Jim Romenesko is reporting that the St. Pioneer Press and The Oregonian, among other newspapers, will not be running next week’s Doonesbury strips, which deal with the effects of those anti-abortion/mandatory ultrasound laws that are making their ways through a number of state legislatures. From Romenesko’s description of the cartoons, it doesn’t appear that they’re sexually explicit. But politically, Gary Trudeau is not pulling any punches. To wit, here’s how one cartoon is described:

In the stirrups, she is telling a nurse that she doesn’t want a transvaginal exam. Doctor says “Sorry miss, you’re first trimester. The male Republicans who run Texas require that all abortion seekers be examined with a 10″ shaming wand.” She asks “Will it hurt?” Nurse says, “Well, it’s not comfortable, honey. But Texas feels you should have thought of that.” Doctor says, “By the authority invested in me by the GOP base, I thee rape.”

Frankly, I’m a little shocked that a strip that for years more often than not has been so toothless is now being so uncharacteristically blunt.

Spokespeople for the newspapers which are banning the strips say their reason is that the material is “over the line” and “inappropriate.”

I wonder when the day will come when these extraordinarily nasty examples of unadulteratedly racist and misogynist (not to mention witless) political cartoons are also considered “over the line” and “inappropriate.”

Who’s to blame for the recession? The right-wing noise machine has pointed the finger at a bewildering array of targets: everything from burdensome regulations to too-high government spending and taxes to, of all things, the late, lamented (and chronically overworked and underfunded) community organizing group, ACORN. One institution that the right has targeted that has proved an especially popular villain of late is labor unions. In states like Wisconsin and Indiana, where anti-collective bargaining and so-called “right to work” laws have recently been passed, labor unions have been painted as public enemy number one, wreaking havoc on te state budgets and the state economy writ large.

But is the union-blaming story remotely plausible? The body of research on the macroeconomic effects (summarized in this book, for example) of labor unions does not support this explanation; it shows no clear pattern regarding the relationship between union density and macroeconomic benchmarks such as the unemployment rate. Nor is there strong evidence that unionized firms are less productive that their non-unionized counterparts (see Bennett and Kaufman’s book, What Do Unions Do? for a discussion of this issue). Unions do however, raise workers’ wages, improve their employee benefits, and reduce earnings inequality among workers (again, as per Bennett and Kaufman).

The alleged causal relationship between union strength and the Great Recession seems particularly dubious when you consider that unions have been in decline for many years, and that union density rates (currently 12.4% overall, and 7.2% in the private sector) are now among the lowest on ever record. Conversely, during the booming post-World War II economy, union density was at an all-time high; at labor’s peak in the 1940s, over one-third of private sector, non-agricultural workers were in unions.

Need more evidence? Economist Jared Bernstein recently ran some numbers, looking at the relationship between state unemployment rates and other state-level macroeconomic data. Unsurprisingly, he found no relationship between union density and unemployment. What he did find, though, was a very robust relationship between rates of negative home equity (that’s what happens when you owe more on your home than it’s worth) and unemployment. The evidence is compelling: the rate of negative home equity in fact “explains 49% of the variation in unemployment rates across states,” which is very impressive indeed. In short, it’s the housing bubble, stupid!

Here’s a sad item from Reuters’ Tim Reid:

Banks are foreclosing on America’s churches in record numbers as lenders increasingly lose patience with religious facilities that have defaulted on their mortgages, according to new data.

The surge in church foreclosures represents a new wave of distressed property seizures triggered by the 2008 financial crash, analysts say, with many banks no longer willing to grant struggling religious organizations forbearance.

Since 2010, 270 churches have been sold after defaulting on their loans, with 90 percent of those sales coming after a lender-triggered foreclosure, according to the real estate information company CoStar Group.

In 2011, 138 churches were sold by banks, an annual record, with no sign that these religious foreclosures are abating, according to CoStar. That compares to just 24 sales in 2008 and only a handful in the decade before.

The church foreclosures have hit all denominations across America, black and white, but with small to medium size houses of worship the worst. Most of these institutions have ended up being purchased by other churches.

The highest percentage have occurred in some of the states hardest hit by the home foreclosure crisis: California, Georgia, Florida and Michigan.

Do you perhaps think the closure of churches in the midst of a Great Recession might be as much a threat to the free exercrise of religious expression as, say, a requirement that church-affiliated institutions allow their insurance companies to provide contraception coverage for their employees? I haven’t heard a peep about it from major religious leaders, much less conservative politicians. Bankers wanting their payments are apparently off-limits to criticism, unlike a president trying to ensure something within shouting distance of equality in access to health care.

The new jobs report is out, the reviews are in, and it seems that even the most bearish of economists sound grudgingly optimistic. “[D]efinitely a better jobs report than we have become used to,” proclaims Paul Krugman. “Not good enough, but ok,” admits Atrios. Even the fiercely skeptical Dean Baker pronounces the report “reasonably good.”

It certainly does look like we’ve turned a corner and that the economy, however slowly and falteringly, is at long last recovering from its doldrums. This is very good news for the country, excellent news for Barack Obama, and pretty terrible news for Mitt Romney. Pretty awesome, right?

Well, call me a Debbie Downer if you will, but I’m not ready to uncork the champagne just yet. Though we are definitely moving in the right direction, there are still some dark clouds on the horizon. For one thing, women’s employment has been much slower to recover than men’s. Although the February report shows that women did gain jobs, the National Women’s Law Center notes that “women have gained less than 12 percent of the nearly 2.2 million net jobs added since the start of the recovery in June 2009,” and that the unemployment rate for women has barely budged since the beginning of the recession.

In addition, long-term unemployment (an unemployment spell of 27 weeks or more) remains a concern; it’s now at a historically high 3.5%. Worryingly, David Leonhardt points out that most forecasters are predicting that job growth will slow, and the forecasting firm Macroeconomic Advisers just reduced its estimate for growth in the current quarter to a pathetic 1.8%, putting us on track for an estimated (and anemic) 2 to 2.5% growth for the rest of the year. Krugman estimates that it will take us “roughly 31 months to [achieve] a reasonable definition of full employment,” which would add up to “almost 7 years of a depressed economy.”

I would also like to point out that if history is any guide, the long-term consequences of an economic downturn will be severely negative for millions of Americans. This paper paper by William T. Dickens and Robert K. Triest from a Federal Reserve Bank of Boston conference last fall, nicely summarizes the research on the long-term labor market effects of economic downturns. A few highlights:

read more »

In trepidation over the sheer nastiness (and emptiness) of the Derrick Bell “scandal” that Andrew Breitbart’s indeological heirs were so exercised about this last week, Kevin Drum reminds us of how prevalent this sort of thing was in the not-too-distant past:

July and August of 2010 were a festival of xenophobia and racial rage from the news organs of the right. Among the topics that generated wall-to-wall coverage on a serial basis that summer were (1) the New Black Panthers, (2) Arizona’s new immigration law, (3) the “anchor baby” controversy, (4) the “Ground Zero” mosque, (5) the Shirley Sherrod affair, (6) a new upwelling of birther conspiracy theories, (7) Glenn Beck’s obsession with Barack Obama’s supposed sympathy with “liberation theology,” and (8) Dinesh D’Souza’s contention — eagerly echoed by Newt Gingrich — that Barack Obama can only be understood as an angry, Kenyan, anti-colonialist. Plus I’m probably forgetting a few.

Kevin is concerned that since 2010 was an election year and 2012 is an election year, we’re going to see a reprise of what he calls the “summer of hate.”

What strikes me about the Bell “scandal,” however, is how relatively little it seems to have to do with Barack Obama. The “story” has very quickly moved on from Obama’s anodyne introduction of Bell at a 1991 Harvard protest, to Bell’s supposed “racialism,” and to the “racialism” supposedly suffusing academia and for that matter, educational affirmative action in general (perhaps in anticipation of a new Supreme Court ruling on affirmative action in college admissions). Sarah Palin’s bizarre suggestion that affirmative action is the same as apartheid is a remarkably common view.

But it almost seems like what our wingnut friends most want is to poke the stick at racial issues so that can scream about the horrible indiginity of being accused of racism, as though they are seeking insulation against future charges of race-baiting. My concern is that’s a sign something a lot worse than video of Barack Obama with Derrick Bell could be on the way. You can go back and forth as to whether this or that element of the contemporary Right is guilty of racism (you cannot, after all, look into everyone’s heart). But there is no question that anti-anti-racism is at epidemic levels, as we are seeing right now.

This is the sort of lede graph that those who think of the GOP as an orderly, hierarchical organization must dream of:

Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney won the unanimous vote among Guam Republicans to pledge all nine of their delegates to his presidential campaign.

The vote was passed Saturday by all 207 of the 215 registered Republicans in attendance at their yearly convention.

The unanimity, and the relatively robust delegate haul, must be music to Mitt’s ears. And it’s a good reminder of the irrationality of the delegate selection process, for better or for worse. Newt Gingrich won 533,000 votes in Florida, and spent a fair amount of Sheldon Adelson’s money, but got zilcho for it. Go figure.

* Meditating on the Derrick Bell/Obama “scandal” of the last few days, Paul Waldman says the hard-core Right is making it very difficult to avoid accusations of racism.

* On a parallel track, David Graham listens to Sarah Palin talking about Obama and Bell and figures she’s saying support for diversity is the same as support for apartheid.

* Karen Tumulty reminds us that Republican success in 2010 depended a lot on major gains with women—gains the GOP is now working hard to squander.

* Extended GOP nominating contest is forcing Romney to undertake major new fundraising drive.

* Unsurpsingly, congressional Republicans not real impressed with recent job gains.

And in non-political news:

* And in sad, non-political news: “Disco Inferno” singer Jimmy Ellis dies at 74.

That’s it from me for the week. This weekend, I’m pleased to announce a new Guest Blogger, Kathleen Geier. She’s guest-blogged before at The American Prospect and The Atlantic, and formerly wrote (as “Kathy G.”) at her personal blog, The G Spot. Please welcome her warmly!

Selah.

Like a lot of commentators (include Daniel Luzer and myself), Paul Krugman thought Mitt Romney’s recent dissing of the idea of federal involvement in making higher education affordable was pretty significant. Though he only mentions it in passing, Krugman makes one observation that’s worth thinking about:

[N]ow one of our two major political parties has taken a hard right turn against education, or at least against education that working Americans can afford. Remarkably, this new hostility to education is shared by the social conservative and economic conservative wings of the Republican coalition, now embodied in the persons of Rick Santorum and Mitt Romney.

The sudden semi-universal hostility to public education, which is an entirely new thing for the bulk of the Republican Party (at least in places other than, say, Alabama), is indeed the product of a convergence of the economic and social wings of the conservative movement, which now largely owns the GOP.

By “economic conservatives” I would include both the libertarian types who reflexively oppose all public services other than national defense and the enforcement of contracts, and “limited government” folk who think, on fiscal grounds, that the public sector as it has existed for many decades now is unaffordable.

In a trend that has been accelerating in recent years, “social conservatives,” which mainly consists of members of the Christian Right, have come to deplore public schools either because they compete with religious schools or home-schooling, or because they are key instruments of a “secularist” cultural assault on “traditional” culture.

It’s all somewhat unsurprising if unfortunate, since support for public education—if sometimes a stern, underfunded version of it—used to be a hallmark of Establishment Republicans, particularly at the state level. But for the sake of honesty, I do wish conservatives would stop pretending that recent GOP education initiatives like George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind law were some sort of godless departure from conservative orthodoxy. The forces opposing public education in the Republican Party have existed for quite some time, but only recently did they achieve mainstream respectability, and then dominance. Pols like Romney are just now catching up. But after all, this anti-school bus has been moving at well beyond the speed limit.

Republicans hate taxes more than anything, right? Well, no—they hate legalized abortion more, it seems. That’s certainly the case in the anti-choice hotbed of Kansas, where the GOP-controlled legislature, with the full support of GOP Gov. Sam Brownback, is considering legislation that will, among other things, impose new taxes on everything connected with providing or obtaining a legal abortion. RawStory has the rundown:

Massive in scope, H.B. 2598 includes provisions being considered in other states as well, like offering doctors immunity from malpractice lawsuits if they do not inform expectant mothers of prenatal health problems that could lead to an abortion; a removal of important tax credits provided to most healthcare institutions; requiring doctors to lie to patients by claiming that abortions may cause breast cancer; forcing women to hear the heartbeat of their fetus before an abortion; and even prohibiting state employees from contributing to the teaching of basic sexual health facts.

The sales tax, however — an innocuous-sounding 6.5 percent — is layered, effectively making it a repeating tax on every service rendered, every product purchased and every sale made in furtherance of an abortion. It also strips certain tax credits for companies that do business with women’s health providers, making such requests a potentially costly proposition.

“This is a complete turnaround in this idea of small government,” Elizabeth Nash, state issues manager for the Guttmacher Institute, told Raw Story. “Somebody spent hours, if not days, combing through the entire Kansas tax code to find every spot where you could possibly prevent abortion providers from being a non-profit healthcare provider. It’s really amazing. The bill is 68 pages long. Somebody spent days trying to figure out how to manipulate the tax code to disqualify abortion providers. That is a level above and beyond what we have ever seen.”

In these days of cookie cutter conservative state legislation, you best believe the Kansas experiment in taxing the exercise of the constitutional right to choose will have a lot of imitators in the months ahead.

Rob Richie of the FairVote organiztion has a cool item at HuffPost today that looks a little more deeply at the 2012 GOP primary and caucus results than has been the case in most MSM accounts. Richie’s most interesting point is his comparison of actual delegate totals with what they would look like under a strictly winner-take-all system and a truly proportional system. His general conclusion is that the awards so far much more closely resemble those of a winner-take-all than a proportional system, despite the RNC’s general ban on winner-take-all systems in contests held prior to April 1. Mitt Romney has benefited particularly from this phenomenon, winning 54% of the delegates so far as opposed to the 39% he would have earned under a truly proportional system. Gingrich and Ron Paul, on the other hand, have fallen far short of proportional awards.

Richie doesn’t much get into why this has occurred, but it’s a combination of factors. First of all, the “proportional” requirement has not been taken very literally by most states, and the RNC has not been inclined to differ with them. The prevailing interpretation seems to be that the rules only prohibit statewide winner-take-all systems prior to April 1. Some states (e.g., SC and MI) have largely utilized winner-take-all by congressional district. Many of the others have limited proportionality (either in CD or statewide awards) with “thresholds” that require a certain performance to win any delegates, and with rough divisions of CD delegates that award first and second place finishers but not by any strict proportional split (e.g., 2 delegates for first place finishers and 1 for second-place finishers). The thresholds and limited awards obviously punish third- and fourth-place finishers, which is mainly why Gingrich and Paul have suffered.

A second big anomaly is that Florida and Arizona blatantly violated the rules by holding straight-out statewide winner-take-all primaries. But since the RNC had already exhausted its penalties for these states (most notably, the loss of half their voting power at the Convention) for violating the calendar rules, it’s taken the position there is nothing more they can do to them. Since Romney won both these states, he both suffered (from the loss of voting power) and gained (from the statewide winner-take-all awards) from their scofflaw behavior.

Richie also summarizes the turnout data for the primaries to date, reporting that it’s down about 10% overall from 2008, despite the lack of competitive Democratic primaries (at least in the majority of states that haven’t had down-ballot primaries at the same time) to draw away voters (yes, some primaries and caucuses have been “closed,” theoretically preventing competition, but most states allow late registration changes even if they technically ban crossover voting).

The best thing about exercises like Richie’s is that they challenge sometimes-erroneous media narratives before they turn into the conventional wisdom of the next cycle. So it saves everyone the archeological effort of digging through the results from past years to determine the truth.

On reading Paul Glastris’ Editor’s Note for the March/April issue of the Monthly, entitled “Clinton’s Third Term,” I figured some of the progressive readers who didn’t agree with his cover article, “The Incomplete Greatness of Barack Obama,” might well nod their heads, and think, “Yep, this is Clinton’s third term, and that’s the problem!”

Some may have forgotten by now, but Clinton’s presidency was surrounded by a lot of the same intra-progressive arguments as Obama’s, and for some of the same reasons. Just as Obama’s 2008 campaign was interpreted by some as a bold series of promises to strike out in a more distinctly progressive direction, and by others as advancing a notably centrist message and policy agenda, many of Clinton’s original backers (e.g., Robert Reich) thought he sold liberals a bill of goods in 1992 and then abandoned his platform at the first sign of trouble, while others thought if anything he was too conventionally liberal in his first year in office after campaigning as “a different kind of Democrat.” Just as many Democrats (probably all of us at one point or another) have found fault with Obama’s way of dealing with Republican obstruction, the same was true of Clinton, particularly his “the era of big government is over” statement as he began his re-election campaign.

Some of these disputes were and are over policy and some over politics. But as we look ahead to Obama’s re-election campaign and a prospective second term, it ultimately does come down to what sort of legacy progressives expect presidents to achieve in tough times (economic and political). One of the more striking assessments of Clinton’s legacy was by Howard Dean in a major campaign address in early 2004, when he described the former president’s accomplishment as little more than “damage control.” As part of his signature injunction to Democrats to exhibit more “fight,” Dean clearly thought consolidation of past progressive accomplishments and the defeat of conservative efforts to reverse them simply was not enough.

If Obama is re-elected, I suspect we’ll see a return and and even an intensification of the same kind of debate, once the euphoria of victory fades. Unless the victory is a lot more sweeping (not just defense of the White House and the Senate or even a takeover of the House, but a return to the kind of margins Democrats enjoyed after 2008) than much of anyone now expects, we will again be arguing over the value of “damage control.” I’m already on record suggesting we’d better get used to lower expectations, and even learn to express some pride over the ability to stop a truly desperate conservative movement and GOP that is determined to create as much wreckage in the public sector as possible before demographic realities force them to change their own strategy or become a semi-permanent minority party. Moreover, as Paul notes in his cover article, the very quality of Obama’s accomplishments depends on “damage control,” since many of them, including health reform, can be easily undone.

In many respects, both the Clinton and Obama administrations, with their overlapping staffs and agendas, exhibit the difficulty of simultaneously preserving, reforming and extending the New Deal and Great Society legacies in a period of globalization and rapid cultural change, against a well-financed and emotionally charged coalition of the Right. It’s been a tough twenty years, all right, and everyone involved probably does (and definitely should) have some regrets about lost progressive opportunities, compromises that gave up too much for too little in exchange, and excessively rationalized complicity with corrupt systems from the financing of campaigns to the Senate’s filibuster rules.

It’s probably healthy, though, to view the Clinton and Obama years—and their relationship to the long national slide into inequality, debt, constitutional erosion and unnecessary wars of the Bush era—as part of a continuing struggle, and a continuing debate.

Mitt Romney joins the long line of yankee politicians who campaign in the South and think it’s a good idea to go native.

It’s usually a mistake unless you know what you’re doing. Something tells me if he keeps this up Mitt will use “y’all” to address an individual, and will pour milk on a big bowl of grits. As another cartoon character, Jessica Rabbit, once said: “I’m just drawn that way.”

Some Friday fish-and-chips:

* Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes buys New Republic at ripe old age of 28 (mag is 95 years old).

* Raz poll of Alabama, which holds primary next Tuesday, shows Gingrich at 30%, Santorum at 29%, Romney at 28%.

* Chris Christie gets in shouting match with Navy SEAL vet, calls him “idiot.” His act is really getting old.

* Update on latest in Koch-Crane struggle for control of Cato Institute.

* Alex Koppelman won’t miss Dennis Kucinich.

And in quasi-political news:

* Cast of Game Change defends HBO flick’s depiction of Palin.

Back by 2:00 EST.

Although Rush Limbaugh’s official line is that everything’s cool with his sponsorship base, and that the boycott involves only local sponsors or companies that don’t even sponsor him at all, the circumstantial evidence that he’s hurting bad continues to mount.

Here’s an AmericaBlog report (based on Media Matters data) from late yesterday (amplifying earlier reports of “dead air”) about the strange doings on his flagship radio station:

Rush Limbaugh is in trouble. Two days ago he didn’t have a single unpaid public service announcement on his flagship show on WABC in NYC. Yesterday, 56% of his ads in NYC were unpaid PSAs. Today, 90% were unpaid PSAs, and the show included three occurrences of ‘dead air’.

Nice as it is that Rush’s ravings are being accompanied by PSAs, they don’t pay the bills. And those bills are substantial, since the old bully-boy is currently under an eight-year, $400 miilion contract signed in 2008.

All’s not bleak for Rush. He is signing up a few new sponsors, most recently Twitchy.com, a new twitter feed digest launched by that paragon of decency and objectivity, Michelle Malkin.

Good to see so many public-spirited folk are filling Limbaugh’s dead air, if not the hungry maw of his budget.