Gonna let my little light shine!

Human beings are by nature social animals. Because of that, much of our view of the world is influenced by the people with whom we come in contact. When our views are out of sync with the general zeitgeist, its time to assess whether that is because we have superior vision or we're interpreting events to fit a pre-determined outlook.

I have been undergoing just such an assessment of my own views lately as I feel completely out of sync with the general perception that the country is going to hell in a hand basket. While the media and Republicans continue their total freak-out about Ebola and ISIS and many Democrats feel the need to distance themselves from President Obama's "toxic" record, here's what I'm noticing:

• The unemployment rate has finally dipped below 6% and is within .04% of 5.5% - the rate which many economists consider full employment,
• We are in the midst of the longest period of private sector job growth in this country's history,
• The number of people who are uninsured is dropping - while the rise of health care costs has slowed,
• The federal deficit is less than half of what it was in 2009,
• Crime is down at the same time that the number of people in prison is decreasing,
• Over half of the U.S. population now lives in a state with marriage equality,
• Due to effective worldwide sanctions, Iran is still at the negotiating table on their development of nuclear weapons and Putin has quieted Russia's incursions into Ukraine, and
• Afghanistan has just completed its first transfer of power via elections in the country's history.

Then today I read this on a topic that is near and dear to my heart.

More U.S. high school students are staying in school, according to newly released data from the Census Bureau, as the national dropout rate reached a record low last year. Just 7% of the nation’s 18-to-24 year olds had dropped out of high school, continuing a steady decline in the nation’s dropout rate since 2000, when 12% of youth were dropouts.

The decline in the national dropout rate has been driven, in part, by substantially fewer Hispanic and black youth dropping out of school (the non-Hispanic white dropout rate has not fallen as sharply). Although Hispanics still have the highest dropout rate among all major racial and ethnic groups, it reached a record-low of 14% in 2013, compared with 32% of Hispanic 18- to 24-year-olds who were dropouts in 2000...

The dropout rate for black youth also was at a record low in 2013 (8%) and has fallen by nearly half since 2000 (15%).

As I continue to absorb this kind of news I find myself shaking my head and wondering WTF is wrong with us that we're not noticing these positive developments. I get that there's still a lot of work to do, but on almost every data point, we're making significant progress.

It seems clear to me that this country is engaging in one pretty massive freak-out. I'll let you pick your target about who/what is to blame for that. But some dank cave of the American id has certainly been tapped in to lately. All I know is that I'll just keep letting my little light shine.

If we ever needed to vote!

I don't know about you, but I sure wouldn't mind if this video went viral right about now.



Make it so :-)

Republicans take a stand against freedom

As a baby boomer, I've had a lot of conversations with my peers about the whole concept of "retirement." Many of us are questioning when to retire and what exactly retirement means. The freedom to answer those questions in a way that works best for each of us as individuals is a blessing that many who came before us weren't afforded (and too many still don't experience).

One of the ways this whole conversation has been altered is with the introduction of Obamacare. For people who are too young to be eligible for Medicare, many of us HAD to work in order to be able to afford health insurance. Both the elimination of denials for pre-existing conditions and the affordability of comprehensive coverage on the exchanges have opened up options that were not available previously.

In his debate last night with Allison Lundergan Grimes, Senator Mitch McConnell said that was a bad thing. He lied about misrepresented a CBO report saying that Obamacare would cost the country 2.5 million jobs when in actuality it said that the law will empower 2.5 million Americans to leave the workforce if they want to.

We're also hearing conservatives decry this freedom when they talk about the economy and our recovery from the Great Recession. I'll grant them this...it gets harder every day to criticize President Obama on this front. To keep up the rhetoric, they have pretty slim pickin's to choose from.

What we're seeing is that one of the only remaining refuges for complaint comes from the recent drop in the labor force participation rate. Over the last few years that number has gone from 66% to 63%. Republicans would have you believe that is totally the fault of President Obama's weak recovery. But economists will tell you that 2% of that 3-point drop is the result of the retirement of aging baby-boomers.

All of this leads me to suggest that perhaps its time for baby-boomers to ask Republicans why they have a problem with our freedom to chose when/how to retire.

Is GOP obstruction coming back to bite them in the ass?

Back in 2011, retired Republican congressional staffer Mike Lofgren wrote this:

A couple of years ago, a Republican committee staff director told me candidly (and proudly) what the method was to all this obstruction and disruption. Should Republicans succeed in obstructing the Senate from doing its job, it would further lower Congress's generic favorability rating among the American people. By sabotaging the reputation of an institution of government, the party that is programmatically against government would come out the relative winner.

It worked. According to Gallup, Congressional approval - 14% in September - is at an historic low. The media is constantly telling us about the low approval ratings for President Obama. We don't hear as much about this side of the story. Its true that the public isn't enamored with the Democrats, but the "pox on both your houses" has Speaker John Boehner's approval rating at 28% (only 46% amongst Republicans).

I would suggest that this is why, as we head into the final stretch before the 2014 midterms, Republican candidates in the deeply red states of Kansas and South Dakota are facing substantial challenges from Independent candidates. If these these candidates do well, I'd predict lots more of this kind of thing in 2016. We could be witnessing the early stages of a new party that would attract Southern Blue Dogs as well as more moderate Republicans. There have already been suggestions that if these Independents win, they might caucus separately from Republicans and Democrats in the Senate next year.

Ever since the Republicans embraced the obstruction Lofgren describes above and fanned the flames of tea party lunacy in their own ranks, many of us have wondered how all this would end. We still don't know for sure. But the Senate races in Kansas and South Dakota will tell us a lot - along with how the GOP reacts to the outcome.

A question for Glenn Greenwald

I just watched Glenn Greenwald's TED Talks video on Why Privacy Matters. In it, he spent quite a bit of time explaining that the goal of the "surveillance state" is to control the population by generating an assumption that we are being watched.

If that were the case, one has to wonder why NSA took such elaborate measures to keep their programs secret. Shouldn't they have celebrated Snowden's revelations instead? After all, how can we be controlled if we don't know we're being watched?

If I was in the mold of a Glenn Beck conspiracy theorist, I might assume that Greenwald/Snowden are really agents of the surveillance state who's job was to get the word out.

Just saying...

;-)

A hit and a miss from Senator Elizabeth Warren

I'd seriously like to support Senator Elizabeth Warren. Perhaps it would help if she didn't do things like agree to be interviewed by Thomas Frank. This is the guy who - even when he knows he's is going to be interviewing its creator - gets confused about the name of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) because all his mind seems capable of comprehending is the "betrayal" of Obama/Holder for not prosecuting enough banks. So you know right away where this interview is going to go.

Initially, Senator Warren makes a very important point when it comes to things like the CFPB.

...the consumer agency is structural change. So basically, the premise behind it was that there were plenty of federal laws out there, but no agency would step up and enforce them...

And so the idea behind the consumer agency was to say: structural change. We need an agency that has one and only one goal, and that is to look out for American families. To level the playing field, to make sure that people are not getting tricked and trapped on these financial instruments. And so it was a big shift, and it’s a shift worth thinking about.

But then when Frank presses her about the lack of Wall Street prosecutions, she says something that is remarkably ignorant.

They [the Obama administration] protected Wall Street. Not families who were losing their homes. Not people who lost their jobs. Not young people who were struggling to get an education. And it happened over and over and over.

I honestly believe that Senator Warren is a smart person. So I have no idea why she would say something like that. Did she not notice that President Obama implemented other structural changes to financial institutions via Dodd/Frank that most of Wall Street hates? Even naysayers like Paul Krugman have had to acknowledge that it has been more effective than they originally thought.

Did Senator Warren not notice the structural changes to student loans that President Obama got passed back in 2010? Or the fact that he endorsed her bill that includes further reforms?

And how about the structural changes Obamacare has made to the number one reason Americans file for bankruptcy - medical bills?

The one thing the Obama administration didn't do was pillory banks and financial institutions during a time when the country was careening towards a second great depression. That should result in one big "Duh!" from anyone with a modicum of intelligence.

I'm growing increasingly weary of this notion that in order to be one of the "kewl kids," one must ignorantly criticize President Obama. Senator Warren would get my unqualified support if she would abandon that nonsense.

What happened to the great Republican wave?

For months pundits have been declaring that the 2014 midterms would bring on a great Republican wave. The ingredients that would lead to that outcome included things that were baked into this particular election (several Senate Democrats up for re-election in red states combined with traditionally low turnout for Democrats in midterms) as well as some assumptions about:

1. President Obama's approval numbers tanking
2. Obamacare being a disaster for Democrats
3. Scandal-mania (Benghazi, IRS, etc)

The most obvious place to observe this great wave was going to be in Senate races where it was assumed that Republicans would gain a significant majority based in part on them ousting Democratic incumbents in places like New Hampshire and North Carolina.

We should all be noticing by now that - regardless of the outcome of the Senate majority - it is increasingly unlikely that we'll see a Republican wave. In terms of Senate races, Republicans will probably win in deeply red states like Georgia, Louisiana and Arkansas. But they won't be picking up seats in NH or NC. And they just might lose in Kansas. The real contests at this point are in swing states like Colorado and Iowa. No wave in sight. 

Of course we're not seeing many pundits declare the death of the Republican wave. After the election, everyone will scramble to explain how the results favor their side or validate their predictions. But I find at least a hint of recognition about this change from Stu Rothenberg - who just a month ago predicted that Republicans would gain 7 Senate seats. Yesterday he hedged his bets by writing: What if I'm wrong about GOP flipping at least 7 seats? That's as good of a mea culpa as you're going to get from guys like Rothenberg.

And so, when it comes to the great Republican wave of 2014...time to wave goodbye :-)