The GOP Plan Is Backfiring

There's new evidence from the Associated Press today that GOP efforts to suppress the black vote backfired in 2012 and resulted in record turnout instead.

America’s blacks voted at a higher rate than other minority groups in 2012 and by most measures surpassed the white turnout for the first time, reflecting a deeply polarized presidential election in which blacks strongly supported Barack Obama while many whites stayed home.

Had people voted last November at the same rates they did in 2004, when black turnout was below its current historic levels, Republican Mitt Romney would have won narrowly, according to an analysis conducted for The Associated Press.

Census data and exit polling show that whites and blacks will remain the two largest racial groups of eligible voters for the next decade. Last year’s heavy black turnout came despite concerns about the effect of new voter-identification laws on minority voting, outweighed by the desire to re-elect the first black president.

That's why you're seeing Republicans scramble to kill early voting and institute increasingly strict voter ID hoops for voters to jump through.  When African-Americans vote, things change.

Romney would have erased Obama’s nearly 5 million-vote victory margin and narrowly won the popular vote if voters had turned out as they did in 2004, according to Frey’s analysis. Then, white turnout was slightly higher and black voting lower.

More significantly, the battleground states of Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Florida and Colorado would have tipped in favor of Romney, handing him the presidency if the outcome of other states remained the same.

Romney would have won all three of the traditional big three battleground states (OH, FL, PA) without the black vote (plus VA and CO).  4 of those 5 states, including the big three, are currently under Republican control.  No wonder the GOP is furiously trying to make voting more difficult.

What will happen in 2014 and 2016?  Time will tell.

StupidiNews!

• President Obama is expected today to announce the choice of Charlotte Mayor Anthony Foxx as Transportation Secretary nominee.
• Two Italian police officers were shot and wounded by a gunman near the swearing-in ceremony for the country's new government.
• Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer has suffered a broken shoulder in a bike accident over the weekend, he's expected to make a full recovery.
• With as much as $32 trillion in offshore accounts across the world, revenue-starved countries from the US to Russia are looking to crack down on wealthy tax cheats.
• The Pirate Party has won 5% of the vote and 3 seats in Iceland's parliament over the weekend, making it the most successful showing for the party worldwide.

Last Call: Stark Raving Sane

WIN THE MORNING is moving to a new phase of the austerity battle:  identifying the few Dems that think making 90% of America suffer at the hands of the 1% is a bad idea and publicly shaming them as the new lunatic "Tea Party" fringe of the Donks.

The two parties are miles apart on how to cut the deficit and national debt: Republicans want to slash spending even more. Democrats want to raise revenue.

And then there are the other Democrats — the ones who reject the entire premise of the current high-stakes fiscal fight. There’s no short-term deficit problem, they say, and there isn’t even an urgent debt crisis that requires immediate attention. This group could make it even harder for President Barack Obama to strike a grand bargain because they increasingly see no immediate need for either new spending cuts or significantly more revenue, both of which they say could further slow the economy.

These Democrats and their intellectual allies once occupied the political fringes, pushed aside by more moderate members who supported both immediate spending cuts and long-term entitlement reforms along with higher taxes.

Note the aspersions cast here.  There's a reason for that.

This intellectual shift away from the need for more immediate deficit reduction is likely to make this summer’s debt ceiling fight even tougher. Democrats are now increasingly likely to revolt against GOP demands, which could include a dollar of spending cuts for each dollar increase in the nation’s borrowing limit.

And it makes execution of a “grand bargain” on debt reduction — a pillar of Obama’s agenda and the subject of renewed talks between the White House and GOP senators — appear all but impossible. Because after all, if the deficit is already on the decline as a percentage of the economy and the debt is likely to remain stable for a decade, why would Democrats agree to fresh cuts to cherished social programs such as Social Security and Medicare, including the president’s proposal to reduce cost of living increases by using a different measure of inflation?

The second time in the article the notion of a Grand Bargain is shot down as "impossible" because Dems are likely to "revolt".  Such subtle language usually reserved for intractable cement-heads like Bachmann or Gohmert, now applied to Chris Van Hollen and the Dems.

If I didn't know any better, I'd say Politico was setting up the Democrats to be blamed for whatever debt crisis the Republicans will manufacture in the next few weeks.

Shocking, I know.

StupidiVid: Knocked 'Em Dead

President Obama at last night's White House Correspondents Dinner was a thing of beauty.




Enjoy. I certainly did.

What The Hell Happened To Yggy?

Pretty sure this is a sign that Matt Yglesias has been hanging out with beltway Cato Institute types just a bit too long.

It's very plausible that one reason American workplaces have gotten safer over the decades is that we now tend to outsource a lot of factory-explosion-risk to places like Bangladesh where 87 people just died in a building collapse.* This kind of consideration leads Erik Loomis to the conclusion that we need a unified global standard for safety, by which he does not mean that Bangladeshi levels of workplace safety should be implemented in the United States.

I think that's wrong. Bangladesh may or may not need tougher workplace safety rules, but it's entirely appropriate for Bangladesh to have different—and, indeed, lower—workplace safety standards than the United States.

OK, sign number one you've been a Beltway econ blogger for too long is that you start assigning cost/benefit analysis to the lives of people in third world sweatshops.

Sign number two is choosing to defend the above post.

Here's what I did. I read a guy who pivoted from the tragedy to a call for the U.S. government or U.S. consumers to try to impose U.S. safety standards on all U.S.-supplying factories around the world. I did not have detailed information about the situation in Bangladesh, but I did—and continue to—have good reason to believe that this call was mistaken. So I wrote a post trying to outline why I think it's appropriate for rich countries to have more stringent standards than poor ones, and I absolutely stand by that conclusion.

But at a certain point as a writer, if you feel like everyone's misreading you, you have to consider the possibility that you've miswritten (thanks to Kendall Clark for making the point). I wanted to write about something I know about (the sound basis for globally differentiated regulatory regimes), and people wanted to read about the news (a scandalous breakdown of Bangladeshi law and basic concepts of informed consent), and mixing them up has done no good.

See, no.  As Lindsey Beyerstein points out, when Bangladesh tried to improve sweatshop conditions, it was US companies that killed the idea.

A group of Bangladeshi and international trade unionists put forward a bold plan to make the garment industry in Bangladesh safer. A surcharge of 10 cents per garment over 5 years would raise $600 million a year, enough to radically transform the infrastructure of the garment industry in Bangladesh. Walmart and the Gap rejected the proposal in 2011.

The Bangladeshi government is unlikely to fundamentally transform the garment industry on its own. Many members of parliament own factories themselves. Whatever the self interests of the elites, Yglesias is right that Bangladesh is a very poor country with many pressing problems. Massive public investments in policing the garment industry may not be a high priority.

The cost of retrofitting the garment industry must be born by the Western firms that flock to Bangladesh for the cheap labor and favorable trade policies. If safety investments were made across the board, then no company could derive a competitive advantage by scrimping on safety. The garments are being made for export, so expense will be passed on to the Western consumers, not Bangladeshis.

The greater point is US corporations are pocketing the difference.  Those profits come at a cost, in this case 300+ lives at last count.  Perhaps we should be talking about how complicit Walmart and the Gap are in these deaths, rather than grousing about globally differentiated regulatory regimes.

Just an idea.  My second piece of advice Matt is take a vacation outside DC.

Winning Rand Paul's Morning

Just a general hint, when a political website gives you a story about how the political perception of a political figure is being changed, politics is being played.

Almost from the moment Rand Paul was elected to the U.S. Senate, a team of advisers has been working over time to distance him from his father’s brand of unconventional politics — both in style and substance.

And they may be succeeding. GOP strategists say the junior senator from Kentucky has come a long way in shedding the eccentric label that dogged Ron Paul’s presidential efforts. Just last week, the younger man was dubbed one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people.

Rand Paul is different from Ron Paul.  More specifically, Rand Paul is a much better liar than his father, he's much more convincing, and he's better at prevaricating and hiding his loathing for Those People.  Paul the elder simply isn't very media savvy.  He can't help but come across as a lunatic because he is one.

But Rand is different in one key way:  he's learned how to disguise the philosophy he's literally named after by embracing the Tea Party as cover.  It's a good match, and Rand uses it well.  So it's no surprise then that Politico is writing a piece where conservative Republican pundits say Rand Paul isn't like his dad.  It's a smokescreen that benefits both groups heading into the austerity era of America.

Rand has tried to maintain this delicate balance by latching onto hot issues at strategic times — like drones, immigration and gun control — that at once thrust him onto the national stage and also appeal to libertarians. “He’s either remarkably lucky or he instinctively knows how to effectively drive a media story,” said Brian Jones, a Republican political and communications strategist.

I'm going to go with the latter.  Rand Paul is far more dangerous than Ron ever will be.  Just keep in mind beneath all the whitewashing is the same deeply mean philosophy of "I've got mine, screw you."

He's perfect for the "new" GOP, isn't he?  He's nothing more than the newest austerity salesman.

StupidiNews, Weekend Edition!

• NYPD officials say a piece of the landing gear from one of the hijacked 9/11 planes was found wedged between two buildings this week.
• A Colorado State Appeals Court ruled that employers can still fire employees for testing positive for marijuana use despite the state law legalizing its use.
• The Senate has delayed a final vote on legislation to force internet companies to collect state sales tax until May.
• Several arrests have been made in connection to the factory in Bangladesh that collapsed, killing more than 300 people.
• Google chairman Eric Schmidt admits that the Google Glass will require new rules of ethics and conduct to keep from being "inappropriate."

Last Call

What Ezra Klein thinks happened on sequestration:

In effect, what Democrats said Friday was that in any case where the political pain caused by sequestration becomes unbearable, they will agree to cancel that particular piece of the bill while leaving the rest of the law untouched. The result is that sequestration is no longer particularly politically threatening, but it’s even more unbalanced: Cuts to programs used by the politically powerful will be addressed, but cuts to programs that affects the politically powerless will persist. It’s worth saying this clearly: The pain of sequestration will be concentrated on those who lack political power.

What actually happened, via Steve M:

Democrats didn't lose the sequester fight today. Democrats have spent the last few decades losing the sequester fight. They lost it long before it even began, because they've done absolutely no pushback against the notion that government budgets are riddled with colossal amounts of waste, the elimination of which is all we need to have balanced budgets and low taxes and a happy dance around the maypole to celebrate our widespread abundance.

Democrats have defended a few programs fairly vigorously at times -- Medicare, Social Security, public broadcasting -- and they've gotten Joe and Jane to accept the notion that the rich are undertaxed. But Democrats have let the "waste, fraud, and abuse" narrative become unquestioned gospel in the heartland. And so the public went into this sequester moment assuming that a few minor adjustments could get all the good stuff paid for.

Republicans understood that. Democrats didn't. So Democrats lost this fight before it began.

I'll go even further.

Please note that in the Senate, that not a single one of the supposed bastions of liberal purity who are far more progressive than President Obama bothered to lift a finger to stop the unanimous consent motion to agree to the FAA deal.  Not Bernie Sanders.  Not Elizabeth Warren.  Not Al Franken.  Not a single effing one of them showed even token resistance to this when they were given a chance to do so.  When one voice saying stop would have least registered the disappointment of the American people, "those who lack political power" as Ezra put it, the Democrats in the Senate did nothing.

Barack Obama did not pass the FAA measure in the Senate by unanimous consent.  Senate Democrats did.  They handed the President this crock of shit and said "You deal with this.  We abdicate any responsibility for it."

Keep that in mind.

If It Weren't For All You Damn Parasites...

...why, handsomely paid business pundits like FOX's Steve Tobak wouldn't be so upset.  You were never supposed to benefit from the easy credit subprime bubble that made the one percent even wealthier, you're supposed to eat your Austerity Sandwich and like it.

Want to know why the gap between the haves and the have-nots keeps growing? Because the haves live within their means. They don’t waste their hard-earned money on all the crap that Americans spend billions, maybe even trillions, on each year.

American consumers seem to have an almost insatiable appetite for just about any type of useless garbage that anyone decides to make in China for a few bucks and sell here for a few hundred. Which is probably why nobody has any savings and everyone complains they don’t have enough money to live on.

Actually, the problem is much worse than that. The all-consuming consumer is like a lifestyle choice that’s quickly becoming the norm. What’s it all for? Honestly, I really don’t know. All I do know is that it wastes far more than our money. It wastes our time. It wastes our lives. And it doesn’t make us happy. It makes us miserable.  

To recap, the economy built on buying useless consumer crap is now your fault, consumers.  When the one percenters buy cars and pet toys and smartphones, that's the economy.  When your ass buys it, it's waste and making you miserable.

Tobak then goes on to rage for another 1500 words at Costco, Whole Foods, and basketball courts that "nobody plays on", and of course ends with saying that really, if all you brokeass mofos would just embrace the fact that you're supposed to be poor like GOP Jesus intended you to be, while guys like Tobak continue to shill for the obscenely rich folks buying up Congress to have them continue to get rid of police, schools, firefighters, environmental protections and the oversight on exploding fertilizer plants, you'd be content with the crumbs that fall to the floor and you'd generally be much happier!

Here’s the thing. Life is for living, not owning or buying. Just ask any legitimate Buddhist monk and he’ll tell you: the less you have, the happier you’ll be. The simple things make you happy. Complicated things make you miserable. No kidding.

Says the former Silicon Valley exec.  Considering Americans have less than ever before, we should be thrilled, right?

The Immigrant Song (And Dance)

Sick of Sen. Marco Rubio getting all the attention, House Republicans have decided that it's time to get started in killing immigration reform by getting the ball rolling on a piecemeal approach that will make a planned comprehensive Senate bill nearly impossible.

Leaders of the House Judiciary Committee announced Thursday they would begin introducing a series of narrow immigration reform proposals, choosing not to wait for a bipartisan coalition to reach agreement on comprehensive legislation.

Saying the committee would examine immigration reform “in a step-by-step approach,” Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.) said Republicans would introduce the first two pieces of legislation this week. One bill would establish an agricultural guest-worker program, while the other would create an employment verification system for businesses.

The move is part of Goodlatte’s plan to take a deliberative approach to immigration as House Republican leaders work behind the scenes to build support among the party’s conservative membership for a comprehensive overhaul. With the House bipartisan group slow to complete its legislation, the lower chamber has taken a back seat to the Senate, where an 844-page proposal is now moving through committee. 

No, that bolded part is an outright lie.  House Republicans aren't working on this to build support, they're working on it to kill support.  If the only thing to come out of the House Judiciary is party-line GOP enforcement and guest worker stuff (without all that messy "compromise with Democrats over citizenship" part in the Senate) then House Republicans can say "Well, we passed immigration reform and the Democrats killed it.  Why does Barack Obama hate Latinos?"

And boom, immigration reform blows up by June, July at the latest. Just like gun control, Republicans expect minimal damage from scuttling legislation that would only help Barack Obama's coalition.

Keep an eye on Rep. Goodlatte's committee here, because this is how the GOP will sink immigration reform.

StupidiNews!

• It took less than a week of sequestration-fueled air traffic controller furloughs causing nationwide delays to get Congress to consider a bill to restore FAA funding.
• President Obama honored the dozen volunteer firefighters killed in the explosion of a fertilizer plant in West, Texas last week at a memorial at Baylor University.
• Egyptian President Mohammend Morsi admits his biggest challenge is Egypt's "deep state", the bureaucracy left over from former President Hosni Mubarak's rule.
• Add Turkey to the list of countries looking to bust offshore tax evasion in the economic downturn, as the country is looking to collect $130 billion from tax cheats.
• Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk says traffic on LA's 405 freeway is so awful, he's willing to donate thousands of dollars of his own money to hire more workers to widen it.

Last Call: Not Blowing Up In Our Faces

Just another reminder while the Village is celebrating the opening of the Bush Presidentin' And Stuff Center in Texas this week and furiously rewriting the history on how we got into two brutal wars that cost us thousands of lives, millions of jobs and trillions of dollars and all, it's gratifying to see that the current President is trying to not get us into another decade-long Middle Eastern ground war.

The Obama administration shares the suspicions of several of its allies that the Syrian government has used chemical weapons, a senior official said Wednesday, but it lacks the conclusive evidence that President Obama has said would lead to American intervention.

Faced with mounting pressure to act against Syria — including a new assertion by an Israeli military intelligence official on Tuesday that Syria repeatedly used chemical weapons — the United States is waiting for the results of an exhaustive analysis of soil, hair and other material to determine whether chemical warfare agents have been used. 

You mean we're actually waiting to gather evidence ourselves before making it up and plunging the country into combat?  How novel.

Even if that investigation proves the use of chemicals, this official said, the White House must determine who used them and whether they were used deliberately or accidentally. He did not offer a timetable for that process. 

“It is precisely because this is a red line that we have to establish with airtight certainty that this happened,” said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity so he could discuss internal deliberations. “The bar on the United States is higher than on anyone else, both because of our capabilities and because of our history in Iraq.” 

Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, speaking in Cairo during a Middle East tour that has been dominated by worries about Syria, said, “Suspicions are one thing; evidence is another.” 

Amazing.  Here we have the Obama administration, including the Secretary of Defense, actively saying that after Iraq, we need to have a higher threshold of evidence before we commit to using our military.  The President will continue to fail to get any credit for that, Team Drones will just yell "Drones!" some more and the right will say that his lack of thirst for ground war means he's a wimp, unlike Bush who totally won Iraq by himself.

But here we are, not invading a country for once.  And silence from the usual suspects.  That is, unless we actually do find that evidence, in which case things get really interesting...

The U.S. intelligence community has uncovered strong evidence that chemical weapons have been used in Syria. Several blood samples, taken from multiple people, have tested positive for the nerve agent sarin, an American intelligence source tells Danger Room. President Obama has long said that the use of such a weapon by the Assad regime would cross a “red line.” So now the question becomes: What will the White House do in response?

We're going to find out very soon.

The Southern Suppression Strategy Continues

North Carolina is finding out the hard way what happens when the GOP has one party control of a state:  Republicans have no problem with taking voting rights away from thousands of the elderly, college students, and working-class African-Americans and Latinos in the name of preventing non-existent "voting fraud".  The Charlotte Observer:

“Our system of government depends upon open and honest elections,” said Rep. David Lewis, a farm equipment dealer from Dunn and a Republican. “Having people prove who they say they are as a condition of voting makes sense and guarantees that each vote is weighted equally and cumulatively determines the outcome of elections.”

But the move was strongly opposed by Democrats who said a photo ID would create longer lines at the polls, make it harder for the elderly, African-Americans and some students to vote, and would unconstitutionally create different categories of voters.

“This bill would attempt to turn back the strong voting we’ve had in North Carolina,” said Rep. Garland Pierce, a Baptist minister from Laurinburg, noting that the Tar Heel state had the 12th-highest turnout in the country last November.

Takes 5 paragraphs to get to the real reason why Republicans made voter ID a top priority in NC, and of course high turnout is bad for Republicans.  Target Democratic voters, make voting onerous, and classify thousands as "provisional" voters  you can disenfranchise if there's any dispute, putting the onus on the voter to prove they have the privilege and not the state to preserve as a right. 

And let's not forget Republicans want to get rid of all early voting in the state, too.

The voter ID issue resonated powerfully in the black community throughout the weeks of debate, with African-Americans comparing the measure to historical efforts to restrict blacks from voting. Complicating the voter ID debate are companion election bills being sponsored by Republicans, not debated Wednesday, that would restrict early voting, Sunday voting and same-day registration – all of which affect African-Americans disproportionately.

After the vote, the Rev. William Barber, head of the state NAACP, called the voter ID requirement an act of voter suppression. 

Funny how it seems like Republicans are targeting the most vulnerable and easiest groups to disenfranchise.  The state must spare no expense in defending the political process against fraud with a voter ID measure that will cost the state millions, but these same Republicans declare early voting is too expensive for taxpayers to foot the bill.

Of course it's an obvious scam.  But as with all the other Southern red states, it's too late now for North Carolina.  Giving in to fear and Obama Derangement Syndrome gave you the Republican nightmare you get to live with, and I don't feel sorry for my home state one bit.

Read more here: http://www.charlotteobserver.com/2013/04/24/4002164/voter-id-one-step-closer-to-become.html#storylink=cpy

Read more here: http://www.charlotteobserver.com/2013/04/24/4002164/voter-id-one-step-closer-to-become.html#storylink=cpy

Granite State Punishment Detail

New Hampshire Republican Sen. Kelly Ayotte has largely been singled out as the 41st Republican to vote against the Manchin-Toomey gun legislation, meaning that she was the vote that effectively killed the bill.  Public Policy Polling took a look at Ayotte's numbers and found that yes, she's currently paying a price for that vote, and a steep one.

Ayotte now has a negative approval rating with 44% of voters giving her good marks and 46% disapproving. That's down a net 15 points from the last time we polled on her, in October, when she had a 48% approval with 35% disapproving. 75% of New Hampshire voters- including 95% of Democrats, 74% of independents, and 56% of Republicans- say they support background checks. And 50% of voters in the state say Ayotte's 'no' vote will make them less likely to support her in a future election, compared to just 23% who consider it to be a positive.

Ayotte won her seat in 2010 by 23 points. But in a very early hypothetical match up between her and new Democratic Governor Maggie Hassan, she trails by a 46/44 margin. This issue is really giving her some trouble.

Ahh, but the key word in the top of the post is currently.  Ayotte will not face voters again until November 2016 should she run again for Senate, and while it may hurt her now, something tells me voters will have other things on their minds by the time New Hampshire gets around to the 2016 elections.  If this gun vote somehow does cost Ayotte her seat, that will certainly be one thing...but in the meantime, gun control legislation is effectively dead until further notice. 

The prospects of a new President raising this as an issue in 2017 is certainly possible, but meanwhile, the NRA will have had four years to lobby the rest of the Senate.  It's very, very unlikely that voters will remember anything Ayotte voted on this month when it comes to 2016.

StupidiNews!

• Three people have been injured as a pair of fuel barges in Mobile, Alabama loaded with gasoline continue to burn after several explosions last night.
• Democrats are introducing federal legislation that would require genetically modified foods to be labeled as such.
• Clashes in China's western Xinjiang province have left 21 dead as ethnic Uighurs and provincial police squared off.
• Spanish unemployment for the first quarter of the year climbed to an all-time record of 27.2% as over six million Spaniards remain out of work.
• A federal judge in Wisconsin has ruled that ordering a suspect to decrypt secure files on his own hard drive is a violation of the Fifth Amendment's self-incrimination clause.