Dana Blankenhorn

The Business Equivalent of Paris Hilton

Can we all, now, at last, get over this nonsense that Donald Trump is a capable businessman?

From here he looks like Paris Hilton with a comb-over. His "feud" with Rosie O'Donnell is more like Paris vs. Nicole than Jobs vs. Gates.

First, he became a millionaire by starting as a billionaire. His "self-made fortune" was made by his father, Fred Trump. The Donald has endured two bankruptcies, anyone who invests with him gets hosed, and his megal0maniacal habit of splashing his name on everything doesn't earn any of these buildings a premium -- just the opposite.

Second, The Apprentice is to business as burlesque was to opera. One has nothing to do with the other beyond the fact they both take place on a stage. Putting his own kids into the cast should have been a Clue. Anyone idiot enough to think being a contestant on this show makes you a "business player" should have their degree taken away from them.

Ad-Mitt None

We have just spent six years dealing with the trips between a father and a son in power. Do we want to do it again?

So let's get Mitt Romney out of our hair quickly, as apparently Republicans are already starting to do. Let's play the 1967 game.

In 1967 a Romney was in the same position Mitt is in now. In fact it was Mitt's own father who was in that position. Meet George Romney.

Americans today do not know just how close George Romney got to the White House, but it was a Dean-like distance of one gaffe.  The 1968 Republican field was actually considered quite weak  -- Richard Nixon was washed-up, Nelson Rockefeller was too liberal. Ronald Reagan and Charles Percy had just been elected to their first statewide offices the year before.

By 1967 George Romney was in his second term as Governor of Michigan. His grandparents were Mormon polygamists who had fled to Mexico, but he did not make his religion an issue, living a secular life in Michigan instead. Before entering politics he had built American Motors into a strong 4th place among U.S. automakers around a compact car called the Rambler. It was an American VW, a great success story of the 1950s.

Politically, George Romney represented the Eisenhower AntiThesis to the Roosevelt Thesis, moderating the New Deal but accepted its premises. In 2008 his son is running as an extension of the Nixon Thesis, emphasizing its social exclusiveness, power available only to "people of faith" who presumably can handle it because they're closer to God than the rest of us.

The Limits of Media Power

What I wanna know is...how did Democrats win last year?

How is it that Democrats now lead nearly all trial heats for the Presidency, that far more people now self-identify as Democrats than Republicans?

To read the blogs of Left Blogistan, this could not possibly be true, because the Right absolutely controls all media, all forms of communication, they have Astroturf everywhere, and they're constantly demanding that liberals be ignored, denied their rights, tortured, or killed, all in the name of God, Mammon, and Imperialism.

So how is it possible? Can these two points be reconciled?

They can, but only if you look at history. Because 40 years ago the shoes were on the other feet. I was there, and I know. Back then it was conservatives who truly were  oppressed, ridiculed, ignored, questioning themselves, yet they were in the ascendancy, and they would triumph absolutely, holding power for a generation, from 1969 to the present day.

Until reality intruded. Until they stretched their myths beyond the point where reality could take them. Until their absolute control of all levers of government started pulling stupidity out of its ass. Until bankruptcies and foreclosures began rising to the sky, and tens of thousands started coming home without eyes, legs, arms, and sanity from a war they insisted had barely cost 3,000 American lives. Until whole cities started disappearing. Until the birds stopped singing in our backyards, and all the kids started coming to soccer practice with inhalers, and the summers got longer than the winters, even north of the Mason-Dixon line.

The War Against Oil

The very heart of our present crisis is a classic misreading of its nature.

To adherents of the outgoing Thesis, this is a war over oil. The struggle of Americans  to control this vital resource has been ongoing since 1933. The union between Texas and Saudi Arabia dates to 1936, and Aramco, the Arab-American Oil Co., to 1944. Hydrocarbons have been seen as essential to nation-building since the 18th century.

In view of such a long history, it is an extraordinary, wrenching thing to imagine that we must now begin an economic and social war against oil, and against all forms of hydrocarbon energy.

But that is the task before us.

The urgency of the task should no longer be subject to question, even by those who doubt the reality of global warming. Maintaining our economy while cutting imports of oil will have enormous benefits across the board. It puts downward pressure on global oil prices, reducing the returns of Iran and of Venezuela, weakening their governments. It results in the creation of technology that can be re-sold, cutting our debts to China, and enabling exports to India.

There are other advantages. Such investments can help drive American technology, and with it, justify investments in education. It concentrates us on domestic events, and on areas where there is consensus.

Imagine what we can start talking about when we truly engage in the War Against Oil.

Killing AT&T Is Easy

For all the hand-wringing I and others have done over AT&T, killing the company could be quite easy.

I excised it from my life last week. I took the family to a Sprint store and got us all cellphones. We even moved the old home phone number over.

The fact is that, if you're not getting Internet broadband service from AT&T, you really don't need the company. You have several alternatives (three major ones) to Cingular for voice service, and if you can scrounge up Internet connectivity from somewhere you're done.

AT&T recognized this when it was buying BellSouth. Its predicate for the purchase was that half of Cingular, the cell phone operation, would pay for most of it, along with something it called Interactive TV, essentially a cable service.

The Cultural Revolution

The Nixon Thesis of Conflict was, and remains, a Cultural Revolution.

A foreign policy challenge was answered with a cultural solution. The War in Vietnam was transformed, through Nixon, from a foreign fight to a domestic one.

In the Nixon Thesis, war is a proxy for the more important battle, the battle for conformity at home. Thus the Reagan Administration engaged in two proxy wars,  along with the budgetary struggle called Star Wars, in order to sustain an ongoing cultural war.

The nature of any political AntiThesis is that it accepts the premises of the Thesis and tries to moderate it. Eisenhower accepted the Roosevelt Thesis premise of government, moderating it to serve middle class ends and balance its books. Clinton accepted the Nixon Thesis of cultural war, moderating it to serve liberal ends and balance its books.

Why are we in Iraq? We fight them over there so we can fight them over here. The them is different in the two halves of the sentence. The first them refers to militant Islam, the second them to cultural deviation at home. The only thing which can square that circle is the Nixon Thesis, war as an instrument of cultural conformity.

But who enforces cultural conformity? Democrats have often asked, why is religion such a big part of the conservative coalition? It's religion's job to enforce the cultural norms. Thus today the people least-trusted for positions of leadership are atheists, who don't recognize the right of religious leaders to do this. In this way the Thesis becomes a win-win for both politicians and preachers.

 

Hillary Loses Netroots Primary

Hillary Clinton has lost the Netroots primary, and with it, perhaps, the support of her party's staunchest activists. (That's Richard Nixon in 1967. Why in a moment.)

The evidence is mounting. Clinton is doing horribly in the monthly MyDD straw poll among its Netroots readers. Matt Stoller writes that she has "a DLC problem," in that she is using big money and establishment positions to try and steamroller her way to the nomination.  Markos Moulitsas, the Kos of DailyKos, wrote yesterday that he can't support her, because of her stand on Iraq.

How does this stack up against the Republicans' analogous situation 40 years ago?

Let's play the 1967 game and find out.

We'll start with Richard Nixon's position vis-a-vis movement conservatism, the closest analog to today's Netroots. You'll remember that Goldwater had been destroyed by Johnson in 1964 (the equivalent of Howard Dean winning his party's nomination in 2004 and losing 60-40 to Bush) so the party's 1966 comeback was tentative, led by AntiThesis politicians like George Romney (Mitt's dad) and Charles Percy. Today's Netroots are much closer to power. Many of their candidates won in 2006. It's the DLC wing of the party that was blamed for the 2004 loss, which was narrow.

Ronald Reagan, who would ride the Nixon Thesis of Conflict to glory (conservatives never call their belief system Nixonism, only Reaganism) was in 1967 the newly-elected Governor of California, and even movement leaders like William F. Buckley were chary of him. Here's a telling moment from a 1967 article which Buckley recently republished in his National Review. It's a month after the 1966 election:

Richard Nixon was in the room. Who, someone asked, would the Republican Party consider as eligible in 1968? Nixon gave the usual names — and added Ronald Reagan's. I objected. It strikes me, I said, as inconceivable. "Why?" Nixon asked — "suppose he makes a very good record as governor of California?" (This was in December, just after Reagan's election.) Because, I said, he is very simply an implausible President.

Rice Science Friday: Bucky Heal Thyself

Buckyballs and Buckytubes (the latter are also called carbon nanotubes) are the subject of study in many Rice University science departments these days.

Buckytubes consist of hexagonal-shaped carbon formations which connect with themselves in a tubular shape.  In a Buckyball the forms come together, like a soccer ball, each one containing 60 carbon atoms each.

In one of the most fascinating findings concerning Buckytubes so far, a Rice Materials Science Professor, Boris Yakobson, has found collections of 10 carbon atoms, in the shape of a pentagon attached to a heptagon, form spontaneously when the tubes are under stress, and then move up and down along the tubes, healing imperfections in the tube's construction and giving off carbon gas.

The 10-atom structures are seen as blemishes on the tube, but they're not really blemishes, they're tiny doctors, which can heal the complex structure as they move along it.

The Internet Can Handle the Plague

There is no technical reason why the Internet can't handle the boom in traffic that might be expected in case of a plague.

Thanks to DWDM the Internet backbone has immense amounts of unused capacity. There is also competition, thanks to Level 3. If AT&T wanted to create an artificial shortage of supply in the Internet Core, in other words, they could not do it -- competitors would just steal the customers.

Problems, if they exist, lie at the network edge. Cable Internet services are designed to share a designated hunk of bits within a neighborhood. When all the customers in an area go online at once, they get bits through an eyedropper. Telephone architecture is different. So long as there is ample local switching capacity, signals should flow easily between ADSL modems. (If you're over 5 miles from a switch, you will have troubles, but you already have troubles.)

But there remains a political threat.

Bush and the Nixon Era Climax

Consider this Vol. 11, No. 8 for A-Clue.Com, which would be delivered to readers tomorrow if we were still doing this via e-mail. Enjoy.

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In the last few weeks President Bush, worried about the legacy of this Administration, has compared himself to (among others) George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Harry Truman.

He sees his lack of popularity, refuses to believe it could be his direction that is wrong, and so grabs hold of the criticisms, and low ratings, sometimes given our greatest Presidents.

It's yet more evidence of the man's own delusion, although the symptom is natural, affecting every President when they face hard times. Legacy is something no one can control. Historians are free to damn as well as praise.

So where does Bush stack up?

Here's a collection of names to conjure with. James Buchanan. Grover Cleveland. Herbert Hoover. Lyndon Johnson.

Each was the last of their line. Buchanan was the last Jackson Democrat, Cleveland the last President of the post-Civil War era, Hoover was the last of the Progressives, Johnson the last of the New Dealers.

These are Bush's true peers. In fact they always were.

Like them, Bush came into office parroting the assumptions of an earlier day, in his case the Nixon Thesis of Conflict. Everything he has done in office has been based on that Thesis. His fans would call this the Reagan Thesis, and it's fine with me if they do, because it means he's taking Reagan's legacy down with him as well.