Month: April 2019

In 2004, when I worked as a county coordinator for ACORN/Project Vote, I had the responsibility of hiring and training people to go out canvassing in a major voter registration and get out the vote program.  A major component of that training was teaching my employees how voter registration forms should be filled out and handled to comply with the law.  Many of the people I was hiring were from North Philadelphia, a poor area of the city with failing schools and very few legitimate job opportunities.  One problem I had was dealing with an absolute flood of applicants. Another was that most of these people were young, didn’t have much work experience, and a lot of them couldn’t do an adequate job and had to be terminated.  We had to have some basic standard for continued employment, so people who were sent out on four-hour canvassing shifts were expected to come back with at least ten new voter registration forms completed. If they failed, they’d get more training, eventually they’d get put on probation, and then finally we’d have to fire them if they couldn’t perform.  An unfortunate consequence of this requirement was that people who were falling short had a powerful incentive to forge voter registration forms.

We had a system for handling this. Registration forms required a phone number, and we would call a sample of the forms that came in to verify that someone at that number had actually filled out an application.  If we had suspicions about an employee, we’d do a more thorough vetting.

Despite these protocols, we inevitably turned in a lot of fraudulent forms to the Election Board.  This obviously was a nuisance that squandered their limited resources.  After the 2004 election, the Republicans exploited flaws like this to harass and demonize ACORN and even to threaten people like me with imprisonment.  They succeeded in destroying ACORN as an institution, but their motivation was not to make for a more efficient administrative state. They wanted to prevent us from successfully registering (mostly black) folks to vote.

A similar battle is now going on in Tennessee, where the state legislature is looking to crack down on “voter registration organizations that turn in incomplete forms” by imposing onerous fines.

The legislation would impose fines ranging from $150 to $2,000 if groups turn in between 100 to 500 unfinished forms. If a group turns more than 500 incomplete forms, they could face fines up to $10,000. Additionally, the legislation would require the groups to submit voter registration forms within 10 days and would also prohibit poll watchers from out of state.

This is a particularly vexing gambit by the Tennessee GOP because state law requires that all forms be turned in, even if they are fraudulent or incomplete. This is a sensible regulation because you don’t want people to only turn in the forms for people who registered with one party or to otherwise screw around with people’s voting rights. But if you require that all forms be turned in, it’s not fair to fine people for turning in incomplete forms.

They should either ban independent voter registration efforts or allow them knowing they’ll have to manage the inevitable influx of flawed forms. They’re trying to have it both ways, which doesn’t make a lot of sense.

According to the Tennessee ACLU, the state ranked next-to-last in voter participation in 2018, so you might think that state lawmakers would be interested in improving on that number rather than taking actions to shut down registration efforts. But the GOP does not want more voter participation, particularly from urban areas with large minority populations.

The legislation comes after the Tennessee Black Voter Project sued Shelby County along with the Memphis NAACP last year. At the time, the county’s election commission was preventing people with incomplete voter registration applications from fixing any problems, like missing addresses or illegible handwriting, and ultimately from voting on Election Day.

The Black Voter Project and the NAACP won their case, and with just over a week to go before Election Day, ordered the election commission to allow people to fix any problems on their applications and vote in the upcoming election.

It’s obvious that the GOP’s main concern wasn’t that the state was receiving some incomplete forms. They were looking for any flaws in the forms in order to disenfranchise legitimate applicants, and they had to be taken to court before they’d allow people to fix minor problems on their forms.

While I am willing to grant that independent voter registration efforts are inevitably inefficient and involve some low-level fraud, that for me argues not in favor of harassing these organizations out of existence but rather for making them obsolete by adopting automatic voter registration.

Everyone should be presumptively able to vote. To make that easier, we should also adopt a universal vote-by-mail system. With those reforms in place, we would no longer have to keep refighting battles with the Republicans about voter registration drives and mostly fictitious in-person voter fraud.

Nancy Pelosi.

“Progressive?”

Yeah.

Right.

Nancy Pelosi takes ANOTHER shot at AOC and says a ‘glass of water with a D next to it’ could have won the 29-year-old’s seat before warning her not to ‘menace’ voters.

US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, 79, has appeared to take another shot at AOC

Pelosi claims that a ‘glass of water with a D next to it’ could have won AOC’s seat

She also said the Democratic Party must avoid the ‘menace’ of liberal policies pushed by rising political stars like AOC if it wants to beat Donald Trump in 2020

—snip—

Pelosi added that New York Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez, popularly referred to as AOC, and fellow young progressives elected in 2018 represented only the margins of American society.

—snip—

Sigh…

I could go on, but why?

Could a “glass of water? have beaten Joe Crowley in the primary? A man who so considered AOC and her Bronx followers “marginal” that he barely made an effort to even run against her?

“SURPISE!!!” Joe.

And Nancy.

You and your two truly marginalized, entitlement-blinded parties have now managed to “marginalize”…economically at the very least, and educationally as well…what could quite likely be a majority of American voters!!!

Been to any inner cities without an escort recently, Nancy?  A police escort and most likely an armored limo as well? Detroit, say? Or Chicago or da Bronx or Cleveland or…or the little flyover cities and towns between your crooked DC and your equally crooked San Francisco? Which is having trouble keeping its golden streets free of human excrement!!!???

Who’s “marginal” now!!!???

The flyover people are.

They just don’t know it yet.

They gonna find out, though.

Soon enough.

Watch.

Disgusting!!!

AG

P.S. Pelosi famously said that the best thing she learned growing up (in a crooked, mafia-controlled Baltimore political family) was “how to count.”

Yup.

Count this, Madam Speaker!!! (Emphases mine.)

The demographics of Hispanic and Latino Americans depict a population that is the second-largest ethnic group in the United States, 52 million people or 16.7% of the national population, of them, 47 Million are American citizens.

Hispanic population is much younger than the rest of the country, less educated, less wealthy, with a very large immigrant component, of no less than two dozen national origins and of every race, with a longer life expectancy than their fellow Americans, and geographically concentrated in the southwestern United States.[1][2][3][4][5]

A large proportion of Hispanics that came from Latin America to the U.S. as adults have academic degrees because public university systems in most countries of Latin America are free[6][7] or very low cost and some of them continue their education or career in the US.[8][9] More than 40 % of Hispanic students are in college or are attending to college.[10]

I got yer “margins.”

Right there!!!

Add in the black vote, the working class and rural white vote…those many who have been absolutely disgusted by Trump’s antics…and the overall youth vote and what do you have?

You, on the very real margins…the rich margins…of a kleptocracy that is about to fall, one way or another.

Once again…her assumed entitlement is disgusting.

Go get a shovel and start cleaning up San Francisco.

I dare ya!!!

At the Washington Monthly, and here at Political Animal, we’ve written from time to time about the Trump administration’s efforts to defang the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, but none of us has done as comprehensive a job of it as Nicholas Confessore. His new piece in the New York Times Magazine focuses on Mick Mulvaney’s time at the CFPB as acting director.

I often hear liberals wonder aloud how so many low-to-moderate income Americans can support the Republican Party when it is clearly not in their financial interests to do so, and nowhere is that more clear than on the issues surrounding the CFPB.  Confessore demonstrates this very ably by doing a deep-dive into the pay-day lending/short-terms loans industry.

In the following excerpt, he explains how the payday loan industry rose in influence and power during the Bush administration by making loans to people who (they hoped) would not be able to pay back the money.  The CFPB was the brainchild of Elizabeth Warren, who was convinced of its necessity by her research into consumer debt.

[Elizabeth] Warren and other consumer advocates argued that payday lenders built their industry on a similar sleight of hand. They marketed themselves as lenders of last resort, offering emergency loans for a broken-down car or an unexpected medical bill. But according to Nick Bourke, a former financial-services consultant who now directs consumer-finance research at the Pew Charitable Trusts, what fed the industry’s growth were not emergency expenses but the increasingly unstable incomes of the working poor. As their hourly wages fluctuated at the whims of workplace-optimization software, payday-loan customers — typically white women earning around $30,000, according to Pew’s research — borrowed to pay their rent or electric bills. The average customer paid $55 in fees to borrow $375, due on their next payday. But most found that they couldn’t afford to repay the loan after two weeks. They took out another loan to cover the first, and usually another.

Consumer advocates called this cycle a “debt trap” and argued that payday lenders, much like credit-card companies, disguised the true costs of their products. Store clerks emphasized the small-seeming fees and pushed customers to roll their old loans into new ones, so that the fees snowballed, eventually exceeding the cost of the original loan. While most banks made money by finding customers who could repay their debts on time, payday lenders made money by finding customers who couldn’t. “If borrowers repaid loans in just two weeks and walked away as advertised, lenders would go out of business,” Bourke says.

What really distinguishes the short-term loan industry from regular banks is precisely the focus on finding customers who will default. They’ve also historically been unregulated by the federal government and free to charge grossly usurious rates. Several states decided to regulate the industry at the end of the last decade, and some like North Carolina banned payday loans outright.

Naturally, there are some consumers who have good experiences taking out emergency loans, and it can work for someone with poor credit who genuinely needs to borrow money for a very short period of time. These feel-good stories are what the industry relies on to rationalize their predatory business model. The overall effect of the industry is ruinous, however, as it sucks up billions of dollars from the people least able to part with their money.

The CFPD didn’t initially think that the payday loan industry would be a high priority for them. But that quickly changed once they opened their doors under their first director, Richard Cordray:

As the human and financial costs of the subprime-mortgage crash mounted, the new bureau was inundated with whistle-blower tips and consumer complaints. Cordray and his leadership team initially planned to focus on the biggest consumer-finance players, like mortgage lenders and credit-card companies; payday lenders were a relatively small industry compared with Wall Street. But it was growing quickly: The crisis had been good for business, pulling more middle-class families into the payday-loan market. And unlike banks, payday lenders were unregulated by the federal government. “It was affecting a lot of people at the margins who could least afford to run into trouble,” Cordray told me recently.

In 2012, the C.F.P.B. began conducting supervisory exams of payday lenders, a process that required them to open up their offices and books, and sometimes yielded evidence of predatory lending for the bureau’s enforcement team to take up. A company called Ace Cash Express, investigators found, harassed overdue borrowers by using phony legal threats. The investigation yielded a potent illustration of the debt trap: Ace Cash’s training manual, which instructed employees to pressure borrowers into paying off overdue loans by taking out new ones, illustrated its customer-service doctrine with a graphic resembling a recycling symbol, with one “short-term” loan fueling the next in an endless loop of debt.

At first, the CFPB went after the most egregious examples of exploitative behavior they could find, and they also put an emphasis on online lenders. In 2015, they began developing a new rule to apply to the industry that they hoped would end the practice of making deliberately bad loans. Lenders would be scrutinized, and they would be expected to examine a borrower’s ability to repay a loan before granting them one. Systemic abuse of the system could lead to hefty fine and even criminal charges. Before the new rule could be implemented, however, Donald Trump surprisingly won the 2016 election.

He then jammed Mick Mulvaney in as the interim replacement for Richard Cordray, and Mulvaney set about not only saving the payday lenders from oversight and regulation but cutting the teeth out of the entire bureau. He was so effective at this job that Trump was convinced to make him the White House chief of staff.

All is not lost, and if a Democrat wins the presidency in 2020 the bureau may be salvageable as an advocate for working people. I imagine a President Elizabeth Warren would be especially invested in that outcome. It seems to me that if people grasped that the Republican Party is on the side of predatory lenders and against protecting people from fine-print scams and debt traps, that a lot of them would be less inclined to take their side because of cultural issues.

The problem is getting them to understand this when there is no much effort going on to keep them focused on NFL players and scary immigrants and the War on Christmas.

Last week, I posted  A comparison of two measures of media bias, which was modified from A comparison of two measures of media bias shows readers and viewers respond to both ideology and quality at my personal blog.  It’s time to post its sequel.

Of all the stories I could have used to follow up on this entry, which was the last one to enter the all-time top ten, the rating of Wonkette is by far the funniest.  Ad Fontes Media, which produces the Media Bias Chart, placed Wonkette on the chart in September 2018, one month after I posted the entry.  Wonkette was not pleased and had pointed things to say about its placement.

Here at Wonkette, we often make #jokes in our headlines and say things that are not literally true for humor purposes, and when we do that it’s pretty fucking spelled out, honestly. For instance, when we wrote that Pat Robertson beat up Hurricane Florence with his Bible and now Hurricane Florence is dead, we do not expect Ms. Otero to literally believe the hurricane is gone because Robertson beat it up!

Shorter Wonkette: Ad Fontes Media has no sense of humor.  I’ve seen that before.

I’m not sure how Wonkette would react to being called a bunch of evil clowns.  They would probably agree about the clown part, but maybe not the evil, although it would depend on the writer.  I’m sure some of them would take it as a badge of honor.

Back to Wonkette’s reaction.

Wonkette is not to the left of Jacobin. In fact, Jacobin would probably tell you that their own selves, verrrrry self-righteously. We are also not to the left of The Intercept.
…
I would agree we are ‘nonsense damaging to discourse’ but we’re HYPERPARTISAN LEFT not EXTREME LEFT and we do NOT BELONG IN MISLEADING, we belong in EXTREME/UNFAIR INTERPRETATION OF THE NEWS.

In other words, “Yeah, we’re biased, but not that biased!”  According to their own view of their site, it belongs on that chart next to Daily Kos, not where it is the the left of Jacobin (I agree, that’s silly) and just above Patribotics (that’s insulting).

Ad Fontes Media responded to Wonkette’s reaction.

The main reasons for Wonkette’s low quality placement are that in our ranking methodology, highly unfair characterizations of political opponents, such as ad hominem attacks, name calling, and foul language result in low scores for quality and high scores for bias–even if it’s for humor.

I see they object to this. I am not calling them “fake news.” That term is not on the chart. Note that the category they are in for quality is “propaganda/ contains misleading info,” which is an “and/or” category. That is, the category is propaganda OR misleading. My ranking categorized them as “propaganda” because its articles get such high scores in the “unfairness instances” metric on the article grading rubric. Propaganda is defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as “information, especially of a biased or misleading nature, used to promote or publicize a particular political cause or point of view.” Many Wonkette headlines are also misleading–for example, though the headline says otherwise, the chart does not say it is “fake news,” and, it is ranked meaningfully higher than Louise Mensch’s blog, Patribotics. However, Wonkette’s articles can be categorized more often as “propaganda” than “misleading.”

That was Ad Fontes Media’s justification of its placement of Wonkette.  What about Wonkette’s defense that it’s all a joke?

“It’s funny/it’s just a joke/it’s “clever snark”

This is true. Their writing is hilarious, especially as viewed through the lens of other liberal, internet savvy, politically astute readers who love a sick burn. However, things that are funny can also be unfair at the same time. So insults, ad hominem attacks, curse words, and name calling, WHILE VERY FUNNY, are still unfair means of persuasion. We categorize several rhetorical devices and statements as unfair in our rankings. A general guideline for what counts as “unfair” are 1) practices not in accordance with journalism ethics and writing style guides and 2) types of information that would not be admissible in court according to rules of evidence. I’ve written more on the “unfairness instances” metric in this previous post.

You may not be convinced that funny insults make a source low quality (just merely biased, you may concede), especially if you like and agree with them. If you like Wonkette and the names it calls Republicans and Trump, consider what you would think of the quality of a source on the right if it regularly called Hillary Clinton a bitch or a hag or worse. Also consider what moderate or slightly conservative readers would think of the quality of Wonkette’s stories in terms of how persuasive they are to them.

Ad Fontes Media then goes on from Wonkette to all kinds of political humor.

I admit it was my subjective decision to have that underlying premise, but I submit that this type of content only serves to reinforce one’s existing beliefs and alienate the other side, and is therefore, highly polarizing. There are certainly lots of sources that do this: for example, John Oliver, Bill Maher, and other evening comedy shows also use pretty cruel humor. There is an audience for it because it is cathartic. There is an important place in our discourse and democracy for humor–we need to have the freedom to be able to make fun of our leaders. But to the extent people rely on it for 1) news ( i.e., fact reporting) and 2) takes on the news (i.e., analysis/opinion), I think that kind of content  is highly polarizing, and thus, extremely damaging.

As support for the proposition that it is damaging, I point to the state of our country’s current discourse and the resulting election of our current president.

I’m not saying these sources have no merit. Humor has purpose. I watch these shows. I’ve read lots on Wonkette. But to the extent people rely on these for news, I argue they should not rely on them, and to the extent these sources try to fill the space where news is, they do damage.

That’s a sobering thought.  It won’t stop me from using John Oliver, Stephen Colbert, Seth Meyers, Trevor Noah, or Samantha Bee to comment on the news, but I will be more cautious about doing so when I could use a more serious news source.

Even from the always truly awful NY Post?

A little truth seeps through once in a while:

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi just sent some more shade to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

In a “60 Minutes” interview, correspondent Lesley Stahl pointed out the different groups within the House Democratic caucus. “You have these wings — AOC and her group on one side,” Stahl said.

“That’s like five people,” Pelosi interrupted.

Stahl corrected the snarky remark, saying that the “progressive group is more than five.”

“Well, I’m progressive — I’m a progressive, yeah,” Pelosi responded.

—snip—

Yeah, right.

She’s a progressive, alright.

No doubt!!!

Why?

Because she said she was.

Duh!!!

Yup.

Read on.
Listen up…those few of you here who can still hear the truths of the matter over the ongoing, seemingly never-ending and basically overwhelming blare of the mass media…left, center and right.

There are maybe five or six Representatives and a few Senators…two of whom (Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren) are running for president…who are even approaching telling the truth about the corporate rot eating up this country and this government.

The rest?

Tap-dancing around in true swampland fashion, trying to stay in power as long as they can.

Pelosi???

Give me a break!!!

Remember that pic of her making a clapping gesture at Trump during his State of the Disunion message?

When I saw it, all I could think was that it was a gang sign…the Bloods and the Crips (red and blue, remember)…just having a little squabble.

Somewhere deep in the back rooms of the Democratic Party/DNC, I can fucking guarantee that Pelosi and/or her little messengers are actively stirring up primary challenges against AOC, anybody who is allied with her now in the House and any of her possible allies who might want to run against mainstream Dems.

WTFU.

AG

P.S. Those of you who actually pay attention to this blog may have noticed that I have not been posting here as much as usual. That will continue until this whole primary farce begins to shake out. My own take on what will happen is that the major media will end up once again seriously and effectively dissing Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Beto O’Rourke and anybody else who does not belong to the Insider Club…anyone else who has not made their bones as an insider Dem by playing the legal graft game. The only question that remains is whether the media have been so seriously harmed by their own false news operations…again, left, right or center…that an appreciable number of U.S. citizens will simply stop paying much attention to them.

Let us pray it so.

But…I would not place a bet on it.

The trance power/addictive power of mass media is amazingly strong!!!

So?

Sigh…

Prepare to welcome in Joe Biden or Kamala Harris or Corey Booker or whomever else both meets the stringent criminal requirements of the Inner Circle and also shows at least some some signs that he or she might actually be able to beat…or at least slow down…Donald Trump and the rest of the several rival gangs’ attempts to take over the whole country.

P.P.S. Speaking of bets…

Betting odds today on the 2020 election…calculated by people with no real interest in the result other than making a profit on it, thus probably the most reliable sign of what is about to happen if conditions do not change radically somehow…show Trump at +130, Sanders at +600, O’Rourke at +800, Harris at +900 and Biden or Buttigieg at +1000.

For those of you who do not speak bookie-talk, this means that…as of now (way early in the game…before that game actually starts, in truth)…If today you bet say $100 on Trump winning and he did indeed win, you would receive $130. If however, you bet $100 on Sanders winning, you would receive $600. This is popularly known as a fairly long shot, and the following odds are even longer.

Of course…all of these odds have to do with the number of candidates running for the DemRat nomination and the (now unfortunately quite remote) possibility that Trump might be rendered unable to run do to…ahem…”legal difficulties” or other negative possibilities too deliciously numerous to mention. Once the Dem field narrows down the odds will of course change, but they will not likely change so far that they will make a Dem the favorite unless (much-to-be-hoped-for) pictures of say Trump in bed with a goat and several children were to surface.

I mean…if you add up the odds of the top five Dem possibilities and then divide by 5, you would get +860 odds. That means that…right now…the pro bookies are saying that it’s a little more than 6.6 to 1 that Trump will be reelected.

Now…were they right in 2016?

No.

They lost.

Big time!!!

There is no telling how much the bookies lost by betting against Trump in 2016. But…especially given his ascendency to the U.S. throne and ensuing survival of everything the centrist/leftiness mass media could possibly throw at him……it appears that they have learned their lesson.

Have you?

Are you ready for another Scylla and Charybdis election?

Win or lose?

Ready to still lose, even if you win!!!???

Either way…more wars, more corporate control of the media and the government, more global climate change, the acceleration of political and climate-caused migrations and their violently anti-human opposition?

Are you ready?

I’m not.

You?