Stop me if you've heard this before, but Michele Bachmann is nuts.

Earlier this week the House of Pho got a robocall from Rep. Michele Bachmann. Somehow we are on some right wing list, even though neither of us have done anything remotely right wing within memory.

So admittedly my attempt to get back into blogging this summer hasn’t gone well. (In related but better news, my house painting is nearly done.) I’ve been looking for something to get me excited about the blog again and if Michele Bachmann robocalling can’t do it, I should just quit. Hell, if Bachmann bringing the crazy to my personal answering machine can’t get me excited, I should check my pulse.

As Bachmannalia goes, this is fair to middlin’. To the good, it turns a basic policy disagreement into a vast conspiracy – a circle of money no less. To the bad, no one is accused of being a Communist or a U.N. spy or even un-American.

But the real crazy here is the call itself. It violates every rule of campaign communications, runs like mad for a full two minutes and ends up no where. I’ll try to get this hosted somewhere because there is no substitute for actually hearing her drone on interminably. In the meantime, here is a transcript, with some notations.

Hi I’m Michele Bachmann and I’m sorry that I missed you.¹ As you might know Speaker Pelosi has taken the unprecedented² step of calling all 435 House members back to Washington DC today for the purpose of spending $26 billion that we don’t have.³ The members were out on a six week hiatus, they’ve scattered to the four corners of the Earth⁴, and I think the reason Speaker Pelosi is bringing us all in today is because her members are in political trouble and she knows they’ll need the financial support of the public employees unions. ⁵

This $26 billion represents a circle that works like this. Take $26 billion out of the productive private sector⁶, deposit it in the U.S. Treasury. Then Speaker Pelosi and the Democrat majority will vote to send this money from the Treasury⁷ and to politicians all across the country⁸. Then state and local politicians will give this money to employees of the public employees unions. The public employees unions will skim their share off the top of the workers check first in the form of union dues.⁹ Part of the dues will be funneled into the union’s political action committee which in turn will be spent on political TV, radio, internet and print ads as well as union boots on the ground.¹⁰

Tonight we’re calling one million households.¹¹ We’re telling them what the Speaker of the House is doing and we’re asking the people’s opinion on this cash for Democrat reelection program.¹² Please come to my website MicheleBachmann.com¹³ for more information at MicheleBachmann.com.¹⁴

Speaker Pelosi has targeted me for defeat this fall¹⁵, so please go to my website MicheleBachmann.com¹⁶ and please do all you can to help.

This is paid for by Bachmann for Congress. My campaign can be reached at XXX-XXX-XXXX.<sup>17

1</sup>I know this it pro forma, but it kind of creeped me out. Like if we had been home, Michele would have wanted to chat. Or ask if I harbor anti-American beliefs.

²Stopping here would have been good. Stopping here I would have respected. George Will is fond of saying “X is a good idea but we cannot afford all good ideas.” It's a damned persuasive argument. But Michele Bachman is dispositionally incapable of stopping at a good, persuasive argument.

³Unusual but not unprecedented, even over the recent past.

⁴Seriously, I’m supposed to feel sorry for legislators who are called upon to legislate?

⁵Here comes the wacky. Congress isn't sending aid to the states because laying off thousands of teachers and cops would be a bad thing. No, it's all a big conspiracy.

⁶Again, do you really want to go there? The private sector is currently producing what exactly?

⁷No idea why this business about into and out of the Treasury is in here. Unless she thought that a robocall of 1:40 just wouldn't do.

⁸Last I checked, the Tea Party believes more than anything else in the wisdom of state and local governments. They believe everything went wrong when the Federal Government grew more powerful to the detriment of the states. Hell, the baggers even want to repeal the 17th Amendment and go back to states appointing Senators. But when state officials think that it might be nice to have enough money to fulfill basic state functions, they are no longer the noble defenders of liberty, they are (make a face when you say it) politicians.

⁹Mind you this never ever happens when the private sector gets Federal money. For instance White Hat surely has never spent a dime of state money on behalf of the legislators who guarantee it a healthy slice of the education pie.

¹⁰When corporations support Republicans, the Bachmanns of the world insist that it's not because they expect legislative favors, it's because those are candidates who support free market principles. That same logic could apply here. The public employee unions support politicians who don't make it a campaign plank to screw them over. But no, in Bachmann's world Republicans are noble defenders of the rich and powerful, but liberals are liberals only because they are corrupt and evil.

¹¹This blows my mind. I can't imagine one million robo calls on this issue being cost effective, especially since all but the most rabid Bachmanniacs have hung up on this thing by now. But when you raise crazy money, you can do crazy things with it, apparently.

¹²So at this point I'm expecting a big finish. I'm expecting some sort of call back option or online poll or something, but I get. . .

¹³Really, that's it? Go to my website is it? This is all about getting hits on the website? And by the way that website doesn't mention any of this. Admittedly I got to it a day late, but still that's not an unexpected response time.

¹⁴Syntactically flawed repetition of the website sic which, along with her increasingly agitated tone and the runon length, makes me wonder if she had a script or was making one million extemporaneous robocalls.

¹⁵DCCC apparently has her opponent Tarryl Clark on their “Red to Blue” list, but I doubt they intend to do anything more than make her spend money on her own race. She's in an R+7 district, raises incredible jack and it's not our year. And while Bachmann raises lots of money for her side, she does pretty well by our side as well. In any event, it's a stretch to say Pelosi has "targeted" Bachmann -- certainly she hasn't in the way that Bachmann has targeted Pelosi.

¹⁶Note that Bachmann's name is spelled idiosyncratically – one “l” in the first name and two “n's” in the last. Anyone who knows this probably doesn't need a robocall from her. And neither “MichelleBachman.com” nor “MicheleBachman.com” refer you to her actual website. Didn't most web pros learn this stuff like ten years ago?

¹⁷The phone number is on the website as well, but no one who reads this blog would do anything wholesome with it and phone pranks can get quickly out of hand. I will be no party to that.

The Right Wing Attempts to Make Ohio's Constitution Unconstitutional

The Tea Party-backed effort to put an issue on the ballot "nullifying" the health care reform's individual mandate is in the news because its supporters aren't getting enough signatures. The even wackier "Ohio Sovereignty Amendment" is not in the news, presumably because it is doing even worse.

If they passed, neither of these amendments to the Ohio Constitution would actually accomplish much, other than pulling the state into Federal litigation that it would lose.

The health care amendment states that no Ohioan can be required to purchase health insurance. The Sovereignty Amendment goes farther, purportedly restricting the Federal Government's jurisdiction in Ohio and therefore its ability to enforce any number of laws.

But the states can't do that. Article VI of the U.S. Constitution includes the "Supremacy Clause" which states:

"This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the contrary notwithstanding."

Sounds pretty definitive, doesn't it. If state law contradicts Federal law, Federal law wins. Every time.

It is odd that the news coverage of these amendments does not mention this problem. It isn't a big deal at this point, given that they are no where close to getting either amendment on the ballot, but even when the amendments first made news, the supremacy problem has generally received scant attention. If either amendment unexpectedly grows legs, it would be a good thing for the media to start paying attention to the fact that neither actually accomplishes what the proponents claim.

The supporters of both amendments answer that they can nullify Federal laws when the national government has overstepped its authority. The short answer to this is that it's still the Supreme Court that has the final say over whether the Federal government has exceeded its jurisdiction, not the states.

Take this as my first post in a promised series regarding the Sovereignty Amendment. The longer answer to the jurisdiction question will be upcoming.

Signature Gathering Beginning for Sovereignty Amendment

Word comes that supporters of a "Sovereignty Amendment" to the Ohio Constitution is beginning.

The Ohio Sovereignty Amendment is part of a broader national state sovereignty movement which seeks to introduce bills, resolutions and constitutional amendments purporting to assert state rights against the Federal government.

As of now, the Ohio effort looks doomed. From the looks of the website of the sponsor, the People's Constitution Coalition of Ohio (PCCOH) it does not look like they have the financial backing necessary to pay for signature gatherers which is indispensable. Someone will roll in here and say that they have committed grassroots support and they can gather the signatures with an all volunteer effort. They can't. As they say, the target is around 700,000 to get the 400 some odd valid signatures needed. Many have tried to do that all volunteer. And have failed.

The PCCOH promises to continue work even if they don't get the amendment on the ballot this go round. If they are able to maintain the grassroots energy they, and their arguments, will be around for some time.

We will explore the Amendment and the arguments underlying it in coming posts. Here's the overview. First, most of the amendment would be unconstitutional. The amendment seeks to have Ohio dictate to the Federal government the limits on the latter's power. It will shock you to learn that states can't actually do that.

The Sovereignits (that will do until something thinks of something shorter) would reply that the only reason people would think their amendment is unconstitutional is that the Federal government has so overstepped its historical limits as to make it look unconstitutional.

Which gets us to the second major point: nearly everything they say is wrong. Not just wrong because I disagree, but demonstrably, objectively wrong. And not merely a little off, but in most cases what they say is the perfect opposite of the truth. They deal in countertruth, in antitruth, in things true only in Bizzaro.

So why bother writing a few posts about a fringe of a fringe organization with delusional ideas and no chance of success? A couple of reasons. First off, it will be fun.

Second, while it is easy to write off the Soveriegnites as ignorant rubes, they actually have developed a fairly detailed theory of governance and that theory gets at some of the most basic debates about government and power. Taking on the sovereignty amendment means taking on basic assumptions made by the likes of the Tea Parties and other anti-government activists. Which isn't a bad thing to spend time doing.

Finally, while their ideas are wrong, it would be dangerous to let them gain currency. It's not too much of an exaggeration to say that the last time ideas like these were broadly accepted, Ft. Sumter was attacked. Not to say that's where we are headed, but let's also not just sit back and let folks like this run the debate.

Scientific Evidence that the Republican Base Is Crazy

Some weeks ago I argued that the vituperative criticism of Obama from the right was not, as some suggested, driven by racism but was the result of the right wing being nuts. Not nuts in the sense that they disagree with me, but nuts in that they increasingly subscribe to paranoid fantasies untethered to the real world as anyone else perceives it.

During my long illness I got an email from Democracy Corps, the polling firm co-owned by James Carville, linking to a report that reaches the same conclusion based on at least semi-scientific investigation. They ran focus groups of older white non-college educated conservative Republicans in Georgia, asking about Obama, health care, the economy and other basic issues. And as a control they ran similar focus groups with independents with similar demographics in suburban Cleveland. This second group they identify as the most conservative swing voter bloc.

The first finding they emphasize is that the participants persuaded them that race is not the basis for their nearly universal loathing of Obama. You can question this study based on the bias of the investigators, but this is a hard conclusion to dispute. After all, the easy and advantageous (for Dems) conclusion would be that anti-Obama conservatives are just a bunch of unreconstructed bigots. That they find the opposite certainly is a credible finding and gives extra credence to the project generally.

The more significant finding is that the ultraconservative Republicans live in a different world from the rest of us -- even from the conservative independents from Cleveland:

The self-identifying conservative Republicans who make up the base of the Republican Party stand a world apart from the rest of America, according to focus groups conducted by Democracy Corps. These base Republican voters dislike Barack Obama to be sure – which is not very surprising as base Democrats had few positive things to say about George Bush – but these voters identify themselves as part of a ‘mocked’ minority with a set of shared beliefs and knowledge, and commitment to oppose Obama that sets them apart from the majority in the country. They believe Obama is ruthlessly advancing a ‘secret agenda’ to bankrupt the United States and dramatically expand government control to an extent nothing short of socialism. While these voters are disdainful of a Republican Party they view to have failed in its mission, they overwhelmingly view a successful Obama presidency as the destruction of this country’s founding principles and are committed to seeing the president fail.

From there the specifics get positively surreal. Obama is controlled by some real power -- most likely George Soros. They want to kill Glenn Beck. Their ultimate goal is the end of civil liberties.

My personal favorite -- because it's so counterfactual -- that Obama started the road to socialism by bailing out the banks. Yes Obama is so diabolical that he orchestrated the bank bailout before he even took office!. Scary.

As I said in my previous post, it's a manifestly bad thing that some twenty percent of the electorate is bonkers. Additionally, I think its incumbent on us non-crazy, reality-based folk to continually point this out.

The media coverage of the ravings from the right repeatedly falls into the false equivalency trap -- let's find someone nutty on the left for balance. (The occasional blogger will fall into this as well.) But the nutty left doesn't affect the course of the Democratic party. Hell, we're lucky if they vote.

The hardcore right described in the report comprise the grassroots foot soldiers of the Republican party. They are the ones who do things like run party moderate out of elections -- and the party. As such, the crazies in the Republican party have real influence on one of the only two real parties in our democracy.

In re Rifqa

Later this month judges in Ohio and Florida will step into the culture war skirmish that is the Rifqa Bary case. If you haven't heard about the case, the facts outline as follows. A teenage girl of immigrant parents gets involved with things the parents aren't wild about. The parents find out, harsh words are exchanged and the child thinks she's been threatened.

So far this is a case I saw more than once in my days as a prosecutor. I've seen cases where I sympathized with the parents (child acting sexually precocious, running with a criminal element) and with the child (child dating someone of a different race.) The Bary case worked its way into a national story of sorts because in this case Rifqa's means of pissing off her parents was converting from Islam to Christianity.

One of the few facts in the case which everyone agrees on is that Rifqa got interested in Christianity by meeting Christians at school and online, converted and kept it hidden from her parents. She claims that when her father found out, he picked up a laptop, threatened to hit her with it and threatened to kill her. She left home and somehow got a bus to Florida where she was sheltered by a Christian pastor and his wife.

So far a difficult but still less than Earth-shattering case. Enter the right wing blogosphere. Righty bloggers have elevated the case to no less than a referendum on America's willingness to stand up to the apocolyptic threat that Islam poses. They say.

The conservative attorneys on Rifqa's side argue that Rifqa's life is in danger if she is returned to her parents and to the Muslim community in suburban Columbus. They base the claim on the alleged threat from her father and the alleged ties of the mosque they attend to radical Islamists. They also note the thread of Islamic thought calling for death to apostates, and the threat of honor killings.

The stance of the right wing bloggers (and the more nutty elements of the right-wing media that have picked up the story) is remarkably -- but not surprisingly -- anti-family. If the term pro-family means something other than code for anti-gay, it presumably means that policies favoring keeping families intact are better than those that don't. But the pro-Rifqa side of the debate has argued consistently that she should be kept in Florida, well away from her parents.

To be sure, one does not need to be a right wing Islamaphobe to have concerns about the case. Regardless of whether killing apostates is a core belief of Islam, it certainly is true that a fair number of Muslims believe it. Similarly, honor killings are a real phenomenon. (Though I must ask here whether they are a real phenomenon in Sri Lanka where the family originates. My understanding is that honor killings are more a matter of custom among Arabic tribes than a feature of Islam. The custom extend to Sri Lanka -- I just don't know.) And frankly the apologists on the left go too far in pretending such threats do not exist.

But the rightysphere allows for no grey in this story. The parents are Muslim and have attended a mosque in which people have spoken who associate with people who associate with people in the Muslim Brotherhood, so case closed. The parents claim, in the first instance, that they aren't all that devout and only attend the mosque infrequently. While we can question the extent to which a threat assessment should take into account the associations of a parent's place of worship, we really should be concerned if the parents are the equivalent of C&E Muslims.

Voices in the right in this debate are -- OK I've said it once, so let's not mince words -- are mostly whack jobs. For example, one of the lead bloggers on the story is Pamela Gellar from Atlas Shrugs. Check out this piece she did on Obama's speech before the NAACP, contrasted with the actual speech. You can't argue with a piece like that. Either her perception of reality is hopelessly skewed or mine is. I prefer to assume my own sanity.

The customary procedure for a case like this is to put the child in foster care and begin a series of supervised visitations to a) try to reunify the family and b) continue to assess the threat to the child. The best first step would be transferring the case (and Rifqa) to Ohio. Hopefully the judges will put the holy war nonsense aside and do what's best for this girl and her family.

RIP William Safire

Former Nixon speechwriter and op-ed columnist William Safire died of pancreatic cancer at 79. As the obits are noting, Safire was the first conservative columnist employed by the New York Times (Reasonable Right holdout David Brooks now holds what could be called the William Safire chair.)

After last week's rant about the craziness of the modern Right, it's worth remembering how Safire went about his business. Early in the Clinton years, Safire wrote a column complimenting the administrations dialogue on race. During the fallout of the Bush warrantless wiretapping revelations while much of the conservative commentariat condemned the Times for publishing them, Safire condemned the wiretapping. His column was personal -- he had been wiretapped while in the Nixon White House.

Safire both cast the mold of conservative commentators and deviated from it whenever moved to. In today's conservative movement, such deviation from orthodoxy wouldn't be tolerated. But Safire's willingness to deviate from the party line made him more credible to those of us who didn't share his views. Safire, along with contemporaries like Jack Kilpatrick and (before he sold his soul) George Will challenged me. Sometimes I had to think about why I believed differently. Sometimes I was persuaded to change my views.

In contrast, today's conservative "commentary" is easily dismissed cant. The conservatives are right that it does no service to the country when only half the political spectrum is represented in the media. It's a similarly bad thing that half the spectrum has no credibility outside of its core believers.

Not Racist So Much As. . .

Professional Chatterers and bloggers have been going on for a couple of weeks now about whether attacks on President Obama are motivated by race. Pretty much every news¹ story about opposition to Obama includes the question now, though the answer varies. Obama in a show of sportsmanship says it's not about race. Liberals are unmollified. Etc.

I submit that the venom directed at Obama is related to race in the same way that the full political contact directed at Hillary Clinton in the primary and the derision of Sarah Palin in the general are related to sexism. Which is to say that, all other things being equal, a whole lot of that negativity would have been directed against its subjects regardless of group identification, BUT that the passions involved allow various unpretty isms to come to the surface as well.

If, for example, Bill Clinton had an accomplished, RFK-type brother who ran as the establishment favorite against Obama, the Obama faithful would have pushed back. Hard. If John McCain had picked a half-term governor from a small western state who exhibited a Palinesqe difficulty with putting together a diagrammable sentence, that running mate would have been fodder for lefty bloggers and late night comics. In both cases the pushback/sport occaisionally crossed the line into sexist ugliness, but it wasn't initially caused by sexism.

That sound you hear is your False Moral Equivalency alarm going off, and rightly so. I don't mean to suggest that the opposition to Obama is the same as that of opposition to Sec. Clinton and it certainly is nothing like the criticism of Palin.². The flaying of Obama by the right wing is far more venomous, delusional and histrionic than anything that happened in the campaign. My point, rather, is that a white President as liberal as Obama who made the same policy choices as Obama would face a nearly identically venomous, delusional and histrionic flaying. Obama's race didn't drive the far right crazy. They have been that crazy for a while and Obama just walked into it.

A couple of weeks ago during the usual All Things Considered Friday tete-a-tete between David Brooks and E.J. Dionne, Brooks implored Dionne to distinguish between "the responsible right and the Death Panel Right." Sadly, Dionne let him get away with it, failing point out that the Death Panel Right has all but entirely subsumed the right wing in American politics. Serial nut job Glennnn Beccckk hosts the highest-rated show on Fox. Conservative talk radio and conservative media are overrun with birthers, deathers and adherents to every other wack job paranoia. As far as I can tell, the Responsible Right currently consists of Brooks, Joe Scarborough and a nice kid in my Judicial Process class.

I can't claim to have predicted all of this, but none of it has surprised me. Recall that long before he was impeached, conservative mainstays were pushing the most outrageous fictions about Bill Clinton. In the age of Limbaugh, it's not enough to win and argument; a political foe must be destroyed utterly. The Limbaugh construct is that Liberals are not merely wrong, they are corrupt, disloyal, conniving, and evil. They want to take your guns, tax you into poverty, convert your son to Islam and send your daughter's rapist to midnight basketball.

That rising strain of right wing thought took over entirely during the Bush Administrations. Writers and talkers like Michael Savage and Ann Coulter trafficked in such bile with nary of rebuke from anyone on the increasingly marginalized Responsible Right. While many factors account for the re-emergence of a Democratic majority -- scandals, fatigue and the sheer incompetence of George W. Bush among them -- the fact that so many self-proclaimed standard bearers for the political right are patently wet-hen, March-hare, batshit crazy.

While the bulk of the electorate has turned away from it all, decades-long loyal consumers have been primed to lose their minds if ever a Democrat won the Presidency again. In a way it's a little silly to imagine racism as a dominant factor in all of this. The Limbaugh Nation has been eating double helpings of CrazyFlakes for breakfast every day for decades now, and we're brought up short that they seem a tad unbalanced? Really? And think it's because of race? Really?

Raising race as a prime motivator offers an implied false sense of hope; if only we can get past this race thing, we will smooth out some of these harsh divisions. In fact, what we are seeing is the inevitable result of a generation of conservatives brought up on the belief that politics is a death sport and political power is their divine right. It's bad for the country, and it's not going away any time soon.

¹I'm not including Fox here; an unnecessary clarification unless you are one of those misbegotten souls who mistakes things on Fox for "news." In which case you may have wandered into the wrong blog by mistake.

²I expect this view would be shared by all but the most rabid Palinistas. If this describes you, please see note 1 infra.

J. Ken Blackwell Acting as One of NRA's Hatchen Men on Sotomayor

The Brady Campaign blog reports that the NRA and other gun lobby organizations are pursuing a "two-faced" strategy in opposing Judge Sonia Sotomayor's nomination to the Supreme Court. While the NRA proper is quietly expressing "concern" about her nomination, certain NRA-affiliated individuals are bringing out the long knives. Among them is spectacularly unsuccessful gubernatorial candidate J. Ken Blackwell.

And, as Brady Blog notes, Blackwell is not being exactly forthright about his affiliation:

While Blackwell – a former officer holder in Ohio and unsuccessful candidate for Chair of the Republican National Committee – now identifies himself as a Senior Fellow of the American Civil Rights Union or the Family Research Council in this context, he neglects to disclose that he is also an elected NRA Board member.

I'll follow this up with a post unpacking Blackwell's argument. For now, just marvel at Ken being Ken.

Last Thoughts on Recall Election Day

Mostly, if you haven't already, GO VOTE. The general impression, bolstered by anecdotal evidence and what the anti-recall camp has said about their internal polling, is that a clear majority are against the recall but that the pro-recall voters are fanatical highly motivated. It would really be a shame if the will of the majority were defeated by the zealotry of the minority. Yes it's a beautiful day and all, but GO VOTE. You won't be in their long.

A few other points.

• I was voter number 46 in my Ward 8 precinct. The flow was pretty steady this morning at my polling location which includes two other precincts. That is consistent with the report from Summit BoE that Ward 8 is heaviest, and that Ward 8 voters led in absentee voting. In that last story, Mendenhall acknowledges that Ward 8 is more Plusquellic territory
  
• It's a shame that the recall has cast a shadow on the rare bits of good news Akron has heard in the current climate. For example, the rollout of the downtown wifi zone has been scheduled for June since at least last Fall. But because that prescheduled date happens in proximity of the recall it's dismissed as a political stunt.
  
• That said, the Mayor skipping the the rollout was the political equivalent of Darryl Strawberry acknowledging the Fenway crowd. Hizzoner needs to ignore the bleacher creatures.
• The Team Mulligan campaign has been able to pull off little other than volunteer canvassing. No mailers, no bilboards, no yard signs. But over the weekend someone tried to go online-linkage with FixAkron.com signs. The website is more of the same. (E.g. Akron is losing population (as is every city other than Columbus and Cincy). One interesting aspect -- hanging problems with the Akron Building and Health Departments on the Mayor. But remember how Mendenhall tried to pump up Joe Finley's campaign by claiming that the mayor had a tirade at the Building Dept? And that we found out later that he went off because they were offering lousy service to property developers? And that in fact that same building dept was put on probation by the state? Same stuff as we've seen this entire campaign.
• Count me among those who grew weary of the anti-recall mailers that demonized Warner Mendenhall. I'm assuming that with a quarter million to play with that stuff was focus-group tested and all, but after the third mailed reminder of Mendenhall's tax delinquency, I was done.
• Having said that, look for a reprise this fall. Mendenhall's "band of radicals" (according to the mailers) will have candidates going in a lot of city council races this fall and I'm guessing their linkage to Mendenhall will be a frequent talking point in the campaigns.
• One interesting feature of this election has been the total radio silence from the local Republican Party. It may be that the Republicans prefer the devil they know. It may be that the rank and file was insufficiently interested in a recall to make it worth putting the party behind the effort. Still, given the past practice of A²cutting deals across the aisle, it's worth keeping in mind going forward that he never put a dog in this fight.

BTW, if you missed the tweet, my absence the last few days was due to technical difficulties. As of now, those difficulties appear resolved.

Now GO VOTE.

Bankrupt: The Fundamental Incoherence of the Recall Argument.

The nature of the recall campaign allows each discontented resident to project his particular gripe onto the Mayor. Job losses? Mayor's fault. Money spent retaining or wooing employers? Mayor's fault. Crime? Or "out of control" police? Check and check.

As a result trying to take on the recall argument is no easy task. And it's made harder by the slipperiness of Recaller-in-Chief Warner Mendenhall. The Beacon Journal has been braving the fray and reporting on the major arguments raised by the Warneristas. Two weeks ago the paper examined the Mayor's travel expenses (Yielding Warner's precious "The business of the city is not business" quote). Yesterday the lede was an analysis of the argument that the city's debt load is excessive (the city is "broke" they like to say.) None of this will matter to the hard core of the recall movement, but at least they do not vent their folly in a vacuum.

The bottom line of the ABJ story is that Akron's debt is not out of line with that of similarly situated Midwestern cities. The story could have been better -- I would like to have seen opinions of experts who are more generally hawkish on debt that the CSU prof they rely on. But overall it's a good read.

The major lesson of the article is that not all debt is the same. Much of the $760 million that Team Mulligan goes on about is special obligation debt -- that is, debt incurred with a funding stream already in place to pay for it. The best example of this is the school rebuilding project for which the city has taken out $200 million in debt to be paid for by a voter-approved income tax.
Confronted with evidence that the debt is not crushing the city, Mendenhall shift the subject. The problem, says he, isn't the debt. No, that's not what he's saying at all. It's what we've spent it on:

Mendenhall said Akron should have spent more on neighborhoods, rather than on public improvements to assist projects like the Northside Lofts and a student housing and retail complex being built on South Main Street downtown.

''When you have strong neighborhoods and good housing, this supports the tax base and the schools,'' Mendenhall said. ''The neighborhoods have clearly suffered.''

First and foremost, if that's the argument, it surely is not a recall argument. I might listen to an argument for recalling a Mayor who has recklessly spent a city into bankruptcy. But this amounts to different policy priorities, which is not an appropriate reason for upending an election result.

Second, the city has spent money on neighborhoods. When I first moved to 'Akron in the early 90s we lived in a neighborhood a little dicier than the one we're in now, one in the midst of a city-sponsored street-level upgrade. The city fixed sidewalks, driveway aprons and sewer lines and provided grants to homeowners to bring their houses up to code. This was going on all over the city in "transition neighborhoods" -- basically those that could go either way. Neighborhood level work has limitations in that people will only allow the city to do so much on their private property, but the city does have a history of doing that sort of work.

And of course the AMHA has been revamping housing projects and trying to create mixed-income subsidized housing developments, first in Cascade Village and in now in Edgewood. Not the city per se, but certainly the city has been at that table.

Moreover, the school/community learning center building project is all about neighborhoods. Good schools grow good neighborhoods. A shiny new building isn't the end of school reform, but at least anecdotally the new schools have seen improvements in student and parent morale which can't hurt.

Ultimately a lot of how people feel about the recall comes down to how they feel about Akron. Team Mulligan has been poormouthing the city from the start. I see a city no longer reeling from losing it's one-time manufacturing base and reinventing itself as a tech center. Doing so requires investment, and not just from the private sector. Akron may have debt, but we also have a more discernable future than most of the metro areas in Northeast Ohio.

Recall Catch-Up

With the recall election 15 days away, that will be a focus of this blog in the near term. A few developments from last week deserve attention.

• This week Akron FOP will vote on what stance, if any, to take on the recall. The fact that there is a debate at all is good news for the Mayor. His conflicts with APD and the rank and file's distrust of him is legendary. Personally I think it's a good thing that the two most powerful agents of executive power -- the police and the executive himself -- are not on the same page.
  
• The funniest event was recall face guy Warner Mendenhall declaring that he won't run for Mayor if the recall is successful. The anti-recall messaging has in part focused on him, his tax delinquency, his general nuttiness. Clearly he felt the need to allay fears that a vote against Plusquellec is a vote for him.
  
• More nuttiness from Team Mulligan. They have petitioned Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner to remove Wayne Jones from the Board of Elections. According to the Beacon Journal article, the letter to Brunner criticized Jones for being "overly partisan in his efforts against the recall." Not, mind you, in his work on the Board, but in his political work outside the Board. *sigh* For those of you still in touch with reality, Ohio's election administration system is built on a theory of bipartisanship, not nonpartisanship. Wayne Jones, Chair of the Democratic Party is, wait for it, partisan. Not exactly a news flash.
• The ABJ lede yesterday was an analysis of the city's debt burden. Thoughts on that later.
  

Rod Blagojevic Is Why I'm Not a "Democrat for Blackwell"

Some merry blogosphereic pranksters have started a "Democrats for Blackwell" Facebook group, advocating that the former Secretary of State and current far right commentator be elevated to RNC chair. The gag -- and it's a good one -- is Blackwell's radical conservatism coupled with his political incompetence will keep the Republican Party weak and regional. All respect to the guys behind this, I laughed when I got the invite. But the ill fortunes of the Republican Party are not a good thing.

Case in point, a David Broder column about indicted Democratic Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevic. After recounting Blagojevic's improbable rise to power, Broder notes

He had a rocky first term in Springfield, where he quickly became known as an absentee executive and where his inner circle was rumored to be operating with hands out. An unseemly family feud with his father-in-law fed the gossip mills.

But in 2006, the badly weakened Illinois GOP furnished another unelectable opponent, and Blagojevich won without breaking a sweat.

I for one want the Republican Party to come back, at least enough to be a credible threat. (I'd like it if we could consistently beat that threat, but still) First I'm close enough to center to understand that a Democratic agenda with no brakes is not a good thing. But more than that, losing political accountability makes the Blogojevices (and for that matter, Tafts and Noes) that much more likely.

I want a Republican Party that can both deter corruption and root it out when it happens. I'd prefer a party that can occaisionally field a moderate candidate who I could vote for if the Dem is, say, a more recalcitrant version of Marc Dann. Sadly, conservatives have spent so much time filtering out anything that doesn't tell them how right they are, I doubt they can properly diagnose their problems, much less fix them.

RNC Chairman Blackwell would calcify all the worst tendencies of the Party. That's an excellent subject for Facebook humor. But it's not something anyone should actually wish for.

The GOPs Problems in a Nutshell

In a HuffPo piece on the RNC looking at Howard Dean's fifty state model for inspiration, this nugget:

"By relying on wedge issues to win, they've used issues to divide people and worked to appeal to an increasingly smaller group of people," said the aide. "Dean's point has not just been that we need to show up in all 50-states but also that as a party we need to ask people for their votes, listen to what they have to say and be willing to work to solve issues in areas where we have common ground, even if we don't agree with everything."

Part of that is simply showing up. The leading Republican presidential candidates this cycle famously shunned an African-American themed debate, much to the chagrin of moderates like Jack Kemp, who worried that the party had become too country club.

It's entirely true that running on a politics of red meat and hot buttons is inconsistent with running across the map. One indication of how far the party has gone toward rigid dogmatism: the fact that Jack Kemp is now being called a moderate. It was surreal when wingers derided McCain as a moderate, but Jack Kemp? He was one of the intellectual drivers of the Reagan revolution for God's sake. He is, to be sure, consistently concerned about elevating the poor, but he has just as consistently stood firmly for market-based solutions and limited government.

Yes, this is a characterization by a liberal blogger and yes, probably "pragmatist" is a better description than "moderate." Still the point remains -- Jack Kemp, once a mainstay of the conservative wing of the GOP is now an outsider and the conservative wing is nearly coextensive with the party itself.

One of my reading obsessions since the election has been anything and everything about how the Republicans can bounce back. It's in the best interests of the country that there be two viable parties to keep each other in check. But more and more it feels like conservatives aren't particularly interested in coming back if it means anything less than fielding a uniformly conservative party.

LMJ's Fact-Free Editorial

The Lorain Morning Journal runs an editorial today -- not a wingnut-penned op-ed, mind, but an editiorial -- rehashing the charge that Obama wants to turn the Constitution into Das Kapital. Here's the nut:

With less than a week remaining before Election Day, it seems to us that the real October surprise of 2008 is how little serious attention is being paid to the genuine and profoundly disturbing statements by Barack Obama himself. Specifically, Obama's "spread the wealth" admission to Joe the Plumber and most especially to an interview Obama did on Chicago public radio several years ago in which he basically dismisses the U.S. Constitution as a flawed document because it only talks about protecting citizens from the government and does not specify what the government "must" do for citizens. His words create the distinct impression that under an Obama presidency, federal judges and Supreme Court justices appointed by Obama would be encouraged to reinterpret the Constiution and to go beyond its words in ways that would result in a whole new concept of what the United States of America is about. Although Obama's delivery of these concepts was as cool and dispassionate as ever, the real-life social impact of such reinventing of the Constitution would surely be so red-hot as to make the word "radical" totally inadequate.

Problem. Obama didn't say that. More to the point, he said the opposite. You can find a transcript on the Fox News site of all places and follow along. (By the way, I've cleaned up the transcription a bit.) First off, here's the bit that Limbaugh et al use to make the charge:

I mean if you look at the victories and failures of the civil rights movement and its litigation strategy and the court I think where it succeeded was to vest formal rights in previously dispossessed peoples so that I would not have the right to vote would now be able to sit at lunch counter and as lpong as I could pay for it would be ok but the supreme court never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth and sort of basic issues of political and economic justice.

OK, stop right there. Not because that completes Obama's thought, but because the wingers using this interview stop there. I unfortunately ran across Rush declaiming on this earlier this week. He stops the tape here and says, "He regrets this. He thinks this is a bad thing." With no actual evidence or anything.

So here's the rest of that graf:

in this society and to that extent as radical as people try to characterize the warren court it wasn't that radical it didn't break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the founding fathers in the constitution at least as it has been interpreted and the warren court interpreted it generally in the same way that the constitution is a document of negative liberties says what the states cant do to you says what the federal govt cant do to you but it doesn't say what the federal govt or state govt must do on your behalf and that hasn't shifted and i think one of the tragedies of the civil rights movement was that the civil rights movement became so court focused i think there was a tendency to lose track of the political and organizing activities on the ground that are able to bring about the coalitions of power through which you bring about redistributive change and in some ways we still suffer from that.

There's a lot here -- about latter day critics of the Warren Court, about the difference between positive and negative rights. It's all heavily academic. The key for our purposes is the last bit where Obama says that the court successes lulled the movement into relying too much on litigation and not enough on political organization. That doesn't sound like someone who wants to write redistribution into the Constitution but the opposite -- someone who thinks questions of economic policy should be left to the political process.

Not enough? Try this from later in the interview:

You know maybe I am showing my bias here as a legislator as well as a law professor but you know I am not optimistic about bringing about major redistributive change through the courts you know the institution just isn't structured that way just look at very rare examples where during he desegregation era the court was willing to for example order you know changes that cost money to local school district and the court was very uncomfortable with it it was hard to manage it was hard to figure out you start getting into all sorts of separation of powers issues you know in terms of the court monitoring or engaging in a process that is essentially is administrative and take a lot of time the court is not very good at it and politically it is hard to legitimize opinions from the court in that regard so I think that although you can craft theoretical justifications for it legally you know I think any three of us sitting here could come up with a rationale for bringing about economic change through the courts I think that as a practical matte that our institutions are just poorly equipped to do it.

So, an interview in which Obama says that using courts to redistribute wealth is used to prove he intends to use courts to redistribute wealth. One wonders if the LMJ actually read the transcript, or if they just heard the Fox/Limbaugh snippet. In their summing up, the paper says:

Do not brush off this admonition as an empty scare tactic from a newspaper that has endorsed John McCain.

Fair enough. Instead let's brush it off as an empty scare tactic from a newspaper that can't be bothered to do basic reporting.

UPDATE: I'm off my game. I forgot to h/t my tweep Olevia for the tip.

UPDATE 2: Olevia points out that I forgot to link to the piece. And I forgot the link for the transcript. Really really off my game. Links are updated above. Also if you want to know more about the negative/positive rights issue alluded to above, Prof. Will Huhn has a good explanation on Akron Law Cafe.

Preachers Pulpits and the Proper Separation

The hard right Christian exceptionalists at the Alliance Defense Fund are on one of their favorite crusades again -- challenging restrictions on political activity by churches. This time they are advising pastors to defy the restriction and preach political endorsements from the pulpit on September 28, and offering to defend anyone brought up on violation of IRS violations.

Not to be outdone in the Dubious Tactics category, an Ohio UCC minister has filed a complaint against the effort alleging that . . . um, they are trying get complaints filed against them. According to a WKSU story (which hopefully will be posted sometime) they are also planning a Sunday of celebrating separation of church and state.

I'm big on church/state separation, but that's not what this is about. Separating church isn't the same as separating religion and politics, which is probaly impossible. The IRS regulations are about separating partisan politics and charity. All nonprofit organizations -- not just churches -- are prohibited from engaging in electoral politics. In other words, the taxpayers don't underwrite political campaigning. What the Alliance wants is an exception for churches and churches only.

This sort of exceptionalism is the norm for groups like ADF, which is ironic. Their rap on opposing gay rights is that they are "special" or "exceptional" rights. The right to keep one's job irrespective of sexual orientation is exceptional. But the use of state resources to "celebrate" the country's Christian heritage (but no other) is simply curtailing discrimination against Christians.

It's so . . . special.

How Far to the Right Is Sarah Palin? UPDATED

Far enough to the right that she supported Pat Buchanan's run in 1999. You know, the isolationist paleoconservative who doesn't hate Jews or minorities, but just really really likes Christian white people? Yeah, that Pat Buchanan.

Game changer, indeed.

UPDATE: Much as I'd like to continue the dialogue with DJW, this story renders the discussion moot. I'm not sure I get a public figure showing up at a rally wearing a button, then saying "psyche." But for a part-time mayor of a small time in Alaska, we can let it pass.

Btw, the Obama campaign screwed up calling Buchanan a "Nazi sympathizer." Buchanan is a Nazi apologist. Let's keep that straight.

Bob Fitrakis Talks out of Both Sides of his Ass

Self-appointed guardian of the vote and stolen election uber-troll Dave Hickman has been spamming the blogosphere again, at least when he's not cozying up to right wing bloggers. He put us on to a Bob Fitrakis post, reproduced here on ProgOH, that supposedly debunks a Dispatch article about how Stolen Election Guy (and in particular Stolen Election Documentarian Guy) is immune to evidence.

The Fitrakis article is mostly the usual collection of dark mutterings, half-truths and apple/orange swaps. But this in particular stood out:

For example, they [the collective personas of reporter Mark Niquette, apparently] report without embarrassment that the official
response for the highly accurate exit polls being wrong in Ohio - and
so outside the margin of error that it would only happen in one in
959,000 presidential elections - was that "…exit polls are based only
on responses from voters who agree to participate."

The Dispatch's own polls, that they brag about as being highly
accurate, are based on only those who agree to participate.

Hmmm. Where have I heard Fitrakis talk about the Dispatch poll before? Oh, yeah:

Despite Democratic victories in five of six statewide partisan offices, an analysis by the Free Press shows a statistically implausible shift of votes away from the Democratic Party statewide candidates on Election Day, contrasted with the results of the Columbus Dispatch's final poll. The Dispatch poll predicted Democratic gubernatorial candidate Ted Strickland winning with 67% of the vote. His actual percentage was 60%. The odds of this occurring are one in 604 million.

This is the essence of Fitrakis. Evidence is selectively important based on whether it supports a pre-determined conclusion. Today the Dispatch poll is to be mocked. In 2006 it was gold.

Fitrakis falling back on the Dispatch tracking poll in '06 was the point at which I went from thinking that Fitrakis tended to overclaim his evidence to thinking he's a publicity-happy hack. In arguing that this one tracking poll proved fraud, Fitrakis ignored the results of every other tracking poll, plus the exit polls that reflected the final result. Three problems here. First, his claim of a one in 604 million result based on one poll falls apart when you mix in the other polls. If the Dispatch poll was accurate, and Strickland in fact won by 67 percent, it means that all other polls are wrong, and that wrongness is similarly statistically impossible.

Second problem explains all that. Pollsters offer (to us mortals, anyway) two figures about how reliable the poll is. One is the margin of error. Fitrakis's "calculations" are based on how far out of the MOE a final result is. The other measure, the confidence interval, functions an estimate of the chance that the poll itself is accurate. Usually it's something in the ninties, so for example a 95% confidence interval means a one in twenty chance that the poll is a big pile of hooey. A longshot chance to be sure, but far more likely than one in 604 million. (h/t Redhorse who explained all this in the earlier incarnation of PBD.)

The third and biggest problem is that the "evidence" for fraud in 2006 is the dead opposite of the evidence for 2004. Prior to the '04 election all the tracking polls showed Kerry trailing, though within the MOE. The result matched the tracking polls, but not the exit polls. I'll accept someone arguing that one or the other type of poll is more reliable. But when he flogs the exit polls in '04 and one tracking poll in '06, survey says he has no credibility.

If Fitrakis and his minions stop by, their first response will be that I'm not a polling expert. Exactly. I'm not an expert and I can see the Mack truck-sized holes in his argument. If you want polling experts to explain the exit poll anomaly in '04, start here.

Wingnut, But Not Moonbat, Added to the Dictionary.

From the PD via Plunderbund we learn that "wing nut" meaning "one who advocates extreme measures or changes : radical" will be added to the next edition of the Merriam Webster dictionary, and already appears online. No such entry, as of this year, for "moonbat."

This is sorta kinda fitting and sorta kinda not, given that Merriam-Webster is the leading liberal redoubt in the usage wars.

The what? You ask.

The language usage wars. In this age of hyper-politicization of everything, there are opposing camps even in an activity as dry and academic as writing dictionaries. In a review of Bryan Garner's¹ A Dictionary of Modern American Usage, David Foster Wallace² ledes:

Did you know that probing the seamy underbelly of US lexicography reveals ideological strife and controversy and intrigue and nastiness and fervor on a near-Lewinskian scale?
For instance, did you know that some modern dictionaries are notoriously liberal and others notoriously conservative, and that certain conservative dictionaries were actually conceived and designed as corrective responses to the "corruption" and "permissiveness" of certain liberal dictionaries?

* * *
Did you know that US lexicography even had a seamy underbelly?

So Merriam Webster, being the most liberal, subscribes to a "descriptionist" methodology. Their mission is (supposedly) to catalog all the words people use and all the meanings they attach to those words. The conservative dictionaries -- the very conservatively named American Heritage Dictionary being something of the, well Heritage Foundation to Webster's Brookings in this field -- is prescriptivist. That is, they tell the rest of us what the language is, no arguments, and how anything outside the hard covers of AHD is simply wrong.

Example: While Merriam-Webster is adding a number of internet-derived words like malware and webinar, American Heritage has yet to include "blog." Gotta be painful for the Pajamas Media crowd.

As for the definition itself, I dissent. If Merriam-Webster really wants to be the descriptionists bible, they should pay closer attention to how people use the words. "Wing nut" is used consistently to denote an extreme conservative, not simply a radical of either wing. The counterpart for conservative derision of fringe lefties is "moonbat."³ Including⁴ a definition for wing nut without the fringe dweller across the aisle is simply wrong, descriptively speaking.<sup>5

1</sup>Yes, this Bryan Garner. It's somewhat ironic he apparently so opposes substantive footnotes given that one of the truly abject raves of his book -- and one worthy of a jacket quote, at least according to the publishers -- includes 80 footnotes over 56 pages of text as reproduced in the collection Consider the Lobster.

²My favorite living writer of both fiction and non-fiction and an enduring influence upon my own writing. For instance, I won't say that the blog would never include footnotes were it not for DFW, but his use of the device both as a writing tool and as a means for making meta points about language has certainly pushed me in an influence/homage/cheap imitation (depending on how you want to look at it) sort of way.

³Or if you are Matt Naugle and are describing anyone to the left of, say, Newt Gingrich, the term is "socialist." But whaddya expect from a wing nut?

⁴More accurately, expanding the existing definition vis-a-vis wing nut since the word already existed as denoting a piece of hardware.

⁵Which is a problem with the whole descriptivists project -- it's simply impossible to capture every construct and change of nuance, meaning at some point you choose and with that make the sorts of value judgments that descriptivists supposedly oppose. For more, see Foster's essay.

Pretend Pino Is Spamming Hate Poems at Me

Some time ago Julio Pino, a KSU history professor and muslim convert got himself involved somehow with an obscure pro-jihadist blog. After a day or so of answering questions, Prof. Pino adopted a public relations strategy of relating to the public as little as possible. He stopped answering press questions, didn't respond to blogger emails, etc.

Since then, someone representing himself as either "Julio Pino" or "Assad Pino" (a muslim name adopted by Prof. Pino upon conversion) has occasionally sent out emails stirring the pot again. Often they are some attempt at poetry and always they spew hatred and celebrate death.

If you are new to all this, you may catch up on my writings here.

This week, I am the lucky recipient. The name on the email is "Assad Pino," though the address is assadleon@yahoo.com (normally I crawlerproof emails, but in this case, the penis enlargement, Canadian pharmacy and Christian singles industries are welcome to add Mr. Leon to their rolls.) The email celebrates the number of American soldiers killed in Iraq. Out of respect for those who served and their loved ones I won't reproduce Leon's scribblings, except to say that he manages three typographical errors over five lines of rhymeless doggerel.

By the way, the email is titled Diamond Dogs. Jihadists dig Bowie. Who knew?

Some Googling turned up the following. First off, Assad Leon had a blog going that Word Press shut down due to terms of service violations. You can catch the flavor of that effort with some web archive captures here. It's very much like the Lover of Angels blog ascribed to Pino -- reproduced news stories with incendiary headlines penned by the blogger and/or a comment or two.

That's all to the good for anyone interested in defending Prof. Pino. But then there's this curious bit. Someone with a biography very similar to the professor gave an interview to a Pakistani site in which he identified himself as blogger Assad Pino and talks about his "site." A site I can find nowhere.

Hmmm . . .

It's Pointless to Argue About Michigan . . .

. . . because Planet Hillary simply is not interested in honest debate. (h/t Plunder)

Nonetheless, consider this. Forty percent of the voters cast a ballot for "Uncommitted." In other words, those forty percent took the time to go to the polls and to pull the lever/punch the chad/fill the oval/touch the screen for NotHillary. So if we just give Hillary her delegates and leave it at that, are we really "counting all the votes" in the sense of making them count?¹ We aren't. The people who voted Not Hillary expressed wishes that are being ignored under the "solution" proposed by the Clinton campaign.

The truly "count every vote" solution would be to subtract from Hillary's vote total those voting NotHillary and tally her delegates based on those votes.

Of course that will not satisfy Hillary. The Tubbs-Jones complaint betrays the strategy we all know is at work. A half-strength delegation does put Hillary any closer to Obama in terms of the number of delegates needed. But a full-strength delegation gives the appearance of diluting the magnitude of Obama's lead, and the whole game is convincing the supers that the voting result is sorta kinda a tie.

I'll admit I have doubts about Obama as a candidate. His experience is thin, he isn't enough of a politician to ditch his fringier friends, etc. But the Hillary campaign's craven, cynical, dishonest closing argument has not simply finished her with me. The whole enterprise so infuriates me that I have difficulty respecting people who will not join in denouncing it, much less those who continue to mouth such nonsense.

¹This being the only sense in which the "Count every vote" trope makes any sense at all, given that the votes have been literally counted. Planet Hill doesn't just want them counted, they want them to be given effect.