On the other hand, many of the companies that Romney closed needed to be closed. It was better for them to die quickly, and for the money to go to productive uses in the economy, than for them to decline slowly. The Obama administration has presided over layoffs in the federal government, not to mention the auto industry, and it would surely argue some of them were necessary.

At its best, private equity acts as an accelerant of needed creative destruction. At its worst, it’s a particularly heartless form of vulture capitalism that kills companies that don’t need to be killed in order to enrich investors who are already very rich. The truth often lies somewhere in the middle.

An “accelerant of needed creative destruction” is an incredibly kind way of describing the modus operandi of companies like Bain. I think Robert Reich puts a finer point on it here :

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rodifJlis2c

Guys like Mitt Romney are vulture capitalists. They’re greedy gambling addicts who fool themselves into thinking hoarding wealth is the same as “creating” wealth. They don’t create anything. At all. The “creative destruction” they bring to the economy is a tangential benefit far outweighed by the unemployment they create, the tax burden the rest of us have to share, and the ever-widening income gap.

Mitt Romney may be a friendly person and a loving family man with a terrific sense sense of humor, but beneath that weird laugh is a scumbag who’s unwilling to acknowledge the pain businessmen like him cause and candidates like him let fester. As Ezra Klein put it :

What he could have learned from that experience is that, just as creative destruction is important for moving an economy forward, a safety net is important for catching those who are left behind. As head of Bain, Romney fired a lot of workers who were perfectly good at their jobs, who were committed to their companies, who had families they needed to support. That was his job as head of a private-equity giant. But his job as president of the United States would also be to look out for those workers.
. . .
Romney’s national platform, however, calls for doing less for the victims of the global economy. He wants to repeal the Affordable Care Act, which would guarantee that workers would get health insurance even if they lost their jobs in, say, a private-equity led restructuring. He wants to pay for large tax cuts and more defense spending by cutting funds for Medicaid, for food stamps, for worker retraining, and for housing subsidies. He wants to cut Social Security benefits. He has no detailed plans to improve the continuing education system, or worker retraining programs, such that displaced machinists have a better chance to find a new job.

For those who miss the earlier designs, here’s a brief history of the evolution of this site. The first look was back when I threw together an art deco-ish design on (the atrociously-spelled) Blog*Spot :

Once I realized blogging wasn’t going to be something I did for a week and then completely forget about, I got a hosting package and migrated the site to Movable Type. In the process, I got a little carried away with the art deco thing and designed a site that was just horrible to look at. Even now, seeing all of that wasted space is just horrendous.

Shortly after that design launched, I realized it sucked. I started over from scratch, mocking up the site in Photoshop, cutting out each element, tweaking HTML and CSS to get everything to line up just right. I still like how this one turned out.

After a couple of years with that design, I got sick of Movable Type and decided to migrate the back-end to WordPress. Since this would require rebuilding the templates from scratch, I took the opportunity to tweak a few things about the design (got rid of the remaining deco touches, softened corners). Disregard the CSS issue that’s skewing the sidebar.

With the new design, I’m finally getting rid of the Cliff Edwards portrait that started as a nod to tendency of many early bloggers to post a photo of themselves on the homepage, but ended up confusing people more than anything else.

But I don’t think the GOP is a lock to win more than 50 House seats or that the Democrats have a less than 20% chance of holding onto the House. Based on what Nate Silver recently wrote, I think it’s looking more like a 50-50 shot :

But suppose that our forecast is biased against the Democrats by one point across the country as a whole, perhaps because pollsters are overestimating the enthusiasm gap very slightly. Just one point. Well, there are 6 seats in which we have the Republican candidate projected to win by less than 1 full point (it might be a very long election night, by the way). If Democrats hold those 6 seats, the projected Republican gains would be down to 46.

Now suppose that the forecast understates Democratic support by 2 points. There are 8 seats in which we project the Republican candidate to win by a margin of between 1 and 2 points; now these would also be wiped off the board. Now the Republican gains would be reduced to just 38 seats — and the Democrats would hold the House, 218-217!

Read that again: it means that if our forecasts turn out to be biased against Democrats by just 2 points overall, the party becomes about an even-money bet to hold the House.

And where might those two points come from? Well, first there’s the cell-phone problem :

The latest estimates of telephone coverage by the National Center for Health Statistics found that a quarter of U.S. households have only a cell phone and cannot be reached by a landline telephone. Cell-only adults are demographically and politically different from those who live in landline households; as a result, election polls that rely only on landline samples may be biased. Although some survey organizations now include cell phones in their samples, many — including virtually all of the automated polls — do not include interviews with people on their cell phones.
. . .
In three of four election polls conducted since the spring of this year, estimates from the landline samples alone produced slightly more support for Republican candidates and less support for Democratic candidates, resulting in differences of four to six points in the margin.

It makes sense that this might underestimate Democratic support since cell-only households tend to be younger, more educated, and urban than those with landlines. Adding to this problem is that some polls, like this one for the Nevada Senate race from CNN, are just undercounting Democratic-leaning demographics entirely :

At the end of the day, it’s all going to be about who’s more motivated to go vote, but I won’t be surprised if the big story next week is about how the media used bad polls to drive a bogus narrative.

If Bravo insists on beating the Project Runway formula to death, I hope they do a series set in the fine arts world next. I’d love to see painters struggle with a sculpture challenge. Or see some jerk-off insist that they don’t have to have any technique because their work is “conceptual”. Or a challenge that takes everyone to the Crayola factory. Or one in which they have to paint something that’s meaningful to them, only to find out the real challenge is to see who can sell the most t-shirts of their painting. Or a commercial illustration challenge in which the contestants have to redesign a corporate logo or redesign the packaging for some product they find abhorrent. Get a dozen pretentious assholes together like that and you know it’s gonna be a good show. The winner gets a gallery show and a feature in Juxtapoz magazine, the loser has to pack his brushes and go.

I’m happy to say that Work of Art is as awesome as I predicted. It perfectly captures everything I hate about the insular, self-proclaimed gatekeepers of the fine arts world. The judges are a bunch of easily-manipulated phonies and the artists seem evenly split between pretentious, self-obsessed douchebags and self-righteous outsiders who resent other contestants for being better at bullshitting their way through a critique. It’s hi-frickin’-larious.

Being a “CEO candidate” isn’t about balancing the books and restoring fiscal responsibility, it’s about making sure rich people get to keep as much of their money as possible, even if it means destroying programs that help children and the poor. That’s how Carly Fiorina did it, cutting tens of thousands of jobs at HP, making the company lose 60% of its value, and securing a $42 million dollar payday for herself. That’s how bank CEOs do it too, bringing the world economy on the brink of a depression, but rewarding themselves with fat bonuses for doing such a great job begging for taxpayer money. CEO’s have a cavalier attitude towards success and tend to take unnecessary risks because, screw it, companies come and go. They get paid either way.

Why anyone would favor this sort of approach to governing is beyond me.

(via)

The filibuster is one of those rules, allowing a 40-Senator minority to keep debate open indefinitely and block the majority from getting to vote. It’s anti-democratic and its abuse has been shockingly nihilistic, but whatever. It’s in the rules.

Another Senate rule, however, allows for budget-related bills to bypass filibuster and pass with a majority vote (ie. “budget reconciliation”). Since it’s restricted to bills that can affect the budget, there are obviously some restrictions, but rules are rules. The filibuster and reconciliation, both perfectly acceptable under Senate rules.

So how the hell did one rule become the de facto standard for passing all legislation and the other a codeword for legislative thuggery? The filibuster is somehow sacrosanct (even among some Democrats with an inexplicable fondness for Senate tradition), but using a loophole to defeat another loophole is equivalent to “jamming” a bill through Congress? Either the rules count or they don’t.

Even worse than all this parliamentary horseshit is the fact that everyone is mischaracterizing the potential use of reconciliation. Health care reform won’t get pushed through the Senate via reconciliation. Reform itself already passed the Senate. On Christmas Eve. After overcoming a Republican filibuster.
What might get passed through budget reconciliation is a much smaller bill with fixes to the Senate bill to bring it closer to the House-passed bill. Fixes, not the overall reform itself. It’s an important distinction. Reform already passed both houses of Congress. All the whining in the world won’t change that fact.

Democrats in the Senate still seem to think there’s some virtue in being polite to their colleagues who would uphold a status quo that kills tens of thousands of Americans every year, but this needs to end. While I doubt the leadership in the “upper house” would ever deign to lower themselves to hurting Joe Lieberman’s feelings in order to save lives, here’s what I would do if I were in charge :

1) Joe Lieberman is persona non grata – From this point forward, it should just be assumed that the Democratic caucus has 59 members. I wouldn’t suggest taking punitive measures against him (yet), lest the leadership come off as spiteful and alienate some of the votes still in play. Rather, Democrats should just ignore Lieberman completely. Stop inviting him to caucus meetings, don’t pay attention to the things he says, and actively engage on-the-fence Senators like Nelson, Collins, and Snowe while making no secret of the fact that the Senate leadership is no longer interested in giving a troll like Lieberman the attention he craves. If asked about Lieberman, Dems should be diplomatic, but treat him as if he were Sen. Graham or McCain. If Joe bashes any aspect of the reform effort, amiably write it off saying something like “Of course Joe would say that. Sen. Lieberman is a good friend, but he’s made it clear over the past few months that his vote isn’t in play.” If Joementum isn’t going to negotiate in good faith, stop negotiating.

2) Put reconciliation back on the table – I understand budget reconciliation is a convoluted process which the Democratic leadership is weary of employing, but they underestimate its value as a threat to moderate Senators who are willing to cut a deal. Harry Reid should split the Senate bill into its budget and non-budget related components (per standard reconciliation procedure), include the House version of the public option, and submit the bills to the CBO for scoring. Even if Reid never intends to move forward on reconciliation, a pending CBO score for a reconciliation-ready robust public option should hang like the sword of Damocles over the heads of every centrist Senator. If you don’t cut a deal, we’ll have a more liberal bill waiting to be passed.

3) The public option is still dead – It’s been obvious since the summer that the public option wouldn’t make it out of the Senate, so the Democratic leadership needs to work overtime to find a good alternative, even if it means taking a hit from the base. Unfortunately, it looks like allowing people to buy into Medicare is a non-starter, but ditching the public option entirely in exchange for ditching annual/lifetime coverage limits, implementing a hard 95% medical loss ratio, ending the monopoly exemption for insurers, and including Ron Wyden’s ideas for opening up the health care exchange (singular, not plural) to every American would accomplish just as much if not more than the already-watered down public options would. The key is to keep focused on the purpose of the bill and not the specifics. If a public option can be traded out for a compromise that will encourage stiff competition and actually control costs, be willing to make a deal.

4) Bring back the “constitutional option” – Once again, like reconciliation, I doubt Harry Reid would ever have the balls to pull something like this off, but it’s still worth employing as a tactic to get moderate Senators talking. The Democratic leadership should start trying to get whip counts together to see if they can scrounge up 51 votes for the nuclear option. Moreover, they need to make a serious effort to put the legitimacy of the filibuster in the spotlight. Every Democrat should be prepared to decry the filibuster as a parliamentary trick that has no constitutional basis and start peppering their speech with go-to phrases like “up or down vote”, “framer’s original intent”, and “simple majority” as a way of drawing attention to the fact that Republicans are using a procedural loophole to subvert small-D democracy. If Democrats can get the message across, they can assure the public there’s no shame in using a loophole to kill another loophole.

As they say, politics ain’t a beanbag, but for too long Democrats in the Senate have chosen the path of least resistance and let the American people be a punching bag in the process. This isn’t a game. Harry Reid and the rest of his cohorts need to put down their copies of “Robert’s Rules of Order” and pick up Machiavelli’s rules for kicking some ass (aka. “The Prince”). They need to stop being congenial and realize that if reform doesn’t happen in the next few weeks, it’s unlikely to happen for another generation or more. The fate of hundreds of thousands of lives rests on their shoulders.