Daily Kos reports that Republicans are “beating up on poor Julia,” a composite voter used to illustrate the Obama Administration’s approach to government and your health, welfare and education, making the very good point that small government is not necessarily good government.

Update: Ross Douthat of the NY Times weighs in and submits that Julia shows the ideological difference between the Democratic and Republican Parties.

Further update: I respond to a piece in the Philadelphia Inquirer (3rd letter, “Can’t turn back the clock) by pointing out that the Grover Norquist vision of a society with a really, really small government is not a very practical one. Quote form Norquist:

“My ideal citizen is the self-employed, homeschooling, IRA-owning guy with a concealed-carry permit,” says Norquist. “Because that person doesn’t need the goddamn government for anything.”

The piece then goes on to compare Norquist’s vision to the society in “Mad Max.”

With convincing victories in several large states, Mitt Romney is now firmly cemented as the Republican nominee for President (With the sad exception of Newt Gingrich and no one ever expected Ron Paul to win anyway). Romney’s speech on victory night was very good in some respects.

Everywhere I go, Americans are tired of being tired, and many of those who are fortunate enough to have a job are working harder for less. For every single mom who feels heartbroken when she has to explain to her kids that she needs to take a second job … for grandparents who can’t afford the gas to visit their grandchildren … for the mom and dad who never thought they’d be on food stamps … for the small business owner desperately cutting back just to keep the doors open one more month – …

My question is, of course, how did this sad state of affairs come about? As CEPRs “Scorecard on Development” series shows, these are hardly problems that suddenly began on January 21st, 2009. They are problems that the Republican Party has been actively collaborating in creating for the past 30+ years. Europe has been trying to do things according to Republican blueprints for the past several years and now appears to be undergoing a real change of heart.

The public generally doesn’t know what the technical economic solutions are, and the media keeps telling them, falsely, there are no good alternatives, because the deficit hysterics still control a conversation disconnected from the reality staring them in the face.  But voters now know their elites don’t have a clue and don’t seem to care that the elite solutions fashioned mostly for banks and bond holders are worsening the human suffering without solving any underlying economic problems.

Does the Romney speech contain any ideas for how we solve our economic problems? I certainly didn’t hear any new or potentially workable or even interesting ideas and actually, solutions are precisely where Romney’s speech really falls short.

Then we get into Romney’s vision….

Romney never makes the turn to how he would achieve this America. Believing in it is apparently enough. The end result isn’t so much a preview of how Romney would govern the country as a game of “I Spy: America the Beautiful” edition.

At least back in 2010, President Obama realized that the solution to an insufficiently stimulated economy was more stimulus and tried to get some through a Congress where the Republican Party could significantly obstruct and delay Democratic programs.

The Democrats have a better way, the Republicans just want more of the same disastrously failed policies that got us into this mess to begin with.

Will Sylianteng (sill-ee-en-tang) will be holding a fundraiser on April 4th. The party starts at 5:30 and goes until 7:30 and will feature special guest Representative Allyson Schwartz.

The fundraising party will take place at the Joseph Ambler Inn at 1005 Horsham Rd North Wales PA 19454. Get Driving Directions

Kindly RSVP by March 31st to 267-645-9092 or info@vote-will.com.

Levels of giving are as follows: $2,500 will get you the designation of “Host.” $1,000 will get you “Sponsor.” $500 – “Supporter” and $100 will get you “Friend.” Committee people & young Democrats can give $50. You can also mail checks to “Citizens for Sylianteng” Post Office Box 844 Montgomeryville PA 18936.

For more information on Will Sylianteng or to contribute online: http://www.vote-will.com/

This event will not solicit or accept contributions in excess of $5000 ($2500 for the primary election and $2500 for the general election) from individuals and partnerships or $10,000 ($5000 for the primary election and $5000 for the general election) from political action committees. No contributions from corporations, labor organizations, national banks, federal contractors or foreign nationals will be accepted.

At the kick-off fundraiser for our candidate to represent the 151st District, Will Sylianteng (Will’s campaign’s Facebook page), I spoke with a fellow Democrat about the war in Afghanistan. He recommended to me the book Three Cups of Tea. It’s about a fellow who raises funds from the US and with those funds, builds schools in Afghanistan. Inspiringly, the fellow who gets these schools built insists to Afghans that they must include girls in their curriculum as a condition of getting their boys educated. Afghans are generally okay with this, but when the Taliban takes control of the village where a school has been built, they react by shutting the school down and tearing down the building.

To me, this confirms my own theory, that winning the war in Afghanistan is not, never was and never will be a purely military effort. The author of Three Cups of Tea is clear when he says that his school-building cannot be done without the protection of US troops. As I’ve often said, the only way to establish an American presence that the Afghan people will tolerate is by having people in the field and on the ground, doing things that benefits Afghans directly. Our “Colonial Corps” can’t all just be sitting on comfortable seats in air-conditioned in offices in Afghanistan’s capital city, Kabul, and have the slightest hope of ever prevailing over there.

Can the US begin to adopt the course of pursuing a combined military/civilian approach to Afghanistan? There isn’t the slightest question that our troops have put out absolutely heroic efforts and that they’ve done all that’s been asked of them, but I believe that it’s just far too late for any new approach to succeed.

…White House spokesman Jay Carney and Pentagon spokesman George Little ventured dangerously close to “Baghdad Bob” territory on Monday, declaring that there is no reason to change the strategy or timetable for withdrawal in Afghanistan despite violence levels that have been on a steady rise since the US diverted its attention from Afghanistan to Iraq in 2003 and a rising toll of NATO forces being killed by Afghan forces.

And, as the Global Post puts it, the riots over the burning of copies of the Quran are essentially a reaction to 10-plus years of occupation. The Afghan people appear to be heartily endorsing the slogan of the US anti-war movement “Support the Troops, Bring ‘em Home!”

We have a piece in the Inky today that makes a terrible stink about how bad the budget deficit is. Has President Obama tried to fix the budget deficit? Actually, he tried much too hard for much too long to do so. In early 2010, Obama “pivoted” away from trying to solve the economic problems caused by the collapse of the housing bubble and tried instead to address the budget deficit by creating what progressives dubbed the “Cat Food Commission.” Actually, it was known as the Simpson-Bowles Deficit Commission, it was known as it was because we felt the obvious purpose of it was to reduce people to eating just cat food. Obama’s pivot was hugely premature and should have waited until unemployment was down to a reasonable level. As of the intended “grand bargain” to trade major cuts in return for big revenue boosts, Obama very sensibly saw that the intended deal over the debt limit in August was a political loser. Fortunately, he’s been pursuing better policies since then.

What exactly is the nature of the economic problem that America faces? Well, the collapse of the housing bubble caused the economy to lose several trillion dollars worth of consumer demand owing to houses all over the country losing their value. How to fix that? The main way that was suggested by liberal Keynesian economists (Who, unlike Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, Bush’s Budget Director (And current Governor of Indiana) Mitch Daniels and Bush’s head of the Government Accounting Office David Walker, saw the housing bubble back in 2002 and talked loudly and frequently about it) was and has been to spend lots of money on economically helpful projects. Do tax breaks help? Yes, but not as much and only if they’re targeted to encouraging very specific behaviors. General tax breaks of the kind Bush passed in 2001 and 2003 do little or nothing to help create consumer demand. Two liberal Keynesians who have repeatedly explained all this are Paul Krugman of the New York Times and Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research.

The point is not that budget deficits are irrelevant in all circumstances, just that they’re actually a useful tool to have when employment is low and there are lots of people out of work. When the economy is doing well and consumer demand is robust, that’s a good time to reduce budget deficits. Yes, we should reduce budget deficits, eventually. There’s no hurry to do so and it can wait until employment is better.

NY Times columnist Paul Krugman admits that “It’s true that 1.9 million fewer Americans have jobs now than when Mr. Obama took office.” However, whenever presidents initiate new economic policies, it always takes awhile to write and pass bills, it always takes awhile for even good policies to take effect. When did most of our jobs disappear during the Obama Administration? 3.1 million jobs were lost before Obama’s first six months were up. Since then? The economy has gained 1.2 million.

Note that we are in a much deeper and longer recession than any other since 1948. Yes, jobs were still being lost at a rapid clip at the 12-month point (January 2009) after the recession began and they didn’t start levelling off until about 16 months into the recession. They finally hit bottom at the 25-month mark. Since then, we’ve seen pretty steady gains.

The employment to population chart tells a similar story. The unemployment rate shot up at the beginning of 2008 and didn’t peak until the beginning of 2010 and has declined ever since. The percentage of the population that’s employed dropped dramatically and then levelled off in the same set of months. Why aren’t the two lines moving in tandem? Why is the second line more or less flat while the first line is steadily dropping? Because in order for the second line to go up, the employment gains have to outpace the gain in population growth. G.W. Bush didn’t manage this very well, it wasn’t until the beginning of 2004 that he started getting some traction in really improving the population-employed picture. We’re still nowhere near where we were in January 2007, but the situation is clearly improving.

I’ll be happy to put together more talking points. What issues are on people’s minds?

These are two PDFs I composed in order to explain two specific issues. Neither one has received any editing from anyone else, so I am completely open to advice/suggestions.

Austerity

Housing Crisis

If you need to obtain a PDF reader, you can get the official Adobe Acrobat Reader here and here’s a no-cost reader supplied via CNet (An excellent software site).

And upon further consideration, I guess I really saw these as being used on a literature table. If we have a party, we can place a few piles of these on the table near the entrance and people who are interested in the specific issues can pick up their copy for free, meaning we’d only need a few hundred of each. As I said, I found out that FedEx/Kinko’s can do the Austerity flyer (Four sides, black & white) for $0.51 each. There are many local printers that are most likely able to do it for less per copy, though I used one recently that insisted on a minimum print run of one ream (500).

In “Obama moving toward the center” (Dec 11), the Inquirer makes the case that overriding its own scientific advisers on the “Plan B” issue may have cost the Obama Administration the votes and/or enthusiasm of “base” voters, but that the Administration stands to gain anyway as now centrist voters will be more likely to support President Obama’s re-election.

Celinda Lake is one of the Democratic Party’s most prominent pollsters and her take on the Obama Administration’s Plan B decision: “alienates the base, causes conflict with women in the base, [is] bad for key groups of women like younger women and unmarried women, and,” very importantly, “doesn’t win the swing independent women.” Lake takes issue with the idea that kicking the liberal base voter automatically results in centrist voters flocking to support Democrats.

Obama made a very energetic play for centrist votes in the mid-2011 debt ceiling compromise. New Jersey Newsroom found on August 18^th that independents weren’t at all happy about the compromise and blamed participants a great more than they credited anybody, but Republicans got 20% of the blame as compared to the Obama Administration getting only 15% of the blame. Only 22% of all voters thought the Republican strategy of cutting spending only (As opposed to raising taxes or a mix of the two) was a sensible one. It gained the Obama Administration absolutely nothing to play the centrist game. On the contrary, they would have done far better to have taken a strong position and to have then held onto it.

Is there a better way available to get votes? Actually, there is. According to extensive polling by CNN and Public Policy Polling, Obama’s problem in 2010 was not voters turning against him or switching parties for any reason, it was pro-Obama voters not showing up at the polls to re-affirm the choice they made in 2008. Specifically, younger women rewarded the Democrats in 2008 with very strong majorities because Democrats took a very strong pro-choice position on the abortion issue. Those same women stayed home in large numbers in 2010 because they felt abandoned by Democrats.

No, the answer for Democrats is not to play the centrist game, it’s to be better Democrats and to more strongly support Democratic values and their own base.

Well, our fearless leader of the Horsham Democrats, Paul Gallagher, and your loyal blogger, Richmond L. Gardner, both tried hard to make it onto the Horsham Township Council, but as the Hatboro-Horsham Patch reports, the Republican incumbents Gregory Nesbitt and Mark McCouch prevailed by a combined total of 5458 votes to 3580.

Congratulations go to the team of Josh Shapiro and Leslie Richards, who are now the incoming Montgomery County Commissioners.

Nationally, the election provided very good news for progressives as Ohio’s anti-union SB 5 went crashing down to defeat and Mississippi’s “Personhood” amendment failed.

6:14 PM PT: Herman Cain is really frustrated because he doesn’t understand what the OWS movement wants. “Do they want the bankers to come downstairs with checks in their hands?” he asks. He’s totally bewildered and obviously pissed about it. He wants to know what to do to make them go away. And he can’t figure it out. And, of course, that’s exactly the point. That’s the question the OWS movement wants him to be asking. And eventually the Herman Cains of the world will be forced to figure it out.

Daily Kos covers Republican debate of 18Oct2011

A Huffington Post writer explores just why the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement has been so successful. BTW, percentage of those who approve of the Tea Party: 27%, percentage of those who approve of OWS: 54%. Heck, New Yorkers like them by a margin of 67%.

Dissenter at FireDogLake.com contributes another, very typical story about what motivates the OWS movement. My own story on visitng OWS in New York. Our allying of Occupy Philly with Philly Against War. Treasury Secretary’ Timothy Geithner’s vow to do “more” to help the 99% rings a bit hollow as no one remembers him doing much of anything to begin with. And last Saturday’s protests? Wow!!!

Is the Democratic Party close and all buddy-buddy with OWS? Not exactly. Both sides have good reason to keep their distance. The National Review website is convinced that the two are in cahoots anyway. Good round-up of views on Democrats and OWS.