The Daily Parker

Politics, Weather, Photography, and the Dog

What if all those separatists got their ways?

Nate Cohn draws the map of these 61 United States:

What would happen if all of them succeeded? Each new state would get two senators and its share of electoral college votes. We ran the numbers and recalculated the 2012 presidential race.

In this bizarro United States, the GOP would have a structural advantage in the expanded Senate, and Barack Obama would have had a tighter fight against Mitt Romney in the electoral college (which he won, in reality, 332–206).

Of course, Cohn assumes that once the states seceded from their parent states—unlikely, in cases where the new states would reverse the existing state's party affiliation—the other states would let them in.

It's an interesting statistics issue, but alas, we're stuck with Texas and the rest of the former slave states that want to re-litigate Article IV.

Suburbanization in my home town

Northbrook, Ill., has always been a suburb. Until the end of the last century, no one had developed large hunks of the village, because two entities controlled several square kilometers of land around it. One entity, the U.S. Navy, operated an air station until 1994; the other, the Catholic Church, had a smallish farm, a convent, and a dairy barn well into the 1990s, and still owns Techny Towers, a religious retreat.

A conversation with a friend this week turned to a discussion of the Whole Foods Market at Willow and Waukegan Roads. So I dug out this photo from May 1985:

That's from the west edge of Waukegan Road, about 150m north of Willow, looking almost due west. Here's what it looks like today:

Notice that we can only see the backs of the stores from the road. All the storefronts point inward, to the parking lot. This is exactly the horror Andres Duany described in his 2000 book Suburban Nation.

When I was a kid, I looked at that huge field and imagined a college. It could have been combined with the land north of Techny Road into a neighborhood of medium-sized houses, with transit links along Waukegan and Willow. Hell, it could have been nearly anything.

Nope. Faced with 500 hectares of farmland in 2003, all the developers could see was an automobile-centric shopping plaza. The air station? Same thing. The Glen at least has a few dozen hectares of prairie preserve and a single transit stop that no one can really walk to. Otherwise, the whole redevelopment shows a staggering lack of imagination or forward thinking.

Career-limiting move by Congressional staff

Tuesday night, after the House of Representatives approved the deal ending the government shutdown, the House Stenographer...well, she added some commentary of her own:

As the House finished their vote to reopen the federal government and raise the debt ceiling, a House stenographer decided it was a good time to let everyone know her feelings about God, Congress, and the Freemasons.

“He [God] will not be mocked,” the stenographer, apparently named Molly, yelled into the microphone as she was dragged off by security. “The greatest deception here is that this is not one nation under God. It never was. It would not have been. The Constitution would not have been written by Freemasons. They go against God. You cannot serve two masters. Praise be to God. Praise be to Jesus.”

In unrelated news, if anyone wants to hire a slightly-unhinged but quite pious stenographer, I know of one who's on the market.

That catastrophe you were worried about? It's already here

Via Sullivan, Reuters' John Judis points out Thursday's deadline doesn't matter:

The best way to look at this, I think, is that there’s a spectrum of default severities. At one end, you have the outright repudiation of sovereign debt, a la Ecuador in 2008; at the other end, you have the sequester, which involves telling a large number of government employees that the resources which were promised them will not, in fact, arrive. Both of them involve the government going back on its promises, but some promises are far more binding, and far more important, than others.

Right now, with the shutdown, we’ve already reached the point at which the government is breaking very important promises indeed: we promised to pay hundreds of thousands of government employees a certain amount on certain dates, in return for their honest work. We have broken that promise. Indeed, by Treasury’s own definition, it’s reasonable to say that we have already defaulted: surely, by any sensible conception, the salaries of government employees constitute "legal obligations of the US."

While debt default is undoubtedly the worst of all possible worlds, then, the bonkers level of Washington dysfunction on display right now is nearly as bad. Every day that goes past is a day where trust and faith in the US government is evaporating — and once it has evaporated, it will never return. The Republicans in the House have already managed to inflict significant, lasting damage to the US and the global economy — even if they were to pass a completely clean bill tomorrow morning, which they won’t. The default has already started, and is already causing real harm. The only question is how much worse it’s going to get.

Sullivan extends it:

It seems to me that if the House GOP really does intend to destroy the American and global economy, to throw millions out of work, to make our debt problem far worse in a new depression … just to make a point about Obamacare, then at some point, Obama, like Lincoln, must preserve the republic.

But no president should ever want to take that position – because it represents the collapse of the American polity. But we are in collapse. If the House pushes the country into default this week, there is no workable American polity left. The most basic forms of collective responsibility will have been forsaken for almost pathological ideological purism and cultural revolt.

These people are crazy, truly crazy. Are we done giving them political power yet?

The GOP as angry controlling restaurant patrons

Really interesting analysis from No More Mr Nice Blog. Key grafs:

The Republican Party at this point in time is entirely made up of Punishers who think they are entitled to treat the government--and especially the government of Barack Obama--as waiters who need to be shown their place. This should surprise no one. At heart the entire Republican Party is made up of winners and losers and they are united in just one thing: they think that money is the only way to tell who is who. If you have money, you use that to distinguish yourself from the losers and to demonstrate your superiority by punishing them further. If you are a loser--a worker, for example, or have no health insurance (say) your job as a Republican is to take your status as a given, accept it, and turn around and get your jollies kicking someone else farther down the line.

I'd even argue that Reince Priebus's absurd "offer" to pay for a few employees to keep the military site open for the honor flight vets was an example of a perfectly logical extension of the tipping principle: that people with money should get better treatment than ordinary customers. That the government's attempt to treat everyone uniformly in both the Sequester and the Shut Down is, to the Republican way of thinking, a greater affront than almost anything else. It flies in the face of the "do you know who I am?" principle which underlies Republican thinking about the nature of the world.

The whole post is worth a read.

Before I forget...

I've got about an hour to prepare for a Meet-Up I'm presenting. While I'm doing that, you read these:

OK, prep time.

I wonder what's making people nervous?

A Gallup poll released today shows the largest drop in economic confidence since 2008:

Americans' confidence in the economy has deteriorated more in the past week during the partial government shutdown than in any week since Lehman Brothers collapsed on Sept. 15, 2008, which triggered a global economic crisis. Gallup's Economic Confidence Index tumbled 12 points to -34 last week, the second-largest weekly decline since Gallup began tracking economic confidence daily in January 2008.

Fiscal brinksmanship in Washington is related to many of the largest weekly drops in Americans' confidence in the economy since 2008. Gallup's Economic Confidence Index fell nine points in late February and early March 2013 as Congress and President Barack Obama failed to reach an agreement to avoid automatic federal spending cuts as part of sequestration. Economic confidence fell eight points during the week ending Feb. 20, 2011, as Congress and the president reached an agreement on the federal budget at the last minute, avoiding a government shutdown.

In related news, the Republican Party, for reasons they can't seem to fathom, is polling only slightly above UKIP:

Republicans in Congress also got record-low marks in the poll. Just 17 percent of Americans approved of the job GOP lawmakers were doing, and 74 percent disapproved. That’s the lowest approval ever in Quinnipiac’s polling, and is down from August and July this summer.

Those surveyed also disapproved of Democrats in Congress, 60 percent to 32 percent, but that was the best approval rating Democrats have seen since May.

Another poll showed that only 5% of Democrats approved of Congress right now. I would like to meet that one guy in 20. That's faith, man. That's faith.

Hipster central!

Just as I start poking around Logan Square, the Reader reminds me it's prime hipster habitat—though it hasn't always been, and it might not be for much longer:

The way Jason Hammel tells it, his arrival in Logan Square in 1995 was like a fairy tale, everyone's dream of arriving in a new, yet-to-be-anointed hipster mecca: "I asked a friend for advice on moving to Chicago. He said, 'Go to Logan Square. There's a cool coffeeshop there called Logan Beach.' I got an apartment without looking at it. It was $325 a month, including utilities. It was big, and it was near the boulevard. On the first day, I walked to Logan Beach. I went with my girlfriend. Her name was Lea Wood. We sat down and looked up at the menu, which was written on a chalkboard, and saw 'Lea's Amazing Soup.' I said we had to order it because it was spelled the same way. And it turned out I was talking to my now ex-girlfriend about my future wife [Amalea Tshilds] while sitting at table 51 in the restaurant I would own. And it was my first day in Chicago. Logan Beach was everything that matters to me in Logan Square."

Logan Square is adjusting more gracefully to its hipsterdom than Wicker Park did. "Logan Square feels more open than Wicker Park of that era felt," Hammel says. "Maybe it was because I was young and felt shut out. I hope it's not like that. Someone once wrote on our window, 'Lula is the same as Wal-Mart.' They wrote it angrily, like graffiti. But isn't there negativity everywhere?"

But rents have definitely gone up. "There's been less of a lag in terms of transition," says Paul Durica. "The transition of Old Town took decades. Wicker Park took from the mid-80s to the late 90s. Logan Square seems like it transitioned from a young, hip neighborhood to yuppie within a couple of years. It's not even waiting for a transition period. It's going from ethnic to hip kids to yuppies all simultaneously. It's a fascinating development."

So, apparently, I'm going to be part of the problem that hipsters face. So where will they go? The author suggests Avondale or Pilsen.