Dear Friends,

I’m disappointed too. I’m less disappointed in what this President said he was going to be vs. what he is than I am between that and what I wanted him to be. He has not lived up to all of his promises, but even looking at his promises he never said he was going to be our knight in shining armor. Republicans said he would be… but who can trust anything they say at this point?

I am frustrated and I am disappointed because I believe, like you do, that there are rare, once in a generation opportunities being lost. I’m frustrated that what I think could be possible right now is not getting done. But as disheartened as I may be at lost potential, even at some outright failures, I have never for a day been sorry I voted for this president. The other choice was John McCain! Hell, if that had happened, Karl Rove wouldn’t be throwing millions of dollars at Republican candidates from Houston, TX… he would still be in Washington throwing hundreds of billions of dollars down far right rat hole after far right rat hole. Are things bad? Yes. Would they have been even worse? Hell yes!

This is not the time… well, there never is a time, but certainly this is not the time for liberals to throw up their hands in defeat. This is the time to take the toe hold we have and work our asses off to make it a foot hold, so we can make that a step, so we can… you know… something like that. I’m not sure exactly where that analogy leads.

But understand my point. This is when we double-down. This is when we fight to reform a broken and corrupted system. This is when we fight like Hell to punish Joe Lieberman and Blanche Lincoln and Ben Nelson. This is when we toy with the Democratic establishment with talk of primary challenges from Al Franken, or Alan Grayson, or Anthony Weiner. This is when we send letters of support to members of the Progressive Caucus and beg them to stand firm.

Our nation is in a deep hole of conservatism that you and I know skirts along the thing edge of fascism. I would LOVE to jump right out of that hole with an FDR or a JFK or a Johnson, but if that isn’t an option, I’ll be damned if I’m going to give up and watch while the hole gets dug deeper and deeper. I just can’t in good conscience allow that to happen unopposed. I have to at least try.

Rough weekend to be a Republican…

• Greenspan says the Republican plan to extend Bush’s taxcuts without paying for them would be “disastrous”.
• Reagan’s Director of OMB says Republicans have “crippled the economy”.
• Zakaria says the Bush tax cuts are the “single largest chunk of our structural deficit.”
• Bill Kristol says Republicans should “just shut up.”
• The Governor of Arizona said their draconian immigration law may not actually improve border security.

Glad I’m not in charge of spinning all that!

Citizens Unite Against Citizens United | The Nation.

YellaDog.org is boycotting Target because of their massive campaign contribution to a group supporting ridiculously anti-gay teabagger candidate for Governor in Minnesota.

Their CEO, by the way, has a long history of contributions that skew not just to Republicans, but to far right wing Republicans including Michele Bachmann!

Lots of places to shop, Target.  The last thing I want is some percentage of my next bath towel purchase going to support fascists and tea party crazies.

I’m also making sure my Facebook status lets the world know about this boycott too.

We need to somehow draw a line between secrets that truly have national security implications an secrets that have policy implications. And we need for our State Secrets regime to explicitly state that making documents secret on a false basis of National Security when the real reason is policy implications or political embarrassment or difficulty is illegal. AND, we have to get a lot more merciless about telling the truth.

Anytime the idea that if the American people knew “X” they would… ANYTHING, that should be a critical flag that the American people mist have access to that information.

At the same time we as Americans need to toughen our skins about our willingness to sometimes do business with people we know are crooks and murderers. The Pakistani intelligence service comes to mind. They need to know that if out government thinks it is aiding the Taliban that the American people are going to know if thinks they are aiding the Taliban. Doesn’t mean we can’t work with them if the government feels it should, but it needs to become unconscionable that the government would withhold it’s opinion on the basis of whether the American people would continue to support the effort if they knew that we’re paying millions of dollars over here that is being funneled to the people we’re paying millions of dollars to shoot over there.

The government is not a person. It has no fifth amendment rights. When officials behaves as if it does, for any purpose that isn’t explicitly and solely for critical national security reasons, they need to be held accountable for their role in eroding our democracy.

We think of unemployment as a phenomenon that happens to people, but in economics the labor that people can provide is an capital asset just like a machine or a vehicle. Unemployment means that there is more capital than is needed to create the goods and services being demanded by the market. Therefor some of that capital doesn’t get employed. It is “unemployed.”. We see it in people, but also in shuttered factories, estuaries lined with mothballed container ships… and excess savings sloshing around the global markets looking for a place that needs it just as desperately as the people looking for jobs.

Inflation is the opposite phenomenon, when the demand for goods and services outstrips their supply.

If there is more supply than there is demand, we have two choices. The ugly one is to reduce supply. That is exactly what unemployment is. The other is to increase demand. Keynesian economics tells us that we can use short term government investment in our economic infrastructure and other government spending to increase demand. But there is another option.

The other option is that we can do things like increasing the minimum wage, strengthen unions and other collective bargaining forces, and make other moves that increase demand and reduce supply at the same time. Money doesn’t HAVE to flow through government to become demand.

Once government is fully funding our infrastructure needs (which admittedly, it isn’t) then any more that it spends on infrastructure will end up exasperating future problems by, actually, making the supply process even more efficient, requiring even less resources, etc.

Given this, it is extraordinary that as unemployment gets worse and worse, so many people start to fear inflation… which at this point we should only be so lucky as to have!  Inflation would mean that money and labor are both being so much utilized that they can’t keep up with demand.  That would be a welcome problem to have right now.

Schroedinger explained a central paradox of quantum mechanics with an analogy of a cat inside a box and a situation that boils down to the idea that anything you do to detect whether the cat is alive or dead, kills it.  So you can’t ever know whether it is alive or dead because any attempt to find out, makes it dead.

Business school students and entrepreneurs find a similar paradox in business.  Profits are a result of a well run business.  If you focus on running your business better, increased profits usually follow.  If you focus on increasing your profits, they disappear.  This is why, contrary to what every business student thinks as a child, business plan’s don’t start out with the objective of “make money”.

Our political class has not figured this out yet.  When things happen there is a reality of what happened.  At the end of the day there is going to be a public perception of this reality.  The idea of “spin” is born of a desire to manage the public perception of this reality.

The political class has gotten so focused now on spinning the public perception of reality that they have completely lost sight of the actual reality in the first place.  They now make all of their decisions on the basis of the impact it will have on the public perception of reality and, like the physicist who has to see whether the cat is alive or dead, or the business leader who is willing to do anything under the sun to increase profits, they are ending up doing exactly the things that they shouldn’t be doing and they end up damaging public perception instead of managing it.

The Sherrod case at the USDA puts this into stark relief.  When Fox News started pushing the made up story that the White House was incompetent because they harbored a racist, the White House immediately became incompetent by demanding, with no due diligence, with no investigation, with no questions, that this person resign.  They were so desperate to manage the perception of their competence that they actually had her pull her car off the road she was driving on so she could text message them her resignation.

Our entire system of governmental checks and balances exists to protect balance the rights of individuals with the demands of mobs.  But there was no balance at all here.  The mob said they would be considered incompetent if they didn’t fire this woman so they fired her immediately!  Immediately!  This was an incompetent thing to do, and as the incompetence became clear just as immediately when the mob’s information turned out to be patently false.

Now how do they look?  They look incompetent, which is exactly what they did not want to look!  But had they actually been competent, they would have come out of this situation looking competent, because they would have been competent!

This is by no means a unique situation for this administration.  This same dynamic has plagued the Obama administration since the campaign.  They have consistently and persistently reacted to charges of incompetence by becoming incompetent instead of ignoring the charges and focusing on actually being competent!

It isn’t even unique to this administration.  Both Hillary Clinton’s and John McCain’s entire presidential campaigns were so focused on how the public perceived them that they abandoned all reality of what they were… and ended up being perceived as people who would abandon all reality of who they were to manipulate public perception!

And this isn’t unique… to any of them at this point.  This problem has completely swamped the entire Republican party, and great huge portions of the Democratic party are infected too.

Politicians desperately need to learn that the only way to appear competent is to be competent!

So many Republicans have changed their ideas on so many major issues that it’s hard to keep up. With the return of Congress this week, two of those issues – campaign finance disclosure and climate change – could play out in the Senate over the next month.

What accounts for the shifts? Evolving principles? Pressure from the right? Political Strategy 101, block Democrats and President Barack Obama so they’ll fail and look bad? Maybe a slightly more subtle approach — find fatal flaws in a compromise that under other circumstances (say if a Republican president wanted it passed) you would support, on the theory that the perfect shouldn’t be the enemy of the halfway decent or the baby step forward? All of the above? Here are seven reversals that hold clues:

Seven Things Republicans Were For, Before They Were Against Them.

This chart is from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics

This chart almost needs no explanation.  This recession has increased the number of unemployed people trying to get each job from an average between one and three over the last decade to six now.  And that improvement you see leading into April is almost entirely due to temporary Census Bureau hiring.  The census push being over, some 700,000 of those people are re-entering the rolls of the unemployed, so this ratio is heading right back up.

When there are six times as many people wanting work as there are jobs it is unspeakable for Republicans like Orrin Hatch to accuse them of being on drugs or lazy.  Does this bastard not understand the nature of the crisis this country is in?  Does he have no freaking idea of how much damage his party has done to the American people?

Glenn Beck cries on TV that he’s had it and he can’t wait for his crazies on the right to take him up on his plea to start shooting.  Lets hope that when they do, they have some sense and target people like Hatch.

Since 1960, Republicans have held the White House 28 years, while Democrats have held the White House 21 years.

In 15 of the years the Republicans held the White House the unemployment rate got better while in 13 years it got worse.  In other words, 54% of the time Republicans were in office the unemployment rate got better and it got worse 46% of the time.

In 17 of the years Democrats held the White House the unemployment rate got better while in 4 years it got worse.  In other words, 81% of the time Democrats were in office the unemployement rate got better and it got worse 19% of the time.

Says volumes.