This morning, Digby wrote a few choice words about what she rightly calls, The New “Blame America First Crowd.” It follows from an interview with Douglas MacKinnon about his recent book, The Secessionist States of America: the Blueprint for Creating a Traditional Values Country… Now. He wants to found a new country called “Reagan.” Digby quoted him arguing that the Civil War was illegal, and that Lincoln went to war because the “North realized very quickly that it could not survive economically without the power of the South.” That’s a thigh-slapper! The South had largely missed the industrial revolution because of its reliance on slaves. It was an economic backwater then and to a large extent remains one to this day.

But the point of Digby’s article isn’t that MacKinnon is delusional; it is that MacKinnon, like so many on the far right, hates America. People like him love “America,” of course. “America” is some ideal that they have in their minds in which everyone agrees with them and they are never taxed, yet the Social Security checks keep coming. Mostly, “America” is a big deal in areas where people get a lot more from the federal government than they pay. But most of all, America constantly and always disappoints “America.”

Digby expressed my frustration perfectly:

It is extremely weird that we on the left have been labeled un-American when all we want are marginal changes to the current state of things. On the right, they are quite explicit that their patriotism is entirely dependent upon America doing exactly what they want. And despite what many people think, this is not a new phenomenon. It was true at least as far back as the 1950s. The most striking thing in Claire Conner’s Wrapped in the Flag is how often the people at that time repeated what is now the clarion call of the Tea Party, “Take our country back!” The implication is that America as it actually exists is invalid.

What it really all comes down to is that we liberals are supposedly wrong because we complain about foreign policy. But you see, this is part of the whole “America” love problem. Part of the conservative love of “America” depends upon the country being able to do whatever it wants militarily. This is why despite the US spending almost as much as the entire word combined on the military, conservatives claim that we must spend more on the military. The point, however, is that liberals are blaming “America” because we are against fascism and imperialism.

Conservatives think they are the arbiters of what America is all about. Liberals do not share in that delusion. In fact, liberals are quite explicit in thinking that there is a battle for the soul of America. So when a conservative bloviates about how abortion should be illegal, liberals may disagree, but they don’t claim the country wouldn’t be America if Roe v Wade were overturned. It’s all about purity, which is a well established conservative obsession. And this is what allows conservatives to claim that liberals hate America, when it is the conservatives who are always wanting to separate from the country. They care about “America,” and “America” only exists in their minds.

Andrew Prokop reported over at Vox yesterday, Election Forecasters Now Give Democrats a Slight Edge in Georgia. And that’s true. Michelle Nunn has been hammering David Perdue who spent most of his career outsourcing, and thinks it is something people should applaud him for. They haven’t been applauding.

It’s the same old story: the things Republicans actually believe in are really unpopular. But I’m sure in the social circle that Perdue is in, it’s a different universe. In it, outsourcing is great, only property owners should be allowed to vote, and taxes must be eliminated for the “job creators.” They are shocked when they get out into the real world and find that these are not widely supported ideas. And this is why conservatives think that liberals shouldn’t be allowed to vote. Unless they understand what “everyone I talk to” knows, they must be ill informed.

If you look at the polls, Nunn really does look like she is beating Perdue — by roughly 2 percentage points. But don’t get too excited. She doesn’t just have to beat Perdue. She has to get over 50% of the vote. If she doesn’t, it goes to a runoff in January. There are two problems with that. First, there is a libertarian, Amanda Swafford, who is consistently getting about 5% of the vote. As I’ve discussed before, libertarians tend to vote Republican. So most of those libertarian votes will go to Perdue in January. The second problem is bigger: voter turnout will be even worse in January, which will help Perdue.

But it is possible that Nunn could get to 50% in the general election. The Daily Kos election model currently has Nunn getting 48.2% of the total vote. As I discussed yesterday, the nationwide polling data for midterms has been off by an average of 2.9 percentage points. The polling for Nunn would only have to be biased against her by 1.8 percentage points. It isn’t out of the question. Just the same, maybe the polls are biased the other way around and Perdue will get 50%. (That’s unlikely; they would have to be running 3 percentage points against him.)

Let’s give the runoff a thought. I think if Nunn loses but still forces a runoff, it’s over. But if Nunn wins and they go to a runoff, I think there will be a lot of resources put to her campaign. And I don’t especially seeing the Republicans’ resources as changing things all that much. Nunn would have two months to continue to beat up on Perdue about how much he thinks it rocks to send jobs overseas. And with an aggressive get-out-the-vote operation, she might just be able to win. But I think it is clear that this is less likely to happen than that she is going to out perform the polls and win outright on 4 November.

It is important to remember, however, that none of this should even be possible. The Georgia electorate is changing, but it hasn’t changed that much. According to the polls, the Democrats are greatly out performing expectations. The Republicans really have nothing to feel good about in this election. And if the Democrats do manage to hold the Senate, there really ought to be suicides on K Street. I don’t expect to see this, however. The Republicans will take what will regardless be gains in the Senate as another reason to continue on with their scorched earth resistance to actually helping the country. Regardless of what happens, this will be the election that people will look back on and say, “That’s when the Republican Party started to lose its grip on national politics.”

Dean Baker wrote a very short but action packed article this morning, The Banking Industry Wins on Risk Retention With Mortgages. It is following up on Floyd Norris’s article in The New York Times, Banks Again Avoid Having Any Skin in the Game. It is all about the securitization of home loans. This probably sounds familiar because this is what wrecked the economy back in 2008. Given that the financial industry didn’t get harmed for what they did before, like a spoiled child, they never learned.

Norris explained that part of the Dodd-Frank law was to have required “risk retention” or “skin in the game” in their real estate securities. So when a bank bundled up a bunch of mortgages and sold them, it would have to keep a 5% interest. But there was a way around this. If the mortgage was considered super safe, this 5% risk retention wasn’t necessary. What made a loan super safe was if the borrower had a substantial down-payment. For example, if someone put down $100,000 on a $200,000 house, it was unlikely to be a problem because the home would have to go down in value by 50% in order for the bank to lose any money.

But this isn’t going to happen. The problem is that the banks had a lot of support in wanting to get rid of any requirements on loans. The economy is sluggish and people are having a hard time getting loans. So a chorus of voices rose up and said that we must do everything we can to encourage the banks to loan. Sigh. I am so tired of this. This is the neoliberal hellscape we now live in. It would be easier if the government just loaned the money directly. But instead, we have to allow private banks to enrich themselves making home loans, which the government guarantees. The banks do a useless job for a lot money at no risk to themselves.

The bottom line is expressed by Barney Frank, “The loophole has eaten the rule…” Except it is worse than that; maybe it would be better to say, “The loophole ate the rule and then died of poisoning.” And the truth is that it probably doesn’t matter. But bad policies are always enacted when they seem reasonable. It seemed reasonable for Bill Clinton to destroy welfare as long as the economy was doing great. It was only after the dot-com crash that it became clear that we still needed welfare as we had known it. So sure, the securities will be fine this year and net year. They may even be fine for the next decade. But eventually, we’ll see the same thing happen again.

Dean Baker pointed out that loans with no down-payments were four times as likely to default as loans with a 20% down-payment. He added, “It is also worth pointing out that the cost of requiring that banks retain risk on low down payment loans did not mean that people could not get loans without large down payments as often claimed.” It simply would have made loans slightly more expensive. But that was not how it was presented.

The the banks have won. Again. Just as expected. I remember back when we were in the middle of the crisis in 2008, there were bankers saying that the government really did need to regulate the banks because the bankers just couldn’t help themselves. But after the government stepped in and saved them, their tunes changed. Even the most minor of regulations were met with screams, “Socialism!” The bankers managed to water down the initial Dodd-Frank law, which was bad enough. But laws always have to be turned into policies by the bureaucracy. So the bankers have been working that system as well. And in the end, the people of the United States get the Michael Corleone deal that we can’t refuse, “Nothing.”

I’ve written before about the fiasco that’s been going on in Kansas, Art Laffer’s Toxic Prescription. Since the 1970s, Laffer has been selling the same old supply side snake oil. The idea is that cutting taxes will so stimulate the economy that it will actually bring more money into the government in the form of taxes. It isn’t true that there is no such thing as a free lunch, but this supply side myth is not one of those free lunches. Given our low level of taxation, it literally never works. But over three decades of failure has not stopped Laffer from continuing to push this idea.

Kansas is ground zero for this right now. Sam Brownback used Laffer’s ideas as an excuse to do what Republicans always want to do: cut taxes. This is not about economics. This is religious faith, which is why intellectual mediocrities like Art Laffer are held up as heroes on the right. But things have not worked out. The tax cuts have not spurred growth — unemployment is higher than it is in surrounding states. And the government has had huge deficits. The response from Brownback is that these things take time. Just keep waiting and eventually all will be well. Of course, the cuts to education are here today. And if the tax cuts were going to work, they would have worked by now.

But I learned something new about the Kansas story from an article by Mark Binelli in Rolling Stone, The Great Kansas Tea Party Disaster. He noted, “Back in 2011, Arthur Laffer, the Reagan-era godfather of supply-side economics, brought to Wichita by Brownback as a paid consultant…” Interesting. I knew that Laffer had consulted on how to destroy the Kansas economy, but I didn’t know it worked that way.

Here’s the thing. Since supply side economics is a religious faith, you don’t go hire an expert who will look at your options and decide on the best one. You decide what you are going to do and then you hire Art Laffer as a way to justify it. Laffer isn’t an economist; he’s a public relations device. So bringing him in to “consult” is picking your solution, because you know that Art Laffer has only ever had one idea (and it isn’t even his). So if you hire him, that’s the idea that you will get.

Many years ago, I was the head of software development at a high tech start-up. We did amazing work — arguably the best work I’ve ever been part of. But there was a shake-up among the owners and the brilliant founder of the company was pushed out. Suddenly, the company was controlled by a bunch of money guys who didn’t understand anything about technology. They hired a friend with a technological bent, but who was totally unqualified for the job. And he proceeded to destroy pretty much everything that was developed under the company’s founder. That was mostly on the hardware side. But at one point, they decided to hire a software consultant. This guy did work on web-based applications. So he studied what we were doing and — What a surprise! — he decided that we should convert the software to be a web-based application.

This is my experience with consultants. In general, they aren’t the generalists you would think. Instead, there is one thing they know and when hired, they always find that the best solution is that one thing they know. In the case of my clueless employers, I don’t think they understood what they were doing. They probably met the guy at a bar and that was good enough for them. But clearly Brownback knew what he was getting. Laffer was not going to surprise him.

The whole thing is remarkably disingenuous. We actually know pretty well what works in terms of economic policy. But there are always conservative economists around to tell conservatives whatever it is that they want to hear. Alberto Alesina is there to tell them that budget cuts in a recession will create a boom. Greg Mankiw will tell them that stimulus spending is good when a Republican is in the White House, and that it is bad when a Democrat is in the White House. Funny that. And Art Laffer, the one trick pony, will tell them tax cuts will pay for themselves. We would be dealing with more open-minded people if we were dealing with the Spanish Inquisition.

H/T: Ed Kilgore

As you probably know, I’ve been paying pretty close attention to the race for control of the Senate. You can see the six main models listed on the sidebar on the right. And recently, things have not been going so well, as I discussed in, Democrats Are Sad Not Delusional. So I continue to focus on Nate Silver’s model — currently giving Democrats a 36% chance of holding the Senate — and using Sam Wang’s model to remain hopeful.

Right now, Wang’s model gives the Democrats a 45±15% chance of holding the Senate. But it has been as low as 25±15% just a couple of days ago. It isn’t this number that gives me hope. Wang provides a more interesting statistic: the meta-margin. This is how far off the polls would have to be for the election to be a toss-up (50% chance that Democrats would keep control of the Senate). Currently, the value is R+0.4%. That is: Republicans are up by 0.4 percentage points and if the polls are off by 0.4 percentage points in the Republicans favor it would be a toss-up.

The reason this gives me hope is that polls usually are off by quite a lot more than that. Looking just at midterm elections (presidential election polling is better), the average magnitude of errors on elections since 1990 is 2.9%. Of course, that doesn’t mean that errors would be in the Republicans’ favor. In 1990, 1994, and 2002, the polls were off in the Democrats’ favor — meaning the Republicans did better than expected. But the last two midterms were off in the Republicans’ favor. And the last four elections total greatly favored the Republicans: +3.4%, +0.9%, -0.2%, +2.7%.

This doesn’t necessarily mean anything. The 1998 polls favored the Republicans by 4.9%. Then the 2000 polls favored the Republicans by 2.1%. But then it flipped and favored the Democrats by 4.0% in 2002. So maybe the polls are all making the Democrats look better than they will turn out to be. That would actually make sense, because the Democrats have been polling far better than anyone expected, given the fundamentals of this election. And if that’s the case, this could be a far worse election than I am expecting.

In the end, when I make my predictions going into the election, I’ll stick with the polls. But I hang onto the hope that the meta-margin provides. Of course, it is just a measure of the error that the models predict. Most of them claim that Democrats have about a one-in-three shot of keeping the Senate. And that means there is roughly a one-in-three chance that the Republicans will have a blow-out. So that’s not a lot to hold onto. But it’s something. As always, it will help if you vote.

You would know I was being ironic if I wrote, “Those subhuman blacks are such racists!” But if I were a conservative, well, you would have to assume that I was serious. I know this sounds like an extreme example, but conservative lawyer Larry Klayman was over at that bastion of sanity WorldNetDaily Friday, Time to Act on Obama’s Ebola-Gate. Basically, it is about yet another of his useless and costly lawsuits. But apparently, Klayman just can’t help himself because, you know, he’s a bigot.

There is, perhaps, nothing that a modern American conservative believe quite as much as “reverse racism.” They think that there is no racism in America because there are no laws that stop people from doing particular things because of their race. But they also believe — contrary to their first claim — that there is racism, and it is against whites for people even claiming that the other kind of racism exists.

Here is the money quote — the one you would know was ironic if I wrote it:

I’m not going to break the whole thing down — much less the rest of the article with such priceless quotes as, “But I am not a racist, and neither are you!” I just want to focus on three little words: “his fellow Africans.” Really?! Obama is an African? That’s amazing. It is now the sixth year of Obama’s presidency, and people on the right can still not accept that he is an America. He is still that inscrutable “African” who managed to trick a lot of the “real” (white) Americans to vote for him. It is a shockingly racist statement. Since Obama is black (whatever that is supposed to mean), he sides with his “fellow Africans” and against “whites and others.”

Brian Tashman at Right Wing Watch noted:

I also like how Africa is a single place in the minds of conservatives. It isn’t 20% of the land area of the world with 47 countries. I guess this goes along with the school district that wouldn’t allow two Rwandan children to enter school because of Ebola concerns. You know: it’s the “dark continent”; how could anyone tell one region from another — much less one nation from another! I mean, Rwanda is only 2,600 miles from the closest country with Ebola. But that’s just “I’m an ignorant American” syndrome. It isn’t racism.

I’ve only said it once, so let me repeat it: Larry Klayman is a bigot. But he has lots of support. If you have a strong stomach, you can read through some of the comments. One person claimed that his lawsuit wouldn’t work, “Crooked judges would rather see themselves and their families die of Obola, than allow discovery on Obola’s forged documents.” Another has it all figured out, “Obama WANTS half of America to die. WHY? CONTROL.” And another gave the obligatory shoutout to the conservatives’ newest authroitarian BFF, “I notice that Russia is clamping down, and Putin is right to do it.” (I can’t actually find any indication that this is true.)

What bugs me is that I’m sure Klayman is no kind of social pariah. That is something that the upper reaches of our society have lost sight of. Norms are enforced by people paying a social price for breaking those norms. But going around publishing racist comments about the president don’t disqualify him from being at all the good parties. I don’t know, but given that it wasn’t for Andrew Breitbart, why would it be for Klayman? The one good thing about this is that you don’t have to read the future Fall of the American Empire because you get to watch it in real time.

H/T: Digby

Ramesh Ponnuru now works at Bloomberg View, which goes along with my theory that any smart conservative will eventually end up with a good job at a mainstream news outlet because there are so few conservative writers who aren’t totally insane. But while I like him and think he often has really insightful things to say about American politics, he is usually just a conservative who can’t see beyond his limited worldview. Take, for example, his article today, Sorry, Obamacare Is Still Unfixable.

Earlier this year, I wrote, Ramesh Ponnuru Obamacare Warning to Conservatives. That was in reference to his article warning that Obamacare was not about to “implode.” But I criticized him for implying that conservative complaints about Obamacare were substantial. They aren’t. And to be honest, I don’t see that Ponnuru’s complaints are either.

In today’s article, he attacked the plan of Senators Mark Warner and Mark Begich to add “copper” plans to Obamacare. These would be plans with low premiums and high deductibles. Ponnuru says that such plans might hurt Obamacare, “That migration could, however, make the exchanges less stable by reducing the amount of money that healthy people are putting into them through their premiums.” It’s possible, but given the conservative tendency to always assume the worst about Obamacare and always be wrong, it is hard to take the “could” complaint very seriously.

But Ponnuru’s complaint especially annoys me because what Warner and Begich are doing is trying to appease conservatives. It is conservatives, after all, who are always yelling about how “catastrophic insurance” is the solution to all our problems. But once such things are on the table, they complain about high deductibles. Indeed, Ponnuru complains about the ridiculously high deductibles in the current “bronze” plans. And I agree: it’s terrible. And I don’t like the idea of “copper” plans. I wanted and continue to want a more liberal plan. The current plan is extremely conservative. Democrats are working to make it even more conservative. And the reaction by conservatives is that moves in their direction are no good. Because, let’s face it, Obamacare will never be any good. There is no “replace” of Obamacare; conservatives just want to kill it.

This brings up an issue: is healthcare in the United States better under Obamacare than it was before? I think the answer to that is clearly and resoundingly, “Yes!” That should be the question for conservatives like Ponnuru, just the same as it is for liberals like me. It shouldn’t be, “Is Obamacare better than whatever solution you have in your head?” I’m not saying that Ponnuru is being disingenuous, but it is just too easy for people (Like me!) to get lost in theoretical-land and not deal with the world as it is.

Ponnuru ended the article in a way that makes me even less keen. He wrote, “An NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll earlier this month found that only 36 percent of the public favors Obamacare.” That’s true, but hardly relevant. People don’t even know what Obamacare is. It is just that the word “Obamacare” has been vilified like the word “liberal” — and by the same people. No change to Obamacare will make “Obamacare” popular. Even if it was reformed to consist only of tort “reform” and huge tax cuts for the wealthy, conservatives wouldn’t like it because it has “Obama” in the word.

I am sure that Ponnuru knows this. So the end of his article is nothing but conservative propaganda. And more generally, but to a lesser extent, that’s true of the whole article. Ponnuru is better than this. Sadly, the conservative movement is not.

This image comes from Digby, Exceptionally Hysterical. What it shows is the coverage of yesterday’s shooting at the Canadian Parliament. On the left is CNN with, “Terrified Capital.” I’m sorry: “TERRIFIED CAPITAL.” On the right is the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) with, “Soldier Dies After Parliament Hill Attack, Gunman Also Shot Dead.” Stark difference.

What’s sad is that if I had only told you the headlines, you would have known: the first was from some American outlet. Even right now, The New York Times headline is, After Shooting, Fear and Anxiety Take Over Ottawa. And you would have known that the second headline was from some other country where they still report the news. Right now, the CBC headline is, Ottawa Shooting: A Day of Chaos Leaves Soldier, Gunman Dead.

I have a message for my fellow Americans: stop being such pussies. Constantly flying into fits of terror does not make us look tough. It makes us look like frightened children. As Russell Saunders noted yesterday, “As of this writing, the number of patients diagnosed with Ebola in the United States can be counted on one hand, and the number who have died on one finger.” Is there no threat too small that we won’t freak out?! If Malia gets a paper cut, will the headlines read, “BLOOD FLOWS IN THE WHITE HOUSE”?

The situation in Canada is pretty clear. There was a violent person who the Canadian government already knew about. He killed a man, which is sad in a general sense and a tragedy for those close to him. And now the violent man is dead. It doesn’t mean planes are heading for our skyscrapers. No black helicopters coming. No Ebola epidemic.

But you know what? There are 10,000 germs on every square inch of your skin! What’s more, every year, over two million children under the age of 5 die of diarrheal diseases. If I were you, I’d get to the bathroom fast. Not only can you vigorously wash your hands over and over again, it will also hide you away so that the rest of the world won’t have to see what cowards Americans are! This is why we spend on our military just under what the rest of the world combined spends: because we are terrified of a fair fight. Because we are the few, the arrogant, the pussies.