Who's playing with fire?

"Capitalism is like fire: a good servant but a bad master."

"Government is like fire: a good servant but a bad master."

Q. Which of these statements is true?
A. Wrong question–because both of these statements are true--




Something many Republicans and some Democrats don't understand.

To filibuster or not to filibuster?

The best way to consider revising the Senate's rules would be to use zero-based budgeting:

That is, supposing we were to have a constitutional convendion and reached the point of determining what rules should be used to govern the Senate--and of those rules, which should be baked into the Constitution.

Let me stipulate that in this hypothetical mission, the Democrats and Republicans each contolled 50 votes in the Senate, and the presidential elections have not yet been held, and all the major opinion polls of likely voters put each team's chances at exactly 50-50.

That is, neither party would have an incentive to jigger the rules to favor the minority or the majority.
So--how would we balance majority vs. minority rights, without regard to the current actual situation or the past four or eight or fifty years?

Some useful principles to use:

1. Transparency: no check or balance should involve anyone being able to gum up the works in secret.

2. Minority rights: while the minority party should be able to slow down particular proceedings; to force issues out of committee for a floor vote; to prevent their will being overrun in secret--at the same time the rules should never permit what would be in effect minority rule.

How about it?

Discussions of this issue are full of tit-for-tatting; hopefully pushing for a zero-based approach can sidestep the endless litary of grievances both sides tend to bring to such debates.

Governor Romney says his business background irrelevant

That's right. According to Governor Romney, his business background is not an important qualification for being President of the United States. Of course this isn't his words. It's his actions. And don't actions speak louder than words?

The action is his choice of Vice President: a 42 year old man with exactly zero business experience--none whatsoever.

So unless you believe that Mitt Romney is immortal and invincible, and if you believe that the Vice President's constitutional job description is "Takes over if the President is killed or incapacitated," then you must agree that the traits and background needed for the job of Vice President are exactly the same as for President.

Which means you must base a vote for President Obama or Governor Romney on their experience in government--Romney as, in his words, the "severely conservative" governor of Massachusetts for one term vs. President Obama's experience in a state legislature, in the national legislature, and as President of the United States, plus Chairman Ryan for his long service in the House of Representatives, plus Vice President Biden for his long service in Congress plus his experience as Vice President of the United States/

Of course there are other relevant things--policy positions, strategic vision, personal character, life story, spouse, education, demonstrated understanding of the needs and concerns of most Americans, mastery of foreign policy issues and tactics, international experience.

Just not business experience. I'd thought it had some relevance myself, but Governor Romney overruled me this weekend with his choice of Chairman Ryan.

On with the Republican debates

http://www.motifake.com/136409

Today's NYTimes editorial speaks in favor of the Republican debates continuing, because it's good for President Obama. They've got a point, but they also erred in the way that people who only speak to people who already agree with them err.


This editorial seems to assume that Republican voters share Democratic voters' values. And they do, to some extent, but in a different order.

Democrats are most terrified of being thought insensitive.
Republicans are most terrified of being thought weak.

The debating points the editorial cites shows how far apart the parties are. To the NYT it's self-evident that these points are wrong.

But take "Ending multilingual ballots (disenfranchising millions)." ---i.e. being insensitive. Quelle domage.

But a Republican reading it would say "First, that's Democrats being disenfranchised, second they're not--they're just being asked to learn this country's language so they understand the national discussion about the issues before they vote. Otherwise they'll vote tribally, for whatever group they belong to, instead of voting as Americans"

Ditto the NYT's horror of "making [illegal aliens'] lives miserable" in order to get them to self-deport. Again, that assumes that Republican voters fear being seen as insensitive to illegal aliens' feelings.

Seriously? Republicans could care less. it also hurts bank robbers' feelings to arrest them. And wife-beaters. So? Republicans would say it probably is "insensitive" for our nation to only accept people who we want to come here, instead of telling the world "step right up. Mi casa es su casa."

As if happens I'll be voting for Obama because of the GOP's voodoo economics. Not because it's "sensitive" to do so.

A comment on the debt crisis that the NY Times censored

Curious about what sorts of comments on the debt crisis the NY Times censors out?


Here's mine, a response to an op-ed piece by Paul Krugman ("The President Surrenders"), excoriating the Republicans for extortion and President Obama for giving in to it:

I generally agree with Dr. Krugman's analysis of the Republicans, but he rarely acknowleges all the ways the Democratic Party has shoved so many Americans into the eager arms of the GOP. That aspect just seems invisible to him.

Illegal immigration is high on that list--pundits in the Northeast seem to have no idea what the impact has been here in the Southwest. In California, illegal immigrants, their children & grandchildren now comprise a majority of all students in our public school system. They're a majority of Los Angeles residents. This isn't multiculturalism--it's the supplanting of one society with another. For people like Dr. Krugman it's unthinkable to even complain about this--since only \"those sorts\" of people would object to their society being replaced by that of another country.

Especially when American blue collar wages have sunk below the poverty line due to competition from illegals. But Dr. Krugman probably doesn't have any blue collar acquaintances...

Nor does it help that in amongst the flagrant lying of the Republicans, nonpartisan factchecking sources like the CBO and factcheck.org also find Democratic politicians shading the truth.

I hate propaganda apparatchiks like Sean Hannity getting to have even the slightest element of truth in their vicious tirades.

And yet they do have a kernel of truth in some of their accusations.

Plus, I wonder whether Dr. Krugman's central thesis here is correct--that President Obama should have stuck to his guns on the debt ceiling. Viscerally I wanted him to do so, but we had 8 years of a visceral prez and that didn't turn out so well.

It may be best for him not to have let the US default on its debts, even though the Republicans' credible threat to do so was treasonous. It may yet be that the voting public will see through the Democrats' many missteps to the fact that the Republican alternative actually endangers the Republic.

Aaron Burr's starting to get real competition.

Should the Constitution be read aloud at the beginning of every session of Congress?

The House's new Republican majority decided to honor the Constitution by mandating that it be read aloud, beginning to end, as the first order of business of the session.

The Left generally derided this as idolatry, as well as pointing out that it cost taxpayers over a million dollars to do so while more and more Americans unwillingly joined the "99 week" club in which your unemployment payments run out after 99 weeks.

They also pointed out that the reading was of a sanitized version of the Constitution, with all the parts revised or deleted later through amendment deleted.

The Right claimed this was pragmatically obvious--that the purpose of the reading was to remind congressmen of the parts that are still germane, to keep in mind as they craft new legislation.

The Left replied that we also needed to remind congressmen that the Founding Fathers weren't perfect, and that omitting the parts later amended/deleted contributed to the presumption that every word they wrote is sacred and no future amendments should be considered.

Centrists like me note that there are a number of features of the Constitution that the Right want changed--such as the use of the 14th Amendment to give citizenship to babies born here even when their parents are here illegally. Doing so wasn't the intent of the 14 Amendment's framers--they were just trying to keep Southern states from disenfranchising ex-slaves and their offspring.

I say that they should have read the whole thing. The parts still extant are useful to guide legislation--and so are the deleted parts, reminding us to treat the Founding Fathers with respect but not reverence.


But here's the kicker. All those flagwaving Republicans who insisted on this public display of conspicuous patriotism? Most of them left the chambers long before this reading was over. By the end only 42 Representatives were left--and that proves what a hollow exercise this was.

I would have been impressed if they'd all stuck around 'till the last dog was hung, so to speak. But they split instead, thus validating the Democrats' contention that this was just another waste of taxpayer money and a diversion from the Republicans' stated goal of focusing like a laser on getting Americans employed again.

Instead it showed that they have a laserlike focus, all right, but it's not on helping Americans who are out of work--it's on bringing back the Bush years of Republican control of all three branches and the fiscal responsibility that ensued.

Not.

Arguing with Tea Partiers

If you read political comment threads about global warming, you'll see they prove that Tea Party types can learn scientific terms--in exactly the same way as a mynah bird does.

That's why they cling to fabrications like the East Anglia stuff. Just because they can say the words doesn't mean they have the slightest understanding of what they mean.

The truth is that they're scared people who have been propagandized into believing all their insecurities are the fault of Lib-er-uls.

So when you debunk their ideas, they don't hear the debunking--they hear that you're attacking their tribe.

See, their fears are justified. They have been shafted. The inflation-adjusted incomes of most (aside from the richest) Americans has stagnated ever since Ronald Reagan spearheaded the move to take from the 95% and give it to the 5%. Moving plants abroad has kicked the slats out of their communities and their lives. The morphing of Wall Street from a service providing capital to manufacturers into a cabal of financial manipulators has destroyed their 401Ks. Their wives now have to work, which galls them.

And the Democrats haven't just made themselves into their enemy because the billionaires' sock puppets told them so. The Democrats have told them that every culture on Earth is precious--except for theirs; that every race and religion on Earth is precious--except for theirs. It has told them that their culture, race and traditions are evil things whose destruction by the shifting demographics of uncontrolled immigration is to be celebrated.

And to add insult to injury, they've discovered that their counterparts in government work make substantially more than they do--and that the public employee unions (apart from the very Republican prison guard union) generally fund Democratic pols enough to win their fealty.

Moreover, the Republicans look and talk like them...in public, at least. While the Democrats often don't. Hence the claptrap about Obama being a furriner from a furrin place with a furrin religion. Of course that's nonsense--but it accurately reflects their feelings of dislocation in their own country.

So we smart liberal--type people have a problem with both these Tea Party types and with ourselves. And unfortunately the sins of our side are more visible and obvious than the sins of the Republicans.

We do ballots in 15 languages. They do default credit swaps. Now try to explain both things to a guy with a high school education. See what I mean?

The Republicans commit their sins in the dark. The Democrats do their in broad daylight.

We do have common ground with the Tea Party types--we've been shafted just like they have.

It's probably impossible to reason with the ones whose minds are set. Most of them at least. But we have to try, don't we?

So start by agreeing that they have indeed been shafted, by both parties, albeit in ways they don't understand as far as the Republican shafting is concerned.

Just don't get your hopes up. As Alexis de Tocqueville pointed out well over a century ago, the Achilles heel of American democracy is rampant anti-intellectualism.

It's actually not all about the economy, stupid--even now

My response to Paul Krugman's current editorial in the NYTimes, blaming the coming Democratic Party bloodbath on inadequate economic policy:

To an economist, everything is economics. But it ain't. I agree with Krugman's economic analysis, but he's missing the sociology of this election. The Democratic Party has morphed from the party of the working stiff to the party of the minority and public employee unions, which themselves employ disproportionate numbers of minorities.

What follows from that is support for a social agenda a majority of Americans oppose: support for illegal immigration--despite an actually good record of enforcement--support for the Mexicaniztion of the American Southwest--support for polylingual ballots--opposition to the English language (I'm describing the emotional reality of these things, mind you)--support for secular people like me who have no use for religion--support for homosexuals, including in the military.

I'm not saying all these supports are bad or good. I'm saying they add up to a zeitgeist that Joe Lunchbook sees as being against HIM.

And the Democratic leadership hasn't done much to counter this impression.

And the many millions being spent by secretive agents of the Billionaire's Club pushes putatively economic message, but if you look at the atmospherics of their ad blitz it's about tribe: if you're a white American who isn't a liberal, they want you to think the Republican tribe--it ceased being a political party in the 1970s--is your tribe, and the Democratic Party is the enemy tribe, to be opposed across the board.

That's what's really going on. I believe Professor Krugman is suffering from a corollary of confirmation bias--in this case, the belief that your academic speciality is at the heart of the politics that's going on.

It's not. People talk about it because they can't or wont' speak the tribality they're feeling. But that's like asking a guy why he bought a ticket me yellow Beemer convertible and he talks about resale value and reliability, not that he got it because he thinks it's a chick magnet.

As Gregory House said, "People always lie." Including to themselves.

So if the Democratic Party wants America back, it's going to have to make some terrifically hard decisions about what it wants to accomplish, and whether adopting a race/ethnic/culturally blind platform isn't the best choice today, even if its political correctness was correct back in the 1960s when blacks were murdered for voting across the South. It's not sunshine and flowers today...but the Democratic Party won't be able to do squat for minorities if it's out of office, will it?

What's wrong with rank and file Republicans?

Democrats look at the shenanigans of Republicans at bondage strip clubs and ask
"Why can't decent working people see through these charlatans?"

Answer: the Democratic Party unintentionally alienated them, even though it's the natural home for working stiffs, and the Republican Party sucked them in by morphing the GOP from a political party into a tribe.

And in a tribe you defend your own and attack your tribe's enemies. Right=my tribe; Wrong=your tribe. This is a fundamental human survival trait--far deeper than simple racism.

We Democrats have to understand how we pushed them out. When the previous generation (that of Lyndon Johnson etc.) went for racial justice and equity, they had a chance to create a level playing field. Instead they tilted it from whites towards everyone else. That was affirmative action.

I'm neither affirming nor attacking affirmative action. I understand why the Democratic Party did it--it was a reaction to the total intransigence of the White South to any form of racial equality at all.

And it's also true that acting to impose any form of racial equality at all would have lost us the Southern Democrats.

But it was affirmative action and its ramifications that lost the rest. Things that seem like simple justice to today's Democrats deeply offend the average White working stiff:

* Amnesty for illegal aliens
* Ballots in dozens of languages
* Affirmative action for the sons of Black doctors, but not for the sons of White sharecroppers
* Black and Chicano and Womens studies departments at most universities
* "Press One for directions in Spanish"
* Abortion
* Gun control
* Eliminating Church stuff from public life--from Nativity scenes on courthouse lawns to school prayer

You get the idea.

Mostly Democrats dismiss people's complaints about these things as knuckle-dragging racism/nativism/fundamentalism.

It's tempting to do so. But don't you realize that this is EXACTLY what Karl Rove wants you to do?

Divide and conquer. It's how the bosses destroyed the populist movement of the late 19th century. Distract working stiffs from their real oppressor with emotion-inducing stuff (like Reagan's welfare queens) so they'll hate each other and forget the foe. And then get the foe to appear in public as if he actually cares about his working stiffs. Voila.

Imagine if the Democratic Party had adopted a race-blind rule instead of racial preference. Who's to say racial equity might not be farther along now if it had?

And so now, even today, we have cases like the white firefighters in Rhode Island who followed the rules, and then when the rules gave them the promotion instead of the black firefighters--they changed the rules.

And you wonder why the Republicans were able to pick them up? White working stiffs have seen their earning power stagnate or even go down radically. Laid off workers almost never regain their former earning power. And even those who haven't been laid off haven't seen their earning power rise for 40 years, more or less. Their lives have been hollowed out. Their wives had to go to work. Their dream of home ownership may have vanished.

Of course as a Democrat I know why--the richest .5% of the country took those people's money and put it in their own pockets. But they make sure to stay out of these guys' sight.

Unfortunately the GOP and its patrons have figured out how to do their dirty deeds in the dark. So what the white guy with the stagnant income and uncertain prospects sees is Republicans who talk like him and dress and cut their hair like him (yes, there's race, but it's more the haircut and the conservative look).

There's also the fact that you can't explain default credit swaps to a guy with a high school education. But you can point at people who don't look and talk like you and say "They're taking your job!"

Nor does it help that often that foreign guy is taking your job. Not mine. I'm an educated professional. But if you're a roofer--yeah, the foreign guy is taking your job. It's just the tone-deafness of so many ideological Democrats that makes them not get that.

Obama does get that, and he's making so many concessions to Republicans less to get Congressional votes than to connect with all those independent voters--mainly white guys--who have the sense that both parties have shafted them.

Because it's possible to pursue Democratic Party ideals without making regular mainstream (mostly white) Americans feel like you disdain and dismiss them.

So we all need to emulate Obama and try to get these angry white guys to simmer down and talk sense. They may be wrong about Obamacare and a lot else, but their sense of grievance--well, they came by that honestly. They should have a sense of grievance.

So before you give in to Tea Party provocations, ask yourself "What does Karl Rove want me to do?" and do the other thing instead. OK?

Tell your House representative to endorse the Senate bill

Paul Krugman's latest NYT op-ed piece ("Do the right thing") proves that the right wing caricatures of him are just that: stupid caricatures. Now if only the House Democrats will man up and follow his sound, pragmatic advice.

To quote the Spanish saying, "Algo es mejor que nada" -- "Something is better than nothing." Because our only alternative to the Senate version is no healthcare reform for another generation. So don't let your congressman ride the Horse of Pride right off the cliff.

Anything but the Senate bill means the healthcare denial industry wins, along with their sock puppets in Congress, otherwise known as the Republican leadership. The Republican rank and file will think they're winning but they'll actually be losing. A small consolation if it turns out that way.

If you're trying to decide what to tell your Congressman, just read the right wing diatribes that will throng Krugman's comment thread. Look at their gloating contempt for you and everything Democrats stand for (or at least should stand for). They want the House Democrats either to blink and pass nothing or stiffen up and demand changes to the Senate bill--but either alternative will produce exactly the same result.

The healthcare denial industry is spending over a million dollars a day, every day, seven days a week, to flood the airwaves with lying propaganda that is working. This propaganda is backed up by a legion of self-aggrandizing, self-styled pundits and rightwing talk show hosts, all in lockstep with the healtcare denial industry's message du jour.

That message is that Obama is a European Socialist, every Democratic congressman is a European Socialist, and the mild healthcare reform of the Senate bill is actually a Soviet-style nationalization of the healthcare industry that will institute death panels to kill Grandma. You laugh. But half the electorate--that half that doesn't live where you do--believe all of this.

If you think we have a snowball's chance in Hell of getting anything better--just because you and your educated friends in your college town want something better--you're dreaming.

I want something better. I want France's healthcare system, OK? I want single payer. I want to see the CEOs of the health insurance companies on the streetcorner, in rags, selling apples. Or pulling oars in slave galleys.

But the universe repeatedly fails to reconfigure itself according to my desires. How about you?

Call your congressman and say "Pass the Senate Bill. Now. Do the people's work."

Republicans are like 3 year old boys ___Democrats are like 10 year old girls

The Republican leadership encourages Republicans to think and act like three year old boys. Three year olds, above all else, want to do what they want to do--and they don't want anyone else to tell them what to do.

That is, to paraphrase a text on anarchism I read in college, a child sees freedom as "freedom from (authority)," while an adult sees freedom as "freedom to (accomplish your goals)."

In promoting blind resentment and distrust of government, Republican leaders commonly say stuff like "I don't want some bureacrat in Washington telling me what to do." The odd thing is that this directly contradicts the conservative's respect for authority. They accomplish this sleight of brain by describing the authority as illegitimate if it's elected by Democrats. Authority is only to be respected if it's Republican. This represents the abandonment of conservative principles in exchange for raw tribalism. It's also anarchistic. And if you've ever worked in a church's nursery for 2-3 year old kids, as I have, you're also recognize it as the behavior of--as I said--three year old boys.

The motive is simple. The Republicans' main campaign donors are billionaires who have no need of government services, and who want to spend their money on themselves instead of paying taxes that will fund government services. But they can't win with campaign slogans like "Billions for Billionaires, diddly squat for thee," so instead they cultivate distrust of all government.

Then Republican rank and file will gladly vote to strip away every protection individuals have against being exploited by powerful billionaires with squadrons of lawyers--all in the name of an autonomy only a billionaire has without those protections. It's a neat trick.


Democrats, meanwhile, want you to think like a 10 year old girl--you know, the kind who brings a stray pregnant cat home and has no comprehension of how many more cats America has than it needs or can care for. All heart, no brain. Thus we have to cater to the needs of anyone who is or has ever been discriminated against by anyone anywhere, while excusing any bad thing that comes along as a consequence of all this catering to special interest groups.

Thus we're supposed to welcome people who respond to Mexico's population explosion (from 20 million in 1940 to over 100 million in 2000) by moving here illegally. Never mind world overpopulation. Never mind Mexico's responsibilities to its own citizens. Never mind our responsibilities to America's own unskilled laborers. Never mind the huge demographic shift being foisted upon us by this mass migration. Never mind the huge negative on schools and hospitals and social services organizations in general. 10 year old girls don't care or understand about such things. They only see a poor little Mexican kid with big eyes like the paintings sold in tourist areas next to the seascapes and clowns. A poor little "person of color," who is therefore saintly, just as a "person without color" is some kind of beast oppressing the former group.

In other words, nevermind consequence.

So we get the party of 3 year old boys vying with the party of 10 year old girls.

Great. Just great.

It's the tribalism, stupid...

In a recent Gallup poll, 59% of Pakistanis said the US is the biggest threat to Pakistan--only 11% said it was the Taliban. A majority of Pakistanis--and this includes the middle class there, not just uneducated poor people--blame the recent spate of bombings there on outside forces--Mossad, India, the CIA, the West's "War Against Islam" etc.

This confirms my growing belief that a majority of humans in developed countries and even more in poor ones are primarily tribal in their orientation. Tribalism excuses everything anyone on your side does and ascribes only evil motives to anything the "other tribe" does, and always blames one's own culture's troubles on "outside forces."

In the South at the dawn of racial integration in the 1960s and 70s, White Southerners usually blamed the Blacks' struggle for equality on "outside agitators."

And today Republicans blame America's ills all on foreigners--mainly Democrats, who they regard as not actually Americans, abetted by the United Nations and international banks etc.

Partisan Democrats aren't much better, never acknowledging any legitimacy to conservative thinking even when it's correct, as with illegal immigration.

It's tribalism that blinds people to reform efforts, and to the idea of using principles rather than tribe as your central philosophy.

Healthcare reform woes partly the Demos' fault

Across America many millions of Republicans await anxiously to see whether their champions in Congress can defeat what they see as the foreigner in the White House and his European Socialist cohorts in Congress trying to bankrupt them and then kill them when they're old and useless.

It's such an irony that it's their heroes who want to bankrupt them and then kill them (when they can't pay their premiums any more).

But it's not just the $1.4M/day the healthcare denial industry is spending to defeat any kind of reform that might reduce their profits. It's not just the Republican partisans whose loyalty is more tribal than principled.

It's also Obama's fault, and the Democratic Congress--they've let the other convince a majority of Americans of one central point: that the Democrats plan to transfer some of their healthcare to others--bums and foreigners mainly. They've allowed this to happen by harping on the need to help those without insurance. Yet most voters have insurance, which they'll have until they actually need it. And then they won't. But that's not now. Now they need to hear about what Obama is going to do for them. And how what most pay for their insurance has zoomed up, but mostly out of sight.

Time after time the Democratic Party manages to sound like it cares about every ethnicity on Earth except for European-Americans, to use a phrase they never use.

I voted for Obama to get healthcare reform, even though, like most Americans, I'm concerned about illegal immigration--especially since I live in the part of America that's being overrun, far from the Beltway.

What happened to the realistic Democrats who knew how to win back Congress and the White House? Did they think the Republican Party's paymasters would just go away quietly? There's waaay too much profit involved. And Democrats must remember that the Blue Dog Democrats are blue dogs because more liberal demos couldn't have gotten elected, and without them the Demos couldn't have taken back Congress, and if the Blue Dogs appear to lose faith with their constituents they won't get re-elected, and then the GOP (Greed Over Principle) party will regain Congress. Do you want that to happen?

You can't get in the ring wearing gloves and talking about altruism when the other guy's stepping in wearing brass knucks and talking about what the majority of Americans most care about--their own healthcare.

Whining about how dirty the Republican leadership fights won't help either. Of course they fight dirty. They've been fighting dirty at least since Reagan painted the government as all bad all the time--a long-term investment in deregulation that has paid off handsomely for the Angry Billionaire's Club. If they fought fair they'd lose. So they don't (see my definition of G.O.P.).

Obama doesn't have to lose his cool. But he does have to deal with the Republican Party he's got instead of the one he wants. And he has to face the fact that this is only going to work if doctors get paid salaries instead of for piecework (procedures); and if the insurance industry profits get scaled back to those of ordinary businesses--and if the pharmaceutical industry's profits go likewise.

Obama's getting the poked hornet's nest attack anyway, no matter what he does. Might as well try to actually accomplish something.

--As long as he keeps making it clear that his beef is with the Republican leadership and their padrones--not the Republican rank and file.