Today’s topic: redrawing the battle lines.
Welcome to the Daily Sausage.
Although much has changed over the last forty years or so, much has also remained the same. However, the changing nature of America’s demographics, as well as the increased access to everyone afforded by the internet, has the potential to reshape much of American politics and the issues of the day.
One issue that I’ve touched on frequently is the utter failure of the War On Drugs. I’ve never served a day in uniform, but I’ve played lots of video games where I have, so I feel safely qualified to say that by whatever measure you would define “success” in a military setting, the War On Drugs isn’t it. After billions of dollars and thousands of lives, we’re no closer to eradicating the flow of illegal drugs into and out of the United States than we were fifty years ago. If anything, we made the problem worse. However, there is hope for change.
California’s Proposition 36 would amend the state’s three-strikes law to only require a maximum sentence for serious and/or violent offenders such as murderers and child molesters. Presumably, this would allow individuals caught with a small amount of drugs, which currently fill our prisons to overflowing, to go free or get the treatment they need.
However, more important than prison reform is what’s going on in Colorado, Oregon, and Washington: measures are on the ballot in all three states to legalize marijuana, which good chances of it passing in all three states. The measures are written such that they would put all three states to the left of the Netherlands on marijuana policy, and completely upend the market.
Traditionally speaking, the Federal government has a tendency to lag behind the states in terms of social policy, hence why the states are referred to as “the laboratories of Democracy”. Sometimes those labs are clean, efficient, highly productive pharmaceutical labs, and other times they’re trailer meth labs. In this particular case, Colorado, Oregon, and Washington have the opportunity to demonstrate to the rest of the country how the legalization of marijuana might look from a policy perspective on a national scale, and demonstrate the benefits of repeal.
It’s somewhat ironic that politicians have spoken of a “Green Revolution” for clean energy as being the big driver of the 21st century American economy, where the true Green Revolution may be from the legalization of marijuana. After all, if you’ve ever spent any time with a stoner, you know that they’re among the more creative and ingenious people you’ll meet; I know guys that can make a bong out of literally anything.
Switching gears, the New York Times is reporting that the Congressional Research Service, a nonpartisan group that provides information to Congress, withdrew an economic report demonstrating no correlation between top tax rates and economic growth, at the behest of Congressional Republicans over “concerns about the methodology and other flaws”. Why is this a big deal? Well, it’s been conservative economic orthodoxy for forty years that reducing the tax rates on high earning individuals was good, as it would trickle down to everyone else. As it turns out, high earning individuals are more like to invest that money or send it offshore than they are to spend it, which decreases economic growth. The GOP isn’t really arguing that reducing the top tax rates raises all boats anymore; they just cut taxes for everyone, which as it turns out disproportionately benefits the wealthy.
There’s a SuperPAC ad being shown in Ohio that encourages African-Americans to vote Republican because Lincoln freed the slaves. I don’t really have a whole lot to say here other than “Oh my God, how fucking stupid do you think African-American voters in Ohio are that this would actually work?”. However, in keeping with our theme, it does demonstrate that at least somewhere in the GOP there are individuals that recognize that Mitt Romney getting crushed 95-0 among African-Americans isn’t a viable long-term strategy in electoral politics.
Hurricane Sandy has, at least for the moment, catapulted two issues to the forefront of the American psyche. The first is global climate change (which was incidentally not mentioned in any Presidential debate for the first time since the 80s), which should be such a no brainer to anyone that ever goes outside that the fact that there are people that are arguing that it doesn’t exist blows my mind.
The second issue is the role of government. Americans say “We want small government!”, but the truth is we just don’t want to pay for all the government we ask for. We ask our government to defend us, to provide for the sick and the elderly, to fund research that will never ever generate a profit, and to do things like help communities recover after a natural disaster. Doing these things costs money, and we’re too fucking cheap as a country to pay for it. This is why we run deficits. It’s why we collectively go apeshit every time a politician suggests raising our taxes a tiny amount. As an example: we’ve been talking about a rise in the top tax rate as part of the Bush tax cuts expiring at the end of the year. You would think, for as much ink has been spilled about it, that it’s like a 30% tax hike. It’s not. It’s like 3%. 3%! Three cents out of every dollar, and the GOP is willing to drive the country into another recession over it.
In keeping with our theme of the day, there’s a reason Mitt Romney is getting his ass handed to him. It’s because people like Fox News’ John Stossel build beachfront property in flood zones, buy federally subsidized flood insurance, collect on that insurance when their house gets flooded and destroyed, and then have the balls to go on TV and argue against “big government”.
And finally, you remember how I talked about the National Review creating an electoral map that gives Romney a ginormous victory, including places like Oregon and New Jersey? Well, now I know where they got it from. Meet UnskewedPolls.com’s prediction for the Presidential election: 359 for Romney, 179 for Obama. I have to admit: it takes real cajones to publish a map like that and believe that you will be held up as anything other than an exemplar of a public education system that failed to teach you either math or reading comprehension in presumably twelve years of schooling.
UnskewedPolls believes that polling organizations oversample Democrats, which knocks about three to ten points off Republican candidates. They have no evidence for this, outside of “Because we feel like it”. So, when they create their map, they give every Republican a boost of three to ten points, and you end up with a map that looks like that.
There was only one candidate in this year’s Republican Presidential Primary race that might have had even a remote shot at creating a map that looked like that, and the GOP basically laughed him out of the party. That would be Former Ambassador Jon Huntsman. Now, Huntsman isn’t perfect; he’s still a Republican. But, Huntsman was neither as callowly opportunistic as Romney, nor as batshit insane as the rest of the field, which is exactly why he lost.
Personally, I would have loved to see a Huntsman vs. Obama campaign. That could have been something special.
