The chart above is from a National Journal article, The 15 Governorships Most Likely to Flip. In it, Steven Shepard and Karyn Bruggeman rank each state by the likelihood of its switching from one party to the other. The top three states (Pennsylvania, Maine, and Florida) are all currently in Republican hands. But of the 15 governorships, 9 are Republicans. So unlike the United States Senate, where the Republicans have a big advantage because roughly twice as many Democrats are up for re-election as Republicans, when it comes to governor, the Democrats have a substantial advantage.

But if that isn’t enough good news for you, Curtis Gans wrote an article over at the Washington Monthly magazine, Midterm Signals and Noise. In it, he argues that many of the reasons that people think that the Republicans are going to do well in the 2014 elections are nothing but noise. I agree. One of the best examples of this is the supposed sixth-year curse. This is the observation that two-term presidents’ parties always lose big in the sixth-year elections. Sean Trende wrote about this last year, and he concluded that for Obama, 2010 already did most of the damage and there wasn’t much more that could be done in 2014.

Still, there are two issues about the upcoming elections that probably will be important. First, as I briefly mentioned above, the Senate landscape looks bad. The base Senate elections have 13 Republicans and 20 Democrats. But with the special elections and taking into account competitive races, it is even worse. The other issue is the tendency for Democratic leaning voters to not vote as much in off-presidential-election years. Both those issues are very much concerns.

There is nothing that can be done about the difficult Senate terrain, but the Democratic Party is making a special effort to make the voter demographics in 2014 look like they did in 2012. As I’ve argued for a long time, the key to Democratic success is always to get as many people voting as possible. If democracy works, we win because the people have a well established liberal bias.

Gans goes on to provide a lot of information about why we Democrats shouldn’t feel so gloomy about 2014. If you want to feel better, go and read the article. Personally, I don’t accept most of it. In the long run he’s right. But for 2014, I don’t think there is going to be any awakening. The fact remains that we have a media establishment that is determined to create balance, regardless of how far out on a ledge the Republicans get. The good news from my perspective is just that the Democratic Party is putting a lot of money into getting out the vote. If we could get Democratic turnout in off years to what it is in on years, not only would the Republican Party be forced to liberalize, so would the Democratic Party.

For some reason, I mentioned Mississippi John Hurt to a client who had never heard of him. So I went looking for a song to send him. Hurt was an interesting guy. He was a sharecropper in Mississippi, but his guitar playing and singing made him popular as a local act. This eventually led to some recordings for Okeh Records in the late 1920s. These didn’t take off, so Hurt went back to farming.

Many years later, an ethnomusicologist, Tom Hoskins, discovered Hurt’s music and decided to locate him based upon lyrics in his song “Avalon Blues.” In 1963, he did so. This led to Hurt performing at the 1963 Newport Folk Festival where he became a star on the folk scene. You can see why. His guitar work is fabulous. And so for the three years that remained for him, he performed widely and recorded three albums. It’s kind of a shame that he didn’t get to perform music his whole life. But at least he and the rest of the world got those last three years and the music that is left to us.

One of his original recording was “Frankie,” an early folk version of the pop song “Frankie and Johnny” about Frankie Baker’s murder of her lover Allen Britt. It’s worth checking out. There is also a fine version of “Spike Driver Blues.” But here is the folk standard “Lonesome Valley.” This is from Pete Seeger’s television show Rainbow Quest:

Matt Yglesias brought my attention to something really interesting yesterday, Ben Bernanke’s Biggest Mistake. It contains more information from the recent dump of FOMC transcripts. But this one paints the Fed in an especially bad light that is unfortunately not at all surprising.

It focuses on the 16 September 2008 meeting—just after Lehman Brothers went bankrupt. At that time, the Effective Fed Funds Rate was still at the relatively high 2%. Right now it is at 0.07%—effectively zero. So there is relatively little that the Fed can do to help the economy. But in September 2008, the Federal Reserve had a lot of power. They could have helped the economy by lowering interest rates. In fact, the markets were expecting them to do just that. Instead they did… nothing.

As Yglesias points out, this potentially had very negative effects on the economy:

What the transcripts show is that the Fed board just wasn’t interested in what was happening to the economy generally. They were focused on what was happening to the banking industry. And that was important. But they didn’t seem to care at all about unemployment. September 2008 was the inflection point from the relatively low unemployment before the crisis to the high levels after it. But it didn’t matter because unemployment never really matters to the Fed.

They had the data that indicted exactly what was happening. As Yglesias puts it, “In other words, inflation was down, the labor market was down, and the dollar was up.” So this isn’t even the usual case where the Fed is willing to do something about unemployment but only if it absolutely won’t cause inflation to tick up, which makes the power elite angry. In this case, they knew that inflation wasn’t a problem. And they did nothing, I think because it just didn’t matter to them.

Let’s look at it from the opposite perspective. If the Fed had information that inflation was about to explode, they wouldn’t have been complacent. They wouldn’t have figured that they could deal with it later when it actually happened. They would have understood that stopping inflation before it starts makes it easier to combat that waiting until it is a problem. They would have understand that allowing inflation to become a problem would cause unnecessary pain. But when it came to unemployment, it didn’t matter. In the month after they decided to not raise interest rates, unemployment went up 0.4 percentage points. Over a half million workers lost their jobs. And it allowed the whole economy to race into a recession that could have been slowed by a brisker response.

The issue, however, is not that proper action by the Fed would have improved the situation a great deal. The issue is that as we already know, the Fed is not focused on the regular economy. Their primary concern is for the power elite: Wall Street and the big banks. And in this case, even with plenty of data indicating that they should take action and lower interest rates, they ignored the concerns of the regular economy because they were so focused on the power elite.

Yglesias also provides a bit of Fed apologetics by noting that “it would be a stretch to say that FOMC members were indifferent to the basic economic situation.” I don’t think it is a stretch at all. They were concerned that the whole infrastructure of their world was falling apart. The fact that “their world” doesn’t include much of “our world” is a huge problem that we see from the Federal Reserve every day—crisis or no.

On this day in 1619, the great French painter Charles Le Brun was born. King Louis XIV considered him the greatest French painter of all time. But he might have been biased; he was Brun’s employer. But Brun did a lot of work outside his palace work. He produced an incredible amount of art in his 30 prominent years working for the court.

Winslow Homer was born in 1836. He is one of the greatest American painters ever, and perhaps the greatest seascape artist across all borders. Unfortunately, his work has been so copied that it is now hard to see it with fresh eyes. But it is worth trying. For example, I think this painting, The Gulf Stream is wonderful:

Other birthdays: steam engine inventor Thomas Newcomen (1664); automata creator Jacques de Vaucanson (1709); music educator Charles Frederick Horn (1762); playwright George Moore (1852); film director Richard Thorpe (1896); actor John Vernon (1932); actor Barry Bostwick (69); actor Edward James Olmos (67); the most overrated “entrepreneur” in history Steve Jobs (1955); and the actor, who plays the most annoying Sex and the City character, Kristin Davis (49).

The day, however, belongs to the actor Abe Vigoda who is 93 today. We all know him primarily for the part of Fish on Barney Miller, which he was only on for three of its eight seasons. But he’s remarkable because he was so convincing as Fish that most of us thought that Vigoda must be at death’s door. But he was only 56 when he left the show. If you saw him in interviews into his 80s, he seemed younger than Fish ever did. So I fully admit: I gave the day to him because he’s lived so long. And because Barney Miller was one of the greatest television shows ever. And because Abe Vigoda is a fine actor. But mostly, because he’s 93 today. And I don’t think this is the last birthday he will celebrate.

Happy birthday Abe Vigoda!

After having a comment discussion with JMF about Kant, I realized that I was rather unclear about just what he had done. Kant is a lot like the blind men and the elephant: it’s a wall! It’s a snake! Kant wrote so much that it is hard to get your head around his totality. Being a mathematically inclined person, I’ve always been more interested in his approach to questions more than his answers. Answers are kind of a fools game anyway; we should all of us strive for better questions.

So last night I went to the library online and requested a couple of books, but I was able to download an audio copy of Kant in 90 Minutes. I didn’t expect much. These books are generally little more than mini-biography and this one was no exception. And I have to say, Kant was much more of a miserable bastard than I had expected. I especially didn’t like the way he treated his family. He reminded me of a number of intellectuals who I have known who place such a high value on knowledge that they completely lose sight of anything else. Throughout his adult life, he never visited with his siblings because they lacked “class.” Of course, I don’t understand how that would matter given that he seemed to think that of everyone.

Regardless, the author Paul Strathern does get into some of Kant’s philosophy. In fact, he spends time discussing something JMF brought up: the fact that Kant believed that it was always wrong to lie. It’s pretty clear that Strathern doesn’t think much of Kant as a moral philosopher, and takes the man to task on a couple of things in Critique of Practical Reason. As usual, Kant didn’t really have anything to say about moral philosophy, he just created a framework in which one might be created. As a practical matter, Kant didn’t agree with his own examples like the “never lie” idea.

What is much more interesting is Kant’s idea of metaphysics. He argued that since God was not something that we had actual experience of—since he was necessarily outside our reality—it made no sense to argue for or against his existence. That strikes me as a rather limited way of looking at the issue. For one thing, what are we to make of negative theology? But then, Kant is great largely in the way he argues against the validity of most things that are of interest to actual human beings.

His metaphysics is based on the independent existence of time and space. That is to say that they exist before anything else. So that time and space are on the same level with God, except that they are things we actual experience. That surprised me. Most of the last hundred years of physics has pushed back rather strongly on that idea. With general relativity 99 years ago, Einstein developed a theory that implies that objects create their own space. Kant argued that you could take away all the observable aspects of an object, but you could not take away the space that it occupies. That doesn’t seem to be true.

Similarly for time. It doesn’t exist without a universe to measure it. We tend to look at actions in the universe as a function of time. But it is probably more accurate to say that time is a function of actions in the universe. Regardless, what does it even mean to say that time existed before existence? It makes my brain hurt to think about. But regardless, our understanding of these fundamental qualities of the universe have changed a great deal since Kant.

So where does that leave Kant? I find ridiculous all the work by philosophers to prove that philosophy doesn’t exist or is invalid. Have people really stopped thinking about philosophy since Wittgenstein? Have they stopped thinking about mathematics since Godel? Of course they haven’t! And the idea is similarly ridiculous that Kant had to save metaphysics from Hume who showed that it was an invalid field thought. That’s especially true given that Kant “saves” metaphysics by redefining it.

In the end, I’m left with the same thing that I always thought: Kant is interesting because of his approach to knowledge, not the knowledge he ultimately brought to light. And that’s good enough. What’s more, I think the 90 minutes I spent reading about Kant is enough for now. I’m going to cancel those other books I requested.