two recessions, this recession has seen an acceleration in job losses after 12 months.

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This is one reason why a major stimulus package is necessary now.

Wimpy Stimulus Limps to the Finish Line

It looks like the Senate has come to a tentative agreement on a wimpy $780 billion stimulus package that contains too much in the way of tax cuts and not nearly enough in the way of spending.

I hope it works, but I really don't think $780 billion is going the job done.

That makes it likely that Obama will have to come back for another huge stimulus package next year.

Principles of Stimulation

Matthew Yglesias has a good comment on the inappropriateness of all the plans to cut the Obama stimulus package.

It’s really remarkable to see all this talk, and even action, of people cutting things out from the recovery bill. Even more remarkable is that the folks doing the talking aren’t being compelled to provide any rationale for what they’re doing.

For Yglesias, the stimulus package needs to be enormous to be effective. Therefore it's cutting things from the stimulus package needs to be viewed with a great deal of scepticism, not the spending.

But it's possible to go further. As I understand Obama's pronouncements, the purpose of the stimulus package is both to reverse the current economic decline and enact fundamental change in the health and energy sectors.

In this light, the Obama administration might consider promoting the stimulus package in terms of three principles.

1. The stimulus package is designed to create a gigantic stimulus on the level of WWII. That's what's needed to prevent a slide from recession to depression.

2. The purpose of the stimulus is also to enact fundamental health reform and begin the transition to a green economy.

3. The stimulus package should also include reforms to keep Wall Street from driving the economy back into the ditch.

These are principles that the Obama administration could sell to the public. The Obama people just have to get out there and shill for it.

Short Stimulus Notes

Obama's speech. It's good for Obama to get out there and campaign for his broader vision of stimulating the economy, reforming health care, and dealing with the energy situation. He also needed to be explicit in rejecting Republican tax cut dogma.

But, Obama should recognize that the Republican Party does not accept accommodation with either his administration or the Democrats. There are four GOP moderates in the Senate who are willing to negotiate and compromise with Obama. They're Olympia Snowe, Susan Collins, Arlen Specter, and George Voinovich. The rest are dogmatic conservatives who view the stimulus fight as a chance to continue John McCain's presidential campaign.

The Permanent Campaign. To counter the Republican "war against Obama," Obama needs to run a presidential campaign while he's in office. Washington has been in the grips of "the permanent campaign" for more than 15 years and Obama doesn't have enough clout to end the fight. That's an unfortunate reality, but it is reality.

Actually, Obama won't be able to run his particular presidential campaign. Instead of focusing on the broader message and grass-roots organizing, Obama is going to have to dirty himself with the effort to dominate day to day media cycles.

It's an ugly job, but it has to be done if Obama is going to succeed as president.

Allergies Prevent Blogging

I had a pretty bad allergic reaction to Rader Hall on the Morehead State University campus today. All the paint and varnish kicked my butt. So blogging has been out.

The Harry Markopolos Time Bomb

Sure Harry Markopolos is the financial sleuth who uncovered the $50 billion Madoff ponzi scheme, and he's to be congratulated for that. But Madoff also reminds me a little bit of Ross Perot. He seems like an over the top guy who's eventually going to go off in an embarrassing way.

NPR Tolerance--Rising

As RSI readers know, I don't particulary like NPR. But I've been trying to revamp my attitude toward the public media over the last several months. It started with KET inviting me to appear on a panel on "Race and Politics in Kentucky." Likewise, the people at MSPR have been very nice to me over the last few months, helping me with my fall series of lectures and forums and interviewing me several times in relation to political events. Three students I know and like are on air as well.

With all those connections and good will, it's just hard to be hostile.

So, I've listening to NPR more than I used to and got through a whole dinnertime set of errands listening on and off to "All Things Considered."

Robert Segal and Melissa Block are still pretty annoying, but my tolerance level is definitely up.

Obama Follows McCaskill's Lead on Salaries

There's a report in the very important New York Times that the Obama administration is going to impose a $500,000 CEO salary cap on companies receiving big TARP handouts.

Needless to say, there's a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth from the business ideologists.

"That is pretty draconian; $500,000 is not a lot of money, particularly if there is no bonus," said James F. Reda, founder and managing director of James F. Reda & Associates, a compensation consulting firm . . . Mr. Reda said only a handful of big companies pay chief executives and other senior executives $500,000 or less in total compensation. He said such limits will make it hard for the companies to recruit and keep executives, most of whom could earn more money at other firms.

Of course, one could ask why making $500,000 in 2009 would hurt Kenneth D. Lewis of Bank of America given that he "took home more than $20 million in 2007. " Of course, $500,000 might not be enough for Lewis if he treated his personal finances like he did the bank's and leveraged himself to the hilt.

I have to admit that I have limited sympathy for someone who can't manage himself on $20.5 million of income in three years.

It would also be interesting to see which big banks would hire Lewis for more than $500,000 given that practically all of them are taking TARP money and therefore subject to the same salary limitations.

In the same way, the Times article mentions that Rick Waggoner of GM made $1.6 mill in 2007 and therefore would have to take a 66% salary cut.

Given the enormity of GM's losses that's hardly unreasonable.

But let's say that Waggoner just can't do with less than $1.5 million. What company would he go to as an alternative--Chrysler, Ford.

I don't think so.

What about Toyota? Toyota is the biggest car company in the world. Well, Toyota CEO Katsuaki Watanabi made $900,000 in 2007 for a company that did a hell of a lot better than General Motors with Waggoner making almost 15 times Watanabi's salary.

And Watanabi is in line for a salary cut this year after Toyota lost money.

It doesn't seem that big business in Japan is as eager to reward failure as business in the U. S.

I'm glad to see Obama do this. If the American financial sector is going to survive, it needs to get out of the super-speculative, get filthy rich, lord of the universe mentality.

Being forced to subsist on $500,000 a year will help encourage financial executives to develop another mind-set.

The Power of the Times

Talk about the influence of the New York Times among the political elites, Tom Daschle scuttled his nomination after seeing an editorial in the New York Times urging him to withdraw.

Daschle Withdraws

It's just coming out that Tom Daschle has withdrawn his candidacy to be Secretary of Health and Human Services.

It wasn't just his failure to pay more than $100,000 in taxes.

Daschle is so deep in the Washington special interest sludge that he really can't hold any responsible position.

One of the interesting questions about the Daschle fiasco concerns his status as a member in good standing in the American political elite. These are the reasons why Daschle would have to have been considered part of the political elite six months ago:

1. Daschle had converted his status as former Senate majority leader into a big money political consultant position with the health and telecommunications industries;
2. He was part of the pool out of which Barack Obama chose his cabinet nominations;
3. Daschle was personally friendly with Obama.

It was because of Daschle's elite position in the Washington political establishment that a guy with $250 million to burn like Leo Hindery let Daschle have a car and a driver.

But there's a decent chance that the failure of his nomination to head HHS means that Daschle falls off the elite wagon. Daschle is certainly out of the running for any kind of big political position in the Obama or any future Democratic administration. That removes a big chunk of Daschle's elite clout. So, two questions remain. First, will the big health and pharmaceutical companies think Tom Daschle is enough of a Big Kahuna that they will gladly pay millions of dollars for his political "advice." Second, will senior people in the Obama administration still call Daschle for advice or take Daschle's calls?

There's no guarantee they will.

In fact, Tom Daschle might fall so far that he might actually have to humble himself and start working as a paid lobbyist.

Just like his wife.

The Super Bowl: Damn!

Another prediction down the drain. I guess the Steelers were stronger opponents than John McCain.

Prediction: Cardinals Win Obama Style

Cardinals win by 10 in a triumph of hope over tradition.

Give Michael Phelps a Break

So Olympic swim hero Michael Phelps was caught on the wrong end of a bong last weekend. Big deal. How many years did Phelps live like a monk getting up to swim every morning at 5:00am? He's been swimming competitively since he was seven years old in 1992. That's 16 years. I can give him a break if he's decided to catch up on some partying.

Why did the GOP Choose Michael Steele?

Was it imitation, desperation, or a little of both?

The Field Negro thinks it was imitation out of desperation:

Steel might be "charismatic", but he strikes me as one of those Negroes who will say whatever is necessary to fit in. I see the guy on FOX NEWS and he is killing Obama and calling him every kind of name in the book. Then I see him on one of those late night talk shows and he is saying what a great guy Obama is and how the repubs have a lot of work to do blah blah blah. Yeah, Michael is somewhat of a fraud, he should fit in well with the folks over at the RNC.

But he will be right at home with the repubs, and this is just what the Doctor ordered for them in the age of Obama. They were losing their minds while trying to come up with an answer for his O ness, and now they think they have it. Damn that Obama sure is popular. He is smart, articulate, and very telegenic. Where can we get a Negro like that? Hey, how about that Steele guy, he speaks really well....

Sure the Republicans were looking for an answer to Barack Obama, but they were also looking for someone who didn't remind people of:

Strom Thurmond (Caton Dawson, Chip Saltsman)
James Dobson (Ken Blackwell)
or the Horse with No Name (Mike Duncan, Saul Anuzis).

Like The Field Negro, I think Steele is going to be exposed as a phony sooner or later.

But Steele isn't obviously inadequate.

And that makes all the difference to the Republicans right now.

Did Daschle Do Any Work for Intermedia?

It appears that Tom Daschle didn't pay more than $100,000 in taxes over the last few years. That means that Daschle had about $300,000 in extra income beyond what he reported.

Nice work if you can get it.

But that's the question in my mind. Did Daschle do any work for the income on which he didn't pay any taxes?

Here's the key passage in the New York Times.

The car and driver were provided by Leo Hindery Jr., a media and telecommunications executive who had been chairman of YES, the New York Yankees regional sports network. In 2005, Mr. Hindery founded a private equity firm known as InterMedia Advisors. Mr. Daschle was chairman of InterMedia’s advisory board.

In a financial disclosure statement filed this month with the Office of Government Ethics, Mr. Daschle reported that he had received large amounts of income from InterMedia, including more than $2 million in consulting fees and $182,520 in the form of “company-provided transportation.”

Given that Leo Hindery is also a big Democratic fundraiser, there's reason to ask what kinds of work Tom Daschle did as "chairman of Intermedia's Advisory Board" and how he earned his "$2 million in consulting fees" and use a company car and driver for mostly personal purposes.

Obviously, there are consultants who do research and give expert advice to "private equity firms" and help those companies increase their profits (at least when the economy isn't collapsing).

But "consulting" is also a sufficiently nebulous term that it could describe other kinds of arrangements as well.

In Daschle's case, you have to wonder if "consulting" is an arrangement where the CEO keeps a political heavyweight on a huge retainer to stroke the CEO's ego, ensure that the heavyweight makes some "real money," or gain benefits for the CEO when the heavyweight gets back into government.

Of course, it could be all of the above.

This isn't like the Timothy Geithner case. With Geithner, it was just a matter of screwing up his tax returns. The Senate should be looking carefully at the sources of Tom Daschle's income as well as his taxes.

And the Senate should not confirm Daschle if it turns out that Daschle's arrangement with Intermedia was some sort of sweetheart deal. That kind of arrangement is inherently corrupt and should be inherently disqualifying.

McCaskill Sends a Lifeline to the Financial Sector

The best thing that could have happened to the financial sector was Sen. Claire McCaskill's (D-MO) bill limiting the salaries of companies receiving TARP funds to $400,000--the President's salary.

The bottom line is that Wall Street and the banking industry haven't responding to the current situation in a tenable way.

The United States is in a financial crisis because American financial institutions have failed and failed catastrophically. Individual leaders failed, institutions failed, and the business culture rooted in the early 80's failed. Beginning with the leveraged buyouts and takeovers of the early 1980's and continuing through the development of the derivatives market, the financial sector developed an enormous sense of entitlement, raised executive compensation to the stratosphere, and kept it there even after the companies began falling into crisis.

To recover from the crisis, the financial sector will have to replace most of its leaders, rebuild the companies, and dramatically change the business culture of financial institutions.

And the first order of change will be reigning in the pervasive sense of entitlement.

That's what Claire McCaskill was helping financial institutions with when she filed the bill to limit the executive salaries of companies receiving TARP money to $400,000. She was helping them change their business culture for the better.

Here's McCaskill talking to Huffington Post (another example of the prominence of blogs in contemporary Democratic politics).

QUESTION: Tell me how you came about introducing this bill.
MCCASKILL: I've been mad for a while, when first there was talk -- even within weeks of when we passed the initial half of the TARP money, [there were] rumors about bonuses, the fact that too many of these guys were holding unto the jobs even though they were running these companies into the ground. Reality didn't seem to be the order of the day. This culture, this idea, that these guys are entitled not just to their jobs but to excessive compensation, even when their companies were in moments of extinction because of the decisions they had made, just seemed unreal
to me.
Looking back, shouldn't legislation like this have been attached to the first installment of the Troubled Asset Relief Program?
Absolutely. Looking back, I just think none of us really comprehended that this culture was so calcified of entitled that multi-million dollar salaries are due, regardless of whether or not they perform (my emphasis). When all this started piling up - and I was having a conversation with someone this morning - and they said: 'None of them should make more than the president.' And he was right. None of them should be making more than the president. So I walked down the hallway and said draft it and we went to the floor and introduced it today.

I think this at least sends the signal that the party is drawing to a close. If you take this bill along with some of the other things my other colleagues are doing, Sheldon Whitehouse is focusing on $40 billion of deferred compensation that is still on the books for these guys and these companies. That needs to be wiped out.

McCaskill had some revealing things to say to NBC as well.

"We have a bunch of idiots on Wall Street that are kicking sand in the face of the American taxpayer." And then the Missouri Democrat reloaded. "They don't get it . . . These people are idiots. You can't use taxpayer money to pay out $18-billion in bonuses... What planet are these people on . . . "

"Once they're off the public dole, once the taxpayers aren't footing the bill, then it's not as much our business what they get paid," she said. "But right now, they're on the hook to us. And they owe us something more than a fancy waste basket and a $15-million dollar jet. They owe us some common sense."

McCaskill added, "We must have our financial institutions survive, but not with a culture that thinks it's OK to kick the taxpayer in the shins while they drink champagne and fly in fancy jets."

Obviously, McCaskill is ticked off. Who can blame her besides a delusional like Rudy Giuliani? But the basic fact is that the private financial sector as a whole is not going to survive if the current culture of executive entitlement continues. The only way to finance the extremely high level of executive salaries, perks, and bonuses was to commit enormous financial resources to speculative bubbles like the derivatives market. If the culture of executive entitlement persists, financial companies will be going back down the road to ruin soon again . . .

And then they will have to be nationalized.

Claire McCaskill is sending the financial sector a lifeline. They should take it.

Blogs in the Political Architecture

Talking Points Memo had a story today on the complaints of Reps. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) and Pete DeFazio (D-OR) concerning the relative lack of infrastructure projects in the Obama stimulus package.

Specifically, the congressmen complained about Larry Summers, the chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, not being committed to infrastructure spending.

DeFazio even joked that "Harvard had it right" in firing Summers as president.

Rachel Maddow and other liberal blogs have been pursuing the "insufficient infrastructure" story for a week and the House did put $3 billion for mass transit back into their stimulus bill.

But what's most significant about the story is that blogs like Talking Points Memo have become a part of the communications architecture through which Democratic Party factions negotiate with each other.

Interesting.

Is It Obama's New Deal or Obama's New WWII

One of the benefits of receiving Ann Coulter's columns in my e-mail is the little sales pitches she makes for a purported stock genius named Mark Skousen, Ph.D.
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I wonder if Coulter gets compensated for that.
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What's interesting about today's pitch is that Coulter titled it "Obama's "New New Deal" -- and YOUR Money."
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But if I understand Obamanomics right, the Obama administration is thinks of its policy as a "New World War II" rather than a "New New Deal."
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What finally brought the American economy out of the Great Depression was the massive government spending associated with WWII.
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That's essentially what Obama wants from his stimulus package, a huge fiscal boost that lifts the economy out of its current downward spiral.
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That brings us to a big question.
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It's doubtful that the current stimulus package of $819 billion is big enough to be the fiscal equivalent of WWII. $819 billion is only 5.7% of our $14 trillion economy.
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But will he be able to get another big stimulus package out of Congress next year?

The Expansion of Health Insurance Begins

Good news on health policy--

The Democratic-controlled Congress moved a step closer to handing President Barack Obama an early health care victory Thursday as the Senate passed a bill extending government-sponsored health insurance coverage to about 4 million uninsured children.

The Republicans worry "that Democrats are using SCHIP to increase the government's role in providing health care."

And they are right.

Of course, expanding the government's role in health care is both a good thing and long overdue.

More Rod to Come

Rod Blagojevich may not be governor of Illinois, but does anybody really think his 15 minutes of fame are really over?

Too bad he couldn't marry Sarah Palin. They could have a great reality show.

Democratic Senate 65

There's been a lot of bogus chatter about the Republicans making gains if the economy doesn't pick up by the 2010 elections.

But it's far more likely that the Democrats will be nudging toward 65 votes.

Think I'm kidding.

Here's the run-down.

There are currently 59 Democrats and 41 Republicans in the Senate if we include Al Franken from Minnesota. And yes, Minnesota has elected a comedian over their incumbent Republican.

But Republican Senators from Florida, Missouri, and Kansas have already declared that they're not running for re-election. Of those three states, Democrats are good bets in Florida and Missouri. The situation for Republicans in Florida is dire because none of the prominent Republicans want to run. A Democratic takeover would also be a good bet in Kansas if Gov. Kathleen Sebelius decided to run.

That gets up to 61 with a decent shot at 62.

There's also two Republicans who are thinking of following Trent Lott's example and quitting mid-term. There's noise about Judd Gregg of New Hampshire joining the Obama administration as Secretary of Commerce and being replaced by a Democratic governor. Likewise, Kay Bailey Hutchinson is thinking about running for governor of Texas and Democrats would have a decent chance of winning an election to replace her.

That makes it 62 with a shot at 64.

Finally, Jim Bunning of Kentucky is the Republican who's in most trouble for re-election in 2010. In fact, he has so little chance of being re-elected that Republican leader Mitch McConnell shouts "dead man walking" every time he sees Bunning in the hall.

The Democrats would need everything to go right to reach 65. But that's a lot more likely right now than any kind of Republican renaissance.

Kissing Limbaugh's Stimulus Ring

Limbaugh's Butt--No. 4. Kissing Limbaugh's Ring--The Republicans are about hierarchy and yesterday they sorted out the new post-Bush order with Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity on top and Congressional Republicans following their cues. Rep. Phil Gingrey of Georgia, the Chair of the Republican Study Group in the House, had commented to Politico.com the day before that it was easy for Limbaugh and Hannity to be bomb throwers.

“I think that our leadership, Mitch McConnell and John Boehner, are taking the right approach,” Gingrey said. “I mean, it’s easy if you’re Sean Hannity or Rush Limbaugh or even sometimes Newt Gingrich to stand back and throw bricks. You don’t have to try to do what’s best for your people and your party. You know you’re just on these talk shows and you’re living well and plus you stir up a bit of controversy and gin the base and that sort of that thing. But when it comes to true leadership, not that these people couldn’t be or wouldn’t be good leaders, they’re not in that position of John Boehner or Mitch McConnell."

Gingrey thought that Boehner and McConnell were in the "leadership position" because of their official positions as "Republican leaders." But Gingrey found out that it was Limbaugh who was in the "true leadership" position. After getting thousands of e-mails and telephone calls, the Georgia congressman felt that it was necessary to go on Limbaugh's radio show, apologize for his "foot-in-mouth disease" and praise Limbaugh to the skies as a "conservative giant." Even more important, Gingrey also had to accept Limbaugh's delusional claim that President Obama is only interested in bi-partisanship because Obama assumes his stimulus package will fail and wants "bi-partisan" cover.

Actually, it shouldn't be much of a surprise that Gingrey had to kiss Limbaugh's ring. Timothy Noah of Slate observed years ago that lobbyists had higher status in Washington than most members of the House. The same was surely the case with Limbaugh and Hannity. What's changed is that Rush Limbaugh now has more clout than "leading Republicans" like Gingrey. Gingrey might have status within the House Republican Caucus but his lack of a national media profile meant that Gingrey is a nobody compared to Limbaugh.

Now, Phil Gingrey and other prominent House conservatives are going to be taking their cues from Rush Limbaugh rather than the other way around. George Bush might be gone, but right-wing delusions are going to dominate the Congressional Republicans more than ever.

By the way, Limbaugh was so nervous and had so many ticks as he was talking with Gingrey that it was hard not to think that he was still having some addiction issues.

The Stimulus Package--The Obama stimulus package passed the House of Representatives yesterday on a 244 to 189 vote without a single Republican voting in support. There's been two kinds of stories about the vote, the story of Obama's bi-partisanship "failing" in the mainstream media and the liberal blogs seeing the Republicans refusing compromise even though the Democratics bent over backwards to accommodate them. This is the Lucy and the Football story in which Obama and the House Dems did many of the things the Republicans wanted and they still pulled the football away and voted "no."

My own view is that the whole thing has a big win for President Obama so far. Obama fulfilled his No. 1 campaign promise of bringing a new kind of politics to Washington, met with the Republicans in all kinds of forums, and adjusted his plans. Obama more than met his obligation to meet the Republicans half-way, but the Republicans remained mired in the "tired partisanship of the past" and that hurt them. Even worse for the Republicans, House Republicans showed that they could be easily pushed around by right-wing talk show hosts like Rush Limbaugh who are reviled by the American public at large. When Phil Gingrey kissed Limbaugh's ring, he lost moderate votes for Republican candidates all over the country and made the Republican Party an even narrower ideological group than it was before.

Getting no Republican votes might have been bad for bi-partisanship, but it's a big political plus for Obama.

The Banking System: A Bad Moon Rising

I was never that big of a Credence Clearwater fan, but I couldn't help thinking of "Bad Moon Rising" when I saw this tidbit in an article on the banking crisis from the Washington Post (via MSN).

The health of many banks is getting worse, not better, as the downturn makes it difficult for all kinds of consumers and businesses to pay back money they borrowed from these financial firms. Conservative estimates put bank losses yet to be declared at $1 trillion.

I think it's fair to say that the American economy doesn't need another trillion dollars in bad news.

Actually, it gets worse.

Author David Cho goes on to look at the credit crunch and argues that the ability of banks to make loans depended on the mortgage based securities that are now on the wrong side of worthlessness.

Some help from the TARP bailout, government officials said, may go to jump-starting the credit markets that finance roughly half the debt owned by businesses and households. During the boom years earlier this decade, investors bought pools of mortgages and other kinds of loans packaged into securities, providing fresh funding for bank lending. But this activity ceased after traders lost confidence that the market was accurately pricing the value of these securities and assessing their risk.

If "normal bank lending" was indeed contingent on the highly speculative market in derivatives and credit default swaps (CDS) that relied on mortgage backed securities, the banking system as a whole was profoundly distorted and unsustainable for any kind of long term.

No doubt following up on his sources in the Obama administration, Cho suggests that the solution would be to put the derivative and CDS markets on a "more solid grounding."

The Federal Reserve is poised to launch an initiative in coming weeks to restart a segment of these markets by offering to buy highly rated commercial paper, backed by assets such as credit card debt, student loans and auto loans. Officials are considering expanding this initiative to help free up loans for municipalities, small businesses, commercial real estate and other consumer debt.

I'm not an economist but this just sounds disastrous. On the surface, it looks like the fed is looking to build an economic castle on a new pile of quicksand. How much more reliable can "credit card debt, student loans, and auto loans" be as a backing for securities than home mortgages? Not very!

There's another problem. If the derivative and CDS markets are tied to things like credit cards, student loans and auto loans, then there will be pressure to offer flimsy loans as a way to keep priming the financial markets. Eventually, the banking system would start falling apart again because of the inability of credit instruments to provide an adequate grounding for the financial markets.

What the Obama administration needs to do is to build (or rebuild) a credit system that does not depend on the derivative and CDS market for the credit needed to make necessary commercial and consumer loans.

If the administration can't accomplish that goal through reconstructed private lending agencies, then they're going to have to do it through some sort of government system.

Good luck with that!

RSI Losing Power

No, it's not a metaphor.

The RSI family was privileged to be one of the 50,000 Kentucky families that lost power last night. Our lights went off at about 9:30--it seemed that a little knot of homes on our street all lost power--and stayed that way for eight hours as the drizzle kept coming down over the ice.

It wasn't too big of a crisis though. We broke out the candles and Miss Tween RSI and a friend went out sleigh-riding. Eventually, Miss Tween was farmed out to the friend's house and the rest of the family hunkered down for a "long winter's nap." The heat was out but everybody was able to sleep. The house is well-insulated. It didn't get that cold.

Today's another day.

Limbaugh's Butt--No. 3. How Can Cillizza Be Boring About Limbaugh?

The Washington Post's Chris Cillizza's note on Rush Limbaugh's new prominence in American politics is an unbelievable bore. How does he do it? Looking at Limbaugh provides an extremely interesting perspective on political dynamics at the outset of the Obama administration. Plus, Rush Limbaugh might be the single most quotable human being in the United States of America (apart from Ann Coulter perhaps).

Yet Cillizza limits himself to one dull Limbaugh quote and goes on to quote a couple of Republican consultants who are trying very hard not to say anything. Here's one.

"Rush is a double-edged sword, he cuts both ways" said Phil Musser, a Republican consultant and former executive director of the Republican Governors Association. "Sometimes you love him, sometimes you cringe at his impolitic (he'd say honest) fusillados."

Talk about cringing, I cowered when I saw "impolitic fusillados." Musser must have spent too much time at all-white country clubs while he was growing up.

There are several facts to keep in mind here.

The most important is that Rush Limbaugh is extremely unpopular with the 80% of the population that aren't committed conservatives. Limbaugh knows this as well as anyone. People on the left despise him as a "Big Fat Idiot, (the book that made Al Franken a senator)" but moderates hate him just as much.

The mainstream media was pulling Limbaugh into the national spotlight even before Obama mentioned him. That's because GOP congressional leaders Mitch McConnell and John Boehner have such a weak media presence. Cillizza quotes Haley Barbour retainer Ed Rogers as saying that the Republican leadership has not found "their voice or direction." That's weak, weak, weak! John Boehner doesn't have enough charisma to fill a shot glass. How's he ever going to find his voice?

The same with McConnell.

The emergence of Limbaugh provided Obama and his press secretary Robert Gibbs with the opportunity to tell Boehner and McConnell that they were either "with Obama or with Limbaugh." Because both of those choices are losers for the GOP leadership, Boehner and McConnell were probably trying to figure out how to stand "on the middle ground" for the first time in their lives.

At the end, Cillizza raises the question of whether Limbaugh's new prominence as a "Republican spokesman" is a good thing for the Republican Party.

Why raise the question when the answer is obvious? Having Limbaugh in the mainstream media is horrible for the Republican Party. They wouldn't do any worse if they dug up Saddam Hussein and made him a party spokesman.

John Boehner and the Art of Demagoguery

Last Friday, the Republicans focused on attacking the spending entailed by the Obama stimulus package working its way through the House. Republican leader John Boehner put it this way.

“How can you spend hundreds of millions of dollars on contraceptives? How does that stimulate the economy?”

Where did Boehner get "hundreds of millions of dollars on contraceptives?" That's an interesting question. Here's the actual provision of the legislation from ThinkProgress.

State Option to Cover Family Planning Services. Under current law, the Secretary has the authority under section 1115 of the Social Security Act to grant waivers to states to allow them to cover family planning services and supplies to low-income women who are not otherwise eligible for Medicaid. The bill would give states the option to provide such coverage without obtaining a waiver. States could continue to use the existing waiver authority if they preferred.

The purpose of the legislation is to provide "family planning services" as part of a general effort to maintain health services for poor women.

As the Republican leader in the House, Boehner could have taken "the high road" and argued that "maintaining health services for poor women" provides little economic stimulus. In terms of economic consequences, the main effect of providing health services for poorer women would be to lower future health expenses. According to ThinkProgress, the figure would be $200 million over 5 years. More health services means fewer unwanted pregnancies, guarding against chronic illnesses like cancer, and things like that. Certainly, lowering health expenses is a worthwhile goal, but there's an argument there it wouldn't provide a significant economic stimulus.

In this context, Boehner could have suggested that family health services could be linked to the construction or remodeling of health clinics in low income areas or Obama's efforts to transform medical record-keeping. In that way, the economic stimulus from putting up new buildings and installing new computer systems would be directly connected to improved health outcomes.

But Boehner decided to take the low road--the very low road.

Instead of framing a serious criticism of "maintaining health services" as economic stimulus, Boehner focused on contraception in a way that impugned an association with promiscuity or abortion or impugned that women's health was not a serious matter.

At the same time, Boehner made up a figure of "hundreds of millions of dollars" and attached it to legislation. The ultimate result was that Boehner deceptively represented the Obama administration and the Democrats as squandering an enormous amount of money on something that's "morally questionable" on the one hand and impugned the seriousness of women's health on the other.

In other words, it was a neat bit of demagoguery.

To top it all off, Boehner made his sensational claim about contraceptives on Friday and thus guaranteed that the Sunday news shows would be about "hundreds of millions of dollars for contraceptives." The result was that he put the Democrats on the defensive for an entire 48 hour news cycle.

No doubt Boehner and other Republicans were happy over winning a small victory on Monday.

What this means is that we're back to the 2008 election in which Obama focused on the big picture and the McCain campaign fought hard to win the daily news.

In fact, McCain managed to create a lot of headlines with his "Celeb" ads. Likewise, a lot of people on the left (like me) wanted the Obama people to be more aggressive in response.

But Obama won handily and I suspect that he'll also win handily on the stimulus package.

Mongiardo Declares

Today, Lt. Gov. Dan Mongiardo of Kentucky announced that he is running for the Senate seat held by Republican Jim Bunning.

The conventional wisdom is that Mongiardo has a good shot to win. Running against Bunning in 2004, he came within 23,00 votes despite being an obscure state senator from Hazard. This time, Mongiardo will have a higher profile, be a more experienced campaigner and will have access to a ton of money from the Senate Democratic Campaign Committee.

That gives him a shot.

The conventional wisdom might be right here because Bunning is such an obvious target. I've seen Bunning speak. Known mostly as a Hall of Fame pitcher for the Phillies and a sharp-elbowed politician, the 77 year-old Bunning's political fastball is just as far gone as his brushback pitch. He made a fool of himself in 2004 by phoning in a debate and making denigrating remarks about Mongiardo (an Italian-American) looking like one of Saddam Hussein's sons.

And the expectation is that Bunning will make a fool of himself again.

At the same time, Mongiardo hasn't exactly proven that he's a big league political hitter while serving as lieutenant governor in the lackluster Beshear administration.

So, the question is whether Mongiardo has enough political talent to take on a guy who's fading as obviously as Bunning.

If Mongiardo gets the Democratic nomination, he'll have a good shot on the basis of turnout.

Mongiardo will get majorities in Louisville, Lexington, and rural Eastern Kentucky and he has a good shot at winning if he can inspire higher levels of off-year turn out in those areas.

That's because turnout most likely won't be that high in GOP strongholds. Bunning is the kind of guy who's almost impossible to get excited about and I don't think that preventing the Senate Democrats or defeating the relatively colorless Mongiardo is going to motivate Republican voters either.

Depressed Republican turnout hurt John McCain. It will kill Jim Bunning.

Krugman and the Lions of Conventional Opinion

Last night, Crooks and Liars had a story on ABC's This Week program entitled Paul Krugman Takes Sam Donaldson to School on This Week.

But the reality of the situation was not so encouraging.

Krugman was on the program with George Stephanopoulos, Sam Donaldson, George Will, Cokie Roberts, and Carly Fiorina.

And he was the only one on the panel who didn't just ASSUME that tax cuts were the best way to address the economic crisis.

In the end, Krugman was just the token liberal on a panel that reiterated the conventional wisdom.

Would Bank Nationalization Be So Bad?

One of the arguments against the nationalization of banks like Citigroup and Bank of America is that government officials can't manage banks:

So far the Obama administration has signaled that it is trying to avoid that day, and members of its economic team — among them Mr. Geithner and the president’s top economic adviser, Lawrence H. Summers — made the case during the Asian financial
crisis in the 1990s that governments make lousy bank managers.

But would "government bankers" really be worse than the current generation of major bank management which has lost hundreds of billions of dollars?

The answer to that is probably no.

Much Worse Than Cocooning

You have to give David Frum credit for trying. Frum served as a Bush speechwriter and wrote a horrible book with Richard Perle, but he does seem to be trying to get a grip on what's wrong with the Republican Party.

Our party has been crippled by an all-pervading assumption at the center that if you just don’t talk about bad news, it will go away: whether it’s an extravagant wardrobe decision - or a bad job creation record. Our leaders cocoon themselves, refuse to hear unwelcome news, and reward yesmanship.

But that doesn't come close to getting it.

The Republican Party and its conservative base go way beyond "cocooning." In fact, they've become deeply committed to maintaining an alternative reality. For the Republicans, it all gets down to the conviction that "Bush was right" and imagining a weirdly distorted world in which such a conviction was justified.

In terms of the war in Iraq, this means that "the invasion was right" despite the lack of WMD's, the failure to understand Shiite/Sunni sectarianism, and the bizarre idea that Iraq would become a beacon of liberty in the Middle East.

That's not to mention the 4,000 American combat deaths.

"Bush was right" also means that Republicans believe that Guantanamo, torture, and extraordinary rendition have been the only thing that's been keeping the country safe for the last seven years.

What the Republicans have been saying about Obama's turning back from Bush's terror policies has been so off the wall that Matthew Yglesias declares himself "gobsmacked" by all the nonsense.

Here's a few examples of the weird stuff Yglesias hass been hearing from the right.

The fact that the Bush administration has let dangerous terrorists go free means
Obama should keep innocent people detained.
The fact that the Bush administration screwed up the paperwork on detainees shows that there was more wisdom to Bush’s policies than Obama acknowledged on the campaign trail.
Obama’s promise of change was empty and hypocritical because it will take time to implement his executive orders.
The “Guantanamo” issue is primarily about the physical location of the facility rather than the legal status or treatment of the detainees.
Since many liberals live in San Francisco, anyone who thinks it would be ill-advised to transfer prisoners to a museum in the San Francisco Bay that hasn’t been a prison for decades is a hypocrite.

It goes on.

"Bush was right" means that "deregulation was right' even though the failure to regulate the financial industry has put the country on the edge of a depression.

It also means denying the vast amount of research on climate change, not giving a damn about the environment, and being opposed to most kinds of social progress.

"Bush was right" mantra also declares that the only way to combat sexually transmitted diseases is abstinence and that pharmacies shouldn't make contraceptives available to women.

In other words, they want to turn back the dial to the fifties.

The problem for the Republicans is that they remain committed to their alternative universe even though their views are rejected and ridiculed by an increasing majority of the American public.

That's a lot worse than cocooning.