Saturday Night Music

I always enjoy this one. Here's a great version of Alejandro Escovedo's "Always a Friend," this time with the Boss himself:

Happy Saturday.

Europe and the Great Recession

Paul Krugman developed this chart comparing how Europe has fared so far in the Great Recession with how it fared in the Great Depression of the 1930s. The comparison is grim:

This tracks nearly the first six years, from the start of the economic downturn until today.

The takeaway is that the European powers that be, with their forced austerity, have botched this recovery. What will history call this era? We don't know yet.

McDonald's Knows What American Workers Need -- It Just Doesn't Want to Provide It

McDonald's and America working together: Wages + food stamps = a living!

McDonald's, one of the most successful American brands in history, has developed a very successful business model to sustain it: make cheap but comfortable food -- a perfect balance of salt, fat, and sugar -- and vastly underpay your workers to deliver it. Result? Bulging profits and soaring stock prices.

That doesn't mean that McDonald's doesn't think its workers don't require more income to live with basic dignity, it just means that its business model demands that it not be the one to provide it. From a New York Times article on Switzerland's flirtation with a guaranteed income for its citizens:

The advocacy group Low Pay Is Not OK posted a phone call, recorded by a 10-year McDonald’s veteran, Nancy Salgado, when she contacted the company’s “McResource” help line. The operator told Salgado that she could qualify for food stamps and home heating assistance, while also suggesting some area food banks — impressively, she knew to recommend these services without even asking about Salgado’s wage ($8.25 an hour), though she was aware Salgado worked full time. The company earned $5.5 billion in net profits last year, and appears to take for granted that many of its employees will be on the dole.

Absurd as a minimum income might seem to bootstrapping Americans, one already exists in a way — McDonald’s knows it. [...]

McDonald's is not alone in adopting this approach, which amounts to taxpayers underwriting their profit margins. Much of the restaurant, hospitality, and retail industries thrive on this model. The only surprise here is that conservatives tolerate this wholesale theft of public moneys.

Oh, wait, conservatives have attacked this formula: massive cuts to food stamps and welfare programs. Problem solved.

Yes, Mary Landrieu's Plan Is a Winner

Louisiana's Mary Landrieu

I've been steamed at how misinterpreting Barack Obama's message on keeping your healthcare policy if you liked it has been a successful political misinformation gambit for conservatives and a convenient bash-the-president message for mainstream media, which is predisposed to knock liberal concepts down (it's a knee-jerk reaction, they can't help it). So, when I first heard Mary Landrieu's proposal all I could do was, well, steam on.

But Marcos over at Daily Kos gets it right in supporting Landrieu's plan to let people keep their lousy plans if they really want to (but insurance companies can't issue new lousy ones):

Right now, the blame is being put on Obama and the Democrats. This bill would turn things around and put the pressure exactly where it belongs: on insurance companies and obstructionist Republicans.

Republicans are acting as if these insurance cancellations are the worst thing since Hitler. Well, put them on the spot: Are they really interested in mitigating the law's unintended injustices (whether real or perceived), or do they merely want to undermine its implementation for sabotage purposes?

We know the answer, of course. Landrieu's bill doesn't have a prayer of passing. Republicans will obstruct it every step of the way. But instead of having Obama taking away your insurance, we'll reverse the equation: It'll now be Republicans defending the ability of insurance companies to cancel those policies.

Heading into 2014, that may be the difference between retaining the political high ground, or facing another 2010. Landrieu's gambit is genius.

Marcos is often more intrigued by political victories than policy ones, even though they're regularly interchangeable. But here with the Landrieu plan, political victory may lead to policy victory, in that the political gambit buys time for a policy victory to come to fruition.

I say, go for it, Democratic Party.

Conjugating Richard Cohen After Most Recent Horrible Column

Here's how I conjugate Richard Cohen's future as a columnist for the Washington Post:

Richard Cohen should go

Richard Cohen should have gone

Richard Cohen shall have gone

But...

Richard Cohen will go

...is not a given.

Ta-Nehisi Coates explains the case.

Josh Marshall amplifies:

The issue isn't that Cohen is a racist. It's that he holds his position of vast influence while living in some older white man's cocoon, liberalish in a way but not much, in which he's either indifferent or unconcerned with the actual America around him and routinely jumps at the chance to normalize and legitimize retrograde views about race. The problem with the article isn't racism but inaccuracy, both descriptive and moral. And the complacent inaccuracy makes it worthy of criticism and contempt. People who have physical revulsion at interracial couples aren't "cultural conservatives"; they're racists. These attitudes about race are not conventional. Most people recognize them as racist and unacceptable in our society today.

I will now and forever have a gag reflex when I see Richard Cohen's face on the Op-Ed page of the Gaggington Post, see Weymouth, Katerine.

Yuk.

Does anyone remember this?

Or maybe this?

Or this?

Whaddya say, Cohen, is your time at hand? After this?

Today’s GOP is not racist, as Harry Belafonte alleged about the tea party, but it is deeply troubled—about the expansion of government, about immigration, about secularism, about the mainstreaming of what used to be the avant-garde. People with conventional views must repress a gag reflex when considering the mayor-elect of New York—a white man married to a black woman and with two biracial children. (Should I mention that Bill de Blasio’s wife, Chirlane McCray, used to be a lesbian?) This family represents the cultural changes that have enveloped parts—but not all—of America. To cultural conservatives, this doesn’t look like their country at all.

Are we finally there with this nonsense? Jeez, I hope so.

American Presidents: Which Ones Abused Their Power?

I caught a snippet of a recent Marcy Wheeler blog post -- more on that later -- that spoke of the causes of potential decline of American hegemony, but what it awakened in me was a filter for judging Barack Obama's ever-shifting legacy.

This led me to review the legacy of recent presidents, say, going back to Truman, which includes those presidents in my lifetime. I'm not sure I know enough about each on the list, but it's a good line, so let's draw it.

Okay, let's back up and look at Barack Obama. Currently he's suffering a sharp drop in favorability ratings, brought on mostly by the disastrous rollout of his signature healthcare act, but I suppose also because of the on-going NSA scandal. I'm not ready to judge him on the healthcare rollout because it's very common for the U.S. to fail massively when attempting a new initiative, especially if large IT systems are involved.

So, looking rather at a simple frame of "abuse of power," how would we judge recent presidencies? Who has abused presidential power? For simplicity, let's assume that, if it happened on their watch, they're guilty.

• Barack Obama: Yes.
• George W. Bush: Yes.
• Bill Clinton: No.
• George H. W. Bush: No.
• Ronald Reagan: Yes.
• Jimmy Carter: No.
• Gerald Ford: No.
• Richard Nixon: Yes.
• Lyndon Johnson: Yes.
• John Kennedy: No.
• Dwight Eisenhower: No.
• Harry Truman: No.

Twelve presidents, five guilty of presidential abuse, seven not. How did I arrive at this?

• Barack Obama: NSA, Guantanamo.
• George W. Bush: NSA, Guantanamo, Iraq, torture, corrupt Dept. of Justice.
• Ronald Reagan: CIA, Iran-Contra, Central American adventurism, Granada.
• Richard Nixon: Vietnam, Cambodia, CIA, FBI, Watergate.
• Lyndon Johnson: Vietnam (Tonkin Gulf).

John Kennedy might deserve an honorable mention because of the assassination of Diem in Vietnam, but I don't know off-hand the provenance of that evil deed.

In my view, the most corrupt presidencies have been Nixon, Reagan, and George W. Bush because their abuse of power was so extensive. Ronald Reagan's role in Iran-Contra was well-insulated and his legacy barely includes it, but I never bought that. It was successful PR, but that's all it was. Let's assume he knew exactly what was going on, and let's face it, it was a huge violation of U.S. law.

Nixon, well, everyone agrees there. As for George W. Bush, his presidency is a special case, being singled out as perhaps the most abusive. Between CIA black ops, black sites, torture, corruption of American law -- with the cooperation of the DOJ -- creation and development of Guantanamo as a law-free zone of massive evasion of both federal and international law, and, well, how far do I need to go? Bush/Cheney wreaked much havoc on our international reputation. And the essential infrastructure of our domestic and international surveillance system was built at their direction.

Here is where we come to Barack Obama, and here is where the fact that the American presidency does not easily relinquish powers once obtained has dealt a devastating blow to an otherwise laudatory American president. Simply put, Barack Obama inherited a growing surveillance state from George W. Bush and not only didn't control it but allowed it to expand, both domestically and internationally.

That fact alone is devastating, both to Barack Obama's legacy and America's international reputation. It's possible -- we can't know this now -- that the NSA "problem" gets ameliorated over the last years of the Obama presidency or simply fades from memory, like Reagan's amorphous involvement in Iran-Contra. Any maybe we patch up our relationships with our allies. But people with memories -- let's call them historians -- may not be so kind.

Count me, for now, among them. Abuse of presidential power has stained Barack Obama's legacy. He has a chance to clean it up in his last few years. But knowing how begrudgingly presidents relinquish an acquired power, I'm not holding my breath.

Footnote. One factor should be noted, and that's the effect of institutional momentum. Barack Obama may step into the presidency only to find that a powerful institution has established ways of "how we do things here" that he didn't anticipate. I'm not saying that men in black suits sit a president down and tutor him in the ways of the world, but institutions do tend to maintain themselves as leaders come and go. Bush/Cheney are an example of leaders who broke the mold, whereas as Obama may be an example of a mold breaking a leader. How one decides this, however, may depend on one's point of view.

There are factors, too, that presidents don't control. Obama did want to close Guantanamo, but a Congress controlled by his own party shut him down by not allowing funding for resettlement of prisoners to the mainland. So there's that to consider. Still, overall, it comes down to the leader. A Lyndon Johnson would have gotten Guantanamo closed. But Johnson perpetrated the Tonkin Gulf incident to create -- like Bush's WMDs -- a case for war. Johnson's forcefulness got him what he wanted and his diminished legacy is the price he'll forever pay for it, just as Bush will never escape his false WMD claim.

Also, I don't classify the use of drones as a presidential abuse of power. Military tactics in an age of asymmetric warfare may be viewed with distaste and even horror, but that doesn't necessarily criminalize them, regardless of one's abhorrence of military aggression. (Note: I'm a pacifist, but that doesn't mean the new realities surrounding asymmetric warfare shouldn't or can't affect our notions of right and wrong.)

Finally, one might have noticed that "protecting moneyed interests" was not included in the list of presidential abuses. Why? Well, when did presidents, with the possible exception of Teddy Roosevelt and Howard Taft, not protect the wealthy?

Stand Up Against Immunization Hysteria

Jenny McCarthy, noted immunization unexpert.

Recent outbreaks of whooping cough in California highlight the dangers of diminishing the "herd
effect" of widespread immunization -- when 95 percent and above are vaccinated, the remaining handful are protected by the herd -- because of non-reality-based hysteria, often spread by discredited doctors and, unfortunately, overly cautious affluent parents who are prone to overprotecting their children.

One particularly grating proponent of this anti-immunization hysteria is former playmate, Jenny McCarthy. Here's what her "contribution" to the debate has produced:

There’s a reason that we associate the whooping cough with the Dickensian: It is. The illness has, since the introduction of a pertussis vaccine in 1940, has been conquered in the developed world. For two or three generations, we’ve come to think of it as an ailment suffered in sub-Saharan Africa or in Brontë novels. And for two or three generations, it was.

Until, that is, the anti-vaccination movement really got going in the last few years. Led by discredited doctors and, incredibly, a former Playmate, the movement has frightened new parents with claptrap about autism, Alzheimer’s, aluminum, and formaldehyde. The movement that was once a fringe freak show has become a menace, with foot soldiers whose main weapon is their self-righteousness. For them, vaccinating their children is merely a consumer choice, like joining an organic food co-op or sending their kids to a Montessori school or drinking coconut water.

The problem is that it is not an individual choice; it is a choice that acutely affects the rest of us. Vaccinations work by creating something called herd immunity: When most of a population is immunized against a disease, it protects even those in it who are not vaccinated, either because they are pregnant or babies or old or sick. For herd immunity to work, 95 percent of the population needs to be immunized. But the anti-vaccinators have done a good job undermining it. In 2010, for example, only 91 percent of California kindergarteners were up to date on their shots. Unsurprisingly, California had a massive pertussis outbreak.

I can only rely on my memories of Marin County news stories -- Marin is an affluent region just over the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco -- but I recall that affluent, well-educated moms are quite susceptible to falling victim to misinformation about immunization dangers. Long after they're discredited. Worry-wart moms don't "want to take a chance" that the reports are true. The resulting loss of protection often results in outbreaks of diseases once thought rendered to the trash bin of history.

Wrong. Any disease can make a comeback if we relax our guard. Thanks, Jenny McCarthy.

Parents, wise up. Have your kids vaccinated. School districts, stay tough. Don't let hysterical, misinformed parents refuse their shots on "religious grounds." The results are awful:

In 2010, a whooping cough outbreak in California sickened 9,120 people, more than in any year since 1947. Ten infants died; babies are too young to be vaccinated.

Public health officials suspected that the increased numbers of parents who refused to vaccinate their children played a role, but they couldn't be sure.

Vaccine refusal was indeed a factor, researchers now say. They compared the location and number of whooping cough, or , cases in that outbreak with the personal belief exemptions filed by parents who chose not to vaccinate for reasons other than a child's health. (Some children with compromised immune systems aren't able to be vaccinated.)

Pertussis is very contagious, spreading quickly through a community. So the researchers had to map not only the location of outbreak clusters, but also when they appeared.

They found that people who lived in areas with high rates of personal belief exemptions were 2 1/2 times more likely to live in a place with lots of pertussis cases. "The exemptions clustered spatially and were associated with clusters of cases," Jessica Atwell, a graduate student at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and lead author on the study, told Shots. It was in the journal Pediatrics.

This is science, folks, science that works to protect our children. Don't listen to the charlatans.

Footnote. Found the facts on Marin County vaccination rates. It's true, the County has a real problem:

Personal belief exemption rates statewide had remained fairly stable at about half of 1 percent for many years until the late 1990s, when a now-discredited report linked childhood immunization to autism. Since then, the rate has been rising steadily, reaching 2.79 percent statewide in 2012-13.

Here in Marin, the personal belief exemption rate has nearly doubled from 4.2 percent in 2005 to 7.83 percent in 2012-13. [emphasis mine.]

 Come on, affluent, educated Marin, knock it off. This is a public health issue.

Small owie, big protection, miniscule risk.