Elias Isquith

If you all would forgive me for a little self-promotion,  The New Inquiry has just published an essay by yours truly about the political economy of coal in Kentucky. Continue reading this post…

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Well, it’s about time we had ourselves a good old fashioned front-page food fight! Things have been entirely too calm and placid hereabouts — at least on the surface. (We all know comment threads are eternal, churning whirlpools of rancor and discontent.) So let’s do this thing and see what we can make from Mark’s recent post, a post that a Huffington Post editor would likely say SLAMMED yours truly and various other lefty talkalots for overwrought criticism of Mayor Booker.

Skipping over the intro — which I must say is something of a masterpiece of libertarian harrumphing — Mark’s main point seems to be the following. Er, well, that is, it’s the opposite of the following, since it’s written in a style that has me wondering if, by the time he was finished, Mark’s tongue had left a gash in his cheek like Ed Norton’s at the end of Fight Club. Anyway… [Continued at Jubilee]

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Newark Mayor Cory Booker has been on something of a permanent honey moon with the Democratic Left — the apotheosis of which was his foray into firefighting — but that now seems to be over.  He had to go and ruin it all on Meet the Press this morning, saying something centrist, like calling the Obama campaign’s anti-Bain Capital ads “nauseating to the American public.”… [Continued at Jubilee]

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Responding to Mitt Romney’s newly unveiled national ad for the general election, Jamelle Bouie writes:

I imagine that the ad will serve its purpose. If you—like most people—haven’t been paying attention to politics over the last year, you would think that President Obama has purposefully kept jobs from the United States, raised taxes on “job creators,” and passed a terrible, ineffective health care bill…

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A bit of yesterday’s news, but I’d like to talk about this article from National Journal‘s Alex Roarty on voter expectation and November’s election.

Roarty highlights a CNN poll that finds a substantial majority of voters expecting to see the Obamas in the White House until 2017. Maybe not especially surprising, if we take into account that most incumbents win reelection (though whether voters know this is doubtful), but what’s striking is just how few think they’ll be seeing Mitt Romney’s mug in their local post office next year… [Continued at Jubilee]

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The Irony Of Mitt Romney, Wingnut

by Elias Isquith May 16, 2012
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It took several months and a rogue barracuda, but by the end of the 2008 campaign, John McCain’s reputation for being a “maverick” with centrist leanings was dead as the moose in the Palin living room. There was always more than a little myth behind the McCain-as-maverick story — excepting those moments when he sought to needle George W. Bush, the Arizona Senator was, on the whole, always quite rightwing  — but whatever vestiges of goodwill his apostasy had earned ...

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When $2 Billion Is Not Enough

by Elias Isquith May 15, 2012
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In the wake of JPMorgan Chase’s $2 billion mistake, you’d think Washington would be paying closer attention to see whether this is a sign that Dodd-Frank, not yet fully implemented, is already proving to be insufficiently restrictive of risky behavior.  The bank’s gargantuan loss, after all, was the result of bet-hedging with depositor money — a practice that a robust version of the Volcker Rule would ban. But because the version of the Volcker Rule passed by Congress was far ...

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Man Of Steel

by Elias Isquith May 14, 2012
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Responding to the Obama campaign’s latest anti-Romney ad, “Steel,” which focuses on a steel company bought and closed under the management of Mitt Romney’s Bain Capital, The Atlantic‘s David A. Graham sees evidence that Team Obama is not only willingly redirecting the conversation toward the economy — after a week-long foray into same-sex marriage — but is doing so in an effort to cast Romney as the villain protagonist ofAmerica’s post-industrial story. Graham sees the commercial’s intended subtext to be: “Romney ...

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Inequality And Same-Sex Marriage

by Elias Isquith May 11, 2012
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The rise of inequality in the United States — and the West, generally — over the past 30 years has led to a lot of changes in both our culture and politics. A lot of these changes have been for the worse. But I think the President’s recent public endorsement of same-sex marriage (SSM) stands, alongside last year’s legalization of SSM in New York, as a rare example of a positive development that may never have occurred, were wealth in ...

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On The Origin Of Barack Obama And Same-Sex Marriage

by Elias Isquith May 9, 2012
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Update: Well, consider this post as something of an explanation for this. [Note: There's a chance that this post is imminently going to become OBE, but what the Hell…] I don’t think anyone in their right mind who has paid any attention to his career believes that the President is opposed to same-sex marriage (SSM). His famous claim to be “evolving” on the issue has been rightly and thoroughly mocked by both the Left and the Right, both for its cravenness ...

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Big Time Democratic Donors To Get Out Their Wallets

by Elias Isquith May 9, 2012
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Everyone knows that an unfathomably large sum of money will be spent this year in service of either Obama or Romney. Romney’s official campaign has raised just shy of $100 million, and he’s got about 10% of that still on-hand. Obama’s raised a whopping $191 million thus far, of which he’s spent about $90 million. But, of course, the reason there’s been so much focus on spending for 2012 has little to do with the campaign fundraising apparatuses, proper. Citizens ...

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Joe Biden Says Innocuous Thing, Rightwing Media Flips Out

by Elias Isquith May 8, 2012
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Oh, Lord, steel me for the next 6 months. Here’s what Vice President Biden said today to a bunch of Rabbis, defending the Obama Administration’s efforts to cease Tehran’s alleged march toward building a nuclear weapon… [Continued at Jubilee]

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The Real Debate Over What Is To Be Done

by Elias Isquith May 7, 2012
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Ed Kilgore makes an argument I haven’t heard before, one in service of swatting down some liberal convention wisdom. And, in a roundabout way, his post helps explain why I write so much more about the Left than I do the Right. Kilgore’s target on this one is the oft-repeated truism that as the Republican Party has moved to the right, it’s dragged the center — and Democrats — along with it. Usually you hear this in the context of ...

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Ed Conard And Crackpot Economics

by Elias Isquith May 5, 2012

David Frum asks Nick Hanauer, an early investor in Amazon as well as other successful tech enterprises, what he thinks of Ed Conard’s theory that the investors among the .01% are the indispensable risk-takers that fuel the American economy. As it turns out, not much: Risk-taking? These guys aren’t risk-takers. Think of the founders of Google. They came from middle-class families and went to Stanford. Short of inheriting the crown of England, there’s nobody in this life less exposed to risk ...

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The Talented Mr. Conard

by Elias Isquith May 3, 2012
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Ed Conard is a very wealthy man. Hundreds of millions. He’s also a former executive at Bain Capital, Mitt Romney’s old haunt. The two are friends to this day. (In fact, you may recall a short-lived and minor scandal involving a dummy company donating $1 million dollars to Romney’s Super PAC — that was Conard.) Conard’s, now retired from Bain and private equity in general, is also an aspiring public intellectual. He’s got a book coming out soon, a strident defense ...

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On Obama’s Afghanistan Speech

by Elias Isquith May 2, 2012
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I thought the President’s speech last night was interesting, especially for an address just shy of 11 minutes long. The basics: Obama declared victory in Afghanistan (basis: wanting) and promised to soon take the United States’ ball and go home. (Of course, when you wage covert war, home is where the drone strike target is.) And he did so on the one-year anniversary of the death of Osama bin Laden, validating those who believed that one of the primary reasons ...

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Richard Grenell, We Hardly Knew Ye

by Elias Isquith May 1, 2012
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Steve Benen weighs in on the recent (utterly inside baseball) news that, due to his stubborn unwillingness to not be gay, Richard Grenell has lost the privilege of being Mitt Romney’s foreign policy spokesman: The larger significance of this is what it tells us about Romney’s relative weakness in the face of pressure from his base. The former governor hired a qualified former Bush administration official; the right said gay people are bad people; so Romney quickly accepted his own ...

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Occupy May Day: Strike Today, Legislate Tomorrow?

by Elias Isquith May 1, 2012
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It’s May Day, a day that’s long been circled in many an Occupiers’ calendar as a hopeful starting date for part two of the Occupy movement. The Guardian has got a continuously updated blog, covering the protests in New York City and throughout the country (and to a lesser extent the world). So far there doesn’t seem to have been any big congregations of protestors or altercations between protestors and police; and I can attest that, at least as far as ...

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The Politics Of Envy

by Elias Isquith April 30, 2012
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Have you noticed the strain of contemporary right-wing thinking in which the speaker purports to be advocating something egalitarian in nature, but is actually using envy to fuel even greater inequality? It’s a slightly more sophisticated version of the “We must repeal Obamacare in order to save our children” line. When done correctly, it’s really an impressive move — the kind of trick the word “sophistry” only begins to describe. And if you haven’t seen it done yet, you will ...

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First Quarter 2012 GDP At 2.2%

by Elias Isquith April 27, 2012
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News on the economy today and it’s looking increasingly like the happy surprises which characterized the end of 2011 and the beginning of 2012 were  aberrations.

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Forget About Undecided Voters

by Elias Isquith April 26, 2012
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Credit where it’s due — this, from the Weekly Standard‘s Jay Cost, is on-the-money: I would say that 90 percent of the vote is pretty well set. And this is the biggest reason that I am skeptical of these predictive models — they usually fail to account for the fact that there were simply more gettable voters for Ike in 1956, LBJ in 1964, Nixon in 1972, or even Reagan in 1984. They assume that a president today can still win ...

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