Prairie Weather

Romney vs the numbers

Chris Cillizza of the Post has some interesting numbers when it comes to Romney getting the electoral college's vote.

It’s no secret that former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney has a narrow path to win the presidency this fall. Nowhere is that reality more apparent than when examining the electoral map on which Romney and President Obama will battle in November.

A detailed analysis of Romney’s various paths to the 270 electoral votes he would need to claim the presidency suggests he has a ceiling of somewhere right around 290 electoral votes.

While Romney’s team would absolutely take a 290-electoral-vote victory, that means he has only 20 electoral votes to play with — a paper-thin margin for error.

Romney’s relatively low electoral-vote ceiling isn’t unique to him. No Republican presidential nominee has received more than 300 electoral votes in more than two decades. ...WaPo

The states with the most electoral votes are all in Obama's pocket.  Except Texas.

The only major electoral-vote treasure trove that is reliably Republican at the moment is Texas, with its 38 electoral votes. So while George W. Bush won 30 states in 2000 and 31 states in 2004, he never came close to cresting the 300-electoral-vote mark in either race. ...WaPo

Texas is swinging back towards Democrats, however.  Not before the November election, and certainly not during a November election in which the Mexican-American population is being disenfranchised by the Republican legislature (ALEC). 

But that's not the whole story.  Texas' population has been growing rapidly over the past few years, fed by populations from other parts of the country.  Many of the newcomers turn out to lean left and centrist.  Counties where the few Democrats were -- seriously -- blocked from voting now have flourishing county Democratic party organizations, protests, and percentages.  The changes are slow.  But they're coming.

Stupid is as stupid does

You could say, let them eat cake!  That's what Romney is saying when, as quoted by Paul Krugman this morning, he says that kids who want to go to college but can't afford to should just choose a  college with "a little lower price."

Or, go "start a business."

Let’s start with some advice Mitt Romney gave to college students during an appearance last week. After denouncing President Obama’s “divisiveness,” the candidate told his audience, “Take a shot, go for it, take a risk, get the education, borrow money if you have to from your parents, start a business.”

The first thing you notice here is, of course, the Romney touch — the distinctive lack of empathy for those who weren’t born into affluent families, who can’t rely on the Bank of Mom and Dad to finance their ambitions. But the rest of the remark is just as bad in its own way.

I mean, “get the education”? And pay for it how? Tuition at public colleges and universities has soared, in part thanks to sharp reductions in state aid. Mr. Romney isn’t proposing anything that would fix that; he is, however, a strong supporter of the Ryan budget plan, which would drastically cut federal student aid, causing roughly a million students to lose their Pell grants.

So how, exactly, are young people from cash-strapped families supposed to “get the education”? Back in March Mr. Romney had the answer: Find the college “that has a little lower price where you can get a good education.” Good luck with that. But I guess it’s divisive to point out that Mr. Romney’s prescriptions are useless for Americans who weren’t born with his advantages. ...Paul Krugman

Part of Romney's (and the Republican party's) blindness leads them to deprioritize education.  They have their reasons.  For some it's simply about blindness; for others it's more about actually wanting a divided society in which a few are the users and the rest are the used.  This is very different from our earliest history as Americans, years in which the first thing settlers built in their new community was the school, years in which some our best and most enduring universities were created.

There is, however, a larger issue: even if students do manage, somehow, to “get the education,” which they do all too often by incurring a lot of debt, they’ll be graduating into an economy that doesn’t seem to want them. ...Krugman

The radical proposition that we shouldn't bother our heads about education or about jobs for graduates is, aside from anything else, about as stupid and unproductive -- anti-productive! -- as anything Romney and his party have put on the table.

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More from Krugman this morning at WBUR.

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Mitt Romney may also be stupid in the way he handles campaign money, opening himself up not just for criticism but for an unpleasant comparison with Obama.  Romney uses "bundlers" and secrecy.  Obama is more open.  The Romney campaign may be wrong, again, in its attitude towards money.

Every presidential nominee going back to 2000 has revealed the names of influential supporters known as "bundlers" because of the way they persuade others to give money to a candidate. Every nominee, that is, until Mitt Romney.

The Romney campaign says it complies with the law, period. And there's no law requiring disclosure of bundlers. It's just been the voluntary standard since presidential candidate George W. Bush started doing it in 1999.

Among those adhering to the voluntary standard — Mitt Romney in 2008. But not this time.

"The one danger is, that if Romney has a questionable bundler, you know, somebody with a troubled legal history," says Bill Allison, editorial director of the Sunlight Foundation, which advocates for transparency in government and politics.

Bundlers who carry political baggage have shown up along the campaign trail before — someone like Norman Hsu, a Ponzi scheme artist and onetime bundler for Hillary Clinton's 2008 campaign, or Jack Abramoff, the lobbyist who pleaded guilty to corruption charges after bundling for Bush in 2004.

"If that kind of story comes up, the question becomes about Romney is, 'Who are his other bundlers, and what is he hiding?'" says Allison.

And here's another reason to disclose. The public recognition can actually make the bundlers more enthusiastic and competitive.

The 2000 Bush campaign bragged about its "Pioneers" who each brought in $100,000 or more. And in 2008, candidate Barack Obama's organization promoted online bundling among small donors.

The Obama campaign this year has more than 500 "volunteer fundraisers," as it calls them. Some bring in a $500,000 or more. The campaign identifies them on its website. ...NPR

Not everyone likes the idea of openness -- most notably, according to NPR,  libertarians.  But it seems to work better politically.  And openness can give a candidate that competitive edge...

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Gotta be careful with empathy.  Americans are supposed to be wary of empathy.  Republicans are normal people while Democrats tend to be empathetic*. 

The more interested in politics a conservative is, the lower his (or her) level of empathy. Liberals move in the opposite direction: the more interested in politics they are, the more empathetic. Empathy, in case you’re wondering, is measured by responses to 28 statements in the “Davis Interpersonal Reactivity Index,” including “I often have tender, concerned feelings for people less fortunate than me,” “I sometimes find it difficult to see things from the ‘other guy’s’ point of view,” and “Sometimes I don’t feel very sorry for other people when they are having problems.” ...NYT

Romney is trying to seem more empathetic while not stirring up the fiends.  Obama is trying to be as empathetic as any normal, decent citizen while not, well, stirring up the same fiends, according to Thomas Edsall in the Times.

Romney has dropped his attacks on Obama’s alleged “entitlement society” and on administration policies that supposedly push the country toward “European socialism,” but he cannot win without addressing and engaging the convictions of a substantial conservative plurality in the electorate.

Obama, too, is walking a fine line as he seeks to firmly establish core support on the “empathetic” left while stressing the theme of  “hard work and responsibility” so that everyone else can hear him. Obama must try to avoid painting himself into the “bleeding heart” corner even as he struggles to deliver relief to the poor and the truly disadvantaged, who made up just under a quarter of all his voters in 2008. ...NYT

The word is really "empathic."  The new usage, "empathetic," is fatter, and fancier.  Many believe a bigger, fancier word is a more important, educated word. So we do that to words, a lot -- we force-feed them in order to make ourselves feel more important. 

On the other hand, maybe the insecure gun-toter doesn't like to be thought of as "pathetic" even with that "em."  Maybe it's the misuse of the word that makes the insecure rightwinger wary of empathy, not the act of feeling empathy.

Gee!  Maybe we could wake Republicans up to reality if we'd just stop calling them "psychopaths, " a word they just brush off.  Let's switch to "psychopathetics."  Worth a try.  Drew Westen, are you listening?

Greed without shame

This bit of Kodak hubris is repeated regularly across the corporate world when big businesses go into bankruptcy. 

U.S. Bankruptcy Court Judge Allan Gropper will hear arguments Monday about Kodak’s request to spend up to $13.5 million for an “employee continuity plan” to cover 319 workers . The company has said it already is losing people, with the bonuses aimed at staunching the outflow.

In the grand scheme of Kodak, which had revenue of $6 billion in 2011, $13.5 million is relatively small change. And bankruptcy laws limit what Kodak is able to do in terms of bonuses and incentives, even though those are often part of compensation packages for managers and executives in corporate America.

But the idea sticks in the craw of many current and former Kodakers.

“Let us not forget that these are the same individuals that have essentially driven this once great company into bankruptcy, as these were the decision makers at the time,” Greece retiree Raymond A. Gleichauf wrote Gropper in a letter dated April 9 in which he objected to the size of the proposed bonuses . “Perhaps the company and board of directors would want to wait until after they successfully emerge from bankruptcy to reward key individuals that have stayed and truly believed in the company?”...Rochester Democrat&Chronicle

The Justice Department is getting involved.

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The LA Times reports on how bad it was -- and is.

Less than a year before the 2008 collapse of Lehman Bros. plunged the global economy into a terrifying free fall, the Wall Street firm awarded nearly $700 million to 50 of its highest-paid employees, according to internal documents reviewed by The Times.

The documents, which were among the millions of pages submitted in Lehman's bankruptcy, show the list of top earners each were pledged $8 million to $51 million in cash, stock and other compensation. How much, if any, of the stock was cashed in before the bankruptcy wiped out its value couldn't be determined.

Still, the rich pay packages for so many people raised eyebrows even among compensation experts and provided fresh evidence of the money-driven Wall Street culture that was blamed for triggering the financial crisis.

"Many people are going to be stunned at how well some people were being paid," said Brian Foley, an executive compensation expert in White Plains, N.Y. "This wasn't a matter of five or six people being paid a lot." ...LATimes

The partisanship is not going away, even after the election

If our democracy is to regain its health and vitality, the culture and ideological center of the Republican Party must change. In the short run, without a massive (and unlikely) across-the-board rejection of the GOP at the polls, that will not happen. If anything, Washington’s ideological divide will probably grow after the 2012 elections. ...Norm Ornstein and Thomas Mann, WaPo

That's the scary prediction of two political analysts who have a history of getting it right.  They call what the Republicans have been doing "the strategic use of partisanship."  You can forget about democracy when strategy is given preference to the interests of the people.  Ornstein and Mann come up with a dandy example of the nuttiness of the right.

In early 2009, several of the eight Republican co-sponsors of a bipartisan health-care reform plan dropped their support; by early 2010, the others had turned on their own proposal so that there would be zero GOP backing for any bill that came within a mile of Obama’s reform initiative. As one co-sponsor, Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), told The Washington Post’s Ezra Klein: “I liked it because it was bipartisan. I wouldn’t have voted for it.” ...WaPo

We can laugh at the absurdity.  But the right isn't laughing.  It's dead serious, serious with an earnestness that crosses the border into a crazy inability to govern.  Ornstein and Mann doesn't go into the spending, but only obscene amounts of money -- virtually unlimited private funds to keep them in power, and absurd levels of government spending while in office -- have sustained the right since the Reagan years.

We have been studying Washington politics and Congress for more than 40 years, and never have we seen them this dysfunctional. In our past writings, we have criticized both parties when we believed it was warranted. Today, however, we have no choice but to acknowledge that the core of the problem lies with the Republican Party.

The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.

When one party moves this far from the mainstream, it makes it nearly impossible for the political system to deal constructively with the country’s challenges. ...WaPo

The headline of their opinion piece is "Let's just say it: The Republicans are the problem."  No, it's not that Democrats are never wrong, it's that the Republicans simply and deliberately stand in the way of reality.  They're set on dragging us along through their fantasy for as many years as they have the money to do it. 

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Another glimpse of what the Republicans have become comes from the Times editors, looking at Congressional races.  Claire McCaskill's efforts to keep her Senate seat, for example.

It is dangerous to challenge the funnel cloud of corporate and right-wing political advertising this year, but Senator Claire McCaskill, Democrat of Missouri, has decided to fight back. She is running commercials that talk directly about the ads trying to prevent her re-election.

“They’re not from around here, spending millions to attack and attack,” said one of her recent commercials, showing clips from the opposing ads that have become ubiquitous in her state. “But what they’re doing to Claire McCaskill is nothing compared to what their special-interest agenda will do to you.”

It will be an uphill fight. Republican interest groups are outspending Ms. McCaskill and other Missouri Democrats by a 7-to-1 ratio; Ms. McCaskill herself is being outspent by 3 to 1. Though she has raised nearly $10 million, the amount could be dwarfed by the unlimited money at the disposal of Republican-oriented groups.

Once again, as in 2010, Congressional races will be the elections most affected by unregulated slush-fund money. ...NYT

At a time when individuals voters, crushed by and just emerging from the effects of the financial debacle, are tapped out, dubious groups like "Crossroads GPS" step in with millions.  Time for the law -- for the IRS -- to get to work.

Crossroads GPS claims to be a tax-exempt social welfare group, so it does not have to disclose its big corporate donors. That lie is no less outrageous than it was in 2010, when these groups first started sheltering their political activity under a tax loophole. It is long past time for the Internal Revenue Service to begin investigating and prosecuting this clear violation of the law. ...NYT

Social welfare?

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Meanwhile, the Dems are, according to The Hill, "planning another trap" for Mitt Romney.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) will bring to the floor in coming weeks legislation to protect women from retaliation by employers if they inquire about salaries paid to male colleagues.

Republicans voted in unison to block the bill, the Paycheck Fairness Act, when it came to the floor in November of 2010.

Democrats say it will be difficult for GOP senators to back out of their opposition, especially because the U.S. Chamber of Commerce has staunchly opposed the legislation.

Mitt Romney will either have to split with Republicans and an important business group or take a position that could further erode his support among women. ...The Hill

The average Republican voter may no longer care much about women or "values" or democracy or equality. Or fairness.

Birthers again

... Religious right leader Tony Perkins, head of the Family Research Council, flirted with Birtherism this week, calling questions about President Obama's birthplace "legitimate." Perkins remains an influential figure in Republican politics. ...Maddow Blog

A pit-stop this morning at the usual convenience store provided more fuel for the birther burn.  Here, in west central Texas, we celebrate diversity and HQ for diversity in this area is my Shell (or is it Valero? Texaco?) store.  The new owner is from Pakistan.  One of the counter guys is from Guam.  Another -- new as of yesterday -- told me this morning that he's Hawaiian. 

"Hawaii!  What brought you to Texas?"

"Family," he responded.  "I came over to America to visit family."

Over to America?  Huh?  And all this time I thought Hawaii was as American as, oh, George Clooney or Barack Obama.

Dumping Ayn

You've heard  that Paul Ryan, that upside-down, ambitious Congressional Republican, is moving briskly away from his old love -- that old fake -- Ayn Rand.  Paul Krugman notes the end of this  love affair this morning in his blog with a great quote from Kung Fu Monkey and perhaps another source.  Wherever it originated, it's worth several smiley faces and a superior, knowing chuckle.

There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.