Month: May 2014

All eyes should be on Albany where the Working Families Party is gearing up to have a vote on who to endorse for governor. The word is that Andrew Cuomo has struck a deal, but there is a lot of resistance inside the hall. What’s in the deal? I’m hearing a hike in the minimum wage and an agreement to fight for Democratic control of the state Senate. Earlier, I heard it was about public funding of campaigns.

If these folks were really smart, they’d nominate someone other than Cuomo who would have a shot at coming in second place ahead of the Republicans. That could knock the Republican Party down the ballot in future elections and also cause them to lose control of some county election boards.

It doesn’t look like that is about to happen, though, unfortunately.

E.J. Dionne proves that he’s a great journalist, again, with his latest piece in The Atlantic. One of the things that kept running through my mind as I read his article was that the Reformicons seem unlikely to play a central role in the 2016 Republican primaries. Despite the fact that they’re among the only ones doing any original thinking (and, frankly, it ain’t all that original) on the conservative side, I just don’t see Ramesh Pannuru and Yuval Levin getting hired by Rand Paul or Ted Cruz to help them craft a set of policies. I could see Jeb Bush or Chris Christie doing that. But I just get a feeling that Jeb and Christie are not going to be able to shift the right’s attention onto the Earned Income Tax-Credit. The fight for the nomination won’t be won by the person offering the freshest set of policies, but by the person who best stirs the rumblings of hate towards liberals while still being able to present surface-level plausibility as a winning candidate.

Think about David Frum’s admonition that the GOP stop fighting for the prohibition of abortion and start focusing on reducing its occurrence “by two-thirds over the next ten years.” If a Republican president proposed something like that and had an actual sensible plan to make it happen, progressives would be completely on board. That’s because the things that will reduce unwanted pregnancies are things that progressives have long supported: protection of women against violence, access to affordable and effective contraception, sexual education, more economic security for the lower classes, and better upward mobility due to better access to higher education. What won’t work is lecturing people about abstinence and insisting the people get married before they have sex. We’re not going back to the days when people got married so that they could have sex. If they’re going to get married, it’s going to be because they can afford to do so, and because they want to make a commitment. If you want to encourage marriage and two-parent households, you should focus on economics, not preaching. In any case, the idea that a Republican can win his party’s nomination for president by calling a cease fire on the abolition of abortion is not one that is rooted in reality.

What we’re going to see instead is a brawl between neoconservatives and libertarians over foreign policy and a brawl between social conservatives and libertarians over things like the War on Drugs. The GOP cannot even discuss health care coherently, so I doubt we’ll see anything grounded in this world discussed on that topic. Do you think the GOP’s primary voters are going to give a crap about what David Brooks or Ross Douthat think about Common Core, Race to the Top, and No Child Left Behind?

Personally, I expect every candidate, excepting possibly Jeb Bush, to just call for block granting everything under the Sun and leaving actual policy and priority setting to the states. Of course, that’s a popular idea in the Reformicon Movement as well.

For Dionne, there’s something lamentable about the pathetic efforts of the wannabe reformers, but I actually see it as a positive. As a country, we’re not ready to reconcile. If the reformers were more sincere and effective and influential, it would be a sign that we might be able to have a functional divided government again sometime soon. But that’s not reality. What we need is a massive victory in 2016, and the reformers’ lack of seriousness, focus, and actual consequence is a great sign that we’ll get that giant victory.

What’s on your mind?

Hello again painting fans.

This week I will be continuing with painting of the 1937 Rolls Royce.  The photo that I will be using is seen directly below. I will be using my usual acrylics on an 9×12 gallery-wrapped canvas.

 When last seen, the painting appeared as it does in the photo seen directly below.

Since that time, I have continued to work on the painting.

There are many changes this week.  I’ve revised the car a bit.  The yellowish rear door is now less bright and more in keeping with the rest of the car.  Ahead of that door, I’ve added a reflection haze to the black paint similar to the front fender.  This was accomplished with some thin white/gray paint.  The same has been done to the rear fender.  There are several components that now have a hard outline.  To the rear of the painting, the hills/bushes have been completed as well as the flat areas before them.  I’ve also adjusted the roadway centerline a bit.  Finally, the bark of the palm trees has been reduced in color intensity by applying the same watery white/gray used on the car body.  The painting is now completed.

The current and final state of the painting is seen in the photo directly below.

I’ll have a new painting to show you next week.  See you then.

Earlier paintings in this series can be seen here.

I was holding out hope that Kathleen Parker’s critique of Michelle Obama’s “Let’s Move” program might include some insightful reforms or interesting anecdotes. But she actually concluded her critique by calling for parents to make their kids’ own damn lunch.

I admit that I had let down my guard. I allowed myself to get sucker-punched by Kathleen Parker because she had convinced me that she’s a “different kind of conservative.” You know, one with an ounce of common sense and some slight ability to empathize with mothers who don’t have the money for a loaf of bread, a jar of peanut butter, and a banana.

My mistake. I will endeavor not to make it a second time.

I haven’t paid a whole lot of attention to the debate over the nickname of Washington’s National Football League franchise. I grew up as a New York Giants fan, and playing cowboys and redskins went right along with playing eagles. I never knew why the Washington team was called the Redskins, although it did occur to me that it was kind of an odd choice. The Giants came from the country’s largest city, the eagle is our national symbol which makes sense for the city of our founding, and naturally cowboys and Dallas go together.

Anyway, the Redskins started out as the Boston Braves. They shared a field with a pre-existing baseball team of the same name. After a while, it got confusing in the same way that it was once difficult to distinguish between baseball’s St. Louis Cardinals and football’s St. Louis Cardinals. On top of that, the owner of the Boston Braves football team decided to begin playing their games at Fenway Park, the home of the Red Sox.

So, since redskins and braves are both references to Native Americans and because Red Sox and Redskins kind of go together, the name change was made. I doubt a whole lot of thought went into it. If the Red Sox had been named the Walruses, the Redskins probably would have become the Warriors.

So, I think we can eliminate original sin from our understanding of the nickname. At the time, there were Native American players on the team including, purportedly, their coach. The coach may have been lying about that, but I still don’t think it’s completely wrong to say that the nickname was in some sense about honoring Native Americans, not deliberately disrespecting them. What is clear is that the owner of the team at the time was explicit that the name was not changed to honor the coach, which is something the modern day owner and even the NFL Commissioner have been saying in defense of the nickname.

What’s also clear is that they should just change the name. Times change. People find the name offensive. They don’t care why the name was chosen. It’s nice that it wasn’t intentionally offensive, but it doesn’t matter anymore. It isn’t worth fighting to preserve the name.

We all know that unlike, say, Rep. Rush Holt of New Jersey, Senator Marco Rubio, Governor Rick Scott, and Speaker John Boehner are not scientists. They don’t claim to be scientists. But we wish that they had at least stayed in a Holiday Inn Express last night. That way, perhaps they would be able to come to grips with the fact that 97% of scientists agree that human activity is causing climate change that will have far more economically-negative consequences down the road than the cost of addressing the problem would have now.

Jonathan Chait wants to know why it is suddenly so popular for Republicans to tell the public that they are not scientists and therefore are unqualified to have an opinion about whether or not climate change is actually occurring. It’s because they lack even an iota of moral courage. It’s because they are paid liars. This is not complicated and it shouldn’t even be debatable. Outside of a very small handful of genuine dunces who actually managed to get elected despite having personal beliefs about science that would make John Calvin blush, every single Republican who is either denying climate change or saying that they can’t make up their mind about it is actually just being dishonest. For money and career.

It is outrageous and deplorable behavior that ought to be met with the same derision and scorn we reserve for scam-artists and thieves. These are people whose basic character is so diminished that you would not leave them with your children. These are the kind of people who sell get-rich-quick pamphlets and try to convince you that you can lose your belly fat through a series of small, electric shocks administered by an ill-fitting belt. What they are lacking is any moral scruples about flim-flamming people. It’s like the Glenn Beckification of the Party of Lincoln is now complete. Science is the enemy because scientists don’t fall for their deceitful pitches for fraudulent products. It’s the party of gold-bugs and unskewed polls.

Karl Rove on election night is the face of the modern GOP. And if we listen to these clowns on climate change or let them continue to have a share of power, we’ll be just as bewildered as Rove was that night when the climate begins to really turn for the worse.

Iowa state Sen. Joni Ernst got some national notoriety by talking about castrating hogs, but the candidate for Tom Harkin’s senate seat is taking heat now for an advertisement she is running in which she points a gun directly at the viewer while a narrator promises that she will “unload” on ObamaCare. In a recent Republican debate, she created a headache for herself by dismissing concerns about the ad while referring to the killing spree in Santa Barbara as an “accident.”

“Mrs. Ernst, a viewer wrote us saying in light of the shooting of Congresswoman Gabby Giffords, the shootings at the Aurora, Colo., theater, and most recently at the UC Santa Barbara campus, ‘we have a Joni Ernst in the television ad that is running continuously on all local television stations that contains violent imagery pointing a gun directly at the viewer and vowing to quote ‘shoot them down’ and hateful language directed toward their opponents. Is this really what politics has become in this country?'” the moderator said. “Mrs. Ernst, what do you say to this viewer?”

“Yes, I would say to this viewer that what happened in that shooting and that stabbing is an absolute tragedy,” Ernst said. “However, I remain firm in my commitment to the Second Amendment. I have been endorsed by the NRA in this race, and again, just because of a horrible, horrible tragedy, I don’t believe we should be infringing upon people’s Second Amendment rights.”

The moderator then asked Ernst if she would change the ad or its timing in light of the UCSB shooting.

“I would not — no. This unfortunate accident happened after the ad, but it does highlight that I want to get rid of, repeal, and replace Bruce Braley’s Obamacare,” Ernst replied, referring to a Democratic Senate candidate. “And it also shows that I am a strong supporter of the Second Amendment. That is a fundamental right.”

I think the outrage has been misplaced. People make misstatements all the time, and using “accident” instead of “incident” isn’t really a big deal. What people should focus on is the basis of her reasoning. We get that she doesn’t want to do anything about gun violence and that she wants to take away the health care of approximately 120,000 Iowans. Those are policy preferences, and she can defend them. What’s harder to understand is why she thinks it matters when her ad was made or first aired. The question is about whether it is appropriate (in light of the Santa Barbara tragedy) to run the ad “continuously on all local television stations” when it “contains violent imagery pointing a gun directly at the viewer.”

She doesn’t think it’s insensitive to keep running the ad. She doesn’t seem to understand why some people think it’s insensitive. That ought to be the real scandal here.

Secretary of Veterans’ Affairs Eric Shinseki fought for his job until the end, but ultimately had to fall on his sword. Probably most fatal was his initial effort to portray the wait-time scandal as isolated in Phoenix. When the Inspector General report revealed that the problem was systemic, it pulled the rug out from Shinseki and left him with too few allies willing to give him the benefit of the doubt.

This is a story about resources, but it’s also a story about perverse incentives. By tying people’s annual reviews to their ability to create short wait-times, the VA gave folks a reason to game the reports. We all want accountability, but we have be careful about how we try to measure performance. I think we see some similar problems with our desire to measure how teachers and school districts are performing. Sometimes our efforts to measure performance are counterproductive or create weird or unethical responses.

When we create these systems, we create an atmosphere where people are incentivized to cheat, so dealing with that has to be built into the system from the beginning. It the VA’s case, they have already suspended the wait-time tie to performance reviews. If they are going to revive that standard, they will need an IT solution that is robust enough to forestall cheating.

Kentucky Governor Steve Beshear has a way of talking about the Affordable Care Act in a common sense manner that is hard to dispute. He’s been unflinching in his defense of the law and the good it is doing for his constituents, even in the face of widespread disapproval in his state for the president and “ObamaCare.” I think he’s put himself on the short list for vice-president, even though his politics are otherwise short of progressive. I love the way he goes after Mitch McConnell in his latest piece for the Huffington Post:

…if each of the over 421,000 people who signed up via “kynect” could grab 10 minutes of Sen. McConnell’s time to explain what health care coverage means for their families, and if the Senator had the endurance to listen 24/7, it would take eight years to hear from each enrollee.

That’s longer than the entire new Senate term he says he deserves.

I’d like to see them put that up as a ballot initiative: “Do you think Mitch McConnell should be forced to give ten minutes of time to every recipient of ObamaCare in the state, even if it takes him eight years of listening twenty-four hours a day?”

It’d be a good way to discover if McConnell has even an ounce of shame.