Rick Perry: Contender?

Even before he announced his presidential campaign, Rick Perry had been generating a lot of buzz.  And now that he’s officially in, media types are giving him all the attention he could want.  Here’s John Dickerson, writing in Slate about Perry’s campaign debut:

Perry's started with protein-rich Powerbar of biography—growing up in Paint Creek, Texas, a town without a ZIP code, farming cotton with little rain, his achievements in 4-H and the Boy Scouts, flying jets in the Air Force.

He didn't take on any of his opponents. It's way too early for that. The lines of distinction were obvious, though. He stressed his record of creating jobs—the central question in the campaign. He promised to cut government spending, and if Congress didn't go along, he would use his veto pen "until the ink went dry."

I can't deny that Perry has some compelling details in his personal story.  Personally, I like the one where he shot a coyote while out for a run.  He's photogenic, a smooth talker, and scary as a candidate because he's a lot better at hiding his crazy than, say, Michele Bachmann.  But at the same time, as a three-term governor, he has a long record to be examined and highlighted.

And ultimately, when I close my eyes and listen to him talk, I can't be the only one whose visceral reaction "oh god not that again."

How much do we spend on food?

Interesting (and interactive) map from The Ration on how much countries spend on food, and how very unequal the cost is. Natalie Jones explains:

A one dollar bag of rice in the U.S. is not the same as a one dollar bag of rice in Indonesia. For an American, who, on average, devotes about seven percent of his or her spending to food, it won’t matter that much if the price of rice doubles to two dollars. An American can likely take the money that would have gone to a “non-essential” item and put it towards food instead. But for an Indonesian, who devotes 43 percent of his/her spending to food, it could mean less to eat.

Related: Nearly 25% of New York households with children do not have enough money to buy food. Also, look for corn prices to go up next year as unseasonably hot weather has led to tighter supplies.

Touchdown Jesus Non-Update

Okay, guys. I’m sorry to report that on my latest trek from the Dayton Airport to Cincinnati, there was no sign of the new Touchdown Jesus sculpture. Have plans stalled out? Has the Solid Rock Church of Monroe, Ohio failed to raise the funds for the replacement giant-ass savior statue?

I thought that a quick perusal of the church’s website could answer my question. The church does have a snazzy-looking site, but the five minutes I was willing to spend on it strangely showed up nothing on TD Jesus.  I searched “sculpture,” “statue,” and “King of Kings” (the piece’s official name)… nothing.  Have they abandoned the project?  Was the original fire in fact self-arson so the church’s leadership could collect insurance and also raise more money from sympathetic believers?  It’s a mystery.

I did learn, however, that “We’re not about building religion, we’re about building relationships.”  Perhaps they mean that literally, and they have decided that erecting enormous statues is not actually the best way to bring lost sheep into the fold.  In addition, should you find yourself at the church, “You can dress up or wear your favorite pair of jeans” because they want you to be comfortable while they preach at to you.

Morning Constitutional – Friday, 5 August 2011

S&P is down, Asia markets are down, and job reports adding to Wall Street’s worries.  Is it too early to say the d–d word? But hey, gasses prices should get better as  a gallon of crude oil is going for $83 a barrel, a 27% drop since May.

Shell received conditional approval to drill in the Arctic waters.

Standoff over the FAA which has put 70,000 government, security, and construction employees out of work seems to have been settled by Congress.

Number of AIDS infections stays steady at 50,000 a year for past decade.

Army veteran is personally suing former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld for being tortured while in Iraq.

More police personnel bailing from towns in northern Mexico as drug cartels continue with the violence.

As bad as Americans think their government is, the Chinese government is in the business of kidnapping children and selling them.

And, a homeless guy could be staying above the poverty line by suing places that throw him out. Need for the money centers around health care.

Frum’s moderate conservatism, or, where did all the serious people go?

The big quote of the day, so to speak, from none other than David Frum is:

It’s being quoted everywhere, as if it, by itself, means something—”Look! David Frum loves Paul Krugman!” or something. Actually, what leads to it is far more interesting (as is often the case):

When people tell me that I’ve changed my mind too much about too many things over the past four years, I can only point to the devastation wrought by this crisis and wonder: How closed must your thinking be if it isn’t affected by a disaster of such magnitude? And in fact, almost all of our thinking has been somehow affected: hence the drift of so many conservatives away from what used to be the mainstream market-oriented Washington Consensus toward Austrian economics and Ron Paul style hard-money libertarianism. The ground they and I used to occupy stands increasingly empty.

Once upon a time, the two sides of American politics basically agreed on economics. They took Keynes (“We’re all Keynsians now,” harped Nixon), added in some Friedman: agreeing that the free market was good, but sometimes the government was needed. Sure, there was disagreement, but it was more on what side (between the market and intervention) to err, not which was wholly 100% correct.

While no viable hard-left movement ever arose (OMG! Socialism!), since Reagan, the right side has gotten more and more radical. Remember, it was Republican George H.W. Bush who called Reagan’s then-radical economic policies “voodoo economics.” That was really the beginning of the end for the consensus. Since then, the left has moved into the center, and the right became, well, crazy.

No wonder Frum (and Sully) are sitting around wondering where everybody went, and find themselves accidentally surrounded by Democrats (Democrats, who would be more comfortable in a center-right party anywhere else in the world). And, no wonder Frum is finding he has more in common with “Little Professor” Krugman, the academic economist who’s also sitting around wondering where all the consensus economists went.

Totally Legitimate and Not Shady At All Money for Williard

NBC reports on some totally legitimate money making its way through to Willard Romney’s campaign:

A mystery company that pumped $1 million into a political committee backing Mitt Romney has been dissolved just months after it was formed, leaving few clues as to who was behind one of the biggest contributions yet of the 2012 presidential campaign.

The existence of the million-dollar donation — as gleaned from campaign and corporate records obtained by NBC News — provides a vivid example of how secret campaign cash is being funneled in ever more circuitous ways into the political system.

Nope, nothing shady at all about mystery companies and million-dollar donations. Nothing to see here. Move along.

Colbert on Women’s Health Plans

This is seriously worth watching if for no other reason than the pantomiming of a T-Rex putting on a condom. Also, he eviscerates those who complain about regulations that will require insurance companies to cover women’s preventative health.

Not Surprised

No longer am I surprised by the antics of freshman Republicans though I am often amused, and occasionally saddened or worried. Poplicola had a good take on debt limit deal, and the more I think about it the more I become immeshed in trying to understand what happened and who are the new people governing (using that word loosely) our country.

Representative Kevin Yoder (R-KS), someone I have reason to believe is a very well intentioned and caring person, had this up on his facebook last Friday:

The ruse of course is that if you search “debit limit plan” at whitehouse.gov nothing comes up.  ”Hahaha, socialist Barry still doesn’t get it”. Normal people will not equivocate an empty website search as proof the President had, or has, no plan on the debt.  First, they probably would not discount the possibility not everything a politician thinks is dictated on their website. Second, they might realize that another search term could be in order, in fact a search for “debt”, “deficit”, “deficit plan” or even ‘debt limit plan’ (that is without any quotations) will find plenty on the White House website regarding the President’s position on the matter, including new releases and speaches the president gave on the debt. So even when the White House makes efforts to be open, transparent and clear on the President’s positions they not only go unrecognized but get criticized for never even addressing the issue.

This from Yoder who voted against the final debt limit deal which received a majority vote from his fellow Republicans.  What is his plan, default? Well, go to his website and search for “debt limit plan” and dang – nothing comes up.  Should we conclude he has no plan?

No, of course not, we think more rationale than that.  You can search his Congressional website for “debt”, you can google ‘Yoder AND debt’ to pull up news stories, you can visit his campaign and twitter websites to try and find more.  It would be assanine to quickly assume a sitting member of Congress didn’t have some general thoughts on reducing the debt and had never made any of them public, but that seems to be Yoder’s belief regarding President Obama. Perhaps he actually knows the President has had a plan to address the debt but just wanted to make fun of the website search (despite the irony his website also produces the same blank search), and for that I am just over reacting to his cruel humor.

But their antics just became a lot less funny, and it is hard for me to be amused any longer.  Yoder and others ignore facts, they misrepresent the truth, all in a false belief that they somehow are the only ones who care about the debt.

I care deeply about the debt but don’t accept the notion we can simply address it with big sweeping cuts to our spending and for that Yoder would have me, the President, and many other Americans are tagged as genuinely uncaring about this important issue.  It is hard to pinpoint where the extreme right went off the rails but it seems to me to have had something to do with believing all of government, the media, and registered democrats are in league together in some mystery cancer that is dragging down the nation. Sounds crazy to me, but Yoder and others act like they are the vaccine?  I think notion came about via gross misunderstanding of public polices, government functions, and economic theory but what would you do if you believed in the apocalyptic analysis?  Would you negotiate with the other side of the isle, would you listen to arguments by the President?  Probably not and that clearly has happened.  Political discourse has always played an important role and nudging stubborn elected officials into silent concessions.  The truth could always percolate through to one’s conscience given enough time.  There is no discourse with the freshman republicans in the House, they do not listen and can make their own conclusions (or jokes) based on what little information they have, mostly other false assumptions from their fellow thinking conservatives on the far right.

That is it for now, just further confirmation that the new governing republicans are here, and do not look to be changing their tune.

We’re not all, nor should we be, entrepreneurs

Sir Charles blasts those who extol some kind of “innovation” economy or the “entrepreneur” economy  or whatever it’s called, as some kind of cure for our shitty situation:

This seems really obvious, but sometimes the obvious needs to be said.  The vast majority of people in this country are not going to be working in Silicon Valley or like enterprises.  They are going to continue doing the jobs that have been staples of the economy for a long time — nurses, teachers, health care aids, building tradesman, truck drivers, firefighters, cops, sanitation workers, hair dressers, grocery store clerks, etc.  These people don’t need to differentiate themselves — they need to be paid a fucking living wage by a society that credits them with some human worth.  The notion that people want to — or will be able to — continuously reinvent themselves as workers is just nonsensical.  It devalues the concept of experience, it belittles the value of stability in people’s lives, and it is, ultimately, a way to glamorize what in fact is an ugly world view of perpetual worker vulnerability and lack of value in a world in which free floating capital continuously undermines any hope that the vast majority will experience anything like a decent and secure life.

Sure, things get better when people invent things. Companies that innovate grow and hire. But, at the end of the day, we can’t depend on finding the next big thing, or inventing, or what have you, to get people to any kind of decent standard of living. That’s a focus for the upper one percent, the rest of the people have to find jobs. Maybe we don’t have to stop helping people start businesses or apply for patents or discover medical breakthroughs, but we really have to admit to ourselves that those things will only be done by a tiny sliver of the population, and successfully but an even smaller portion. The vitality of our economy is based on how well everybody else does, and it’s time to start helping them.

Of course, instead we’re gutting the government and any support it may provide to the middle and lower classes in order to protect the low tax rates the top among us get.

Senator Al Franken busts Focus on the Family witness for outright lying

“It doesn’t actually say what you say it says,” said Senator Franken to Focus on the Family’s Tom Minnery on Minnery’s comments that an HHS study showed that children are better off with opposite-sex parents. Turns out, it didn’t say that at all.

Politico:

I’m glad this guy isn’t Commerce Secretary

Former New Hampshire Senator Judd Greg:

“My gut tells me that we’ll need a weekend of drama — maybe a weekend of the government not paying its bills — politicians need drama to make something happen. As soon as social security checks don’t go out, the politics will change. I suspect it’ll take artificial drama to get closure past the House.”

Democrats could learn a thing or two from the gays

I just want to echo LGM’s Erik Loomis here:

Also, it’d be nice if Democrats realized that the strategies behind the gay rights movement–pushing for a program with refusal to compromise long-term goals, grassroots organization, building support among the young–would probably work for other parts of the Democratic agenda.

TARP and the debt ceiling

Nichole Gelinas does a fine job drawing the line from the TARP, which (other than a black Muslin soshulist commie pinko ascending to the presidency) drew a lot of support to the tea party, and the current intransigence of the tea party-aligned Republicans with regard to the debt ceiling debate:

Tea Party freshmen and their supporters hold this establishment in contempt. Implicitly invoking TARP, as Pelosi did when she mentioned a stock-market crash, won’t scare them; it will only embolden them. It would be one thing if Tea Party adherents merely believed that a default wouldn’t spell disaster; in that event, the GOP freshmen would figure out the truth soon enough. The problem is that many Tea Partiers consider TARP such a terrible idea that they would have chosen to brave a worse financial disaster instead. Today, they think that a market cataclysm would be better than another “sellout” vote. House veteran and GOP presidential candidate Michele Bachmann set the pace in last month’s GOP presidential debate: “I fought behind closed doors against my own party on TARP. It was a wrong vote then. It’s continued to be a wrong vote since then.” As the defeat of Utah senator Bob Bennett in 2010 showed, party voters are unforgiving of Republicans who supported TARP. A debt-hike vote will follow Republican candidates in their primaries next year.

Now, don’t tell anybody that the TARP made the government money, or that it lowered the debt (by making money), or that a massive financial cataclysm would do more to raise the debt than anything.

Beauty as well as Bread

“Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where nature may heal and give strength to body and soul.” –John Muir

Jack B. and I went for a hike yesterday to the top of Mt. Washburn, in Yellowstone National Park.  It was short but strenuous, up-up-up for three miles and then back down the way we came, after stopping a while to appreciate the panoramic view from the top: several mountain ranges, Yellowstone lake, canyon, valleys and forests.  In addition to the natural beauty throughout the hike, we also happened upon a group of bighorn sheep, ewes and their babies, who wandered right past us and then went frolicking across the snow.

It was quite the beautiful day.  Jeez, I love national parks.

Lousy Columns and Investments

Robert Bridges at the Wall Street Journal:

At the risk of heaping more misery on the struggling residential property market, an analysis of home-price and ownership data for the last 30 years in California—the Golden State with notoriously golden property prices—indicates that the average single family house has never been a particularly stellar investment. In a society increasingly concerned with providing for retirement security and housing affordability, this finding has large implications. It means that we have put excessive emphasis on owner-occupied housing for social objectives, mistakenly relied on homebuilding for economic stimulus, and fostered misconceptions about homeownership and financial independence. We’ve diverted capital from more productive investments and misallocated scarce public resources.

Between 1980 and 2010, the value of a median-price, single-family house in California rose by an average of 3.6% per year—to $296,820 from $99,550, according to data from the California Association of Realtors, Freddie Mac and the U.S. Census. Even if that house was sold at the most recent market peak in 2007, the average annual price growth was just 6.61%. So a dollar used to purchase a median-price, single-family California home in 1980 would have grown to $5.63 in 2007, and to $2.98 in 2010. The same dollar invested in the Dow Jones Industrial Index would have been worth $14.41 in 2007, and $11.49 in 2010.

Bridges forgets a little thing that houses are important for:

You get to live in them.

You can’t live in the Dow Jones Industry Index (trust me, I tried). You wouldn’t buy a house and leave it empty for ten years. You wouldn’t buy a factory, shut it down for a decade, try and sell it after that decade is out, and expect to profit wildly (gold factory?).

So often, these people forget that the actual utility of a thing is more important than its final return. Buying a house means you’re not paying rent. Buying a factory gives you the ability to make things to sell. Buying stock is the weird thing that lets you make money by…having money to buy things.

Now, houses shouldn’t necessarily be investments—they should be places to live. And, if you happen to make something off selling it, well, good. Because you want the value of your stuff to appreciate. It helps make up a little for all that shit you buy that dives in value immediately. And, you may even be better off renting and using the extra for savings, stocks, starting your own business. Hell, you probably are, but don’t tell the “ownership society” that.

Really, I probably agree with Bridges here, but I hate it when the people I agree with make no sense even more than the people I don’t.

Where’s Mittens?

The News of the World Wall Street Journal wants to know: Where in the debt ceiling debate is President-to-Be Willard Romney?

Republican presidential candidates have used the debate over raising the nation’s borrowing limit to score points with conservative voters and insert their views into Washington’s thorniest political dispute.

But Mitt Romney, the Republican front-runner, has taken a subtler tack, avoiding the issue of the debt ceiling as he presses a more general assault on President Barack Obama’s economic record. That has attracted the attention of his GOP challengers, who have begun to accuse him of ducking the most vital issue of the campaign so far.

Um, well, keeping the fuck out of all this is smart—if you expect that you may be the president some day. Congress voted 19 times during the Bush presidency to raise the debt ceiling, by a total of $4T.  If you think you may actually have to be president someday, you know full well that it’s going to come with the need to raise the debt ceiling yourself. So, it’s smart to not have to be on one side or the other before that happens.

Gone Fishin’

Okay, no actual fishing per se.  But Jack Burden and I are off on a western adventure, seeing states unseen and national parks unvisited… by us, since everywhere we’re going is pretty popular for tourists.

Anyway, that’s why we won’t be blogging regularly for a spell, but I’m hoping to snatch the occasional few minutes plus internet connection to check in on V&V.  How about some landscape photos?  Here’s Colorado:

Boulder Falls, roaring.  We were there, we got sprayed by the waterfall mist, and it was gorgeous.

Eldorado Canyon.  We were there, we climbed (a very very small) portion of it, and it was awesome.

Hugs from the West,

Lady B

Disorder in the House

Forget the country, turns out the Republicans aren’t even that good at running their own legislative chamber:

The rapid-fire succession of floor votes in the House this year has triggered lawmaker confusion and mistakes.

With dozens of votes stacked in a lengthy series on recent bills, a number of House lawmakers have cast the wrong votes.

….

While unintended votes happen in each Congress, some contend that they are on the rise in 2011. Part of that trend is attributable to changes implemented by Republicans.

The new House GOP majority has adopted a much different schedule from what Democrats embraced during the last Congress. By and large, the House recesses once every three weeks, allowing members to spend more time with their families and constituents. That change has attracted praise from members, but it also puts pressure on leaders to cram as many votes as they can into the schedule.

That has led to a slew of “personal explanations” about mistaken votes submitted in the Congressional Record.

Color me surprised. In 2006, Democrats came into the majority in the House promising that they’d spend more time at work, so to speak, by taking fewer recesses and working through the week (and, to a limited extent, they did). Republicans charged back in 2010 promising to go back to working, well, whenever they felt like it. And, despite the sheer number of crises underway, such as the debt ceiling, the economic barely-recovery, what seems like 17 wars, etc., etc., etc., they’ve managed to keep to their lazy schedule.

Independence Day

We — the authors of this site — are off today celebrating the 4th of July. We hope you are too. Before you go out to your cookouts, your fireworks, your what-have-yous, if you’re already on the computer, stay for a minute and read these three items. There are many appropriate readings for this day, and I implore you to add suggestions in the comments, but I’m the one who’s putting this up, and these are mine.

July 4, 1776 (RTWT):

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.–Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government.

July 4, 1852 (RTWT)

Citizens, your fathers made good that resolution. They succeeded; and to-day you reap the fruits of their success. The freedom gained is yours; and you, therefore, may properly celebrate this anniversary. The 4th of July is the first great fact in your nation’s history—the very ring-bolt in the chain of your yet undeveloped destiny.Pride and patriotism, not less than gratitude, prompt you to celebrate and to hold it in perpetual remembrance. I have said that the Declaration of Independence is the ring-bolt to the chain of your nation’s destiny; so, indeed, I regard it. The principles contained in that instrument are saving principles. Stand by those principles, be true to them on all occasions, in all places, against all foes, and at whatever cost.From the round top of your ship of state, dark and threatening clouds may be seen. Heavy billows, like mountains in the distance, disclose to the leeward huge forms of flinty rocks! That bolt drawn, that chain broken, and all is lost. Cling to this day—cling to it, and to its principles, with the grasp of a storm-tossed mariner to a spar at midnight.

And a poem, Carl Sandburg’s “I Am The People, The Mob” in honor of LB:

I AM the people–the mob–the crowd–the mass.
Do you know that all the great work of the world is
done through me?
I am the workingman, the inventor, the maker of the
world’s food and clothes.
I am the audience that witnesses history. The Napoleons
come from me and the Lincolns. They die. And
then I send forth more Napoleons and Lincolns.
I am the seed ground. I am a prairie that will stand
for much plowing. Terrible storms pass over me.
I forget. The best of me is sucked out and wasted.
I forget. Everything but Death comes to me and
makes me work and give up what I have. And I
forget.
Sometimes I growl, shake myself and spatter a few red
drops for history to remember. Then–I forget.
When I, the People, learn to remember, when I, the
People, use the lessons of yesterday and no longer
forget who robbed me last year, who played me for
a fool–then there will be no speaker in all the world
say the name: The People, with any fleck of a
sneer in his voice or any far-off smile of derision.
The mob–the crowd–the mass–will arrive then.

And, here’s a video of a dog with a Roman Candle:

Happy Fourth!

Marriage Equality

Linda Hirshman brings up an interesting rationale for depriving same-sex couples marriage equality: the idea that “traditional marriage” is actually just a name for “subordinating women into wives.”

As the arguments for heterosexual marriage inequality were used to fight same-sex marriage, so the success of same-sex marriage is a living refutation of the argument that marriage requires congenital natural inequality with women on the bottom. Even the campaign for same-sex marriage, consisting of a torrent of moving stories about the happy same-sex couples who want to get married, is a feminist windfall. Maybe marital equality and happiness aren’t so incompatible after all.

As it turns out, it’s the only argument I’ve ever heard that makes any sense. Too bad it’s absolutely terrible, and thank god it’s exceptionally out of date.