Ain’t it, tho?

On her Facebook page yesterday, former Alaska governor Sarah Palin announced that she was “very excited about the upcoming road trip” to promote her book, which will be released later this month. As CNN’s Alexander Mooney notes, Palin “hinted she’d likely sit down with a string of friendly faces during the tour that begins in two weeks.” Indeed, Palin is hoping to do interviews mainly with Fox News hosts and contributors:

We’re in the process of arranging interviews with local and national media. An interview with Oprah Winfrey is already scheduled, and I’m also hoping to have the opportunity to talk with Bill O’Reilly, Barbara Walters, Sean Hannity, Greta Van Susteren, Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Mark Levin, Laura Ingraham, Dennis Miller, Tammy Bruce, and others, including local Alaska personalities Bob & Mark and Eddie Burke. (Variety is the spice of life!)

See? Variety! Fair and balanced!

Via Matt Y., interesting piece over at Ryan Avent’s DC Streestblog on how government policy might actually be bailing out sprawl:

Foreclosures have been concentrated on urban fringes, so federal efforts to modify mortgages and otherwise reduce defaults have tended to direct more aid to exurbs than inner suburbs and city centers. In addition, rates of home ownership and car ownership are higher in the suburbs than in city centers, so federal housing subsidies (including the new home-buyer tax credit and low interest rates generally) and automobile subsidies (”Cash for Clunkers”) have had a geographic bias toward suburbanites.

To a certain extent, this has been unavoidable. Most Americans live in auto-oriented areas in suburban places, and a large share of those Americans are facing financial difficulty. Any measure that helped stressed households, including checks of equal value cut to all workers, would tend to benefit suburbanites more than urban dwellers.

But it’s his anaylsis of the dynamics of the bust, and it’s affect on suburbia, suggest that some suburbs could go the way of the inner city:

When the crash came, it quickly became apparent that housing inventory on the fringe had grown out of all proportion to the actual demand for such housing. Meanwhile, there continued to be excess demand for homes in center cities.

So while the bust ended up being painful for everyone, it was far less painful for urban centers. In those places, price declines brought in buyers, helping to keep inventory down and price declines orderly.

In exurbs, by contrast, falling prices went hand in hand with huge numbers of vacancies. Prices fell chaotically and dramatically as inventory overhang led to falling home values, which contributed to foreclosures, which added to inventory, which further depressed home values and led to still more defaults and foreclosures.

Another way to say this is that center-city housing markets experienced a correction, while exurban housing markets entered a vicious cycle leading to wrenching housing price declines that will likely push prices below replacement costs in some areas.

This is a dangerous place for neighborhoods to be. Vacant homes will begin to deteriorate, and occupied homes unlikely to sell for more than replacement costs (or more than the value of the owner’s mortgage) will suffer from disinvestment. The housing stock will become second-rate.

As neighborhoods fall apart, wealthier and more mobile homeowners will move away, while excess inventory and rock bottom prices will attract low-income households. The tax base will fall and so services will decline, and the general desirability of such areas will drop. Some, and perhaps many, of these neighborhoods will become slums.

How do we know? Well, this is a storyline we’ve seen before, both in center cities during the decades of urban decline and in depopulating Rust Belt cities for much of the past half century. It is a process that is very difficult to reverse.

Been saying this around here for quite some time; Eliot Spitzer gets it, too:

Imagine this: by next spring, an intellectual consensus will have emerged that the concentration in the banking sector that developed from the 1980s until the crash of ‘08 was misguided. Voices as disparate as Former Fed Chair Paul Volcker, Bank of England Governor Mervyn King, meta- investor George Soros, and the Wall Street Journal editorial page will be in agreement on this point.

A few brave souls on the Right — recognizing that the Republican Party has been bereft of ideas in its attacks on President Obama — will then try to re-define a populist, conservative attack by asserting that the White House has been captured by Wall Street. Real populism and change, they will argue, will come from the Republican, not the Democratic, party.

The power of such an attack from the Right should not be underestimated. There will be a huge first mover advantage that goes to the candidates who grab the real banner of attacking the structure of Wall Street as having been the root of the crash of ‘08. …

<snip>

So the simple question remains: why aren’t we focusing on the problem that got us here in the first instance — the scope, range, and size of the mega-institutions whose risk taking has so far inflicted only enormous harm on our economy? If the Republicans pick up this issue before we do, the elections of 2010 could be even worse than we are now fearing.

But can the right do this?

Again, it goes against their ideological grain. If the government were to break up capitalist institutions like big banks, that’s government meddling in the economy - isn’t it?

But Spitzer is right, this is what the public is waiting for; it’s a huge banner to be seized and waved about. Yet neither party seems interested in picking it up. Cultural populism only goes so far; marry it with legitimate economic populism and it would be a force that couldn’t be stopped.

Gotta say, the narrow victory for Lancaster Mayor Rick Gray really surprised me. I figured he’d win - but by more than a mere 313 votes.

That was pretty close to a repudiation. Dunno if Gray sees it that way - but he should.

The Donegal thing is kind of sad, too. The tax increases - $117 yearly for three years - would have been pretty steep, especially now. But if you’ve ever been in the high school, as I have a few times, you know the place needs help. The trailer situation - no parent wants his or her kid’s school to have to use trailers on a permanent basis. It bespeaks a lack of commitment on the part of the district, and its taxpayers, toward the students. And for those who say, just renovate - how can anyone have confidence that taxpayers would approve that bill? I really get the idea that there are people in Donegal who think the trailers are just fine. And so for kids and their parents - they’ll have to be.

Nationally the governor’s races in Virginia and New Jersey went to the Republicans. Lots of talk about What It All Means, with the prevailing narrative being “The GOP is back, baby!” Whatever. Don’t know much about Virginia; in New Jersey, Democratic incumbent Jon Corzine is a former CEO of Goldman Sachs. Hell, I’d have voted against him on that basis alone.

But what intrigues me is that upstate New York race, the 23rd District, in which the Conservative Party candidate Doug Hoffman - who actually called Glenn Beck his mentor and was the favorite of the teabag crowd - lost. He lost to the Democrat Bill Owens; that district has been a Republican stronghold for generations.

The Teabag Great White Conservative Hope lost. And I’m sure the teabag crowd doesn’t see that as a repudiation.

But it was.

So the GOP actually comes up with a health care proposal, which Matt Y. aptly calls the “No Soup for You” plan:

If you’re uninsured, this won’t help you.

If you’re insured, but you worry that circumstances beyond your control—a global financial meltdown leading to layoffs at your company, say—this won’t help you.

If you’re insured, but you worry that if you get sick your insurer will gin up some pretext to drop your coverage, this won’t help you.

If you’re insured but your premiums are escalating so fast you worry that you won’t be able to afford to keep paying them, this won’t help you.

Instead, Boehner is proposing the de facto total deregulation of the health insurance industry. Starting with the accurate observation that it’s odd to have insurance regulated fifty different ways in fifty states, the GOP decided not to do the sensible thing and create uniform federal regulation, but instead to let insurers sell plans across state lines. In other words, there’ll be a race to the bottom and all insurance will soon be offered under the rules of whichever state is laxest in its rules—goodbye consumer protections!

The result of all this will be a situation in which the health insurance systems works better for people who don’t need health care services, and much worse for people who actually are sick or who become sick in the future. It’s basically a health un-insurance policy.

Dean Baker:

McClatchy Does Its HomeWork on Goldman Sachs

They have some good investigative work here, here, and here. If Fox went over Goldman with the same energy it pursued Acorn, no one in Congress would go within a mile of its lobbyists.

But Fox won’t go after Goldman, because Fox is ideologically committed to free markets, which means trying to curtail Goldman’s recklessness goes against its very DNA. Indeed, Fox News Conservatism insists that only when Goldman is free to do whatever it wants can true prosperity be gained.

From one of the McClatchy stories:

In 2006 and 2007, Goldman Sachs Group peddled more than $40 billion in securities backed by at least 200,000 risky home mortgages, but never told the buyers it was secretly betting that a sharp drop in U.S. housing prices would send the value of those securities plummeting.

Goldman’s sales and its clandestine wagers, completed at the brink of the housing market meltdown, enabled the nation’s premier investment bank to pass most of its potential losses to others before a flood of mortgage defaults staggered the U.S. and global economies.

Only later did investors discover that what Goldman had promoted as triple-A rated investments were closer to junk.

Now, pension funds, insurance companies, labor unions and foreign financial institutions that bought those dicey mortgage securities are facing large losses, and a five-month McClatchy investigation has found that Goldman’s failure to disclose that it made secret, exotic bets on an imminent housing crash may have violated securities laws.

But securities laws are exactly the type of “government regulation” conservatives detest.

Capitalism: Smell it.

Saw this over the weekend, one guy writes in saying he’s surprised I didn’t come up with this. No - but I’m happy to pass it along.

This is Frank Rich in the NYT, writing about the race in upstate New York - where it looks like Conservative (not Republican) Party candidate Doug Hoffman is going to win today. It’s a fascinating case because the GOP candidate - endorsed by Newt, Boehner and much of the official GOP - was deemed insufficiently conservative by the likes of Michelle Malkin and Sarah Palin, the leaders of what movement conservatism has become. Into the breach steps Hoffman; as this section of upstate NY has long been a Republican bastion, he will likely beat Democrat Bill Owens.

And in one respect - good for conservatives for saying, this is what we stand for and this is what we demand the party that is supposed to represent us stand for; and if the party doesn’t stand for that, we’ll bolt.

But the bottom line is - what is it they stand for? Resentment, cultural puritanism, and a Darwinian society.

Yeah. Ideological purity might win you the odd House seat, it ain’t exactly the path to a winning national coalition. Cue Rich:

The battle for upstate New York confirms just how swiftly the right has devolved into a wacky, paranoid cult that is as eager to eat its own as it is to destroy Obama. The movement’s undisputed leaders, Palin and Beck, neither of whom has what Palin once called the “actual responsibilities” of public office, would gladly see the Republican Party die on the cross of right-wing ideological purity. Over the short term, at least, their wish could come true.  …

<snip>

But it’s even better for Democrats if Hoffman wins. Punch-drunk with this triumph, the right will redouble its support of primary challengers to 2010 G.O.P. candidates they regard as impure. That’s bad news for even a Republican as conservative as Kay Bailey Hutchison, whose primary opponent in the Texas governor’s race, the incumbent Rick Perry, floated the possibility of secession at a teabagger rally in April and hastily endorsed Hoffman on Thursday.

The more rightists who win G.O.P. primaries, the greater the Democrats’ prospects next year. But the electoral math is less interesting than the pathology of this movement. Its antecedent can be found in the early 1960s, when radical-right hysteria carried some of the same traits we’re seeing now: seething rage, fear of minorities, maniacal contempt for government, and a Freudian tendency to mimic the excesses of political foes. Writing in 1964 of that era’s equivalent to today’s tea party cells, the historian Richard Hofstadter observed that the John Birch Society’s “ruthless prosecution” of its own ideological war often mimicked the tactics of its Communist enemies.

The same could be said of Beck, Palin and their acolytes. Though they constantly liken the president to various totalitarian dictators, it is they who are re-enacting Stalinism in full purge mode. They drove out Arlen Specter, and now want to “melt Snowe” (as the blog Red State put it). The same Republicans who once deplored Democrats for refusing to let an anti-abortion dissident, Gov. Robert Casey of Pennsylvania, speak at the 1992 Clinton convention now routinely banish any dissenters in their own camp.

Like I said, good for conservatives for sticking up for what they believe in. But while this may be a conservative country, it ain’t a far right country. And by undermining the GOP and forming their own far right party - the conservative Stalinists slit their own throat.

Taibbi runs a piece on Palin he wrote that was never published, which probably gets at the conservative culture-war mindset better than anything I’ve seen:

Just as she had during the campaign last fall, Palin defied rational analysis by making a primal connection with the subterranean resentments of white middle America, which is apparently so pissed off now at the rest of the planet for not coddling its hurt feelings in the multicultural age that it is willing to embrace any politician who validates its insane sense of f*****-overness.

Nobody understands this political reality quite like Palin, even if she doesn’t actually understand it in the sense of someone who thinks her way to a conclusion, but merely lives it, unconsciously, with the unerring instinct of a herd animal. Palin’s supporters don’t judge her according to her almost completely nonexistent qualifications for serious office, they perceive her as they would a character in a Biblical narrative, a Job in heels with cross-eyes and a mashed-potato-brained husband who happens to spend a lot of time getting shat upon by Letterman and Maureen Dowd and the other modern-day Enemies of Christ.

On some level Palin understands better than any of us that what’s important to her base isn’t how well she does her job or even what she does with her time before 2012, but who her enemies are and how loudly she beats the drum against them – and when the news comes out that these foes have recently driven her to such distraction that she even started losing her hair (reportedly necessitating a recent emergency trip to personal hairdresser Jessica Steele), it elevates her conservative martyr credentials to previously unimagined levels.

As a national candidate she seems to us normal/rational observers mortally wounded, but as a conduit for middle American resentment she may actually have gained in stature, and don’t be at all surprised if she doesn’t emerge with the status of something like a religious figure when they roll the rock back for her inevitable candidacy three years from now. …

<snip>

She could turn her resignation into the supreme expression of conservative principle, seeming to show such high distaste for government that she can quit an executive job in a nervous panic and still get high marks from her base for ideological leadership – a hilariously contradictory and idiotic situation only possible in a country willing to go past a certain intellectual point of no return.

Emphasis added.

Well, Sarah’s fans are well past that point. It’s all herd animal for them - all resentment - all martyrdom. Qualifications? You want qualifications? How elitist of you. So she quit - so what? So what if the eldest daughter of this socially conserative politician has a kid out of wedlock?

So what? All of that is merely proof that the people who think they’re better than us are out to get us. And we resent it.

And that’s the entirety of Sarah Palin as a political entity, right there.

Update: Sullivan:

I think the support for Palin among the GOP base is now a matter of identity and religion, so that no actual data could hurt her chances. In some ways, the worse she does helps her. The base sees her failings as proof that the libruls and the establishment is out to get her. I’m not sure that any revelation would hurt her now with this group.

It wouldn’t.

Sullivan links to one that would take wayyyy too much time, but is awesome anyway.

But I  bet you could pull something like this off - wish I’d have thought of it:

Vid of the week is up.

Interesting. Atrios:

Those of you who saw Michael Moore’s latest know about the case of the judge getting kickbacks to send kids to a private juvenile detention facility. PA Supreme Court tossed almost all of the cases out, meaning they can’t even be retried. Good for them.

Happy Halloween, all. The boy is the Joker, the little girl is Minnie Mouse; I wanted to be a teabagger but my wife said “Let’s not start any political arguments at the party,” so that’s out. Instead she’ll be a doctor and I’m the patient; or maybe I should go as an insurance company executive. Now that’s scary.

Nice.

President Obama today signed into law a Homeland Security appropriations bill that grants the Department of Defense (DOD) the authority to continue suppressing photos of prisoner abuse. The amendment, which would allow the DOD to exempt photos from the Freedom Of Information Act (FOIA), is aimed at photos ordered released by a federal appeals court as part of an American Civil Liberties Union FOIA lawsuit for photos and other records related to detainee abuse in U.S. custody overseas, although it would apply to other photos in government custody as well.

You know, I don’t recall voting for Bush last fall. But apparently I did.

Ah, joy:

In the wake of the recent financial meltdown, it sounds like a reasonable idea: A proposal granting the White House broad new authority to take over when a failing institution threatens to drag others — perhaps the whole economy — down with it.

Yet that proposal, included as a part of wide-ranging finance reform legislation moving through the House this month, is also sparking bouts of indignation on Capitol Hill, where at least one vocal Democrat says the provision represents an executive-branch power grab that would prop up too-big-to-fail institutions at the expense of smaller banks.

Rep. Brad Sherman (D-Calif.), a former accountant and member of the House Financial Services Committee, says the proposed new bailout authority would create a kind-of mutant extension of the Wall Street bailout — the differences being, he maintains, that the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program at least had a cap on spending, an expiration date, congressional approval, independent oversight and some executive pay limits for the banks on the receiving end of the taxpayers’ largesse. The California Democrat is calling the bailout authority requested by the White House, which lacks most of those safeguards, “TARP on steroids.”

<snip>

David Min, financial markets expert at the Center for American Progress, said the resolution authority, by definition, has to be unlimited in order to maintain the government’s credibility as an effective backstop. But such a system, he added, will lower the capital costs for the largest institutions, making it more difficult for smaller banks to compete.

“The whole scheme of systemic stability really favors larger institutions and encourages them to become too big to fail,” Min said.

Sherman agrees. “That is a huge gravy train to the top 20 [financial institutions] because it allows them to borrow money at a lower rate,” Sherman said by phone last week. “Think of what this does to moral hazard.”

It obliterates it for the biggest of the big.

This is astounding. Our response to systemic risk isn’t to insist that financial institutions that would pose a threat by collapsing be shrunk down to size. No; we’re just going to commit more taxpayer dollars to the biggest of the big in the event they get into trouble.

Isn’t that how we guarantee more trouble, rather than preventing it?

House health care bill is out.

Details here.

Whee! The recession’s over! Except…

Going forward, many analysts expect the pace of the budding recovery to be plodding due to rising unemployment and continuing difficulties by both consumers and businesses to secure loans.

All this focus on “securing loans” - it’s ridiculous. Can’t speak for what businesses are doing but as for consumers - hell, I don’t know anyone who’s dying to get a loan and can’t. The people I know are trying to get out from under the debt they have.

But you read these reports and you get the idea that there are hordes of consumers out there who’d spend spend spend, if ONLY more debt was made available to them!

Yet it’s also worth asking - if such people DO exist, should they be getting loans? That’s one of the big questions about the home buyer subsidy; people who are using the $8,000 for their down payment, so they can get into houses with virtually no money - how is that wise or sustainable?

Credit cannot keep expanding forever and it should not keep expanding forever. But “continuing difficulties by consumers to secure loans” implies that we need to lower lending standards even further.

That’s pretty much the exact opposite of what ought to be happening. So naturally - that’s what we’re doing.

Patriot News writes about how your electric bill is going up come January:

To cash-strapped PPL customers, the only aspect of electricity deregulation that will seem important on Jan. 1 will be the 30 percent jump in your bills.

This is a bad time to add more expenses to home budgets already on tilt — yet the electricity industry argues that 13 years after legislation was enacted, consumers will finally start to see the benefits of deregulation, despite the bitter pill of higher prices.

The benefits?

What, are we going to get better electricity or something? 

It’s a tough sell, and the industry knows it. But the industry’s leaders argue that the expiration of government-mandated rate caps that kept prices at 1996 levels is just a return to reality — and they say the rate caps were the very reason why the promises of deregulation haven’t been kept.

Consumer advocates have shifted from fighting the rate cap removal to coping with it. They’re hoping homeowners will learn to take advantage of money-saving opportunities, and that the higher prices will finally motivate consumers to use less energy.  And as the public displays anger, confusion or indifference toward the issue, the electric industry has been busy trying to explain why it’s all happening.

“A lot has changed” since 1996, said Ryan Hill, a PPL spokesman. “Customers haven’t seen that yet. They’re going to see that in 2010 now, and it’s going to be an adjustment for those customers.”

You bet it is. And at a time when those customers’ health care premiums are increasing, when trash bills are likely to go up, as gasoline prices climb back towards $3 per gallon - PPL is here to blow sunshine up our collective bottom.

See, your new higher electric bill will merely reflect “reality,” the real cost of power, a price which PPL couldn’t pass on to you because rates had been capped (though PPL nonetheless set a record for profitability under the caps, in 2007).

Now prices are uncapped, the profit motive is supposed to swing into full gear and we should have a whole slew of competitors crowding to sell you power.

So far, we’ve got one. Dominion Energy is offering 10 percent off PPL rates. There may be more; but even if there are, let’s say they match Dominion’s offer - that means at best, you’re paying 20 percent more for your electricity next year.

And not just you, but local companies. Governments. Here’s an aspect of this that the Patriot-News didn’t invoke, but the Morning Call did, talking to an economist:

”This is the worst possible time for consumers and businesses to take such a huge hike in their rates,” Afshar said. ”The result will obviously be that some businesses will have to cut elsewhere, possibly layoffs.”

Sweet.

This is going to hit like a brick, and I expect full-throated primal scream after the first of the year. But it’s too late. This is deregulation, this is a free(er) market. Does it benefit you, does it benefit society? That was all taken on faith. In a few months we’ll have the results.

Can’t wait to to see the Republican legislators waving the socialist banner in response.

One of conservativism’s greatest failures, and there are many, is its simultaneous insistence on personal responsibility! while at the same time it absolves some folks of all personal responsibility.

As in, the Masters of the Universe.

John Kay makes a point in his Financial Times column that we ought to repeat here every day of the week, so that maybe it’ll finally penetrate the addled brains:

Their activities underwritten by implicit and explicit government guarantee, it is increasingly business as usual for conglomerate banks. The politicians they lobby sound increasingly like their mouthpieces, espousing the revisionist view that the crisis was caused by bad regulation. It was not: the crisis was caused by greedy and inept bank executives who failed to control activities they did not understand. While regulators may be at fault in not having acted sufficiently vigorously, the claim that they caused the crisis is as ludicrous as the claim that crime is caused by the indolence of the police.

But that is the claim conservatives make.

Their line is that the financial crisis was caused entirely by government, by a failure of government. But what about the bankers themselves? How much blame do they bear?

And if you read enough conservative commetary you can’t help but come away with this sense that conservatives don’t blame the bankers at all - because they were merely taking advantage of opportunities presented to them by government. The bankers might have been greedy or reckless, but if government hadn’t provided them with perverse incentives, this wouldn’t have been a problem!

This is the same as saying that the person who stole your GPS isn’t really to blame - it’s all your fault because you forgot to lock the door to your car! You provided him a perverse incentive!

News flash: Even if/where the government provided perverse incentives, this doesn’t in and of itself absolve those who grasped at those perverse incentives.

“Personal responsibility” involves resisting temptation - doesn’t it?

Fight!

Last night on Fox News’ On the Record, host Greta Van Susteren asked Gingrich about the “heat” he’s been getting for endorsing Scozzafava, especially from Beck. Gingrich fired back, saying the right-wing support for Hoffman is based on “misinformation” and an abandonment of conservative values:

GINGRICH: I just find it fascinating that my many friends who claim to be against Washington having too much power, they claim to be in favor of the 10th Amendment giving states back their rights, they claim to favor local control and local authority, now they suddenly get local control and local authority in upstate New York, they don’t like the outcome. […]

So I say to my many conservative friends who suddenly decided that whether they’re from Minnesota or Alaska or Texas, they know more than the upstate New York Republicans? I don’t think so. And I don’t think it’s a good precedent. […]

And so this idea that we’re suddenly going to establish litmus tests, and all across the country, we’re going to purge the party of anybody who doesn’t agree with us 100 percent — that guarantees Obama’s reelection. That guarantees Pelosi is Speaker for life. I mean, I think that is a very destructive model for the Republican Party.

But don’t worry - I’m sure the “conservative party” is capable of generating electoral majorities.

In Fantasyland.

Apologizes on air for the “lack of balance” in a Fox Report.