Last night I watched the first segment of 60 Minutes. It looked like they were going to do a hit job on the clean energy industry. And I was not disappointed. After all that we’ve been through the last couple of months with the show, I am now convinced that someone is in charge who has a real conservative ax to grind. First we had Benghazi. Then we had the NSA whitewash. And now we’re back to what was effectively a rant about Solyndra going out of business and “wasting” a half billion dollars!

The documentary We’re Not Broke (currently available on Netflix) reports that every year, the federal government loses $70 billion from corporations using offshore tax havens. Yet 60 Minutes is concerned that the government spent a couple billion dollars investing in cutting edge technologies that have not paid off? That’s not reporting. That’s propaganda.

Leslie Stahl listed four clean energy companies that had gone out of business. Then she added, “I’m exhausted.” Four companies exhausted her! No wonder her reporting is so bad. If saying 14 syllables exhaust her, then doing any research would be out of the question. (Note: in the transcript, more was written, but she gave up after the four in the actual interview.) The answer to this from Steven Koonin was, “As I told you at the beginning, the energy business is tough!”

Think Progress published a great article with some informative charts, 60 Minutes Hit Job on Clean Energy Ignores the Facts. It responded:

Despite the fact that the vast majority of start-ups go bankrupt, the government’s investments do far better. Even with the half billion given to Solyndra and Abound, the “DOE Loan Guarantee Program has a whopping 97 percent success rate.” Now I’ll admit, if 60 Minutes had presented the story accurately, it would have been a puff piece, “Government Program Really Successful in Clean Energy Funding!” But why not a puff piece? The show was more than willing to present a puff piece to justify NSA spying.

According to Media Matters, one of the people 60 Minutes interviewed for the segment, energy expert Robert Rapier, tweeted after the the show that he gave them a list of successes and told them that solar energy was the future. But that conflicted with the narrative that Leslie Stahl and company wanted to present. So that information didn’t make the cut.

Perhaps the most egregious (but hardly shocking) fact about the story was that global warming was not mentioned once. In fact, about half way through the story, it became clear to me who was really behind it: the fracking industry. Stahl dutifully noted that that natural gas was “relatively clean.” Well, in terms of local pollution it is quite clean. And in terms of global warming, it is a hell of a lot better than other hydrocarbons. So in that regard, I guess it is “relatively clean” in the sense that eating off the floor is “relatively clean” compared to eating out of a dirty toilet.

Also not mentioned were the huge subsidies that traditional energy supplies get. When Vinod Khosla said there was no down side to gas made from trees, Stahl responded in voice-over, “Well there is: first off, his clean green gasoline costs much more than what you pay at the pump.” (BTW: there was no “second off.” That was her only complaint about it as an energy source.) I guess that Stahl and her producers have never heard of externalities: costs that we all pay for that isn’t factored into the price. You know: like global warming and oil spills. And then there are all those tax subsidies that Exxon-Mobile gets by keeping all their profits off shore. And there is much more. The price we pay at the pump is not the price we pay. The real price we pay is much higher. Higher than Khosla’s gas? I don’t know. He might be a charlatan for all I know. But the fact is that even with all its unfair advantages, soon the fossil fuel industry will be beaten by solar.

But Leslie Stahl and 60 Minutes are doing everything they can to push that day off as far as possible.

Martin Longman wrote an interesting article over at Booman Tribune yesterday, GOP’s Irrational Exuberance. It’s about the Republicans and their conviction that they are going to totally rock in the 2014 elections. Longman isn’t so sure. He thinks that “they will have to develop a positive message.” If he’s right, then all hope is lost for the GOP in 2014, because the party just doesn’t have a positive message. That’s what made Reagan so important to the conservative movement: as vile as his policies were, he seemed like he cared. (He didn’t really; he was the leading edge of winner-take-all conservatism.)

What I think will happen in the 2014 election regarding the Republicans is what always happens. The Republicans will run the same old candidates and hope that the Democrats just don’t come out to vote. (This is unfortunately, a highly successful approach.) But as I discussed this last week, the GOP attempt to get better candidates won’t work. Almost half of the Republican Party is made of fools who believe the Fox News propaganda as faithfully as they believe the Bible.

You see, it doesn’t matter what the “establishment” Republicans want for candidates. What they believe in are exactly the same things that the Crazy 40 believe in. Oh, I know! The establishment types don’t really believe that it is better to let a pregnant woman die than get an abortion. And they don’t believe that God Hates Fags. But they know that they can’t upset the Crazy 40 or they will be decimated in the general election.

And let’s look back on the notable crazy candidates of the past. In 2010, it was Sharron Angle and Christine O’Donnell. But even if the Republicans had nominated better candidates who had won the general election, the Republicans would not have taken control of the Senate. In 2012, it was Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock. But again: had better candidates been nominated and won the general election, the Senate would have remained in control of the Democrats. Right now, the Democrats have 55 seats (including two leftist independents who caucus with the Democrats) in the Senate and the Republicans have only 45. So even if all of the 4 crazy Republican poster children had won, the Democrats would still control the Senate.

What’s more, those last two elections were ones where the Democrats had vastly more seats to protect. And that is again the case in 2014. But in 2016, it will be the opposite. And that means a couple of things. First, it means that the Republicans only chance to take over the Senate is to do it in 2014. Second, it means if they take over the Senate, they will only have it for 2 years, under a Democratic president so it won’t do them much good anyway. And third, it means that the in 2016, the Democrats could again have a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate.

As for the House, the gerrymandering continues to help the Republicans. But as each day goes by, the gerrymandering has less and less impact. I’ve argued that 2016 will be a huge year for the Democrats where what little gerrymandering advantage the Republicans still have will not be enough to maintain control of the House. Given that the Democrats will also likely keep the White House, 2016 will look a lot like 2008. But even that will not cause the Republicans to make any policy changes. That will have to wait until 2018, when they find that they can’t even win elections in an off year anymore. But they may not be willing to make changes even then; they may just disintegrate. (Note: the next redistricting takes place after the 2020 elections—an on-year election that is likely to benefit the Democrats. If I were a Republicans I would be terrified. Or maybe not, because if I were a Republican, I would be an idiot.)

Regardless, I think Republicans have advantages in 2014 that will allow them to keep the House and if they are very lucky, take over the Senate. It will be a last hurrah for them, however. And no amount of strategy is going to change 2014 in a big way. It will mostly be a wash, regardless of what candidates the Republicans manage to nominate.

I’m no fan of David Brooks. A couple of days ago, I wrote, David Brooks Puts Profits over Prophets. But I don’t see why liberals are so upset about his Drug War apologia. Don’t misunderstand: I see what they are saying. David Brooks used to smoke pot, but he thinks it should remain illegal without the slightest recognition that the drug’s legal status had no effect on his life. He was white and upper middle class (at least). If he had been black and poor, the drug’s legal status might have destroyed his entire life. He doesn’t understand that. I get it.

Of course, David Brooks also doesn’t seem to get that simply being born black and poor would also destroy your whole life. Not a lot of poor black kids get to go to Grace Church School. David Brooks seriously needs to go to a Tim Wise seminar. But that’s what David Brooks does: not understanding that we live in an incredibly unjust country with an economic system seemingly designed to reward the worst of what we are. He’s an apologist for the rich. And the fact that he is well paid to work at the “newspaper of record” is all the indictment of our society that you need. We have a very sick culture.

But David Brooks isn’t the only clueless person around. Our last three presidents have all committed drug felonies. Two of those three were Democrats. Our most recent president was paid millions of dollars to write about how he not only smoked pot, but also did cocaine from time to time. None of these men seem to care that the lives of young people today are being destroyed by those very same laws that they managed to avoid getting applied to them.

I can hear the apologists calling foul right now. Yes, I understand. There is a reason. There is always a reason. Clinton was a draft dodger so he couldn’t actually be liberal when it came to drug “crime.” Bush was a conservative so what do you expect? Obama is black so obviously he can’t be liberal, except in as much as he is dragged along by popular opinion. And I haven’t seen a whole bunch talk about those cocaine laws that Obama occasionally broke.

We have a major problem with drug laws in this country. But David Brooks is not part of that problem. Did anyone expect him to come out in favor of drug legalization? Even David Frum still thinks that cannabis is a dangerous drug! And who cares what David Brooks thinks? I know some people do but they’re all idiots anyway. Our drug law problems come from our politicians—especially our “liberal” politicians. So complain all you want about David Brooks’ hypocrisy on our drug laws, but just remember: he is way at the back of a line that’s head is guarded by President Obama.

I was watching an interview on Democracy Now! with Kevin Phillips from a couple of weeks after the last presidential election. Phillips is an interesting guy and he is always worth listening to. But he said something that really stood out to me. He noted that America was a nation in decline. This is a big issue to me that I almost never hear anyone talk about.

Where I see America’s decline most clearly is among the rich. These people demonstrate a “circle the wagons” mentality. That’s what all the tax policy is about. The rich seem to have gotten to the point where they don’t think they will get richer because the nation is getting richer. Instead, they just want to take a larger and larger slice of the economic pie. That’s how you get rich in a dying empire.

What’s really important here is that this belief in the decline of the nation is self-fulfilling. Over the last 40 years, we have given the rich a larger and larger share of the economy. This has effectively decimated the middle class. So while we are still a very wealthy nation we have become a kind of banana republic. Of course, instead of having banana plantations, we have a financial industry. That makes it worse! At least you can eat bananas. Most of the financial industry is useless even regarding its already dubious purpose of moving capital around.

The other important aspect of this is the income inequality. Increasingly, we have the very rich and we have the poor. In as much as we have a middle class, it is made up of the remnants of our once unionized work force. For a very large segment of the modern American work force, it might was well be the late 19th century. There is no 40 hour work week when you work 3 jobs. There’s no overtime. There’s no benefits, even at companies that offer them because you don’t work enough for that particular company.

And we are declining in the most horrible way possible. We are constantly told that we don’t have enough money to provide for the poor or have universal healthcare or a clean environment. But we do have enough money for corporate welfare. We do have enough money to lock up cannabis smokers. We do have enough money to cut the taxes of the rich. And note this because it is very important: spending money on the things that our rich overlords tell us we can’t afford would make our country and our economy stronger. And the things they say we can afford are the primary causes of our national and economic decline.

Arnold Schwarzenegger once said, “If you work hard and play by the rules, this country is truly open to you. You can achieve anything.” Pretty much the same thing has been said about every politician during my lifetime. But I haven’t seen any of them do anything about it. It is patently false. Obama hasn’t even tried to do anything for the labor movement. Why would he?! New Democrats don’t believe in that old economy stuff. They think if everyone would just teach themselves computer programming, everything would be fine.

But everything will not be fine. That’s because the rich have given up on America. They are just consolidating their gains. And their politicians have given up on America too. The only ones who haven’t given up on America are the poor. But no one listens to us. When the Occupy movement started, the media yawned. “Just a bunch of liberals.” But when the Tea Party movement started, the media celebrated. “A bunch of old people backed by the rich pushing for lower taxes on the rich!” That was something “new” and worth reporting!

And that’s our country in decline: the only things that matter are the things that matter to the rich and that’s because the only people who are ever listened to are the rich. This is not democracy. This is not freedom. If it weren’t so tragic, it would be a joke.

Earlier today, Jonathan Chait wrote, Republican Reformers Stop Being Polite to Tea Party, Start Getting Real. Seeing that title, I jumped right in. I was prepared to savage any silly ideas that Chait had about Republican reformers and where they do or do not fit into the conservative movement. But that title was just about as inaccurate as it could be.

The article summarizes two articles in the most recent issue of National Affairs magazine. One by conservative hacks Michael Gerson and Peter Wehner. And another by AEI’s Michael Strain[1], who I will admit has shown himself in the past to not be a total idiot and nutjob. As Chait describes it, the “Prague Spring for the mainstream” conservative intelligentsia. And then he spends the rest of the article showing how it is nothing of the sort.

The problem is that being a conservative in any capacity is a really well-paying gig. No one is going to threaten his cushy job at AEI in the name of fixing the Republican Party. But even if one were so inclined, they would quickly figure something out that I’ve been talking about for years: the Democratic Party is the conservative party. So if these people really want to reform the Republican Party, they have to pretend that the Democratic Party is something that it is not. Chait puts it perfectly:

He then goes on to note that it isn’t that Republicans don’t have actual policies that they are vigorously pushing. It is just that they are the most vile policies imaginable that no conservative apologist could countenance. This is the Wonderland that conservative intellectuals live in. If you talk to them (And I do!) about their policies, they will tell you about how they are good for the poor. This is where Paul Ryan gets all the hammock garbage. The reason that people are poor is that the government is giving them too much! But when you step out of Wonderland, it gets hard. Poor kids go to school hungry. Poor kids get worse educations. Poor kids die at a much higher rate than rich kids. Well, the conservative intellectuals don’t want that, so they stay locked up inside Wonderland where all children are equal and have a good shot at the American Dream.

What’s most important to me in all of this is that these would be reformers aren’t just spewing out their Wonderland message of the perfect conservative policy. They are also reinforcing the beliefs of the reactionaries that Obama and the Democrats are secret communists trying to destroy the nation. And these “Republican reform” articles (it’s a genre) are always peppered with these distortions about the Democrats that reinforce what the Tea Party crowd already believes.

A more fundamental problem is that if there really were such a thing as a reasonable Republican, he would not stay one for long. Think of Michael Strain. If he really believes in what he claims to believe in, he fits much better in the Democratic Party than the Republican Party. But if he became a Democrat, he might lose his job at the AEI. I’ve wondered the same thing about Norman Ornstein, who is also at AEI. But I put him in the same category as David Cay Johnston and Bruce Bartlett: people who align with Republican ideals but don’t seem to vote with the party anymore. But Strain is much younger without the enormous reputations of these three men. So he has to be careful.[2]

But I have some advice for him and others like him: stop trying to be reformers. You’re only making things worse.

Afterword

Look at that picture of Strain above. He looks like a nice young man. He’s welcome in the big tent of the Democratic Party. I know that the two of us would be on opposite sides of the tent. But I’d welcome him. I doubt he’s much more conservative than Obama.

[1] Be careful. This is Michael R. Strain. It is not the Louisiana Republican Michael G. Strain.

[2] Generally, reform is for the older, so Strain is actually showing more bravery than most people in Washington.