A few more lessons from Bernie Sanders' run for President

I don't disagree with Jeb Lund on the positivity of Sen. Bernie Sanders' run for President, but there's a bit more to say here.

First, about being the right-looking "blowdried" candidate with a red tie: yes, true, alas. But let's not swoon over Bernie just because he "doesn't give a f--k" about his image. Let's swoon over him because he does give a f--k about the right things. And he actually proposes good legislation: on the minimum wage; regulating the Wall Street fraudsters; and on and on.

I mean, image is a terrible thing nowadays. The Republicans' version of the perfect-image candidate is Ben Carson: a black identity politician whose positions are indistinguishable from anybody else's (insofar as he has stated positions on anything). His bona fides are that he pulled himself up by his bootstraps despite being black and poor, can't stand his fellow African-American Barack Obama, and most importantly, rails against Obamacare. Beyond that, Ben Carson is a cipher... or an empty suit. He doesn't have many policy ideas because, as is blindingly obvious -- and this only adds to his appeal among Republicans -- it never occurred to him to run for President until quite recently, at the urging of Republicans who were out to prove they didn't distrust black people... as long as they believed all the "right" things.  

Second, Bernie's humble economic station is a good thing nowadays; but a politician's wealth or privileged background was not always a predictor of his political leanings or his performance in office. FDR, an all-time top 3 U.S. President and blueblood patrician, proved that. What Roosevelt had was a sense of old-money, old-fashioned noblesse oblige. With the recent departure of Sen. Jay Rockefeller, the closest things we have to old money in U.S. politics today are Jeb Bush and Donald Trump.  

In fact, running for President today -- the GOP presidential nomination, that is -- is not a result of a candidate's wealth and privilege, necessarily, it is a path to wealth and privilege: as a FOX contributor / talk radio host / author / highly-paid guest speaker. Never before was political loserdom a path to anything but a ticket to retirement.  Now with enough Super PAC money and a favorable audience with Sheldon Anderson, a nominee can be plucked from political obscurity and made a front-runner, with his guaranteed payday at the end, whatever the result.

Third, there's something different about a Bernie Sanders or Ralph Nader running for the Democratic nomination, knowing he's going to lose, in the hopes of nudging (or embarrassing) the eventual nominee to move slightly to the Left, and the gaggle of Republican candidates trying to outrun each other to the Right, eastward beyond the horizon.  Because many Democratic voters would be uncomfortable with a Bernie Sanders as a nominee -- "too liberal!" -- whereas, no matter who gets nominated by the GOP, most Republican voters will be dissatisfied -- "he's not conservative enough" -- or even bestow the worst insult imaginable -- "he's a RINO."  

Most Republicans probably don't stop to think why there's no equivalent of the "RINO" label among Democrats. (I wish there were). But if they did, they might realize that we Democrats are a pretty diverse bunch who can't even agree among ourselves what a true Democrat is. On the Republican side, talk radio settled that issue at least 15 years ago; and the media masters of the GOP police their ideological purity mercilessly...even at the expense of losing elections. (Which I grudgingly give them credit for; although they have convinced themselves that they speak for America's "Silent Majority," and when they lose, it is thanks to George Soros and the Lib'rul Media conspiracy, not their ideology). 

Bernie Sanders doesn't have to win the Democratic primary to do a lot of good

By Jeb Lund

May 27, 2015 | Guardian

URL: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/may/27/bernie-sanders-democratic-primary-do-good?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Gmail

Pew: How Americans fall out politically

Lemme summarize this summary of a Pew Research survey of Americans' political leanings:

• More Americans than in the past claim they are independent, but they're actually lying about it;
• Those who call themselves politically moderate are more likely to be independent, but they're not really moderates -- 
• "Being in the center of the ideological spectrum means only that a person has a mix of liberal and conservative values, not that they take moderate positions on all issues," and
• Thus, the political middle "does not form a potentially coherent coalition around which some political entrepreneur might build a centrist party;"

• Moderates are less politically active;
• Ipso facto, those that do claim a party affiliation are more politically active, and they are more polarized than in years past;
• More Americans nowadays are calling themselves liberal, and fewer conservative, even though a plurality still calls itself conservative.

So I don't often quote polls, since this blog is about the issues and my opinion, not public opinion.  But this data is significant because it shows that many Americans are either confused, or not entirely honest, about their political leanings.  

Anecdotally, in my own life, I have seen it often with so-called "Independents" who are really just Republicans or Democrats according to how they vote, yet they want to retain the self-myth that no party can contain their maverick political spirit.  Yeah, right.

What’s left of the political center?

By Dan Balz

July 5, 2014 | Washington Post

URL: http://wapo.st/1ta1hWr

Dems propose Net Neutrality bill that has not a chance in hell

I'd proudly call this a class warfare bill.  Net neutrality is one of those issues that separates the wheat from the chaff.  

So why isn't talk radio and Fox News going nuts over this bill, which should be known as the "Keep the Internet the Way It's Always Been Act"? 

Well, you see, it's much easier for conservative bloviators to foam at the mouth over alleged denials of tax-exempt status by the IRS for clearly political Tea Party groups that are most certainly not "social welfare organizations."  

Yeah, that's the ticket. None of these Tea Partiers are engaged in politics, no sir!....

Democrats Unveil A Bill To Ban Internet Fast Lanes

By Elise Hu

June 17, 2014 | NPR

URL: http://n.pr/1kK5XYR

Obama is a 'tyrant' for issuing fewer executive orders than Reagan and Bush

Sooner or later, most conservative chain-email garbage finds its way down to the talk radio-FOX cesspool. Latest case and point:Obama's executive orders.

FOX's resident legal expert Andrew Napolitano, who still goes by the title "Judge," called Obama's executive orders "tyranny." And good ole' Rush Limbaugh riffed on this on his show today.  

Rush calls folks who disagree with him "low information voters." Well, a simple Google search reveals that, lo and behold, conservative hero Ronald Reagan issued 381 executive orders, Dubya issued 291, whereas Obama has issued 168 as of January 20, 2014.

Rush deifies Reagan, yet calls Obama's use of executive orders "an impeachable offense." Now that's not stupid and partisan at all, no siree. Because Obama is a Democrat, and different rules apply to Democrats. See?

Even more outrageously, Republicans' hypocrisy has come up in the context of immigration reform. Speaker John Boehner says the Republicans can't make a deal with President Obama and the Democrats because they can't trust him to enforce a new immigration law, even though Obama has broken all records for the number of illegal immigrants deported, earning him the nickname "deporter-in-chief," as even FOX News Latino (not to be confused with FOX News Anglo, aka FOX News) couldn't help but note. Yet again, there is a different set of rules for Democrats.  Go figure.

Poll: Americans still blame Dubya for bad economy

Whoever said Americans are dumb?  No way!  Only 33 percent of them.

CNN Poll: Is Bush still to blame for economy?

February 6, 2014 | CNN

URL: http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2014/02/06/cnn-poll-is-bush-still-to-blame-for-economy/?hpt=hp_bn6

Dem congressmen's hypocrisy on minimum wage

Seldom do I quote the far-right Daily Caller, much less agree with it, but never say never. (HT: AL).  

I tells it like it is, and lets the chips fall where they may. Check it [emphasis mine]:

According to a new study by the Employment Policies Institute (EPI), only four percent of the 210 lawmakers who pledged their allegiance to a bill raising the minimum wage pay their interns.

The Fair Minimum Wage Act would increase the federal minimum wage from $7.25 an hour to $10.10 an hour. EPI found that 96 percent of its House and Senate supporters give their interns a minimum wage of zero.

For shame, my liberal comrades!  

Seriously though, I've written before about the institutional elitism of unpaid professional internships. There ought to be a law against them, except in very special circumstances.  If something is worth doing, it's worth paying for; if it's worth paying for, then unpaid interns shouldn't be allowed to do it. They displace people who are looking for jobs but can't afford to work for free.  

Why is it elitist, you ask?  Because only young interns from well-off families can afford to work for free on Capitol Hill to gather up DC connections and pad their resumes.  

Report: Minimum wage hike backers rarely pay interns

By Breanna Deutsch

January 26, 2014 | The Daily Caller 

URL: http://dailycaller.com/2014/01/26/report-minimum-wage-hike-backers-rarely-pay-interns/#ixzz2rblSciKn

Safety net reduces poverty - now more than ever

LBJ and every Democrat since then was right: the safety net works. We have reduced poverty.

The facts show that we are right and the critics are wrong. Liberals should never apologize for policies that have saved millions of lives. 

We liberals should be proud! 

Study: U.S. poverty rate decreased over past half-century thanks to safety-net programs

By Zachary A. Goldfarb

December 10, 2013 | Washington Post

URL: http://wapo.st/IMOJhu

How KY, CT and WA got Obamacare to work

How'd they get Obamacare to work in the states Connecticut, Kentucky and Washington?  Step 1: Giving a damn.  Step 2: Less bitching at Washington and more working at home.

Republican state politicians, take note!

How we got Obamacare to work

By Jay Inslee, Steve Beshear and Dannel P. Malloy

November 18, 2013 | Washington Post

In our states — Washington, Kentucky and Connecticut — the Affordable Care Act, or “Obamacare,” is working. Tens of thousands of our residents have enrolled in affordable health-care coverage. Many of them could not get insurance before the law was enacted.

People keep asking us why our states have been successful. Here’s a hint: It’s not about our Web sites.

Sure, having functioning Web sites for our health-care exchanges makes the job of meeting the enormous demand for affordable coverage much easier, but each of our state Web sites has had its share of technical glitches. As we have demonstrated on a near-daily basis, Web sites can continually be improved to meet consumers’ needs.

The Affordable Care Act has been successful in our states because our political and community leaders grasped the importance of expanding health-care coverage and have avoided the temptation to use health-care reform as a political football.

In Washington, the legislature authorized Medicaid expansion with overwhelmingly bipartisan votes in the House and Senate this summer because legislators understood that it could help create more than 10,000 jobs, save more than $300 million for the state in the first 18 months, and, most important, provide several hundred thousand uninsured Washingtonians with health coverage.

In Kentucky, two independent studies showed that the Bluegrass State couldn’t afford not to expand Medicaid. Expansion offered huge savings in the state budget and is expected to create 17,000 jobs.

In Connecticut, more than 50 percent of enrollment in the state exchange, Access Health CT, is for private health insurance. The Connecticut exchange has a customer satisfaction level of 96.5 percent, according to a survey of users in October, with more than 82 percent of enrollees either “extremely likely” or “very likely” to recommend the exchange to a colleague or friend.

In our states, elected leaders have decided to put people, not politics, first.

President Obama announced an administrative change last week that would allow insurance companies to continue offering existing plans to those who want to keep them. It is up to state insurance commissioners to determine how and whether this option works for their states, and individual states will come to different conclusions.

What we all agree with completely, though, is the president’s insistence that our country cannot go back to the dark days before health-care reform, when people were regularly dropped from coverage, and those with “bare bones” plans ended up in medical bankruptcy when serious illness struck, many times because their insurance didn’t cover much of anything.

Thanks to health-care reform and the robust exchanges in our states, people are getting better coverage at a better price.

One such person is Brad Camp, a small-business owner in Kingston, Wash., who received a cancellation notice in September from his insurance carrier. He went to the state exchange, the Washington Healthplanfinder, and for close to the same premium his family was paying before got upfront coverage for doctor’s office visits and prescription drug , vision and dental coverage. His family was able to keep the same insurance carrier and doctors and qualified for tax credits to help cover the cost.

Since Howard Stovall opened his sign and graphics business in Lexington, Ky., in 1998, he has paid half the cost of health insurance for his eight employees. With the help of Stovall’s longtime insurance agent and Kentucky’s health exchange,Kynect, Stovall’s employees are saving 5 percent to 40 percent each on new health insurance plans with better benefits. Stovall can afford to provide additional employee benefits, including full disability coverage and part of the cost of vision and dental plans, while still saving the business 50 percent compared with the old plans.

In Connecticut, Anne Masterson was able to reduce her monthly premiums from $965 to $313 for similar coverage, including a $145 tax credit. Masterson is able to use her annual premium savings of $8,000 to pay bills or save for retirement.

These sorts of stories could be happening in every state if politicians would quit rooting for failure and directly undermining implementation of the Affordable Care Act — and, instead, put their constituents first.  Health reform is working for the people of Washington, Kentucky and Connecticut because elected leaders on both sides of the aisle came together to do what is right for their residents.

We urge Congress to get out of the way and to support efforts to make health-care reform work for everyone. We urge our fellow governors, most especially those in states that refused to expand Medicaid, to make health-care reform work for their people too.

Obamacare: Another conservative-lite idea

As I've said before, Obamacare was not what real liberals and progressives wanted: single-payer. In today's op-ed, Zelizer laments that, and warns liberals against "half-baked" liberal policies that are really just conservative-lite ideas.

Obamacare is the classic example. It was first proposed by the uber-conservative Heritage Foundation in the early 90s, then supported by uber-conservative economist Milton Friedman and Republican Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, among 25 conservative leaders, then implemented on the state level by a Republican governor.  

The only problem is that the conservative party in the U.S. has gone farther to the Right since the 90s.  Now its "best & brightest" like Rush Limbaugh believe that the answer is to get rid of health insurance altogether. We should return to the 19th century. Idiots!

Before Obamacare, Obama never even put the single-payer option on the table. Congress never voted on it. Obama began with closed-door negotiations with insurance companies and drug makers to see what they'd agree to. Obamacare is what we got. Now their revenues are hitting all-time highs and projected to rise in 2014 as well, so don't cry for them.

Nevertheless, there are those on the Right today who ridiculously view Obamacare as a big, elaborate socialist conspiracy to usher in single-payer health care. Talk about a disconnect!  On one side, we have dissatisfied liberals lamenting that Obama missed a once-in-a-generation chance to change the healthcare game. On the other side, we have dissatisfied conservatives who say the liberals are pulling a fast one to get what they want eventually. Eventually, in some distant future.... It's as if paranoid conservatives have more faith in the inevitability of liberal ideals than liberals do!

There are two variants on this conspiracy theory, as far as I can pick up. The first variant goes: expanding Medicaid for the poor is just one more step toward single-payer, since the government already pays for more than half of all healthcare in America.  The second one goes: Obamacare is intended to be such a disaster that Americans will throw up their hands, decide private insurance is a mess, and demand single-payer instead.  

I'll give both versions more time than they deserve, if only because millions of talk radio/Tea Party Republicans really believe in them. As for expanding Medicaid, conservatives can breathe a partial sigh of relief, because their Republicans governors already blocked Medicaid expansion to 8 million Americans in their respective states. There is a problem here though, and it's real. GOP governors also refused to set up their own health insurance markets, thus shifting the burden to the federal Healthcare.gov website. This is delaying people getting health insurance who want it, and they might just give up entirely. 

Rick Moran summed up the self-defeating idiocy of Republicans' spiteful, partisan refusal to establish state health insurance exchanges:

[W]hile conservatives think the Obamacare exchanges are overregulated and oversubsidized, they are actually closer to the right-of-center vision for health care reform than the Obamacare Medicaid expansion, which is happening no matter what transpires with Healthcare.gov. So if the exchanges fail and the Medicaid expansion takes effect (and, inevitably, becomes difficult to roll back), we’ll be left with an individual market that’s completely dysfunctional and a more socialized system over all.

The second variant on this conspiracy theory might end up being true... but only by accident, not by design. I mean, do conservatives really believe that Obama is such a secret, selfless socialist ideologue that he has intended all along for his signature piece of eponymous legislation to be a total failure -- a failure that would define his presidential legacy? Talk about taking one for the team!  

Furthermore, if conservatives really believe Obamacare was designed to fail, then... why do they take such glee at every opportunity to declare it a failure?  Aren't they playing right into Obama's diabolical hands?  But ah, says the tinfoil hat crew, Obama didn't intend for it to fail so soon. Because he's so darn incompetent, see? He can't even screw up right. They say Obama intended for us to get good and used to Obamacare first, so that it could fail several years from now, just when we were about to... so that we would... you see then.... Oh, I can't follow this wacky line of reasoning any further.  

Obamacare and the failure of half-baked liberalism

By Julian Zelizer

November 11, 2013 | CNN

URL: http://edition.cnn.com/2013/11/11/opinion/zelizer-obamacare-liberalism/index.html?hpt=hp_t5

Frum: 'Tea Parties, don't let the door hit you on the way out'

Boo-ya!  Republican David Frum unloads with both barrels on the Tea Parties:

Right now, tea party extremism contaminates the whole Republican brand. It's a very interesting question whether a tea party bolt from the GOP might not just liberate the party to slide back to the political center -- and liberate Republicans from identification with the Sarah Palins and the Ted Cruzes who have done so much harm to their hopes over the past three election cycles.

It's worth repeating over and over again. Add Todd Akin in Missouri and Richard Mourdock in Indiana, Sharron Angle in Nevada and Ken Buck in Colorado, Christine O'Donnell in Delaware and Joe Miller in Alaska -- and you have half a dozen Senate races lost to the GOP by extremist nominations.

Maybe the right answer to the threat, "Shut down the government or we quit" is: "So sad you feel that way. Don't let the door hit you on the way out."

Nevertheless, if it hurts the GOP if the Tea Parties stay in, then as a Democratic "hack," I think the TPs should stay.  The TP pirates will keep on cutting the throats of GOP "RINOs" even as the Republican ship sinks to the bottom.  We liberals should let their lust for anarchy wreak its havoc on the Republican Party. 

A tea party exit would be a blessing for GOP

By David Frum

October 14, 2013 | CNN

URL: http://edition.cnn.com/2013/10/14/opinion/frum-tea-party-third-party/index.html?hpt=hp_t5

Eskrow: Where did U.S. wages go?

Here's Eskrow's key observation, one that you cannot even make nowadays in America without being accused of a socialist bent [emphasis mine]:

We don't have a problem of inadequate wealth. The problem is inadequate wealth distribution. For 99 percent of Americans, wage growth has lagged significantly behind increases in productivity. As the authors [of the briefing paper "A Decade of Flat Wages"] note, this is true "regardless of occupation, gender, race/ethnicity, or education level." Since the Great Recession productivity has grown by 7.7 percent, while wages have actually fallen for the bottom 70 percent of earners.

[...] Between 2001 and 2012 productivity grew by 22.2 percent, while wages grew only 0.8 percent. 

My Republican friends, take special note of the phrase, "...regardless of occupation, gender, race/ethnicity or education level."  This phrase should stifle your knee-jerk reactions to blame those other people for America's economic woes.

So the facts are indisputable.  The question is: what are the causes? Eskrow points out a few:

A companion report from EPI, The State of Working America, 12th Edition, identifies some of the causes: Growing inequality. Policy inaction which eroded the value of the minimum wage. The weakening of employees' rights. Tax policy. Wall Street deregulation.

Other factors are left unmentioned, including problems in corporate governance and the distorting effect of changing executive compensation on corporate management practices.

Eskrow also blames another cause: "centrist" Democrats, aka 1990s-era Republicans who today call themselves Democrats: 

The word "centrist" is placed in quotation marks because polls show that their economic views are to the right of the American mainstream. On issues such as corporate taxation, Social Security benefits, and free trade, they stand to the right of most Americans -- and sometimes to the right of most registered Republicans.

Forget Republicans in Congress, they're nuts.  We need Democrats to be Democrats again, grow a spine, or get out of office.

Where Have America's Wages Gone?

By Richard (RJ) Eskrow

August 28, 2013 | Huffington Post

URL: http://huff.to/1ds6Asl

Stop pretending there's a political center

Here we have two op-eds basically saying the same thing. Wrote Weiler:

The dynamics of GOP politics are clear -- the biggest threat to state legislators, generally drawn as they are into solidly red districts, is from yet more right-wing politicians. There is almost no incentive to run toward the center and every reason to push farther to the right. 

And here's Cohen:

Quite simply, Republicans are being destroyed by the rightwing monster they created.

Although, once upon a time, the divide in the GOP was between moderates and conservatives; today, the intra-party cleavage is between the Republican establishment and the lunatic fringe. And the fringe is not so fringe-y.

Despite the rightward radicalization of the GOP, writes Weiler,

... political media in general still cling to the preposterous belief that the parties are equidistant from some notional "center" in American political life. But that premise -- symmetrical polarization -- is simply and flatly wrong.

And here's the upshot, according to Cohen:

The result of all this is more dysfunction, more budgetary shutdowns and more political black eyes for a Republican party unable to reason with its most ideologically fervent followers. None of this should really be unexpected. If you're going to tell radical conservatives that Obamacare is the worst thing to ever happen to America, is it really a surprise that those same extremists are not going to meekly nod when you tell them that it's now a fact of life? If you're going to tell voters that government debt is destroying the country, is it really a surprise when those voters demand that every step must be taken to reduce it?

Any hope that the defeat of Mitt Romney in November 2012 would begin to drain the GOP's fever swamp has gone by the wayside – and Republicans have no one to blame but themselves. In nurturing and radicalizing its extremist fringe – in pursuit of short-term gain – the Republican establishment created a political Frankenstein. Increasingly, however, it looks as though the monster's first victim is going to be them.

So let's stop pretending there is a political center in America, and that if only Democrats would give a little, and Republicans would give a little, we'd end up at some happy medium. Today's Democrats are early-1990s Republicans, let's face it, while today's GOP is a new radical-right party whose only internal debate is the extent to which a do-nothing husk of a federal government should protect white Christian identity, and intervene in other countries' business by military force.

Republicans' big problem with crazy

By Michael Cohen

August 15, 2013 | Guardian

URL: http://gu.com/p/3t364

The Myth of the Republican Moderate

By Jonathan Weiler

August 15, 2013 | Huffington Post

URL: http://huff.to/1bzeED6

Greenwald: Dems are hypocrites on NSA spying

Glenn Greenwald, the journalist who broke the Snowden-NSA story, is right: many Democrats and liberals are being hypocritical in defending Obama's vast program of spying on innocent Americans without probable cause, totally trashing the 4th Amendment and any semblance of privacy we had left.

For stark evidence of how a majority of Democrats have flip-flopped on whether they like the NSA spying on them, Greenwald offers us two Pew polls, one during Dubya's reign and one this month:

P.S. -- Respect to Yahoo, who, according to the New York Times, went to court to fight the PRISM program directive to turn over its users' info to the NSA.  Yahoo lost.

On PRISM, partisanship and propaganda

By Glenn Greenwald

June 14, 2013 | Guardian

URL: http://gu.com/p/3gt5x

Red v. Blue states? No, Urban v. Rural counties

So here's Bernstein's Civil War what-if in a nutshell:

Suppose instead that Southern politicians had decided not to leave the Union but to stay and fight—in the halls of Congress. Suppose that they had pursued a politics of obstruction, a political counterpart of trench warfare—blocking every measure, stalling every policy, jamming the works of government to prevent even appointments of federal postmasters in Southern states. What might have happened?

The result might well have been a cycle of frustration and resistance that would have made today’s brawls look like child’s play. 

This is all moot because the real divide in today's America is not Red vs. Blue States, but Rural vs. Urban, as the article, Red State, Blue City: How the Urban-Rural Divide Is Splitting America, clearly shows: "Partisan lines that once fell along regional borders can increasingly be found at the county level":

The new political divide is a stark division between cities and what remains of the countryside. Not just some cities and some rural areas, either -- virtually every major city (100,000-plus population) in the United States of America has a different outlook from the less populous areas that are closest to it. The difference is no longer about where people live, it's about how people live: in spread-out, open, low-density privacy -- or amid rough-and-tumble, in-your-face population density and diverse communities that enforce a lower-common denominator of tolerance among inhabitants.

The voting data suggest that people don't make cities liberal -- cities make people liberal. 

Check out these voting maps from 2012 if you don't believe me.  Suddenly the Red States don't look so red, do they?  Even Paul Ryan admitted it in November 2012.

This truth has tremendous implications for urban development and retail politics alike. If conservative politicians realize -- and I think they do -- that they cannot win over America's cities, then their policy choices will favor rural communities and suburban sprawl over urbanization. But if conservatives try to fight the urbanization trend, either by gerrymandering or by depriving cities of the infrastructure that they need to flourish, then they'll be swimming upstream, to say the least, against global economic trends.  And in the process they'll also be restraining America's economic and social dynamism. I put nothing past their selfish desire for political power.

The Sequester and the Civil War

By R.B. Berstein

March 11, 2013 | Daily Beast

URL: http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2013/03/11/the-myth-of-bob-woodward-why-is-this-man-an-american-icon.html

Red State, Blue City: How the Urban-Rural Divide Is Splitting America

By Josh Kron

November 30, 2012 | Atlantic

URL: http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/11/red-state-blue-city-how-the-urban-rural-divide-is-splitting-america/265686/

Party affiliation depends on who was President when you were 18

Intwisting. In my case this was true eventually, although I hated Bill Clinton and voted Republican in the 1990s. 

Even if it's true today, still it doesn't change much: young people today are still going to keep voting Democratic, not Republican, until a "successful" Republican POTUS can "flip" the pro-Democratic era presided over by Clinton-Bush-Obama.

Seniors lean Republican, young people more Democratic, right? Not so much

By Harry J. Enten

February 15, 2013 | Guardian

URL: http://gu.com/p/3dzbp

Study: The more Repubs know, the crazier they are

Let's recall the famous quote first attributed to American humorist Josh Billings and paraphrased by Ronald Reagan, among others: "It ain't ignorance causes so much trouble; it's folks knowing so much that ain't so."  Check it out:

75 percent of Republicans, but only 56 percent of Democrats, believed in at least one political conspiracy theory. But even more intriguing was the relationship between one's level of political knowledge and one's conspiratorial political beliefs. Among Democrats and independents, having a higher level of political knowledge was correlated with decreased belief in conspiracies. But precisely the opposite was the case for Republicans, where knowledge actually made the problem worse. For each political knowledge question that they answered correctly, Republicans' belief in at least one conspiracy theory tended to increase by 2 percentage points.

Well, we liberals already knew that FOX and talk radio make you stupider. Now we have proof.

Tinfoil: the official headgear of the GOP. Get yours today!

The More Republicans Know About Politics, the More They Believe Conspiracy Theories

By Chris Mooney

January 24, 2013 | Mother Jones

URL: http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/01/conspiracy-theory-partisan-bias

Dems have always championed the 'out-groups'

Political analyst Bill Schneider found a way to tie together the old and new Democratic Party:

Notice that the Democratic Party changed its ideology, from anti-government to pro-government. But the party did not change its allegiance. The Democratic Party remained the party of out-groups. Only now, those out-groups saw the federal government as their ally, not their enemy. Under President Obama, the Democratic coalition includes working and single women, African-Americans, Latinos, Asian-Americans, gay people, young people, Jewish voters, educated professionals, and the "unchurched" (the one-fifth of Americans who say they have "no religion").

That's the New America. For different reasons, they all see themselves as out-groups. They see the federal government as a force that protects their interests and promotes their values. They see the Republican Party as the party of entrenched wealth and privilege (i.e., Mitt Romney). What's changed is that the New America is becoming the nation's majority. Democrats have carried the popular vote in five out of the last six presidential elections.

Let's hope Schneider's right, and government isn't a dirty word in the U.S. anymore. Next we'll restore for the words liberal and progressive the respect they deserve.

Sh*t, F#%k, D&mn -- Is Government No Longer a Four Letter Word?

By Bill Schneider

January 25, 2013 | Huffington Post

URL: http://huff.to/11WOxUo

Romney's hopes rest in 'contempt for the electorate'

Romney really has been hoping that nobody would care to dig into any of his statements or arguments, like his plan to cut taxes by $5 trillion and increase military spending by $2 trillion and yet (somehow) cut the deficit:

The important thing to remember here is that the GOP argument for a Romney victory rests explicitly on the hope that those who turned out to vote for Obama last time won’t be quite as engaged this time around. Republicans are hoping the electorate is not as diverse as it was in 2008, and they are arguing that the GOP base’s enthusiasm is much higher than that of core Dem constituencies. The Romney camp seems to think it will help whip GOP base voters into a frenzy — and perhaps boost turnout — if Romney casts the way Obama is urging Democratic base voters to get more involved in the process as something sinister and threatening. This is beyond idiotic; it is insulting to people’s intelligence.

The Post editorial board, in a widely cited piece, has claimed that the one constant about the Romney campaign has been that it is driven by “contempt for the electorate.” To make this case, the editorial cites Romney’s nonstop flip flops, his evasions about his own proposals, his refusal to share basic information about his finances and bundlers, and his monumental Jeep falsehood and all his other big lies. It’s fitting that Romney’s closing argument rests heavily on one last sustained expression of that contempt for the electorate — one focused squarely on a call for more engagement in the political process, i.e., on something that is fundamental to democracy itself.

Call me a conspiracy nut, but I think many smart Republicans realize Romney's plans are pie-in-the-sky.  It's just that they hate Obama so deeply, so viscerally, that they will vote for anyone running against him.  And those Republicans are mostly white people, mostly white men, mostly white older men.  It's really as simple as that.  This isn't a campaign about ideas for them.

Mitt Romney insults the American electorate one last time

By Greg Sargent

November 4, 2012 | Washington Post

URL: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/post/mitt-romney-insults-the-american-electorate-one-last-time/2012/11/04/84e2f5be-268e-11e2-b2a0-ae18d6159439_blog.html

'Business experience' loses on POTUS scoreboard

This post is for the reality-based community, for that sliver of the American electorate still concerned with facts, not gut feelings, blind ideology and personal anecdotes.  I.e, the smarts.  All you stupids, take a FoxNews break.  Go check SporstCenter.

Here are the real stats (oh, wait, all you mind-numbed sports fans are supposed to be obsessed with stats, but anyway...):

The startling bottom line is that the nation’s GDP has grown more than 45 times faster under presidents with little or no business experience than it has under presidents with successful business careers. And on average, when there has been a successful businessman in the Oval Office (so, Truman is excluded), GDP growth has been negligible.

On average, under presidents with successful business experience, GDP has increased 0.12 percent. And under presidents with little or no business experience, GDP has grown 5.46 percent.

That's right, sports fans, it gets even worse for the Red Team:

The most startling figures emerge when we combine party and business experience. Historically, a Democrat without business experience has been extraordinarily better for the economy and the stock market than a Republican who had a career in business. In the past 84 years, GDP has grown 7 percent per year under Democrats without business experience (FDR, JFK, LBJ, Clinton and Obama) and fallen by 0.2 percent per year under Republicans with business experience (Hoover and the two Bushes). The Dow has risen an average of 16.8 percent per year under Democrats without business experience and has fallen by 3.7 percent per year under Republicans with business experience.

I would yell "Scooorebooooard!" except Republicans don't care about the scoreboard unless it's a black or Hispanic athlete doing the scoring in a meaningless socialistic sporting event that is subsidized by taxpayers.  Go figure.

Can a businessman help the economy?

By Robert S. McElvaine

October 20, 2012 | Washington Post

URL: http://wapo.st/PH9cXU

Another nail in the GOP's coffin

The GOP is already in trouble, demographically.  They already lost blacks and women, and they're losing Hispanics; meanwhile, the GOP is "not generating enough angry white guys to stay in business for the long term."  And now there's this:

The [Pew] study, titled "Nones" on the Rise, indicates that 1 in 5 Americans now identifies as "religiously unaffiliated," a group that includes those who say they have no particular religion, as well as atheists and agnostics.

Perhaps more instructive is a close look at the age breakdown: If you're under 30, there's a 1-in-3 chance that religion plays little or no role in your life, according to the survey.

"This finding and the growth of this group has very real political consequences and political implications," says Greg Smith, a senior researcher at the Pew Research Center's Forum on Religion & Public Life and a co-author of the study.  "It's heavily Democratic," he says.

Why are so many under 30s turning away from religion?  I side with this explanation:

"There is considerable evidence suggesting that the 'nones' have actually been caused by politics," says Campbell, co-author of American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us. "Many people have pulled away from the religious label due to the mingling of religion and conservative politics."

Conservatives, by making their religion political (or actually subordinating their religion to their politics, I would say), have turned off a whole generation of people from religion (and politics, too).  This all started in the U.S. in the 80s, so it's no surprise that kids born then and grew up in this evil mix of religion and politics can't stand it as young adults.

Young 'Nones' Set To Transform The Political Landscape

By Scott Neuman

October 9, 2012 | NPR

URL: http://n.pr/UPOpOE