Month: November 2012

Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

John Sides at The Monkey Cage reports this analysis by Nicholas Goedert, a Postdoctoral Fellow at Washington university, on the question of why Democrats won the popular vote for Congress, but Republicans maintained their majority. Not Gerrymandering, but Districting: More Evidence on How Democrats Won the Popular Vote but Lost the Congress:

This is a guest post by political scientist Nicholas Goedert, who is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Washington University.

*****

Expanding on recent posts by Dan Hopkins and Eric McGhee,
there appears to be evidence at a state-by-state level that the
disparity between the popular vote in the House and the distribution of
seats is not just due to Republican gerrymanders, but due to a skewed
geographic distribution of population putting the Democrats at an
inherent disadvantage, along the lines of Chen and Rodden’s recent work. That is, the Democrats’ loss in the House was caused largely not by gerrymandering, but districting itself.

McGhee’s post compares the results of the 2012 elections to what the
election might have looked like using the 2002-2010 maps, and finds that
the most recent round of redistricting had relatively minimal
effects. An alternate way of measure districting effects is to compare
the 2012 results with historical patterns from recent congressional
elections for seats won for a given popular vote share.  Using
this technique, I find slightly greater effects of partisan
gerrymandering, but also a persistent bias in favor of the Republicans.

* * *

In every state districted by Republicans, Democrats won fewer seats
than their historical expectation, and in six cases they underperformed
by 20% or more (as a percentage of total seats up for election). So it appears that Republicans gained benefits across the board from controlling the redistricting process.

Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

When I first read the headline the other day that the owners of Hostess bakeries have decided to liquidate the company in bankruptcy and go out of business, the inner child in me screamed "Nooo!" No more Twinkies? No more Ding Dongs? No more fruit pies? Another iconic part of my childhood was disappearing into history.

The corporate "lamestream" media immediately parroted the owners of Hostess Brands and blamed it on a labor dispute with their Bakery Workers unions. As always, upon closer examination of the facts, this turns out to be bullshit. The unions actually made concessions.

The real villains here are the vulture capitalist hedge fund owners of Hostess' debt who killed Twinkie the Kid by profit taking through liquidating the company in bankruptcy.

CNBC's John Carney explains in How Hostess Failed: Hedge Funds vs. Unions:

When Hostess Brands announced that it would close up its operations,
the forces most responsible for that decision were two hedge funds that
control hundreds of millions of Hostess debt and which have finally
decided they won't squeeze any more filling into the Twinkie.

The
funds, Silver Point and Monarch, are what are known as distressed debt
investors. They buy the debt of troubled companies—usually at steep
discounts. Some consider them white knights who are willing to take make
risky investments in companies on the verge of failure. Others say they
are “vulture funds.”

Only
Silver Point and Monarch could have kept Hostess out of liquidation and
kept the Twinkie bakery ovens firing. But they were, ultimately, unable
to reach a deal with the unions that represents the workers who make
and deliver products like Twinkies, Wonderbread and Ding Dongs. Without
large union concessions—what some would say, total union
capitulation—the hedge funds decided Hostess would have to die.

Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

It's heeere!

The Euro financial austerity crisis in the European Union has triggered the inevitable recession that I have been warning you about this year. It's only a question of how much of an impact it will have upon the U.S. economy.

The AP reports at the Washington Post, Eurozone back in recession as official figures show 0.1 percent contraction in Q3:

The 17-country eurozone has fallen back into recession for the first
time in three years as the fallout from the region’s financial crisis
was felt from Amsterdam to Athens.

And with surveys pointing to increasingly depressed conditions
across the 17-member group at a time of austerity and high unemployment,
the recession is forecast to deepen, and make the debt crisis — which
has been calmer of late — even more difficult to handle.

Official figures Thursday showed that the eurozone contracted by 0.1
percent in the July to September period from the quarter before as
economies including Germany and the Netherlands suffer from falling
demand.

The decline reported by Eurostat, the EU’s statistics
office, was in line with market expectations and follows on from the 0.2
percent fall recorded in the second quarter. As a result, the eurozone
is technically in recession, commonly defined as two straight quarters
of falling output.