We’re All Evolving

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One of the most interesting things I’ve seen all weekend is that a prominent Republican pollster is warning the GOP to back off of outrage over marriage equality. Apparently polls are saying gay bashing is not the winner wedge issue it used to be.

John Stewart notes that a few years ago the Fox Bobbleheads were screaming that marriage equality would allow humans to marry turtles. Now they’re saying that Obama only is embracing marriage equality to get re-elected, a tacit admission that the tides have turned.

Still, Mittens can’t find a sweet spot to stand on anywhere. Last week he said he thought adoption by same-sex couples was a “right”; then the next day he “clarified” that he doesn’t actually support gay adoption; he was just saying it is legal in most states, like it or not.

See also Zandar, “International House of Pain Cakes.”

Mittens the Mean Boy

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I’ve been ambivalent about the Washington Post story of Mittens’s alleged preppy-days bullying. Although it’s sourced well enough to be true, probably, and reveals a very ugly side of Mittens, it was 50 years ago. People do change, and there’s plenty of more current stuff with which to bash Mittens.

However, I agree with Joan Walsh that his reaction to the story was bizarre.

What’s giving the story legs isn’t merely the homophobic hair-cutting episode, which a lawyer friend of Romney’s termed “assault and battery,” not “hijinks.” It’s Romney’s callous reaction. His campaign first tried to shrug off the story with an insincere non-apology, but when the details of Horowitz’s tale got people’s attention – the “terrified” classmate John Lauber “with tears in his eyes” as Romney chopped off his hair with a scissor; the callow preppie leading a sight-impaired teacher into a set of closed doors – the candidate made his own statement. And what a statement it was.

After Fox’s Brian Kilmeade shared the Lauber story, Romney actually chuckled, and said:

You know, I don’t, I don’t remember that incident. I’ll tell you, I certainly don’t believe that I or – I can’t speak for others – thought the fellow was homosexual. That was the furthest thing from our minds in the 1960s.

You really have to listen to it to hear that the callow preppie hasn’t changed much in 50 years. As I noted yesterday, it’s rather brazen to say he doesn’t “remember that incident,” but to immediately volunteer that he didn’t think “the fellow was homosexual.” How could Lauber’s being gay have anything to do with an incident he says he doesn’t remember?

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And I remember the 1960s well enough to know that homosexuality was not “the furthest thing from our minds.” Not the first thing on our minds, maybe, but we were hardly Victorians about it.

The story is that in 1965 Mitt was a senior at a preppy private high school. A junior boy showed up after spring break with longish (drooping over his eyes) bleached blond hair. Remember that in 1965 the Beatles released Rubber Soul and the Rolling Stones hit the charts with “I Can’t Get No Satisfaction.” The Brylcreem look was for old men and losers.

But Mittens couldn’t deal with a blond Beatle bob on a boy, so he led a posse of other boys to tackle the shaggy one and hold him down while Mittens clipped off his hair with scissors. One of the participants remembered it as “viscous.”

Charles Blow:

In an interview with Fox Radio on Thursday, Romney laughed as he said that he didn’t remember the incident, although he acknowledged that “back in high school, you know, I, I did some dumb things. And if anybody was hurt by that or offended, obviously I apologize.” He continued, “I participated in a lot of hijinks and pranks during high school, and some might have gone too far. And, for that, I apologize.”

There is so much wrong with Romney’s response that I hardly know where to start.

One, the incident as described was not “hijinks.” It was assault. Second, how could he not remember that? Third, this was a classic unapologetic apology. But most of all,

Lastly, this would have been an amazing teaching moment about the impact of bullying if Romney had seized it. That is what a real leader would have done. That is what we would expect any adult to do. …

…While I have real reservations about holding senior citizens to account for what they did as seniors in high school, I have no reservations about expecting presidential candidates to know how to properly address the mistakes they once made.

This is where Romney falls short, once again.

This really does remind me of Dubya making fun of Carla Fay Tucker or giggling about the death penalty in a debate with Al Gore.

There is something seriously twisted about Mittens.

Update: I’m not the first one to notice this resemblance, but I couldn’t find a decent “comparison” graphic, so I made one myself:

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Dumb, Dumber, Dumbest

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Somebody explain to Tim Graham of Newsbusters that an “exposé,” by definition, is a news story that exposes something for the first time. Information that somebody already admitted in a book published years ago is already exposed.

Richard Mourdock, the teabagger who defeated Sen. Dick Lugar in the Indiana primaries, compares his outrage that 47 percent of Americans not paying income taxes to Lincoln’s outrage over slavery.

JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon managed to lose $2 billion on one risky trade, it was admitted yesterday. Dimon has been known previously for his loud objections to banking regulations, particularly of a sort that would have stopped him from making that trade. He was in Washington just last week to personally lobby the Federal Reserve to weaken the Volcker Rule.

Dumb!

Fires and Fallout

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The House lost no time this morning passing an amendment — 245-171 — to stop the Department of Justice from using taxpayer funds to oppose the Defense of Marriage Act. Yes, let’s draw some clear lines in the sand here. Works for me.

Meanwhile, some leftie-bots are still whining about Obama being no better than Bush. One clueless wonder on Facebook immediately accused the president of being weak because he waited until the day after the North Carolina vote to endorse marriage equality. Like his campaigning against Amendment One would have (a) been constitutionally appropriate or (b) made any difference.

One might accuse him of being cautious on the issue, but since we’re wading into unknown political territory I’m not so sure he was being all that cautious. See Nate Silver for analysis of the risks.

Some are blasting him because he said marriage laws are up to the states, but I believe marriage is considered to be one of those areas of authority reserved for the state by the Constitution. I’m pretty sure that’s the case. Which is why DOMA is such bullshit.

Anyway — righties are accusing Obama of declaring war on marriage and even war on the Christian Church. All I can say is that I’m not expecting riots in the streets over it here in New York.

GOP: Let Grandma Eat (Cold) Cat Food

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They were so outraged that Grandma might be denied a heart transplant by President Obama’s completely fictional death panels. Now a Republican-contolled House panel has voted to cut Meals on Wheels.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Well, there are priorities, see.

The heartless GOP, led by Private Ryan in the House, wants to cut $260B in domestic spending to shield the Pentagon from automatic budget cuts at the end of the year. Those programs include food stamps, Medicaid and the child tax credit.

Even the GOP cheerleader Wall Street Journal today reported the severity of the slashing, pointing out that Ryan’s plan would strip funding from the “Meals on Wheels” program. Geez, that’s way over the top.

The rampage continued today as the GOP blocked a Democratic bill to prevent the doubling of interest rates on student loans. Without Senate action, the interest rate will rise to 6.8 percent on July 1.

Hey, bedridden old folks are unlikely to vote, especially if they don’t have a proper voter ID.

Have I Mentioned Lately That David Brooks Is an Idiot?

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I knew I shouldn’t read Brooks’s most recent column, because he’s talking about the economy, and Brooks is always in over his head when talking about the economy. But then he’s in over his head about just about anything else, too. I suspect he could be quite the authority on many simpler things, such as cheese graters or crew socks, but anything that involves more than a couple of moving parts tends to confuse him.

Nevertheless I waded in, to find Brooks explaining that neither conservatives nor liberals really understand what’s wrong with the economy. But he has perceived that its problems are structural, not cyclical. “Fixing these structural problems should be the order of the day, not papering over them with more debt,” he says.

So what are these structural problems?

“First, there are those surrounding globalization and technological change. Hyperefficient globalized companies need fewer workers. As a result, unemployment rises, superstar salaries surge while lower-skilled wages stagnate, the middle gets hollowed out and inequality grows.”

I hadn’t noticed a need for fewer workers in those globalized companies, just cheaper ones, such as in Mexico or China.

There’s actually a free-market solution for that, though. Once there’s no middle class to play the role of “consumer,” the globalized companies won’t have any “consumers” around to buy their products, and the whole house of cards will collapse. A correction! Or, a depression!, depending on your point of view. But let’s go on.

“The United States, once the world’s educational leader, is falling back in the pack. Unemployment is high, but companies still have trouble finding skilled workers.”

I though they didn’t need workers? But is it true companies are having trouble finding skilled workers? I have heard of some isolated incidents, but I have a hard time believing this is a major trend.

“Over the decades, companies and other entities have implanted a growing number of special-interest deals into the tax and regulatory codes, making it harder for politically unconnected, new competitors, making the economy less dynamic.”

There may be something to this, but essentially it comes down to the big companies rigging the system to eliminate competition from smaller companies. Theodore Roosevelt had a similar problem to deal with, as I recall. In his case, government was the solution.

“These and other structural problems have retarded growth and wages for decades.”

Beside shipping jobs to Asia, what’s suppressing wages are a whole mess of other things, including the decline of unions, which Brooks doesn’t mention.

“Consumers tried to compensate by borrowing more. Politicians tried to compensate by reducing the tax bill, increasing deficit spending, ensuring easy credit for homebuyers”

Yes, blame the poor homebuyers, not predatory lenders, for the financial crash.

“… and by helping workers shift out of the hypercompetitive, globalized part of the economy…”

… since their jobs were lost forever to Bangladesh …

“…and into the less productive and more sheltered parts of the economy — mostly into health care, government and education.”

I hadn’t noticed that government was doing all that much to train people to take jobs in health care, government, and education, and in any case government jobs have been chopped all over the place lately. And I’m not sure what he means by “sheltered.” Is Brooks hallucinating?

“But you can only mask structural problems for so long. The whole thing has gone kablooey. The current model, in which we try to compensate for structural economic weakness with tax cuts and an unsustainable welfare state, simply cannot last. The old model is broken. The jig is up.”

Granted, the tax cuts aren’t doing a hoo-haw to get the economy moving, but the “unsustainable welfare state” is mostly a figment of the Right’s imagination. America is pretty chintzy on “entitlements” compared to a lot of other countries, but if Brooks can’t appreciate the structural role played by Medicare and Social Security and other props to keep the middle class from sinking into a third-world bog, then he truly is an idiot.

“Unlike the cyclicalists, we structuralists … “

“We structuralists.” That’s so … affected.

“… do not believe that the level of government spending is the main factor in determining how fast an economy grows. If that were true, then Greece, Britain and France would have the best economies on earth. (The so-called European austerity is partly mythical.)”

Translation: Brooks can’t believe genuine austerity is failing as badly as it is obviously failing in Yurp, so he assumes the Yurpeans must be doing it wrong. But the only partly mythical thing here is Brooks’s brain.

But let’s go back to “we structuralists do not believe that the level of government spending is the main factor in determining how fast an economy grows.” I don’t think anyone believes just spending a lot of money makes the economy grow. This is a fantasy the Right has pushed for ages; that the Left believes spending lots of money in and of itself is a good thing. If that were true, then let’s role the dice and use the entire federal budget to give ourselves vacations in France. That would certainly be great for the economy … of France.

What some of us believe is that if taxpayer money is invested in things like, oh, I don’t know — education, maybe. Brooks says we need a better educated workforce. Does he think the “free market” will take care of that? On what planet?

Make college more affordable, for example. Make student loans cheaper. Throw some money into failing public schools so that the buildings aren’t falling apart, class sizes are smaller, and at least some of the books in the library were published after 1989.

Throw some money at infrastructure issues such as the energy grid, roads, and bridges; plus information technology. Business needs this stuff to thrive, you know. Plus, it makes jobs.

Let’s go with a single-payer health care system, to get health care costs off the backs of business and prevent medical bankruptcy from ruining so many lives. Plus, a healthy workforce is a more productive workforce.

Invest in scientific research. All that pure science stuff is what provides the know-how for new products of the future.

Etc. etc. There are a few more paragraphs in Brooks’s column, but I lacked the strength to go further. Brooks is a freaking idiot.

I actually do agree with him that the ultimate problems are structural and not cyclical, but as I see it, the whole consumerist-capitalist economic system is unsustainable. We’re going to have to evolve into new economic models. But that’s hard to do when people conflate economic theory with religion. So I’m not hopeful.

Right’s Idea of Bias: Any News That Might Reflect Well on Obama

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In an article called “Spin of the Times: Bias cloaked as Front-Page News,” Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit complains that the New York Times runs news stories that are biased in favor of “Democrats and leftish ideas.”

His example of this is a recent article called “In Hopeful Sign, Health Spending Is Flattening Out.” The article looks at the fact that health care costs in the U.S. have risen much less sharply than expected in the past couple of years, which of course is good news to anyone who cares about, you know, American citizens and the American economy.

Is the story biased toward “Democrats and leftish ideas”? Here’s the weird part — Reynolds does not show that the article misrepresents or leaves out facts to make the article appear to be favorable to the Left. He quotes the article itself to argue that some of the cost slowdown is because of the recession, not because “Obamacare” is working.

The article is full of caveats and to-be-sures like this: “The growth rate mostly slowed as millions of Americans lost insurance coverage along with their jobs. Worried about job security, others may have feared taking time off work for doctor’s visits or surgical procedures, or skipped nonurgent care when money was tight.” Or this: “Some experts caution that there remains too little data to determine whether the current slowdown will become permanent, or whether it is merely a blip caused by the economy’s weakness.”

But, we’re told, “[M]any other health experts say that there is just enough data to start detecting trends — even if the numbers remain murky, and the vast complexity of the national health care market puts definitive answers out of reach.”

At this point, an editor might have spiked the story, commenting that all we’ve got are dueling experts who admit that they don’t really know what’s going on amid their “murky” numbers.

But the story is that health care costs in the U.S. have risen much less sharply than expected in the past couple of years. This is from the article:

In 2009 and 2010, total nationwide health care spending grew less than 4 percent per year, the slowest annual pace in more than five decades, according to the latest numbers from the Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services. After years of taking up a growing share of economic activity, health spending held steady in 2010, at 17.9 percent of the gross domestic product….

… The implications of a bend in the cost curve would be enormous. Policy makers on both sides of the aisle see rising health care costs as the central threat to household budgets and the country’s fiscal health. If the growth in Medicare were to come down to a rate of only 1 percentage point a year faster than the economy’s growth, the projected long-term deficit would fall by more than one-third.

That’s a significant bit of data. Just because the data don’t clearly show why it’s happening doesn’t mean it isn’t happening.

If you read the New York Times story — which Reynolds doesn’t link to, of course — you see that it provides a number of possible reasons for the slowdown in cost increase, some of which reflect well on the Obama Administration and some of which do not. And it provides the “bad for Obama” possible reasons first, before going on to the “maybe Obama’s policies have something to do with this” reasons. Reynolds quotes those “bad for Obama” reasons with approval and then complains the article is biased because … well, why? Because it then goes on to provide some “good for Obama” reasons as well?

What Reynolds is saying is that this bit of news must be suppressed until someone can show decisively that it’s really a bad thing that is all Obama’s fault.

And what makes this even more hysterical is that Reynold’s piece is published in the New York Post, one of the nation’s foremost purveyors of pure, old-fashioned yellow journalism. For example, in today’s Post there’s an article by a guy named Glenn Reynolds with an alarming headline about spin and bias at the New York Times, but if you read the article it’s just a highly biased piece about a Times article that really isn’t biased at all. Reynolds just doesn’t like it because it isn’t anti-Obama enough for his taste.

France Dumps Sarkozy, Probably

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McClatchy:

French Socialist Francois Hollande appeared headed to victory over President Nicolas Sarkozy, according to exit polls of voters released by Swiss and Belgian news media.

Those polls showed Hollande with 52 to 53 percent of the vote in an election that turned on solutions for Europe’s economic crisis amid record unemployment in France.

These are exit poll results, not actual results, but it appears it would take a miracle and the U.S. Supreme Court to keep Sarkozy in power.

Associated Press:

France voted in a presidential run-off election on Sunday that could see Socialist challenger Francois Hollande defeat incumbent Nicolas Sarkozy by capitalizing on public anger over the government’s austerity policies.

This will probably be the big news of the day.