Let’s face it, with the breadth of issues that could be discussed, the fundamentals still favor Obama. Despite how much he’d likely deny it, Mitt Romney is still the guy who would veto the DREAM Act, wants to make life so horrible for immigrants that they “self-deport”, opposed the auto-bailout, would repeal Obamacare and take away the insurance of tens of millions, wants to transform Medicare from a guaranteed benefit to a “here’s a coupon, fend for yourself” program, gut funding for Medicaid, prevent women from having their birth control covered by private insurance, says a trip to the emergency room is adequate to treat chronic illnesses, denies that poor people die due to lack of health insurance, and thinks that 47% of Americans are “victims” who aren’t willing to work hard.

The facts are already on his side. All Obama needs to do to win is to connect with voters and *say* this stuff.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VUtU9f6oFTs

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RlkPMdoTVLw

(h/t Amanda Marcotte)

On the other hand, many of the companies that Romney closed needed to be closed. It was better for them to die quickly, and for the money to go to productive uses in the economy, than for them to decline slowly. The Obama administration has presided over layoffs in the federal government, not to mention the auto industry, and it would surely argue some of them were necessary.

At its best, private equity acts as an accelerant of needed creative destruction. At its worst, it’s a particularly heartless form of vulture capitalism that kills companies that don’t need to be killed in order to enrich investors who are already very rich. The truth often lies somewhere in the middle.

An “accelerant of needed creative destruction” is an incredibly kind way of describing the modus operandi of companies like Bain. I think Robert Reich puts a finer point on it here :

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rodifJlis2c

Guys like Mitt Romney are vulture capitalists. They’re greedy gambling addicts who fool themselves into thinking hoarding wealth is the same as “creating” wealth. They don’t create anything. At all. The “creative destruction” they bring to the economy is a tangential benefit far outweighed by the unemployment they create, the tax burden the rest of us have to share, and the ever-widening income gap.

Mitt Romney may be a friendly person and a loving family man with a terrific sense sense of humor, but beneath that weird laugh is a scumbag who’s unwilling to acknowledge the pain businessmen like him cause and candidates like him let fester. As Ezra Klein put it :

What he could have learned from that experience is that, just as creative destruction is important for moving an economy forward, a safety net is important for catching those who are left behind. As head of Bain, Romney fired a lot of workers who were perfectly good at their jobs, who were committed to their companies, who had families they needed to support. That was his job as head of a private-equity giant. But his job as president of the United States would also be to look out for those workers.
. . .
Romney’s national platform, however, calls for doing less for the victims of the global economy. He wants to repeal the Affordable Care Act, which would guarantee that workers would get health insurance even if they lost their jobs in, say, a private-equity led restructuring. He wants to pay for large tax cuts and more defense spending by cutting funds for Medicaid, for food stamps, for worker retraining, and for housing subsidies. He wants to cut Social Security benefits. He has no detailed plans to improve the continuing education system, or worker retraining programs, such that displaced machinists have a better chance to find a new job.

For those who miss the earlier designs, here’s a brief history of the evolution of this site. The first look was back when I threw together an art deco-ish design on (the atrociously-spelled) Blog*Spot :

Once I realized blogging wasn’t going to be something I did for a week and then completely forget about, I got a hosting package and migrated the site to Movable Type. In the process, I got a little carried away with the art deco thing and designed a site that was just horrible to look at. Even now, seeing all of that wasted space is just horrendous.

Shortly after that design launched, I realized it sucked. I started over from scratch, mocking up the site in Photoshop, cutting out each element, tweaking HTML and CSS to get everything to line up just right. I still like how this one turned out.

After a couple of years with that design, I got sick of Movable Type and decided to migrate the back-end to WordPress. Since this would require rebuilding the templates from scratch, I took the opportunity to tweak a few things about the design (got rid of the remaining deco touches, softened corners). Disregard the CSS issue that’s skewing the sidebar.

With the new design, I’m finally getting rid of the Cliff Edwards portrait that started as a nod to tendency of many early bloggers to post a photo of themselves on the homepage, but ended up confusing people more than anything else.

But I don’t think the GOP is a lock to win more than 50 House seats or that the Democrats have a less than 20% chance of holding onto the House. Based on what Nate Silver recently wrote, I think it’s looking more like a 50-50 shot :

But suppose that our forecast is biased against the Democrats by one point across the country as a whole, perhaps because pollsters are overestimating the enthusiasm gap very slightly. Just one point. Well, there are 6 seats in which we have the Republican candidate projected to win by less than 1 full point (it might be a very long election night, by the way). If Democrats hold those 6 seats, the projected Republican gains would be down to 46.

Now suppose that the forecast understates Democratic support by 2 points. There are 8 seats in which we project the Republican candidate to win by a margin of between 1 and 2 points; now these would also be wiped off the board. Now the Republican gains would be reduced to just 38 seats — and the Democrats would hold the House, 218-217!

Read that again: it means that if our forecasts turn out to be biased against Democrats by just 2 points overall, the party becomes about an even-money bet to hold the House.

And where might those two points come from? Well, first there’s the cell-phone problem :

The latest estimates of telephone coverage by the National Center for Health Statistics found that a quarter of U.S. households have only a cell phone and cannot be reached by a landline telephone. Cell-only adults are demographically and politically different from those who live in landline households; as a result, election polls that rely only on landline samples may be biased. Although some survey organizations now include cell phones in their samples, many — including virtually all of the automated polls — do not include interviews with people on their cell phones.
. . .
In three of four election polls conducted since the spring of this year, estimates from the landline samples alone produced slightly more support for Republican candidates and less support for Democratic candidates, resulting in differences of four to six points in the margin.

It makes sense that this might underestimate Democratic support since cell-only households tend to be younger, more educated, and urban than those with landlines. Adding to this problem is that some polls, like this one for the Nevada Senate race from CNN, are just undercounting Democratic-leaning demographics entirely :

At the end of the day, it’s all going to be about who’s more motivated to go vote, but I won’t be surprised if the big story next week is about how the media used bad polls to drive a bogus narrative.

If Bravo insists on beating the Project Runway formula to death, I hope they do a series set in the fine arts world next. I’d love to see painters struggle with a sculpture challenge. Or see some jerk-off insist that they don’t have to have any technique because their work is “conceptual”. Or a challenge that takes everyone to the Crayola factory. Or one in which they have to paint something that’s meaningful to them, only to find out the real challenge is to see who can sell the most t-shirts of their painting. Or a commercial illustration challenge in which the contestants have to redesign a corporate logo or redesign the packaging for some product they find abhorrent. Get a dozen pretentious assholes together like that and you know it’s gonna be a good show. The winner gets a gallery show and a feature in Juxtapoz magazine, the loser has to pack his brushes and go.

I’m happy to say that Work of Art is as awesome as I predicted. It perfectly captures everything I hate about the insular, self-proclaimed gatekeepers of the fine arts world. The judges are a bunch of easily-manipulated phonies and the artists seem evenly split between pretentious, self-obsessed douchebags and self-righteous outsiders who resent other contestants for being better at bullshitting their way through a critique. It’s hi-frickin’-larious.

Being a “CEO candidate” isn’t about balancing the books and restoring fiscal responsibility, it’s about making sure rich people get to keep as much of their money as possible, even if it means destroying programs that help children and the poor. That’s how Carly Fiorina did it, cutting tens of thousands of jobs at HP, making the company lose 60% of its value, and securing a $42 million dollar payday for herself. That’s how bank CEOs do it too, bringing the world economy on the brink of a depression, but rewarding themselves with fat bonuses for doing such a great job begging for taxpayer money. CEO’s have a cavalier attitude towards success and tend to take unnecessary risks because, screw it, companies come and go. They get paid either way.

Why anyone would favor this sort of approach to governing is beyond me.

(via)