Calcium leaks cause muscle fatigue, not lactic acid

The New York Times reports the new discover of how muscles get tired. The old explanation, that muscles release lactic acid, turns out to have been wrong.

In a report published Monday in an early online edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Dr. Marks says the problem is calcium flow inside muscle cells. Ordinarily, ebbs and flows of calcium in cells control muscle contractions. But when muscles grow tired, the investigators report, tiny channels in them start leaking calcium, and that weakens contractions. At the same time, the leaked calcium stimulates an enzyme that eats into muscle fibers, contributing to the muscle exhaustion. [Snip]

Dr. Marks, a cardiologist, wanted to discover better ways to treat people with congestive heart failure, a chronic and debilitating condition that affects an estimated 4.8 million Americans.

Its hallmark is a damaged heart, usually from a heart attack or high blood pressure. Struggling to pump blood, the heart grows, sometimes becoming so large that it fills a patient’s chest. As the disease progresses, the lungs fill with fluid. Eventually, with congested lungs and a heart that can barely pump, patients become so short of breath that they cannot walk across a room. Half die within five years.

In his efforts to understand why the heart muscle weakened, Dr. Marks focused on the molecular events in the heart. He knew the sequence of events. As the damaged heart tries to deal with the body’s demands for blood, the nervous system floods the heart with the fight or flight hormones, epinephrine and norepinephrine that make the heart muscle cells contract harder.

The intensified contractions, Dr. Marks and his colleagues discovered, occurred because the hormones caused calcium to be released into the heart muscle cells’ channels.

But eventually the epinephrine and norepinephrine cannot stimulate the heart enough to meet the demands for blood. The brain responds by releasing more and more of those fight or flight hormones until it is releasing them all the time. At that point, the calcium channels in heart muscle are overstimulated and start to leak.

When they understood the mechanisms, the researchers developed a class of experimental drugs that block the leaks in calcium channels in the heart muscle. The drugs were originally created to block cells’ calcium channels, a way of lowering blood pressure.

Dr. Marks and his colleagues altered the drugs to make them less toxic and to rid them of their ability to block calcium channels. They were left with drugs that stopped calcium leaks. The investigators called the drugs rycals, because they attach to the ryanodine receptor/calcium release channel in heart muscle cells. The investigators tested rycals in mice and found that they could prevent heart failure and arrhythmias in the animals. [Snip]

Dr. Marks wondered whether the mechanism he discovered might apply to skeletal muscle as well as heart muscle. Skeletal muscle is similar to heart muscle, he noted, and has the same calcium channel system. And heart failure patients complain that their muscles are extremely weak.

“If you go to the hospital and ask heart failure patients what is bothering them, they don’t say their heart is weak,” Dr. Marks said. “They say they are weak.”

So he and his colleagues looked at making mice exercise to exhaustion, swimming and then running on a treadmill. The calcium channels in their skeletal muscles became leaky, the investigators found. And when they gave the mice their experimental drug, the animals could run 10 to 20 percent longer.

Then, collaborating with David Nieman, an exercise scientist at Appalachian State University in Boone, N.C., the investigators asked whether the human skeletal muscles grew tired for the same reason, calcium leaks.

Highly trained bicyclists rode stationary bikes at intense levels of exertion for three hours a day three days in a row. For comparison, other cyclists sat in the room but did not exercise.

Dr. Nieman removed snips of thigh muscle from all the athletes after the third day and sent them to Columbia, where Dr. Marks’s group analyzed them without knowing which samples were from the exercisers and which were not. The results, Dr. Marks said, were clear. The calcium channels in the exercisers leaked. A few days later, the channels had repaired themselves. The athletes were back to normal.

There is discussion in the article of a drug being developed to correct the problem of calcium leaks, but any effective medications are a long way off. What really matters is that researchers are beginning to have a greater understanding of muscle fatigue, and that understanding is going to result is new ways of getting the human body to work better.

We all experience muscle fatigue, and the researchers are only just now getting a better handle on understanding of it. Could these findings shed light on Chronic fatigue syndrome and Fibromyalgia?

This article leads me to a speculation. I use caffeine (coffee or tea) when I am feeling fatigue. Caffeine causes a physical reaction similar to the fight or flight mechanism. Noting the description above of how the body puts out the fight or flight hormones of epinephrine and norepinephrine to make the muscle cells contract harder when they are fatigued, I wonder how the caffeine and calcium leakages interact?

I also wonder how many other physical, emotional and mental events we all experience are just waiting to be unraveled this way.

The Washington state Republican caucuses.

The way the conservatives tried to manipulate their own caucuses in Washington State is quite unbelievable - or it would be if they weren't conservatives. Here is what Sam Boyd had to say about it:

...they ran the caucuses contrary to their own rules, possibly fiddled with the results of those caucuses (remember the party ran this election not the state) and then just stopped reporting the results at all once they had their desired result. And we wonder why conservatives have trouble governing...

More details will appear soon, I am sure.

But will they appear in the national media? The New York Times has yet to publish a story on this clear effort to rig the Republican caucus. Similarly, the Washington Post provided a brief report on Huckabee's complaint about how the Republican Party just stopped counting votes, but the report came out Monday. They missed the story when it happened Saturday, and haven't gone beyond a short Reuters wire report of Huckabee's challenge on Monday.

Who are the media afraid of embarrassing? John McCain or the Republican Party in general? One thing is clear, though. They've missed the real story and embarrassed themselves.

What's happened to America? Over half a century of war and the conservative movement.

What’s gone wrong with the American economy? The Cold War, excessive military spending, and a refusal to invest in the most important economic resource America has, its work force. This has been concealed by the free market fantasies of the Reagan Revolution, which has destroyed more of the economy than it has built. This has been shown by the failure of real middle class wages to increase since 1970. The economy has been pumped up by first getting housewives out of the home and into the work force, followed by an economy pumped up by making credit easier to get, then during the 90’s the Federal Reserve has manipulated the interest rates to be lower to give the illusion of a healthy economy. This has resulted in the two most recent bubbles in the financial economy, but the manipulations of the financial economy have primarily redistributed income away from the real economy and productive workers to people in positions of control of financial products. Unfortunately, financial products have little or no effect on real economic productivity. All these financial manipulations have had the effect for the last three or more decades of exporting our real economy to the rest of the world.

Charles W. McMillion has written an article, first published in "Manufacturing and Technology News" January 24, 2008, that shows the current state of the American economy.

In just the past seven years, US household debt almost doubled and federal debt soared by near two-thirds, rocketing by a combined $10.5 Trillion. The total combined debt of households ($14.4 Trillion) and the federal government ($9.2 Trillion) is now 168% of GDP, far higher even than in the brief spike during World War II. All other levels and ratios of debt also have soared far beyond any past precedent.

Yet, this record-shattering explosion of debt stimulus created the weakest seven year job growth (4.4%) and one of the weakest periods of real GDP growth (18.1%) since the Depression: less than 6 million new jobs ($1.8 million of debt per job) and a mere $4 Trillion increase in GDP.
This period began with the collapse of Wall Street's stock market bubble from the late 1990s and ends now with the collapse of Wall Street's housing and other debt bubbles. That such massive mortgage and consumer borrowing, tax cuts and war spending produced such remarkably weak real economic results suggests the months and years ahead could be quite difficult.

Yet, along with Fed rate cuts for cheaper debt, the only policies seriously considered by this year's crop of Wall Street-funded political candidates is more short-term household and federal debt "stimulus." Locked into a failed, 30-year-old ideology of deregulation and debt, there is no option to compete with the remarkably effective industrial and trade policies pursued by China and others.

2008 will be the ninth consecutive year the US economy grows slower than the world's growth while China grows more than three times faster. In the past seven years of sluggish growth, the US accumulated Manufacturing trade deficits (production shortfalls) of over -$3 Trillion with full Current Account trade losses of -$4.3 Trillion; more than the entire nominal growth of GDP.

At the same time, now in the third year of their remarkable 11th 5-Year Development Plan, China's accumulated Current Account surplus soared by nearly $1 Trillion since 2001, near 13% of GDP in 2007. These surpluses are funding China's now $1.5 Trillion war chest of foreign currency reserves.
Record US trade losses have accelerated the hollowing-out of the once dynamic US economy. For the first time on record, in 2002 the US lost its historic global trade surplus in Advanced Technology Products. Worsening sharply, since 2004 the ATP deficit became larger than the US trade surplus for Intellectual Property services, royalties and fees. That is, for the past four years the US has a worsening combined deficit in technology goods and services. Technology no longer pays any part of the US import bills for oil, cars, electronics and clothing, etc. China now accounts for half the US Manufacturing trade deficit and more than the entire deficit in technology.
Reflecting the production shortfall from the trade deficits, BLS data show output growth since 2001 is among the weakest since the Depression and the gain in total hours worked (just 0.5%) is, by far, the weakest. This is why productivity growth has appeared misleadingly healthy; productivity is a measure of output per hour of labor.

Another powerful measure of the hollowing out in the economy is the radical shift in the job market. Of the 5.92 million total new jobs in last seven years, only 4.32 million were in the private sector while 1.66 million were in state/local governments, mostly for public education, health and prisons. The federal government cut jobs in the Postal Service.

More than all of the new jobs added by the private sector since 2001 are in private education and health care bureaucracies (3.34 million new jobs) and in bars and restaurants (1.53 million new jobs.) Uniquely, all net new jobs added fall in the non-supervisory/production category -- half a million supervisory jobs were lost. Manufacturing lost -3.28 million jobs (-19.1%) and now provides fewer jobs than in July 1942 -- seven months after the attack on Pearl Harbor.

Despite concerns about illegal immigration, since 2001 the labor force has grown more slowly (7.4%) than during any seven-year period since 1955 and participation rate of those in the labor force, those working or looking for work, also fell sharply -- from 67% to 66%. This is the reason that the un-employment rate, now 5.0%, is not much higher.

The average weekly wage for non-supervisory jobs buys 2.0% more now than seven years ago and the average real salary and benefits for all workers is up by 9.0%. These real increases are down from the bubble period of the late 1990s but they are far better than the declines of the previous 20 years. Unfortunately, these recent increases in "average" wages appear to be a product of the latest financial bubbles, the widening use of stock options and very large bonuses in compensation, particularly on Wall Street.

Median real wages have continued to decline, including by -1.4% over the past year. Median household real incomes fell -2.0% from 2000 to 2006 (latest data available) and even the average income fell -0.5% with inequality now the worst on records back to the 1960s. The total current savings of ALL households over the past three years is virtually nothing; by far the worst since the 1933.

The foolishness of powerful, self-interested claims of a "new paradigm" is again exposed. The fantasy is that soaring debt and the loss of production through trade deficits are good things and the lack of current savings irrelevant. As a long forgotten advertisement once proclaimed: "If you don't have yourself an oil well, get one!" We can all live well from royalties and asset appreciation.

Soaring debt and debt schemes did drive up many asset prices, creating a borrowed illusion of general prosperity along with enormous actual wealth and power for a few. But now, unprecedented debt and soaring inventories of unsold homes are driving down the inflated prices for homes and other assets. For at least the next several years, most households will now be forced to cut spending and earn, not borrow, their living standard.

Another short-term debt stimulus may take the edge off the difficult economic conditions of the next few months. But trading away our once unique economic strengths while borrowing against the future has failed. Making even minimum interest payments on these massive, soaring debts will be increasingly difficult as the success of thoughtful industrial and trade policies in China and elsewhere continues.

That tells us where we are right now.

How did we get here, after America had the most powerful and productive economy in the world following WW II? The short answer is “the Cold War.”

We put our investments into military forces and international military expansionism instead of economic growth, mass education and universal health care. While containment of the USSR was worth it, it drained America’s economy as much as it did that of the USSR. America “won” the Cold War by outlasting the Soviet Union in a test of who could waste more money on military spending, something that always detracts from economic growth.

The Reagan Revolution has been a three-decade effort to avoid admitting that what America was doing economically was not working. Fred Kaplan is right to state that conservatism is based on the myth that America gained strength during the Cold War. The truth is the exact opposite. Both the Soviet Union and America squandered their national strength, and America just outlasted the Soviet Union. But the destruction of the American economy lasted throughout the Cold War. The Conservative movement was a panicky set of actions attempted to forestall the clear decline of the American economy. (The invasion of Iraq was a similar conservative panic in which an attack on a small and relatively defenseless Middle Eastern nation was to have been a demonstration of the folly of threatening the American Superpower. The Iraq War and Occupation has been another failed conservative idea.)

The conservative free market policies and the anti-union policies have been designed to compensate for the poor economic performance by substituting the magic of well-finances and highly rewarded entrepreneurs for a lack of economic investment. But intelligent people resort to magical solutions when they cannot see a realistic solution to the problems they face. That this magical solution (“The Invisible Hand”) has not been working has been concealed behind a combination of Federal Reserve manipulation of the monetary economy and interest rates, together with massive international borrowing by the federal government. The borrowing drove America from a creditor nation to a debtor nation during the Nixon administration and the Vietnam War, and sharply accelerated during the Reagan/Bush41 administrations. The government activities have all been ways of papering over the basic economic failure of massive military spending combined with the refusal to invest in workforce education and healthcare.

So now America is facing economic exhaustion. For half a century we have hollowed out our productive economy, shipping it to the rest of the world, and replaced it with a paper-based financial economy that is internationally dependent on the good will of the rest of the world to continue to operate. Yet the 300 million plus American people are still a powerful economic resource, and with investment, the economic infrastructure still exists. The challenges of the increased cost of energy, global warming, and polluted environments will require a great deal of effort to deal with, an effort that paying the massive American military force and for the war of the occupation of Iraq will detract from.

The challenge is facing us, and Rambo is not going to meet that challenge. American workers are. It’s time to put them back to work in real productive jobs. We'll see an indicator that America has turned back in the correct direction when we start graduating more American-born engineers than MBAs and Lawyers. But that will not happen without coordination. Remember - government is not the enemy. The American government is us. Reagan and the conservatives got that wrong, too.

It's time to stop blaming others for the failure to meet the challenges facing us and get down to work to build and fix things instead of bombing every imagined threat.

Republicans are taking the long view - of necessity

Most predictions aren't worth much. Either not enough is known to forecast reliable trends, or the prediction is of something that is so easy to anticipate that people wonder why you are even talking when you say it. This one, from Digby, tends towards the second category. Strangely enough, not many Democrats seem to know how true it is.

I have been saying for some time now that the Republicans can read the tea leaves and they know this isn't their election, so they are teeing up the next one. They aren't going to make it easy for the Democrats --- they'll damage him or her as much as possible so that he or she can't govern effectively. But they are going to lose and they know it, and they're going to blame it all on their lost boy Bush and the maverick who tried to succeed him for not being conservative enough.

The results of this Fall's Presidential election were determined when

• Bush's invasion of Iraq failed to find WMD's and became a widely-predicted but badly-planned-for and severely botched occupation and counterinsurgency operation. The fact that it drags on now without known purpose, merely so Bush does not have to admit that his voluntary and unnecessary war is lost and bring the troops home, is not a surprise to most voters.
• After his narrow win in 2004 Bush announced he was out to destroy Social Security.
• FEMA proved that it could not handle one of the three widely predicted disasters expected since 2001 or earlier,
  
• The Republicans lost Congress in 2006 largely over their corruption and incompetence, and
• Following the collapse of the housing bubble the mortgage market collapsed and took the credit worldwide markets with it, leading to the current recession with layoffs and everything.

The voters are quite properly blaming the Republicans.

There will be a Democratic President in office in January 2009. It will not be a blow-out election like 1964, though, because the Republican Party seems poised to nominate the candidate long known to have the best possible chance of holding down Republican losses, John McCain. The only surprise not seen at least two years ago is that the Democratic President may be Barack Obama rather than Hillary Clinton.

So the Republicans are taking the long view. They are going to accept their losses this Fall and blame Bush and McCain for those losses. Why? Because Bush and McCain are insufficiently conservative. Conservatism cannot fail - individuals fail because they are insufficiently conservative. Then the conservatives know what they are going to do after the lost election.

They have already started with their threatened filibusters and procedural obstructions in the Senate. After the election the conservatives are going increase their efforts to make America ungovernable. Like any classic minority insurgency, they will work every way possible to destroy the legitimacy of the current government and then promise they will being in good governance when they are given the power to replace the current government they are trying to destroy.

That's what America has to look forward to. For all his promises, Obama (If he wins) will not bring peace to Washington or this nation. The conservatives won't let him, because that would legitimate his government and prevent them from regaining power.

Conservatives created the current situation, they can't fix it, and they can't allow anyone else to fix it either. That is the long view, again brought to America by conservatives.

Republicans vs. Truth and Honesty - no connection

What do they have to hide? Why is the National Republican Congressional Committee handing out a fake audit report? From The Politico:

Rep. Mike Conaway (R-Texas), a certified public accountant, had pushed for months for an internal audit of the National Republican Congressional Committee, according to GOP members, but the committee’s treasurer at the time was reluctant.

Finally, at a recent meeting, the now former NRCC treasurer, Christopher J. Ward, relented, giving Conaway what was supposed to be an official internal audit from 2006. That document was a fake, the GOP members said. Even the letterhead on which it was sent was a forgery.

Revelations about the falsified document touched off an unfolding scandal that has rocked the NRCC and spurred a criminal investigation by the FBI into the committee’s accounting procedures.

Fearing the fallout from the discovery, the NRCC informed its principal lender, Wachovia, of potential accounting problems. Wachovia, which declined comment Thursday, had lent the committee $9 million in 2006, according to Federal Election Commission records.

Knowing the bank was required by law to notify federal investigators of any “suspicious activity,” the NRCC also alerted the FBI, Republican insiders confirmed.

At the same time, NRCC officials notified the FEC that the committee may have filed inaccurate disclosure statements.

If it were anyone except the Republican Party in Congress, this would be beyond belief, but for those guys this is just standard operating procedure.

When every major institution in the Republican Party demands no oversight by anyone and operates entirely in secret, then you know they are crooks rapidly carrying off as much as they can before the light of day catches up to them. Randy "Duke" Cunningham, Bob Ney and Jack Abramoff may soon have a lot of company in the federal penitentiaries. There will never be an adequate accounting of all the criminality of the Republican Party during the Bush 43 years.

Washington state Republican caucus - vote rigged for McCain?

It looks like the Republicans may have gone too far in vote stealing. It's bad enough when they steal votes and elections from Democrats, but this time the establishment Republicans may have tried to steal the Washington state caucuses yesterday from Huckabee for McCain. Here, from The Seattle Time's David Postman is what Huckabee's campaign manager, Ed Rollins, has to say:

“The Huckabee campaign is deeply disturbed by the obvious irregularities in the Washington State Republican precinct caucuses. It is very unfortunate that the Washington State Party Chairman, Luke Esser, chose to call the race for John McCain after only 87 percent of the vote was counted. According to CNN, the difference between Senator McCain and Governor Huckabee is a mere 242 votes, out of more than 12,000 votes counted—with another 1500 or so votes, apparently, not counted. That is an outrage.

“In other words, more than one in eight Evergreen State Republicans have been disenfranchised by the actions of their own party.

I'm sure the Washington state establishment Republicans have a good reason for calling the election for McCain when only 87% of the votes were counted and the difference between McCain and Huckabee was a mere 242 votes. Like, for instance:

"What? You mean that Huckabee voters are Republicans, not Democrats? Are you sure?" or

"McCain is going to win anyway. We have our orders." or

"We just figured the Huckabee social conservatives would shut up and follow orders for the good of the Party. They always have in the past." or

"Huckabee? You mean that's not a joke name, like Mickey Mouse, that some prankster added to the ballot when they were being printed? We just assumed it was a joke." or

"Don't get your knickers in a twist. We'll count the rest of them along with the Florida 2000 ballots - someday." or

"We're just practicing for the general election."

I'm sure there are hundreds of similar good reasons. Has the Republican National Committee weighed in yet?

Well. Wasn't Saturday interesting. So now what?

Here's my take on the Saturday political games from the perspective of the Republican and Democratic nomination activities yesterday, and then I will discuss how I think the general election is beginning to shape up.

Republicans • Democrats• Vice Presidents • Election fundamentals
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Republicans

One thing is clear from Saturday. While McCain is the Republican frontrunner, and the man I think will ultimately win the Republican nomination, the Washington state caucuses showed that the Republican Party really doesn't like him. Even after Romney formally got out of the race, McCain couldn't decisively beat him. Nor could McCain decisively defeat the two clearly self-limited other candidates, Huckabee and Ron Paul.

I can't help but wonder. Would the Washington state Republicans have chosen "None of the above" over any of the candidates they did vote for?

That's not to say that the Republicans won't put a strong campaign together behind McCain for November in the next eight-plus months.

Still, the only thing that I can see the Republicans are getting out of the 2008 nomination races is a really politically powerful Christian fundamentalist right-wing political leader who will be with us for decades. I'd say Huckabee has picked up the mantle of Billy Graham, John Rushdoony, Jerry Falwell, and Pat Robertson and rather thoroughly displaced James Dobson. Huckabee and the Discovery Institute will be with us for the foreseeable future trying to turn America into a Dominionist theocracy, and the 2008 Republican nomination campaigns has placed Huckabee at the top of that heap. Except for Billy Graham (who was just a politically powerful preacher) the rest are actively opposed to America under the Constitution and need to be carefully watched.

Ron Paul, unsurprisingly, is going nowhere in the Republican race for the nomination. Somewhat to my surprise, he has announced that he will not run on a third party. The news report point out that he needs to return to his congressional district and head off a primary challenge, so I guess he doesn't want to give up his Congressional seat.

Democrats

Obama clearly had a very good day Saturday, but he isn't going to put the nomination away before the Democratic convention, just as Hillary won't. Each need 2025 delegates to win the nomination outright, each has something in the ball park of 1000 delegates, and only about 1400 remain to be won in the remaining primaries and caucuses. The Democratic nomination for President is essentially a tie in the primaries and caucuses, so the decision will come down to the Superdelegates.

As good as Saturday was for Obama, Hispanics are not voting for an African-American. The big states remaining on the Democratic primary - caucus calendar are Ohio (161 delegates), Texas (228 delegates), Pennsylvania (188 delegates) and North Carolina (134 delegates). Hillary has a better organization and longer relations in Texas, plus she has courted the Hispanic vote here. Obama is unlikely to get over a third of the Texas delegates (~76). Depending on Black turnout in North Carolina, give him two-thirds there (~90) and split Ohio and Pennsylvania, maybe an edge to Obama. (~180). So give Obama 346 of the 657 delegates, and Hillary 311. That's roughly 52% Obama to 48% Hillary.

Of 657 delegates, 20% will be Superdelegates, so only about 525 are up for grabs. Neither is going to put the nomination away. The Superdelegates will decide. This is not a bad thing for the Democratic Party. As I posted Friday:

I really think it is coming down to an effective tie for delegates when the Democratic voters and caucus-goers are counted, so the final decision is going to the 20% Superdelegates at the convention. Those are Democratic Party professionals and they will choose the person with the greatest likelihood of coattails. Since that will have the greatest power to build the Democratic Party, that's the way the decision needs to be made.

Undemocratic? Forget such kneejerk ideological reactions. There is more to consider than just voter impressions, especially when they are essentially tied. There is also the question of how to build a better Democratic Party, one able to prevent the conservatives from destroying America as it has for the last thirty to forty years. Jimmy Carter's worst flaw as President was that he did nothing to build the Democratic Party at a time when the Goldwaterites, John Birchers and unreconstructed Nixonites were bringing the political evangelists and Reagan Democrat racists into the Republican Party and building the Reagan coalition. Party-building matters. A strong Democratic Party is better for America and for Americans in the long run. If the voters are essentially tied when it is time to choose a Presidential nominee, then it is appropriate for the party professionals to consider the realities of electoral politics. If the Superdelegates get it wrong, then American democracy will correct them on the first Tuesday in November. So as things look right now, the Superdelegates may make the final selection between Hillary and Obama, and that's not a bad thing to have happen. They really can't go wrong deciding between those two.

About the only argument that remains in play is which of the two, Hillary or Obama, can more easily defeat McCain. So with the Presidential nominees for each party relatively clear, it is probably time to consider Vice President choices.

Vice Presidential Choices

I had thought that Obama would be a good Vice Presidential candidate for Hillary. I don't think that Hillary would strengthen an Obama ticket, but that is pure opinion. Eric Alterman disagrees with me on Obama as Veep to Hillary. He also comments on Veep choice for McCain.

5) Running mates? Again, I dunno. Clinton/Obama in either combo makes no sense. The ticket needs a white male. Jim Webb would work well for either one. So would John Edwards, and Joe Biden. Chris Dodd makes a lot of sense for Obama but not for Clinton.

For McCain, if he's worried about Limbaugh-like lunatics staying home, he will have to go to his right flank and pick an anti-immigrant demagogue, though Huckabee could work here, he's also a high-risk choice because of his (endearing) personality quirks and total and complete lack of understanding of foreign affairs. Otherwise, he should go north and make himself competitive in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, though I don't have any names in mind for that. Tom Kean is too liberal and would be a Democrat anywhere else but the Northeast.

So that's where we are today. What about the general election?

The Election fundamentals

There are at least three major issues that are going to determine the outcome of this election. They are

Change, Security and The Economy.
Then how will the issues work out on
Election day?
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Change - The polls this eight months before the election are a waste of time. They tell us nothing. So look at the fundamentals. Americans want a change away from the conservative policies that have been destroying the American government and economy. both Hillary and Obama offer that, with Obama seen as the stronger of the two. McCain offers continuation, not change.

Security - Security is supposedly McCain's strongest issue. But is it? McCain is a stark raving mad militarist and Imperialist who never saw a war he didn't want America to fight. This, his legendary temper and his support by the Neocons and Joe Lieberman (who will happily support fighting any Arab anywhere any time) make McCain a prime candidate for "Goldwaterization." When the over two-thirds of Americans consider the Iraq adventure a major blunder in the first place and want America out as soon as possible, McCain may be swimming upstream. There's a limit to how long voters will vote against real needs out of fear.

Obama may have an edge over Hillary on the security issue because she voted for the Iraq war and he didn't. [No telling what he would have done had he been in the Senate, but that's the way it is.]

But speaking of the voter's real needs, there is the economy.

The Economy - No party that controlled the White House when the economy went into Recession during election year has seen their candidate win the Presidency. This has been true for the last century, and it isn't going to change. That makes the 2008 Presidential election one for the Democrats to lose, and they would have to work hard to do so. McCain has, if it is possible, negative credentials for dealing with the economy. His statement that he doesn't know much about it, but has bought Greenspan's book is just crying out for repeated replay in October.

The Bush administration is going to work hard to downplay America's economic problems, but they have gotten to obvious to be overlooked by most voters. Romney was their only chance to deal with the economic problems, and too many social Republicans just couldn't vote for a Mormon.

On the Democratic side, Hillary is the strongest of the two candidates for dealing with the economic problems. I haven't seen much indication that Obama is any better prepared than McCain is.

Election Day - Given those three issues, Security is the only one that McCain might be strong with, and his strength can be neutralized by exploiting his character, both his militarism and his temper. So America will get change, from conservatives to Democrats. The question is, Hillary or Obama?

The third issue, the economy, together with the Superdelegates reactions to the race, is going to probably determine that. Since it is now clear that the Democratic nomination is going to be determined by the Superdelegates, What motivates them? Local party strength.

The Superdelegates are going to look at which of the two has the strongest coattails. Hillary has the better economic credentials, and right now she has the in-depth long term national organization that the Superdelegates, considering local and state election outcomes, are likely to prefer to a roll of the dice on the Obama movement. So unless Obama creams Hillary for the next two months while simultaneously building a credible nationwide organization for the state and local elections, Hillary is going to be the choice of the Superdelegates.

A Hillary nomination will probably make the Presidential general election nastier, since the right-wing hates Hillary worse than they do an African-American candidate. That Hillary will get nastier treatment isn't clear, though, because an Obama nomination is going to bring out the right-wing Racists in force. In either case, the recession economy and the demand for change is going to be the political wind in the Democratic sails.

If Hillary gets the nomination, what happens to Obama? He wants really badly to be President, and he is quite young. He will be Hillary's presumed successor unless he messes up somehow. So he can be expected to throw his full weight behind Hillary's campaign in the general election.

Anyway, that's the way things seem to be stacking up as of today from my perspective.

Comments and criticism are encouraged.

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You may notice that I have been playing with internal HTML links in this post. I wasn't sure that blogger would support them, but they do. Now that I know they work I'll try to use them to make my writing a little less bulky, turgid and intimidating. If you want shorter posts, forget it. That's just not me.

Apparently blogger's spell check feature is off, so I apologize for those spelling errors I have missed.

Today's primaries

Today we have

• Republican Primary in Kansas (39 delegates)
• Louisiana primary (Democrats - 68 delegates; Republicans - 47 delegates)
• Nebraska Democratic caucus (31 delegates)
• Washington state caucuses (Democrats - 97 delegates; Republicans - 40 delegates)
• Virgin Islands is holding a Democratic caucus worth 9 delegates

[See A list of 2008 state primaries and caucuses for everything this year.]

MSNBC announces that Huckabee has won the Kansas primary with a resounding 60 percent to McCain's 24 percent over McCain. Texas Rep. Ron Paul got 11 percent to maintain his usual showing in the republican primaries. This is the first Republican contest since Romney suspended his campaign.

Obama has won the Nebraska caucus. In Washington State, with 24% of the votes counted MSNBC reports "Obama was winning 65 percent of delegates to Clinton's 33 percent." MSNBC goes on to point out that with both Obama and Hillary seen as offering very similar policies, the issue seems to be a question of which of the two is more likely to be able to defeat McCain in November.

The International Herald Tribune has reported some interesting results from the Louisiana primary, but the winners and losers are not yet known. Louisiana has long been close to evenly split between Democrats and Republicans, but with the loss of over 200,000 people from the Democratic stronghold of New Orleans after Katrina, there is a strong likelihood that Republicans will dominate that state for the foreseeable future.

DEMOGRAPHICS

Blacks were close to half the Democratic electorate, while nine in 10 Republican primary voters were white. As is typical for presidential primaries, men predominated in the GOP electorate while more women voted in the Democratic contest. Close to one in 10 voters in both primaries were under age 30 and one in four were over age 65.

HURRICANE KATRINA IMPACT

One in seven Democratic voters and about one in 10 Republicans said Hurricane Katrina caused their families severe hardship and they have not recovered. About one in four in both parties said the storm caused severe hardship but they have recovered. Two-thirds of Republicans and a little more than a half of Democrats said Katrina did not cause their family severe hardship. There also were early indications from the exit poll that the northern part of Louisiana was a larger share of the electorate in both parties compared to past primaries, reflecting a population decline in New Orleans and other coastal areas. [Snip]

RACE AND GENDER

In the historic Democratic contest to nominate either the first black or first woman for president, about one in five voters said gender was an important factor in their vote and about as many said that about race.

The results out of Louisiana should provide a hint regarding the political future of that state.

David Frum? Correct for once? Let's hope.

David Frum writes that the period of conservative ascendancy is coming to an end. Here is a key statement

In polls, Americans express preference for Democrats over Republicans on almost every issue surveyed, including such traditional Republican advantages as taxes, ethics and competence.

In 2002, equal numbers of Americans identified as Republicans and Democrats. In the six years since, Republican identification has collapsed back to the level recorded before Ronald Reagan. The decline has been steepest among young voters. If they eat right, exercise and wear seatbelts, today's 20-somethings will be voting against George W. Bush deep into the 2060s. Most ominously, US polls show an ideological sea change: a desire for a more activist government, a loss of interest in the tax question and a shift to the left on most social issues (although not, interestingly, abortion).

I wonder what his first clue was? FEMA at New Orleans? The Iraq invasion and botched occupation? The slow collapse of the American economy into recession and stagflation? Or maybe something else?

Conservatives can't even be honest about the economy

This is an interesting insight into both business reporters and conservatives. They fear using the word "Recession," possibly because to use the word is to bring on a Recession.

Refusal to face reality is a guarantee of failure in the future at some point. Why would any investor in their right mind listen to business news in which the news readers weren't allowed to use the word recession? That's not news, that's pure fantasy.

The extent of the Democratic Party conflict and problems

As I read around the blogosphere, I am surprised at just how many people are writing about the Obama - Clinton conflict as though it was the most critical thing for Democrats since - since forever maybe? It's time to sit back and put a bit of perspective on the situation. Is Hillary really an ogre tied to the corporations and the DLC? Is Obama just a hyper ambitious politician who can spin speeches and paint visions of a better world, but makes no promises that he can be pinned down on? Does the very existence of America and the Democratic Party depend on the decision between which of them to nominate for President this year? How much hyperbole and manufactured division can we take? How does this last month's conflict fit in perspective over the longer period?

I am a long time Democrat who voted for LBJ in 1964, and I watched Nixon and Joe McCarthy in black and white on TV. I also voted absentee for Nixon in 1968 from where I was stationed with the Army in Germany because I trusted Nixon's promises to get us out of Vietnam, and I learned firsthand what Republican lies meant. I've seen it go downhill since then. This year is the best for Democrats that I have ever seen.

Right now the Democrats have two really fine candidates (unfortunately, I thought it was three but my favored candidate, Edwards, is gone) and the question now is which of the two will we support. I see Hillary stronger at getting stuff done. At my age, I have learned that experience counts a great deal and Obama hasn't got it on the national level. Hillary was well prepared to start the campaign and has responded really well to roadblocks. She is also a known quantity. We in the public have a decent idea of what to expect from her, though one thing I do expect is some surprises, mostly positive. She is one of the best debaters on the national scene. If Joe Biden could get to the point as effectively and as clearly as Hillary can, he would have been President. She has also done a masterful job of dealing with the anti-Hillary Press. She knows the Democratic Party nationwide in a way Obama will take years to achieve. Compare her to Obama.

Obama has great rhetoric and he appears to have really good organizing and fundraising abilities. His ability to motivate and bring in the youth vote is better than anyone I have ever seen run for President. Plus the media likes him (today only - they hide the expiration date.) He's new on the national scene, but he has a great personal story, and he is amazingly difficult to dislike. His speeches are good, although his debating style is somewhat lacking. I am enough of a wonk and an analyst that I find his great visionary rhetoric lacking in the detail needed to explain how to achieve that vision, but I recognize that the very detail I crave turns most audiences off, and Obama is speaking to his major audiences, not so much to me. I can recognize that his ability to speak of visions and gloss over the engineering detail is a lot of his strength as a politician even as I find it somewhat discomfiting, since I am looking for more of a road map than a vision. I already have my own vision, and it is described in the Constitution. But my vision requires a Democrat as President, and Obama may well be the man who can get that job. Which brings me to the question of policies.

I preferred the policies that Edwards promotes to what either Hillary or Obama has announced, but both of them are very bright and educable. The most important thing about the policies either Obama or Hillary present in the campaign is still the 7,000 political appointees the incoming President will appoint to the Plum book positions anyway. Those are the people who will implement and shape the policies that the President directs, and the nature of our government will be determined by the collective character of those appointees, just as the collective character of the Bush administration has been determined by the appointees that Dick Cheney selected in 2000 and 2001.

As long as Democrats replace the Republican cronies, incompetents and Cheney's made men, either candidate will be a major step forwards for America. The most important point to remember is that both Hillary and Obama will be selecting the personnel from the same pool of Democrats, and they will be replacing the mostly incompetent and corrupt Republicans who hold those positions today. Ultimately, policy is more a personnel matter than it is one of campaign rhetoric.

It'll be nice to see political appointees who have read and understand the Constitution, unlike the un-American individuals like John Barton and David Addington or like FEMA's Michael Brown. Those personnel selections are much more important than which to the two otherwise very similarly qualified candidates the Democrats nominate. But of course, there is the Republican reaction to the ultimate Democratic nominee to consider.

Will Clinton's nomination energize the Republicans to oppose her? I live in Texas. Believe it. The nomination of Hillary for President will bring the crazies out of the walls and from under the rocks. The Republicans in the South and Texas are haters to begin with, and they make a fetish of Hillary-hating. But if you think they won't come out equally to defeat a Black man, you are living in a fantasy world. This is going to be the nastiest Presidential campaign I have ever been aware of, and that goes back to 1960.

As we Democrats make our choices for the Presidential nominee this year, we have a great opportunity. The differences - the reasons to choose one candidate over the other - are miniscule compared to the many, many great qualities they both bring to the race. For a while I thought that Obama would shake up the D.C. establishment more than Hillary, but as I watched Hillary in last Sunday's debate, I realized she already knows how to make the changes and Obama has to learn how to do it. She may not promise as much change as Obama does, but that may be because Obama doesn't know how difficult making all that change is going to be.

I can't even use identity politics to decide. First Black President vs. First Woman President? Both are outstanding steps forward for America, and neither significantly MORE important than the other. And still, I have to decide which to choose.

That is the real problem this year, of course. There are two really outstanding candidates to choose from, and we have to choose only one of them. For too long Americans have been offered only a single competent candidate for President. It has been easy to choose that one while putting down the others. The decision was made for us, we did not have to choose between two similar and essentially equally competent candidates.

The Press (especially TV) and a lot of people are trying to force the choice into the old decision-making model by anointing one candidate and down-rating the others. They don't know any other way to decide. They have never been offered two essentially equally qualified candidates and then been required to decide between them. When there are two such qualified candidates, the process of anointing one and demonizing the other will be clearly seen by many as unfair and simply wrong.

What we Democrats are going to have to do is each make our individual choices, then use institutional processes to select which candidate will be our party nominee. We should rejoice in the difficulty, because it means we are a lot less likely to make a mistake of the kind American made when Bush was selected in 2000. Neither Hillary nor Obama would have made the series of panicky and incompetent decisions as President that Bush did in 2001 and since. Our problem is a good one. When we choose our candidate, we will be selecting against an almost equally good candidate, and that can't be comfortable. But it is great for both America and for the Democratic Party. So I think I have made my decision. Now we have to go through the party selection process to see how everyone's individual decisions get lumped together.

My choice is down now to the fact that Hillary is a known quantity, and Obama is too new on the scene for me to believe that he is capable of doing what he promises. I simply do not think that Obama has been on the national political scene long enough to understand the overall complexity of America well enough to know which way to jump when he has to make a quick decision. Of course, as Somalia showed, Bill Clinton wasn't ready for the decisions that bush 41 dumped on him, either. JFK was handed a similar situation by Eisenhower when the Bay of Pigs invasion was initiated. Between Hillary and Obama I think that Hillary is better prepared.

So as I run my precinct primary election on March 4th and then run the caucus to choose delegates to the county convention, I'll go as a Hillary delegate.

Noise, venom and hurt feelings. There's a lot of that in political campaigns. The old saying that politics in academia is so nasty because there is so little at stake really applies here. Logic doesn't provide an easy decision when the choices are so equally matched, so all we have is politics. What we shouldn't forget, though, is that for the first time in half a century, either choice is probably as good as the other, and both are very, very good.

So from this perspective, here's what I see happening between now and the Democratic Convention.

I really think it is coming down to an effective tie for delegates when the Democratic voters and caucus-goers are counted, so the final decision is going to the 20% Superdelegates at the convention. Those are Democratic Party professionals and they will choose the person with the greatest likelihood of coattails. Since that will have the greatest power to build the Democratic Party, that's the way the decision needs to be made.

Undemocratic? Forget such kneejerk ideological reactions. There is more to consider than just voter impressions, especially when they are essentially tied. There is also the question of how to build a better Democratic Party, one able to prevent the conservatives from destroying America as it has for the last thirty to forty years. Jimmy Carter's worst flaw as President was that he did nothing to build the Democratic Party at a time when the Goldwaterites, John Birchers and unreconstructed Nixonites were bringing the political evangelists and Reagan Democrat racists into the Republican Party and building the Reagan coalition. Party-building matters. A strong Democratic Party is better for America and for Americans in the long run. If the voters are essentially tied when it is time to choose a Presidential nominee, then it is appropriate for the party professionals to consider the realities of electoral politics. If the superdelegates get it wrong, then American democracy will correct them on the first Tuesday in November. So as things look right now, the Superdelegates may make the final selection between Hillary and Obama, and that's not a bad thing to have happen. They really can't go wrong deciding between those two.

My bet is that Hillary will get the nomination. If so, I would hope she offers the Veep to Obama, and since he is young and desperately wants to become President someday, he'll take it. He'd be a fool not to. I remember the shock when Kennedy chose his bitter rival, LBJ and no one thought it something they could do, but they did it. This nomination hasn't been nearly that nasty.

On the reverse side, though, if Obama gets the nomination, then I'd love to see Hillary stay in the Senate and replace Harry Reid. I've seen reports that he isn't wild about the job and would be happy if Hillary took it. She'd be superb. (Obama doesn't have the experience yet.)

An Obama, Hillary, Pelosi government would be an outstanding opportunity for the Democrats to bring democracy back to the U.S. and break the stranglehold of the conservative movement, allowing America to work on the problems of the American people instead of the International corporations and the wealthy.

Since Romney suspended his campaign yesterday, it looks like McCain will be the Republican Presidential nominee. His challenge is going to be to unify the Republican base, get the radical extremist right-wingers and talk show hosts to vote for him, along with the social conservatives. If that's not challenge enough, he has to do it in such a way that he can draw in the independent voters. On top of that, McCain's support of the Iraq war and his known bad temper make him a person who will be easy to Goldwaterize as a radical crazy extremist militarist who cannot be trusted with nukes or the military. While I don't think that McCain will be easy to defeat, all the Republican swiftboaters in the country (see here and here) are not going to make McCain's success easy. I expect this to be the nastiest Presidential election I have ever seen.

What it all comes down to is that the Democrats need to get back into control and start to work to repair the damage done by thirty years of the Reagan Revolution and the conservative movement. Either of the two current candidates for the nomination can do that. We simply have to decide which one, and then all of us support that person. And we will!

The disaster of conservatism is about to be lifted from America's neck. We Democrats just have to decide which road we will take to get there.

Another bush attack on the courts and the Rule of Law

I'm no attorney, but this seems like it totally invalidates the travesty that passed for a trial of Zacarias Moussaoui. Clearly, the Bush administration decided to convict him for something, Attorney General Ashcroft announced to the press that Moussaoui was guilty of terrorism, then they determined how to conduct a Soviet-style show-trial to enact that conviction.

McCain - easy to Goldwaterize

Mark Kleiman has a really good point about McCain. Anyone who is concerned that either Clinton or Obama might have difficulty defeating john McCain if he is the republican nominee for President ought to look at what happened to the similarly extremist militaristic Goldwater in 1964. McCain has certainly set himself up for such an image.

As for the Media's fawning support for McCain, forget it. The political reporters in Washington love to set someone up just so they can tear them down later. They love it. It makes them believe that they are objective.

Lieberman stripped of superdelegate status for endorsing McCain

This is good news. Independent Senator Joe Lieberman will not be one of the Superdelegates at the Democratic national Convention in Denver this year because he endorsed McCain for President.

Bush's disgraceful budget proposal

Rick Perlstein provides an overview of the most ridiculous proposals in the new budget proposal that Bush just offered. It is extremely clear that he doesn't give a damn about America or the political future of the Republican Party.

Obama for Veep

Armando, writing as Big Tent Democrat, makes a strong case that yesterday was the high water mark for Obama. He points out that Obama has been an insurgent candidate trying to knock off the front runner, and his media, momentum and endorsements put him in the position on Super Tuesday where, if he could win at least one of the large states (California, Massachusetts, New Jersey or New York) he might be able to keep the momentum going forward and defeat Hillary. Unfortunately, Obama failed to get any of those states. Since Clinton is preferred by the Hispanics and White women, Texas is probably out of his reach also. Without at least one of those five very large states, Obama will not get the nomination. Armand puts it this way: "He can not win women, Latinos, older voters and lower income non-African Americans. The Obama coalition is simply not enough".

That analysis seems quite persuasive to me. I don't think that Texas is going to be changed enough in the next month for Obama to win. Since Texas has 28 different television markets, any fast change in the attitudes here are extremely unlikely. Any attempt to make such a change is prohibitively expensive. (California, I am told, has only four TV markets.)

That's going to leave Obama in an interesting position as the convention approaches. It is clear that the strongest Democratic ticket would be Clinton/Obama. It is also very clear that Obama wants to run for the Presidency. If he can't do it this year, he will have a much better shot at it later from the position of Vice President than he would from being just another Senator.

I've heard rumors that Clinton and Obama don't like each other that much, and that would prevent him from accepting the position of Vice President on the Democratic ticket. That's what people thought in 1960 when Kennedy took the Democratic nomination from Lyndon Johnson, too, and it didn't stop LBJ from taking the job. Even if there is bad blood, which I consider more of a media artifact to gin up conflict and make stories more interesting than it is a fact, if Clinton gets the nomination and offers the position of vice President on the ticket to Obama, he'd be a fool not to take it. And, since the Democratic nomination looks like it is coming down to the decision of the roughly 20% superdelegates, I think those professionals will push both individuals into such an arrangement.

A race between Clinton/Obama and McCain/(Huckabee?) would pit the strongest Democratic coalition against the a Republican coalition that leaves out the extremists conservatives but otherwise carries the moderate Republicans and the evangelists, which is probably the strongest possible Republican coalition. And the extremist conservatives are not going to sit on their hands and not vote when they have a chance to vote against both Hillary and a Black Democrat at the same time. So the only people to be left out on the Republican side are the extremist right-wing talk radio hosts and Mitt Romney.

The comparative turnout between the Democrats and the Republicans in the Primaries and caucuses indicates that a Democratic win in November is very likely.

The other thing that is extremely likely is that the wealthy Republicans who hate losing and who fund swift boat campaigns will be out in force, making this the most nasty Presidential election in the memory of living voters. I don't think they will change the election dynamics this time, except possibly against the Republicans. One of the main things that Obama has had going for him as a candidate is his promise to make elections about the future of America instead of fighting off nasty attacks, and I think the climate this election is going to one in which swift boat attacks become a negative for the candidate they are supposed to support.

And no, I don't think that the Democrats do the same thing, certainly not as blatantly. These dirty tricks are a trademark of Republican politics as played by Lee Atwater and Karl Rove.

But this isn't a prediction. It's a possible scenario.

Countering the myths about Canadian health care

I am a strong proponent of single payer universal health care provided as a human right. We already try to provide health care to everyone who needs it, at least on an emergency basis, but this is both inefficient, misses a lot of people, fails to provide care to a lot of people with chronic conditions, is ridiculously expensive, wastes tons of money on unnecessary administration that is required so that the company who receives the premiums can't shift the payment off to some other entity, and causes physicians to spend too much time as administrators, thus wasting their extensive medical training.

People who oppose single payer health care offer two major arguments. One is that it is "socialized" medicine. This argument is ridiculous on the face of it, and is not to be considered as a serious objection. The second and somewhat more serious argument is that the Canadian system is single payer and has failed to provide the care the American ("lack-of") system does. The second argument is not much more serious than the first one, but requires more facts to counter. Those who use that argument never provide facts, just anecdotes. A system cannot be built on anecdotes. Facts are required before it can be determined which stories matter and which do not.

So Sara Robinson has provided an excellent article that lays out the details of the Canadian health care system, with both its advantages and its disadvantages.

Here are the facts. Go read the article.

---

Bet you thought I was going to write about yesterday's Super-Tuesday primaries this morning, didn't you? Nope, not yet.

I can't provide any breaking news, and it is too soon to know what really happened. We'll just need to collect more information and see what the outcomes from the day are before any analysis that matters can be expected. It's enough for right now to recognize that yesterday was a really important day for America. It will be interesting to see how.

What's wrong with the Democratic Party?

We know what's wrong with the national Republican Party. They can't govern. As Fred Kaplan has just described in his new book Daydream Believers: How a Few Grand Ideas Wrecked American Power, the Republicans live in a fantasy world and when given the power to lead government they act as though their fantasies were reality, with the devastating results that such insane behavior would normally be anticipated to deliver. (See How conservative fantasies have worked to destroy American power.) Republicans can get elected because getting elected is all about making promises. Fantasies help a politician make bigger, better and more grandiose promises. But once in office, the American Republican Party has shown itself to be consistently unable to deliver.

If the Democratic Party is to defeat the Republicans nationally they have to take advantage of the failures the Republicans have repeatedly demonstrated and offer a better political product. Voters aren't going to switch unless they think the Democrats can do better. That turns out to be a lot harder than it looks from the outside. When Democrats took the Congress back in 2006 there was a momentary hope that the grown ups had returned to government. The Democrats haven't delivered on the promise of the 2006 election, and their polls have dropped as a result.

Essentially the Republicans view the 2008 elections as lost before they start. Their problem is to pull the Democrats down so that the Democrats can't make big gains this year and build for another election when the problems the Republicans have created are forgotten by the voters. The Republican solution is to be total obstructionists, something the structure of the Constitution makes very easy.

The result is that the Democrats have a real image problem. They came in with great promise, raising hopes for change, and now they are shown that they aren't especially more efficient than the Republicans were. The Democrats appear to have compromised too much, and having compromised with the Republicans, the Democratic leadership in Washington have bought into much of the Republican disaster. Why has this image developed? Look at the way the politics look.

The American people have two choices for a national party, the Republicans and the Democrats. It seems reasonable that if the Republicans show the electorate that they are consistent incompetents and blowhards, then the American people are going to choose the alternate party - the Democrats - to run government. And they have in the past. They chose Bill Clinton because Bush 41 failed to deliver what the voters wanted. They chose Bush 43 because they were disgusted by the conflict between the Republicans and Bill Clinton, Gore was out of Clinton's regime, and Bush - from outside Washington D.C. - promised a new, quieter and more effective government. Remember Bush as the uniter who would work across party lines? Pure rhetoric, of course, but after the disaster of the impeachment of Bill Clinton, it was what the voters were looking for.

Bush's failure to live up to his promises, together with the failure of his War in Iraq and his ill-fated effort to destroy the well-like Social Security Program, caused the American people to rather resoundingly give the Congress to the Democrats in 2006. Glenn Greenwald (day pass required) carries the story on from there. The Democrats took office in January 2007 with great approval from the public.

Early on, ratings for Congressional Democrats were consistently near 50% as Americans had high hopes for their willingness to change the course of the country and place real limits on the deeply unpopular Republican policies. But as Congressional Democrats became more and more characterized by capitulation and an unwillingness to stand up to Republicans, their approval numbers steadily dropped to its current mark, just one point away from their lowest approval rating of the last 14 months.

The more willing Democrats are to stand up to Republicans and oppose their defining policies, the more popular they become. The less willing they are to do so, the more eager they are to erase distinctions and accommodate this deeply unpopular party, the more unpopular Democrats become. The empirical evidence for those propositions is close to indisputable. The profound rejection by the country of the Republican Party permits only one lesson: the country wants a party that opposes them, not resembles or fears them.

It is very clear to the non-Republicans who watch the political arena closely that the Republicans have failed. Fred Kaplan of Slate magazine points out why the Republicans have failed so completely at governing. The Republican incompetence is based on two major fantasies, "... that the world changed after Sept. 11, when it didn't, and that the United States emerged from the Cold War stronger than before, when in fact it was weaker."

The image of the Democratic Party leadership in Washington is that they all came to power by compromising with (1) those who based their actions on those fantasies and (2) those who were pushing the Christian evangelist agenda. Look at the key Democratic Congressional leaders.

• Harry Reid, Senate Majority Leader - Senate Democratic Whip, first as minority whip from 1999 to 2001 and again from 2003 to 2005, and as majority whip from 2001 to 2003. He was minority leader in 2005 and then became majority leader when the Democrats took the Senate in 2007. While he has at times been confrontational against the Republicans, he apparently sees his job as seeing that the Senate actually appears to be functioning, not simply in paralysis. That and the Senate tradition of the filibuster gives the Republicans a great deal of leverage over him. Reid is also a conservative Mormon who is likely to believe the same fantasies as the Republicans.
• Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the House - She was first elected to Congress in 1987 in a safe Democratic district and became House minority Whip in 2001. When Dick Gebhard ran for President in 2002 she was elected House Minority Leader to replace him, and when the Democrats retook control of the House in 2006 she was elevated to the position of Speaker. She rejected running on the idea of impeaching President Bush, apparently fearing that the voters would see it as nothing more than political payback for the 1998 Republican effort to impeach Bill Clinton. She apparently saw any effort to impeach Bush as a net political negative for the Democratic Party, and has successfully blocked all efforts in 2007 to impeach him.
  
  I guess it's a fine line. An effort to impeach Bush could be viewed by voters as the Democrats being just like the Republicans, but refusing to entertain impeachment is clearly viewed by many voters as refusing to stand up to the clear Republican political atrocities and even criminal wrong-doing. Does the electorate really consider an effort to impeach Bush and Cheney to be the same level of destructive and otherwise purposeless politics as the Republican effort to impeach Bill Clinton?
• Steny Hoyer, House Majority Leader - Hoyer is a long-time close associate of Nancy Pelosi. They by both interned together for Senator Daniel Brewster (D-Maryland) in 1962. Hoyer was first elected to Congress in 1981, and was elected Minority Whip in 2002, replacing Pelosi when she was elevated to House Minority Leader. When Pelosi became Speaker of the House in 2006 Hoyer became Democratic Party Majority leader.

Have the clearly extremist actions and positions taken by the Republican Party in both Congress and in the White House made it impossible for the Democrats to respond for fear of looking equally extremist?

Clearly a lot of Democrats believe that what Bush and the Republicans have done since 1994 call for correction, but many of the correcting actions can be painted as politically extreme by those who see only what is happening today and ignore the history that brought those actions on.

Those of us who are Democratic political junkies get really frustrated when The Democratic Congressional leaders so clearly ignore the history of criminality, corruption and incompetence of the Republican Party. The refusal of the Democratic leaders to stand up to the Republicans is immensely frustrating. But most voters do not follow politics closely. They do not decide who to vote for until shortly before the election, and they have little historical knowledge of the candidates or the issues. They are easily swayed by emotional issues, political negative attacks and rhetoric from people they don't know well enough to know they should not trust them. Unfortunately, winning the elections depends more on the last minute deciders than it does on the issues and candidates' effectiveness in office that the political junkies consider so important.

The Democratic leadership clearly feels that they have to cater to both groups, and more to the late deciders than to the political junkies if they are to win elections. It is not enough that a politician be correct. First he or she has to get elected. The result is that the Democratic leadership is not doing anything to rock the boat. Rocking the boat makes it more likely that the politician will lose the election. Unfortunately, more and more of the American public wants change, and change means rocking the boat.

What's wrong with the Democrats? 2008 is very likely to be a pivotal election. The Democrats don't dare do anything to lose it, so they are doing nothing controversial that might be viewed as rocking the boat. The Democrats need every swing election to succeed in removing the Republicans. The Republicans, particularly in the Senate, have nothing to lose by being pure obstructionists, since this is an election they are unlikely to win anyway. They can do whatever they need to to keep the Democrats from appearing to successfully run Congress, and the Democrats will get the blame unless some things are passed. Since they are unlikely to regain the Congress, they don't need the swing districts and states. Having written off the close elections, the Republicans can be as obstructionist as they want. The Republicans taking the action are in secure districts and states, and if they can bring the image of the Democrats down to the same level of incompetence the Republicans already enjoy, then they can survive as a party and perhaps regain the Congress in a later election.

The facts that large segments of the Washington Media prefer the Republicans, defunding troops in Iraq can easily be spun as failure to support the troops at war and as abandoning the fight before it is lost, that a coalition of "blue dog" Democrats still cross over to support Republicans, the ability to threaten a filibuster can require a minimum of 60 votes to pass anything in the Senate and that Bush can veto with impunity (since he isn't running for reelection) and demand a 67 vote majority to pass anything, all together make responsible governance by the Democrats almost impossible.

Worse, the Republicans are quite good at stopping any progress and then placing the blame on the Democrats. The only thing left for Democrats to do is publicize the Republican obstructionism and face down George Bush. Bush's pool ratings would seem to make this easy, but can the Democrats hold their coalition together as the attempt it? Joe Lieberman and the Blue dog Democrats are happy to cross over and make life more difficult for good governance.

Hell, I don't know the answer. It's going to be interesting to see how this works out this year.

How conservative fantasies have worked to destroy American power

This week Slate has posted two excerpts from Fred Kaplan's new book, Daydream Believers: How a Few Grand Ideas Wrecked American Power. Kaplan argues

that the failures in Bush's foreign and military policy stem from two great misconceptions: that the world changed after Sept. 11, when it didn't, and that the United States emerged from the Cold War stronger than before, when in fact it was weaker.

Instead of me spending time writing "I told you so!", just go read the excerpts in Slate. They can be found at

1. Part One - In the 21st Century, the United States Has Been Led by Fantasists,
   posted Sunday, Feb. 3, 2008 and
2. Part Two - The Importance of Allies
   posted Monday, Feb. 4, 2008.

Kaplan has nailed it. From Part one

Bush's strategies neither succeeded nor endured—not even through the two terms of his presidency—because they did not fit the realities of his era. They were based not on a grasp of technology, history, or foreign cultures but rather on fantasy, faith, and a willful indifference toward those affected by their consequences.

Those in charge of his policies cared little about the details of warfare, knew little about the realities of the Middle East, and had not thought through what made freedom work in their own country, much less what might make it work elsewhere.

Except for the fantasies that will be maintained by American conservatives like those true-believers who still believe that Nixon did nothing wrong and that Watergate was a liberal dirty trick and a coup d'état, these ideas from Kaplan's book will form the core of the historical legacy of the Bush administration.

Here, according to Kaplan, it a description of the Bush administration fantasy, where it has gotten things wrong and the way both the Republican and Democratic parties have responded to the fantasies as they were enacted into government policy and actions.

They [the conservative Republicans especially] believe that America emerged from its Cold War victory as not only the most powerful nation but the only nation whose power deserved heeding. From there, it was a short leap to view America's values and interests as identical with those of the world; to assume that, deep inside, everyone would want to live the way Americans live, if only they were set free from tyranny. Combine these notions with America's technological superiority, and the stage was set for the delusions that followed.

The high-tech weapons developed in the 1990s—the smart bombs and the computerized intelligence networks—certainly gave the U.S. military an unrivaled edge on the open battlefield. But they don't win wars; they can't achieve the political objectives that inspire a war in the first place. They're useful for toppling regimes, but of no use in inspiring order afterward. In the end, the old verities—boots on the ground, shrewd strategy, knowledge of the local language and culture—remain key.

Finally, the world might be a more peaceful place if every nation were free and democratic (or all alike in some other way). It's merely utopian to believe that this someday might happen; it's folly to base policies, as Bush did in his second term, on the premise that this utopia is imminent.

There is no Universal Man marching inexorably down a common path to freedom. Real human history is molded, not fated; and its raw materials are the culture, geography, traditions, and past events of particular areas. It's not only naïve but reckless to believe that blowing off a tyrant's lid will unleash the geyser of liberty. It will unleash only whatever social forces have been teeming or festering underneath. If those forces are favorably disposed to democracy, as in some of the central European nations after the Soviet empire fell, democracy will have a good chance of flourishing. If they're not so well disposed, as in, for example, Iraq, the chances for democracy will be dim.

George W. Bush violated these common-sense precepts to an unprecedented degree and at staggering cost. But the Democrats have not presented an alternative approach. They may lament the skyrocketing defense budget, but they rarely cut or challenge specific weapons systems and veer away from military strategy. They criticize Bush's unilateralism, but only rhetorically. They stop short of acknowledging that America's interests might differ from those of prospective allies and that, therefore, building alliances often requires serious compromise.

In short, they sidestep the central challenge of foreign policy in a fractured world—facing up to the limits of America's power while preserving its stature and influence.

All the pieces of Kaplan's articles have been talked about in the blogosphere. Bush's well-known "bubble" in which he resides with little connection to reality along with the incompetence of his administration are descriptions of the fantasies Kaplan discusses. Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld's clear incompetence in prosecuting the war in Iraq with too few troops and an expectation that simply removing Saddam would create an economic powerhouse and American-style democracy in the Heart of the Middle East showed the extent of the fantasy and its failure. Bremer's CPA was an extension of the failed fantasy.

The support of the Bush fantasy by the Republican Party has been unsurprising. It is part of the conservative ideology to live in a fantasy world. Unfortunately, the leaders of the Democratic Party have either bought into the fantasy or been intimidated so badly that they refuse to oppose that lack of reality. This, too, is well-known and widely discussed in the blogosphere. Oddly enough, recognition of the unreality and danger of the Bush and Republican conservative fantasy and failures is widely derided by the Washington D.C. media as being a "left-wing extremist" position. That shows how utterly out of touch the Washington D.C. media is when they consider demanding reality-based government policies to be an extremist position.

Kaplan pulls all of these disparate elements together and explains them as the result of the conservative fantasies which have so badly damaged America and a great deal of the rest of the world.

Kaplan's book, Daydream Believers: How a Few Grand Ideas Wrecked American Power, is badly needed. It should sit on the shelf of every good American right alongside David Cay Johnston's devastating exposé - Free Lunch: How the Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves at Government Expense (and Stick You with the Bill) -, of the right-wing economic fantasies which have been devastating the American economy and the American middle class.

The fine art of extortion as practiced by Bush's HUD Secretary

Apparently Bush's Secretary of Housing and Urban Development learned his management skills from the Mafia. Demand what you want for your friends, and if the people whose property you are trying to have transferred to your friends refuse, then punish them every way possible.

The Washington Post has the story.

What's the difference between the Bush administration and a criminal cartel?

About the only thing noticeable is that most criminal cartels have higher standards of personal honor and aren't as dependent on military power.

The dangers of "reform" as an unquestioned goal

Ian Welsh questions to the apparent demand for "reform" when no one bothers to understand why things were initially set up the way they are now. Here are some of his really excellent examples:

You should never, ever, make a policy change unless you can say why the policy was enacted in the first place. You should never, ever, make a policy change unless you are able to make the argument for not changing it.

This is a constant problem. People want “reform” (the most debased word in the political lexicon, since most reforms aren’t) but they never seem to understand the costs of change.

When you reduce capital gains taxes you push money into the secondary securities markets and reduce consumption demand. You make the rich richer, and people who work for a living comparatively poorer.

When you get rid of estate taxes you will increase the amount of money that living people have to pay in taxes and help create a class of rich people who never earned their own money.

When you reduce the progressivity of the taxation system overall you reduce growth in demand for general goods and services and increase the demand for financial products and luxury goods.

When you reduce funding for public health you increase the spread of STDs and you create a pool of people who will act as carriers for infectious diseases, thus making even rich people more likely to suffer from and die from disease.

When you make it impossible for rich people to cut large checks to politicians, and don’t allow public funding, you make fundraising take up much more of the time of politicians and require many more compromises, not fewer compromises. They wind up owned by more people, not fewer people.

Examples are endless.

Reagan came into office by blaming government for all the failings of America, economically, socially and in Vietnam, up to that point. He was also riding on a wave of right-wing resentment about the massive defeat of Goldwater in 1964 and what they considered then (and still do) a coup de etate that removed Richard Nixon from office. Reagan's classic sound bite line "Government is not a solution to our problem, government is the problem." encapsulated all the resentment felt by the American right wing while offering the solution. Eliminate government.

The conservatives didn't want to hear disagreement or defenses of government. They just wanted "reform." They considered the explanations to be nothing more than opposition to the great, simple, solution they had to offer and they didn't want to hear it.

Well, the examples above were all predictable. An experiment wasn't needed to show that increasing the reward to investment would damage consumption, and that our economy is over 70% based on consumption demand. That's logic, and the conservatives base their "great ideas" on feelings and simplicity. But Ian has more:

The rule of “reform” is that it moves in cycles. First the rich are taxed lightly. Money concentrates in their hands, the economy financializes, real economic activity grows more slowly than before, the poor and middle class borrow themselves into bankruptcy. The economy crashes. Taxes are shifted to being highly progressive, demand improves. Once things are good for long enough that those who remember are dead or retired (once the Lost Generation lost power) it begins to seem “unfair” to tax the rich so heavily. They get rid of most of it. The economy financializes, real economic activity grows more slowly than before, etc…

In businesses the same things happen. Some manager decides costs are too high and outsources operations. Costs are reduced, and he gets a promotion. The new manager discovers service is worse and that anything extra he wants done costs a lot of money and requires contract renegotiation. He decides that the loss of control is costing them more money than its worth. He brings the operations back inside the company. Control increases, the amount of money being generated increases, but costs also accelerate. He gets promoted. A new manager comes in. He notices that costs are too high….

Those were cyclical examples. Sometimes things aren’t cyclical. Sometimes they’re just bad and lead to bad places. When Spain financialized its economy, it never recovered, because by the time it was clear that there was a problem that the next treasure ship wouldn’t solve, the middle class had been destroyed to the point where it couldn’t be rebuilt. All that was left were poor people and rich useless people living on “incomes.”

When GM and Ford decided that they were finance companies, when they decided to stop being controlled by men who had been engineers, and have suits control them, they let their engineering cultures decay. Now, building lousy cars that aren’t worth what they cost to build, they keep trying to dig themselves out by new financing schemes, by promotions, by cost cutting… But the problem isn’t their financing, the problem isn’t their sales force, the problem isn’t primarily their costs (they could get rid of their pension obligations, their health obligations and cut wages in half and they would just go bankrupt slower), the problem is that they have a lousy engineering culture. And none of what they’re doing is designed to fix that - it’s all spreadsheet management, running around trying to change the numbers in the cells on management’s excel sheets. Which doesn’t make better cars.

Developing nations train and reward engineers, not financial experts and bankers as the U.S. has done for over a generation now. I know a number of engineers, and almost all of them at about age 40 went back and got MBA's instead of advanced engineering degrees.

Bankers don't create new products that matter, nor do they increase economic productivity. Engineers do that. But the American economy has been financialized, and not longer can compete internationally.

It's time to dismantle the disastrous Reagan Revolution reforms and get the engineers back into running American companies with advice from financial experts and economists.

What has gone wrong with newspapers

I have read newspapers since the 1950's and still do, but the ones that are published today simply aren't equal to those earlier ones. About a year ago I was looking for some information about my community during the 1940's after WW II and went to the library archives to read some newspapers. Frankly I was shocked.

The same newspapers I pick up today and rarely find a real news item in were interesting and chock full of news in those days. They had real reporters out all around the world writing clear, lengthy stories from the four corners of the world. My city had several newspapers with foreign bureaus and published news, not gossip. Today my city has a single newspaper and the best national and international news is written in Washington D.C. by the McClatchy news bureau. There are no foreign bureaus. Apparently the only newspapers who still have them are the New York Times, the Washington Post and the LA Times. None in Texas. What's gone wrong with newspapers?

Jon Talton, writing as "Rogue Columnist," explains why in a manner that makes a lot of sense to me. The answer is that newspapers grew to be big business. The family run papers sold stock on Wall Street and the families left the business. The corporate managers came in and promised impossibly high rates of return on investment to jack up stock prices. To achieve those returns they cut the editorial staff and closed international bureaus, making themselves less attractive to customers. But how does an accountant measure the value of a good reporter or a foreign bureau to readers? There simply is no metric that accountants can use.

And Wall Street will not put a high value on a business whose total revenue and net profit are not both growing. How do you achieve that? You buy out your competitors and raise advertising rates, and when your competitor tries to buy you out, you sell your own company to a large newspaper cartel that can protect you. But the cartel then sends in the bean counters and cut the "nonproductive" (for that read Editorial staff) positions to save money. So you end up with single newspaper towns in which the single newspaper has no competition to beat when getting the local stories.

Since the Reagan administration began permitting one newspaper to buy out and close down its competitor I have seen the Dallas Morning News buy out and shut down the Dallas Times Herald, and the Houston Chronicle bought out and shut down the Houston Post. In both cases, the surviving local monopoly newspaper immediately raised advertising rates and shortly thereafter began cutting editorial staff and publishing fewer features. Local news coverage ceased to include controversy and was reduced to metropolitan boosterism.

Since I don't follow high school sports, the only remaining reason for reading a newspaper is the comic page, and they keep shrinking that.

Here's Jon's take on the subject:

-The creation of monopoly markets and, through consolidation, cartels of newspaper ownership. Economic history shows us that monopolies and cartels always commit suicide. Divorced from the imperatives of real competition, monopolies easily slip into a self-centered world of bureaucratic conformity and a desire to protect the status quo. They became slow and rigid, in other words, road kill for competitors.

-Consolidation of newspapers into large, publicly held companies. This removed newspapers from their communities and killed a sense of holding a public trust. And it left them at the mercy of Wall Street. Newspaper executives promised returns that are nearly impossible for any (legal) entity to sustain year after year. Everything came to depend on delivering these short-term “growth” numbers to the Street. Among the biggest losers was the ability to invest in future technologies and the ability to shift to meet changing consumer habits. Those wouldn’t deliver instant double-digit margins. Thus, newspaper companies failed to start, or failing that, buy, a Yahoo or Craig’s List.

-A largely defensive strategy took hold, even though history shows that no company under siege ever merely cut its way to recovery. Significantly, investment in the unique intellectual capital of newspapers – journalism – was constantly reduced. Newsrooms lost much of their top talent. Marketing, more important than ever in business, was never a newspaper strength, and was cut to the bone. Research and development received little more than lip service, or was another tool to hand down demands for shorter, dumber, fluffier stories. There was little interest on the advertising side in the kind of “skunk works” that might have leapfrogged from print to online before the crisis became acute. No longer did the smartest business-school grads want to work on the business side of newspapers. A thousand cuts hurt readership. One example: eliminating stock tables antagonized the most loyal readers, older folks who weren’t online. Many went away. Multiply that around every newspaper each time a key reader destination was eliminated. The cutback of international coverage comes just as America's future is more and more determined by world events (yes, even the soccer mom's ability to fill up her SUV).

-Groupthink was a natural outgrowth of monopolies and the demands of Wall Street. This was hastened by the ascendancy of Gannett and its (for a while) superior returns. A startlingly conformist agenda emerged all over: design over content; short, uninteresting (but non-irritating to advertisers) stories, etc. The universe of different tactics, strategies and innovations that a competitive industry would have evolved never happened. The industry became strikingly inwardly focused, insulated from a changing world. When change was noted, it somehow always produced moves that degraded the news product. Years were spent developing “new editorial products” to attract non-readers. This was a questionable use of resources, as surveys and focus groups showed most of these people wouldn’t read anyway, and certainly not subscribe seven days a week to a print edition. But the resources to do them were diverted away from coverage that served existing readers. Industry leaders were singularly cavalier about their loyal customers, while chasing ones they had little chance to attracting.

-Leadership collapsed under the weight of these forces. A generation of managers that would go along with these dictates rose, while those with other ideas were pushed out or aside. These surviving managers – of course with honorable exceptions – were singularly incapable of dealing with the historic turning points facing newspapers. Every day they came in hoping to not make a mistake, to merely preserve the business they had, or to push through artificial, top-down, one-side-fits-all formulas, usually backed by questionable research. At some chains, the jobs of editors became little more than gathering stuff for graphic do-dads and implementing the content rules cooked up at headquarters. These were once the front-line leaders who made the biggest difference in the quality of a product based, inexorably, on the written word, well told. The simple creed of "get a great story and put it in the newspaper (or online)" went away. For example, experienced police reporters went away -- even though it's clear that well-done cop stories draw readers. In their place was a 21-year-old taking dictation from a police public-affairs announcement.

-The biggest problem, of course, had nothing to do with the newsrooms. It was the collapse of an unsustainable business model. Simply put, the model involved sending miniskirted saleswomen out to sell ads at confiscatory rates to lecherous old car dealers and appliance-store owners. Protecting these profits, whether from national, local or classified ads, became the central focus of newspaper bosses. These areas were the most vulnerable to new competitors. But the condition of the industry by the 1990s – risk averse, promising unrealistic margins, losing its best talent, ignoring ideas outside its preconceived notions – left it unable to meet these threats.

I won't discount the competition of TV in providing headlines and tabloid gossip passing as news while sucking up the local advertising dollars. But TV doesn't now, and generally never has provided timely news except in the case of mass disasters. It is too stuck in the studio and too hung up on the model-type image of the newsreader to bother finding the underlying social currents that make up real news.

I don't expect that newspapers will ever return. They have had a major problem with adapting their business model to the late twentieth century American economy and society. What is clear, however, is that the "solutions" of recapitalization, consolidation and cartelization that Wall Street pushed onto the newspaper industry have both increased the speed at which the newspaper industry has died and prevented the rise of innovative leaders who might have built something out of what has been a long and excellent tradition of news gathering and publication.