MichiganLiberal

Why do we keep talking about recovery without discussing increasing demand?

Eric B. — Sun, 27 May 2012 15:44:56 GMT

Rick Haglund takes a trip to Henry Payne's Museum of Half-Formed Thoughts and finds that Hillsdale College's Finest Mind says benevolent overlord Rick Michigan should get credit for the modest recovery under way in Michigan. That's a recovery, by the way, that predates his first day in office, but who's counting? (I note that Nolan Finley wrote something very similiar in this morning's Sunday column.)

Of course, this is all poppycock. The people who are writing this stuff were attributing good things to benevolent overlord Rick Michigan even before he took the oath of office (well, at least Daniel Howes did that). As Haglund notes, nary a word's been said about the rescue of the auto industry, which at Henry Payne's Museum of Half-Formed Thoughts is still referred to as by such wizened terms as Obamamotors (the apparent thinking is that the current sitting president is so delegitimized in their eyes that anything can be made bad by simply putting his name on the front of it). And, based on the numbers, it has been an auto industry-driven recovery. That sort of makes a lot of sense, when you put two seconds' thought into it, since it was an auto industry recession in the first place.

I digress. Haglund notes that the shift in tax policy probably created confidence in the business community. This is the same fairy-like thinking that has prompted so much talk about austerity. Austerity is supposed to increase confidence, which will naturally lead to greater investment by "job creators," which will happen right to the point where the pioneers of austerity say, "Hey, don't fucking try this, 'cause it doesn't work."

What's missing is that confidence alone doesn't grow an economy. I'm sorry to say this, because faith in confidence is a uniquely American trait. If you build it, they will come and all that. However, that's not always the case, and is especially true when it comes to expanding a business. Take the "If you build it, they will come" business plan to your local community bank and ask them for a loan, and you will find this out in very short order.

It turns out that the key element to actually growing a business turns out to be sales. If you have more people who want the products on your shelves, your sales increase and you move more products. If this happens enough, you run out of space and require both more of it and more employees to manage it. This is something that if you can demonstrate on paper is a good deal more likely to convince your local bank to give you money so that you can expand. How is that? Because your local bank is thusly more convinced that you will give it back the money you took. It works almost as if by magic, if "by magic" you mean "This is how the real world functions."

The question is how the Snyder policies relate to stimulating demand for products. The answer is that they have shifted a lot of money out of the pockets of the people who purchase things, which is bad, and into the pockets of people who own businesses. If this sounds sorta familiar to you, it's just like a traditional business transaction -- customer gives money to business owners -- except that the business owner doesn't give a product or perform a service for the consumer in return. It's a straight wealth redistribution scheme, and it's been pimped chiefly by people who oppose such things as "class warfare."

Haglund does go on to make some very good points about the recklessness of using excess revenues taken in by the state Treasury to bribe voters with a paltry Election Year pittance. It's "We realize we've taken thousands of dollars you might otherwise use to stimulate demand for goods and services and simply handed it over to business owners without giving you anything in return, but here is a check that will cover a sack of charcoal, a bag of frozen chicken wings, and a six-pack of beer ... go nuts" thinking. That money might otherwise be better spent on things like roads and schools and even public safety officers to keep down crime and damage from fire (thereby reducing business costs through lower insurance premiums). However, when you've already gone in for the "Let's take your money and give it to someone else and give you nothing in return" sort of policy making, it's probably a bit much to expect you capable of any kind of real long-term strategizing.

Today in "Why do we even bother with a Board of Canvassars?"

Eric B. — Sun, 27 May 2012 14:08:41 GMT

Whatever happened to empiricism?

According to a Michigan GOP operative who is following the race, McCotter faces a tough road ahead.
“The board consists of two partisan Dems and two partisan Repubs.They will deadlock at 2-2, which means McCotter would need a judicial intervention," said the operative, "but absentee ballots go out mid-to-late June, so time is against him.”

Assumng this unnamed person -- and can anyone explain why this source's information was so vital to the story that he or she couldn't be named? -- is correct, it's another stirring victory for the "Facts are relative" crowd! The courts have already been tasked to settle questions about font size (which you used to be able to do with a pica pole) and how to arrive at a 2/3 fraction of a set number of people. Now, they're going to have to issue a judicial ruling on how to count to 2,000.

Even if the Board of Canvassars comes down and rules unanimously that either there were or weren't 2,000 valid signatures, and does so honestly, the entire body has obviously lost its credibility. If people don't have any faith that it can function for the public good rather than for the political gain of the two parties, then why we do even bother with it? Why not just get rid of the God damned thing and replace it. Or not. At the same time we get rid of a broken Board of Canvassars, let's also dispense with the nonsense that petitioning government for redress of your grievances, which is what gathering signatures for a ballot question is, is supposed to be difficult. It's a Constitutional-fucking-right.

Finally, in none of the coverage have I seen it pointed out that last year when McCotter was running for president that the coverage said he had what other Republican candidates lacked, which was a reputation for having serious intellectual chops. Your candidate for the Republican nominee for president doesn't know how to count to 2,000. What does that say about the intellectual chops of the rest of the field, and the party as a whole?

Tim Walberg's concept of the nation's founding unsurprisingly a rightwing fantasy

Eric B. — Sat, 26 May 2012 18:40:58 GMT

I spent a little time fishing the Internet for Tim Walberg's position on the Law of the Sea Treaty today. For the uninitiated, the Law of the Sea Treaty is an international agreement that would establish rules (i.e. author laws, by which signatories are bound) for the extraction of natural resources (i.e. oil and natural gas) from parts of the Arctic Sea that are currently mostly ice covered but which will soon be opened up by global warming-driven loss of sea ice. The oil and gas industry likes it, as does the U.S. Navy (who have an impractical preference for matters of sovereignty to be spelled out in treaties rather than to paraphrase a bellicose yawping by the influential rightwing rag Investor's Business Daily, he who shows up first with the most guns). Naturally, Republicans are against the thing mostly because it involves the U.N., which has them hearing the rotors of black helicopters, and that naturally had me thinking of Tim Walberg, who I assumed would have some detailed explanation for his support even though he doesn't serve in the Senate.

Instead, I found this, which is even worse.

The recently introduced Walberg resolution, which has 33 cosponsors, says that "prayer before school board meetings is a protected act in accordance with the fundamental principles upon which the Nation was founded."
It cites a Supreme Court ruling that deliberative public bodies are allowed to pray. There have been other court rulings that say school-led prayer is unconstitutional.

it goes without saying that he is just simply confused when it comes to the fundamental principles upon which the nation was founded. If this was a nation founded upon Christian principles, then it wouldn't have required the labor movement to force an end to seven day workweeks, since such things are very cleary prohibited by the most famous of the three versions of the Ten Commandments these people want to see posted everywhere. Instead, the nation was founded on entirely secular principles and our most important documents were written by men who were either hostile towards the mysticism of religion (the part that evangelicals like Walberg tend to like best) or opposed to the idea of injecting any religion into any public square to the point where (Madison) opposed allowing chaplains to acquire commissions in the military and who were highly dubious of the ceremonial first prayer to lead off Congress.

Ever clueless, McCotter creates Dem pickup chance!

Grebner — Sat, 26 May 2012 01:05:03 GMT

To quote from MIRS:

"BREAKING NEWS: SOS: McCotter Short on Sigs -U.S. Rep. Thad McCOTTER (R-Livonia) does not have the 1,000 valid signatures needed to make the 2012 primary ballot, according to a Secretary of State (SOS) spokeswoman this evening."

If this is correct, all hell is abour to break loose. For one thing, there's already a tea-party Republican candidate (Kerry Bentivolio) on the ballot, who seems likely to become the Republican nominee, and who would be likely to make the seat competitive in the fall.

For another, the screwup almost certainly reflects McCotter's own lack of diligence and competence, which may make the Republican establishment leery of putting their muscle behind getting him through a write-in campaign in the primary, which will only be possible if Bentivolio is left to his own devices. If the national network of crazies becomes involved, I'd say Bentivolio is unstoppable - in the primary.

For a third, the just and upright Republican majority on the Supreme Court is likely to look for some way to fix the problem with the peititiions, whatever it was.

And, finally, Mark Brewer is bound to be at the center of Dem efforts to take advantage, which will mean... uh ... well .... a great chance to observe genius applied to a difficult and high-stakes problem.

The Democratic candidate, for those who care, are:

Bill Roberts, who proudly touts his connection to Lyndon Larouche and the tin-foil-hat caucus.

Syed Taj, a medical doctor and native of India, who was elected to the Canton Twp board in 2008. Not a hopeless, but also maybe not exactly what Waterford Twp is looking for in a Congressional candidate.

Nolan Finley wants presidential campaign to be about stuff we've already talked about

Eric B. — Fri, 25 May 2012 01:42:41 GMT

Nolan Finley wants this year’s presidential campaign to revolve around stuff people talked about four years ago and ultimately decided was unimportant.

Every company Romney invested in is being fine-tooth-combed. But Obama's association with Wright, domestic terrorist William Ayers and anarchist Saul Alinsky are pooh-poohed. Ask a question about the president's college records, his law school writings or new reports that he claimed to be born in Kenya to sell books and you're dismissed as a crazy birther.

Keep in mind that he writes that last bit almost a year after the president released the “long form” of his birth certificate. I can’t tell if he’s full of chutzpah or just stupid, but it’s hard to think of another reason why he appears to believe that the last four years haven’t been one long and tiring examination of the current president’s relationship with Bill Ayers and Jeremiah Wright. Also, Saul Alinsky? The “Alinsky’s-per-post” will soon become a standard unit of measurement in determining the relative batshit craziness of a website’s author.

You have to consider the entirety of what he’s saying, because it’s instructive to the way the Right has communicated lo these many years (starting when they started to learn that if they acted like they were entitled to be treated with a special sort of kid gloves that allows them to say whatever they want but that prompt them, once someone to object, to immediately declare themselves the victim of horrible censorship). What he’s saying is that despite four years of this that they ought to be allowed to continue on with it, with no inquiry into the conduct of their candidate (this is the direct opposite of how political campaigns have ever been covered, which is to discuss the relative personal flaws once a candidate has arrived on the big scene, and not waiting years to do that when it can best satisfy the sense of immediate gratification of rightwing newspaper editors). Their candidate, in this case one Willard Mitt “Mittens” Romney, is not to be subject to the sort of scrutiny that we generally put presidential candidates under. Such scrutiny is a bore and an insult to the private sector.

Meanwhile…

The president is right that venture capitalists are laser-focused on making money. And they make more of it if they successfully turn around a company than if they tear it apart.

And, how do venture capitalists “turn around” companies? As a member of the media and an employee of a company that has had its share of financial difficulties, it’s hard to believe that Finley is unaware of this, since downsizing has been a part of his chosen industry for the last decade. They “turn around” companies mostly by going in and reducing the company’s liabilities, which is a funny way to say that they reduce labor costs by shit canning lots and lots of people. Then, with the balance sheet looking brighter, they sell the thing off. The company appears profitable on paper, even if what the venture capitalists mostly did was shut off the water, tear out the copper pipes to sell as scrap, and then marketed the place as a functioning home.

The point, after all, is to merely make the companies once again profitable, not good corporate citizens or the source for decent-wage jobs. If that can be achieved by turning a labor force of middle managers, accountants, graphic designers, and human resources specialists into burger flippers and pizza delivery people, well that's a price Nolan Finley is happy for everyone else to pay.

Tax relief, House Republican style

Eric B. — Thu, 24 May 2012 17:57:29 GMT

The looming question here is where is Leon Drolet and his foam pig? Where is the threat to recall everyone who voted to raise taxes?

House Republicans must think voters are awfully stupid.
Apparently, they think the average voter can be bought off with 50 cents more jingling in his pocket each week, thanks to what they adorably call "tax relief."

The whole thing is worth reading, really. The only thing missing was an obvious allusion to George Bush Jr. taking the Clinton surplus and spending it by sending everyone a $300 check. David Cross' bit about it is just as fresh today as it was then, thanks to the House Republicans.

Teh Demas goes on to say that it's pretty clear that the House Republicans don't have a clear plan. I think that's been pretty evident for a very long time. They don't have plans, because they a) don't understand government, and b) come from a political ideology that regards government planning as inherently evil. This is precisely what you get when you elect people hostile to both government and knowledge to craft laws and term limit out of office everyone with experience. No one has any business professing to be surprised by any of this. No one has any business pretending that Democrats are equally guilty for this, either, although I'm fairly certain that last bit will get tossed around, anyway.

The things you learn while reading the morning paper

Eric B. — Wed, 23 May 2012 14:05:30 GMT

At least the catastrophic claims fund won't have to pay for a lifetime of rehabilitative care.

It appeared that Simmons’ cause of death was a head injury, Wilson said, adding that Simmons had severe trauma to the lower area of the back of his head.
Whether Simmons would have survived if he was wearing a helmet was unknown Tuesday, but Wilson said a helmet would have prevented the injury that investigators saw when they examined him, Wilson said.

In other words, dude would be alive today if he'd worn a helmet. I suppose it'd be crass to ask whether we could indict benevolent overlord Rick Michigan for violating the state's assisted suicide law for enabling this.

Austerity gibberish comes further undone

Eric B. — Wed, 23 May 2012 13:43:28 GMT

Just yesterday we had a hearty chuckle over the Detroit News issuing forth over austerity budgeting, which was the fad in Europe until it turned out to not be terribly effective. Today, another hearty chuckle at their expense.

A giant austerity bomb is timed to go off at the beginning of next year, and the threat of significantly higher taxes and lower spending has Republicans running around the Capitol sounding more like John Maynard Keynes than John Boehner.
Automatic, across-the-board reductions to domestic and defense spending, combined with the looming expiration of the Bush tax cuts, will dramatically consolidate the budget in the next calendar year, if Congress does nothing. And despite bemoaning deficits throughout the Obama years, the GOP’s suddenly come around to the view that cutting government spending is a job killer.

This is rich. Slashed government spending is the only thing that's held unemployment rates high over the last three years on the grounds that government work isn't supposed to be real employment. Glad it's an election year, or else they mighta never figured it out.

It is my earnest hope that the state's opinion writers figure out the basic truism that laying people off is no way to reduce unemployment, whether they be assembly line workers or school teachers. It is my earnest hope that they do this before they start giving credit to benevolent overlord Rick Michigan credit for the state's employment picture, which started to change even before he took the oath of office (this was when Daniel Howes claimed that unemployment was going down merely by the fact of his election), and that they point out that the state would be in much better shape had we not fired a bunch of cops (10 in Saginaw's latest budget), firefighters, and teachers so that we could afford to pad the pockets of business owners through a massive tax cut.

It is my earnest hope, at least.

Wherein I offer one of my semi-regular personal disclaimers

Eric B. — Tue, 22 May 2012 23:38:49 GMT

So, here's a story from the day my sister got married. I'd just started dating the girl who would later go on to give birth to my son, and didn't feel that exposing her to my family for the first time at my sister's wedding was such a hot idea. That left me facing a long drive to Chicago by myself for a weekend to be spent entirely with my family. One of my oldest friends from college, a guy named Steve Coon, volunteered to go along because he enjoyed observing my family up close. I won't go into details.

Anyway, we went, I drank the better part of a bottle of rye, my sister's husband told Steve that if things didn't work out there was always d-i-v-o-r-c-e, which is what happened (he got her to convert to his faith of Catholicism, by the way, as a sign of how dire a menace homosexual nuptuals pose to the institution), and later my mother told me that it would be okay with her and the rest of the family if I came out of the closet as a homosexual*.

A couple of years ago, I pointed out that I was good friends with the Dillon campaign spokesman, T.J. Bucholz. Well, I'm even closer friends with Steve. He was there at my sister's wedding, he was there when I graduated from CMU, and he was there last weekend when I was putzing around on my front porch and he was out on a walk. Dude lives about three blocks away from me, which proved convenient one awful Monday night last March when I was able to stagger over to his house after receiving a phone call from a mutual former co-worker of ours that another mutual former co-worker of ours had died following a short illness. Later that week, while drinking beer after the funeral, he declared us heterosexual life partners, which I thought was funny enough that I later put it on Facebook.

Congrats, Steve. As for the Pestka-Thomas race in the 3rd, this is the official announcement that this site is officially neutral, although I think Pestka is going to mop up the floor with dude, Jennifer Granholm's support notwithstanding.

*--I'm not.

Why even bother with a public relations staff when the local paper will do?

Eric B. — Tue, 22 May 2012 15:08:09 GMT

This is just awful.

To Michigan leaders, charter schools offer alternative, competitive programs to the traditional public schools and a choice for parents.
Schuette said such schools offer a value-based, performance-measured, quality-focused education, and provide greater access to education and more freedom for Michigan's family and children.

Let it be said that when it comes to things like event coverage that I think it's terrible to include dissenting opinions for the sake of including dissenting opinions, especially when said dissenting opinions add nothing of value to a story. That is, why ask for an official Republican or Democratic reaction to a development within the other party when such a reaction is easily imagined by anyone capable of fogging a mirror?

In this case, however, the efficacy of the comment in question is highly debatable and comes from someone -- the state's attorney general -- with no special, discernable expertise to make it. Furthermore, it is starkly at odds with the available research, which says that simply opening charter schools hasn't done anything to improve the education of the state's children. Furthermore, by way of sin of omission, it suggests that the traditional public school model, the one that built the fucking country, is a failure.

I'm not sure how you can write a story like that without turning it into cheap propaganda, but it does recall a very good rule that newspapers held dearly when quality was regarded as an important priority ... never publish photos of people passing oversized checks between them.

Like Pravda, except for idiots

Eric B. — Tue, 22 May 2012 14:52:34 GMT

News from Europe!

Germany, Europe's largest economy, will accelerate to 2% growth next year after 1.2% growth in 2012, while France, the eurozone's second-largest economy, will expand 1.2% next year after 0.6% growth this year, the OECD said.
Italy's economy, by contrast, will shrink 1.7% this year and 0.4% in 2013, the OECD forecast. Spain is also set to remain mired in recession, with contraction of 1.6% this year and 0.8% next.

It should be noted that Italy and Spain are notable for another reason, which is that both of them -- like much of Europe -- have embraced austerity budgets, slashing government spending during a recession or weak recovery. The point of the belt tightening, as we've heard ad nauseum for the last four years, was that reducing government debt would inspire confidence in private investors. Slashed government spending would thus result in greater private investment, sort of like the inbred cousin to the idea that cutting taxes will always result in greater government revenue.

The problem? The world doesn't appear to work that way. Reduced government debt hasn't inspired anything but a risk of even deeper recession. The real world experience has been that when fewer people have less money to spend, the economy can't claw its way out of doldrums nearly as easily, and that cutting spending doesn't automatically through the power of Underpants Gnomes result in greater invester confidence.

So, what kind of nitwit continues to believe that real world experience is not a reliable guide to outcomes? This kind of nitwit.

The choice for western economies is positioned as being between austerity and growth, with growth defined as emanating from new government spending. A better option is having both austerity and growth through policies that restrain runaway government spending and encourage private investment.

A better option yet would be to wait for magical pixies to come flittering out of the Magic Forest and spread their special pixie Prosperity Dust on us all. That has as good a chance to work as would continuing to cleave to the austerity line that has failed so badly over the last four year everywhere it's been tried out. In fact, we tried it out in this country during the Great Depression. The results? Things got worse.

The News goes on to wipe this away by proclaiming the president guilty of introducing uncertainty into the tax-and-regulation mix (where were these people when Tom McMillin and the rest of the state House wanted to push light bulb manufacturers into a regulatory patchwork). This is the old chestnut about how American capitalism is such an inflexible, flimsy thing that profits are made elusive by mere talk about raising taxes on the wealthy from their current historic lows (something again rebutting by history, which tells us that the greatest economic growth came when income taxes on the highest brackets were at historic highs). This leads us into our next question...

Can we all agree that we've finally reached a point where it's become appropriate to question whether people who are overtly hostile to knowledge and education are the sort of person who should be lecturing us on how something as complicated as a modern economy is supposed to function? I mean, let's connect the dots a minute here ... these same people who don't appear to understand basic theories in physics about how the atmosphere functions feel qualified to denounce climate change as a Bolshevik plot, and who thought democracy would spring forth from bare rock even as they were entirely ignorant about the differences between Shiite and Sunni Muslims, are the same people who insist that against all experience that cutting government spending will lead to robust economic recovery. Pardon me for once again being uncivil to my centrist brethren, but at one point is is appropriate to tell people who've been regularly wrong about everything to just sit down and shut up a minute.

By the way, one last paragraph for your amusement.

Instead, private capital is reluctant to come into the market at a time when the future cost of taxes and regulations remains so uncertain, and when the country is led by a president who is now arguing that the purpose of business is to create jobs, and not value and profit.

From the same newspaper, in 2006.

This raises an interesting question: What's the problem with cutting another $1 billion in the budget to attract more jobs to Michigan with lower business taxes if she already has cut $4 billion in a $41 billion budget?

Editorial consistency is really only a problem if you view yourself primarily as an objective truth teller. Cheer leaders, however, are really only concerned with how to get the crowd rooting for the home team.

One thing leads to another

Eric B. — Tue, 22 May 2012 14:09:40 GMT

Via Facebook, Barb Byrum says that they've had to set up overflow rooms at the state Legislature, my guess is that it's from people outraged over the debate concerning bills that would make it harder for minorities, poor people and probably the elderly to vote. Keep in mind that this isn't a privilege, but a right that the state Legislature is going to vote to create hoops it expects you to jump through to exercise it. It's classic "All men are created equal, but some are just more equal than others" governance so adroitly lampooned by Orwell, except that this time the target isn't a misguided worker's revolution in Russia.

To understand how badly flawed this legislation is, it's worth considering the arguments put up to promote it. Anyone who tells you that voter fraud is a genuinely seriously problem is either lying or stupid, so they've had to resort to utter nonsense like arguing that a) Democrats are hypocrites because they announced an expectation that participants in their purely private nominating contest to produce identification and b) that an audit that found statistically insignificant numbers of bad votes is proof positive that illegal immigrants are overtaking the election system. To that, I have to point out that the idea of illegal immigrants voting is a very, very old one ... when Dave Camp voted against the MTv-driven Motor Voter bill of the early 90s, his reasoning was that illegal immigrants would line up around the corner to get a crack at voting for Bill Clinton.

The party in the majority of the state Legislature long ago abandoned reason in crafting policy, so I don't expect anyone's objections to do anything to derail this. Let's just get out in front of the Ron Dzwonkowski's of the world and say that when the voiceless are further disenfranchised for no good reason that Democrats are just as much to blame as Republicans, and that what we need are leaders who will come to the center.

The Catholic Church argues that it is a person

Eric B. — Mon, 21 May 2012 18:45:37 GMT

The First Amendment is supposed to guarantee rights to invididuals to be free from the repression of state-organized churches. You know, individuals like you, and me, and that other person known as the Catholic Church.

The conference said Monday that the mandate violates religious freedom by requiring many religiously affiliated hospitals, schools and charities to comply. President Barack Obama offered to soften the mandate to accommodate religious groups, but U.S. Roman Catholic bishops say the change doesn't go far enough.

Okay, so this is how a reactionary church organization reacts to news that it has to change with the times ... it sues, claiming rights normally reserved for a living, breathing human person. I mean, what they're arguing here is that it's not enough for women to receive contraception from the insurance company, which a majority of their own flock, especially women, think is a good thing; they just don't want women employed at their institutions to receive it at all. You can pick your sides on this historic fight for equality across the board. The Catholic Church is against homosexuals and women, which suggests that there are probably very good reasons why the size of Rome's flock continues to dwindle, especially among what would be tomorrow's parishoners.

I'd be remiss to visit this topic without reminding all that while the Church has remained steadfastly against expanding the rights of women and homosexuals, there is at least one important demographic to whose defense it has risen to give a stirring defense ... pedophile priests.

From the Department of "Who could have predicted?"

Eric B. — Mon, 21 May 2012 14:42:00 GMT

Last year, the state cut business taxes and again cut municipal revenue sharing, replacing their pot of statutory revenue sharing with "Do as we say" money. at the time, I seem to remember predicting that this was the real underlying flaw with the Emergency Manager law, that it would wind up being applied to cities that didn't mismanage resources because of decades of broken promises by the state to local government, and a local government system in the state of Michigan that is just insane. Yesterday, in the Freep.

The news last week that middle-class Allen Park could soon be administered by a state-appointed emergency manager should be a wake-up call to the entire state, pushing Gov. Rick Snyder and legislators to re-examine how state fiscal policy is pushing municipalities to the brink and threatening to undermine their plans for economic revival.

The problem is that Republicans and conservatives are happy to provoke these mini-crises because they will help local governments whack local worker unions. As with all things, they haven't shown much interest in policy making that addresses underlying problems like an outdated approach to local government (no one has, while we're bullshittin'), and they don't appear to be terribly interested in crafting policies that puts attracting young talented people, critical to today's economy, at the forefront. That would be habitable, livable communities, sunshine, or as Jennifer Granholm called them, "Cool Cities."

Instead, in deed, they've shown a great willingness to starve cities and other local govenments because a) our Legislature isn't filled with terribly bright or terribly forward-looking people, and b) the people driving policy making are interested in political outcomes rather than working government.

But, I know, pointing this out is an offense to the "both sides are equally guilty" fashion of the age, even when this is all happening while one party controls the policy-making machinery. Blame Gretchen Whitmer ... for some reason.

If "centrism" fell in the forest, should anyone care?

Eric B. — Sun, 20 May 2012 14:40:01 GMT

Let’s say that you and I had to run a household together. Lets say that we decided that while some of our decisions would be an individual thing that management of common spaces and storage of common items would be jointly decided. Let’s say, then, that in sorting this all out I said that we should store rags used to change the oil in our cars inside the fireplace. Let’s further say that I refused to budge from my position that we should store oily rags in the fireplace, and angrily denounced you for suggesting that we could always just keep them in a box in between the gas furnace and a giant magnifying glass set so that at the sun’s highest point it focused that light down to the size of a pin head on the oiliest square inch of the oiliest of the oily rags. Let’s say that the rebuffing of your suggestion prompted you to harden your position on the issue of the oily rags, that you put my foot down?

What would any casual, neutral observer, let’s just for sake of brevity assign him the gender of a man, say about this arrangement? He would very rightly refer to it as insane. His first question would probably be why we’re storing oily rags in the first place, why we didn’t just dispose of them properly. He would then probably ask why we were storing the damned things inside, let alone inside of a fireplace or in between a furnace and what would amount to a focused beam laser.

If you’re Chad Selweski, Phil Power and Ron Dzwonkowski – all practitioners of the strange journalistic religion called High Broderism (known also as “centrism”) – your response would be different. Your response would be to shake your head sadly and bemoan the death of compromise. They would say that you bear as much to blame for our inability to arrive at a solution for where to store the oily rags as I do. The thorny reality that the position from which one of us refused to budge would lead to the house burning down is less a concern to them than the fact that we can’t agree on where to put the rags. Under those circumstances, it is preferable to just go ahead and store the damned rags in the fireplace. George Weeks touches on the issue this week, lamely alluding to Republicans who say it’s “both sides.” Olympia Snowe says something changed in maybe 1996, a year that marks the high water mark for one Newt Gingrich, whose tenure as House Speaker was marked primarily by a desire to destroy Democrats and everyone else who disagreed with him. How you hang that equally on both parties is a good question, and the answer appears to be invariably a not-terribly-thought-through, “It just is.”

After establishing that the death of centrists is a two-party problem, although more acute in one of them, Weeks then spends three-quarters of his column identifying the rightward tilt of the rightwing party. Moderate after moderate after moderate (including one Democrat) are replaced by ideologues … it just happens that the ideologues are all from the same party (including the one who replaced the moderate Democrat). Weeks waves off the pesky disconnect between his thesis and the evidence by concluding with three paragraphs of gibberish about Carl Levin’s tenure in the Senate.

It’s very appropriate that this latest loving ode to High Broderism comes the same weekend that the state GOP ousted from its national committee the disagreeable but honorable Saul Anuzis, who made strides in trying to balance conservatism with the pragmatic demands of big tent party building, and replaced him with Dave Agema, who gives the impression from everything he says that if empowered to do so that he’d put political opponents in a concentration camp. He pledges to help take the national party further to the right, which is to say further away from compromise that isn’t predicated to “the enemy” (for these people have trained themselves to regard Democrats and everyone who doesn’t think, believe and/or act like them as enemies) completely yielding to their demands.

And, what are their demands? Chiefly that we store oily rags in the fireplace. These are the same people who are outraged that the debt ceiling was raised (that is, bills were paid, which they have hopelessly confused with the act of spending money), who believe that the federal deficit is caused by spending money on public broadcasting and the space program, who think we can lower health care costs by throwing seniors off Medicare, who believe that energy efficiency and alternative energy programs are forms of Socialism and who are convinced that not only is climate change a hoax but people who say that it isn’t are in on the conspiracy.

Again, it has to be asked … is it really so awful to refuse to compromise with any of that?

Update! ... Made to order, from the man called Booggerman:

Nyhan says that some of today's polarization is an outgrowth of the fairly benign 1950s, when the most frequent complaint about politics was that you couldn't tell the two parties apart.
"Now," he said, "we tend to look at politics like a team sport, all about winning and losing. But people do have a much better sense of where the parties stand ... the choices they are facing."
But how do we fix this? How do we get to a sensible middle ground where I think most Americans -- not the noisiest ones -- would like their leaders to be, so politics can be about public service instead of seizing power?

We actually know what happened in the 1950s, when the divergence between the two parties started to take shape. If Ron "Booggerman" Dzwonkowski were so inclined to investigate this, as you'd expect a journalist to want to do, he could find out what changed himself and allow that to inform his commentary.

What changed, for those of you disinclined to read history, took place within the Republican Party. Highly organized, well-financed activists who saw as their leaders Barry Goldwater and Ronald Wilson Reagan waged a war of control over the party with the consensus, Eastern establishment wing that had as its leaders Dwight D. Eisenhower, Nelson Rockefeller, and to some extent George Romney (the guy who later said he was brainwashed into supporting Vietnam ... anyone ever hear of him?). The winner promptly started to wage war on the other political party and the idea of American political consensus. Which one won? I'll give you two guesses, and the first doesn't count.

This stuff is hardly a state secret; in fact, it's not even controversial to the point where I doubt that even the most argent conservative with rudimentary familiarity with American political history would dispute the basics of this historical narrative. So, how does it fail to the work of the likes of Ron "Booggerman" Dzwonkowski? Why are we hearing this mushy-headed nonsense about a loss of political consensus and how no one will come together in the middle anymore? All answers that I can imagine to be possible just leave me sad.