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I Can Haz Slogan

[ 0 ] July 5, 2017 |

This new slogan by House Democrats is terrible.

The campaign arm for House Democrats on Wednesday tried out a new slogan: “I mean, have you seen the other guys?”

The sticker slogan, one of several floated as part of a fundraising effort by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), caused a stir on social media, where many wondered why the party would try out such a self-deprecating campaign line.

“Not exactly the most inspiring slogan, @dccc,” wrote ProPublica reporter Derek Willis.

“Dems are asking people to vote on a new sticker and I’m not sure anyone in history has been as bad as this,” tweeted Adam Serwer, a senior editor for The Atlantic.

Or as someone tweeted to me:

As Willis and Serwer note, this is pathetic. Hell, as Serwer notes, all their ideas are terrible.

It’s possible that “not being Republicans” might be enough to win the House in 2018. But if it is, it won’t be because of that slogan. It will be in spite of it. If Democrats want to convince people to vote for them, “We aren’t Trump” is not going to be enough. There has to be leadership, ideas, and vision. I’m not saying that everyday voters follow position planks on platform, but as Trump showed, they need to believe that the party they are voting for will appeal to their lived experience. Democrats clearly have not figured out how to do that yet. Maybe a national $15 minimum wage would be a start. Or, I don’t know, Medicare For All. That seems good and relevant. Anything is better than what the DCCC proposed today.

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Rahm’s Chicago

[ 75 ] July 5, 2017 |

Rahm Emanuel’s new education policy is senseless on the face of it.

To graduate from a public high school in Chicago, students will soon have to meet a new and unusual requirement: They must show that they’ve secured a job or received a letter of acceptance to college, a trade apprenticeship, a gap year program or the military.

Mayor Rahm Emanuel (D) said he wants to make clear that the nation’s third-largest school system is not just responsible for shepherding teenagers to the end of their senior year, but also for setting them on a path to a productive future.

“We are going to help kids have a plan, because they’re going to need it to succeed,” he said. “You cannot have kids think that 12th grade is done.”

How is this possibly workable? Are you going to require Chicago employers to hire recent high school graduates? Is everyone just going to have to pay the application fee to community college, even though many won’t go? I can see the military jumping all over this to get more recruits. I can also see people effectively paying a black market for job offers that don’t exist. The implementation of this seems like an utter disaster waiting to happen. You know damn well Rahm isn’t going to make sure Chicago schools are funded well enough to have meaningful guidance counseling for all its students, an issue brought up in the article linked above.

“It sounds good on paper, but the problem is that when you’ve cut the number of counselors in schools, when you’ve cut the kind of services that kids need, who is going to do this work?” said Karen Lewis, president of the Chicago Teachers Union and Emanuel’s longtime political opponent. “If you’ve done the work to earn a diploma, then you should get a diploma. Because if you don’t, you are forcing kids into more poverty.”

Right. The other option is that high school graduation rates in Chicago see a sharp decline. And won’t that just be great for everyone!

Janice Jackson, the school system’s chief education officer, said that is how the new requirement is supposed to work — pushing principals to improve efforts to help students prepare for the future. About 60 percent of district students have postsecondary plans when they graduate, she said, and she doesn’t think the schools should wait for more money to set an expectation that the remaining 40 percent follow suit.

Would Chicago really withhold diplomas from students who meet every requirement except the new one? Jackson says it won’t come to that, because principals, counselors and teachers won’t let it. They’ll go to students in that situation and press them to make sure they have a plan.

Well, Rahm has respected teachers so well during his tenure that it’s hard to see how these overworked, underpaid, downsized workers won’t devote all their free time to their students. Oh wait, many already do.

To put it another way:

But you know Rahm has the kids’ education in mind. After all, his shuttering of hundreds of schools has paid off in what counts: more upper class housing.

The Uptown controversy has to do with a sign posted outside 4525 N. Kenmore, the building that was formerly Graeme Stewart School. Chicago Public Schools closed the school and sold it to a private developer who’s turning it into the Stewart School Lofts, which are being marketed shamelessly on a placard over the school’s abandoned playground as “best in the class” rentals.

CPS officials hailed the Stewart sale as a win-win. “This is the fifth former school site we have sold in the past three months,” CEO Forrest Claypool said in a press release. “While we still have work to do, I am encouraged that the engagement process is working and expect this positive trend to continue.”

Not everyone sees it that way, especially Wozniak, who lives in Uptown. “To me, this is Rahm Emanuel’s Chicago,” she says. “We’re closing schools and turning them into private projects and disinvesting in neighborhood kids.”

What really galled her was that damn sign. “I find that insulting to all the kids who went to Stewart and all the people who worked there,” Wozniak says.

More maddening still is that Emanuel earmarked $16.1 million in TIF dollars to subsidize the development of a high-rise apartment complex at Clarendon and Montrose—not far from Stewart.

So once again there’s no money for our dead-broke schools, but millions for upscale housing.

Forcing kids to an acceptance letter to graduate will truly make Chicago great again.

Another Reformicon Faceplant on TrumpCare

[ 35 ] July 5, 2017 |

Ramesh Ponnuru is the latest conservative intellectual to apologize for the BCRA. The results are unpersuasive in the extreme:

Republican efforts to pass health-care legislation are in jeopardy again, in part because of controversy over its potential impact on Medicaid. But the Republican reforms are more moderate, and more worthwhile, than they are getting credit for.

If cutting Medicaid by 35% and substantially reducing subsidies and regulations for private insurance, resulting in more than 20 million people without insurance and insurance for most people who maintain it being made worse is “moderate,” I’d hate to see the “extreme” version. And given that the only actual benefits in the bill go to very wealthy people getting a tax cut they will barely notice, the “worthwhile” is also going to be a tough lift.

Here’s the core of the argument, which is worth unpacking:

Medicaid is a program that is rife with inefficiency. A 2015 study found that recipients derived only 20 to 40 cents of benefit for every dollar governments spend on it. Researchers have struggled to find any positive effects Medicaid has on beneficiaries’ physical health.

This description of Medicaid is bad faith almost to the point of dissembling. The first claim leaves the impression that Medicaid is wasteful and inefficient compared to private insurance. But the linked study says no such thing. Rather, it concludes that Medicaid recipients get only 20%-40% of Medicaid benefits because the poor uninsured get a substantial amount of their medical expenses covered by “implicit insurance”: i.e. emergency treatment that is eaten by hospitals and/or taxpayers. The study counts this “implicit” insurance as an existing benefit and hence concludes that less than half of the spending benefits Medicaid recipients because more than half benefits the “implicit insurers.” But there’s nothing “inefficient” about replacing “implicit” insurance with actual insurance — quite the opposite. Actual insurance is a better deal for the poor, hospitals and taxpayers alike. Ponnuru also cites no evidence supporting his implicit claim that the private insurance he prefers is more efficient than public insurance, for this obvious reason that this is utter nonsense.  And the comparison with “implicit insurance” would still hold for private insurance — it’s neither here nor there.

The second claim is phrased cagily enough to not be outright false. But it’s intended to leave the impression that the bulk of the evidence is that having Medicaid is no better in terms of health outcomes than not having insurance at all. But the evidence in fact indicates that the highly implausible claim that Medicaid is no better than being uninsured is false. And, again, it’s pretty infuriating to see affluent conservatives glibly advocating these “are people really better off with health insurance?” experiments being carried out on much less privileged people.

Most of the rest of the column argues (not very convincingly) that the CBO estimates exaggerate the number of people who will be uninsured by BCRA. OK, let’s say arguendo that only 18 million people will lose insurance, leading to still-substantial preventable death, suffering, and financial ruin in order to give a huge tax cut for the rich. What’s the affirmative case for this? There isn’t one. Here’s the punchline:

My own conclusions should probably by now be pretty clear: The CBO is exaggerating the effects of the Republican legislation on Medicaid enrollment, it’s worth putting Medicaid on a firmer footing, and any additional resources for health insurance for low earners should be directed toward enabling them to buy private coverage rather than pumped into Medicaid. On Medicaid, in short, the Republicans are on the right track.

Medicaid will, in the Orwellian phrase, be “put on firmer footing” by massively cutting Medicaid spending and insuring fewer people. Most of these people will lose insurance entirely, and we’re quibbling only over the exact number. To replace Medicaid, Ponnuru gestures in the direction of providing more subsidies to buy inefficient, high-premium insurance, but slightly higher subsidies aren’t going to do much to help poor people who have the choice between insurance with $6,000 in annual deductibles and nothing.

It’s also worth nothing what Ponnuru doesn’t — the the Republican attack on the ACA has been breathtakingly dishonest. Trump promised to protect Medicaid, and not only Trump but Republicans in general have attacked the ACA as having premiums and  deductibles that are too high. Only the BCRA would make these problems much worse. Ponnuru tries to square the circle by arguing that Medicaid cuts don’t really count because the insurance has no added value — but the argument is false. The American public strongly prefers the ACA to BCRA, for obvious reasons that the latter offers massive cuts in exchange for nothing to people who don’t have a large amount of annual investment income. These “reformicon” defenses of BRCA are pathetic — just slightly more sophisticated-sounding versions of what the Wall Street Journal is saying.

America, July 4, 2017

[ 104 ] July 5, 2017 |

This fucking country.

NPR has been reading the Declaration of Independence on air in a tradition that dates back 29 years. And in fairness, the Declaration of Independence is a pretty anti-authoritarian document. So it makes sense that people might believe that it’s a statement against all tyrants.

But you’d think that people who want to “make America great again” might recognize the words of the Declaration of Independence. I guess not.

The only clear solution is to continue defunding the humanities and social scientists in colleges and universities and hire more professors to teach Management.

Your Republican Congressmen

[ 31 ] July 5, 2017 |

Clay Higgins represents a district in Louisiana. He seems like a nice man:

A US congressman has been criticised by officials at the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum after he posted a video on the internet taken inside a former Nazi death camp gas chamber.

Clay Higgins, a Republican from Louisiana known as “the Cajun John Wayne” filmed himself and narrated the footage which was then posted on his website.

The Cajun John Wayne. This ought to be great. What did he have to say?

Mr Higgins, a former police officer and Crime Stoppers host, sits on the House Homeland Security Committee in Congress.

He said in the video: “A great sense of dread comes over you in this place. Man’s inhumanity to man can be quite shocking.”

The congressman said it demonstrated why the US military “must be invincible”.

He added: “The world’s a smaller place now than it was in World War II. The United States is more accessible to terror like this, horror like this. It’s hard to walk away from the gas chambers and ovens without a very sober feeling of commitment, unwavering commitment, to make damn sure that the United States of America is protected from the evils of the world.”

And Higgins certainly understands something about mass death.

“Not a single radicalized Islamic suspect should be granted any measure of quarter,” the Louisiana Republican posted on Facebook on Sunday. “Their intended entry to the American homeland should be summarily denied. Every conceivable measure should be engaged to hunt them down. Hunt them, identify them, and kill them. Kill them all. For the sake of all that is good and righteous. Kill them all.”

I guess Auschwitz is the perfect place for the modern Republican Party. Just not in the way it is for people who think the Holocaust should never be repeated.

Those Tech Geniuses and Their DISRUPTION!!!!

[ 37 ] July 5, 2017 |

In a story titled, “Apple Disrupts Silicon Valley With Another Eye-Catcher: Its New Home,” the New York Times demonstrates the truly DISRUPTIVE and INNOVATIVE process by which Apple has built a gigantic suburban office park. I look forward to the next incredible DISRUPTIONS from Silicon Valley such as engaging in rank sexism in the workplace and becoming middlemen in a livery service. Oh Silicon Valley, what will you think of next?

….Of course, the true DISRUPTION is that the complex lacks a child care center.

Did the White Working Class Abandon the Democratic Party Because It’s Not Left-Wing Enough on Economics?

[ 251 ] July 5, 2017 |

It’s a simple, oft-told story. The problem is, the historical evidence for the proposition that good liberal policy is inevitable good politics has always been scant. Osita Nwanevu’s essay is brilliant and should be read in its entirety, but is especially good on this point. The most obvious problem with the “Appalachian whites without college degrees are demanding MOAR SOCIALISM” narrative is that the WWC exodus happened…immediately after one of the two most progressive administrations of the last century:

It’s a story both simple and substantially untrue. In fact, the decline in white working class support for the Democratic Party at the presidential level began well before the party’s retreat from progressivism and pro-worker politics. Alan Abramowitz, a political science professor at Emory University, and Ruy Teixeira, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress who presciently identified the disenfranchised white working class as a force to be reckoned with nearly 20 years ago in America’s Forgotten Majority: Why the White Working Class Still Matters, laid out the timeline of their departure from the Democratic Party’s coalition in a 2008 Brookings working paper called “The Decline of the White Working Class and the Rise of a Mass Upper Middle Class”. According to Teixeira and Abramowitz, the Democratic vote among whites without college degrees fell from an average of 55 percent in the 1960 and 1964 elections to 35 in the 1968 and 1972 elections—a decline of 20 points in just over a decade. What happened during the 1960s? Had the Party moved substantially to the center? Had the Party become less committed to progressive social programs that would help struggling whites? To the contrary—the 1960s and two Democratic administrations brought the creation of Medicare and Medicaid, the expansion of Social Security benefits, the revival of food stamps, minimum wage increases, the launch of the Head Start early childhood education program for lower-income children, increased federal funding for public education, the creation of the Job Corps youth employment program and other vocational education programs, and a dizzying array of other government initiatives that constituted the most expansive array of progressive successes since the New Deal. None of it mattered.

An additional problem is that the Democratic candidates since 1968 who have done best with the WWC are the two most conservative ones:

Those voters never really looked back. The theory that they would have had the Party offered up truly economically progressive candidates has to contend with the failed candidacies of George McGovern in 1972, whom Nixon trounced with 70 percent of the white working class vote and the staunchly pro-labor and union-backed Walter Mondale, whom neoliberal archdaemon Ronald Reagan trounced with 65 percent of their vote in 1984. Since 1968, two Democratic presidential candidates have done well with the white working class: Jimmy Carter, who dramatically outperformed George McGovern in the demographic by running as a conservative Democrat against Ford in 1976, and the DLC-anointed bubba neoliberal Bill Clinton. Ross Perot’s insurgent populism and his warning that NAFTA would produce a “giant sucking sound” as blue-collar jobs were lost to Mexico failed, ultimately, to prevent the man who backed and signed NAFTA from winning narrow pluralities of the white working class vote in 1992 and 1996.

Again, none of this means that the Democratic Party’s leftward shift is wrong. Clinton showed that it’s possible to win on a progressive agenda, and trying to reassemble Bill Clinton’s coalition wouldn’t work even if the policy consequences wouldn’t be so undesirable. But the simple narrative that the WWC would fully embrace the post-Civil Rights Act Democratic Party if only it was less neoliberal is supported by pretty much nothing.

Republicans Wanted to Stop the ACA Because They Knew People Would Eventually Like It

[ 114 ] July 5, 2017 |

Whoops:

The Indiana Republican Party posed a question to Facebook on Monday: “What’s your Obamacare horror story? Let us know.”

The responses were unexpected.

“My sister finally has access to affordable quality care and treatment for her diabetes.”

“My father’s small business was able to insure its employees for the first time ever. #thanksObama”

“Love Obamacare!”

“The only horror in the story is that Republicans might take it away.”

Now that people know what’s in it, away from the fog of controversy, the ACA is popular. The Republican replacement ranks in popularity somewhere between “the BTK killer” and “cancer of the rectum.” And unlike the ACA, it’s not like its individual components (gutting Medicaid, deregulating insurance, massive upper-class tax cuts) have ever been or will ever popular either. Still, I’m sure if Republicans succeed in stripping more than 20 million people of their insurance they will be greeted as liberators:

Summer States

[ 190 ] July 4, 2017 |

Mostly I can’t disagree with this ranking of which states are the worst to spend summer. Washington is named the best state and while it might be a touch chilly at times, sure. Then it’s Minnesota. My one experience with a Minnesota summer is being 11, going to a family reunion at Leech Lake, which my brother discovered earned its name, feeling humidity for the first time, and being feasted upon my mosquitoes. I guess compared to every other time in Minnesota, this is pleasant. Rhode Island is third, and while I can’t accept that any place with a high level of humidity is better than Oregon, Rhode Island is very pleasant in the summer. I should however say that in 6 years of living in Rhode Island, I have spent precisely 0 days at the beach in that state. I think I spent one at Cape Cod a couple of years ago; it was fine because my brother-in-law had a little kayak and I tooled around on the pond on the other side of the road. Then we have Oregon, which is of course objectively the best state in everything except for cheese and Wisconsin helped elect Donald Trump so bite me Sconnies.

Anyway, I mention all of this because the list has one grave error. As you get closer to #1, the states get worse and worse. And I certainly get making grand statements about parts of the country made mostly just to irritate readers, trust me. But the ranking of New Mexico I cannot abide.

9. New Mexico

It’s tough to escape the desert heat when even the water supply has state-mandated thresholds of green chile. Somewhere south of Santa Fe there’s a gila monster pricing flights to Seattle at a public library before realizing he has no source of income and deciding to peruse some NSFW lizard websites instead, really creeping everyone out in the process.

No, no, no. Look, if you are in Las Cruces summer may suck. But who does that except for the poor bastards living there? If you are Albuquerque or north, it’s not bad to pretty bloody awesome. There’s a reason 50% of the vehicles in New Mexico in the summer are trucks with Texas plates. I think Texas actually enforces its fantasy 1836 map on the state between June and August; certainly places such as Red River and Eagle Nest feel like Dallas except not ugly and the worst place on Earth. Basically, there’s no comparison between New Mexico and the other far southern states in the summer because you are at 5000 feet or higher. And that elevation makes all the difference. June can be pretty rough, yes. Then the monsoons come and those are awesome. By August, when the eastern half of the nation is sitting under 90 degree temperatures and 72 degree dewpoints, it may well be 90 in Albuquerque, but it is dry yet just enough moisture to take the edge off and maybe you get a thunderstorm in the afternoon. In Santa Fe or Taos, it’s basically paradise, or at least it would be if you could get rid of the millionaires from New York playing cowboy and wearing bolo ties and hoop skirts while staying at $350 hotels. Outside of June, there really isn’t a terrible time to be in New Mexico, which says a lot more for it than most of the country.

In conclusion Go Lobos. Also, fuck Texas.

Gentlemen, Start Your Wanking!

[ 232 ] July 4, 2017 |

America is in the midst of a political crisis. Finally, someone has a solution: a postpartisan centrist vanity party, using the magic of the internets. It’ll be Hot Soup meets No Labels!

So, Pincus, the co-founder of Zynga, and Hoffman, the brains behind LinkedIn, want to force Democrats to rewire their philosophical core, from their agenda to the way they choose candidates in elections — the stuff of politics, they said, that had been out of reach for most voters long before Donald Trump became president.

That’s the guiding principle behind Win the Future, a new project by the tech duo that’s launching in time for July 4. The effort — called, yes, WTF for short — aims to be “a new movement and force within the Democratic Party, which can act like its own virtual party,” said Pincus, its lead architect, during an interview.

Think of WTF as equal parts platform and movement. Its new website will put political topics up for a vote — and the most resonant ideas will form the basis of the organization’s orthodoxy. To start, the group will query supporters on two campaigns: Whether or not they believe engineering degrees should be free to all Americans, and if they oppose lawmakers who don’t call for Trump’s immediate impeachment.

Participants can submit their own proposals for platform planks — and if they win enough support, primarily through likes and retweets on Twitter, they’ll become part of WTF’s political DNA, too. Meanwhile, WTF plans to raise money in a bid to turn its most popular policy positions into billboard ads that will appear near airports serving Washington, D.C., ensuring that “members of Congress see it,” Pincus said.

Billboards! This is surely the most persuasive theory of political change since Larry Lessig’s.

And there’s an even more exciting new twist that will never let you go:

WTF is also eyeing more audacious efforts: Initially, Pincus had planned to solicit feedback at launch on recruiting a potential challenger to Democrats’ leader in the House, California Rep. Nancy Pelosi, in a primary election. That idea is on hold — for now — but Pincus and Hoffman are still trying to solicit candidates to run elsewhere as so-called “WTF Democrats.” For Pincus, one of his early targets: Stephan Jenkins from Third Eye Blind. The two have met in recent months, in fact.

Jenkins/Thomas ’20: never has wank voting been so semi-charmed or smooth!

Via Tom Tomorrow, who observes that Tom Friedman has already written this column dozens of times:

Happy Independence Day!

[ 55 ] July 4, 2017 |

Enjoy this public service announcement from Ginger Baker:

Should the Democrats Become an Anti-Immigration and “Anti-PC” Party? (SPOILER: No)

[ 311 ] July 3, 2017 |

If they open a Pundit’s Fallacy Hall of Fame, Peter Beinart will go in on the first ballot:

In 2014, the University of California listed melting pot as a term it considered a “microaggression.” What if Hillary Clinton had traveled to one of its campuses and called that absurd? What if she had challenged elite universities to celebrate not merely multiculturalism and globalization but Americanness? What if she had said more boldly that the slowing rate of English-language acquisition was a problem she was determined to solve? What if she had acknowledged the challenges that mass immigration brings, and then insisted that Americans could overcome those challenges by focusing not on what makes them different but on what makes them the same?

Some on the left would have howled. But I suspect that Clinton would be president today.

Yes, it is very plausible that if Hillary Clinton had given a speech at a campus denouncing use of the term "microaggressions" and demanding action against "the slowing rate of English-language acquisition," she would totally be president today. This is the centrist equivalent of “Clinton would have if Lena Dunham hadn’t saturated her campaign with CELEBRITY GLITZ by appearing on a panel at Duke. If the election of Donald Trump proves anything it’s that Americans hate celebrities. I am not a crank.” Indeed, it’s one of the most egregiously bad “Dems should move right” arguments since…Beinart endorsed Joe Lieberman for the Republican nomination.

One good thing came out of this article, though: a superb critique by Dylan Mathews you’ll actually learn something from:

It’s certainly interesting fan fiction, not least in that it implies that America’s most radical pro-immigration agitator is UC president Janet Napolitano, who dramatically ramped up deportations as Secretary of Homeland Security. The essay as a whole is similarly far-fetched and confused. Beinart appears to want to both make a policy argument that Democrats are mistaken to support mass immigration, and a political argument that they have to turn right on the issue to survive.

The piece conflates the two arguments at points, but they’re very different. One is an argument about the economic and cultural effects of immigration, about which Beinart is wrong. The other is an argument about what policies on immigration Americans are in fact demanding, about which Beinart is also wrong, but in a more interesting way.

Read the whole etc.

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