Lack Of Intelligence Doesn't Hurt Conservative Candidates With Conservative Voters

"You don't have to pass an IQ test to be in the Senate, though," giggled conservative Arkansas Senator Mark Pryor on the big screen. He was unseated by an undistinguished right-wing extremist, Tom Cotton, 476,309 (56.5%) to 332,669 (39.5%). I don't know how much his remarks to Bill Maher played into his defeat. I don't know how much Arkansas voters care about IQ test results or intelligence in their elected officials at all for that matter. And this week, a neighboring state's governor, Rick Perry, was playing up on that sentiment in his "I'm back and I'm different this time" plea for support in his quest for the 2016 GOP presidential nomination. Perry's polling support hovers around 2% among GOP voters-- better than Rick Santorum, tied with Bobby Jindal.

But Perry's handlers are telling big donors he's kicked his drug addiction problems and he's telling interviewers his awkward, stumbling nature and low IQ don't matter in a Republican primary. He says "life experience is more important than book smarts in a president." Book smarts, though, isn't what IQ measures. IQ measures human intelligence and conservatives, by nature, are extremely distrustful of any such thing. General intelligence refers to the ability to reason deductively or inductively, think abstractly, use analogies, synthesize information, and apply it to new domains. We'll get to that in a minute. Back to Perry first.

"Running for the presidency's not an IQ test. It is a test of an individual's resolve. It's a test of an individual's philosophy. It's a test of an individual's life's experiences," Perry said in an interview at the Governor's Mansion, which he's leaving as his term ends. "And I think Americans are really ready for a leader that will give them a great hope about the future."

Perry said he probably has less "margin for error" after he famously couldn't remember one of the federal agencies he said he'd ax during a November 2011 Republican debate. But "I think, over the course of the last two years, people realize that what they saw in 2011 is certainly not the person they're looking at at 2013, 2014, 2015," he said.

Perry also said he'd have no problem convincing Republicans that he can win in 2016, saying potential backers "are pouring in here to sit down with us, to talk to us."

"The policy individuals that have said 'listen, we want to come help you become even better prepared as we go forward' is already the answer to that," he said.

A few years ago Professor Satoshi Kanazawa of the London School of Economics published a piece, Why Liberals And Atheists Are More Intelligent, in the Social Psychology Quarterly that turned political conservatives off to intelligence permanently. His study found that higher intelligence directly correlates with liberal political ideology. "General intelligence, the ability to think and reason, endowed our ancestors with advantages in solving evolutionarily novel problems for which they did not have innate solutions," says Kanazawa. "As a result, more intelligent people are more likely to recognize and understand such novel entities and situations than less intelligent people, and some of these entities and situations are preferences, values, and lifestyles." He argues that humans are evolutionarily designed to be conservative, caring mostly about their family and friends, and being liberal, caring about an indefinite number of genetically unrelated strangers they never meet or interact with, is evolutionarily novel. So more intelligent children may be more likely to grow up to be liberals. Here's how Time covered the report back in 2010, noting that Kanazawa is a libertarian and non-partisan.

The notion that liberals are smarter than conservatives is familiar to anyone who has spent time on a college campus. The College Democrats are said to be ugly, smug and intellectual; the College Republicans, pretty, belligerent and dumb. There's enough truth in both stereotypes that the vast majority of college students opt not to join either club.

...What's new in Kanazawa's paper is a provocative theory about why intelligence might correlate with liberalism. He argues that smarter people are more willing to espouse "evolutionarily novel" values-- that is, values that did not exist in our ancestral environment, including weird ideas about, say, helping genetically unrelated strangers (liberalism, as Kanazawa defines it), which never would have occurred to us back when we had to hunt to feed our own clan and our only real technology was fire.

Kanazawa offers this view of how such novel values sprang up in our ancestors: Imagine you are a caveman (if it helps, you are wearing a loincloth and have never shaved). Lightning strikes a tree near your cave, and fire threatens. What do you do? Natural selection would have favored the smart specimen who could quickly conceive answers to such a problem (or other rare catastrophes like sudden drought or flood), even if-- or maybe especially if-- those answers were unusual ones that few others in your tribe could generate. So, the theory goes, genes for intelligence got wrapped up with genes for unnatural thinking.

It's an elegant theory, but based on Kanazawa's own evidence, I'm not sure he's right. In his paper, Kanazawa begins by noting, accurately, that psychologists don't have a good understanding of why people embrace the values they do. Many kids share their parents' values, but at the same time many adolescents define themselves in opposition to what their parents believe. We know that most people firm up their values when they are in their 20s, but some people experience conversions to new religions, new political parties, new artistic tastes and even new cuisines after middle age. As Kanazawa notes, this multiplicity of views-- a multiplicity you find within both cultures and individuals-- is one reason economists have largely abandoned the study of values with a single Latin phrase, De gustibus non est disputandum: there's no accounting for taste.

Kanazawa doesn't disagree, but he believes scientists can account for whether people like new tastes or old, radical tastes or Establishment ones. He points out that there's a strong correlation between liberalism and openness to new kinds of experiences. But openness to new experience isn't necessarily intelligent (cocaine is fun; accidental cocaine overdose is not).

So are liberals smarter? Kanazawa quotes from two surveys that support the hypothesis that liberals are more intelligent. One is the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, which is often called Add Health. The other is the General Social Survey (GSS). The Add Health study shows that the mean IQ of adolescents who identify themselves as "very liberal" is 106, compared with a mean IQ of 95 for those calling themselves "very conservative." The Add Health study is huge-- more than 20,000 kids-- and this difference is highly statistically significant.

No, that isn't Michele Bachmann above. Still Perry... celebrating. Hard to fathom though, that in the middle of the fight to keep the government open/deregulate Wall Street, the White House not only hosted a Christmas Party, but invited dangerous right-wing radicals to it. I hope they all got thoroughly patted down. Even Michele Bachmann, who is being allowed to walk away from a serious criminal investigation in return for her retirement from Congress, was permitted to attend.

Why would she even bother? She wanted to tell President Obama, in person, to nuke Iran, which has over 77 million inhabitants, more than the population of Iraq and Afghanistan combined. Throw in Libya and Qatar and we're still not there yet. First she promised her family she wouldn't make a spectacle out of herself when it was time to pose with the president for photos. But as soon as they had left the stage, that special Bachmann derangement gene kicked in.

“I turned to the president and I said, something to the effect of, ‘Mr. President, you need to bomb the Iranian nuclear facilities, because if you don’t, Iran will have a nuclear weapon on your watch and the course of world history will change,’” she told the Washington Free Beacon.

“And he got his condescending smile on his face and laughed at me and said, ‘Well Michele, it’s just not that easy.’ And I said to him, ‘No, Mr. President, you’re the president, it will happen on your watch, and you’ll have to answer to the world for this.’ And that was it and then I left. Merry Christmas,” she said with a laugh.

...Bachmann now plans to travel across the country, giving speeches and writing op-eds ahead of what she called a “consequential” election in 2016. Presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton will simply continue Obama’s widely criticized domestic and foreign policies, Bachmann said. Republicans for their part need to ensure that they do not nominate a candidate who is “changing their stripes just for an election.”

“If we get a very bold conservative who has a strong identification of where they want to take the country, both economically and in terms of national security, we do have a chance to have a major course correction for America in the future,” she said.

Yes, But WHY Didn't Democrats Turn Out On Election Day? WHY?

A Member of Congress, a strong, active, unambiguous progressive who sailed to victory Tuesday, called me complaining about Pelosi's tele-caucus meeting the other day. The Democrats, Pelosi said, did badly in the election because-- wait for it-- turnout was bad. It was bad... something like only 36.6% of registered voters went to the polls. But that in itself doesn't explain why the Democrats did poorly, nor why Republicans did well. On C-Span's Newsmakers this morning, Bernie Sanders said he thinks "many of the Democratic candidates did not run on an agenda which resonated with working people… where the Democrats have been weak and individual Democratic candidates have been weak is not really coming up to the plate and saying, ‘You know what? We’re going to have to take on the billionaire class'." One of those weak, confused candidates the Democrats ran was Alison Grimes in Kentucky. When questioned she couldn't even admit she had voted for Obama. So the result? Tuesday she wound up with 100,000 fewer voters than Obama got in Kentucky in 2012. Her total was 584,622 and his was 679,370.

Members were grumbling that what Pelosi didn't address is why turn out was low. What had gone wrong that the Democrats couldn't turn out their voters? Why, for example in Arkansas, why did 546,135 voters (65.9%) opt for the minimum wage increase, while electing Asa Hutchinson governor 468,017 (55.4%) to 350,535 (41.5%). Asa Hutchinson, not only didn't back the minimum wage increase but he doesn't back the concept of having a minimum wage at all. Arkansas voters also elected a radical right, anti-minimum wage senator, Tom Cotton 476,309 (56.5%) to 332,669 (39.5%) and 4 Republicans to its 4 House seats-- while growing the state House GOP majority from 51 Republicans to 63 Republicans?

Well, the guy who ran against Hutchinson for governor, Mike Ross, (aside from being a crook) is a Blue Dog who had amassed one of the most conservative, pro-Republican voting records in Congress and was forced to retire in 2012 rather than face certain defeat in the district he had first won over a decade earlier. Of the 4 Democrats running for the congressional seats, none were progressives; all were conservatives with Republican-lite messages for the voters. And the U.S. Senator who Tom Cotton beat, Mark Pryor, was across all issues among the 3 most conservative Democrats in the U.S. Senate. And someone absolutely incapable of selling a progressive message. Watch this confused mess in his own office trying to navigate a conversation he should probably have never been in to begin with. Voters can smell the bullshit and the fear:



In Alaska, the minimum wage bill passed with an even greater margin, 154,516 (68.8%) to 70,082 (31.2%)-- while those same Alaska voters appear to have elected a right-wing kook, Dan Sullivan, who opposes a minimum wage. He's currently leading generally conservative Democrat Mark Begich 110,203 (49.0%) to 102,054 (45.3%). In Nebraska, voters decided, by a margin of 59.2% to 40.8% to increase the minimum wage-- while electing minimum wage opponent Ben Sasse with 64.8%. Republicans had banner nights in South Dakota and West Virginia as well-- both of which had majorities in favor of minimum wage increases-- and new Republicans elected who oppose minimum wages on principle-- or, more to the point-- support the concept of slavery for the working class. In Illinois, voters approved a nonbinding advisory question that calls on the state Legislature to approve a $10 minimum wage-- and elected sleazy anti-minimum wage billionaire Bruce Rauner governor. At the same time, Illinois Republicans managed to defeat 2 Democratic congressional incumbents, Brad Schneider and Bill Enyart-- both confused, conflicted conservatives-- while electing Robert Dold and GOP sociopath Mike Bost.

The AFL-CIO has post-election data that shows that an overwhelming majority of Americans favor Democratic Party progressive positions-- from a more specific one like raising the minimum wage to a more amorphous one like reducing the power of Wall Street and Big Business. AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka says that there's a disconnect with voters because over half of them agreed that "politicians from both the Democratic and Republican parties do too much to support Wall Street financial interests and not enough to help average Americans." That explains why most of the pain and suffering Tuesday was among members of the Republican wing of the Democratic Party-- Blue Dogs, New Dems and other corporate whores-- and, with a few exceptions, not among normal progressive Democrats. "If a candidate goes out with a strong economic message, and says, 'Here’s how I’m gonna solve your economic problems,' that candidate’s gonna do well," said Trumka. "It doesn’t matter whether they’re a Democrat or Republican. But the economic message that voters heard, they heard stronger from the Republican side than from the Democrats."

On Friday, I talked a little about why voters didn't vote but this morning I found a perspective worth looking at by George Lakoff. "Democratic strategists," he wrote "have been segmenting the electorate and seeking individual self-interest-based issues in each electoral block. The strategists also keep suggesting a move to right. This has left no room for the Democrats to have an overriding authentic moral identity that Americans can recognize." That's the crux of it. Pelosi appointed Israel because he's greasy crook with strong ties to slimy lobbyists, Wall Street predators and Big Business interests. His job was to raise money-- and he did. The problem was that he was an abject failure at crafting any kind of strategy (mystery meatism could not have possibly worked) or in recruiting viable candidates capable of independent thought and carrying a progressive message and vision-- both of which are abhorent to Israel himself. Israel's base is not working families; it is the strategic infrastructure on which Lakoff bases part of his critique: "PR firms, pollsters, consultants, researchers, trainers, communication specialists, speechwriters, and their funders."

Lakoff points to a dozen strategic points the Beltway Democrats use as an excuse for strategy:

• Use demographic categories to segment the electorate, categories from the census (race, gender, ethnicity, age, marital status, income, zip code), as well as publicly available party registration.

• Assume uniformity across the demographic categories. Poll on which issues are "most important," e.g., for women (or single women), for each minority group, for young people, and so on. This separates the issues from one another and creates "issue silos." It does not include segmentation for moral worldviews that differ between conservatives and progressives.

• Assume language is neutral and that the same poll questions will have the same meaning for everyone polled. In reality, language is defined relative to conceptual frames. And the same words can be "contested," that is, they can have opposite meanings depending on one's moral values.

• Assume that people vote on the basis of material self-interest and design different message to appeal to different demographic groups. In reality, poor conservatives will vote against their material interests when they identify with a candidate and his or her values.

• In polling, apply statistical methods to the answers given in each demographic group. This will impose a "bell curve" in the results. The bell curve will impose a "middle" in each case.

• Assume that most voters are in the middle imposed by the bell curve. Move to the middle. If your beliefs are on the left of the "middle," move to the right to be where most voters are. You will be helping conservatives, by supporting their beliefs. And you may be saying things you don't believe.

• Check the polls to see how popular the present Democratic president is; if he is not popular, design you message to dissociate yourself from the president. It will reinforce the unpopularity of the president when members of his own party, as well as the opposition, disown him.

• Attack your opponents as being "extremists" when they hold views typical of the far right. This will help your opponents as standing up for what they believe among those of their constituents that share any of those views.

• Attack you opponents for getting money from rich corporations or individuals. This will help your opponent among Republicans (and some Democrats) who respect the values of the wealthy and successful.

• Argue against your opponents by quoting them, using their language and negating that language. Negating a frame reinforces the frame, as in the sentence "Don't think of an elephant!" This practice will mostly reinforce the views of your opponent.

• Privatization: When significant public resources become owned or controlled by private corporations, the public has lost an essential element of freedom.

• Fear: When you are emotionally gripped by fear, you are not free.

This is certainly how Steve Israel ran the DCCC (and how Michael Bennet ran the DSCC and how Debbie Wasserman Schultz runs the DNC). "Such strategies," writes Lakoff, "miss the opportunity to present an overriding moral stand that fits the individual issues, while saying clearly what ideals Democrats stand for as Democrats. There happens to be such an overriding ideal that most Democrats authentically believe in."

All politics is moral. When a politician says to do something, he is implicitly claiming that it is the right thing to do. No political will over say, do what I say because it's wrong-- pure evil! None will ever say, "Do what I say, though it doesn't matter." When politicians' policy prescriptions differ widely, it because their sense of what is right is very different. In short, they have different moral systems. That is true of progressives and conservatives alike. The political proposals conservatives and progressives make are based on different moral systems.

Progressive and conservatives have very different understandings of democracy. For progressives empathy is at the center of the very idea of democracy. Democracy is a governing system in which citizens care about their fellow citizens and work through their government to provide public resources for all. In short, in a democracy, the private depends on the public.

Elizabeth Warren says it out loud. If you have a business it depends on public resources: roads, bridges, the Interstate highway system, sewers, a water supply, airports and air traffic control, the Federal Reserve, a patent office, public education for your employees, public health, the electric grid, the satellite communication system, the internet, and all the government research behind computer science. You can't run a business without these. Private enterprise depends on the public.

The same is true of individuals, who depend on public resources like clean air, clean water, enough food, safe food and products, public safety, access to education and health care, housing, employment-- as well as those roads, bridges, sewers, satellite communication, electric grid, and so on. And most important-- voting in free elections, choosing the government to provide those resources. Private life depends on the public.

What public resources provide is freedom. Most progressive issues are freedom issues.

And one more, which had a major effect in the 2014 election:

• Voting: Without the ability to vote in free elections you are not free.

• Health: If you get cancer or even break a leg and don't have health care, you are not free.

• Education: Without education, you lack the knowledge and skills not just ot earn a decent living, but also to even be aware of the possibilities of life. Without education, you are therefore not free.

• Women: If you are denied control over your body, you are not free.

• Marriage: If you are in love and are denied the ability to marry with a publicly declared lifetime commitment, you are not free.

• Vast income inequality: When the economic gains that most people have worked go not the those who worked for them for go only to the wealthiest of the wealthy, those who did the work-- most people-- are not free.

• Race: When you are treated with suspicion and disdain, you are not free.

• Corporate Control: When corporations control your life for their benefit and not yours, you are not free.

As FDR pointed out, Freedom From Fear is a vital freedom. In the 2014 election, conservative played on fear - of Isis and Ebola.

Every progressive instinctively knows all this, but very few say it. Instead, progressives tend to talk not about such values, but instead about facts, policies, and programs.

Conservatives, on the other hand, have a very different view of democracy. For them democracy is supposed to provide them with the liberty to do what they want, without being responsible for others and without others being responsible for them. For them, there is only personal responsibility, not social responsibility. Indeed, providing public resources is, to a conservative, immoral, taking away personal responsibility, making people dependent, lazy, unable to take care of themselves. Removing public resources is seen as providing incentives, and individual liberty is seen as the condition in which you can carry out your incentives.

This is very much what conservative morality is about. If you cannot succeed through personal responsibility, you deserve what you get.

But these are not just two equally valid, though opposite, moral systems. Because the private really does depend on the public, because personal responsibility without public resources gets you nowhere, the conservative view of democracy has radically false consequences. It is immoral because it lacks empathy, but it also just plain false... Progressivism supports freedom. The private depends on the public. If you believe it, say it. Moral ideals matter. Authenticity matters.

Authenticity? I suppose some would argue that the words "inauthentic" and "politician" go together like a gin and tonic but if you want the ultimate definition of inauthentic look no further than losing conservative transactional Democrats like Charlie Crist (FL), John Barrow (GA), Pete Gallego (TX), Ron Barber (AZ), Joe Garcia (FL), Brad Schneider (IL), Ro Khanna (CA), Jennifer Garrison (OH), Andrew Romanoff (CO), Domenic Recchia (NY), Sean Eldridge (NY). Give me a break. These are a bunch of pointless careerists, not even politicians! Pelosi is about to replace the most inauthentic DCCC Chair in recent memoiry with a Wall Street puppet even less authentic, Jim Himes, a catastrophe in the making for working families who depend on the Democratic Party and are the real victims of the party's geriatric leadership's inability to see the errors of its own ways.

The Koch Billions' Toxic Effect On American Democracy

Last week we talked about how Republicans were unleashing a barrage of attack ads against weak conservative Democrats, like John Barrow, for voting with Republicans. Democrats who crossed the aisle to vote with Republicans to cut Social Security benefits for retired people are now being bombarded with ads-- that are true, regardless of the disingenuous source-- pointing out that they are the enemies of working people. That's what Blue Dogs and New Dems like John Barrow-- he's both-- deserve anyway.

Taking it a step further, the Koch brother's Americans For Prosperity went after Arkansas Senator Mark Pryor this week for being out of touch with income inequality in America. Mindboggling! Pryor has had a repulsive tendency to vote for the same interests the Kochs promote-- even if he's doing it on behalf of even richer plutocrats than the Kochs-- the Walton family. Take a look at the trailer for Brave New Films Koch Brothers Exposed, 2014 immediately below this paragraph. "Day in and day out, we see the Kochs using their billions to purchase politicians-- and policy-- taking a terrible toll on democracy... stomping on poor people."

The enormity of the Koch fortune is no mystery. Brothers Charles and David are each worth more than $40 billion. The electoral influence of the Koch brothers is similarly well-chronicled. The Kochs are our homegrown oligarchs; they've cornered the market on Republican politics and are nakedly attempting to buy Congress and the White House. Their political network helped finance the Tea Party and powers today's GOP. Koch-affiliated organizations raised some $400 million during the 2012 election, and aim to spend another $290 million to elect Republicans in this year's midterms. So far in this cycle, Koch-backed entities have bought 44,000 political ads to boost Republican efforts to take back the Senate... The company's troubled legal history – including a trail of congressional investigations, Department of Justice consent decrees, civil lawsuits and felony convictions-- augmented by internal company documents, leaked State Department cables, Freedom of Information disclosures and company whistle­-blowers, combine to cast an unwelcome spotlight on the toxic empire whose profits finance the modern GOP.

...[I]in the real world, Koch Industries has used its political might to beat back the very market-based mechanisms-- including a cap-and-trade market for carbon pollution-- needed to create the ownership rights for pollution that Charles says would improve the functioning of capitalism.

In fact, it appears the very essence of the Koch business model is to exploit breakdowns in the free market. Koch has profited precisely by dumping billions of pounds of pollutants into our waters and skies-- essentially for free. It racks up enormous profits from speculative trades lacking economic value that drive up costs for consumers and create risks for our economy.

The Koch brothers get richer as the costs of what Koch destroys are foisted on the rest of us-- in the form of ill health, foul water and a climate crisis that threatens life as we know it on this planet. Now nearing 80-- owning a large chunk of the Alberta tar sands and using his billions to transform the modern Republican Party into a protection racket for Koch Industries' profits-- Charles Koch is not about to see the light. Nor does the CEO of one of America's most toxic firms have any notion of slowing down. He has made it clear that he has no retirement plans: "I'm going to ride my bicycle till I fall off."

It's worth pointing out that, at least in passing, that Daniel Scarpinato, national press secretary for the NRCC, noted that some Democrats have been similarly masquerading as Republicans-- i.e., the Republican wing of the Democratic Party. Scarpinato sent HuffPo a dozen campaign ads to demonstrate his point. One is from Montana Democratic House candidate John Lewis, who brags about his high NRA approval rating and attacks his Republican opponent for supporting gun control. Another shows Nick Rahall (Blue Dog-WV)-- who the DCCC and their House Majority PAC have already wasted and unprecedented $5,020,316 on (including $702,799 just this week)-- denouncing the Environmental Protection Agency (and President Obama).

The Koch's are laughing their asses off as their extremist puppets, like Tom Cotton in Arkansas, Joni Ernest in Iowa, Cory Gardner in Colorado, Mike Rounds in South Dakota, Thom Tillis in North Carolina, Shelly Moore Capito in West Virginia and Steve Daines in Montana are propelled towards the Senate takeover the Kochs are willing and able to underwrite. Vice President Henry Wallace warned about Koch-types that "the American fascist would prefer not to use violence. His method is to poison the channels of public information." And that's exactly what the Kochs have been doing. Do you help bankroll them by buying their products? It's worth thinking about. So is Jon Stewart's welcome to the Koch's as a new advertiser on his Comedy Central show:



NOTE: Short of losing control of the House, which-- thanks to Steve Israel-- is an impossibility this cycle, no House result anywhere in America would damage the Kochs more than losing their Energy Committee chairman, Fred Upton, in MI-06. A dark money group they finance and control, "American Future Fund," has rushed hundreds of thousands of dollars into the race in the last few days to try to save Upton. Lawrence Lessig: "Fred Upton has already taken $2.1 million from Big Oil and energy interests and voted to give away billions in tax breaks for oil and gas companies. Now, a shadowy group that has been largely bankrolled by two billionaire oil barons is pouring money in Southwest Michigan to support him. Voters have a right to know if the hundreds of thousands of dollars AFF is spending to send Fred Upton back to Washington comes with strings attached... The Koch brothers have billions of dollars invested in the very industries that Fred Upton oversees as Chairman of the powerful House Energy and Commerce Committee. If they are funding a last ditch effort to save Fred Upton, voters deserve to know about it."

Steve Israel may be working to protect Upton but Alan Grayson just endorsed Paul Clements. "On Tuesday," he told his supporters today, "we have a chance to take out the reigning king of the polluters, Rep. Fred Upton, the Republican Chairman of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce. The Los Angeles Times has called Fred Upton "one of the biggest threats to Planet Earth on Planet Earth."

Upton has tried to overturn the U.S. Supreme Court decision allowing the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to regulate greenhouse gas pollution. He says that Congress's failure to act against climate disruption-- a failure that he is largely responsible for-- means that the EPA must sit on its hands, as well. Upton says that doing anything to fight carbon pollution would "hamstring our economic recovery."

But Upton's not all bad. He cosponsored a bill to make light bulbs more energy efficient. Then he led the fight to prevent President Obama from enforcing it.

Let me put it this way: When Upton was an infant, his first words were "drill, baby, drill."

...Upton's opponent is Paul Clements, a political science professor at Western Michigan University. Clements isn't pulling any punches: he says that environmental protection is THE issue. He is running against Upton because defeating Upton means defeating climate change. Clements wants to bring more clean-energy jobs to Michigan.

It looks like Clements has Upton on the run. A poll last week showed Clements down by only four points, within the margin of error, with ten percent of the voters still undecided. Clements has momentum. He can win. With our help, Paul Clements can beat Fred Upton.

Please keep Paul Clements in your prayers this week. Last minute contributions can be made here.

Alan Grayson (D-FL) vs Arkansas Extremist Tom Cotton

Beltway pundits are always smitten with aloof intellectual phonies. Paul Ryan has been the most obvious example in recent years but Arkansas pedant Tom Cotton— another Harvard-educated reactionary is always such a curiosity… like a circus freak show— is catching up. The closet case thing makes it all the more of a set up for a future Shakespearean blockbuster… down the line. Right now, though, as Greg Sargent pointed out for his Washington Post readers Tuesday, Cotton is making news by claiming ISIS terrorists are working with Mexican cartels to infiltrate Arkansas. And he isn’t being laughed out of his Senate race. From Cotton’s audio town hall:

“The problem is with Mark Pryor and Barack Obama refusing to enforce our immigration laws, and refusing to secure our border. I’ll change that when I’m in the United States Senate. And I would add, it’s not just an immigration problem. We now know that it’s a security problem. Groups like the Islamic State collaborate with drug cartels in Mexico who have clearly shown they’re willing to expand outside the drug trade into human trafficking and potentially even terrorism.

  “They could infiltrate our defenseless border and attack us right here in places like Arkansas. This is an urgent problem and it’s time we got serious about it, and I’ll be serious about it in the United States Senate.”

This is pure Republican fantasy from crazy websites, fringe magazines and coked-up Hate Talk Radio hosts— repurposed as opportunistic scare tactics by demagogues like Tom Cotton. As Sargent concludes, “For Congressman Cotton, this story is something of a political two-fer. On the one hand, he has sought to exploit the ISIS threat to attack Democratic Senator Mark Pryor as weak on national security. Meanwhile, Cotton has also sought to exploit the crisis of migrant children crossing the southern border to attack Pryor as weak on border security. Yet each of these lines of attack may be at risk of losing potency. After all, Cotton voted just as Pryor did on how to respond to the ISIS threat, supporting Obama’s plan to arm the Syrian rebels. Meanwhile, the migrant crisis has faded from the news— and perhaps so have fears about the border. And so, through the wonders of political alchemy, Cotton has fused the two charges together, reinvigorating both and making the new product far more frightening than either one on its own ever was.”

Cotton’s new TV ad— which makes plenty of use of his latest political acquisition, the new spanking new beard that “disproves” the flood of gay rumors— forcefully asserts that he’s a leader, not a backbencher. Alan Grayson knows Cotton better than anyone else I know. They serve on the House Foreign Affairs Committee together— and Grayson is not impressed.

Last year the House Foreign Affairs Committee “marked up” an Iran Sanctions bill, taking amendments from committee members before sending the bill to the “Floor” for a House vote.



I offered five amendments. They all passed.



It’s hard to believe, I know, but there actually is a spirit of bipartisanship on the Foreign Affairs Committee, so things went smoothly— until it was Tom Cotton’s turn.



Some background on Cotton: The Bush Administration created a secret program, of questionable constitutionality, that aggressively monitored the finances of alleged terrorists. The New York Times uncovered the program, and reported it. Tom Cotton, private citizen, called for the arrest, conviction and incarceration of the editor and two reporters who reported on the secret program.



In a deep red district in Arkansas, that soapboxing was good enough to get Cotton elected to the U.S. House of Representatives. Which plopped him down on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, with me.



No matter what the subject before our committee might be, Cotton always has to hold forth on how much he loves America. According to Cotton, he really, really loves America. Almost in the biblical sense.



Let me put it this way: When I hear Cotton, I think of Lady Macbeth, another great patriot. “Out, damned spot! Out, I say!”



Which, in Arkansas, qualifies Cotton for the U.S. Senate. Yes, Tom Cotton is running for the U.S. Senate.

And we have to try to stop him. Click here, if you want to lend a hand, and keep this schmo out of the U.S. Senate.



So anyway, there we were, trying to pass a bill that would keep Iran from getting nukes, and Cotton thought that he had come up with the perfect idea: imprison all of the Ayatollah’s relatives. Not the Ayatollah himself, just his relatives.



Cotton offered an amendment that would extend sanctions under the bill not only to the high government officials of Iran, but also to their relatives “to the third degree of consanguinity.” In case you missed the quiz on consanguinity, that’s children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, parents, brothers, sisters, nephews, nieces, uncles, aunts, grandparents and great-grandparents.



But somehow, not second cousins twice removed. It must have been an oversight.



The enforcement mechanism for our sanctions is a criminal penalty. Specifically, five years in a federal prison. So if the Ayatollah violated our sanctions law, and his entirely innocent niece visited the United States, she’d get five years in the slammer under the Cotton Amendment. Just for being the Ayatollah’s niece.



By the way, the Cotton Amendment is a constitutional threefer: it violates three different provisions of the U.S. Constitution at the same time. They are the Fifth Amendment, the Eighth Amendment, and the very rarely heard of “Corruption of Blood” clause. It’s rarely heard of because almost no one is so stupid as even to contemplate punishing the relatives of wrongdoers.



Except for Tom Cotton.

When Cotton offered his amendment, I was tempted to say, “Now wait just a cotton-pickin’ minute.” But that would have been disrespectfully to Bugs Bunny and possibly others, so I didn’t. Instead, I patiently pointed out the constitutional infirmities of the Cotton Amendment.



To their credit, the Republican Members of Congress have some regard for the oath that they took to preserve the Constitution (as they see it), so there were certain murmurings on the other side of the aisle. The GOP Chairman asked Cotton to withdraw his amendment, and he reluctantly did so.



I thought that that would be the end of it. But no. Cotton came to me afterward, and offered to “work with me” to put his amendment back in the bill before the House voted on it. As one Harvard Law School graduate to another, I asked Cotton how he thought that imprisoning nieces for the acts of their uncles was constitutional. He told me, “they’re just foreigners; they have no rights.”



I think that he pronounced it “feriners.”



Seriously, it’s bad enough that someone like this got elected to the House. We have to stop him before he makes it to the Senate.



If Tom Cotton lived in Gotham City, he would reside at the Elizabeth Arkham Asylum for the Criminally Insane. But since Cotton’s home is Arkansas, not Arkham, that makes him a Congressman instead, and now a U.S. Senate candidate.



Cotton’s opponent is Senator Mark Pryor. Pryor is not my favorite Senator, but Tom Cotton makes Mark Pryor look like Mother Theresa.

How Arkansas Extremist Tom Cotton Pissed Off Top Chef Tom Colicchio

With Steve Israel's policy of never targeting GOP leaders, policy makers and committee chairman keeping the DCCC out of the MN-02 race that pits progressive Mike Obermueller against reactionary incumbent John Kline-- chair of the powerful and destructive House Committee of Education and the Workforce-- Blue America was over the moon that Bill Maher has stepped into the breach. Maher is bashing Kline up but good and bringing his repulsive anti-family record to the attention of voters in southeast Minnesota. This was a Maher tweet from early Thursday morning:

Blue America is working the positive side of the street (for a change), talking about why Obermueller is a better candidate than Kline from a policy perspective and what a natural district MN-02 would be to flip, despite Steve Israel's intent on protecting Kline again. (Obama won the district against McCain by 10,000 votes and beat Romney in a squeaker by around 300 votes!) Al Franken is on the ballot this year and he's substantially ahead of disreputable bankster/GOP crackpot Mike McFadden who is struggling in the polls to get to 40%. (You can help Obermueller's grassroots campaign here.)

And, of course, Maher isn't the only celebrity out talking sense about midterm races this cycle. Up top is an excellent segment from Chris Hayes' Wednesday night show featuring Top Chef Tom Colicchio. TV viewers may know him as the positive, no-nonsense head judge on every season of Bravo's Top Chef, and foodies know him as the founder and executive chef of the Gramercy Tavern (NYC) and founder of Craft (NYC, L.A., Dallas, Las Vegas, San Francisco) and the winner of 5 James Beard awards. But he's also been one of the most stalwart political fighters for healthy and sustainable food policies in America. Wednesday night he was on with Hayes explaining why Tom Cotten is a terrible choice for the Arkansas Senate seat currently held by Mark Pryor. It made me wonder if other celebrity chefs are politically active.

I would bet that a dick like Robert Irvine is a Republican but he's a Brit so there's no way to be sure. He did make a bunch of bogus claims that you would generally expect from conservatives, not normal people-- being a Knight Commander of the Royal Victorian Order, receiving a Scottish castle from the Queen, being a White House chef and making Princess Di's wedding cake, all false-- and cheating investors out of their money, another very right-wing move. The one actual Republican among the celebrity chefs I could find was Texas meat cooker Tim Love. I wouldn't eat in a restaurant associated with him anyone-- nor with Irvine. Celebrity chefs who have been supportive of Democrats, besides Colicchio, include Alice Waters, Rachel Ray, Elizabeth Falkner, Bobby Flay, Marcus Samuelsson, Mario Batali, Jean-Georges Vongerichten (a major Obama bundler) and Daniel Boulud.

Remember, the best chance the Democrats have to keep conservative Mark Pryor in and neo-fascist closet case Tom Cotton out seems to rest with making Arkansas voters wonder why the rest of their congressional delegation-- 4 Republicans and Pryor-- voted for the Farm Bill while Cotton joined extreme right-wing ideologues from other states to oppose it. So who was right, voters are supposed to wonder, Senators Boozman and Pryor and Congressmen Womack, Griffin and Crawford… or a Tom Cotton who's happy to see taxpayer money flow into the coffers of his own family farm while voting no on a Farm Bill that everyone else in Arkansas sees as a reasonable compromise?

The most recent legitimate poll, from Suffolk University last week, shows Pryor leading 45-43%., even though 37.4% of respondents admitted their most trusted source of news is Fox. The polling analysis memo offered an interesting word association question for Cotton in which the top scoring words were "dishonest," "untrustworthy," "crook" and "dislike him." They didn't test for closet case or gay. Pryor's #1 word association, by far, was "like him."

This was Colicchio's OpEd for Food Policy Action:

The food that feeds our families and supports our agriculture industry is affected every day by the decisions that elected officials make in Washington. Members of Congress regularly vote on policies that affect the quality, availability, and sustainability of our food supply. And yet, there has been very little attention to bringing transparency and accountability to that discussion.

As someone who has spent his life in the food business, I firmly believe that when citizens enter the voting booth, they need to be as informed about food policy as they are about a candidate’s views on job creation, foreign policy, and social issues. Unfortunately, in Arkansas right now, we have a classic example of what’s wrong with the political discourse around food in this country.

U.S. Rep. Tom Cotton, who is running for Senate, released a campaign ad that misleads voters and misconstrues the facts about the Farm Bill. The Farm Bill is a critically important law that shapes food production, determines nutrition assistance, and supports farmers, among other things. Sadly, Rep. Cotton’s ad wrongfully accuses President Obama of “hijacking the farm bill and turning it into a food stamp bill,” which simply isn’t true.

But don’t take my word for it. the Washington Post called the ad’s claims “invented history,” and the non-partisan fact-checker Politifact gave the dubious ad its “Pants On Fire” rating, which is the equivalent of an “F” on a high school report card. The truth is, SNAP (a.k.a. food stamps) first became a part of the Farm Bill during the Great Depression, and has been included in every Farm Bill that has become law since 1973. It has been supported by Members from both sides of the aisle for decades.

Today’s voters deserve better. We’ll never be able to improve food policies in this country if our leaders distort and distract instead of discuss and debate. Voters need information, which is why I co-founded Food Policy Action, a non-partisan organization dedicated to bringing light and accountability to the food debate.

Every year, Food Policy Action puts together a Legislative Scorecard to help voters get the information they need to know exactly how their elected officials vote on these important issues. You can find more information about the scorecard at www.foodpolicyaction.org.

Last year, Rep. Tom Cotton scored a 0% on the Legislative Scorecard. In other words, on every single vote that touched upon sensible food policy, Rep. Cotton voted the wrong way. In light of this score and his blatantly false ad, I know this much to be true: the public deserves better. It’s up to voters to make sure Rep. Cotton gets the message.

Normal People Have No Choice In The Ugly Arkansas Senate Race

Right-wing extremist Tom Cotton (r) with his lovely, blushing beard, Anna

Mark Pryor is way too conservative for my tastes. According to ProgressivePunch his 62.82 crucial vote score for the 2013-14 session marks him as the 2nd most conservative Senate Democrat, slightly better than Joe Manchin (D-WV) and slightly worse than Kay Hagan (D-NC), Mary Landrieu (D-LA) and Joe Donnelly (D-IN). That's why you haven't been reading much about him and his see-saw reelection race in Arkansas here at DWT. He's sure not on the Blue America ActBlue Senate page-- and never will be. But that doesn't mean he has a much worse Republican opponent. He does. Tom Cotton is more than just a garden variety right-wing extremist, although he would certainly be a member of a fanatic extremist triumvirate with Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Mike Lee (R-UT) were he to win in November. There are a lot of particularly atrocious Republican candidates for the Senate this cycle-- Cory Gardner (CO), Mike Rounds (SD), Joni Ernst (IA), Thom Tillis (NC), Terri Lynn Land (MI), Steve Daines (MT)-- but none come close to Cotton, the most anti-democracy royalist to run anywhere in America for years.

Writing for The Atlantic last week, Molly Ball rang the alarm bell… loudly, reminding her readers that Cotton "is the ultimate product of today's hard-edged, ideologically driven Republican Party." She reveals the content-- for the first time-- of his 92-page Harvard senior thesis, calling it "A cogent and tightly argued document" revealing "a contrarian devotion to some ideals that seem out of date today. Cotton insists that the Founders were wise not to put too much faith in democracy, because people are inherently selfish, narrow-minded, and impulsive. He defends the idea that the country must be led by a class of intellectually superior officeholders whose ambition sets them above other men. Though Cotton acknowledges that this might seem elitist, he derides the Federalists’ modern critics as mushy-headed and naive." I wonder if Pryor will have the good sense to make sure Arkansas voters understand that Cotton was talking about them. If Pryor doesn't, polls indicate he is likely to lose his seat.

“Ambition characterizes and distinguishes national officeholders from other kinds of human beings,” Cotton wrote. “Inflammatory passion and selfish interest characterizes most men, whereas ambition characterizes men who pursue and hold national office. Such men rise from the people through a process of self-selection since politics is a dirty business that discourages all but the most ambitious.”

Cotton was only summarizing the views of Publius, the collective pseudonym used by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay in the Papers. His reading is neither outré nor revisionist. Yet it seems significant that, out of all the ideas outlined in the Papers, these were the concepts Cotton chose to focus on and to defend forcefully against what he saw as more modish, inclusive ideas. To be sure, these words were written when Cotton was a mere undergraduate. But when I spoke to him in Arkansas recently—sitting in his campaign RV, which is decorated with a camouflage motif and a large red, white, and blue combat-boot print, as he prepared to give a speech in Hot Springs—he was eager to defend his views of a decade and a half before. He recited many of the thesis’s contentions nearly word for word, including the quotation from Abraham Lincoln that appears on page 70: “I have no [ambition] so great as that of being truly esteemed of my fellow-men,” Lincoln said, “by rendering myself worthy of their esteem.”

Men who seek national office, Cotton wrote in his thesis, are the most ambitious men, seeking the headiest sort of power over a nation’s commerce, finance, and affairs of state. Self-selection ensures that they have “a superior intelligence compared to the unambitious and to the lesser ambitious.” This does not necessarily mean that they are wise, he notes, but “it does imply some amount of sheer, raw brainpower. National officeholders will all possess something akin to shrewdness, cleverness, or perhaps even cunning.”

From the time he was a teenager, Cotton has been nurtured and groomed by conservative institutions-- scholars, think tanks, media, and advocacy groups-- to be the face of their political crusade. Pure, upright, and ideologically correct, he is their seemingly flawless mascot. (Conservatives would surely argue that a potent network consisting of regular academia and the mainstream media nurtures left-wing candidates.) And now he is finally on the cusp of achieving the platform consummate to his talents, a seat in the U.S. Senate.

The upright part doesn't include the widespread rumors in DC that Cotton is another Republican closet case, a gay hypocrite like Aaron Schock, Patrick McHenry and Lindsay Graham, who votes against LGBT equality while sneaking around in dark places looking for quick sexual thrills with other men. Remember Idaho's hysterically anti-gay stalwart Larry Craig? Cotton is a lot like him, although no one has caught him with another man in a public toilet yet. Republican-style, he suddenly got married to a GOP hack attorney (female) from Nebraska a few months ago to cover up his sexual preference for males. Cotton has no personality and no ability to connect with other human beings on any basis other than his obsession with right-wing ideology. He's probably clinically insane-- and Arkansas voters who come in contact with him are starting to notice it.

At this appearance and others, many voters asked Cotton about his vote against $300 million in federal funding for the Arkansas Children’s Hospital in Little Rock. The vote had been featured in a dramatic recent Democratic commercial (above) that said his priorities were “not with Arkansas children.” Cotton laughed it off and told them not to believe those nasty negative ads. “The legislation had no specific funding” for Arkansas, he said, and “I don’t support giving the president more leeway.” He added, “I ultimately did support later versions of the legislation, and I fully support Children’s Hospital, of course. Next week, when you hear I don’t support puppies, don’t believe that either.” But as John Brummett, the left-leaning columnist for The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, has pointed out, Cotton’s “yes” votes were on meaningless, doomed budget bills; the one time the hospital appropriation was specifically at stake, Cotton voted against it. Every other Republican in the Arkansas congressional delegation voted in favor of the funding. “He voted against money for the hospital but won’t admit it,” Brummett wrote, in a column that was pressed into my hand by an 89-year-old Conway Lions Club member who urged me to read it. “Thus he obfuscates in the style of any other politician."

It is not the only time Cotton has outdone even other Republicans with his conservative absolutism. He was the only Arkansas Republican to vote twice against the farm bill and five times against disaster-aid funding-- two initiatives that national conservative groups like the Heritage Foundation see as symptoms of big government, but that many rural Southerners rely on heavily. Cotton also was the only Arkansan to vote for a budget drafted by the Republican Study Committee that would slash spending, voucherize Medicare, and raise the eligibility age for Social Security to 70.

The day after his speech in Conway, I spoke to Cotton in Hot Springs. I asked him whether it was important to stand on principle even when doing so might be unpopular. “I’ll tell you the truth, even in an election year, and that’s what people are ready for,” he said. “They don’t want traditional politicians like Mark Pryor, who’ve been hanging around for 24 years, who trim and hedge and won’t level with you.” If that was the case, I asked, why not own the unpopular votes-- against the hospital funding, or the farm bill, or disaster relief-- as necessary medicine for an out-of-control federal budget?

“Look at what I’ve said about disaster relief,” Cotton replied. “I support the traditional disaster-relief program FEMA administers. It is done by neutral, transparent criteria, and when communities like Vilonia or Mayflower are hit by a tornado, they can apply and receive that assistance.” Sixteen people were killed and the two towns were nearly destroyed by a tornado in April of this year. Mayflower’s mayor subsequently criticized Cotton for his disaster-aid votes. But, Cotton continued, “What I don’t support is a bill like Hurricane Sandy [relief] that is rushed through, that has $60 billion in new spending, much of which is not related to the disaster at all.” Cotton’s explanation sounded sensible enough; many House Republicans opposed the Sandy bill for similar reasons. Yet Cotton also voted against one bill that contained nothing but funding for the Federal Emergency Management Agency. (Cotton's campaign said he opposed that bill because the spending in it was not offset by budget cuts elsewhere.)… His is a harsh, unyielding, judgmental political philosophy. “I don’t think Arkansas needs to bail out the Northeast,” Cotton said of his vote against the Hurricane Sandy relief bill.

…Today Cotton, in his 19 months in office, has earned a 92 percent on the Club [For Growth]’s scorecard. The votes that marked him an outlier in the Arkansas Republican delegation-- the farm bill, disaster aid, the Children’s Hospital--were all in keeping with the Club’s austere philosophy. “If every member of Congress was like Tom Cotton, the world would be a better place,” Chocola told me approvingly. Some D.C. Republicans wish Cotton weren’t quite so pure. One GOP strategist involved in the midterm elections complained about Cotton’s failure to leap decisively ahead of Pryor, telling me, “His problem is, his voting record was scripted by the Heritage Foundation."

Scorecards like the Club’s frustrate House Speaker John Boehner, who believes that it and other pressure groups-- the Heritage Foundation keeps a similar tally--encourage Republicans against constructiveness and compromise. But the groups’ tough-minded ideology has found willing acolytes in the House’s most staunchly ideological crop of members, many of them elected in the Tea Party wave of 2010 that handed Republicans the House majority, and more, like Cotton, elected since. Politico last year dubbed Cotton the face of the “hell no caucus” that was making Boehner’s life difficult by refusing to entertain any inkling of gun control or immigration reform. Abigail Thernstrom worries that Cotton’s votes have hurt his popularity. “For political reasons, I would have been less principled than he has been on the farm bill,” she told me. “But he seems willing to vote his principles even when it’s not politically wise.”

I can't image ever voting for someone like Mark Pryor. And I can't imagine ever doing anything that would allow a dangerous psychopath like Tom Cotton to get a foothold on power greater than his rural, backward R+15 west Arkansas congressional district based in Pine Bluff and Arkadelphia.

Can A Paltry Minimum Wage Increase Save The Senate For The Democrats?

It's no coincidence that Florida Democrats put a referendum on the November ballot legalizing medical marijuana. Aside from passing a really good proposal, the referendum should draw lots of pro-marijuana voters to the polls where, it is hoped, most will vote for Democrats. Unfortunately, no one took Debbie Wasserman Schultz and her financiers at the private prison industry into account, The people who are helping-- along with Big Sugar-- her run for the top Democratic House leadership post need those arrested pot smokers to keep their prison cells full-- so that they can make big profits and donate a cut to Wasserman Schultz's slimy political career. So… once again, the avaricious mess who allowed the GOP to gerrymander the state up in their favor in return for her getting an unassailable district filled with elderly Jews, has betrayed Florida Democrats for her own selfishness. She's campaigning against the marijuana initiative, prompting Florida's most important Democratic donor-- and head of United for Care-- John Morgan, to say that he knows the "most-powerful players in Washington, D.C.… [and that] Debbie Wasserman Schultz isn’t just disliked, she’s despised. She’s an irritant." Fortunately there's no Debbie Wasserman Schultz standing in the way of Democratic strategy in Arkansas.

In that state, where Mark Pryor, a very conservative Democrat, is facing off a far worse Republican, Tom Cotton, they've managed to put a very popular minimum wage hike on the ballot for November. Republicans tried to keep it off the ballot but supporters turned in more than double the number of signatures needed. The Republican Secretary of State, Mark Martin, has already validated over the 62,000 valid signatures that were needed. It's a paltry raise-- up to $7.50 by January 1, 2016 and then a buck more a year later. Pryor has endorsed the measure (Issue 5) and Cotton has been talking out of both sides of his mouth, as usual-- not wanting to piss off the Koch brothers and their billionaire friends who have financed his political career but frightened that Arkansas voters will figure out who he works for if he doesn't back the measure.

So how unpopular is increasing the minimum wage-- or even having a minimum wage at all-- with Cotton's paymasters? Everyone knows ending the minimum wage is a top Koch agenda item, but this week news broke that one of their top strategists told a roomful of right-winger that the minimum wage leads directly to fascism. No, really; he said that.

At a political strategy summit hosted on June 16 by the conservative billionaires Charles and David Koch, Richard Fink, their top political strategist, told the private audience that when he sees someone “on the street” he says, “Get off your ass, and work hard like we did.” Fink's anecdote came during his presentation titled “The Long-Term Strategy: Engaging the Middle Third,” which capped off a session of four speeches detailing the intellectual foundation of Charles Koch’s political ideology.

…In his speech titled “American Courage: Our Commitment to a Free Society,” Charles Koch echoed an op-ed he wrote earlier this year in the Wall Street Journal in both his paranoia and self-pity. The billionaire oil industrialist, hosting some of the most powerful men in Washington, without irony claimed in his speech that he and his brother were “put squarely in front of the firing squad.” He later framed the path ahead for America as a binary choice between freedom and collectivism, a catchall term he used to describe liberalism, socialism, and fascism. Koch refrained from drawing explicit parallels to fascists, but his lieutenants did not… This conflation was a running theme throughout the session, articulated in large part by grand strategist Fink. An economist by training, he pointed to psychology to explain the dangers of raising the minimum wage vis á vis totalitarianism.

“Psychology shows that is the main recruiting ground for totalitarianism, for fascism, for conformism, when people feel like they’re victims,” said Fink. “So the big danger of minimum wage isn’t the fact that some people are being paid more than their value-added-- that’s not great. It’s not that it’s hard to stay in business-- that’s not great, either. But it’s the 500,000 people that will not have a job because of minimum wage.”

He continued, “We’re taking these 500,000 people that would’ve had a job, and putting them unemployed, making dependence part of government programs, and destroying their opportunity for earned success. And so we see this is a very big part of recruitment in Germany in the '20s.”

“If you look at the Third -- the rise and fall of the Third Reich, you can see that,” Fink said. “And what happens is a fascist comes in and offers them an opportunity, finds the victim-- Jews or the West-- and offers them meaning for their life, OK?”

Fink cited the historical examples of Nazi Germany and communist Russia and China to segue to terrorism. “This is not just in Germany. It's in Russia, in Lenin, and Stalin Russia, and then Mao,” said Fink. “This is the recruitment ground for fascism, and it's not just historical. It's what goes on today in the-- in the suicide bomber recruitment.”

Fink’s commentary on collectivism led to observations on the psychological underpinnings of the environmental movement. According to Fink, in the same way that lack of meaning in life leads to terrorism, it leads to environmentalism.

“The environmental movement. Occupy Wall Street. These kids are searching for meaning. They're protesting the 1 percent. They are the 1 percent, but they're protesting the 1 percent. The environmental movement and climate change. It's not about climate change.

I studied climate change for six years. I can't figure it out, quite frankly. Charles is ahead of me on this. I'm not a climatologist, but I'm not completely stupid. I can tell you I meet with people, particularly in California, that are convinced the world is going to burn up in you know, a year or two. They don't know the answer-- they don't even know the question, because it's not about climate change. It's about a cause. It gives their life meaning.”

Fink's statement that he's not a climatologist is notable considering both his education and employment. Koch Industries is a leading proponent of climate change skepticism. David Koch has posited that climate change may turn out to be good for humankind in that longer growing seasons would support greater food production. And Charles Koch personally helped found the Institute for Energy Research, a group that defends oil industry tax subsidies. Despite his actions, Charles Koch railed against this type of behavior during the seminar. “So to truly help the poor and the economy, we have to eliminate cronyism,” he said. “We have to eliminate welfare for the rich.”

Fink also pointed to blocking cap and trade as a success of the Koch network, appearing to give it equal weight to their success in flipping the House of Representatives. Cap and trade, a market-based approach to curbing carbon emissions, was first implemented on a large scale during George H.W. Bush’s administration to combat acid rain. The measure, derided by the tea party as “cap and tax,” died in Congress in 2010, chiefly as a result of staunch oil industry opposition. Later that year, the movement would claim victory in the historic landslide election that turned the House of Representatives over to Republican control. Both Koch Industries and David Koch have previously been reluctant to acknowledge any involvement in the early days of the tea party movement, though Americans for Prosperity has fueled much of its rise. AFP was founded by David Koch and is the primary vehicle of the brothers’ political activity.

Fink described the differences between the three thirds of the electorate-- the "freedom" third, the "collectivist" third, and the non-ideological middle third of voters, whose recruitment he said is crucial for the Koch network’s success. “Mitt Romney won on leadership. He won on the economy. He won on experience,” Fink said. “What did he lose on? He lost on care and intent. Intent is extremely important.”

Fink spoke at length about the appearance of the Koch network’s motives to the middle third, and the business-oriented solutions for improving its political brand.

“Yeah, we want to decrease regulations. Why? It’s because we can make more profit, OK? Yeah, cut government spending so we don’t have to pay so much taxes,” said Fink. “There’s truth in that, you all know, because we’re in the 30 percent of the freedom fighters. But the middle part of the country doesn’t see it that way.”

“When we focus on decreasing government spending, over-criminalization, decreasing taxes, it doesn’t do it, OK? We’ve been reaching the third by telling them what’s important-- what we think is important should be important to them. And they’re not responding and don’t like it, OK? Well, we get business-- what do we do? We want to find out what the customer wants, right, not what we want them to buy,” he said.

Arkansas Senate Race-- Who Believes In God, And Talking Snakes, More?

We haven't really been covering the Arkansas elections this cycle. Basically, all the contests are classic lesser or two evils situations-- Democrats rated D or F and Republicans rated F-minus. Is there anything less than an F these days? All the grotesque DCCC recruits will lose spectacularly, wasting immense amounts of money that could have been used to win actual seats for actual progressives in actual swing districts-- like MI-06 (Upton vs Clements) and WA-08 (Reichert vs Ritchie)-- or could have been put to work on 2 cycle plans to take back relatively easy seats the DCCC isn't contesting at all, like FL-27 (Ros-Lehtinen), FL-13 (Jolly), NY-02 (King), WI-07 (Duffy), PA-07 (Meehan), PA-15 (Dent), CA-25 (open), and a dozen other primo opportunities Israel is wasting so he can fail with his collection of vile Blue Dogs and New Dems.

That said, the banner contest in Arkansas this year isn't in the House; it's between Mark Pryor, one of the most conservative and least bold members of the Senate, and Tom Cotton, an extremist lunatic to the right of Ted Cruz. A week or two ago, Cotton, who has consistently been out-polled by Pryor, was desperate enough to question Pryor's faith to a interviewer. Now there's a lot you can say about Pryor, but the man is a believing' bozo as you can see from the classic Bill Maher interview up top. At the bottom of the page is the TV ad Pryor put out yesterday, pouncing on Cotton's latest misstep. No one-- except extreme GOP partisans-- seems to like Cotton. He's not connecting. As U.S. News and World Report lamented yesterday, he comes across as wooden and academic in a state where retail politics matter. His own party has lost faith in him and are worrying that they're wasting the millions of dollars they're spending on what they now see as "a cold fish."

The overarching problem: While Cotton’s resume is sparkling, his persona is flat. He speaks with authority, but lacks warmth. His wooden delivery is more often academic, lacking an everyday, common touch that’s still essential in a place with slightly less than 3 million people, the smallest state in the south. His slender frame and boyish haircut makes him look even younger than his 37 years, a trait Democrats are attempting to subtly exploit as they portray Cotton as a bit too overeager as he seeks a promotion after just a single term in the House. He's a smash hit with the conservative commentariat class in Washington, but remains a largely unknown quantity to the everyday Arkansan.

“He talks like he’s at a dinner party at Bill Kristol’s house. There’s things I like about that, but that’s not the way you want to talk when running around Little Rock,” says one Beltway Republican operative closely following the race who has become measurably less confident about Cotton’s chances.

Some lament, when it matters most, Cotton is not even showing up. The freshman representative missed the Bradley County Pink Tomato Festival in his own district in June, a celebration attended by an estimated 30,000 that has become a marquee opportunity for political candidates to showcase their grinning, gripping and backslapping. Pryor rode in the parade, posed for pictures with ladies in tomato-cut aprons and spoke at a luncheon. When it came time for the candidates to compete in the fast-paced tomato eating contest, Cotton was nowhere to be found. Instead, The Nation reported Cotton was at a political event in California with the Koch Brothers, the libertarian-minded billionaires who have been villainized by Democrats for devoting their fortune to conservative causes and candidates.

…“Pryor was a dead man walking three months ago,” conceded a Democratic consultant in Washington. “But the momentum has shifted and it speaks more to Cotton’s weakness as a candidate than what Pryor’s done. It’s more about Cotton… His ads reinforce his negative quality-- which is, he moved back to run for office,” says the Democratic consultant.

…[O]ne Little Rock, Arkansas, donor who has met Cotton and contributed to his first congressional campaign told U.S. News he’s supporting Pryor in the Senate race due to what he sees as Cotton’s rigid ideological posture on a stream of issues.

“He’s a nice gentleman … but too far to the right,” the donor said on the condition of anonymity.

The contributor, who has given to several prominent Republicans in the past, including former Sen. Jesse Helms, R-N.C., also relayed that he was disheartened by Cotton’s lack of visibility after a tornado outbreak in late April.

“I did not see him anywhere showing his support to the people who truly suffered,” he says of Cotton.

When asked how Cotton could be perceived as unacceptable to someone who supported the arch-conservative Helms, the donor explained while he didn’t agree with Helms on many issues, he was impressed by his “commitment to his constituents.”

Republicans are already down to their last arrow in the quiver: "OK, Cotton isn't ready for the Senate and he's as bad in Arkansas as he's good Inside-the-Beltway but he's the one who can stop Obama(care)." If it doesn't work, a path to victory for the Senate Republicans becomes nearly impossible.