The world's worst negotiator

Nothing causes me more agita than watching the President negotiate with Republicans. It's like he's Walter from Fringe and he intentionally removed the part of his brain that deals with strategy and bargaining. If he strikes a "grand bargain" that doesn't include a permanent deal to raise the debt ceiling, then it's a Pyrrhic victory at best. The Republicans will just come back and extract the last pound of flesh when the debt ceiling needs to be raised. Is it really possible he doesn't understand this? It can't be right? He just really really really wants to strike a deal, just for the sake of striking a deal. God he really sucks sometimes.

Go over the god damn cliff already!

UPDATE -

Looks like a deal may have been struck. And surprise, surprise it's awful. It also does nothing to reduce the deficit, which was supposed to be the most important crisis EVAH!

It remains to be seen whether the Teahadists decide, once again, to save Democrats from themselves by beating the bill back in the House. Right-wing insanity - ACTIVATE!

Federal Marijuana Crackdown

I am starting to hear some rumblings that the Obama administration may call down the thunder on Colorado and Washington in regards to their decision to legalize marijuana in those states. BTW, they already have a track record of doing just that. I can't even begin to describe the despair I would experience upon discovering that the administration that didn't have the political will-power to investigate Bush-era torture practices or accusations of massive accounting and financial malfeasance would somehow have the political-will to waste billions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of manpower busting potheads. The morality of that executive particular decision would be unforgivable. Especially considering our president is a self-admitted former pothead/habitual cocaine user. Sometimes I wonder how he sleeps at night.

Barack Obama is aware of all internet traditions

I hate to fall into fanboy worship (and I promise it won't happen too often), but it's kinda awesome how funny our President is...

President Barack Obama jokingly mimics U.S. Olympic gymnast McKayla Maroney's "not impressed" look while greeting members of the 2012 U.S. Olympic gymnastics teams in the Oval Office, Nov. 15, 2012. Steve Penny, USA Gymnastics President, and Savannah Vinsant laugh at left. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

Spiking the football

Today I'd like to post a series of links that have had a significant effect on me after the election. However, first I'd like to point out that before the first debate, Barack Obama had roughly a 2.2% lead over Mitt Romney if you looked at poll averages (my source is my boy Nate Silver at 538). Now that Florida has been tallied, Obama has a roughly 2.0% lead in the popular vote, with Washington still be counted. And I guess my point is, again, that debates just don't matter my friends (particularly a performance in a single debate). Eventually, the mythical "independent" voter comes home to their preferred candidate. Period. People just like to describe themselves as independent because a) it makes them seem wise, and temperate and considered or b) because they want politicians to kiss their asses and promise them things. Sarah Kliff did a series of interviews with "undecided voters" and by God there is no doubt who these people are going to vote for.

I would also like to point off that gaffes don't really matter either (at least primarily in a presidential contest), because let's be honest, I think Romney's 47% video had the greatest potential to be a "game-changer" and it absolutely wasn't. On the other hand, gaffes CLEARLY matter in Senate races, huh? I mean Akin getting slaughtered in Missouri? Mourdock losing Indiana? So, um, yeah, I think we discovered the so-called "third rail" in American politics and it's not Social Security, it's rape apology! Just look at this track record...

And a big "Yay for democracy!" thanks to gay marriage wins in Maine, Maryland and Washington. Additionally, a Constitutional ban to gay marriage in Minnesota was defeated. That 4-0 record in 2012 ends an 0-32 streak at the state level. That's real progress there. Special thanks to Andrew Cuomo by the way. I don't have a good theory why, since New York state wasn't the first state to legalize gay marriage, but New York state legalization seems to have proved a critical turning point in the gay marriage debate. Joe Biden deserves special credit for forcing the President's hand on this issue as well.

The most surprising result, for me personally, was the straight-up legalization of recreational marijuana-use in Colorado and Washington. On a historical basis, this was not too surprising to me. I think the curve of history is bending in that favor. However, straight legalization in 2012? Man, that surprised me. I was in Colorado for the initiative to legalize marijuana in 2006 and it didn't even get close. I think the ramifications of these marijuana votes are, in the words of our Vice President, a big fucking deal. We waste a lot of money and human talent enforcing, prosecuting, and locking up human beings for individual marijuana possession. It's utterly insane. I have no horse in this race, (I'm not pro-marijuana legalization so I can get high), so please believe me when I say the war on recreational marijuana-use is horrible public policy. Just awful really. Awful in financial costs. Awful in human costs. It's good to see the American people slowly but surely come to their senses on this issue.

Finally, as promised, two good links. One is Rachel Maddow explaining why the Republican party needs to come to its senses. Our democracy operates more effectively when we have two sane, sensible, and reasonable parties. Right now, we don't have that. Believe it or not, even I can acknowledge that Republicans have good ideas! They do! I work with Republicans on the local level who have both excellent ideas and who are dedicated to good, effective government (not a lot, but some lol). The best example of excellent public policy that derived from conservative think tanks is the trading of pollution credits. Trading pollution credits was amazingly effective in solving our acid rain crisis in the 70's and 80's. It's free-market friendly, incentivizes long-term environmental stewardship, and minimizes government interference and monitoring costs. That's a win all-around. In fact, it would be the best policy to confront global warming if Republicans, you know, would admit that global warming is real. Republicans are also dead-right when it comes to free-trade. I am a fierce trader. I am also in the Yglesian school of large-scale reductions in regulatory oversight at the local level. For the most part, current regulatory policy is designed to protect entrenched and politically connected businesses, not to encourage competition and enhance consumer experiences and outcomes. There is a lot of room for agreement between Democrats and Republicans there. Simplifying the tax code could be an area of agreement as well.

Anyway, here is the link I mentioned -

Here's the other link. It's a more uplifting link. I think this link is important because it's nice to remember from time to time that Barack Obama is a human being who is remarkably well-intended and takes his job and his role in history seriously. It's also important because its nice to see someone so successful admit that there was a time in his life where he wanted to affect "change," whatever that meant, but he had no idea how to do it, and no idea how to go about it. I find myself even older than he was in that story, and I can relate. I am still casting about, looking for small opportunities to change minds, affect electoral outcomes, and influence policy. Because I honestly and legitimately want to make peoples lives better. I want to make the lives better for people who agree with me and for the people who disagree with me. Honest to God, that's all I want to do. Right now I suck at it, and it drives me mad. It's depressing and despairing, and I frequently find myself casting about for better options, better opportunities, better mentors, better experiences. But Barack Obama sucked at it too. And now, slowly but surely, Barack Obama is changing the arc of history for the better. And maybe one day I can overcome my own personal failings and laziness and do the same.

The razor's edge

So it's election day and I am massively stressed out. Which is weird because I'm also somewhat convinced Obama is going to win. I don't know how I'd feel if I thought he was going to lose. Despondent maybe? Massively depressed?

Anyway, all comments on facebook or twitter are candidates to send me over the edge. It's not a nice place to exist. I already have some "de-friend" targets on facebook who probably won't make it through the day. Don't worry. If you're reading this blog right now, I don't think you're one of them.

Let me give an example of how emotionally unstable I am right now. (Warning: Massive Humblebrag Alert)

Sometimes at work, I interact with people who assume I will be running for office one day. Instead of telling them I can't run for office because I am a massive life fuckup (i.e. the truth), I tell them I can't run for office because I've never influenced anyone about anything, ever. To be truthful, I've never had a conversation with a person where they said to themselves at the end, "Wow - This person just made a very well-reasoned argument and I really need to re-evaluate my position on 'X'". It's never happened.

It's never happened mostly because I'm a massive asshole, but also because human beings (including myself) envelop themselves in a core set of beliefs that dictate their world attitudes. These attitudes are rarely, if ever, successfully challenged because they are governed by a lifetime of core experiences and influences. In fact, it would be silly if these attitudes were affected by, for example, my facebook rants.

However, as I mentioned previously, I have, on occasion, spoken with somewhat influential politicos who assume I'll be running for office one day. I must admit, I do reek of that ambition, despite the fact that my personal failings would warrant an entire chapter in the Encyclopedia of Mental Health. So instead of telling them the truth ("I suck"), I tell them that I can't run because I am the most unpersuasive human being on the planet. Any argument I've ever had is much more likely to harden the attitudes of the people on the other side, rather than move them towards my position. Let's put it this way, if debate teams had an "anti-matter", it would be me. If you want to win an argument, just put me on the other end of it.

Anyway, as I continue to explain to this person how unpersuasive I am, I usually try to lighten the mood by adding that I literally know only ONE person who seeks out my opinions on political matters. One person who I think I can influence.  One person IN THE WHOLE WIDE WORLD who respects my opinion and appreciates the thousands and thousands of hours I spend reading and writing about politics. One person who thinks I just might have something valuable to add to our political discourse.


 
And then that person sent me a text message this morning saying that he voted for Mitt Romney and I just started crying...

Unemployment Numbers and Conspiracy Theories

A quick post on today's unemployment numbers. According to job creator douchebag Jack Welch, "the fix is in" and the numbers were cooked!

Look, I think it's a good thing when these so-called non-partisan captains of industry like Trump and Welch expose themselves for the ratfuckers they are. It gives us the opportunity to undercut their image as unbiased wise old sages. Really they're just a bunch of lucky idiots who can't figure out the basic premise of their business model which should read, in short, that people NEED MONEY to spend on their products. Squeezing every last penny out of the middle and lower income classes, cutting their benefits, eliminating infrastructure investments and reducing their social services will not sell more dishwashers. The path to economic prosperity is not, as they suspect:

1. Tax cuts for the rich
2. ????
3. PROFIT

But anyway, the right-wing is convinced that Obama cooked the books in order to bring the unemployment numbers under 8%. There are two things I find funny about today's trendy conspiracy, which has obviously been given serious mainstream media attention, because, uh, um, the media is liberal? Or something?

One, it's funny that the Obama Administration and the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which are, like, totally in cahoots with one another, are corrupt enough to game this month's job reports numbers, but apparently not smart enough, or not corrupt enough, to game the last two years of job numbers. Did it just occur to the "corrupt" Obama Administration to trick the job numbers now? Is it possible that David Axelrod only realized now that declining unemployment numbers might give the Obama campaign a boost? That seems like a pretty glaring oversight for a man considered to be somewhat of a campaign savant. And is 7.8% unemployment really some kind of magical number when it comes to re-election? I mean, that number still seems pretty bad to me. If this is the Obama administration cooking the books to win a presidential election, they are pretty fucking miserable at it. Better corrupt Democrats please!

Two, the consistent right-wing harping of today's "bogus" unemployment will only ELEVATE the amount of media attention paid to these numbers. Generally, who the hell pays attention to the monthly unemployment numbers? Nobody. But now, when everyone following the Twitters and the Facebooks and the color TVs are talking about unemployment numbers, and they hear, "Hey, the unemployment numbers are really good this month but the crazy Muslim socialist may have cooked the books," well they're just going to discount the crackpots and take away the message that the economy is slowly but surely getting better. These conspiracy theories may work on the true-believers, but they turn off the so-called independent swing voter (or so I'm told). All it really does is remind people that the economy is getting better and that the right-wing can get pretty fucking crazy. And that's not a particular welcome reminder for the Romney campaign.

Birthers Won't Go Away

One of the reasons I avoid political discussions entirely and I prefer these one way posts where I'm essentially shouting into the wind, is because I'm familiar with much of the political psychology research on the brain's processing of new information as it interacts with ideology. Long story short, ideologues are guilty of internalizing information that coincides with their world view and rejecting all information that is inconsistent with that world view. Conservatives, unsurprisingly, are more guilty of this bias than liberals are, but that shouldn't shock anyone reading my blog. This is why conservatives en masse reject information that contradicts their ideological agenda - tax cuts do not increase government revenues, evolution and global warming is scientifically valid, George W. Bush actually increased the deficit and expanded government spending substantially more than Obama, torture is not an effective means to obtain information from suspected terrorists, etc. Instead, they discount these truths and facts as propaganda tools of the liberal media. Of course, in a world of Fox News, The Wall Street Journal and conglomerate ownership of all major media outlets, the existence of a liberal media cabal is pretty laughable. But conservatives cannot, and will not, entertain these alternate truths. Of course, the most vapid example of conservative dissonance is the idea that Barack Obama is not an American citizen. Of course, of the hundreds of thousands of Republicans who think Obama is some kind of Kenyan Muslim plant, none has put forward a compelling origin story that explains this vast conspiracy. Did a mixed-race couple during the very height of the civil rights movement really conceive a child while stationed somewhere abroad in 1961, yet had the foresight at that very moment in political history to plant a story in the both the Honolulu Advertiser and The Star Bulletin announcing the birth? That's pretty prescient. They also had the know-how and political connections, while abroad mind you, to be sure to forge Hawaiian birth certificates just in case their child decided to become America's first black president in 2008. That seems an unreasonably complicated method to go about the process since clearly a couple that was so convinced that their son was going to become President would have found a way for the American-born mother to conceive the child on American soil. It's not like they didn't know when pregnancies came to term in 1961. So why are conservatives so convinced Obama is a foreign national? Race tells part of the story, but not all of it. I mean, hated as they were by conservatives, I've never really seen it suggested that former Democratic presidential candidates Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton were not American citizens. They may not be considered "real Americans," but that is because that distinction is reserved for uneducated white people.
No, the additional factor that convinced conservatives that Barack Obama is not an American citizen, in addition to his race, is clearly his name. I know - pretty stupid right? But his blackness, in concert with his unique name, is enough to convince conservatives of his "otherness". They really don't need anything more than that. I don't think we would be having this discussion all the time if Barack Obama was named Michael Washington. And no amount of evidence will convince conservatives that Obama was born in the U.S. Liberals and rational sane independents may have believed the question of Obama's nationality was to put to rest when he finally released his "long-form birth certificate" - you know, whatever the fuck that is. Well, to some extant, this effort was successful. Before the release of the certificate, only 55% country believed that Obama was born in the United States. That's a pretty pathetic accounting of political knowledge in this country, but at least the number jumped to 67% after he released the document. "Yay for new information! Maybe voters can internalize this stuff!" Of course, that number is already down to 59%, meaning 41% of this country once again isn't sure if Obama was born in the U.S. Sigh. But here's the really crazy fucking number.  According to the same study conducted by Adam Berinsky, the number of Republicans who believe that Barack Obama was born in the U.S. is actually lower now than it was before the release of the birth certificate. 73% of Republicans are either unsure of or actively believe that Barack Obama was born outside of the United States where it was 70% previously. That's an absurd level of craziness, even for the hive-like mind that we call conservative thinking. I want to be clear that I am not being hyperbolic when I say that a democracy cannot function effectively in conditions such as these. People get all upset when 13-year-olds can't tell you who the country's Vice President is but this level of political ignorance is much more dangerous. When such a vast proportion of the American populace (and its elected officials) thinks the commander-in-chief is an illegitimate usurper, those individuals will do anything in their power to grind government to a halt and overthrow the "usurper". This an unsustainable climate for a functional democracy. Unfortunately, I have no idea how it is to be overcome.