Prairie Weather

Are both major political parties on their last legs?

The Week has a round-up of the trouble we've faced and the news that it's just beginning.  Most startling?  Well, we may have lost our political parties to big money already. 

Here's how it's done.

Campaign finance reform once promised the end of big money influence in politics. The McCain-Feingold campaign finance law put an end to “soft money,” the large donations made to political parties by interest groups which could then be doled out to individual candidates. But a series of court decisions weakened the law and gave rise to “Super PACs” which now control the big money instead of the political parties. These independent organizations typically have much narrower agendas than the national parties.  ...TheWeek

If I read that right, money cabals no longer need to court the party of their choice with serial contributions.  They're setting up different systems to make sure their agenda is adopted.  Such as?  Well, ALEC.  The US Chamber of Commerce.  Wall Street, for god's sake.  And let us not forget:  the media, however fragmented it seems.

For decades Americans received their news from three evening newscasts. Each of the television networks competed for the biggest viewing audience across the entire country. The strategy required newscasts to at least try to be politically neutral to appeal to the most people. This changed with the advent of cable television and then accelerated as the Internet fragmented the news audience into even more narrow audiences. Being neutral is now considered a losing strategy for building a news audience on the Internet. ...TheWeek

Don't think you're immune.  We all buy in. We are all "microtargeted." Our smart phones, our tablets, our laptops all tie us to The System, sometimes with the help of harvesters like NSA, Google, Microsoft...

Though we could stop being microtargets...

Which dumb party do you belong to?

"Only 60 percent of American adults believe in evolution, regardless of political affiliation," Daily Intel reports after spotting the latest update on ignerntz at Pew Research. 

Really.  It's almost as bad in the Democratic party as in the Party of Ignerntz over on the right.  The numbers have improved just a tiny bit since the last report.

TAO -- Tailored Access to your life

According to the Spiegel report, TAO staff are based in San Antonio, Texas, at a former Sony computer chip factory, not far from another NSA team housed alongside ordinary military personnel at Lackland Air Force Base. The magazine described TAO as the equivalent of "digital plumbers", called in to break through anti-spying "blockages". The team totalled 60 specialists in 2008, the magazine said, but is expected to grow to 270 by 2015. ...Guardian

Tailored Access Operations is just the latest secret operation in NSA we're learning about from Snowden/Poitras via Der Spiegel.

Details of how the division, known as Tailored Access Operations (TAO), steals data and inserts invisible "back door" spying devices into computer systems were published by the German magazine Der Spiegel.

The magazine portrayed TAO as an elite team of hackers specialising in gaining undetected access to intelligence targets that have proved the toughest to penetrate through other spying techniques, and described its overall mission as "getting the ungettable". The report quoted an official saying that the unit's operations have obtained "some of the most significant intelligence our country has ever seen". ...Guardian

There has been, of course, a reaction from our government -- the usual:  "Move on, please.  We're just doing our job. We're keeping you safe." 

They're doing it down here, in San Antonio, Texas, a formerly pretty, civilized city and now a nightmare of sprawl, traffic, crime, military facilities, more crime, colleges, and several interstates up on stilts with traffic careening off ramps into narrow, bumpy, one way streets below. 

The confused, amoral, self-limiting NSA brain, working in an old Sony factory, is probably a mirror image of the confusion that is "San'tonio."  Lots of potential but in a mess.

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By the way, Texas is taking a double hit. Not just the spies in the old Sony building, but spies overhead.

The Federal Aviation Administration announced six states on Monday that will develop test sites for drones, a critical next step for the march of the unmanned aircraft into U.S. skies.

Alaska, Nevada, New York, North Dakota, Texas and Virginia will host the research sites, the agency said. ...CBSNews

Is masochism so, so over?

It wasn't just about two economic ideologues falling in plain  sight.  This blogger concluded  early on that America's sicko love affair with budget cutting -- an absurd reaction to a financial crash -- was a step just short of self-immolation.  Why else would we so readily accept the Republicans' "fiscal cliffs"? 

Well, because we'd been naughty spenders in our personal lives, living a perilous plastic life.  We deserved punishment.  Political moves towards cutting spending on securing the lives of  America's middle and working classes were deserved.  The data were there to prove it.

Then, as Paul Krugman reminds us today, things began to change.  The data used by Congressional Republicans to support policies of fiscal austerity was found to be wrong. Two well-known economists had published data supporting the right's convictions. Republicans relied heavily on this "proof" that they were right. 

Then the debacle:  a student rechecked Professsors Reinhart and Rogoff's numbers and... uh-oh...

For those who missed it or have forgotten, for several years fiscal scolds in both Europe and the United States leaned heavily on a paper by two highly-respected economists, Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff, suggesting that government debt has severe negative effects on growth when it exceeds 90 percent of G.D.P. From the beginning, many economists expressed skepticism about this claim. In particular, it seemed immediately obvious that slow growth often causes high debt, not the other way around — as has surely been the case, for example, in both Japan and Italy. But in political circles the 90 percent claim nonetheless became gospel.

Then Thomas Herndon, a graduate student at the University of Massachusetts, reworked the data, and found that the apparent cliff at 90 percent disappeared once you corrected a minor error and added a few more data points. ...Krugman,NYT

That left a stunned group of Republicans (not to mention Reinhart and Rogoff) up the creek without a paddle. 

Krugman puts it better:

Now, it’s not as if fiscal scolds really arrived at their position based on statistical evidence. As the old saying goes, they used Reinhart-Rogoff the way a drunk uses a lamppost — for support, not illumination. Still, they suddenly lost that support, and with it the ability to pretend that economic necessity justified their ideological agenda.   ...Krugman,NYT

Either way, it's amazing how quickly austerity was so, so over!  Many of us dusted off our credit cards, decided it was time to replace the ageing computer.  Or the car.  But while we were busy learning Windows 8 a relentless bunch of tea partyers continued to target the unemployed in another burst of  "starvation for you, reelection for us!" 

Oh sure, we reasonably comfortable Americans were willing to punish ourselves just a little, but we've been persuaded by the right that it's okay to continue to punish the most exposed and the most damaged among us.  Or, as Krugman reminds us, "fiscal scolds may have lost control of the conversation, but that we’re still doing terrible things like cutting off benefits to the long-term unemployed."  But, on the brighter side, he writes, "While policy remains terrible, we’re finally starting to talk about real issues like inequality, not a fake fiscal crisis. And that has to be a move in the right direction."

Indeed.  And we need to start with the lavish amounts of money invested by some of the very wealthiest Americans in sustaining inequality as -- somehow -- a better policy than widespread and shared prosperity.

I'm sorry.  I shouldn't use the word "share."  It upsets so many of us...

Vigilantes wearing black hats and flag pins

Inflation didn’t take off; bond vigilantes didn’t turn America (or any nation that borrows in its own currency) into Greece, Greece I tell you. ...Krugman,blog

As Paul Krugman points out, we didn't become Greece despite dire warnings coming from the right.  But have they said anything like, "Oops, we were wrong"?  No way.  They went into the argument wrong, mouthed off, and have come out soiled.

...Their excuses shifted. Through 2011 and even through 2012, it was still mainly “just you wait!” — inflation was coming any day now, or maybe it was already here but sinister statisticians were faking the numbers. In 2013, however, it became “I never said that!” — declarations that they only said that inflation was a risk, not that it would necessarily happen, so the failure of inflation to materialize was no big deal.

This is, I’d argue, a significant development, because it gives us a new window into the nature of the disagreement. As late as last year you could view this as a legitimate contest between rival models. But we’ve now seen that one side of the debate not only refuses to take evidence into account, but tries to dodge personal responsibility for getting it wrong. This has gone from a test of ideas to a test of character, and a lot of people failed. ...Krugman,blog

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Oh, and have you seen how the auto industry hasn't just climbed out  of the hole?  No, it's healthier than it had been for years thanks to the bail-out. Bush urged it; Obama pulled it off.   It saved us an entire industry.  Bail-out provoked the backlash from palinistas which has pretty much dominated our politics since. 

Surprise! Surge in Obamacare applications!

This comes from The Hill.

More than 1.1 million people enrolled in ObamaCare before a December 24 deadline for consumers seeking healthcare plans that begin Jan. 1, the Obama administration said early Sunday.

Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) Administrator Marilyn Tavenner said in a blog post that more than 975,000 people enrolled in a qualified health plan through the federal marketplace in December, following a rocky rollout in October.

Tavenner called the late surge “welcome.”

“Our HealthCare.gov enrollment nearly doubled in the days before the January 1 coverage deadline compared to the first few weeks of the month,” she said. “December enrollment so far is over 7 times that of October and November. In part, this was because we met our marks on improving HealthCare.gov: the site supported 83,000 concurrent users on December 23rd alone.”

Tavenner said administration officials expect to see enrollment ramp up through the six-month open enrollment period, “much like other historic implementation efforts we’ve seen in Massachusetts and Medicare Part D.”

The administration said Friday that the HealthCare.gov website adequately handled a massive surge of Internet traffic ahead of last Tuesday's deadline.

So we may be seeing less of this... from Fox Snooze.

As the campaign season for the 2014 midterm elections approaches, conservative activists are targeting vulnerable Democrats over their support for ObamaCare, signaling that the president's signature health care law will play a key role in yet another election cycle.