Sen. DeMint's mistaken statements about Hitler's Germany

Dear Jim DeMint:

The following is a recent quote you made regarding German history:

Part of what we’re trying to do in “Saving Freedom” is just show that where we are, we’re about where Germany was before World War II where they became a social democracy.

Given your interest in the subject, I'm sure you'll appreciate this brief lesson.

In 1933, after the parliamentary building burned down under suspicious circumstances, the German Reichstag formalized Adolf Hitler's totalitarian rule as the Führer by passing the Ermächtigungsgesetz, or Enabling Act. The law was an amazing relinquishment of authority by an elected body and it has since become the foremost example of failed democracy.

What was most disturbing was that Hitler's party, the national socialists or "Nazis," held only 45% of the Reichstag's seats. The rest of the seats were held by a collection of smaller parties with varying political views. Nonetheless, every single party voted to abandon their mandates to Hitler's tyranny, with the exception of just one.

Who were these brave souls, who stood firm in their defense of democratic legitimacy and whose leader, Otto Wels, used his last speech in a free Germany to welcome people being "repressed and oppressed" by the nascent regime?

The Social Democrats.

I don't mean to be nitpicky, Senator, but it's just that history is a stubborn thing...

Signed,
Packherd

P.s.: No Communists voted against the Enabling Act because all the Communists had already been imprisoned or murdered by the Nazis.

The Obama Eight: CA-48

Cross posted @ DailyKos

Special thanks to Laine for putting this post together. (This is the second time he's helped me get the job done.) Hat tip to you, sir!


Let's take a drive down that ol' 405...

GOP incumbent: John Campbell

Registration:
Dem : 29%
GOP : 45%
DTS : 22%

Obama's performance (margin / vote):
+0.75% / 49.3%

2008 results
Steve Young : 40.6%
Campbell : 55.7%
Patterson : 3.7%

The CD's "flipability" rating is -16, which measures the disparity between voters' actual voting behavior in 2008 at the top of the ticket versus their party identity. (This puts CA-48 at the far bottom of the Obama Eight in terms of flipability, contrasting, for example, CA-26 and its flipability of +4.) Now let's dig deeper.

The Congressman

The Representative for CA-48 is John Bayard Taylor Campbell III. This guy is Mr. Los Angeles and Mr. corporate conservative credentials. He went to the LA-area prep school Harvard Westlake, UCLA for a BA in Economics, USC for a Masters in Business Taxation, went to work for the accounting firm Ernst & Young, and then ran Saturn, Saab and other dealers in OC.

Campbell's political career got started in 2000, when he ran for an open State Assembly seat and won. In 2004, he moved over to run for an open State Senate seat and again won. In 2005, the CA-48 seat opened up when Chris Cox resigned to become Chairman of the SEC under George Bush. (Apparently, CA-48 has a penchant for sending business / econ wonks to Congress.) In the special election, Campbell took 45.5% of the vote, the highest total, but short of the 50% plus one needed to avoid a runoff. He won with 44.4% in the December 6, 2005 runoff election, beating out Democrat Steve Young's 28% showing, and American Independent Party candidate Jim Gilchrist's 25.1% showing.

In 2006, Campbell ran for reelection to his first full term.He again faced Democratic challenger Steve Young, beating him by 23 points. In 2008, with Obama taking the District, Campbell faced Steve Young for a third time, and beating him resoundingly for a third time. Campbell's numbers slipped just a bit, and Young's numbers increased slightly, but it was still a decisive win for Campbell at 55.7% to 40.6%.

Wikipedia advises:

Congressman Campbell hosts an annual fundraiser named Mai-Tai’s and Mark-Ups on the Wednesday after Memorial Day at Crystal Cove State Park. It is unknown how the party came to be named but it is believed to be indicative of the congressman's legislative process.

But don't think for a second Campbell is your feel-good type of Republican. He's a die hard liberal economic Repub, famous (apparently) for giving out copies of Ayn Rand to departing interns:

Rep. John Campbell (R-Calif.), who gives his departing interns copies of Ayn Rand's novel Atlas Shrugged, told me today that the response to President Obama's economic policies reminded him of what happened in the 51-year-old novel. "People are starting to feel like we're living through the scenario that happened in Atlas Shrugged, said Campbell. "The achievers, the people who create all the things that benefit rest of us, are going on strike. I'm seeing, at a small level, a kind of protest from the people who create jobs, the people who create wealth, who are pulling back from their ambitions because they see how they'll be punished for them."

The Dems:

It's certainly possible that Steve Young will choose to face Campbell for a fourth time. Young has been increasing his share of the vote with each election, edging up to 40.6% with the Obama coattails in 2008. But the big news of the last several months was the entry into the Democratic field by Beth Krom, Mayor of Irvine, with a population of over 200,000 and by far the largest city in CA-48. Blogs up and down California have been thrilled at the prospect of running a hardened candidate against Campbell, with real campaigning experience and a fundraising base. The local blog OC Progressive praised Krom:

She can win elections. Beth Krom has won five campaigns, In 2006, she garnered 60% of the vote in her re-election as Mayor and in 2008, won her current City Council seat with 8000 votes more than the next candidate.

And there's data to back up the enthusiasm:

Krom outraised Campbell in the first quarter of the year, and is telling fellow Democrats she wants to have $250,000 by midyear and $1 million by the year's end.... In the first quarter of this year, Krom raised $63,370 to Campbell's $54,500. However, Krom was just starting her campaign account, while Campbell already has $297,000 on hand including money raised before 2009.

The calculus changed, however, just a few weeks ago when tragedy struck the Krom family. On June 8th, Krom's son, Noah, died after an apparent fall from a cliff. He was just a week shy of graduating from UC Santa Barbara. She released the following statement in mid June:

IRVINE, CA, June 18, 2009 — In response to inquiries regarding the impact of her son’s death on her Congressional race, Beth Krom has confirmed that she is fully committed to continuing her campaign to represent the 48th Congressional district.

Beth and Solly remain grief-stricken over the tragic death of their 22 year old son, Noah, on June 6, 2009 in Santa Barbara, California. In recognition of his academic achievements, Krom was posthumously awarded a diploma in Business Economics which was presented to his sister and brother at Commencement by UCSB President Henry Yang.

So Krom is in it to win it - but it's unclear whether this will change the race dynamic over the next year plus leading up to November 2010 and to what extent. Will other contenders throw their hat in?

The Outlook:

We've seen that Campbell racks up big percentages in this district, winning against Democratic candidate Steve Young three times now by 15 or more points. CA-48 has been going pretty red at the top of the ticket, too. Bush took the district in 2000 and 2004 with 60.4% and 58.3%, respectively. In 2008, Obama eeked out a win – still flipping the district by a heck of a swing (John Kerry and Al Gore each only got 40%). On the other hand, the district still has an enormous flipability handicap.

The question remains: Can a Congressional challenger duplicate whatever it is Obama did in 2008? Consider the Dem candidate's flipability gap, or how well that challenger measured up against the flipability and Obama. Steve Young's was almost null.

In other words, the Dem challenger performed about as expected. So we know CA-48's got horrible registration numbers (16% GOP advantage), Obama remarkably overcame those numbers to win it (by a razor thin margin), and John Campbell still won by 15.1% – pretty close to the registration advantage. On the other hand, the Cook Political Report's 2009 update moved CA-48 from R+8 to R+6. So how does this bode for 2010?

Important Links
Candidates:
Steve Young for Congress
(website still up from 2008)

Beth Krom for Congress

News:
OC Register
OC Progressive
The Liberal OC

Party:
Democratic Party of Orange County

~~~

Three down, five to go! Stay in touch and keep us abreast of the latest!

Not running in 2012

I'm making this prediction: John Ensign, Mark Sanford, and Sarah Palin are not running for the Republican nomination in 2012.

AnonGuy gets it right,

Considering she is bailing on her one and only term as Governor, I suspect Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, Haley Barbour, Mike Huckabee, Tim Pawlenty, etc., are drooling at the chance to paint her as someone who can't finish the job. Or, in these tough economic times, can't stand the heat. I can see the 30-second spots attack spots already, "She couldn't even finish one term as governor of a small state ... now she wants to run our country?"

But of course, somewhere on the Tubes, someone is trying to spin this as a convoluted plan to position for 2012. Blogs for Victory provides the first hit,

Fabulously popular, a certainty for re-election in 2010…and now she leaves?

Perhaps she’s just sick of the nastiness? If so, then we’re to blame, as a country, for failure to sustain someone as good as she is…

Perhaps her family just wants a year off prior to a Presidential run? Remember, if she ran for re-election she’d be busy in 2010 and then in 2011 its off to the races…

But leave it to Politico to go the extra mile, going so far as to tell Palin there are 7 things she must do,

Those who underestimate her do so at their own risk. She projects a tough but warm personality. Her most famous line — “You know what they say the difference is between a hockey mom and a pit bull? Lipstick!” — reflects that. She is a conservative in an increasingly conservative party.

True, the GOP's gotten a lot more conservative, but they'll figure out after 2010 that extremism won't beat Obama. Competence will.

Yeah, Pawlenty's declining re-election too, to focus on 2012, but Pawlenty's not running away from an ethics probe. There's a difference between taking a break in preparation for a run and bailing out of your career mid-term like it's a doomed airplane.

It's still Mitt Romney's to lose.

Hooray, Artomatic! Boo, venue!

I finally went to Artomatic today and saw floors 3 and 4. I also walked around the work-in-progress Waterfront area around Nationals Park. I'm not a really a baseball fan, so it's not a neighborhood I would go to, but art puts me in an ambitious and introspective mood, so now I want to write about what I saw.

The first thing I walked away thinking was, unfortunately, how much I disliked the area's new architecture. And this is especially troubling for me, because I normally love contemporary architecture.


55M, home of Artomatic 2009. Note the exposed diagonal supports and the
asymmetrical but still right-angle dominated façade.

I'm not a trained architect, tho I did present failed a bid for a Fulbright scholarship on postmodern monumentalization in Germany. So I feel especially well-qualified to write about this.

Much of what's built these days is given the moniker of postmodernism. This is not the place for a philological deconstruction of the term or it's nauseating overpresence in today's commentary, so I will only say that I think the term is somewhere between troublesome and abhorrent.


Bank Center, Houston. The shape suggests urban architecture in
the Netherlands, recalling Dutch financial dominance.
Postermodern architecture often references preexisting concepts
rather than copying them outright as is done in revivalism.

Postmodernism is our generation's rejection of 20th Century functionalism and it tries, sometimes desperately, to relocate the importance of ornamentation. It draws from the Brutalism that almost took over DC in the seventies, the high-tech exposure which still seems to frighten Americans, and the old standby international style that defines many American skylines.


Every underground Metro station features Brutalist style in the ceiling pattern.
Brutalism does not fail on it's theory – leaving artifacts of the form's construction is not
inherently bad – but in practice it seems to dominate entire structures, and it certainly
dominated Washington's last urban renewal after the riots. (The fearsomely ugly FBI
building is another prominent example).

Although that pedigree is clear at the Waterfront, there is no revivalism and no homage on display in this development. (That's not a judgment, just a statement.) The materials are cutting edge and the form reflects this. The capabilities of the material allow for hints of the underlying structure and process of the building to show thru, suggesting a sort of neo-Brutalism or neo-high-tech. However, unlike Brutalism and high-tech, these styles are not the focus of the building, but only possibilities. The brackets that hold the windows are capped with stainless steel. The elevator is visible, but its machinery is tucked away.











Postmodern additions add contemporary functionality to history structures.
Left: New DC Court of Appeals at Judiciary Square. The postmodern atrium obviously alters the form from its original. It defaces the historic building but does not offend it.
Right: Nevada State Museum, Carson City. I haven't seen this in person yet, tho I'm excited to get the chance. It's one of the coolest museums anywhere (not being ironic!) and I want to feel how it works.

So all we have left to describe what we see is postmodernism. And it feels so... unsatisfying. Why do I like this style at Judiciary Square, and why am I excited about it at the Nevada State Museum, but it feels so sickly and sterile at the Waterfront? Part of my frustration, I think, is that the style has no inherent life – a fact made clear when you walk thru the empty lobby of 55M. Flat light seeps thru the glass or plastic walls of the room, ensuring no corner is hidden in shadow. Marble, wood and brass, materials prevalent in the decadent neo-classical government buildings, is non-existent here. In theory, this should create a sense of egalitarianism in the space, where the people are foremost, but I suspect that in practice this forces the people to architecturalize themselves. The seams of their pants, the cut of their décolletage, the tattoos on their skin must provide the context.


Sadly, this is not the Rotunda of the Capitol, where Americans of every type gather to observe and interpret their collective self. In its attempt to move beyond the nostalgia of repeatniks and conservatives, it has created a lifeless fashion runway that only waits for models and designers to fight over their individuality. It creates competition, not community.

The art inside the building, however, is great and I'm excited to head back tonight and tomorrow!

I'm tired of these posers!

There's been a lot of talk about Republicans and infidelity lately, like John Ensign and Mark Sanford invented the horny conservative genre.

Bullshit!

I do respect the Silver Fox's attempt to take the crown from California's reigning champ, Gavin Newsom. There are few things scumbaggier than gettin' it on with your friend's wife. Such drama, however, is so pedestrian it's featured in Greek plays. Way to be original, Senator.

And as for poor Governor Sanford, I think he's just livin' his life like its a Barry White song. It's going to be a long time before another pol of either party brings that kind of sexuality and emotion to a press conference. He may yet send Danielle Steel into early retirement, but he is not big pimpin'.

The most gangsta Republican of our generation remains the one-of-a-kind Nevadan, Jim "LuvGuv" Gibbons (with a big thank you to Dullard Mush for the tip):

Anyway, a friend of ours was recently at a new south Reno Mexican restaurant when Governor Jim Gibbons and an entourage arrived. The bartender there apparently was quite familiar with Nevada's Guv as she ran up and gave him a big 'ol lusty hug. Not only did Gibbons heartily return the favor, but his paws quickly headed south -- the deep south. So while my friend was getting an eyeful, our Governor was getting a handful. It obviously wasn't the first time, and probably not the last either.

Well, at least this tail-grabbing incident was consensual.

That's how it's done.

~~~

Special Note to AnonGuy: I understand your hesitation to dogpile on the Party, but don't think of it as a cheap shot against the GOP. Think of it as doing a solid for Mike Montandon. (Whose logo makes excellent bling, btw.)

I hope RedState didn't notice this

I think I just saw the Human Rights Campaign logo in an Orbitz commercial.

Four guys are are golfing and the refund guy shows up in his hovercraft. It looks like the logo at right is embroidered on one of the guys' polo shirts.

Any confirmation?

Update: Holy smokes, I was right!

BLOGGERFIGHT!!!

I have very few personal views on the California budget crisis. I'm bad with numbers. But I couldn't resist writing about the online slapfight between David Dayen of Calitics and Phil and Jerry at Calbuzz.

It all started when the Commission on the 21st Century Economy (a.k.a. the Parsky Commission) started putting forward some proposals that would include a flat(ish) tax and replace the corporate tax with a net revenues tax. Calbuzz provided an analysis that pointed out the difficulty of getting consensus on such thorny issues.

Calitics, however, called the proposals crazy right-wing insanity,

the real shock doctrine is happening behind the curtain, with a proposal engineered with bipartisan support, that will really permanently turn the state into an experiment in Chicago Boys free-market fundamentalism, not unlike the conservative "paradises" created in developing nations, all of which are crashing, by the way.

Arnold Schwarzenegger is NOT Pinochet, but I get the Chicago Boys metaphor nonetheless. Taking advantage of political expediency, he is importing minions to enact extreme economic experiments that could overthrow the established liberal order.

But they raised Calbuzz's ire by calling them "useful idiots" who enable such extremism by advocating the moderate path.

Calbuzz responded by lampooning Calitics' hyperbole with some of their own,

As regular readers of Calitics, we admire your passion, if not your common sense. But let’s be clear that our mission at Calbuzz is quite different than the ideological ranting that is your stock in trade: it’s called “journalism.”

Let’s be blunt: You knew bupkus about the maneuvering and politics unfolding behind-the-scenes at the tax commission until we started covering it. To attack us for digging out the story is to mistake the map for the territory, using the same kind of tiresome, rigid, WATB ideological projections as you decry in the Yacht Party.

I don't think Calitics was behaving like a "whiney ass titty-baby," but they were certainly reacting from one end of the political spectrum. It could've stopped there, with Calbuzz claiming the moderate position against Calitics' unapologetic progressivism. But it didn't. Calitics re-reacted to Calbuzz's critique-of-their-critique with a classic ad hominem attack,

Unlike you, I don't pretend to hide my opinions on the very clear economic and tax policy implications of the Commission's report behind some false veil of objectivity. Most of my comments were directed at the report itself, and the way in which a flat tax would quite obviously shift the burden of taxation to the middle class and the poor; but I couldn't help but notice clear language like...

the impending bankruptcy of state government should be sufficient to show players at every point of the political spectrum not only that sweeping change is needed, but also that everyone will have to compromise to keep California from sinking into the 9th Circle of Hell

...which certainly allows people, in my view, a window into how you determine the best policy, defined as the midpoint between whatever pleases those hateful hippies and the ranters on the right. That may be a nice and quick methodology, but it's anything but rigorous, and I'm pretty sure it's an apt description. After all, wasn't one of you the communications director for Gray Davis, who was not above bold expressions of centrism and a fear of the spectre of "The Left"?

(How did pumping out that daily message for ol' Gray turn out, by the way? What did that guy do after his two successful terms were up? Just curious.)

Wow. David Dayen does not like Gray Davis, I guess.

This exchange highlights the upcoming war within the Democratic establishment over how to respond to the voters' rejection of the budget compromise. Moderates will argue that the disaster at the ballot box shows Democrats need to be open to a fundamental change in California's revenue system. Progressives will argue that the result shows Californians are fed up with revenue neutral solutions and they want a real change.

To put this simply, California is majority Democratic, but not majority liberal. While some well-meaning activists on the left see this as an opportunity to install a social democratic economic system in the biggest state in the U.S., there remains an aggressive and electorally viable plurality that does not believe the conservative revolution is over yet.

There are technocratic debates that need to be had, of course, but they won't happen here (or on any other blog). Rather than seeing progressive Democrats and moderate Democrats go at one another's throats, I would like to see them rally behind what I believe is their unifying value which generates California's Democratic majority.

Namely, the political system should put the preferences of the welfare state before the preferences of the tax structure. What I mean is, the purpose of democracy should be to measure the types and levels of government service demanded by the people, then it is the responsibility of elected officials to extract the revenue necessary to meet those demands. To reverse that model as conservatives do - measure the people's tax preferences then design the government structure that is affordable under that preference - devalues democratic government.

Government of the people is more than a cost-benefit analysis or a necessary evil, it is an open-source forum, the first, final, and only arena where the differences among individuals and communities can be resolved through passionate discourse instead of political violence.* It is the closest we have to a society-wide family, and like your family it is more than the sum of its economic parts.

*The space between those two is often narrow but it always exists, it must exist.