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Optimism about Obama's chances

Two New York Times reporters have scoured the landscape and find some hopeful signs for President Obama's reelection in 2012.  Let's leave aside for a while the polls which consistently show the Republicans in trouble, in spite of cable coverage and declarations of confidence.  No one likes Congress these days, but get into the weeds and find that in pretty much every case it's Republican members of Congress for whom the lowest approval ratings are reserved.

Some interesting excerpts from Times reporters Calmes' and Landler's survey:

While Mr. Obama’s approval ratings have slid across the board as unemployment remains high, what buoys Democrats are the changing demographics of formerly Republican states like Colorado, where Democrats won a close Senate race in 2010, as well as Virginia and North Carolina.

With growing cities and suburbs, they are populated by increasing numbers of educated and higher-income independents, young voters, Hispanics and African-Americans, many of them alienated by Republicans’ Tea Party agenda.
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“The country is changing. In every election cycle, every year, every day, this country becomes more ethnically diverse. And that has an impact on the kind of coalition that you need to put together to win.” He added, “The truth is, Obama needs fewer white voters in 2012 than he did in 2008.” [That's from Terry Nelson, a Republican campaign adviser.]
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Except for Indiana, a long shot, Obama advisers say the president will be favored or competitive everywhere he won before, including Ohio. But polls underscore how tough a task he will have with independents in the industrial belt ...
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The latest nationwide New York Times/CBS News poll this month showed that 51 percent of independents with household incomes below $50,000 disapproved of Mr. Obama’s performance, as did 57 percent of those with incomes of $50,000 to $100,000. But independents with household incomes above $100,000 approved of his job performance by 50 percent to 43 percent.

Health care and the Supreme Court

Garrett Epps is a journalist and legal scholar who teaches Constitutional law.  He has some interesting thoughts about how the health care act will do now that it's in the clutches of a self-centered and asocial Supreme Court.

... I'm sure most of the justices are mystified by the criticism -- most cogently written by Dahlia Lithwick and Lisa T. McElroy -- of its still unexplained three-and-a-half-hour radio silence on the evening of Troy Davis's execution. In the Court's hermetically sealed world, the actual people affected by its decisions aren't just unimportant, they are basically nonexistent. Less than four hours is practically neutrino speed in Court terms.

I wouldn't be surprised if the health care challenge looks different to the justices than to outsiders as well. Media figures and barroom authorities alike view it through the lens of the 2012 election. Rejection of the "individual mandate," they reason, would be a sharp, and perhaps fatal, blow to the shaky prospects of a second Obama term. Since five of the nine clearly despise Obama, the assumption runs, these five will rush to deliver the coup de grace.

But to justices, presidents come and go; the Court remains, and so does the law it makes.  The smartest justices -- such as Chief Justice Roberts -- often think two or three cases ahead, to what direction they want the law to take over decades. It may be less clear to them that stomping Obama on this issue is the wiser course. ...

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If I could be fly on the wall during the discussions of this case, the justice I'd most like to hear from is Elena Kagan.  She isn't as far away from "actual people" as other justices.  She is, in that and in other ways, more like John Roberts -- her opposite politically -- than like any other of her colleagues.  That's according to Robert Barnes who wrote about her the other day in a WaPopiece marking her first year on the Court.

... In the campaign finance dissent, she said her colleagues on the other side thought that they had found a smoking gun. “But the only smoke here is the majority’s, and it is the kind that goes with mirrors,” Kagan wrote.

When her interviewer at Aspen read that line, the audience laughed and applauded. Kagan said: “You know, listening to that, I’m not sure I would have written it that way again.”

The majority view in that case was written by Roberts. And when Kagan chose to summarize her dissent from the bench — a rare move even rarer for a rookie — their point-by-point arguments resembled the opening round between two people identified early in their careers for their potential.

Roberts and Kagan are something of a pair: ideological opposites who possess similar Ivy League educations and intellects; potential coalition builders on a splintered court and writers who seem to strive to explain their jurisprudence to those beyond the walls of the Supreme Court. ...

Put that together with her reputation for being rational and persuasive.  In an interview at the Aspen Institute a little while back, Kagan had this to say about having been Solicitor General first, before joining the Court.

“You’re not deciding the cases but you’re focused all the time on the Supreme Court,” she said at the Aspen Institute gathering. “Your job is to try to figure out how to persuade nine Supreme Court justices to take a particular position. And now my job is to figure out how to persuade eight.”

Reading others' descriptions of Kagan, I get the feeling that if anyone can persuade 'em, she can.

OMG

James Fallows found this. 

We have maybe a few minutes to see it before the Chinese realize their mistake:  They have posted videos at their CCTV website of their latest satellite being launched.  The launch music is.... ta da!... "America The Beautiful."

Give it a try.  You may catch it.

But not as low as Congressional Republicans

Let's face it.  There isn't an entity in America, short of cockroaches and listeria, that's less popular than Congressional Republicans.  Get up into the C+ to D- range, and there's greater diversity among the unpopular people.  The Red Sox, broccoli, and clamshell packaging group of unpopular things.  That's where the tea party and Obama find themselves, though the tea party is moving downward towards cockroaches and Obama is moving up towards decent coffee that's not hot enough.

For the first time, a majority of Americans--53 percent--have an unfavorable view of the Tea Party, just slightly edging past the president's disapproval of 52 percent, according to a recent CNN poll. Disapproval of the barely two-year-old right-wing political movement has finally caught up to Obama's. ...Atlantic

Rick Perry's health care

The quality of healthcare in Texas, even in some rural areas, is nothing to complain about.  One of the downsides, and this is happening in healthcare across America, is the dehumanization of health care.  Dehumanization and industrialization of the patient-doctor relationship.

In Texas, though, it's about the availability of health care.  Here, dehumanization is most notable in the territory where those without insurance and the money to buy either insurance or pay for care directly reside.  Rick Perry has made their plight considerably worse and, in spite of the efforts of his political backers, he can't cover this up.  Here's the reality:

Texas Medicaid is austere — many low-income Texans who might qualify for public insurance in other states do not qualify in Texas.

Just 50 percent of Texans get insurance through their employers, 10 percentage points below the national average. And though health insurance premiums in Texas are slightly below the national average, they have nearly doubled in the last decade. Despite suggestions that Texas’ illegal immigrants are to blame for the sky-high rate of the uninsured, they make up just one-sixth of the total, according to an analysis by the left-leaning Center for Public Policy Priorities, or C.P.P.P.

...“Year after year, session after session, they’ve looked at health care not as an investment in our community but as something they resent doing, like a social welfare item,” said Kim Ross, a health policy consultant based in Austin.

According to Mr. Perry’s staff, Texas provides an adequate safety net to those “truly in need.” But in 2003, in the face of a huge budget shortfall, he supported the Legislature’s decision to slash the state’s Children’s Health Insurance Program, eliminating coverage for more than 200,000 children, or 40 percent of those enrolled. (It took seven years to restore CHIP enrollment to its pre-2003 level.)

In another effort to cut costs that year, the state authorized privatizing the eligibility and enrollment systems for CHIP, Medicaid and food stamps, leading to mistaken rejections and much-delayed services. The projected savings never materialized, and the state was forced to cancel the contract. ...NYT

Notably, Governor Perry tried to get the federal government to pay to insure "two million working-poor Texans'" health costs.  His scam was turned down by the Bush administration.  Next came the "Healthy Texas" initiative, a great program expanding access to health insurance.  But it touches at most a quarter of the people needing help and doesn't change the plight of the working poor in this state.

Gilt

The Gilded Age goes on -- just not in most Americans' households.  Eric Dash reports on getting fired -- not from your job down here with the rest of us but when they toss you as CEO because you were incompetent. 

In the world of the corporate kings, being fired for incompetence can get you "$13.2 million in cash and stock severance, in addition to a sign-on package worth about $10 million."  That stands in sharp contrast to, say, a schoolteacher -- a  first-rate teacher, beloved of students -- who gets laid off and now stands in line for unemployment benefits -- if they're still available.

That 13 + 10 million was given a couple of weeks ago to Leo Apotheker of Hewlett-Packard, by the way. Apotheker "was shown the door after a tumultuous 11-month run atop Hewlett-Packard."  Way to go!  Robert Kelly at BoNY was treated nicely, too, as was Yahoo's Bartz a few days later.

At the end of August, Robert P. Kelly was handed severance worth $17.2 million in cash and stock when he was ousted as chief executive of Bank of New York Mellon after clashing with board members and senior managers. A few days later, Carol A. Bartz took home nearly $10 million from Yahoo after being fired from the troubled search giant.

Gee, I hope you're feeling some empathy for these poor souls, even though David Brooks, also writing in the New York Times, tells us "empathy is a sideshow."  From there he gets into a muddle about values and action.

Think of anybody you admire. They probably have some talent for fellow-feeling, but it is overshadowed by their sense of obligation to some religious, military, social or philosophic code. They would feel a sense of shame or guilt if they didn’t live up to the code. The code tells them when they deserve public admiration or dishonor. The code helps them evaluate other people’s feelings, not just share them. The code tells them that an adulterer or a drug dealer may feel ecstatic, but the proper response is still contempt.

The code isn’t just a set of rules. It’s a source of identity. It’s pursued with joy. It arouses the strongest emotions and attachments. Empathy is a sideshow. 

"Me want cookie!"

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Plenty of people challenged the authenticity of market trader, Alessio Rastani, who went on the BBC the other day and talked about his plans to make a bunch of bucks off the coming "double dip."  His unabashed amorality and narcissism were too shocking for some to take seriously.  But, as a writer in the Guardian comments today, he's for real, not another member of the "Yes Men."

Rastani is small potatoes, but he's a real trader. And he said nothing that would suggest otherwise; he simply described what he does, more honestly than a true insider would, but quite accurately. "Every night I dream of another recession," Rastani said, and explained that it's possible to make huge money from a big crisis even when millions of others lose their life savings, and worse. ...

...Unlike Rastani, true industry insiders like Paulson, Geithner et al remain silent about the way their system works, couching it all in technical jargon and full-on deceit. They've been doing it for decades, and, since Ronald Reagan's day, with increasing consistency.

When we look at the protesters on Wall Street (the ones who were brutalized by the police), we need to realize that they are not alone.  Right across Europe and at the borders of Central Asia, crowds are "amassing" in similar protests.