President SCoaMF, Martyr

M2RB:  The Scorpions, live in Red Square, Moscow

Ooh, babe, I just need you like never before
Just imagine you'd come through this door
You'd take all my sorrow away

There's no one like you
I can't wait for the nights with you
I imagine the things we'll do
I just wanna be loved by you

No one like you
I can't wait for the nights with you
I imagine the things we'll do
I just wanna be loved by you

No one like you


 

Listen closely and you can hear the sounds of slogging echo across the decades. They emanate not just from the failed president but from sympathetic journalists trying to absolve him of the responsibility for his failure.

 

Obama was not the first Big Brain, Holy Man, Man of Peace, Allow-Us-To-Shine-Your-Iron-Fist-With-Our-Velvet-Glove, Unicorns-Energise-The-World, We Can Work With Despots, Genociders, Israel-Haters, We Can Subjugate Western Civilisation and Laws to China In the Name of Business and The Builders of a Muslim Caliphate In the Name of Global Peace, Social Justice, Environmental Justice, Ecological Justice, Reparations, Biomass Credits, etc.  No, he wasn't the first.  He is merely serving the first one's second term.

 

Peter Baker of the New York Times informs us in a "news analysis" that "for Barack Obama, a president who set out to restore good relations with the world in his first term, the world does not seem to be cooperating all that much with his bid to win a second." Thanks a lot world, you ingrate!

The world's perfidy notwithstanding, "polls show Mr. Obama with a double-digit advantage over [Mitt] Romney on foreign policy," Baker notes. But in a cruel twist of fate, "in the latest New York Times-CBS News poll, only 4 percent of Americans picked foreign policy as their top election concern."

Fate is cruel to Obama in more ways than one:

"If anything, the dire headlines from around the world only reinforce an uncomfortable reality for this president and any of his successors: even the world's last superpower has only so much control over events beyond its borders, and its own course can be dramatically affected in some cases. Whether from ripples of the European fiscal crisis or flare-ups of violence in Baghdad, it is easy to be whipsawed by events."

All indisputably true. It's also true that into every life a little rain must fall, but that's not much of a defense for a poorly performing employee whose boss is considering whether to renew his contract.

Lately we've seen a spate of articles blaming Obama's failures on impersonal forces beyond his control. Thus Chris Cillizza in the Washington Post:

Lost in the chatter about whether President Obama will win a second term in November is an even bigger--and perhaps even more important--question: Is it possible for a president--any president--to succeed in the modern world of politics?

Consider this: We are in the midst of more than a decade-long streak of pessimism about the state of the country, partisanship is at all-time highs and the media have splintered--Twitter, blogs, Facebook and so on and so forth--in a thousand directions all at once. . . .

"Due to the evolution of our politics and media, we may never see a two-term president again," said Mark McKinnon, a senior strategist for President George W. Bush's 2000 and 2004 campaigns.

We are going to go out on a limb and predict that we will see another two-term president, though perhaps not this year.

"In the same years when presidential politics changed so greatly, governing did, too," writes the Times's Tom Wicker: "It got harder. . . . The rise of single-interest politics and independent legislators has made it more difficult to put together a governing coalition; sophisticated new lobbying techniques wielded on behalf of virtually every interest group further complicate the task. And a strong argument could be made that the major issues--energy and the economy, for instance--are more complex than they were."

Hey, wait a minute. Didn't Tom Wicker die last year?

Why yes he did. That quote came from a column he wrote in April 1980, the last time a Democratic president was in the midst of an unsuccessful re-election bid. And he's not the only one whose 32-year-old plaints sound awfully familiar.

Jimmy Carter was known for his bright smile 
.

"The Presidency today is entangled in the great crisis of all established authority...Executives of every kind--political, educational, ecclesiastical, corporate--are under incessant public attack...[The president's life] is under such relentless scrutiny that he can only seem ordinary, never extraordinary. No man is a hero to his valet, and America is now a nation of valets."

- Henry Graff, Columbia University historian (now emeritus), New York Times 25 July 1980

 

Graff did not mention Twitter, blogs, Facebook and so on and so forth.

"Watching President Carter try to juggle all the contradictory foreign and domestic problems of the nation during a presidential election and an economic recession, you have to wonder who can do it and who can govern America." 

 

- James Reston, New York Times, June 1980

Reston, who died in 1995, concluded:

"Carter's campaign theme is clear. It is that while the economic figures are not on his side, the economic 'trends' are changing for the better, and that, as he hopes to demonstrate in his meetings with world figures, he knows more about foreign policy than [Ted] Kennedy, Reagan or [John] Anderson."

Then again, it's easy to be whipsawed by events.

"The presidency has grown, and grown and grown, into the most powerful, most impossible job in the world."

 - Walter Shapiro, Washington Post, 13 January 1980

Shapiro's piece was titled "Voters Expect to Elect a Mere Mortal" and he made the rather pompous observation while simultaneously trying to argue that the problem wasn't that Carter was too small a man for such a large, powerful position, but instead the office had become to great for any one man to succeed in alone.

"Voters have lowered their expectations of what any president can accomplish; they have accepted the notion that this country may never again have heroic, larger-than-life leadership in the White House. . . . Some voters have entirely discarded textbook notions about presidential greatness and believe that Carter is doing as good a job as anyone could in facing new and difficult problems and in coping with an independent and restive Congress."

 - Walter Shapiro, Washington Post, 13 January 1980

In August 1980 (in a story not available online), Post reporter Robert G. Kaiser, now an editor, described the speech in which Carter accepted the Democratic nomination:

President Carter in 1980 had to try to explain why he had not become the sort of leader Jimmy Carter promised to be in 1976. . . .

Not surprisingly, this 1980 Carter sounded much more defensive. Carter's 1976 acceptance speech contained no negative references to . . . Gerald R. Ford. It was entirely a positive statement.

About a fourth of last night's speech was devoted to lambasting the Republicans and Ronald Reagan.

"If the Grand Old Party should win in November, I see despair . . . I see surrender . . . I see risk."

 - President Jimmy Carter, Democratic National Convention, 1980

He also sees repudiation, of course, which explains his defensiveness. . . .Carter's acceptance speech in 1976 was a magical moment, perhaps the high point of his political career. Carter spoke quietly that night in the lilting cadence of a Baptist preacher with a sure sense of himself and his message. . . .There was no magic in Thursday night's speech. Instead, a weary convention heard the sounds of slogging from a worried politician who knows he is in deep trouble.

Listen closely and you can hear the sounds of slogging echo across the decades. They emanate not just from the failed president but from sympathetic journalists trying to absolve him of the responsibility for his failure.

Taranto closes with a journalist’s 1980 speech comparing the Democratic presidential nominating convention addresses that Carter gave in 1976 and 1980. The journalist noted that Carter’s speech in 1976 was an “entirely positive statement” while his 1980 address evoked the “sounds of slogging from a worried politician who knows he is in deep trouble.” Many suspect that a note of “deep trouble” will be sounded by President Barack Obama in Charlotte this summer.

Taranto closes his piece by noting that history proved rather quickly that these were short-sighted observations.

“We learned in the 1980s that the presidency was still big. It was Jimmy Carter who turned out to be small.” 

- James Taranto

“In the same years when presidential politics changed so greatly, governing did, too.  It got harder. . . . The rise of single-interest politics and independent legislators has made it more difficult to put together a governing coalition; sophisticated new lobbying techniques wielded on behalf of virtually every interest group further complicate the task. And a strong argument could be made that the major issues–energy and the economy, for instance–are more complex than they were.”

- Tom Wicker, New York Times, 1980

They put Ronald Reagan in the White House, and eight years later no one was asking if the presidency was too big for one man to handle.

It turns out that it takes a particularly small man to make the office look overwhelming, and for the second time in 32 years, we've found one. 

"[I]f America cannot grapple with its deep and real problems after electing a new president with two majorities, then America’s problems are too great for Americans to tackle.” 

- Andrew Sullivan, Daily Beast

“Due to the evolution of our politics and media, we may never see a two-term president again.”

- Mark McKinnon, adviser to President to George W Bush, who served two terms.

Sounding a well-entitled-to-note-0f-exasperation and eyerolling:

“Have we become so shallow and vain as to think our generation and our time is more consequential than that which came before us."

There's No One Like You - Scorpions

Girl, it's been a long time that we've been apart
Much too long for a man who needs love
I miss you since I've been away
Babe, it wasn't easy to leave you alone
It's getting harder each time that I go
If I had the choice, I would stay

There's no one like you
I can't wait for the nights with you
I imagine the things we'll do
I just wanna be loved by you

No one like you
I can't wait for the nights with you
I imagine the things we'll do
I just wanna be loved by you

Girl, there are really no words strong enough
To describe all my longing for love
I don't want my feelings restrained
Ooh, babe, I just need you like never before
Just imagine you'd come through this door
You'd take all my sorrow away

There's no one like you
I can't wait for the nights with you
I imagine the things we'll do
I just wanna be loved by you

No one like you
I can't wait for the nights with you
I imagine the things we'll do
I just wanna be loved by you

No one like you

Obama's Great American AutoBioNovelGraphy

M2RB:  Madonna

"Re-invent yourself."

- Madonna

inShare2

 

 We’re too busy inventing ourselves to be interested in the truth.

By Mark Steyn

Courtesy of David Maraniss’s new book, we now know that yet another key prop of Barack Obama’s identity is false: His Kenyan grandfather was not brutally tortured or even non-brutally detained by his British colonial masters. The composite gram’pa joins an ever-swelling cast of characters from Barack’s “memoir” who, to put it discreetly, differ somewhat in reality from their bit parts in the grand Obama narrative. The best friend at school portrayed in Obama’s autobiography as “a symbol of young blackness” was, in fact, half Japanese, and not a close friend. The white girlfriend he took to an off-Broadway play that prompted an angry post-show exchange about race never saw the play, dated Obama in an entirely different time zone, and had no such world-historically significant conversation with him. His Indonesian step-grandfather supposedly killed by Dutch soldiers during his people’s valiant struggle against colonialism met his actual demise when he “fell off a chair at his home while trying to hang drapes.”

David Maraniss is no right-winger, and can’t understand why boorish non-literary types have seized on his book as evidence that the president of the United States is a Grade A phony. “It is a legitimate question about where the line is in memoir,” he told Soledad O’Brien on CNN. My Oxford dictionary defines “memoir” as “an historical account or biography written from personal knowledge.” And if Obama doesn’t have “personal knowledge” of his tortured grandfather, war-hero step-grandfather, and racially obsessed theater-buff girlfriend, who does? But in recent years, the Left has turned the fake memoir into one of the most prestigious literary genres: Oprah’s Book Club recommended James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces, hailed by Bret Easton Ellis as a “heartbreaking memoir” of “poetic honesty,” but subsequently revealed to be heavy on the “poetic” and rather light on the “honesty.” The “heartbreaking memoir” of a drug-addled street punk who got tossed in the slammer after brawling with cops while high on crack with his narco-hooker girlfriend proved to be the work of some suburban Pat Boone type with a couple of parking tickets. (I exaggerate, but not as much as he did.)

 

Oprah was also smitten by The Education of Little Tree, the heartwarmingly honest memoir of a Cherokee childhood which turned out to be concocted by a former Klansman whose only previous notable literary work was George Wallace’s “Segregation Forever” speech. Fragments: Memories of a Wartime Childhood is a heartbreakingly honest, poetically searing, searingly painful, painfully honest, etc. account of Binjamin Wilkomirski’s unimaginably horrific boyhood in the Jewish ghetto of Riga and the Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz. After his memoir won America’s respected National Jewish Book Award, Mr. Wilkomirski was inevitably discovered to have been born in Switzerland and spent the war in a prosperous neighborhood of Zurich being raised by a nice middle-class couple.  He certainly had a deprived childhood, at least from the point of view of a literary agent pitching a memoir to a major publisher. But the “unimaginable” horror of his book turned out to be all too easily imagined. Fake memoirs have won the Nobel Peace Prize and are taught at Ivy League schools to the scions of middle-class families who take on six figure debts for the privilege (I, Rigoberta Menchú). They’re handed out by the Pentagon to senior officers embarking on a tour of Afghanistan (Greg Mortenson’s Three Cups of Tea) on the entirely reasonable grounds that a complete fantasy could hardly be less credible than current NATO strategy.

In such a world, it was surely only a matter of time before a fake memoirist got elected as president of the United States. Indeed, the aforementioned Rigoberta Menchú ran as a candidate in the 2007 and 2011 presidential elections in Guatemala, although she got knocked out in the first round — Guatemalans evidently being disinclined to elect someone to the highest office in the land with no accomplishment whatsoever apart from a lousy fake memoir. Which just goes to show what a bunch of unsophisticated rubes they are.

In an inspired line of argument, Ben Smith of the website BuzzFeed suggests that the controversy over Dreams from My Father is the fault of conservatives who have “taken the self-portrait at face value.”  We are so unlettered and hicky that we think a memoir is about stuff that actually happened rather than a literary jeu d’esprit playing with nuances of notions of assumptions of preconceptions of concoctions of invented baloney. And so we regard the first member of the Invented-American community to make it to the White House as a kinda weird development rather than an encouraging sign of how a new post-racial, post-gender, post-modern America is moving beyond the old straightjackets of black and white, male and female, gay and straight, real and hallucinatory.

The question now is whether the United States itself is merely the latest chapter of Obama’s fake memoir. You’ll notice that, in the examples listed above, the invention only goes one way. No Cherokee orphan, Holocaust survivor, or recovering drug addict pretends to be George Wallace’s speechwriter. Instead, the beneficiaries of boring middle-class Western life seek to appropriate the narratives and thereby enjoy the electric frisson of fashionable victim groups. And so it goes with public policy in the West at twilight.

Thus, Obama’s executive order on immigration exempting a million people from the laws of the United States is patently unconstitutional, but that’s not how an NPR listener looks at it: To him, Obama’s unilateral amnesty enriches stultifying white-bread America with a million plucky little Rigoberta Menchús and their heartbreaking stories. Eric Holder’s entire tenure as attorney general is a fake memoir all by itself, and his invocation of “executive privilege” in the Fast and Furious scandal is preposterous, but American liberals can’t hear: Insofar as they know anything about Fast and Furious, it’s something to do with the government tracking the guns of fellows like those Alabama “Segregation Forever” nuts, rather than a means by which hundreds of innocent Rigoberta Menchús south of the border were gunned down with weapons sold to their killers by liberal policymakers of the Obama administration.  If that’s the alternative narrative, they’ll take the fake memoir.

 

Similarly, Obamacare is apparently all about the repressed patriarchal white male waging his “war on women.” The women are struggling 30-year-old Georgetown Law coeds whose starting salary after graduation is 140 grand a year, but let’s not get hung up on details. Dodd-Frank financial reform, also awaiting Supreme Court judgment, is another unconstitutional power grab, but its designated villains are mustache-twirling top-hatted bankers, so likewise who cares?  

One can understand why the beneficiaries of the postwar West’s expansion of middle-class prosperity would rather pass themselves off as members of way cooler victim groups: It’s a great career move. It may even have potential beyond the page: See Sandra Fluke’s dazzling pre-Broadway tryout of Fake Memoir: The High School Musical, in which a 30-year-old Georgetown Law coed whose starting salary after graduation is 140 grand a year passes herself off as the Little Rigoberta Hussein Wilkomirski of the Rite-Aid pick-up line. But transforming an entire nation into a fake memoir is unlikely to prove half so lucrative. The heartwarming immigrants, the contraceptive-less coeds, the mustache-twirling bankers all provide cover for a far less appealing narrative: an expansion of centralized power hitherto unknown to this republic. In reality, Obama’s step-grandfather died falling off the chair while changing the drapes. In the fake-memoir version, Big Government’s on the chair, and it’s curtains for America.   

— Mark Steyn, a National Review columnist, is the author of After America: Get Ready for Armageddon. © 2012  

Obama's Very Bad, Terrible, Atrocious, Not-So-Great June

 

M2RB:  Death In June 

 

The blood of His Dreams
The Dreams of This Youth
For the Master-Slave
For the One-Step Men
The Right of Confession
The Rites of Confusion
Expect no more
This Love Burns Life

Giddy Giddy Carousel
Giddy Giddy Carousel

 

By Peter Wehner

President Obama was already suffering one of the worst imaginable months for an incumbent president in an election year – including a dismal jobs report and declining factory orders, falling approval ratings (including in swing states), the overwhelming victory of Governor Scott Walker in Wisconsin, the president’s widely ridiculed claim the private sector is “doing fine,” Bill Clinton’s various apostasies, the realization that Obama might be outspent in this election by Mitt Romney, and a major speech in Ohio that was panned even by sympathetic liberals. (Jim Geraghty provides a nice summary and analysis here.)

But it may be that the first half of June was a walk in the park compared to the latter part of the month. Because two events – one which just happened and one that will happen next week – may turn out to be powerful, and even crippling, body blows to the president.

The first one is the burgeoning “Fast and Furious” scandal, which has now been elevated from a secondary story to a major one. The president’s assertion of executive privilege is without foundation–a transparent effort to protect his attorney general, and possibly himself, from a legitimate congressional inquiry about a scandalous policy failure. The more this story unwinds, the more obvious this will become.

The man who promised us a “new standard of openness” and the “most transparent and accountable administration in history,” who said his administration would create “an unprecedented level of openness in government” and would “work together to ensure the public trust and establish a system of transparency, public participation, and collaboration” is now engaged in what could reasonably be construed to be a cover up. (If you’d like your belly laugh for the day, you might take a look at this document, Open Government 2.0 (!), put out by the Department of Justice – which claims, “The Department of Justice is committed to achieving the president’s goal of making this the most transparent administration in history.”)

This is Obama’s first bona fide, full-scale scandal. The president, with his assertion of executive privilege, has now placed himself at the center of the storm. And he’s done so with less than 140 days before the election. One can only imagine what the administration has to hide in order for Obama to have done what he did.

In addition, next week, the Supreme Court will in all likelihood announce its decision on the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act. If the Court overturns the ACA, in whole or in part, it will be devastating to the president. After all, his signature domestic achievement — one which dominated American politics for much of Obama’s first term — will not only have been judged to be unconstitutional; it will also have proven to be a colossal waste of the country’s time and energy. And even if the Court doesn’t overturn the Affordable Care Act, it will thrust to the fore what presidential scholar George C. Edwards III calls “perhaps the least popular major domestic policy passed in the last century” (which helps explain why the president rarely speaks about this “achievement” in the run-up to the election).

Elections are rarely decided in June, and this one won’t be, either. But history may look back at this as the month when the president fell behind Romney and never fully recovered.

We’ll know soon enough.

Obama's White Support Is Too Low to Win

M2RB:  Foreigner, live Dortmund, Germany

 

 

Cause I'm a dirty, white boy, yeah, dirty, white boy.
I'm a dirty, white boy, dirty, white boy.
Come on, come on, boy, white boy, I'm a dirty, white boy, a dirty, white boy!
Hey, I'm a dirty, white boy, yeah, I'm a dirty, white boy, dirty. white boy, yeah!

"Revenge best served cold never tasted so good."

- Anonymous blue-collar, white, bitter-clinging white voter

 
By David Paul Kuhn


President Obama does not currently have enough white support to win re-election even if he retains his minority base from 2008. At the same time, electoral data indicates Mitt Romney has not yet attracted enough of these white voters to capitalize on Obama's weakness.

Pundits often note that Romney cannot win with his current level of Hispanic support. That's likely true. But so is the converse: Obama cannot win with his level of white support unless white swing voters withhold their votes from Romney as well.

Today, fewer whites back Obama than any Democratic candidate since Walter Mondale. Romney does not need to emulate Ronald Reagan to win. Should he match Reagan’s share of the white vote in 1984 -- presuming all else remains constant since 2008 -- Romney would rout Obama.

Of course, America has changed since Reagan. Non-Hispanic whites were 89 percent of the electorate when Reagan first won the White House in 1980. They were 85 percent in 1988. By 2008, whites were 74 percent. That shift has upended the electoral landscape. But only so much.

Take Michael Dukakis’ fate as an example. In 1988, George H.W. Bush’s margin of victory exceeded Obama’s in 2008. But if Obama’s level of white support in 2012 equals Dukakis’, and all else remains the same from 2008, Obama would likely narrowly win. He would lack a mandate and risk immediate lame-duck status. But he would survive with white support that once sundered Democrats.

Unless . . .

What if Obama doesn't even match Dukakis with whites? That’s the dynamic of 2012. This electorate has a white floor. And it has broken for this president. Democrats cannot depend on demographics to save them.

Should Romney win the whites Obama lost, Romney will only need to perform as well as John McCain with minorities to win. This is true even under Democrats’ most optimistic, and unlikely, demographic scenario: that the white share of the electorate decreases another two percentage points from 2008, blacks turn out at the same historic levels they did then, and the Hispanic share of the vote rises from 9 to 11 percent of the electorate while Obama retains the same level of support from other minority groups.

The white margin to watch: 61-39. That’s the rough break-even point. Obama likely needs more than 39 percent of whites to assure re-election. Romney likely needs at least 61 percent of whites to assure Obama’s defeat (or 60.5 in some scenerios). These are estimates based on an electorate that matches the diversity of 2008 or is slightly less white. It presumes the Electoral College outcome does not diverge from the winner of the popular vote (loose talk aside, it’s only happened four times in U.S. history).

Thus, Obama can do a little worse than Dukakis, and Romney must perform a little better than Bush circa 1988. Whites favored Reagan in 1984 by a 64-35 margin. They favored Bush in 1988 by a 59-40 margin. Four years ago, whites favored McCain by a 55-43 margin.

Only 37 or 38 percent of whites back Obama today, according to the Gallup Poll’s authoritative weekly averages since early April (which have a larger sample size than most polls combined). The rub for Romney? In those same matchups, Romney only wins 54 percent of whites. Other surveys show the same. CNN’s latest pegged the white margin at 53-39. FOX News’ latest, 51-35. Ipsos-Reuters, 53-38. The Pew Research Center's polls have, however, shown Obama stronger this year. Its recent survey placed the margin at 54-41.

Writ large, Obama appears below his floor with whites. But so does Romney. Obama has too few whites saying yea to a second term. And Romney has converted too few nays to his side. Notably, the same share of whites say they will vote for Obama as approve of his job performance.

These whites constitute, by far, the largest share of the swing vote. The president depends on Hispanics to partly compensate for his weakness with whites. That’s possible in some states like Florida, Colorado and Nevada. But Latinos are less than a 10th of the electorate in every other swing state.

Obama’s recent immigration decision will probably help secure his Hispanic flank. But he already had the support of nearly two-thirds of Hispanics by Gallup’s measure -- roughly the share he earned in 2008. Hispanics’ views of Obama have, however, fluctuated more than whites’.

That steady white opposition should now concern Democrats. Obama’s broken floor with whites appears to be his new foundation. And it’s more than a white working-class problem. In fact, it always is. The white male gap helps explain why. Economic class and education do not impact white men and women the same way.

Currently, among white college graduates, according to Gallup data, 48 percent of women favor Obama and 40 percent of men do as well. Among working-class whites, 37 percent of women favor Obama and 30 percent of men agree.

Obama had a breakthrough with white men a political world ago. He performed better with white men than every Democratic nominee since Jimmy Carter (a point to remember, when Obama's race is raised). Obama performed better than John Kerry, though slightly worse than Al Gore and Bill Clinton four years earlier, with white women (see my wrap-up of 2008 for more details). Obama’s current support with white men, 34 percent, reflects about where he stood with them before the September stock market crash.

That crash was critical to the making of this president’s mandate. Now the economy threatens to unmake his presidency. Those voters who swung to Obama with the crash have left him, above all else, because they came to believe he did not focus enough on the Great Recession that followed the crash. That’s no small side note, especially on the cusp of the Supreme Court’s health care ruling. Obama chose to invest his political capital in that cause over others, such as a new New Deal.

Whites helped give Obama his capital. He began his presidency with at least six-in-10 whites behind him. His white support first fell, as with independents, below 50 percent in the summer of 2009. Washington was then consumed with health care. Americans then felt consumed by hard times. The health care law passed in early 2010. Only about a third of whites approved of it. Why? Begin with the mommy-daddy politics that molds modern American politics. Soon after the law passed, Obama tried to pivot to the economy. But it was too late. Governing is choosing. And by the midterm elections, as I first reported the morning after, Democrats suffered unprecedented white flight. Obama’s party paid for the economy but also his choices.

Today, the demographic status quo is not good for either candidate. The long-term future favors Democrats. The GOP must reconcile itself with the browning of America. But even in early 2009, amid renewed talk of an emerging Democratic majority, it was clear that demographics are not electoral destiny. That Democratic majority has not emerged over the past decade because Democrats have not made sustained inroads with the actual demographic majority.

How quickly that proved true. In 2010, whites backed GOP House candidates by a 60-38 margin. It gave Republicans a historic landslide. The white margin two years ago roughly matches the break-even point today. That’s because presidential electorates are browner and blacker, though possibly not enough for Democrats. Plainly put, the data shows that Romney will likely win if he matches his party’s minority support in 2008 and its majority support in 2010.

Democrats have come to depend on diversity. But even today, diversity may not prove enough to save Obama. 

Dirty White Boy - Foreigner

Hey baby, if you're falling down, I know what's good for you all day
Are you worried what your friends see
And will it ruin your reputation loving me?

Cause I'm a dirty white boy, yeah a dirty white boy, a dirty white boy
Don't drive no big black car, don't like no Hollywood movie stars
You want me to be true to you, you don't give a damn what I do to you
I'm just a dirty white boy, dirty white boy, dirty white boy, dirty white boy

Well I'm a dirty white boy, dirty white boy, yeah, dirty white boy
A dirty white boy
I've been in trouble since I don't know when
I'm in trouble now and I know somehow I'll find trouble again
I'm a loner but I'm never alone
Every night I get one step closer to the danger zone

Cause I'm a dirty white boy, yeah, dirty white boy
I'm a dirty white boy, dirty white boy
Come on come on boy, white boy, I'm a dirty white boy, a dirty white boy
Hey I'm a dirty white boy, yeah I'm a dirty white boy, dirty white boy, yeah!

IMF to Germany: From Each According To His Ability, To Each According To His Need

 

 IMF piles pressure on Germany to help struggling eurozone banks directly

Christine Lagarde urges eurozone leaders to ease 'acute stress' on euro as Moody's downgrades 15 of world's biggest banks.

The IMF chief urges the eurozone to centralise economic control. Link to this video The head of the International Monetary Fund has piled pressure on Germany by recommending a series of crisis-fighting measures that chancellor Angela Merkel has resisted.

IMF managing director Christine Lagarde warned that the euro is under "acute stress" and urged eurozone leaders to channel aid directly to struggling banks rather than via governments. She also called on the European Central Bank (ECB) to cut interest rates.

Her comments came as Italy's prime minister, Mario Monti, warned of the apocalyptic consequences if next week's summit of EU leaders were to fail.

The stark message from Lagarde, delivered to eurozone finance ministers who were meeting in Luxembourg, will increase pressure to come up with a unified approach to tackle problems including Spain's struggling banks. She urged the 17 eurozone countries to consider jointly issuing debt and helping troubled banks directly. She also suggested relaxing the strict austerity conditions imposed on countries that have received bailouts.

"We are clearly seeing additional tension and acute stress applying to both banks and sovereigns in the euro area," Lagarde said after the meeting.

"A determined and forceful move towards complete European monetary union should be reaffirmed in order to restore faith," she said. "At the moment, the viability of the European monetary system is questioned."

Asked what Germany would think of her suggestions, she smiled and said: "We hope wisdom will prevail."

At lunchtime, Merkel will meet Monti and the leaders of France and Spain in Rome in an effort to forge a common strategy to save the euro. Some, Merkel included, consider the survival of the single currency essential to preserving the EU itself.

"It will be interesting to be a fly on the wall given that Mr Monti is fast losing support in Italy, due to the speed of his reform programme which is causing mutterings of discontent from all sides," said Michael Hewson, senior market analyst at CMC Markets UK. "In any case, the German chancellor's room for manoeuvre is limited, given the questionable legality of any form of debt mutualisation under German law, and voter discontent at home."

Spain could make a formal request for financial assistance to bail out its teetering banks as soon as Friday. On Thursday, independent auditors concluded that Spanish banks would need up to €62bn (£49.8bn) to protect themselves from financial shocks. That is far below the offer of €100bn of banking aid Spain has received from the EU.

At the start of next week, officials from the IMF, the EU and the ECB will arrive in Athens to begin a review of Greece's progress in reforming its budget. Some European officials have indicated that the harsh austerity measures that have sent Greece's economy into a rapid downward spiral could be loosened.

One of Lagarde's recommendations for Europe was that eurozone leaders should consider issuing bonds or debt "in some form" backed by the governments of all member countries. Berlin opposes the idea because it would put German taxpayers on the hook for foreign debts and increase the country's cost of borrowing.

In addition, Lagarde said it was necessary to break "the negative feedback loop" that occurs when governments take on more debt to bail out their banks, and she called on Europe's two emergency bailout funds to shore up shaky banks directly.

The Supreme Court’s Scott Walker Moment

 

M2RB:  Michael Jackson

 

 

 

You Have To Show Them That You're Really Not Scared
You're Playin' With Your Life, This Ain't No Truth Or Dare
They'll Kick You, Then They Beat You, Then They'll Tell You It's Fair
So Beat It, But You Wanna Be Bad

 

 

We won.

You lost.

Eat it.

Five justices tell public-employee unions they “tolerate” them—for now.

By Garrett Epps

On First Amendment Thursday, the conservative majority on the Supreme Court delivered an unsubtle warning to public employee unions: You are living on borrowed time.

In Knox v. Service Employees International Union, the five—Chief Justice John Roberts and Associate Justices Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy, Clarence Thomas, and Samuel A. Alito—reached out to decide a question that was not argued or briefed; their opinion all but begs right-wing advocacy groups and public employers to use its emerging First-Amendment jurisprudence to take down public-employee unions and in essence find a Southern-style “right to work” law in the Constitution. In the days when right-wingers favored judicial restraint, this might have been called “judicial activism.”

It is the Court’s Scott Walker moment.

The case concerned the rules by which unions can assess “agency fees” payable by non-members who benefit from the unions’ collective bargaining efforts. Though public employees can’t be forced to join unions, it is legal for governments to contract with unions like SEIU to provide representation to all employees in a bargaining unit. Under the contract, non-members can be charged an “agency fee” that reimburses the union for the costs of negotiating contracts and handling grievances.

However, under prior precedent, non-members can’t be forced to pay for various political activities by the union. This, the Court has held, violates the First Amendment rule against “compelled speech.” So every year, the union takes the applicable dues payment for members, reduces it by the percentage of last year’s dues that went for political activities, and charges non-members the remaining percentage of dues. The rationale for the remaining charge is that non-members would otherwise benefit from the union’s efforts as “free riders.”

In 2005, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger called for a special election to approve two anti-union ballot provisions. SEIU responded to this unexpected crisis by temporarily raising dues to amass a “Political Fight-Back Fund.” Unlike with ordinary dues payments, non-members weren’t given a chance to opt out of the fund.

In an opinion by Alito, the Court held that emergency funds were not exempt from the general rule requiring objectors to opt out. That’s not a huge surprise. What was a surprise—and an ominous one—is the majority’s second holding: even allowing non-members to opt out of such an assessment would not cure the First Amendment violation. Instead, it said, the Constitution requires the union to collect the assessment only from members who specifically opt in, giving notice that they want their checks reduced to pay for the special political campaign.

That new rule would impose substantial administrative costs on the union, and reduce the amount it collects. But more significantly, the majority’s rationale would seem to apply to all agency payments by non-members. And indeed, language in the opinion suggests that the majority thinks the whole idea of agency fees is a violation of the First Amendment. “[C] compulsory fees constitute a form of compelled speech and association that imposes a ‘significant impingement on First Amendment rights,’” the Court said, quoting an earlier case.  “Our cases to date have tolerated this ‘impingement,’ and we do not revisit today whether the Court’s former cases have given adequate recognition to the critical First Amendment rights at stake.”

If I were the National Right to Work Legal Defense Committee, these words might sound to me very much like, “Bring us a case and we will void the agency shop altogether.” That’s particularly true given language later in the opinion calling the entire “free rider” rationale into question. If workers can’t be required to join a union or to pay agency fees, then the so-called “right to work” zone will cover 50 states and Puerto Rico.

Though the result was 7-2, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined only by Justice Ginsburg, concurred only in the result. The union should have offered an opt-out, she said. However, “I cannot agree with the majority’s decision address unnecessarily significant constitutional issues well outside the scope of the questions presented and briefing”—meaning the new constitutional “opt in only rule,” which was not argued by the parties and contradicts a long line of precedent. In a dissent, Justice Stephen Breyer, joined by Justice Elena Kagan, made the same point. The “opt-in” rule “runs directly counter to precedent,” he wrote. “No party asked that we [impose the rule]. The matter has not been fully argued in this Court or in the Court below.”

Breyer noted that “each reason the Court offers in support of its ‘opt-in’ conclusion seems in logic to apply, not just to special assessments, but to ordinary yearly fee charges as well.” He accused the five conservative judges of putting a finger in the scales of the ongoing fight over public-sector unions. “[T]he opinion will play a central role in an ongoing, intense political debate.” To underline his concern, Breyer took the unusual step of summarizing his dissent from the bench, while Alito, a poor winner, glowered at him like an angry headmaster five seats away.

Public employee unions have had a bad spring. In the long run, Knox may warn of a worse defeat than anything that happened in Wisconsin.




 "Beat It" - Michael Jackson

[1st Verse]
They Told Him Don't You Ever Come Around Here
Don't Wanna See Your Face, You Better Disappear
The Fire's In Their Eyes And Their Words Are Really Clear
So Beat It, Just Beat It

[2nd Verse]
You Better Run, You Better Do What You Can
Don't Wanna See No Blood, Don't Be A Macho Man
You Wanna Be Tough, Better Do What You Can
So Beat It, But You Wanna Be Bad

[Chorus]
Just Beat It, Beat It, Beat It, Beat It
No One Wants To Be Defeated
Showin' How Funky Strong Is Your Fight
It Doesn't Matter Who's Wrong Or Right
Just Beat It, Beat It
Just Beat It, Beat It
Just Beat It, Beat It
Just Beat It, Beat It

[3rd Verse]
They're Out To Get You, Better Leave While You Can
Don't Wanna Be A Boy, You Wanna Be A Man
You Wanna Stay Alive, Better Do What You Can
So Beat It, Just Beat It

[4th Verse]
You Have To Show Them That You're Really Not Scared
You're Playin' With Your Life, This Ain't No Truth Or Dare
They'll Kick You, Then They Beat You,
Then They'll Tell You It's Fair
So Beat It, But You Wanna Be Bad

[Chorus]
Just Beat It, Beat It, Beat It, Beat It
No One Wants To Be Defeated
Showin' How Funky Strong Is Your Fight
It Doesn't Matter Who's Wrong Or Right

[Chorus]
Just Beat It, Beat It, Beat It, Beat It
No One Wants To Be Defeated
Showin' How Funky Strong Is Your Fight
It Doesn't Matter Who's Wrong Or Right
Just Beat It, Beat It, Beat It, Beat It, Beat It

[Chorus]
Beat It, Beat It, Beat It, Beat It
No One Wants To Be Defeated
Showin' How Funky Strong Is Your Fight
It Doesn't Matter Who's Wrong Or Right

[Chorus]
Just Beat It, Beat It, Beat It, Beat It
No One Wants To Be Defeated
Showin' How Funky Strong Is Your Fight
It Doesn't Matter Who's Wrong Or Who's Right

[Chorus]
Just Beat It, Beat It, Beat It, Beat It
No One Wants To Be Defeated
Showin' How Funky Strong Is Your Fight
It Doesn't Matter Who's Wrong Or Right

[Chorus]
Just Beat It, Beat It, Beat It, Beat It
No One Wants To Be Defeated
Showin' How Funky Strong Is Your Fight
It Doesn't Matter Who's Wrong Or Right
Just Beat It, Beat It
Beat It, Beat It, Beat It

Niall Ferguson: 'We’re Mortgaging The Future Of The Younger Generation'

M2RB:  Bob Marley, live in London

 

 You can fool some people sometimes,
But you can't fool all the people all the time.
So now we see the light (what you gonna do?),
We gonna stand up for our rights! (yeah, yeah, yeah! )

So you better:
Get up, stand up! (in the morning! git it up! )
Stand up for your rights! (stand up for our rights! )
Get up, stand up!
Don't give up the fight! (don't give it up, don't give it up! )

 

 

 

Just say no: the young can unwittingly argue against their own long-term economic interest. If young Americans knew what was good for them, they would all be in the Tea Party.  

By Niall Ferguson

Critics of Western democracy are right to discern that something is amiss with our political institutions. The most obvious symptom of the malaise is the huge debts we have managed to accumulate in recent decades, which (unlike in the past) cannot largely be blamed on wars.

According to the International Monetary Fund, the gross government debt of Greece this year will reach 153 per cent of GDP. For Italy the figure is 123, for Ireland 113, for Portugal 112 and for the United States 107.

Britain’s debt is approaching 88 per cent. Japan – a special case as the first non-Western country to adopt Western institutions – is the world leader, with a mountain of government debt approaching 236 per cent of GDP, more than triple what it was 20 years ago.

Often these debts get discussed as if they themselves were the problem, and the result is a rather sterile argument between proponents of “austerity” and “stimulus”. I want to suggest that they are a consequence of a more profound malaise.

The heart of the matter is the way public debt allows the current generation of voters to live at the expense of those as yet too young to vote or as yet unborn. In this regard, the statistics commonly cited as government debt are themselves deeply misleading, for they encompass only the sums owed by governments in the form of bonds.

The rapidly rising quantity of these bonds certainly implies a growing charge on those in employment, now and in the future, since – even if the current low rates of interest enjoyed by the biggest sovereign borrowers persist – the amount of money needed to service the debt must inexorably rise.

But the official debts in the form of bonds do not include the often far larger unfunded liabilities of welfare schemes like – to give the biggest American programmes – Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.

Uncontrolled public debt threatens to rupture society as the older generation thrives at the expense of the young.

The most recent estimate for the difference between the net present value of federal government liabilities and the net present value of future federal revenues is $200 trillion, nearly 13 times the debt as stated by the US Treasury. Notice that these figures, too, are incomplete, since they omit the unfunded liabilities of state and local governments, which are estimated to be around $38 trillion.

These mind-boggling numbers represent nothing less than a vast claim by the generation currently retired or about to retire on their children and grandchildren, who are obligated by current law to find the money in the future, by submitting either to substantial increases in taxation or to drastic cuts in other forms of public expenditure.

To illustrate the magnitude of the problem, the economist Laurence Kotlikoff calculates that to eliminate the federal government’s fiscal gap would require either an immediate 64 per cent increase in all federal taxes or an immediate 40 per cent cut in all federal expenditures.

When Kotlikoff compiled his “generational accounts” for the United Kingdom more than 12 years ago, he estimated (on what proved to be the correct assumption that the then government would increase welfare and health care spending) that there would need to be a 31 per cent increase in income tax revenues and a 46 per cent increase in National Insurance revenues to close the fiscal gap.

In his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), Edmund Burke wrote that the real social contract is not Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s contract between the sovereign and the people or “general will”, but the “partnership” between the generations. He writes: “SOCIETY is indeed a contract… The state … is … a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.” In the enormous intergenerational transfers implied by current fiscal policies we see a shocking and perhaps unparalleled breach of precisely that partnership, so brilliantly described by Burke.

I want to suggest that the biggest challenge facing mature democracies is how to restore the social contract between the generations. But I recognise that the obstacles to doing so are daunting. Not the least of these is that the young find it quite hard to compute their own long-term economic interests.

It is surprisingly easy to win the support of young voters for policies that would ultimately make matters even worse for them, like maintaining defined benefit pensions for public employees. If young Americans knew what was good for them, they would all be in the Tea Party.

A second problem is that today’s Western democracies now play such a large part in redistributing income that politicians who argue for cutting expenditures nearly always run into the well-organised opposition of one or both of two groups: recipients of public sector pay and recipients of government benefits.

Is there a constitutional solution to this problem? The simplistic answer – which has already been adopted in a number of American states as well as in Germany – is some kind of balanced-budget amendment, which would reduce the discretion of lawmakers to engage in deficit spending, much as the practice of giving central banks independence reduced lawmakers’ discretion over monetary policy.

The trouble is that the experience of the financial crisis has substantially strengthened the case for using government deficit as a tool to stimulate the economy in times of recession.

Last year, following a German lead, continental European leaders sought to solve that problem by resolving to limit only their structural deficits, leaving themselves room for manoeuvre for cyclical deficits as and when required. But the problem with this “fiscal compact” is that only two eurozone governments are currently below the mandated 0.5 per cent of GDP ceiling; most have structural deficits at least four times too large, and experience suggests that any government that tries seriously to reduce its structural deficit ends up being driven from power.

It is perhaps not surprising that a majority of current voters should support policies of intergenerational inequity, especially when older voters are so much more likely to vote than younger voters.

But what if the net result of passing the bill for baby boomers’ profligacy is not just unfair to the young but economically deleterious for everyone? What if uncertainty about the future is already starting to weigh on the present? As Carmen Reinhart and Ken Rogoff have suggested, it is hard to believe that developed country growth rates will be unaffected by mountains of debt in excess of 90 per cent of GDP.

It seems as if there are only two possible ways out of this mess. In the good but less likely scenario, the proponents of reform succeed, through a heroic effort of leadership, in persuading not only the young but also a significant proportion of their parents and grandparents to vote for a more responsible fiscal policy. As I have already explained, this is very hard to do. But I believe there is a way of making such leadership more likely to succeed, and that is to alter the way in which governments account for their finances.

The present system is, to put it bluntly, fraudulent. There are no regularly published and accurate official balance sheets. Huge liabilities are simply hidden from view. Not even the current income and expenditure statements can be relied upon. No legitimate business could possible carry on in this fashion.

Public sector balance sheets can and should be drawn up so that the liabilities of governments can be compared with their assets. That would help clarify the difference between deficits to finance investment and deficits to finance current consumption.

Governments should also follow the lead of business and adopt the Generally Accepted Accounting Principles. And, above all, generational accounts should be prepared on a regular basis to make absolutely clear the intergenerational implications of current policy.

If we do not do these things then I am afraid we are going to end up with the bad, but more likely, second scenario. Western democracies are going to carry on in their current feckless fashion until, one after another, they follow Greece and other Mediterranean economies into the fiscal death spiral that begins with a loss of credibility, continues with a rise in borrowing costs, and ends as governments are forced to impose spending cuts and higher taxes at the worst possible moment.

There is, it is true, a third possibility, and that is what we now see in Japan and the United States, maybe also the United Kingdom. The debt continues to mount up. But deflationary fears, central bank bond purchases and flight to safety from the rest of the world keeps government borrowing costs down to unprecedented lows. The trouble with this scenario is that it also implies low to zero growth over decades.

As our economic difficulties have worsened, we voters have struggled to find the appropriate scapegoat. We blame the politicians whose hard lot it is to bring public finances under control. But we also like to blame bankers and financial markets, as if their reckless lending was to blame for our reckless borrowing. We bay for tougher regulation, though not of ourselves.


This is an edited extract from the first of Prof Niall Ferguson’s four Reith Lectures, to be broadcast today on Radio 4 at 9am




Get Up, Stand Up - Bob Marley

Get up, stand up: stand up for your rights!
Get up, stand up: stand up for your rights!
Get up, stand up: stand up for your rights!
Get up, stand up: don't give up the fight!

Preacher man, don't tell me,
Heaven is under the earth.
I know you don't know
What life is really worth.
It's not all that glitters is gold;
'Alf the story has never been told:
So now you see the light, eh!
Stand up for your rights. come on!

Get up, stand up: stand up for your rights!
Get up, stand up: don't give up the fight!
Get up, stand up: stand up for your rights!
Get up, stand up: don't give up the fight!

Most people think,
Great god will come from the skies,
Take away everything
And make everybody feel high.
But if you know what life is worth,
You will look for yours on earth:
And now you see the light,
You stand up for your rights. jah!

Get up, stand up! (jah, jah! )
Stand up for your rights! (oh-hoo! )
Get up, stand up! (get up, stand up! )
Don't give up the fight! (life is your right! )
Get up, stand up! (so we can't give up the fight! )
Stand up for your rights! (lord, lord! )
Get up, stand up! (keep on struggling on! )
Don't give up the fight! (yeah! )

We sick an' tired of-a your ism-skism game -
Dyin' 'n' goin' to heaven in-a Jesus' name, lord.
We know when we understand:
Almighty god is a living man.
You can fool some people sometimes,
But you can't fool all the people all the time.
So now we see the light (what you gonna do?),
We gonna stand up for our rights! (yeah, yeah, yeah! )

So you better:
Get up, stand up! (in the morning! git it up! )
Stand up for your rights! (stand up for our rights! )
Get up, stand up!
Don't give up the fight! (don't give it up, don't give it up! )
Get up, stand up! (get up, stand up! )
Stand up for your rights! (get up, stand up! )
Get up, stand up! (... )
Don't give up the fight! (get up, stand up! )
Get up, stand up! (... )
Stand up for your rights!
Get up, stand up!
Don't give up the fight! /fadeout/