Stunning! Those that overwhelmingly oppose healthcare are also overwhelmingly unlikely to vote for a Democrat, any Democrat in the upcoming 2010 Congressional mid-terms. (PDF of polling data here)

Does that mean that the Democrat will now go ahead and push through health insurance reforms, secure in the idea that those opposed would never vote for them anyway, and those “unsure” are, at least, somewhat malleable and willing to be convinced on the matter? Of course they won’t. Are you fucking retarded?

Can’t be done

This quote is probably worth noting:

Japan Steel Works is spending 80 billion yen ($864 million) at its Muroran plant in the country’s northern island of Hokkaido by March 2012 to increase capacity to make parts for 12 nuclear reactors a year, compared with 5.5 units now, the president said.

The investment will increase annual sales from Japan Steel Works’ cast and forged steel for electric and nuclear power to 70 billion yen from the year starting April 2012, up from 45.5 billion yen expected for the current year, Sato said.

This is important, you see, because we can’t make this part in America. Despite all the hype recently given over to the idea that we’ll be steadily building new nuclear power plants (and wind turbines and solar cells and lots of other, non-carbon based energy production mechanisms) in this country as a partial offset to our ever greater carbon emissions, it’s completely clear that we can’t and won’t be building very many nuclear reactors, if any at all. Simply put, we cannot because we cannot. We cannot cast the key component here. Meaning in this country, which, as we are constantly reminded, is supposedly superior in all respects. But rather it’s over in Japan, where Japan Steel Works is currently the only place that can cast these large, integral, and functionally irreplaceable single pieces. And, oh by the way, China has an interest in cornering some or all of their current and theoretical output:

The country has 9,100 megawatts of nuclear capacity and has approved the construction of additional reactors able to generate 25,400 megawatts, Sun Qin, then-deputy head of the National Energy Administration, said last month. China will issue a plan by the end of the year to push development of clean energy sources such as nuclear, wind, solar and hydro power.

The average time it took to build China’s first 10 nuclear reactors was 6.3 years, according to a report commissioned by the German environment ministry.

Gross domestic product in China expanded 7.9 percent in the second quarter as the economy rebounded from the weakest growth in almost a decade, boosted by stimulus spending.

“Similar to road and railway construction, nuclear energy is also part of China’s plans for a recovery after the economy slowed,” Sato said.

In fact, the entire future run of this component for five to ten years (or more) is already spoken for. Recovery X all over again. We need a new economy. We need to make things, preferably things that are in demand. You want a real National Security issue of the Call to Greatness kind? This is it.

A real country with functional leadership (and, uh, leaders) would be talking about this right now. Acting, right now. It will take decades to do even begin to do anything about it. Instead, we’ll spend those decades not doing anything while China (and the rest of the world) acts. As it stands right now, China looks to have the money, the power (both political and but more importantly: electrical) to be unassailably in ascendancy over the next 50 years. The US: not so much. We’ll be lucky to still be a reasonable tourist destination come 2050.

You might just take a look at what quantity of excess electrical power-generation the United States had on hand in 1940. What are a few of the more important war and/or peace projects that we carried off with that seemingly excess power capacity? Compare that situation with today’s. Then look at China. Who is better prepared for the future? To grow and locate a new market in an X-shaped recovery, in which the “old” jobs and the “old” economy simply never return? Just saying.
Then pause to consider this: which country is currently leading the world in wind turbine production? In solar cell production? GeoThermal? Hydroelectric? I’ll give you a hint: the United States isn’t even reliably in the Top 5 of those categories. Even from a purely capitalistic position: which countries are then better positioned to profit on the grand conspiracy that is climate change and carbon emissions reduction? Is it to be thought of as an a priori harmful concept to generate power from sources other than fossil fuels? Or to make and sell equipment to others who may wish to do likewise? Judging from our national posture, one could only assume it must be.

The Chinese and others have chosen their priorities and are working towards them. We have an inwardly focused, rotting core of a political system that is doing less than nothing about even setting national priorities, much less acting on them. Wonder who’s going to come out on top in that equation? Sure as hell won’t be America, home of Free Enterprise, with special emphasis on would, as in “theoretically could”:

Czech forges have said that they would be able to retool to build large reactor vessels within about two years.

This economy can’t get back on track because the track we were on for years – featuring flat or declining median wages, mounting consumer debt, and widening insecurity, not to mention increasing carbon in the atmosphere – simply cannot be sustained.

The X marks a brand new track – a new economy. What will it look like? Nobody knows. All we know is the current economy can’t “recover” because it can’t go back to where it was before the crash. So instead of asking when the recovery will start, we should be asking when and how the new economy will begin.

Robert Reich. X is the new L. This elusive new economy is precisely why we should be investing, and heavily, in infrastructure and overall technological development. Nothing else matters. At all.

Just about everyone

America: satisfied to be number two. Or ten; or even just outside the top-25 somewheres, but who can keep count?

While China (and others) use the current downturn to invest heavily in their infrastructure, we in the United States use it to line up for group photos and pat ourselves on the back for the political savvy it took to stop any kind of productive jobs bill from getting through and but still allowing some “jobs” bill to get through such that we don’t look like obstructionist asshats (it’s our “play of the week”, Bill!). Oh, wait, did I say “we”? I meant the GOP.

Anywho, worth repeating:

a Chinese official [reportedly told] him “over the past decade you’ve spent $1 trillion on Iraq and Afghanistan, we’ve spent $1 trillion building the future of China”

You’d think a politician somewhere would grab this concept that seemingly combines 52 different concerns into a simple, understandable concept that can be stated in one sentence, and then use that sentence to craft a new politics of American progress, building infrastructure and other actually useful projects that both provide jobs today and also create the greased skids of tomorrow’s economic growth. But, no. Can’t do that here. Just like most other things China is, you know, actually doing.

It’s going to be a long, slow slog back up. America:Britain::1900:2015. Welcome to functional irrelevancy.

Realistically what I think is going to happen is that almost no significant legislation of any kind will pass until 2017, by which point the GOP will [likely] control both the White House and the Senate and immediately eliminate the filibuster via the “nuclear” approach [meaning 50 Senators vote in favor of an opinion on the part of the President of the Senate that the super-majority is unconstitutional; thus the filibuster ceases to be]. Republicans, to their credit, tend to prioritize their vision of the national interests over issues of process and ego. Democrats, by contrast, seem to have mostly gotten into politics in order to bolster their own sense of self-righteousness and aren’t especially concerned with whether or not their conduct in office is efficacious.

Matt Yglesias, positively bubbling over with optimism for the country. If the filibuster goes in my lifetime, I think this is exactly how it will transpire, though: as the first action of a Republican controlled Senate serving a Republican President.
Yglesias is also 100% right that the credible threat of filibuster reform is more potent and much more likely to end in real reform than the actuality of that process (meaning: pushing a bill to end it with everyone knowing 67 votes aren’t out there). Democrats can never get these concepts through their heads, though. So forget about it.

Why We Fail

Jonathan Chait looks over Paul Ryan’s economic proposals, notes their direct and admitted lineage to the pop-philosophy of Ayn Rand, and the worshipful treatment it receives at the hands of many in the right, including Ryan himself. He furthermore folds in the lunatic ravings of Jonah Goldberg (author of Liberal Fascism, which makes the stunning, transitive “discovery” that American liberals like social programs, the Nazi party was made up of National Socialists, thus American liberals are Nazis) and opines:

They’re written by people who don’t understand liberalism and the left at all, and are thus unable to present liberal ideas in terms remotely recognizable to liberals themselves. The specific lack of understanding lies in an inability to grasp the enormous differences between American liberalism and socialism or communism, seeing them as variants on the same basic theme.

[…]

The result is a tendency to see even modest efforts to sand off the roughest edges of capitalism in order to make free markets work for all Americans as the opening salvo of a vast and endless assault upon the market system.

Um, no. We are not talking about any lack of understanding here, unless you count “willful lack of understanding used towards cynical goals” as falling under that rubric. If anything, they understand liberalism all too well. The work of Jonah Goldberg et al. is entirely predicated on making fantastical statements with little or no logical underpinning in the cynical hopes of selling a few books to the choir. Period. No different from Ann Coulter or, for that matter, Glenn Beck, though his brand of hucksterism veers more towards that of a TV preacher hawking prayer rags than actual “political thought” insomuch as you can call the Goldberg-style spew “thought.”
Their weapon is precisely in understanding that the Left will dutifully take these ideas up, just as Chait does here, as though they are seriously offered, based on serious thought, are entirely legitimate points of view, and thus worthy of serious discussions and/or use as the basis of policy negotiations going forward. By doing so, the Left signals that, far from being abject lunacy, these are the points of discussion and arguments for the political class, and thus are the goalposts ever moved rightward.

It’s the logical fallacy of “when did you stop beating your wife?” writ large, and the right uses it relentlessly and with disheartening effectiveness. Say: “Well, the Democrat isn’t a Nazi because…” and you’ve already lost, no matter how the thought ends; you’ve implicitly agreed that there is some reason to make a Democrat/Nazi connection and/but here are the rational arguments against such a thesis. This is horseshit. Induce laughter at the mere idea, the immense foolhardiness of it all, and you’ve won. Same idea goes for Palin, and all the rest of this anti-intellectual crowd. They must find themselves automatically marginalized from “Washington Society” until such time as something rational emerges from their festering maw. More than anything, they crave the attention. That is why it must be removed.

That the progressive or liberal thinkers in this country continue to entertain Goldberg et al. as rational, serious contributors to the dialogue of this country going forward is precisely how you lose. I agree that you can’t just ignore them, but you must never, ever imply that there’s even a grain of truth to what they are saying; they must, therefore, be made objects of derision. Their output is, after all, utter foolishness. You may as well let reports of Bat Boy in the Weekly World News drive Medicaid policy and coverage limits. As Rachel Maddow recently noted:

They are not embarrassed. Charging them with hypocrisy, appealing to their better, more practical, more what’s-best-for-the-country patriotic angels is like trying to teach your dog to drive. It wastes a lot of time, it won’t work, and ultimately the dog comes out of the exercise less embarrassed for failing than you do for trying.

When these folks move to stop efforts to “sand off the roughest edges” they are not moving to compromise. They do not begin with “the best intentions.” They are moving to destroy, utterly, the progressive position and are willing to do so by any means at hand; and, they are not embarrassed. They don’t care how they look in the process, because their treatment thus far has shown that how it looks won’t matter. Not long-term. This is why they never apologize, never compromise, and never even bother to negotiate in good faith. It is because they fear no reprisal of any kind. So there’s no cost to these actions.
You, the progressive, must be prepared to move as ruthlessly. That the left’s first impulse is, inevitably, to find the “serious person” middle-ground is precisely why the country ends up with policies far to the right of the position of most Americans on any given issue. That this policy is then called “centrist” is precisely what is systematically making it harder and harder to even “sand off the roughest edges,” precisely because yesterday’s far-right position is today’s tomorrow’s “sensible, centrist compromise.” And, to add insult to injury, recent history has found Democrats coming to the table already having given away anything resembling a center-left policy; thus, any “compromise” made to push a bill through only results in de facto GOP legislation. Which, of course, they proceed to filibuster anyway.

The Democrats have got to start re-framing everything, every issue, soup to nuts. It won’t come easily, and it won’t be a short term project. Yes, this will also mean doing politically uncomfortable things like prosecuting Bush administration law breakers. But, more to the point at hand, it means screaming out every hour of every day of every week for the next decade or so, relentlessly and unavoidably, the moral, intellectual, and ultimately patriotic bankruptcy of the right. The American people need to be so sick of hearing about this stuff that they want to cry. Then, a few years after that, we’ll find that the polity have quietly and progressively become inoculated to the sort of brazen bullshit routinely peddled today such that they will simply not listen to it anymore, will react negatively and automatically to it, and the various outlets of today’s noise machine will gradually find themselves ignored. Accordingly, the right wing noise machine will cease to exist. Simple demographic shifts in the country will help, but the Left must act as well.
You can see faint instances of this in the last election. Noun/verb/9.11 and several other right-wing memes simply didn’t hold sway over voters anymore; all the while, users of these levers were made to look all the worse as the public finally saw at least some elements of the emperor’s new clothes. Unfortunately, those changes came about organically or accidentally for the most part. The Democrats need to see to it they begin to come about systematically.
This means message discipline. Part of the problem of the W-induced Democratic tidal wave was that it returned the Democrats to control before they had spent sufficient time in the wilderness to hone their message, to feel, deeply, the fierce urgency of now such that, when power came, they acted. Ezra Klein, commenting on Democratic resistance to using reconciliation to finish health insurance reform legislation, notes:

At this point, Democrats have passed health-care reform bills through the two legislative chambers charged with considering them. The president stands ready to sign the legislation. The roadblock is that 41 Republicans have sworn to use a parliamentary maneuver to obstruct any effort to smooth out differences between the bills. It’s pretty clear who’s stepping outside the traditional workings of the process here. Yet Democrats have allowed the other side to make it look like they’re the ones who are bending the rules! It’s completely astonishing.

It’s not astonishing, Ezra, it’s simply how things are done by the Left in D.C. today. Everything, and I mean everything that progressives get up to in this country needs to be aimed at this long term goal: re-framing the tenor of the political discourse in this country. Nothing in the near term matters as much as resetting the frame for political discussion back to where it was pre-Reagan. Nothing. You start with the lowest hanging fruit: jobs, bankers, Wall Street. The GOP literally has no defense to offer in these arenas. Make them pay for it.

Mirandizing terrorists inhibits intelligence collection? Wrong. Charging a terrorist in criminal court is a danger? Hundreds have been convicted that way. Non-torturous methods of interrogation fail? They work better. Call the Obama team pussies and they’ll back down? They’ll smack the tartar off your teeth. The public will rally around Republicans if they just ignorantly yell OMG TERRORISM loud enough? They’ll go to the other guy.

There’s just nothing left. […] [T]he GOP, for the first time in decades, is completely discredited on national security, without any credible spokespeople.

Spencer Ackerman, who’s right about everything except for his implicit assertion that the public understands this in any kind of durable way. Without continual, drumbeat messaging they will soon forget and fall back on the MSM trope that only the GOP can be trusted with Our National Security. It’s just too pervasive a frame, and one that has been repeated so relentlessly, explicitly and implicitly, for decades to the point that, like gravity, it’s just there, and not even noticed when invoked. You can’t and won’t undo that overnight. See: health insurance reform and government takeover of, subhead Death Panels. Democrats just don’t do this idea of “messaging” very well, if at all. I’m seriously not yet convinced they are aware of it as a concept.

1776

We fought the British over a 3 percent tea tax. We might as well bring the British back

–William Temple of Brunswick, Ga., perhaps marginally better known as the fellow appearing at tea-party events dressed in his trademark three-cornered hat.

Indeed, William, why don’t we? The Brits are at least having a truth-commission of sorts that aims to get to the bottom of (but not prosecute those involved in) their complicity in the lie-laden run-up to the Iraq folly. Likewise, the Brits enjoy (and broadly support) their National Health Service, which, I might add, routinely outperforms American healthcare in any outcome metric you might reasonably choose to look at and costs half as much (as a share of GDP) to operate. Conservatives in Britain strongly support NHS. Wouldn’t think of privatizing it. Furthermore and finally, the Brits actually have a functional parliamentary system, as opposed to our functionally parliamentary system in which nothing can get done. In scary, scary Britain, when your party wins an election, you get to set the policy and set about governing. Imagine that. If the public broadly disapproves of your outcomes and prefers the platform of the shadow cabinet, then, hey what do you know, those folks get elected and start governing. Lather, rinse, repeat. It’s what we in the Big City call “representative democracy.”

So count me with the Tea Partiers. Let’s ask Big Daddy Britain if we can just come back and all is forgiven.

Connections

A: Many of the tea-party organizers I spoke with at this conference described the event as a critical step in their ascendancy to the status of mainstream political movement. Yet with rare exceptions, such as blogger Breitbart, who was reportedly overheard protesting Farah’s birther propaganda, none of them seems to realize how off-putting the toxic fantasies being spewed from the podium were.

B: Perhaps the most distressing part of all is that few media observers bothered to catalog these bizarre, conspiracist outbursts, and instead fixated on Sarah Palin’s Saturday night keynote address. It is as if, in the current overheated political atmosphere, we all simply have come to expect that radicalized conservatives will behave like unhinged paranoiacs when they collect in the same room.
(http://www.newsweek.com/id/233331/output/print)