"Identity Politics"

Although I agree that we need to reach beyond our urban base to win elections, I hear some profoundly disturbing overtones in the "identity politics" election autopsy. I'm going to group the identity politics argument into several subpoints:

1. That we lost the election by underperforming with white voters
2. That (super paradoxically) we need to start treating white voters as a political identity and we need to improve our outreach to it as a constituency 
3. That those of us who aren't straight white men should subsume our parochial concerns to a "post-identity" push and "educate [ourselves] about parts of the country that have been ignored."

Item 3 is wrong and dangerous. Women, minorities, and LGBT people really do experience power, inclusion/exclusion, and prejudice differently. That spike in hate crimes and harassment is real, and it isn't directed at straight white men. That line about how "America is sick and tired of hearing about liberals' damn bathrooms" is not only obnoxious and condescending, but also reveals a fetishization of the mythological white working class and a disregard for the social/economic anxieties of anyone else.

The whole identity politics critique also totally confuses a failure of outreach with a failure of policy. These are not the same things. The Clinton campaign famously produced detailed policy proposal after detailed policy proposal for everything from raising the minimum wage to reining in Wall Street and drug prices to job placement and retraining for the unemployed to treating opioid addiction to promoting unions. All were substantive and practical ideas aimed squarely at lifting up the working class.

Hillary Clinton might have lost the Rust Belt because she didn't spend enough time campaigning in the rural Midwest, but some on the left are using this to push their narrative that we lost a contest of ideas. We did not lose a contest of ideas We lost a contest of channeling blind ethno-populist rage.

The worst way for us to overlearn the lesson of this defeat is to think that we should ask marginalized people to take a backseat at the table of power while we reshuffle the chairs in search of Midwestern voters who won't vote for us even when our policies are better for them.

Our airstrikes against ISIS are not motivated by oil

Yes, Iraq has oil. So does Venezuela.

But we didn't invade and occupy Venezuela with 160k ground troops for the better part of a decade. Because our actions in Iraq are not about protecting some slick business interests there. Our national security goals are more about fostering stability (and even if you're not a neocon, democracy is part of stability) in the troubled regions of the world. In a wide arc from the border of India and Pakistan across Northern Africa, it's a mess of failed states and mercurial friends.

Unfortunately, the Bush Administrations war in Iraq displaced a (relatively stable) dictatorial regime with a (kind of democratic) failed state. And with ISIS actively conquering territory and setting up a services and governance in the land it administers, Iraq looks more and more like it will crumble if we don't provide some air support. We fucked up in Iraq and we should fix it.

I rest my case

Rep. Aaron Schock (R-IL)

The Biggest Threat to Obamacare

The Obamacare website debacle is in many ways worse than people realize and it actually plays into one of the threats that can badly undermine the entire law. The success of the health insurance exchanges will be judged on their ability to provide low premiums to consumers. If the plans offered on the exchanges were to charge very expensive premiums, consumers would exit in droves - especially the young and healthy, who need insurance the least.

What's the quickest way to drive up premiums? Get the young and healthy to never sign up in the first place.

As I mentioned, the exchanges need a large number of healthy people to enroll if premiums are to stay low. This is because an insurance policy is a pooling of risk, such that what consumers pay in monthly premiums is more or less the same, and the level of benefits is also the same, across the entire policy. A very sick patient is rather costly to care for and looks like a gallon of red ink to the insurer; a healthy one is very cheap to insure and looks like dollar signs. So that's the insurance companies' calculus, and the insurers will have to jack up rates if they see that only sick people are signing up.

Getting sick people to enroll in Obamacare is easy. They're desperate for coverage and many have gone without needed care to scrimp for savings. Nope, the tricky part, unfortunately, is motivating young people to sign up. They have a calculus too, and it's the opposite one. A 25 year old guy in good shape has no real financial incentive to join a risk pool where the average member is sicker and costlier than him. He's just subsidizing someone else's care and is unlikely to receive as much of the benefits.

The bungled website only feeds into this dynamic. By throwing up an annoying barrier to enrollment, they're further dampening the likelihood that a young person will put up with the nuisance of buying something they didn't need very much in the first place. When the insurance companies reevaluate their pricing schemes for next year, they're going to have to take a hard look at their covered populations. It's not a pretty picture right now.

My (Least) Favorite Things

10) Republicans
9) Republicans
8) Republicans
7) Republicans
6) Republicans
5) Congressional Republicans
4) Young Republicans
3) Women Republicans
2) Gay Republicans
1) Black Republicans

Right-Wing Scum I'd Like to Have a Beer with

Everyone knows I hate Republicans because they're ignorant, greedy, and politically, they're only incrementally more evolved than fascists. But there are some Republicans whose personalities I don't find all that repugnant:

1. Ann Coulter, drag queen and an all-around horrible human being. Even if she's not a drag queen, she's at least got to be a fag hag. And she's such a fucking bitch that I kinda relate to her.
2. Rick Santorum, self-righteous zealot with a pretty cool last name. He might have the moral beliefs of a neanderthal (er... Homo Erectus) but he's stubborn about what he believes and probably won't recant even under torture.
3. Condi Rice, Soviet expert and Bush-era war criminal. For a woman whose job description was in her title, she didn't have the foresight as National Security Adviser to see any geopolitical downside to invading Iraq. She's cultured, sharp, and gives a mean RNC speech though. 

My Darling Barack

I can't bear the thought of losing you. It took me two years to get over Nancy.

Bareback iPhones

Never heard them called "nude iPhones" before. I always called them bareback iPhones.

August 2012 Budget

This is how I'll be spending my disposable income this month:

Except for my bare bones hair essentials (really this belongs in my rent/food/bills budget, but I digress), all my money is going to campaign donations for the upcoming election. 

The election is in three months, so this is actually very late to donate and still make an impact. Besides the Obama campaign, where my support is pretty obvious, I chose some congressional races that might not be on everyone's radar in case people want to donate but don't feel like doing the research. Every single race I picked is eminently winnable, and I focused on California congressional districts for all the House elections, just because I'm Californian and I feel like it. The one Senate race I'll be donating to is Elizabeth Warren's, because I fucking love bitches who tell it how it is.

You can also donate to the parties' House or Senate campaign arms, the DCCC and the DSCC, if your only interest is congressional majorities. But there's a big fat caveat emptor with donating to the campaign arms, because they often funnel money into races with conservative Democrats. It's not necessarily a bad thing in Republican states and districts, but I personally prefer to have more control about where my donation is going.

The Black List

This is a running list of people, things, ideas, industries, and organizations that I hate:

1. Oil companies
2. Coal plants
3. Anything involving fossil fuels
4. The NRA
5. Anyone who owns a gun (relatedly, anyone too pussy to say that they hate guns)
6. Eric Cantor
7. Anyone who uses the term "illegals" or "aliens" to describe human beings
8. Organized religion
9. Texas
10. Southern Baptists
11. Seventh Day Adventists
12. Pentecostals
13. Creationism, intelligent design
14. The CEO of Whole Foods who criticized Obamacare
15. People who criticize Obamacare
16. People who criticize Obama (you should be thrown in prison and tortured within an inch of your life)
17. SF MUNI
18. MUNI drivers
19. MUNI riders
20. BART
21. People who oppose California High Speed Rail
22. People who complain about high taxes
1. Rich people who complain about high taxes
2. Middle class people who complain about high taxes
23. Strict constructionists
24. College students
1. College students who sit in Occupy tents all year and then don't vote on election day
2. College students who think LaRouche is some kind of hero
3. College students who think Ron Paul is some kind of hero
4. College students who complain about how much their tuition went up and aren't able to critically deduct that the fee increases are the direct causal result of massive state budget cuts and then blame the fee increases on everything from the lack of Occupy tents on the quad to the rapaciousness of public school administrators
5. College Republicans - schooling is meant to make you smarter, not dumber. But I guess you can't really learn anything when you're convinced that all peer-reviewed information is a communist conspiracy
25. Hummers
26. Fraternities
27. Sororities
28. When people call you instead of texting. Join us in the 21st century plz

Private equity explained

There's been a lot of back-and-forth about Mitt Romney's record at Bain Capital and this has mushroomed into a larger debate about private equity ever since Cory Booker self-servingly defended it against that meanie Obama. Most people have only the faintest idea about what companies like Bain Capital do, so I thought it might be nice to give everyone a little background. The attacks on Mitt Romney's record at Bain Capital usually go something like, "he took over my company and laid us all off, and then the company went bankrupt" and they're going to keep coming because there's more than a pebble of truth in it. That being said, it's also a lot more complicated than that because private equity is a bit of an odd business.

The Why (Profits)

It helps to think of Richard Gere's character in Pretty Woman. He's a ruthless corporate raider who buys up companies and strips their assets to sell for a profit. Bain Capital, which Romney helped found, is a private equity company and also makes a lot of its money by buying weak companies. But Bain Capital doesn't usually look for companies to hack to pieces. Bain Capital was created by Mitt Romney and other management consultants from Bain & Company. And management consultants have jobs (at least in theory) because they're the best at optimizing operations and squeezing profits out of the business. So Bain Capital, true to its management consulting roots, buys companies it thinks can be made more profitable, and often looks to invest in its targets for the long haul. But remember that boosting profits means both growing revenue and cutting costs - and in most companies, the biggest cost is people. So laying off workers is one of the surest ways to increase an acquisition's value and that's what Bain Capital did innumerable times. This is not to say that Bain is evil; we're a market economy after all, and many of the companies it took over were very uncompetitive and badly needed restructuring, even if it means they had to jettison workers. And Bain actually had some pretty big success stories like Staples and other companies that have become household names after Bain stepped in.

The How (The LBO)

But private equity has a very particular, very ingenious way of raising the capital needed to buy up companies. It's called a leveraged buyout, and the "leverage" half of the term is finance jargon for "debt." Neither Bain Capital, nor its investors, actually front all the money needed to acquire a target through an LBO. Bain identifies a company that it thinks it can turn around, presents its plan to a bank, and takes out a big loan with a small downpayment. And then it uses the loan to purchase the target's capital.

To use a familiar investment analogy, your bank will let you take out a mortgage on a home, but you must put up the home as collateral in addition to making a downpayment, and the bank can foreclose on and sell the house in the event that you default on your loan. Similarly, Bain's investment might sour, and its bank can come in and liquidate the collateral. The twist in an LBO is that the target's assets, not Bain's assets make up the collateral for the loan. So when a private equity firm buys out a business, that business is immediately saddled with millions of dollars of new debts that will force it into liquidation if its new managers can't turn nurse it back to profitability. The private equity firm and its investors are only liable to the extent of the initial downpayment.

Long story short: when Bain's acquisition takes off, it has a profitable company that it can flip to a new owner for a lot of money. When Bain's investment turns out to be a dud, the company it acquired goes bankrupt and the bank comes in and tries to cut its losses by selling that company's assets at firesale prices.

Private equity is kind of a mixed bag, and you have to admit it can be pretty innovative. But for someone (*ahem* Cory Booker) to say that attacks on private equity are "nauseating," I have to assume that the good mayor simply has an oversensitive gag reflex.

Ron Paul Takedown

I just need to vent because I'm obsessed with libertarians (and their retarded cousins, the objectivists) and the more I think about their policies and how many young people of my generation fall for Ron Paul's naive worldview, the more explosively angry I get. That being said, I'm going to be super fair and try not to strawman his positions until I start to blow a fuse halfway through writing this.

1. Ron Paul thinks that we should go back to the gold standard. I'm sorry, since when was the modern global economy centered around mineral extraction? Our economy is not based on gold mining, and tying the money supply to gold extraction/inventories is disastrous policy in that it places a completely arbitrary limit on monetary expansion and a corresponding dampener on economic growth. People who don't understand economics love the idea of gold as currency. It's portable, shiny, and it has nice fuzzy historical associations. It's also not very strong and therefore not incredibly useful for building things so people decided it was a convenient store of value, for lack of a better purpose. But gold, just like any currency (from treasury notes to corporate stocks to municipal bonds), only has value by dint of social convention and legal contract. It makes no sense to impose an artificial mineral brake on a modern money supply that needs to grow in proportion to GDP.

2. Ron Paul thinks that inflation has undermined the USD and destroyed savings wealth. It's true that the USD has lost most of its value in the past century due to inflation... But unless your idea of good monetary policy revolves around protecting the nest eggs of a group of people who live 120 years without spending or investing money and just hoard cash (i.e. gold) under their beds awaiting the next revolution, this is not the most rational point you want to be making. 

3. Ron Paul thinks that you should have a right to buy a semiautomatic assault rifle without a background check and bring it to your local high school auditorium on a concealed-carry permit (though in his reckoning, forcing someone to even apply for that permit is a tyrannical government intrusion on civil rights). 'nuff said - this guy's a loony. 

4. Ron Paul believes that "amnesty" for illegal immigrants will encourage more moral hazard and reward law-breaking. Tough shit. If you were brought to this country illegally as an infant, you were not complicit in any illegal activity and anyone who says otherwise is a fascist racist piece of shit. Besides, how fucking dare anyone question illegal immigrants' love of America? Did you risk your life to come live in this country? I didn't. I was born here and got to enjoy freedom and prosperity by birthright and I can't even imagine what those people lived through so they could wash our toilets and then get insulted by fascist Republican racists like this man.

5. Ron Paul wants to repeal Roe v. Wade and doesn't believe that abortion has ever been needed to save the life of a pregnant woman. Dr. Paul has never heard of an ectopic pregnancy.

6. Ron Paul's energy platform promises to drill for more oil and fight "cap-and-tax" proposals in Congress. Cap-and-trade is a system hatched up by capitalist Republicans to align incentives among polluters by allowing markets to price the cost of carbon emissions. Also, the guy doesn't believe global warming. Maybe we should argue about gravity, evolution, and cosmic microwave background radiation too. 

7. Ron Paul opposes the drug war. Agreed. But what kind of fucked up, reality-contorted universe do you live in to think that this makes up for Points 1 through 6?

I love being a self-righteous liberal, because it makes me better than other people.

Thoughts on the health care mandate

I wonder how you'd feel about the nature of liberty, deprivation, and government coercion as a response to health care market failures if you lived a few months in [insert developed country other than USA], where no one has the 'freedom' to opt out of health care and no one is denied life saving treatment because of preexisting conditions or inability to pay.

There are very different ways to be 'free' and for all its faults, I'd argue that government regulation in service of internalizing negative externalities in health care (no, pure markets can't do it) and providing a minimum means of survival for our poorest citizens reflects a far more useful and real understanding of liberty than the narrow abstraction that says freedom means freedom even from coercive mandates to do something that any rational person would do anyway and have no problem with if it weren't called a mandate. Any government that is more wedded to the semantic abstraction of "liberty" than to the substantive, concrete realities here on planet Earth doesn't know what's up.

And to Justices Scalia and Roberts: I'm even comfortable with the logical extremes of my argument. The federal government can and should compel people to eat broccoli. Whether you like it or not, one's personal life choices have broader economic consequences that the constitution empowers the government to regulate.

Evangelicals are Wahhab Saudis

The way Santorum talks about contraception being "harmful to women and society" and the way his prominent supporter suggested that back in his day not being a slut was the main method of contraception, I feel totally justified in saying that the only difference between conservative evangelicals and Wahhab Sunnis is that one talks about Jesus and the other about Muhammed.

Life imitating art

Amanda Knox (Italian study abroad murder trial) = Roxy Hart (Chicago)

The Two B's

Bailout or bankruptcy? Specifically, the question that Obama faced and what we now know as the very successful auto bailout. (GM produced record profits and Chrysler was back in the red for the first time in over a decade) But Romney would have chosen the second B. Let's be clear: bankruptcy is very kind to a company's shareholders and creditors, and very unforgiving even as it shreds its (contractually obliged) promises to its workers. What else to expect from a Wall Street guy? He was willing to inflict immense pain upon workers whose financial planning would have been completely upended. And he takes that position because people like him believe quite paradoxically that the average well-managed investment portfolio wouldn't be sufficiently diversified to allow it to absorb the loss of some auto company securities. So instead, we should decide to take away the employees' livelihoods. All to spare the rich the indignity of a poor return on investment.

This would never happen at a Romney event

The first questioner wanted to know what the candidate was going to do for his wife, Callista, on Valentine’s Day. Gingrich said they would have a private dinner, hopefully exchange gifts and “reconnect a little bit,” which drew whoops from the crowd and led Gingrich to say: “No more details.”

Is it art imitating life?

Three of Romney's four main presidential rivals [Santorum, Gingrich, Obama but not Paul (yet)] are making the case against Romney based at least partly on character. Gingrich thunders that he is boldness to Romney's trepidation. Santorum reminds Tea Partiers that Romney is a moderate in conservative's clothing for the sake of convenience. And the Obama campaign, whose chief strategist suggested that Romney would not win because presidential elections are MRIs for the soul, is only too happy to add its (always constructive) analyses whenever the news turns to the negativity of the Republican primary.

Is the fact that everyone is talking about Romney's character a sign of a real weakness in his retail politicking skills? Or is it one of those self-fulfilling prophecy things, when everyone talks about his weakness until its the only pattern we can see anymore?

Boehner gots Romney's back

Obama's been taking shots at Romney over remarks that we should just let housing bottom out and now the speaker lends his voice to the shouting. Just get government out of the way.

Let them run against the morbidly unpopular idea of government. The only thing that's comparably unpopular is congressional Republicans. In November, we'll find out whether voters are more afraid of getting Medicare or of Republican plans to turn the US into an anarcho-capitalist brand.

Florida's primary being as good as over

I'd stake out a space 100 leagues right of where Romney is on any issue imaginable if I were Newt Gingrich.

A couple ideas off the top of my head:

- Call on congressional Republicans to reject funding compromises for the payroll tax cut extension unless they include provisions expediting the Keystone XL pipeline
- Call for a constitutional life amendment (inalienable right to life begins at conception)
- Call for a constitutional death amendment (to clarify: states have an unalienable right to execute people whom due process has judged not to have rights to life)