The Weekly Sift

The discussion shows that are supposed to add to public understanding may actually reduce it, by hammering home the message that “issues” don’t matter except as items for politicians to squabble about. … The press, which in the long run cannot survive if people lose interest in politics, is acting as if its purpose was to guarantee that people are repelled by public life.

James Fallows, Breaking the News (1995)

In this week’s sift:

• Voter Suppression 101. Imagine you are a politician who serves only the top 1%. What’s your plan for getting enough votes to win?
• Tea By Any Other Name. After the disastrous end of the Bush administration, conservatives used their money and media power to ditch the wounded Republican label and rebrand themselves as the new (and therefore blameless) Tea Party. Now that the Tea Party’s public image is tanking, how long before they try the same trick again?
• A Week of Down. Bad as it looked, the debt-ceiling deal was supposed to keep the stock market from crashing and the ratings agencies from downgrading our bonds. Funny how that worked out.
• The Solar Oil Field and Other Short Notes. Oman uses solar to bring up more oil. Protesting Obama’s 50th birthday. Sponge Bob, propagandist. The E-Trade baby loses everything. Matt Damon sticks up for teachers. The EPA saves money. And a manufactured snub of Easter.
• Last week’s most popular post. At last count Confessions of a Centrist in Exile had received 240 views on the blog. The most-clicked-link was the solar-powered bikini.
• This week’s challenge. Six Republican state senators face recall elections in Wisconsin tomorrow. If three of them lose, the state Senate flips to the Democrats. This would send a powerful message to state governments around the country about union-busting and favoring corporations over people. It’s too late for your money to do much good, but they need people to make get-out-the-vote phone calls and you can do it from home.

A special note to RSS subscribers. If you read the Sift via Google Reader or some other RSS reader, you’ve probably noticed all the out-of-date posts you’re getting. Here’s what’s happening: When I moved the Sift to weeklysift.com a few weeks ago, the archived posts didn’t transfer perfectly. So I’ve been fixing them little by little. Unfortunately, those fixes have been showing up in the RSS feed as if they were “updates”. I’m not sure what to do about this other than just get the fixes done as fast as possible. Any Weekly Sift post that shows up on anything other than a Monday is the result of this glitch. My apologies.

We did not call it propaganda, for that word, in German hands, had come to be associated with deceit and corruption.

— George Creel, How We Advertised America (1920)

In this week’s Sift:

• The Dog Whistle Defined. How Tim Pawlenty and Rick Perry send messages to the Religious Right that they don’t want you to hear.
• Digging Into the Deficit. When you gather together the rights charts and graphs, the deficit isn’t that complicated: We cut taxes too far, and healthcare costs are rising exponentially.
• Short notes. If you’re not Muslim, it’s not terrorism. The debt ceiling comes down to the wire. Yesterday’s talking points are today’s deadbeats. The hazards of lying to Al Franken. Dogs and smurfs. And the week’s most interesting question: Did communists raise Captain America?
• Last week’s most popular post. Hands down it was Meet ALEC, which at last count had 878 views (most of which came through Reddit, if I’m reading the stats right). That’s part of a national wave of attention to the secretive American Legislative Executive Council. This week the story escaped the liberal blogosphere and made it to Bloomberg News and NPR. A good way to go deeper is to look at one state in detail: ALEC Bills in Wisconsin.
• This week’s challenge. Sign a petition to make corporations impersonal again. If it takes a constitutional amendment, let’s get one started.

I promised a follow-up on last week’s review of Warren Mosler’s Seven Deadly Innocent Frauds of Economic Policy, where I would describe his proposals. But I ran over my 3000-word weekly limit, so I’ll put that off to next week.

Welcome to Austerity in America. We can afford tax breaks for millionaires, but can’t afford five-day school weeks.

— Steve Benen, The Washington Monthly

In this week’s Sift:

Is Obama on Our Side? What if President Obama isn’t being out-negotiated by Republicans? What if he’s getting what he wants?

The Hard Line. The Republican inclination not to compromise goes all the way down to the grass roots, where three kinds of fundamentalism are replacing the 20th-century conservative’s respect for the status quo.

What “Spending” Really Means. Cutting government spending sounds good until you have to get specific. Do we want safe food and fire engines that work?

Short Notes. Fiore’s biting animations. We had a revenue crash, not a spending orgy. New light bulbs and solar panels. The debt ceiling is constitutional. And Ohio says that poll workers don’t have to be helpful.

This Week’s Challenge. As I redesign the Weekly Sift blog, now is a good time to make your suggestions.

Nobody has acknowledged that
a) the bubble economies of tech and housing were not financially real,
b) we can not “recover” to a condition that was not financially real in the first place, and therefore
c) we need to start focusing on a transition to something close to reality,
which is a long ways from where we currently are.

— Charles Marohn, The Growth Ponzi Scheme

In this week’s Sift:

• Presidents and Precedents. If President Obama’s manipulation of the War Powers Resolution process stands, what might a President Perry or Bachmann build on that foundation?
• Ponziville: The Suburbs Are Unsustainable. Charles Marohn claims that sprawling suburbs are an inefficient use of infrastructure. But the problem stays hidden until the initial developments start to wear out.
• Short Notes. Funny fake news vs. scary fake news. New Yorkers notice that same-sex marriage has not destroyed civilization in Boston. Matt Taibi demonstrates how not to attack Michele Bachmann. A Pulitzer-winner fesses up to being undocumented. Without illegal aliens, Georgia reaps only a metaphorical harvest. It’s not just the music that’s synthesized, it’s the girl. The First Amendment now protects data-mining. Vermont keeps heading towards single-payer health care. And more.
• This Week’s Challenge. If you want to help in the Wisconsin recall elections, here’s how.

During the last administration, I often warned Republicans not to claim any powers for President Bush that they wouldn’t want President Hillary Clinton to have. Maybe they trusted W with extraordinary powers, but I hoped it might slow them down to imagine some future Democrat tapping phones without warrants or locking people up without charges.

It never worked.

Even so, I think it may be time to take my own medicine: Sure, I mostly trust President Obama, so I haven’t been watching our involvement in Libya as closely as I might. I know there are War Powers Resolution issues and Congress should be involved to some degree. But seeing congressional Republicans play chicken with the debt ceiling hasn’t made me wish that they had more opportunities to get in Obama’s way.

Still, today’s actions are tomorrow’s precedents. Eventually there will be another Republican president, maybe sooner than I think. And if someday President Bachmann decides to invade Sweden to protect the world from socialism, shouldn’t she have to make her case to Congress? Or somebody?

Maybe it’s time to pay attention.

The Founders’ Vision of War. The Constitution divides the nation’s war-making powers. The President is commander-in-chief (Article II, Section 2), but only Congress can raise armies or declare war (Article I, Section 8).

Why did the Founders do that? They believed that standing armies tempted rulers to impose their will by force. And the US had the unusual advantage of being far away from potential enemies. So they pictured a ground-up form of defense that would only require a sizable federal army on rare occasions.

Most common threats (criminal gangs, pirate or Indian raids) a community would handle itself, maybe with the help of neighboring communities. (Picture the colonial Minutemen or the posse that goes after the bank robbers in a western.) Larger threats (big Indian raids or slave uprisings) would be the responsibility of the state militias. Only when things really got out of hand, say if we were attacked by a European power, would a federal force be needed.

And those big wars would be rare, because we were going to stay out of “entangling alliances”. In President Washington’s Farewell Address, he wrote:

Why, by interweaving our destiny with that of any part of Europe, entangle our peace and prosperity in the toils of European ambition, rivalship, interest, humor, or caprice? It is our true policy to steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world.

So most of the time the President would be commander-in-chief of not very much. When tensions rose, Congress would assemble an army and decide which countries to use it against. The commander-in-chief clause made sure those armies would report to a single commander, avoiding strategy-by-committee in Congress.

(BTW: This interpretation also makes sense out of the “well-regulated militia” clause of the Second Amendment: “A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the People to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” The people should keep and bear arms not so that they can overthrow the government — as the Tea Party would have it — but so that they don’t depend on a standing army that could be used against them.)

Rep. Lincoln. As a congressman, Abraham Lincoln opposed President Polk’s role in instigating the Mexican War. Arguing by letter with his law partner William Herndon in 1848, Lincoln wrote:

Allow the President to invade a neighboring nation whenever he shall deem it necessary to repel an invasion … and you allow him to make war at pleasure. Study to see if you can fix any limit to his power in this respect, after having given him so much as you propose. …

The provision of the Constitution giving the war making power to Congress was dictated, as I understand it, by the following reasons: kings had always been involving and impoverishing their people in wars, pretending generally, if not always, that the good of the people was the object. This our convention understood to be the most oppressive of all kingly oppressions, and they resolved to so frame the Constitution that no one man should hold the power of bringing this oppression upon us. But your view destroys the whole matter, and places our President where kings have always stood.

Historical drift. The Founders’ vision slowly came apart. President Lincoln himself, facing an enemy within cannon-shot of the capital, acted on his own authority and sought congressional approval later. By 1900, the US had colonies of its own and intervened constantly in Latin America. We came out of the World Wars with global commitments and a world-spanning enemy. Now we were trying to entangle other nations in our alliances — NATO, SEATO, CENTO, OAS, etc.

Eventually, nuclear missiles threatened to destroy our cities in less time than it took Congress to assemble. So power accrued to the President because no one else was in a position to wield it.

Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia. The Korean War (1950-1953) was the first major conflict the US fought without a formal declaration of war. That looked like an aberration at the time, but instead it became the new model. Congress has not declared war since, but has indirectly signed off on presidential wars by continuing to fund them and occasionally endorsing them in resolutions like the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution.

President Nixon pushed presidential authority too far by bombing Cambodia secretly in 1969-70 and delivering misleading records to Congress when it investigated in 1972-73. Congress needed to take some power back.

The War Powers Resolution of 1973. Passed over Nixon’s veto, the WPR gives a president 48 hours to inform Congress of a military action, and then gives Congress 60 days to authorize it. If it does not, the President then has 30 days to disengage.

Subsequent presidents have groused, but have mostly gone along with the WPR, for the simple reason that it’s sound practice. (It’s a myth that presidents have all regarded the WPR as unconstitutional.) If you can’t get Congress to endorse a war at the beginning, before the bodies start coming home, then you’d better hope you can go in, declare victory, and get out in short order.

Obama and Libya. The bombing in Libya started on March 19, and Congress has not passed any authorization. So President Obama’s 30-days-to-disengage has run out. But instead of standing down, the administration sent a report to Congress making this claim:

The President is of the view that the current U.S. military operations in Libya are consistent with the War Powers Resolution and do not under that law require further congressional authorization, because U.S. military operations are distinct from the kind of “hostilities” contemplated by the Resolution’s 60 day termination provision.

Where did the President get that view? Not from the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, which is the official executive-branch body to study such issues. And not from the Pentagon general counsel, either. Instead, he followed the opinion of an ad-hoc group of executive-branch lawyers led by the White House counsel, who is not approved by the Senate and in some administrations is nothing more than the president’s personal lawyer.

Constitutionally, the President is not obliged to follow any particular legal advice. But Yale Law Professor Bruce Ackerman explained in the NYT why circumventing the OLC is a bad practice:

If the precedent Mr. Obama has created is allowed to stand, future presidents who do not like what the Justice Department is telling them could simply cite the example of Mr. Obama’s war in Libya and instruct the White House counsel to organize a supportive “coalition of the willing” made up of the administration’s top lawyers. Even if just one or two agreed, this would be enough to push ahead and claim that the law was on the president’s side.

Remember Mukasey’s Paradox from the Bush administration: Lawyers can’t commit crimes when they act under the orders of a president, and presidents can’t commit crimes when they act under the advice of lawyers — any lawyers, even if they were hired precisely to give that advice.

We don’t want to go down that track again, because it undermines the whole notion of the rule of law. Regardless of what you think of Libya or Obama or Congress, the really bad thing here is the precedent. Imagine what a President Rick Perry could do with it.

In a classic Ponzi scheme, money from new investors pays off old investors — who then brag about the rate-of-return they’re getting and tempt even more new investors to get in. As long as inflow of new money grows exponentially, everybody stays happy. But that can’t continue forever, and so the scheme collapses.

Charles Marohn claims this model fits the suburbs:

the underlying financing mechanisms of the suburban era — our post-World War II pattern of development — operates like a classic Ponzi scheme, with ever-increasing rates of growth necessary to sustain long-term liabilities.

The model has been that state and federal money, developer investment, plus a small amount of local-government borrowing, builds the initial infrastructure of a suburb — roads, sewers, schools, etc. — and so the local tax base goes up accordingly. But the infrastructure has a life span, and the increased tax base is not sufficient to rebuild it when it wears out. The only way to hide this is with more growth — new sprawl that raises the tax base in the near term while adding more long-term liabilities.

In America, we have a ticking time bomb of unfunded liability for infrastructure maintenance. … The reason we have this gap is because the public yield from the suburban development pattern — the amount of tax revenue obtained per increment of liability assumed — is ridiculously low. Over a life cycle, a city frequently receives just a dime or two of revenue for each dollar of liability. … We’ve simply built in a way that is not financially productive.

I wish Marohn had said more about the urban side of the equation: By moving our rich people to the suburbs, we’ve also wrecked the tax base of our cities.

I’m struck by how Marohn’s vision dovetails with John Michael Greer’s model of long-term decline. Here’s my summary of what Greer says in The Long Descent,:

At its peak a society builds a larger capital base than it can maintain. From then on, the deferred maintenance periodically comes due in some big failure, which cascades through the system until things settle down at a lower level. Then the pattern repeats: The lower capital base generates enough resources to maintain itself day-to-day, but not long-term — eventually leading to the next big failure.

So: News Orleans can’t afford to maintain its dikes, which fail during Hurricane Katrina. Then New Orleans rebuilds, but not all the way. The new, lower tax base will be unable to maintain something else, which eventually will lead to another disaster and another contraction.

In the longer version of Marohn’s article (on his Strong Towns site), he starts prescribing rather than diagnosing:

a rational response is to start insisting that our places show a positive financial return. That will require a completely different approach to building our cities along with a completely different understanding of growth. If you need help getting started on this, check out our Starter Strategies for a Strong Town as well as our Strong Towns Placemaking Principles.

lt’s on: Funny fake news (Jon Stewart) is going after scary fake news (Fox).

Friday night, a same-sex marriage bill passed the Republican-controlled New York Senate, with 4 Republicans and 29 Democrats voting for it. Governor Cuomo signed it just before midnight, and it will take effect after 30 days, in late July. The NYT reports:

In New York, passage of the bill reflects rapidly evolving sentiment about same-sex unions. In 2004, according to a Quinnipiac poll, 37 percent of the state’s residents supported allowing same-sex couples to wed. This year, 58 percent of them did.

That’s a much faster increase than you can get just by the passing of an older generation. To me, it’s the natural result of the scare-tactics anti-gay activists have used. For a long time, their message has been that civilization will literally fall if men start marrying men. Such alarmism works as long as the practice is theoretical. But it starts to sound silly when New Yorkers can clearly see that civilization has not fallen in Boston or Montreal.

OK, California. You’re up.

In the current Rolling Stone, Matt Taibbi writes a strangely self-defeating analysis of Michele Bachmann. He convincingly characterizes her as  a champion of the ignorant masses who feel abused by the ridicule of the educated. “Bachmann’s stature rises,” he writes, “every time she does something we laugh at.”

But he still can’t stop himself from heaping scorn on her rather than coolly cataloguing her flaws.

She is at once the most entertaining and the most dangerous kind of liar, a turbocharged cross between a born bullshit artist and a religious fanatic, for whom lying to the infidel is a kind of holy duty.

The article goes on like that. Taibbi’s rhetoric is entertaining if you already agree with him. But if you forward it to your fundamentalist cousin or aunt, they’ll think Taibbi despises people like them for not being as smart as he thinks he is. And they’ll want Bachmann to succeed, just to put Taibbi in his place.

The Des Moines Register has Romney and Bachmann neck-and-neck among likely Iowa-caucus-goers. Romney leads 23-22, but Bachmann is the second choice of 18% to Romney’s 10%. When folks realize Cain and Santorum aren’t going to make it, they’ll go to Bachmann.

In one graph, Gallup explains why Jon Huntsman is no threat to be nominated. His polling data shows two clear trends: name recognition up, positive intensity down. The more Republicans know him, the less they like him.

Another recent poll has President Obama beating all major Republicans in an unlikely place: Tennessee. Steve Singiser from Daily Kos Elections explains it like this: Tennessee is experiencing the same kind of Republican over-reach that has wrecked their poll numbers in Florida and Michigan. 2010 voters who thought they were voting for traditional Republicanism suddenly find themselves living in Kochistan.

Remember the Paul-is-dead rumor of 1969? (OK, maybe not if you’re under 50.) Well, Eguchi Aimi of the Japanese girl-band AKB48 has taken it one step further: She never existed to begin with. The uber-cute Ms. Aimi is a computer-generated synthesis of the cutest features of the other girls in the band.

Using the sad example of Chicago’s parking meters, Senator Durbin warns against the temptation to raise cash by selling off public assets at fire-sale prices. In particular he proposes that if federal money builds a local asset which the local government then sells, the feds should get their money back.

The DREAM Act, if it ever passes, is supposed to normalize the status of undocumented immigrants who came here as children and have done well since they arrived. It makes sense: The original sin belongs to their parents, not them, and they know no other country they can go back to. As they become adults, they keep breaking the law — forging documents, lying on forms — because all the other choices are worse.

Wednesday, young journalist Jose Antonio Vargas put his own face on this problem. In My Life as an Undocumented Immigrant he tells his story: He came to America from the Philippines at age 12, and found out he was here illegally at 16. But rather than pick fruit or work in a sweatshop, he got himself a job with the Washington Post and was part of a team that won a Pulitzer.

He told a lot of lies and forged a lot of documents to give himself those opportunities. But now that he has fessed up, the moral onus is on us: Do we send him back to the Philippines?

Meanwhile, the harsh new law that was supposed to keep illegal aliens out of Georgia is working. Blueberries, onions, and cucumbers are rotting in the fields. They’ve tried getting criminals to do the picking, but it’s not going so well.

In practice, “cutting the waste out of our school budget” means firing librarians.

Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice David Prosser was in Justice Ann Walsh Bradley’s office last week, was asked to leave, and wound up with his hands around her neck. But it’s her fault. Just like it was Justice Shirley Abrahamson’s fault when Prosser called her a “bitch”. Those female judges … you know how they get. What’s a real man to do?

It’s been a very pro-corporate Supreme Court term, as I’ll outline after it ends next week. But the worst of it may be Sorrell v IMS Health, where corporate First-Amendment rights got their biggest boost since Citizens United. The Court threw out a Vermont law that stopped pharmacies from selling prescription data to data miners, who could then advise pharmaceutical companies on marketing to doctors. If you can see any legitimate free-speech issue there, your eyes are sharper than mine.

Vermont’s Senator Leahy called the decision “a win for data miners and large corporations and a loss for those of us who care about privacy not only in my home state of Vermont but across the nation.”

But Vermonters keep plugging with their New England common sense: They’re moving towards single-payer health care because it’s cheaper and it works better.

Right now Wisconsin is the central front in the struggle to defend the middle class and the public sector. Six Republican state senators and three Democrats are up for recall this summer, and the Republicans look far more vulnerable. Picking up three seats will flip the state senate to Democratic control. That would not only change the equation in Wisconsin, it would send a national message: Voters don’t support taking away workers’ rights, or cutting education to pay for corporate tax breaks.

You can contribute online through Act Blue. If you want to phone bank or volunteer in some other way, go to the Wisconsin Democratic Party web site.

The Weekly Sift appears every Monday afternoon. If you would like to receive it by email, write to WeeklySift at gmail.com. Or keep track of the Sift by following the Sift’s Facebook page.

The men who talk most about reverence for the American Constitution are the last people in the world to welcome a study of its origin. For the conservative is not devoted to a real past. He is devoted to his own comfortable image of it.

— Walter Lippmann, Drift and Mastery (1914)

In this week’s Sift:

• The Constitution as Symbol. Tea Party leaders constantly claim to revere the Constitution and the Founding Fathers who wrote it. So why do they know so little about either? It’s simple: To them the Constitution is a nostalgic symbol, not a reality.
• Tea Buyer’s Remorse. New Tea Party governors have very quickly become unpopular. How they did it.
• The Economy: Dip or Dive? Housing down, unemployment up. Was May just a glitch, or is the recovery over already?
• Short Notes. Is the Ryan budget “courageous”? Koch’s congressman doesn’t deny being bought. Two fun inventions and one very important one. The Air Force Academy clears itself of religious discrimination. Ayn Rand and the religious right are strange allies. And Vermont bucks the rightward trend with single-payer health insurance.
• This Week’s Challenge. As the Right unifies around nostalgia, what can the Left unify around?

Tea Party rhetoric is full of references to “the Constitution” as it was written by “our Founding Fathers”. But anyone who paid attention in U.S. History class is often bewildered: What are they talking about?

Case in point: Herman Cain. Tuesday, ThinkProgress linked to a Cain radio piece from October, where he lectured his listeners about how the federal government “has no jurisdiction over bankruptcy law”. Strange that a Constitutionalist like Cain didn’t know Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution, which enumerates the powers of Congress:

To establish a uniform rule of naturalization, and uniform laws on the subject of bankruptcies throughout the United States;

Or who can forget Michele Bachmann’s claim that the Founding Fathers “worked tirelessly until slavery was no more” and that “once you got here, we were all the same” — as if slavery had not been institutionalized in the Constitution, as if it didn’t last until well after all the delegates to the Constitutional Convention were dead, and as if many of the Founders were not slave-owners themselves? Or Bachmann’s misplacement of The-Shot-Heard-Round-the-World in Concord, NH rather than Concord, MA.

Or Sarah Palin’s backwards and self-serving understanding of the First Amendment? (She thinks it protects her from the press, not the other way around.) Or (just this Thursday) her garbling of Paul Revere’s ride?

The Onion was spot-on with this parody: Area Man Passionate Defender of What He Imagines Constitution To Be. Tea Partiers don’t venerate the real Constitution or the real Founders, but a Constitution and a founding generation that exists only in their imaginations.

The Constitution as scripture. The template here comes from fundamentalist religion: The Constitution is like scripture, and the Founders are its prophets. (Tea Party Patriots pushes a curriculum explicitly teaching that the Constitution was divinely inspired.) Like fundamentalist scripture, the Constitution is to be revered, but not thought about too deeply. You read it with your heart, not with your eyes and brain.

Wise as many of the Founders were, the real Constitutional Convention wasn’t trying to write scripture. It was trying make a nation out of 13 newly independent states that had as many differences as similarities. So the actual Constitution was full of compromises between high ideals and unfortunate facts-on-the-ground like slavery.

We’ve been fixing that Constitution ever since: freeing the slaves, giving women the right to vote, disestablishing the state churches and so on. Plus, the Constitution has required regular maintenance: We have to keep reinterpreting time-bound phrases like “the right to bear arms” and “freedom of the press” so that they stay meaningful in an age of atomic warheads and the internet.

But that just gets us back to the original question: If the Tea Partiers aren’t talking about the real Constitution, what are they talking about?

Nostalgia. A David Roberts article on the Grist blog (which I’ll get back to in the Challenge) lays a foundation for answering that question:

[T]he American right grows ever more homogeneous: ethnically, socioculturally, and ideologically. … Precisely because it is homogeneous, the right is intense. There is no political force more potent than a privileged class in the process of losing its privilege. The right base sees itself as an Us beset on all sides by Thems; cries Michele Bachmann, “are we going to take our country back?”

The emotional engine that powers the Tea Party is nostalgia. But the specifics — what the base is nostalgic for — can’t be spoken in so many words. Some of it is morally suspect: nostalgia for white, Christian, or male privilege, or for a time when gays were in the closet and non-English-speakers whispered to each other because they were ashamed of their ignorance.

Another part of the nostalgia can’t be spoken because the billionaire backers of the Tea Party want it suppressed: nostalgia for a time when employers had to respect the power of workers to unionize and strike, when economic growth was widely shared rather than captured by the rich, when one factory job could support a family.

Nostalgia that can’t be spelled out needs to be symbolized. The Constitution — the fantasy Constitution written by divinely inspired prophets — is that symbol. If you are part of the conservative base, it symbolizes a time when life was easier for vaguely defined “people like me”, when you didn’t have to make room for people whose religions and worldviews are different or care whether or not you were insulting them, when you could be treated with respect and be confident about your future.

Some of that is a worthy fantasy and some of it isn’t, but it has nothing to do with the real Constitution.

Counter-attack. Understanding this nostalgia can help liberals frame their counter-attack: We need to spell out the parts of the nostalgia that the Koch brothers want to suppress. Corporatism is not nostalgic. Union-busting is an ugly part of our history that working-class Americans do not pine for. Deregulation sounds wonderful when you think of the sod-busters of the frontier, but less wonderful when you think of miners trapped underground. That part of the past is coming back, and it’s not pretty.

Liberals have their own nostalgia to promote: the budget surplus of Bill Clinton, FDR’s establishment of Social Security, Lyndon Johnson’s establishment of Medicare, the unionization that made American factories safe and brought American workers into the middle class. There have been times when working people stood together against the rapacious rich, and made society work for the many rather than the few.

Remember?

Herman Cain himself is a symbol, which is why his candidacy is has been taking off. Being black, he is a symbolic answer to the charge that the Tea Party is racist. (You can see that we’re-not-racists sentiment very clearly throughout the nostalgic Herman Cain Train music video. “Eat your words,” Cain says to those who charge the Tea Party with racism.)

The racism charge stings because it is 80% true. Its truth makes it hard to dismiss, but the 20% falsehood makes it feel genuinely unfair. Let’s sort it out: If racism means a reflexive hatred of black skin, the Tea Party is not racist and Cain proves it. He has black skin and they don’t hate him.

But if racism means that blacks come to the plate with two strikes — as I think it does in today’s America — so far Cain has proved nothing. Let him swing and miss once, and we’ll see if he’s called out. So far, his rhetoric is down-the-line what billionaires and nostalgic whites want to hear. But if (just once) he wants to go in the “wrong” direction, we’ll see if he gets a white candidate’s share of the benefit of the doubt.

The Constitution/Bible analogy explains something else: why Republicans keep confusing the Declaration of Independence with the Constitution. Herman Cain did it (seconds after scolding “we need to re-read the Constitution”). John Boehner did it (while waving a pocket copy of the Constitution). It happens fairly often.

Why? It’s simple: The Declaration is the old testament of the Constitution.

Since February, PPP has polled eight states that elected Republican governors in 2010: Seven of them would like a do-over. Nevada would vote for Gov. Brian Sandoval over Democrat Rory Reid (Harry’s son) again, and by almost the same margin. But John Kasich’s 2-point win in Ohio in November would be a 25-point loss today. Rick Scott’s 1-point win in Florida is now a 19-point deficit. In Wisconsin, Scott Walker’s 6-point advantage has turned into a 7-point hole. Pennsylvania’s Tom Corbett went from up-5 to down-9. And so on. Even won’t-he-run-for-president Chris Christie in New Jersey has seen his approval fall.

What happened? It’s simple. In state after state, Republicans ran vague times-are-tough, we-need-more-jobs, I-share-your-values campaigns. (Check out John Kasich ads like this and this and this.) Immediately after taking office, they implemented radical plans that were remarkably uniform across state lines: bust the unions (Wisconsin, Ohio, Florida, Michigan), make it harder for people to vote (Florida, Wisconsin, Ohio), cut education (Pennsylvania, Florida, New Jersey, Wisconsin), cut Medicaid (Ohio, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania) or even privatize it (Florida) — while continuing to cut taxes for corporations (Florida, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin). Other than the corporate tax cuts, it’s hard to find any mention of these specifics in last fall’s campaign.

Despite the campaign message that the Tea Party movement was about government spending, not social issues, Tea-Party-supported governors and their legislatures have passed a raft of laws restricting abortion. (Rachel Maddow has been doing a great job of covering abortion restrictions in her Really Big Government series.) Collateral damage includes women’s health in general: The federal government is challenging the legality of Indiana’s defunding of Planned Parenthood (similar to efforts in North Carolina, Texas, Wisconsin, and Tennessee). The state funds were not used for abortions, but for contraception, cancer screenings, STD testing, and other important services.

Citizens haven’t taken all this lying down. The Wisconsin union-busting drama (with its Democratic senators escaping to Illinois, 100,000-person demonstrations, and fly-by-night votes in the legislature that are overturned by the courts) has reached its next milestone: Of the eight Republican senators that were eligible for recall petitions, six will face new elections this summer. (Republicans tried to gin up interest in recalling the eight eligible Democratic senators, but they ended up filing petitions on only three of them. The state has yet to rule on their validity, due to allegations of fraudulent tactics — like telling people the petition was for something else.)

The Ohio union-busting law is on hold pending a petition drive to put it on the ballot in November. (The law is polling badly). A recall petition is circulating against Michigan’s Gov. Snyder, and Wisconsin’s Walker is bound to face a recall when he becomes eligible in January. (Wisconsin law won’t let voters recall an official who hasn’t served a year yet.)

That’s a lot of change for seven months. If you want to keep the momentum going in the right direction, consider supporting We Are Wisconsin as it starts campaigning in the recall elections.

There’s no point trying to put a good face on it: The economic news last week was bad. Tuesday, a key housing-market index fell past the low it hit in 2009. Wednesday, bad news about the job market started coming out, culminating in Friday’s report from the Labor Department. It showed that the economy added only 54,000 jobs in May — well below the 100-150K needed to keep up with population growth. Consequently, the unemployment rate edged up to 9.1%. The Dow Jones average dropped 2.4% (about 300 points) for the week.

Economic writers spent a lot of time arguing about whether this was (1) the start of another downturn, so recently after the last one; or (2) a hiccup in an already slow stop-and-start recovery. The consensus, as best I could piece it together, was (2), but that the hiccup has moved us into perilous territory where unpredictable bad luck — a natural disaster, terrorist attack, or surprise corporate bankruptcy — could trigger (1).

The explanation I found most plausible was from New Deal Democrat on the Bonddad blog. Here are the key features of the problem:

• Overall, we have a demand problem. Recoveries are usually pushed along by consumer spending, but most consumers have not seen much from the recovery yet. (Almost all the gains so far have gone to the wealthy.)
• If the world is not already at peak oil production, it’s close. There’s no longer any button the Saudis can push to put more oil on the market.
• Given that oil production is more-or-less fixed, any increase in world demand raises the price.
• Consequently, economic recovery is self-stifling: Growth raises demand for oil which raises the price of gasoline. Higher gas prices take money away from low-to-middle-income consumers, the people most likely to spend. So demand drops, shutting off growth.

That’s why we have a stop-and-start recovery to begin with. Why it’s stopping right now, NDD claims, is partly random and partly due to the Japan tsunami, which has screwed up supply chains around the world.

So we should cross our fingers and try not to panic for the next few months. If there’s no additional shock to the system, we should get back to bumpy growth soon.

If you feed “jobs report” into Google News, you’ll notice something interesting: The unemployed are just tokens on somebody else’s gameboard. Articles focus on how the jobs report will affect the stock market or Obama’s chances for re-election — not what it means to people who need jobs.

This reflects something Tom Stites was talking about in 2006: Newspapers target the top 40% of the economic pyramid. Everybody else is invisible until they affect the top 40%.

This was sadly predictable:

Top Republicans on Friday said an increase in the jobless rate underscored the need for President Barack Obama to get personally involved in talks to cut government spending to help stimulate economic growth.

In case you’re wondering, no econometric model in the world predicts that cutting government spending will stimulate near-term economic growth or create jobs. And it’s not working anywhere that has tried it. But John Boehner can say stuff like this and have it reported seriously in the national media.

Three days before, Naked Capitalism’s Philip Pilkington explained how this kind of thing happens: TV talking-head economics has become a morality play, not a social science:

Politicians and economic commentators play into this by acting out various roles. They’re not simply lying – indeed, to an extent they seem to believe in the part they play, even though they know that what they are saying is misleading. But to step outside of the play – to pull a Brechtian manoeuvre and bring the audience in on the truth – would make them appear crazy; nothing, after all, appears quite so crazy as when someone starts telling too much truth. So the commentators and politicians get caught up in a slipstream of misleading nonsense – all the while furthering their careers.

Nicholas Kristof points out where the conservative economic program goes. There already is a country with low taxes, traditional religious values, a strong military, and industry unburdened by environmental or worker-safety regulations: Pakistan.

I spend a fair amount of time reporting in developing countries, from Congo to Colombia. They’re typically characterized by minimal taxes, high levels of inequality, free-wheeling businesses and high military expenditures. Any of that ring a bell?

Liberal values, on the other hand, are embodied in countries like Germany and Norway. Where would you rather live?

Katrina vanden Heuvel notes the change: Political courage used to mean doing the right thing and suffering the consequences. Now it means “making the hard choices” — i.e., deciding which powerless people you’re going to stick it to. Paul Ryan’s budget gives tax cuts to his rich base and sticks it to the old and the poor. There’s nothing “courageous” about it.

A really courageous Republican would tell his base this truth: We got here by cutting taxes. After you eliminate everything that could conceivably be called “waste”, we’re still going to need more revenue.

Congressman Mike Pompeo’s district contains the Koch Industries headquarters, and they’re his biggest contributor. When National Journal asks whether he’s been “influenced” by the Koch brothers, he responds like the Koch PR department:

Koch Industries is an amazing business that has succeeded by building a product that customers love dearly. The folks who run Koch are very clear. They would love to have government just get out of the way and allow companies to compete, whether in their particular sectors or other sectors.

Translation: “Yes, I am bought and paid for. You got a problem with that?”

Geek Power. This guy from Prague has a great idea: If there’s no bike lane, make your own. The projector on his bike adds dotted lines and a bicycle symbol to the pavement in front of him.

If TVs in public places annoy you, this woman has a device to turn them off sewn into her jacket.

And this invention will change lives in poor countries: inexpensive glasses you can tune yourself — no optometrist needed.

I’ve posted before about the Christianist take-over of the Air Force Academy and other military training programs. Chris Rodda (author of “Liars for Jesus: the Religious Right’s Alternate Version of American History“) reports the latest: The Air Force Academy has done an investigation and cleared itself. One faculty member commented to the Military Religious Freedom Foundation: “You don’t do proper research with a self-selected sample — unless, of course, you are fishing for the answers you already want.”

Meanwhile, the MRFF claims that the Academy still contains a group of at least 100 cadets who fake being fundamentalist Christians so that they’ll be left alone.

Uh-oh. Somebody just told the religious right that Ayn Rand was an atheist.

While other states have been taking a sharp turn to the right, Vermont is moving towards single-payer health insurance. The motivation combines Bernie-Sanders-style liberalism with traditional Yankee thrift: Why are we sending all that money to out-of-state insurance companies who don’t contribute anything to the healing process?

Grist’s David Roberts observes that the Right has a lot of homogeneity — racially, culturally, religiously. That gives them unity and intensity, even as they shrink demographically. The Left, on the other hand, is “a contentious coalition of Thems”. Hence this question:

What vision of America’s future is broad enough to inspire and cohere the left’s fractious coalition but specific enough to distinguish it from the conservative status quo? What new narrative can turn the gaze of the country’s elite away from rosy-tinged nostalgia for frontier libertarianism and white privilege?

Any answers out there?

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