I’m not one for inspirational stories. In fact, I hate them. It’s really because I grew up in the United States. Now, for most people, this would mean that I would have grown up to believe in the greatest American myth: the will to success. This is the idea that you can do anything if you try hard enough. This is just nonsense. And it is pernicious nonsense because the flip side of it is that if you fail at something it is just because you didn’t try hard enough. The best some people can hope for is just to be mediocre. Like me on the guitar: I’m not bad but there is no way that I ever would have been great. Some people play guitar for 10,000 hours and become Duane Allman. Others do the same thing and become me. It is what it is.

But I read a great story in the Alaska Dispatch, 100-Mile Backcountry Ride on a Unicycle? No Problem. For the last five years, the loons up in Fairbanks have been doing the White Mountains 100, “a ultra-marathon endurance race staged in Interior Alaska.” It is open to “skiers, cyclists and runners.” And it’s hard: in addition to the 100 mile course, it involves going up 7,400 feet elevation and then back down. So the people who do it are the kind of people I like to think of as crazy.

But we need a different word for Elliot Wilson. On his birthday last year, he decided to learn to ride a unicycle. Because who doesn’t think “unicycle” when Fairbanks comes up in conversation? Later, when he got to compete in the White Mountains race, he thought it would be cool to do it on his new unicycle. But at that point, he could not ride it more than a quart mile without falling off. So, to make what is a long story including a trip to India short, he perfected his technique and won the race. Just kidding! He came in 43rd place out of 65 with a time of 19 hours. But that’s still five and a quarter miles per hour, which is a hell of a lot better than I could probably do on a two-wheeled contraption.

Unlike me, Wilson is a real American. He said, “I set out to do this to prove to myself that one can learn something quickly if one puts their mind to it.” I think that’s nonsense, and not just because he uses three pronouns in the same sentence. In order to agree with that sentence, I’d have to laden it down with so many caveats that it would be unrecognizable. Could I have done what he did? No. Could he have mastered Jackson’s Classical Electrodynamics in six months? Maybe, but I’ve never known anyone to do it. Most people (Smart people!) find they can’t do it after a lifetime.

But it’s still awful cool that this strange young man decided to race a unicycle through the frozen mountains for no particular reason. It is very American. And I mean that in the best sense of the word. Because Americans are at their best when they let fly with their weird. America is, above all, the land of freaks and the home of the bizarre. Play ball!

Afterword

I am well aware that those members of the Cult of Positive Thinking will believe that it is my attitude that prevents me from learning how to ride a unicycle and racing 100 miles in six months. But these are the people who make the world a better place. In my experience, such people have never had to overcome anything really hard. And the research is on my side. A positive mental attitude really doesn’t help people recover from cancer. So if you are a member of that particular cult, do everyone a favor and keep it to yourself. We are only interested in hearing it after you maneuver a unicycle through 100 miles of icy mountain. And then only for a very brief time.

H/T: FARK

On this day in 742 (or 747 or 748) Charlemagne was born. He was also called Charles the Great. Of course, his wife called him Chuck the Not as Great as You’d Imagine. I’m just saying.

He’s notable for more or less putting the old Roman Empire back together. Initially, he was King of Franks with his brother, Carloman. But they didn’t get along and were basically at war with each other. And then Carloman just up and died very conveniently of a nose bleed. “Nose bleed” is a common Germanic euphemism for fratricide. Given that Charlemagne is generally thought well of, most people don’t blame him for killing his brother. But come on!

What I think is interesting about Charlemagne is how entirely typical he is. If you look at “great” rulers like Alexander the Great and Genghis Khan, they all start out as royalty. I think we in the United States especially tend to think of such men as having clawed their way to the top. But that’s rarely the case. Instead, they are men born on home plate who take over other rich guy’s ball fields.

Conservatives, I’m afraid, are especially prone to this kind of thinking. That’s why everywhere you turn in conservative media these days, pundits can hardly contain their love of Putin. And if they were honest, they’d admit that they actually have a great deal of respect for Stalin and Hitler. I’m not saying they respect the genocides that both men led, but just that they love the idea of the “tough” leader. But it is mostly a myth. Anyway, Putin didn’t take power; he was given it.

Now I can’t say whether conservatives would like Charlemagne. True, he was an authoritarian. But he was also a capable administrator. Being competent is so girly. Plus, Charlemagne clearly thought that government had a purpose more than simply the enrichment of your already rich friends. In fact, by the standards of his time, he was a liberal. So I think on balance, conservatives would be against him. They’d be out with their signs, “Government Hands Off the Emperor’s Coronation!” Anyway, this song has nothing to do with him:

Happy birthday Charlemagne!

I really don’t want to write about this, but some stories are like smack to a junkie. Remember Dean Chambers? He was the guy behind Unskewed Polls. Despite everything, I thought he at least had a tad of shame. I based that on the fact that right before the last presidential election, he changed his polling results to be in line with what everyone else was saying. But I should have known better because after the election, he started the website Barack O’Fraudo, which claimed that he had been wrong only because of widespread voter fraud committed by Obama.

Okay, so the guy is just an extremist ideologue who is positively useless. But fun! You see, what happened to Chambers is quite clear. In 2012, he didn’t like what the polls were saying. Like a lot of people who have a tenuous grasp on statistics and extrapolation, he was convinced that the polls didn’t reflect reality. After all, everyone he knew was a big Romney supporter. So he looked at the demographic makeup of the polls and found that they were not the same as they were for previous elections. So he “unskewed” them, not realizing that the reason that the polls indicated a more diverse electorate was that the electorate was more diverse. The 2012 election must have been a humiliating defeat for him.

But like most ideologues, Chambers just knew that he couldn’t be wrong. But before he was clever: looking at the demographics of the polls was smart, even though he wasn’t smart enough to be right. At this point, however, he was just dumb. He grab hold of a tired old talking point: “ACORN stole the 2008 election for Obama!” Note how silly this is. If a Democrat couldn’t get elected after the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, then a Democrat could never get elected. Whatever. On the extreme right of the Republican Party, the “Democrats cheat” narrative is very big. This, by the way, is what allows them to push voter ID laws without thinking they are against democracy.

This brings us to yesterday, when Dean Chambers wrote an article in Examiner.com, Obama Regime’s Fuzzy Math Is Entirely Fraudulent. Even apart from the content, the article is hilarious. He doesn’t mention the Obama “administration”; it is always “regime.” He uses the word 11 times in an article that is 670 words long. The tone of the whole thing screams off the page as though Chambers fears that tomorrow may not come.

But what is perhaps most wonderful about the article is that it is not really about Obamacare, which is what it purports to be about. The first paragraph is about Obamacare. Then he spends the next four paragraph talking about unemployment. And in doing so, he shows that he doesn’t understand how unemployment statistics are gathered. He’s just ranting. What’s more, Chambers blames Obama for the high unemployment rate in the first months of 2009. Sometimes I think that my own rhetoric is a bit over the top, so I have no idea what you even call this other than the ravings of a mad man.

In the sixth paragraph he completely loses it. He writes, “The most out-of-touch president in the history of the country once declared, ‘we don’t have an inflation problem.’ Yeah right, he doesn’t have a coke problem either.” Nice bit about the cocaine; that’s definitely lends credibility to the argument. But the reason that Obama said we don’t have an inflation problem is, well, because we don’t have an inflation problem. Inflation has been pretty constant at around 2%. True: I think that’s a problem because it is too low, but I know that’s not what Chambers thinks.

He did, however, come back to the ACA. He said, “The Obamacare enrollments numbers are bogus.” This contrasts with his first paragraph where he wrote, “[T]he Regime has quite magically announced the seven million figure is reached.” And the entirety of his seventh and last paragraph, “This magic seven million Obamacare signups is no different than anything else reported by the Regime. Completely fraudulent, fake, and phony.”

It’s a very consistent argument: the Obamacare enrollment number is fraudulent because everything Obama does is fraudulent because Dean Chambers says so. There is nothing else in the article. He looks at no numbers. He unskews nothing. He simply proclaims that reality is different from what everyone else thinks. Generally, this is the definition of insanity. Such people are normally seen on city street corners having angry arguments with invisible people. But not Dean Chambers! He’s a respectable mad man because he tells conservatives what they want to hear.

H/T: Wonk Wire

Welcome to your oligarchy! The Los Angeles Times reported this morning, Supreme Court Lifts Overall Limits on Congressional Campaign Donations. It used to be that donors could only give a total of $123,000 per year to Congressional candidates or political parties. This decision is not a shock, of course. The reasoning is the same as it was for Citizens United. And the same five justices voted in favor of it just like the same four justices voted against it.

According to the article, “The justices noted that donors must still abide by rules that prevent them from giving more than $2,600 per election per candidate.” That’s actually kind of shocking. If money is speech and there is no reason to stop total campaign contributions, how is limiting the amount someone can give to an individual candidate justified? I think I know the reason and it is really upsetting.

If the justices simply removed all campaign finance at once, there would be a backlash. The people would demand a change to the Constitution. The justices know this. So it is their plan to eliminate all limits gradually. That way, by the time the rich own our democracy, it won’t be shocking. It will be just another negative step, but not that much worse than the way things were just before. So there’s no cry for change.

The big problem here is just how radical the activism of the Supreme Court now is. Remember all the discussion of stare decisis when John Roberts was nominated? This is the idea that if you are going to overturn long settled matters, you had better have a good reason. Well, in the case of Citizens United and today with McCutcheon vs FEC, the Court overturned decades-old law. And they have not done it with a scalpel but rather with a baseball bat.

I hope everyone sees just how dangerous this all is. Already, the Court decided that state campaign finance law in Montana was unconstitutional. Step by step, the Court is tightening a noose around the neck of democracy in America. Soon, we will have an oligarchy. Of course, in good American tradition, we will still call it democracy.

We liberals don’t tend to like bankers. They seem to make a lot of money for doing nothing. But in fact, they do important work. At least some of them. Think about it. There are disparate people who have money they want to invest and disparate people who need investment money. At their best, bankers are like casting directors in the movies. Just the same, here in America, we’ve really mythologized bankers. The truth is that bankers help the economy run well, but they are not the reason the economy runs. And it is totally out of control.

After World War II, financial industry profits were roughly 10% of all business profits in the United States. And they pretty much stayed at that level for a long time. But then they really took off starting in the 1980s. It’s interesting that 1980 seems to be the inflection point where the United States went from a middle class society to an oligarchy. Before the Lesser Depression, the financial industry was responsible for 40% of all business profits in the United States.

There has been a lot of talk recently about “high frequency trading” because of the media blitz for Michael Lewis’ Flash Boys. This is actually kind of strange, because this has been well known for a long time. But anything that gives the issue more attention is good. Because here’s the thing. High frequency trading does not do any of the good things that bankers do. All it does is skim off profits.

And it’s worse than that. Given that these trades take money away from investors, it takes some of the incentives out of investing. What’s more, it pushes the narrative that Wall Street is not doing anything productive and that it is just a big casino. So we should get rid of the high frequency trading. But we don’t need to legislate it out of existence. For a long time, Dean Baker has been pushing a financial transaction tax. As he noted yesterday, “A bill proposed by Senator Tom Harkin and Representative Peter DeFazio would impose a 0.03 percent tax on all trades of stocks, bonds, and derivatives.” That’s a very small fee, which would not affect regular trades. But it is enough to put the high frequency traders out of business.

Of course, the financial industry is completely against such a tax. But this is bizarre. When I go to the store and make a financial transaction of cash for Advil, I have to pay a financial transaction tax, more commonly referred to as a sales tax. And it is 8.75%, not 0.03%. So a financial transaction tax shouldn’t be a big deal. And if we lived in a democracy, it wouldn’t. Unfortunately, both of our political parties are beholden to the financial industry so I doubt anything will change soon.

That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try. In addition to eliminating a truly pernicious aspect of the financial industry, the tax would raise an estimated $400 billion over the next ten years. That is almost five times as much money as Congress just cut from the food stamp program. This is why issues like the financial transaction tax are so frustrating. They are overwhelmingly beneficial. But they aren’t done because a very small number of extremely powerful people benefit by the system staying in its current broken state. Hopefully, Michael Lewis’ book will help to push the matter. And you could, you know, write your representatives and vote.

Today, the White House announced that 7.1 million people have signed for the ACA on the exchanges, thus meeting the administration’s initial goals. Of course, when it comes to the Republican response, the healthcare law can’t win. If the signups had not met goals, they would have said it proved that the law was hopeless. Now they claim that the numbers are fake and even if they aren’t it still means the law is hopeless. There is something hopeless in Washington and it isn’t Obamacare; it’s the Republican Party.

But it is true that seven million people signing up on the exchanges does not mean the law is a success. There are things that could derail it. The most obvious is how the insurance rates are going to look next year. This is the kind of thing that smart conservatives like Josh Barro are talking about. But it is unlikely that it will actually be a problem. MS at The Economist wrote, Will the Haters Ever Stop Hating? It talks about how MS is from the Netherlands where they have had essentially the same system since 2006 and it works just fine.

The bigger issue, of course, is the endless series of court cases against the ACA, trying to bring the law down by any means available. It’s especially sad that the vast majority of these are lawsuits by supposed Christians. I guess the idea is that birth control, which is not discussed in the Bible, is more important than helping the poor, which is in the Bible. Huffington Post has a nice slide show that would be helpful for Christians to check out, 9 Jesus Quotes About The Poor. Never did Jesus say, “Blessed are those who prosper be denying the least of brothers healthcare.” But that’s Conservative Christians for you: 99% conservative and 1% Christian.

Jonathan Chait wrote a brilliant article about this conservative opposition this afternoon, The Obamacare Train Did Not Wreck. It emphasizes something that informs all of my political writing: liberals are essentially practical and conservatives are essentially ideological. In the press, the two sides are presented as equal and opposite, but that’s just not true. Conservatives claim to be for small government as an end in itself. But liberals are not for big government as an end, although they don’t mind it if it is a practical necessity.

Now I said above that conservatives “claim” to be for small government. This is very important because the fact of the matter is that conservatives are not, in practice, for small government. It is most accurate to say that they are situationally in favor of small government. When it comes to giving money to the rich, they rarely say anything about big government. It is only when big government is helping the little guy that they have a problem.

The perfect example of this is what has gone on with the farm bill this year. The Republican Party in the House wanted to savage aid to poor people. But they wanted to increase funding to farmers, almost all of which are rich. And notice how unfair this is. One of the justifications for food stamps is that farm price supports make the cost of food more expensive. So if the poor have to pay more money for their food because of the government, the poor ought to be compensated. But no: big government largess for the the rich and small government austerity for the poor. That is the Republican way.

And that’s all we are seeing with Obamacare. They don’t like the fact that it takes money from the rich and gives it to the poor. All the arguments about individual mandates and religious liberty are just a means to an end. And that end is a world in which the government makes money flow only one direction: from the poor to the rich. And that is the system we mostly have today. The ACA is the only big exception in recent years. No wonder the Republicans hate it.

Ed Kilgore often annoys me because of his New Democratic outlook on politics. Just the same, he is a keen observer who posts 12 articles a day. So he is required reading if you want to know what’s going on in partisan politics. But what bugs me most about him is what I see as cynical defeatism. He is very much part of crowd that argues we have to move to the center to get those mythical swing voters. But today, we are of one mind, How to Get Marginal Voters to the Polls.

The biggest challenge facing Democrats this year is the falloff of base voter participation in midterm elections. There are two approaches to fixing this. The first is the “inspire” approach. The idea is that if the Democrats rally around an exciting issue like increased funding for Social Security, the base will come running to the polls. The second is the “nuts and bolts” approach to getting out the vote (GOTV). The idea here is simply to knock on doors and provide drivers to get people to the polls.

Although I do think it is important to inspire Democratic voters, this is more about the party’s long term prospects and my desire to have actual liberal policy instead of the usual “not quite as bad as the Republicans” policy that so often defines the Democrats. When it comes to winning elections, I don’t think the Democratic Party should much worry about policy at all. As I say all the time: our policy ideas are popular, so if a lot of people vote, we win. It’s as simple as that.

As Kilgore points out, it isn’t as though we can’t do both. But if I had to pick just one, it would be enhanced GOTV efforts. Kilgore has his own reasons for favoring this. But I think it is as simple as the fact that the reason that Democratic voters don’t show up in midterms is that their lives are more scattered and it is harder to make time to vote. It isn’t that they aren’t interested in voting. And if there is one thing I’ve learned over the years from small time organizing, it is that a simple phone call makes a huge amount of difference. Knowing that even one actual human being cares that they show up makes people much more likely to do so.

So the news that the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee is going to spend nine times as much on its GOTV efforts than it did in 2010 is huge. All you have to do is look at turnout patterns over the last few elections and you will see it all. The Democrats lost in 2010, but not because the people turned against them. They lost because the people who liked them in 2008 didn’t show up in large enough numbers in 2010. And if the Democrats lose this year, it will be for the same reason.

My understanding is that the Democratic Party as a whole is going to be focused on trying to overcome the base voter turnout. Just the fact that they are trying to address the problem is cheering news. Too often in the past, it has seemed that the Democratic establishment has just sat on its hands grumbling that the voters weren’t showing up. The Koch brothers can spend their millions on blanket advertising. What else can they do? Their policies aren’t popular and the people who like them already vote in high numbers. The Democrats are the party of the people (or as close as we are going to get in our two party system). Leave the wholesale politics to the Republicans. We can win with retail politics.

I have only been the primary caregiver to two cats: Pulitzer and Deadline. They were both black cats with small amounts of white. That’s probably just a fluke, because I’m not a racist when it comes to cats. I judge them on the content of their personalities not the color of their fur. But apparently, I am in the minority. According to Alissa Scheller at The Huffington Post, white cats are almost three times as likely to get adopted as black cats.

This seems especially strange to me, because totally black cats are probably the most beautiful of all. In fact, according to the article, one Nevada shelter started a campaign to “Adopt your own mini-panther.” And all of their black cats were quickly adopted. There’s no surprise to that. Black cats do seem especially sleek and dexterous, even if it is just an optical illusion. But I would think people would pick up on that without having to be told.

It is true that some people are superstitious about black cats. In fact, some shelters will not allow black cats to be adopted around Halloween for fear that they will be mistreated. But only 13% of Americans are superstitious about black cats—not nearly enough to explain the discontinuity. What’s more, in England, it is considered to be good luck to give a bride a black cat. In Scotland, seeing a black cat indicates that you are going to get some money. And doubtless, some percentage of Americas would want to have a black cat because of its association with witchcraft. So I doubt any of mythology about black cats really has much to do with the adoption rates.

The same thing happens to dogs. Although if you look at the research, it is far less pronounced an effect than it is for cats. So it is interesting that this behavior is known as “Black Dog Syndrome.” As my sister would note, this is just another example of our cultural bias against cats. But I’ll leave that issue to another time. When it comes to dogs, it seems the problem is to some extent just outright racism: people think black dogs are more aggressive. It’s just terrible.

I think that people may assume that black cats and dogs are less emotional. It is true that it is harder to determine the details of their faces. It is also possible that black animals at shelters don’t stand out in their little cages. If they are less likely to be noticed, they are less likely to be adopted.

All black animals (Including rats!) are adorable and deserve our love. So if you are planning on adopting a pet, you really should look for a black one. This isn’t just something you should do out of altruism. The fact that black animals stay at shelters longer means that you are likely to get a better pet that is black. The syndrome also affects other darker colored animals, so check them out too. You’ll be glad you did.

Afterword

Also: go to a no-kill shelter. Most shelters do little but kill animals.