The Daily Parker

The President's announcement yesterday and a new ad this morning make it clear the election 179 days from now is about the future vs. the past:

Sullivan comments:

One small note. Above, Romney says that we should not discard 3,000 years of history of one-man-one-woman marriage. Ahem. His own family were ardent polygamists only a century ago - and went to Mexican colonies to escape US federal oppression of their version of marriage (which also goes back a long, long way and still exists across the world). Romney's great-grandparents were polygamists; one of his his great-great-grandfathers had twelve wives and was murdered by the husband of the twelfth.

For Romney to say that the definition of marriage has remained the same for 3,000 years is disproved by his own family. It's untrue. False. A lie.

Why people fight so hard to cause other people pain has never made sense to me.

The President's stance has evolved:

Question: when will Romney say something?

I'm not the only one who sees Richard Lugar's defeat last night as more evidence the Republican party, long unmoored from reality, has drifted to the edge of the flat world they inhabit. It turns out, Lugar sees the same thing:

[Republican U.S. Senate nominee Richard Mourdock] and I share many positions, but his embrace of an unrelenting partisan mindset is irreconcilable with my philosophy of governance and my experience of what brings results for Hoosiers in the Senate. In effect, what he has promised in this campaign is reflexive votes for a rejectionist orthodoxy and rigid opposition to the actions and proposals of the other party. His answer to the inevitable roadblocks he will encounter in Congress is merely to campaign for more Republicans who embrace the same partisan outlook. He has pledged his support to groups whose prime mission is to cleanse the Republican party of those who stray from orthodoxy as they see it.

But wait, there's more:

I don't remember a time when so many topics have become politically unmentionable in one party or the other. Republicans cannot admit to any nuance in policy on climate change. Republican members are now expected to take pledges against any tax increases. For two consecutive Presidential nomination cycles, GOP candidates competed with one another to express the most strident anti-immigration view, even at the risk of alienating a huge voting bloc. Similarly, most Democrats are constrained when talking about such issues as entitlement cuts, tort reform, and trade agreements.

Says Robert Wright, "It almost sounds as if he thinks Republicans are a bigger part of the problem than Democrats."

In unrelated news, Sunday was the 75th anniversary of the Hindenburg disaster. I mention this only because the Atlantic had a side-bar on the Lugar story, and I thought it was interesting. Yay Internet, helping people forget what they were mad about!

Update, from Mourdock: "I have a mindset that says bipartisanship ought to consist of Democrats coming to the Republican point of view."

Yep, that sounds like an accurate view of the Republican party.

Today the right wing won two battles in their long, slow, rear-guard war against the 21st century.

In North Carolina, voters chose by a 60-40 margin to add an anti-marriage amendment to the state constitution, continuing the tradition of tolerance and modernity established by enlightened statesmen such as Jesse Helms and William Blount:

North Carolina has become the 31st state to add an amendment on marriage to its constitution, with voters banning same-sex marriage and barring legal recognition of unmarried couples by state and local governments.

Money from national interest groups poured into North Carolina. The National Organization for Marriage contributed $425,000 to the Vote for Marriage campaign, according to the latest reports, and the Human Rights Campaign and its affiliates contributed nearly $500,000 to the opposition Coalition to Protect All N.C. Families.

Vote for Marriage raised more than $1 million, and the Coalition to Protect All N.C. Families raised more than $2 million.

It's interesting that the latter two groups, who received most of their money from out-of-state, anti-gay concerns, failed so miserably to do what their names suggested were their missions. It's almost as if George Orwell had named them, but of course he's been dead for quite some time.

Meanwhile, Indiana Republicans tossed out the third most senior U.S. Senator because his decade-long rightward drift wasn't radical enough:

Sen. Richard Lugar’s 36-year Senate career is now history.

Lugar was defeated in today’s Republican primary election by Treasurer Richard Mourdock, ending his bid for a seventh term in the U.S. Senate.

It wasn’t even close.

With 70 percent of the vote counted, Mourdock had 60 percent to Lugar’s 40 percent.

It's possible that Democratic U.S. Rep. Joe Donnelly will defeat Mourdock in November, but not likely. Indiana, some will recall, came close to legislating the value of a mathematical constant not too long ago, shortly before giving vital support to the Ku Klux Klan.

The struggle between fear and future has gone on longer than written history. Future always wins. But fear inflicts an enormous cost in the bargain. I only hope today's victories by the religious right in the U.S. are what they seem: tantrums of the bigots and zealots that history is leaving behind.

Update: Milwaukee mayor Tom Barrett has won the Wisconsin Democratic primary to face Governor Scott Walker next month in the latter's recall election. The re-match of the 2010 election is a statistical dead heat, though Barrett has a slight edge. At least Wisconsin's right wing is unambiguously about making rich people even richer, without muddling the message with religion. Still: I'll be glad to see the back of Walker, whenever he leaves office.

Washington Post columnist Steven Pearlstein yesterday expanded on how American Airlines' unions bested management by dealing directly with US Airways:

Bankruptcy has changed [the unions' bargaining strengths]. Suddenly, airline executives discovered a way to unilaterally abrogate their labor agreements, fire thousands of employees and impose less generous pay and more flexible work rules. Indeed, the technique proved so effective that several airlines went through the process several times. The unions’ strike threat was effectively neutralized.

All of which makes what is happening at American Airlines deliciously ironic. Late last year, American finally decided to join the rest of the industry and make its first pass through the bankruptcy reorganization process after failing to reach agreement on a new concessionary contract with its pilots’ union.

Essentially, US Airways agreed to pay all of its pilots — the American pilots as well as its own — the higher American Airlines wages, along with small annual raises. In return, the union accepted less lavish medical and retirement benefits along with adoption of US Airways work rules that have been rationalized during two trips through the bankruptcy process. In the end, what probably sealed the deal was the US Airways promise of no layoffs.

He concludes:

For years now, Corporate America has viewed the bankruptcy court as a blunt instrument by which failed executives and directors can shift the burden of their mistakes onto shareholders, employees and suppliers. The auto industry bailout orchestrated by the Obama administration posed the first challenge to that assumption. Now the unions at American airlines have taken another step in curbing this flagrant corporate abuse and restoring the rule of law.

The more I think about the two airlines merging, the more excited I get about the deal. The unions and creditors (not to mention the Pension Benefit Guarantee Corp.) are right: a strong airline with competent management is good for everyone, including us customers.

New video from the Obama campaign, featuring one of the dumbest things Mitt Romney ever said:

Oh yeah.

Despite the rise of right-leaning economics ideology, reality stubbornly retains its liberal bias, with further evidence today coming from the latest UK economic figures:

The UK economy has returned to recession, after shrinking by 0.2% in the first three months of 2012.

A sharp fall in construction output was behind the surprise contraction, the Office for National Statistics said.

"The huge cuts to public spending - 25% in public sector housing and 24% in public non-housing and with a further 10% cuts to both anticipated for 2013 - have left a hole too big for other sectors to fill," said Judy Lowe, deputy chairman of industry body CITB-ConstructionSkills, said.

Or, as Krugman points out, the Conservative's austerity measures have worked no better in the UK than anywhere else in the world:

Now Britain is officially in double-dip recession, and has achieved the remarkable feat of doing worse this time around than it did in the 1930s.

Now, the defense I hear from Cameron apologists is that the austerity mostly hasn’t even hit yet. But that’s really not much of a defense. Remember, the austerity was supposed to work by inspiring confidence; where’s the confidence? Basically, the expansionary aspect should already have kicked in; it’s all contraction from here.

Needless to say, Cameron and Osborne insist that they will not change course, which means that Britain will continue on a death spiral of self-defeating austerity.

It's amazing, really, how Keynes looked back at the Great Depression and learned something, which the right have forgotten for ideological reasons. It's simple: the way out of a recession is for governments to borrow money to get people back to work. This causes growth. The government can then pay back the money when revenues rise because of that growth. Right now, with real interest rates around –4% (yes, minus four), people will actually pay the US government to lend it money. The UK is in a similar situation.

So: the way for the West to get out of the recession is pretty clear, and today's UK GDP growth numbers confirm it. But politicians in most of the world don't believe the facts before them yet. And the recession drags on.

The retiring congressman sat down with New York magazine in February:

The main reason for the increase in partisanship is Newt Gingrich and the success of his decision to demonize the opposition as a way to win. That was reinforced by the right-wing takeover of the Republican Party, And finally, modern communications. Twenty years ago, people had a common set of facts that they read. They read opinion journalists, but they got their information generally from newspapers and from broadcasts. Now the activists, left and right, live in parallel universes which are both separate and echo chambers for each. If you’re on the left, you listen to MSNBC, you go to the blogs, Huffington Post, etc., and others, and you basically hear only what you agree with. If you’re on the right, you watch Fox News and the talk shows and you hear only what you agree with. That’s greatly intensified it. You know, it’s the primaries: People who want to be moderate lose. And when we try to compromise, what you find is not people simply objecting to the specific terms of the compromise but the activists object even to your trying to compromise, because they say, “Look, everybody I know agrees with us, so why are you giving in?”

Mike Oxley was chairman of that committee in 2003 until 2007. I was able to work with him. When I was the ranking member and he was the chairman, and even the chairman before that—so I was able to work with the Republicans from ’95, when they first took power, through 2007, when I became the chairman. I was able to work with Jim Leach and Mike Oxley on a lot of things, so I’d say that’s when things really changed.

When we took power, they moved very far to the right, and from the time I became chairman in 2007, it became virtually impossible to work with them. Spencer Bachus, who was the senior Republican, tried to work with me, and he almost lost his position because of it. When 2007 came, they really imposed this rigid discipline, so from 2007 on, as chairman, I was an institutionalist, but I spent almost all of my time making sure I had a majority. As I said, in 2007 and 2008, and 2009 and 2010—well, in 2009, we were doing the financial-reform bill, there were 71 members of the committee, 42 Democrats and 29 Republicans, and as I said, the last thing I thought of every night when I went to sleep was 36. Thirty-six is one more than half of 71, and I just had to keep 36 Democrats, always Democrats, never once did I have a Republican in my four years as chairman who was critical to a majority.

He's forthright and lucid. And he's firmly in the reality-based community. He will be missed.

NBC News has hired the 32-year-old Clinton as a feature reporter. Naturally, given her parents, there is some controversy:

Upon her arrival [at 30 Rockefeller Center], Chelsea was given a welcome bag, filled with NBC swag, 30 Rockers tell me. NBC’s David Gregory responded by jokingly asking: “Where’s my welcome bag?”

Gregory’s joke hints at the unprecedented level of special treatment Chelsea receives: she didn’t do live shots on her Rock Center debut; she gets chauffeured everywhere in a town car while others her age strap hang with the suckers in Gotham’s sewers; she has her own personal spokesperson; and she has her own chief-of-staff, Bari Lurie. (Lurie is to Chelsea what Huma Abedin is to Hillary: a fiercely loyal female aide and confidante, who logged over 7,000 miles with her during the 2008 campaign.) Other top talent at the network noticed that luxury: Lester Holt, Hoda Kotb, Natalie Morales, and Savannah Guthrie all share a single assistant. (An NBC spokesperson says, however, that Chelsea pays for her own chief of staff.)

“Everyone needs to get a grip,” says [a] high level [NBC] executive. “She’s hardworking, she’s taking it very seriously. She really wants to genuinely do these Making a Difference pieces. She knows she’s a lightening rod. When people write nasty things, she takes the lumps.” After all the bad press during the roll out, there were fears Chelsea was going to pack it in. Instead, she decided to tough it out. “I respect that,” says the NBC insider. Clinton’s personal spokesperson, Matt McKenna, had strong words for her detractors: "When Chelsea's critics are ready to step forward and use their names, she'll be more than happy to answer them. In the meantime, she's enjoying working for NBC and NBC is glad she's a part of their team."

So how did she do in her first segment? Take a look:

I've seen a lot of TV, both amateur and professional. This is average professional work. It's a good package, maybe not that exciting, but one that tells a harmlessly good-feeling story.

Of course Clinton won't have the same treatment at NBC as other kids her age; she's already a public figure, with a view of history that even the top Medill grads probably won't have had. Of course this will cause resentment. I hope Clinton handles it with the same grace she's already handled the derision and ridicule people have heaped on her since she turned 13. The only question that matters in the present situation is: does this hire make sense for NBC? I think we'll see pretty soon.