Why The Tea Party Can't Win The Republican Nomination

Conor Friedersdorf:

But the actual tea party isn't savvy. It overestimates its clout within the GOP, fails to appreciate the many obstacles to winning a general election, let alone implementing its agenda, and is therefore careless and immature in choosing its champions. It elevates polarizing figures of questionable competence like Sarah Palin because doing so is cathartic. It backed Michele Bachmann despite her thin resume, erratic behavior in interviews, and the fact that she cares most about advancing a socially conservative agenda, not a small-government agenda. Its erstwhile favorite, Rick Perry, doesn't even subscribe to what ought to be a core tea party tenet: that the government shouldn't subsidize particular firms, picking winners and losers. Perry is a right-wing corporatist. And Herman Cain, the front-runner of the week? He has zero governing experience, acknowledges that he knows next to nothing about foreign policy, flip flops on matters of tremendous consequence, and touts a flawed economic plan, 9-9-9, that could never pass.

I'll go with that they like idiots and assholes, and they don't have the money to buy the nomination like the establishment Republicans and the corporations do.  The establishment and the corporations don't hate the current system, because they benefit the most from it.  They'll allow the loons to push the Overton window further right, because it benefits them, but when the Tea Party tries to cut them off from the government trough, the Tea Party gets the boot.  It's pretty simple, the Tea Party is there to give the Republicans the majority, at least in non-presidential year elections.  They may get some idiot congressment in there, but come the next election, that candidate isn't going to get any corporate money if they don't play ball.  The establishment is playing a dangerous game, but they can get away with it in Presidential elections, because those elections cost so much, and the candidate has to win votes in the suburbs, not just in rural districts which love to hear the Tea Party garbage.  The corporations and the establishment hold the power in national elections, and nobody should believe otherwise.  The Tea Party will fall into line when Romney is nominated, just watch.

Not Extremely Productive

Yesterday wasn't the best day.  I broke an electical plug on the combine when I forgot to unhook it from the corn header.  That took over an hour to put back together, after I did it wrong the first time.  I also backed the back tire of the combine into the ladder on the back of the semi trailer, bending the ladder significantly.  Luckily, nothing further was damaged, and we were able to combine about 30 acres of beans.  Hopefully I can avoid further damages until the season is over.

This Job Deserves High Wages

Via the Awl, Capital New York includes an ironworker's photo from One World Trade Center:

Seven Deadly Lies

Robert Reich highlights the seven biggest economic lies passed off as economic wisdom (via Mark Thoma):

1. Tax cuts for the rich trickle down to everyone else. Baloney. Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush both sliced taxes on the rich and what happened? Most Americans’ wages (measured by the real median wage) began flattening under Reagan and have dropped since George W. Bush. Trickle-down economics is a cruel joke. 

 2. Higher taxes on the rich would hurt the economy and slow job growth. False.

My favorite part of number 2:

(Don’t believe small businesses would be hurt by a higher marginal tax; fewer than 2 percent of small business owners are in the highest tax bracket.)  

I want to kick the TV when I hear somebody say that the top marginal income tax rate can't increase because it will hurt small businesses.  I guess it depends on what you consider small, but most owners of businesses employing fewer than 20 workers aren't making $200,000 a year.  They shouldn't be impacted by increasing the top marginal rate.  And if they are doing that well, they can reinvest in the business, create new jobs, and lower their taxable income.  That would seem like a pretty good deal to me, but what do I know, I'm not a job creator, I'm just a leech working for them.

The One Percent

Christopher Ketcham gives the data on the top 1% of household incomes in New York City (via Ritholtz):

New York, the FPI informs us, is now at the forefront of the maldistribution of wealth into the hands of the few that has been ongoing in America since 1980, which marked the beginning of a new Gilded Age. Out of the twenty-five largest cities, it is the most unequal city in the United States for income distribution. If it were a nation, it would come in as the fifteenth worst among 134 countries ranked by extremes of wealth and poverty—a banana republic without the death squads. It is the showcase for the top 1 percent of households, which in New York have an average annual income of $3.7 million. These top wealth recipients—let’s call them the One Percenters—took for themselves close to 44 percent of all income in New York during 2007 (the last year for which data is available). That’s a high bar for wealth concentration; it’s almost twice the record-high levels among the top 1 percent nationwide, who claimed 23.5 percent of all national income in 2007, a number not seen since the eve of the Great Depression. During the vaunted 2002–07 economic expansion—the housing-boom bubble that ended in our current calamity, this Great Recession—average income for the One Percenters in New York went up 119 percent.

Where is Mark Twain when you need him?  He could easily author an updated edition of The Gilded Age.  I really don't understand why people in Kansas (for instance) will vote for tax cuts for the uberwealthy in New York City, when Shawnee County, Kansas, the county containing the state capital of Topeka, doesn't have enough money to prosecute misdemeanors, including misdemeanor domestic violence.  Don't get me wrong, I think there are definitely too many prosecutions, but it is pretty bad when the only reason they aren't prosecuting crimes is because they don't have the money to staff the office.  Something is definitely wrong.

The First Oktoberfest

October 12, 1810:

First Oktoberfest: The Bavarian royalty invites the citizens of Munich to join the celebration of the marriage of Crown Prince Ludwig of Bavaria to Princess Therese von Sachsen-Hildburghausen.

Prosit!

The All-Time Leading Pro Passer

At Grantland:

On Monday¹, presuming he throws for at least 258 yards, this man you've probably never heard of will become the leading passer in the history of professional football. He has accumulated more yards than Peyton Manning, more yards than Dan Marino, more yards than John Elway and Jim Kelly and Fran Tarkenton and Joe Montana and Brett Favre, and he has done it all without ever being even marginally famous in the United States. This in itself is a remarkable accomplishment. That he is 39 years old and still considered one of the two or three best players in his adopted country is another. That he has continued to play football even after both he and his wife fought cancer is still another. Not only is Anthony Calvillo the most prolific anonymous quarterback who ever lived, his is one of those great American stories, an epic tale of failure and adversity and redemption. It just happened to take place in Canada.

A confession: Until midsummer, I had no idea who Anthony Calvillo was, either. But I've long harbored a fascination with the Canadian Football League, with its colorful nicknames (Eskimos and Blue Bombers and Argonauts) and its bizarro edicts (110 yards instead of 100, three downs instead of four, 12 men instead of 11), with the idea that there is a league just like ours and yet completely different, as if it were birthed on an alternate plane of reality. Is there a more apt metaphor for how America sees Canada than how Americans view the CFL? Most of our knowledge is acquired out of desperation and boredom; the CFL regular season starts in June, when we are jonesing hard for football, and when it does show up on our television — say, on an otherwise idle Friday night on the NFL Network — it is more Rube Goldberg than Vince Lombardi, because of its extra-man-per-side and its stretched field and because it allows us to reconnect with former college standouts we had otherwise forgotten. In Canada, Ken-Yon Rambo and Avon Cobourne are stars.

I've turned on the CFL when it was on NFL network, but haven't really paid much attention.  I usually look to see who was playing and who was winning, but I was really surprised the other Saturday when I saw Edmonton leading 1 to 0.  That left me scratching my head.  Here's the explanation of the 1:

That "4" was put up not because the Eskimos sacked Calvillo twice in the end zone, but because of the novelty concept known as the single, or rouge: One point is awarded when the ball is kicked into the end zone by any legal means other than a made field goal, and the receiving team is unable to scuttle the ball out of the end zone by either running or kicking it back out, which can lead to a back-and-forth straight out of Benny Hill. As an American, you probably find the rouge an idiotic perversion of the game, and I wouldn't blame you. Even Canadians are self-conscious about the rouge, and there's been discussion about abolishing it. Thirty years later, the rouge was the first thing Charlie Weatherbie mentioned when I asked him about adapting to the peculiarities of the CFL.

Anyway, congratulations to Anthony Cavillo, and good luck to the Alouettes (not offspring of the Alou brothers). 

African Concrete Work

From a reader at the Dish, this is unbelievable:



That is some serious work.

Chart of the Day

From the Dish:

So who benefits from 15% tax rates on dividends and capital gains?  I think we know.

America's Failing Infrastructure

Via the Big Picture, ASCE pushes for infrastructure investment:

Sure, they are a lobbying group which would benefit from the spending, but they are right, we need to do a lot of work on our infrastructure.