Kind of forgot this blog was here for a while. What to talk about?

1: America, Land of Solipsism
So let me get this straight: as outrageous as the porno scanners (Jane Hamsher’s term) the TSA uses are – and even worse, their thuggish assaults on anyone who won’t go through one – this is what gets Americans upset? Really? Not mass murder, not mass torture, not execution of American citizens, but backscatter x-ray scanners?

They are truly awful machines, and the TSA is outright lying when they say they can’t store and transmit pictures, of course – and there’s considerable debate over whether they might cause skin cancer. Personally, given the FDA’s track record, when credible scientists say to worry, I do.

2: Still No Need for Foreclosure Moratorium
Remember this? John Cole from October 12th:

That isn’t taking the side of the banksters, that is taking the side of common sense. What possible use could there be for a nationwide halt to foreclosures?

Yep. Couldn’t do any good. Not like the current system is a total con job, HAMP an abject failure by design, and the big banks all largely insolvent.

Everything’s just working swimmingly, and the housing market is doing its job in an orderly fashion:

Hundreds — and possibly thousands — of Massachusetts homeowners are facing back-to-back foreclosures as lenders realize there were problems with property titles the first time around. Those lenders, often unable to obtain title insurance, are opting to start from scratch with what is being called a “re-foreclosure.’’

And it’s not like the current borderline anarchy brings us the risk of another complete collapse, right?

The Congressional Oversight Panel, the TARP watchdog program formerly chaired by Elizabeth Warren and now helmed by former Senator Ted Kaufman, has released a report detailing the failures in the mortgage servicing industry, and the threats to the overall housing market, financial sector and greater economy. The report is chilling; while it rightly says that we don’t yet know the extent of the fraud involved (they call it “irregularities”), even a small chunk of the mortgage-backed securities market going sour would have major implications for all of us. As Ted Kaufman notes, the private-label MBS market totals $7.6 trillion dollars. You don’t have to see much of that break down before you get to the total market capitalization of the biggest financial institutions on Wall Street.

Which naturally leads to the question on everyone’s lips: When will Obama bail out the banks again? Well, perhaps quite soon, with an assist from the thoroughly captured Democratic party:

There are rapidly emerging signs the Obama Administration and Congress may be actively, quickly and covertly working furiously on a plan to retroactively legitimize and ratify the shoddy, fraudulent and non-conforming conduct by MERS on literally millions of mortgages.

But hey, at least the banks aren’t killing people, right?

In a nation with millions of foreclosed homes, the one next door proved the most dangerous for 2-year-old Isaac Dieudonne.

On Oct. 11, 2009, Margarrette and Woulby Dieudonne were moving into their new home in the 6700 block of Southwest 26th Street in Miramar when their son Isaac strolled unnoticed out the family’s open front door. Minutes later, the toddler was found floating facedown in the algae-ridden backyard pool of a neighboring foreclosed home.

A neighbor administered CPR as the foul water spewed from Isaac’s mouth. Thirteen minutes after arriving at the hospital, he was pronounced dead.

…

Untold thousands of foreclosed homes across the United States pose an added public safety hazard because of their green, murky backyard pools, which can breed mosquitoes, nourish problem animals and rodents, or, in the case of Isaac Dieudonne, attract young children.

The Dieudonnes’ lawsuit hinges on a simple, but painful, question: Who is most liable for the boy’s accident? Was it the parents who were watching him or the property owners, servicing companies and maintenance firms that were responsible for making sure the vacant house met public safety requirements?

Like millions of foreclosed properties across the country, the home where Isaac drowned has been awash in legal action over the years, making it difficult to determine who owned the property at the time of the accident.

It took months for the family’s attorney, Janet Spence of Pembroke Pines, to sort through the property’s muddied chain of title possessions and transfers. At one point, Spence said, the home had two separate foreclosure actions pending simultaneously.

Yeah. What was that Cole said again?

That isn’t taking the side of the banksters, that is taking the side of common sense. What possible use could there be for a nationwide halt to foreclosures?

Well, it might prevent a financial meltdown, but if that’s not reason enough, we might have fewer dead kids.

Then again, that second bit’s an argument that would have worked against the war in Iraq too…

Fuck all these people, in the Administration, the big banks, and yes, in the legions of sycophants who carry water for the lot of them on this issue.

3) Matt Yglesias is the Stupidest Motherfucker Alive
Seriously. He proposed, in all apparent seriousness, pushing seniors from Medicare, with its extremely low overheads, onto private insurance in the heavily subsidized exchanges, to save money.

I suspect that part of the issue is that the implications of the Affordable Care Act haven’t really sunk in yet. Traditionally raising the Medicare eligibility age more than a teensy bit would be unthinkable, since absent Medicare an elderly person would be totally uninsurable. But under ACA that’s not the case. Of course subsidies will be needed for most retirees, but a workable highly progressive system would be in place to ensure that nobody has to go without access to health coverage.

Atrios took him to task:

Saying that “the Affordable Care Act haven’t really sunk in yet” is another way of saying that the assumptions used to calculate cost savings to the government of increasing the Medicare eligibility age are quite wrong. Shifting old people out of an efficient insurance provider into an inefficient one that they pay for with government subsidies isn’t sound policy.

At which point, as is his wont, he backtracked to cover up for his own inability to do basic reasoning (spending more money means you end up with less, the sort of thing 3rd graders can grasp).

Sigh. Matt Yglesias, ladies and gentlemen.

There, that’s as much strength as I have to navigate this lousy hotel wifi. Vacay time!

Just a quick post wherein I curse our outgoing governor Doyle for being a gutless coward and backing off his manuever to trap Scott Walker, while being oddly forced to praise a Republican, our current Transportation Secretary LaHood, for taking out the old brickbat and putting it right in Walker’s mug, telling him he either gets the train or he gets the shaft.

Yeesh. It’s truly beyond pathetic when only Republicans get anything done at all for Liberal causes.

The cynic in me is starting to seriously wonder whether President Obama wanted the recent Democratic rout so as to advance his own personal policy preferences.

The alternative is that he’s a blithering idiot.

Let’s look at the facts. Midterm elections are typically dominated by base turnout. In non-presidential years, most people tune out and the number who go to the polls is way, way below a majority of eligible voters. Thus, the election hinges upon, and is dominated by, those highly motivated individuals who turn out to elections regardless of the public mood. This leads to a long-held strategy of focusing, in such years, on the ideological base of your party, putting resources toward getting out their vote and dealing with their issues.

Obama, the DNC and his old personal organization OFA had other ideas this time around though. Their plan was to focus not on the reliable base voters but on the fringe voters who had turned out, often for the first time in their lives, to vote for Obama in 2008:

ABC News’ David Chalian reports: Democrats will be facing a restive and disgruntled electorate in six months as they attempt to hang on to their House and Senate majorities on Capitol Hill, but that isn’t stopping Barack Obama’s DNC and his hand-picked party chairman from keeping their ultimate goal, the president’s 2012 reelection effort, in sight as they roll out the party’s 2010 battle plan.

…

Many Democrats on Capitol Hill have privately expressed concern about this strategy because it is not centered on turning out the tried-and-true midterm election voters the party will need at the polls in November to significantly mitigate the anticipated large number of losses in key congressional races around the country.

Chairman Kaine claimed that the campaigns are already positioned to reach those voters and that the DNC will assist in that effort, but that is not where the committee sees itself adding most value. The previously announced $50 million investment in the midterm races will be greatly focused on cultivating these first-time voters from 2008 who are more likely to be engaged in the next presidential election with Barack Obama’s name expected to be on the ballot than they are to be in this year’s midterm contests.

In a nutshell, the Obama faction wanted to spend precious resources in a tight election year not on voters likely to turn out, but on maintaining Obama’s relationship with sunshine voters who he’ll need in 2012.

If that strikes you as dangerous and narcissistic, you’re not the only one, and as the election loomed many establishment Dems got panicky:

The White House strategy is focused on an unprecedented effort to turn out the voters who cast their first ballots for Obama in 2008. The Democratic National Committee has pledged $30 million in voter turnout efforts this year, largely geared toward those first-time voters through Organizing for America, the outgrowth of Obama’s political operation.

…

Old school Democrats, mostly affiliated with the labor movement and congressional campaigns, aren’t buying it. They don’t believe the DNC understands what the midterm electorate will really look like.

“The notion that first-time presidential voters will come out in an off year is limited,” said one veteran Democratic strategist closely aligned with labor unions. In 2006, massive efforts to turn out the Democratic base, coupled with a political wave, swept Democrats into power. “If only the party and operatives were focused on getting that turnout in hand before going for extra icing,” this strategist said, “they’d have a far tastier cake.”

…

Democrats critical of the DNC’s strategy believe the committee is focused more on Obama’s 2012 re-election bid than on the party’s success in the midterms. From the White House perspective, that may be an understandable act of self-preservation, given how dismal the landscape looks for Democrats. But it’s not something Capitol Hill Democrats appreciate.

So who was right? It might not surprise you to learn it wasn’t the Obama faction:

Core Democratic groups stayed away in droves Tuesday, costing Democratic House candidates dearly at the polls.

Hispanics, African Americans, union members and young people were among the many core Democratic groups that turned out in large numbers in the 2008 elections, propelling Mr. Obama and Democratic House candidates to sizable victories. In 2010, turnout among these groups dropped off substantially, even below their previous midterm levels.

Voters under the age of 30 comprised 18 percent of the electorate in 2008 and nearly 13 percent in 2006 but only made up 11 percent of the electorate in 2010. The share of voters from union households dropped from 23 percent in 2006 and 21 percent in 2008 to 17 percent in 2010. African Americans made up 13 percent of the electorate in 2008 but fell to 10 percent in 2010. Such apathy likely cost the Democrats House seats as voters in each of these groups cast ballots for Democratic House candidates by at least 15 point margins.

The strategy, as you can see, was a dismal failure, and it helped contribute to the slaughter the Dems faced in the House this week. So at first glance, Obama would seem to be a truly terrible tactician.

Or… would he?

It all depends on who he needs to advance his agenda. What is that agenda?

Over the last two years, President Obama’s administration has been handing out huge sacks of cash to large corporate interests in the health care and automotive sectors, while refusing to reign in the financial sector robber barons who brought about the recession. In order to do this he needed a certain coalition consisting of pro-Detroit, pro-bankster, pro-health lobby Democrats to pass his legislation.

Said coalition is utterly in ruin now, of course, but he doesn’t need them anymore, as he now has other plans.

First, ‘Free Trade’:

In addition to education, another area where you can see the President and the Republicans in Congress agreeing is on the issue of trade. One of the first international figures Obama talked to on Election Day was the President of South Korea, and he assured him that the US was working on passing a free trade agreement between the two countries.

Obama and a few Republicans may agree, but I’d be hard-pressed to find any Democrats to join them, including the Blue Dogs. For all his obvious faults, Heath Shuler is a fair trader. So was the majority of the 111th House of Representatives, as evidenced by the vote on the Chinese currency bill, which had the support of 99 Republicans, most of whom remain in the House. A new report from Public Citizen shows that 205 Democratic and Republican candidates used fair trade and anti-outsourcing messaging in their election campaigns. Only 37 candidates campaigned as pro-NAFTA free traders, and half of them lost.

Gee, it’s a shame that so many Democrats who would have been potential impediments to this big free trade pact are suddenly out of the picture, isn’t it?

Nice priorities there too, negotiating a free trade pact on the day your hand-picked electoral strategy destroys your own political party.

What else is on the schedule? Gutting Social Security comes to mind:

With Republicans in no mood to launch a legislative attack on Social Security, there was nobody for Obama to make one of his grand comprises with. So, in February of this year, he issued an executive order creating his own anti-entitlement missile, the panel that quickly became known as the “cat food” commission, harkening back to the pre-Social Security days when many of the elderly where reduced to eating cat food.

Obama’s trick was to conjure up a political demand for the gutting of entitlements when no serious movement in that direction existed in the Congress. The commission route allowed him to concoct a majority right-wing constituency in a bottle, so to speak, by weighting the membership with pro-corporate players.

No one doubts that the panel is rigged to recommend cuts that Democrats (and a few Republicans) would be prepared to fight tooth and nail if proposed by the GOP. Blood would flow in the halls of the House and Senate, and in the end the assailants would likely lose. But by packaging the poison in a commission, Obama is allowed to behave as if the entitlement debate has oozed from the ether, demanding to be made manifest.

The only thing I’d add to that excellent synopsis is that, after the election, Congress now has a slew of crazy, fire-breathing anti-entitlement Republicans and Tea Party maniacs to back his play and aid the triangulation.

In review: over the last two years, Obama’s agenda has been tilted toward handing out giant sacks of cash to large corporate interests traditionally aligned with Democratic pols (autos and healthcare) or neutral to them (finance). Republicans could be expected to oppose said efforts on simple zero-sum game grounds, and so he required a Dem coalition to pass his bailouts.

Now he wants to move on to handing huge sacks of cash to traditionally Republican interests (free traders) while gutting entitlements, which Dems would at least half-heartedly oppose (and who successfully blocked the 2005 gutting of Social Security).

Isn’t it convenient, therefore, that OFA and the DNC implemented a ludicrously stupid election plan that contributed to massive Democratic losses, changing the constitutency of the House to one that just happens to align more closely to his desired policy goals?

As I said above: President Obama, Tim Kaine and the like are either blithering idiots… or they’re actively working against the Democratic Party, seeing it as an obstacle to future plans.

The next few months should be interesting. My bet: Obama triangulates against Social Security, using his personally crafted Catfood Commission to justify gutting the signature New Deal program and legacy of actual progressivism. He’ll also ram this South Korean free trade deal through, further damaging both the Democratic Party and the Unions it relies on to survive.

Ian Welsh is right; it’s long past time to work toward primarying Obama in 2012.