"Isn’t there something creepy about Starbucks’ CEO Howard Schultz having... 'asked his Washington-area employees to write "Come Together" on each customer cup today, tomorrow and Friday, as a gesture to urge leaders to resolve the fiscal cliff'?"

Asks Mickey Kaus.

Did Schultz take a poll of his employees–sorry, “partners,” he calls them–before ordering pressuring asking them to join in this lobbying effort? What if he were, say, the CEO of Chick-fil-A and he “asked” his “partners” to write “Preserve the Family” on the outside of cups and containers?

I’m not saying what Schultz did is or should be illegal, certainly not in a Citizen’s United world. If he wants to run a hybrid coffee-shop-political-organization, that’s fine with me. But maybe he should have made that clear to his workers when they signed up.

What troubles me about the slogan "Come Together" is that it's a pretty obvious reference to the Beatles song that begins with Lennon saying "shoot me" over and over. Given the recent massacre — and the fact that Lennon himself was shot to death — it's not good resonance.

As for an employer telling employees what to say to customers, I've got no legalistic problem with that. The first job I ever had was as a waitress, and I was required to greet the customers with the lengthy "Hello, my name is Ann, and I will be your waitress tonight." How do you give that wooden line a good reading?

I'd much rather say "Come Together," especially if I was serving muddy water, brewed with a mojo filter.

"'White turkey chili': That's what President Obama served Mitt Romney for lunch."

"Was this really an intentional (ungracious, gloating, etc.) slap? I'm a paranoid — but it is the sort of thing the hard core politicos I've known would find funny...."

ADDED: Just before Thanksgiving, The Atlantic published this item: "Why Does the White House Always Pardon White Turkeys?"

Obama "must repair his badly damaged relationship with the business community, which overwhelmingly supported Mitt Romney."

"It’s doable. From avoiding the so-called fiscal cliff, to an overhaul of immigration laws, to tax reform, there’s much more common ground than the combatants could acknowledge during the campaign."

It's doable. But what do you want done?

Meanwhile, Mickey Kaus says: "The entire GOP elite seems to be trying to sell out en masse on immigration.

Maybe these people are convinced the larger GOP project can be saved simply by caving on just this one issue. That seems cracked.  The bulk of the Hispanic electorate appears to instinctively vote Democratic, and not just because of immigration. Maybe they can be wooed over to the Republican side over the course of decades. But by then there will be another wave of new, instinctively Democratic illegal immigrants (lured by the Boehner Amnesty) for Dems to appeal to. And the idea that the GOPs don’t have to change any of their other ideas if only they appease this one ethnic group (making up 10% of the electorate) is highly questionable....

"A top, key, well-placed, influential Romney aide told me months ago he thought the race would be decided in the last 72 hours."

"That’s still 24 hours away! A long time."

Mickey Kaus is "assuming the Bureau of Labor Statistics will release the October employment statistics on schedule."

"The paranoia that would accompany a delay (this close to the election) would be too destructive, even if the delay was justifiable. But if the Obama administration were really playing politics with the numbers in the way the paranoids fear, do you think it would merely delay the release of the numbers? Not cunning enough!"

Did Biden blame Hillary for Benghazi?

Mickey Kaus thinks so.

Will Hillary now retaliate and protect herself by leaking word that the White House did too know? Will her husband continue to tour the country trying to pull Obama’s bacon out of the fire (as he did at the convention) even as Obama points a finger at his wife? Will they all cut some sort of deal in which Hillary agrees to take the fall and Bill soldiers on … in exchange for, what? Have they already cut a deal?  Is the White House going to try to hang its hat on the idea that Obama and Biden didn’t know, but maybe their staffs knew? Will that really fly? Aren’t they responsible for their staffs? Will the staffs fight back?

That's a lot of internal intrigue to keep under control until the election. What an October surprise!

They October-surprised themselves. 

"The Romney revival lasted, what, 12 hours?"

Mickey Kaus has a sharp eye:

Before the debate, Mark Halperin said the press corps was itching to write the Romney comeback story. It turns out what they were really itching to write was the Obama-comeback-from-the-Romney-comeback story. You know, something like “How Obama reset his campaign.” … Glenn Thrush of Politico has, in fact, already written it:  There’s  already a “newnarrative.” A “whipsaw transformation.” Obama “was radically different Thursday—not just calm but buoyant, loose, focused.” He gripped the podium with a fresh intensity! “That’s what he does when he’s really into it,” a “top” Obama adviser revealed.  …

(Internal links omitted.)

"General Motors' profits fell 41% in the second quarter..."

That's the news today. Was your first thought what this means for Obama? If so, isn't that crazy?

Here was Mickey Kaus, yesterday:

I don’t quite understand why President Obama has to claim that General Motors is a great success story (“back on top … [b]ecause America always wins when the playing field is level …” etc.). Why couldn’t he say: “We gave GM and its employees another chance, at a time when our economy was fragile and couldn’t absorb a massive shutdown. Now it’s up to them. They have the tools they need. They may make it–I hope they do. They may not. We aren’t going to bail them out again.”

"The left-leaning press should be all over this, no? Evil Big Drug Companies (PhRMA) funnel money to David Axelrod’s old ad firm..."

"... (which is still paying him for his share) even as they are negotiating with the Obama administration? Hello? Josh Marshall? Arianna? You there? Someone explain to me why this isn’t a scandal."

"Should We Hire Even More Teachers, Cops, and Firemen?"

"Not if we want the economy to recover any time soon," says Nick Gillespie at Reason.com.

Unless you believe that the primary function of the public sector is to be a jobs program, there is no reason to sweat recent cuts to public-sector jobs, whose numbers, as Mickey Kaus has pointed out, have "been bloating since around 1980."...

As it happens, Nobel-winning economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman and many others (let's call them stimulatarians), seem to believe that a key function of government is precisely to employ lots of people who otherwise would look for work elsewhere....

And check out the caricature of Obama at the first link. All swirly hallucinogenic shapes and psychedelic colors. I showed it to Meade and said "That's the way I was always drawing when I was in high school," and he said he did too. (I'm class of 1969, and he's '72.)

The Walker recall election is more important than the presidential election.

Mickey Kaus says:

1) Tomorrow’s recall may not be the “second most important election this year,” as some observers have claimed. It may be the first; 2) The ramifications for American government, which are profound, vastly outweigh ramifications for the Obama/Romney presidential campaign, which are secondary at best, even though national reporters like to go on about them, perhaps because doing so avoids … 3) The union issue: It’s a “referendum on the future of public sector unions” and maybe unions generally....

Well, somebody should have told Tom Barrett. He didn't want to talk about the unions, and he didn't want to talk about it because he knew the people were on the other side. So what if he wins? He won by ignoring the unions. He was not their candidate. So the unions have already lost. They lost in the Democratic primary. A Barrett victory will only mean that the Dems scampered away from the unions in time.

4) Previously unthinkable: The important lesson, if Walker wins, is that it’s possible to cut back on what the Left terms “collective bargaining rights” and get away with it.... 5) I’m for Walker. Even if you support private sector unionism, I don’t think public sector unionism makes sense–if the unions win too much, we can’t let the government go broke the way we cqn let GM go broke [bad example-ed you get the point--the market's restraints aren't there]. Democrats who believe in affirmative government should want it to be as efficient and affordable as possible–so we can afford more of it, if necessary. The combination of official bureaucracy plus labor adversarialism plus dues-fueled political contributions has not been a happy one.. …

"Another Atlantic-sponsored party where ordinary guests get to stand in a separate area and watch the higher-ranking guests talk to each other."

"Somebody over there thinks Americans like that sort of thing."

That's Mickey Kaus, via Instapundit.

I'd like to see the Atlantic make a TV show out of it, the way Playboy did with "Playboy After Dark" and "Playboy's Penthouse." I'd stand in a separate area willingly if I could watch Lenny Bruce:



"I was talkin' to the chicks and all of a sudden they just floated off... This is a kind of an interesting party. You know, I first figured it would be like sort of a TV you know typical uh fake party, you know. But it's kind of good party feeling to it with some pretty chicks which is a good composite here... That's what grooved me about the show, that is, it's actually a party, so that whatever happens at a party, you know, within limitations."

Was anyone blabbering at that level at the Atlantic party?

You know, Lenny Bruce is really sort of you know hard uh to kind of transcribe there's all these extra like... words.

Bloggingheads collapses.

Essentially. Remnants will remain, but, basically, it was never economically viable. Here's the whole clip explaining it, and here's the most interesting part saying it's particularly hard to build a site based on putting ideologically adverse interlocutors together:



Bob Wright says that "you need huge numbers" to monetize a website adequately, and the sites with big traffic, Bob says, are the ones where like-minded people get together — "where you just sit around and tell each other how stupid people on the outside are."

Mickey Kaus offers the theory that video is the problem: Video commentary is never going to get as many hits as text. Bob concedes: "Video is an inefficient medium." That's sad for Bloggingheads, but wonderful, really. There was a time when we thought that the future of humankind was staring at televisions. The web has revived reading. People prefer to look at text. I find it hard to watch any kind of video commentary or reporting, but I read it for hours a day.

As a blogger, I interact with text fluidly, copying this and that and pasting it interwoven with my writing. You can make a clip from a Bloggingheads video, but finding something you want to clip entails putting up with a lot of yammering, with the hope that you might find something you'd like to write about. With text, you can see from a distance — e.g., Drudge or Memeorandum or a Google alert — whether you even want to click over to a page. If you do, you can instantly scan it, search for key words, focus on the interesting parts, and copy the bits you want to riff on. And your post is up and creating new text-based effects of its own.

Another problem Bob talks about is that his "heads" — often writers and academics — had endless problems dealing with the technology involved in video recording their performance and sending the file to Bloggingheads to be made into their nice, split-screen presentation. It's easy to screw up, even if you have a Mac with a built-in camera and QuickTime software. I've botched recordings and then needed to redo them. (Oddly, the redone videos were, in both cases — here and here — particularly good: The dry run improved the performance.) Because of the technical issues, Bloggingheads employed 5 assistants. No wonder it wasn't economically viable!

It wasn't just that the various 'heads were technically inept and in need of expensive hand-holding. The 'heads were nearly all print-based folks. Writers. They weren't oriented to video. They made little effort to look and sound interesting on camera. When I was on, I tried to get back-and-forth action going for the sake of the viewer, but most of the 'heads would take turns making long-winded statements while the other stared blankly into the camera.

The key Bloggingheads technology was the split screen, but if the nonspeaker does nothing, you might as well have edited video — technically easy to do — showing one speaker and then the other. You could take out all the pauses and boring stuff too. But then the immediacy is lost, the thrill of real-time interaction. But it was that very thrill that made most 'heads boring! Writers, speaking, with no ability to edit? That tends to result the kind of talking that reminds me of the way I spoke when I tried to use a Dictaphone, back in the days when professionals didn't do their own typing.

Anyway, Bob says he's going to concentrate on blogging now, and he's going to be blogging at The Atlantic, which is a great perch. So, congratulations on that.

And goodbye to Bloggingheads as we've known it.

Should Obama not run for re-election in 2012?

That's the meme of the day over at Memeorandum. Patrick Caddell and Douglas E. Schoen have this piece in the Wall Street Journal: "The Hillary Moment: President Obama can't win by running a constructive campaign, and he won't be able to govern if he does win a second term." Investor's Business Daily has picked it up: "The 'Dump Obama' movement has begun; Guess who'd replace him?"

I think it's ridiculous to pressure the incumbent candidate to step down, especially to cede the floor to the person he beat to get the job in the first place. The fact is, he's President, and that has a powerful effect on our minds. We can certainly see him as President. Everyone else is a puny upstart (until they prove otherwise). Now, perhaps I'm more of a sucker for incumbents than most people. Only twice in my life — and I've voted since 1972 — have I declined to vote for the Democratic presidential candidate, and both times, it was for an incumbent Republican. I'm referring to the 1976 and the 2004 elections. In both cases, I could visualize the President as President, but not the challenger.

Now, let me be clear. I have argued that Obama shouldn't want to run for a second term. Back on April 3d of this year, I indulged in some imaginative mind-reading, but that wasn't about how the Democratic Party could increase it's chances of winning in 2012. It was a flight of fancy into Obama's psyche:

If he is reelected, then that will be the end of running for President. He'll be 54 years old, and what will he do? Move to Hawaii and play golf? But he could move to Hawaii and play golf in January 2013, if that's an enticing prospect. And, if he does, he won't have maxed out his eligibility for being President. He can tantalize us, year after year, with the possibility that he would run for another term — a fascinatingly out-of-sequence term. The thing he's best at is running for President. Why let that game expire? He could toy with it in 2016, when he's 58, and in 2020, when he's a clear-visioned 62, and in 2024, when he's a well-seasoned 66, and in 2028, when he's a beneficent elder, offering his services once again, because his country longs for the golden days of 2011. It will never end, as long as the icon of hope and change — oh, my lord, I typo'd "hope and chains"! — walks the face of the earth... unless he serves that second term.

So, I can see Obama choosing to withdraw, with some magnificent long-term life plan. But pressure him out? Ridiculous! Whatever his poll numbers now, whatever the pain and suffering, he's got a long campaign ahead of him. The campaigning Obama is the one we know best. Sure, he'll have a lot to answer for, but it's not a question of whether we're happy about what's been going on these last few years. It will be a choice between him and that other guy (or gal). And I'm betting he'll win.

ADDED: Here's a May 1st post talking about Mickey Kaus saying Obama shouldn't run:

I'm not saying Mickey stole my idea. In fact, our ideas are completely different (except for picturing Obama not running). Mickey portrays Obama as a big old failure who ought to get out gracefully and give another Democrat a clean shot. Meade and I were fantasizing from Obama's perspective — what his life really feels like to him and how to milk the pleasure of being Obama for all it's worth.

What's gone wrong with The Daily Beast?

Kaus looks at the evidence. There's a theory that "Tina Brown has now decamped for Newsweek magazine with all her favorite hires, leaving the remnants at the Beast web site feeling abandoned like unwanted stepchildren." But even so... it's weird for page views to fall. Are the "unwanted stepchildren" really that bad?

"Just when we had Rick Perry on the ropes, WaPo has to go and give his candidacy new life by creating a Perry vs. Liberal MSM controversy. "

"GOP primary voters don’t like being told they have 'no heart' — but they don’t like the press trying to take a Republican out with a second-order racial-insensitivity scandal either. … If I had to guess which candidate’s camp leaked this story, I might guess Perry’s. Who benefits?"

Mickey Kaus, via Instapundit — who also takes a shot at Herman Cain:

I think that Herman Cain hurts himself by joining in on these attacks. His big appeal is that he’s not just another black race-card-playing politician. Climbing on board with the Post’s hit piece suggests that actually, he is. It reminds me of Tim Pawlenty’s weak and opportunistic reaction to the attacks on Sarah Palin. I think that’s what killed his campaign. If you side with the media establishment against other Republicans, you won’t help yourself in this election cycle.

But you know who really benefits? Obama. And I don't mean because it's about race. Obama benefits whenever any subject other than the economy captures the public's attention.

ADDED: Here's Cain:

Should Obama hope he loses the Obamacare case in the Supreme Court?

Mickey Kaus says:

If the law is as unpopular as it seems to be, and if the individual mandate is “the most hated piece of the law,” then the Court, by removing the threat of the law, or at least the mandate, on constitutional grounds, would remove a big reason to oppose Obama, no? 

Not only that, but if the Supreme Court upholds the law, Obama's opponents will have a rich opportunity to rail against those terrible liberal justices who don't respect the Constitution and its basic structure of limited, enumerated powers: They've said it's "regulating commerce" to tell a private citizen he has to buy a product that he's chosen not to buy. Alarm! Alarm! Don't let Obama appoint any more Justices!

But if the Court strikes down the individual mandate, Obama will suddenly be able to say: Those terrible activist conservatives on the Court! They've illegitimately grabbed the power to veto a law conservatives don't want! They talk about judicial restraint, but look how they set themselves up as a super-legislature when they don't like what Congress has done.

By the way, I think the decision in the case is likely to track the will of the people, as perceived by the Court. So, it's important to advocates to create the appearance of public acceptance or public outrage over the law. This demonstration of public opinion should happen anyway as the presidential campaigns move forward. It will be fascinating to see what happens when the Supreme Court decision plops into that discourse.

If the Supreme Court upholds the individual mandate, Republicans will say: Now it's crucial to win the presidency and strong majorities in both houses of Congress so we can repeal this thing. If the individual mandate is unconstitutional, is there nothing Democrats can do? Well, the existing form of legislation is out, but there are other ways to extend health care that would not meet the same constitutional problem. But would Democrats want to argue that they need to win the presidency and strong majorities in both houses of Congress so they can push through some new health care reform? I doubt it. What a nightmare it was the first time, devastating the path of the Obama presidency and giving rise to the Tea Party!

Thinking through all these permutations, I'm guessing the Supreme Court will strike down the individual mandate. The existing doctrine doesn't require that outcome, but I'm reading the political forces at play and assessing the Court's vulnerability to those forces, and that's my interpretation.

IN THE COMMENTS: Garage Mahal asks: "Will Thomas recuse himself?" Here's a better question: Considering my analysis above, if Thomas recuses himself, should we see him as extracting himself from politics or — slyly and deviously — playing politics?

Mickey Kaus thinks it's "odd" that people aren't connecting “Obama” and “Boehner Plan” and “briar patch.”

He's got an argument that he thinks is so good, he's surprised no one has made it using the term "briar patch":

[I]sn’t the Boehner Plan the President’s most promising route to the “grand bargain” (including revenue increases) he says he wants? It would set up a commission to propose $1.6-1.8 trillion in deficit closing measures–which could include tax increases and entitlement reforms. Then it would force an up or down vote under threat of default if Congress votes “no.” It almost seems like Obama’s dream bill, if you take what he says seriously. If you were cynical you would say that this is why he has semi-threatened to veto it.

So the threat of veto is like Brer Rabbit saying "don't fling me in dat brier-patch" in the old Uncle Remus story "How Mr. Rabbit Was Too Sharp for Mr. Fox."

"'Skin me, Brer Fox,' sez Brer Rabbit, sezee, 'snatch out my eyeballs, t'ar out my yeras by de roots, en cut off my legs,' sezee, 'but do please, Brer Fox, don't fling me in dat brier-patch,' sezee.

"Co'se Brer Fox wnater hurt Brer Rabbit bad ez he kin, so he cotch 'im by de behime legs en slung 'im right in de middle er de brierpatch. dar wuz a considerbul flutter whar Brer Rabbit struck de bushes, en Brer Fox sorter hang 'roun' fer ter see w'at wuz gwinter happen. Bimeby he hear somebody call im, en way up de hill he see Brer Rabbit settin' crosslegged on a chinkapin log koamin' de pitch outen his har wid a chip. Den Brer Fox know dat he bin swop off mighty bad. Brer Rabbit wuz bleedzed fer ter fling back some er his sass, en he holler out:

"'Bred en bawn in a brier-patch, Brer Fox--bred en bawn in a brier-patch!' en wid dat he skip out des ez lively as a cricket in de embers."

Brer Rabbit's problem, of course, was that he'd gotten stuck on the Tar Baby (in "The Wonderful Tar Baby Story"). I think no one's talking about the briar patch because everybody learned to stay away from the Tar Baby after John McCain caught hell for using the metaphor back in 2007:



You have to be forgetful or naive to deploy the old Brer Rabbit/Tar Baby/Briar Patch image these days. Whether it's actually inappropriately racial or not, mainstream political speakers have protected themselves from criticism by staying away from the Tar Baby. Maybe saying "briar patch" is different, but I suspect that, especially when you're talking about this President, it's getting too close to the Tar Baby.

ADDED: Animation.

"Wow. Am I crazy, or has the NYT just deployed some powerful new liberal bias technology?"

"I mean, with the 'draws attention to' formulation, Times editors can concoct a lede 'news' story making practically any tendentious ideological connection they want."

The Times wields a rhetorical device — does it have a specific name? — where you exclude human agency not with the passive voice but by making some abstraction the subject of a sentence written in the active voice. [CORRECTION: I mistakenly wrote "passive voice" for "active voice" at the end of that sentence. Sorry for the confusion!]

The headline Mickey Kaus draws attention to is "Sagging Economy Draws Attention to War Spending." In reality, somebody — e.g., Obama, the NYT — is trying to tell us to look at Y instead of X. The headline absurdly infuses the "sagging economy" with the will and the capacity to cause "attention" to be diverted to the subject of war spending.

The word "attention" also drains the headline of human will. The truth is that Obama/the NYT would like people to look at war spending instead of the economy. "Attention" isn't an entity with powers of perception that can be influenced to look at from one thing to another. The economy isn't trying to get attention to flit immediately from the troublesome subject of itself over to the preferred topic of war spending.

Real human beings, with interests and will, are trying to manipulate the minds of other human beings, who also have interests and will. And there's no evidence that the people have turned our attention to the subject the would-be manipulators prefer. In fact, we're still looking at the economy. It's the economy, stupid, a wise man once said. We're not stupid.

Mickey Kaus says: "Weiner is a victim of web-driven macho partisan cocooning."

That sounded like a great string of words, but then I realized I couldn't grasp the concept. I had to say it out loud. Victim. I get it. Weiner is the victim. Okay. Web-driven macho partisan cocooning. Web-driven partisan cocooning I would get. But what was macho about it? Didn't Weiner leave when he got double-teamed by Nancy and Debbie. And then Obama stuck his toe in and said what he would do if it were him. That wasn't macho. Then a porn star delivered the final blow. Maybe that was macho.

But, reading on, I see that the cocoon Mickey is talking about is Weiner's lefty friends on the web, including Daily Kos people and the lady-fans Weiner found on-line. They made him feel so powerful that he made mistakes. But I'm back to the same question. What's macho about that? Kaus thinks that Weiner thought that the lefty bloggers would fight for him. And that's macho... why?

Sorry. A middle-aged politician sitting at home masturbating because young women thought he was cool when he yelled at that guy that one time is not macho. And it doesn't get more macho because he's counting on lefty dweebs with blogs to type out a defense for you.