Daily Kos

Reposted from Daily Kos Elections by David Nir Crazy-man Paul Broun—the "evolution is lies from the pit of hell" guy—is the man Democrats would very, very badly like to see win the Republican nomination for Georgia's open seat Senate race. And whaddya know, a new Public Policy Polling poll for progressive group Better Georgia shows him leading the pack, in a big jump from last August (shown in parentheses):

Rep. Paul Broun: 27 (19)
Rep. Phil Gingrey: 14 (25)
Rep. Jack Kingston: 13 (15)
Businessman David Perdue: 12 (5)
Former SoS Karen Handel: 9 (13)
Activist Derrick Grayson: 3 (3)
Undecided: 23 (20)

This is actually the first survey to show Broun with a meaningful lead, though it's not entirely clear how he's gotten there (if this poll is accurate). The primary is not until May 20, and candidates have only recently begun advertising statewide—and Broun hasn't yet been among them. It's easy to imagine that Broun, as the most extreme true believer in the GOP field, has an appeal his opponents lack, but he's fared poorly on the fundraising front and won't have an easy time maintaining his advantage once the campaign kicks into high gear.

Still, in a race with five legitimate candidates, tea party enthusiasm may be enough to power Broun to a spot in the July 22 runoff, which would be held if no candidate reaches 50 percent in the first round of voting. And in the world of Republican politics, crazy can often beat money.

Interestingly, though, Broun actually fares best against the lone Democrat in the race, non-profit founder Michelle Nunn. Head below the fold to see what the general election looks like.

Senate Democrats, led by Majority Leader Harry Reid, are continuing their efforts to expose the Koch brothers and their pernicious influence in our elections. Above is Alaska Sen. Mark Begich's first ad of the campaign, aimed directly at the Kochs in response to attack ads.

“First it was a D.C. actress pretending to be an Alaskan,” says a narrator in the ad, which was shared early with POLITICO. “Now ads attacking Mark Begich on a carbon tax have been called false and not true.” […]

The second half of the ad features Alaskan voters talking about the Kochs — and hitting them for the closure of the Flint Hills Resources Refinery, an Alaska oil refinery owned by Koch Industries.

“They come in to our town, buy our refinery,” one man says, while another follows by saying the company is “just running it into the ground.”

That's the localization of a national campaign against the Kochs spearheaded by Reid in a series of blistering floor statements and in interviews. Reid's now put up a web page, so head below the fold for one-stop shopping for background on the radical agenda of the Kochs.

House Government Oversight Committee Chairman Republican Obama Derange Syndrome Lead Investigator Darrell Issa has a problem: Thanks to House GOP rules, he's limited to serving six years as chairman of the committee that he's made synonymous with every Fox News conspiracy theory about President Obama on the planet—and this is his sixth year.

Issa wants to extend the term limits so he can continue harassing the Obama administration for another two years, but Politico reports Republicans aren't likely to grant him his wish. Instead, another player has emerged as the likely winner of the intense battle to succeed Issa as the House GOP's lead conspiracy theorist: Rep. Jason Chaffetz of Utah.

And the reasons why Chaffetz appears likely are exactly what you'd expect from a party whose main interest in investigating the president is to fuel right-wing paranoia and troll the media:

His district is extremely conservative, so constant tossing of red meat isn’t a political risk for him. The former Brigham Young University placekicker is also a constant presence on television, appearing on everything from MSNBC to Fox News.

Plus, Chaffetz has been an aggressive fundraiser for Republicans across the country, which helps his cause in two ways. First, it earns him favors to redeem. Second, it helps Republicans raise the money they need to retain the House. That's doubly important, because if Politico's report is right, the only real thing standing between Chaffetz and the gavel are the voters in November.

Reposted from Daily Kos Labor by Laura Clawson Workers rallied at a Chicago McDonald's Saturday afternoon to protest a manager's extreme verbal abuse of a sick worker there. Carmen Navarrette, who's been working at the McDonald's for nine years, says that after she asked to go home after a diabetic episode, her manager told her she should "just put a bullet in [her] head."

Several Chicago aldermen rallied with the workers, and:

"I stand with the workers of McDonald's and call on the corporation to treat them with respect and dignity,” Ald. Muñoz of the 22nd ward, where Carmen Navarrette lives, said in a statement. “No one should be verbally abused or threatened at work."

While telling workers to shoot themselves in the head may be an extreme example, fast food workers often report bullying and verbal abuse from managers. It's just that, unless workers are organized enough to fight back, we don't hear about it. Billionaire venture capitalists get space on the Wall Street Journal editorial page to claim that complaints about massive economic inequality are just like Nazi Germany, while fast food workers are insulted and made to work off the clock or while they're sick and we only rarely hear about it.

Aside from the insults and abuse, not being allowed time off when they're sick is typical for fast food workers outside the few cities and one state that have paid sick leave laws. A paid sick leave bill in Chicago has the support of a majority of aldermen, but no word on whether Mayor Rahm Emanuel supports it.

Two months after Americans started getting health coverage under Obamacare's exchanges, it's working. The uninsured rate is dropping, the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index shows. In the fourth quarter of 2013, 17.1 percent of Americans did not have health insurance. So far in 2014, that number has dropped to 15.9 percent.

The biggest drops in the uninsured rate—or gains in the insured rate—came among lower-income and black people. In late 2013, 30.7 percent of people earning less than $36,000 a year were uninsured; now, 27.9 percent are uninsured, a drop of 2.8 percentage points. The uninsured rate declined a similar 2.6 percentage points among black people. Latinos lag, with their uninsured rate having dropped just 0.8 points, a disappointment, and one perhaps linked to the troubled rollout of the exchanges:

With the highest uninsured rate of any racial or ethnic group, Latinos were expected to be major beneficiaries of the new health care law. They are a relatively young population and many are on the lower rungs of the middle class, holding down jobs that don't come with health insurance.

But the outreach effort to Hispanics got off to a stumbling start. The Spanish-language enrollment website, CuidadodeSalud.gov, was delayed due to technical problems. Its name sounds like a clunky translation from English: "Care of Health." A spot check of the Spanish site on Sunday showed parts of it still use a mix of Spanish and English to convey information, which can make insurance details even more confusing.

Every fraction of a percent that the uninsured rate drops is a political problem for Republicans and they know it, no matter how many so-called Obamacare horror stories they trot out, only to have them debunked. The Republican response to this survey may be to celebrate that the biggest drops in the uninsured rate have come among low-income people and black people—groups they've long ignored—but in their partisan world, where repealing President Barack Obama's signature achievement and defeating Democrats are more important than the well-being of non-wealthy Americans, such a noticeable and immediate drop in the uninsured rate is not good news. For the rest of us, and especially for people who can now go to the doctor without fear of bankruptcy, it's very good news.

Reposted from Comics by Barbara Morrill

For those of you who live in the San Francisco Bay Area:  I will be talking and showing my work at the Cartoon Art Museum in SF on Tuesday, March 11 at 7 p.m., and at the Schulz Museum in Santa Rosa on Saturday, March 15 at 2 p.m.  Hope to see you there!

Reposted from Daily Kos Elections by David Nir Leading Off:

• FL-13: Oh wow. The special election isn't until tomorrow but Republican recriminations were already flying as of late last week. If you're a connoisseur of cat fud, Alex Isenstadt's piece on David Jolly—and the GOP establishment's views of him—is a must read:

Over the past week, a half-dozen Washington Republicans have described Jolly's campaign against Democrat Alex Sink as a Keystone Cops operation, marked by inept fundraising, top advisers stationed hundreds of miles away from the district in the state capital and the poor optics of a just-divorced, 41-year-old candidate accompanied on the campaign trail by a girlfriend 14 years his junior. The sources would speak only on condition of anonymity.

Yow—even going after his girlfriend! As Isenstadt speculates, D.C. Republicans are likely laying the groundwork for a post-mortem analysis that faults Jolly, rather than themselves, for a loss on Tuesday. They may yet eke out a win, but it's pretty terrible to even be in this position in the first place. Put another way, there haven't been comparable stories about Democrats trying to pre-blame Alex Sink.

There are all kinds of great tidbits in the article, including the fact that despite finishing the January GOP primary almost broke, Jolly still had not hired a finance director—and, says Isenstadt, "some Republicans grumbled that he was reluctant to make fundraising calls." The NRCC sent staffers down to Florida to try to bail Jolly out, but Democrats used their financial advantage to beat Republicans on to the airwaves and start hammering Jolly for his career as a lobbyist.

There's much, much more at the link, including details about Jolly's communications director, who's been stationed four hours away from the 13th District in Tallahassee, and the fact that John Boehner's staff was furious that Jolly was non-committal about backing Boehner for speaker (as if fulsome support would have helped Jolly win!). Go have a read, and enjoy.

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We're back for another week of not knowing exactly what we're going to be doing until we're already doing it!

The reader's freshly stocked with good material, Greg Dworkin will be back with us, and the weather looks like it might finally be turning. I've never been more optimistic about this handbasket we're in, and wherever it is we might be going!

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From the GREAT STATE OF MAINE…

Monday Channel Surfing

"Hi, I'm Pastor Chuck McAlister. Come on down and join the Lone Oak Baptist Church in Paducah, Kentucky for a chance to win a handgun, a long gun or a shotgun in Jesus' name!"

[Click]

"Hi, I'm Pastor John Koletas.  Come on up and join the Grace Baptist Church in Troy, New York and you could walk away with a genuine God-blessed AR15 assault rifle!"

[Click]

Hi. I'm Bill in Portland Maine. If you've been looking to join a conservative evangelical church lately, you've probably been peppered with all kinds of offers for free guns. But you know what? Guns are a dime a dozen these days, aren't they? Truth be told, they really don’t impress God anymore. Heck, if a church tries to give you a wimpy old pistol, they might as well be inviting Satan to waltz right through the American heartland to fry your soul on the altar of tyranny.

But now there's a better way. Come join me in pastoral unity here at the Church of Billeh. At the C of B, we believe that devotion is best expressed not by the caliber of the bullet, but by the size of the explosion. That's why, when you join my church, you get a gift that's worthy of your love for Jesus: dynamite.

That's right. Join the Church of Billeh today and I'll drive you out to my personal armory on Leviticus Lane so you can pick up your own box of 100 percent pure dynamite. That's twenty sticks you can use to make a joyful noise in His name and leave some craters for Christ. You can even use it to teach important Biblical proverbs like this one: "Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. But toss a stick of dynamite from the Church of Billeh in Moosehead Lake and you'll be passin' the tartar sauce around the dinner table for, well, at least a good three months anyway."

So if you're tired of the same old churches doing the same old boring gun giveaways to get your butt in their pews, come have a blast with your own free dynamite from the Church of Billeh, where our motto is nailed up over the door: "Praise the Lord and Stand the Hell Back."

Now back to our regularly-scheduled blogging.

Cheers and Jeers starts below the fold... [Swoosh!!] RIGHTNOW! [Gong!!]

Paul Krugman at The New York Times writes about a recent upending of conventional wisdom in Liberty, Equality, Efficiency:

It’s widely known that income inequality varies a great deal among advanced countries. In particular, disposable income in the United States and Britain is much more unequally distributed than it is in France, Germany or Scandinavia. It’s less well known that this difference is primarily the result of government policies. Data assembled by the Luxembourg Income Study (with which I will be associated starting this summer) show that primary income — income from wages, salaries, assets, and so on — is very unequally distributed in almost all countries. But taxes and transfers (aid in cash or kind) reduce this underlying inequality to varying degrees: some but not a lot in America, much more in many other countries.

So does reducing inequality through redistribution hurt economic growth? Not according to two landmark studies by economists at the International Monetary Fund, which is hardly a leftist organization. The first study looked at the historical relationship between inequality and growth, and found that nations with relatively low income inequality do better at achieving sustained economic growth as opposed to occasional “spurts.” The second, released last month, looked directly at the effect of income redistribution, and found that “redistribution appears generally benign in terms of its impact on growth.”

In short, [LBJ chief economic adviser Arthur] Okun’s big trade-off doesn’t seem to be a trade-off at all. Nobody is proposing that we try to be Cuba, but moving American policies part of the way toward European norms would probably increase, not reduce, economic efficiency.

Dana Milbank at The Washington Post belatedly discovers that the Republican Party is in disarray. He writes At CPAC, a Grand Old Free-for-all:

The notion of “civil war,” often used to describe the clash between the Republican establishment and the tea party, implies a conflict with identifiable sides. In reality, the GOP condition is more of a free-for-all.

The annual CPAC gathering, conservatism’s trade show, provides a snapshot of the anarchy:

The group’s much-celebrated straw poll of presidential candidates listed no fewer than 26 prospective contenders on the ballot this year—a sign of just how fractured the party is in advance of 2016.

Robert Samuelson at The Washington Post whines about the very modest cuts at the Pentagon in Defunding defense:

The United States’ military retrenchment won’t make China’s leaders less ambitious globally. (China plans a 12 percent increase in military spending for 2014; at that pace, spending would double in six years.) Nor will it dampen Iran’s aggressiveness and promote a negotiated settlement over its nuclear program. Probably the reverse. Diplomacy often fails unless backed by a credible threat of force.

More excerpts from pundits can be found below the fold

When she was 18, in 2007, Samantha Larson became the youngest non-Nepalese woman to reach the top of Mt. Everest. (A 15-year-old Sherpa girl was the youngest person ever to climb the highest mountain.) That ascent also made Larson the youngest person to have climbed the seven highest peaks on the seven continents. At Grist, she writes of millennials—No, we’re not “environmentalists.” It’s more complicated than that:

We’ve been called out: Millennials are not environmentalists. A new Pew Research Center report says that only 32 percent of people born after 1980 identify themselves as such—versus 42 percent of people born between 1965 and 1980, or even 44 percent of those born after 1945. But, as someone born in 1988, I find it hard to believe any of those numbers actually matter. Samantha Larson The old guard loves to harp on us for being an apathetic, unmotivated, and lazy bunch (old guards tend to make a habit of this, regardless of the era). OK, as a generation, we might not be storming the streets, or the seas, à la Greenpeace—but judging by the host of things still going badly for planet Earth, while that kind of activism may be admirable, it seems clear it’s not the silver bullet. Growing up with a universe of information constantly at our fingertips means we know every issue is complicated and loaded with unintended consequence. We know solutions that rely on preachiness or dogmatism won’t last.  […] And look at what’s actually happening. Millennials are far less likely to own a car, or to even make that a priority. Instead, we tend to opt forpublic transit, biking, or car sharing. While millennials don’t identify as vegetarians, either, we actually trend towards eating less meat—and we value the eating experience, which means that, though we tend to make less for our work (or sometimes nothing at all), a lot of us are still willing to spend a little more to go organic and local. Heck, even the fact that so many of us still live at home, or choose to live in shared houses or dorms rather than getting a place of our own, translates to a more efficient use of household water, electricity, and gas. Which isn’t to say that millennials are making these choices exactly for the purpose of being green. We do it because it makes sense: Green living is more affordable, more enjoyable, and thus perhaps makes us more able to deal with the messes we’ve been left with. But, as long as things are starting to change, does it really matter what the motivation is? […] Not that I’m not trying to give my generation a gold star for having it all figured out. We can, and hopefully will, do a lot more. But the fact we don’t identify as environmentalists doesn’t mean that we pour motor oil into the ocean for kicks. Just like, according to the same Pew report, while only 27 percent of us actively identify as Democrats, 60 percent of us voted for Obama in 2012. In fact, only half of millennials choose to identify with a political party at all—but that doesn’t mean we vote any less.

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Blast from the Past. At Daily Kos on this date in 2012—Mitt Romney: Regulators should see businesses as 'friends,' like in China:

Mitt Romney doesn't just think corporations are people. He wants corporate people to have friends, and if he was president, there's one group he'd order to be friends with corporate people: “I want regulators to see businesses and enterprises of all kinds as their friends, and to encourage them and to move them along.” Aww ... be friends and encourage them. Isn't that sweet? Except that if a mining regulator "encourages" his friend the mining corporation to improve safety standards rather than ordering it, and issues a friendly heads up that an inspection is coming, people will die. Just for instance. Regulators aren't supposed to be like some Big Brother/Big Sister self-esteem program for corporations, they're supposed to be watchdogs keeping the air we breathe clean and protecting workers from injury and preventing or discrimination.

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High Impact Posts.  The Week's High Impact Posts.  Top Comments.

There’s a scene near the beginning of the 1975 movie, Rollerball, in which fans of the brutal sport are instructed to rise for “our corporate anthem”—an anthem that turns out to be the darkly compelling Toccata and Fugue in D Minor. It’s an evocative moment, one that tells us much about the culture of the world we’re peeking into. This is not a happy place.

There’s a reason that corporate states, ones in which corporations participate heavily in the role of government, litter dystopian fiction.

First, it’s because we’re all too aware of the gross imbalance of power between corporations and individuals in any capitalist society. Corporations may have been created to provide a protective envelope for investment risk, but they easily accrue privileges and abilities that position them well outside that original intent.

Second, it's because we've already had experience with what happens at the end of the corporatism road. Somewhere, not too far out of sight, is that land where the trains run on time, but in which government acts primarily as a pooled resource to protect the interests of corporate power against that of individuals.  

In very few scenarios does corporate statism seem like an inviting vacation spot for anyone not enjoying the scene from a corner office.

These days corporations are largely unchecked by organized labor and—not at all coincidental to their status as electoral super-citizens—are increasingly unburdened by regulation. Between the wide-open political power opened through the gates of Citizens United, and the dead-hand-at-the-tiller intentional neglect provided by Congress, the soil for rising corporatism has rarely been richer.

And what’s taken root in that soil is something that we used to call a “bank.”

Come inside for a closer look.