Quick Notes From the Sunshine State Asylum

While I'm heading into Post #500 (this one will be #493), I feel the need to pass along a few good news, bad news, WTF news from the great state of Florida.

• The Miami-Dade government made a "last-minute" move to NOT make massive cuts into the county library system by pulling funds from a "rainy day" reserve.  This is good... for a year, at which point the issue of funding libraries will come back up again.  Hint to Miami-Dade: try a bond issue, it worked wonders in neighboring Broward County over a decade ago.
• Rick "F-ck Florida" Scott issued a directive this week to county health care offices that the "navigators" made available by Obamacare to assist state residents figure out their health care plans would not be able to perform such outreach in those health care offices.  Essentially making it harder for the navigators to do anything to help anyone.  There's already been push-back by one of the counties that's gotten direct funding to hire some navigators, but it's pretty clear Scott and his ilk are doing everything possible to obstruct the health care reform efforts.
• Speaking of Rick "Too Self-Serving To Know He's Being Dumb" Scott, he had a fundraiser scheduled in the form of a $25,000 per person alligator hunt.  The campaign had to quickly cancel it not just because of the suddenly intense media interest in the story but because it turns out that alligator hunting licenses were strictly limited and only gained by lottery system.  You'd think someone in his office would have Farking done some research on this.
• George Zimmerman is back in the news regarding a possible domestic violence incident with his separated-seeking-divorce wife.  There's been conflicting stories, a damaged iPad, and an exasperated sheriff quickly tired of Zimmerman's sh-t.  For anyone who had a betting pool on when Zimmerman was gonna snap and do something dumber and more violent, it looks like anyone with September or October of this very year is in line for the win.
• This joker - the one who burned a Quran and started a global riot in the process - was arrested this 9/11 anniversary time while he was en route to a Polk County park to set fire to 2999 more Qurans.  Turns out preachers gotta answer to secular law, and it's a felony to transport gasoline in improper containers.

Okay, so.  For the seven readers... well actually for the seventeen readers now that I've got some Crooks & Liars audience members... still keeping an eye on this site, any suggestions for Post #500?

Should The Legacy of 9/11 Be More War?

Today is another remembrance of 9/11/01.  On this day we remember that 2,000-plus people lost their lives to 19 idiots seeking glory in death, ordered by another group of idiots who hid in a cave and didn't have the balls to do the deed themselves.

Today we remember that we as a nation launched a war on Afghanistan where those idiots were hiding, protected by a fundamentalist Taliban regime.  Today we have to remember that we're still in Afghanistan fighting those Taliban forces who will most likely re-seize power the second we leave, which is pretty much what the cave idiots want out of us: perpetual war.

Today we remember that we as a nation got lied to by George W. Bush and Dick Cheney regarding Iraq: that Saddam was tied in with those cave idiots (that was a lie), that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction (that was a lie), that Saddam was a threat to Middle East security (the 1991 Persian Gulf war neutered his forces), that felling Saddam would bring peace and democracy to the Middle East (Cheney and Co. wanted to put Chalabi on the throne and leave a puppet regime in place).

This last remembrance is key, because it's a very good reason why a vast majority of Americans do not want our nation under Obama to go starting another military action in the Middle East.  On this day, we're thinking about Syria as much as we're thinking about the Twin Towers, the Pentagon, and Flight 93.

The Syrian civil war is one of the messiest results of the Arab Spring of two years prior (the collapses of Egypt and Libya over this summer are starting to get as bad).  We've got 2 million refugees across the borders and 4 million more displaced within Syria: a massive humanitarian disaster in the making.  Adding to the problem is that the current Assad regime isn't a friendly or humane government... and that a growing number of Syrian rebel forces are tied into the Al Qaeda cave idiot extremists, meaning the U.S. really doesn't have an honest side to back.

The biggest headache is how Assad's government does have WMDs in the form of chemical weapons.  While warfare is a bloody mess regardless what weapons are used, chemical warfare is a Big No-No: the risk to civilian exposure is the biggest worry, especially since there's little warning when the attacks come and there's not a lot of people going around with gas masks.  When the fighting got worse, but the U.S. had no reason or allied support to go in, Obama issued a stern warning (the "red line") that chemical weapon usage would cause reprisals.

Chemical weapons got used.

Forced to uphold the "red line", Obama did what every other President seeking military action would do: call on allies to back him up.  This time, however, our allies refused.  In a public display of rejection, the British Parliament voted against the call for support.  Going to the UN for a military airstrike - missile or aerial bombing - was out of the question with Syria's backer Russia nearly certain to veto any action.

This brought him back to the U.S. going to Congress to ask for a resolution (something Presidents are supposed to do, but because of constitutional question marks they avoid this step).  This was originally viewed as the one thing the Republicans would actually back Obama on... except now there's no guarantee as the House GOP obstruction game-plan (destroy Obamacare, destroy Obama, destroy the government, etc) is back in full effect.

The worrying thing is how the knee-jerk reaction comes so easy on this: the urge to use military force as the first step rather than the last.  There is this lingering paranoia among our political leaders that nobody wants to look "weak".  That nobody wants to be accountable when something goes wrong, except for when a military strike could go wrong, in which case the answer would be an escalation in the fighting.

The current situation - the possibility of a diplomatic solution to the chemical weapons, it won't stop the fighting but it will reduce the need for the world power(s) to get further entangled - provides some hope for the present and the future.  If the United States can get Russia to back the effort, if Russia can get Syria to sign onto the chemical warfare treaties limiting their use, if Syria honestly gives up control of those weapons to international (UN) observers...  For the first time in what seems like decades, we would have a diplomatic solution to a problem rather than a military one.

And wouldn't that be a better legacy Post-9/11 than yet another war?

How To Cut a Gordian Knot

Ever hear of Lateral Thinking?  It's a problem-solving method of using non-conventional or unorthodox means to solve an otherwise intractable problem.  Where logic fails, you apply some illogical method that most people wouldn't see coming.

An example would be the legend of Alexander the Great confronting the problem of the Gordian Knot.  Where most everyone else tried to physically untie the knot, Alexander cut it with his sword.  It may seem like cheating, but it wasn't against the rules.  It symbolized how Alexander would conquer Persia/Middle East with the sword.

A modern-day Gordian Knot is the whole Middle East itself: war-ravaged, divided, tribalistic... if there's been a solution to stopping the ongoing violence that has plagued the region since, well, ever, no one's found it yet.

Part of the problem is that each region has its own internal issues that forces external politics to react disproportionately... and reverberates against every other problematic nation within shouting (or shooting) distance.  You've got 20 Gordian Knots adding up to one big Knot... and there's not a big enough sword to cut them all, not all at once.

For the United States, tied into the Middle East due to our alliances to various nations in the region (Israel, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Libya) - and our opposition to other nations such as Iran and Syria - we're coping with the disastrous civil war in Syria by trying to enforce the unenforceable.  Syria is one of the nations with a sizable chemical weapons stockpile, and there's been recent usage of chemical weapons that's killing/wounding hundreds of civilians caught in the cross-fire of the civil war.  Obama tried earlier to push a "red line" stance on the use of chemicals... but now that they've been used, Obama's finding himself in almost no position to enforce it.

The standard response to what's happened in Syria is a "surgical" or tactical strike against key Syrian government targets, usually buildings that we plan to have as few people in them as possible when the missiles/bombs hit.  However, this most likely won't discourage Assad or his allies: it may actually make them react in the worst way.

Troubling Obama is the fact that this time the United States doesn't have many allies lining up to back any such strike.  The British Parliament voted against it.  NATO (outside of France, who will only provide political cover and not much else) is reportedly not in favor either.  There hasn't been an attempt to take this to the UN for a resolution, since the odds are Russia (Syria's biggest ally) and China will not play along.  It's gotten to where the only way Obama can get any political cover for striking Syria is by taking this to Congress to get a vote on a "limited military action", which he's kinda supposed to do under the War Powers Act but is something most Presidents haven't done in what seems like ages (or at least since the first Persian Gulf War in 1991).

Worst of all: most Americans do not want to get involved in Syria.  And it's not just the Far Right population opposing Obama's stance on Syria simply on principle (of hating Obama).  And even in the face of the growing humanitarian disaster that is the refugee crisis.  We've been burned out by 10-plus years of unending wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.  Getting lied to by Cheney and Bush the Lesser about Saddam's WMDs is affecting the national mood.  If Congress votes No on Syria - and after my earlier contention that Congress might go along, there's signs now that the Far Right might not give Obama this - Obama will have no political cover to push for a strike.  He could still order it - the War Powers has yet to be constitutionally upheld, and it's in a grey area at best - but Obama would be held responsible on both the national and international stage for ignoring the people he's supposed to represent... and would be violating national laws he's supposed to uphold.

This is where Obama would be looking for a third option... an alternative solution to cut the Gordian Knot he's just tied himself into.

Who would have thought it would be diplomacy and NOT the sword that might actually solve the problem?

Secretary of State Kerry seemingly threw out there during a meeting with the UK Foreign Office the possibility that if Russia could talk Syria into giving up control of their chemical weapon stockpiles to international observers (UN most likely), it might resolve the issue and make a military strike moot.

When the State Department tried to talk back Kerry's statements, making it look like an off-the-record "gaffe" (wink wink), Russia's Foreign Minister quickly responded with favorable language, and Syria's foreign minister joined in.  This is kinda how Hollywood works when movie blockbusters have to be ironed out between supersized egos, I've been told.

If it turns into something that can get worked out between the key parties, the whole matter of chemical warfare - one of the Big No-Nos of fighting - could be taken out of the equation.

It won't resolve the civil war itself: Assad is fighting for his life, with his minority ethnic clan struggling alongside him, against a nationwide uprising against his family's brutal decades-long rule.  It will, however, get Obama and the United States out of a nasty political nightmare and give the major powers involved - Russia, US, France, Britain, Turkey and Iran - some room to maneuver regarding the Syrian disaster.

And who knows?  This diplomacy thing might catch on across the rest of the Middle East.  Trick is, of course, to make sure the goddamn killing stops first...

Presidential Character: Week Thirty-One, the Peter Principle Applied to Presidents

While this year-long attempt at documenting Presidents relies on James David Barber's seminal work Presidential Character, I do rely on the occasional outside reference to highlight a point.

For example, bringing up the Peter Principle.  To wit:

...in a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to their level of incompetence.

Now, an elective office like the Presidency doesn't work as a hierarchy.  As a rule, people are not hired and promoted upward into the Oval Office (well, outside of the Vice Presidents on those rare painful exceptions).  Thing is, people vote for experience: they vote for political figures, military leaders, governors and captains of industry because such candidates have proven themselves in some fashion.  So in a way, a President can be a man who's done wonders at a lower level of prestige and excites the populace into thinking they can do just as well as Leader Of the Free World.

Herbert Hoover was just such a man by 1928.  One of the self-made success stories of the early 20th Century: became a mining engineer in youth, then a mining consultant and leading business figure on the global stage, organized American evacuation from Europe on the outbreak of World War I and turned right around to lead relief effort and food aid for war-stricken Belguim, when the United States entered the war he was put in charge of food administration and effectively managed homeland rationing to ensure priority food supplies got overseas, and he oversaw relief efforts for post-war Germany and war-torn Russia (during the Bolshevik takeover) which were suffering massive famines.  By 1920 Hoover was considered one of the greatest humanitarians the world had seen.

Actively becoming a Republican when politics proved the next challenge in his life, Hoover was placed in Harding's Cabinet as Secretary of Commerce.  Taking control of what was a minor office at the time, Hoover used his initiative to establish a department dedicated to business growth and control of economic affairs.  When confronted with a problem that was lapsing in someone else's Cabinet, Hoover worked it so that Commerce became responsible for its oversight and fixes.  Where previous Presidents Roosevelt, Taft and Wilson were adversarial to corporations, Hoover - being a businessman himself - preferred the "soft power" approach of making business leaders allies instead of enemies.  He worked with banks and savings and loans to rework home mortgaging to promote home ownership to Americans, increasing home construction.  It all culminated in one massive economic boom of the Roaring Twenties.

Hoover was one of the incorruptible men under Harding's administration, and became one of the indispensable men under Coolidge's.  When 1928 rolled around and Coolidge refused to run for another term (well within the unofficial two-term limit), Hoover was practically the only choice the Republicans had for the Presidential nomination.  Despite personal concerns from Coolidge - they apparently didn't get along, the Passive-Negative Coolidge finding Hoover's aggressive personality abrasive at best - Hoover got the nom, easily won against the Democratic challenger Al Smith, and settled into the White House in 1929 under the belief that "no one can rightly deny the fundamental correctness of our economic system."

1929 is traditionally the year the Great Depression started.

There's still an argument about what caused it.  Considering the size and scope of what that Depression was, there had to be a variety of factors culminating in one perfect storm of an economic disaster.  Also, put a hundred economists into a debate room and you'll get a hundred different answers to the simple question "what caused it?"

It could have been any of these things.  The failure of Midwestern farms leading to foreclosures, and then bank failures in the wake of that.  The U.S. government commitment to the gold standard, which kept interest rates too high and limited monetary policy.  Wealth disparity during the 1920s which fed money into investments for the rich rather than spending income for the poor and middle classes.  Massive personal and financial debt across the board, another reason for the bank failures.  Land speculation, especially in Florida (hi again!), and a housing bubble related to that.  Growing unemployment caused by a decline in population numbers due to fewer families and fewer immigrants, which paradoxically made it harder for the flesh-and-blood unemployed to find jobs (it has something to do with the lack of demand in a growing consumer economy).

The infamous Stock Market Crash of October 1929 isn't viewed by the experts as a cause, but a symptom exposing to the world just how bad the economy was getting and turning the economic mood from positive to negative.  (Also, anyone else notice how a good number of those causes are similar to the problems we're facing today...?)

Almost one thing most of the economists would agree on was that the Great Depression wouldn't have been as bad as it had gotten (to some economists, in 1929 it was just a regular recession or panic) if the response to it had not been so badly bungled.

This is where Hoover's personality traits become part of the problem.  This is where being an Active-Negative at heart turned Hoover from one of the 20th Century's greatest men into one of history's greatest failed Presidents.

The defining trait of an Active-Negative President is Uncompromising.  The A-N operates by certain principles or beliefs that cannot bend in the face of "enemies" or those opposed to his work.  To quote Barber about A-Ns:

But the most pervasive feeling in the Active-Negative makeup is "I must."  He is a man under strict orders, required to concentrate, to produce, to follow out his destiny as he sees it.  At any given moment, he feels bound by what he has already undertaken, already promised, already committed...  He finds it hard even to see alternatives to the course he "must" follow, much less change that course when it proves unproductive...  From the inside... the Active-Negative type generates tremendous energies for political domination.  From the outside, he seems at first extraordinarily capable and then extraordinarily rigid, become more and more closed to experience, including the advice of his ardent allies... (p. 82)

Hoover's "I must" moment was the handling of the Depression.  Previous experience as a businessman and Commerce Secretary told him how to react (not act) to the economic crises of 1929: Let the market correct themselves.  Let the businesses fail that are going to fail, and the industries will recover on their own.    Hoover's Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon infamously deemed that to "liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmer, liquidate real estate..." and that it would make people "work harder and live a more moral life."  However, that meant one thing: liquidate everything in the economy because too many factors were failing all at once.  It also failed to consider the possibility that there was nothing in the economy people could work harder for, as unemployment went up and kept going up during Hoover's tenure.

In this regard, Hoover was a lot like other A-N Presidents - Van Buren, Cleveland, and Buchanan are good examples - when faced with a financial panic.  They too preferred to let the markets correct themselves.  And under normal circumstances, Hoover wouldn't have been far wrong: a brief recession in 1921 corrected itself by letting liquidation do its thing and redistribute capital.  Hoover's failing was thinking that all this economic panic was came from the financial markets re-adjusting itself.  It never occurred to him that parts of the economy were literally disappearing and never coming back.

Hoover instead focused on keeping the federal government solvent: he abhorred the trending Keynesian theories of government spending to "buy out" the economic crisis, and focused instead on keeping the budget balanced (again, sounds a bit familiar don't it).  The Depression cut into those attempts to budget, however, making Hoover even more reluctant to create massive spending projects to fix the Depression first.

This is partly where the Peter Principle comes into play as well.  Hoover, once one of the most competent men on the planet - great organizer, driven, focused on tasks and finishing them - became as President one of the most incompetent leaders at a time of need.  It wasn't so much that Hoover failed to respond - he actually did respond, a good number of government programs started between 1930 to 1932 formed the basis of much of the New Deal of the 1930s, famously with the Hoover Dam construction project - it was that he failed to organize on the scale that the crisis demanded, and for a man once driven to succeed he suddenly looked like he was just sitting there.

His previous jobs - engineer, mine owner, businessman, relief organizer, Commerce Secretary - were ones that did not necessarily require him to "think outside the box" as it were.  Respond to a problem and fix it with the tools at hand (not considering new tools may need to be invented).  Manage something already working and making sure it stays working (keeping the engine going while ignoring the fact the train is charging off a cliff).  Reforming government and adding regulations where needed (but drawing the line at where the private sector must remain free of the public sector).

Being President means making decisions, something that Hoover had done often before and usually successful at it.  But being President also means creating compromise solutions when the situation demands it, making decisions that a President will be uncomfortable making yet would recognize as necessary (an Active-Positive, for example, making a deal he knows will suck for himself or his personal allies but will make life easier for 100 million others).  And in Hoover's case, it meant making decisions (making the public sector more aggressive in job creation, for example) he wouldn't - and didn't - make.

As President, he was faced with a situation - the Great Depression - the size and scope of which was larger than anything seen before, especially in terms of job losses and mass unemployment.  Hoover was being asked by the desperation of the times - the Bonus Army marching on Washington for financial relief, the failure of businesses and banks to reinvest capital to spark a stalled economy - to make the hard decisions and compromises that could have relieved the crisis.  Asking an A-N President like himself to "think outside the box" and consider other economic models as possible fixes would have been akin to asking a whale to try walking on land instead of swimming in water.

Basically, Hoover had gotten promoted to a job he wasn't suited for.  The Presidency was something outside of his temperament.  If he had been Treasury Secretary or still Commerce Secretary in 1929, and the President was an Active-Positive sort calling on Hoover to solve some of the economic woes within his range of influence, I wouldn't doubt that Hoover would have resolved the matter within that term: doing so on the orders and direction of a man more capable of making the decisions Hoover couldn't make.

And we wouldn't have called homeless towns "Hoovervilles".  Hoover's reputation as a humanitarian would have remained intact: the image of him feeding children replacing the images of starving families in the history textbooks.

Remember the evil banker character from John Ford's Stagecoach?  At one point, he rails against the federal government and insists everything would work if there was a businessman in charge of government.  It was Ford's (and Hollywood's) rude judgment on the Hoover administration.  Which wasn't entirely unfair, but harsher than it deserved to be.

(P.S.: I wouldn't put the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act on Hoover's shoulders.  That was more a protectionist effort by Congress... which essentially started a trade war/boycott with the rest of the planet that made the Great Depression worse, thanks a bunch Smoot and Hawley)

Next: For this President, I might have to make two separate entries for two thematically different historical eras.

Leave It To The Onion To Realize What Americans Really Think

The Onion may be satire, but it is in satire that the truth is found.

Poll: Majority of Americans Approve Sending Congress to Syria.

Citing overwhelming support from the international community—including that of the Arab League, Turkey, and France, as well as Great Britain, Iraq, Iran, Russia, Japan, Mexico, China, and Canada, all of whom are reported to be unilaterally in favor of sending the U.S. Congress to Syria—the majority of survey respondents said they believe the United States should refocus its entire approach to Syria’s civil war on the ground deployment of U.S. senators and representatives, regardless of whether the Assad regime used chemical weapons or not.

In fact, 91 percent of those surveyed agreed that the active use of sarin gas attacks by the Syrian government would, if anything, only increase poll respondents’ desire to send Congress to Syria.

Seriously, I'd love to see Pew Research or Gallup or Rasmussen poll Americans on this.

Dear Congress: This is what happens when your favorable numbers are so bad that certain diseases are more popular than you.

The Massive Disconnect Between The Voters And The Elected

Among the many things bothering the hell out of me regarding Syria - the real need to focus first on the refugee crisis, the need to stop Assad's use of chemical weapons versus the inability to really do anything about it other than an outright invasion and all the horrors THAT would entail, the realization that the entire Middle East from Egypt to Libya is in total chaos and we're unable as an international power to focus on any of that - is this simple fact:

A vast majority of Americans are polling as opposed to any military strike or action on Syria... and our elected officials (and their friends in the Beltway media) are still poised to vote in favor of it.

Link to Pew Research Center's results:

Also wik:

Yet just right now, the Senate Foreign Relations committee overseeing such issues just voted 10-7 in favor of a "limited military response" to Syria's use of chemical weapons.  There's still a full Senate vote I believe and also a House resolution, but most of the experts believe that both parties may go along with approval (Dems because they have the need to back their party's nominal leader, Republicans because there's a sizable faction of neocon interventionists seeking to "tame" the Middle East through superior firepower).

Usually elected officials are more aware, more alert to the reality that voting whole-heartedly against their constituents' opinions tends to be a bad idea.  They're at least aware of the risks: even during the health care reform debates a good number of Democrats openly worried they would lose seats over passing any reform despite the fact that everybody knew health care costs needed to be controlled somehow.

Yet with the Syrian military strike as an issue, there's this kind of intellectual if not emotional disconnect to what's happening.  None of the politicians seem to be pointing to the poll numbers or worrying about how this plays "back home" with their voters.  If there are any, I'm not seeing them speak up on the news channels or websites.  (If there's at least one, please pass along the link)

Sullivan points it out clearly:

I cannot remember a war in which the public in the most affected countries is so opposed. And that opposition is not likely to melt in a week or so – certainly not if many people listened to John Kerry yesterday. And that poll is about the abstraction of “strikes” – and not about the open-ended war to depose Assad that the administration actually proposed in its own resolution. Mercifully, Americans are not as dumb as many think...

I don't consider the polling about invading Iraq in 2002 to be of relevance here: considering that Congress and the public were lied to about Saddam's having WMDs as an excuse to go in, the general public support for that invasion/occupation is kind of an illusion.

There's been times that the DC "establishment" were not in tune with the nation as a whole: the obsessive hate-on for Clinton (not just the GOP but the media elites and power-brokers operating in DC) that made many voters side with him when the Lewinsky scandal broke is a recent example.  But this time it's troubling.  This time, lives - ours and Syrians - are at stake.  The chaos of the Middle East may well get worse if military action takes place.  And there's no guarantee that the planned missile strikes will do anything productive.

In a situation where diplomacy makes the most sense - the possibility of getting with Russia and Iran, Syria's primary backers, both of whom are troubled by the gas attacks as well - it's terrifying that nobody in DC wants to argue for this as a sensible alternative.

This isn't Munich.  Like Conor points out - "For Hawks, it is always 1938" - there's no Chamberlain-esque appeasement here other than trying to find something that would stop the damn bloodshed:

Every part of that part of that argument is wrong. The war weariness of post-WWI Britain was very different from the war weariness of present day America, and an unwillingness to strike dictators who kill their own people is not the same as appeasement. By Hirsh's logic, it is imperative that we immediately invade North Korea because otherwise we are appeasing it, and inviting it to begin a blitzkrieg across the Western world, because Hitler. The approach he implies -- intervention wherever there is a dictator or a mass murder -- is a recipe for far more war, and far more misery from war.

One of our nation's biggest problems hasn't been the partisan brinkmanship, the incessant noise machine drowning out policy solutions, the sheer amount of money in the electioneering business (seriously, it's in the billions now), it's been the Lack Of Accountability.  We're having one of those Lack Of Accountability moments.  And everyone's failing the moment.

The True Meaning Of Labor Day

Presents.  Yeah...

No, wait, that's South Park.

Labor Day came about because Grover Cleveland once sent the military out to suppress a workers' strike.  The public reaction was mostly for it, but the unions railed against the use of the military like that and convinced Congress to pass legislation designating the first Monday of September to honor Labor (not Labour, which is the UK political party.  We're Americans dammit we f-ck with the letter U whenever we can).  Appeased with such a meager trade-off, the labor unions later gave Grover Cleveland a collective firm handshake and friendly pat on the shoulder.

AND THUS WAS THE HOLIDAY BORN.

Now, back to presents!

Promoted With Comment: the Times' Editorial on Rick "Go Away" Scott

If you don't get the St. Pete... sigh, the Tampa Bay Times, you missed a front-page editorial titled Governor Phony, on one of the worst governors the state of Florida has ever seen:

...The reality is Scott failed to show up at his own summit to listen to the concerns of school superintendents and others. Instead he ate dinner privately with former Gov. Jeb Bush, whose passion for education is unquestioned even if some of his views are controversial.

This year's per student funding is the highest of Scott's three years as governor. But it is still lower than each of the five previous years under his predecessors, Charlie Crist and Bush. Scott also signed into law the legislation that siphons off school construction money to privately run charter schools. And the governor's last two hand-picked education commissioners have shown more interest in advocating for charter schools and expanding voucher programs than in creating successful public schools.

Now there is another interim education commissioner, and the revolving door in Tallahassee leaves local school districts without clear direction from the state. Will Scott fold on Common Core and the student assessments needed to make them work?

...The governor decimated growth management and eliminated the agency that enforced it. He fought the federal government over clean-water standards, neutered the water management districts by slashing their tax base and manipulated the regulatory process to put politics above science. His money for Florida's springs is hardly meaningful. The deal he cut with the federal government on restoring the Everglades put the deadline off again. And to raise money to buy sensitive lands, the state's solution is to sell land it already owns.

Scott is still looking at toll roads to nowhere across the middle of Florida. The state still has no cohesive energy policy. And the governor's environmental agency is more focused on quickly approving the requests of developers than on protecting wetlands. A news conference on one worthy project cannot mask years of bad policy.

...Scott inaccurately claims he is more than halfway toward meeting his pledge of creating 700,000 jobs, and he keeps cranking out the news releases. Last week: 100 jobs at Boeing in Miami; 105 new air cargo jobs in Orlando; 200 jobs at technology company Citrix in Fort Lauderdale. The week before that: 40 jobs at the moving and storage company PODS in Clearwater.

Many of the jobs Scott counts won't be created for years, if ever, and the bigger picture is darker. The state's unemployment rate has been stuck at 7.1 percent for three months, better than the national average of 7.4 percent. A report by the Bureau of Labor Statistics says the labor force expanded in the Tampa Bay area, Jacksonville and Orlando in the past year but in other areas — South Florida, the Panhandle, Bradenton, Sarasota and Lakeland — the labor force contracted. And the jobless rate in Pasco and Hernando counties is still 8 percent or higher.

Scott's heavy-handed attempt to lure companies from other states is a public relations nightmare, and it isn't working. While Florida now has roughly as many jobs as before the recession, people earn less and there are more part-time jobs. Jobs in the low-paying leisure and hospitality sectors are up. Better paying jobs in construction, manufacturing and professional/business services are still down...

...Scott sat by as House Speaker Will Weatherford blocked expansion, and he has dropped the issue. What the governor has done is reject millions in federal dollars to implement health care reform and left the creation of an insurance exchange to the federal government. He also foolishly signed into law a ban on state regulation of health insurance rates for two years.

New U.S. Census figures show nearly 1 in 4 Floridians lack health insurance, the second highest rate in the nation. Hospitals in Orlando, Vero Beach and elsewhere are laying off workers and reducing pay in part because the new Medicaid dollars aren't coming.

Scott isn't expanding access to health care. He is working against it. He is making it harder for hospitals to make ends meet, harder for the uninsured to get coverage and harder for businesses to comply with the federal law...

Here's my two cents: this commentary needs to be on the front of every Florida newspaper between now and Election Day 2014.  We need to remind Floridians that Rick Scott is not in this for the state, he's in it for himself and he'll f-ck us over to get it.  Pardon my Swedish.

Thank you.

Presidential Character: Week Thirty, The Passive Tense

The traits of Active and Passive for a President are pretty straightforward.  Actives are active in terms of pursuing goals, facing conflicts, getting things done.  Passives just kinda sit there: okay, I kid, but Passives react more to situations and sometimes not at all.

Which makes it odd that Passive-Negative Presidents ever get elected into office: Passives don't exactly pursue that kind of political career, and Negatives are uncertain if not despising of the powers of the office (they tend to be self-limiting in terms of what they do).  And yet, as James David Barber has noted in his work, we've had several: Washington, Eisenhower (more on him later), and today's special guest Calvin Coolidge.

In Washington and Eisenhower's cases, there are good reasons both of them ended up Presidents.  They were basically drafted to the job.  As Generals, they had experience of leadership that the nation sought them out to serve as leaders from the White House.  In Washington's case, he was the only man anyone would trust as President under the then-new Constitution: In Eisenhower's, he had led the nation's army on the great European battlefield of World War II with prudence and determination.

Why a P-N character would accept a nomination for the high office is due to their primary sense of Duty: if asked to serve, they would.  They may make good leaders especially in a military environment but only through consensus, adherence to procedure, and avoidance of internal conflicts (they act Withdrawn in public and sometimes even in private).  The next best thing about P-Ns is that they don't let all that power get to their egos.  Third best thing is that they tend to put decent men into key official positions (P-Ns are not seeking love, and tend to be immune to the suck-ups and con artists).  But the worst thing about P-Ns is that they tend not to think outside the box or show initiative, or plan ahead...

In Coolidge's case, it wasn't that he was drafted to be the President, it was that he got promoted instead.  With Harding's untimely demise, what had been a decent job placement for a Passive-Negative - the Vice-Presidency - got turned into the Top Job in the nation.  As befitting his character when Coolidge was woken at night and received word that Harding had died, Coolidge got dressed, called his father over (Coolidge was visiting home at the time) who served as a Public Notary, took the Oath of Office with his father, and then went back to bed.

As metaphors go, it was pretty apt.  Not so much that Coolidge slept through his entire administration, but that he went at his own slow pace.  Whereas Harding's administration was lively to say the least, Coolidge's was collected and quiet.  He could be a mean deadpan snarker when he had to be - Dorothy Parker reportedly tried to get him to say more than three words: Coolidge replied "You lose" - but if he didn't need to say anything he kept his mouth shut.

As President he believed in a hands-off approach to government: he let the private market take care of itself and restrained the federal public sector believing the states could do better.  He let foreign policy be managed by his Secretary of State Kellogg and economic domestic policy be managed by his Secretary of Commerce Hoover.  If he took anything seriously about executive authority he lent it to civil rights matters, pushing for anti-lynching laws and signing the Indian Citizenship Act which granted full citizenship rights to the native tribes.  He worked to defuse racial tensions, and during his tenure the Ku Klux Klan which had been rising in political power in the early 1920s had those gains reversed (albeit due to their own internal scandals and recklessness).

The most quoted statement Coolidge ever gave: "The chief business of the American people is business."

But that hands-off approach had its failings: the federal government's poor response to the Great Mississippi River Flood of 1927 and the failure to pass meaningful agricultural reform to help out poor farmers during the 1920s.  For someone who favored business and individual enterprise, Coolidge turned a blind eye to the farmers struggling to cope with falling market prices and growing debts.  The failing agribusiness industry would be one of the key contributors to the looming disaster awaiting the world in 1929...

As to what Barber noted about Coolidge in Presidential Character:

His philosophy helped him rationalize his leisurely pace.  His method was to concentrate on matters only the President had to decide, and to define that category as narrowly as possible.  Most everything could wait.  And Coolidge himself could wait, with utter unflappable calm, for longer than the last of his advisors.  He also managed to rationalize his independence of others; clearly his style in close interpersonal relations cut his off effectively from much of the Washington conversational froth - but also from any effective political bargaining with administrative or legislative or party leaders.  He was a loner who endured in order to serve, while the nation drifted... (p.172)

In terms of cleaning up the messes Harding left behind, Coolidge did a good job as President.  In terms of failing to keep an eye on the "business" of governance, Coolidge did a poor job keeping things safe for the poor bastard who had to follow him into office.

Next Up: That Poor Bastard.

The Secret About White Voters

This was something I spotted on Think Progress earlier today:

...McAuliffe’s numbers among black voters are likely to improve as undecideds tune into the campaign, but right now he is not riding a groundswell of African-American enthusiasm. Instead, his relatively strong lead comes from a counter-intuitive Cuccinelli weakness: white voters.

In the simplest possible terms, Cuccinelli has a white voter shortage. Consider Romney’s performance in in the state in 2012 in what was, after all, a losing effort. Romney carried white voters by a very strong 23 points. By comparison, Cuccinelli only leads among whites by 8 in the Quinnipiac poll.

The mystery deepens when you break down the numbers even further. Among white college graduates, Cuccinelli is only breaking even (Romney won this group by 10 points). The difference can perhaps be explained by Cuccinelli’svery public identification with hardline social conservatism, though it’s hard to say for sure.

What’s really baffling is Cuccinelli’s underperformance with white working class voters, who tend to identify with more “traditional” moral values. In the Quinnipiac poll, Cuccinelli has a 16 point lead among these voters. This may sound good, but it is not remotely large enough for a GOP candidate to carry the state even allowing for the relatively favorable turnout patterns of an off-year election. Romney carried Virginia’s white working class by a whopping 44 points, and still wound up losing.

Cuccinelli may have assumed his far right economic and social positions would be catnip for Virginia’s white voters, especially the white working class. So far, that’s looking like a poor assumption...

The blogger Ruy Teixeira is wondering how candidate Cuccinelli - already a national name thanks to his grandstanding on climate change and pogrom against consensual sex acts - could be losing not just young white voters (as Millennials are proving more liberal at their young age than previous generational cycles) but also older more traditional white voters (the Angry White Guy Coalition).

Well, there's a little dirty secret about white voters that people seem to keep forgetting: well, you see white voters are not as monolithic a group of voters as the pollsters, hucksters, media elites and suckers think we are.

By comparison, let's look first at the major ethnic groups.  Blacks, as documented rather well, nowadays tend to vote entirely for Democrats: sure, there are notable exceptions of African-American conservatives, but they're honestly few and far between.  Blacks are by generational development more pro-government (for good reason), pro-voting-rights (for good reason), pro-public-works (which tends to focus on construction and urban development, both solid job markets).  On the political spectrum, a solid number of African-Americans would lean to the Liberal end, which is currently best represented by the Democrats.  But it's not so much that Blacks are whole-heartedly Democratic: it's that the Republican Party in its current form is so anti-government, anti-voting, anti-anything that it's driving away African-Americans (even moderate ones) to a near 93 percent (98 percent in major urban areas) population count.

Hispanics aren't as devout (that chart for Obama's results show 71 percent compared to Blacks' 93 percent), but still vote in large enough numbers for Democrats to make note (7 out of 10 is a very solid majority).  It's partly due to the Republicans' hard-right turn against immigration, but it also has to do with the Republicans' stance against government social services and health care.  Both are key issues to the Hispanic communities: Hispanics don't have the disdain for the public sector that the current Republicans do.  Where Hispanics can be more conservative on an individual basis, as a community they'll vote the community interests (La Raza as a social concept).  And community interests tend to lean more Liberal (shared resources, free or low-cost public education, health care, public works) than Conservative.  Which is one reason why the Republicans' failure to pass any immigration reform - which hurts the Hispanic community as a whole - is proving foolhardy...

Asians as a smaller percentage of the national population still vote much the way the Hispanic population does, voting for Obama in roughly the same 7 out of 10 percentage.  It doesn't help the GOP that Asians are also greatly affected by the failure of immigration reform.

Into all of this is the White voter bloc.  Other major ethnic groups - Blacks (9 out of 10), Hispanics (7 of 10), and Asians (7 of 10) - have definable voting blocs.  Whites?  While they're the only group to lean Republican,  it's a 59 percent to 39 percent split.  More like a 6 out of 10 vote, the weakest voting bloc by percentage out of the ethnic groups.

While White Americans share the largest overall numbers of the population, White voters overall don't follow clear voting habits: of the major ethnic groups, Whites have clear distinctions between Right, Moderate, and Left voting groups.  Part of it has to do with how little the White voters have at stake on certain issues, especially on immigration (Hispanics, Asians) and on voting rights and civil liberty issues (Blacks overcoming decades of Jim Crow and segregation).  Those issues can galvanize those ethnic groups like no other. Whites would get more worked up on issues like taxes and business regulation, which are more polarizing than galvanizing.  On issues shared between all ethnic groups - education and health care - again these are more polarizing due to their complexity, and while White voters may lean Conservative on those two issues they are not unilaterally inclined to do so.  There may be one issue where whites are more Conservative than others - gun ownership - but even then it's not as absolute a vote-getter as it's polarizing as any other issue.

There's another aspect of the dirty little secret about White voters: we're not as a group keyed to the idea about race conflict the way the GOP is preaching it.  Yes, there are a good number of Whites who take serious the "reverse racism" argument, but not a majority of whites do.  Left-leaning Whites clearly don't, and there are signs the Moderate White voting bloc won't as well:

...But if the GOP determines that its future lies with an all-out pursuit of whites, it might find an unwanted surprise. Some white voters, particularly young ones, won’t align themselves with a party that can’t attract support from Hispanics, African-Americans, and Asians. To attract more white voters, the GOP, ironically, might first need to attract more minorities.

That’s the central dilemma of any plan to win with a nearly all-white coalition. As the minority share grows with each presidential election, Republicans would need to win a greater and greater percentage of the white vote to prevail. That challenge proved insurmountable last year, when Mitt Romney won nearly 60 percent of white voters and still lost... 

...Seventy-six percent of likely millennial voters, for instance, say immigrants make the country a stronger place, according to a July poll from the Democratic firm Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research. Just 61 percent (Note: that's still a huge positive for immigration reform that the GOP is pissing off) of all likely voters agreed with that. “On a number of key issues, if the party appears to be intolerant of gays, minorities, or immigrants, it’s going to have trouble competing with this group,” says Michael Hais, a Democrat and a coauthor of the book Millennial Makeover...

...College-educated women and suburban moderates hold similar views. Both groups are more accepting of diversity, and they recoil at the notion of backing a party that doesn't encourage it. It’s a story that has played out in the GOP’s past, says Whit Ayers, a Republican pollster and immigration-reform advocate. The Republican Party’s perceived intolerance turned off voters who otherwise might have been drawn to the GOP on issues such as the economy and foreign policy. “It’s just like the white suburban women who were uncomfortable with politicians who used quasi-racist language,” he says. “They just don’t want to be associated with them.”

For all the crowing in the nation's media elites about America being a "center-right nation" or the counter-claim of it really being a "center-left nation", the ones making those distinctions keep focusing on the "right" and "left" and forgetting the "center" part.  The thing about the voters in the "center" (aka the Moderates): we tend to be open-minded, kinda the whole point of being moderate.  Moderates tend to be open-minded about voting rights and immigration reform, which as the GOP turns further to the Right on those issues will drive those Moderates away.  (Moderates also tend to vote for competency, a skill set the modern Republican lineup is failing at, but that's a divergent issue.  Just related, that's all).

To get back to the issue with Cuccinelli's failings in Virginia, I need to point out that while Virginia has a solid conservative voting base it's not a dominant one: the state isn't fully a Red State (Republican), it's voted Blue (Democratic) the last two elections for President and has voted for Democratic governors (2001, 2005) in its recent history during Republicans' national dominance (both governors now serve as U.S. Senators): Virginia tends to be considered a Purple state (in flux between two parties) far more than other states.

Cuccinelli is currently losing Virginia by about 6 percentage points behind a Democratic challenger - McAuliffe - who really isn't considered even by fellow Democrats to be the best possible choice for the Governor's seat.  That 6 percent difference is similar to the victory difference current Senator Tim Kaine won over his Republican challenger last fall.  And at this point in the election cycle (the governor vote is this November), it's not like Cuccinelli can rally even more Far Right voters who are already rallied for him to make up for that 6 percent difference: this is the point in the general election where the candidates have to appeal to the moderate/undecided voters.  But Cuccinelli's failures to lean more moderate on immigration (he noted he doesn't support amnesty, a key reform issue) doesn't help.

If Cuccinelli does fail in the Virginia election, it will be a big signal to the national Republican Party how their stance is failing with the moderate/centrist voters that are always key to any statewide/nationwide election (in gerrymandered congressional districts, independent votes tend to get wasted).  The Republican leaders - Limbaugh, Fox Not-News, and other non-elected types - always argue that they've lost the last big elections - 2008, 2012 - because the candidates were too moderate.  They won't be able to argue that with Cuccinelli: he's not moderate on anything, there's no way to disguise that.  And while this is a state-level election, the national interest in the campaign during a key mid-term period - especially as it's drawing in fund-raisers across the nation - will draw a lot of dissection and truth-seeking.

That Cuccinelli is "losing" the White Vote - he's actually losing a sizable bloc of it - isn't the reason I took notice of that Think Progress article.  It's that the Republican Party is losing that voting bloc.  I'm starting to feel a little hopeful about 2014...

I'm With Mistermix and Balloon Juice On This One: If We Wanna Help Syria...

The current situation with Syria is that, sadly, there's still fighting going on.  The U.S. plan to target certain Syrian facilities hit a snag with the British Parliament - burned by the lies over Iraq, thank you very much Dick Cheney - voting against military action, which means the international political cover isn't there... unless Obama decides to push for NATO or UN (very unlikely, as Russia might balk) or even wonder of wonders CONGRESSIONAL support.

But in the meantime, Mistermix over on Balloon Juice made this observation:

Food, water, shelter and sanitation for refugees is nowhere near as sexy as war, so this is getting little attention. If, as Juan Cole recommends, Obama decides to pivot and move to diplomacy after losing British support, focusing on the plight of refugees and using our airlift to send them aid would be smart politics as well as good policy.

This makes absolute perfect sense.  If we're supposed to be doing this on humanitarian grounds, focus on the humans first and foremost.  Get food and shelter and medical help to the refugees right now, Mr. President.

Personal Notes: Things To Do For Labor Day Weekend

1) Sleep.
2) Get some writing done.  Usually I'd be doing the 3-Day Novel Contest, but the stress of doing that actually exacerbated my writer's block, so a more leisurely do-it-my-own-pace would suffice.
3) Sleep.
4) Vacuum the floor.  Haven't done it in three months.  My bad.
5) Sleep.
6) Get Calvin Coolidge's Presidential Character profile done.  I figure there's 1,000... uh 100... okay seven of you eager to see what his trait will be.
7) Eat.  Can't sleep all the time.

What about you all?  Any plans for the long weekend?  The Comments section is relatively open (just no Chinese spam, my writing blog site got hit real bad with that, and nobody bought my ebooks... :(  ) so go ahead and drop some wisdom.

Also, if anyone in the New York City area knows a good bookstore that likes hosting relatively unknown authors for event/signing/reading/D&D campaigning (I'll have to roll a new character, haven't played in ages), lemme know in the Comments section or email me.  Danke.

Anniversary: I Have a Dream And What It Means Today

Today is the 50th anniversary of the March On Washington For Jobs and Freedom that took place back in 1963 (seven years before I was born).  One of the largest protests formed in American history - with roughly 200,000 to 300,000 in attendance - it was a combination of two major issues: civil rights and economic rights.  .

When Reverend Martin Luther King Jr spoke, it wasn't immediately recognized in the papers even though the television coverage gave it a lot of attention.

And so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal."

I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.

I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. I have a dream today!

I have a dream that one day, down in Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of "interposition" and "nullification" -- one day right there in Alabama little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers. I have a dream today! 

I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, and every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight; "and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed and all flesh shall see it together."

This is our hope, and this is the faith that I go back to the South with. With this faith, we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. With this faith, we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith, we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day. 

And this will be the day -- this will be the day when all of God's children will be able to sing with new meaning: 

My country 'tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing. Land where my fathers died, land of the Pilgrim's pride, From every mountainside, let freedom ring! 

And if America is to be a great nation, this must become true...

And so where are we 50 years later?

In terms of social equality across the board, we're not there yet.

In terms of economic equality, given the Great Recession we're in, we as a whole nation - white, black, Hispanic, Asian, native, man, woman - are royally screwed if we're not in the upper 1 Percent bracket.

In terms of electoral equality, we as a nation and blacks and Hispanics and the college-age and a lot of women are well and truly screwed.  The Supreme Court just defanged the Voting Rights Act and a good number of states - North Carolina, Texas, Mississippi, Florida, South Carolina and even Pennsylvania now for God's sake - where the social conservatives (aka Far Right Republicans) hold all the power are going out of their way to make it harder for people to vote using arguments about voting fraud that have no evidence.

In terms of day-to-day, the crime of Walking While Black has led to Fourth Amendment violations and in some cases open hunting season.

In terms of America becoming the great nation it keeps telling itself it can be, we're still stuck where we were 50 years ago.  Electing a black man to the Presidency seems like another country now, doesn't it.

We can be better than this if we as a nation can give up the hate and fear that's driving a lot of the wingnut bullsh-t.  We're living a dream that's all wrong, more nightmare than hope.  We as a nation have got to wake up from that.  It doesn't have to be a dream: it has to be just freaking common sense and decency.

Presidential Character: Week Twenty-Nine, Keep Your Friends Close Your Enemies Closer and Your Cronies Out of the Cabinet

A Friend Helps You Move.  A True Friend Helps You Move the Bodies. - Old Cardassian Proverb

Being President means being a leader of Men (in the plural gender neutral sense).  A leader of Men needs to be a good judge of Character, in order to grant authority to those working for him to do the best job possible.

So what happens when someone who's a terrible judge of Character gets the job of the Presidency?

We've seen earlier cases where Presidents proved a terrible judge of those serving under him: Grant in particular, with possible candidates in Madison and Pierce.  U.S. Grant's two-term administration was filled with questionable talent, cronyism, and corruption.  James Madison's Cabinet failed managing the War of 1812.  Franklin Pierce's was filled with pro-slavery elements that drove the nation further into division rather than compromise (and any administration with Jefferson Davis serving in it can't be called "the best and brightest").

Warren G. Harding topped them all in terms of setting up an administration brimming with corruption.  Even Grant, which honestly took some doing.  Harding's Passive-Positive character traits was one contributing factor: to be fair, being Pass-Pos doesn't automatically create a corrupt administration.  Taft's was relatively scandal-free and lacking in cronyism, and while Madison and Pierce presided over weak administrations corruption didn't make them that way.

What set Harding at the bottom of the heap was the man himself adhering to questionable behavior.  While Harding never profited from some of the largest scandals under his tenure, he was a hard-drinking womanizer creating a code of behavior that trickled down through the rest of his White House.  When the boss behaves a certain way, the others under his command tend to behave that way too.  Other Pass-Positives at least had the forgiving habit of maintaining scruples which added to their personal appeal.  Harding had to throw in some of the self-destructive habits of the Active-Negatives to boot.

A most appropriate and direct indictment of Harding comes on p. 222 of James David Barber's Presidential Character (the reference on which these reviews are based):

Advanced to the Presidency, Harding turned out to be venial only in his personal search for fraternal conviviality and sexual relief.  There were thieves all around him, but he did not steal.  Still, he could not face up to the spreading rot of his government - probably could not quite see it, because his attention was so heavily in the service of his need to believe his friends were really friends...

Harding achieved the Presidency as the compromise candidate of a Republican Party eager to win office after the disaster of Woodrow Wilson's second term.  The post-war mood of the nation has usually tended towards the need for "normalcy" and the Republicans sought to provide it.  Of the political bosses controlling the back rooms of the nominating convention, Harding quickly became the favorite: well-liked, media savvy (as a newspaperman, he had a solid sense of journalism, both tabloid and professional), and eager to help out his friends.  Basically easing into the job through one of the biggest popular vote landslides in American history (garnering 60 percent of the vote), Harding had it made.

Like other Pass-Positives, Harding filled his Cabinet with allies and cronies not truly suited to their jobs: Daughtery, the man who got him the nomination, asked for and got the Attorney General's seat; Albert Fall was first suggested for the State department but external opposition drove him over to the Interior; Charles Forbes was put in charge of Veterans Affairs.  With Fall you get the Teapot Dome Scandal, in scale of corruption and criminality topped only by Watergate itself; with Forbes you get a man who embezzled $225 million and wasted millions more; with Daughtery you get a Justice Department refusing to investigate complaints of criminal behavior, instead hiring questionable persons to investigate critics of the administration, and also getting charged with accusations of bribery, kickbacks and more.

To be fair, Harding put into office qualified men who ran their departments with skill, especially the likes of Herbert Hoover at Commerce, Charles Dawes as the first-ever Budget Director, and Charles Evans Hughes at State.  As a result, Harding's administration presided over a period of effective economic reform and foreign policy initiatives that would make an Active-Positive President green with envy.  Having worked as a key U.S. Senator to get the 19th Amendment passed for women to vote, having released political prisoners rounded up during Wilson's Red Scare period, and being the most vocal proponent against Jim Crow segregation since Roosevelt (he pushed for an anti-lynching bill that died in the very Southern-conservative Senate), Harding gained the reputation of civil rights advocacy that should impress progressives to this day.

But it was Harding's Ohio Gang (which hated the nickname because not every member was from Ohio) that would mark his Presidency... and Harding quickly realized it as the corruption exploded within his administration.  One of the Ohio Gang's lackeys had committed suicide just before Harding's boat trip to Alaska, and Harding had suddenly invited Hoover to join him for the trip.  While Harding recognized Hoover publicly and privately as one of his most competent allies, the two were not close personally: Hoover too religious and clean-cut compared to Harding's fast-living style.  During the trip, Harding continued to get notices from the White House about various rumors and reports, and:

Finally, on the boat sailing toward Alaska, he asked...Hoover to come to his cabin. The President asked, "If you knew of a great scandal in our administration, would you for the good of the country and the party expose it publicly or would you bury it?" Hoover replied, "Publish it, and at least get credit for integrity on your side." ...Hoover asked what relation Harry Daughterty...had to the affair.  At that point Harding abruptly cut off the conversation and never resumed it... (Barber, p. 210)

Harding also said to fellow traveler and journalist William Allen White "I have no trouble with my enemies.  I can take care of my enemies all right.  But my damn friends, my God-damn friends, White, they're the ones that keep me walking the floor nights!" (same pg).

It was on this trip that Harding suffered from food poisoning, a heart attack, and finally a fatal stroke that ended his life in 1923.  The suddenness of the death caught a lot by surprise, and because the scandals haunting Harding had not yet become public, the nation mourned an incredibly popular President (think Reagan at the height of his popularity and add a bucket of happy puppies to get a good idea how popular Harding was).  Six months later the scandals started spilling out and Harding quickly became the second-most unliked President of the 20th Century.  Talk about a fate worse than death for a Passive-Positive.

Next Up: Bet We Can't Make This Guy Say More Than Three Words.

When Politics Fails There's Always Impeachment

The summer recess that Congress takes is ostensibly done to allow the Congresspersons to head back to their districts and host Town Halls in order to shill their agenda and let the local voters vent on the issues of the day.  Venting also means a lot of crazy talk gets thrown out there for public consumption.  It gives the nation a chance to see which direction Teh Crazy wants to go.

The talk this summer has been split between how EVIL OBAMACARE IS (even though its' current implementation is winning people over), and how soon Congress will vote to impeach Obama out of office:

...And Republican politicians … well, their strategy (as Joan Walsh details in a nice item summing up these episodes) is all over the place. So we have Ted Cruz calling it a “good question” but noting that there just aren’t the votes in the Senate to convict; one member of the House saying that the votes are there in the House, but not in the Senate; another saying it would be a “dream come true” but that they just needed the “evidence”; and Sen. Tom Coburn saying that Obama is “perilously close” to impeachment.

Well, the answers are all over the place in one sense, but in another they are all actually pretty similar: None of them dismissed the idea out of hand. None of them simply said that impeachment is an extreme remedy for only the most serious malfeasance in office, and as wrong as they believe Barack Obama has been on matters of public policy, and as bad a president as they believe he has been, there’s absolutely nothing out there remotely in the neighborhood of an impeachable offense.

That’s what any responsible elected official would do...

I'd been wondering, since the 2010 midterms, when the Republicans would just jump straight into "Impeach Obama" Mode.  I honestly thought for awhile there they wouldn't even wait for an excuse and just go straight to the vague accusation of "high crimes": I keep saying, half in jest, that they'd impeach over how Obama ties his shoelaces.  So I ended up being wrong about how eager the Republicans were to use impeachment: in hindsight it made more sense for them to stick to obstructing government as it cost them less politically, and it meant they didn't have to work twice as hard (since impeaching means that, you know, they had to show up and do stuff when they'd rather be off yachting or golfing or both).

However, the talk has popped back up again.  Partly because of the faux controversies that Congress tried to stir up over Benghazi (a disaster that turned out to do more with Congress' refusal to fund adequate embassy security) or the IRS investigating Tea Party groups (it turned out to be internal overreach caused by confusing tax code distinctions between non-profits and PACs that investigated a lot of groups on both sides: worse, it also turned out members of Congress knew about it before Obama ever did).  Mostly because Obama's now a Second-Termer who won a solid majority for the second time and thus legitimate in the eyes of majority voters, in the face of constant reminders by the Far Right Noise Machine that Obama is a Secret Muslim Socialist Kenyan Racist Terrorist.  In short, the Far Right voters have been told enough times that Obama is illegitimate: now they want Congress to do something about it.

...But the second thing all these answers appear to have in common is actually even more astonishing and irresponsible: None of these politicians seem to feel any need to actually discuss the grounds for impeachment. At best there’s some hand-waving around the minor scandals of the last year, but for the most part it’s just assumed that impeachment is what Republicans normally do to Democratic presidents, just because.

The conclusions? Bill Clinton wasn’t impeached over sex (what Democrats believe) or over perjury (what Republicans claim); he was impeached because he was a Democrat in the White House. That’s enough...

...Part of the explanation: There are no core “conservative” ideas for these politicians to embrace, ideas that would allow them to successfully fight back against charges that they are squishes or “RINOs.” It’s not ideology; it’s partisanship...

So will we get an actual impeachment? On the one hand, it does seem that one positive lesson Republican congressional leaders did learn from the Newt Gingrich years is that a pointless impeachment without the votes to convict was a pretty bad idea. On the other hand, what Republicans also seemed to have learned from Newt is that impeachment is pretty much the normal punishment to administer to a president you don’t like much...

Impeachment is growing likelier, not because of anything Obama's done - and on some issues Obama's losing his base, such as the NRA warrantless wiretapping, but it's doubtful the Far Right will go after him on that as they like the idea of a surveillance state - but because the House Republicans have painted themselves into the corner on the issue.  They've spent so long working up their base into thinking Obama is this great evil that mere obstruction of policy or budgeting may no longer appease that base.  Some of the party leaders are already facing primary challenges from party members further to the Right than the leadership: in order to secure their Far Right bona fides they may well encourage or at least condone a lot of the nastier political scheming to bear fruition.

When Congress gets back, the House is expected to work on an immigration reform bill (most observers think it's dead, half because of the issue and half because there are more major issues to confront), and on a budget resolution to overcome the current sequester, and then most likely face another Debt Ceiling hike resolution.  On any of these points, the Republican Far Right are expected to hold a No-Compromises line, either against Obama's call for a tax hike on upper incomes (the top 5 percent), Obama's call for tax reform to close costly loopholes, and/or funding ObamaCare (the Far Right wants to kill it but since their 40 repeal votes never went anywhere, defunding it is their next worst solution).  Obama's not likely to budge on any of those counts either, especially on the "defund ObamaCare" part, so I'm half-expecting the House to vote for impeachment when those votes comes up and Obama and the Democrats turn the GOP down.

If any of the readers here have been tracking my year-long review of Presidential Character (based on James David Barber's work), you'd notice the few times impeachment ever came up as an issue.  Congress talked impeachment only rarely: in a case like John Tyler (when Tyler seemed to betray the Whig Party on a personal level); and in a case like Andrew Johnson (when party foolishness put a Democrat in the line of succession, leaving a Radical Republican Congress to reach for any excuse to purge him).  The impeachment process against Tyler went nowhere because the Whigs couldn't garner enough votes in the House: the impeachment against Johnson came one vote shy of success, which historians still argue was the closest we'd ever gotten to a political coup in our nation's history.  Both times, impeachment was used as a means to remove a President simply because of ideological conflict: neither one really broke the law (technically Johnson broke the Tenure of Office Act, but that law was specifically written against him, and the courts ruled it unconstitutional), they both were radically opposed to what Congress wanted.

This is the danger of impeachment: meant to be a tool to remove a powerful political figure that might otherwise be above the law, impeachment has rarely been used as such (only once).  It's gotten to where impeachment is not talked about as in the nation's best interests: it's in the interests of the radicals in charge of whichever party is in Congress in opposition of the sitting President.  It's worse when the radicals in charge are convinced there would be no political blow-back for what they do.  It's even worse when those same radicals - some of them still around from when they last tried this with Clinton - try the same damn trick near 12 years later.  It's like they totally forgot that SNL skit of ousted leaders Newt Gingrich and Bob Livingston going "what the hell happened?"

As a secondary thought, it was surprising that the apparent issue of craziness - immigration reform - turned out to be a bit of a dud with the public.  The Far Right tried to host a few rallies here and there but a lot of them had a ton of no-shows.  While the Tea Partiers could raise a fuss over healthcare reform and tax reform, they couldn't get their base out to rail against The Other. It didn't help the GOP that the noisiest anti-immigrant voices like Rep. Steve King of Iowa jumped straight into some stupid racist comments that painted the Far Right's side in a bad light.  It may be that most of the GOP voters have an understanding of how complex, how human, the immigration debate can be...