Shutdown is the least of Democrats' problems

The embarrassing cave-in from the ill-advised government shutdown ploy of the congressional Democrats won't be their biggest problem in November. Rather, it will be their dishonest opposition to the Republican tax reform that will come to haunt them.

Even leaving aside the powerful effect of the long-overdue reduction in corporate taxes, the impact on personal income taxes will resonate in the middle class. Nancy Pelosi might think a hundred dollars a month in saved taxes is "pathetic," but for many people that means a welcome addition to discretionary spending. Besides, for many people, the savings will be much greater.

In the meantime, Trump is going to outmaneuver them on the Dreamer issue. Not all the media bias and invective in the world will keep people from seeing what is going on.

On top of that comes Trump's inspired choice to attend Davos. The Times may trumpet that Trump's "isolationism" (why are they still pushing that tired old chestnut?) will isolate him, but the photos of him dining congenially with top executives from Germany and other countries belies that. Dick Durbin can do his best to poison the domestic well but he is sitting at home while Trump is meeting with the president of Rwanda in Davos.

Total bankruptcy of the Democratic Party

The only thing more stunning than the hypocrisy and cynicism of the Democratic leadership in Congress in this government shutdown is the cluelessness and stupidity of the lawmakers who follow them. After excoriating the Republicans for tactical moves that shut down the government, Schumer and Pelosi now imitate those tactics in the belief that Republicans will be blamed and it will give them a further edge in November midterms.

So is Hillary Clinton masterminding this stupidity? It is as tone deaf and cynical as anything she attempted. In my humble opinion, Democrats are making a disastrous miscalculation. Just because the mainstream media is playing along with their game doesn't mean that most people won't see through this and it will boomerang against them.

I have never been convinced that Democrats have a lock on midterms just because Trump is so repellent. And this, I think, will seal the deal for the Republicans.

Regarding the mainstream media. I have thought the rampant bias and dishonesty in reporting was due to their being prisoners of a bubble that has skewed their perception of reality. But I'm beginning to think that it is purely cynical dishonesty with an economic motivation.

Nobody wants objectivity. The New York Times and Washington Post have come to realize that they get more subscriptions and readership by pandering to their blue state audiences than by honoring traditional standards of balance and objectivity. The Times bragged that their subscriptions went UP when Trump was elected, acknowledging their new role as a full-fledged left-wing rag. It is an existential question for these legacy media.

Contrary to the conventional wisdom of the pundits and bloviators, people aren't stupid. A reckoning is coming for the media and for the Democratic Party.

Groupthink

Another insightful analysis by Thomas Continetti in the Free Beacon bewails the bias in the press that Trump has no pushed into the open. Among other things, he blames groupthink fostered by social media. I'm not sure it's social media so much as cultural isolation.

When I was writing my political column for MarketWatch, the editors gave me totally free rein to pick my subjects, write my columns, express my opinions. It was a liberating experience and I'm grateful to them. Only once did I take part in an editorial conference call, shortly before the November election. to coordinate coverage of the big event. I was astonished -- and that is a mild word for my feeling -- at the groupthink evident in the call. The disdain for Trump (and his supporters), the unshakable conviction that Hillary was going to win skewed the whole conversation as editors and columnists divvied up how to cover her victory. I kept quiet. In my columns, I'd already repeatedly expressed my concern that Trump was on a path to victory because of Hillary's flaws and his ability to find issues that people cared about.

All this only got worse when he won, and that is the point of Continetti's column today:

The forces that brought Trump to power are alien to the experience of the men and women who populate newsrooms, his supporters unlike their colleagues, friends, and neighbors, his agenda anathema to the catechism of social liberalism, his career and business empire complex and murky and sensational. Little surprise that journalists reacted to his election with a combination of panic, fear, disgust, fascination, exhilaration, and the self-affirming belief that they remain the last line of defense against an emerging American autocracy.

And again:

Especially when the depletion of veteran editors, the relative youth and inexperience of political and congressional reporters, and the proliferation of social media, with its hot takes and quips, its groupthink and instant gratification, makes the transition from inquiry to indignation all too easy.
There is still excellent journalism. I would point, for starters, to the work on charter flights that led to the resignation of Tom Price. But the overall tone of coverage of this president and his administration is somewhere between the hysterical and the lunatic.

I don't know how this ends, but I can't think it's helping media any.

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Starting afresh

My column for MarketWatch, Darrell Delamaide's Political Capital, ended yesterday after nearly 10 years. I mostly refrained from writing on this blog in order not to give any ammunition to critics about any biases betrayed here. Now that I'm free from that constraint, I will repurpose this blog to continue my political commentary. These blogs will be more informal, and generally much shorter, than the column.

In the latter months of writing the column, I was often accused of being too sympathetic to Donald Trump, of defending him, even of being a right-wing hack. Even before he announced his candidacy, when he was talking about single payer healthcare and expanding Social Security, I said he bears listening to. A dinner party guest here rejected that notion, saying she would never listen to anything that racist, misogynist creep said. She's probably still not listening to him, but 63 million people did and voted him president.

I don't like Trump, I didn't vote for him and never would. I think in many respects he does represent a danger to the world. But the one-sided, biased reporting on him and his administration has mostly served to degrade the media, not him. Anything I have to say that might seem to support his point of view is partly to correct that failure.

So, for instance, the tax plan announced yesterday is, in my opinion, in large part a reasonable, even very constructive plan. In particular, corporate tax reform is long overdue. It drives me crazy when lamestream media simply lumps it all together as "tax cuts for the rich and companies." These are such completely different things, Reducing U.S. corporate tax to 20% from 35% only brings it in line with other industrial countries, A onetime reduced penalty for repatriating foreign profits is also a reasonable and overdue measure. Both have the potential for significantly increasing investment in this country.

The other thing that caught my eye was Trump abandoning notions of public-private partnerships for infrastructure investment. This, too, is a positive step. At their best, these "partnerships" only impose another tax on Americans in the form of tolls for roads and bridges. At their worst, they are an invitation to graft.

The effect of both these plans will be to increase the federal deficit, which is fine by me. I have long made the argument that we can afford to substantially increase the deficit. The deficit is causing absolutely no harm now -- in crowding out private borrowing or pushing up interest rates, for instance -- and there's no evidence a bigger deficit would either. All these fables about saddling our grandchildren with a burden they will never be able to repay is nonsense, and most of the people who cynically peddle this notion know it. The federal debt will never be repaid, it will only be rolled over and serviced ad aeternam.

And while the Laffer Curve has largely been discredited, it may well be that some tax cuts will result in added growth and increased tax revenue to offset the cost of the cuts. I'm all for trying it.

Vox

Vox -- the self-indulgent site founded by Ezra Klein and some other bright 30-somethings -- is out of control. It seems determined to write itself into irrelevance with self-referential news judgement that totally bypasses the concerns of ordinary people.

Unless I'm missing something. But I think they will burn through their venture capital funding and then fold. Who is interested in anything they write?

Then there is the case of Matt Yglesias, a super-bright guy who used to come up with really interesting ideas. He is now on the way to becoming a parody of himself. His latest posting on Vox is a plea to do away with time zones and put everyone on Greenwich Mean Time, so we can go to work at 1400 and knock off at 2200. Wow, that's appealing.

Really? Really?? C'mon Matt,there's a lot of important stuff going on in the world. This is not thought leadership. This is outer space.

Atlanta serendipity

Our trip to Atlanta for a graduation turned out to be more fun than I anticipated. While Atlanta may not offer much of a destination for tourists, it appears to have a relatively high quality of life that we benefited from as visitors.

More by luck than anything else, we landed in a hotel within walking distance of the High Museum. We were surprised to see long lines and found out it was the final days of a big exhibit of Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo. So we braved the line -- which, as much else in Atlanta, was handled with great efficiency -- and went through the exhibit. I had seen the big Frida Kahlo exhibit here in Washington and actually visited the Casa Azul in Mexico City, but this exhibit had a number of her self-portraits as well as the less well-known still lifes. Other highlights were some early paintings by Rivera, showing how he cut his teeth as a painter by mimicking the cubist lights in Paris, and several photographs of the two of them which were works of art in themselves. We dashed through some of the standing collection and were impressed by the number of well-known contemporary artists.

On Sunday, we walked up Peachtree Street from our brunch and wandered into Piedmont Park, a wonderful urban playground that was being put to good use. Our goal was the Botanical Garden, simply because it was a beautiful spring day. To our surprise, we once again stumbled into a rare exhibit -- the first ever in this country of some monumental plant sculptures -- mosaiculture -- that were truly phenomenal. There were two large butterflies made up of various plants as we entered the grounds, which we thought was just some ornamentation. But then we ran into two monstrous cobras, and an ogre, and some bunny rabbits, and dancing berries and realized this was not an everyday occurrence. So we sought out the fabulous Earth Mother and the shaggy dog.

The garden itself was quite nice, with spring blooms. The hothouse was too crowded and, well, too hot to enjoy and the edible garden was in the very early stages after spring planting, but the canopy walk, the fountains and the well-placed benches made it a very enjoyable visit.

We also had great luck with the food and saw much in the department to explore if we ever do go back. You never know.

The next American revolution?

I went to a talk at Politics & Prose yesterday with Gar Alperovitz, the historian and economist who teaches at Maryland, who was plugging his new book What Then Must We Do? Straight Talk About the Next American Revolution.

I like Alperovitz and quoted him once in a column. He's a radical progressive and drew a crowd to P&P much like Howard Zinn did. Most of what he said made a lot of sense.

He says we're in the midst of a systemic crisis, not a political crisis, because things don't change regardless of which party is in power. This is enlightening because it is obviously true that Democrats Clinton and Obama have been no more successful in changing the Reagan juggernaut than the Bushes, who weren't trying to change it. It explains why the elections in 2014 and 2016 offer little hope of improvement.

Alperovitz says we need to "put a couple of decades on the table" to get the systemic change he thinks we need. There's no guarantee we will get the change, he says, and we could just continue on the road to decay that we have been on for three decades. In any case, a couple of decades sounds optimistic to me.

The system that is in crisis is corporate capitalism. Part of the problem is that many of us think that the period from the 40s to the 60s, when labor unions were an effective countervailing force against corporate power, is the norm, when in fact that was the temporary aberration. What we've had since then -- the untrammeled power of corporations to avoid taxes, enrich the wealthy and impoverish the middle class -- is the real norm for corporate capitalism.

Alperovitz says we are in a pre-history of transformation, like the pre-history that preceded the Great Depression, creating the bases for change. He says the revolution will be the democratization of wealth, and he sees the beginnings of it in coops and credit unions, worker-owned businesses in Cleveland and elsewhere, state banks in North Dakota and elsewhere, and so on. He did not talk about crowdfunding or other forms of locavesting but perhaps this is in his book.

He asked the audience to abandon their practice of looking in the rearview mirror to figure out what lies ahead and also to drop their cynicism and pessimism and figure out what they can do to contribute to this pre-history of the revolution.

It's a great challenge and applying it to myself I realized that my foray into self-publishing and my devotion to blogging are part of the democratization of wealth. At least a dozen times, Alperovitz said "you won't read about this in the press," and if I'd had more patience I would have been curious to ask him why thought that was so. But the answer is obvious, because the press is part of corporate capitalism and that goes for book publishing, too.

I bought his book, though I'm not sure there's much more in it than was in his talk. I found it all quite validating. My own feeling of liberation from being able to self-publish my novel and put my blogs out there I can now see as part of a more generalized movement. My immediate fascination with Amy Cortese's Locavesting and my efforts to get these kinds of stories in the short-lived Sustainable Money all fit into the pattern described by Alperovitz.

A Jesuit pope

Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Jesuits, wanted to shield the members of his new order from the ambition and corruption he saw in the Renaissance church and wrote into the rules that, unlike in other religious orders, Jesuits would not be allowed to accept appointments as bishops or other high church posts. This led to the perception of Jesuits as behind-the-scenes manipulators and earned the superior general of the order the title "black pope," because he would be whispering instructions into the ear of the man in the white cassock.

Exceptions were made for bishops in "mission" countries, and that is probably the rationalization for Bergoglio becoming archbishop of Buenos Aires, though a country that is predominantly Catholic and which once enjoyed a standard of living comparable to many countries in Europe can hardly be described as a "mission" country. Once a bishop gets the cardinal's hat, of course, it's out of the hands of the order, and the college of cardinals, if so moved, is free to choose that member of their select group as pope.

In any case, a Jesuit pope is something of an anomaly, because one of the distinctive characteristics of the order is a special vow of obedience to the pope. Again, in the context of the 16th century when the order was founded, the idea was to ensure a loyal shock troop to stem the tide of Reformation sweeping down from Germany. Unwavering loyalty to the pope in Rome was seen as the way to do that.

It was perhaps inevitable, though, that eventually one of these highly qualified, highly motivated priests would become pope. What's interesting is that Pope John Paul II, who feuded with the Jesuits off and on, would select the head of the order in Argentina first as bishop, then as cardinal. John Paul was so enamored of Opus Dei, the secretive order engaged in an intense rivalry with the Jesuits for influence in the church, that it was rumored he was himself a member of the secular order. It is ironic, then, that a Jesuit is now pope and will by his very presence on the throne of St. Peter tilt the playing field in favor of his order.

Not only will his election now give Jesuits the upper hand throughout the church, it is likely to revitalize the order, which has shrunk to half the size it was when I entered the novitiate in 1966 -- to 17,500 members from 35,000 then. It is no stretch to imagine that young men around the world, especially in Latin America, will discover they have a vocation to join the Society of Jesus.

I left the order after only six years and no longer practice my religion, but the church continues to fascinate me as an institution. Argentine President Cristina Fernandez got it exactly right when she called Bergoglio "medieval" for his opposition to same-sex marriage. But it may be his equally medieval devotion to St. Francis will counterbalance this reactionary tendency as he brings a new attitude of humility to the papacy. I thought it was disappointing when Benedict said he would continue to wear a white cassock and live in a palatial setting in the Vatican, styling himself pope emeritus. It seemed to me more appropriate for the first pope to retire in several centuries to retreat to a monastery in Bavaria and wear a simple black cassock. So Bergoglio is immediately refreshing in forgoing the red slippers and instructing the cardinals to come to their first audience with him in black cassocks instead of scarlet and lace.

More Mackey idiocy

Whole Foods CEO John Mackey called Obamacare fascist. To which I say, takes one to know one. In fact, Mackey's vision of corporatist control and the way he runs his supermarket chain are much closer to any "dictionary definition" of fascism than Obamacare.

He's treading on thin ice because, again by definition, most of the people who shop at Whole Foods are going to be progressive and they don't like the idea of supporting a bigoted reactionary.

I once boycotted the corner bakery in Paris because they were rude at one point. I discovered that the bakery continued to prosper but I had to walk twice as far for my morning croissants, so I gave it up and came to the conclusion that personal boycotts are by and large pointless.

Even an organized boycott in this case would achieve what exactly? Mackey has preemptively apologized, so would the goal be to change this leopard's spots or get a new leopard? Neither is likely to happen.

I have other beefs with Whole Foods, as readers of my food blog know (no pun intended, because beef is not one of them). I do try to shop alternatively where possible but convenience often wins out and WF remains the best one-stop shopping for high-quality food in my little neck of the woods. But WF is vulnerable to competition. Other premium-quality supermarkets are unlikely to move into Chevy Chase just because they see a disaffection with Mackey among progressive shoppers. But once they do move in, disaffected shoppers like myself will rush to the competition.

Jon Stewart is just a comedian

So now liberals are upset because Jon Stewart is making fun of the trillion-dollar platinum coin. Of course that's what comedians do -- make fun of idiotic ideas, and even its backers acknowledge it is idiotic. Paul Krugman is upset because Stewart's humor, he feels, is good because it is anchored in reality and based on solid research.

Sometimes it is. But sometimes it isn't. Jon Stewart is a funny guy but I pretty much stopped watching him when he took himself way too seriously and staged this "unify the country" rally on the National Mall with Stephen Colbert.

The problem here is not that Jon Stewart doesn't understand economics -- he clearly doesn't but neither does Michael Bloomberg and many other people who matter more -- but that anyone takes his jokes about platinum coins seriously. Lighten up. It really is just a comedy show.

Italy fever

For some reason, I've been in the grip of Italy fever lately. I'm liking Italian food, looking for places in Italy to visit, and last week I even started an intensive Italian language course.

I've always wanted to learn Italian just because I like the language, the culture, the place. It always seemed a bit impractical since I don't really need it for short visits and there's really not much prospect of ever living there for an extended period of time. Spanish always seemed more practical because it is so widespread in this country.

But what the heck. I'm not getting any younger and I might enjoy learning a new language just for the fun of it. The Italian Culture Institute in Bethesda offers an accelerated course for people who already speak another Romance language (French, Spanish or Portuguese). The class is small, the teacher is Italian, from Liguria, so it's a fairly ideal situation. We'll see whether I go beyond this initial course of 10 sessions once a week.

I've been to Italy often but it never seems to be enough. I went to Rome and Frascati for a week or so two or three times in my early trips to Europe as a Jesuit seminarian. I spent a couple days in Genoa waiting to board the Michelangelo for my voyage home after my Fulbright year. I traveled for business and pleasure when I moved back to Europe as a journalist, working on stories in Milan and Rome, visiting Venice and Florence. During my time at Institutional Investor, I went to Turin for a bank conference and had a spectacular dinner with white truffles; attended a three-day conference at the Villa d'Este on Lake Como with its glorious scenery and food; and most fun of all spent a few days with a Belgian banker at his villa outside Siena to write a story about his project of doing the ultimate guidebook on Tuscany. I spent a wonderful week over Christmas with American friends in Rome. Finally, to spend more time in Italy I rented a farmhouse outside Perugia for a month, taking day trips to Rome, Florence, Assisi, Spoleto, Ravenna and stopping in Venice and the Alto Adige on the way home. At Bloomberg, I headed the European team covering the G-7 summit in Naples. We stayed across the bay in Sorrento at the Grand Hotel and visited Pompeii. My last trip there was to Venice during my two-month stay in Munich working on a supplement for the Washington Times.

I've never been to the Amalfi coast or Capri, to Sicily or Bari, and I've spent too little time in Bologna and Emilia Romagna in general. But right now we are looking at a rental house in Umbria, this time near Todi. There is this great line in La Dolce Vita when Marcello drives outside Rome and stops at a country restaurant. The setting is so idyllic that as he's watching the waitress he exclaims, "You are like an Umbrian angel." Umbria does not have the best wine or cuisine in Italy, but it has wonderful scenery, Etruscan ruins, the incredible cultural richness that seeps out of Italy, and it's midway between Rome and Tuscany. We'll see.

Calendars

Maggie Oster's Herb Gardens calendar

For some unfathomable reason, I've always liked calendars. I appreciate their decorative aspect -- I like having nice pictures that change every month. Somehow, I must also like the time-monitoring aspect as well. Perhaps changing the page every month helps punctuate the increasingly relentless march of time.

The only place I've found for a calendar in our house is in the kitchen. Last year, I had a herb garden calendar by Maggie Oster that worked particularly well, so I got another one for 2013. There are pretty photos of herb gardens along with a seasonal recipe using herbs for each month and various little facts sprinkled through the days of the month, along with the usual holidays and other calendar items. I don't have available wall space in my office and it doesn't make sense to have a calendar in a room, like our finished basement, where I don't spend much time, so the kitchen is it.

In Europe, there was always a wide selection of very nice calendars in all shapes and sizes. Predictably, calendars have been standardized and commercialized here to the point that they come in more or less one size, so that they fit into the display racks in stores. They generally all follow the same format of unfolding with a photo on the top page and the calendar on the bottom page. So the beautiful big calendars I had in Europe, with large pictures and only a token listing of the days (who really needs a calendar to figure out the date?), are a thing of the past.

As I'm experimenting with Pinterest, I've created an "Ideal Calendar" pinboard with the idea of picturing one to four places where I would like to spend all or part of each month. I already have three for January and one for February. I'm beginning to think the year will be too short to put in all the places I'd like to spend time! I'm trying to divide the photos between places I've been in that month (and, it goes without saying, would like to revisit) and new places I'd like to visit.

In general, Pinterest, with its focus on the visual is a bit like a calendar of one's life -- big photos with few words marking the various interests you have.

Taking peace and democracy for granted

In my MarketWatch column yesterday, I quoted a speech from Jamie Galbraith about the risk of an "explosion of violence" in Europe. He said that Yugoslavia is a model for what could happen, as social and economic rivalries -- not age-old ethnic hatreds -- led to violence when that union disintegrated.

There wasn't space in the column to remind readers that the two countries hardest hit so far by the euro crisis -- Greece and Spain -- are also (coincidentally?) the two latecomers to democracy. Greece was ruled by a military junta from 1967 to 1974, and Spain transitioned to democracy only after Franco's death in late 1975.

This wasn't so long ago. One of the reasons the EU was created was to promote and support democratic rule in Europe and it is a condition for membership. The irony of the joint currency is that it seems to be subverting this overarching goal rather than supporting it. The New Dawn fascist party in Greece has links to the old junta, while in Spain the very concept of a unified nation is being challenged as a result of the economic crisis.

Galbraith goes on to say that another model for disintegration in Europe is the amicable divorce between the Czech Republic and Slovakia. "But I have to ask," Galbraith asks rhetorically, "does any country anywhere in the world enjoy the sane, secure, farsighted moral leadership that Czechoslovakia happened to have had at that time?"

The bloodshed and genocide that accompanied the dissolution of Yugoslavia into the 1990s is still the subject of prosecution in international courts. Merkel, focused so singlemindedly on getting herself reelected next year, takes peace and democracy in Europe for granted only at her peril and great risk to her country and the rest of Europe.

Starbucks propaganda

Ed Kilgore has a pointed blog post about Starbucks' disgusting and hypocritical "Come together" campaign, exploiting baristas to spread propaganda about reducing entitlements that counters their own best interests.

Like Whole Foods, Starbucks is headed by a CEO with decidedly paternalistic and borderline fascistic tendencies. It's disturbing to me that two companies that help make my life in Washington more pleasant are led by these ideological egomaniacs.

Washington unfortunately is lacking in a cafe culture, at least in Upper Northwest, that provides convenient alternatives to Starbucks. I do seek out what alternatives there are -- Marvelous Market, Politics & Prose, the little coffee place at Fessenden and Wisconsin, even the Avalon cafe -- whenever possible. I'm loath to suggest moving our Saturday morning kaffee klatch out of Starbucks because it works so well the way it is.

Whole Foods is harder, though their overweening arrogance in carrying only those products that meet some high-faluting standard they set, for letting a computer decide what products disappear from their shelves, and lately, I'm coming to suspect deliberately, leaving "sale" price signs posted while charging the full price at the register -- all these again are making shopping there less and less enjoyable.

Make Bloomberg gun czar

Chris Matthews has been touting Michael Bloomberg for a cabinet post like Treasury, arguing that a guy with his obvious talents and desire to serve should be put to use. I worked for Bloomberg and dealt with him from time to time. I have a lot of admiration for his good qualities, though I personally would not want to see him as Treasury secretary because he has some primitive ideas about government finance.

However, the tragic killing of Connecticut schoolchildren today makes some drastic action on gun control necessary and Bloomberg would be the ideal person to head up a special presidential task force bringing together federal, state and local officials to figure out sensible ways to keep automatic weapons out of the hands of unbalanced individuals.

Gun control per se is obviously a vexed issue in this country. But a starting point would be to figure out ways to enforce existing laws, to close the loopholes that allow unscrupulous dealers to sell guns in defiance of background check requirements, and to educate people about the proper use of firearms. This has been one of Bloomberg's biggest issues as New York mayor. He is passionate about it, he is savvy, and he is on the side of the angels on this one.

Someone else can finish out his term as mayor. President Obama should appoint him tomorrow with an executive order creating this task force.

Susan Rice's smart decision

Susan Rice made the smart move and got President Obama out of a bind. It was virtually impossible for her nomination to be confirmed in the Senate, leaving Obama the awkward choice of fighting a futile battle -- when he already has so many of those on his hands -- or be seen as caving to Republican opposition.

Liberals are quick to call this a smear campaign, but there's clearly more to this whole Benghazi affair than meets the eye and Rice may not be wholly innocent.

More to the point, however, is that she would have been a lousy choice for secretary of State. She has by all accounts been a bully and a remarkably undiplomatic diplomat throughout her career at State. Her version of Realpolitik with regard to African dictators hardly recommends her. She will doubtless do well in the private sector if she now chooses to leave public service.

This probably opens the door for John Kerry, after all, even with the risk that brings for his Senate seat. There's no reason to think he wouldn't be a very good secretary of State. A lot of us thought he would have made a good president.

Michigan

There's a lot of anguish over Michigan's new "right to work" law -- the one that allows workers not to pay union dues even if they are covered by the collective bargaining agreement reached on their behalf by the union.

I don't know the details of what has been happening in Michigan -- how it is that Republicans control both houses of the legislature and the state house. But it seems to me that you cannot blame the Republicans for this. They have always championed "right to work" and every other measure to restrict or eliminate union activity. It's like letting a fox into the hen house and then being surprised you have dead chickens. It's what foxes do.

Blame, if that's what you want to apportion, would seem to go first and foremost to Michigan voters, and particularly white working-class voters who voted against their own economic self-interest by giving the Republicans control of state government. You can be a single-issue voter at your risk, because you vote for a package of measures when you elect one party or the other. It may be that for whatever reason you don't like a black president who Rush Limbaugh has convinced you is going to take away your guns, so you can vote Republican. The next thing you know, the Republicans have gutted union rights and stripped you of a very helpful protection at work.

The unions are also to blame, of course. Now they say they are going to work "unceasingly" to turn Republicans out of office in the next elections. Again, I don't know how active or inactive unions were in the last round of Michigan elections, but the question does come to mind of where were you then. More basic, though, is the fact that unions have allowed the perception to grow that they are complacent and smug, more interested in protecting their members than fighting for the working class in general. This may be an inaccurate perception, but if so it needs to be combated more vigorously.

It is sad to see union rights eroded after all the heroic effort it took to win them. Hopefully, this will produce a backlash strong enough to turn the tide and lead voters to make choices in their own best interest.

Jim DeMint

Some people seem to think it's a smart move for the enfant terrible of the Tea Party, Sen. Jim DeMint of South Carolina, to quit the Senate and take the helm at the Heritage Foundation. The thinking seems to be it will give him a platform to be an even bigger enforcer of conservative purity than he can be in the Senate, where he rubs many of his colleagues the wrong way. Look at what Grover Norquist has been able to do outside public office.

Perhaps, but my take is different. I see little else but a cut and run. DeMint doesn't like the prospect of being in the minority without any of the privileges and power of a committee chairmanship. He does like the prospect of making a million dollars-plus. It's hard to see this as anything other than a sell-out. Ultimately, a senator has power that is very real. There are only a hundred of them and they make the laws, they shape the laws and they exert their influence in a myriad of ways because they can do that. It's not something to give up lightly.

To me it's a signal that DeMint realizes the game is lost. He is just the first rat off the sinking ship. It is the country's gain.

More scary Romney bubble

It turns out Romney wasn't the only one who was shocked, shocked that Obama won. According to Chrystia Freeland in conversation with Ezra Klein, many of his fellow plutocrats who supported him were equally shocked.

Chrystia Freeland: There’s a great joke on Wall Street which is that the bet on Romney is Wall Street’s worst bet since the bet on subprime. But I found the hostility towards Obama astonishing. I found the commitment to getting him out astonishing. I found the absolute confidence that it would work astonishing. On that Tuesday, the big Romney backers I was talking to were sure he was going to win. They were all flying into Logan Airport for the victory party. There’s this stunned feeling of how could we be so wrong, and a feeling of alienation.The Romney comments to his donors, for which he was roundly pounced on by Republican politicians, I think they accurately reflected the view of a lot of these money guys. It’s the continuation of this 47 percent idea. They believe that Obama has been shoring up the entitlement society, and if you give enough entitlements to enough people, they’ll vote for you. 

Lost week

Thanksgiving fell on the earliest date possible this year because Nov. 1 was a Thursday so the fourth Thursday was only three weeks into the month. Normally the holiday falls in the last week of November and the whole week is off limits for scheduling any meetings or conferences or interviews.

But this year, there was a full week in November after Thanksgiving week. My calendar, however, is blank, and I think it's because people never really put two and two together to realize they could schedule events without the holiday interfering. The week kind of got lost in the shuffle.