Happy Tuesday.

Andy sent some old posts from back in the 2011 debt ceiling debate. Here's one from me, one from Drew, and one from me again. I'd honestly forgotten that we've been having this "Let it Burn" debate for quite a bit longer than just the past month:

Purists insist that the Cut, Cap, and Balance plan that passed the House (thank you, Speaker Boehner) is still viable, though Reid shot it down in the Senate, but there is no reason to believe that is the case. The Senate won't vote for it and the President won't sign it. And leveraging the threat of economic calamity isn't changing that.

What might change that particular stalemate would be to push past the August 2 (or is it August 10?) deadline, let our AAA rating be lost, let federal disbursements be disrupted, and use the actual economic calamity as leverage for CCB and the Balanced Budget Amendment. That is the strategy that the purists are suggesting now. Of course, there's no reason to believe that Republicans will not be blamed in whole or in part for this "Let it Burn" plan and it has the smell of desperation about it. While it may be fun to imagine using economic Armageddon to get everything we want without having to compromise on anything, they're playing with people's lives and livelihoods in a particularly cynical and unprincipled manner.

And here's RD saying the final debt ceiling deal wasn't a capitulation crossed with Ace, who said it was a capitulation.

In other words, doesn't seem like much has changed, except this time the GOP is having to negotiate against both itself and President Obama rather than itself and Senator Reid. You will recall that back then Obama was taking a much more hands-off role.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 02:53 AM | Comments (249)
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Beer and Your Politics

We've analyzed Scarborough Research data, which includes 200,000 interviews with American adults, to determine the politics of beer drinkers. As the bubble chart shows, Dos Equis is a bipartisan brew - Republicans and Democrats both like to drink it. So Mr. Goldsmith's [the Most Interesting Man actor] public foray into the 2012 race could alienate a large share of Dos Equis fans. Ironically, this is in contrast to its corporate sister Heineken, which as it turns out is the most Democratic beer of all. On the other hand, Republicans love their Coors Light and favor Sam Adams, which is brewed just a few miles away from Romney campaign headquarters and whose namesake was an original tea partier.

Unfortunately there's no word on where the only Hopper-approved (PBUH) beer falls on the political spectrum.

Eh - there may be correlations between certain brands and politics but I'm just going to drink what I like and not drink what I don't. Life is too short to drink swill just because of politics.

Posted by: Maetenloch at 05:45 PM | Comments (583)
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The Texans and the Patriots.

I'm kinda thinking the Texans can make it to the show this year. I don't even like the Texans.

Well, ok I like this one.

Posted by: Dave in Texas at 04:36 PM | Comments (273)
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I don't mean the political beliefs -- I mean the endlessly-repeated catchphrases.

There's a whole alternate slanguage among People of Stupid.

Pearl clutching. Fainting couch. Smelling salts. Oh noes! Luke Russert. Snarky. My head's exploding. Snarky again. Wow, couch an accusation as a question with “much” at the end much? I’m curious. Buehler? Buehler? Really? Seriously? Because, Muslims.

Confidence Fairy. Talking point. Jeebus! Luke Russert is very annoying. Also too, eh. This is very concerning. “Align yourself with a feminist identity.” Abstract noun trumps other abstract noun. “What is our real investment in celebrity fertility?” “Lending pedigreed intellectual credence.” A whole lot of fail. A whole lot of verb used as noun.

Relish. Glee. Bliss. Elixir. We relish the prospect of Rethuglican fail on this issue. The prospect of Rethuglican fail on this issue uncorks in us a blissful elixir of unbridled glee. Really? Seriously? Cringe. Facepalm.

Posted by: Ace at 04:05 PM | Comments (218)
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Bigger than Wisconsin, Mike Flynn says, given that Michigan is the home of the UAW.

This is a big step for worker freedom. No longer will workers be coerced into joining a union. No longer will they be forced to see their earnings go to political causes and goals with which they disagree.

...

The fight against public sector unions in Wisconsin was important, in large part, because it was the first state to grant public sector unions collective bargaining rights. Michigan, home to the UAW, is almost a founding state for labor unions in this country. It has a higher percentage of unions members than almost any other state. If union power over individual liberty can be rolled back there, it can be rolled back in Ohio or Pennsylvania, where the GOP controls state government, as well.

President Permanent Campaign had something to say about that, of course.

What we shouldn’t be doing is trying to take away your rights to bargain for better wages and working conditions. … These so-called right-to-work laws, they don’t have to do with economics; they have everything to do with politics. What they are really talking about is giving you the right to work for less money. … We don’t want a race to the bottom. We want a race to the top. America’s not gonna’ compete based on low-skill, low-wage, no workers’ rights — that’s not our competitive advantage. … It’s also what allows our workers to then by the products that we make, ’cause they’ve got enough money in their pockets.

Just to note for Joe Scarborough -- this is the sort of winning "intellectual" message in America.

Again, I've got nothing against intellectualism. But I have got something against thoughtless puffery. And the sad fact -- fact -- is that it's not actually intellectual messages that win elections. It's stupid chains of nonsequitors like this.

I think the perfect candidate would be a man generally believed to be smart, who, while on the campaign trail, says lots of stupid things, but says these stupid things with "warmth."

Eh, I'm just being bitter (though I think I'm right). But honestly, Scarborough is just using "intellectual" as a synonym for "liberal," which is the whole problem in the first place.

Posted by: Ace at 01:54 PM | Comments (406)
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Really?

Eesh.

Okay, I guess Hillary 2016 is a topic.

In related news, I just finished a difficult crossword puzzle in four minutes by filling in every answer with a variation of "Please Kill Me Now."

Your Mouth

Expect further precipitation.

Posted by: Ace at 01:17 PM | Comments (212)
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So, this.

Aiming to bring public pressure on Republicans to back higher taxes for the rich in the “fiscal cliff” fight, the Obama-Biden campaign today began urging supporters to join a local, online phone bank to help the president blast the GOP.

In an email, supporters are directed to a “Call Tool” where they are provided with somebody to call. Include is a telemarketing-style script to read.

A successful effort will then be tabulated on a “leaderboard” of callers.

“Today you will be calling fellow supporters with a message about extending middle-class tax cuts. Your job is to lay out the choice Congress is facing on keeping taxes low for the middle class, and encourage supporters to call their representative. You will be able to provide all the information,” said the memo emblazoned with the Obama-Biden campaign emblem.

The proper reaction to this is ridicule and jeering. But that's only the proper reaction because we didn't think of this first. The best option -- doing this ourselves -- is closed off to us, so we should make fun of it.

I can think of a lot of good reasons for this sort of thing.

1. Work as Play. I think the Obama Minions cleaned our clocks on a very basic concept about human behavior: We will more readily pursue activities that seem like "play" than seem like "work."

Goofy as this is -- and it is goofy, I grant you, but it's goofy because people are goofy -- it gives people a "play" mode for political work. Which leads to the next point.

2. Many intense partisans feel that that the party is letting them down and not fighting hard enough unless it is constantly offering them new avenues for fighting. Offering them opportunities to fight has two important benefits: 1, you actually get people doing political work and keeping politically invested (remember, once you get someone to contribute even a dollar to a cause, or ten minutes of time, you've psychologically invested them in victory and this in turn will propel them to sacrifice even more for victory). 2, they will not carp about the party "rolling over" and "surrendering" and "giving up" and "refusing to fight" because you're offering them any number of fresh outlets for Keeping Up The Fight.

I think the purpose of this game is not persuasion of other voters, but the illusion of the opportunity to persuade other voters, which itself leads to increased morale among the True Believers.

And that's not nothing. I know a lot of conservatives right now are looking for ways to Fight, and get mad at me for not thinking of such ways (such as organizing an email campaign urging Boehner to get some backbone, etc.). No one likes losing, and many within a party will grow to hate the party if they see others accepting loss.

I do not know the actual value of this particular avenue for Fight Fight Fighting -- I expect it's quite low -- but I know it at least shows "We're not done yet" and "We've not yet begun to fight" and other such sentiments which are very important to the most committed, Fightiest partisans.

And the Democrats actually won, so this is just offered for those who can't even accept some time off after a victory but rather still want to do more for the cause.

Now, given the Republicans lost, I imagine this sort of thing would be even more psychically useful for a despondent party rank and file which is beginning to feel everything is hopeless (and a feeling of hopelessness leads directly to a lack of action and a grim acceptance of the status quo -- classic depression, of course).
Immediately post-election, a NYT article revealed that the Obama campaign had consulted a group of psychologists and psychiatrists about methods of animating their voters and possible potential voters.

The Obama campaign did not brag about this during the election -- it's off-putting to know a campaign is using head-shrinkers' ploys against oneself -- but after the election they let the cat out of the bag, that they had weaponized behavioral science.

This election season the Obama campaign won a reputation for drawing on the tools of social science. The book “The Victory Lab,” by Sasha Issenberg, and news reports have portrayed an operation that ran its own experiment and, among other efforts, consulted with the Analyst Institute, a Washington voter research group established in 2007 by union officials and their allies to help Democratic candidates.

Less well known is that the Obama campaign also had a panel of unpaid academic advisers. The group — which calls itself the “consortium of behavioral scientists,” or COBS — provided ideas on how to counter false rumors, like one that President Obama is a Muslim. It suggested how to characterize the Republican opponent, Mitt Romney, in advertisements. It also delivered research-based advice on how to mobilize voters.

“In the way it used research, this was a campaign like no other,” said Todd Rogers, a psychologist at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and a former director of the Analyst Institute. “It’s a big change for a culture that historically has relied on consultants, experts and gurulike intuition.”

When asked about the outside psychologists, the Obama campaign would neither confirm nor deny a relationship with them...

And while most of them won't talk -- pretending they did very, very little, and that the only thing that moved votes was the Power of Obama's Detailed and Forward-Thinking Agenda -- others are more candid:

...

“A kind of dream team, in my opinion,” Dr. Fox said.

He said that the ideas the team proposed were “little things that can make a difference” in people’s behavior.

It seems to have worked. Or, I can't prove it worked, but the theory behind some of these ploys certainly seems solid enough for investigation and emulation.

Corporations spend a lot of money on marketing, and marketers' work is based largely on psychology. As I have no connection with the RNC, I can't say that we have no psychology-based marketing going on. In fact, I strongly doubt that we have none of that.

That said, it also seems to me that the Obamabots are using more of this stuff, taking it more seriously, always trying to think of new ways to keep their voters involved and psychologically invested.

You may say this is creepy. I would also say it's creepy. I'm creeped out by this crap.

But it may actually be effective, and we might want to start considering this sort of thing.

I imagine that right now a common feeling in the RNC is "We just lost, after getting our voters very animated to vote and volunteer for us; it would be wrong and unseemly to ask them to do more for us right now, when they're dejected."

However, I think maybe the exact opposite might be true: Given that people are dejected and hopeless, perhaps now is precisely the time to ask people to do things. Nothing defeats depression like taking active steps to do something. Anyone who is depressed will find that doing anything -- anything, from vacuuming the house to, say, learning Francais -- helps alleviate the depression.

Maybe the RNC should think that way, and start trying to think of ways that people can get a sense of mastery over their own political fates by offering up organized activities for politicking, too. Even if the activity has little actual usefulness, sometimes a placebo can work wonders on a patient.

3. Last point: The Democrats have been running on a Middle Class Tax Cut for so long it seems it's always been this way.

The greatest political failure of the Republican Party, and the Romney campaign, was to give up what had always been our most powerful position.

It's not that we actually changed our minds on it -- we didn't -- but we allowed the Democrats to say "We support lowering taxes on the Middle Class" so often, with the implication (and outright explicit statement) that we don't.

And we never knocked them down on this -- no, if you're supporting raising government spending to WW2 emergency levels forever, you certainly are also planning to raise taxes on the middle class. It's called math, and it offers some conclusions to those who invest in a pencil and scratch pad.

But notice they're out there saying "We want to keep middle class taxes low!" and we're saying... I don't know what we're saying. We're entirely reactive. We are way behind in the OODA loop.

Posted by: Ace at 12:24 PM | Comments (291)
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Scarborough says a few things that I almost agree with.

I'm a bit astonished at his lack of self-awareness, though. This guy's brand consists almost entirely of being a "bully" (as he terms it) for the northeastern moderate wing of the Republican Party, constantly insulting rivals and millions of voting citizens.

I don't begrudge the moderate wing its own bully, but his diagnosis here is so filthy with opportunism and self-interest it's offensive.

He got booted off the air because people weren't listening to his radio show and he was losing in the ratings to competitors. And he seems to be doing nothing but trying to get payback for that (for his own failure to connect with an audience) and buffing his own brand.

I do not believe all this crap about the Republican Party needing to be more controlled by/influenced by/led by intellectuals to succeed.

Let's think about this.

Here's what I do believe: I believe Republicans should be more intellectual, generally. Actually, I think all people should be more intellectual, generally.

I think conservatives especially should be more intellectual, or more... admittedly intellectual. Let me explain: I think most readers of this site are actually intellectuals to one degree or another. Anyone who's quoting Hayek? Congratulations, you're an intellectual.

If you're strongly interested in ideas and you read a fair amount, and you enjoy abstract thinking and arguing about concepts and principles, you're an intellectual.

Now, conservatives hate this designation and they run from it. I am generalizing from my own experience, here: I never wanted to think of myself as an intellectual. I think I tried to hide my intellectualism in the guise of anti-intellectualism, but that is still basically an intellectual position.

Conservatives don't hate intellectualism, per se. They hate faux intellectualism, which is certainly the dominant form of "intellectualism" that exists in the current age. (Let me just throw in a broad guess and say that's probably the dominant form of intellectualism in any age.) And this faux intellectualism, this faux sophistication, generally takes the guise of a faux thoughtfulness -- see Bob Costas -- or pettifogging sophistry.

So people run from the label and don't self-identify that way. Those who do identify as intellectuals, and adopt the Cultural Signifiers of the Intellectual Tribe, tend not to be terribly thoughtful and not actually, oh, what's the word I'm looking for? Not that smart. So the self-identifying intellectuals -- most of them, the... bitter clingers, if you will, to a false, contrived shallow signification of intellectualism, have damaged the brand.

But let's face it, who are we kidding? Empire of Jeff, for example, uses the same sort of Lowbrow guise as I do but, you know, he's smart. He's read a book. His idea of fun is to go online and read arguments and respond to arguments. So, you know, dick jokes and all that but I'll call him out as an intellectual.

Most of the people on this site are. Including the folks who didn't go to college, who are largely autodidacts to one degree or another.

I could also put in a brief argument here (generalizing from personal experience) that men, especially conservative men, tend to view self-improvement type things as fundamentally womanly (real men are what they are and don't need improving!), which is a not-very-helpful attitude on a purely personal level, and which ultimately contributes to this idea that identifying as someone who likes learning things is a bit soft and "liberal," but that's just a suspicion. Again, generalizing from my own previous attitudes (which I'm trying to wring out of my system). And this attitude stems from those who urge self-improvement type things generally being, what's the word, idiots.

Anyway, I think most people here are intellectuals to a fair extent and probably would not admit that even if I juiced them up with sodium pentathol. And that's fine. I get, as I did that for all my life. Those who claim to be in the club of intellectuals tend to make the club look fairly lame.

But is Scarborough right that anti-intellectualism, especially that espoused by other "talk radio hosts" dragging the party down?

Is Rush Limbaugh an intellectual, by the broad definition I've just suggested? Is Mark Levin? Is Glenn Beck?

Yes, of course. By the broad definition I've suggested, they are primarily idea-oriented and argument-oriented and therefore intellectuals.

Now they're not full-on intellectuals, at least not in their day jobs. They're pop intellectuals -- people who popularize intellectual ideas. Which is, ultimately, how the great majority of the public gets their exposure to intellectual ideas. The public does not read Steven Hawking's actual papers. They would not understand them. (As I wouldn't.) To the extent the public knows about Steven Hawking's ideas they know them from his pop science book and the occasional news story about him written in a pop science fashion, which means no math, no definitions, no rigor, but a lot of hyped up metaphors.

"Think of chaos theory as a ball of yarn twisted into knots by a billion subatomic epileptic kittens," or whatever. Not really "science." It's a meaningless sentence. Tells you nothing. You're actually dumber for having read it.

Anyway, point is, the conservative movement has a fair number of pop intellectuals, and those are generally the sort of intellectuals that engage the general public. And ultimately, it's not that Rush Limbaugh is "anti-intellectual" and Joe Scarborough is "intellectual;" it's that they're both pop intellectuals, and they just happen to disagree. Joe Scarborough just happens to be more.... yes, liberal. By inclination and also by requirement for continued employment.

Now as a personal matter I've now quit the anti-intellectual habit and like anyone who's quit recently, I'm a bit of an annoying evangelist for it. Just like an ex-smoker is very annoying about quitting smoking.

And so, as a personal matter, I'm currently big on advising people to become smarter, as I'm trying to do that myself. I would advise dumb people to become smarter, and smart people to become smarter, and genius level people to become smarter.

But while I'd say this is good personal advice, as "quit smoking" and "try Adkins" are good bits of personal advice, do this advice really have anything to do with winning elections?

Adelei Stephenson was, I understand, a self-identifying tribal-signifying intellectual. He got demolished. I know little of Barry Goldwater, but I get the sense he was something of an intellectual (certainly he inspired later intellectuals in the conservative movement). He got demolished, too.

Romney, as I often said with some worry, was strongly self-identifying as a rationalist and as a thinker, and he doubled-down on intellectualism/rationalism with his VP pick of another strong rationalist/intellectual. They lost.

Note Obama -- obviously a self-styled intellectual -- picked for his VP a dummy.

Let's not mince words here. We're among friends. You're all pretty smart.

Most people are not that smart. more...

Posted by: Ace at 10:08 AM | Comments (681)
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The only thing that surprises me is that someone thought it was worth buying. I suppose some of those millions we spent must have bought some research that can be useful to someone, at some point.

True that the A123′s Michigan plant will remain open, but what weÂ’ve essentially accomplished here is borrowing money from the Chinese, to build a company at a loss, to then sell it to the Chinese.

The plant will remain open for now. The Chinese don't buy companies to employ foreign workers. They believe in insourcing.

Posted by: Ace at 08:23 AM | Comments (365)
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He writes about the stultifying, soul-draining experience of a life on the dole, and not just a life, but the same life for one's children, and their children, and so on until the Republic collapses.

Barone digests his column.

Kristof is writing from Breathitt County, Ky., deep in the Appalachian mountains, about mothers whose Supplemental Security Income benefits will decrease if their children learn to read. Kristof notes that 55% of children qualifying for SSI benefits do so because of “fuzzier intellectual disabilities short of mental retardation,” far more than four decades ago when SSI was just a new program.

Evidently SSI administrators decided to be more generous to parents of such children. But, as Kristof notes, giving parents an incentive to keep children from learning to read works against the childrenÂ’s long-term interest.

Kristof’s column makes a point similar to that in my De. 2 Examiner column on the vast rise in people receiving Social Security Disability Insurance payments. As with SSI, one imagines that those responsible for extending benefits to those not previously eligible did so out of a sense of generosity. But as I noted, “there is also a human cost. Consider the plight of someone who at some level knows he can work but decides to collect disability payments instead. That person is not likely to ever seek work again, especially if the sluggish recovery turns out to be the new normal. He may be gleeful that he was able to game the system or just grimly determined to get what he can in a tough situation. But he will not be able to get the satisfaction of earned success from honest work that contributes something to society and the economy.” Generosity that produces “soul-crushing dependency” is not really generosity.

I haven't read Kristof's column (update -- I have now), but it looks like he chooses to avoid the Wedge Issue of the teacher's unions. Poor kids have only one way Up and Out, and that's a decent education, but the Democrats absolutely refuse to reform the educational system.

When the media natters Republicans about intransigence and being held prisoner to their most "extreme" and ideological elements-- how come never a single word is mentioned about Democrats' evil obedience to the teachers' unions?

The incredible thing here is that almost every liberal will admit this, and almost every liberal in the business of politics has seen the documentary Waiting for Superman. They know the current system is more of a trap for, say, poor black kids than Jim Crow ever was.

And what do they propose doing about it? Absolutely nothing. Absolutely nothing.

But no one ever talks about that, eh? You'll never see a single person on the media ask a Democrat about his party's "extremism" and extreme anti-black attitudes when it comes to basic education.

Nope, He Didn't Talk About Reforming Education: And his article actually does discuss education, and private groups which try to help poor kids learn.

But he avoids the Democratic Top Priority of doing nothing to improve education except paying teachers more.

A reformer in Waiting for Superman made this point: If school districts had the power to fire (without the heavy union interference) merely the bottom 6% of teachers, 90% of the problems with public education would be solved.

But Democrats will never permit that. That 6% that is in danger of being fired are the most fired-up members of the Teachers Unions, because their livelihoods depend on the policy of absolutely no terminations for incompetency, and those most fired-up members of the Teachers Unions are in turn the shock troops of the Democratic turnout machine.

So yes yes, let's continue talking about "extremism" without ever mentioning the Democrats' extremism and crucial reforms blocked by ideologues -- nay, not even ideologues, as there's no "idea" here worth discussing. This is pure partisanship only, pure power politics. It's entirely thoughtless and reflexive.

It's the ultimate Cult of the Old -- we do this because we have always done so before. Not a single Member of the Herd of Independent Thinkers ever demonstrates all this "courage" they're always complimenting themselves for to question this demonic policy.

Posted by: Ace at 06:45 AM | Comments (269)
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