A Bush Dog Revels In Poverty

Considering all of the rural areas and dirt-poor urban centers in the country, you have to be a little surprised that Jim Costa's Central Valley district is the worst in the country for quality of life.

Poverty, poor health and low graduation rates have put the San Joaquin Valley's 20th Congressional District dead last in a new national scorecard that ranks the well-being of residents.

Even notoriously grim Appalachia fares better than the congressional district that sweeps in Fresno, Kings and Kern counties, the study made public Wednesday shows. The assessment of health, education and income ranks the district 436th out of 436 districts nationwide.

CA-20 has the lowest rate of college graduates in the country, just 6.5%. The median annual salary is just $16,767, and life expectancy is 4.5 years lower than in rich, high well-being areas like the Upper East Side of Manhattan. It's an appalling set of numbers.

We know the challenges in this district. Factory-style farming has lowered the air quality and increased the public health risks. As income inequality stratifies, places like the Central Valley get left behind, even more so in a California with a 6.9% unemployment rate. A lack of development into 21st-century jobs causes a brain drain, and higher energy prices cripple rural America.

And there's a residual benefit. A dirt-poor district is a district that doesn't vote heavily or pay much attention to politics, paradoxically so since they need to the most. And so we get Representatives like Jim Costa, whose district has the lowest participation rates in the entire state. Which means he can vote the wrong way on issues like FISA or war funding and not get much feedback about it from a constituency that's struggling to survive. In this context, his desire to return federal funds to the district or improve quality of life would seem to be low, at best. It's a vicious circle: poverty breeds inattention, inattention breeds bad lawmakers, bad lawmakers have trouble improving poverty.

We need less legislators like Jim Costa who seem more interested in pleasing their corporate contributors than the suffering citizens in their own districts. The problem is how to reach a low-information constituency, and how to make that connection, that sustained political power and engagement is vital if we want to end poverty and build the post-carbon, post-agrarian economy that would lift up whole regions like the Central Valley.

The Green Cultural Movement

I went to the Dwell on Design show over the weekend, a look at home furnishings from the architecture and design magazine. And what amazed me was how foregrounded the green credentials of all the products were. Even in front of the design qualities. From VOC-free paint to tabletops that don't emit radon gas to solar panels to tankless water heaters and on and on, there was practically nothing at this design show that was purely aesthetic.

The green movement is cultural. It's not using the usual measures of politics to gain power, but creating a lifestyle that incorporates eco-friendly elements into it. It's starting in building and re-design, and because of the price of gas is moving quickly into transportation. Both Nissan and Saturn are putting a significant investment into electric cars, and as most Americans expect gas prices to remain high it's very likely they'll buy them and find alternative means of travel.

Of course, this cultural movement is going to leave some people behind. Green technologies are expensive now, and out of reach to many. That's what I thought when I read this article about how rural Americans are suffering the most from higher gas prices. Electric cars aren't coming to the heartland anytime soon. How do we deal with this?

Across broad swaths of the South, Southwest and the upper Great Plains, the combination of low incomes, high gas prices and heavy dependence on pickup trucks and vans is putting an even tighter squeeze on family budgets.

Here in the Mississippi Delta, some farm workers are borrowing money from their bosses so they can fill their tanks and get to work. Some are switching jobs for shorter commutes.

People are giving up meat so they can buy fuel. Gasoline theft is rising. And drivers are running out of gas more often, leaving their cars by the side of the road until they can scrape together gas money.

The disparity between rural America and the rest of the country is a matter of simple home economics. Nationwide, Americans are now spending about 4 percent of their take-home income on gasoline. By contrast, in some counties in the Mississippi Delta, that figure has surpassed 13 percent.

As a result, gasoline expenses are rivaling what families spend on food and housing.

“This crisis really impacts those who are at the economic margins of society, mostly in the rural areas and particularly parts of the Southeast,” said Fred Rozell, retail pricing director at the Oil Price Information Service, a fuel analysis firm. “These are people who have to decide between food and transportation.”

Outside of rebates, I don't know how you deal with that. Building an entirely new energy infrastructure, new bus routes and mass transit, in areas that have none, is prohibitively expensive. A windfall profits tax won't impact these people, at least not to the extent that they can fit transportation cleanly into their budget.

Something to think about.

Tell Me, Punditocracy, What Lower-Middle-Class Voters in Hazelton Think

I think it's become pretty clear that pundits don't know what they're talking about. They are seemingly allergic to policy, and they are interested in politics in the way that groupies are interested in rock stars. Yet there are these 24 hour news networks which have to fill time, so they get these pundits on to hear themselves talk, without standards or really even information to back themselves up. So we get streams of consciousness based on stereotypes and long-held beliefs that they pick up from random (mostly well-funded Republican propagandist) sources. Like this:

[Reuters Washington correspondent Jon Decker]: They do. And let's not forget Barack Obama bowling. You know, this cuts to "is this person real? Do they connect with me as a voter?" You know, for someone who's in a bowling league in northeast central Pennsylvania, in Scranton and Wilkes-Barre, they can't identify with someone getting a 37 over seven frames.

As Hunter notes, the day that the media collectively decided the guy running the most powerful nation had to be a decent bowler and a drunk is the day that this country went into decline. After choosing a President based on being a "regular guy" and seeing how that transpired, can we sort of never go back to that criteria ever again? Do journalists think the people are that stupid?

I'd trade our media at this point for any other media on Earth. Gambia's journalists couldn't get it this bad. Paul Waldman has the best take:

Russert and Matthews may be at the top of their profession's hierarchy, but their proletarian pose has become the standard affectation of the media elite. This Blue Collar Chic unites the allegedly neutral journalists and the conservative commentators, whether it's Peggy Noonan dismissing the "intellectuals, academics, local clever people who talk loudly in restaurants, and leftist mandarins," so distant from "a bigger America and a realer one -- a healthy and vibrant place full of religious feeling and cultural energy and Bible study and garage bands and sports-love and mom-love and sophistication and normality," or Michael Barone harrumphing about "soft America," where those pathetic liberals sip merlot and listen to NPR, in contrast to "hard America, where the real folks do the real work." The Washington journalists themselves are as elite as they come, but they know who the good guys are -- they're the residents of the small towns, whose "values" can't possibly be matched by those who live in cities; they're the people whose lowbrow tastes make them "authentic"; they're the earthy, regular Americans defined by their modest tastes in food, drink, and entertainment. The journalists may not actually know too many of these people, but they know they're there, and they know they're better than the rest of us.

This kind of stuff just makes me pull my hair out. These stuffed shirts presume to speak for people they have absolutely no connection to, and it's sickening.

UPDATE: What Jon Stewart said.

Republicans - The Most Condescending Elitists The Country Has Ever Known

I basically agree with TBogg's take on this Obama "bitterness" nonsense, this is the selective outrage of a bunch of self-appointed elites who have decided for the rest of the country that they in fact look down upon what should upset them:

Shorter Everyone Who Is Appalled By Obama's Comments About "Bitter" America:

"I'm here to defend and speak for the stupid fucking rubes who are too fucking stupid to know that they've been insulted by Barrack Obama. Hillary/McCain rulz!"

I mean please. Is there anyone in this country who doesn't believe in the existence of wedge issues? Because that's basically what Obama was describing.

And you don't have to take my word for it. How about Jack Abramoff and Tom DeLay deputy Michael Scanlon?

Consider one memo highlighted in a Capitol Hill hearing Wednesday that Scanlon, a former aide to Rep. Tom DeLay, R-Texas, sent the Coushatta Tribe of Louisiana to describe his strategy for protecting the tribe's gambling business. In plain terms, Scanlon confessed the source code of recent Republican electoral victories: target religious conservatives, distract everyone else, and then railroad through complex initiatives.

"The wackos get their information through the Christian right, Christian radio, mail, the internet and telephone trees," Scanlon wrote in the memo, which was read into the public record at a hearing of the Senate Indian Affairs Committee. "Simply put, we want to bring out the wackos to vote against something and make sure the rest of the public lets the whole thing slip past them." The brilliance of this strategy was twofold: Not only would most voters not know about an initiative to protect Coushatta gambling revenues, but religious "wackos" could be tricked into supporting gambling at the Coushatta casino even as they thought they were opposing it.

The Republican Party has nothing but contempt for their voters, and in the modern age, they always have. They've been targeting "the wackos" openly for many years now. If Obama did anything wrong is was not to read this memo aloud as proof of what he was expressing. Presidents should resist the opportunity to play pundit, but Obama was asked a pundit-like question in a private setting, and he responded with a basic truth.

I'm not a politician, so maybe I can express it a bit more freely. Republicans think you're stupid. They treat you like suckers and distract you with wedge issues that have no material effect on your lives while they bleed you dry economically and engage in endless war and torture in your name. They have no experience with or even interest in the everyday lives of Americans. They get their dander up and scream "class warfare" any time they're challenged on any of this because they don't want anybody peeking behind the curtain and discovering the shadow war on the middle class.

But the truth is that most folks have already figured it out. We have a President hated by almost everybody and a general sense that the country has gone off the rails. We're not idiots and we're going to place the blame squarely where it belongs, media hypemeisters and GOP spinmeisters be damned.

What's most newsworthy about that Scanlon quote, by the way, is that it came out in a hearing investigated by the Senate Indian Affairs Committee, which was then chaired by... John McCain. It should also interest you that McCain limited the scope of his investigation and failed to investigate any members of Congress implicated in the scandal, and indeed never got to the bottom of things. He thinks you're stupid, too.

The Stupid Season

OK, I've had it. I guess Barack Obama is not allowed to describe the world as it is, for that way lies gaffe.

But the truth is, is that, our challenge is to get people persuaded that we can make progress when there's not evidence of that in their daily lives. You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

And now all the pious politicians from wealthy families and cushy Senate jobs and all the goat blowers in the commentariat have to condemn such awful remarks and self-righteously make common cause with those "real Americans in the heartland" who Obama apparently slandered.

Give me a break. It's a gaffe to say, rightly, that politicians and media types descend on small-town America and eat their local foods and talk very earnestly about their economies every four years, and then never come back, and never address their issues? Did it ever occur to anyone that Barack Obama's entire political life has been in service to representing poor people in government? That those are his constituents? Even, horrors, those Midwesterners in the heartland?

And it's a gaffe, now, to say that Republicans have used social issues and scapegoats to stand in for their own failures on the economy, especially in rural communities? Isn't this painfully obvious by now? Those who are describing Obama as elitist need to go look up the definition of "empathy."

I mean, this is bullshit. And Hillary Clinton and John McCain and every very rich media type who now tries to connect this back to some made-up view of Barack Obama as an elitist, which is really just a layering over of every Democrat as an elitist, needs to with all due respect shut their fucking mouths. The manufacturing base of this country has been hollowed, agribusiness has crushed family farms, industries are flying overseas with each passing day, and if someone attempts to explain that process and the expected reaction to it they're an elitist? Actually, the elitists are the puffed-up failed sportscasters that fail to read the context of any campaign remarks, and the idiot consultants who think they can pull one over on "the rubes" by casting a commonplace argument as the words of someone "who doesn't share your values". I guess the elitist is the one who offers legislation to rein in CEO compensation packages. That absolutely sounds like something an elitist would do.

Just shut up, and don't assume that every rural voter is as sensitive and aggrieved as you all clearly are. You don't know them, don't understand them, and certainly shouldn't presume to speak for them.

I'd continue, but it would probably me a mass of sputtering and different variations on the word "fuck," so I'm going to let Senator Obama have the last word.

"I was in San Francisco talking to a group at a fundraiser and somebody asked how're you going to get votes in Pennsylvania? What's going on there? We hear that's its hard for some working class people to get behind you're campaign. I said, "Well look, they're frustrated and for good reason. Because for the last 25 years they've seen jobs shipped overseas. They've seen their economies collapse. They have lost their jobs. They have lost their pensions. They have lost their healthcare.

"And for 25, 30 years Democrats and Republicans have come before them and said we're going to make your community better. We're going to make it right and nothing ever happens. And of course they're bitter. Of course they're frustrated. You would be too. In fact many of you are. Because the same thing has happened here in Indiana. The same thing happened across the border in Decatur. The same thing has happened all across the country. Nobody is looking out for you. Nobody is thinking about you. And so people end up- they don't vote on economic issues because they don't expect anybody's going to help them. So people end up, you know, voting on issues like guns, and are they going to have the right to bear arms. They vote on issues like gay marriage. And they take refuge in their faith and their community and their families and things they can count on. But they don't believe they can count on Washington. So I made this statement-- so, here's what rich. Senator Clinton says 'No, I don't think that people are bitter in Pennsylvania. You know, I think Barack's being condescending.' John McCain says, 'Oh, how could he say that? How could he say people are bitter? You know, he's obviously out of touch with people.'

"Out of touch? Out of touch? I mean, John McCain—it took him three tries to finally figure out that the home foreclosure crisis was a problem and to come up with a plan for it, and he's saying I'm out of touch? Senator Clinton voted for a credit card-sponsored bankruptcy bill that made it harder for people to get out of debt after taking money from the financial services companies, and she says I'm out of touch? No, I'm in touch. I know exactly what's going on. I know what's going on in Pennsylvania. I know what's going on in Indiana. I know what's going on in Illinois. People are fed-up. They're angry and they're frustrated and they're bitter. And they want to see a change in Washington and that's why I'm running for President of the United States of America."

This is a very honest, Thomas Frank-like argument that shows an understanding of working America's concerns, and the next media idiot that challenges it and starts to say how "regular people" will respond to this needs to be asked "When's the last time you ever talked to a so-called 'regular person'? When's the last time you ever looked at a price tag in a store? Shut your god-damn mouth!"

UPDATE: Fuck Ben Smith. Obama did NOT say that there's something wrong with clinging to faith or clinging to guns. That's what you think he said because in all likelihood that's what you believe. Obama is saying that people losing their jobs and struggling to get by look for answers, and when they're presented with no economic answers but a whole passel of moral ones, that's where they'll gravitiate. It's pretty clear.

UPDATE II: More from that elitist:

Ordinary citizens can have an enormous influence on what happens in Washington. The problem is that they're just not organized right now. And so those who are organized, the corporations, the special interests, the big lobbies, they have a disproportionate influence, and part of what hopefully this campaign is about is to tilt the scales in favor of ordinary people.

Did he say that from a marble veranda eating finger sandwiches? Pompous windbag!

UPDATE III: Unbelievable. The AP headline goes: Obama Concedes Remarks Were Ill Chosen. In other words, he gives a four-minute, fully-rendered argument with one throw-away line saying "I didn't say it as well as I should have," and the headline is... that throwaway line.

Our entire media can be safely dumped into the sea.

UPDATE IV: Shorter Evan Bayh: I'm going to let you know that I know exactly what Obama meant and then deliberately distort it so that my candidate looks better.

One of Clinton's staunchest supporters, Sen. Evan Bayh, D-Ind., acknowledged there was some truth in Obama's remarks. But Republicans would use them against him anyway, Bayh said.

"We do have economic hard times, and that does lead to a frustration and some justifiable anger, it's true," Bayh told reporters after introducing Clinton in Indianapolis. "But I think you're on dangerous ground when you morph that into suggesting that people's cultural values whether it's religion or hunting and fishing or concern about trade are premised solely upon those kinds of anxieties and don't have a legitimate foundation independent of that."

But nobody said that people's cultural values are premised SOLELY upon those anxieties. He said that people VOTE on those cultural values because corporatist Democrats like you haven't lifted a goddamn finger for them in 30 years, and the only way Democrats win is if they return to being the party of the people. I'm not surprised you didn't get it.

Prison Town, USA

With all of the hysteria about Michael Moore's SiCKO, I wanted to show you a clip from another documentary that will not have the same reach as the Moore film, but covers just as important a subject. And the focus is right here in California.



Susanville, California is a small rural town tucked into the northeast corner of the state that is one of many cities which has had to make the choice to take in a state prison as a means of economic survival. The extent to which the town has become dependent on the prison is chilling. The consequences of building municipal economies on the backs of the prison-industrial complex are obvious: public policy obviously would never want to REDUCE the number of inmates as that would necessarily reduce the number of workers, and support structures, and facilities to cater to inmate visitors. And remember, the governor and the legislature are about to build these places out, adding 53,000 beds to the corrections system. Those beds need space, and small rural towns while family farmers can be bought out provide the best opportunity.

This film is showing as part of the Los Angeles Film Festival next week. You can see it by visiting the LAFF site and typing in "Prison Town" under "individual tickets."

Rolling in the Mud

This Mudcat Saunders thing is made all the weirder by the fact that he is advising John Edwards, much beloved by the liberal bloggers whom Saunders castigates. I personally think this is all some kind of simmering rage from being smacked down by Tom Schaller at Yearly Kos last year. And anyone decrying the existence of a "Metropolitan Opera wing" of the Democratic Party (which may indeed be a constituency, but it certainly doesn't match up with online activists) is essentially saying that there shouldn't be a "smart wing" of the party, which strikes me as a little bit how we received our current President.

I don't know what to make of the Edwards thing, but you can't win the Presidency with just one strategy, so if Saunders wants to try to win rural voters in the South and stay the hell offline, fine with me. I'm not quite hopeful that appealing to Southern whites would succeed and would rather see a Western strategy as put forth by Schaller in Whistling Past Dixie, but Edwards does have the right message on economic justice that could theoretically work. And Saunders did advise Jim Webb, too. If he hates bloggers so much, why does he always hook up with netroots darlings? Maybe because he likes winning.

Democrats and Rural America

Before relinquishing my subbing duties, I wanted to touch on two important (and related) stories that broke today, both of which speak to the growing importance of the rural vote to the Democratic base.

First up, Dave "Mudcat" Saunders, rural liaison for the John Edwards campaign sparked a firestorm today in his inaugural post on Time's Swampland by ripping into the leftwing blogosphere, appearing to bite the hand that feeds as it were:

So to those bloggers who believe in a straight-forward dialogue and exchange of ideas, God bless you and thank you. Together, you're coming up with a lot of good stuff, and frankly, much of it has been helpful to me. At the same time, those Democratic bloggers, who have appointed themselves as intellectually superior and believe the only way to win an argument is to shot the loudest with personal attacks, you can go to Hell. Intellectually superior? The truth is these people remind me of the guy who told so many people he had a horse that he finally went and bought a saddle. The "incivility" in their tones tell me they would be much more happy following "pro rasslin" than the political blogs.

Well, he certainly appears to be asserting the inherent virtue of middle America vs. the coastal urban elites as he sees them, yet later he issued a response to the not so kind reaction he got to his first post:

Nowhere in my first post did I say I was "anti-blogging". Quite to the contrary, I said to bloggers who want to take the Democratic Party back into the big tent, "God bless you and thank you." I was quoted saying after the Webb election that the "bloggers" led the way...The blogs are the Democratic Party's greatest source of power and unity. Why would I am be anti-blogging? In other words, I wasn't talking to all of you. Just some of you.

Where in my post did I say I was anti-urban? I was on Carlson with Sharpton before the SC Democratic debate and said clearly (Sharpton agreed) that the problems of Urban America and Rural America are mirror images of each other, and the problem is that few candidates will talk about our common ground of economic unfairness and disparity.

So whose side is he on, exactly? Chris Bowers sees some contradictions in his posts. And I have to wonder, is this an example of a lack of discipline on the Edwards camp's part or is the message Saunders is sending out really to be seen as separate from his capacity as a liaison between Edwards and rural America?

This is all appropos to a Center for Rural Strategies poll that came out today that shows while rural areas of the country are certainly conservative, Democrats have made significant inroads.

Rural voters remain more conservative than the nation as a whole, creating an opportunity for Republicans to make up their losses, according to the poll of 804 rural likely voters conducted this month.

Rural voters deliver a narrow plurality to a generic Democratic candidate for President: 46 - 43 percent. In contrast, President Bush won the rural vote in 2004 by 19 points.

The poll indicates that a large part of the reason for the erosion of support for Republicans among this traditionally Republican stronghold, is the Iraq War. Stoller sees the results as a rebuke of Stu Rothenberg's concern troll predictions, Sirota sees it as a rebuke of DC Democratic consultants's concern troll warnings not to run against the war in conservative districts lest they suffer losses and MissLaura sees it as a rebuke of good old Mudcat himself.