Democrats hold onto two State Senate seats in Wisconsin

Tonight, the two Democratic State Senators facing recall won their races. Senators Jim Holperin and Bob Wirch will continue to serve.

GOPers control the Senate by a margin of 17 - 16, after Dems. picked up two seats in last week's recall elections. Read the rest of this post...

Do Bachmann and Perry think non-believers should be put to death?

Bachmann and Perry both have ties to Dominionism, a fringe far-right Christian movement.  Since they both believe that they have the right to impose their religion on the rest of us via legislative fiat, perhaps it's time we learned more about their rather odd, and extreme, version of "Christianity."  From the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette:

I didn't take Christian Reconstruction as a political philosophy seriously until I met an actual Theonomist (follower of God's Law) in the real world.

"Oscar" was in his early 20s, as was I, when we met. He was a Jewish convert to Christianity, so he was always on the defensive. As a young believer, he fell in with a mob of Theonomists in San Diego before moving to Pennsylvania for college. The primacy of the Old Testament in Christian Reconstructionist thought appealed to his sense of cultural identification.

Since I knew he was from a family of Holocaust survivors, I asked him what he thought of the mandate that all non-Christians would have to convert or die. Oscar said that if his relatives refused to become Christians or submit to forced exile, then they would suffer the civil penalty for practicing idolatry. He would carry out the execution himself if called upon to do so by the Christian state.

Oscar was the first self-consciously Christian fascist I ever met, but he wasn't the last. Eventually, the movement, which was scorned by many leaders of the Religious Right for being "too crazy," went underground as its leaders died or fought among themselves.

Today, two of the leading Republican presidential candidates, Texas Gov. Rick Perry and Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann, reportedly have ties to the Dominionist movement. The press has got to get up to speed on the movement's ideas before either a President Bachmann or a President Perry are in a position to drag Jesus feet first out of heaven.

It's time we stopped treating these nuts as just another religion.  They're not.  And what's worse, like the Mormons, and the religious right in general, they're trying to impose their religion on the rest of us by legislate fiat (or in the case of the Mormons, by creepily baptizing our dead against our will). Read the rest of this post...

Obama finally criticizes GOP, then takes swipe at Dems

I was so ready to write a post saying "hallelujah!" about the President finally taking a swipe at the Republicans.

Then I keep reading, and what does the President do?  He takes a generic swipe at "congress" (because he wouldn't want people to think that the Republicans in Congress are the actual problem), and then he takes an additional swipe at Democrats (in and out of congress) for being concerned about Medicare and Social Security.

Responding to a question by a lung cancer survivor worried about changes to Social Security and Medicare, Obama said that he wants to preserve the programs but that he is “frustrated” by Democrats who sometimes say “you can’t make changes to any government programs.”

I'm sure the President thinks such a message will resonate with "independents," the people who are now the focus of any and all policy decisions in the Obama White House. But the President, by continually taking swipes at Democrats and not explaining that Republicans in the Congress are the problem, not just "congress," is also hurting the chances of Democrats in Congress to hold on to the Senate, and take back the House.

He's also hurting the chances of Democrats by constantly putting Social Security and Medicare on the chopping block (neutering the number one advantage the Democrats had going into the next election).

And he's hurting our chances for protecting both programs by constantly telegraphing his willingness to put them on the table.

(Here's a thought: If you're really dead set on cutting Social Security and Medicare, why not at the very least let the GOP "force" you to put them on the table, then get a concession in return? Why keep offering them up for free?)

Maybe it's time the Democrats in Congress gave the President a taste of his own medicine.  Every time the President implicitly or explicitly criticizes Democrats, they should publicly quote a little Krugman about how "President Pushover" is the real problem in "Washington."  Then see how often he does it in the future.

The President isn't the only Democratic pushover in town.

(PS Jonathan Cohn from the New Republic seems more impressed by the new Obama showcased in the midwest this weekend.) Read the rest of this post...

Krugman: Rick Perry is "a shoo-in" after threatening Texas "ugly" if Bernanke plays politics & "prints more money"

Matt Browner Hamlin covered this earlier today (see here, including video), and Paul Krugman adds his thoughts:

[E]veryone I’ve read seems to miss the bit about Bernanke playing politics — implying that anything he does would be in the interests of helping Obama get reelected.

That’s a hell of an accusation to make — especially when you bear in mind that Bernanke was a Bush appointee. But this is apparently how people like Perry think.

After this, I suspect that Perry is a shoo-in for the nomination.

Krugman reminds us that "as early as 1993, Republican Senators would joke about what might happen to Bill Clinton if he visited their states, and the Broders of the world pretended not to notice".

It's an interesting trap to put Bernanke in. If he helps the country recover by borrowing money at ungodly low rates (if you were the government, wouldn't you borrow money at less than 1%?), he's "playing politics" since that helps Obama.

This is, in effect, telling Bernanke that he has to let Obama fail (by letting the economy fail) — because anything that helps Obama is political. This is like the Scalia SCOTUS saying that counting the Florida ballots interferes with George Bush's right to be president. Helping the economy succeed interferes with Obama's demise and the Republicans' right-of-return.

This also follows Limbaugh's Rule: "The dirty little secret ... is that every Republican in this country wants Obama to fail" — and will do anything needed to achieve that goal.

I suspect this latest salvo will fly, and that after the right amount of "just joshin'" language, the media will give Perry a pass. And if it does, that will be a sign that Krugman is right — Perry is the "hair apparent" (so to speak) of the Republican crown.

Don't forget, as Texan Jim Hightower noted on The Last Word, Perry was hand-picked by Karl Rove, and Rove can definitely pick them. Quoting James Moore:

[Karl Rove] said, I saw him walking up, and he was wearing boots and blue jeans, and a brown leather bomber jacket, and he had these steely blue eyes, and he was smacking gum. He had this thick curly hair, and you could see the tobacco circle pouch in his back pocket. And Rove said, I thought he was just the coolest guy in the world. I wanted to be like him.

That's Rove on Bush. Later, Rove picked Perry to run against Hightower. The man definitely has an eye for talent.

GP Read the rest of this post...

Oil spill in North Sea worst in a decade

Why do the oil companies always have to immediately dismiss these events and try to cover up the information? Is it asking too much of our political leadership to demand accountability?

The flow of oil from the worst spill in UK waters in the past decade, at one of Shell's North Sea platforms, has been "greatly reduced" but not yet stopped completely, the government said on Monday.

Stuart Housden, director of RSPB Scotland, said: "We know oil of any amount, if in the wrong place, at the wrong time, can have a devastating impact on marine life. Currently thousands of young auks – razorbills, puffins and guillemots – are flightless and dispersing widely in the North Sea during late summer. So they could be at serious risk if contaminated by this spill."

Greenpeace criticised Shell for not being sufficiently open about the progress of the spill, which was first discovered on Wednesday but not announced publicly by the company until Friday.

Shell said on Monday that it could not quantify the volume of oil spilled so far, but put it at 1,300 barrels, with a residual leak of about 5 barrels a day that has still to be stopped. Last year's BP spill in the Gulf of Mexico was estimated to be spilling up to 70,000 barrels a day. Shell said it could not predict when the leak would be halted completely.

Read the rest of this post...

Is the Internet making us smarter?

Following on from John's post, linking to the original Guardian story, about a researcher concerned that the Internet may be making us dumber.

The original article (not John's reply) falls into two cliches of academic research in psychology. The first cliche being that new technology is making us stupider. It was said of video games, it was said of television, it was said of radio, it was said of newspapers, it was said of books.  Every new technology has been denounced in these terms. It appears that at least some of these predictions have been wrong.

Here I must admit a personal bias, as I was an early contributor to the design of the World Wide Web. This is my work that Dr Wolf is treading on. So guage my rebuttal accordingly.

The other, more insidious cliche is that of the researcher who discovers that their subjects have different intelligence, and assumes that this must mean inferior. Thus if the Internet is changing people's brains, it can only be for the worst since the investigator already has the best of all possible brains.

If you haven't read it, Stephen Jay Gould's The Mismeasure of Man is the definitive smackdown of this mode of research. Gould describes the history of IQ tests, from their original invention as a means of measuring the progress of mentally retarded patients, to their miscomprehension as a measure of intellectual capability.

One of the claims made for IQ tests is that they are a measure of innate intelligence, and that "practice" does not affect the results. I know from my own experience that this is wrong. As a pupil at a selective junior school, we were required to take practice tests every week to prepare us for the senior school examination. Since we had already passed the junior school entrance examination, our IQ scores were already well above average, yet all of our scores rose over the year. By the middle of the year I was consistently scoring 100%, and so were others.

The brain is plastic and if you train it to do a particular task, particularly at a young age, it will adapt to that task and get better. The Soduku craze is almost certainly changing people's brains. But nobody seems to worry much about the pernicious threat from Soduku.

Dr Wolf's hypothesis might have validity if all that people did on the Internet was read. But even then, is the fact that youth culture is now a litterary culture such a bad thing? Twenty years ago, reading was considered an unconditional good. But children don't just read on the Internet, they play games as well as read, and the better, more popular games are the ones that have some intellectual depth. Crazy birds has a fairly sophisticated two dimensional physics engine built into it, simulating the effect of each missile. Civilization is grounded in history and technology. Tomb Raider presents the player with sophisiticated logic puzzles.

Dr Wolf's claim, that children are reading faster because they are not reading analytically, seems questionable to me. Children may not be reading analytically in the lab because they have already established the necessary analytical framework to comprehend the text before they stepped inside.

Of course, the newspaper op-ed is itself an imperfect medium, and it is entirely possible that what people are going to read into Dr Wolf's article (Internet = bad) is not what she intends. She appears rather more reasonable in an extended interview.

As society places a greater priority on reading, the reported incidence of reading disorders is going to increase. Twenty years ago, the teen with reading difficulty was easily overlooked as 'slow' or 'stupid.' Today even the slow and stupid kids are texting away on their mobiles, and the teen who isn't reading or writing is far more conspicuous.

So in counter-point to Dr Wolf, is anyone examining the contrary hypothesis? Is the Internet making kids smarter, as they start reading at an earlier age and become adept at synthesizing and managing large volumes of facts and information? The Internet is undoubtedly making kids different, but is it making them smarter or dumber? It can well be both, as intelligence is not a linear variable -- there are different types of intelligence.

In the sci-fi show Babylon 5, one of the plot threads involves the Psi-corps, a government agency of telepaths. Socially isolated, the telepaths look down on non-telepaths as 'mundanes.' I am pretty sure that the Internet is not turning kids into telepaths.  But if adults leap to the conclusion that 'different' must mean 'inferior,' they may well find that they are the ones being looked down on as mundane.
Read the rest of this post...

Rick Perry and the "New Apostolic Reformation" movement

This is a Rachel Maddow show segment from just after the Rich Perry prayer event from a week ago. Maddow catches what many have missed about this event.

It's not just hyper-religious in that "Jesus gonna get you" kind of way. It's hyper-religious in that "trying to take over the government" kind of way. And it features a bunch of people from a single movement — the New Apostolic Reformation movement.

It's a great watch. I created a sub-clip just about Perry and the movement itself. Maddow starts here with a series of quotes from movement leaders, then notes similarities in the message, and then at 6:25 discusses the movement itself. (The full clip is here if you want to see the intro.)



The New Apolostic Reformation movement has been connected to Kingdom Now Theology (don't you love those names?). The google is filled with wonders to delight you on these subjects. Read up; these guys are serious. (People like Monica Goodling are fellow travelers. Think they won't be brought back?)

They chose Perry; he's the candidate for this movement. And then he chose them, at least for his prayer event. Will he choose them if and when he attains the secular prize?

GP Read the rest of this post...

Striking Verizon workers speak out

This is a great video of striking Verizon workers speaking about why they're out on strike and what the strike means to them. It's clear that these are smart, savvy, informed union members. The workers in this video are just a few of the 45,000+ Verizon workers of the CWA and IBEW who are out on strike now. Laura Clawson of Daily Kos gives more background as to what the strike is about:

A New York Times story by Steven Greenhouse is revealing, placing the workers' view—that Verizon's demands are an assault on middle-class jobs—against Verizon's argument that that's not the case because Verizon workers could take a pay cut and still be considered middle class. That's the company's argument: There shouldn't be a problem driving down benefits and job security, because by some measures workers will still be in the middle class—just hanging on by their fingernails instead of solidly so.

So to management, the idea that this is about middle-class jobs is just some kind of cynical talking point. And that's probably the most revealing evidence of just how much this is about middle-class jobs, because it's about the very definition of what it means to be in the middle class (always a nebulous term anyway). Verizon's official position is that what used to be a middle-class job—that what Verizon negotiated in their last contract as a middle-class job—is now too good for regular working people and that big chunks of the job security and benefits it offered must now be removed for that same job to count as appropriately middle class. If that's not an idea to fight back against, I don't know what is.

Read the rest of this post...

Secessionist Rick Perry thinks Bernanke doing his job is treasonous

Secessionist candidate Rick Perry apparently thinks that Fed Chair Ben Bernanke doing his job to help stimulate the US economy borders on treason and if he were to come to Texas after printing more money, he'd probably fall victim to some state-sanctioned violence.

Speaking just now in Iowa, Perry said, “If this guy prints more money between now and the election, I dunno what y’all would do to him in Iowa but we would treat him pretty ugly down in Texas. Printing more money to play politics at this particular time in American history is almost treasonous in my opinion.”Here's the video:

Things that aren't "almost treasonous": the chairman of the Federal Reserve printing money.

Things that are "almost treasonous": threatening secession from the Union.


Perry's comments about the President not loving America, the troops deserving a patriotic veteran Commander in Chief, and Bernanke committing treason they all get at his biggest weakness: his secession comments. Perry is deploying a classic Rovian tactic - go after your opponent where you are weakest.

Cross posted from AMERICAblog Elections: The Right's Field

PS from JOHN: Perry isn't backing down from his threat against Bernanke. It sounds to me like a ploy by Team Perry to spin Perry as a crotch-grabbing manly man who just can't help but threaten violence against other men because, you know, that's just what straight guys do. Read the rest of this post...

Nobody can win the GOP nomination

The GOP primary does not so much resemble a political process as a reality TV show. Reading the commentaries in the wake of the first contestant being voted off the island, I can only conclude that none of the candidates can win the nomination.

Romney is too phoney, Bachmann is too whacko, Perry is even more whacko than Bachmann, Gingrich is a has-been whose campaign staff quit... The list goes on. For every candidate there is a reason that they definitely can't be the one. But someone has to.

The establishment media just loves this stuff. Its horserace politics with none of that difficult-to-explain policy stuff to worry about.

Conventional wisdom is that the GOP has to pick Romney as the most electable candidate and the only one likely to beat Obama. But that assumes that Romney can win the nomination and still be placed to reach out to independents. In the Karl Rove GOP the only strategy that works is to turn out the GOP base and depress voting by Democrats by whatever means they can.

The GOP base thinks that evolution and global warming are hoaxes, that budgets can be balanced by the tax cut fairy and will soon believe that George W. Bush personally killed Bin Laden with his brush cutter before he left office. Why shouldn't they also believe that Michelle Bachmann is their best chance to win the White House?

Of the current field, my hunch is that Bachmann would be the GOP's best bet. The power of being the first woman to run on a major party ticket is not to be dismissed. If Bachmann is the GOP nominee, Biden should probably start packing his bags as Obama would be practically obliged to pick a female running mate.

So facing a serious possibility that the GOP actually nominates Bachmann or Perry, are they really as whacko as we think?

If you haven't read Matt Taibbi's piece on Bachmann, you should. She is worse, far worse than most of us could imagine.

As for Perry, try this piece by Yglesias who has been reading Perry's book.

That Palin-Trump ticket is starting to look attractive in comparison. Read the rest of this post...

It’s a record-breaking Congress: A new low for approval, new high for disapproval

It's really, really hard to get 84% of Americans to agree on anything. But, Boehner, Cantor and the teabaggers have managed it.

From Gallup:

Americans' evaluation of the job Congress is doing is the worst Gallup has ever measured, with 13% approving, tying the all-time low measured in December 2010. Disapproval of Congress is at 84%, a percentage point higher than last December's previous high rating.

These results are based on an Aug. 11-14 Gallup poll, which includes the first update on Congress' job approval rating since the government reached agreement on a deal to raise the debt ceiling after contentious and protracted negotiations between President Obama and congressional leaders. Standard & Poor's subsequently downgraded the United States' credit rating, in part citing the current political environment in Washington. That sparked a week of intense volatility in the stock market, with days of sharp losses and large gains.

Great work! Now, this just has to translate into shifting control of the House back to the Democrats in 2012. Read the rest of this post...

Rick Perry threatens to secede from heterosexuality

As the subject of ongoing, and recently increasing, speculation that he's gay, you'd think Rick Perry wouldn't open the door to trafficking in unsubstantiated rumors about other presidential candidates. But you'd be wrong.

Rick Perry is now questioning whether Barack Obama loves America.

What's really going on is three-fold.

1. Perry is being as sensationalist as he can in order to break through the 2012 chatter and get press, so that he's marked as a real candidate.

2. Perry is throwing racist red-meat to the GOP base that decides GOP primaries.  The best thing you can throw them is something that isn't true, and is as bigoted as possible, as they're not the brightest most-evolved bunch (cf., Obama is a Muslim, and let's cut the budget in the middle of an economic crisis).

3. Perry is trying to butch things up in order to deflect speculation that he's a closet gay.

Of course, the best way to get people to stop talking about whether you had an affair with another senior state official is not to start spreading rumors about other candidates in the race.  At the very least it opens you to charges of hypocrisy, and at worst, it may make some reporters start re-investigating those persistent rumors. Read the rest of this post...

Former correspondent says phone hacking was "widely discussed" at News of the World editorial meetings

From the Guardian:

Rupert Murdoch, James Murdoch and their former editor Andy Coulson all face embarrassing new allegations of dishonesty and cover-up after the publication of an explosive letter written by the News of the World's disgraced royal correspondent, Clive Goodman.

In the letter, which was written four years ago but published only on Tuesday, Goodman claims that phone hacking was "widely discussed" at editorial meetings at the paper until Coulson himself banned further references to it; that Coulson offered to let him keep his job if he agreed not to implicate the paper in hacking when he came to court; and that his own hacking was carried out with "the full knowledge and support" of other senior journalists, whom he named.

The claims are acutely troubling for the prime minister, David Cameron, who hired Coulson as his media adviser on the basis that he knew nothing about phone hacking. And they confront Rupert and James Murdoch with the humiliating prospect of being recalled to parliament to justify the evidence which they gave last month on the aftermath of Goodman's allegations. In a separate letter, one of the Murdochs' own law firms claim that parts of that evidence were variously "hard to credit", "self-serving" and "inaccurate and misleading".

Read the rest of this post...

German economy grinds to a near halt, joins French and American economies in malaise

The last bit of good economic news from the eurozone is now disappearing. Even worse, the first quarter numbers were revised downward. France was also flat last quarter so everyone will now be watching closely to follow the numbers in the current (Q3) quarter. BBC News:

Growth in the German economy slowed sharply between April and June, and was weaker at the start of the year than previously thought, figures show.

The economy grew by just 0.1% in the quarter, according to provisional figures from the national statistics office, while growth in the first three months of the year was 1.3%.

The NY Times is going in the opposite (but mainstream) direction today with Germany Is Flying Above the Economic Storm in Europe. Read the rest of this post...

UK courts to disregard normal sentencing for rioters

Because democracy and the normal rules should of course be throw out when times get tough. Well, when times get tough for the lower classes. When it's the elite, it's generally best to ignore the catastrophic impact and pretend as though it never happened. No wonder the world is so jealous of our political systems in the west. We disregard the rules at will and protect the criminals with the deepest pockets. The Guardian:

Magistrates are being advised by the courts service to disregard normal sentencing guidelines when dealing with those convicted of offences committed in the context of last week's riots.

The advice, given in open court by justices' clerks, will result in cases that would usually be disposed of in magistrates courts being referred to the crown court for more severe punishment.

It may explain why some of those convicted have received punitive sentences for offences that might normally attract a far shorter term.

In Manchester a mother of two, Ursula Nevin, was jailed for five months for receiving a pair of shorts given to her after they had been looted from a city centre store. In Brixton, south London, a 23-year-old student was jailed for six months for stealing £3.50 worth of water bottles from a supermarket.

The Crown Prosecution Service also issued guidance to prosecutors on Monday, effectively calling for juveniles found guilty of riot-related crimes to be named and shamed. Those dealt with in youth courts are normally not identified. The youngest suspects bought before the courts last week in connection with the riots were an 11-year-old girl and a 12-year-old boy.

Flash back to the banking crisis when some called for listing the names of the bankers and how much they earned. That was of course much too much and a violation of their privacy. Despite earning money that was funded by taxpayers it was too much. Naming and shaming the lower classes is fine, because they're the lower classes. Read the rest of this post...