The newest right-wing meme.. a photoshop fraud? (Updated: NOT)

(update 7/19/12: this is is not fake as I initially thought.  Instead it's a second fundraising space used by Obama for America, which I didn't find when I searched for Obama field offices.  He apparently has his campaign field office at 1037 Forest Ave, and then an OFA space at 533.  See comments  for more detail)

After President Obama's remarks that no businessman succeeded completely on his own, the right-wing has been having some fun.  One of their "fun" pictures appears to be a fraud.

I'm referring to this website http://obamadidthisonhisown.com/ which purports to show the irony of an Obama field office located above a carpet store that is going out of business. Here is the picture:

This piqued my interest so I googled on the name of the business.  I found their listing in the Superpages and this address is 533 Forest Ave in Portland, ME.   I also found this real estate listing that confirms it, as it has a picture of the building and lists the same address.   So is Obama's field office at 533 Forest Avenue located above a failing business? 

No. 

Obama's field office in Portland is located at 1037 Forest Avenue, as shown on his website. According to Google maps, this is 1.2 miles away from the location pictured here.

Also, take a close look at the picture of the building in the real estate listing linked above, and compare it to the picture from the right-wing blog.  Particularly notice the wording and coloring of the banners.  Photoshop has definitely been applied here. 

King Canute: North Carolina Republican?

Canute was king of England from 1016 to 1035.  He is generally seen as by history as a good king and an effective administrator, but he is famous for one story: His attempt to order the tide not to rise.  Let's let the chronicle of Henry of Huntingdon  tell the story:

with the greatest vigor he commanded that his chair should be set on the shore, when the tide began to rise. And then he spoke to the rising sea saying “You are part of my dominion, and the ground that I am seated upon is mine, nor has anyone disobeyed my orders with impunity. Therefore, I order you not to rise onto my land, nor to wet the clothes or body of your Lord”.

Well it's really not fair to compare our state's Republicans with such a delusion.  After all, King Canute tried to command the sea arbitrarily, as if it would obey his will simply because he was king.  On the other hand, NC's legislative Republicans follow procedure and take a democratic vote before commanding the sea.   So they are much more rational.

Maybe it's not fair to just give Daily Kos's view. Stephen Colbert's is much funnier:

The Colbert Report
Get More: Colbert Report Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,Video Archive

Of course there is more to the story.  Canute was actually trying to make a point, and prove to fawning courtiers that his power was limited.  NC's Republicans... well, nevermind

Did you hear the one about how Bev Perdue and David Price control the Ukraine government's agricultural policies? (updated 8/11/11)

Whenever a major plant closes, finger pointing and blame abound. For the last four years, when the Chatham county commissioners were Democrats, every job lost in the county, or every prospective job what went to another county, was blamed on county government's so-called anti-business attitude. Examples: here, here, here, here, and here.

But now the county commission is firmly in the hands of the GOP. So now when there is a loss of jobs in the county, the same people who looked no further than local politicians now need to find someone else, who is a Democrat of course, to blame. People who previously blamed county job losses on local politicians have suddenly opened their minds to global or statewide trends.

The recent announcement of the closing of the Townshend's chicken plant is a perfect example. The local Republicans have gone through a few scapegoats, none of them local, but all of them Democrats.

Here is a link to the N&O's article about the closing. This article devotes significant space to the effect of high corn prices on the chicken raising model.

First GOP scapegoat: ethanol loving environmentalists

So naturally, the blame must be with environmentalists who are forcing us to create ethanol, driving up the price of corn! There are two problems with that theory.

The first problem is that environmentalists are not responsible for ethanol subsidies and mandates. Politically powerful agribusiness lobbies are. After all, among the politicians who support ethanol are such liberal environmentalists as Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich. What do these GOP stalwarts have in common? Oh yeah, they are running for President and need to do well in the Iowa caucuses. Meanwhile, the GOP candidate who has come out most strongly against ethanol subsidies is Jon Huntsman, who is arguably the most liberal GOP candidate and is coincidentally skipping the Iowa caucuses.

The second problem with that explanation is that the price of corn really didn't increase much while Omtron owned the plant. It is true that it has shot up in the last year, but during the five months between Omtron's purchase and decision to close the plant (Feb 2011 to July 2011), the price of corn went up only 4%, from $293 per metric ton to $305. During that time frame, the peak price was $319, but that was in April and it's been going down ever since. So Omtron decided to close the plant after three months of steady declines in the price of corn. You can look at the historical price data here.

Second GOP scapegoat: State government (but only the parts controlled by Democrats)

An interesting rumor started making the rounds that the state of NC would not let the owner of the chicken plants use state ports to import cheap corn from Ukraine. You see it turns out that apparently Omtron's plan was to use the fact that they had signfiicant food processing interests in the Ukraine to get cheap corn for their chickens, therefore beating the grain market. What a brilliant plan. Until, according to local GOP activists, it was spoiled by Bev Perdue and David Price.

Normally it's hard to trace false rumors like this back to the source, but in this case it can be traced to its source. Tom Glendinning, frequent conservative poster to the Chatham Chatlist and staunch Brian Bock supporter appears to have started this rumor. He posted this rumor to Brian Bock's facebook page (see screen shot) and sure enough within an hour of that posting going up, Bock's supporters ran with it and used this "fact" to make BBS postings blaming governor Bev Perdue for the closing of this plant.

Tom also posted this "discovery" of his to the Chatham Chatlist. Here is part of what he posted:

And if you get a chance to whisper in the governor's or David Price's ear, let her know that we would like an unloading dock permitted for Omtron so that it can bring the grain over to feed the chickens, to sell the meat, to pay the workers, to pay the taxes, and let us get back to living again rather than dusting off our tents to set up our "primary dwelling spaces."

Now one thing is strange about this, besides the fact that this "fact" is false (which I'll get to in a minute). And that is, why is David Price's name even mentioned? David Price doesn't have authority over NC's ports. David Price doesn't represent the part of the state where the ports are located. David Price also doesn't represent the part of the state where the chicken plants are. Why in the world would he be involved? Besides the fact that he's the nearest Democrat that Tom can lash out at, that is.

If the port rumor were true, I could see Bev Perdue having something to do with it, but trying to pin this on David Price is just silliness.

Now about this "fact" about the port. None of the news stories about the plant closing mention any problem with the port. In fact, besides Tom's "this guy I know said it" rumor, I can't find any evidence of any problem with the ports.

So I contacted Dianne Reid, the head of the Chatham Economic Development Corporation to ask if she had heard of any problem with the ports. Not only did she respond that she was aware of no problem with the ports, but she had also asked the state commerce secretary and he wasn't aware of any port issue either.

(update 8/11/11). More info on this has come to light, from this Chatham County BBS posting. This is NC Secretary of Commerce Crisco being paraphrased by Pittsboro Mayor Randy Voller, this was discussed at a Triangle-J Council of Governments meeting at which Mr. Crisco was the guest speaker (and commissioner chair Brian Bock was absent).

"...Omtron has had a good offer for the facilities, which they have so far declined to accept. Omtron was well aware that North Carolina was not set up with a grain elevator at our port(s) yet pursued the purchase of Townsend's through the bankruptcy court. The state was working with Omtron to contract such a facility. The state was about a month behind schedule, but all parties anticipated its completion in a reasonable time frame to meet Omtron's needs. Omtron's Ukrainian management told the state that they were pulling out not due to this situation but because of some unspecified grant they claim to have been promised by an agency in the federal government. Sec. Crisco said that his department could not verify the veracity of this claim."

So who's my scapegoat?

When I have disputed partisan GOP explanations for the closing of the chicken plants, I am often asked for my own.

The N&O article about the closing is probably most accurate and it mentions two factors worth mentioning.

The first factor is a supposed lack of discipline in the U. S. poultry industry. At first blush this might seem like a swipe at the workers in the plants, many of whom our Republican friends like to remind us are illegal aliens. However it only looks like that if you don't read the next sentence. Here is the "discipline" quote, in its full context:

He just decided to shut it down and take his losses and go on," said David Purtle, a former Tyson Foods executive who was hired to be Omtron's CEO. "He just didn't like the environment in this country and the lack of discipline that the poultry industry had."

The U.S. poultry industry has been resisting calls to reduce production levels, something that many believe is necessary in order to put it on firmer financial footing.

It's clear that by "discipline" Omtron's CEO isn't referring to shiftless workers. He's referring to price fixing and production controls.

The next factor is the price of feed. As I described above, the market price of corn didn't increase significantly during Omtron's ownership of the chicken plants. However the N&O article about his purchase of the plants, in February, referred to a plan to beat the corn market by importing cheap corn from Ukraine. Even the reporter who wrote that story thought that was pretty tenuous plan, but it was a plan.

Who ruined the cheap corn plan?

However that plan didn't look quite as good when, on July 1st, the Ukraine government imposed a 12% export tax on corn. As the linked story said, this caused corn exports from Ukraine to become uncompetitive and plummet 75% in a month. Clearly if you had a plan based on getting cheaper corn from Ukraine, and the Ukraine government raised the price of your corn, then your plan to rely on cheap corn from Ukraine is broken.

In light of that, is it a coincidence that just over three weeks after this Ukraine tax went into effect, the decision was made to close the chicken plants?

So my conclusion is that government action did in fact ruin the business plan for chicken plants. The Ukraine government, that is. Clearly, you should call Bev Perdue and David Price and demand that they do something about this!

Last Call: a book political junkies of all stripes can enjoy immensely

I just finished reading the book Last Call, which is comprehensive history of Prohibition from the very beginnings of anti-alcohol movements in the 1800s to repeal in the 1930s and its effects beyond that.

This is without a doubt the most entertaining and informative political and history book I have read in years. And anyone who enjoys politics can enjoy it, be they left, right, or something else. The events and controversies in this book took place so long ago (80-150 years ago) that even though Republicans and Democrats are involved both parties are mostly unrecognizable to their current adherents, but still similar enough to their modern counterparts to keep it interesting.

This book has everything, and I do mean everything. Some gems, without giving away any of the books' reading enjoyment, include:

• The surprisingly large effect apportionment and the state of district maps of both Congress and the state legislatures had on both enactment and repeal of Prohibition
• How Congress blatantly violated the Constitution for a full decade, in order to protect Prohibition. It's surprising this isn't more well known.
• The role and operations of pressure groups on both sides of the issue, and how amazingly similar they are to today's pressure group operations. You've probably never heard of Wayne Wheeler which is a shame because he is the political ancestor of Karl Rove, James Carville, and everyone of that ilk.
• The role of the KKK in American society then. And no, contrary to popular belief it wasn't just Southerners or Democrats who allied with them. Not by a long shot
• The role of the Catholic and Jewish religions and Americans' views of them in shaping politics and society
  
• Why none of these three things could have happened without the other two: The income tax, Prohibition, and women's suffrage. The links and interrelationships between these three are fascinating
• Why Henry Ford and other big businessmen flip flopped on Prohibition
• Reading quotes from politicians, both on the left and the right, that would be positively cringe-inducing and career ending now.
• Why it's probably not a good idea for modern day liberals to adopt the term "progressive"
• A serious and factual investigation into Joseph Kennedy's past, with results that may surprise you
• An era when the sheer weight of hypocrisy could actually end a law, even a constitutional amendment
• A reminder of how it is possible for Congress to get a constitutional amendment ratified without cooperation of the state legislatures.
• Why St. Pierre in Canada was the place to be, moreso than anyplace else in Canada
• Can you imagine a time when the federal government was so skinflint Congress refused to appropriate funds to enforce federal law? And it wasn't for any other reason than they were too cheap, it wasn't resistance to the law itself

I could go on and on with so much more but I think the point is made that there is not a dull moment or an uninteresting thing in this book, for a reader with an interest in politics.

I also learned recently that Ken Burns is going to be doing a miniseries on Prohibition. It's apparently loosely based on this book in that he and author shared some research, but it is not a collaboration between them so it may provide a different perspective. I'm looking forward to it.

Will Bob Atwater switch to the NC House?

Here is the new NC House map:

And here is the old NC Senate map:

Why did I put the new house map next to the old senate map? Compare new house district 54 with old Senate district 18. They are very similar. Note that if you bring up the new house map in the detailed district viewer, new house district 54 contains more of Sanford than the picture above implies. -- but not district 51 rep Mike Stone's house, which is on the west side of U.S. 1.

Given that Bob Atwater and Ellie Kinnaird have been drawn into new Senate district 23 together, and the new district 23 appears to favor Ms. Kinnaird since it includes Chapel Hill, and that new house district 54 not only looks a lot like Bob's old Senate district, but also has no incumbent, I wouldn't be surprised to see Bob Atwater concede the senate seat to Ellie Kinnaird and switch to the house and run for new district 54.

Bob's already familiar with campaigning in Sanford and it seems to me he would have a better chance in new house 54, than in a primary against Ellie Kinnaird in a district that includes Chapel Hill.

That's my guess just from looking at the maps, I haven't spoken to either of them or anyone on either of their teams.

A Gerrymandering "work of art"

It's no wonder the NC GOP waited until the Friday before the fourth of July weekend to drop their redistricting map on the public. Nate Silver said it best when he tweeted:

GOP gerrymander in NC is a work of art. State voted for Obama, but McCain won between 56-58% of the vote in 10 of 13 new districts.

That just about sums it up, and not a whole lot more needs to be said.

Except that I will say some things, because redistricting is just too interesting to me leave it alone. It's one of my strongest political interests. Maps, numbers, history -- what more could you want?

First of all, here's the proposed GOP map:

And here's the map as it currently stands, which the GOP map will be replacing:

My comments:

1. Obviously, gerrymandering is in the eye of the beholder. For two decades the GOP and their conservative allies have whined about the 12 district, calling it the ugliest gerrymander in the country. So now that the GOP has a chance to do something about it, what do they do? They make it even more weirdly shaped, stretched out, and squiggly than it was before. Not only that, but they take the 4th district, which was one of the most compact ones in the state, and transform it to make it look much like the 12th. So now we two snake-shaped districts instead of one, courtesy of the same GOP that complained about the shape of the 12th for 20 years.
2. Brad Miller (13th district Democrat) is toast. This is not an insightful observation, it's been obvious from the beginning that the GOP was going to target him and they did. That said, it's hard to feel sorry for Brad Miller, even though he's a fellow Democrat. First of all, I can't think of any way in which he's distinguished himself in Congress. But most of all, we have to remember how he got that seat in the first place. As chair of the Democratic legislature's redistricting committee in 2001, he custom-drew it for himself. He also drew the Republican who is now chairing the redistricting committee out of his seat in the legislature. Revenge is a dish best served cold, but also: what the redistricting pen giveth, the redistricting pen taketh away. Bye-bye Brad, hope you enjoyed your 10 year run.
3. Heath Shuler is more screwed than I expected. For at least 30 years, the 11th district has been one of the most compact and regularly shaped districts in the state. It was also reliably Republican, until Shuler took it in 2006, and surprisingly easily won re-election in 2008 and 2010. Well the Republicans have exacted their revenge by removing Asheville from the district (notice how district 10 reaches up and grabs it). Asheville is the most Democratic place in western NC and was likely Shuler's base. Now he's lost it.
4. Asheville is just as screwed as Shuler. It's now stuck in Patrick Henry's district, one of the most Republican in the state represented by one of the most extreme wingnuts in Congress. Talk about a bad fit, but the intention wasn't to make a fit -- it was to deprive Heath Shuler of Asheville's Democrats, and bury them in a district where they will no influence. It's pure gerrymandering genius.
5. Rene Ellmers, whom the Daily Kos aptly called "one of the dimmest bulbs in the freshman class" has hit the lottery. Remember she barely squeaked by a tired and damaged Bob Etheridge to win district 2. Now it's been redrawn to keep her safe. The good news, for me personally, is that she will no longer represent me, with Chatham County drawn out of her district. I'm happy to not be represented by her.
6. If he hasn't already, David Price (4th district Democrat) can go ahead and buy a house in DC. The new map ensures his continued tenure, as the mapmakers crammed every Democrat they could from the Triangle and its surrounding area into his district, to make the ones around him more Republican. He got Chapel Hill, Durham, the northeastern Chatham County, the area of Wake county where NC State and Meredith are as well as the areas around the SAS institute where the educated high tech voters live. Yes his district now looks like District 12 Junior, but it's safe for him.

So what do I really think?

After all that you may think I hope the map gets thrown out, or think it's beyond the pale. Well I don't. Yes it royally screws Democrats, and it's an ugly looking gerrymander, and it exposes the hypocrisy of decades of GOP whining about Democratic maps. But Democrats have been doing it for 140 years.

Now after all this time the Republicans control redistricting, and you bet they are going to maximize their advantage and do all they can to make up for all those decades of Democratic gerrymandering. Redistricting is the ultimate example of "to the victor goes the spoils" and by winning the legislature for the first time in over 100 years last year, the NC GOP has earned the right to draw their maps. We shouldn't expect them to show restraint that our party never showed.

Democrats inadvertently complicit in their own redistricting slaughter

Besides, the NC Democrats are complicit in their current situation. Recall that the governor of NC has no veto power over district maps.

Why is that?

Because when the Democratic-controlled legislature amended the NC constitution in 1996 to give the governor the veto, they figured they would always control the legislature but that the Governor could be a Republican. So they made sure the Governor had no say in this process.

Now it's 15 years later and oops -- we have a GOP legislature with a Democratic Governor who is forced to sit helplessly on the sidelines while the GOP carves up the spoils of NC redistricting.

Talk about an example of trying to fix the system in your favor, backfiring.

Examining the Republican claim that George Lucier redistricted without public input

The GOP majority of the Chatham Board of Commissioners is working on pushing through their commissioner redistricting plan. Brian Bock explained how they did this in his blog. Basically he and Commissioner Petty drew the districts with help from the county GIS department. No one else was included.

Commissioner Bock justifies this by claiming this is what George Lucier did in 2007. The exact quote from his blog on this is:

Commissioner Lucier worked directly with the county GIS department to develop new districts to propose to the BOC.

Furthermore, Bock's supporters have been hitting the bulletin boards, claiming that what Commissioner Bock is doing now is no different from what Commissioner Lucier did then.

However, Bock and his supporters are not telling the full story. Commissioner Lucier did not simply go to the county GIS office and invent a completely new district plan like Bock and Petty did. Commissioner Lucier's goal was to restore the districts to what they were prior to 2006, when Bunkey and his lame-duck board attempted to gerrymander them after being voted out of office, but before leaving office.

Recall that among other things, the Bunkey gerrymander would have prevented commissioner Patrick Barnes from running for re-election, plus it was rejected in a countywide referendum in November 2006, so it was clearly an egregious injustice that had to be undone.

So Lucier did not come up with his own plan. He simply restored what was there before Bunkey tried to gerrymander the districts. This is what Lucier and his allies said they would do before the 2006 general election, and he followed through.

Now when this is pointed out to Bock's supporters, they will claim that is not true, that Lucier did not restore what was there before Bunkey. And it's true that Lucier's map is slightly differerent from the pre-Bunkey map, however it had to be.

The only way Lucier could legally replace Bunkey's map was if his replacement map had more equal population between districts than Bunkey's map, using 2000 census data. Bunkey's map had about a 3.5% population deviation between districts using this data. So Lucier and the county GIS department tweaked the pre-Bunkey districts to make their 2000 census population deviation 1.7%, to meet this legal requirement.

Did that result in a different plan that was "devised" by Lucier? Well rhetoric can fly all day, but at the end of the day the best way to judge that is compare the actual maps side by side.

First of all, apologies for the quality of the following pictures. They are like this because the only way I was able to get them was in .pdf format. I had to screen copy the PDFs and convert the screen copy into jpgs, to get these into a postable format.

This is what the Chatham County commissioner election districts looked like before Bunkey changed them in 2006 (source: Chatham County GIS office):

This is what they looked like after Lucier changed them in 2007 (source: Chatham County website):

Looking at these two maps side by side, it's pretty obvious that what Lucier did was restore the pre-Bunkey maps as much as possible. OK, he also changed their map colors. :) That's it. The very slight differences between the two maps, which were legally required, are very thin justification indeed for likening what Lucier did to what Bock is doing now.

Correction 6/23/2011: I actually had the maps switched when I originally posted this, and have corrected that. It's an easy mistake to make because, except for the colors, the maps are almost identical (which was the point anyway).