Thomas Frank and Bernie Sanders talk about things Adam Dickey doesn't want to hear.

Since I'm in such a good mood this morning, we'll be taking a glance as Thomas Frank and Bernie Sanders talk about an array of compelling ideas that local party bigwig Adam Dickey doesn't want to hear.

However, first let's take a brief diversion into post-electoral Democratic self-delusion, one of Mr. Disney's perennial specialties.

Can They Count?, by Jonah Walters (Jacobin)

Blaming third-party voters for Trump’s win isn’t just bad politics. It’s bad math.

In the aftermath of Donald Trump’s election day victory, political wonks find themselves in an urgent predicament — apparently, not a single one of them owns a calculator. This crisis is ill-timed indeed. Performing simple feats of addition and subtraction is a vital part of the wonks’ post-election number-crunching ritual. But without calculators, wonks make mistakes.

The calculator crisis has already had an impact on public opinion. Justifiably unnerved by the shortage, data-slingers have flailed in the days and weeks following the election. As a result, they’ve churned out misleading analyses full of bad math.

The worst instances of bad math have to do with the so-called “protest vote,” cast by those voters who, disgusted by the major candidates on offer, pulled the lever for marginal third-party challengers like the Green Party’s Jill Stein. To hear the wonks tell it, these voters were dupes — frauds even — and they cost Clinton the election.

Because what really happened was this.

The Democrats lost because their Republican challenger was able to galvanize voters far more successfully than Hillary Clinton, whose technocratic blend of esoteric policy-talk and milquetoast liberalism did next to nothing to motivate turnout, even with the specter of a Trump presidency looming large.

So, the Democrats drew the short straw, and the reform process begins. Or does it?

How the Democrats could win again, if they wanted, by Thomas Frank (The Guardian)

Labor and economic equality used to be at the heart of liberal politics. Rich professionals expunged these concerns – and have reaped the consequences

What makes 2016 a disaster for Democrats is not merely the party’s epic wipeout in Washington and the state capitals, but that the contest was fought out on a terrain that should have been favorable to them. This was an election about social class –about class-based grievances – and yet the Party of the People blew it. How that happened is the question of the year, just as it has been the question of other disastrous election years before. And just like before, I suspect the Democrats will find all manner of convenient reasons to take no corrective action.

But first let us focus on the good news. Donald Trump has smashed the consensus factions of both parties. Along the way, he has destroyed the core doctrine of Clintonism: that all elections are decided by money and that therefore Democrats must match Republican fundraising dollar for dollar. This is the doctrine on which progressive hopes have been sacrificed for decades, and now it is dead. Clinton outspent Trump two-to-one and it still wasn’t enough.

Leaving aside the question of how this conclusion pertains to Jeff Gahan's fattened war chest, it isn't pretty.

This year the Republicans chose an honest-to-god scary candidate, a man who really ought to have been kept out of the White House, and the party’s centrists choked. Instead of winning, the pragmatists delivered Democrats to the worst situation they’ve been in for many decades, with control of no branch of the federal government and only a handful of state legislatures. Over the years, and at the behest of this faction, Democrats gave up what they stood for piece by piece and what they have to show for it now is nothing.

At least we now understand what it really means to swing.

... the real swing voters are the working people who over the years have switched their loyalty from the Democrats to Trump’s Republicans. Their views are pretty much the reverse of the standard model. On certain matters they are open to conservative blandishments; on economic issues, however, they are pretty far to the left. They don’t admire free trade or balanced budgets or entitlement reform – the signature issues of centrism – they hate those things. And if Democrats want to reach them, they will have to turn away from the so-called center and back to the economic left.

Frank doesn't believe the Democratic Party will be up to the task of introspection and rehabilitation. The party won't make the necessary changes, and ...

This will happen because what leading liberals cannot understand – what they are psychologically blocked from understanding – is that the problem isn’t really the white working class. The problem is them.

For those of an optimistic nature, there's a potential silver lining.

If the unreconstructed Democratic party is to be saved, I suspect, what will save it is what always saves it: the colossal incompetence of the Republicans. This, too, we can already see coming down the rails. Donald Trump is getting the wrecking crew back together, and before too long, I suspect, he will have the country pining for Hillary Clinton.

Ah, what might have been, but Bernie Sanders is not looking back in anger.

Bernie Sanders: Where We Go From Here, by Matt Taibbi (Rolling Stone)

It feels like a bomb went off in Washington. In less than a year, the leaders of both major parties have been crushed, fundamentally reshaping a political culture that for generations had seemed unalterable. The new order has belligerent outsider Donald Trump heading to the White House, ostensibly backed in Congress by a tamed and repentant majority of establishment Republicans. Hillary Clinton's devastating loss, meanwhile, has left the minority Democrats in disarray. A pitched battle for the soul of the opposition party has already been enjoined behind the scenes.

Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, who won overwhelming youth support and 13 million votes during primary season, now sits on one side of that battle, in a position of enormous influence. The party has named him "outreach chair," and Minnesota congressman and Sanders political ally Keith Ellison is the favorite to be named head of the Democratic National Committee. This is a huge change from earlier this year, when the Sanders campaign was completely on the outs with the DNC, but many see Sanders' brand of politics as the Democrats' best shot at returning to prominence.

Since November 9, the Floyd County Democratic party has continued doing what it's done best during Chairman Dickey's tenure: Avoid any trace of content while erecting sanitized facades to hide behind.

Of course, there are times when Occam's razor rules, and the simplest explanation is the best; as such, local Democrats have absolutely nothing in the tank, and so nothingness is the only path the party can take.

We already know how it's going to play out hereabouts:

New Albany Heating and Air presents ...

COOL PAPA GAHAN AND THE COMPLETELY REVISED AND UPDATED FLOYD COUNTY DEMOCRATIC PARTY

"Meet the new loss ... same as the old loss ... "

Yo, Chairman Dickey: "It is crucial that our cultural elite, most of it aligned with the New Democrats, not be allowed to shirk their responsibility for Trump’s success."

But Uncle Walt typically had better years.

It starts right here, at the grassroots, and the Floyd County Democratic Party, the only entity hereabouts with an existing structure capable of being retrofitted for some semblance of a purpose, might actively seize this revolutionary moment by initiating dialogue aimed at the future.

So here is our silver lining. This is a revolutionary moment. We must not allow them to shift the blame on to voters. This is their failure, decades in the making. And their failure is our chance to regroup. To clean house in the Democratic party, to retire the old elite and to empower a new generation of FDR Democrats, who look out for the working class – the whole working class.

To be blunt, in the three weeks since the New Democratic Order had its clocked clean locally, regionally and nationally, our Floyd County Democratic leadership cadre (with apologies to leaders who actually heed the literal definition stipulating "one who leads") has emitted little more than the whimpering of lashed curs, a few stray platitudes, and the stench of utter bullshit.

Whether one is inside the local party or outside it, and assuming that the party itself lacks the chutzpah to gift party chairman Adam Dickey with a pink slip, it's obvious that Dickey must resign. Mayor Jeff Gahan is the highest ranking Democrat left woozily wobbling. He actually has a record of winning elections, and so it's his party now -- not that he has any idea what to do with it, just that this is the way politics works following a debacle like 2016.

It is doubtful that more than a handful of local DemoDisneyDixiecrats grasp the immensity of the task ahead.

(Bill Clinton's triangulation) heralded the Obama years, as the New Democrats continued to justify their existence through a focus on social causes that do not threaten corporate power. Or as Krystal Ball put it so powerfully: “We lectured a struggling people watching their kids die of drug overdoses about their white privilege.” Add to this that we did it while their life expectancy dropped through self-destructive behaviors brought on by economic distress.

Nevertheless, the window is cracked open. Can a local political party that finds competitive discourse so highly distasteful that it rigidly censors its own social media platform, thus all but ensuring a culture of losing, look deeply into the mirror and commence the 12-step program for reversing rot and recapturing roots?

It's doubtful. Is there a doctor in the house to check the corpse for a pulse?

Clinton & co are finally gone. That is the silver lining in this disaster, by Hazem Salem (The Guardian)

... Hillary Clinton has given us back our freedom. Only such a crushing defeat could break the chains that bound us to the New Democrat elites. The defeat was the result of decades of moving the Democratic party – the party of FDR – away from what it once was and should have remained: a party that represents workers. All workers ...

Lest we forget:

In a capitalist democracy, the party of the left has one essential reason for existing: to speak for the working class. Capitalist democracies have tended towards two major parties. One, which acts in the interest of the capitalist class – the business owners, the entrepreneurs, the professionals – ensuring their efforts and the risks they took were fairly rewarded. The other party represented workers, unions and later on other groups that made up the working class, including women and oppressed minorities.

This delicate balance ended in the 1990s. Many blame Reagan and Thatcher for destroying unions and unfettering corporations. I don’t. In the 1990s, a New Left arose in the English-speaking world: Bill Clinton’s New Democrats and Tony Blair’s New Labour. Instead of a balancing act, Clinton and Blair presided over an equally aggressive “new centrist” dismantling of the laws that protected workers and the poor.

Responsibility? What a seldom-seen concept locally:

This is not to deny the reality of structural racism or xenophobia or the intolerance shown to Muslims or the antisemitic undertones of Trump’s campaign. I am myself a person of color with a Muslim-sounding name, I know the reality and I am as frightened as everyone else. But it is crucial that our cultural elite, most of it aligned with the New Democrats, not be allowed to shirk their responsibility for Trump’s success.

So let us be as clear about this electoral defeat as possible, because the New Democratic elite will try to pin their failure, and keep their jobs, by blaming this largely on racism, sexism – and FBI director Comey. This is an extremely dangerous conclusion to draw from this election.

I love the smell of purge in the morning. Now, please.

On Bernie Sanders, the fall of the wall, and Russian words not used here.

Rewinding to November, 1989, we see Bernie Sanders between gigs -- loser of a congressional election, and no longer mayor of Burlington. Sanders sought brief refuge at Harvard, teaching briefly while "plotting his next move."

When the Berlin Wall Fell, Bernie Sanders Didn’t Respond Like Other Politicians, by Richard Kreitner (The Nation)

Instead of heralding “the end of history,” Sanders called on Americans to take the revolutions of 1989 as a model.

... In an op-ed he wrote for The Harvard Crimson that month, Sanders wrote that watching the dramatic events unfolding abroad—“glasnost; perestroika; free speech; open parliamentary debate televised before millions of viewers; the beginning of organized political opposition to the Communist Party; mass strikes and demonstrations by workers and ethnic minorities; serious publications dealing honestly with the nation’s sordid history which had been covered up for decades by officials lies”—prompted him to consider the need for something similar to happen at home.

A quarter-century later, I still use these Russian words quite often. I may actually have campaigned for office on their basis, although few people seem to remember what they mean.

... Without glasnost, (Mikhail) Gorbachev believed, there could be no perestroika; without a popular outpouring of anger and dissent, the powerful and the privileged, those who profited from the status quo, would continue to block the thoroughgoing systemic reforms he had proposed.

Similarly, Sanders acknowledges that the sweeping political changes necessary for making the United States a more just and equal nation are impossible—he is, indeed, that much-abused word, “unelectable”—without a groundswell of support among the marginalized and the disillusioned.

Soul searching as impetus for structural reform? It makes sense to me, although you simply cannot TIF it and declare victory. At this precise moment, I'm not optimistic. Then again, relative sobriety has been known to induce horrifying realities.

Perhaps tomorrow will be different.

ON THE AVENUES: BSB’s second five-year plan begins now.

ON THE AVENUES: BSB’s second five-year plan begins now.

A weekly web column by Roger A. Baylor.

I’m the first to admit that Thursday’s ON THE AVENUES column (“I thought I heard Buddy Bolden say”) was consciously offered as a primal scream of artsy-fartsy annoyance with persistent municipal tone deafness. In it, the same phrase was repeated thirty-odd times, with a purely intentional poison-pen coda.

Venting is good for the soul. However, the column was neither “Revolution 9” nor Andy Warhol’s soup cans, and perhaps I shortchanged loyal readers, so please accept my apologies. Today I’ll make it up to you by abruptly changing the subject.

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Tomorrow (Sunday, March 9) is the 5th anniversary of Bank Street Brewhouse’s soft opening, with the first official day of business coming on March 10, 2009.

NABC’s high command decided quite some time ago not to do anything special to mark these anniversaries; after all, lives and businesses go on, at least until they don’t, and we’ll use the time saved to prepare for marking our decade of longevity in 2019.

By the way, did you know that anniversary number ten is to be celebrated by the gift of tin?

As we’ve approached the end of the first five-year plan, I’ve been reaching back into 20th-century history for analogies. Since last September, and with enhanced intensity the past two months, you might say that we’ve undertaken a round of perestroika at the expense of glasnost, which is to say that economic restructuring (perestroika) has been occurring at Bank Street Brewhouse without concurrent openness (glasnost).

Translation: We’ve been making changes, and not talking very much about them. Back in those USSR days, there was plenty of talk, but not enough reform. These days at BSB, we’re hoping it’s the other way around.

My personal position since January 1 has remained unchanged: We'd begin to make these necessary structural changes, and as soon as someone asked me, I'd be my usual truthful self and tell all. As I imagined all along, free-lancer Steve Coomes was the first to notice, and to ask. Here are the answers, and as usual, Steve gets it right.

Restaurant Roundup: Bank Street downscales, TPD upscales, chef Schwartz to Doc Crow’s, Doc Crow’s to Cincy, by Steve Coomes (Insider Louisville)

The partners behind Bank Street Brewhouse have scaled back its gastropub menu in an effort to control costs and better position the operation in the casual marketplace of downtown New Albany.

That’s the official way of saying, “Oh, the menu it is a changin’.”

The new BSB menu?

It’s different, but not radically so. We simply looked at what was selling and what wasn’t; we kept the former and did away with the latter. The second most difficult decision was to let go of the pork chops, but only after we learned that those few servings being sold in an average month generally were being purchased exclusively by our landlord and his family.

(Note to self: Who needs rent parties when we might have periodic Pork Pitch-Ins?)

By far the hardest part was relieving Chef Matt Weirich of his position of almost three years, but Matt’s a class act from start to finish, and we all love him dearly. He’s a talented young man, and has landed on his feet. I suspect you’ll be seeing a lot more of him, and locally, too.

BSB’s current General Manager, Kimberly Durham, is managing the kitchen, where staff remains in place. She’s crunching numbers and making improvements designed to set a banker’s heart racing … and even make a few bucks for the company.

In Steve Coomes’s phrasing, we’ve gone from being a gastropub to pub, but semantics aside, items like the burgers, croque, fish, frites and tacos still are being made the same way as before, and by the same folks. Of course, so is the beer, which remains nonpareil.

The as-yet-unanswered question is whether these moves will improve the bottom line, and although early returns are favorable, five years of trench warfare have proven nothing if not the merit of taking an extremely long, patient view.

Bank Street Brewhouse is a warm weather kind of scene, and to have maintained our sales equilibrium these past two months while retooling in mid-air with the engine light flashing during the coldest winter in recent memory strikes me as no mean feat, and a favorable first step. But it’s only a first step, and that rhetorically hackneyed jury remains out.

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Since the Sherman Minton Bridge reopened in 2012, we’ve been tantalizingly close to aligning Bank Street Brewhouse’s financials and aesthetics. But five-tool players only succeed when they use them all in synchronicity, and close only counts in Horseshoe Casino’s proximity to the Floyd County border. We've never quite gotten there.

I’ve always tried to be honest when asked, “How’s Bank Street Brewhouse doing?” To be sure, in five years of business, enough mistakes have been made to preclude restful sleep for the rest of my life, if I were to opt for self-flagellation – and I don’t, because at the same time, especially in this brutally competitive line of work, keeping doors open for more than a year or two qualifies as an achievement in itself.

Consequently, given the number of eateries and bars debuting in downtown New Albany during this same span of time, most of which still are in business, it makes me feel good to know we made a beachhead and weathered 60 whole months. BSB’s original business plan was entirely obsolete by March 11, 2009, but one plank of the platform always has held true: We promised to be leaders, and not followers.

This we have done. But screw the elegiacs; after all, this isn’t an obituary. We’re still alive and kicking, if evolving into a slightly different sort of food and drink beast than before. The landscape downtown is different, and a career in opportunism beckons.

Lately, I’ve been conceding to close friends that it’s just dandy if other establishments move to the front and guide the peloton, as we’re perfectly content to draft for a while and enjoy the slipstream. Yet even this analogy is imperfect. When it comes to craft beer, there are no holes in NABC’s lineup. We’ll be placing greater focus on the future of the brewery operation in the context of an American brewing scene gone wild. The road ahead is long.

NABC always has been an evolutionary process, and it will continue to be. Thanks to all our friends and customers who’ve supported us along the way.

Without you, there is no us.

On the nature of five-year plans.

A few days back, I mentioned a "five-year plan." It occurs to me that younger readers might not know the context of this usage.

Five-Year Plan

Soviet economic practice of planning to augment agricultural and industrial output by designated quotas for a limited period of usually five years. Nations other than the former USSR and the Soviet bloc members, especially developing countries, have adopted such plans for four, five, or more years.

When Bank Street Brewhouse came into being, we signed a five-year lease. The details are unimportant, but with the renewal date approaching, it's easy to see how the mind of this ex-Sovietologist would make a connection with the command economy of old.

When I decide how glasnost and perestroika fit into all of this, you'll be the first to know; just recognize that in New Albany, openness and restructuring seem always to comprise the last items on the checklist -- and no one even mentions uskorenie any more.