Declaration of Victory

In Georgia, politics will no longer be decided along partisan, political party lines. Instead, all decisions will be made based on intraparty politics.



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Why Redistricting Matters

Georgia was a de facto one party state. Now they're a de jure one party state.



2023. At least a few people realize what's going on here.



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More Reality With That?

There are still a lot of folks who aren unwilling to accept the reality presented by the loss of the Wisconsin recall effort. I know it is a lot of reality to accept, and it isn't the reality that was thought to exist before the polls closed. But you can take your medicine now and start figuring out how to do things differently, or you can hold fast and keep losing.



Here are six things the Wisconsin votes showed us, the most important of which is that unions, under their current SOP, are finished as a major political force in this country.



As I've been telling people, union-busting, defund public education Republicans hold the government of Wisconsin. They took them in general elections, and survived a mulligan set of special recall elections in which the full force of union political power and money was brought to bear. Again, in Wisconsin.



You don't get more game-set-match than that.



Time to reinvent the wheel.



(HT: Andrew Sullivan)



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National Repercussions

The focus of Peach Pundit is on Georgia state politics, so when the politics of other states show up on the front page, it is generally for a purpose. Here's their thoughts on the Wisconsin recall elections, and if you were looking for a quick summary of what those elections meant, you won't find it put more succinctly:

The election results will likely embolden Washington conservatives to stand their ground in upcoming budget debates.

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Imagine the crushing effect that a Wisconsin Democratic takeover victory would have had on state-level conservative reformers across the country. After all, our state governments are often the place where new ideas are incubated and then carried to Washington.

I added emphasis to that last part, because that statement by itself is of vital importance to understand why Democrats, Liberals, and Progressives continue to lose elections as well as policy and political questions. The GOP has gone after the states first, have built up their party organization, and have no end of ideas or candidates to bring off the bench into the national spotlight. Those ideas and candidates almost always have a support structure, press, and political review ready when they debut. Not only that, but they already have some idea what opposition to expect and how best to counter or discredit that opposition.



It didn't take long before another Peach Pundit front-pager chimed in:

Republicans are quick to note that Democrats just spent an amount that could run three competitive U.S. Senate races and their result was to pick off two State Senators, one with serious personal baggage. Moreover, they point to the fact that national union interests flooded a major union state with cash and workers, only to have the majority of Republican reformers affirmed by voters.

It isn't just Republicans who should note this dynamic. As I said before, the DLP needed to win or tie the Wisconsin recall elections. They did not. If DLP's can lose to Republicans in Wisconsin over the issue of union-busting and defunding public education, the rout is officially on: in 2012, expect the GOP to add to their number of state legislators, to bolster their majority in the US House of Representatives, to gain the majority in the US Senate, and probably oust the incumbent President of the United States.



And that's just national politics; as far as unions go, this election consigns their current political clout to the dustbin. They are finished under their current operating model. Their two options now is to deny that reality and continue losing competitive elections by inches or come up with a new way of organizing, adding value for their membership, and marketing themselves poltically.



Kyle Wingfield at the AJC puts it more succinctly:

Republicans held onto four of the six — and thus a one-seat majority in the Senate — by an average of 6 percentage points. The cumulative vote was 53 percent to 47 percent in the GOP’s favor.

A union-busting, defund public education GOP in Wisconsin.



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Southern Strategy Endgame

Why won't the Democratic Party regain the US House of Representatives for the next 12 years (at least)? For the same reason the Democratic Party is going to permanently lose Georgia State Senate and House seats in this round of reapportionment. Georgia House Minority Leader Stacy Abrams puts it this way:

They accomplished this by purging the state of Georgia of white Democrats.

Maybe Representative Abrams needs to get together with the Democratic Party of Wisconsin, and together they can tell the rest of the Professional Democratic, Liberal, and Progressive side of the aisle why they keep losing policy and political issues to the other side.



HT: Peach Pundit.



Of course, it would be par for the course for Republicans to point out that this kind of thing is A) the same thing Democratic officials did to the GOP for two generations, and B) that this is simply the logical result of the Voting Rights Act. < / Rolling Eyes >



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Truth About Blight

Owen Courreges at the Uptown Messenger examines some of the legal hurdles to addressing blight in New Orleans.



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Twelve Years

The next time the Democratic Party is able to name a Speaker of the US House of Representitives will be in 2023 at the earliest. Thus are the results of abandoning state parties and allowing the GOP to manage the congressional redistricting process in a majority of the United States.

And remember, that 2023 number is at the earliest. That's if the Democrats figure out right now the importance of reasonable districts, make that an issue with voters, and deliver on those promises. I don't expect that to happen.

Unfortunately, there are too many national Democratic representatives who like consolidating likely Democratic voters in their own districts and protecting their own job security. They will continue to allow the more numerous GOP to draw Democratic voters out of the more numerous Republican districts. While they will keep thier jobs (for a time) their actions effectively kneecap any chance Democrats have to put some of those other districts into play in general elections.

This is why I laugh at those Democrats, Liberals, and Progressives who are gnashing their teeth over Obama's "surrender" on the debt ceiling. The President is a pragmatist, a realist, and got the best deal he was able to get out of an undefeatable, stark raving mad Republican and Tea Party controlled Congress. And the reason he has to make deals like that is because too many of his party's House caucus surrendered the states to the GOP years ago.

That's why next year's "Mediscare" campaign isn't going to swing control of the Congress. And if that doesn't work, the Dems are out of political options. If voters in the majority of Congressional districts don't like their incumbent, they're going to choose another Republican in the Primary.

And what's really going to bake your noodle is the effect this will have on Senate and Presidential elections. The greatest voter turnout occurs when voters believe they have a form of agency, and that their vote matters. If Democratic voters live in a GOP district, and there is no credible Dem challenger, they are less likely to go to the polls and pull the lever for other offices. It may not make much of a difference, but in a country as evenly divided as this one, it could make all the difference.

I read an article the other day that was as much science-fiction as it was political. It was about Nancy Pelosi plotting her return to the Speaker's chair. I wonder if she realizes she'll likely have to serve in Congress for 20 more years before she even sniffs another chance. My money says Pelosi, Hoyer, and Clyburn will be retired Congress long before the next time the Dems choose a Speaker.

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Caylee's Law?

Get ready for the cable-news-personality-driven push to enact "Caylee's Law" all over the country. They're entertaining one in the State of Georgia, and the usually diverse commentary at Peach Pundit presented a nearly united front against.

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Race to the Bottom?

MOAR SOUTHERNERZ BE TAKING URR JOABS!!!

Georgia gets ready to make a bid for the North American Audi manufacturing plant. While this might be exciting that more manufacturing is taking place in the Deep South, I despise the fact that the main discussion centers around which states will offer the most robust subsidies for these industries. According to the article, Georgia offered Kia $400M in breaks, and Tennessee offered Volkswagen $500M.

Yes, I realize that these are subsidies that include tax exemptions for taxes that wouldn't exist if the plant was built somewhere else. Hell, as a Southern Liberal, I'm all about using strategic subsidies to encourage development where appropriate. It just chaps me that people may not realize just how much of the store the state gives away to land these developments, and I definitely want the dialouge to be more honest.

People need to know, after all, how much the state is making off such a robust investment. People also need to know how this sort of thing plays with the "small government" narrative. Such expenditures are often labeled as "pork" or "bailouts" when a less politically-savvy political party makes deals of this kind.

Of course, I am glad to be proven completely correct about the root cause for the Seattle vs. South Carolina Boeing dust-up. It is all about the subsidies, baby.

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Too Big for a Nation

And too small for an insane asylum. I like Governor Brown's response to the proposal to create the state of South California: if you don't like it, there's always Arizona.

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The Hayride Went Down to Georgia

Georgians are experiencing a trust problem that starts in the governor's office. Sound like any governments we know?

It says a lot that folks in Georgia are asking Deal to listen to Bobby Jindal's advice.

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Everybody's Doing It

Gerrymandering, I mean redistricting, is going on across the country. You'll notice how little the actual opinions of the voters comes into play in this analysis. The only time that matters is if the voters get angry at blatant redistricting overreach. Everything else makes it sound like a bunch of horse tradin'.

And, no, I still don't think Democrats will win control of Congress for the next decade, precisely for this reason.

(HT: Peach Pundit.)

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Why We Can't Have Nice Things

Mayor Landrieu makes the case for building the University Medical Center in New Olreans. This is a response to those who would seek to take the knees out from under the project and benefit their special interests under the cloak of "fiscal conservatism." All at the last minute, once an entire neighborhood has been destroyed and families have been uprooted.

In the larger context, Landrieu's rebuttal exposes the way individuals who play "conservative" on television willingly misrepresent tax figures as a means of providing for their own pork projects and protecting their own clients' subsidies.

For those of you who live in more progress-prone parts of the nation, you may be scratching your head wondering why this has been so difficult for New Orleans. Jeffery puts it in local context:

Ever content to remain the richest club in a poor and shrinking city, New Orleans' socialites resist any and every effort to grow the economy. They dress this conservative agenda up as "preservation" but it's better described as ossification. What gets "preserved" are old buildings, staid pageantry, anything that might make easy packaging for a hotelier or a filmmaker to sell.

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How Not to Build Stuff

Maybe they should have thought of this, or something like it BEFORE they declared imminent domain and bulldozed the neighborhood that existed there before. You want to talk about government waste?

Step 1: Your city has a teaching hospital run by the public state university that treats a high volume of at-risk patients. The system has big problems, but the building is solid and would be viable given some serious renovations.

Step 2: Man-made disaster seriously damages the teaching hospital.

Step 3: Agents of the government attempt to repair the teaching hospital. It is a hospital in the middle of a disaster area. Such facilities tend to be useful.

Step 4: Agents of the public state university allegedly stop repairs and close the teaching hospital. They want to declare the old hospital a loss, collect insurance money, collect national disaster money and build a new teaching hospital.

Step 5A: Powers that be know where they would put a new hospital. Friends, family, and connections begin buying cheap land in and around that area. These properties are left to moulder because they'll all get torn down when the new teaching hospital gets built.

Step 5B: Regular citizens who live in that area move back into their homes, and use what little insurance and government disaster aid they can apply for to renovate their homes. They aren't informed by the powers that be that all of their properties will be seized by imminent domain and torn down to make way for a new teaching hospital.

Step 6: Argue in public over the option to renovate the old teaching hospital (for $600 million) or build a new teaching hospital (for $1.2 billion). Ignore homeowners and businesses and other government agencies who have sunk money into properties that will be demolished. Let several years go by without much action, because who really needs a public hospital in the middle of a disaster area to serve at-risk populations?

Step 7: Convince the US Department of Veterans Affairs that the new teaching hospital is a done deal, and that they should start building their new hospital nearby.

Step 8: Convince developers and investors that the new teaching hospital is a done deal, and that they should start building new retail and residential use facilities as if the new hospital is guaranteed to be built.

(Seriously, I have a friend in another city, and some NOLA booster organization gave them a sales pitch that this hospital would be ready to open this fall or winter, with 5,000 new professional jobs coming to town.)

Step 9: Win the argument despite divisive local opionion and viable, cheaper alternatives. A Shiny New Hospital Will Be Built! Begin declaring eminent domain and bulldozing buildings. Move a few historical buildings to shut up the most agitating homeowners and preservationists. Clear dozens of city blocks of structures.

Step 10: Have state and federal officials representing competing intereststs attempt to derail the project at the last minute under the name of hostage taking fiscal conservatism.

Because if you think anything above describes fiscal conservatism (or fiscal liberalism, for that matter) you watch too much cable network news and don't understand the definition.

As a whole, words just fail.

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"Resegregating the South"

Cynthia Tucker at the AJC reexamines the unintended consequences of the Voting Rights Act of 1984. She starts with a mea culpa and then blisters the effect gerrymandering redistricting has had on our nation as a whole, and particularly the South.

And if it is to change, we will need many voices ready to overcome the racially-based demoagougery we are sure to hear from the left. Especially the machine politicians who benefit the most directly from turning majority-minority districts into personal fiefdoms.

If black voters think they have made substantial gains simply by having more black representatives in Congress, they’re wrong. They’d have more influence if they were spread through several legislative districts, forcing more candidates to court them.

I'm glad to hear someone saying it. Y'all what has been going on is bad for everyone. We need more demographically balanced districts all over the country, and we will need them if we ever, ever hope to rationally address the problems this nation is facing.

Case and point: Louisiana just got some new Congressional districts. Take a moment and look at the map. See if you can guess which one is specifically drawn to concentrate as many minority voters as possible.

Then look at the demographics. For a state that is one-third African-American, African-Americans have a voice in only one-sixth of the state's Congressional delegation.

Unintended consequences don't begin to cover it.

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House of Cards

Here's a cautionary tale if there ever was one.

You want to know how Georgia's economy fell apart, read it. That kind of development situation, replicated over and over again - maybe not to scale - combined to crush the state's banks. Though not every situation was big enough to thoroughly derail the Jekyll Island redevelopment.

You'll also notice the absence of federal government culpability, so loudly touted as a way to explain the economic collapse. Instead, this is a story of a previously successful private developer borrowing hundreds of millions from banks while recieving tax breaks from the state government specifically to inflate the prices of real estate oversupply.

The collateral for the loans? Real estate oversupply with inflated prices.

I'd also like to point out how the state government (dominated by the GOP) directly subsidized the already wealthy development company to the point where the state would be losing money on the deal.

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4th Amendment?

What 4th Amendment?

The case ultimately reached the Indiana Supreme Court, which ruled last week that current "public policy" is not conducive to resisting entry because civil protections have arisen to mitigate the threats of pre-industrial prison life -- threats like indefinite detention, violence or disease from unclean, overcrowded facilities.

The court reasoned that since those things are no longer of concern (even though they are), Indiana should not permit citizens to resist unlawful police entry, which they saw as having the potential to cause an escalation of violence toward officers.

The decision (PDF).

This reminds me of Arizona's Jan Crow laws - where police are able to stop anyone anytime and demand to see their papers proof of United States citizenship.

So now police in some of the several states have the ability to check someone's identification (and prove some cause later) and to enter someone's home without a warrant (and prove some cause later). Which isn't terribly different from what came before, but now has explicit legal allowance to do so. Why is it so difficult for some individuals to envision the intended and unintended consequences of such allowances?

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Streetcars & Cash Money

Owen Courreges at Uptown Messenger seems to think New Orleans is making unsound financial sense and living in the past by building new streetcars.

He uses Houston, TX as an example of how investing in light rail hasn't made a return on investment. Since folks who live in New Orleans seem almost contractually obligated to compare NOLA's decision making processes to those in Houston or Atlanta, I'll go with the devil I know and bring up the ATL. Here's part of my comment:

But when it comes to the capital costs of building and maintaining roads vs. streetcar lines, let us not kid ourselves – the fantasy land cost-benefit analyses come into play with roads.

Y’all may not be used to it in New Orleans, but I come from a place where no one ever saw a road project they didn’t like. In this land of massive concrete projects the pitiance of the gasoline tax doesn’t make a dent in the DOT budget – when a gasoline tax exists at all.

As far as streetcars are concerned, they will really provide the return on investment when gasoline runs up over $5 per gallon, and people are looking for alternatives.

Mass transit ridership increased 14% even in auto centric Atlanta the last time gas was over $4 a gallon. As prices continue to rise due to increased demand, you can expect more folks to ride transit, and buses to cost more.

You can also expect the politicians, fearing voter backlash over high gasoline prices, to gut road and transportation budgets as they fall over themselves lowering gas taxes so they can appear to be doing something about a problem they cannot control.

We can invest now and benefit, or we can invest later when it costs far more to do so.

You know what transportation budgets are often first to see the axe? Mass transit. You know what happens when you cut access to mass transit? Low ridership and less return on investment. The thing I don't understand is cutting back on transit precisely at the time it is needed most by American commuters.


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Small Government at Work

You know why I don't trust the "Small Government" concept of political management? Contractors. If you operate on the premise that you can "run government like a business" and that "government can't manage things correctly," then it makes sense that one of the ways you deliver public services to the community is to set out a bid for a contract, and go with the lowest bidder for the services.

On its face, this appears to shrink the government and save the taxpayers money.

In practice, however, it leads to nonsense like New Orleans' traffic camera fiasco.*

In this case, an external entity has convinced a government officials to purchase their services in an effort to raise revenue for the government budget under the guise of increasing safety. This is an incredibly unpopular program that would likely be voted down if offered up on a referendum, and has been the subject of many lawsuits. To legally administer the program while protecting the city from litigation raised by the program requires measures that have led to the suspensions of high level police officials who were part of the "clean up corruption" regime.

This happens because the program is ripe for corruption, and even the most above-board administration appears dirty when you've got this much money made from a low political risk program that delivers nearly unchallengeable verdicts regarding an almost indefensible crime. (Disclaimer: I've been caught by one of these cameras.)

My problem is that the city shouldn't be making money in this way, and shouldn't be depending on revenue generated. As Mark points out:

Even if you buy into the idea that the cameras are more about safety than revenues, it still doesn’t make sense for a city to rely on revenues from scofflaws. If the cameras DO actually change driving behavior, as proponents suggest, then these traffic camera revenues will decline over time anyway, as people drive more safely. That creates an incentive for the city to install ever more cameras to overcome the decline in ticket funds.

If the program's big proponents are defending it because the city will lose money if it is terminated, then you see the only reason we have this program. And it ain't public safety. It is about a snake-oil solution to a problem no one wants to face politically.

The better idea, it seems to me, is for this city to fix its incredible revenue problems as well as the city's unbelievable spending problems. Because, like most governments, this city has both problems in abundance.

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* Which is not to be confused with the non-revenue generating New Orleans crime camera fiasco. That wasn't about public safety, either.

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More Feudalism

Which, as Jay Bookman points out, should not be confused with "conservatism." With "conservatism" and the "free market," the consumers chose where to spend their dollars, and the government provides the infrastructure necessary for markets to exist.

But we don't have that anymore (if we ever really had it). In our current feudal state, the government - often those run by the GOP - choses where to spend both tax dollars and consumer dollars. That way, the Lords and Ladies of well-connected industry are sure to recieve returns on their modest investments in the form of profits that are taxed less and less, regardless of how their ventures actually perform. They even benefit from consumers who never patronize their business.

Not to say that subsidies and tax breaks aren't sometimes necessary to encourage economic development, but things have gotten quite absurd.

The GOP is very lucky that most Democrats also appear to have confused the terms "conservative" and "free-market" with "feudalism" (those both for and against it). If that dynamic ever changed, the GOP would get blown out of the polls based on economic policy alone, because they no longer represent economic conservatism.

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