We Should Welcome The Oppo Party Posturing

John Cole asks a thought provoking question:

You know, I keep wondering- was the opposition party this petty and stupid during the great depression? When FDR proposed his budget, did some rich prick with a fake tan get up in front of microphones an hour after it was proposed (mind you, this is the same guy who whinged he did not have enough time to read the stimulus bill after a month, but an hour was sufficient time to read the budget), and say “OH MY GOD THE ERA OF BIG GOVERNMENT IS BACK!” Was there a John Boehner of that time period? And this is a serious question- was our politics always this stupid, and were we always suffering from morons like this?

During the depression, were there organizations of idiots running around having little tea parties and chanting porkulus? Or are we as a nation intent on proving Darwin wrong?

From what I can glean, the answer is an unsatisfactory, "Yes, and No."  Roosevelt did not seem to face any significant opposition just for the sake of appearances at the onset of his administration, but by the time he took office in March of 1932 the economics of the Depression and humiliation of the Republican Party were complete and all but irreversible.  Economically, today, we're not there yet, and hopefully we won't dive that deep - but it's getting close.

When things were "only" as bad as they are today, there was still a lot of political posturing and the usual nonsense.  By the time FDR was sworn in, things were much worse than now -- primarily due to an administration that took the political/ideological games seriously and was on the wrong side of the argument while the nation sank into despair for over three years.  If we had another 2-3 years of George W. Bush doing nothing to look forward to, there would barely be a country to hand off to Barack Obama.  That's was Hoover's gift to Franklin Roosevelt.

Historical parallels are never exact, but often instructive.  Consulting my handy 6 volume collection by James Truslow Adams, The March Of Democracy, at least this contemporary historian notes no significant obstructionists to FDR's initiatives at the beginning of his presidency.  The attitude of the population had undergone a remarkable transformation between the Crash and FDR assuming office and Congress reflected that change.  From Adams, Vol. IV, Pg. 338:

In 1928 we had been told we were within sight of perpetual prosperity and the abolition of poverty.  By 1932 we seemed to see nothing but poverty and to be faced by stark ruin on every side.  Few nations, if any, have ever had to drop with such appalling swiftness from superhuman hopes to blank despair.

This was a different time, the nation was in full-blown panic.  The day FDR took office, the national banks of New York and Pennsylvania were added to an ever growing list of financial institutions whose doors were shuttered.  This was fully 3-1/2 years after the infamous stock market crash of 1929 during which the Hoover administration was exposed as inept, Congress completely discredited and the Wall Street types we hate today were even more hated then. 

Institutions familiar even now like National City Bank of New York and Chase National Bank were found to be scandalously mismanaged by their front offices, leading to "collosal losses" just coming to light at the beginning of 1933.  Back then, there was no New Deal era device to protect depositers like the FDIC.  The panic was real, the losses palpable and real hysteria did not need to be pumped up by bloviating pundits and Congressional leaders for political exploitation.

FDR's Cabinet was approved without committee hearings by 6:00 pm on Inauguration Day, March 4, 1933, including Cordell Hull, the first southerner serving as Secretary of State since John C. Calhoun in 1845, and the first woman Cabinet official, Frances Perkins, Secretary of Labor.  Less than a week later, during a special session after only 40 minutes of "debate" the House passed by acclimation the President's banking initiatives, conferring peace-time financial regulation authority previously only considered legal under war conditions through the Trading with the Enemies Act.  The measure passed the Senate 73-7 after considering the act only three hours. 

This was more than a mere reflection of the Democratic Party's gains from the election four months earlier.  There was a new psychology at work, an acknowlegement that something, anything must be done -- and done right then and there.  Yes there were substantial critics, vocal groups and editors who fought FDR every step as the commentors at Balloon Juice point out -- Father Caughlin and the Liberty League for example -- but no truely effective opposition on Capitol Hill at that point.

This was a stark reversal of the previous years' political battles.  In 1932, "The debates over the problem of meeting the hitherto unheard-of deficit in the Treasury by taxation became so wild and acrimonious that Congress had to be adjourned for tempes to cool and reason to reassert itself."  While electorally, we are now in the post-inauguration after-glow/honeymoon period -- the carnival and trade-show atmosphere at CPAC notwithstanding -- economically it's 1930, and hopefully we can steer a different course than Hoover.

In a way, we should point to the nonesense from Republicans like Boehner, Cantor, and, Jindal as a healthy sign.  If things were really as bad as they were when FDR took over, they would have already shut their yap.

What Did You THINK 'United We Stand' Meant Anyway?

We're all in this together?  Shared sacrifice?  Rising tide floats all your boats ... or something?  Preposterous!

How dare Barack Obama suggest that we try to save ourselves by having those who are still on relatively sound financial footing throw a rope to the folks drowning in debt before they pull us all over the abyss.

When you come across an insane diatribe from a ridiculous meat puppet like Alan Keyes calling the President of the United States a "radical communist," the first instinct is to dismissively snicker at this strange little man and his ilk.  But put in context with the over-the-top screeds of someone like Rick Santelli touting virtues of the poor, down-trodden commodities traders being unfairly forced to buy their neighbor's homes so their own condo suite values don't bottom out makes it all clear -- Obama is Doctor Evil, hell bent on taking over the world.

Good enough for me.  I'm convinced.  I can't bear to think what the world would look like if the guys who make their living speculating that the price of bacon will out perform today's spot price on Light-Sweet Crude might have to play roulette or (gasp) the Lottery to equal the same bang-for-buck prospects they usually enjoy in what they refer to in all seriousness as "work."

In fact, Obama's no better than any other petty tyrant and dictator we've know throughout history, as bad if not worse than the man whose diabolical genius orchestrated his meteoric rise to power -- George W. Bush.

How else could a country as decadent as America elect a man whose polyglot ancestry bears not one hint of the elite aristocracy that the American peasantry recognizes as entitled to rule our Commercial Republic?  Why would the tribal fiefdoms of Hyannisport and Kennebunkport unite with Wall Street to allow someone, anyone who promised change to their entrenched hegemony come to power?  Inconceivable.

It must have been a Rovellian plot.  The sheer scale of the deception may never be known.  The level of plans within plans is hard to appreciate, tarnishing the brand of the entire conservative apparatus, destroying the entire world's economy, convincing  everyone on the planet that the Land of Liberty was hell bent on becoming an expansionist empire, allowing only the most two-dimensional buffoons to run in the GOP primaries  ... the mind boggles.

Only the folks who were able to pull off the most amazing illusions in modern history -- the Supreme Court appointment of the loser of the 2000 election to the White House AND the reelection of that same miserable failure in 2004, not to mention drumming up enough support for a war against a country that never had anything to do with attacking us -- could possibly have brought Barack The Imapler to power.

It's a plot I tell you, an evil Darwinian plot to redistribute our precious bodily fluids.... GAH!

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

The Presider

I think Sully has it exactly right in describing the role President Obama sees for himself in the Constitutional scheme is "Presider," not decider/dictator/party leader or omniscient messiah, but president -- one who presides.  Both the word preside and president, naturally, come from the same Latin root: [praesident-, from present participle of praesidre, to preside; see preside.]

As the media obsesses on artificial measures of Obama's success hinging on how he does in his first 100 days, measuring each trend in the daily news cycles as a tremendous setback or stunning victory, neither they nor Congress seems to appreciate the truly revolutionary, uhm ... change ... the President has brought to the dynamic of governing already. 

He hasn't been there a month yet, and they're working on a spending bill ten times larger than the initial appropriation for the Iraq War.  (Remember that $87 Billion Senator Kerry voted for before he voted against it.  This one will be around $870 Billion.)  Indeed, any of the five news anchors who interviews the President this week would acknowledge that Obama's handling of the economy will be a large part of his legacy decades from now, which is dependent to an enormous degree on the Stimulus Bill -- yet they emphasized the withdrawal of Tom Daschle's nomination in their interview questions; a blip in the grand scheme.

Everyone in the Capitol is going to get a chance to take their shot, and they're taking them.  That's the way it's supposed to work.  Critiques that Obama lost control of the message, that his bipartisan outreach has failed or even (dare I suggest) that the GOP is not so much being obstructionist rather than grounding their dissent on valid concerns that the Democrats are trying to ram this stimulus bill though as a liberal wish-list is at best premature.

Mind you, many of the GOP positions are indeed ludicrous. 

“It’s a rare day when the President goes to the Capitol to meet only
with members of the other party,” noted CBS correspondent Chip Reid.
Reid’s story included plenty of doubting Republicans—Minority Leader
John Boehner said the bill was doomed by “spending pushed by liberal
Democrats.” But the story also conveyed a sense that the White House
outreach might pay dividends down the road.

As the President noted you cannot be upset because the recovery bill spends too much ... because "that's the point," to spend a lot and prime the economic pump.  As Presider, the President is correctly moving the debate back to productive (and sane) parameters.

In a world of horse-traders we have elected a negotiator who is more focused on results than "winning."  In then final analysis, at the risk of projecting too far into the future, Obama will be judged by the accomplishments of his government than whether his championed agenda wins the day.  Constructing a deal that everyone can live with, and over which no one necessarily can claim total victory, is the goal of a "presider."  The deal itself, authority for a massive amount of domestic spending, is what the President wants.  And that's what he will eventually get in this process that is really only half-way done.  Conference Committee markup and final approval by both Houses loom after we get a Senate bill.

If you have any experience with mediation, you'll quickly recognize what is going on.  Obama has taken sides to be sure, but he's not so much "negotiating" in the traditional horse-trading sense as he is "mediating" from inside.

I would often adopt a conciliatory style as divorce counsel with a goal towards avoiding expensive litigation (costly both emotionally and in dollars) in favor of the much less expensive push towards an agreement that no one would walk away claiming they had "won" their divorce case.  Realistically you can't win a divorce.  You lost your hopes and dreams for your now destroyed family long before you ever showed up at an attorney's office.

I found that by starting with a reasonable offer, one that did not overreach, would either quickly result in a separation agreement (when I had experience family lawyers on the other side) or break down to attempts at horse trading that backfired (with noobies that didn't specialize in domestic relations).  Once the more naive opposing counsels would try and up the ante, they weren't met with the expected counteroffer, but a more hardened position and withdrawal of some of my more generous giveaways.  As they got less and less from me, the pressure to cut their losses brought the folks to the table. 

The only times this didn't work was when the other lawyer was more interested in milking a cash cow than any good faith settlement.  Those cases that went to trial invariably resulted in a ruling nearly identical to my initial offer -- and that counts as a win to me.

I've no doubt that Obama is mediating for a result rather than fighting for a "win."  That smacks the sensibilities on many a progressive, myself included.  But that's the POTUS we've got, and he's adopted a pretty effective way of moving the agenda as far as I can tell.  Maybe that's the best we can hope for, or maybe next time we'll work even harder for a fighter in the Howard Dean/John Edwards/Dennis Kucinich mold of crusader. 

Then again, it's still entirely possible that this Hope/Change guy knows just what he's doing, because the ol ways of doing things haven't worked all that well.

What's A Wingnut To Do

Palin backs Obama's StimPak despite howls from Limbaugh and GOP Congress Critters united opposition.

I think this almost assures passage of the Stimulus Package despite filibuster threats and makes for interesting theater as Sarah and Rush vie for the hearts and minds of the Republican Party. New RNC Chair, Steele, already praised the House GOP for uniting against fixing the economy. I see a junior varsity version of Hillary vs. Barack when Palin and Steele inevitably lock horns. Good times.

By the way, Oliver, Pam ... lighten up.

With filibusters off the table, universal health care should be doable once Gregg accepts appointment to Commerce (and they finally swear in Franken), which will leave the Rump Republicans without their greatest obstruction tool. 60 votes by Spring! (Surely Gregg will vote against filibustering his own nomination.)

Oh yeah, Tom Daschle's bid for HHS is running into a snag due to tax problems. I know a lot of folks on the left are ready to hang Daschle out to dry, sick of millionaires not paying their fair share, but I'm a bit dumbfounded how one could be crucifying for not paying taxes on something you received for free. Free is free.

Yes, I guess the argument goes that he should have included the free use of a driver as personal income, but it's not like anyone sent him a 1099 form, did they. Someone paid this driver's salary, presumably paid his withholding and FICA, and paid for the car itself and probably wrote the thing off as a business expense or charitable gift or ... what? Wait, no? Wasn't a campaign contribution, right? If no one wrote it off, thenDaschle is supposed to pay taxes on something that was already taxed and paid by someone else. I call Shenanigans!

Geez, ya gotta marvel at the confiscatory nature of our tax system when accepting a free ride can cost you thousands, hundreds of thousands.

I think he could have fought this out with the IRS, but paid it instead to avoid any problems with his confirmation -- which of course in the Bizzaro World of Versailles on the Potomac had exactly the opposite effect.

But when Tom is confirmed, and in the collegial world of the US Senate where he's being sponsored by his old nemesis Bob Dole, he'll be confirmed -- which will give the wingnuts something to unite against for all the good it will do them.

Stop Calling It An "Industry" Too

You can stop calling banks or investment firms a financial services "industry" while you're at it.

My desktop American Heritage Dictionary defines industry as: 1. economic activity concerned with the processing of raw materials and manufacture of goods in factories. The online version is similar, specifically referring to the manufacturing sector of the economy, but notes the changing times:

A clear indication of the way in which human effort has been harnessed as a force for the commercial production of goods and services is the change in meaning of the word industry. Coming from the Latin word industria, meaning “diligent activity directed to some purpose,” and its descendant, Old French industrie, with the senses “activity,” “ability,” and “a trade or occupation,” our word (first recorded in 1475) originally meant “skill,” “a device,” and “diligence” as well as “a trade.” Over the course of the Industrial Revolution, as more and more human effort became involved in producing goods and services for sale, the last sense of industry as well as the slightly newer sense “systematic work or habitual employment” grew in importance, to a large extent taking over the word. We can even speak now of the Shakespeare industry, rather like the garment industry.

Magically turning risky debt into a valuable asset by slicing and repackaging questionable mortgages into default-swap bond instruments is not "manufacturing" anything but fraud. These folks really thought they found the sorcerer's stone, a way to turn lead into gold.

If you don't make stuff, or things you can make other stuff with, it ain't an industry. Our founders would have scoffed at the idea bankers and land barons, the heirs to the gentrified aristocracy who now inhabit upper management high rise offices across the nation, collectively contribute anything to society other than making capital more conveniently accessible to the "real" economy -- all the while leeching as much as they can get away with from the rest of us and providing absolutely nothing of comparable value in return.

The very idea that providing more and more money to a class of people whose raison d'être is the accumulation of more and more and never the distribution of wealth, and somehow that largess would "trickle down" in any meaningful way to the rest of us is perhaps the biggest fraud since the industrial revolution. 

Thom Hartmann on Countdown explained it all so well.



Tony Wikrent's analysis of Hartmann's thesis at epluribusmedia.net is even more apt.

The problem was – and still is – that the Reaganuts failed to recognize that actual industry is morally superior to usury, rent, and speculation. And here is where I want to explain that there is a fourth way an oligarch that loathes work can make a living – management. If you think about it, many of the problems in the U.S. economy – the deterioration of quality, the lack of customer service, the 30-year decline of working class wages, the amazing and enraging unaccountability of top executives - arise from the peculiar fact that American MBA programs do not really turn out industrial managers, so much as they train plantation overseers and work gang bosses.

Go back and look at how the English oligarchy adapted to the Industrial Revolution: the ruling families that survived and prospered did so by seizing control of manufacturing companies and imposing themselves as a new management class. This long, multi-generational process of replacing industrial entrepreneurs with managers from the oligarchy had the highly visible effect of retarding British industrial development and quality, especially as compared to other countries. A similar effect has occurred in the United States since the Reagan Revolution, with the U.S. losing the technological lead in industry after industry, and often losing some industries, such as shoe making or textiles, almost entirely.

It is that national failure over the past three decades to differentiate real economic activity from usury, rent, and speculation that has led to the present crisis. It is that failure that has allowed American manufacturing industry, over the past three decades, to be subjected to the whims and caprices of corporate raiders, megalomaniacal empire builders, and Wall Street analysts and traders insisting that the next quarter be better than the last.

It is that failure that has led to the creation of an American ruling class that believes it is, above all, entitled to rule, just because it is.

One can look to the American oligarchy's emergence from the world-wide economic collapse of the 1870s as well (the Long Depression), a period more comparable to today than the Great Depression of the 1930s.

Folks like Carnegie and Rockefeller represented a class of American industrialists who could take advantage of the fire sale of companies when we faced a similar economic meltdown -- a Gilded Age for the rich few, a nightmare for the rest of us. It began with a housing bubble spurred by new and exotic debt instruments and innovations (credit default swaps versus fixed return bonds), a new center of economic gravity came on the world stage (now China and India, then it was the USA), the transportation manufacturers faced near certain doom (now GM/Chrysler, then the Railroads), A stock market crash paralyzed the rest of the economy and the massive joblessness caused the newly homeless and poverty stricken to look for an easy scapegoat (now Hispanic immigrants, then it was the beginnings of virulent anti-semitism manifesting in the Jewish pogroms in the 1880s).

A simple look at what it took to successfully emerge from both the Long and Great Depressions should give us some clues for what we need now. We know that a Keynesian combination of jobs programs and stringent regulation of banks and investment firms coupled with a social safety net began to lead us out of the mess of the 30s, with the total mobilization of the manufacturing industry leading up to WWII brought us to superpower status. In the 1800s, refinancing the railways and government giveaways of public resources to commercial interests made things nice for those who were able to survive the 1873 Panic, but only led to another crash 20 years later.

Needless to say, examining today in light of other Depressions does nothing to sway my long held belief that we should "Eat The Rich," including the much overrated (and fellow Toledoan) author P.J. O'Rourke who ten years ago was ridiculing the impotence of China as player on the economic stage.

Auto Bailout Band Aid

The Plantation Caucus was temporarily outmaneuvered (no car-czar, no binding concessions until Obama takes over) as the White House pumped enough cash into GM and Chrysler for them to keep the doors open a couple months -- with the added benefit that maybe GMAC (through which the funding will flow) will have enough capital to make some car loans to all the folks who want and can afford to buy cars but were turned down by all the other banks that stole TARP money.

I'll probably have a lot more to say about this, like the idea that this was more like a "take it or leave it" offer than any kind of negotiation.  Meanwhile I'm back to digging out from last night's ice storm.  I'll just note for now that not every conservative hates this "deal."  Professional Bush apologist Hugh Hewitt, consistent with his lap-dog personality, is positive Bush did exactly the right thing in exactly the right way at exactly the right time because, well . . . it was Bush after all who did it.

Excuse me as I go and rinse the bile out of my throat.  On the bright side, since most of the right hates this thing (here's a typical example, and I'm watching Larry Kudrow on CNBC lose his mind), it must be a great thing.

Just 38 Scoffing Days Left

Earlier, CNBC-TV18 had reported that the auto makers had first asked for USD 25 billion and then two weeks later revised it to USD 34 billion. After two grueling days of being questioned at the Capitol Hill, the CEOs seem to have convinced the government representatives, though maybe partially, because what they are likely to get is USD 15 billion.

Anyone else find it a bit too convenient that George Bush played hardball with the auto-makers and House Democrats, whittling down their final request of $34 Billion down to $15 Billion and insisting it come out of the $25 Billion already earmarked for green-retooling the companies and not from the TARP -- only to find out that so far the Treasury has spent all but $15 Billion of the money's already appropriated to bailout the banks with zero oversight?

Treasury has already run through the TARP's first $335 billion, with just $15 billion left before he has to seek further authorization from Congress. That $15 billion might tide GM and Chrysler over until the new Congress convenes, but it will leave him with little running room to help out the banking system.

Seriously, this isn't just a dot to connect, a mere coincidence.  This is a clumsy a "tell" as you get.  Phoenix Woman at Firedoglake is close in her analysis, liking the whole charade as Kabuki Theater.  The "take their first shot against organized labor" memo outlines the closed-minded tactics involved (although any coherent strategy among the "Plantation Caucus" is conspicuously missing).

Bush and the Democrats came up with a deal that won bipartisan approval in the House, and then when Senate Republicans created a few obstacles to poison the deal, the Dems gave them almost everything they wanted.  But of course, this ISN'T what they wanted.  What they wanted was to have political cover for killing the deal, so they could pretend that the Dems were being unreasonable.  They had multiple reasons for not wanting this to pass, but they knew that it would hurt the party politically if they couldn't come up with some decent sounding excuse for why they were killing it.

Bush already signaled their "out," that they were covered for up to $15 Billion once he got Pelosi, et al. to lower their demand to less than half of what was barely adequate.  But the Senate GOPers overplayed their hand and now have nothing to show for all the criippling concessions demanded from the UAW.

You'll note that talk of tapping the TARP was out there almost immediately upon the death of the emergency loan in the Senate.  My guess is that knowing how fragile and volatile the markets are, they weren't going to risk even a day where the headlines would be full of the Rust Belt's obituaries. 

Bush is in legacy-fixing mode and it's care for his own worthless hide that is motivating him far more than refusing to watch Detroit go the way of post-Katrina New Orleans.  Presiding over the ghettoizing of the industrial mid-west would be the last straw. No gate-community retirement home could hide him.

What's funny is hearing Plantation Caucus spokesman, Bob Corker saying that it would be irresponsible for the President to unilaterally give the Big Three any cash without all the safeguards and conditions worked out in the House -- which he led the way to flush down the toilet.  These folks just don't know how to play a winning hand, went all in and got called only to find out they were the ones bluffing all along.

Briar Patch?

There's a theory/rumor/piece of wishful thinking floating 'round Blogtopia (yeah, Skippy, whatever) that faced with the not unlikely thousand point cliff-dive the DOW might take on the news of the collapse of the Detroit auto-makers loan, Bush will tap into the TARP and throw cash at GM, Ford and Dan Quayle, *with no more oversight than AIG got* in order to save Wall Street from imploding, and bringing along both Main Street and what's left of Telegraph Road along with it.

Bank bailout funds could be used for Detroit
Sources: White House warning GOP senators Wall Street bailout funds might be used for automakers now that auto loan package has failed.

As part of their full-court press to urge skeptical Republicans to back it, [Bush officials] made clear that if Congress didn't act, the White House would have to step in to save Detroit from collapse with funds from the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), according to the sources familiar with the conversations.

"I would only hope that the president, who has worked so well with us for the past several weeks, would now use consider using the TARP money," said Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., after the vote.

One of the sources said the a White House official made clear to a GOP Senator that would be the worst option, because the loan could go to the auto companies with few or no requirements along with it.

Democrats had pressed the White House from the start to help Detroit by using some of the $700 billion for the financial sector, but the White House had refused.

At this stage, I'm not going to get my hopes up that Bush is capable of doing the right thing. It makes me laugh just to write those words. If that petulant little prick can figure out a way to spin this thing, he'll let the American auto industry simply die.

Hell, he's killed more people than will lose their jobs and homes if the big two-and-a-half fail. Why should he care if folks are just broke? I can't believe that he would let his last act be remembered as giving the Democrats and a union exactly what they want. Digby isn't holding her breath either.

If this really was the message that Cheney brought to Capitol Hill, that unless they went along with the program Bush's hand would be forced and he'd have to save Detroit with TARP funds, it backfired in a completely predictable way. It gives the GOP Senators an out.

See, they get to further distance themselves from Bush (always a good thing), and act the pigheaded louts their inbred constituency loves them for -- knowing that the dreaded consequences of their intransience will never occur. They don't get blamed for the manufacturing collapse fortold if they scuttle the bridge loan because they know it will never happen. The rest was just theater, waiting to see if Harry Ried calls their bluff or blinks, further humiliating the workers who've already bent over backwards.

With the TARP in play, the execs get to keep their ridiculous salaries and golden parachutes (if they can do it and still look in the mirror) just like AIG and Citibank, there won't be any car czar, nobody will be forced to retool unless they want to, and they can keep their stupid jets. Meanwhile, BushCo gets to play the reluctant hero, placing the blame for any further trouble the comparative pittance he'll throw Detroit's way doesn't cure squarely on the next administration.

Bullfrogs

A sign of the times.

The Arena Football League, which has grown steadily in popularity and
fan attendance during the past decade, is expected to cancel what would
have been its 23rd season in 2009, according to multiple media reports.

Toledo's team is The Bullfrogs, an homage to when the city was subject to one of the Egyptian Plagues and it rained frogs, or something.

I never saw the Bullfrogs.  Never even knew we had a team until yesterday.  Now I can't even pretend root for them to win the, umm . . . amphibian trophy . . . whatever.

Bastards

Josh Marshall on the GOP stopping the auto bailout: "In the future I think it will be difficult to explain why this happened, perhaps even more challenging to explain why this key national decision was left in the hands of lame duck senate Republicans."

GM is preping for a Chapter 11 filing.  By the time we get to the heart of what ails us, our sick health care system, it will be too late.  GM would have another $22 billion to play with if we worked under the same rules in every other civilized country.

The other econ news simply sucks.  Krugman is calling the jobs outlook a nosedive.  Unbelievable that someone can get away with a $50 billion ponzi scheme, for years, before the SEC catches the crook.

I swear we are just a nation of bandits in suits and ties, folks more than willing to turn millions of their fellow citizens out on the street in the name of cheap, disposable labor.  But then again, patriotism is only a slogan to them they use to beat liberals over the head with.

Patriotism: from the Latin patriota meaning "fellow countryman."  Colin Powell damn well knows what he talks about when warning that his party cannot continue to listen to the likes of Rush Limbaugh and hope to have a future.

"Can we continue to listen to Rush Limbaugh?" Powell asked. "Is this really the kind of party that we want to be when these kinds of spokespersons seem to appeal to our lesser instincts rather than our better instincts?"

Rush certainly does have a vast audience . . . and they scare the crap outta me.

The Zero Emission Car & The Network It Runs On

[cross posted at E Pluribus Unum]

Shai Agassi has started a company called Better Place and he's busy building a new paradigm.

Cars with zero emissions. At Better Place, we know that if we are going to reduce transportation’s impact on our planet, this must be our goal. Not just better gas mileage. Not just reduced emissions.

No emissions. Zero.

OK, interesting. But aren't there more than a few electric cars and electric car companies gearing up right now? What makes Agassi's company so special?

For starters, he's not in business to build cars.

Better Place is a California-based, venture-backed company that aims to reduce global dependency on petroleum through the creation of a market-based transportation infrastructure that supports electric vehicles, providing consumers with a cheaper, cleaner, sustainable, personal transportation alternative.

Hey look, here's what their website says:

Better Place is working to build an electric car network, using technology available today. Our goals? Sustainable transportation, global energy independence and freedom from oil.

So how does it work? Here's Tom Friedman:

The Better Place electric car charging system involves generating electrons from as much renewable energy — such as wind and solar — as possible and then feeding those clean electrons into a national electric car charging infrastructure.

From Wikipedia:

In January 2008, Better Place announced a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with Renault-Nissan to build the world's first Electric Recharge Grid Operator (ERGO) model for clean transportation in Israel. Under the agreement, Better Place will build the electric recharge grid, and Renault-Nissan will provide the electric vehicles. In 2009, Better Place expects to deploy hundreds of charging stations as the company moves toward wide-scale deployment in 2011.

The first prototype cars are the Renault Mégane with a battery instead of a fuel tank and an electric motor instead of an internal combustion engine...

The range of the car running on just one battery is from about 100 miles to 120 miles . By replacing the battery at a service station, the range is limited only by the geographical distribution of the battery-swapping infrastructure.

Friedman, again:

Under the Better Place model, consumers can either buy or lease an electric car from the French automaker Renault or Japanese companies like Nissan (General Motors snubbed Agassi) and then buy miles on their electric car batteries from Better Place the way you now buy an Apple cellphone and the minutes from AT&T. That way Better Place, or any car company that partners with it, benefits from each mile you drive. G.M. sells cars. Better Place is selling mobility miles.

BTW, did you catch that? General Motors snubbed Agassi.

But I digress...

Friedman sees in this new paradigm a similarity with the paradigm Apple created for the music industry via the introduction of the iPod and iTunes:

What Agassi, the founder of Better Place, is saying is that there is a new way to generate mobility, not just music, using the same platform. It just takes the right kind of auto battery — the iPod in this story — and the right kind of national plug-in network — the iTunes store — to make the business model work for electric cars at six cents a mile. The average American is paying today around 12 cents a mile for gasoline transportation, which also adds to global warming and strengthens petro-dictators.

What does an electric car infrastructure look like?

The batteries of a zero-emission vehicle need three things in place in for optimum functionality: charging spots, battery switching stations, and software that automates the experience.

The charging spots will keep the batteries topped off with power so that they always have 100 miles of driving capacity. They are located where you work, live, shop and dine in parking lots so that an electric car will have the ability to recharge when the software instructs it to top off.

For trips longer than 100 miles (161 km), battery switching stations will be available roadside. Stations are completely automated, and the driver’s subscription takes care of everything. The driver pulls in, and the depleted battery is quickly replaced with a fresh one, without anyone having to leave the vehicle. The process takes less time than it does to fill a tank of liquid fuel.

Because most electric vehicles will be charging during the evenings while at home, the batteries become distributed storage for clean electricity. In Israel, for example, excess power from the growing solar industry will be stored in the cars’ batteries.

Similarly, in Denmark, unstored energy from the country’s wind turbines will be utilized. Better Place can help each market identify and develop its own “virtual oil fields” of renewable energy. Same with Australia which possesses wind farms throughout the country. So too does California.

That's just scratching the surface. Here's the tactical plan:

Better Place will build its first Electric Recharge Grids in Denmark, Israel and Australia where the electricity will be generated by renewable energy. Denmark and Israel have enacted policies, which create a tax differential between zero-emission vehicles and traditional cars, to accelerate the transition to electric cars. ...California and Hawaii are the first US states to announce deployment of Better Place electric car networks.

Here's an 8-minute video of Agassi speaking at a conference. The sound is a bit echo-y but hang in there -- it's an inspirational look at the future.

And General Motors? Having snubbed Agassi, they'll be lucky if they last out the next 90 days.

If Krugman Is Scared...

...Then I'm terrified

So here’s what I’m wondering: will it, in fact, even be possible to pull the economy out of its nosedive before unemployment goes into double digits? I’m starting to wonder.

Brad Delong alerts us that we're already there according to the WSJ bloggers.

Broader Unemployment Rate Hits 12.5%

The headline unemployment rate of 6.7% in November isn’t the only one the Labor Department reports. They also break the rate down by age, gender, ethnicity, and education [pdf ~Mark]. And in table A-12, on page 19 of the report, they also share their broadest estimate of the unemployment rate, which includes the total unemployed (the standard rate) plus "all marginally attached workers, plus total employed part time for economic reasons… plus all marginally attached workers."

That rate (called "U-6") in November? A whopping 12.5%.

The U-6 rate only has comparable history back to 1994, but November’s rate is by far the highest since then and the swift rise to that elevated level also far surpasses similar moves during the recessions in 2001 and 1990-91. Previously, the Labor Dept. kept a similar gauge with history back to 1970, showing a high of 14% unemployment during the deep recession in 1982.

The U-6 rate rose sharply in November, from 11.8% in October, and is markedly higher now than the 8.4% recorded in November 2007.

"It was already clear that this would be 'one of the worst recessions' in the post-war period," said Nigel Gault, chief U.S. economist at IHS Global Insight. "After today’s horrendous November employment report, it is beginning to look like the worst." –Kelly Evans

I'm thinking about making an investment to help out with our economic woes -- some new soup pots, ladles, spoons and bowls.

More from the WSJ hints at How bad can it get?

But in most prior downturns when job losses topped 300,000 in a single month, payrolls posted at least six additional months of declines before returning to consistently positive territory during the expansion. The 2001 recession, with its jobless recovery, proved to be the outlier: After the loss of 325,000 jobs in November 2001, payroll declines followed in 17 months into mid-2003.

Well, that's good in a way. Eventually things will move up again . . . or not.

But the December payroll report is likely to be dismal as well. And with continuing claims for jobless benefits at a 26-year high, the unemployment rate — now at 6.7% — appears on track to hit 8% in the next year. Given companies’ expectations for the economy in 2009, comparisons to the post-2001 jobless recovery may be closer to reality. –Sudeep Reddy

"Jobless recovery" is an oxymoron that should be permanently stricken from the lexicon, as useless a phrase as "highly depressed," "mandatory options" or "business ethics."  Leave it to Shrub to find new and fascinating ways to go from shitty to suck . . . again.

Here we go again
Early in what became the Great Depression, John Maynard Keynes was asked if anything similar had ever happened. "Yes," he replied, "it was called the Dark Ages and it lasted 400 years."

And yes, I do take this personally, and hold George W. Bush ultimately to blame. Recessions happen, sure. Disintegration of the entire economic system, a global catastrophe to capitalism itself takes a special kind of effort -- neglect as an art form.

Holier Than Crap

Rep. Thaddeus McCotter (R-MI) usually strikes me as either a fool or a tool, but he actually made sense today as I watched the automotive hearings on C-SPAN. 

Essentially he posits that since the auto industry bailout/loans are coming out of funds already appropriated wither from the TARP fund or the Department of Energy loans for green retooling, anyone saying that they are trying to save the taxpayers money by denying the loans full of crap.

Democrats want the White House to tap an already approved
700-billion-dollar finance industry bailout known as the Troubled
Assets Relief Program (TARP) to rescue the auto firms.

But the
Bush administration insists the money should come from diverting 25
billion dollars in loans to the industry designed to spur development
of fuel-efficient vehicles.

Republican Thaddeus McCotter broached
a compromise, which would take half of the 34 billion dollars from the
financial bailout and half from the previous auto industry loan.

He warned the failure of the auto firms could take out millions of jobs in related industries.

"That is not a ripple effect, that is a tsunami effect in these critical times."

Lord knows there'll be more accountability, and has already been more thought and study in this decision than the money Wall Street burned through.  This is one of the few lawmakers with an "R" after their name who wasn't just using these hearings as a way to break the UAW.

Nice to see McCotter's practicing what he preached, and that there's at least one conservative out there who is showing that Republicans are "free to start thinking again."

a.W.o.l.

Half a million jobs vanished, *poof* in one month. Sweet GeeBus.

Almost fitting, if not entirely teeth gnashingly aggravating that Still PrezNitWit C+ Augustus fiddles with his legacy in his nearly patented Orwellian/Machiavellian/Rovian way as the nation's economy dives off a cliff. We seem to share a morbid fascination with Richard Nixon some three decades later, a certain distane for the Cult of Reagan that led us down the path to our current Supply-Side SNAFU, but down the road will we spit out Bush's name with the same vexatious disgust that roils in the heart of anyone but the dead-enders?

I'm speaking, of course, to my fellow BDS sufferers. Surely it's not possible to keep this festering wound open as we emerge, eventually, from this current morass.

I got your damn legacy, George. Right Here!

He's gone, if not in body, certainly in spirit. He had zero items on his calendar one day last week, and the rest was filled with ribbon-cutting and legacy-building nonsense. His useless Secretary of State was litterally fiddling around, giving a piano recital for the Queen of fucking England as Mumbai was picking up the pieces of their own (latest) 9/11 -- fitting in a side-trip to India almost as an after-thought. Meanwhile, the final touches on a Status Of Forces Agreement were worked out between the Iraq government and the Pentagon instead of the agency tasked with, you know, working out diplomatic agreements with foreign countries. (Again, like in out Katrina response, this shows that when you turn over the bulk of your national wealth to the military, it is the only arm of the government that can act somewhat competently.)

Speaking of QE2, the Queen sure knows how to deal with a useless conservative government when faced with a liberal insurrection spurred by their feckless handling of a spiraling economy -- shut it down. Out of site, out of mind.

Locally, they idled a thousand workers at the brand new Jeep factory up the street and the part-supplier whose workers make up a good percentage of my bar's regulars, Textileather, has pretty much shut down for good -- over a hundred of my neighbors have no job after this month. And I thought business was already bad. I don't know if I'll have a hat to hang on to by the time it's all over.

The only pro-active thing I've seen our absent president do in months is go out and do what none of us peasants can dream of any more -- buy a nice new (expensive) house. (You don't suspect that the depressed housing market had anything to do with him trying to get a bargain, do you? -- Man I got some bad BDS.)

Shut Up Chuck

Although he doesn't actually come right out and say it, my Washington Post summary email on Charles Krauthammer's column today called From Market Economy to Political Economy did one of those "Shorter Chuckles" thingies, saying,

This is not the time to pursue an economic agenda based on liberal social goals.

Is it ever with these twits? Onward and forever to tax-cutting and cannibal capitalism!

Creepier still is what he actually has to say, conflating the evils of lobbyists who have a worse reputation than lawyers lately, Wall Street bankers who as a group are probably less popular that the C+ Augustus still aggravatingly living at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. that Chucky has been fellating O' these many years, and the entire city of Detroit with its principle industry as both a wholly subsumed nationalized colony of Washington DC with its hand out like any common crook lobbyist as well.

For the hat-trick, he looks in his crystal ball and declares any attempt to assist the auto industry in modernizing and greening our future stinks of the Soviet Union's completely planned Diktats on every factory floor, then pronounces the entire effort doomed to the same failure.

All this because we might want GM, Ford and Chrysler to build affordable, fuel efficient hybrid cars if they want a loan. (And they should look really cool too, but that's just me.)

The ruling Democrats have a choice: Rescue this economy to return it to market control. Or use this crisis to seize the commanding heights of the economy for the greater social good. Note: The latter has already been tried. The results are filed under "History, ash heap of."

I smell fear. Fear that events and the excesses of those who share Krauthammer's dementia are truly irrelevant, increasingly so in a world that is passing them by. The more they sink into the "ash heap" of their "commercial republic," the more outlandish the rhetoric will become.

I've no doubt Charlie will be deriding President Obama in stark terms in short order. He'll compare Obama to Stalin for instituting virtual gulags for FOX reporters who never get to ask a question at press conferences. He'll demand the Democrats provide bridge loans to house the refugees of a Purity Purge as soon as he doesn't retain every single incompetent US Attorney hired by AG Gonzales based their use of smiley-faces instead of periods at the end of each sentence in their essay on "What I Did Over My Summer Vacation To Make George W. Bush Even More Awesome." Obama will walk on sour wine and only heal everybody those who wait in line long enough to see a doctor that doesn't speak English -- since all the "good" docs, those still permitted membership in those whites-only country-clubs, will have left the country to set up practice in Dubai.

No doubt my crystal ball is fractured just as much as Krauthammer's. The problem is that he looks through his murky lens to see the past, and the present -- wrongly.

Just keep this in mind with all this talk of nationalization and socialism right now, communists didn't "loan" capital to industry. They just took over, declared the state the owners and ultimate authority over everything. They didn't just hand over rubles to company managers, with or without conditions. For the various bailouts to be anything remotely resembling what the Bolsheviks did, we would have to completely replace the management of those companies with federal bureaucrats and destroy shareholder equity.

Indeed, there wouldn't be any stock market for Chuckles to get his skirts all twisted over when it bolts up and down on the latest message from Obama or Secretary Paulson. Under Soviet-style socialism, for those who either don't know nor care to grok, you don't play with fractions of ownership rights in corporations like so many casino chips. You eliminate corporations altogether.

Not to put too much an edge on it, when President Obama decides to "buy" GM et al., I'll worry about our new socialist overlords. Telling the automakers that they only will get the USA as a co-signer on their loan application if they promise to use the money for good -- good for the USA btw -- is just plain old-fashioned horse trading, capitalism in it's purest form.

There are no free lunches, right? You want something from me, I get something in return -- and if you want it bad enough I can demand very favorable terms. What part of "you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours" stuff don't these Free Marketeers understand? I mean, Detroit doesn't have to take the deal and can take their chances.

We Haven't Hit Bottom Yet

[cross posted at E Pluribus Unum]

My son has asked me on more than one occasion recently, "So what do we do now?" Usually, in that conversation, I start out apologizing to him for the mess my generation has left him to deal with. Which leads to him asking his question.

What I tell him is that we don't really have a good idea yet because we haven't yet hit bottom. We don't know quite how big this whole thing is. Every so often we think we have an idea, then a guy like Krugman puts in his two cents and then we get scared all over again.




"No analogy is perfect," I say, "But It's kind of like an enormous explosion has occurred. We've been thrown in the air."

"It's going to hurt when we hit the ground," he says.

"Well, yeah, eventually. But at this moment we don't even know yet if we're still going up or if we've started coming down. It's hard to say because we've lost our bearings in the shockwave after the explosion. All we know is that we're suspended somewhere between the earth and the sky."

"Not a happy place. Then what?"

"Well, at some point we're going to come all the way down to earth. We'll land -- with a crunch -- in some sort of blast crater."

"Ouch."

"No shit sherlock. But even then we won't know how big and deep the crater is until we start trying to climb out of it. It'll be like rock climbing a sheer wall. Brutal."

"I'm so glad I asked."

"You asked and I'm telling."

"So once we've climbed out then we're out of trouble?" he asks.

"Not exactly," I say. "Only after we've climbed all the way out and walked away and then looked back, will we be able to begin to understand how bad this thing really was...and what we can do to make sure it doesn't happen again."

"No wonder Krugman is so freaked out."

"Yeah. And he's not the only one."

CHANGE Is Not Normal

So the upside to the global financial crisis is gasoline is down to $1.67 a gallon, right?  As they say in the Peoples Republic of Alaska: You Betcha!

It's troubling though.  People just can't handle too much turmoil in their lives, even when it saves them money.  Just ask this nice lady I met at the gas station.

I'm in line at the cashier, just stopping in to grab some smokes.  (I hear they're bad for for me.  Who knew?)  This woman comes in and tells the girl behind the counter that the pump is broken.

"There's something wrong with pump 2.  It only will go up to 17, then shuts off.  I can't get any more gas out of it."

The checkout girl looks confused when a helpful guy right in front of me says, "Maybe it's full."  Sure enough, unless her Ford Escort's gas tank is bone dry, a Twenty buys more gas than it can hold.  She went out to test the theory.

She came back a little red-faced to collect her change -- change she never would have believed in.

It's Not Obama's Recession

But it will be his recovery.

After two days of punishing losses, Wall Street surged on Friday
afternoon after news reports said that President-elect Barack Obama had
tapped Timothy F. Geithner, the president of the New York Federal
Reserve, to be secretary of the Treasury.

Put that "Heh" in your "Indeedy."

Yeah, life's not fair, so suck on that.

Disgusting Displays

A standing ovation for a convicted felon who should never been allowed inside the Senate chamber let alone honored like he was man of the year...

A trillion for banks and AIG with no oversight, no plan, and no clue exactly what would happen if they didn't get their extortion money. (Brad has the right idea on this.)...

The markets (along with everyone's retirement plans and any hope of financial security) are still tanking, losing half their value so far with no idea where the bottom is. Citigroup may be next, Boeing in trouble ...

Faux outrage over private jets. Union busting and style over substance driving decisions when we know exactly what kind of turmoil ensues if the American auto industry is allowed to die. Who can compete when burdened with health care costs foreign competitors' governments cover when they too were hit by Wall Street craziness, the credit squeeze, and the failure of those "pro-business" conservatives to insist that the industry abide by reasonable mileage standards and competitively retool for 21st century transportation needs.

Funny how we got a bailout of the bankers and brokers in a heartbeat that the public didn't really like, let alone understand. Everyone knows what kind of deep doodoo we're in if GM goes under, and they can't get a loan for 3% of what we've thrown at Freddy, Fanny, all the banks and AIG. No wonder the GOP is hated more each day and everyone is just holding their breath until January 20th.

I guarantee Joe the Plumber never heard of AIG before this year -- but he knows the Rust Belt will be hemorrhaging jobs if we stop making American cars. If there has ever been a clearer example of the Villagers on the Potomac being far more concerned about wealth over workers, I can't think of it. Two months seems like an eternity.

The only real variable is that we just don't know exactly how many unemployed millions will be walking midwestern streets as that southern rump party and that C+ Augustus in the White House watch approvingly as Detroit dies just as sure a death as New Orleans when Katrina struck. A million unemployed here, a million there, and pretty soon you're talking real Depression.

Why should they care when they've got friends who can spend $20 million on fireworks just to get their parties started and have brand new Nieman Marcus Christmas catalogs to drool over.

(Yeah, I'm back, and pissed. You should be too.)

Ohio Poll And Job Numbers

Obama - Plus 11.5% ?  Plus 14% ?!?  Holy Crap!
Jobs - Minus 7.2% ?  Minus 434,000 ?!? Oh Shit!!

Something stinks with all those numbers.  Not that I don't believe them.  I'm no expert on statistical analysis or unemployment calculations.  It's just that numbers like this usually only exist in some alternate universe.  A figment of a bizzaro imagination.

Look folks, whatever the "experts" say, we've been in a recession for a year now, and we've got a year or two more of the same crap facing us.  Most recessions last no more than 8 months and aren't even declared until they're over.  This one's much harder to obscure.  We aren't so much running with the "hot chick" as running from the ugly one when it comes to our choice in new leadership. 

Ohio, perennial grand prize in the presidential sweepstakes, is right in the middle of our economic woes.

Yesterday, Chrysler eliminated it's entire second shift in Toledo's Jeep plant, over 825 jobs half a mile from my blue-collar bar that caters to these guys and the factory workers and tool-n-die workers, drivers, broom pushers and upholstery makers who supply the place, adding to a steep rise in unemployment claims which were already in recession territory.

When you consider the employer-matched taxes, health insurance premiums, unemployment and workers compensation payments each Jeep employee represents on top of their salary, a modest estimate of the economic effect of losing those jobs is about $90,000 per worker, or almost $75 Million of Toledo's economy was just wiped out.  The mayor said in no uncertain terms the Jeep layoffs, "reflect the disastrous economic policies of the Bush presidency." 

Mayor Finkbeiner announced a three-day shut down of all nonessential government business to try to claw the city out of debt knowing it's tax revenue will be another million or two less than projected with the lay offs.  It was bad before, it never felt like we recovered from the first "W" recession.  Now I feel like I'm at ground zero of the collapse of the real economy.  I remember the feeling, having lived outside of Youngstown, Ohio when the steel mills closed in the late seventies.  (Hey, it's not my fault, dammit.)

Of course, the way it works is exactly the opposite of what the government should be doing.  When all those city-workers lose three days pay, they'll buy less which hurts all the area's small businesses.  We sell a fair amount of Budweiser to guys off work from the city garage down the street -- who will be buying just that much less.  A municipality that cannot run a defict really has no choice, I know.  But knowing that doesn't mitigate the suck.  This will be exactly the opposite of economic stimulation.

But we're a blue county here in Northern Ohio, solidly Democratic.  My Congress woman, Marcy Kaptur, is a netroots hero who voted against the Wall Street bailout, both times, because once again Washington's fix was to help the millionaires and not people who work for a living.  The fact that bad
things are happening in the Rust Belt doesn't phase GOP election strategy.  They only care about the voters who live closer to the River than the Lake.

Nevertheless, the overall Ohio unemployment data has got to effect John McCain's chances here.  There are five Ohio counties that have over 10% unemployment right now -- all but one are outside of the Lake Erie watershed and each voted strongly for Bush in 2004. (Tables and maps available here.)  Huron in Northern Ohio, Van Wert in the West, Pike, Meigs and Morgan counties in the South and Southeast have the worst jobs outlook in the state right now.  Believe it or not, the numbers say this won't matter as much as you might think, not everywhere.

It could be enough to push Obama over the edge, but some red counties in Ohio are just plain stubborn.  Here's why.  Back in September of 2004, Pike county, Bush country, had a 9.5% unemployment rate.  Meigs was at 9.6% and Morgan boasted 9.8% out of work.  None are really that much worse now at 10%+, a point or so higher in these Appalachian foothills.  Despite tumbling over they abyss they were only looking into four years ago, they'll vote for McCain.  Watch. 

I think the economy will, however, make a difference in a northern county like Huron whose unemployment was high enough at 6.7% in '04, or in western Van Wert which only saw a 4.9% jobless rate when they voted for Bush.  These folks don't know what hit 'em now that they're in double digits.

Of course outside of Columbus, Dayton and Cincinnati there are few "red" zones with large population centers in Ohio, and the vote counts in the urban centers were very close last time.  Van Wert county, on the other hand, is one of the least populous, so it's nothing to get excited about if it switches to the Democrat on the heels of doubling it's unemployment rate (even though it would be noteworthy and very welcome if it went blue).  

Huron county is another story, half-way between the Cleveland and Toledo metro areas it would be a healthy addition to the blue column -- but they don't have an especially high concentration of voters there either, but it's even more welcome to join the reality based community. 

As for the big red counties, the Dayton metro area (Montgomery county) is witnessing a 7.8% unemployment rate, 1.3% more than in October of 2004.  That translates into 17,700 people on the streets then compared to 21,300 now.  To give you an idea how that compares to Van Wert county, there were only 14,827 total voters there in 2004, less voters in Van Wert than job hunters in Dayton. 

Huron county turned out 25,557 voters in 2004.  Today there are more people scouring the help wanted ads in Hamilton county (Cincinnati) which had 23,500 unemployed in October of 2004 (5.6%) and just barely went for Bush.  Now there are nearly 3,000 more people looking for work there (6.3%) who are not only bitter (whether they cling to guns and religion or not), but who have family and friends depending on them who are equally pissed off at the way the Republicans have mis-managed everything economic.  Just these slight downturns in the Southwestern Ohio metro centers may have a much more dramatic effect on voter sentiment than more rural areas facing unemployment rates they haven't seen in generations.

Columbus, much like Washington DC, really doesn't have a workforce that makes anything -- except trouble and paperwork for the rest of the state.  While higher than four years ago, they still are around the national average when it comes to joblessness.  It's more about the availability of enough working voting booths there than working people.  If everybody in Franklin county who wants to vote, gets to vote -- they go blue.

Loyal GOPers, bless their deluded souls, have a built-in excuse for losing this one.  Somehow, "mysteriously," the economy tanked.  But this is an economy of their own making.  I will never forget Bush's second Treasury Secretary Snow, a Toledo native for Pete's sake saying outsourcing was a good thing back in '04, and that new jobs were coming to Ohio.  What bull!

The sad part, for the Republicans anyway, is that despite all of this John McCain actually had a chance to win on this issue.  He had a real shot at owning the economic argument.  No really, he did. 

He could have parlayed that campaign "suspension" gimmick into a true maverick moment, rejected the bailout on principle alone as passionately as did Marcy Kaptur, but for entirely different reasons -- earmarks -- and spent the last two months lambasting Bush for his financial fecklessness without fear of damaging his support with the conservative base since there is no definition of conservatiism that can be applied to Bush's fiscal policies.

What a douche.