I am trying to work on a couple of different posts, but in the meantime, let me recommend this fantastic piece on Springsteen in the New Yorker by David Merrick. It's a great read, filled with interesting stuff.
Talk about whatever is on your minds -- the Olympics, Romneyshambles, the incredible bullshit of the Sunday shows, etc.
To say that I am enjoying Mitt's miserable no good day in London is really an understatement of remarkable magnitude. I am doubtful that it will have any long term significance on the election -- people who will vote for Romney won't give a shit what a bunch of snooty foreigners have to say. Although I think having the next few days be about Mitt's ineptitude among his fellow Anglo-Saxons is going to hurt his efforts to damage Obama, which I think remains his strongest hope of winning.
Ultimately, Romney's gaffe will be significant more for what is says about the man -- and his likely problems as a candidate. This is an arrogant isolated prick. I don't think we have ever seen anyone receive a nomination for president who was less in touch with normal life -- his wealth, his privileged background, his religion -- yes, I'm going there -- his abstemiousness, his bullying prep school background, his vulture capitalist CEO life-style, and his complete lack of demonstrable empathy make him the oddest duck I've ever seen in the chase for the White House. He makes Richard Nixon seem like the guy next door. Obama -- despite his color, his name, and his seemingly exotic upbringing seems, in the end, far more normal than Romney. And yes, you can't really imagine having a beer with him. Or a coke.
"Song for a Deck Hand's Daughter" - James McMurtry
Bad news, bad news, and more bad news for working Americans.
- The classic canard in today's capitalism is that if only workers were skilled and productive enough to make their company's prosper, then they would share in the wealth they help create. Well tell that to the employees of Caterpillar, who helped their employer make $4.9 billion in profits last year. Their reward: employees at their Joliet, Illinois plant asked to take a six year wage freeze, a pension freeze, and pay more out of pocket for medical coverage despite the fact that Caterpillar is realising a profit of $39,000 per employee. One wonders really in what circumstances employees could expect to receive wage increases and otherwise improve their standard of living -- maybe when Caterpillar makes $10 billion in profit. Anyway, the Machinists Union is striking, a rare moment when workers are actually fighting for themselves. I wish them well.
“There’s nobody who cares about our health — there’s just pressure to empty cases at a fast pace,” said Mr. Herrera, who is part of a complaint that Warehouse Workers United filed last week with the state. “All the dust we inhale, all the heavy things we have to lift with all our strength and no support, it’s very hard.
I suppose in today's America, Mr. Herrera should be thankful to have his unsafe job. (Hat tip to bbw.)
- And, of course, the notion that any of these working people should be allowed to retire with an adequate pension, well that's just silly talk.
How many of these workers will in turn go out and vote for politicians like Mitt Romney, who will pursue policies that will render them ever more economically insecure? There was a time when leftist crowed that the last capitalist would sell the rope with which they would hang him. I am pretty sure that today's working class will embrace the politics and policies that will render them ever more vulnerable to capitalist predation without having the first clue as to what they have done.
- I pointed this Krugman item out to Roy this afternoon, so gobsmacked was I that Jack Welch's concubine would not only attack Barack Obama, which is par for the course, but also Al Green as somehow un-American and exotic. (Now I am old enough to remember when Let's Stay Together was a huge #1 hit, back in the days when Top 40 radio was eclectic, integrated, and not lacking in artistry.) Who doesn't like Al Green?!! Who is more American than Al Green? Who makes you prouder to be an American?
One is struck by the implicit racism in all this -- Al Green as the other, something less than American. (Krugman links to this Financial Times piece from which this wonderful excerpt is drawn.) It's amazing to what degree these people -- and I love calling them these people -- don't understand how much of American popular culture is black culture.
- On a sadder note, I don't have anything profound to say about the Colorado shootings. It seems to me that we, as a society, decided some time ago that these kinds of massacres were tolerable and we would take no real steps to prevent them from happening in deference to the imagined Second Amendment right of lunatics to be lethally armed with assault weapons and high capacity magazines. I have to say, I am one of those who agreed with the Democratic Party's decision to walk away from gun control. It seemed to be having a really negative effect at the ballot box while not really amounting to anything of substance. I am not really sure what should be done at this point, but it is surely madness to have such a heavily armed society.
[Please consider this and all posts these days to be an invitation for your input on anything that grabs you.]
A wonderfully joyful performance. Keith Richards looks like he couldn't possibly be having a better time.
- Once again the ideological dogma that dominates the Republican Party these days is on full display in the ridiculous contretemps over President Obama's "you didn't build that" remarks. It is evidently un-American to acknowledge that business success depends in large parts on government inputs from roads, bridges, canals to law enforcement to courts and patent protections, etc. I particularly enjoyed Romney invoking Henry Ford and Steve Jobs as people who really built their businesses without government aid. One would be hard pressed I suspect to come up with two worse examples -- talk about businesses built largely upon governmental infrastructure -- no highways or "information superhighway" and Ford and Apple aren't really worth a whole lot.
- In case you were wondering about the degree to which fear of "the other" is the central operative tenet of the Republican Party, take a look at this, and this, and, of course, this. Haters gonna hate.
All I can say is that if Romney really continues to insist on not releasing his tax returns in the wake of these overwhelming calls to do so, then he really must have something to hide. Irresponsible to speculate . . .?
Because nothing says class like larger than life (?) Hello Kitty sculptures, mysteriously featured outside of the W Hotel in South Beach. Rusty too.
Heading back to DC first thing in the morning with deadlines a loomin'. On the plus side, I'll be reunited with Stanley.
I have a question -- why does Matt Yglesias think that Barack Obama is not opposed to offshoring of American jobs? And why does he seem to suggest that it's preposterous to view offshoring -- at least in some circumstances -- as immoral. He raises the issue of Toyota and BMW setting up production facilities in the U.S. and whether anyone would object to that? Well, I think there is a fundamental difference between setting up a production facility in a place where your product is being sold versus sending jobs overseas -- to have your product reimported back into the U.S. -- in order to take advantage of incredibly cheap labor.
And yes, I actually do have a problem with BMW -- they set up their facility in rat-bastard, right to shirk South Carolina, instead of place where their facility would be unionized as they are back in Germany. Mercedes has followed suit in Alabama and now Airbus seems ready to do the same. It's more than a little galling to watch the American South serve as some kind of glorified third world production facility for German enterprise to exploit.
Let me assure Matt -- and the villagers whose sentiments he seem to echo -- that most Americans strongly object to offshoring and view it as an attempt to drive down American wages and the middle class standard of living that was once viewed as synonymous with the greatness of this country.
On a different, but in some ways similar note, next to Glenn Kessler, I think the member of the Washington smugocracy I'd most like to knee in the nuts is Matt's buddy Tyler Cowen. His piece on Medicaid in the New York Times today is notable for its complete inattention to the issue of the uninsured. This guy is the most overpaid, underworked state employee this side of Glenn Reynolds.
The only kind of lies Mitt Romney knows how to tell.
I was enjoying the destruction of the execrable Washington Post "fact checker" Glenn Kessler today. Kessler is the clown who specializes in giving "four Pinnocchios" to Democrats whenever they land a particular effective blow against Republicans. His most recent atrocity has been his contention that the Obama campaign lied when it claims that Romney continued to have involvement with Bain Capital after putatively leaving the company in 1999. When it came to light that SEC filings for 2000-2002 show Romney as the CEO, Chairman of the Board, and sole stockholder of Bain, Kessler nonetheless persisted in backing Romney.Kessler is being hammered all over the internet for his obduracy.
More importantly, I think Mitt Romney is showing a really poor ability to deal with the heat on this issue. He is coming off as an arrogant, entitled asshole -- probably because it is. He also seems -- what do you know -- like a guy who will say whatever is expedient for his purposes at any given time. I expect the Obama campaign to continue bringing the heat, not backing off the Bain stuff for a minute, while also hammering Romney on his taxes. Mitt's hoped for apology from Obama -- I don't see that happening.
"I am Trying to Break Your Heart" - JC Brooks and the Uptown Sound
Fabulous cover of a great song -- like Otis Redding wrote it. Let's undress just like cross-eyed strangers indeed.
- I promised I'd try to avoid too much election speculation, but sometimes I can't help myself. I found it interesting reading Nate Silver's latest post and looking at the state by state electoral map he has at his site. You have the paradox of an election in which national polls are quite tight, but state by state races yield little in the way of excitement. In forty states, either Obama or Romney have a better than 80% chance of prevailing. In two others, Pennsylvania and Missouri, Obama and Romney are thought by Silver to have a 79% chance of prevailing. So basically the election comes down to eight states in which the odds are narrower: Obama is favored by Silver in six of them -- Nevada 72.8%, New Hampshire 65.9%, Virginia 64.9%, Iowa 64.6%, Colorado 64.2%, and Ohio 60.8% -- and Romney in two, North Carolina 73% and Florida 51.6%. Now obviously there are months to go before the election and unforeseen events can occur. Still, one gets the sense that a huge amount of the electoral map is absolutely locked in in a way that is unlikely to be changed. We appear to have arrived at a 2004 style electoral situation, only this time the Democrats have the edge and the Republicans have to fill in an inside straight to win, i.e. sweep Florida, Ohio, Virginia, and North Carolina in order to get to 272 electoral votes. It is certainly possible, but it seems remarkably similar to the task that Kerry faced against Bush. (I tend to take Silver's prognostications as being as good as they get -- he is one of those rare people who does not let his biases color his analysis and his methodology is rock solid.)
One of the interesting things will be to see how effectively all of the money raised by both sides can be deployed in a fairly small number of media markets - Las Vegas; Boston (for New Hampshire); DC (for northern Virginia) along with Richmond, Norfolk, and Roanoke; Des Moines; Denver; Columbus, Cleveland, Cincinatti, Toledo, and Dayton; Charlotte and Raleigh/Durham; and Tampa, Orlando, Jacksonville, and Miami. I think there is likely to be a law of diminishing returns at some point -- really how many thirty second spots can people endure?
Anyway, I continue to think it that as tight as the race might be that if Virginia gets called for Obama early on it will mean he has won.
If that happens we can then obsess about the Senate, which continues to worry the hell out of me.
What do you all think? And what else is grabbing your attention?
Post Script: I wanted to address the tone of some of the comments in one of the most recent posts, which have caused some upset. I know that this is a place where people have strong opinions and a forum in which they are free to express them. But I would really urge people to use some care in attacking fellow members of the community here. I value all of your contributions and don't relish the thought of refereeing disputes that become personal. So please, if you disagree with someone, by all means say your piece, but let's try and give everyone the benefit of the doubt about being good-faith actors and think a little bit before hitting the old post button. Thanks.
- I have been trying to do more reading (of the old fashioned kind) and less web browsing lately in an attempt to recharge the batteries a bit intellectually. I am now reading (after having polished off both Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies over the last couple of weeks) America's Great Debateby Fergus Bordewich, which deals with the Compromise of 1850 and the last gasp of 19th Century Senate titans like Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, and John C. Calhoun. The book deals with the aftermath of the Mexican-American War and the dispute over how the conquered territories would be admitted to the Union and, if so, whether they would be free or slave states. What is amusing (to me at least) is the unabashed nature of the debate from the southern states, which is all about and only about slavery. There is no euphemism, no reliance on the term "state's rights" -- the issue is slavery and the southerners view slavery as an unequivocal good and one which is constitutionally protected and must continue to be so. So the next time some clown tells you that the Civil War wasn't about slavery, this is a pretty good book to give them. (Once I finish I hope to write further about the book.)
- And speaking of goofy, I relish the thought of the right promoting the idea that sexual desire is the enemy of freedom. This seems an utterly winning platform to me.
- The Pennsylvania voter ID law is an outrage and indicative of the willingness of Republicans to subvert the right to vote in order to rule. These are bad fucking people.
- I think the story of Romney's many overseas holdings is just beginning to get legs. I am personally quite curious about how Romney has an IRA worth a putative $100 million. I just don't see any way in the world that this could have been done legally. The Obama campaign should keep pounding away on this issue -- it is a no lose proposition.
The storm now seems to have passed here without doing any damage -- in fact, without seemingly having dropped any rain.
Because even though not much is happening, we still might want a bit more room to banter back and forth.
Kent Jones at MaddowBlog shared the following, and I'm cheerfully ripping it off:
Too many renditions of church hymns to a watered-down version of the 'Ode to Joy' theme (they are to Beethoven what Red Delicious is to apples) sit like a cloud between me and a decent recollection of just how wonderful a piece of music the Ode to Joy is when done right. As I said in comments over at MaddowBlog, this blew away the cloud for a bit. Hope it does the same for you.
What's going on in everyone's weekend? I think the kid and I are going to brave the Farmer's Market tonight; after that, I think we'll either be in the water, or inside staying cool.
(I like the building scenes that go along with the video.)
- I enjoyed this article on America's love affair with saying how "busy" we all are -- I'm certainly not immune. I particularly enjoyed this line: "if your job wasn’t performed by a cat or a boa constrictor in a Richard Scarry book I’m not sure I believe it’s necessary." Words to live by. This seems particularly apt in light of the DC area's desperate need for people to remove downed trees and tree limbs and repair power lines -- all of our high powered nonsense is exposed as just that when the electricity isn't running.
- I am pretty much done arguing over the merits of the ACA against the magical thinkers on the left. Pretty much all I had to say is captured in this post by Scott Lemieux at LG & M. And its follow up. Simply put, there is nothing to suggest that there was ever going to be sixty votes in the Senate for a single payer system. Moreover, I have serious doubts that if push came to shove, the ghosts of FDR and LBJ working in concert with Obama could have mustered a majority in either house for single payer. It just wasn't going to happen.
- Roy does his usual fine job in capturing the madness, (and for us, the sweet, sweet schadenfrede of the pink Himalayan salt tears [a phrase I've shamelessly stolen and can't remember from whom]) of the right wing over John Roberts' perfidy -- coerced, as we all know, by the New York Times editorial board holding his children at gunpoint.
- And please read what LG&M accurately characerized as this "epic post" at Crooked Timber critiquing libertarians and their unwillingness to deal with the coercive power of management and ownership in the workplace, something that remains to my mind the central power relationship in most of our lives and the one in which the rankest forms of dominance take place. It says everything I would have like to have said and better.
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