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Thursday, March 10, 2016
The Day That Was
The Wichita Eagle was a veritable catalog of horrors yesterday.
I'm working off hard copy, but if you hurry you might find the URIs
online at
Kansas.com. Here are some of the
things that caught my eye (or nose, as the case may be).
Page 1: Wichita school district officials will consider staff
cuts. This story has gone around the block several times before. When
Sam Brownback was elected governor in 2010, he passed a state income tax
cut, promising it would act as "a shot of adrenaline" straight into the
heart of the Kansas economy. (To reduce his credibility, he even hired
Arthur Laffer to study and recommend the cut.) The most notable thing
about the cut wasn't that it favored the already rich: it zeroed out
all income taxes on "small business owners," i.e., those with "Chapter
S" businesses, e.g., Wichita billionaires Charles Koch and Phil Ruffin.
The result was that tax revenues fell far short of spending, so Brownback
tried balancing the books with spending cuts, while the state legislature
raised taxes on sales and "sins" (like tobacco) -- Kansas now has the
highest sales tax on food in the country, and it's even higher in many
counties since they've been encouraged to levy their own sales taxes
(as opposed to, say, property taxes). So state and local government
have been severely pinched for five years now.
To complicate matters, there's a clause in the Kansas state constitution
which says that the state government has a responsibility to provide
adequate funding for local school districts. Many school districts have
repeatedly sued the state for failing to honor the constitution, and
the Kansas Supreme Court has repeatedly sided with them, ordering the
state to pony up more money. A couple years back the legislature came
up with what they called a "block funding" scheme to satisfy a court
order, which promptly was challenged and ruled unconstitutional. This
year the legislature is considering various bills to replace the sitting
Supreme Court with one more to their liking. (To be fair, the Justices
have been remiss in dying, like Antonin Scalia had the decency to do,
so Brownback hasn't had much opportunity to leave his mark, as he has
done to virtually every corner of the state.) Page 1: Westar seeking rate hike for homes, cuts for businesses:
Wester is the local electric company, formerly known as Kansas Gas &
Electric before it got conglomerated. Like most electric companies, they
are a natural monopoly, and as such are regulated by a state utility
board. Every year Westar asks for ridiculous rate increases, and every
year they get beat down to something slightly less ridiculous. However,
Brownback has managed to restaff that board with crony appointments,
and sometime last year then decided to fire the staff that reviews the
rate proposals and rededicate themselves to fighting against federal
government regulation of utilities, leaving those utilities free to
gouge Kansas consumers. Well, it turns out that Westar is taking full
advantage of this "regulatory capture" and proposing a 31% increase
in residential electric rates. They're willing to give some of this
increase back in the form of rate cuts to large business users --
after all, you can't be too grateful to "job creators" in Kansas --
but that looks pretty paltry by comparison. Like I said, normally
when you read about rate increase proposals, you know it's a game
and most of the hit will be knocked down, but this time it's
different: the "regulators" having surrendered, there is no one
to stand up for Kansas consumers, so the predators will feast. Page 2: Police: Hutch students planned to detonate pipe
bombs in school: Juveniles, ages 14 and 15, no names released. Page 2: Hesston police chief: 'I am not a hero':
There was a mass shooting at the Excel factory in Hesston (a small,
mostly Mennonite, town less than an hour north of Wichita) a week or
two ago. The shooter killed three and wounded more than a dozen,
before the police chief fatally wounded the shooter. Needless to
say, another triumph for gun rights in Kansas. Page 5: Kansas bills seek to reduce early-term birth costs:
Kansas has its own privatized Medicaid service ("KanCare"), which costs
the state a lot of money. The legislature has been looking for ways to
trim costs, so they hired someone to study the situation, and they've
come up with long lists of ways to reduce costs by denying services they
regard as inessential. One of these is to outlaw cesarean deliveries of
premature babies (any under 39 weeks). Presumably there is still some
way to establish a medical necessity, but this adds a whole new layer of
legal interference with women's reproductive care. (Of course, a more
effective way to save money would be to allow, or even encourage, covered
women to opt for abortions, but it's taboo to even mention that in the
state legislature.) Another proposed law would "require physicians to
offer birth risk factor screenings for women in the first trimester to
determine whether a pregnant woman uses tobacco, consumers alcohol,
abuses substances, suffers from depression or is a victim of domestic
violence." (No info on what happens if she does.) Page 6: Old Town shooting a test of new chief's approach to
policing: Another mass shooting, the first since Wichita got a new
Chief of Police a few weeks ago. Page 6: 4 people shot to death in KCK; fifth killing in
mid-Missouri may be linked: Kansas City, Kansas. Shooting deaths
there hardly ever get reported here, so I guess 4 must be the magic
number. Page 6: Trump wins Mich., Miss.; Democrats split states:
So, Tuesday's presidential primary election results get buried deep
in the paper, a single column about eight inches long, under a head
no larger than "Prepaid card users, under scrutiny, find tax refunds
frozen" and "Drug in Sharapova case used by Soviet troops in 1980s."
The night's big story, barely mentioned, was Bernie Sanders' surprise
upset of Hillary Clinton in Michigan (a state 538 gave her a 21-point
poll advantage and a 99% chance of winning). On the other hand, they
make no mention of Trump's third win in Hawaii, or Cruz's solo win in
Idaho, or that Marco Rubio got zero delegates from those states. Page 12: Sports Authority default ripples through sporting-goods
industry: One store in Wichita, now shuttered, employees sacked.
Another overleveraged chain bites the dust. Page 13: Two Sedgwick County officials back measure that would
restrict property tax increases: Not enough for Sedgwick County
Commissioners Jim Howell and Karl Peterjohn to not pass property tax
increases, they want to use their limited time in office to lobby the
state legislature to prohibit future tax increases -- otherwise, like,
future county commissioners might try to use county and local government
to, like, do things for people. Page 13 (Opinion): Cal Thomas: Culture beast to blame for
Trump's rise: Nearly everything in this column is absurdly wrong,
but my eyes were drawn to this paragraph:
On the other side of the political fence, Bernie Sanders and Hillary
Clinton feed into the entitlement mentality that the government exists
to give you stuff and take care of you. Democrats have exploited race
and class for political advantage, deepening the divide between whites
and blacks (and increasingly Hispanics), as well as the three classes --
poor, middle class and wealthy. If the left really cared about
African-Americans, wouldn't that core Democratic constituency be
better off now than they have ever been, given the amount of money
spent on social programs supposedly created to improve their lot in life?
First point: the United States government does exist to "give
us stuff" (the wording in the US Constitution is "promote the general
welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty"). What Thomas calls an
"entitlement mentality" is what most of us think of as the basic rights
of citizenship -- one of which is that we elect, and therefore effectively
own, the government. If the government is ours, why shouldn't we use it
for our own benefit? Where Sanders and (even) Clinton run afoul of Thomas
is that they encourage us to take advantage of our own citizenship and
use our votes to increase "the general welfare." On the surface, it's
hard to understand how people like Thomas can even write this nonsense,
but that they can gives you an idea of how completely they are enclosed
in the right-wing media bubble.
Second point: Thomas remains a captive of one of the right wing's
oldest and deepest cons: the notion that helping people hurts them.
Conservatives love this con because they hate sharing: it makes them
feel especially virtuous, and if the disadvantaged fall for it they
might go away blaming themselves for a system that is rigged against
them. A corollary to this point is the belief that liberal efforts to
improve the general welfare of Afro-Americans have only hurt them (and
that the Democrats are hypocrites or just plain cruel for pursuing
such policies). The problem with this point and corollary is not just
that they're cynical and self-serving: it's that they're flat out
falsehoods. The fact is that most Afro-Americans are much better off
now than they were before the Great Society programs, before the Civil
Rights laws, before the New Deal. It's certainly true that much more
could be done, that there is much room for improvement, but you can't
begin to justify an argument that those programs haven't helped. (As
I'm writing this, one example of this is the full-color Berkshire
Hathaway ad on the opposite page, showing showing a prosperous-looking
black couple talking to a real estate agent in front of some rather
upscale suburban housing. Ads like that didn't exist when I was a
child. You can readily find examples elsewhere. For example, this
piece was written to dispell misconceptions Sanders' supporters
may have about blacks, but could enlighten Thomas as well.)
Third point: blaming the Democrats for exploiting "race and class
for political advantage" and "deepening the divide between whites and
blacks (and increasingly Hispanics)" is, well, obscene. Class exists
because one group owns property and makes its income from rents and
profits, and another only makes a living by selling its labor, and
that difference puts those two classes in conflict with one another.
Political parties didn't invent capitalism; they arose because of it.
What Thomas is really saying is that it would be good for his side if
the other side never talked about class conflict. Race complicates
this only a little bit: most Afro-Americans came to America as
slaves, were held as such until 1865, and even after emancipation
were discriminated against in ways designed to maintain them as a
low-wage labor pool. Slaveholders, in turn, used the ever-present
threat of slave revolts to organize poor white militias, a division
that persists to this day, undermining class solidarity which could
improve the lot of both black and white working classes. Similar
divisions have long existed between native and immigrant workers --
again something that owners have often exploited to increase their
advantages in class struggle.
Thomas is not objecting to class, racial, or ethnic divisions --
indeed, he views them as immutable, the very foundation of his ideal
conservative order. What he objects to is any possibility that the
people not favored by his ideal hierarchy should become conscious
and realize that change is possible -- that the general welfare can,
in fact, becomg more general. Page 13: Letters to the Editor: One letter points out
the value of burying electrical lines rather than the cheaper (and
much more outage-prone) stringing of lines from poles -- perhaps
something that could be added to Sanders' infrasructure program,
but that's hard to do when the power grid is trusted to predators
like Westar. One letter touted Sanders' supporters, and two more
had praise for Ted Cruz. Consider this paragraph:
Beck opined that unless Republicans quit their infighting and unite
behind a principled Republican conservative such as Sen. Ted Cruz,
R-Texas, they will lose the election to an unworthy Democrat, who
will follow President Obama's job-killing policies.
It still shocks me when I find people so totally ignorant of the
facts. GW Bush was the job killer, winding up with negative job growth
after eight years after his short-term housing bubble gains were wiped
out when the bubble burst. Obama, on the other hand, has seen America
steadily add jobs after an initial dip bequeathed by Bush, and the net
result as been sharply positive (despite a loss in public sector jobs
thanks to Republican slagging on government spending, especially at
the state and local level -- remember Brownback?). In fact, ever since
WWII Democratic presidents have average over twice the growth rates of
Republicans (despite huge increases in deficit spending by Reagan and
the Bushes). I'll leave it to you to look up the numbers, but believe
me, the differences are huge.
There is also a letter on Trump:
Trump is what the base of the Republican Party has been clamoring for --
nay, demanding -- for decades and has given an outlet to racists, bigots
and misogynists who blame political correctness on their inability to
practice these openly. So why is the party surprised?
Well, because Republicans' capacity for self-delusion is boundless --
almost as great as their knack for passing the buck (for example, see
Bobby Jindal Blames President Obama for Donald Trump's Rise; it's
really pretty galling how easily Republicans fling about "job-killing,"
especially with "Obamacare" -- but never with job-massacres like NAFTA
or TPP). Leaving
Trump aside for the moment, I've seen Ted Cruz talk passionately about
stagnating wages, and then in the next breath proposing to abolish the
IRS to solve the problem. How is that supposed to work? If the federal
government has no facility for collecting taxes, how can it afford to
do anything, much less encircle the globe in military bases armed to
the hilt with state-of-the-art weapons systems? Without future tax
income the federal government won't even be able to borrow money.
Printing more money doesn't begin to solve the problem. And then what
happens to the 20-25% of the workforce who lose their government jobs?
And the millions more who lose Social Security and Medicare? You know,
I hate taxes too, but I can't pretend nothing bad will happen if you
abolish the IRS.
As for Trump, Republicans have plenty of reason to be embarrassed
by him, but the actual complaints coming from people like Thomas and
Jindal and everyone from Glenn Beck and Bill Kristol to David Brooks
and Mitt Romney boil down to two points: one is that Trump deviates
from (and is not seen as a true believer in) the conservative dogma
that right-wingers have spent millions (possibly billions) of dollars
drumming into the movement, and the other is that Trump isn't wholly
dependent on said right-wingers -- so they fear he's liable to go off
script.
For many years we suffered bad politicians with bad ideas and somehow
muddled through. Even now, people my age are more likely to die quietly
than to see their world descend into dystopia. But I have little faith
now that young people today will be able to muddle through even as we
did. Throughout much of my lifetime the left tried to organize on the
basis of helping other people -- something noble but when push came to
shove not exactly dependable. But with the Sanders campaign what I see
is young people mobilizing to defend themselves against a future full
of peril. Meanwhile, when you look at newsdays like the above, that
peril appears not just as something looming like global warming but as
something frightfully urgent.
A couple quick links on the election:
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FiveThirtyEight: What Went Down in the March 8 Presidential Primaries:
Live blog from the night, closed out before anything from Hawaii reported,
so not really the whole night. They spent a lot of time patting themselves
on the back for nailing the Republican contests, and more time complaining
about the bad polling data that screwed up their 99% prediction of a
Clinton win in Michigan. For more of the latter, their Carl Bialik
added a post-mortem,
Why the Polls Missed Bernie Sanders's Michigan Upset. The reason
that makes the most sense to me was that Sanders really hit the right
notes with the Flint debate and the Detroit town hall events, although
that's too subjective for these guys (they complain about not having
any post-event polls, an excuse they also used with Cruz in Iowa). The
one I don't believe at all is that over-confident Clinton supporters
switched to the Republican primary to stop Trump. That doesn't make
sense on any level, and exit polls tell us that only 4% of identified
Democrats crossed over anyway so it couldn't have been much of an
effect (sure, 4% would have tilted the election to Clinton, but I
really suspect that most of that 4% crossed to vote for Trump, not
against him, and I doubt that Trump-leaning Democrats would have
preferred Clinton over Sanders -- unless they were super hawkish).
Nate Silver: Marco Rubio Never Had a Base: Rubio finished below
the delegate threshold in all four Republican primaries on Tuesday,
so he wound up with zero delegates. He trailed Kasich (and Cruz) in
Michigan, so wound up fourth there. He significantly underperformed
expectations in all four states. He's trailing in 538's poll average
in his home state of Florida to Trump 30.6-39.9% (or 24.7-40.2%,
depending on which chart you use; his best recent polls are 30-38%
and 32-42%, but others are 22-42%, 20-43%, and 22-45%). He's dropped
from 2nd to 3rd in all recent polls in North Carolina. He's still a
bit better in Illinois (20.4%), but that reflects more on Trump
(33.0%) and Cruz (19.5%). Silver has some ideas on why Rubio hasn't
done well, but they don't go far toward explaining why he's tanked
so much lately. I'd say it's basically because he's a placeholder --
a way of saying "none of the above." Let's face it, no one really
likes him, even if they think they should. Silver trots out one
revealing bit of data: Rubio's best districts so far are all very
Democratic. Good chance what those voters like about Rubio is that
they see him as someone they may be able to slip him past a more
liberal electorate. Sure, he's a phony, but their phony, and no
one doubts that if he wins he'll do as he's told.
This is probably as good a place as any to mention two popular
memes that came out of Super Tuesday and intensified this week.
One is the proposition that if conservatives really want to stop
Trump, the only choice they have left is to back Cruz. Sure, he's
possibly the most toxic politician in America right now, but with
him you get the whole package: a doctrinaire conservative even
more principled (i.e., extreme) than Rubio and Kasich, and a guy
who appeals to the basest instincts of the party base (much like
Trump minus the flim flam). The second is that Rubio should cut
a deal where he withdraws, throws his support to Cruz, and joins
the ticket as Cruz's vice president. It's amusing to think that
Rubio thinks he has supporters so loyal that now they would
follow him into Cruz's arms when it was Cruz (and Trump) that drove
them to Rubio in the first place. He's a politician with no intrinsic
appeal, and it's good that's becoming obvious to everyone.
If you want to read more, there's
Gary Legum: The Marco Rubio post-mortem: How a supposedly ready-made
GOP nominee crashed and burned.
Bill Curry: It should be over for Hillary: Party elites and MSNBC can't
proper her up after Bernie's Michigan miracle: Few people remember
this but when Eugene McCarthy ran against Lyndon Johnson in 1968,
McCarthy actually lost to Johnson in New Hampshire. Nonetheless, that
he came as close as he did rattled Johnson so severely that he dropped
out of the race almost immediately. He could see that McCarthy would
keep gaining traction, and while he could almost certainly have still
won at the convention -- Hubert Humphrey in fact did without running
in a single Democratic primary -- he didn't want to go out like that.
I think of this not only because it was one of my formative political
experiences but because Hillary Clinton started this campaign in every
bit as dominant a perch as Johnson had in 1968. Her nomination was so
pre-ordained that virtually no mainstream Democrat even considered a
run against her. (Martin O'Malley ran a very half-hearted campaign,
having positioned himself as Hillary's backup plan. Sanders and Lincoln
Chafee weren't even Democrats, and Jim Webb wasn't much of one.) So
why does Clinton, unlike Johnson, truck on after repeated primaries --
both in 2008 where she kept her losing campaign going all the way to
the convention, and so far in 2016 -- reveal her to be a flawed and
vulnerable candidate? Could just be hunger, but could also be a sense
of entitlement. One thing it certainly involves is a willingness to
win ugly, especially if that's the only way she can do it. Curry points
out some of the obvious problems. A couple paragraphs, the first from
a section headed "The old politics is over," the second from the end:
I often talk to Democrats who don't know Obama chose not to raise the
minimum wage as president even though he had the votes for it; that he
was willing to cut Medicare and Social Security and chose not to
prosecute Wall Street crimes or pursue ethics reforms in government.
They don't know he dropped the public option or the aid he promised
homeowners victimized by mortgage lenders. They don't know and don't
want to know. Their affection for Bill and Barack -- and their fear
of Republicans -- run too deep. [ . . . ]
In the end, thinking only tactically makes you a bad tactician.
When revolution's in the air polls, money and ads mean far less.
Reporters who know nothing else can't conceive how voters choosing
among a democratic socialist, a pay-to-play politician and a fascist
might pick door number one. They bought Hillary's myth of inevitability,
but as Lawrence of Arabia told Prince Ali in the desert, nothing is
written. If Democratic voters really use their heads, they'll see
through the tactical arguments just like the voters of Michigan did --
and then walk into voting booths all over America and vote their hearts.
Then there will be change.
The first paragraph reminds me of disappointment: that voting for
Obama in 2008 was a vote for change, but in fact what we got was a
president and administration that was dedicated to preserving the
liberal-conservative tradition in America, to not rocking the boat
and not changing anything -- in short, the sort of business-as-usual
administration we expected from Clinton. Looking back, it's easy to
see that we could have done much worse, but we also could have done
better. Now we're being offered the same-old, same-old we rejected
in 2008, and we're being told first that it's inevitable -- that one
is proving flimsy -- and that Clinton is the only one able to stave
off the barbarian hordes. I saw David Corn on TV last night arguing
that Hillary's been "tested by fire" over thirty years, while Sanders
has never had to face the sort of assaults the Republicans will surely
bring against him if he's the nominee. Still, it's not as if Hillary
hasn't been burnt a few times along the way, and he overlooks that
Sanders has actually held elective office for thirty-some years,
whereas Hillary only served one unfinished Senate term, one that
was gift-wrapped for her in a safe state. Maybe Sanders is tougher
than the pundits think. Maybe he just has less unsavory laundry to
air out.
Curry also wrote
Hillary's inevitability lie: Why the media and party elites are
rushing to nominate the weakest candidate.
Andy Schmookler: Who Is the Better Bet to Beat Trump, Hillary or
Bernie?: Doesn't offer a clear cut argument for Sanders, but
the argument for Hillary isn't very clear cut either. (Curry, by
the way, subtitled the piece above "She's the one Dem even Trump
beats.")
Charles Pierce: Why Bernie Won Michigan: One reason was that Clinton
tried to claim Sanders' vote against the TARP fund bank bailout bill was
a vote against the later auto industry bailout that Obama worked out
using TARP funds:
But, as I talked to more and more people around Flint, I got the sense
that the resonance of the exchange was not what HRC and her campaign
thought it would be. The UAW members I talked to clearly considered
HRC's use of the auto bailout against Sanders to be at best a half-truth,
and a cynical attempt to win their support, and they were offended by
what they saw as a glib attempt to turn the state's economic devastation
into a campaign weapon. These were people who watched the auto industry
flee this city and this state, and they knew full well how close the
country's remaining auto industry came to falling apart completely in
2008 and 2009. They knew this issue because they'd lived it, and they
saw through what the HRC campaign was trying to do with the issue.
Pierce also has a piece about Clinton trying to red bait Sanders
over old comments he made about Cuba and Nicaragua:
Bernie Sanders Said Something We Weren't Ready to Hear Last Night:
The pundits are right that Sanders' statements back in the 1980s are
fertile ground for conservative ratfcking -- look how easy it was for
HRC to turn them around on him -- and likely would be used to make a
meal out of him in a general election. The biggest problem that Sanders
has here, though, is that he told a truth that we're still not prepared
to hear. That Elliott Abrams has not been fitted with a leper's bell
yet is proof enough of that.
Still, I can't help but think that Obama has painted himself red,
white and blue in patriotic homilies, fervently striving to steer any
attention away from the fact that as a black American he might have
had a somewhat more nuanced view of this country's legacy in the world.
Note that I'm not saying he does, but no matter what he's said or done
it hasn't cut any mustard with the rabid right, who have spent the last
eight years frantically trying to deny that he's even a real American.
So what crime is Sanders committing here by admitting the truth, and
offering lessons from history as a guide for future policy? Merely
that he will be attacked for not parroting common myths. But isn't
the fact that he hasn't been pilloried yet for embracing Socialism
at least a suggestion that the sanctities of the high priests are
slipping? What ultimately undermines Obama and Clinton here is the
widespread (and I'm pretty sure unfounded) belief that they are not
sincere. But by not falling for the homilies, Sanders is showing that
he is sincere, honest, truthful, and trustworthy -- and when he doesn't
get hurt by doing so, that starts to free us from the dead weight of
retrograde ideas. I have to admit, I myself always cringe when I hear
Sanders' line about "a political revolution." I consider myself well to
his left, and I would never use the r-word, partly to be circumspect but
mostly because I don't consider it a real or even particularly desirable
possibility. But then a funny thing happens every time I hear the line:
applause. And I have to admit, I'm not the sort of political purist who
makes a fuss against something worthwhile that seems to be working.
Sarah Leonard: Which Women Support Hillary (and Which Women Can't
Afford To): I saw this piece a while back (posted Feb. 17), and
the title resonated through the Kansas caucuses and into Michigan.
Could go on much longer, but let's close with a Matt Taibbi tweet:
Struggling to find the comp for that Trump victory speech. Ron Jeremy
meets Stalin?
If anyone out there is too culturally illiterate to get the point,
Ron Jeremy is a pudgy porn actor with modest skills as a comic, perhaps
best known for waging swordfights with his erect penis. Stalin was head
of the Soviet Union from 1929-1953, during which time he had nearly all
of his political opponents killed off, some after elaborate show trials,
at least one by an icepick-wielding assassin. He was famed for giving
marathon speeches, frequently interrupted by long stretches of applause.
It's been observed that the reason the applause lasted so long was that
no one wanted to be seen as the first person to stop clapping. Sorry
if you flash on both images next time you hear Trump speak, but I know
I will.
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