To read more about how that came to pass, click here.

Michael Steele, the hapless Republican National Committee chairman, who briefly asserted his independence from Limbaugh Saturday night, now says he didn’t mean what he said. You can read the details here.

Dr. Parnell served as an expert witness in a case in Zanesville, Ohio. In that case, the town of Zanesville had built sewage pipes to run water to its residents beginning in 1956. The problem: clusters of mostly black -owned houses just outside the town limits were denied the treated water. Only under the threat of litigation did the town extend the lines to the predominantly black outskirts, in 2004. The lawsuit continued, however, resulting in an $11 million judgment for the plaintiffs in 2008. Time magazine had a pretty good summary of the case and its outcome, so I won’t dwell on the details.

But since Dr. Parnell came to speak to my class a couple of weeks ago, I did want to add a few additional points:

1) In the case of Zanesville, some of the cluster of black houses that sat outside the city limits was less than a mile from the city limits. Therefore, the town’s claim that it was too expensive to build the piping out to these areas rings hollow. This is especially true since the town did extend the pipes out to other surrounding areas that were predominantly white, even though they were much more than half a mile from the town limits.

2) As Dr. Parnell explained to my students, where people live in relation to town limits is not mere happenstance. Yes, there are better off folks who choose to own ten or forty acres of land out in the country and live a rural existence. And there are communities that choose not to be incorporated. But a key feature of current racial residential segregation is that municipal governments will often incorporate some areas on their outskirts where better off residents live. This both ensures a higher tax base for the town and ensures that poor, usually minority areas, are deliberated drawn outside the municipal boundaries. In other words, for many poor minority communities, being outside the town limits is not a matter of choice. It’s a matter of government policy.

3) Incredibly, it is sometimes the case that municipal boundaries are drawn to exclude people who live physically inside the perimeter of the municipality. This is true, for example, of Modesto California. There, thousands of poor Hispanic residents, living in the interior of Modesto, are nevertheless drawn out of the town limits. The consequence: they are far less likely to have street lights or side walks (so traffic and pedestrian-related fatalities are high), or treated water. Naturally, the sewage treatment plant itself is sited in a densely populated, low-income Hispanic neighborhood, but the sewage lines themselves are only accessible to those folks living inside the incorporated town limits.

For a more detailed analysis from Dr. Parnell himself, including some extraordinary maps showing the pattern in Zanesville, click here. One thing I did want to mention: at one point during the Zanesville trial, the city lawyers tried to argue that there were a bunch of black folks, 34 to be exact, living in a particular tract just outside of town, who did receive city water. Dr. Parnell did some sleuthing and discovered that these did not correspond to 34 black-owned houses on the edge of town receiving the water. So, who were these folks? It turns out that they were 34 black residents of a predominantly white nursing home. If this is the best foot the city could put forward at trial, no wonder it got stomped on.

“White House aides say they have concluded that Obama too frequently lost control of the debate and his own image during the stimulus battle. By this reckoning, the story became too much about failed efforts at bipartisanship and Washington deal-making, and not enough about the president’s public salesmanship.

For Obama’s next act, the program is the same as he has been planning for months: New Deal-style plans to rescue struggling homeowners and rewrite regulations on the financial markets, plus a budget proposal that lays the groundwork for sweeping health care reform.

But the strategy to promote these items is getting an emergency overhaul. Obama plans to travel more and campaign more in an effort to pressure lawmakers with public support, rather than worrying about whether he can win over Republican votes in Congress. Officials suggested that the new, more partisan tone Obama embraced last week in his speech before House Democrats at their retreat and continued at his news conference Monday was what he should have been doing all along” (my emphasis).

This is more or less what I advocated a couple of weeks ago. We are in political territory where bi-partisanship, if it ever meant anything, is an empty, counter-productive slogan now. One entire political party has disqualified itself from serious discussion about the nation’s serious problems.

As the conservative apostate Andrew Sullivan wrote on Friday:

“Here’s why they are not being intellectually honest…The GOP has passed what amounts to a spending and tax-cutting and borrowing stimulus package every year since George W. Bush came to office. They have added tens of trillions to future liabilities and they turned a surplus into a trillion dollar deficit – all in a time of growth. They then pick the one moment when demand is collapsing in an alarming spiral to argue that fiscal conservatism is non-negotiable. I mean: seriously.

The bad faith and refusal to be accountable for their own conduct for the last eight years is simply inescapable. There is no reason for the GOP to have done what they have done for the last eight years and to say what they are saying now except pure, cynical partisanship, and a desire to wound and damage the new presidency. The rest is transparent cant.”

This would all be painfully obvious were it not for the fact that much of the mainstream media has been trying so hard to turn the idea of bi-partisanship into the most important problem facing the United States and insisting, in their inimitable way, that bi-partisanship really means that Obama and the Democrats should always bend over backwards to accommodate the Republicans:

“Just look at the stimulus debate in the House. The Democrats included billions of dollars’ worth of tax cuts in an effort to appeal to Republicans, and they dropped provisions the Republicans objected to, like funding for contraceptives. The Republicans, on the other hand, offered an alternative that consisted of nothing — absolutely nothing — other than tax cuts. And keep in mind that government spending on things like unemployment benefits and food stamps is far more stimulative than tax cuts, according to economist and McCain campaign adviser Mark Zandi, among others.

Now, given all that, you might assume that when House Republicans responded to Democratic concessions by unanimously opposing a stimulus bill containing a mix of tax cuts and spending, voting instead for one that contained only tax cuts and would provide less of a boost to the economy, they would be portrayed by the media as intransigent partisans.

But that’s not what happened. Instead, Obama and the Democrats were portrayed as insufficiently bipartisan. Time‘s Mark Halperin, for example, blasted Obama for failing to “go for centrist compromises” and compared him to George W. Bush.”

The good news is that the unwashed masses, aka, the American people, aren’t buying it: overwhelming majorities support Obama and hold Republicans in Congress in deep contempt; solid majorities support the stimulus package. Obama would do well to take full advantage of these facts by arguing clearly and aggressively for the benefits to the American people and the country’s well-being of an ambitious agenda. As I and many others have said before, the Republican Party understands clearly that successful government efforts to help dig the country out of its economic difficulties is a political catastrophe for them. Given these realities, Obama is better off making his case around the country, rather than staying in Washington and trying to play footsy with an opposition only interested in kicking him in the shins.

“In 2003, when he won the American League home run title and the AL Most Valuable Player award as a shortstop for the Texas Rangers, Alex Rodriguez tested positive for two anabolic steroids, four sources have independently told Sports Illustrated.

Rodriguez’s name appears on a list of 104 players who tested positive for performance-enhancing drugs in Major League Baseball’s ’03 survey testing, SI’s sources say. As part of a joint agreement with the MLB Players Association, the testing was conducted to determine if it was necessary to impose mandatory random drug testing across the major leagues in 2004.”

Those tests were supposed to be anonymous, but that list of 104 names was seized by federal agents in 2004 as part of the BALCO investigation that has focused on, among other people, Barry Bonds.

There were no penalties for steroid use in baseball back in 2003 and it is unlikely that there will be any disciplinary action against Rodriguez.

But it’s noteworthy that from the moment Barry Bonds broke Hank Aaron’s all-time homerun record in the summer of 2007, much of the baseball public has been eagerly anticipating the day when a “clean” ballplayer would wrest baseball’s most cherished record away from the tainted Bonds. That player would surely have been Arod. Only 33 years old, Arod has already hit 553 career homeruns, good for twelfth all time. Assuming he stays healthy, he is very likely to shatter Bonds’ career record of 762 in the next five or six seasons.

Now, however, Arod is likely tainted too. Though he’s not well-liked, Arod will not be vilified to the degree that Bonds has. But he can no longer “save” baseball’s Mount Olympus from the man that baseball fans and media have always loved to hate.

By some accounts, for every one phone call coming into congressional offices in favor of the stimulus, one hundred are coming against it. The vaunted organizational skills of the Obama campaign appear to be sitting in neutral now that Obama is President. Meanwhile, the administration’s best weapon, the historically popular President himself, has arguably been spending too much time in the nitty gritty of policy work and not enough time trying to influence public opinion. Perhaps the administration was surprised by the unanimity and tenacity of GOP opposition to the still-popular stimulus. Perhaps it didn’t anticipate such extraordinarily negative media coverage. Whatever the explanation, Obama has now begun a more significant personal crusade to influence the debate.

Among his media stops yesterday was an interview with Katie Couric. Here’s part of the exchange he had with her yesterday:

Couric: Sen. Mitch McConnell said over the weekend that surely you’re privately embarrassed by some of the product that came out of the house version and let me just mention some of the spending in this package: $6.2 billion for home weatherization, $100 million for children to learn green construction…

Obama: Lets take that example. I’m stunned that Mitch McConnell use this as an example … We’re going to weatherize homes, that immediately puts people back to work and we’re going to train people who are out of work, including young people, to do the weatherization. As a consequence of weatherization, our energy bills go down and we reduce our dependence on foreign oil. What would be a more effective stimulus package than that? I mean, you’re getting a threefer. Not only are you immediately putting people back to work but you’re also saving families on your energy bills and you’re laying the groundwork for long term energy independence. That’s exactly the kind of program that we should be funding.”

This is the sort of work that Obama and his allies need to be doing relentlessly. And, unsurprisingly, Obama does it well here. But its worth pausing here for a moment to underline what a disaster our mainstream media are. If you or I interviewed Obama, we could be forgiven for offering poorly thought through examples of “embarrassing” spending in the stimulus bill. But, what’s Couric’s excuse? Presumably she prepared diligently for the interview. She’s not preparing for it alone, either, of course. She has a large staff of researchers and CBS news has access to an army of economists and other consultants to fact-check themselves. Perhaps you’re inclined to accept the extremely charitable explanation that Couric raised the weatherization example just to set Obama up to explain clearly what stimulus actually looks like. More likely though is the extraordinary fact that in all her preparation for this interview, none of Obama’s arguments ever occurred to her or to any of the people who helped her prepare for the interview. That all she knew was that weatherization sounded kind of tangential to economic stimulus and that Republicans, who always get their arguments aired, no matter how mindless, attacked it.

This is just one small example of the kind of uphill battle Obama faces in making sure that he gets a good bill through Congress – negotiating a relentless barrage of right-wing disinformation, refereed by an ignorant media.  To succeed, he needs to drop his arguably unhealthy attachment to “bi-partisanship” and to start seeing this for what it is – a gun fight to which Obama needs to bring a loaded weapon.

The confirmation of Tom Daschle, Obama’s nominee for Secretary of Health and Human Services has hit a few snags. In the past week, various reports have surfaced detailing Daschle’s initial failure to pay taxes for certain aspects of consulting work he did after he left the Senate in 2004. That consulting was itself very lucrative for Daschle, earning him several million dollars and included work for the kinds of private health insurance interests that many critics believe impedes real reform of our health care system. (For a more detailed catalog of Daschle’s alleged indiscretions, click here).

Since Obama picked Daschle largely for his perceived ability to shepherd health care reform through Congress, this last point is especially disturbing for some. Jonathan Cohn, a writer for The New Republic with expertise on health care, says that Daschle’s connections should not be disqualifying.

Glenn Greenwald offers a much more critical and disturbing take on Daschle and his wife Linda Hall, a high profile lobbyist for some of America’s biggest defense industry contractors and aviation interests. Greenwald acknowledges that we simply do not know whether Daschle will be effective in helping to champion meaningful health care reform.

But, he cautions:

“Other than his being more extreme than most (in his questionable ethics), and the fact that he and his wife work in tandem as a public-private team, there isn’t anything particularly unusual about how Tom Daschle functions. He’s quite emblematic of the Beltway syndrome. But that’s the point: while it’s unreasonable to expect that Obama will be able to avoid all ethically questionable individuals, it seems rather unnecessary to take one of the most ethically compromised Beltway mavens and place him in charge of a massive industry, one that has been lavishing him with undeserved wealth for the past several years.”

I also don’t know whether Daschle might be effective. What I question, however, is whether there really are no other viable choices out there to lead HHS. When Clinton and Obama were slugging it out in the primaries last year, and health care reform was at or near the top of the list of concerns of Democrats, no one said then that Tom Daschle was uniquely placed to see through such an important reform. One of the consequences of the insider Beltway culture is a tendency for people inside that bubble to convince themselves that only the people they know intimately are capable of doing the job well. Tom Daschle was always viewed as a compromiser and, once he became Senate Democratic leader, a pretty weak one. Compromising in politics is, of course, necessary and therefore by no means always a bad quality. Weak leadership is, on the other hand, harder to rationalize. How that guy, after several years as a lobbyist for powerful private economic interests, has morphed into the single best person to tackle a massive and dramatic social and policy transformation is, frankly, a little beyond me.

Update:

The New York Times says Daschle should withdraw his name from consideration.

The House of Representatives has now passed its version a currently $800 billion-plus stimulus package. In what some view as a surprise, not a single Republican voted for it. It is likely that when the Senate votes on this, at least one Republican – Olympia Snowe of Maine – will support it. But the vote results in the House highlight what should already be obvious – the GOP is simply acting in bad faith when it insists on being heard in negotiations over the stimulus. As Josh Marshall and others have convincingly explained, a successful stimulus package is a political disaster for Republicans and they have no intention of voting for one. If it works, it only enhances Obama’s and the Democrats’ political standing. And, on a deeper level, it drives another stake in the heart of Reaganism – the belief that “government is the problem, not the solution.” This is why Republican office-holders and right-wing media have spent considerable energy lately trying to argue that the New Deal was a failure. Reaganism was born as a successful attack on the legacy of the New Deal. That attack was central to its ability to tear apart the political coalition that arose at the time of FDR and had made Democrats the dominant political party for most of the period from 1932 to 1980.

The financial collapse now under way, on top of the other disastrous failures of the Bush administration, threatens to accelerate the unraveling of the modern GOP and bring about another period of lengthy Democratic ascendancy. This is on top of the demographic changes that helped bring Obama to power and threaten to destroy the competitiveness of an evermore authoritarian and intolerant Republican Party, less equipped by the day to speak meaningfully to an increasingly diverse country.

There are three lines of argument currently in widespread circulation that signal the combination of ideological extremism and lack of commitment to forging a serious solution to the current problems.

1) In addition to the predictable attacks on FDR’s New Deal policies as ineffective and responsible for prolonging the Great Depression, current right-wing talking points include the laughable point that Herbert Hoover, the President history has charged with sitting on his hands as the Great Depression deepened, was actually a “progressive” and a spend-thrift whose FDR-like policies were the real cause of the economic catastrophe of that era.

In a normal political culture, such arguments would be too idiotic to ever be uttered in public by national political leaders. But, such is the nature of the current GOP and the misnamed “liberal media” that acts as if these are serious arguments.

2) The GOP’s lame arguments against the stimulus. The above-mentioned Josh Marshall has been all over this, so let me quote him:

“Over the last few days I’ve been trying to take stock of an essential element of the current stimulus debate: namely, Hill Republicans have been getting a lot of air time and minimal press criticism for a series of arguments about the stimulus that are in most cases transparently ridiculous. For instance, I heard several House Republicans yesterday making the straight up argument that the renovation of the Capitol Mall wouldn’t create any jobs or stimulate the economy. Well, obviously any major building project creates jobs. Nothing could be more straightforward. Whether it’s the best long-term use of the money, in the sense of whether the building project will have spin-off effects creating greater productivity and growth over time is a decent question. And looking at what’s in the bill I find myself wishing that more of the more was being spent in a more concentrated fashion — largely on infrastructure projects. But every major building project creates jobs.”

In a similar vein, Republicans have complained that spending on things like Pell Grants, Amtrak, other construction projects and Medicaid are not stimulus, proving nothing so much as the fact that they lack the most elementary understanding of what the word actually means.

3) And, of course, resorting to a Congressional Budget Office (CBO) “report” that did not actually exist to claim the stimulus would not be sufficiently stimulative.

Unsurprisingly, the only plan under consideration that more than a tiny trickle of Republicans were willing to support is one that focused exclusively on tax cuts, despite the fact that mainstream economics accepts as nearly categorical the fact that spending is a better stimulant than are tax cuts.

Obama may merely be playing smart politics by trying to court some Republican support for his plans. But the bill that passed the House yesterday is already arguably too tilted toward tax cuts to provide the bang for the buck the country needs right now. And it’s tilted that way in part because Obama wanted Republican input into the legislation. His reward for that was, to repeat, zero Republican votes.

To the extent that the modern Republican Party has an agenda, it is simple and straightforward, as I wrote three years ago:

“For many, Reaganism was the touchstone of what “true” small government conservatism really was. But, it’s worth asking, did conservatives during the Reagan era decry the war on drugs, the massive expansion of the prison-industrial complex, the larger expansion of executive/policing power in the United States, a Christian-inspired agenda intent on legislating the private social affairs of ordinary Americans, all massive efforts to expand the power of the modern American state?

What has bothered right-wing conservatives about “big government” was whom it was helping….But the idea that conservatives really wanted to restrain the power of government per se is crap. Since 1980, dominant conservatism has whole-heartedly embraced government as an instrument to advance their preferred interests – corporations, the religious right, the military-industrial complex and so on.”

In other words, there is no principle behind current GOP opposition to the stimulus, save their general aversion for helping those most in need. There is only political calculation and of a particularly craven nature.

When the chattering classes turn to talk of bi-partisanship, it is worth recalling how hollow its meaning is in the current circumstances, as Glenn Greenwald bluntly explains.

There is no reason to idealize any of the Democrats, including Obama, in all of this. They have their own often narrow corporate interests to serve and, it’s a truism to say that political motivations figure into their calculations about the optimal shape of the stimulus package. But only one party is even trying at this point. The other, as Greenwald says, “has degenerated into the crazed, primitive, regional mess that it is today,” captive to the fanaticism of the Texas Republican Party and its ideological soul mates. Consequently, sitting Republican House members, concerned only that they face even more far-right wing challengers in their 2010 primaries in their evermore right-wing districts, catering to the most extreme elements in their party, are now struggling to come up with any serious reasons at all to try to stem America’s worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.

The New York Times’ Alan Schwarz has been faithfully following the story of concussion-induced long-term trauma in NFL players.

In today’s editions, he reports:

“Brain damage commonly associated with boxers has been found in a sixth deceased former N.F.L. player age 50 or younger, further stoking the debate between many doctors and the league over the significance of such findings.

McHale died at age 45. Researchers found brain damage uncommon for someone his age.

Doctors at Boston University’s School of Medicine found a condition called chronic traumatic encephalopathy in the brain of Tom McHale, an N.F.L. lineman from 1987 to 1995 who died in May at 45. Known as C.T.E., the progressive condition results from repetitive head trauma and can bring on dementia in people in their 40s or 50s.”

I have written previously about concussions and the NFL here and here.

One point I want to make: one reason why I cannot abide fans who complain about players’ salaries is that those complaints vastly outweigh, in sheer frequency, complaints about owners’ profits. But athletes – particularly in football, but not only – put their bodies on the line in a way that owners simply do not.  No one has any patience for players complaining that five million dollars a year isn’t enough money, and I understand that. But owners never put anything meaningful at stake, especially in the world of guaranteed profits that is big time athletics in America. That reward follows from risk, a bedrock of American capitalism, surely applies to players. But as in much else in American life, when it comes to the super-rich, owners’ reward comes risk-free.

Stories’ like Tom McHale’s make it hard to stomach the free pass owners get from fans convinced that players make “too much.”

The New York Times is reporting the results of an interesting study in which “researchers have documented what they call an Obama effect, showing that a performance gap between African-Americans and whites on a 20-question test administered before Mr. Obama’s nomination all but disappeared when the exam was administered after his acceptance speech and again after the presidential election.”

According to one of the study’s authors, Vanderbilt professor Ray Friedman,

“In the study, tests were administered to a total of 472 participants using questions drawn from Graduate Record Exams (GREs) to assess reading comprehension, analogies and sentence completion. The tests took place at four distinct points over three months during the campaign: two when Obama’s success was less prominent (prior to his acceptance of the nomination and the mid-point between the convention and election day) and two when it garnered the most attention (immediately after his nomination speech and his win of the presidency in November).” The study tested Blacks and Whites at equivalent levels of education, ranging from less than a high-school education to those with Ph Ds.

The Times article acknowledges several caveats: the study has not yet been peer reviewed, nor has it been replicated elsewhere. Therefore, its effects might merely be transitory – not a harbinger of a longer-term change. And the study appears to require dedicated viewing of events like Obama’s convention speech. In other words, Obama’s success does not, by itself, produce the observed effect, even according to the authors’ study (and assuming, of course, that the study measured something real, and was not simply a statistical fluke). Only people paying active attention appeared to have experienced the change in testing.

It will be interesting to see whether there is something larger going on here.

Here’s a snippet of what Covenant News had to say:

Civil officials who approve of homosexuality, make the civil government a vile cesspool from which the abominations vomit out across the land. By displaying such a contempt for the administration of Justice by promoting this criminal behavior, “such civil officials are not only the source of the defilement, they are the criminals, and a hostile enemy authorizing the destruction of the society in which we live.”

You can read the rest of the Talk2Action item here.

1) Generally, it struck me as a kind of rhetorical transition for Obama. It’s in a President’s informal job description to cajole, inspire, teach and comfort. So rhetoric will continue to matter. But among the feelings I got from the inauguration address was a sense that Obama knows that the time when he will be defined predominantly by his soaring oratory is past. From now forward, he will be judged mainly by what he does, not what he says. Of course he will always attempt to frame his actions in words that shine a positive light on his deeds. But one gets the feeling that Obama already knows that the frame game only takes one so far, especially in a time of acute crisis. This may explain the more tempered, workmanlike quality of the speech than we’ve seen from him in the past.

2) Obama broke new ground in specifically acknowledging non-believers as a part of the strength of our “patchwork heritage.” Though we are a uniquely religious nation compared to the world’s other prosperous countries, non-believers represent a growing proportion of the population, especially among those under forty. It’s another reminder that Obama is comfortable with diversity in its many forms – a useful quality in the leader of a country that is becoming more diverse in every way, every day.

3) Obama incorrectly identified himself as the 44^th person to take the oath of office. By a quirk of how these things are counted, Grover Cleveland Alexander is regarded as both the 22^nd and 24th President of the United States. We’ve now begun our 44^th presidency. But only 43 men have actually been presidents, including Obama.

4) As the botched oath was in progress, I thought to myself “someone on the right is actually going to raise questions about whether Obama is really President now.” It’s comforting to know how predictable these things have become.

5) Obama made the very useful and important point that “the success of our economy has always depended not just on the size of our gross domestic product, but on the reach of our prosperity; on our ability to extend opportunity to every willing heart – not out of charity, but because it is the surest route to our common good.”

As I mentioned a few days ago, inequality in America has become so extreme, that even many conservatives now acknowledge that it’s a problem, not only for ethical reasons, but because it threatens our social fabric. A more progressive tax code will help. So will a real jobs program. But policies skewed overwhelmingly to favor the wealthy remain endemic in our political system. These will need to be addressed.

6)  Perhaps the most problematic part of Obama’s speech came when he said “With old friends and former foes, we will work tirelessly to lessen the nuclear threat, and roll back the specter of a warming planet. We will not apologize for our way of life, nor will we waver in its defense, and for those who seek to advance their aims by inducing terror and slaughtering innocents, we say to you now that our spirit is stronger and cannot be broken; you cannot outlast us, and we will defeat you.”

Few people would object to Obama’s vow to defeat terrorism or lessen the nuclear threat. But the re-affirmation of “our way of life” has, in American political parlance, an indisputably larger meaning. We regard ourselves as entitled to a level of material consumption unparalleled in human history.  It’s fine for our leaders to talk about the principles of sacrifice, hard-work and personal responsibility. And attacking greed is always a political winner. In the abstract, Americans by and large embrace these things.

In concrete terms, however, we hate being told that we might to change our consumer-driven way of life – our big houses (and, compared to the rest of the world, even our “modest” houses are large), new cars, our ipods, cell phones and large television sets, our wardrobes, new computers and our sprawl.

As it is, of course, many individual Americans do without these things. But no society consumes at the level we do. Jimmy Carter’s famous 1979 “malaise” speech warned Americans that the era of crass materialism and conspicuous consumption was drawing to a close. We faced an energy crisis of massive proportions and would imperil our future if we didn’t reclaim older verities of community, spirituality and frugality. He was trounced a year later by Ronald Reagan who promised Americans, in so many words, that Carter’s doom and gloom vision was nonsense, that America would always be Number one. After 9/11, Bush 43 told us our patriotic duty wasn’t to cut back on our consumption and use of energy resources, it was to shop. Bill Clinton told us that if we worked hard and played by the rules, all Americans deserved all the accouterments of the American dream.

Americans represent 5% of the world’s population and use 25% of its fossil fuels. We face the real prospect that we will not be able to fix the planetary climate crisis without changing fundamentally our lifestyles. There is a hope that a technological breakthrough will afford us access to limitless sources of energy, so that there would be no day of reckoning. Maybe that will come to pass. But we are likely facing far more profound trade-offs than any of our political leaders are prepared to say.

Rather than warn of such a possibility, Obama sought to allay the “nagging fear that America’s decline is inevitable, and that the next generation must lower its sights. Today I say to you that the challenges we face are real. They are serious and they are many. They will not be met easily or in a short span of time. But know this, America – they will be met.”

Later, Obama did nod briefly to the imbalance in global consumption: “and to those nations like ours that enjoy relative plenty, we say we can no longer afford indifference to the suffering outside our borders; nor can we consume the world’s resources without regard to effect. For the world has changed, and we must change with it.”

But there was only a single reference to our warming planet in the speech.

It’s not surprising that Obama would, on his inauguration day, avoid a depressing harangue about the future we may well face. But we’d likely regard it as inadequate if a newly-crowned President McCain gave such short shrift to important realities.

7) Thank the lord we have a new President.

Watch the video here.

As we count down the final hours of the Bush presidency, it’s time to recall the remarkably far-sighted bit of satire The Onion penned in January 2001. Among the many chillingly prescient elements of the fake Bush speech that the Onion penned for him eight long years ago:

“You better believe we’re going to mix it up with somebody at some point during my administration,” said Bush, who plans a 250 percent boost in military spending. “Unlike my predecessor, I am fully committed to putting soldiers in battle situations. Otherwise, what is the point of even having a military?”

On the economic side, Bush vowed to bring back economic stagnation by implementing substantial tax cuts, which would lead to a recession, which would necessitate a tax hike, which would lead to a drop in consumer spending, which would lead to layoffs, which would deepen the recession even further.”

The Onion also “quotes” then Republican Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert looking forward to the Bush presidency:

“Finally, the horrific misrule of the Democrats has been brought to a close,” House Majority Leader Dennis Hastert (R-IL) told reporters. “Under Bush, we can all look forward to military aggression, deregulation of dangerous, greedy industries, and the defunding of vital domestic social-service programs upon which millions depend. Mercifully, we can now say goodbye to the awful nightmare that was Clinton’s America.”

Re-reading this now, I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. But you can read the rest of it here.

But according to the Times, “in conversations behind closed doors with investment analysts, some bankers have been candid about their intentions.” And it seems that lending money is well down on bankers’ list of priorities for how to spend their new-found windfall: “an overwhelming majority saw the bailout program as a no-strings-attached windfall that could be used to pay down debt, acquire other businesses or invest for the future” as well as a means to comfortably “ride out the recession.”

The US economy is in a recession and has been, according to the latest numbers, since the end of 2007. In such a climate, it makes sense that banks would be reluctant to lend money. The worse the economy is doing, the less safe it is to make loans to businesses. In other words, the credit freeze that has received so much attention is being a bit over-stated – it’s not happening in a vacuum. Instead, it’s a function, to some degree of the fact that the economy is struggling. But whether the banks are acting in an economically rational way, the way they are using the “bailout” money undermines almost entirely the rationale for the bailout in the first place. To take it a step further, the very fact that the banks are acting rationally by sitting on bailout money, or using it to improve their businesses in the long run, demonstrates that it was simply false that the bailout was necessary to avert an immediate crisis.

That the government has provided the staggering sum of $350 billion to the banking sector, with another $350 presumably on the way is extraordinary enough. But what makes it more infuriating to contemplate is the intense political battle and national hand-wringing over the bailout of the Big Three automakers. To be clear, the Big Three have been making largely inferior products for a long time. In the process, they have used their political clout for decades to shield themselves from the full effects of their weakened ability to compete in the marketplace. And, as an added bonus, they’ve increasingly banged out products that are only worsening the climate crisis, while obstructing the development of cars that could alleviate that crisis. In other words, there’s a lot that is wrong with Detroit, especially the incompetence of their executive leadership.

But those problems are not, ultimately, the reason that it was such a battle for the automakers to receive a $15 billion loan – chump change in the current environment. The main obstacle to Detroit receiving bailout money was that the Republican Party, aided and abetted by typically shoddy reporting, insisted that it was the unions that were killing Detroit. Repeatedly asserting that union autoworkers were making $70 an hour – a simple lie – opponents of the automaker bailout argued that it was well-paid American auto-workers that were making it impossible for Detroit to be competitive. It’s hard to over-state how perverse these arguments were (and are) in light of the massive sums of money being sent to the banks with no promise that they will use that money in America’s national interests. Current union workers make roughly $57,000 a year. Newly hired workers often make a little more than half that. And according to the most credible analysis, the difference in labor costs between Japanese-made and American made cars adds somewhere between $270 and $800 to the price of a new American car. In other words, the somewhat higher labor costs of unionized plants is simply not the reason that consumers prefer Toyotas to GMs. (Toyota, of course, is itself being battered by the current crisis). The government has been funneling hundreds of billions of dollars to the banking sector to do whatever they wanted with the money – a big thank you for having engaged in years of reckless business practices that have brought our economy to its knees. And yet, we had a straight-faced national conversation about whether a fifteen billion dollar loan to an industry employing millions of blue collar workers would be an unfair “reward” for bad behavior. (and, needless to say, in all the discussion of how American auto workers make so much more than their counterparts in Japanese owned plants, there was nary a peep about the enormous differences in compensation for American auto executives compared to Japanese auto executives).

Whether intended or not, this is, at bottom, war by other means against the less well-off in America. The tap never closes for the wealthy and the (non-unionized) institutions most closely associated with the wealthy. But the pipes suddenly freeze when it comes to providing aid to the lower orders in American society.

This is worth keeping in mind as we gird for the coming fight over health care reform. A new analysis by the Commonwealth Fund shows that a plan for universal health care, proposed by Congressman Pete Stark, would cover more people at less cost than any rival plan. In fact, the Stark plan – close to a plan for universal, government-paid health insurance – would save the country tens of billions of dollars a year in health care costs. But the Stark plan is almost certainly not politically viable because, as Matthew Yglesias puts it, “it’s too left-wing.” Commenting on this fact, Yglesias writes:

“But what’s incredibly frustrating is that a lot of people who claim to want to change public policy to expand health care coverage and better control health care costs will nonetheless fail to embrace Stark’s plan or anything similar for no real reason other than ideological posturing. It just can’t be the case, as a matter of centrist dogma, that the best solution is actually the most left-wing solution. It’s a far more ideological stance than anything you’ll ever hear from Pete Stark or from me. But the people hewing to it will insist on being called pragmatists.”

It’s a depressing fact that, in America, our default mode is to accept that the well-to-do are entitled to whatever they can get their hands on, while the less well off should be grateful for whatever is given to them. The differences in the nearly obstacle-free road to the massive financial bailout and the obstacle-laden path in the way of emergency loans to Detroit is a telling proxy for the larger class realities in America. We will hear lots of hand-wringing about how expensive it will be to extend health coverage to uninsured Americans. But in light of the bankers’ bailout (and just five years after Congress passed an enormous expansion of Medicare that was largely a give-away to large health industry corporations), it will be worth questioning whether concerns about costs or “principled” refusal to reward bad behavior are the real reasons why, yet again, we must tell the less well-off that when times are tough, they just need to suck it up.

In fact, the “water cure” as it was then called, was widely acknowledged as torture a century ago when, during the vicious American campaign in the Phillipines at the beginning of the twentieth century, reports of the use of the water cure against Filipino insurgents were common.

Relatedly, in an interview this week, Susan Crawford, the convening authority for the military commissions at Guantanamo Bay, has now said unequivocally that torture was used there to extract confessions from alleged 20^th Sept. 11 hijacker Mohammed al-Qahtani. Furthermore, Crawford said, the torture itself undermined the prosecution’s potential case, compelling her not to refer the case for further adjudication before a court.

As critics have been hammering home for years, not only is torture, as a legal matter, in categorical contravention of American law and our international commitments under the Geneva conventions and other agreements, but its application sullies our moral reputation and standing. Furthermore, it’s widely accepted by intelligence professionals themselves that torture is, as a practical matter, counter-productive, far more likely to extract false information than actionable intelligence.

America’s hands have, of course, been sullied by torture before the Bush administration came to power. It’s long been an unacknowledged part of American practice, both domestically and internationally. Even when American personnel have been barred from practicing it as a legal matter, we’ve long tolerated or facilitated such practices in our allies when it served our purposes. One should not be naive enough to think, therefore, that the Obama administration will completely rid itself of this particular stain. But it’s at least refreshing to see the next Attorney General of the United States reject the sickening moral relativism and linguistic slight of hand that has characterized the past eight years when it comes to this issue.

Though most economic attention of late has been focused on Obama’s likely stimulus plans, there has been a growing background hum about the need for “entitlement reform.” In outlining his economic plans more broadly last week, Obama said “I would expect that by February, in line with the announcement of at least a rough budget outline, that we will have more to say about how we’re going to approach entitlement spending.” That comment prompted a misleading article in the New York Times about the supposed problems facing social security and a series of editorials and articles in the Washington Post that raised the usual alarmism about the long-term viability of the program.

Since misleading characterizations about social security are so widespread and since a majority of Americans, especially young ones, are convinced that the program won’t exist by the time they retire, here are five points about its real state:

1) The program is fully funded decades into the future

According to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), the program will be fully able to pay all projected benefits through the year 2049. That’s forty years from now. In 2049, the oldest baby boomers will be 101, the youngest 85. You will hear lots of dates thrown around – 2017, 2025, 2030, etc – for when doomsday is set to occur. But the trust fund that will help cover all obligations to all retirees will not run out until 2049 (the Social Security Trustees estimate that the trust fund will run out in 2041, still decades into the future and using arguably flawed assumptions).

2) Even when the trust fund runs out, social security will still be in good shape

When reporting on the expected date that the trust fund will run out of money, media commonly and mistakenly use words like “broke,” “insolvent” and other adjectives to describe social security. The trust fund was established in 1983 (under a reform commission headed by Alan Greenspan). Its specific purpose was to ensure that social security could meet its obligations when the baby boomers began to retire in about 2013. As the projections suggest, by the time the trust fund is exhausted, it will have done its job – having provided the extra money to cover the retirement years of the vast majority of baby boomers. That the trust fund will eventually exhaust its reserves is by design, not an unforeseen disaster. This is why describing social security as broke, or insolvent once the trust fund runs out is simply false. Social security will always be able to provide benefit levels for all retirees at a higher level than retirees receive today. This is because social security is funded by payroll taxes, and as long as those are being collected, retirees will continue to receive their checks. Nothing will change this fact unless Congress decides that social security taxes should no longer be collected, and retirees should no longer receive benefits. In other words, unless Congress decides to abolish the program or deliberately reduce its scope, none of the doomsday scenarios will come to pass.

3) Repeat after me – Social Security is not Medicare, Social Security is not Medicare

One of the common errors in reporting on social security’s (non-existent) problems is to lump it in with the (real) problems facing Medicare and Medicaid. But those programs are separately funded from social security. And their problems are traceable to a simple source – the runaway costs of our bloated, bureaucratic and highly inefficient health care system. And it’s the inefficiency of the private sector of the health care industry that is largely responsible for the explosion in costs. This has nothing to do with social security. Whether intentional or not, lumping social security in with Medicare and Medicaid amounts to simple fear-mongering about social security’s future viability

4) To the extent that there is a long-term hole, it’s easily fixable

The Trustees calculate a 75-year projection for the program. So does the CBO. When one projects the potential shortfall over 75 years, one gets some pretty large numbers. As of the year 2083, according to the Trustees, there will be a $4.3 trillion hole in the program. That sounds like a lot. But as a point of comparison, that is the equivalent, in current spending, of roughly six or seven years of Pentagon expenditures. As another point of comparison, the Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003, which largely benefitted the well-off, will be roughly three times more costly to America’s bottom line over the next 75 years. Furthermore, closing the 75 year long hole would require a quite modest increase in payroll taxes equivalent to a roughly one percent increase in workers’ deductions (or less). In other words, though the size of the very long-term social security deficit looks scary, it’s not and is, therefore, easily correctible.

5) The Crystal Ball

Point four assumes that the estimates about the 75-year shortfall are correct. The main actuarial organization in the United States – this is the professional association whose membership does all of this head-spinning work – said back in 1993 that 75 year projections are “of little practical value” and “pure speculation,” likely to scare a misinformed public without providing any useful information. And speaking of 1993, Paul Krugman noted in March that the Trustees own 2008 report acknowledged that the program appears healthier than it has at any time since 1993. The 2008 report prompted Krugman to write that “what this tells us is that projections made in the mid-to-late 1990s were, in the light of subsequent revisions, way too pessimistic.”

Moral: Social Security’s financial problem is relatively minor. It doesn’t deserve the emphasis it receives from most pundits.”

Needless to say, America faces massive problems – a major economic crisis that will require trillions of dollars to fix when all is said and done; climate change; the deteriorating state of health care, violent conflict and terrorism to name just a few. These problems all require urgent attention and will, over the course of the next generation, let alone roughly three generations, cost us extremely large sums of money. These areas each face what could reasonably be called a crisis, demanding very large investments and financial commitments for the foreseeable future. By contrast, social security’s problems, to the extent that they exist at all, only exist in the frankly unforeseeable future, making social security well down on the list of urgent concerns facing Americans.

The man who sprinted to a record-shattering 1406 stolen bases during his great career, waltzed into Baseball’s Hall of Fame, earning the votes of 94% of Hall of Fame voters on his first try (a player needs to appear on 75% of ballots to make it in). Henderson was best known for being a terror on the bases, but he was more than that – a selective hitter who drew more walks than any player in baseball history except for Barry Bonds, a surprisingly powerful hitter who smashed nearly 300 career homeruns and a devastating leadoff hitter who did what leadoff hitters are paid to do: score runs. Henderson scored more of those than any player in baseball history. If you had to draw up the perfect leadoff man – you’d be hard-pressed to do better than finding the guy who ranks number one in baseball history in stolen bases and runs scored and number two in walks. And, yes, Henderson was an excellent defensive left-fielder for much of his career. Rickey’s brash and cocky style didn’t always sit well with the media, but he was just so good – under-rated, in fact, because of the excessive focus on his steals and lack of attention to how well he did everything else. Bill James, the Godfather of the modern revolution in baseball statistical analysis was once said of Henderson, “If you could split him in two, you’d have two Hall of Famers.”

Jim Rice, the other player elected today, has been a controversial figure in Hall of Fame voting for many years. He last played in 1989 and was first eligible for election in 1995. Rice was part of a fantastic rookie duo (along with league MVP Fred Lynn) that helped the Red Sox to an unlikely American League pennant in 1975. From 1977 to 1979, Rice was a terror, tearing up the American league. In 1978, when Rice won the American League Most Valuable Player award, he smacked 46 homeruns, drove in 139 runs and hit .325. And he added an oh-by-the-way league-leading 15 triples. These numbers, while common now, were all but unheard of in the American League of the late 1970s. Rice was 25 years old in 1978 and seemed headed for an all-time great career. But Rice peaked early. He had an excellent year in 1983, hitting a league leading 39 homers (the third and final time he led the league in that category) and another big year in 1986, helping the Red Sox to another pennant. Rice was 33 and was out of baseball by age 36. As a result, his career numbers, while very good, are not overwhelming. He was not a good defensive player and he didn’t run very much. According to the kinds of statistical analysts who have revolutionized the way baseball evaluates talent (pioneered by the aforementioned James), Rice is not a worthy Hall of Famer.

One such writer, Joe Sheehan (a favorite of mine) said this about Rice after his election today:

“The hagiographers, the storytellers, the mythmakers…they’ve won. Those who would argue the objective standards have lost. Once Rice advanced to within a handful of votes and a spot as the leading returning vote getter, it was clear that he would cross the line this time around, making a debate over his candidacy pointless. All of the points made last year, and the year prior, and the year before that are just as valid, just as winning as they have always been. All of the comparisons of Rice to Hall members, and those left out, and his peers on the ballot still show him to fall below the line. Nevertheless, the idea that Rice was the “most feared” hitter of his era, a notion that is both unproven and unprovable, has carried the day.”

Another such writer, Rob Neyer (also a personal favorite) wrote today:

“Now we can stop talking about Jim Rice, until a respectful period has passed and we can simply add him to the list of good players — Bruce Sutter, Catfish Hunter and Orlando Cepeda come to mind — who don’t really belong in the Hall of Fame but are there anyway. As I wrote earlier this morning, the election of Rice will do little to lower the standards of the institution, as it’s unlikely that players like Dave Parker, Albert Belle, Dick Allen and big Frank Howard now will be knocking on the Coop’s door (even though, it should be said, all of them were at least Rice’s equal).”

But his peers did think the world of him. Ron Guidry, the great Yankee pitcher of the late 1970s and early 1980s (who finished a close second to Rice in the 1978 MVP voting) is a good example. In a recent exchange with a sportswriter, ” When Ron Guidry was asked whether he thought Rice should be in the Hall of Fame and he looked at the interviewer like I was crazy. “Of course he should be,” Guidry said. “Guy scared the crap out of every pitcher in the league.” Rice’s strength was legendary – he reputedly broke bats just by checking his swing. And he endured a lot in the late 1970s and early 1980s, playing in a racially tense and divided Boston when, in some years, he was the team’s only African American player and when opposing players often reported being the targets of racial slurs and taunts by Boston fans.

A final note: The Red Sox were the last major league team to racially integrate their roster and Rice is the first Black player who spent the bulk of his career with the Red Sox to be elected to the Hall.

Thursday’s New York Times reported about a sheriff in Alabama, Greg Bartlett, who took advantage of a century-old Alabama law that allows lawmen to skimp on prisoners’ meals and pocket the saved money. Bartlett made an extra $212,000 over the past three years by doing so, while his inmates lost weight at an alarming clip. But his jail was already under a federal consent decree requiring Bartlett to provide for the proper care of his inmates. So, on Wednesday, a federal judge ordered Bartlett locked up for a night so that Bartlett could ponder how to provide reasonable sustenance for his inmates.

The Times story quoted Bobby Timmons, head of the Alabama Sheriff’s Association, who said: “You’re never going to satisfy any incarcerated individual.” Besides, Mr. Timmons said, “an inmate is not in jail for singing too loud in choir on Sunday.”

But while people don’t go to jail for singing too loud in choir, the story quotes one inmate who had lost 15 pounds since being jailed in October and was imprisoned for selling marijuana. In fact, an extraordinary number of Americans are incarcerated for non-violent drug offenses. As Casey noted earlier this week, Obama’s website promises to revisit the nation’s drug laws. And Virginia Senator Jim Webb has promised to make prison reform a priority in the new Congress. As it stands, about 2.3 million Americans are behind bars, making the US by far the largest jailer in the world, with nearly a quarter of the world’s inmates. Only one country, Russia, rivals the US prison population on a per capita basis. And Russia, under the dictator Vladimir Putin, has carried out a series of prison amnesties over the past decade, allowing it to drop well behind the US in that category.

According to a recent Washington Post profile, “Webb (D-Va.) plans to introduce legislation on a long-standing passion of his: reforming the U.S. prison system. Jails teem with young black men who later struggle to rejoin society, he says. Drug addicts and the mentally ill take up cells that would be better used for violent criminals. And politicians have failed to address this costly problem for fear of being labeled ‘soft on crime.’”

The story also notes that:

“Webb aims much of his criticism at enforcement efforts that he says too often target low-level drug offenders and parole violators, rather than those who perpetrate violence, such as gang members. He also blames policies that strip felons of citizenship rights and can hinder their chances of finding a job after release. He says he believes society can be made safer while making the system more humane and cost-effective.”

And it’s not just Webb who is raising concerns about this issue. This past week, several current and former Chief Justices of State Supreme Courts wrote a letter to Obama calling for an overhaul of sentencing guidelines and greater scrutiny of racial disparities in imprisonment. There are very few credible law enforcement officials left who believe that the current incarceration levels in America are keeping us safe. But Politicians’ fear of being labeled soft-on-crime, a senseless and ineffective “war on drugs,” inertia and special interests with a financial stake in the prison-industrial complex are sustaining counter-productive policies.

For an in-depth analysis of the war on drugs and its relationship to our burgeoning prison system, here’s a report courtesy of The Sentencing Project, a prison reform advocacy organization.

Yesterday, the Dallas Cowboys released the controversial and oft-suspended cornerback Adam “Pacman” Jones after one season with the club. Jones was a dud on the field this year and incurred another suspension mid-season. The Cowboys’ stated reason for releasing Jones, however, was the recent surfacing of allegations that Jones may have contracted a shooting in 2007, though the case, while open, is not currently being investigated (I have my doubts about whether, had Pacman just had a big season, the Cowboys would have made this move). As is inevitably the case when there is controversy in Cowboys’ land, you can be sure Terrell Owens’ name can’t be far from the headlines. ESPN’s Matt Mosley argued yesterday that Cowboys’ owner Jerry Jones should dump Owens as soon as possible now that he’s gotten rid of his Pacman headache.

There are reasons why Owens might be worth cutting. He’s 35 years old and has been in the league for thirteen years. He’s a physical and fearless player and his years in the NFL have, inevitably, taken a toll on his body, though he remains in great physical condition. His performance has slipped – he’s still a dangerous playmaker, but not the consistently devastating game-breaker he was a few years ago. Drops have been a problem for him in recent seasons. All of which might make it not worth paying the $9 million or so dollars the Cowboys would owe him for next season. These are not, however, the things that people usually talk about when they talk about T.O. Mosley argued that Owens was “busy dividing” the Cowboys’ locker-room, though such claims are hard to pin down. In general, T.O. has become a poster child for all of the things that mainstream sports media hate about the “modern” athlete. But here’s the thing: T.O.s never really done anything. He hasn’t broken any laws. He hasn’t engaged in any significant on-field misconduct. He’s done his share of over-the-top celebrations after touchdowns, he’s had his share of squabbles with teammates and in September 2006, he was at the center of a media feeding frenzy akin to a presidential assassination attempt after he apparently over-dosed on sleeping pills. But, really, where’s the beef that would justify the endless stream of inane commentary about the hated Owens?

Three weeks ago, MODI at Sports On My Mind (SOMM) penned a very sharp parody of the famous Nathan Jessup speech from A Few Good Men, as if given by Pacman. But I would ask, as you read it, to substitute T.O for Pacman as the imaginary speaker. The noteworthy fact is that the effect is still the same. Pacman’s real problems with the law and the over-hyped trivialities that comprise the bill of complaint against Owens are one and the same in the world of what SOMM’s Dwil calls Big Box Sports Media. One demonized black athlete is as good as another, no matter how disparate the transgressions. Just ask OJ Mayo.

In any event, here’s MODI’s Black athlete/Jessup missive:

“Son, we live in a world that needs black sports villains and those villains need to be guarded by ESPN. Who’s gonna do it? You? I have a greater responsibility than you can possibly fathom. You weep for “good role models” and curse the name ”Pacman”; you have that luxury. You have the luxury of not knowing what I know: that my life, while tragic, probably enhances your life… and that my existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, enhances lives — especially white lives. That’s why you can’t let me go; comment 400 to 4000 times each time I sneeze; and never grow tired even after 2000+ ESPN articles.”…

…I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to a sports fan who rises and sleeps under the psychological empowerment that I provide, and then questions the manner in which I provide it. I would rather you just said “thank you”, and went on your way. Otherwise, I suggest that you pick up a keyboard and write a post — about the tons of positive athlete stories you currently ignore while typing your nth comment on how I “just don’t get it”. Either way, I don’t give a damn what you think of me!

… Because we both know why you can’t stop thinking of me.”

Courtesy of Glenn Greenwald, the outstanding blogger and legal expert, on why the choice of Johnsen is so encouraging. The Office of Legal Counsel, Greenwald argues, “is probably the most consequential federal government office that remains relatively obscure.” Greenwald notes that “The legal opinions which it issues become, more or less automatically, the official legal position of the Executive Branch. It was from that office that John Yoo, Jay Bybee and others did so much damage, issuing now-infamous memoranda that established the regime of lawlessness that has dominated our political institutions over the last eight years.” This regime of lawlessness justified repeated illegal spying on Americans, green-lighted torture in contravention of US domestic and international legal obligations and excused the President from any responsibility for these actions.

After the systematic degradation of presidential accountability over the past eight years, Johnsen’s appointment is an encouraging sign that President-to-be Obama takes seriously the idea that there are, in fact, limits to Presidential power.

A good example of her views can be found here.

Greenwald’s post about Johnsen elaborates on her credentials for helping to restore such limits. You can read it here.

One other related point – also courtesy of Greenwald. He’s been documenting for years now the complicity of Democratic leaders, including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senator Jay Rockefeller, Chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, in the Bush illegalities. He has an especially incisive and disturbing post on that here.

It’s a favorite pastime of conservatives to warn about the perils of unintended consequences. In its most basic form, this warning derives from the conviction that any time government undertakes to remedy one problem, it runs the risk of creating other, even more intractable problems. Now one would think that the current economic crisis we are facing, largely brought about by the unintended consequences of private economic behavior, would compel conservatives to be a bit more humble in warning of the possible excesses of public policy. And some are. But apparently not George Will. In a truly stupefying column in Sunday’s Washington Post, Will pinned the blame for thirty five years of growing inequality in America on a series of Supreme Court cases and Congressional action designed to eliminate discrimination in hiring. The short story is this: in 1971, the Supreme Court ruled that even hiring practices that did not intentionally discriminate against certain groups could be deemed illegal if their effects were discriminatory. To take a hypothetical example, if a local company said it would only hire people who came from a certain part of town, and it happened that that part of town was mostly white, the practice would be deemed discriminatory even if that were not the intent. Unless the criterion was directly and necessarily related to job performance, it could not be a basis for hiring.

According to Will, citing a paper by Richard Vedder and Brian O’Keefe, the consequence has been that:

“many employers, fearing endless litigation about multiple uncertainties, threw up their hands and, to avoid legal liability, threw out intelligence and aptitude tests for potential employees. Instead, they began requiring college degrees as indices of applicants’ satisfactory intelligence and diligence.”

Will provides no data, so it’s hard to pin him down, but it is a fact that many professions, employing large numbers of people, do require licensing and aptitude tests. These include police officers, firefighters, many categories of state and federal workers including foreign service, as well as nurses, lawyers, accountants, teachers and more. Furthermore, many other kinds of jobs, like advertising, newspaper reporters, plumbers and university professors, to name a few, do not now and have never, to my knowledge, required professional employment tests. In other words, absent any hard data, there is no basis for assuming that testing is less common in professional life today than it was forty years ago. To take one obvious example, demands for teacher testing have grown dramatically in the past two decades. Absent any evidence for the overall decline in professional licensing and testing, it should be clear that Will’s entire argument falls apart. (Will cites one piece of data about testing: that there used to be 2000 different kinds of aptitude tests. Now, one assumes, there are many fewer, though Will doesn’t say. But that there are fewer kinds of aptitude tests in use doesn’t mean that fewer people are being tested. It just means there are fewer types of tests).

It is true, as Will notes, that there has been an explosion in college enrollment since the 1970s. And virtually every study suggests that the growing inequalities in American society are a product, in part, of the growing gaps between the incomes of the college-educated and the non-college educated. But Will has provided the flimsiest basis for pinning that growing gap on efforts against discrimination.

One assumes that if Will had a better argument to make, he would have made it. But this incredibly shallow argument is really just an excuse to write the final paragraph:

” Soon the Obama administration will arrive, bristling like a very progressive porcupine with sharp plans — plans for restoring economic health by “demand management,” for altering the distribution of income by using tax changes and supporting more muscular labor unions, for cooling the planet by such measures as burning more food as fuel, and for many additional improvements. At least, those will be the administration’s intended consequences.”

There are many ironies in this parting shot, but one that is worth special attention is the petty little dig at Obama’s likely efforts on climate change. After all, has there been a larger unintended consequence of market-based activity, specifically the industrial revolution, than the perilous threat of global warming that is an unintended effect of the millions of private acts in creating modern, consumer society.

Let’s leave to the side the fact that for decades Conservatives have dismissed concerns about inequality as liberal hand-wringing designed to interfere with the natural order of things. Conservatives pride themselves on their astute and sober understanding of the limits and foibles of human behavior. And their caution would be worth taking seriously were it not compromised by an overwhelming, ideological blindspot – that human nature’s consequences are only negative when humans in government make decisions. In fairness, some conservatives do recognize this. But, for George Will, the conviction remains that, magically, decisions made by private actors necessarily yield good outcomes. It’s as if only governments are staffed by actual humans. In the private sector, one must presume, all decision-making is made by angels. This is the fantasy, in any event, that Will, despite all the available evidence, is still trying to sell.

Earlier this week, I dissected the bogus efforts to smear the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA), a Carter-era initiative to bar red-lining and discrimination in lending by banks to ensure low-income and minority access to bank loans. As the widely-read economist Brad Delong puts it: “Of all the bizarre things coming out of the Republican Party…is the claim that the financial crisis is the result of government regulation that forced banks to lend to poor people–especially to poor brown and black people.” Courtesy of Delong’s blog, here are a couple of additional strikes against that smear.

1) The Wall Street Journal reported this week on a study by two economists about lending to poor and moderate income communities in California and found, among other things that a) “loans originated by lenders regulated under CRA in general were “significantly less likely to be in foreclosure” than those originated by independent mortgage companies that weren’t covered by CRA” and b) 12% of the loans made by CRA lenders in these areas were high-priced loans, a technical definition of subprime…52.4% of loans made by independent mortgage companies in low-income areas.”

2) As a consequence of research conducted on behalf of the Federal Reserve, including the study mentioned above, one Fed governor, the conservative economist Randall Kroszner has concluded that: “the very small share of all higher-priced loan originations that can reasonably be attributed to the CRA makes it hard to imagine how this law could have contributed in any meaningful way to the current subprime crisis.”

Of course, the fact that it’s obviously untrue doesn’t mean that the right-wing will stop pushing the story. Because the alternative to the CRA myth is to admit that there are limits to the magic of endless wealth-creation if only the government and liberal do-gooders would just leave the market alone. Although even the greatest free-market ideologue of all, Alan Greenspan, has now admitted that there is a “flaw” in that kind of thinking.

According to ESPN.com’s David Thorp, Mayo is the top NBA rookie so far. He’s averaging about 20 points a game and here’s how Thorp describes his play:

“Composure is one of Mayo’s biggest strengths. And most of the time, composure in a player results from genuine confidence. Genuine confidence, as opposed to the type of confidence that is merely a shell covering insecurities, is born of hard work and successful practices and games.”

Referring to a recent game in which Mayo shot the ball poorly, Thorp observed:

“I saw a player still locked into the total game. He didn’t allow his off night from the field to deter him from finding ways to help the team win, or keep him from taking good shots. He looked like a veteran, and has been playing like one all season.”

These are nice qualities in a rookie who played only one year of college basketball (at USC). But they’re especially noteworthy for a player who, just eighteen months ago and then a high-school phenom from West Virginia, was at the center of a storm of controversy. In the Spring of 2007, Mayo was being demonized across the sports blogosphere, most notably by ESPN’s superstar writer, Bill Simmons. Simmons wrote a widely circulated article, aptly titled “Down with the OJ Mayo Era.” Simmons criticized Mayo’s “appalling play” in the jut-completed McDonald’s High School All America game and compared Mayo unfavorably to another top high school player, Kevin Love (who, after one year at UCLA, is now also in the NBA):

“With Mayo joining a loaded USC team and Love playing 20 minutes away for a Final Four team, that’s looming as a dynamite rivalry and the most intriguing media subplot for the 2007-08 season. After all, Love represents everything good about basketball (unselfishness, teamwork, professionalism) and Mayo represents everything we’ve come to despise (showboating, selfishness, over-hype). If Love were black, this would be a much easier topic to discuss. But he’s white. So even though there’s a natural inclination to embrace Love’s game and disparage Mayo’s game — you know, assuming you give a crap about basketball and care about where it’s headed as a sport — there’s also a natural inclination to hold back because nobody wants to sound like the white media guy supporting the Great White Hope over the Black Superstar Du Jour.”

It wasn’t just white sports commentators piling on Mayo. On Pardon the interruption, ESPN’s Michael Wilbon also decried Mayo at the time:

“I wouldn’t even let this kids’ plane, and it might be a private jet land in the city where my school is, because what’s next for Coach Floyd (the USC coach, for whom Mayo decided to play without visiting the school), is OJ gonna say “coach, run out and get me a samich (sic),” is he gonna say coach “I’ll take care of the timeouts,” “coach I don’t want to practice today.” [Floyd] has turned himself over to some kid, he’s turned his whole program over to a kid who says, “no, I don’t want you to be able to call me,” it is insane.”

These are just a small sampling, but you get the idea.

So, what horrible things had the teenage Mayo done to warrant such vituperation?

1) at the end of the West Virginia state championship game in 2007, Mayo heaved the ball skyward in what was regarded as an unacceptable show of disdain for his opponents.

2) he was the subject of a highly unusual recruiting process, in which he chose to go to USC without having visited the campus.

3) he once bumped a referee. (Mayo was eventually suspended for three games, but almost all observers now agree that there was only incidental contact and that the ref took a dive worthy of a pro wrestler).

I, and others, wrote about the controversy surrounding Mayo at the time, and I won’t rehash all of that discussion.

But a few points are worth recounting:

A) Concerning that McDonald’s all America game, stopmikelupica went hard after Simmons:

“Yeah, you’re right. Mayo should care more about winning an ALL-STAR GAME. What a selfish prick. Oh, you might want to fail to mention that on March 17, 2007, Mayo led Huntington High School to its third consecutive Class AAA basketball championship in the state of West Virginia with 103-61 rout of South Charleston. Mayo finished with a triple-double: 41 points, 10 rebounds, and 11 assists. You might want to leave that out, because the winning three championships in a row thing might make it seem to ignorant people like me like Mayo cares about winning somewhat (Mayo was only part of the final championship team, but SML’s point still stands). Or those 11 assists in the championship game might make him seem like an odd choice to criticize as selfish.”

B) About Mayo’s unusual recruiting process – that he essentially chose USC rather than allowing himself to be wooed by the major programs, the Big Lead (TBL) wrote:

“It’s incredibly sickening, and we truly wish Tim Floyd the best in this endeavor …Why Floyd would want anything to do with someone who lives by this credo, “O. J. doesn’t give out his cell … He’ll call you” is beyond us. Mayo is the anti-Kevin Durant, and exemplifies everything that is wrong with American youth basketball. Increasingly, it’s trickling up to the NBA.”

Mayo’s crime, in addition to failing to visit USC, was that, according to the lengthy New York Times piece about his recruiting process, he apparently refused to give out his cell phone number and told Coach Floyd that he, Mayo, would initiate contact.

In response, I wrote at the time:

“That TBL regards Mayo’s “attitude toward college basketball” as “incredibly sickening” is fascinating, for two reasons. One, the Jenkins article isn’t really about Mayo’s attitude toward college basketball per se – it’s about his decision to come to USC. And, according to that article, Mayo chose USC over UCLA because he wanted to make a mark by helping establish a new tradition. What’s so objectionable about that particular desire is unclear. Furthermore, according to the Jenkins piece, as noted above, Mayo was only interested in USC or a historically Black college. It’s not clear how this shows greater contempt for college basketball than any other blue chip recruit – almost none of whom can really be said to basing their school choice on the quality of education they might receive or any other consideration outside of how it might affect their basketball careers. That Mayo is more up front about that appears to be his most serious transgression.”

As a footnote to that discussion, I had an exchange with TBL about Mayo and their complaint that he never even visited USC. I noted that I had never visited Ann Arbor before I decided to go to Michigan as undergraduate. More importantly, Michigan’s new basketball coach, John Beilein, accepted the job there in the Spring of 2007 having never visited to Ann Arbor. Needless to say, neither TBL nor anyone else of note complained about Beilein’s irresponsible and reckless behavior.

C) Finally, in response to Simmons’ self-conscious concerns about the racial aspects of his Mayo/Love comparison, I said:

“To be clear, liking Kevin Love and disliking OJ Mayo is not, in itself, racist. The problem is not with preferences for individual players… The problem is with representations. We no longer live in an era in America where direct, overt expressions of racism are acceptable in mainstream discourse. You can’t any longer say that Black people are inferior, or less intelligent, or whatever, without being condemned by most Americans (see Michael Richards)…. [But] wittingly or not (I personally would argue for the latter), [Simmons] is trading in highly charged representations that have inescapable racial content. Simmons has managed to attach Mayo to everything scary about American culture today for many (white) Americans: rap music, disrespectful teenagers, contempt for tradition and proper structures of authority. And, that’s why this conversation isn’t really about the state of basketball, as Simmons puts it. It’s deeper than that. It’s about America – the kind of society we live in, the values we hold, the prospects for our future well-being – those things are all implicitly at stake in this hand-wringing about OJ Mayo who, incredibly, is already symbolic of an entire era.

…

Now, Mayo’s decision to choose college rather than wait for colleges to choose him and the reaction to that fact is also not inherently racial. There are all sorts of examples of athletes, Black and White, getting slammed for refusing to play for the team that drafted them (JD Drew being a classic example), and part of that has to do with the expectations that fans of American team sports have about how athletes should show their gratitude for their great good fortune.

But, the problem with branding an entire era the Mayo era, in addition to its obviously absurd, over-the-top character, is that it plays on still simmering racial resentments felt across the length and breadth of this land, wherein a better, more orderly past is giving way to a more uncertain and dangerous future and the face of that future is, for many, a menacing face that looks different from the faces we associate with tradition, order and the good in America. It’s easy to stir people’s racial and ethnic animus when one preys upon their anxiety and uncertainty in this way, even if one doesn’t mean to.”

Simmons has since backed off his views of Mayo. By the middle of Mayo’s freshman year in college, the 2007-08 season, Simmons was describing in glowing terms Mayo’s abilities as a basketball player, including his court awareness and all around strong play. So what changed? Simmons has never been a fan of Tim Floyd, so he’d be hard-pressed to argue that Floyd was somehow responsible for Mayo’s maturation during his one season under Floyd’s tutelage. The truth is this: there’s was never any serious basis for hating on Mayo to the degree that Simmons, Wilbon and their many brethren in the sports commentariat did? The “appalling” and “sickening” behaviors to which they referred were, in truth, utter trivialities. But athlete demonization remains a fixture of sports commentary. And more often than not, Black athletes are its targets.

Just wanted to link to this worthwhile article from Paul Jenkins at Huffington Post. In the wake of the controversy over the CD that includes the song “Barack, the Magic Negro” there’s been renewed attention to the Republican Party’s increasing difficulty in appealing to non-white voters.

Spelling out the general scope of the GOP’s political problems, Jenkins writes:

“[The GOP is] utterly unrepresentative of America in the 21st century. Its Congressional representation is nearly uniformly white, and overwhelmingly male. So much so, in fact, that there is not one single African-American GOP member of Congress (out of 219 or 220); nor, for that matter, are there any black GOP Governors (out of 22). There are just four Republican Latinos in Congress, all Florida Cuban-Americans; one of them, Senator Mel Martinez, has announced his retirement. He is the only non-white or Hispanic GOP Senator.”

Amazingly, as Jenkins points out, the last African American Republican in Congress was JC Watts, who left the House in 2002. Jenkins fails to note that Democrats are essentially no better in the Senate, but there are over forty African American Democrats and roughly two dozen Hispanic Democrats in the House.

Especially interesting is Jenkins’ observation that African Americans are increasingly able to win in Congressional districts that are majority white. This is a product of an important, larger trend:

“It was all supposed to end very differently: the Republican Party’s Southern strategy, which seemed to many so cynically brilliant as recently as the turn of this century, has backfired so badly that even parts of the South, such as Virginia and North Carolina, are now dominated by Democrats, and not the old-school segregation-era Democrats. These new Southern Democrats come in all colors and both genders and they range from the most socially progressive to others who would have felt quite at home in the more moderate Republican party of old. The failure of the GOP’s Southern strategy is also in evidence in one often overlooked respect: the election of candidates by electorates of a different race or ethnicity. Obama is, of course, the most extremely visible example of this phenomenon, but there are others, including in the South. In Georgia, for instance, the 2nd district’s Representative, Sanford Bishop, who is African-American, has been comfortably reelected several times despite redistricting that has given his constituency a slender white majority. The same goes for Mel Watt, one of the most progressive members of Congress, an African-American elected in a narrowly white majority district in North Carolina….In total, there are over two-dozen seats nationally that are represented by members who are in a racial or ethnic minority in their own constituency; half of these are African-Americans, many of them in the Midwest (Indianapolis, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, Kansas City) and in California. This represents a sea change from just a decade ago, when it was considered far-fetched to believe that a black candidate could be elected from a district that was anything less than 60% African-American.”

The day after the election, I wrote that demographic changes in America were posing an increasing challenge to the Republicans’ political viability. The “Magic-Negro”-CD incident suggests that the Republican intolerance is still trumping its ability to face America’s political future. As Jenkins writes, the CD and other incidents are “just the more bizarre manifestations of a party that has wallowed for so long in the privileges of its white male supremacy that it does not even realize that everyone has left the plantation, and they are not coming back.”

In a discussion this past week on FOX News, commentators expressed indignation over this New York Times analysis of the roots of the financial crisis. The FOX commentators’ beef? The article failed to mention the role of liberals, government intervention and the pernicious effects of the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA). Originally passed in 1977 and expanded, in part, during the 1990s, the purpose of the CRA was to compel banks to expand opportunities for home-ownership for lower income Americans, including minorities. During the just-concluded presidential campaign, as the economic crisis mushroomed into a catastrophe, the CRA became a central element in a right-wing narrative about the sub-prime meltdown, the bursting of the housing bubble and the larger crisis. Desperately trying to deflect responsibility from their own blind fealty to the power of unfettered and unregulated markets, conservatives used the CRA to argue that liberal do-gooderism, government interference in otherwise always well-functioning markets and forced lending to irresponsible minority home-buyers were the real roots of the crash.

And, as Media Matters reported this past week, FOX News is still trying to push this bogus narrative despite the fact that it has been thoroughly debunked. Since we are likely to continue hearing it, below are five points (with plenty of links if you’re interested) to help parry conservative nonsense about the collapse of the housing bubble, its origins and its connection to the current economic collapse.

1) 1) The vast majority of subprime loans were originated by institutions not subject to CRA oversight. In other words, the vast majority of subprime loans were issued by financial institutions that had one over-riding incentive to make these loans – they were the most profitable.

But, don’t take it from me. Take if from Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, appointed by President Bush to replace Alan Greenspan in 2006. In a letter to Senator Robert Menendez on November 19, Bernanke wrote: “Our own experience with CRA over more than 30 years and recent analysis of available data, including data on subprime loan performance, runs counter to the charge that CRA was at the root of, or otherwise contributed in any substantive way to, the current mortgage difficulties.”

For a thorough analysis of the flaws in this argument, see the Congressional testimony by Eric Stein, of the Durham-based organization Center for Responsible Lending (especially pp. 26-30).

I2I 2) If you add up to the total value of all subprime loans, not just those in default, but all of them, the figure you get is about $1.5 trillion. That’s a lot, but it’s a relatively small fraction of the many trillions of dollars of now bad mortgage-fueled securities. According to journalist and former Wall Street Banker Nomi Prins: “Subprime mortgages have been blamed for the financial crisis, but we’re spending more than five times more money (in Fed loans, injections, bailouts and guarantees) than the value of every subprime loan in the country combined.”

So, not only is CRA not a cause of the subprime meltdown, but the subprime meltdown itself is only a relatively small part of a much larger real estate bubble whose bursting is a key reason for the current economic crisis.

(For a good dissection of the mortgage feeding frenzy as it played out at the now failed Washington Mutual, see this New York Times article).

And, here’s a great analysis about the “boiler room” mentality more generally, how it drove that feeding frenzy and the business press’ failure to report it.

3) Sub-prime mortgages actually governed by CRA did relatively well in the current crisis – the rate of loan default in CRA-generated mortgages is much lower than the national average. That’s a hard piece of data to accept when you’re trying to spin a familiar yarn of liberal social policy in cahoots with irresponsible poor people screwing it up for everybody else. But for understanding reality, it’s important to keep in mind. According to the CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco Janet Yellen, “studies have shown that the CRA has increased the volume of responsible lending to low- and moderate-income households”

4) 4) Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae were followers, not leaders.

This is worth keeping in mind because a key part of the right-wing effort to obfuscate the true source of the current economic crisis is to blame those two (formerly) quasi governmental institutions. But it was a lack of regulation at those two institutions that contributed to their serious problems and they, in any event, were not leaders in the mortgage-security frenzy that helped take down the economy – they were followers – trailing the private institutions that were most aggressively pushing mortgages and their securitization in the critical 2002 to 2007 period.

5) 5) The subprime crisis has hit minority homeowners, particularly Blacks, especially hard, as greedy lending institutions did sell bad loans using unsavory sales pitches as aggressively as they could to the most vulnerable borrowers. They didn’t do this because of CRA, whose regulations make such conniving loan practices much harder to pull off or because of larger government mandates to make sure that minorities became home-owners, regardless of their means. Financial institutions pushed bad mortgages because an insatiable appetite for ever-greater profits in a nearly regulation-free lending environment allowed them to.

In nearly every way imaginable, the current economic crisis is a devastating blow to the Reaganite fantasy about unfettered markets. But right-wingers have grasped desperately for a straw man comprised of their favorite bogeymen – liberal social policy, poor people, minorities and ACORN (the right’s favorite new bogeyman). Basic facts are an important tool for tearing apart that straw man.

Chip Saltsman (pictured), candidate to head the Republican National Committee, sends out a Christmas goodie bag to RNC members with a CD including the racially loaded parody of Obama’s liberal supporters.

Courtesy of Eric Kleefeld of Talking Points Memo, who aptly notes:

“If one of the Republican Party’s challenges is how to effectively oppose the first black president without coming off as racist, one of the candidates for RNC chair is hardly off to a good start — he is now distributing a CD that includes a racially-charged song called “Barack, The Magic Negro.”

The CD is by Paul Shanklin, who writes right-wing parody tunes and is often featured on Rush Limbaugh. Casey has, of course, already documented in detail Rush’s racist history.

The top article on the New York Times website this morning has following introduction:

Expansion of Clinics Shapes a Bush Legacy

By KEVIN SACK

President Bush has doubled federal financing for community health centers, enabling the creation or expansion of 1,297 clinics in underserved areas.

Sounds great, doesn’t it? The Community Health Centers program, launched under the Great Society by President Johnson in the 1960s, is a laudable program, as are efforts to expand it. But the Times article this morning is simply baffling in its omission of critical context for evaluating President Bush’s legacy when it comes to health care for the less well-off in America.

The article begins with these grafs:

“NASHVILLE – Although the number of uninsured and the cost of coverage have ballooned under his watch, President Bush leaves office with a health care legacy in bricks and mortar: he has doubled federal financing for community health centers, enabling the creation or expansion of 1,297 clinics in medically underserved areas.

For those in poor urban neighborhoods and isolated rural areas, including Indian reservations, the clinics are often the only dependable providers of basic services like prenatal care, childhood immunizations, asthma treatments, cancer screenings and tests for sexually transmitted diseases.

As a crucial component of the health safety net, they are lauded as a cost-effective alternative to hospital emergency rooms, where the uninsured and underinsured often seek care.”

Though the article begins with an obligatory acknowledgment that the number of uninsured has “ballooned” under Bush’s watch, it suffers from two striking omissions:

1) though it mentions that the program “could be vulnerable” to cuts in federal programs like Medicaid and SCHIP (the State Children’s Health Insurance Program) out of which the health centers are partially funded, it omits completely reference to the fact that the states are being forced, right now, to consider massive cuts in their share of Medicaid. While the current economic crisis is the most immediate cause of these anticipated cuts, there is no avoiding this fact: the hundreds of billions of dollars in tax breaks for the wealthy that Bush has championed over the past eight years are a direct cause of the reduction in federal aid to the states (as, of course, are the massive outlays for the war in Iraq). One key consequence: the financially strapped states are forced to make significant budget cuts, including in their contributions to Medicaid. (And the mounting health care crisis has, of course, predated the 2008 economic crisis).

To give a sense of the scale here – whereas annual federal funding for the community health centers is, according to the Times, about $2.1 billion dollars (with proposed expansion to $8 billion), the anticipated shortfall in funding for Medicaid in the next two years is $100 billion.

In a remarkable contrast, while the Times chose to tout a Bush legacy, the top article on this morning’s Washington Post website is: “States Driven to Reduce Health Coverage for Poor,” outlining the enormous scale of the impending cuts.

2) Bush’s unconscionable decision to veto expansion of SCHIP funding in 2007. As noted above, the Times article does acknowledge that the community health centers receive part of their funding from SCHIP. But in 2007, Congress passed legislation to expand the very successful program, which extends health insurance coverage to children from families that are not poor enough to qualify for Medicaid, but still too poor to pay for the mushrooming costs of health insurance. Bush vetoed that expansion, potentially denying health insurance to an additional several million American children over the next five years.

Omission of discussion of SCHIP in this context is particularly galling because the Times article notes that Bush views the community health centers as a valuable alternative to the obvious perils and inefficiencies of emergency room health care.

Why is this so galling?

When he spoke in opposition to S-CHIP last year, the President blithely argued that expansion of the program was unnecessary since lack of health insurance and access weren’t really problems in America. Why? Because “after all, you just go to an emergency room.”

And as Paul Krugman pointed out, Bush’s opposition to expansion of the program came down to what Krugman described as an “immoral philosophy:”

Writing about SCHIP in the summer of 2007, Krugman wrote:

“Well, here’s what Mr. Bush said after explaining that emergency rooms provide all the health care you need: “They’re going to increase the number of folks eligible through Schip; some want to lower the age for Medicare. And then all of a sudden, you begin to see a — I wouldn’t call it a plot, just a strategy — to get more people to be a part of a federalization of health care.”

Now, why should Mr. Bush fear that insuring uninsured children would lead to a further “federalization” of health care, even though nothing like that is actually in either the Senate plan or the House plan? It’s not because he thinks the plans wouldn’t work. It’s because he’s afraid that they would.”

Yes, the community health centers are a nice and valuable program. But it ought to be the responsibility of journalists to place important policies in a context that allows readers to evaluate their larger significance. The Times article today fails to do that: it leaves the highly misleading impression that the President has been a champion of innovative health care solutions for the less well-off. In fact, he has been a disaster on that front, notwithstanding his support for a program that is a finger in the dike of a deluge for which he bears significant responsibility.

Some worthwhile commentary on Obama’s controversial decision to invite Pastor Rick Warren to give the Invocation at the Presidential Inauguration

Below is a sampling of some of the more worthwhile commentary – both for and against Warren and his inclusion – I’ve seen on the controversy. I do want to make one point up front, before I yield the floor. Some people, including Rick Sanchez on CNN, are arguing that it’s hypocritical of “the left” to oppose Warren’s inclusion in the inauguration ceremonies after having supported Obama’s position during the campaign that he would talk to our enemies, including the objectionable Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Whatever one thinks of Warren and the controversy, it’s a silly point for the obvious reason that Obama is not inviting the Iranian President to give a religious invocation at his inauguration. If he wants to talk to Iran, he has no choice but to talk to the Iranian political leadership. He had plenty of choice in whom he honored with a prestigious place at his swearing-in as President.

OK. On to the show.

Michelle Goldberg

Key quote:

“The truth is that the primary difference between Warren and, say, James Dobson (of the Christian Fundamentalist group Focus on the Family) is the former’s penchant for Hawaiian shirts. Warren compares abortion to the Holocaust, gay marriage to pedophilia and incest, and social gospel Christians as “closet Marxists.” He doesn’t believe in evolution. He has won plaudits from some journalists for his honesty in forthrightly admitting that he believes that Jews are going to hell, but even if one sees such candor is a virtue, the underlying conviction hardly qualifies him as an ecumenical peacemaker. Speaking to the Wall Street Journal earlier this year, Warren himself described his differences with Dobson as “mainly a matter of tone,” and was unable to come up with a theological issue on which they disagree.”

John Cole

Key quote: (from an interview Obama gave to the Washington Blade during the campaign)

Blade: If DOMA (Defense of Marriage Act) is repealed fully or in part, the federal government most likely still could not recognize civil unions or domestic partnerships performed by states. Would you ask Congress to pass federal enabling legislation that would require the federal government to recognize civil unions and/or domestic partnerships performed by states so that same-sex couples joined in civil unions or domestic partnerships could obtain the same federal rights and benefits of marriage that you have called for?

Obama: I support the notion that all people – gay or straight – deserve the same rights and responsibilities to assist their loved ones in times of emergency, deserve equal health insurance and other employment benefits currently extended to heterosexual married couples, and deserve the same property rights as anyone else.

If elected, I would call on Congress to enact legislation that would repeal DOMA and ensure that the over 1,100 federal legal rights and benefits currently provided on the basis of marital status are extended to same-sex couples in civil unions and other legally recognized unions.

Pam Spaulding

First of all, Warren was Barack Obama’s selection. While it was announced by an inaugural committee, the buck stops with the man at the top of the food chain. He wouldn’t have the anti-gay, anti-choice, anti-science, church-and-state-merging Warren up there if he didn’t think it was a good idea. After all, they are friends despite the megachurch pastor’s sandbagging of candidate Obama during the Saddleback forum re: choice.

While it’s obvious that an invocation is just a prayer and that Warren is not part of the Obama administration, Warren taking the pulpit as some sort of olive branch to evangelicals and a show of unity and diversity is absurd and insulting symbolism. The fact that the Obama camp’s talking points mention a LGBT marching band’s presence during the official parade shows you how clueless (or calculating, you decide) these folks are.

A marching band is entertainment, someone up at a pulpit (whether you are of faith or not) delivering an invocation is an obvious, powerful symbol of a “message of the day” endorsed by the soon to be sworn-in president. It is delivered by the person selected because of who they are and what they stand for.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

Key quote:

“The case against gay marriage, is for my money, a bigot’s case. The appeal to history is false, in the first, for the reason that all appeals to history are false. For thousands of years the dominant form of government in the world was a dictatorship–and then we “redefined government” to make democracy. Was that wrong? But more than that it’s false on the the actual facts–historically, marriage has not always been one man, one woman. It’s been one man and fifty women. It’s been one man and–what we would consider today–one child. One man and five children. One woman and five men. And so on…

No, the objection here is to gays, in particular, which brings me to Obama and Warren. I want to be absolutely clear here. Obama hasn’t betrayed anything or anyone. On this issue, he is what I thought he was. One of the first blog posts ever wrote (sic) noted the amazing hypocrisy in Obama lecturing black people on homophobia, while himself, holding a position on arguably the most important civil rights issue of our time, which was essentially bigoted. It’s my job to say things like that, to, at once, not just carp, but still not simply fall in line.”

Another key quote:

“Sorry, I was supposed to be getting to the diplomatic part. The diplomatic part is this: Barack is the president of the United States. He has all sorts of people pressuring them. His job is to respond to those pressures in such a way as to not break the consensus he needs to get things done, and to expand the Democratic brand in the American mind. So when people make the pragmatic arguments, it’s not that I think they’re wrong. They are, in fact, totally right.

But Obama’s job, isn’t my job. I just don’t think it’s my role to make him as comfortable as possible. This isn’t about betraying progressives, it isn’t about lefties being “depressed,” it isn’t about a Democratic civil war, and it doesn’t need to be squished into a seven minute segment on Hardball. Let’s be honest here–Barack Obama has, so far, been exactly what we expected. Exactly. Let us acknowledge that. But let’s not use that as an excuse to not our job, which is as I see it, to say, “Mr. President. Now, do more.”"

Juan Cole

(Cole was in attendance this weekend at a Muslim Public Affairs Council gathering at which Warren spoke).

“A lot of pastors would tell the story of building their congregations and saving souls as the pinnacle of their lives. For Warren, that was only the beginning. He and his wife had an epiphany six years ago when she read an article about there being 12 million children in Africa who had been orphaned by AIDS. They started going to southern Africa, and Warren became devoted to helping those orphans.

But then he began thinking bigger. He has identified 5 major problems he wants to address:
Spiritual emptiness, corrupt leadership, disease pandemics, dire poverty, and illiteracy. He wants to do job creation and job training. He wants to wipe out malaria in the areas where it is still active. He is convinced that religious congregations are the only set of organizations on earth that can successfully combat these ills. And he is entirely willing actively and directly to cooperate with mosques to get the job done.”

Five rules of the road for (not) playing the race card

Charles Barkley’s comments last week about the Auburn coaching situation sparked a lot of discussion in the world of sports talk. One particular conversation among those caught my attention: a diatribe against Barkley by Eric Kuselias on ESPN radio. Kuselias fumed that Barkley was making what was, in essence, a slanderous claim against Auburn in invoking race as a factor in the decision to hire Gene Chizik over Turner Gill. Kuselias’ attack on Barkley was a good illustration of five basic rules for how race can (and can’t be) discussed on (the largely white medium of) sports talk radio. (Tim Wise has the definitive discussion of the “race card” and its uses, here).

Rule #1: All discussion of race is, so to speak, Black and White

Kuselias essentially asserted that Barkley was slandering Auburn by calling race the number one factor in the decision to hire Gene Chizik over Turner Gill because Barkley was accusing Auburn of being “a bunch of racists.” In sports talk radio world, there are no subtleties when it comes to race. Either you are a proven member of the KKK, or to invoke race as a factor is unfair slander. Kuselias himself said that one reason for hiring Chizik was that he was “familiar” because of his ties to Auburn. But he isn’t necessarily familiar to his potential recruits, at least half of whom will be African American. Instead, he is familiar to wealthy boosters, alumni, trustees, high school coaches and other relevant actors. Such familiarity might have made him a safe choice and tipped the scales in his favor. Does that reality make Auburn’s decision-makers “a bunch of racists?” Not necessarily. And, I don’t think that’s what Barkley said. But race is a factor in social networking, including job networking. And it is plausible to say that invoking familiarity itself has potential racial implications. But to Kuselias, the all-or-nothing rule applies. It’s a nice way to foreclose any discussion of race.

Rule#2: A Few Good Men: Only the courageous few white radio hosts will dare speak out against the tyranny of political correctness.

One caller asked Kuselias whether Barkley was going to be “punished” for his comments. By whom? For what? Naturally, these questions were not addressed. But it was an opportune time for Kuselias to remind his audience that only he was willing to tell it like it was. Though it’s not true of all sports talk, white self-pity is a recurring theme in sports talk radio, the apogee of which may have been the controversial firing of Don Imus in the Spring of 2007 (for in-depth coverage of media reaction at the time, see here and here). In this world of self-pity, facts like the roughly four percent of upper division head football coaching jobs belonging to African Americans constitute far less of a grievance than the intolerable assertion that race might have something to do with that fact.

Rule#3: If the Shoe Were on the Other Foot…

This is the one where hosts and callers hypothesize about what would have happened if the circumstances had been reversed. In this case, one caller said, with Kuselias’ approval, that had Chizik been Black, Barkley would have defended the decision to hire him. The implication, unacknowledged by the caller, or Kuselias, is that Chizik does have a questionable resume (In the 15-minute segment I heard, Kuselias never once mentioned Chizik’s 5-19 won loss record in defending him as a good selection). But the point, of course, is that Black guys with Chizik’s resume don’t get prestigious job offers in college coaching. And White guys with Gill’s resume are hot commodities that have major programs banging down their doors to hire them. But it’s far more satisfying to traffic in hypothetical scenarios when you’re trying to prove that up is down and Black is white.

Rule#4: Beyond a Reasonable Doubt.

The life blood of Sports talk radio is banter, endless speculation and typically unsupported assertions about people’s (especially athletes’) motives and behavior. But when it comes to race, Kuselias warns us, you better be “100% sure” before you suggest that race is a factor. Why? That’s never really made clear. One presumes it’s because, in the upside down world of sports talk, once someone is accused of having racially questionable motives, one is somehow ruined for life. Barkley’s claims about Auburn will provide a good test. Let’s see whether there’s a boycott of Auburn football, or the program is tainted and fails to make money in the future or gets dropped from television contracts or suffers any other meaningful consequences as a result of its decision. I am willing to bet that none of these things will come to pass, despite the unacceptably dangerous suggestion by Barkley that the Chizik hire was tainted by race.

Rule#5: No Context Allowed.

Barkley played at Auburn. He’s from Alabama. He’s Black. He was involved in the hiring process that led to Jeff Lebo being named as Auburn’s men’s basketball coach. (Lebo, who is White, had a losing record, and of the four finalists, was the only one who had not made the NCAA tournament at a previous coaching stop. The other three finalists were, by the way, Black). Maybe Barkley knows something about race and sports at Auburn. Maybe there’s some context for his comments. To hear Kuselias tell it, all of that is irrelevant. Chizik was a great defensive coordinator at Auburn (I misidentified him as an offensive coordinator in the original post). He’s “familiar.” That’s it. That’s the case. No context, no history, no other considerations besides, presumably, a smoking gun in which the Auburn athletic director were caught on tape using the N-word could justify raising race as an issue. (And apparently ESPN’s own reporting that Gill’s white wife may have been a strike against him is not worthy of comment on Kuselias’ show. Hat Tip: Dwil).

To be clear, Chizik may turn out to be a great coach at Auburn. And Barkley can’t know that race was the number one factor. But the indignant victimology that white sports talk radio indulges in follows a familiar and tired script. And it could use a re-write.

Is it race?

Last week, Auburn University, a premier college football program that as recently as 2004 went 13-0 and finished ranked second in the country, hired Gene Chizik, former head coach of Iowa State as its new football coach. This followed the resignation under pressure of Auburn’s previous coach , ten year veteran Tommy Tuberville. Though Auburn had a tough year in 2008, the Tigers’ head job is a coveted one. Alabama is a football-crazy state and Auburn plays in the nation’s toughest league, the Southeastern conference. The pressure is intense, but so are the rewards, including multi-million dollar annual pay. Chizik had a connection to Auburn – he was the team’s offensive coordinator until he was hired by Iowa State before the start of the 2006 season, including during the great 2004 season.

Iowa State has long been a bottom-feeder in college football, a cellar-dweller in the highly competitive Big 12 conference. Even by Iowa State Cyclones’ standards, however, Chizik’s two seasons there were a disaster – the team went a combined 5-19 (the Cyclones went 18-18 in the final three years under Chizik’s predecessor). Five wins in two years in a major college football program normally gets you fired. In Chizik’s case, however, it was a spring board to an offer from a far more prestigious program. And Charles Barkley, perhaps Auburn’s most famous alum, has been livid:

“I think race was the No. 1 factor…You can say it’s not about race, but you can’t compare the two résumés and say [Chizik] deserved the job. Out of all the coaches they interviewed, Chizik probably had the worst résumé.”

The other resume in question here was that of Turner Gill, an African American who also interviewed for the position. There has been a lot of attention of late to the fact that of 119 football programs in college football’s top division (the FBS), only four have Black head coaches. And Auburn’s decision to pass on Gill in favor of Chizik only adds fuel to the fire. Gill arguably performed the coaching miracle of 2008, leading the heretofore uncompetitive SUNY Buffalo program to a conference championship and a bowl game appearance. Buffalo has only been in the FBS since 1999. And in its first seven seasons, through 2005, its best record was 3-8. Most years, records like 1-11 were the norm. Gill was hired in 2006 and in this, his third season, the team went 8-5 and won its conference title (he has now received an extension and raise from Buffalo).

Whether race was an explicit and self-conscious reason for rejecting Gill is hard to know. Barkley knows the program and the state better than I do, of course. Regardless, in sports, as elsewhere, even if race isn’t an explicit factor, hiring is often a product of networking, insiderism and familiarity and, as a consequence, Blacks still face significant obstacles to getting positions that, on the merits, they’ve earned, because they are often excluded from the kinds of social networks that lead to sought-after positions. This is one reason why cries about affirmative action as “reverse discrimination” are perverse in fundamental respects. Blacks face many informal as well as formal disadvantages in job markets that only explicit interventions can correct. The NFL has improved its hiring situation significantly in the past few years by implementing its own version of affirmative action – the Rooney rule. But the Chizik hire is an example of something about which I have written previously – the persistence of arguably higher standards facing Black athletes and coaches in big-time athletics. Chizik’s employment by Auburn is a reminder that we will be able to say that real progress has been made in hiring when a Black coach with a 5-19 record on his resume can score a major promotion.

There were two striking items in the most recent issue of The Nation Magazine. The first was a letter, from the Sociologist Stephen Steinberg, complaining that in a previous issue’s lead editorial, “The First Hundred Days,” the magazine laid out an agenda for fighting poverty that included no mention of race or racism. Steinberg wrote, “a colorblind approach will not address the distinct problems African Americans confront: occupational apartheid that leaves half of black men in cities like Chicago and Washington without jobs; the evisceration of affirmative action by all branches of government; mass incarceration that exceeds 2 million, two-thirds of them Black or Latino” and more. The second striking item was the current issue’s lead editorial – Stimulus from Below – warning of the “terrifying” economic data confronting America – rising poverty and unemployment, nearly one in eight Americans food insecure, social service organizations overwhelmed by the growing ranks of people in serious economic distress. And, once again, not a single mention of race or racism.

The problems now confronting the United States are overwhelming and will require massive government intervention to expand our tattered social safety net and stimulate our moribund economy. But, it would be disturbing if the election of America’s first Black President were a license to ignore the persistent racial realities of economic life in America, including the likely disproportionate impact that any economic downturn will have on those already closest to the economic margins. According to the , the period 2000-2007 witnessed stagnant household income growth in the United States. By their estimate, all American households saw an average decline in real income of 0.6% during that period (the updated data for 2008 will obvious show a deteriorating picture). But, those losses were not spread evenly among the population. Whereas white non-Hispanic household income was exactly flat during this period, among African American households, the decline was substantial – 5.1%. Likewise, whereas poverty rose by 1.2% for the country as a whole during 2000-2007, it rose by nearly double that – 2% – for African Americans.

And, remember, of course, poverty rates for African Americans in 2000, though low by historic standards, were already triple the rates of poverty for White Americans (the data for Hispanic Americans is comparable to that of Blacks).

That such omissions would occur at The Nation is, in some ways, especially distressing. The Nation is a left-liberal publication with a long and admirable record of advocacy on issues of particular concern to African Americans. And, the sorts of policies the current editorial calls for – increased food stamp benefits, extending unemployment insurance, rental assistance and aid to state governments – will certainly help many African Americans in particular distress. But, as Steinberg warns, general aid programs by themselves, whatever the racial identity of the next occupant of the oval office, will not by themselves meaningfully close the economic-distress gap between Black America and the rest of the nation.

Five reasons why last night was such a big deal (other than the obvious):

1) According to the exit polls, African Americans comprised thirteen percent of the electorate last night and went for Obama by an incredible 95% to 4%. In 2004, Blacks were 11% of the electorate and gave 90% of their votes to John Kerry. In absolute terms, about 13 million Blacks voted in 2004 and gave Kerry a roughly eight million vote margin over Bush. This year, roughly 16 million Blacks voted and gave Obama an incredible 15 million-plus margin over McCain. That’s a massive advantage, one that McCain had no hope of overcoming unless Obama’s white support completely collapsed.

2) One reason it didn’t collapse is the youth vote. Early exit polling indicates that 18% of the electorate was between the ages of 18-29. This is slightly higher than their share from 2004. Whereas John Kerry won 54% of the vote from this age group, Obama is estimated to have won 66% of voters under 30. This is a enormous win – by far the most one-sided election for this group since data was first collected on age cohorts in 1976. It justifies the huge bet that Obama made on youth support, as voters under thirty gave Obama a roughly seven million vote advantage over McCain.

3) Karl Rove believed strongly that the Republican Party needed to make inroads into Hispanics’ support for the Democratic Party. And, though Hispanics still supported Kerry over Bush by roughly 60-40 in 2004, this represented progress for the Republicans. The increasing right-wing tilt of the party, however, including the party base’s deep anger about illegal immigration and the more general threat that immigrants pose to America, has cost the Republicans dearly. An estimated 66% voted for Obama helping to swing Nevada, Colorado and New Mexico firmly into the Obama column. More important for the long-term, Hispanics now comprise a larger portion of the population than African Americans. At eight percent, they still do not represent as a big a share of the electorate. However, their slice of the electorate is only going to increase in subsequent years. Republicans may think they can blow off the Black vote. They cannot blow off the Black vote and the Hispanic vote and remain competitive.

4) These demographic changes have led to a re-drawing of the political map. As I mentioned last night, this is unlikely to be a one-cycle fluke. Lots can happen in two or four years, of course. And Obama and the large Democratic majorities in Congress face daunting challenges. As of right now, however, the Republican Party is speaking to an increasingly narrow slice of America, and appealing to that slice on the basis of resentment and reaction. They are no longer competitive in the Northeast, on the West Coast or in broad swaths of the industrial Midwest – areas that are worth well over 200 electoral votes. Virginia now has two Democratic Senators a Democratic governor and gave Obama a solid win last night. North Carolina is a firmly purple state. Florida and Ohio, with large and increasingly diverse populations have tipped. The Republican Party will need to develop a more inclusive, less reflexively negative vision to regain their footing. Sarah Palin, incidentally, won’t help them do that.

5) This election is a political watershed in a way that Clinton’s 1992 victory wasn’t. Ronald Reagan won a landslide in 1980 and, more than that, ushered in a period of dominance for a political movement – the New Right. That period has transformed the nation’s courts, limited the public’s sense of what public policy can do to improve people’s lives and made values conflicts central to our political struggles. Clinton’s two victories were, at best, a rearguard action that did nothing to thwart meaningfully those developments.

Last night represented, in important respects, the defeat of the New Right and its politics. An increasingly tolerant, increasingly diverse electorate rejected the politics of cultural polarization and of laissez-faire government – the two hallmarks of the New Right, all at once. While it’s true that Clinton swept to power with large Democratic majorities in Congress, those majorities were much more heavily populated with conservative and Southern Democrats. No “movement” could plausibly be said to have brought Clinton to power – just a very smart campaign waged against a deeply unpopular President.

By contrast, like Reagan, Obama’s win can be seen as a victory not only for a candidate. Instead, it is a victory for a movement – a mobilized, dedicated base of support whose aim is to remake politics, not merely decide who resides at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Obama energized that movement and helped bring it to maturity. That movement has had its roots among dedicated younger Americans marinating their grievances and their visions on the internet and forward-thinking Progressives who believed a multi-cultural coalition could be a majority coalition. Sick of the politics of cultural polarization, and first given a taste of their power during the Dean campaign in 2003-04, the new progressives first got angry, then got organized.

We have not entered an era of conflict-free Obama love. John McCain won 55 million votes. Furthermore, the new progressives lack the institutional foundation of the New Right (rooted as it was in Evangelical churches). This makes it an arguably more tenuous phenomenon than the New Right has been. Dan Charnas was right when he said last night that much remains unchanged in America. Still, the New Right, 28 years lately, has been directly and decisively repudiated. And, that does mean, as Ronald Reagan liked to say – it’s morning in America.

MCCAIN’S SPEECH GRACIOUS, REPUBLICANS EXTREMIST

McCain’s very gracious speech is a reminder that there was a path not taken in this campaign. I have never especially been a believer in the McCain myth. But McCain could have run as a bi-partisan maverick, and not as an extremist. He likely still would have lost, but could have been more competitive and not disgraced himself in the process. The Republican Party base is now extremist and authoritarian and that’s poisonous for our politics and a losing hand for the party.

BARACK OBAMA WINS OHIO AND WINS PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION!!

History has been made. The networks call it for Obama. And, it cannot be overstated – in addition to the obvious history-making nature of Obama’s candidacy and now presidency, he and the Democratic Party have re-written the electoral map. They have broken through in Virginia, have battled North Carolina to a draw; they’re becoming the dominant party in the southwest, they have a rock-solid foundation in the northeast and the West and a stranglehold on the industrial Midwest. This is not a one-election fluke. The Republican Party will have to appeal to a new, multi-ethnic, multi-racial and tolerant America, or it will continue to lose ground.

MCCAIN IN HOT WATER

McCain’s electoral prognosis just went from critical to terminal: with FOX and NBC calling Ohio for Obama, there is now no plausible path to 270 for McCain. Barack Obama is going to be the next President of the United States.

KAY HAGAN UNSEATS ELIZABETH DOLE IN NORTH CAROLINA

The first major Democratic breakthrough in the Senate – Kay Hagan has unseated Elizabeth Dole. Hagan has benefited enormously from Obama’s ground game in the state, and from a huge infusion of cash from the national Democratic party. And, in a desperate eleventh hour attempt to make up ground, Dole ran perhaps the single most disgraceful ad of the entire season. After showing shadowy images of Hagan juxtaposed with atheists, an actress meant to sound like Hagan declares, “there is no God.” Hagan is an elder in the Presbyterian church and the spot caused a huge uproar. Of special note, Republican consultant Alex Castellanos called the ad over the line. Why is this significant: because Castellanos was the mastermind behind the infamous “white hands” ad, one of the most racially inflammatory ads of the past quarter century. That 1990 commercial ran in the final days of a North Carolina Senate race in which Jesse Helms narrowly defeated African American Harvey Gantt.

The ad showed a pair of white hands crumbling a piece of paper while an announcer said:

‘”You needed that job.  And you were the best qualified.  But they had to give it to a minority because of a racial quota.  Is that really fair?  Harvey Gantt says it is.  Gantt supports Ted Kennedy’s racial quota law that makes the color of your skin more important than your qualifications.  You’ll vote on this issue next Tuesday.  For racial quotas: Harvey Gantt.  Against racial quotas: Jesse Helms.”‘

So, for Castellanos to call the Dole ad over the line is really saying something.
NBC CALLS PENNSYLVANIA FOR OBAMA, 8:03 pm

The first really big news of the night is in: as soon as the polls closed in Pennsylvania one minute ago, NBC called it for Obama.  McCain threw everything he had into the Keystone state, and it was obviously for naught. There is almost no plausible path to victory for McCain without it. It’s early, but shaping up to be a big night for the Illinois Senator.”

DEMOCRATS SECURE FIRST SENATE WIN, 7:11 pm

Completely unsurprising, but Democrats have netted their first Senate seat of the night. Former governor Mark Warner, an overwhelming favorite, was called the winner of the Virginia Senate race as soon as the polls closed there at seven.

Perhaps more interesting, conservative stalwart Pat Buchanan just told an MSNBC audience that tonight could be the end of the conservative era in American politics that was ushered in by Ronald Reagan’s landslide victory in 1980. I will have more to say about that election as the night goes on.”

TOO MANY VOLUNTEERS IN NORTH CAROLINA, 2:26pm

Several friends and I have been planning to volunteer for the campaign this afternoon and evening. But the word we’ve been getting from some of the volunteer staging areas in and around Chapel Hill is that they are getting too many volunteers and are turning people away. We’re calling around to try to find offices that actually want the help. We’re getting the same word from Durham. It’s hard to overstate what an extraordinary field operation the Obama campaign has put together across the country and here in Tar Heel territory. And, by the way, it’s been raining here all day.

A CANVASSING STORY, 12:24 pm

As folks go to the polls today, I wanted to pass along a pretty heartening canvassing story from this weekend

On Saturday, three friends and I canvassed in Oxford, NC, about forty five minutes from Chapel Hill. It’s pretty downscale, rural and has a large African American population.

The most interesting encounter of the day came when a friend and I hiked through some woods to a run down set of trailer homes that were on our walk list. One home we approached appeared to be abandoned. The window to the front door was partially broken, and peering in revealed a dark and dank living area that looked like a storage warehouse. We got no answer when we knocked so we went around the side and knocked there. No answer, but then we heard a dog barking and went around back, where we met a middle aged African American woman with unkempt hair who had to hold her pants up with her hands.

We introduced ourselves and she told us that she wasn’t voting for “either of one of them.”

Why? Here’s (more or less) what she said about Obama: “He says he’s Black, but he has a white mother and was raised by white parents (she meant grandparents, I am sure). And, he’s a Muslim.

She repeated that a few times, while we tried to interject that, in fact, he was a Christian. We noted that, yes, his father was a Muslim, but that he had no relationship with his father and that Obama had been a practicing Christian his whole life.

Then she said, “in case you haven’t heard, his Muslim minister said God damn America.”

We acknowledged that Jeremiah Wright had said that, but that he was not a Muslim, he was a Christian.

The woman then said that we needed someone in the White House whose soul was saved. She herself believed that Jesus was our Lord and Savior and that the holy spirit would cleanse us. We noted that these were precisely Obama’s own professed beliefs.

She went on to say that Obama was only one man and that the President can be over-ridden by “the House of Senate and the House of Congress.” We agreed, at which point my friend said “Obama really needs your vote.” She was clearly interested at this point, and kept peering intently at the packet of information my friend was holding, including sample ballots and early registration information, before she finally asked in exasperation, “aren’t you going to give me any of that?”

She then said she would, if we agreed to pray that Obama would be saved and after a little chatter, repeated the request. At that point, I said “ma’am, we agree that Obama is going to need all the help he can get.”

We proceeded to discuss registration – she was unregistered, so we explained that until 5pm that day, she could one-stop register and vote, but that there was no such option on Tuesday. We confirmed that she had a ride (there was one functioning car in the back yard) and she said she had a fully up to date driver’s license.

Finally, after we walked her through the sample ballot and the registration stuff, she said “they killed JFK, they killed Martin Luther King, and they’re going to kill Obama, too.”

The journey through her fears in the course of the ten minutes we spoke was fascinating – from the Obama-is-a-Muslim line, to the deeper concern about saving souls, to the perhaps deepest concern of all (they’re just going to kill him anyway).

In any event, we felt good walking away, though my friend let the folks at HQ know that they had a potential voter out there with whom they needed to follow-up.

I am convinced that, regardless of the outcome in NC today, the Obama campaign has reached voters here that no presidential campaign has ever reached before.

OBAMA WINS FIRST VOTE IN DIXVILLE NOTCH, N.H., 7:36 am

From the Associated Press:

“Barack Obama came up a big winner in the presidential race in Dixville Notch and Hart’s Location, N.H., where tradition of having the first Election Day ballots tallied lives on.

“Democrat Obama defeated Republican John McCain by a count of 15 to 6 in Dixville Notch, where a loud whoop accompanied the announcement in Tuesday’s first minutes. The town of Hart’s Location reported 17 votes for Obama, 10 for McCain and two for write-in Ron Paul. Independent Ralph Nader was on both towns’ ballots but got no votes.”

Democrats are poised to make major gains in the Senate, but getting to sixty will be a tall order. Right now Democrats have a 51-49 edge in the Senate, but that includes the vote of Connecticut independent Joe Lieberman, who still caucuses with the Democrats but has been a vocal supporter of John McCain and an increasingly disgruntled member of the Democratic caucus. If you include Lieberman with the Democrats, they need to pick up a net of nine seats to reach 60. Without him, they need ten.

Open Republican seats in Virginia, New Mexico and Colorado are a lock to become Democratic seats, where Mark Warner, Mark Udall and Tom Udall have commanding leads.

Additionally, four Republican incumbents appear headed for defeat. Democratic challenger Jeanne Shaheen is virtually certain to knock-off incumbent John Sununu in New Hampshire. Mark Begich is now in the driver’s seat over long-time incumbent and newly convicted felon Ted Stevens in Alaska. In Oregon, Democrat Jeff Merkle has opened a solid lead against Gordon Smith. Finally, Democrats are poised for victory in the ugly and expensive North Carolina Senate race, where incumbent Republican Elizabeth Dole appears to be slipping behind Democratic challenger Kay Hagan.

This gives Democrats seven likely to certain pick-ups.

An additional possible net gain for Democrats is in Minnesota, where comedian turned Democratic challenger Al Franken is locked in a dead heat with Republican Norm Coleman in Minnesota. Another intriguing race is in Georgia, where incumbent Republican Saxby Chambliss is in a surprisingly tough race with Jim Martin.

As has been the case in North Carolina, early voting has been extremely heavy in Georgia and African American turnout has been very high. If Blacks make up 30% of the votes in Georgia this year (this has been the early voting figure), Chambliss may lose his seat (and John McCain may lose the state). If Franken and Martin manage to win, Democrats would control 59 seats even without Lieberman.

Longer shots to secure a Lieberman-proof sixty seats include Carl Lunsford, running against long-time incumbent Republican Mitch McConnell in Kentucky, and Ronnie Musgrove, trying to unseat one-term GOP senator Roger Wicker in Mississippi.

Only one Democratic incumbent, Mary Landrieu of Louisiana, faced a serious challenge this year, but she appears to be in command at this point in the race.

270
This, of course, is the number of electoral votes needed to win the presidency. With 24 hours to go, Obama holds a solid lead in the national tracking polls and what appears to be a near-lock on the Electoral College. Senator McCain is pouring vast resources into a last-minute play for Pennsylvania because it is the only Kerry state that McCain feels he can pick off this year. Without it, his odds of winning are very long.
The math is daunting for McCain: Kerry won 252 electoral votes in the close 2004 presidential race. At least three states that went for Bush in 2004 appear to be solidly in the Obama column: Colorado (with nine electoral votes), Iowa (7) and New Mexico (5).

Add those three states to Kerry’s 252, and Obama is already at 273, regardless of what happens in Ohio, Florida, Virginia, North Carolina, Missouri, Indiana or any other swing state. Hence, it’s of vital importance to McCain to put Pennsylvania’s 21 electoral votes into play. Polls there close at eight, though the race will probably be too close to call for some time, but that will be one of the key races to watch all evening.

7:00 pm to 7:30 pm
The earliest poll closings of significance will be in Indiana, Virginia and Georgia at 7:00 pm EST and Ohio and North Carolina at 7:30. All five states voted for George W. Bush in 2000 and 2004 and all five are competitive this year.

The most likely Obama pick-up in this normally Republican group of states is Virginia, where Obama has maintained a lead in the polls for most of the last month. An Obama win in any one of these would put a nearly mortal lock on an Electoral College victory. If Obama wins any two of these five states, he achieves an Electoral College majority even in the unlikely event he loses Pennsylvania.
Ohio’s 20 electoral votes are the biggest prize in this group and Obama has held a lead there for the past few weeks. However, whereas John McCain must win Ohio to have any realistic shot at the White House, Obama can relatively easily chart a course to 270 even without the Buckeye State.

0
This is the number of African Americans who would be in the United States Senate if Obama were to become President, since he’d have to give up his seat. Jesse Jackson, Jr. is on the short list of likely replacements for Obama (Democratic governor Rod Blagojevich makes the pick).

One Million
This is the approximate number of references to the so-called “Bradley effect” during this election cycle. This phenomenon is named after former Los Angeles Mayor and failed California Gubernatorial candidate Tom Bradley, an African American. The effect asserts that Black candidates are likely to do worse than their poll numbers suggest, because a substantial number of white voters lie to pollsters when they say they will vote for the Black candidate. Bradley appeared to have a big lead in the polls against George Deukmejian, but lost the 1982 election. Similarly, Doug Wilder, who became the first African American governor in the United States, barely eked his 1989 victory in Virginia, despite polls showing him with a substantial lead.

The evidence suggests that, since the 1990s, no such effect has existed in high-profile elections involving one Black and one White candidate. In fact, Obama clearly out-performed the polls in numerous (though not all) primary states against Democratic rival Hillary Clinton.

At the root of this perspective is the belief that our crisis is primarily a behavioral problem. It’s not price-gouging insurance or pharmaceutical companies; nor is it monopoly patents on drugs and other medical devices; or the stress-induced health problems of living in a society with stagnating living standards; or lack of access to decent primary care and preventive services. Instead, the problem is Americans’ bad habits. They over-eat, they don’t exercise and they paper over these personal failings by electing to purchase the most expensive drugs and access the most costly procedures. And they feel entitled to all manner of treatments, from the fanciest state-of-the-art technology to the most exotic alternative remedies.

In plain English, we overuse health care because we have no incentive not to overuse it. We are like kids in a candy store unable to control our urges and indulged in our bad behavior by a system of perverse incentives. What we need, therefore, is some sobriety, personal responsibility and limits to our reckless inclination to access expensive health care procedures every time we have a runny nose or fail to control our own bad habits.

As McCain health adviser Al Hubbard told a conference recently:

“When a third-party pays for a service or product-we consume it as if it was free…if you would think about, the employers rather than providing health care insurance they provided food insurance. So every time you go to the grocery store you just take out your food insurance card, you give it to the cashier, she scans it, and you’re outta there. Pretty soon, you would start buying caviar, expensive steak, and you start buying more than you need, and also pretty soon the supermarket would discover that you really didn’t care about price, so the supermarket would remove price, because it doesn’t affect your decisions about what to buy and what not to buy.”

McCain’s health proposals follow from Hubbard’s logic: reduce overly generous employer-based coverage over time by steering more and more Americans into individual plans that will force them to make hard choices about their medical care – either to purchase more expensive plans or to buy cheaper ones that have much higher deductibles and co-pays and cover fewer potential medical problems. This will force Americans to be cost sensitive and, as a consequence, act more frugally and responsibly about health care.

Of course, in the real world, insurance doesn’t cover 100% of health care costs. Rising deductibles and co-pays are a universal reality. In addition, many Americans face the nightmare of fighting with their insurance company over whether a particular visit or procedure will be covered, which often deters pursuit of treatment.

For these and other reasons, most Americans already are cost sensitive about health care.
However, accepting McCain’s logic, it would stand to reason that the most pernicious health plans are the ones that provide the most coverage for the smallest out-of-pocket costs – the gold-plated employer-provided plans, with minimal premiums, and small co-pays and deductibles for a wide range of services. These plans would seem to pose the greatest danger to America by encouraging their beneficiaries to mindlessly burn through scarce health resources.

There is perhaps no plan that better fits this description than the one enjoyed by members of the United States Congress, including John McCain. And since conservatives love to talk about personal responsibility and good role models, perhaps an ideal place to begin fixing our sick system would be for John McCain to renounce and refuse the destructive Rolls Royce health insurance that he currently receives through his employer.

A cynic might conclude that, as with so much else, conservative doctrine on health care follows from the belief that if you are rich and well-connected, you deserve whatever you can get your hands on but that if you are an ordinary, unconnected American, you can go fuck yourself.

But if McCain is sincere and genuinely believes his own diagnosis of America’s health care crisis, I would urge him: reject the profligacy of comprehensive health care coverage. Reject the siren song of unfettered access to health care. Reject the temptation to dodge personal responsibility when you make health care decisions. Renounce your government-sponsored, free-ride-inducing health insurance. John McCain tells us that he has always fought for his country and he vows, as President, to fight for all of us. It would be an easy but powerful first act to do what’s right by his country by rejecting the very kinds of insurance policies that he believes have brought us so much harm.

Country first.

In this way, conservatives have attempted to argue that their opposition to affirmative action is not racially motivated, but rather flows from noble principle.

There are general problems with this argument. For one, conservatives’ hand-wringing about merit seems not to apply to the estimated half of all job openings in the United States that aren’t posted and instead go to connected insiders.

Nor do such concerns apply to legacy admissions at universities, which account for a significantly higher percentage of entries than does affirmative action, especially at elite schools. (Though most media have been too polite to make much of it, John McCain himself would never have been accepted into the naval academy on his own merits and his well-documented abysmal performance while there would have sunk the career aspirations of a less well-connected midshipman.)

Both types of preferential treatment-legacy admits and non-competitive hires-disproportionately benefit the already better off. But if there were any doubts that the right-wing’s harping on affirmative action as the cause of declining American standards was disingenuous, Sarah Palin’s selection as the GOP’s choice for Vice President and the right-wing’s defense of her as a viable candidate should put those questions to rest.

To call Palin mediocre might be overly generous. Regardless, only a movement as contemptuous of American political institutions as the modern right, could argue with a straight face that she merits serious consideration as a possible President of the United States.

Her obvious, willful ignorance of basic knowledge and her evident pride in that ignorance were on full display when she crowed during the VP debate, “I’ve only been at this for, what, like five weeks.” This comment demonstrated her monumental self-delusion (does she actually think she’s been a quick-study?) and her conviction that being no more well-informed than a typical American adult is actually a badge of honor.

All of which is par for a movement that doesn’t actually care about merit. Instead, the modern right concerns itself with defending the ramparts of white privilege against the onslaught of “uppity” minorities and their liberal enablers. Hence, when blatantly inept aspirants prove themselves to be willing stooges for the perpetuation of that privilege, they become heroic precisely because of their lack of merit and qualification.

In a recent Newsweek article, Jon Meacham reminds us that we’ve been down this road before: “In 1970 a Nebraska senator, Roman L. Hruska, was defending Richard Nixon’s nomination of U.S. circuit Judge G. Harrold Carswell to the Supreme Court. An underwhelming figure, Carswell was facing criticism that he was too ‘mediocre’ for elevation. Hruska tried an interesting counterargument: ‘Even if he were mediocre, there are a lot of mediocre judges and people and lawyers. They are entitled to a little representation, aren’t they, and a little chance? We can’t have all Brandeises, Frankfurters and Cardozos.’”

As Meacham notes, we can certainly come from humble circumstances and achieve great things. But the right-wing seems to aspire to mediocrity; they celebrate ignorance, lack of curiosity and an insistence that you need not ever be self-critical because you have no need to try to improve yourself. In these traits, the movement sees resoluteness. Others might reasonably see in it a recipe for arrogant incompetence.

Former Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson penned a favorite phrase of conservatives, the “soft bigotry of low expectations.” This phrase is supposed to (a) convey compassion for those coddled poor souls whose low standards have only made them worse off in the long run, and (b) to project deep, serious thought about the need to uphold timeless verities and lofty standards worthy of a great nation.

But that’s all a sick joke in the face of the endemic crony-ism of the Bush years, the right wing’s embarrassingly thin arguments for defending baldly cynical nominees to the Supreme Court, like Carswell and Clarence Thomas (you don’t have to be white to play this game) and now Sarah Palin.

The bigotry on display here is, however, anything but “soft”-the undeserving are perfectly qualified as long as they show proper contempt for the actually under-privileged. And those “low expectations” are to be praised and fiercely defended so long as they’re in the service of bigotry and contempt.