Uppity Wisconsin

It seems that many of those who are regular guests of this space are committed to a worldview based on some degree of reason and rationality.

That's a handy thing if the "Covert Alarm Locator Apparatus" in your Isaac Daniel® Compass Global 1000 GPS sneakers should happen to fail and you need to find your way back to where the rest of us are; sadly, not all voters are equipped with such a helpful worldview.

Luckily for them, there are lots of conservative "mouth organs" ready to fill the "information gap".

They send out lots of emails every day, spreading their Word, and as a public service I receive several of them; this to help keep track of just what's out there, exactly.

If you ever wondered why otherwise normal people believe some of the craziest things about "Obama's Secret Death Care And National Virgin Sacrifice Program", have a look at some of the things I get every single day, and it might all make a bit more sense.

LANGUAGE WARNING: Today’s story is uncharacteristically blunt, and from this moment forward we will be using lots of inappropriate language in making our points.

Gentle Reader, you have been officially...warned.

With that in mind, if you take offense when confronted with language strong enough to knock a fuckin’ buzzard off a shitwagon, please stop reading now.

It is by now fairly well known that Rahm Emanuel, President Obama’s White House Chief of Staff, had a bit of a blow-up with liberals who were ready to start running ads against “blue dog” Democrats who were working very hard to shut down the health care reform effort.

Now we’re not gonna get in the middle of that argument today; instead, since we’re finally getting a chance to talk, I figured me and Rahm could get a few other things out of the way that have been on everyone’s mind for the past year or so.

We strive to be, if anything, a participatory space around here, and I’ve had a question come to my inbox that is very much deserving of our attention.

To make a long story short, our questioner wants to know why, on the one hand, despite the passage of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA, also known as the “stimulus”), unemployment in the construction industry continues to increase, and, on the other hand, why there is such a giant disparity, on a state-by-state basis, in the cost of saving a job?

They’re great questions, and, having done a bit of research, I think I have some cogent answers.

It was a long hot August for those who would like to see health care reform, as rabid “Town Hall” protesters proffered visions of public options that would lead to death panels and socialism and government tax collectors with special alien mind control powers that would use sex education and child indoctrination and black helicopters as the means for gay people to impose their dangerous agenda on the innocent, God-fearing citizens of someplace in Mississippi that I’m not likely to ever visit.

Part of the reason that opposition was so rabid was because health care interests were spending millions upon millions of dollars doing...well, doing whatever the opposite of giving a distemper shot to the angry mob might be, anyway.

So wouldn’t it be great if all the CEOs of all those health care interests were to gather at one time and place so you could, shall we say, gently express your own thoughts regarding the issues of reform and public options?

By an amazing coincidence, that’s exactly what’s going to happen Thursday in Washington, DC, as the Patient Centered Primary Care Cooperative (PCPCC) holds its Annual Summit.

Follow along, and I’ll tell you everything you need to know.

So it’s the day of the big speech, Mr. President, and we got trouble with a capital “T” right here in Health Care City.

What are you gonna do? Do we follow the traditional Democratic Party legislative process of passing...something...at any cost, assuming the entire time that the Left and the Netroots will “go along with the program”, or is there a risk that the calculus doesn’t work as well today as it did in 1994 and 1996?

Well, lucky for you, I’m a fake consultant, and I know a few things about your “target market”, so before you answer that question...we need to talk.

Sigh-

I noticed this the other day, when I was wondering why the heck I had an increase in Nigerian 419 spam - and took a look and saw that some of it had been forwarded from the Democratic Party mail servers. 

Seems the democrats.org web site has an invite page that lets you send emails through the site to invite people to the web site.  You can put anything in the email you want.  They even make it easy to take addresses out of your address book.  No Captcha, no spam control, no nuttin'.  A spammer's paradise, just write a little script to exploit it. I haven't seen anybody do this for years - just not good net citizenship.  Anyway, it's been noticed.  Hasn't been fixed as of this afternoon, but it's been noticed.  I keep trying to become one of them high-paid Democratic consultants, so maybe spam alleviation is my in.  You'd kind of think they'd know better.

So if you’re like me, you have been wondering just exactly what all this “tea party” stuff is about. There’s going to be some sort of protest, that we know; but beyond that the whole thing seems a little...vague. Alternatively, it’s possible that you were unaware that “tea party” has recently become a word reborn in conservative political circles. Well, whether you knew it or not, April 15th was indeed a day of protest, with citizens gathering for what were reported to be a series of grassroots events across the nation that was intended to invoke the spirit of the Boston Tea Party. In an effort to find out exactly what is motivating these folks, and to find out what they are trying to accomplish, I took my handy recorder and captured a conversation with a “tea bag” protester. We will review that conversation, and we will follow it up with a few thoughts about how this group of voters might impact electoral politics going forward. Let’s begin by setting the stage: the city of Issaquah, Washington (population about 17,000) is more or less 15 miles east of downtown Seattle, in eastern King County. It’s a bedroom community, for the most part, with some light industrial and stores like Home Depot.

Securing the votes in Congress to pass real immigration solutions into law isn't going to be easy. The next President - no matter who wins - will need to lead his own party first to get it done.

Senator Obama would surely have an uphill climb, even with a Party Platform that favors comprehensive reform. But, given an enforcement-only Party Platform and the policy positions of most Republicans in Congress, Senator McCain may need to scale a brick wall to bring his party on board!

Nevertheless, both candidates continue to talk about reform (at least in Spanish).

Well, we've already heard enough rhetoric- we want a roadmap. We're asking the Senators how they will unite their own parties to pass real immigration solutions into law.

We're saying, Show America the Immigration Reform Roadmap during the next presidential debate on October 7th!

Resources

The Republican Platform

The Democratic Platform

Why is that every time bad investments made by private institutions go belly up, the U.S. taxpayers are called upon to socialize the financial risk? WHY?

Why is it that suddenly, government isn't the problem, it's the solution?

Democrats and Republican lawmakers are to blame for the current mortgage and investment banking crisis. From a legislative perspective, they saw this coming years ago and did nothing to stop it. This has happened before. Remember when taxpayers were called upon to bailout the Resolution Trust Corporation and the S&L crisis in the 1990s?

When will we hold politicians and powerbrokers in this country responsible for believing risk should be socialized, but wealth must be privatized?

I’m supposed to be finishing another story tonight, but I’ve just come from Darcy Burner’s primary night party...and I have in front of me the results of the important races tonight in Washington’s newfangled “top two” primary.

It is unfair to extrapolate the results of elections in the “People’s Republic of Washington” directly onto a national map, but as I look as these results it seems fair to say that if any Republican strategists aren’t sweating bullets this morning it’s because they’ll be hustling for votes in towns like Maggie Valley, North Carolina (don’t forget to stop by Saratoga’s for the Wednesday night jazz...)...or, perhaps, Bessemer Bend, Wyoming.

For the rest of the Republican community, tonight’s events are not good news.

We have a fair amount to cover, so let’s get to it.

Those who are coming to this story today have jumped into the middle of quite a tale.

I put myself in a tough position last time by promising to link a British “garden of lust”, Benjamin Franklin, and 18th Century bloggers into a narrative that concludes with the nascent United States of America and its shiny new Fourth Amendment.

So far, amazingly enough, I’m pulling it off.

If you need to catch up, here’s what’s been going on:

When last we met...it was in a world of scandal and intrigue; with King George III and the Earl of Bute (and of course, their assorted minions) very upset with John Entick, author, and John Wilkes, author and world-class raconteur (and drinking buddy to Franklin), because they had the temerity to...well, blog.

The Earl of Bute had taken so much abuse from the Johns that he had been forced to resign from his position as Prime Minister...leaving the minions under his control, many said, only now from behind the scenes.

Something needed to be done...and when you have minions, you put them to use.

It is by now an accepted fact of life that the Internet is having some sort of impact upon the political process...after all, if it wasn’t, would we even be here?

But we’ve all wondered exactly how much impact; and now the good folks at the Pew Research Center have taken the time and trouble to do some survey work that seeks to answer that very question

The logical approach would be to "walk through" the data (which is, frankly, good news for Obama) and see what they have to say about it...but let’s take a different approach today.

Let’s instead look at the data and ask ourselves: who aren’t we reaching, why, and what implications might those answers have going forward—and downticket?
fake consultant's diary :: :: 

First things first: we’ll be evaluating data obtained from Pew’s "The Internet and the 2008 Election" report (part of the Pew Internet & American Life Project)...and if you don’t regularly visit the Pew sites, you should. They are a fantastic resource for those interested in reality-based reality—and in this election season, reality will matter.

It’s possible to summarize the report’s findings in a paragraph or two, and let’s use that as a jumping off point:

Democrats in Congress who voted against immunity for the telecommunication companies in March, then flipped their votes this month and now do not support prosecution for illegally eavesdropping on Americans, received more money from AT&T, Sprint, and Verizon, than those who did not change their votes.

None of the 94 Democrats who changed their vote are from Wisconsin, thankfully - and a big shout out of support to Russ Feingold for attempts to lead a filibuster of the bill - but there are many fellow Midwesterners who did flip.

Were contributions to their coffers the reason? It looks like those who voted to give immunity received double the money from the telco PACs, than those who did not.

Here's the list, courtesy a great organization, MapLight.org.

Wow.

HRC's top strategist Mark Penn thought the democratic primary races were a winner-take-all affair. He didn't know that for the past twenty years, it's been proportional representation.

The republican primary race is structured as winner-take-all.

This critical misunderstanding makes sense if you consider Mark Penn is a republican and his PR firm is co-owned by McCain's chief strategist.

Time magazine details HRC's other mistakes.