Dana Blankenhorn

Republicans are Toast

It's time someone admits it. The TeeVee won't, it would be bad for ratings, and when it's a choice between telling the truth and securing ratings the TeeVee lies through its teeth.

The Republicans are Toast. They're done. They're dead. Stick a fork in 'em. They'll be lucky if they survive as a national party after November.

All this assumes, of course, that we're allowed to have a free election. But the margins Democrats are piling up in opinion polls would be tough for even Robert Mugabe to steal away. And Americans don't lie down like the Burmese do and just take it.

The plain fact is that the Republican brand is dead to us. They trotted it out twice in recent weeks, once around Baton Rouge, Louisiana and again yesterday in northeast Mississippi. Both Louisiana's 6th and Mississippi's 1st were deep red districts, the kind a Republican should take without thinking twice about it.

Both times the Republicans sought to nationalize the election. They trotted out Barack Obama as a bogeyman, and in case people didn't get the connection, added Nancy Pelosi. Crickets. In Mississippi last night, Travis Childers won 54-46, a really enormous margin in a district which went for Bush 2-1 and was drawn especially to elect a Republican.

Those Republicans commenting to the state's chief GOP political site, Y'All Politics, were, well, despondent last night. Wrote one who calls himself "Reagan Dem":

Think about that:  the vote from northeast Mississippi will be the same as the vote from Pelosi of San Francisco, which will be the same of that of Barney Frank of Massachusetts, which will be the same as that of John Conyers of Michigan, which will be the same as Jesse Jackson, Jr. of Illinois.

Beautiful.

I assume he meant that last bit facetiously.

If Republicans can't win on their party label in Mississippi's 1st CD, nothing is safe. Alaska isn't safe. Wyoming isn't safe.

There are a few states where the Republicans can expect to clean up this year, thanks to the weakness of local Democrats. Kentucky is one. My own home state of Georgia is another. You can add South Carolina, Tennessee, Florida and Alabama to that list, although whether Alabama's GOP will survive a Democratic Attorney General is an open question.

But even in the Deep South, Republicans are getting hit right-and-right. Virginia is practically gone Blue. North Carolina too. Democrats are competitive in Louisiana, and they may just grab a Congress seat in Alabama! This is their heartland, for pity's sake!

Some Republican leaders are starting to panic, and their best hope at this point may be for everyone to try and save himself, to recall Tip O'Neill's claim that "all politics is local," and tell their Washington consultants to go stick it where the sun don't shine.

Trouble is, I don't think they can do that. And I question whether it would help.

Now for the bad news...

Thinking of Chengdu

As you may recall, our plans have been to visit Chengdu, Sichuan China starting next Thursday, May 22 through June 4.

I'd say the chances of that happening are now 20%. There's no official word from the tour sponsor, Ms. Ning of the North Atlanta High Chinese Department (who lives in Chengdu and whom we're trying to accompany home) but right now I just don't see it.

NPR got "lucky," in that their anchors were in Chengdu doing pre-Olympic prep when the earthquake hit. Their reports have been nothing short of heart-breaking. I try to imagine how I might feel if the quake had waited, say, 10 days, and I were, say, at the Airport (above) when this happened.

The Airport is quite far from the epicenter, according to Google Earth. The city is situated much like Denver, on a plain with the front ridge of the Himalayas running at a southwest-northeast angle, 60 miles away at the nearest point. It's along this ridge that the quakes occurred, the giant 7.9 quake coming around 1:20 PM local time, when everyone was at work or school, and a long series of aftershocks continuing to this moment, most in the 5-6 range. (Note that the Richter scale is logarithmic -- the first shock was 100 times more powerful than most aftershocks.)

Hope Rising

Think of this as Volume 11, Number 19 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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In most of the items marked Crisis of 2008 I have emphasized the difficulties in the time we're living with, the problems, the dangers.

But it is also vital, sometimes, to look at the opportunities, and to see the hope rising all around us.

I'm fortunate to find such things often in my work. Sometimes I bring them to you. Here are two just from this week:

• Simple breakthroughs in things like capacitors that can improve the efficiency of electric motors by as much as 300%.
• Breakthroughs in telemedicine which Microsoft is quickly taking advantage of.

Science and engineering are using the benefits of Moore's Law to create progress at a Moore's Law rate. That is breakthroughs are coming faster-and-faster, fast enough (perhaps) to halt the present processes destroying human life on this planet, and even turn them around.

If, that is, they can be brought into the world rapidly enough. The society which brings them to the market most rapidly will have the greatest share in the resulting prosperity.

What we need to make this happen is a process revolution. I am talking about accelerating both economic and political processes. We need to change business' processes so companies make more money solving problems than  causing them, as they have in this decade. And we need to change the way political change occurs at a fundamental level.

A generation ago Republicans talked about making government run more like a business. Now we need businesses to start taking their societal responsibilities seriously.

You do that by changing incentives.

• Right now electric utilities have more incentives to build power plants than to build efficiency into our electrical grid. We can change that.
• Right now drug companies have more incentives to create "me-too" drugs with patent protection than to produce generics we know work. We can change that.
• Right now energy producers have more incentives to withhold product from the market than to produce it. We can change that.
• Right now companies have more incentives to create monopolies than to open new markets. We can change that.
• Right now companies have more incentives to create paper than to see loans are repaid. We can change that.
  

When Al Gore talks about trading carbon credits, this is really what he's talking about, creating an incentive to emit less carbon by simply putting a price on it.

None of these changes are terribly difficult. Most are just a matter of will. And when we put the power of the market to work on the world's problems, pointing to those problems as opportunities with profits going to those who create solutions, positive change can happen quickly.

But that's not all.

My Burma Sorrow

I am sorry about the Burma hurricane. I am sad that its leaders are so paranoid as to refuse aid from the world. I am saddened that so little aid is getting into the affected region and that people are dieing needlessly.

But still...

When I read complaints from our government about the failure to allow aid it's like someone rubbing a balloon before popping it and laughing in my face.

Is it that way to you?

This morning on TV Cindy McCain was complaining bitterly of the Burmese peoples' plight. I have no doubt she felt sincere. But I kept switching back to that picture of her husband, the day Katrina hit New Orleans, standing with our leader, and a birthday cake.

Crocodile tears.

When I see Secretary of State Rice demanding that Burma allow aid in, all I can think of is what she was doing when Katrina hit New Orleans. Shopping for shoes.

When I read about U.S. diplomats bemoaning the destruction of Burmese rice fields, I think about how all they cared about after Katrina was getting the casinos back into operation, and how we're now benefiting from higher rice prices.

Closing the Deal

I'm sort of accustomed to being ignored. But since I often end up being right, I just shrug my shoulders and move on.

I'm a bit like the lady to the right in that. As has been noted before, she passed away at the same age I am right now, at 53. And she didn't live one day for how other people saw her. She charted her own path. She was a role model.

So now, despite my distinct lack of qualifications or notoreity, I'm going to explain to Barack Obama just how he closes this nomination deal.

Yo Mama.

Had Stanley Ann Dunham not been felled by ovarian cancer in 1995, she would be turning 66 this year. She would be right in Hillary Clinton's wheelhouse.

So use that. Speak from the heart of how she might feel. This is the time in campaigns where we start getting the full autobiography anyway. This question has to be addressed.

Start by stating the obvious.

The Road to Chengdu

The tickets are paid for. The visa application is in the mail. It seems likely that my son John and I will be heading to Chengdu, Sichuan, China on May 22, taking his exchange teacher home.  (Not this way, of course.)

A decade ago, I would have gone with great optimism, a representative of American values. Now? Well, consider these two stories, and where in the world they occurred:

• Hundreds of people quietly protest a new refinery, expecting to be heard.
• Regime opponents are subject to political prosecutions, to having their homes torched, while elections are stolen and public opinion is ignored.

The first story is from Chengdu. The second is from Alabama. As others have noted, the Bush war against democracy continues apace, and even seems to be accelerating.

I think it's time for us to get off our ideological high horses and start talking first principles, not just the what but the why.

The Wright Reality

No matter how we feel about "phony" controversies they usually have an important point behind them.

They define the limits of acceptable speech.

Take the Jeremiah Wright mess, which Bill Moyers is still agonizing over. Why is Wright condemned for statements like "God Damn America" while preachers like John Hagee, who (along with Falwell and Robertson) said the exact same things (only with different reasons) go merrily on. Isn't that a double standard?

Well, yes and no.

It's a double standard in that one man's speech is seen as out of bounds and another man's speech is seen as within bounds. True. But the whole purpose of the exercise was to define the bounds of acceptable political speech. It was to make Wright, and everything he says, out of bounds while enabling extremists on the other side free rein. (Actually, free reign.)

In this, as in other phony controversies over the years, the Right has been masterful. Through this process of phony controversy the acceptable discourse within our society has been pushed ever-more to the right, so it's becoming impossible to even publicly utter obvious truths. I'd say that's an important result.

For instance, the following sentence is, politically, completely out of bounds within the American political discourse:

The Oil Standard

Think of this as Volume 11, Number 18 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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I have long been intrigued by what stands for value. (Picture from The Zoo.)

Throughout the 19th century, gold was the standard of value.

The 1896 Crisis, the Cross of Gold speech, these were outgrowths of the 1895 gold loan by J.P. Morgan to the U.S. government in exchange for bonds, which Morgan then sold at the "usurious" interest rate of 4%. With gold as the standard of value, the value of other commodities (like wheat) withered. Farmers suffered, bankers gained. The farmers' uprising was called Populism, and it made Democrats dominant in the farm belt for decades.

Today we have a new standard of value. Oil. And the impact is much the same. For wheat read dollars, for farmers read Americans, and for J.P. Morgan read the Saudi sheikhs, Hugo Chavez and Vladimir Putin.

What makes a "strong" store of value is the fact that its supply is limited, that it doesn't inflate. It's stable. It's sound.

The U.S. dollar is no longer sound. It's being tossed out by Helicopter Ben the way farmers a century ago tossed wheat on the market, and the result is very predictable. The age of the "dollar standard" is over, and while the world seeks a new safe haven, oil will do nicely.

There can be only one response.

Open Source is Parallel Processing on Steroids

I was chatting up a Washington liberal today, and it was depressing.

The subject was computing. The liberal bemoaned the power of corporations to wreck a great, highly-functional government project.

The project was starved for funds, its developers allowed to leave, and now its bones were being picked by lobbyists, all aiming their "best of breed" systems as replacements for bits-and-pieces of what had once been a magnificent computing edifice.

Even if Democrats are elected this fall, he said, they don't understand these technical arguments about open source vs. proprietary. They'll be bought off just like the current crop.

Which is when it hit me, the frame he could use to tear down all those vendors and bring back what was lost, what is in the process of being lost.

Open source is parallel processing.  (Shown is the parallel processing lab at the University of Utah.)

No matter how big a vendor might be, it's still one system. Like the Von Neumann architectures that dominated computing for its first 40 years they have a bottleneck. The only way to speed up the process of finding a solution is to speed the whole process, get more GHz. It's this kind of thinking which led, by the 1980s, to so-called "supercomputers" like the Cray.

Parallel processing was developed in the 1980s at the Sandia Labs in New Mexico. The idea was simple -- to break jobs into parts, to move the parts onto many systems, and then to put the solutions together on the back end.

In the 20 years since parallel processing has come to dominate computing, relegating Von Neumann to a Wikipedia entry. First people stacked Macs to beat a Cray. Then they used parallel processing on the Internet itself, creating distributed computing projects like SETI @  Home. Today parallel processing is used inside chips -- all today's latest AMD and Intel silicon is doing parallel processing. From two to four to eight -- who knows how far we can go with it.

That's sort of how open source works. Only on steroids.

Because with open source not only do you parse out pieces of a project to different companies, or different developers, but their work can cross-pollinate. Not only can you build systems in parallel, but you can also use a vast community of users to find bugs, and another vast army to stamp out the bugs.

The genius of Linus Torvalds lies in his ability to constantly re-engineer Linux' development process, first farming out all the work, then finding new ways to coordinate the massively-parallel architecture which develops in response. And the design of Linux itself responds well to this parallel processing impulse, since it consists of central functions in a kernel, ancillary functions surrounding it, and a host of distribution providers who can build working systems from all the pieces -- sometimes using just parts of the kernel for a mobile system, embracing optional things like virtualization for a server.

The Manipulators

We don't like being talked down to.

(This is actually a marketing talk, by Seth Godin, done at Google, but it's worth listening to whatever business you're in. Notice that he's not talking down to anyone.)

The reason the Obama "bitter" deal hasn't hurt him is the same reason the "Jeremiah Wright" deal didn't hurt him.

This election is not about him.

What all the manipulators who are pissing-and-moaning about it, whether on the TeeVee or online, don't realize is something just as important.

This election is not about them, either.

This election is about us. You and me.

Crisis elections are like that.

Anyone want to deny we're in a crisis (other than the manipulators)?

A World Without a Moral Center

As I may have mentioned here before I'm scheduled to visit Chengdu, China next month. Blogging will be sporadic.

Given the recent headlines over the torch run I'm certain you're wondering what I might tell my hosts.

The answer is -- not much.

For one thing I expect few there to know English. But even without the language barrier I'd mainly want to listen. Listen to my son try to puzzle out the language barrier after three years of Mandarin. Listen to people greet me, and try to explain things by speaking Szechuan ve-ry slow-ly (as though that would help).

But there's another, more important reason. I no longer have cause to condemn anyone.

Neither, frankly, do you.

Rage, Rage Against the Dying of the Light

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

What is true for mortal man is also true for ideas, for concepts, for myths and values, for political theses.

That's what we're dealing with in events like the supposed "bitter" contretemps and Barack Obama.

Forget for a moment whether Barack Obama is a black man or white. He is, first of all, a Hawaiian.

Hawaiians surf. They stand on a board above the waves and they ride the water the way Texans ride horses. Obama surfs history the way painters like Picasso surf artistic trends or the way a Tom Brady surfs through defenses seeking a receiver.

As do we all, once we realize it. But journalists are stuck in the eternal now, and have no concept of this idea of surfing.

Thus they see scandal where there is, in fact, the death rattle of their own assumptions of political myth, value, and power, and the alchemy in which both are created.

What Barack Obama said last week in Pennsylvania was the simple truth. It should surprise no one that people turn bitter when their jobs disappear, when politicians in both parties use that to gain power and then do nothing about it.

The Clintons promised to help, but instead took that power and endorsed free trade agreements which guaranteed the jobs would never come back. The Bushes blamed the blacks, the browns, all the "others," then continued the march away from production, towards consumption.

There is no lie there. There is no scandal.

Tribes of the GOP

Think of this as Volume 11, Number 15 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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Back in 1968 it was easy to identify the Democratic tribes splitting off from the party by the way they dressed and the way they looked.

White, black, brown, male, female, young, old -- each tribe had its own look and its own outlook.

It's tougher now. About the only black Republicans are on TV. Republicans are generally Euro-Americans, aged 30 and higher. They blend in. It's only when they start talking that you detect the tribal differences.

Anthropologists had two ways to discern the tribal identity of Nixon-era Republicans, by where they sat and by what they obsessed over. 

Where they were definitions include:

• Wall Street Republicans -- Urban only if they had an apartment in New York itself (maybe Philly), otherwise strictly suburban or exurban. Their first concern is money, getting it, keeping it, getting more of it, keeping other people from getting any.
• Church Street Republicans -- Usually found in megachurches or in front of their TV sets. Densest populations in the South and Southwest, but found in every state. Their first concern is morality, usually others, and using the power of the state to force that morality into a mold their preacher approves of.
• Easy Street Republicans -- Mostly found in Florida, Arizona, and California, these are Wall Street Republicans who made their pile. Often found in motor homes, on golf courses, or on condo balconies.
• Talk Show Republicans -- Often found in pick-up trucks on on job sites. They like them some Rush Limbaugh. Used to call themselves Reagan Democrats. Archie Bunker's real kids. The kind of people other Republicans like to rob.
• Professional Republicans -- Mostly found in Washington and its suburbs, or on TV.  Professional greasemen (and women),  sucking either at the government teat or those of other Republicans, mainly the Wall Street variety. Rush Limbaugh himself.
  

Wolf Blitzer Will You Please Go Now?

Let me say at the top I found protests over the Beijing Olympic torch in San Francisco to be silly.

The United States has no credibility in accusing anyone else of human rights abuses, or of ignoring democracy. After the last 8 years of suppression and war, our ability to tell the world what to do about itself is exhausted. It's a sick joke. And it will remain that way long after we change our ways -- assuming we ever do.

I had just finished work yesterday and was flipping around the TV when the protests arrived in Wolf Blitzer's Situation Room.

It was a disgusting display. Not the protests. Not the reaction by authorities. Not the irony of China glorying in an event first staged by Nazis. Not even the Chinese goons who have been part of the parade of continents. 

All that was to be expected.

What was unexpected was Blitzer's narration, which was so over-the-top in attacking the protesters and worrying about the feelings of the poor Chinese government that I was, once more, ashamed to be an American.

Ending the Zero Sum Game

Perhaps the grossest myth of the last American generation is the Zero Sum Myth.

This myth was very much on display yesterday during the Iraq testimony. This is why it seemed at times that Gen. David Petraeus and the Democrats questioning him were speaking different languages, living on different planets.

To Petraeus, as to John McCain and the great majority of Republicans, there can only be two outcomes in Iraq. You win, you lose. The idea of some different, muddier, more real outcome is entirely foreign to them. Listen to any of them closely, listen to them tolerantly, and this comes through. You don't have to argue with it. It's simply their reality.

The point was brought home by Barack Obama's questioning (above). Is there an outcome other than a fully democratic (well Republican) Iraq, under American control, with no Al Qaeda and no influence from Iran, which you might define as victory, he asked? Petraeus reacted as though Obama were speaking his father's native Luo language. It was, to him, inconceivable.

This is in the nature of the Nixon Thesis of Conflict. It's at the heart of it, really. Life is a zero sum game. You either win or you lose. Peaceful coexistence is impossible. There can be no meeting of the minds, no agreeing to disagree. 

Dust

Think of this as Volume 11, Number 14 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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On sunny Sunday mornings, while the rest of Atlanta is in bed, at church, or huddling over brunch, I ride my bike downtown and visit Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (right).

It's quiet then. Just a few Japanese tourists wander by. If it's sunny, if I've been riding a few hours, I will sit by the reflecting pool and talk to him.

I don't expect him to talk back. He's dust. His tomb is a symbol for the life he lived, and the work he did. I was pleased when I snapped this picture, because it shows his wife Coretta is now with him. She lived nearly as long without him as he'd spent time on this Earth (38 years against 39) but they're together now in heaven, and in memory.

Public Interest?

I visited my son's public school this afternoon.

It was depressing. The rules a new principal had promised to enforce rigidly in the fall were being flouted and ignored in the spring. Dress code? Quiet in the hall? Getting to class on time?

One of the teachers was furious. Why should those who get to class on time be penalized in favor of those who arrive late? My son shrugged. I was more concerned with teachers who seemed more interested in kids' deference than their performance or effort.

The room remained tense until the teacher said, "I don't understand about this No Child Left Behind. You can't treat everyone the same. Some want to learn, some don't. Some can learn more than others." It's treating sponges like rocks.

Bias Doesn't Help

Having been a business reporter for 30 years this summer I understand the natural bias to identify with your subject.

The job of a journalist is to organize and advocate an industry, place or lifestyle. Thus, a certain bias favoring the political views held by the group you write about is natural.

But at some point your ideological blinders have to come off, or else you're doing your readers and viewers a disservice.

This has plainly happened with the financial press.

Media coverage of the Big Shitpile has ignored the Big Fact. This happened because unregulated markets were allowed to be created, to grow, to soak up much of the world's capital. When two brokers or hedge funds repackage mortgages or other things into new types of trading instruments, they are printing money, just as the Federal Reserve prints money. They're doing it in the same way, by declaring the existence of new paper, by putting a price on it, and making a market in it.

Anyone who does this has a fiduciary responsibility. You become the trustee of your investor's interest, which is supposed to trump your own. Ethical rules can police such a responsibility. So can laws and regulations.

What happened in this decade is entirely new markets and new instruments were allowed to be created, which lacked these controls.

Nothing I have seen, either from the Administration or the financial press, addresses this key point. Nothing I've seen endorsed from either is designed to control these markets. It's all window-dressing, pushing papers and organization charts around in the appearance of doing something while in fact doing nothing.

This guarantees the scandal will happen again, sooner rather than later.

Will you read this in Forbes? Will you see this on CNBC? No you won't. Jim Cramer won't tell you either. The ideological blinders of all these outlets cause them to hide from this simple truth.

We must regulate our markets, or we will lose them.

Let me put this in a way Cramer might understand. You have two casinos. One is regulated. The other is not. Where will you place your bets? Will you do it at a place where, if the casino plays 3-card monty on you they will be caught and punished? Or will you do it where the game is crooked and there's no cop on the beat?

Regulators are cops. When conservatives go on this knee-jerk "anti-regulation" jag they're arguing for lawlessness. Markets which can't guarantee transparency, which act as unregulated casinos, will over time be rejected in favor or markets where honesty is assured.

The growth of the U.S. financial industry over the last 80 years has been driven by its honesty, by its transparency, by the wealth of information on players and games which regulators of all types have imposed. Eliminating these regulations, or going around them, does not make markets more efficient. It makes them more crooked.

Law good. Lawlessness bad.

My Candidate is Teh Awesome. Your Candidate is Teh Suck

That (complete with misspellings) is the "deep thought" Atrios (alias Duncan Black, right) often offers concerning the Clinton-Obama race.

The implication, made explicit when he addresses the point at some length, is that it doesn't much matter, in the end, which Democrat runs in November. Just that they win.

If you look at their policy positions he's right. Choosing between these candidates based on the proposals on their Web sites is a losing proposition.

But what's left is not atmospherics, as some may think. There is in fact some there there.

And that there is probably why my preferred candidate, John Edwards, has yet to make an endorsement. It's worth exploring.

Don't Get Killed in the Semi-Finals

I was told this a lot in 1968, by conservatives I considered knowledgeable friends.

It summed up their attitude toward Vietnam at the time, and their feeling the Vietcong would be reluctant to risk death. (They were wrong, of course.) The real fight wasn't with us, but between them, they assumed. So don't get killed in the semi-finals.

The good news from Iraq is we seem to be past the semi-finals. The current Battle of Basra is really the Bush Administration's last stand.

If Nouri al-Maliki should win, we will have chosen Iraq's new Saddam. He'll be a Shiite Saddam, he'll be a Saddam allied with Iran, but we'll have put him there. The point is this may be "victory" enough for our troops to get the heckoutofthere.

Unfortunately, right now he doesn't look like a winner. He's already had to call on Uncle Sam to hold Baghdad and we're hearing the same-old same-old about bad planning further south.

The AntiThesis Must Fall

Think of this as Volume 11, Number 13 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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When you look at American politics from the perspective of generations, one of the most startling things you learn is how each generation's Anti-Thesis, the myths, values and assumptions which fought the previous era, must fall as the era falls.

Easy to say, hard to put into practice, but voters manage it. They do it by building a new Thesis within the rising party, then battling the old Anti-Thesis within their own party  until it's dead.

Here's how it has run, in every generational crisis, from the last crisis in the 1960s backward through the Civil War:

• 40 years ago, this meant the Eisenhower Republicans. The party faction which Dwight D. Eisenhower brought to power was moderate in tone, wanting only to lean against the assumptions of the New Deal and make them work better. By the 1960s this meant Nelson Rockefeller (right), who became a hated figure within the new New York Conservative Party starting in 1960. While Rockefeller ended up (briefly) as Gerald Ford's Vice President, he had lost his relevance by that time. Today moderate Republicanism is just about dead.
• 36 years before that, this meant Wilson Democrats, represented best by Wilson's own son-in-law, William McAdoo. Woodrow Wilson crafted a marriage of convenience between business-oriented Democrats in the northeast and the remnants of failed Bryan populism. Roosevelt's nomination was fueled by his opposition to the former and his alliance with the latter. It was McAdoo (right), who had tried for the nomination twice before, whom Roosevelt most needed to outmaneuver in order to win himself.