Author: Marie2

Master politicians like FDR and LBJ not only had no illusions about their opponents but also knew exactly what was required to defeat them soundly.  Watch this currently popular FDR clip again and think it through from a strategic perspective.

Opponent pummeling?  Yes, but that would be merely fighting a battle and not a war.
The 1964 Daisy Ad was similarly strategic.

And in her debate this week, Elizabeth Warren accomplished the same strategic objective.

Are you getting what that is?  It’s not complicated, although it seems to have totally flummoxed President Obama.  As it did Hubert Humphrey’s campaign, Jimmy Carter, Walter Mondale and every Democratic Presidential candidate in my lifetime.  (And no, Bill Clinton didn’t get it either.)

To be fair, Massachusetts isn’t the nation and Warren had more than ample warning of the task she faced.  Scott Brown has been in GOP general election mode since 2010 because the Republican base in that state is so small that candidates can rhetorically ignore them and still count on their votes.  As such, Brown has been able to coast on his established credential as the Moderate Scott Brown.  What Warren did in the debate was to reduce the size of Brown’s comfy “moderate” box.

Against Goldwater, LBJ locked and secured the door to moderate territory.  Left him stranded and wandering in the racist crazyland that nominated him.  

Unlike Reagan and GWB, Mitt isn’t a darling of rightwing crazyland.  His religion and his devotion to it insure that he will always be somewhat suspect among “christian” fundamentalists.  Oh, how he struggled for over a year to gain their grudging acceptance. But those “christians” are if not a forgiving lot than a forgetting one.  And just in time for a combative Moderate Mitt to make a safe entrance at his first debate with Obama.

Paul Ryan, with his wacko base secured, has been worming his way into non-crazyland in the past few days.  And why not when the opposition has left the door open?  Can Biden force him to retreat in tonight’s debate?  Or will we see another exercise in hand-to-hand debate combat?  

 

Once again, Matt Taibbi dares to mention the elephant in the room:  How the Hype Became Bigger Than the Presidential Election

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What we Americans go through to pick a president is not only crazy and unnecessary but genuinely abusive. Hundreds of millions of dollars are spent in a craven, cynical effort to stir up hatred and anger on both sides. A decision that in reality takes one or two days of careful research to make is somehow stretched out into a process that involves two years of relentless, suffocating mind-warfare, an onslaught of toxic media messaging directed at liberals, conservatives and everyone in between that by Election Day makes every dinner conversation dangerous and literally divides families.
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In polite company a few decades ago, people in this country avoided three topics: money, religion, and politics.  Somehow everyone managed those issues in their personal lives without endless instructions or demands blaring from TV and radios.  It worked well enough that way, mostly better than it does today.  The minimum wage was over 30% higher and student loan debts were 300% or more lower.  The occasional paranoid batshit crazy politician got elected to Congress, but few survived more than an election or two.  Perhaps because voters read newspapers that told them what the politician had done and said.  Best of all, by the time one voted, people weren’t already sick of the candidates and all the endless lies, obfuscations, and empty promises.  

That’s what my then eighty-six year old Uncle Lou said.  To me.  In a moment when others weren’t present.  I asked if it had been a WPA job and he said that it had been with the CCC.  I wanted to hear more, but the private moment was lost as others rejoined us.  It was as if Uncle Lou had shared a secret with me.  Or maybe it was only a secret because he’d never spoken of that time of his life.  The few years before WWII and his seven year enlistment in the US Navy.  More than a decade before he’d met and later married my mother’s sister.

“Mr. Roosevelt Gave Me A Job.”  

Some sixty-five years later and for a reason or reasons unknown to me, it still resonated enough for him to speak of it.  If only briefly, possibly in passing, but not in front of his wife and her other relatives.  What was unmistakeable in his phrasing, tone, and feeling was gratitude and respect for Mr. Roosevelt.  Unlikely to have been shared within the very conservative Catholic family he married into.  Perhaps and perhaps not forgotten over the decades when he cast his secret ballot.  

Lou was one of the fortunate ones that during a period of high youth unemployment* Mr. Roosevelt gave him a job.  A job that likely contributed to the well-being of his parents and siblings as well as himself, but for a nation even more than that.  As Eleanor Roosevelt so clearly articulated in 1934 :

“I have moments of real terror when I think we might be losing this generation. We have got to bring these young people into the active life of the community and make them feel that they are necessary.”
–New York Times, 5/34

Watching the GOP freak-out over the latest unemployment rate of 7.8% is somewhat amusing until I recall that President Obama has stated that government doesn’t create jobs.  That would be one issue on which Mr. Obama and Mr. Romney seem to agree.  When this country needs another Mr. Roosevelt, we get two candidates espousing the outsourcing of job creation to the free market fairy.  Because today there are millions of mature and financially secure Americans like my Uncle Lou that today say, “Mr. Reagan gave me a job.”
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Worth reading: Bob Herbert’s For Obama, No More Excuses

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In the face of the worst economic calamity since the 1930s, the United States needed a mammoth job-creation and economic revitalization program, a New Deal for the 21st century. But that would have required presidential leadership capable of challenging the formidable opposition mounted by the very folks who caused the crisis in the first place. Instead we got a woefully insufficient stimulus program and a failed effort at some kind of grand bargain between the president and the retrograde Republicans in Congress. That grand bargain would have imposed austerity measures that would
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* Youth unemployment as high as 30% according to The Roosevelt Institute  That 30% may be a wild under-estimate given current evidence in the US and other countries.  Recent US figures on youth unemployment have been on the order of twice that of the overall unemployment rate.  That multiple of two-times is what is currently seen in Ireland.  Two-times plus in Spain and Greece, but a whopping three and half times in Italy.  Therefore, when the aggregate US unemployment rate was 25% during the Hoover Depression, why was the a youth unemployment rate a mere 20% higher?

As Michael Pollan pointed out in The Omnivore’s Dilemma, we have become the people of the corn.  Only we don’t seem to get that notion.  If we did, alarm bells over this past summer’s drought in the corn belt would have been blaring and it would be a campaign issue.

But just wait until the Bacon Shortage hits next year and we’ll hear the howling.  The UK National Pig Association reports:

A world shortage of pork and bacon next year is now unavoidable,…
New data shows the European Union pig herd is declining at a significant rate, and this is a trend that is being mirrored around the world. Pig farmers have been plunged into loss by high pig-feed costs, caused by the global failure of maize and soya harvests.

US farmers are scrambling to replace the increasingly expensive corn based feed for their livestock.  And they’ve been finding some interesting substitutes.  From the Vancouver Sun:

As the worst drought in half a century has ravaged this year’s U.S. corn crop and driven corn prices sky high, the market for alternative feed rations for beef and dairy cows has also skyrocketed. Brokers are gathering up discarded food products and putting them out for the highest bid to feed lot operators and dairy producers, who are scrambling to keep their animals fed.

In the mix are cookies, gummy worms, marshmallows, fruit loops, orange peels, even dried cranberries. Cattlemen are feeding virtually anything they can get their hands on that will replace the starchy sugar content traditionally delivered to the animals through corn.

These cheap alternatives will run out soon enough because what has made them cheap is all the HFCS — CORN syrup.  On the plus side, consuming less meat and corn will make our diets healthier.  
 

Migrant Mother as she was known for over forty years from this photograph taken by Dorothea Lange in 1936.

An image seared into the minds of many as emblematic of the Great Depression and the particular struggles of women in caring for and feeding their children.  Not that such times were in the past and forgotten thirty years later at the beginning of the War on Poverty and don’t continue to exist in destitute Native American communities.

In Migrant Mother, we could see The Grapes of Wrath and what could so easily become the plight of most of us.
Over those decades of her public anonymity, Florence Owens Thompson worked and raised her children.  Those children grew up, worked, married, had children of their own, and they in turn grew up.  All of them would have heard family stories.  Maybe not that their mother and grandmother was the model in “Migrant Mother,” but that Florence was full blooded Cherokee.

Look at her!  Can you not see that she’s Native American?  Yes or No?

Florence was born before Oklahoma was a state but after the deadline for registering as a Native American had passed.  So, technically and legally she wasn’t a member of the Cherokee Nation  Records to establish her ethnic ancestry don’t exist. Only the words that were spoken to her and she in turn spoke to her children who believed them and spoke them to their children.  

“Tom,” one of Florence’s great-great-grandsons, heard and believes those words.  Who’s to say that the white man’s record keeping is right and his relatives are wrong?          

According to WAPO Election Blog Team Mitt was at least eleven million dollars short in primary campaign funds.  So, they just took out a $20 million loan to get them to the General Election monies.

In campaign financing terms that eleven million dollars will not be considered a big deal.  But how many Romney donors didn’t chip in the maximum?  The not wealthy GOP donors that Mitt insulted this week?

Apparently Kos is a bit put out that his troll hunters blew it.  That a bit of news gold was dropped in their laps and was quickly shoved down some memory hole.

Odd considering how so many were taken in by “The Nephew” who seemed highly questionable to me.  Odd that they have yet to learn the first rule about suspected trolls; don’t feed them.  Without reinforcement, they get frustrated and either quickly flame out or move on.  That sort of patience and flexibility requires a liberal mind.  

The dKos community also missed out on breaking the Gannon/Guckert story.  So many on the site were doing solid and good data collection on the guy — but the threads quickly became so long and filled with unnecessary comments that a key tip uncovered in the first two or three days was overlooked.  Then a second one was consciously rejected as too unseemly because it required checking out porn sites.  Leaving it to Aravosis to find and break that part of the story.  Sadly, it mostly died after that without getting a reveal on the full story.

Why do I make these comments here instead of dKos?  After ten years, the troll hunters took me down.

   

— Or how Al Gore and Barack Obama won —

Clinton fans seem as much, if not more, impervious to facts as Reagan zombies.  Thirteen years on they still refuse to accept what team Gore discovered in 1999 and what Sally Bedell Smith reported in 2007 in White House Civil War.

The study reported that Gore’s favorability rating was 47 percent, down from 58 percent the previous December. Seventy-four percent of those polled were “tired of all the problems associated with the Clinton administration” –an alarming phenomenon that became known as “Clinton fatigue.” Only 29 percent of Americans would have welcomed four more years of Bill Clinton, and 52 percent said they liked Gore better. In a hypothetical race between Gore and George W. Bush, the Texas governor led 54 percent to 41 percent, up several ticks since January.

Independents just weren’t that into Bill Clinton:

To avoid associating themselves with the president’s excesses, both Gore and Hillary made strategic decisions not to campaign with Bill publicly, even as he campaigned for both of them–considerably more for Hillary than for Gore–at private fund-raising events around the country.

But facts suggest that it was worse than that and reconfirmed what Harry Truman observed long ago:

“Given the choice between a Republican and someone who acts like a Republican, people will vote for the real Republican all the time”

<Given a choice between a      
While every election is multi-factorial and it’s lazy, if not disingenuous, to abstract a single cause, ignoring results, both positive and negative, is silly.  Results mean the WH and Congress.

From 1932 through 1992, Republicans controlled the House of Representatives for a total of four years.  First lost in 1946 and solidly recaptured two years later.  Lost again in 1952 and regained in 1954.  

Over that same period of time, Republicans fared better in the Senate.  In the majority party for ten years.  Six of those years coincided with the first six years Reagan was in the WH.  

Equally interesting are the years in which Democrats lost House and Senate seats.  Truman knew where of he spoke.

After retaking the Senate in 1986, Democrats added one more seat to their margin in the two subsequent elections.  Modest gain to the DEM majority in the House were also posted in those three elections.  (Even in 1988 when Dukakis lost.)

So, what happened after team-Clinton took over the party in 1992?  One Senate seat gained that year.  Nine lost (and the majority) in 1994, two lost in 1996 and no losses in 1998.  In the House, Democratic seats were lost in all four of those elections with the majority also lost in 1994.  

In 2000 when Gore won, the GOP Senate majority was reduced to zero (Jeffords later defection from the GOP made it 51 for the Democrats) but two more House seats were lost.  However, team Clinton never fully relinquished its control of the Party and took over as soon as Bush v. Gore was settled by the SCOTUS.  Six more DEM Senate seats and the majority were lost in the next two elections.

Then along came Howard Dean from the “Democratic wing of the Democratic Party” with his 50 state strategy.  Within two years Democrats were the majority in both the House and Senate.  Al Gore stopped being forgotten.  Those majorities were increased two years later and a Democrat was elected POTUS.  

A very curious thing happened between election day 2008 and when Obama began announcing his cabinet choices.  Team Clinton was baack.  Dean and candidate Obama were gone  “Republican like” lost in 2010.  (Could have been worse if the GOP hadn’t gone with batshit crazy in the Maryland and Nevada Senate races.)

Since we saw the line-up of GOP wannabe POTUS candidates a couple of years ago, I haven’t doubted that Obama would get his second term.  At the most simplistic level and on a comparative basis, crazy, empty-suited, or weak loses in Presidential general elections.  Depending on the day of the week, Romney usually exhibits one of those characteristics.  Only his skin color and rightwing billionaire donors are keeping him afloat at this time.  Even Karl Rove appears to have shifted his efforts from Mitt to Senate races and probably correctly perceiving that Democrats have no game for House seats.  However, after dumping a boatload of money in Ohio, the GOP super-pacs have  already had to concede defeat to Sherrod Brown who doesn’t legislate or run as “Republican like.”  Karl also appears to concede that “Republican semi-like” McCaskill can beat a rightwing loon challenger.

Yet, rightwing loon House incumbents seem set to be re-elected.  How can that be?

 

Forget all the charts that document the falling wages for those at the lower rungs of the income ladder and flat wages for those a bit higher up.  Don’t pay any attention to the negative net worth for those at the bottom and the paltry net worth for those slightly better off.  The NYTimes today saw no reason to include such economic reminders in two stories today.  Other than the editorial decision to publish those two stories on the same day didn’t offer any words for readers to connect the two.

First up: If A House Can Cost This Much, Maybe It’s Art

Since Citigroup’s former chairman, Sandy Weill, sold his penthouse at 15 Central Park West late last year for $88 million, or $13,000 a square foot, to a Russian billionaire, sales prices in Manhattan have been flirting with $100 million, and brokers say it’s only a matter of time until the barrier is broken.
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Something is certainly leading to record prices for what brokers describe interchangeably as trophy or art properties. An apartment at One57, a tower under construction across from Carnegie Hall, sold for $90 million and another is in contract for a sum said to be over $90 million (though less than the list price of $115 million.) The casino executive Steve Wynn, who is also a prominent art collector, bought a penthouse at the Ritz-Carlton on Central Park South for $70 million in June. A duplex co-op on Park Avenue sold for $52 million in May.
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The brokers seem stunned and perplexed by this buying frenzy by the very well heeled.  Dare even to suggest that the rich are — well, sort of stupid.

But, he said, “they’re confusing price with art. You’d think that titans of industry would be very individualistic about their acquisitions, but at the very top, there’s a herd mentality. You get one or two very large transactions that grab headlines and then it’s like a light switch goes off. In New York, this happened in the second half of 2010, and since then it’s been very intense. The size of what’s happening is unprecedented. How long can this go on? You see this kind of behavior and you have to wonder.”

As if all that money shoveled up to the wealthy since the financial meltdown was going to sit around getting moldy or be used to create jobs.  These people have so much money that they’re also throwing gobs of it at a loser GOP ticket.  Calculating that that investment will also payoff.

So, who pays the price for the US national consensus that the rich aren’t rich enough?  Too many around the world to name, but the subsistence hard workers mining the natural resources to feed “our way of life” are definitely part of it.  Craig Blankenhorn supplies the pictures of those closer to home denied a place to live at all in Young And Homeless.

A society that cannot supply living wage jobs to all and provide affordable housing for everyone before others get multiple mansions and $100 million apartments should bury its head in shame.  Then get its act together and fix this shameful situation.  

 

From RawStory Romney Wishes To Live In New Hampshire and “Save Some Tax Dollars.

What the Mittster said in Manchester was:

“So many friends here in New Hampshire,” Romney said at the beginning of his remarks. “I feel like I’m almost a New Hampshire resident. … It would save me some tax dollars, I think.”

Has it occurred to anyone but me to wonder why this tax-avoidance-scum has never publicly claimed that he was a legal resident New Hampshire?  Preferred his son’s unfinished basement to his estate in New Hampshire?  To be fair, it’s not known exactly where the Romneys legally resided for most of the past decade or so.  Could have been any one or none of the houses they owned.  Could even have been New Hampshire in certain years.

Why?  New Hampshire taxes unearned income.  And seems not to permit any gaming of that flat 5% tax rate on unearned income.  Thus, the little bit Mitt would save by not being taxed on his earned income (a small portion of his 2010 income) wouldn’t make up for the higher tax bill from his unearned income.  However, that large loss carry-forward on his 2010 return suggests that New Hampshire might have been an excellent tax-avoidance haven for the Romneys in 2008 and/or 2009.  So, there’s one more possible reason why their tax returns won’t be released.