Emma Sullivan is no longer a generic Kansas HS student. This should open a lot of doors for her. Hope she takes advantage properly.

Not sarcastic. She seems to have a lot going for her, and hopefully this will open some doors.

You do fail to understand.

You don’t seem to be trying very hard. Why should I help you out? Continue to fail!

There’s actually a story about Friedman. His wife’s family used to be worth a billion, give or take half a billion, through their share in General Growth Properties, which did real estate. In 2009 GGP went bankrupt.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Growth_Properties

The numbers are uncertain, but after losing 90%-99%, the Friedmans are probably still worth $10,000,000 or so, plus his job. So they’re still in the 1%, but no longer in the 0.01%.

No one should ever give money to the DNC,the DCCC, or the DSCC. This was already true before this issue came up. The advantage of central committees like these is that they have a national strategy and can direct the money where it’s most needed. Unfortunately, their national strategy includes maintaining center-right control of the Democratic Party, and they will always strategize against us.

My understanding is that Collin Peterson is invulnerable as Big Ag’s #1 Democrat in the House. He may be a little more vulnerable now that he’s not a committee chair. I doubt that he depends at all on the DCCC.

I’m not giving credit to Cheney, who remains a criminal regardless. He’s still a very bad guy on every issue but that one, and Walmart is still very bad on every issue but one.

Walmart is an overall negative force in a number of ways. Their primary problem isn’t the way the treat sexual minorities but the way they treat everyone who works for them, minority or majority.

Call me an asshole, but gender-identification issues are not that hard for the bad guys to deal with. Dick Cheney is one of the big villains of the last half-century, and he’s come out in favor of gay marriage.

Obama is our Grover Cleveland. The Democrats had a hard time after the Civil War and Cleveland won by getting Republican votes, mostly because he was less horribly corrupt than the Republican candidates, but also because he didn’t push the Democratic issues hard. (Both parties were conservative, but the Democrats had a few saving graces). In office he was worse than expected, sending the Army in to crush the Pullman strike.

Out of this came the Populist Party, which failed but frightened the other two parties enough to get some concessions and force them to think about certain issues.

Who’s her new speechwriter? sounds “American Conservative”-ish.

I haven’t read Woodward’s book, but others about that era. My reading is that the Populists and Bryan Democrats frightened the D and R establishments so much that the Republicans tacitly allowed the Democrats to destroy the Republican Party in the South. In North Carolina Populists and Republicans were in coalition and between them swept the 1896 elections almost completely. Neither Party wanted that. Democrats spent months organizing a military assault and overthrew the Republican city government of Wilmington (NC’s largest city then). The Republican governor and national Republicans did nothing. In the 1898 election terror tactics were also used, the Democrats won, and they then instituted Jim Crow.

McKinley’s 1896 campaign was the first big-money campaign. The Rs outspent the Ds 10-1 or more. Mark Hanna was the first election consultant.

Reminder Most Senators Will Be Long Dead before Social Security Trust Fund is Exhausted

Not dead enough.

This is a joke, right? Rahm Emmanuel?

They should be moderate and just ask that dumdum bullets and flamethrowers not be used.

He doesn’t compromise with *us*. “Don’t pander to the base” is one of his basic principles. It is diametrically opposite to the basic principle of the victorious Republicans.

The stuff he said to the students is for their consumption; his actual problem isn’t that he compromises too easily, but that he’s trying to do the wrong thing. He’s telling the students that THEY should compromise with HIM

A lot of that is Pol Sci 101. A large part of the academic / Pol Sci establishment has a horror of ideological and majoritarian politics, and the Democratic Party is dominated by Pol Sci types, often PhDs but at least people who have taken Pol Sci 101.

The Republican Party, by contrast, is dominated by opportunistic, semi-educated, semi-criminal entrepreneurs from the College Republicans. Karl Rove spent a total of one (1) year in college.

Who wins? Since 1968 it’s been the Republicans. Each Republican President changes the world, and each Democratic successor wins back only a small part of what was lost.

There’s another, game-theoretical principle that says that if you don’t bargain tough you lose, and if you don’t take chances you never win much. This is never taught in Pol Sci 101, but the College Republicans figure it out on their own.

If Pol Sci were an actual science, Democrats would win. It isn’t. It’s an anti-populist ideal, and a historical relic of past politics, but it’s not a science because it leaves out important things.

Can’t taint a Republican.

Academic economists were entranced by mathematics, and learned to write everything in the form of equations.

There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with this, in fact it’s a good thing, except that economists used math as a barrier, so that people who didn’t know the math (including good economists such as JK Galbraith) were ignored. As time went on, it became a competition to devise the most sophisticated mathematical models, even though their connection to reality was uncertain. (Even some insiders admitted that this was happening, and some of them thought it was OK). Finally the “quants” were brought in, doing math so difficult that none of the economists could understand it, and at a certain point everyone was flying blind (since the economists didn’t understand the math and the quants didn’t understand the econ.)

At the same time, as academic professionalism became bureaucratized, certain schools of economics gained control of the profession and marginalized other schools. New graduate students got with the program or quit. New hires were normally from the dominant school, and usually promotions too. This was all done by bureaucratic politics; people pretended it was an intellectual triumph, but it wasn’t. At this point, the dominant schools were invulnerable, answering only to themselves.

Finally, economists have lots of opportunities of various kinds in finance, banking, the Fed, etc., and many of them were corrupted that way. There aren’t any poor economists and very few middle-class economists. Even those who aren’t players in finance identify with the ones who are. And almost all are globalizing neoliberals, politically.

There are exceptions to all of this, notably Dean Baker, James Galbraith, and Mark Thoma.

The American people have been betrayed by government, the political parties, the major media, the major financial instiutions, and by many in academia, especially in economics. Very few ordinary citizens have any understanding of what just happened, and by an large, in my experience, they’re blaming the wrong people. Things could get much nastier than they are.