What You Missed on Sunday Kos ....

• In The Past and Future Election, DemFromCT discussed the stark policy contrasts between the two presumptive nominees for president--particularly in policies that the American people are reporting as most important to them this election cycle.
• DemFromCT--doing double duty this Sunday--addressed the painful and difficult topic of how decisions are made about who to treat and who not to during a widespread emergency, when medical resources are finite and can't cover all of the afflicted, in Disasters, Surge and Pandemics.
• SusanG reviewed Larry Bartels' Unequal Democracy.
• DHinMI explored how the Bush administration's naivete and bumbling closes doors on opportunity in Lebanon: Yet Another Foreign Policy Opportunity Screwed Up by the Bush Administration.
• BarbinMD looked at John McCain's long, corrupt history of doing favors for shady characters and land speculators in If the Price is Right, You've Got a Friend in John McCain..
• mcjoan examined the subterranean ties between telecoms and front groups involved in the electoral process in Hoyer's and Rockefeller's Strange Corporate Bedfellow.
• Plutonium Page gave readers the rundown on the new line of junk science making the rounds in Alaska in Enter the Inhofian Polar Bear Expert.
• Meteor Blades reviewed Tim Shorrock's Spies for Hire.

Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age
By Larry M. Bartels
Princeton University Press
Princeton, NJ: 2008
328 pages
$29.95

... American beliefs about inequality are profoundly political in their origins and implications. Well-informed conservatives and liberals differ markedly, not only in their normative assessments of increasing inequality, as one might expect, but also in their perceptions of the causes, extent, and consequences of inequality. This is not simply a matter of people with different values drawing different conclusions from a set of agreed-upon facts. Analysts of public opinion in the realm of inequality--as in many other realms--would do well to recognize that the facts themselves are very much subject to ideological dispute. For their part, political actors in the realm of inequality--as in many other realms--would do well to recognize that careful logical arguments running from factual premises to policy conclusions are unlikely to persuade people who are ideologically motivated to distort or deny the facts. While it is certainly true, as Jennifer Hoschschild has argued, that "Where You Stand Depends on What You See," it is equally true that what you see depends in significant part on where you stand.

A challenge to conventional wisdom--including, specifically, many strains of liberal conventional wisdom--Unequal Democracy is a flat-out wonkfest of statistics, charts, tables and (thankfully) Larry Bartels' patient hand-holding and explanations of the mass of data that points to the undeniable realities of class in our society and how that affects our political system.

And as most readers at Daily Kos could probably guess, news is not good on the class front, in many cases in unanticipated ways. Just a few of the conventional wisdom-busters Bartels discusses in Unequal Democracy include:

1. Americans hate the estate tax, and they did long before the right wing changed it to the "death tax."

2. Politics matters. A lot. There is a huge difference between Republican and Democratic policies that affect the pocketbooks of middle-class and working-class Americans.

3. Contrary to popular belief, working-class whites (outside of the South) have not deserted the Democratic Party--affluent whites have.

4. Economic issues still vastly outweigh cultural/social issues when it comes time to cast a vote.

5. To the extent that social issues have increased in importance, it is only so for the affluent white voter, not the working class.

6. Gaps between the classes are at least equal to--and often exceeding--those found in Europe.

7. The more informed the voter, the more pessimistic he or she is.

8. Low-information conservatives and low-information liberals are virtually indistinguishable in their beliefs; high-information ideologues of both stripes differ greatly.

9. Self-identified Democrats and Republicans differ more in perception about America's economic opportunity than the actual rich and actual poor do.

Coming Up on Sunday Kos ...

• If your stereotypical image of a spy is a government agent, either slinking around the back country of Waziristan trying to find somebody who knows where Osama bin Laden is or sitting behind a computer evaluating cryptic cell-phone calls, think again. Spies are doing that all right. And a whole lot more. But they're more likely to be private contractors these days than government employees. As Tim Shorrock writes in Spies for Hire: Inside the Secret World of Intelligence Outsourcing, 70% of today's $60 billion intelligence budget goes to private contractors, many of whom have left government jobs at the CIA, NSA, DGIA, or one of the other 13 intelligence agencies and walked back in the door as a private contractor for three times the salary. It's all part of what people inside and outside government are calling the "Intelligence- Industrial Complex." Meteor Blades will take a close look at Shorrock's book and the implications of his findings.
• SusanG will review Larry Bartels' Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age.
• DemFromCT has two posts on deck. In one, he will review recent recommendations that will have profound impact on hospital plans for surge capacity in the event of disasters such as pandemics, wildfires and hurricanes (see Doctors debate who would be allowed to die in pandemic), and how that fits in with health reform. In his second post, he'll look ahead to November and preview Barack Obama and John McCain running in The Past And Future Election.
• Plutonium Page will discuss the nuclear posture of the United States, paying particular attention to Hillary Clinton's recent remark about obliterating Iran and her repeated comparisons of today's foreign policy climate with the Cold War.
• mcjoan will explore how deeply AT&T's tentacles have reached in their fight for telecom amnesty.
• BarbinMD will examine John McCain's decades-long history of helping out land developers in his native Arizona--all of whom just happen to be big campaign contributors.
• DHinMI will discuss how US miscalculations may be a factor in the possible eruption of a full-fledged civil war in Lebanon.

Coming Up on Sunday Kos ...

• If your stereotypical image of a spy is a government agent, either slinking around the back country of Waziristan trying to find somebody who knows where Osama bin Laden is or sitting behind a computer evaluating cryptic cell-phone calls, think again. Spies are doing that all right. And a whole lot more. But they're more likely to be private contractors these days than government employees. As Tim Shorrock writes in Spies for Hire: Inside the Secret World of Intelligence Outsourcing, 70% of today's $60 billion intelligence budget goes to private contractors, many of whom have left government jobs at the CIA, NSA, DGIA, or one of the other 13 intelligence agencies and walked back in the door as a private contractor for three times the salary. It's all part of what people inside and outside government are calling the "Intelligence- Industrial Complex." Meteor Blades will take a close look at Shorrock's book and the implications of his findings.
• SusanG will review Larry Bartels' Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age.
• DemFromCT has two posts on deck. In one, he will review recent recommendations that will have profound impact on hospital plans for surge capacity in the event of disasters such as pandemics, wildfires and hurricanes (see Doctors debate who would be allowed to die in pandemic), and how that fits in with health reform. In his second post, he'll look ahead to November and preview Barack Obama and John McCain running in The Past And Future Election.
• Plutonium Page will discuss the nuclear posture of the United States, paying particular attention to Hillary Clinton's recent remark about obliterating Iran and her repeated comparisons of today's foreign policy climate with the Cold War.
• mcjoan will explore how deeply AT&T's tentacles have reached in their fight for telecom amnesty.
• BarbinMD will examine John McCain's decades-long history of helping out land developers in his native Arizona--all of whom just happen to be big campaign contributors.
• DHinMI will discuss how US miscalculations may be a factor in the possible eruption of a full-fledged civil war in Lebanon.

Via Jake Tapper:

Sen. Barack Obama moved into the lead today in the last category that Sen. Hillary Clinton had claimed to have an edge -- support among the Democratic Party's superdelegates.

The Illinois Democrat grabbed the superdelegate lead thanks to a switch by New Jersey Rep. Donald Payne and an endorsement from previously uncommitted Rep. Peter DeFazio of Oregon.

Those two votes gave Obama a 267-266 lead over Clinton. That is a huge shift since the days when Clinton boasted about a 60-plus vote lead among the party's pros back on Super Tuesday.

Yet another Clinton talking point falls ....

[Erik W also has a diary going on the topic.]

Update: As Markos has explained, the superdelegate count at the top of our page is based on the numbers provided by the excellent Democratic Convention Watch, which is keeping track of the count using tight criteria that goes beyond news stories or campaign press releases. They insist on verification. Once they change their numbers, we will update the count at the top of our page.

Although tons of ink have been devoted to the demise of the Democratic Party's New Deal coalition, remarkably few analysts seem to have noticed that the net decline in support for Democratic presidential candidates among white voters over the past half-century is entirely attributable to partisan change in the South. It is equally notable, in light of the alleged abandonment of the Democratic Party by working-class cultural conservatives, that white voters in the bottom third of the income distribution have actually become more loyal in their support of Democratic presidential candidates over this period. Republican gains have come not among "poorer folks" but among middle- and upper-income voters--and even those gains have been concentrated entirely in the South.

--Larry Bartels, in Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age, to be reviewed this coming weekend in Sunday Kos.

The pollster calls hogwash on Hillary's claims of being the only candidate who can deliver white voters in November:

PRINCETON, NJ -- Barack Obama's current level of support among white voters in a head-to-head matchup against John McCain is no worse than John Kerry's margin of support among whites against George W. Bush in the 2004 presidential election.

Much of the talk following Tuesday's Indiana and North Carolina primaries has focused on just how electable Obama -- now the highly probable nominee -- will be in the general election. The Clinton campaign has argued that Obama's weaknesses among white voters and blue-collar voters will hurt him against McCain in the fall.

But it appears that the way Obama stacks up against McCain at this point is similar to the way in which Kerry performed against Bush in 2004 within several key racial, educational, religious, and gender subgroups.

One talking point down, six zillion to go.

Check out how green you are on the green calculator at the National Geographic Society site.

And oh, yeah ... this thread is now officially open.

Indiana

North Carolina (Winner: Obama)

CNN says Lake County results might actually begin coming in before midnight. Let's see.

Update by kos: Lanny Davis is embarrassing Clinton tonight.

Update II by kos: Jeffrey Toobin is right. Lake County's behavior right now is suspicious. There's no reason they should be withholding their count until all results are in. If Obama comes in with a narrow victory, it won't look so good.

Spelling Markos for a bit here....

Clinton: Full speed onto the White house!

Ummmm ... all right.

Gas price, gas price, gas price.

"I can assure you I will work for the nominee of the party in November."

And CNN changes Indiana from "Too Early to Call" to "Too Close to Call," for what it's worth.

John McCain spoke at Wake Forest today, addressing the timely topic of separation of powers, starting off with a look at the executive branch:

All the powers of the American presidency must serve the Constitution, and thereby protect the people and their liberties. For the chief executive or any other constitutional officer, the duties and boundaries of the Constitution are not just a set of helpful suggestions. They are not just guidelines, to be observed when it's convenient and loosely interpreted when it isn't. The clear powers defined by our Constitution, and the clear limits of power, lose nothing of their relevance with time, because the dangers they guard against are found in every time.

...And though you wouldn't always know it from watching the day-to-day affairs of modern Washington, the framers knew exactly what they were doing, and the system of checks and balances rarely disappoints.

There is one great exception in our day, however, and that is ...

Drum roll ... Yes! he's going to do it! He's going to call out President Bush on his violations of the Constitution! At last! I mean, he started this off talking about the executive branch, right?

Wrong.

There is one great exception in our day, however, and that is the common and systematic abuse of our federal courts by the people we entrust with judicial power.

Huh?

For decades now, some federal judges have taken it upon themselves to pronounce and rule on matters that were never intended to be heard in courts or decided by judges....[long high-falutin' screed about the interfering judiciary]

No serious discussion about the suspension of habeas corpus. Or torture. Or violation of the Geneva conventions. Or illegal wiretapping. Just the tired old rhetoric about activist judges that we've come to expect from tired old Republican candidates with every election. Does he really think this is going to gain traction this cycle? With Iraq, the economy, health insurance hanging over the heads of voters?

georgia10 will chime in later--probably on Sunday Kos--with a detailed look at what McCain's judicial philosophy looks like, based on this speech. Bur for now, I leave you with the thought: Given the chance and inclination to discuss Constitutional overreach, McCain chose to scold the judiciary in an era marked by unprecedented seizures of power by the president, a position he aims to fill. Needless to say, this speech doesn't bode well for what he would do with executive power were he to ascend to the office.

What You Missed on Sunday Kos ...

• DarkSyde looked at the misrepresentation of Darwin and the misappropriation of the Holocaust by the religious right in order to promote the teaching of creationism in schools in First, They Came for the Biologists.
• DemFromCT dove into the nitty-gritty of the leading presidential candidates' health care proposals--including the disastrous one presented by John McCain--in Health Care Proposals: What's Going On?.
• georgia10 pointed out the perils for John McCain in modern era of YouTube, despite the adoration of the press, in An Old Campaign in a New Digital Era.
• SusanG reviewed Matt Taibbi's riotous The Great Derangement: A Terrifying True Story of War, Politics, and Religion at the Twilight of the American Empire.
• brownsox examined the dynamics of a recent victory--and some of the repercussions for a newly fledged Republican governor--in LA-06: The Sweet Smell of Success.
• smintheus took a long hard look at the 'Mission Accomplished" anniversary and the fatal 50 days that followed the declaration in 2003 in White House Still Wedded to Its Own Propaganda.

The Great Derangement: A Terrifying True Story of War, Politics, and Religion at the Twilight of the American Empire
By Matt Taibbi
Spiegel & Grau
New York, 2008

In the pointy-headed northeastern America of my experience there were no legends of wandering prophets, no dinner-table discussions about personal salvation. But in the rest of the country you had this weird dichotomy, and advanced industrial economy confidently riding the superconductor and the microchip into the space age while most of its population hurtled backward away from the Enlightenment, living out a Canterbury Tales-type quest for revelation in a culture dominated by superstition and mystery.

Reading Matt Taibbi always reminds me of the infamous scene in Dr. Strangelove in which Slim Pickens is riding the H-bomb to certain death: there's a certain bitter, wild, laughing-on-the-way-to-destruction bravado about the fireworks of the Rolling Stone contributor's biting observations and spectacular writing skills. Nowhere is this more on display than in his current offering, The Great Derangement.

In the introduction to the book, Taibbi explains his roundabout journey to the current version: first, he explains, he was going to pen a "survey of the worst people in American politics," but he feared being pigeon-holed as the left's answer to Anne Coulter, so he wiggled out of that one, pitching to the publisher a book about how the red/blue divide is a trumped-up, over-covered piece of faux divisiveness that is serving the powers-that-be. In his own words, he explains how that got off course: "I made it about eleven thousands words into that effort before realizing that even I had no idea what the fuck I was talking about." Granted, that hasn't stopped enough authors in the past, but it stopped this one. So he proposed a year-long diary of attending Congressional sessions, but realized after plunging into the project that his commitment to Rolling Stone meant he would have to travel and leave DC too much to do the job right, so this project was abandoned as well after it had begun. But during these assigned journeys as national affairs correspondent that took him away from the nation's bubbled capital, he began to tune in to the mirror images he saw in the left and right extremes in our political culture, which became the germ of the book we now have in hand:

The Great Derangement is about a stage of our history where politics has seemingly stopped being about ideology and instead turned into a problem of information. Are the right messages reaching our collective brain? Are the halves of that brain even connected? Do we know who we are anymore? Are we sane? It's a hell of a problem for a nuclear power.

From bin Laden’s point of view, the whole situation had to be immensely frustrating. He pulls off the crime of the century, of the millennium perhaps, and the victim America turns out to be so wrapped up on its own intramural bullshit that it can’t even give him credit for it. America turned out to be, in a way, psychologically immune to attack; its government was too corrupt to fight back, and its people were too crazy to comprehend their position in the world. We were a nation gone completely mad, blind to everything outside our borders, with our effective institutions co-opted by crooks and thieves and our citizens piddling away the last days of their influence reading sacred tracts and spinning absurd theories about the grassy knoll, WTC7, and the international Masonic conspiracy.

--Matt Taibbi, The Great Derangement: A Terrifying True Story of War, Politics, and Religion at the Twilight of the American Empire, due for release May 6, 2008

Thread yourselves some open discussion.

File this under "It Didn't Even Seem Like a Good Idea at the Time":

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A gas tax holiday proposed by U.S. presidential hopefuls John McCain and Hillary Clinton is viewed as a bad idea by many economists and has drawn unexpected support for Clinton rival Barack Obama, who also is opposed.

"Score one for Obama," wrote Greg Mankiw, a former chairman of President George W. Bush's Council of Economic Advisers. "In light of the side effects associated with driving ... gasoline taxes should be higher than they are, not lower."

The Reuters article cites Bush's former chariman of the Council of Economics advisors, economics professors, think tank wonks and Paul Krugman, all agreeing that the proposal sucks eggs. When you have Krugman and former Bush officials agreeing on something, it must truly be bad.

Economists said that since refineries cannot increase their supply of gasoline in the space of a few summer months, lower prices will just boost demand and the benefits will flow to oil companies, not consumers.

"You are just going to push up the price of gas by almost the size of the tax cut," said Eric Toder, a senior fellow at the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center in Washington.

Obama threw out a great quote about the proposal yesterday; "This isn't an idea designed to get you through the summer, it's an idea designed to get them through an election."

Confirmation of Obama's take was provided this morning by the Washington Post:

Clinton aides think that even if the measure is a limited way to reduce gas prices, it allows the candidate to bash oil companies and cast her opponent against an idea that has political appeal.

Aside from the political ploy aspect, there is the long-term cost of convincing the public that such an elementary quick fix will solve our energy problems, as the Reuters article points out:

Many economists implicitly agreed with Obama and said the McCain-Clinton gas tax plan sent the wrong signal on energy efficiency and was at odds with their pledges to combat climate change by encouraging lower U.S. carbon emissions.

Update: To get an extra taste of how bad it is, here's an excerpt from uber-Clinton supporter Krugman's analysis:

Anyway, John McCain has a really bad idea on gasoline, Hillary Clinton is emulating him (but with a twist that makes her plan pointless rather than evil), and Barack Obama, to his credit, says no....The Clinton twist is that she proposes paying for the revenue loss with an excess profits tax on oil companies. In one pocket, out the other. So it’s pointless, not evil. But it is pointless, and disappointing.

Update #2: And here's Tom Friedman on it as well:

Hillary Clinton has decided to line up with John McCain in pushing to suspend the federal excise tax on gasoline, 18.4 cents a gallon, for this summer’s travel season. This is not an energy policy. This is money laundering: we borrow money from China and ship it to Saudi Arabia and take a little cut for ourselves as it goes through our gas tanks. What a way to build our country.

The Los Angeles Times this morning, reporting on a new Kaiser Family Foundation poll:

WASHINGTON -- Some people marry for love, some for companionship, and others for status or money. Now comes another reason to get hitched: health insurance.

In a poll released today, 7% of Americans said they or someone in their household decided to marry in the last year so they could get healthcare benefits via their spouse.

Can't wait to hear the right-wing wurlitzer crank up to demand universal health insurance to preserve the sanctity of wedlock. Surely all those desperately non-insured brides and grooms hooking up are threatening the marriages of all the rest of us. Right?

... the truth of the matter is that mass opinion often bears rather little connection to the tidy ideological landscape that political elites take for granted. Thus, while ideological debate among elected officials and public intellectuals does seem to have shifted significantly to the right over the past 30 years, it is far from obvious the political views of ordinary citizens have become noticeably more conservative....

--Larry Bartels, in Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age, due out May 2008.

This thread is .... wide open!

At the peak of its intensity, in 2004, the blue-state/red-state split represented, in a way, an enormous triumph for mainstream politics. It was a time when huge masses of the population could be organized into two rival groups, each trained to hate the other intensely.  But what’s happening now is that many people are beginning to resent being lumped simplistically into shallow, media-created Crossfire-style categories of "left" and right"; on the one hand they distrust the very media that celebrates those simplistic distinctions, and on the other they see that the elected politicians who ostensibly represent those would-be opposing ideologies actually do no such thing.

**

Because a mass Balkanization of the political landscape in this country would, of course, be enormously dangerous to that kind of dug-in, corrupt elite. When the country is split up not into two neat sides but in a million little pieces, how do you tie up the population with hatred for the "other half" while you burgle the national treasure and run Congress like a medieval Khannate?

--Matt Taibbi, The Great Derangement: A Terrifying True Story of War, Politics, and Religion at the Twilight of the American Empire, due for release May 6, 2008