Come for the politics, stay for the snark.
Lily demonstrating what a vicious case of the Mondays looks like:
Woke her up and made her go outside this morning, and it was cold and the ground had frost, so she quickly did her business and said to hell with this and ran back inside. I found this ten minutes later.
Daily Beast columnist Michael Tomasky has given up on the South after 2014 as far as Congress goes, and is tired of the Dems spending good money on races they will never, ever, ever be able to win. Yes, NC, VA, and Florida are necessary for the White House, but…
At the congressional level, and from there on down, the Democrats should just forget about the place. They should make no effort, except under extraordinary circumstances, to field competitive candidates. The national committees shouldn’t spend a red cent down there. This means every Senate seat will be Republican, and 80 percent of the House seats will be, too. The Democrats will retain their hold on the majority-black districts, and they’ll occasionally be competitive in a small number of other districts in cities and college towns. But they’re not going win Southern seats (I include here with some sadness my native West Virginia, which was not a Southern state when I was growing up but culturally is one now). And they shouldn’t try.
My friend the political scientist Tom Schaller said all this back in 2008, in his book Whistling Past Dixie. I didn’t want to agree with Schaller then, but now I throw in the towel. He was a man ahead of his time. Look west, Schaller advised the Democrats. And he was right. Now it’s true that many states in the nation’s heartland aren’t winnable for Democrats, either. Kansas, Nebraska, Wyoming, Idaho, and Utah will never come anywhere close to being purple. But Colorado already is. Arizona can be. Missouri, it’s not crazy to think so. And Montana and South Dakota are basically red, of course, but are both elect Democrats sometimes. (Did you know that both of Montana’s senators right now are Democrats?!) In sum, between the solid-blue states in the North and on the West Coast, and the pockets of opportunity that exist in the states just mentioned (and tossing in the black Southern seats), the Democrats can cobble together congressional majorities in both houses, under the right circumstances.
This is the crucial argument that the Left has had on the future of the Democrats: which is better, more Democrats, or better Democrats? I’ve long been a proponent of more Democrats (Howard Dean’s 50 state strategy) but considering how quickly that has disintegrated in just 8 years, leaving the GOP with the biggest House majority they’ve had since Hoover, I’m going to say that “more Democrats” isn’t going to cut it. The 50 state strategy isn’t going to work anymore in Alabama or West Virginia or (and let’s face it) Kentucky.
But it’s not just a question of numbers. The main point is this: Trying to win Southern seats is not worth the ideological cost for Democrats. As Memphis Rep. Steve Cohen recently told my colleague Ben Jacobs, the Democratic Party cannot (and I’d say should not) try to calibrate its positions to placate Southern mores: “It’s come to pass, and really a lot of white Southerners vote on gays and guns and God, and we’re not going to ever be too good on gays and guns and God.”
Cohen thinks maybe some economic populism could work, and that could be true in limited circumstances. But I think even that is out the window now. In the old days, drenched in racism as the South was, it was economically populist. Glass and Steagall, those eponymous bank regulators, were both Southern members of Congress. But today, as we learned in Sunday’s Times, state attorneys general, many in the South, are colluding with energy companies to fight federal regulation of energy plants.
It’s lost. It’s gone. A different country. And maybe someday it really should be.
And that’s where Tomasky loses me.
Giving up on the South 100% is a recipe for repeating the last six years forever. It’s the ultimate emoprog copout, not to mention it erases the political power of millions of people of color and treats us as what, hostages with Stockholm Syndrome, not to mention that there are millions of poor white voters in the South too.
But we do need a new solution. We need better Democrats AND more Democrats, and giving up on the South and handing it over to the GOP for the next 20 years only assures more of the country-destroying insanity we’ve seen since 2009.
The Tea Party is not going to magically go away once Obama leaves office. We need to fight back on this crap and give people a reason to vote FOR Democrats and not just against the GOP. It’s hard to say “we can’t give up on the South” when Southern Democrats have given up on the Dems. But at the same time, running Republican-lite candidates to win Blue Dog seats only hurts the Dems across the board.
So is the fight now “Since Southern Democrats told Obama to go to hell, what should we do to keep them?” The answer will define the party for the next generation. In 2014, “They’re not Republicans!” was only good enough for what, 16% of the voting public to get off their asses and vote. We’ve got to try something else, and now.
Something like “Let’s run actual Democrats as candidates”.
Sorry. We gave the Alison Grimes and the Mary Landrieus a shot, and they failed miserably. They ran as Republicans and ran away from Obama and I spent months trying to convince anyone in earshot that this was the only way. The empirical evidence is in, and Blue Dogs are done for.
But that doesn’t mean “Dump the South” unless you want more years of wondering why a Democratic president can’t get anything done with a GOP Congress.
As Team WIN THE MORNING points out, in a post-Citizens United world, the Koch brothers have figured out the game more quickly than everybody else in either party and they’re playing it even more skillfully. Why bother with buying national party machinery when you can just bring your own people in to run things?
The Koch brothers and their allies are pumping tens of millions of dollars into a data company that’s developing detailed, state-of-the-art profiles of 250 million Americans, giving the brothers’ political operation all the earmarks of a national party.
The move comes as mainstream Republicans, led by Mitch McConnell, are trying to reclaim control of the conservative movement from outside groups. The Kochs, however, are continuing to amass all of the campaign tools the Republican National Committee and other party arms use to elect a president.
The Koch network also has developed in-house expertise in polling, message-testing, fact-checking, advertising, media buying, dial groups and donor maintenance. Add mastery of election law, a corporate-minded aggressiveness and years of patient experimentation — plus seemingly limitless cash — and the Koch operation actually exceeds the RNC’s data operation in many important respects.
“The Koch operations are the most important nonparty political players in the U.S. today, and no one else is even close,” said a top Republican who has been involved in the last eight presidential campaigns.
Two years ago the Kochs worked with the Drive The All New Reince Priebus and ended up with Mitt Romney, somebody that even they didn’t have enough money to buy the White House with. This time around, the plans seems to be to just cut out the RNC middleman and exercise that free speech directly with your own party apparatchiks.
Heading into 2016, the Koch network — under the auspices of Freedom Partners — has in many ways surpassed the reach and resources of the RNC. And, unlike the party, it isn’t bound by rules requiring it to maintain neutrality in primaries. Though the network has yet to engage in primaries, that could be the next logical step in its progression from apolitical think tank consortium to aggressive privatized political machine.
The best president money can buy, tanned field-tested, and ready. Of course this is the logical endpoint of “private sector solutions to public sector problems” and all that messy democracy crap, right?
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Via New York Magazine. Set your DVRs now.
Also a small ray of hope, from Daniel Politi at Slate:
Six detainees who had spent 12 years in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, were sent to Uruguay as refugees in the first resettlement of detainees in a South American country. The prisoners—four Syrians, one Tunisian, and a Palestinian—were detained in 2002, but were never charged and made up the largest group ever resettled in the Western Hemisphere. They have been getting ready for the transfer for months and have been taking Spanish lessons at the detention center since March, reports the Miami Herald. The best-known of the six is Abu Wa’el Dhiab, a 43-year-old Syrian who has been on a prolonged hunger strike and filed a lawsuit to prevent the military from force-feeding him. Although his release is likely to make the case irrelevant, the fight over whether a videotape of the procedure should be released is likely to continue, details the New York Times.
The United States has transferred 19 prisoners out of Guantanamo this year, leaving a total of 136 detainees in the controversial prison that President Obama has vowed to shut down. The White House is optimistic that if it can get the number of detainees down to “two digits,” Congress will revoke the law preventing the transfer of Guantánamo prisoners to U.S. soil, details the Times. If all low-level detainees approved for transfer are taken out of Guantánamo, some 69 would remain…
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Apart from hoarding what hope we can gather, what’s on the agenda as we start another week?
Mr. Charles P. Pierce, at Grantland, going after the easy targets…
Given my track record, I am in no position to wax sententious about any journalism start-up. Since 1978, I have worked full-time for five publications. Two of them do not exist anymore… So, if Derek Jeter wants to start up an athlete webzine and use it to cut out the middleman in the delivery of sporting banalities, who am I to ridicule the notion?…
In case you missed it, Jeter has launched something called The Players’ Tribune, a website where celebrity athletes — or someone in their employ — get to communicate with their primary audience without having to go through the scrimy reprobates of the establishment press corps… This, of course, is not the first time anyone has thought of this. They’ve been doing it for a while on the political side of things: ghostwritten editorials and books, the lamentably departed George magazine, the lamentably still extant Politico, and, of course, Fox News and MSNBC. In sports, we’ve had the ghosted biographies and autobiographies — Charles Barkley once famously insisted he’d been misquoted in his autobiography…
But in these clickbaiting days, what any fledgling publication really needs most is one good controversy to light up the more obscure regions of the blogosphere. TPT had its breakthrough only recently, and it was a whopper. It involved Tiger Woods and his sense of humor, which I believe was on loan from the Petrified Forest at the time…
It seems Mr. Woods was offended by a parody written by Dan Jenkins for Golf Digest. Mr. Woods’ decision to start a war of words with the guy who wrote Semi-Tough — not to mention a certain other sportswriter whose initials are CPP — turns out to be every bit as ill-advised as if either Mr. Jenkins or Mr. Pierce had decided to challenge Mr. Woods to a few rounds of golf.
Second funniest post I’ve read this week about of the very sensitive, extremely tender fee-fees of America’s Point-Zero-Zero-One Percenters, right behind Darrell West’s “How I Upset Donald Trump and a Few Other Powerful Billionaires” in the Atlantic…
Late Night Open Thread: One Last Media “Fiasco” for the WeekPost + Comments (25)
Bad as Ebola is, I’m kinda fascinated by the stats on Lassa in this article. Only 84% of those sick enough to be hospitalized die — that seems pretty serious to me. Gina Kolata, in the NYTimes, on the scientists “Sifting Through Genes in Search of Answers… “:
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — An old two-story brick building in a shabby part of town, formerly a distribution center for Budweiser beer, is now the world’s most powerful factory for analyzing genes from people and viruses.
And it is a factory. At any given time, 10,000 tiny test tubes each holding a few drops of gene-containing fluid are being processed by six technicians, working 24 hours a day, 365 days a year — two on the night shift — using 50 dishwasher-sized machines in two large rooms…
It is all in service of researchers who work for the Broad Institute, a gleaming, lavishly endowed genetics center a few blocks away. The sequencing center has worked on human DNA from an international effort, the 1,000 Genomes Project, that looks at the genes of thousands of people from around the world. It has gotten sequences of microbes, like dengue fever, malaria and West Nile virus. It has gotten genetic sequences from animals like chimpanzees.
And it is here that Broad scientists studying Ebola and a similar deadly disease, Lassa, send their samples, taking advantage of what the center’s manager, Andrew J. Hollinger, referred to as superfast track sequencing in their urgent work on these diseases ravaging West Africa. Those scientists receive their sequence data in about 40 hours, compared with days for the usual work.
The Ebola and Lassa group, led by Pardis Sabeti, wants to know what the viruses look like. Do they mutate while they are infecting people, possibly evading the immune system? Are some strains more deadly than others? And what about the genetics of the people who are infected? Are some people more resistant, perhaps even immune, to these viruses because of tweaks in their own genes?….
(More) proof that the universe is not only stranger than we imagine, but stranger than we can imagine. From the AP:
Chlorine gas sickened several people and forced the evacuation of thousands of guests from a suburban Chicago hotel early Sunday, including many dressed in cartoonish animal costumes for an annual furries convention who were ushered across the street to a convention center that was hosting a dog show.
Nineteen people who became nauseous or dizzy were treated at local hospitals, and at least 18 were released shortly thereafter.
The source of the gas was apparently chlorine powder left in a 9th-floor stairwell at the Hyatt Regency O’Hare, according to the Rosemont Public Safety Department. Investigators believe the gas was created intentionally and are treating it as a criminal matter…
Pieter Van Hiel, a 40-year-old technical writer from Hamilton, Canada, said the conventions are about having fun with people who enjoy the same hobby.
“This is intense weekend of socialization. It’s kind of weird, but it’s not weird here,” said Van Hiel, who said he writes role-playing games for animals. He laughed as he described being herded out of the hotel and across the street to the Donald E. Stephens Convention Center: “There was a dog-grooming trade show going on and in walk all these people dressed like dogs and foxes.”…
Kinda hoping this is an in-fandom beef, because c’mon — If the idea of people spending their own money to associate with other costumed individuals perturbs you to the point of committing a terrorist act, then it’s not the furries who need stronger supervision.
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What else is on the agenda, as we wrap up the weekend?