Tag Archives: Politics

Random Thoughts on the Charlie Hebdo Attack

I have been deeply busy in copy-editing my novel and as such I have neglected this here blog. Now I am sick with flu and my head is in a perpetual dizzy state. However I will attempt to put down at least some of the thoughts that have been running through my brain since this horrific attack in Paris.

  1. These murderers are nothing more than vicious, savage barbarians. An attack on free expression is an attack on civilization. The slaughter of unarmed people is not an act of war, or courage, or defiance. It is barbarity.
  2. The writers, editors, and artists at Charlie Hebdo, in my opinion not speaking as to French law, have a right to free expression and being insulting, offensive, or blasphemous does not restrict or rescind that.
  3. Some have argued that it is wrong to ‘punch down.’ That is to mock or satirize people from disenfranchised or marginalized populations. I disagree. There is no state of being that immunizes anyone from mockery. Any idea is subject to ridicule.
  4. That said I am sure that there are those would who advocate I should use the blog to reproduced the images that some found so offensive as symbolic stand for the ideal of free expression. I can stand for the ideals of free expression without being obligated to reproduce content with which I disagree.
  5. From what I have seen the images in question are neither worthy in an artistic or satirical manner. Simply being insulting isn’t satirical, being offensive doesn’t mean you had anything interesting to say. I particularly do not agree with images that mock the entire religion. The trouble is with radicalized fundamentalist at war with modernity, not the entire 1.8 billion followers of that religion.
  6. Throughout the world there is a problem with fundamentalist thought and mind-set. In my country is it Christian fundamentalism in politics that is the trouble. All religions have such extremist, not all are violent, but more than most people generally think.

Those are my thoughts on this flu fogged day.

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Thought of the Cuba re-engagement

I have been dreadfully busy the last few weeks. The dayjob has hit it peak crush and OT is plentiful. There are stirrings in the writing the department that may herald good news, but it is too early to tell more than that. So my poor blog has been a wee bit neglected. However the news on Cuba is so big I just have to comment.

I confess to being torn on the issue. On one hand Cuba is a brutal, murdering dictatorship.The less we have to do with such beasties the better. That island is no workers paradise. It pretty much flows from the definition of paradise that people would claw to get into one, not out.

One the other hand out five decade policy simply is not working. We have not crushed Castor’s government, and for fifty years the people of Cuba have suffered. The pragmatist in me is repelled that the thought of continuing a policy that doesn’t work.

We engaged with the Soviets, while keeping a strong commitment against their totalitarian rule and in the end they fell. In part because of the seduction presented by the engagement, the people could experience a better life, they could suffer McDonalds and want more. So engagement is not always appeasement and it can help us spread freedom to people who need it.

Yet we have also seen that engagement appears to the failing in China. Those brutal rulers seems to be navigating their way out of communism and into Fascism. this transformation is being fuel my American enterprise utilizing the cheap labor, but the price in the end may turn out to be quite high.

So engagements can work and it can fail. Did the Administration do the right thing?

I don’t know.

 

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A Snapshot of the current economic picture

So last night a friend and I were were discussing politics, life, the universe and everything. He seemed incredulous that I thought that from some measurements and perspectives the economy was doing quite well and that from other points of view it was doing quite poorly. I believe that it was his impression that the economy was doing poorly. This morning after having blood drawn I went and looked up a few graphs to illustrate what I was talking about.

All of the graphs come from the same source the Federal Reserve at St. Louis.

So street level, how does this economy look to the person who is working for a living?

Employment:unemployment

So from this graph it’s quite clear that employment, while improving has yet to recover fully from the disastrous financial crisis of 2008. Bad for the working person.

Household Income
household income

Median Household Income has only recently began to recover from the 2008 crisis. As you can see in the graph, the household income continues to fall even after the recession had ended. Bad for the working Person.

Stock Prices

Stock prices

Stock prices have fully recovered are in fact higher than before the crisis. The stock market  is going like gangbusters.

Corporate Profits

Coporate profits

Corporate Profits have fully recovered from the crisis and just as with stock prices are now higher than before the crisis.

I think that this is one of the essential driving forces in the ‘throw the bums’ out mood of the electorate in the 2014 Midterms. The working person isn’t feeling like that they are in an economic recovery, their view is that jobs are scare, the jobs available are not as good as the ones that they used to have and that their incomes are low. Where this leads I do not know, but it will be interesting.

 

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The core challenge of our times

I believe that the central challenge, politically, for our age can best be expressed in a single graph from the Economic Policy Institute.

Productivity vs wages

Quite simply, in real dollar terms, wages have been effectively flat for 30 years. This effect has been masked by easy credit, and a real estate bubble, but the underlying core condition is a grave one.

What cannot go on will not go on, House prices cannot rise forever and a consumer driven economy cannot survive if the consumers do not posses the excess money to go out and consume.

I propose no solutions. I know of no magic wand that will reunite these tends but something will happen. Whichever political party or ideology that finds and implements a solution to this will reap tremendous benefits, those that stick their heads in the sand are likely, in the long run, to get their asses kicked.

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The Red Election

I can’t take credit for the comparison between this week’s U.S. Mid-Term elections and the disastrous wedding for the Starks in ‘Game of Thrones’ I spotted it on twitter, but the analogy is quite apt.

The Democratic Party, with a coalition that is better suited to presidential elections, found itself thoroughly routed electorally from the contest as the Republican Party, its ranks filled with people willing to crawl across broken glass to cast a vote against Obama and his allies, swept the national legislature.

I would have written about this yesterday but I have taken ill and on Wednesday I was unable to craft sentences beyond ‘tree good fire bad.’

Now that the House and the Senate at firmly under Republican control, but short of veto proof levels, it shall be interesting to see which track the Conservative trains depart along.

When the Democrats held the senate the Speak of the House had no pressure keep back any of the more extreme conservative measures. Passing repeals of the ACA was easy when you knew it would die leaving the House, but with a friendly Senate things get more complicated,

The truth of the matter is killing the ACA would involve throwing millions of their insurance, and forcing the issue through a government shutdown. No simple repeal bill will be signed by the president. Any bill defunding it will not be signed by the president. You can only get those signature by attached it to ‘must pass’ legislation and then refusing to back down as the government shutters in crisis.

A smarter course would be to seek modifications to the ACA and then declare victory, but after selling the evils of the ACA to their base for six years it will be hard convincing said base that now it is acceptable policy no matter how much tinkering at the edges (medical device taxes etc) you have performed.

Of course the Republican now own the budget process. No longer can they pass the Ryan budget confident it will go nowhere and have the actual pain its cuts would cause remain theoretical. It’s true that the Democrats, in a fine display to invertebrate physiology, failed to pass a budget for 4 years, but last year when they did pass one, the Republicans refuse to conference on the matter. Now it is all theirs.

I do not know what is going to happen, but I do suspect it will be interesting.

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The Dog is Gaining on the Car.

The mid-term elections are only a few weeks away and it looks as thought life might get interesting. Nate Silver, last I looked, was giving the Republicans about a 65% chance of taking control of the Senate. Given the sweep of governorships the Republican won during 2010, a critical redistricting election cycle, the baked in advantage from rural districts outnumbering urban ones, and the Democratic party’s base for not showing up on off-year elections, it looks all but certain that the Republicans will retain control of the House. I see no signs of a wave election, for either party, and if forced to guess I would hold that in November the Republicans will have control of the Legislative branch of the United States Government. I am not sold that this is going to work out all that well for the Republican Party in the long term. If they want to move legislation from bill into law they will have to pass bills that the President can sign. Right now, with the Democrats controlling the Senate, the Republicans have been having a responsibility free ride in their legislative actions. They can pass repeals of the ACA all they like, knowing perfectly well that the bills will die in the Senate, with the majority of American unaware of their existence. Once they control the Senate the landscape changes, but the internal dynamics of the Republican Party does not. The Tea Party base will brook no concessions, no compromises with President Obama, but to pass bills into law they will have to compromise. The Hassert rule, which is really more of a guideline but they adhere to it like it was the 11th Commandment, means nothing gets out of the House unless the Tea Party faction is happy with it. You cannot make them happy with compromises and you can’t violate the rule, leaving the Republicans in a position where their options are to pass nothing, or pick fights with the President, fights that they will lose. Why will they lose those public relations fights? Because it is easier for the White House to stay on message then it is far the vast number of Representative and Senators to do that same. Because the President will offer compromises, just as he already has on Social Security (offending his base) and the Republicans will be forced to publicly reject them. Because it it the Republican’s philosophy that government is the problem and when government is locked up in a partisan fight people tend to assume that the Republicans like it that way. If this goes on for two years, the Republican nominee will have a headwind he or she will not need. They may very become the Dog that caught the car and asked, now what?

[Update: apparently Silver’s latest projections have the Republican Take-over down to 53%. Interesting]

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I think the climate is changing

And I mean the political climate.

Yesterday’s SCOTUS decision was a bad one in my opinion. It’s already having repercussions beyond the Republican obsession with the ACA. (Apparently at least one employer is already wanting to use the decision to discriminate against gays. This was totally predictable.) Now, I am not going to go into why the decision was wrong headed. I already did a post/essay on how I think you slice that gordian knot or individual religious freedom and public accommodation.

What I want to say is that this is really, I think, going to be bad news for the Republican Party when it comes to Presidential Elections.

Here is a graph I made of the female vote for all presidential elections since Reagan. (I selected 1980 because I think that is the point where a new republican started started to be born.)vote graf

Seriously, How is what happened at SCOTUS July 1 going to help that red line get any closer to that blue one? It won’t. Add the hispanic votes walking out the door and the youth vote giving the conservative party the finger and I think things look nasty for the Republicans in presidential elections.

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Hillary the Inevitable

In the 2008 primary season we were treated to a barrage of opinion pieces that proclaimed the inevitability of Hillary Clinton in her quest for the Democratic Nomination. Of course we have the advantageous position of historical high ground to see just how wrong all those predictions turned out to be.

Here it is 2014 and without the mid-term election yet resolved the opinion are flying fast and furious about 2016. Those opinions are as rooted in serious thought as the Fast and Furious films were dedicated to realistic physics. Naturally one of the most persistent memes is that Hillary is once again the inevitable Democratic Nominee for PotUS.

‘Inevitable’, you keep using that word; I do not think it means what you think it means. Hillary is no more ‘inevitable’ in her aspirations than any particular character is inevitably going to survive their encounter with George R.R. Martin’s bloody word processor.

It is certainly true that Hillary (It is no disrespect to refer her by her given name to prevent confusion with her equally famous spouse.) possesses tremendous advantages going into the fight; her name recognition, fund raising ability, a deep well of contact and connected supporters, all play an important part in a candidates odds of success, but other factors matter as well.

Hillary is a spectacularly poor campaigner. Like Mitt on the Republican side, she has actually won only a single electoral contest. She has displayed a gross inability to connect with voters, has a notoriously thin skin criticism, holds grudges with a tenacity unseen since Nixon, and has approached the nomination process, both in 2008 and 2016, as though it were a coronation.

None of this means she will not be the nominee. Just as Mitt was able to achieve victory in the Republican Primary field of 2012 she could pull it off, but I think it would take a similar dynamic.

Mitt faced a Party that did not trust him and was further to the right than what seemed his natural position. (Personally, I am not convinced we know what is Mitt’s true position. He was always the salesman and in a predominantly liberal state he played up the moderate and in a conservative primary he switched colors faster camera-equipped traffic light.) Hillary faces a party that is becoming more populist and more liberal while she herself has a difficult time selling that message. Mitt survived because there were plenty of not-Mitt candidates to split the vote, allowing the distrusted Romney to claim the Republican Iron Throne. Clinton would be best served by a pack of not-Hillary candidates who could split the more liberal voter of her party, allowing her a similar path to victory.

The rise of popular and decided liberal politicians such as Elizabeth Warren is a major threat to Hillary and only time will tell if she can survive and once again fail while being declared inevitable .

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I’ve been very busy

In addition to working 50 hours a week at my day job, I have been racing to complete my novel in progress. The final section has been handed over to my sweetie-wife for her proofing and when that is done I will be ready for beta readers.

To pass the time here is a picture of Obama on the iron throne as tweeted by the White House.

Obama Iron Throne

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A Brief Return to Politics

After a couple of film related posts, here’s a bit of politics for those who are inclined to hear my thoughts on the matter. This time I not interested in a particular  event or controversy , but rather an element of modern political life that had me feeling like an outsider.

Conflicted support.

It seems from most of people I have as friends on my Facebook page, or follow along on Twitter, or know in real life have a fairly easy time deciding who is right and who is wrong on any political issue. Naturally the right/wrong axis matches pretty closely to their side and the other side. I rarely feel so certain that one philosophy or strain of through has got it all worked out.

Worse yet for me I happen to have a number of positions that end up being mutually exclusive in our crude national political culture. For example I fully support marriage equality and I also support Second Amendment rights. It’s fairly difficult to find a person to vote of that fits both those bills. (yes I know about the Libertarians  but there are aspects of modern life that requires modern governance and you can have my FDA when you are my personal Guinea pig.) This of course is not my only internal political conflict, I do not believe in progressive taxation and I do support the ACA (‘Obamacare’ for the rest of you.)

I am forced in each election to put my beliefs through a grueling grinder to produce a hierarchy  and I am always for to sacrifice some to advance others. This doesn’t make me a terribly happy person with the votes I must cast, but it the reality of the universe. You cannot let the perfect be the enemy of the good, and some progress is better than a principled stand to yields nothing.

However when I look around it seems to me that my relatives and friends and associates hardly seem to suffer this sort of conflict at all. Left is the way! Right is the Way!

I know that there is n end in sight for me. I will forever be balancing the times, my priorities, and what can be achieved, but  I dream of a day with more people will be open to their own conflicts and less religious in the certitude.

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