Democrats and Sexism, perfect together

Yes, she is more presidential than he will ever be.

Ladies, remember all those articles in the past year that said, “Gosh, Hillary is pretty darn near perfect! When Obama’s 2 terms are up, she’s going to run in 2016 and THEN all of the people who think Hillary will be a fantastic president will have a chance to vote for her, just you wait and see!”

That crap was all over the place in every newspaper.  It was all about delayed gratification.  Sure, Obama is a miserable incompetent and getting stuck with him for four more years is going to suck yak testicles, they seemed to say, but just think about 2016.  Keep your eyes on 2016.  Hillary is going to run.  No, she never said she would but we pundits just know it.  So, people, give it up for Barack just one more time and then you’ll get the competent, resolute, experienced, intelligent DEMOCRAT you’ve been waiting for.

Then, on Friday, an article appeared in the New York Times which changed all that because all the people who decided to take an old cold tater and wait for Hillary simmered in their own juices in 2012 and said nothing just like they were told, expecting nothing, demanding no promises from the DNC.  Here is the title of that article in all its glory:

For Ambitious Governor, a Clinton Stands in the Way

Read it and weep.

Yes, just like in 2008, Hillary Clinton is the inconvenient woman who is standing in the way of the presidential ambitions of a younger man, Andrew Cuomo.

All that shit the party hinted at and intimated and implied and danced around to make you think that Hillary was going to run in 2016 was just a cynical ploy to get you onboard to vote for Obama now.  To me, this ranks right up there with Romney telling his donors that the 47% of Americans who pay no income taxes have the unmitigated gall to insist on eating.  Having a woman at the top of the Democratic ticket in 2012 or 2016 would only send a positive signal to OVER HALF of the population who is under siege from the religious right but who cares?  Not Democrats.

Of course, your mileage may vary but one of the reasons we are headed into this fall election with two candidates who don’t give a f^&* about working people or women is because the Democrats failed to challenge Obama with the only other person on their side of the aisle who had a prayer of beating the Republicans, Hillary Clinton.  You don’t get anything if you don’t ask for anything and the media was complicit in delaying the gratification of the desperate, the unemployed and the Clintonistas until 2016, so they asked for nothing.  See how this works?

If you don’t believe that the Democrats have absolutely no intention of EVER mentoring or promoting Hillary or likely any woman for president, read the article.  It’s full of the same sexist shit we saw in 2008.  For one thing, why aren’t we framing the headline, “For Ambitious Secretary of State, Democratic Males Continue to Obstruct”?  But wait! There’s more:

Creating frustration for his inner circle, as Mr. Cuomo considers a 2016 campaign for the White House, the eyes of his party are fixed on Mrs. Clinton, whose already sky-high stature among Democratic activists was enhanced by her husband’s crowd-pleasing speech this month at the party’s convention in Charlotte, N.C., and who can count on broad support if she decides to run.

Mrs. Clinton complicates Mr. Cuomo’s ambitions in several ways. Despite the fact that she hails from Illinois, she is now viewed as a New Yorker and commands deep loyalty from the state’s Democratic establishment. And Mr. Cuomo, 54, reveres her husband, former President Bill Clinton; he views Mr. Clinton as a mentor who helped him begin a career in politics, according to Cuomo friends and associates.

My GOD! There is a man who is frustrated!  This shall not stand!

And Hillary is complicating Cuomo’s ambitions.  Why is she doing that!?  Doesn’t she understand that he really wants to be president?

Neither she nor Mr. Cuomo has signaled any plans for the 2016 election, and the governor says he is focused on his current job. (Mrs. Clinton is not expected to stay in her cabinet post if Mr. Obama wins a second term.) But the potential collision between them is gripping the political world in New York.

“In terms of the psychodrama of politics, it does not get any better than this,” the Democrat close to Mr. Cuomo said.

While Mr. Cuomo has deep affection for Mr. Clinton and calls him for advice, his relationship with Mrs. Clinton is less personal.

What potential collision? The DNC virtually promised women and gullible Clintonistas that she was going to run.  All it needs to do is tell Andrew Cuomo is to suck it up and step aside.  How hard is that?

Ahhhh, but you see, Andrew Cuomo doesn’t have a personal relationship with Hillary Clinton, therefore, it will be OK for him to go after her personally and have his droogs tear her presidential ambitions to shreds.  It’s what Democratic males do.

What is most vexing to those who want to see Mr. Cuomo run is that Mrs. Clinton, given her popularity in the party, can take her time deciding whether to make another bid for the presidency, essentially freezing the rest of the Democratic field.

Yes, it’s altogether vexing.  Damn her.  Why doesn’t she just quit?  It’s almost as if she’s so popular because so many people have been waiting so long for her.

But here’s the best line in the article:

But others reject the notion that Mrs. Clinton poses a serious obstacle to Mr. Cuomo, saying she is enjoying a political honeymoon right now but still has many of the weaknesses that plagued her in the past, including a polarizing image.

By contrast, they say, Mr. Cuomo is a fresh face whom Democratic officials, donors and activists will naturally want to court — provided that he wins re-election in 2014, when Mrs. Clinton will most likely be out of a job in politics.

This is a not so subtle way of saying that Hillary is old.  Forget that her approval rating is stratospheric, she must still be called “polarizing”, she’s simply old news. She’ll be 68 before she’s allowed to run again.  She’ll be past her freshness date. And she’ll be running in a primary against this young whipper snapper with a penis who wants her to get the fuck out of his way.

I hate to say I told you so, but I told you so.  This is the way the party is going to get rid of Hillary.  They have no intention of ever putting her in the White House.  Repeat after me: The Democrats do not mentor women.  Don’t believe me?  Remember how the Democrats saddled Nancy Pelosi with Steny Hoyer instead of John Murtha, the guy she originally wanted?  Yep, before she was even out of the gate as Speaker of the House, the party guys stuck her with a minder who would simply ignore and override her. (I’ll try to find the pic where Nancy has to stand next to Steny after that announcement.  The look on her face says it all. ahh, found it.  See below. )  Nancy’s not much of a true liberal anyway, since she’s got her own clan to protect, but she’s not really in charge anyway.  Steny is.

Remember what happened to Chellie Pingree in Maine this year?  She was a Democratic representative who wanted to run for Olympia Snowe’s senate seat.  But the Democrats told Pingree they were going to support an independent candidate instead of her.  So, not only did the Democrats decide to support someone not even in their party, but they allowed a female senator’s seat to be replaced with a man.  We have a lousy 17% representation of women in Congress and Democrats have no obligation or desire to change that number.  Oh, sure, maybe Pingree couldn’t have won, but it’s not like the Democrats stood behind her and made her look like a formidable candidate.  Democrats don’t do that for their female candidates.  But they’ll do it for a first term senator Barack Obama and Andrew Cuomo, both of whom have the patience of a 2 year old.

Look at Elizabeth Warren.  The Democrats have been notably cool to her.  If she’s pulling ahead of Scott Brown now, she’s doing it pretty much on her own.  That’s because Democrats don’t back their female candidates. They have no faith in them, don’t want to have to work with them, act like they’re second best, tokens.  And they always expect them to step aside when an ambitious man wants to run for something.

You can deny it all you want but that’s the truth, people.  Democrats don’t think very highly of women.  They just don’t. And when you’re no longer fresh, you won’t get off the damn stage.  And when push comes to shove, they’re going to sell you out on everything that’s important to you: equal pay, equality in general, abortion, contraception.  They will ignore you in meetings, call you “not a team player”, say that you’re “hard to work with”, you insist on your own way.  Don’t believe me?  Go ask Christine Romer, Brooksley Born, Sheila Bair and Elizabeth Warren. Heck, the White House didn’t even keep Nancy Pelosi in the loop on the debt ceiling meetings in the summer of 2011.  Obama’s team wanted to do their deal through Steny and leave Nancy out of it. They didn’t even have the courtesy of keeping her updated.  If you raise your voice, attempt to exercise power, express an opinion and don’t go back home to tend the garden, they don’t want you around.

I say this as a liberal, Democrat-in-Exile, not because I want the Republicans to win. It is past time for women to seriously consider not belonging to parties that do not have a hard quota of female representation in their foundation documents, just like some European parties do that have greater female representation in government.  It’s too late in 2012 but it’s not too late for 2014.  I am sick to death of these two political parties treating us like we don’t matter to their own ambitions, like our lives are not as important, that we’ll just go along with the program.  They treat us like children, substitute their own judgement for ours and flush our votes down the drain if they’re inconvenient.  That shit’s got to stop.

Given that this is the strategy they’re going to take to sideline Hillary and everyone who has been waiting for her turn, I can’t see myself ever voting for another Democrat for president in my lifetime.  I was dubious that Hillary would even want to run in 2016, no matter how much the media pushed that meme.  I think she sees the writing on the walls.  The Democrats don’t see her as a full person with the ability to command the way they see men.  She’s also to the left of Obama and the party doesn’t want to represent working people and women anymore than Republicans do. And then there the issue of penis years.  She could be as perfect a presidential candidate as there ever was and they’d still shave points off of her because she doesn’t have a penis. Penises make you want to be president more.  If you don’t have a penis, your ambition mojo is not as strong.

And they’ll drag up the old urban legends about how her campaign was badly run.  Yes, a campaign that won CA, PA, NY, NJ, TX, OH, MA, IN, MO, FL, MI, NM, WV, KY, AR etc, etc, was poorly managed. {{rolling eyes}} Nevermind that it was Obama’s campaign that needed to have the rules changed so the party could drag his sorry ass over the finish line for the nomination, it will always be HER campaign that was mismanaged because she concentrated on big Democratic states and ignored Idaho.

So, anyway, Democrats are lying, sexist assholes.  That’s the truth.  You’ve seen the data, draw your own conclusions.

Thursday: Perplexed by Pork Roll

Update: Atrios’ Lucky Ducky list is out!  I am one of 412K in new unemployment insurance claims.  I have arrived!

I’ve been living in NJ for two decades and have never eaten pork roll.  My former colleague, Ralph, a New Jersey native, used to wax eloquently about pork roll in the same way my old Sicilian Spanish teacher used to pine for marzipan while stuck teaching in the boondocks of upstate NY.  Ralph’s eyes would shine as he looked back to his last encounter with pork roll, his fingers rubbing each other as if trying to recapture some elusive quality.  But then again, he’d get all misty eyed over the memory of the grease wagons that lined up on the street near Rutgers where he went to school.  So, I just wrote pork roll off as some weird local right of passage, like Philly cheesesteaks or Pittsburgh hot sausage sandwiches with peppers and onions.

The other day, the pork roll called to me from the dairy case.  I’d passed on it so many times before.  What the heck.  I bought some “Tangy Pork Roll”.  OoooOOoo.  Tangy! It comes in flavors.  It looks like thick slices of bologna but has the appearance of a finer grade of Spam.  Assuming it wasn’t cooked, I looked all over the package for cooking instructions, hoping there would be a “Trenton Style Tangy Pork Roll Sandwich” recipe somewhere.  Nope. Having no idea how to prepare this sucker, I stuck it in the microwave for a minute.  (Someone out there is going to tell me this is sacrilege)  The result was a hot and greasy round of pork product with the right mouth feel of fat and plenty of salt.  The tangy comes from what tastes like vinegar.  If you’ve ever been to a dive bar and had one of those pickled sausages that come in a giant glass jar with your beer, that’s what it tastes like.  So anyway, preparing pork roll is not a hard job even without instructions.  What does this have to do with anything?  I don’t know.

Gretchen Morgenson and Louise Story recount how the bankers got away with the financial crisis of 2008 with no punishment or prosecution.  Right from the start of this piece, it becomes clear that there was not going to be any serious attempt to bring the bastards to justice.  Tim Geithner (him again) sets the narrative early on by putting out the theory that attempting to prosecute the evildoers would further destabilize the markets in a time of crisis.

Answering such a question — the equivalent of determining why a dog did not bark — is anything but simple. But a private meeting in mid-October 2008 between Timothy F. Geithner, then-president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, and Andrew M. Cuomo, New York’s attorney general at the time, illustrates the complexities of pursuing legal cases in a time of panic.

At the Fed, which oversees the nation’s largest banks, Mr. Geithner worked with the Treasury Department on a large bailout fund for the banks and led efforts to shore up theAmerican International Group, the giant insurer. His focus: stabilizing world financial markets.

Mr. Cuomo, as a Wall Street enforcer, had been questioning banks and rating agencies aggressively for more than a year about their roles in the growing debacle, and also looking into bonuses at A.I.G.

Friendly since their days in the Clinton administration, the two met in Mr. Cuomo’s office in Lower Manhattan, steps from Wall Street and the New York Fed. According to three people briefed at the time about the meeting, Mr. Geithner expressed concern about the fragility of the financial system.

His worry, according to these people, sprang from a desire to calm markets, a goal that could be complicated by a hard-charging attorney general.

Asked whether the unusual meeting had altered his approach, a spokesman for Mr. Cuomo, now New York’s governor, said Wednesday evening that “Mr. Geithner never suggested that there be any lack of diligence or any slowdown.” Mr. Geithner, now the Treasury secretary, said through a spokesman that he had been focused on A.I.G. “to protect taxpayers.”

My gut reaction says that’s bull.  If anything, crackdown on the bankers might have signalled to the global financial market’s hostage takers that the government was not playing games and might have averted further threats and destabilization.  And let’s not forget that now these assholes have us and our 401k portfolios by the short hairs.  They weren’t punished so they will feel free to act with impunity again.  The other bizarre notion was that taxpayer money would be used to pay for settlements.  Ok, it is not clear to me why this would be a problem.  If the settlements were *to* the federal government, wouldn’t that mean the taxpayer money would be returned?

Is anyone getting the sense that Geithner is one nasty guy with a silver tongue and a benign appearance?  If there’s one thing we have not learned from recent years it is not to automatically trust men in suits.  We don’t have to worship them or defer to them or treat them as authorities.  They shouldn’t get a pass just because they went to the right school or know the right people.  They should have to earn our respect.  No, if anything, the election of Obama shows that merit, exprience and responsibility can easily be trumped by the oily charisma of the company man.  The whole piece makes me outraged, as if that is even possible these days after all of the other outrages.  We walk the unemployment lines while the bankers walk away with millions and barely a slap on the wrist.  This will really burn your oatmeal:

But Mr. Alvarez suggested that the S.E.C. soften the proposed terms of the auction-rate settlements. His staff followed up with more calls to the S.E.C., cautioning that banks might run short on capital if they had to pay the many billions of dollars needed to make all auction-rate clients whole, the people briefed on the conversations said. The S.E.C. wound up requiring eight banks to pay back only individual investors. For institutional investors — like pension funds — that bought the securities, the S.E.C. told the banks to make only their “best efforts.”

Isn’t that nice?  Read the whole thing.

Whoo-Hoo! The editorial page of the NYTimes is finally telling the truth about tax cuts and their effect on the budget deficit?  In Budget Battles-Tax and Spending Myths and Realities, the editorial states:

President George W. Bush and Congress undid that progress with $1.65 trillion in tax cuts, heavily skewed to high earners. The economic recovery of the Bush years was extraordinarily weak by historical standards. By early 2009, shortly before Mr. Obama took office, the Congressional Budget Office projected a budget deficit for that year of more than $1 trillion.

These are the economic facts, which Americans need to hear. The Republicans certainly won’t tell anyone. And, so far, the Democrats haven’t had the political courage to challenge them head-on.

President Obama’s proposed budget for fiscal-year 2012 does call for a mix of tax increases and tax cuts, but he hasn’t made a serious effort to explain the need for substantially more revenue.

[…]

As a matter of fairness, raising income taxes must start with requiring the richest Americans — who have been the biggest beneficiaries of Bush-era tax cuts — to pay more. But even that won’t dig the country out of its hole. The middle class is also going to have to pay higher taxes. That is the only way to pay for needed services, tackle the deficit and slow the borrowing and the rise in interest payments.

I don’t know about raising taxes on middle class people.  I already pay a ton of money in taxes and live a very modest lifestyle for my salary.  Honestly, I don’t think I could pay any more without severely jeopardizing my savings for retirement.  Saving for college is already next to impossible.  So, let’s start with soaking the rich first and see how that goes before we ask anyone living in Central NJ on one income and a kid to support to pony up.

Did Krugman finally get through to the serious people on staff?  Is this message coming too late to make a difference?  Will the editorial board get cold feet and issue a retraction after a few nasty emails from Grover Norquist’s secret shock troops? Stay tuned.

Derek Lowe at In the Pipeline has two interesting posts about Foxes vs Hedgehogs here and here and how they apply to researchers.  Hedgehogs are researchers who delve into one particular subject in depth for most of their careers, like mathematicians studying a particular theorem. The other type of researcher, the fox, likes to be stimulated by many different problems.  Chemists and biologists tend to fall into this category.  I like to think of myself as a combination of fox and squirrel, storing away little bits of what looks like useless trivia until I find an interesting problem to apply it to.  It doesn’t always work and it can be distracting.  But you never know when something you read or did somewhere a long time ago might be useful.  Last year, I went back to the lab after a long time’s absence and learned to make proteins from ecoli and insect cell cultures.  Up to that point, I never had any use for the microbiology course I took decades ago.  Very handy.  “Luck favors the prepared mind.”  Derek’s illustration of how a researcher can be happily engaged in interesting research in industry is refreshing and mirrors my own experiences.  You don’t have to be in academia to get your problem solving fix.

A little something from Atrios the other day has been twitching my tin-foil antenna:

That Can’t do Spirit

I’ve commented on this before (as with most things), but I continue to be amazed at the completely pervasive can’t do spirit that seems to have gripped the country. Maybe we need to win a hockey game against the Soviets or something to bounce back.

I don’t think this is accidental.  I think it’s deliberate.  What better way of entrenching the idea that the country is run by a small evil group to which no one we know belongs than to reinforce learned helplessness.  There is a tangible inertia about the election next year.  I predict a disaster unless we get an Eleanor Roosevelt type to perk things up and help despairing Americans find their dignity.  Obama can’t do it.  He is more aspirational than inspirational.  If you’re not already at his level, he has very little to offer. And he intends to continue offering very little.  If you’re a well educated unemployed person with a kid to put through college, a house to pay for and a retirement to save for, Obama stands in your way.  What the inert want right now is a recipe for getting him to move, either forward or out.

Monday: Live by the, you know, sword…

Dear Caroline,

He already had 15 Penis Years on you at age 3

If your brother were asking to fill Hillary’s seat, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.  He would have been *well* qualified.  It wouldn’t have mattered a bit to New Yorkers how many times he had failed the bar exam.  He would have been a son of a president and we would have all passed pictures around the web of him saluting at his father’s funeral.  Little girls didn’t salute.  See, even at 3 years old, he had more in penis years than you did as his senior by 3 years.

The drubbing that you are getting in the court of public opinion is an unintended consequence of your ill-considered endorsement of Barack Obama.  Did your uncle put you up to that?  You passed up a hard working, well-respected, two term senator who earned her seat by campaigning and meeting the people of New York, for an empty suit who refuses to lead and will instead rely on the youthful hooliganism of his base in order to govern.

More than that, you have helped to set the bar so incredibly high for women candidates that it may be hard to find any woman in NY who will be able to meet the new standards set for them.  That is not to say there aren’t well qualified candidates who are women,  There most certainly are.  But there are an increasing number of people who are saying, “Well, it doesn’t *have* to be a woman as long as it’s the best candidate”.  See, that’s just wrong because the scales are unequal for men and women.  Hillary wasn’t good enough for the media and the DNC because they set the bar for her at 432 ft and expected her to pole vault over it while Obama’s bar was set at knee height and his friends carried him over, gently, so as to not upset his waffle digestion

And so it will be for the women in NY State who want to fill Hillary’s shoes.  Well, let’s just say for the record right now that it will be very difficult for anyone, regardless of gender, to fill Hillary’s shoes.  But for women like Carolyn Maloney and Kirsten Gillibrand, women who are well qualified to fill her seat, the fact that they are even lunped in the same category as Andrew Cuomo is kind of insulting.  The two women have real legislative experience and have competed in congressional races while Cuomo has served as an Attorney General and as a housing secretary during the Clinton administration.  All things being equal, he’s on the same par as Lisa Madigan, the attorney general of Illinois, who was actually a state senator.  She says she has zero chance of being appointed (although the odds may have changed now that JJJr is out).  So, if Lisa isn’t being seriously considered, why is Andrew?

I’ll tell you why.  Penis years.  He’s a guy.  His name is almost always mentioned as a Hillary replacement in the articles about you.  Carolyn Maloney’s almost never and she has been elected to her seat in Manhattan eight times.  If that doesn’t demonstrate a record of achievement and fundraising ability, what does?  Yes, it’s unfair.  But not to you.

It was unfair to Hillary and Sarah and Linda Stender and every other woman who ran this year and lost.  It’s not fair to any of us that we can be reduced to a bunch of “you knows” and “I can see Russia from my house!” and “why didn’t Hillary cry for Katrina?”.  Now, Caroline Kennedy, that second in line to the throne after her younger brother, is going to be subjected to the same sexism and misogynism that reduced Hillary from one of the most powerful women in the world and Sarah from the governor of a crucial oil state with two international borders to charicatures of the calculating uber-bitch and brainless beauty queen respectively.  Your new role will be as one of the aristocratic “ladies who lunch” socialites whose family pulls out of private life to shore up the brand name.

I hear, you know, you are a lawyer.   Like, really?  You’d never know it from the press you’re getting.

You know.

Sincerely,

RD

PS.  The idea of Harriet Christian for senate is actually growing on me.  Few people understand the average New Yorker better than Harriet and she’s articulate and courageous.  What a combo!