Shark!

Why did Russ Feingold lose to an inarticulate dolt with no ability to articulate his policy preferences? Sharks, that's why.

Voters have great difficulty judging which aspects of their own and the country’s well-being are the responsibility of elected leaders and which are not. In the summer of 1916, for example, a dramatic weeklong series of shark attacks along New Jersey beaches left four people dead. Tourists fled, leaving some resorts with 75 percent vacancy rates in the midst of their high season. Letters poured into congressional offices demanding federal action; but what action would be effective in such circumstances? Voters probably didn’t know, but neither did they care. When President Woodrow Wilson—a former governor of New Jersey with strong local ties—ran for reelection a few months later, he was punished at the polls, losing as much as 10 percent of his expected vote in towns where shark attacks had occurred.

New Jersey voters’ reaction to shark attacks was dramatic, but hardly anomalous.

This time, of course, the sharks' bite was 30 years of failed neo-Liberal, Reganite, Thatcherite, and Libertarian policies.  Which is to say, stuff over which Feingold had less control that Wilson did sharks.

The idiotic sharks attack therefore I won't vote for the incumbent dynamic explains why this dust up between Glenn Greenwald and Larry ODonnell is so embarrassing for  O'Donnell; he, after all, blamed policies when its was sharks.

How Russ Got His Groove Back

For any number of decades now, manufacturers and accountants have been shipping jobs overseas because it makes short term economic sense.  Ron Johnson touts his manufacturing and accountancy bona fides as reason to vote for him as Wisconsin's, a state that benefited from immigration as great naturalized American citizen and proud Wisconsonian Carl Schurz[1]recognized some time ago, next Senator.  Russ Feingold points out that Johnson is full of hooey:




And as by the way, "creative destruction" is Joseph Schumpeter's notion of the

opening up of new markets, foreign or domestic, and the organizational development from the craft shop and factory to such concerns as U.S. Steel illustrate the same process of industrial mutation–if I may use that biological term–that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one. This process of Creative Destruction is the essential fact about capitalism.

There is no sense of moral or socially beneficial change but rather the iron necessity of change for change's sake. Creative destruction is a fact of the matter only so far as one is concerned with profit and exploitation.

[1] His memoirs are really worth reading.

Liberalism Makes a Comeback

As this post shows workers are going to be better off with Obamacare than they are now with the crappy insurance extended them by their benevolent overlords.  Today, it seems, Russ Feingold, who is running for Senate in the fall color behued state of Wisconsin, decided to tout his support for this major and important reform.

Meanwhile

Johnson says he entered the race solely because of his anger over the health care bill. In his appearances and speeches, Johnson rarely misses a chance to call the law "the greatest assault on our freedom in my lifetime."

He wants it repealed and, if elected, it's high on his to-do list.

Repealing the tyranny affordable health insurance is high the list of things our manufacturer and accountant hates, like the crazies with their global warming and "science," because all Americans, regardless of income, ought to enjoy equally their natural born freedom to . . .  What exactly? Not only sleep under the same bridges but to not get timely access to competent health professionals?