Average hourly wages since 2007

Paul Krugman has a blog post about deflation that includes this frightening graph.

Feel free to read about deflation; he's likely right (as we've argued before). Me, I prefer to absorb the graph.


Wages are in the tank, Mr. Prez. Now about those cuts to Social Security...

GP Read the rest of this post...

Did the Dems lose the youth vote?

From the NYT:

Have the Democrats lost the young?

Two years ago, the Obama campaign galvanized young voters, and they turned out and helped elect Democrats around the country. This year, voters under 30 were the only age group in which a majority voted for the Democrats, but relatively few of them bothered to show up on Tuesday. But that does not mean young voters are forever lost. Young voters are among the most transient and tend to sit out midterm elections. This year was no different.

Young voters did make up a decidedly smaller portion of the electorate this year: 11 percent, down from 18 percent in 2008, when many turned out for the presidential election. But their turnout this year was not much different from their turnout in the last midterm elections, in 2006, when 12 percent of the voters were under 30.

Wrong analysis. The issue isn't whether Dems have lost young people. It's whether Dems have lost the new generation of young people that Obama brought into the process for the first time, and the answer appears to be yes. If we're back to where we were in 2006, pre-Obama, then that means the Obama factor did nothing to boost youth turnout this year. And that would suggest that we lost the new Obama youth. Completely. Read the rest of this post...

Juan Cole on Olbermann: MSNBC has a 'long history of throwing liberals under the bus'

The countdown continues, so to speak, as commenters absorb the MSNBC / Olbermann news. Juan Cole provides some needed history:

MSNBC has a long history of throwing liberals under the bus, despite its recent strategy of trying to use them to counter-program against Fox.

In the build-up to the Iraq War, MSNBC had Phil Donahue, whose evening magazine show was the highest-rated thing on the network. As the momentum for war built, the top corporate management became very nervous about having a show starring an anti-war liberal, so they fired Donahue[.] Rick Ellis wrote at the time that General Electric-owned NBC had commissioned a study of its public image, and that the consultants produced a report in which they wrote, that Donahue was a “difficult public face for NBC in a time of war……He seems to delight in presenting guests who are anti-war, anti-Bush and skeptical of the administration’s motives.” The report worried that the war fever would benefit rival, pro-war, pro-Bush networks and implied that Donahue might succeed in branding NBC in a way that caused viewership and therefore advertising revenues to plummet.

MSNBC replaced Donahue with far right wing shock jock Michael Savage, Dick Armey and Republican Joe Scarborough (who went on to donate to a Republican politician while on the air).

Then there was Ashley Banfield, a television reporter who was almost killed on 9/11.. She went off on this quest to understand Pakistan and Afghanistan, about which she had known nothing, and she risked life and limb to get up to Kabul as soon as the Taliban fell, and when the road from Jalalabad was very bad. She was on a steep learning curve and tried to take her MSNBC television audience along on this quest to understand the forces that had nearly snuffed her out. Then on April 24, after the successful Bush invasion of Iraq, she gave a public speech in which she criticized US television news for its rah-rah cheerleading of the war, which was not exactly in the best tradition of sober reporting. She was marginalized and ultimately fired.

I'm waiting for the full realization to be the frame — Any mega-corp who can buy media should do it; it confers enormous political power. In fact, this is the Rupert Murdoch secret — Buy media; sell propaganda services to government officials; get even more power and money in return.

Note to progressive commenters: Now's the time, while the iron is hot, to frame this story correctly. This is a Citizens United / Billionaires' Coup story. Write it this way now, and let the other side deal with our frame for a change. The good news? Our frame is factually accurate.

GP Read the rest of this post...

Taibbi on Olbermann

Matt Taibbi is coming to the Keith Olbermann story cold, so this is just his first take. That said, here you go:

I went online and read the news and found the inevitable commentary by ostensible experts on journalistic ethics, who are all lining up to whale on Olbermann. One quote I found in this Bloomberg piece:

"Journalists who work for a news organization have an ethical responsibility to honor their guidelines and standards,” said Bob Steele who teaches journalism ethics at Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg, Florida. “If NBC and MSNBC spelled out those guidelines clearly and Olbermann violated those guidelines, then he should pay the price."

He should pay the price? Is Bob Steele kidding? What the hell is wrong with people?

We had a whole generation of journalists who sat by and did nothing while, for instance, George Bush led us into an idiotic war on a lie, plus thousands more who spent day after day collecting checks by covering Britney's hair and Tiger's text messages and other stupidities while the economy blew up and two bloody wars went on mostly unexamined... and it's Keith Olbermann who should "pay the price" for being unethical?

Not bad. When Matt really thinks this through, he'll figure out the rest of what's wrong with this affair.

You can frame in this several ways. One way is that Olbermann crossed a line that doesn't exist in Fox-world, but should. Another is corp stupidity and wrong-headedness about "journo ethics".

But the third is the Citizens United esprit de coup flexing its muscles again — "We're doing it because we can, and you can't stop us. Oh, and for the press, here's our reportable (possibly even credible) cover story."

As noted, John (and others) caught that Comcast Bushie Steve Burke is set to take over MSNBC, and may be already calling shots behind the scenes. Digby:

Sadly, all the MSNBC hosts will undoubtedly be aware --- if only subliminally --- that regardless of Olberman's eccentricities, the fact that the bosses are clipping his wings over something they could have technically overlooked ("it's an opinion show") is a message, particularly since he was getting good ratings. They don't have a whole lot of rope and I'm sure they know it.

And there's a lot more comment like that one. Hubris, folks; our very good friend. They're getting pretty naked in their acts, and that cover story looks paper-thin to me.

This one has legs, and good ones for us.

GP Read the rest of this post...

McConnell basically declares war on the President

How much you want to bet the President caves on something important in an effort to woo McConnell and the GOP to play nice with him?

Senator Mitch McConnell, the minority leader, said Thursday that “the only way” his party would succeed in advancing its agenda was to ensure that President Obama was defeated in two years, seemingly bringing a quick end to post-election professions from both sides about working together.

Even as President Obama announced that he had invited Congressional leaders of both parties to meet him this month to discuss the legislative agenda for the rest of the year, Senate Republicans were flexing their muscles in the new playground of divided government, scrambling to fill leadership posts, announcing a legislative agenda and warning their Democratic counterparts to change their ways or else.

Mr. McConnell’s comments about Mr. Obama — echoing a line he used before the election — suggested that he had heard the no-compromise message coming from the most conservative members of his party and that he intended to wage an aggressive battle in the Senate even though Republicans failed on Tuesday to gain a majority there.

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White House thinks it was the stimulus that killed them

Yes and no. First read this from the NYT, then some much needed analysis:

Underlying the thinking is the conclusion that the electoral thrashing had more to do with larger economic forces and strategic decisions about health care and stimulus than with the particular operations of the White House. In other words, as Mr. Rouse and his colleagues analyze the criticism, what they are hearing is not that the White House did things wrong, but that it did the wrong things.

Mr. Rouse declined to comment. But in a rare interview in September before his selection, he insisted Mr. Obama’s first two years would be judged well by history, but lamented that the economic crisis forced a series of actions that fueled the image of a traditional Democrat, even while staving off a depression.

“If we’d had our druthers,” Mr. Rouse said, “starting out with a $787 billion spending program that people don’t think benefited them, that reinforced the idea of big-spending liberal, isn’t the option we would have chosen, but it was what was called for.”

Eh gads. You could have been heroes, riding in to boldly save the country from an imminent depression, but instead the President treated a nation on life support as just another bargaining chip for his larger goal of bipartisanship. That's what went wrong. He showed weakness, he settled for far too little, and the economy limped along as a result.

And one more thing. As Joe and I have been arguing for 20 months, the White House's messaging sucks. They didn't fight adequately for the stimulus (no one ever asked us to help pass the bill), and they let the Republicans define the legislation and its aftermath, as they always do.

Imagine a White House that actually fought for the full $1.5 trillion stimulus that was needed. A White House that blamed the GOP for even one dollar less, and predicted the recovery wouldn't be as strong because of the GOP cutting the stimulus. Imagine a White House effectively messaging for the past two years, non stop, that they saved the country from a depression, while the GOP tried to make the economy sink further. Imagine unemployment 2 points lower today, and how that would have affected the election.

Even at half the stimulus, with 35% given away to tax cuts, you still just freaking saved the entire country from disaster, and because you couldn't figure out how to effectively tell the country that fact. So you now think the stimulus was the thing that brought you down, rather than your handling of it. With all due respect, what has the White House handled well for which it has gotten the credit it deserved?

This White House has a messaging and backbone problem. And it still doesn't seem to have caught on to that fact. Read the rest of this post...

Saturday morning open thread

Joe is off watching polar bears somewhere near the north pole, and I'm preparing for an exciting trip to Costco and then Marshall's. Ah yes, good times.

This morning I give you a photo sent to me by my friend Chris (not in Paris). He writes:

There are two kinds of people in this world:

1) Those who have to ask for the backstory on this picture, and,

2) Those who do not, because the backstory is obvious, and makes perfect sense.

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