Today Sonny Perdue signed the voter ID bill. Let's do a little recap on Sonny's decade plus in politics. In 1990 he was elected as a Democrat to the state Senate, where he quickly rose to the top (under the tutelage of former Lt. Gov. Pierre Howard (D - Decatur)). In that time period, the leadership of the Democratic Party in the state Senate was overwhelmingly dominated by white males. In 1997 Sonny was elevated to President Pro Tem of the Senate, which is considered the top spot and in that time period served as a very close #2 to the Lite Governor.
Something else happened in 1997, Charles Walker, the charismatic African American senator from Augusta became the first black Majority Leader of the body. Interestingly, he beat out future party switcher Jack Hill (D - Reidsville), who also happens to be a college friend of Sonny's. About a year later, at the end of the '97-'98 session, Perdue announced he was leaving the Democrats and switching to the Republican Party. Allegedly he had become involved in a shouting match with Walker that may have gotten physical.
In 1998, Perdue predicts (wrongly) that a number of other Democrats in the Senate would switch parties with him and that Republicans would take over the body after the election. Instead, Democrats have an historic year, thanks in part to record African-American turnout, and elect statewide a number of progressives on race, including Governor Roy Barnes and Lt. Gov. Mark Taylor (who both nearly instantly become Perdue nemeses) as well as an Attorney General and Labor Commissioner who are both black.
This all culminates three years later when Barnes pushes through a divisive but long overdue change of the state flag. Legislative Republicans are almost universally opposed to removing the racist Confederate battle emblem from the banner -- then Republican House minority leader Lynn Westmoreland advises his colleagues that the flag change is "a Democratic issue that they must settle. An issue that the governor must address." Then Republican Senate minority leader Eric Johnson adds "It's their [Democrats] problem. Let them deal with it."
The cowardly insinuation was clear -- when the flag was last changed in 1956, the legislature was overwhelmingly Democratic and so it was their problem. Never mind that in 1956, the vote was extremely close (the Sons and Daughters of the Confederacy had opposed the change) and that those segregationist Democrats that voted for it where the forefathers of the modern Georgia Republican party. In the case of Westmoreland there wasn't a clear-cut direct lineage, but in the case of Perdue and many other Republicans who had actually been Democrats only a few years before, Westmoreland and Johnson's logic should have compelled them to not just participate in but lead the effort for the change. After all, if it was the Democrats fault that we had the old flag, and the responsibility of those Democrats to change it, well you can't just absolve your old Democratic sins by calling yourself a Republican.
The flag change, if nothing else, finally gave Republican activists something concrete to point at when rural conservative Democrats would question why they should abandon a Democratic party that had been so good to them. Amazingly, only a charisma challenged suburbanite and Cruella DeVillish state school superintendent challenged Perdue, a real life good ole' boy if there ever was one in the Republican primary. Perdue hitched his wagon to a subtle racist opposition to the flag change that was good enough to win both the Republican primary and general election.
It should have been clear to just about everyone that Sonny has what you might call a problem with race, but he's a "nice guy" so he gets a pass. He simultaneously announces a racial healing tour of the state and a bill to change the state flag that includes a provision that could ultimately lead to the return of the 1956 flag (House Democrats remove this provision, the tension filled atmosphere surrounding the bill ultimately leads to the disarray that causes the Democrats to lose control of this body).
Two years later, the Republicans have complete control of Georgia government. A top priority becomes a voter-id bill, which includes stringent identification requirements that will slow down and bottleneck voting at heavily minority and elderly precincts while at the same time loosens requirements and invites fraud in Republican dominated absentee balloting. Today, Sonny Perdue signed that bill into law. Confronted with the myriad objections of groups like the NAACP, League of Women Voters and AARP, he said he "just can't comprehend" their arguments.
And so, Sonny Perdue has come full circle. He emerged from a culture where whites (then Democrats) dominated. Confronted with a resurgence of minorities having power (like Walker) or wielding it (to change the flag) he balked, switching allegiances to a party where whites (now Republicans) still dominate. And now he has used the levers of power to try and cement a status quo where the right issue still allows a coalition of traditional whites to dominate.
Sonny Perdue is a man of God, and having met him (and being on a first name basis) I don't doubt his convictions. The Voter ID bill (like opposition to the flag change) may help him get re-elected, and for four more years he and his party may well reign supreme over our state. But at some point he will look back on his life in politics, how he took the easy road and appealed to the basest elements in his fellow man. And he will have to ask himself whether he was serving God or a man-made ideology. That will be a tough question for him to answer.
I wasn't exactly a Dean person when it came to the chairmanship. However, like a lot of the other non-Dean people, I wasn't exactly a Roemer or Frost or Rosenberg person either. My own preference was Roy Barnes, but he wasn't interested in the job. That said, I'm impressed with some of the moves that Dean has made so far. Among them is giving wide latitude to Congressional Dems to set policy -- that's always a good idea. Let your elected officials, the only ones who face voters (400 people elected in small caucuses at party events is generally not the most representative group) set the policy.
Second, in a little noticed move, Dean picked his former rival Tim Roemer to be a spokesman for the DNC in more conservative states and areas. Maybe some rural counties or areas should look into having Roemer as a JJ guest. I don't know if this is one of these keep your friends close and your enemies closer moves, or (as I suspect) Dean has a decent understanding of the problems the party faces in rural and conservative areas (even if he hasn't quite mastered the necessary rhetoric himself), but this was a good move.
Look forward to more positive moves from the DNC. As controversal as McAuliffe was at the time, looking back there is no doubt that he left the party in good financial shape for one of the first times ever. That is no small feat. Now it's up to Dean to take it to the next level.
Amazingly, the provision in the ethics bill that would have legalized Sonny Perdue's unlawful behavior from the 2002 campaign was removed after the Democratic Party of Georgia's press conference pointing out what a bad thing it was to do and how it attempted to whitewash Perdue's past. Even though Perdue's spokesperson mocked Bobby Kahn and said they didn't know anything about the provision, somehow it disappeared in conference. Goes to show that occasionally if you throw enough darts you'll hit something, even though you wouldn't have read about it in the AJC (they buried it in a legislative wrapup). Credit where credit is due, the Morris newspapers all wrote good stories about this blatant attempted unethical powergrab.
I suppose that Rob Teilhet, Inc. and Bill Stephens Manufacturing will now be dissolved. Now that you can't funnel money from your personal business to your political campaign, for many Georgia politicians, what's the point of being an entrepreneur?
Only in the fantasy world of the blogosphere is someone with a 66-23 approval rating vulnerable in a primary or general election. MyDD and DailyKos are all atwitter because Joe Lieberman has a higher approval rating among Republicans in his home state than among Democrats. And yet, his approval rating among Democrats is still the aforementioned 66-23, which is not great for your own party but which is also well into the comfort zone.
The fact that his approval among D's is lower than among R's means nothing, and this highlights actually a big problem among some of the amateur statisticians of the blogosphere. First let me say that I encourage anyone who wants to crunch numbers to do so and also it is an unqualified good thing to take a look at the way things are from angles that others maybe hadn't considered.
However, it is important to remember that you can have a lot of fancy statistics but you must understand which ones mean something and which ones are just fancy statistics. This is something I've meant to discuss for a while.
MyDD has what they call a "partisan index" that compares the vote for President in a state with the national popular vote each year. If the Republican margin was better than nationally, they have a Republican partisan index and likewise for a Democrat. Here is a link to their partisan index page compiled before the 2004 election. It is kind of a neat reference to see how a state fared compared to the rest of the country, but doesn't tell you much about what you can expect in the future.
It doesn't even accurately paint a portrait of what already happened. Here is a DailyKos post that illustrates that. According to Kos, these are the states that moved from the RNC partisan index camp in 2000 to the DNC camp this year, states that are "getting bluer": Iowa, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Ohio, Oregon and Wisconsin. Hmm, notice anything about that list? Maybe that Iowa and New Mexico were carried by Democrats in 2000 but Kerry lost them this time! Some comfort it is to know that those two states are more Democratic than the country as a whole in 2004 but Bush still won them.
On another list that includes states where the largest gains on partisan index were included you have states like Colorado (lost) and Pennsylvania (won). Gee, I wonder if that is because both states were among the most heavily targeted this time, Colorado wasn't last time and Kerry basically matched Gore's performance in Pa but improved that state's partisan index because he underperformed Gore nationwide.
To show that a measure isn't that worthwhile of a predictor one thing you can do is look at it's track record for the past. After the 2000 election, none of the states qualified for the first DailyKos list, that is none of the states saw their partisan index switch from pro-Republican to pro-Democratic. Yet, four years later New Hampshire flipped to a Democratic state. Additionally, these states would have made Kos's B list: CA, CT, DE, DC, FL, IL, KS, MD, MA, NV, NJ, NY, PA, RI, TN, VA. To suggest that Florida, Kansas, Tennessee and Virginia were on the cusp of making great gains this election cycle is laughable. Even most of the blue states on the list got redder. The one state that had the biggest swing (Vermont) actually decreased in the partisan index from 1996 to 2000.
Further still, the state that came closest to flipping the election for Kerry, Ohio, appeared to be trending the wrong way (again, using the index) and we all know how wrong that is. People in the blogosphere (myself included) have a tendency to obsess over data. It's problematic, however, when someone obsesses over something that isn't even useful.
Amusingly, many candidates obsess over trivial minutia until they talk to a consultant who tells them it doesn't matter and to get back on the phone raising money. MyDD has been very aggresive in what I'd call the "fire the consultants" clique in the blogosphere, and it is no secret that they and many like them aim to be the new consultants hired once the mass layoffs begin. And yes, as invaluable as their blog is for discussion, breaking news and occasionally analysis (I read it all the time), I would have little faith turning over the keys because for all their interest in politics, they don't seem to be able to offer much insight into what to do differently in order to win other than fear and respect the netroots and utilize the partisan index and other ultimately useless measures to determine where to spend resources and how to spend them. Interestingly they also argue that Democrats do not have a national security problem, which to me is laughable.
I apologize for the length of this post, but it's something I've been wanting to write about for some time.
I got a notice that my cardholder agreement with American Express has been updated in one very important way today. Previously, with American Express, you had a grace period on new charges whereby interest is not accrued as long as you pay your statement's closing balance by the day it is due. If you had an outstanding balance of $1,000 and had charged $100 more during the next month, you would not pay interest on the $100 of new charges as long as you paid off the $1,000 by the date it was due. Simple, and fair enough.
Now, AmEx charges you interest on the new charges until you pay off your balance in full, unless you have paid your balance in full the two previous months. This may not seem like a big deal, but many cardholders won't read the fine print and understand how this works, which could cost you a lot of money.
Imagine that you had a balance on your card one month and paid half of what was due. You didn't charge anything the next month and planned on paying the other half, plus whatever interest charges had accrued so that you'd be paid in full. Under the old rules, since you were paying off your bill in full, you wouldn't be charged interest on new charges during your current billing statement. If you *assume*, like I would, that you have a grace period, you might agree to charge a large one-time expense that you know you'll pay off right away. Say that your car needs repair so you put a $2,000 charge on your card because you'll have the money at the end of the month.
There are generally about 15 days between when your statement period ends and when the bill is due, so during that 15 days you'd be charged interest on your new $2,000 charge. It might only come out to $10 or so, but imagine instead you charged something very expensive for work because you'd get paid back -- you could be stuck with considerable interest charges.
The point is that American Express (which is one of the good guys of the credit card industry) and the rest of the industry already makes enough money as it is. Congress is signalling that when it comes to consumer protection law, anything goes, and the credit card companies are taking that as a cue to further gouge consumers. I won't go so far as to say never use a credit card, because they are a very convenient way to keep track of your spending, with downloadable billing and one check to write per month instead of whenever you buy something. But use your credit card and try to pay the balance in full each month and every month. That's the only way you won't pay hundreds of dollars extra per year even if you ARE a good customer who follows all of the rules.
And if you're able to join a credit union through work or some other affiliation, by all means do that as well.
A lot of ink has been devoted to Google's mail client, GMail, lately. Importantly, Google has increased the storage space for users' accounts from an already unheard of at the time 1 GB to 2 GB. A Maxtor OneTouch 300 GB external hard drive costs $300, a Maxtor internal 300 GB drive costs $250. That's less than $1 for every gigabyte.
Using Google Ads on my site, I've made an average of about $8 / month. My guess is that GMail users make Google a pretty decent sum, at least $1/month per user on average, because Google sells targeted advertisements that are placed in your email based on the keywords contained in your message. So the ads pay for the extra space, and the extra space attracts more users. Not a bad business plan they've got going on there.
But, it should also show consumers that storage space should not be at such a premium, as it is so cheap. Earthlink/Mindspring made a long overdue increase in storage space for their email accounts, going from 10 MB to 100 MB (1/20th of Google's capacity). That's fine for me, occasionally I'd brush up against the 10 MB limit but I rarely need to receive a file over 100 MB. However, Earthlink, Yahoo and other companies should take the lead in moving into online storage for photos, documents and other accessories. The drive space costs next to nothing, but as Google has shown the kind of loyalty it can engender from your customers can be very valuable.