QOTD, digby:
This is so politically obtuse that makes me wonder what in the hell these people are really worried about. It occurs to me that they are seeing something much more devastating in their numbers than just losing the Hispanic vote of the future. It seems they must be afraid of losing the white working class. Assuming they are behaving rationally (which is assuming a lot) the only logical reason they could have for ginning up all this racial animosity is if they feel the need to secure their base with the old tried and true racial resentment. If they were secure there, they could afford to be magnanimous toward Sotomayor in a situation that makes no substantial change in policy.Krugman on Dimensionality
A number of commenters on my Michelle Malkin post objected that it’s not possible to reduce political views to a one-dimensional, left-right scale.
That’s what I would have thought a few years ago. But then I became familiar with the Poole-Rosenthal work on Congressional voting. They use a clever algorithm to jointly map bills and members of Congress in a hypothetical issues space. The number of dimensions in that space is arbitrary — but they found that historically just two dimensions accounted for the great bulk of voting. One dimension corresponded to left-right on economic issues; the other was basically race/segregation.
And since the 1960s, with the great Southern realignment, the race dimension has collapsed. So Congressional politics is left versus right — end of story. Oh, and polarization along that dimension has increased hugely: the center did not hold, and there really isn’t any middle ground.
Now, real people may be more multidimensional than Congressmen. But I suspect that even among the general public, we’re more one-dimensional than you might think.
digby on Winger StrategeryThe guy who lost the election is still bitter.
I honestly don’t remember an election in my lifetime where the losers generated this much attention and media coverage. But everyday, we are inundated with Palin drama and mean old man McCain’s grumpy commentary. Doesn’t losing mean anything anymore? I haven’t had to spend the entire offseason listening to nonsense about the damned Cardinals.
I've been wondering about this too. From Jonathan Singer at MYDD:C&L: Michelle Malkin gets slapped down for bogus claim that people would rather receive unemployment than workThis report from NPR's Nina Totenberg contains a fairly remarkable piece of news: So determined to block Sonia Sotomayor, the first Latina ever nominated to the Supreme Court, McConnell took the unprecedented step of getting the NRA to do his dirty work.This is what I find inexplicable about Republican strategy. They knew before she was nominated that the person Obama named was 99% likely to be confirmed. They knew she was replacing a liberal on the court, so no harm no foul in terms of the balance on the court. And they know they have a problem with Hispanics, the fastest growing demographic in the country. Allowing a large margin to vote for Sotomayor would be an easy way to ease some of those tensions, buy some good will and provide some cover the next time the Democrats try to block a nominee, without having to actually do anything. It's just good politics.
One top aide to GOP leader McConnell confirmed that McConnell, at a meeting of conservative groups, asked the NRA about scoring the Sotomayor vote as a key vote hostile to gun rights. The aide conceded that in asking the question, McConnell was promoting an unusual step that the NRA then took.You have to wonder how it is going to play in the Hispanic community around the country that the Republicans were so diametrically opposed to the nomination of Sotomayor, the Supreme Court nominee with the longest resume in nearly a century, that they called upon the NRA to twist Senators' arms -- even though they knew they didn't have the votes to stop her nomination.
And yet they've gone out of their way to publicly sully the woman's reputation and now are pulling every possible string to keep the vote as tight as possible, thereby reinforcing the notion that they hate Hispanics so much that they will do everything in their power, even when they are sure to lose, to keep one from the Supreme Court.
I've heard people make the case that this is payback for Thomas, which is seen as the destruction of a good man's reputation for no good reason. But aside from the merits of the case, (which was about sexual harrasment being ignored by a bunch of powerful, pompous men, not race) the Democrats weren't in the process of losing the black vote in vast numbers when it happened and because the Dems had been the party of civil rights by that time for more than 30 years. If anything, they were going against type.
This is so politically obtuse that makes me wonder what in the hell these people are really worried about. It occurs to me that they are seeing something much more devastating in their numbers than just losing the Hispanic vote of the future. It seems they must be afraid of losing the white working class. Assuming they are behaving rationally (which is assuming a lot) the only logical reason they could have for ginning up all this racial animosity is if they feel the need to secure their base with the old tried and true racial resentment. If they were secure there, they could afford to be magnanimous toward Sotomayor in a situation that makes no substantial change in policy.
Of course, it could also just be that they are a bunch of sexist, racist bastards themselves and just can't stand the idea of a woman of Puerto Rican extraction being in power. With these people it's usually a good idea to apply Occam's Razor and call it a day.
By John Amato Sunday Aug 02, 2009 11:30amThere's no shortage of wingnuts out there, so why would George Stephanopoulos invite on someone too crazy for even Bill O'Reilly? Only people with a Malkin brain would believe and push across the notion that Americans would rather collect three hundred dollars a week on unemployment insurance rather than get a job that supplies benefits and pays a salary.
Yea, because there are so many jobs available, people will just wait until the insurance ends and then immediately get hired. I'm sorry, where are all these jobs again? On ABC's THIS WEEK Malkin made this bogus claim. A quick Google search uncovers that when Michelle claims Larry Katz once said that the benefits could discourage people from seeking employment, Katz actually said just the opposite during our current financial mess:
Traditionally, many economists have been leery of prolonged unemployment benefits because they can reduce the incentive to seek work. But that should not be a concern now because jobs remain so scarce, said Lawrence Katz, a labor economist at Harvard.
For every job that becomes available, about six people are looking, Dr. Katz said. “Unemployment insurance gives income to families who are really suffering and can’t find work even if they are hustling to look,” he said. With the economy still listing, he added, a temporary extension can provide a quick fiscal stimulus. And, Dr. Katz said, when people exhaust unemployment and health insurance, many end up applying for disability benefits, which become a large, unending drain on the Treasury.
It does help to fact check what conservatives say.
Malkin: If you put enough government cheese in front of people they are just going to keep eating it and you're just kicking the can down the road and just to hammer this point about the unemployment benefits extension again it was Larry Katz, who's a chief labor economist under the Clinton labor department who came out with a study and there are a lot of these economists who say this that if you keep extending these "temporary" unemployment benefits you're just going to extend joblessness even more.
Stephanopoulos: I don't know if I follow that though
Malkin: That was a Clinton economist who said it George...
Stephanopoulos: Choosing to take the unemployment benefits when a job is available?
Malkin: Seventy nine weeks already and then they're going to extend it by another thirteen weeks and what happens is according to these economist who have seen it including this Clinton economist is that people will just delay getting a job until the three weeks before the benefits run out.
Tucker: Well, that might be true when there are jobs out there that are available, but there are very few jobs available at the moment so I don't think people are using that unemployment benefit to be lazy instead of going out and searching for jobs...
Malkin: I'm not making a moral judgment, it's an incentive problem.
Tucker: But when businesses advertise the few job openings they have, they'll advertise twenty openings, they have six thousand applicants so I don't think that's the problem...
Hunt: If Starbucks were hiring, suddenly you'll see lines around the block. Anecdotally George, I have a kid who has some friends from college and many of them don't have jobs and boy, they are looking.
Stephanopoulos: And there are other states especially that are hard hit.
I know she probably worked on her government cheese talking point for a while, but it makes no sense except if we've all turned into little mouses now. With unemployment so high, where are the jobs that people are not bothering to take that bears any of this out? There's good money to be made in wingnutland, so she can attack Americans just trying to stay afloat by receiving unemployment compensation. I never realized how wonderful not having a job is.
Unemployment insurance is a lifeline for 9 million Americans, with payments averaging just more than $300 per week, varying by state and work history.
While many recipients find new jobs before exhausting their benefits, large numbers in the current recession have been unable to find work for a year or more.
Calls are rising for Congress to pass another extension this fall, possibly adding 13 more weeks of coverage in states that have especially high unemployment. As of June, the national jobless rate was 9.5 percent; it was 15.2 percent in Michigan. Even if the recession begins to ease, economists say, jobs will remain scarce for some time to come.
"If more help is not on the way, by September a huge wave of workers will start running out of their critical extended benefits, and many will have nothing left to get by on even as work keeps getting harder to find," said Maurice Emsellem, a policy director of the employment law project.
Everybody just sort of looked at Malkin, like she was INSANE, and George Stephanopoulos very politely said, "Uhm...I don't know if I follow that." To which Malkin replied: "BUT IT WAS A CLINTON ECONOMIST, BLARGLE!" Stephanopoulos was still a bit dumbfounded, wondering why anyone in their right mind would take unemployment benefits "when a job was available."
Malkin's counter argument is that, for some reason -- who knows why really, maybe there was a presidential administration that recorded epic job losses for a decade maybe, it's a real mystery -- there has been unemployment insurance for many weeks. And for some reason, they are going to keep extending it -- as if there was some sort of ongoing economic crisis or something! And because of that, "people will delay getting a job until three weeks before the benefits run out.
By Heather Sunday Aug 02, 2009 9:30amBill Maher goes after Michelle Malkin for already writing a book trashing Obama's Presidency only six months in, and has a bit of fun with Jonah Goldberg, Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter and Glenn Beck in the process.
BTW, Malkin is going to be a guest on This Week with George Stephanopoulos. Bravo George. At least the Maher's of the world are making a fool of you for giving the likes of Malkin another format to spew her venom.
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