Patriot's Quill

Florida debate redux

2012-01-24T04:19:00.000-08:00

I've mostly confined my blogging to Stinque, but I thought I'd drop by and share some peronal observations about last night's Florida GOP presidential debate, mostly just to point out what I felt were the event's most risible moments. Haven't been able to find a transcript online yet, so I'll quote from memory.

Hands down, the biggest howler of the evening belongs to Newt Gingrich who, when pressed on his lobbying business with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac insisted that he had not been hired as a lobbyist, but rather as a "historian of Washington." I haven't heard such a hilarious euphemism since South Carolina governor Mark Sanford was said to be "hiking the Appalacchian Trail" when he was, in fact cavorting in Argentina with his mistress. Newt is amazing in his shamelessness and ability to argue that black is white and up is down.

An eye popping moment, for me, at least, came when Mitt Romney, attempting to fend off Newt Gingrich's criticism of the favorable tax treatment he receives under current law noted that under Gingrich's tax plan he, Mitt Romney, would have paid no taxes at all. Not a dime. It's obvious and shouldn't have shaken me, but for some reason it did. Really gets to the essense of just how unfair the tax proposals floated by the GOP really are.

I did enjoy the moment when Brian Williams asked Mitt Romney to predict what people would be talking about "tomorrow" when his tax records were released. Among the things Romney said people would be talking about is just how "complicated" the tax code can be. I suspect that was Romney's way of saying that people will be surprised at the lengths to which his accountants have gone to game the tax code and shelter as much of his wealth from taxation as possible.

Ron Paul's insistence that Iran's threat to block the Straits of Hormuz is merely as response to a previous U.S. act of war (the blockade) shows just how outside the mainstream of the Republican party that guy really is. It's mind blowing to see stuff like that said on the GOP stage. These arguments will be missed when Paul is no longer able to run his Quixotic presidential campaigns (guy's age is starting to show).

Meanwhile, Ron Paul's ludicrous claim that the Community Reinvestment Act caused the 2008 financial meltdown shows just how childish his economic views can be. The CRA as root cause of the crash simply fails the laugh test on every conceivable level. But for a free market absolutist like Paul, everything bad that happens in the economy must be the fault of some "market distorting" government policy somewhere.

OK, that's it for now. I've got much more that could be said, but have run out of time.

My Activities of Late

2011-12-20T04:45:00.000-08:00

Though I have written very little here over the pasy few weeks, I continue to blog for Stinque. To that end, I'd like to direct anyone who might drop by to two of my most recent pieces: here and here.

Just Give Up Already...

2011-11-10T04:50:00.000-08:00

We're to the point where it's just sad, really. Hard to believe that a couple of months ago this guy was a frontrunner for the GOP nomination based solely on speculation that he'd announce.

Dumbest thing I've read in a long time

2011-11-06T09:23:00.000-08:00

Ross Douthat's column in the New York Times today has got to be one of the dumbest editorials I've read in quite some time. Douthat correctly identifies a hyper educated, very sophisticated and highly intelligent Wall Street elite as the source of many of out nation's current ills. But in suggesting that the Republican electorate is in search of a more "down-to-earth" candidate to serve as a counterweight to these people he ignores two very important realities: (1) from 2000 to 2008 this nation was governed by a dim-witted Texan whose educational acheivements were "brought to you by the letter 'C'" and who had difficulty so much as putting together an entire sentence without committing a grammatical atrocity. It was a government headed by this sort of "down to earth" politician that witnessed and enabled Wall Street's recklessness. (2) Anyone who has paid even a moment's attention to the cries of the Tea Party and the blathering of the current crop of GOP presidential hopefuls realizes that these people don't blame the Wall Street elite or the banks for our current economic state. It is an article of faith among theabaggers that Washington regulations were to blame for the crisis, and the solution to our ills is to give evenmore freedom and leeway to the Wall Street wiz kids that Douthat lambastes.

As best I can tell, Douthat's column is simply an attempt to make sense of the shallow vulgarity of the GOP's current anti-intellectual tendencies without acknowledging the simple fact that the GOP electorate demonstrates these inclinations because they are fostered by a conservative elite that sees anti-intellectualism as a bullwark against the emergence of economic class consciousness. The GOP faithful don't despise the intellectual elite because they believe them to have brought about the 2008 financial crisis. They despise them because the massive and well funded conservative propaganda machine sees it in its interests to decry supposed "class warfare" while fostering resentment of the nation's intelligentsia.

Dropping all pretense

2011-10-30T09:05:00.000-07:00

Last week, in an attempt to reclaim some newspaper headlines, Rick Perry finally presented the coutry with an economic plan, the centerpiece of which is a 20% flat tax proposal. This isn't that unusual for a Republican candidate, one will recall that it was also the centerpiece of Steve Forbes economic proposals when he ran for president. What's different about Perry's proposal, however, is a curious twist he's added. In an apparent attempt to assuage fears that a flat tax would constitute a tax increase on poorer Americans, Perry has decided that his flax tax should be optional. If you like it, you pay 20% of your income to the Federal Government and you're done (well... except for your state taxes), but if you remain unconvinced, you can stick with the current system.

This little twist apears to have received little scrutiny among the commentariat. Perhaps this is due to the fact that Perry has largely faded from the scene, his numbers dropping precipitously after a series of dissappointing debate performances. Perhaps it is because it apears too gimmicky to merit serous consideration. Still it is suprising how little attention has been paid to the "optionality" feature, because it implies a significant departure from the standard arguments that have, till now, been employed to promote the flat tax. Students of the various and sundry GOP tax proposals that have been floated over the last few decades are no doubt aware that one of the justifications that Republicans frequently provide for their flat tax proposals is the claim that under current law, the super rich are able to exploit loopholes allowing them to shelter much of their income from taxation. The flat tax, proponets have often argued, would actually increase taxes on those wealthy Americans who rely on an army of tax lawyers to help them escape taxation.

And then here comes Rick Perry with another flat tax proposal, however, unlike previous proposals, wealthy individuals are under no obligation to pay a flat 20% of their income to Uncle Sam. They can continue to employ their army of accountants to pay little or nothing. In the end, Perry's proposal represents a tax increase only on those who don't want to go through the hassle of calculating exemptions and looking up tax tables. One wonders what the point is.

Of course, in the end, skeptics are more than justified distrusting Republican candidates' justifications and projections of the effects of their flat tax proposals. If tax loophole allow the super rich to escape taxation, why not simply close those loopholes? And given that most flat tax proposals tend to exempt capital gains from taxation altogether, the idea that these tax plans would repesent an actual tax increase on wealthy Americans is as fanciful a tale as stories about the lost continent of Atlantis.

What we have in Perry's plan, then is just the latest example of GOP policies that are completely divorced from arithemetic and empricial reality. Currently, the U.S. borrows some 40 cents of every dollar it spends. The idea that you can institute a tax plan that is guaranteed to decerase government revenues and still balance the Federal budget in six years... well that's akin to caliming, not merely that you've discovered the lost continent of Atlantis, but that it was inhabitted by Faeries and unicorns.

Puzzling Cain

2011-10-21T04:49:00.000-07:00

I've got to say that I'm somewhat puzzled by Herman Cain. I mean, I can understand how a guy who's shown no interest in foreign policy could fumble a question about the Palestinian "right of return." But for a candidate running as a Republican to not realize that expressing an effectively pro-choice position on abortion is a deal breaker with GOP primary voters... that shows a remarcable lack of insight into the U.S. political process.

In any case, it will be interesting to judge the fallout from Cain's statements, especially in places like South Carolina where he's become an unlikely and unexpected frontrunner.

Occupy Orman

2011-10-17T04:40:00.000-07:00

Paul Krugman points his readers to this column by Suze Orman, in which the personal finance guru endorses the Occupy Wall Street protesters, and rails against the unfairness of the events that have transpired over the past few years, with major banks and other financial institutions seeing massive bailouts while ordinary homeowners, their mortgages under-water, have been left out to dry.

One point Orman makes is to note the unfairness of a system in which our youth are graduating from college loaded up with student loan debt, and few if any job prospects to help them repay it. Furthermore, recent legislation makes this debt nearly impossible to discharge in bankruptcy court. It's no wonder the kids have taken to the streets.

By manner of comment, I would like to repeat something I have said in other venues: when future historians look back at the wreckage that is becoming of the American economy, they will note with sadness our skewed priorities. And they will wonder how it is we ever got to a point where a propective homeowner considerng the purchase of his next MacMansion can rest secure in the knowledge that should things go wrong, he can simply turn his key in and walk away from the mortgage suffering no legal ramifications. Whereas, by contrast, a young person looking over a stack of college prospectuses and trying to decide where she wants to pursue her higer eductaion faces the very real risk that the massive loans she takes out to pay for her education will haunt her for the rest of her life.

Perry/Thompson 2012

2011-10-13T04:27:00.000-07:00

I must say that one of the few genuine pleasures of the GOP presidential candidate nomination process has been playing witness to the Rick Perry implosion. It reminds me so much of what happened in 2008 with the candidacy of Fred Thompson. With his genial grandad persona and "plain spoken horse sense" Thompson was the Republican. Dali Lama, a reincarnation of Ronald Reagan who would carry the presidency by channeling the Gipper, carried aloft into the White House by a throng of GOP faithful. Yet when he dropped into the race, instead of walking on air, Thompson fell to earth with a dull thud. Apparently the guy was just too lazy to get up and walk, and the rest of the field just ambled past him.

Perry, likewise, came into the race as gun-wielding, the neo-secessionist, guru and anointed prophet of the Tea Party cult. His initial poll numbers were staggering and he was pronounced the Republican frontrunner before he had even officially announced his bid. But he too, quickly fell to earth once it became amply clear that the quip that Perry was "George W. Bush minus the gravitas and intellectual curiosity" was far from an exaggeration. Indeed, it was so close to reality that even the Tea Party (heretofore enamoured of certifiably insane Christofascist Michelle Bachmann) was able to see him for the pretty-faced imbecile he was.

For me, the last nail in the Perry coffin was finally hammered in last night when, responding to an accusation of Mitt Romney's that Perry has thus far failed to present a viable economic plan, Perry responded by noting "you've been doing this much longer than I have" or words to that effect (I'm quoting from memory). It's always a bad sign when your retort to an accusation could just as easily have been an extension of the accusation itself. Had I been Romney My response would have been "You're right, Rick... I have been thinking about these issues and developing policy proposals much longer than you have. Thanks for making my point for me."

That said, I don't want to give the Tea Party too much credit. After all, their current darling appears to be Herman Cain, a guy who ridicules the notion that he should be expeceted to have a rudimentary grasp of geopolitics (or even, geography) and whose 9-9-9 economic plan reads like it was dreamed up in a Vegas hotel room by a trio of junior hedge fund managers after snorting a few lines of coke off the ass of the sleeping hooker they just shared.

Debate reaction

2011-10-12T04:35:00.000-07:00

I only watched the first few minutes of last night's GOP debate. Couldn't stand to watch much longer. The extent to which the GOP is living in a world of purely ideological invention is just stunning. In response to questions referencing the "Occupy Wall Street" demonstrations, the GOP candidates all affirmed the conviction that the housing bubble, collapse and subsequent financial crisis were all a result of government regulation. Michelle Bachmann thrust the CRA canard front and center, blaming a 30 year old law that prevents banks from redlining minority neighborhoods for the orgy of speculation and securitization of worthless mortgages that were the cause of the crisis. This talking point has been thoroughly rebutted by those who have looked at the data (I mean, the law's been on the books for 30 years wihtout caysing these problems, and most of the institutions that pushed sub-prime mortages weren't even subject to the Community Reinvestment Act) but if the last 3 years have taught us anything it's that reality and GOP fantasy rarely intersect.

And Michelle Bachmann's nonsense paled next to Newt Gingrich's answer to the question of whether anyone on Wall Street should have been jailed over the massive fraud that led to the economic collapse. No, Gingrich insisted, instead Barney Frank and Chris Dodd should be jailed. Yes, legislators who were in the congressional minority (and thus powerless) over the bubble years, and who only recently have proposed measures to restrain Wall Street from bringing about another financial crisis are the ones who should be jailed. I can't help but think of the events that are currently unflding in the Ukraine, where a rising despot is in the process of jailing the former Prime Minister and a leading opposition figure on trumped up charges related to her government's handling of a gas pipeline with Russia. If htere's any doubt that the GOP is a party with totalitarian tendencies, let Gingrich's comments lay those doubts to rest.

A Key Differentiator

2011-10-11T04:38:00.000-07:00

There's been a great deal of debate in the media and on the blogosphere lately concerning the nascent "Occupy Wall Street" movement that has recently taken to the streets to protest social inequality and the corruption of our governing institutions by moneyed interests. Much of that commentary has focused on the question of whether these protests represent a left-wing answer to the Tea Party. And yet in all these discussions commentators have missed a key differentiator between Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party: timing.

The Tea Party allegedly arose as a movement that was concerned about America's mounting Federal debt. And yet, it is a movement that did not exist in any form between 2000 and 2008 when a Republican president and Republican majorities in both houses of congress presided over a doubling of the national debt. Those of us who have been following politics closely for many years were hardly surprised by this, since concern about the Federal debt among Republicans is a purely opprtunistic, tactical move designed to weaken their Democratic opposition by mobilizing public opinion against them. In reality, Republicans have never cared enough about the Federal debt to make a significant debt, even, in the yearly deficit. In this sense, the Tea Party is merely an instrument of GOP policy, a purely Astro Turfed movement (even if its followers, in many cases, do not recognize themselves as such).

What differentiates the Occupy Wall Street movement, then, is that it has risen in the midst of a Democratic presidential administration, and until recently, was viewed with great skepticism by the Democratic party leadership. It is a truly organic, grass rootsmovement, not a instrument of the political opposition. I expect that we'll see more of this movement, well into the next few years, regardless of who wins the presidency.

I'll have more thoughts on this tomorrow (work becons!)

Economic Reality vs. fantasy

2011-10-03T04:43:00.000-07:00

Haven't got much time this morning. Gotta be at work in a few minutes. Nonetheless, there are some thoughts I'd like to lay down before events have me moving on to other subjects and other considerations.

A fair amount of recent debate in the economics blogs (Brad deLong, Paul Krugman & others) centers around the effect that "regulatory uncertainty" is having on job creation. I don't have time to cite sources of offer links, however, the long and the short of it is that right-wing economists and trade associations have spent the last few years arguing against the notion that current economic woes are caused by a lack of consumer demand. For these guys, economic troubles are always the result of pressures on supply. Now, this is a ridiculous argument to make in these economic times, when we're living a terrible recession caused by the sudden disinflation of the mortagage bubble and the concommitant loss of trillions of dollars of consumer wealth that it occasioned. As Krugman and deLong (and other "Keynesian" oriented economists) point out, consumers who once spent profligately thanks to growing principle balances in their homes, suddenly found themselves "under water" on their mortgages, owing more on their properties than the properties themselves were worth. As a result they cut back on their spending and focused their economic efforts on paying down their debts (to the extent they were able). Suddenly businesses that depended on the American consumer for their profits saw sales dry up and profits vanish. Panicked, they cut back on production and fired workers.

The right-wing economist, however, tells a wholly different story. For him the problem isn't a lack of demand. For him the underlying problem is "regulatory uncertainty." Businesses would love to hire new workers and get the economy rolling, it's just that with a radical-Marxist in the whitehouse threatening massive burdensome regulation of private industry, they dare not hire workers who might come to cost them too much in the future.

Of course, this story is nonsense, but "regulatory uncertainty" has the benefit of being an ineffable quantity that one can summon when all other arguments fail to pan out. It basically equates to saying "because there's a Democrat in the White House." It is an argument that takes its own assumptions as conclusions.

Perhaps the quickest way to show this is to look at the evidence. While I don't have time to show it, at the moment, a look at the data clearly shows the economy falling off a cliff in the run up to the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, then stabilizing afterwards. Hiring, which was plunging, picked up, though not at levels that would make a significant dent in our much higher unemployment figures, Nonetheless, a graph of the trajectory of hiring clearly shows a reversal in what was a terryfying trend (recall that from late 2008 to early 2009 businesses were cutting jobs by hundreds of thousands of workers a month. Comapred to those figures, a lackluster 30,000 new private sector jobs in a month looks like a veritable hiring boom.)

That the stimulus didn't return the economy to the place it was before the crash is indisputable, and the fact that conservatives use arguments along those lines to show that the stimulus "failed" shows the poverty of their reasoning. The stimulus did not acheive massive economic growth and reemployment, in part because it was too small, and because of politicl realities. Nearly one third of the package was made up of tax cuts, which are a poor way of providing stimulus to the economy. Roughly one third consisted of aid to the states, which merely replaced money they were cutting from their own budgets (and thus, added no net new money to the economy). And the last third (roughly $250 billion) was spent over a period of two years. SO, in essence, the money the U.S. spent over two years stimulating its own economy roughly equalled the sum we spent in one year supporting the occupation of Iraq at the height of that conflict's development.

So what about the uncertainty argument? Well, this argument has the virtue of being somewhat testable. If businesses were leery of hiring workers when Obama was the leader of a party that held hte congress and had a fillibuster proof majority in the Senate, then surely the loss of the Congress and the loss of the 60 vote majority in the Senate would have restored business confidence. After all, the actions of the GOP majoriyt in Congress and the minority in the Senate have made it clear that Obama will notbe able to pass major regulatory lesgislation. Regulatory uncertainty is a thing of the past.

So business is booming now, right? Well... not quite. In fact, we're about as close to falling back into recession as we have ever been, in no part due to the fact that the last of the Obama stimulus funds are being spent, and there is little prospect of a meaningful second round. In other words: orders have dried up. Demand is falling off a cliff again, and the economy is once again teetering on the edge.

(This analysis, of course, leaves off the looming european catastrophe, but that's. a story for another day)

A Farce

2011-09-20T02:40:00.000-07:00

So this is what it takes to make fair-weather friends like David Brooks become disenchanted with Obama... a millionaire tax? How perfectly sad. Now we see clearly where the Right's allegiances lie: in protecting the assetts of the ultra-wealthy. Ask people whose annual incomes exceed $1,000,000.00 to contribute a bit more, and you've gone off the deep end. How dare Obama call for shared sacrifice that actually demands that those who can afford to pay more, do so? After all, as Brooks so helpfully points out, a guy who brings in $1,000,000.00 a year today is really only left with $700,000.00 after taxes at current rates. If that ain't struggling to get by, then the phrase has no meaning.

It's pretty clear at this point (if there ever was any doubt) that guys like Brooks supported Obama purely for "Nixon in China" reasons. They felt that he was the one guy most likely to be able to sell a dismantling of the Great Society to Democrats.

What a farce.

Quote for the Day

2011-09-16T04:24:00.000-07:00

People close to the campaign, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said Mrs. Bachmann is often influenced by the last person she speaks with on an issue rather than maintaining discipline in communicating a message.

-An anonymous source "close to the Michelle Bachmann campaign" as cited by the New York Times.

I suppose that as long as we can ensure that the last person she speaks to before making a policy decison is sane, reasonable and well informed on the issue at hand, a Michelle Bachmann presidency would work out just fine.

Prodigious Anger

2011-09-13T04:24:00.000-07:00

And he said unto him, Son, thou art ever with me, and all that I have is thine. It was meet that we should make merry, and be glad: for this thy brother was dead, and is alive again; and was lost, and is found.

It is hard not to be terribly depressed after watching last night's Republican/Tea Party debate. Rage is the one emotion that emanates from this crowd, blind rage fueled by ignorance and bigotry and a seemingly religious hatred of anything they naively deem "socialism." Perhaps the standout moment (and one that's making waves in the blogosphere) is the point at which the audience cheered the prospect of letting a 30 year old uninsured man die if he found himself in the position of being unable to pay for a needed medical procedure. At least one, perhaps two members of the audience, taken by much the same fervor with which the evangelical shouts "hallelujah" in church, could not contain his fury and screamed out loudly "Let him die!"

It was an amazing moment, to be sure. Yes, Wolf Blitzer's hypothetical involved a healthy young man who foolishly and irresponsibly chooses to forgo purchasing health insurance (presumably to spend the money on more pleaasurable pursuits). One could well argue that the audience would have reacted differently to the example of an individual too poor to afford health insurance (though in arguments that I have personally engaged in with conservatives, let me assure you many would have reacted in exactly the same fashion).

Still, for an audience supposedly so reverent of "Judeo Christian values" it is astonishing that they would react so violently to a hypothetical that is merely a variation on the New Testament parable of the Prodigal Son, as recounted in Luke , Chapter 15: 11-32 --a classic tale illustrating the virtue and praiseworthyness of compassion and forgiveness.

Maybe they just didn't see it. Maybe it takes a liberal atheist such as myself to make the connection.

Life on Charon

2011-09-11T11:29:00.001-07:00

Just watched the tail-end of Fareed Zhakaria’s interview with Donald Rumsfeld. Pretty astonishing. The two takeaways on Rumsfeld’s views:

1) The US is not spending enough on defense. We can spend a lot more, as evidenced by the fact that at one point in our history we were devoting 10% of GDP to defense spending.

2) Rumsfeld’s one regret is that post-9/11 we weren’t vocal enough about the treat of radical Islamic extremism.

The first claim is astonishing enough: sure US military spending as a % of GDP is lower than it was at the height of the Korean and Vietnam wars. But to point to those years as sustainable limits is absolutely absurd. Furthermore, while military spending as a % of GDP may have been higher then, it is also true that in real, inflation-adjusted adjusted dollars, we are spending much more than we were even at the height of the Vietnam war (graph and source). Finally, in recent decades, Federal receipts as a % of GDP have run about 18% of GDP source. So a 10% upper limit means spending up to 55% or so of Federal revenues on defense!

The second claim is just a joke. The notion that over the past 10 years the American people haven’t been subjected to a steady enough barrage of hysterical Phillipics warning us of the threat of “radical Islamic extremism” can only be held by: (1) an idiot (2) a liar (3) a full-time resident of Pluto’s moon Charon. Which one is Rumsfeld? I'm going to be charitable here and suggest that maybe the guy was abducted by aliens sometime after he resigned as Secretary of Defense.

The Dark Ages

2011-09-09T04:43:00.000-07:00

Paul Krugman offers his thoughts on what has happened to the economic profession over the last few decades:

We’ve entered a Dark Age of macroeconomics, in which much of the profession has lost its former knowledge, just as barbarian Europe had lost the knowledge of the Greeks and Romans.

Debates

2011-09-08T04:35:00.000-07:00

Was only able to watch a few minutes of the debate last night. The questioning was surprising incisive, to NBC's credit. Huntsman, to my mind, came off at the best prepared and most presidential cadidate. It's a sign of the extreme rightward turn of the GOP that he's also the candidate with the least real prospects of getting the nomination. Rick Perry seems to have stolen the GOP base's heart, and it's also telling just how transparently shallow and disingenuous his answers were. The question on health care was especially apposite. Contrasting Massachussetts' 5% rate of uninsured to Texas 27%, Brian Williams asked Perry why voters should favor his approach to Romney's (and by implicit extension Obama's). That Perry could claim with a straight face that excessive goverment regulation is the cause of Texas' uninsurance problem simply highlights the extent to which slogans have substituted for thinking in the GOP. After all, is Massachussetts any less regulated than Texas?

Nothing special

2011-09-06T04:46:00.000-07:00

Nothing much to say right now. Just feel like writing something. The day after the labor day weekend has a few bloggers returning to their blogs. Andrew Sullivan has some worthwhile observations on the current state of the Obama presidency. For the most part, I think Sullivan has it right. The Obama administration can boast some impressive acheivements (the rescue of the U.S. auto industry alone is a huge credit on his legacy) but the weak economy and the terrible jobs picture makes those acheivements moot, in many respects. It matters little at this point that the alterative policies that the GOP has floated would have dragged the world into a far worse state. For that reason, I doubt even the GOP would have followed their own policy proposals were they in power. As much as the right likes to portray John Maynard Keynes as the Devil incarnate, once they find themselves in power Republicans are hardly averse to turning the U.S. Treasury into their personal checkbook. How many stimulus checks did the Bush administration mail out between 2000 and 2008?

Now, this new pack of Teabaggers in Congress is another story. If you thought the debt cieling debate made John Bohener sweat, imagine what it would have been like to fight his own party to pass a budget championed by a Republican president! That day may yet come. One thing is certain: one of the very early steps the next president will have to take in 2013 is a raising of the debt ceiling. Should that event ocurr under a Republican president, it will be interesting to see if the result is internecine warfare or outright hypocrisy. My bet is we'll see just enough contrived protest to mollify whatever remnants of the Tea Party are still around at that time. But I suspect that rank hypocrisy is just a little less likely. Like the militia crazies that melted back into the woodwork when G.W. Bush came to power, the Tea Party will likely dissolve should a Republican president be elected. These movements are basically engineered by plutocrats, even if their members don't fully realize the extent to which they are merely following someone else's script.

John McCain: Not Fit to Run A Baskin Robbins

2011-08-22T09:42:00.000-07:00

It's an idea that is astonishing in its singular stupidity: John McCain wants to impose reparations costs on the Libyan people for the money we spent supporting their revolution:

How this guy could ever have been taken seriously as a presidential candidate is a complete mystery, because as this tweet shows, McCain clearly hasn't the intellect, the temperament or the wisdom to manage a Baskin Robbins, let alone the world's lone Superpower. Recall that McCain isn't just another U.S. Senator: he was the GOP's last presidential candidate. There are certain responsibilities that inhere with that emeritas role, and one of the things the onetime GOP standardbearer absolutely should not do is go around antagonizing a nascent democracy and potential ally by shooting his mouth off in such a stupid manner.

(Via Wonkette)

Taking down Kevin Williamson

2011-08-18T05:40:00.000-07:00

Andrew Sullivan today links to a critique of Paul Krugam's analysis of the so-called "Texas Miracle" in job creation over the past few years. The critique is by Kevin Williamson and appears in the National Review. I won't quote from the article extensively (you can follow the link and read it yourself) but I will offer my own rebuttal of its claims:

1) Cost of living: Krugman specifically acknowledges that Texas has lower cost of living (when noting the lower cost of housing), and that this lowered cost of living plays a factor in attracting both immigrants and businesses (since they can pay lower wages). So why Williamson spends so much time arguing against this straw man is a mystery to me. What is important is the significance of this lower cost of living to the current political debate: Texas' lower cost of living is not something that can be replicated on a national scale, so it can't possibly speak to Perry's attractiveness as a presidential candidate. Krugman sees this. Williamson, for some reason, does not.

2) Health insurance: Williamson dismisses statistics showing that Texas has a distressingly high percentage of uninsured residents by noting that the state has a high proportion of people under age 18. This is a perfectly bizarre defense of Texas' low rates of insurance. For one thing, residents under the age of 18 should be more likely to be insured, since they are generally covered under their parents’ plans. Furthermore, statistics also show that Texas has one of (if not the) highest rate of uninsured children in the nation. It's puzzling, then, that Williamson thinks that demographics somehow excuse the sad state of health insurance rates in Texas.

3) Unemployment: when you track actual job growth against population growth, you see that Texas pretty much follows national trends these past few years, and this statistic by itself refutes the notion that Texas has showed exemplary job growth. Williamson's entire article is premised on the notion that it was job growth spurred immigration into Texas and not vice versa. But the high unemployment rate in Texas belies this thesis, because what this high unemployment rate means is that for Texas to have been an engine of jobs in an otherwise depressed economy, it would have had to be very peculiar engine of jobs. It would have to have been an engine that created jobs that could only be filled by people outside Texas. Think about it: you've got an economy that is supposedly creating thousands of jobs intrinsically (that is, they are not being created as a result of population growth) but these are jobs that cannot be filled by native Texans (who live there, and don't have to deal with the economic burden and inconvenience of selling their homes and moving). Instead, they must be filled by out-of-staters. And even if this (credulity straining) situation proved true it would merely speak to the exceedingly poor state of education in Texas (and don't forget that Perry and the GOP legislature have slashed billions from education in recent budgets, as a way to avoid raising taxes.)

No right to judge...

2011-08-08T10:29:00.001-07:00

Standard & Poors' recent decision to downgrade the United States credit rating from AAA to a AA+ has caused not a little handwringing among the chattering classes. The move dominated the financial news over the weekend, and investors the world over are wondering just what it means for the future borrowing costs of the world's largest economy.

Which is pretty silly.

Because truth be told, in the grand scheme of things and once the dust settles, Standard & Poor's rating of United States debt will prove about as relevant to investors as an unknown blogger's review of the latest Hollywood blockbuster is to the movie industry as a whole. Which is to say: about none at all. Indeed, it's a mystery why the the rating downgrade caused any sort of flare up at all, given Standard and Poor's miserable track record issuing ratings over the past few years. As both Paul Krugman and Daniel Gross have pointed out in recent columns, Standard & Poors' poor judgment in assessing the risks of securitized mortgage debt helped enable the 2008 economic collapse. Krugman is amazed at the Chutzpah:

America’s large budget deficit is, after all, primarily the result of the economic slump that followed the 2008 financial crisis. And S.& P., along with its sister rating agencies, played a major role in causing that crisis, by giving AAA ratings to mortgage-backed assets that have since turned into toxic waste.

Nor did the bad judgment stop there. Notoriously, S.& P. gave Lehman Brothers, whose collapse triggered a global panic, an A rating right up to the month of its demise. And how did the rating agency react after this A-rated firm went bankrupt? By issuing a report denying that it had done anything wrong.

So these people are now pronouncing on the creditworthiness of the United States of America?

And Gross reminds us that S&P's ratings of sovereign debt are both capricous and irrelevant:

S&P, which covered itself in a substance other than glory during the mortgage crisis, may have a poor record and strange methodology when it comes to sovereign ratings. France, which has a far higher debt per capita ratio than the U.S., still enjoys a AAA rating. And a downgrade, alone, doesn't mean U.S. interest rates will spike -- on Monday or at any time in the future. Japan's credit rating was downgraded several years ago, when the interest rates its government paid on bonds was already extremely low, and they've generally trended lower in the years since

My personal view is that, given the rating agencies' dysmal performance throught the 2000's, the current move by Standard is little more than an attempt to appear "serious, prudent" and "conservative" by issuing a "shocking" judgement that, on closer examination, looks to have been arrived at through the arduous, precise and scientific process of dilligently exaggerating currently fashionable cliches. Because S&P's downgrade of U.S. debt is an obvious and laughably transparent over-correction. Having given Lehman and the Subprime Mortgage market an undeserved vote of confidence just before they collapsed, Standard & Poor's seeks to repair its reputation by issuing the United States and undeserved downgrade. Yet as the driver who swerves left to avoid a ditch well knows, over-correction can just as surely leave you stranded in a ditch on the opposite side. The collapse of Lehman and the securitized mortgage market revealed a corrupt, incestuous relationship existed between the ratings agencies and the debt issuers to the point that the former were unable or unwilling to perform their job. What we see here is the little man behind the curtain, imploring us to ignore the little man behind the curtain, even as he hurriedly speaks those words into a microphone and frantically turns dials and flips switches. And if there were still some doubt that Standard and Poor's assessment of U.S. debt is a joke, the revelation that the agency crunched the debt reduction numbers wrong to begin with should settle it:

Before downgrading U.S. debt, S.& P. sent a preliminary draft of its press release to the U.S. Treasury. Officials there quickly spotted a $2 trillion error in S.& P.’s calculations. And the error was the kind of thing any budget expert should have gotten right. After discussion, S.& P. conceded that it was wrong — and downgraded America anyway, after removing some of the economic analysis from its report.

As I write this, the markets are in turmoil. That's not too surprising. In the short term the stock market reflects a casino mentality as traders attempt to gauge investor mood and market direction in hopes of making a quick killing. The long term trends should remain relatively unaffected after the inital rumblings subside. That's not to say everything's hunky dory with the nation's finances, but the long-term trends are as unaffected by Standard & Poor's rating as a freight train smacking a butterfly. Just ask Japan.

(Note: This essay also appears in Stinque)

Double Dip Recession

2011-08-05T04:02:00.001-07:00

Brought to you by your friends at the Tea Party... with a helping hand by the Mainstream Media (AKA: the GOP talking points echo chamber) and a spineless Democratic party.

As international markets echo the Dow Jones Industrial Average's 500+ point tumble, just two days after Congress and the President negotiated a deal that pulls 2.6 trillion dollars out of the U.S. economy over the next 10 years (with a promise of another trillion or two in cuts to be announced later), one can't help but be overcome by simultaneous feelings of anger, betrayal and depression. Contempt and disgust are the correct emotions to feel towards the media. When they are not actively promoting a GOP agenda aimed at weakening the U.S. economy that a Democratic president might be defeated in 2012, they're playing the role of useful idiots to the Right, complicit in the Tea Party's contemptible (and potentially treasonous) economic terrorism by virtue of their spinelessness and/or evident intellectual incuriosity. Those who are ignorant of history are condemned to repeat its mistakes, as George Santayana used to say, and the mainstream media has betrayed astonishing ignorance in their reportage. This intellectual deficit might be excusable in a laborer who puts in his daily 8 to 10 hours at a construction site then spends his evening sprawled out on the couch watching American idol, but in the men and women who are tasked with bringing and explaining the world to us it is nothing short of a crime (don't doubt for a second that your average CNN reporter spends more time putting on makeup than researching the subjects he'll be reporting on). After all, it's not like we haven't been down this road before, and it's not like we haven't seen what happens when the government slashes spending in the midst of a poor economy. It's not like we haven't been warned.

Bald Faced Lie of the Day

2011-07-16T04:28:00.001-07:00

"We've been down this road before, and Republicans will not go down it again. In 1990, Congress and the President struck a deficit reduction deal that combined spending cuts with tax increases. Unfortunately, while the tax hikes remained, the spending restraint did not, and our debt has only marched higher."

-Republican Senator, Orrin Hatch

Apparently, being a Republican means you can re-write history any which way you please, and not be called out on it. This morning, as I watched CNN, the 24 Hour News network ran a segment on President Obama's call for a debt limit/long term budget compromise position that would involve spending cuts and tax increases at a ratio of about 5 to 1. CNN then quoted Hatch above, but for some reason saw no need to point out that Hatch's statement is a bald faced lie, seemingly suggesting that the Clinton era tax increases (which left the nation with a $200+ billion surplus when the Democratic president left office) are still with us today, when in fact they were undone by his Republican successor, President Bush, who pushed through massive tax cuts that immediately plunged the nation into deficit. Hatch is correct that massive spending increases also followed, but conveniently fails to note that the spending increases, too, were the result of Republican policies, such as unnecessary wars and a poorly conceived prescription drug benefit for seniors that was not balanced by either tax increases or spending cuts and which specifically excluded the government from using its purchasing power to negotiate better drug prices.

You Can't Make This Stuff Up

2011-07-13T03:46:00.000-07:00

The extent to which Republicans are willing to damage the country's long term health to protect the assets of the moneyed classes is truly astonishing (and sickening). The Daily Beast is reporting that, even as the GOP stands in absolute opposition to any tax increases that might form part of a budget package to reduce the national debt, Speaker of the House John Boehner and Viginia representative Eric Cantor have identified one area of potential revenue increases they are willing to consider. Student loans:

As Monday’s White House budget talks got down to the nitty-gritty, Eric Cantor proposed a series of spending cuts, one of them aimed squarely at college students.

The House majority leader, who did most of the talking for the Republican side, said those taking out student loans should start paying interest right away, rather than being able to defer payments until after graduation. It is a big-ticket item that would save $40 billion over 10 years

That Republicans are willing to make higher education even more unaffordable than it is now to shield their wealthy patrons from tax increases is simply astonishing and betrays a degree of irresponsibility that is difficult to fathom. As our economy becomes more and more focused on high technology and innovation and as the nation faces ever mounting challenges from emerging econmies around the world, the GOP is promoting policies that would hamper the educational prospects of our next generation of scientists, businessmen, entrepeneurs and innovators. It's mind boggling. It's a dagger, thrust directly into the heart of the middle class. How these people still command legions of angry followers simply defies explanation. GOP voters need to get back on their meds so they can see the world as it really is, and not as the screetching voices echoing in the hollow spaces of their paranoid minds tell them it is.

Annals of Newt

2011-06-22T08:23:00.001-07:00

You know that $500,000.00 Tiffany's line of credit that everyone's favorite joke of a presidential candidate, Newt Ginrich, spent the last few weeks playing down? Well apparently there's another Tiffany's line of credit he totally forgot to mention, and this one was good for a cool million. So gone are the days of Pat Nixon's "respectable cloth coat." $30,000 diamond tennis bracelets are what the smartly dressed Republican wife is wearing these days.

Not Afraid to Lie

2011-06-21T09:42:00.000-07:00

I'm conflicted about writing about Bristol Palin. After all, I do believe that the children of politicians should not have to bear the consquences of their parents sins. But when the twenty year old children of politicians chase fame by appearing on reality shows and write vicious "memoirs" that slander others and are carefully crafted to polish the political family's image at the expense of the truth, it seems to me they invite closer scrutiny. Such is the case with Bristol palin and her new book: Not Afraid of Life. The memoir includes some startling accusations (including rape) and claims that must elicit, at best, skepticism. The younger Palin claims, for instance, that she lost her virginity unwittingly to the man who would later become her finacee, when the two were on a campign trip and she passed out from too much alcohol. She remembers nothing of the incident. Furthermore, she makes the hardly believable claim that she was on prescription birth control when she became pregnant and that the pil was prescribed for her due to menstrual cramps (wouldn't want anyone to think that family values icon Sarah Palin condoned her unmarried daughter's sexual activities). Couple these claims with the younger Palin's recent plastic surgery, which was paid for by her insurance company because she found a doctor who would sign off on it being "medically necessary" and a picture begins to emerge of a young lady who lies almost as frequently, publicly and badly as her mother.

(Correction: this post originally claimed Bristol Palin was 26)

Shorter John McCain

2011-06-20T10:32:00.000-07:00

"There is substantial evidence that everything bad in the world is caused by people whose demonization furthers my political ambitions."

-John McCain

Christopher Hitchens Reads David Mamet...

2011-06-20T04:02:00.000-07:00

...so you don't have to.

Here's a taste of what Hitch has to say:

Propagandistic writing of this kind can be even more boring than it is irritating. For example, Mamet writes in “The Secret Knowledge” that “the Israelis would like to live in peace within their borders; the Arabs would like to kill them all.” Whatever one’s opinion of that conflict may be, this (twice-made) claim of his abolishes any need to analyze or even discuss it. It has a long way to go before it can even be called simplistic.

...and also:

[Mamet] shows himself tone-deaf to irony and unable to render a fair picture of what his opponents (and, sometimes, his preferred authorities, like Hayek) really believe. Quoting Deepak Chopra, of all people, as saying, “Our thinking and our behavior are always in anticipation of a response. It [sic] is therefore fear-based,” he seizes the chance to ask, “Is it too much to suggest that this quote contains the most basic prescription of liberalism, ‘Stop Thinking’?” On that evidence, yes, it would be a bit much.

The entire review can be found here.

No, We Are Not Greece...

2011-06-17T06:23:00.000-07:00

Regardless of what the Right might want you to believe, the U.S. is in no real immediate danger of collapsing due to eccessive debt obligations:

An investor now has to pay about $2 million annually to insure $10 million of Greek debt over five years, compared with about $50,000 on the same amount of United States government debt, according to Markit.

For folks whose actual money is on the line, U.S. debt remains a far safer bet than Greece... really, there's no comparison. Indeed, we are seen as 1/40th as likely to default as Greece.

5%

2011-06-14T09:50:00.000-07:00

As a followup to my previous post: here is MIT Economist Brad DeLong explaining just how difficult it would be for the U.S. to acheive 5% economic growth:

For one thing, we'd need a significant increase in the number of Americans in the workforce, but:

The American working-age adult population in 2020 will on average be older than it was in 2000--and older people are less likely to want to work. Americans will spend more time in school in 2020 than they did in 2000--and adults who are in school aren't working. We won't see 64.7% again--not without big changes like raising the Social Security retirement age a lot, which aren't on Pawlenty's menu.

Nor will population growth help much here:

The Census projection sees the 18-and-over population growing at 0.88% per year, and the 18-to-64 population growing at 0.23% per year...

And there is little to suggest that productivity growth can make up for this:

We just had such a transient early-recovery spike: 5 quarters during which productivity growth averaged 6.1% rather than 2.7%. We are unlikely to have such
a spike again in the next ten years. Subtract out the excess productivity growth above trend of this spike and we have a forecast of labor productivity growth over the next ten years of not 2.5% per year but 2.2% per year. Now that is significantly better than the 1.7% per year of 1981-2011--or the 0.9% per year of 1981-1995. But it doesn't get you to 5% per year.

All in all, a sober analysis by someone who knows what he's talking about rather than just promising every voter a pony and a gingerbread castle with a chocolate draw-bridge and a gumbdrop doorbell.

Cynicism

2011-06-14T04:05:00.000-07:00

He's being hailed as one of the "serious" GOP candidates this coming election season (in contrast to the crazies like Bachmann, the celebrity candidates like Sarah Palin, or the novelty candidates like Herman Cain), but one look at his economic proposals should belie any claim to seriousness. Pawlenty's economic "plan" consists of little more than continued gutting of regulations and a lowering of effective tax rates, then crossing your fingers and hoping for a miracle in the form of 10 years of steady economic growth at a rate that hasn't been seen in country since we were massviely ramping up our military industrial production to fight Tojo and the Nazis:

Let’s start with a big, positive goal. Let’s grow the economy by 5%, instead of the anemic 2% currently envisioned. Such a national economic growth target will set our sights on a positive future. And inspire the actions needed to reach it. By the way, 5% growth is not some pie-in-the-sky number. We’ve done it before. And with the right policies, we can do it again.

Between 1983 and 1987, the Reagan recovery grew at 4.9%. Between 1996 and 1999, under President Bill Clinton and a Republican Congress the economy grew at more than 4.7%. In each case millions of new jobs were created, incomes rose and unemployment fell to historic lows. The same can happen again.
Growing at 5% a year, rather than the current level of 1.8%, would net us millions of new jobs. Trillions of dollars in new wealth. Put us on a path to saving our entitlement programs. And balance the federal budget.

How do we do it? In short, we create more economic growth. By creating more economic freedom. We should start by overhauling the tax code. Its currently an anti-growth, nine thousand page monstrosity. That’s chock full of special deals for special interests. It’s main goal, seems to be to generate campaign contributions. Not jobs.

I think my favorite part of Pawlenty's ridiculous proposal is the notion that if you just tell people to grow the economy at 5%, by gosh they'll do it! Thus the Paulenty Plan is one part Supply Side Vooodo, and one part Maoist Great Leap Forward. It's also amusing that, as evidence that 5% growth over 10 years is possible, he references two substantially shorter periods of less than 5% economic growth. Paul Krugman, for one, points out that we haven't seen this level of economic growth since the Second World War (a period diuring which corporate tax rates ran as high as 95%, BTW), and former White House deputy Press secretary Bill Burton delivered the most fitting reaction to Pawlenty's plan when he mocked it thus:

“Do you think Goolsbee and Sperling are sitting around the White House like, ‘Oh, why hadn’t we thought of that?’” Burton said of Obama’s economic advisers. “I mean, it’s not just pie in the sky. It’s a whole floating bakery.”

But almost as sad as Pawlenty's economic plan is his response to his critics:

Obama's economic team doesn't have a plan, so their spokespeople attack ours. The idea that they don't believe in the American people enough to say that we can grow the economy at 5% GDP really says everything.

This statement reminds me of nothing so much as the courtroom scene in Animal House, where the Delta House defense attorney, in a singular act of disingenuous sophistry, interprets the school's proposed sactions against his fraternity as an attack on the United States of America:

Otter: Ladies and gentlemen, I'll be brief. The issue here is not whether we broke a few rules, or took a few liberties with our female party guests - we did.
[winks at Dean Wormer]
Otter: But you can't hold a whole fraternity responsible for the behavior of a few, sick twisted individuals. For if you do, then shouldn't we blame the whole fraternity system? And if the whole fraternity system is guilty, then isn't this an indictment of our educational institutions in general? I put it to you, Greg - isn't this an indictment of our entire American society? Well, you can do whatever you want to us, but we're not going to sit here and listen to you badmouth the United States of America. Gentlemen! [Leads the Deltas out of the hearing, all humming the Star-Spangled Banner]

So with a disingenous rhetorical twist, criticism of Pawlenty's absurd economic plan becomes a lack of faith in the American people. It's enough to make one wonder why Pawlenety settled for just 5% economic growth? Does he himself not have enough faith in the American people to expect 10% annual growth? And if 10% is possible then why not 20%? Oh, ye of little faith!

This sort of thing makes for a funny movie, all right, but it's just pathetic (and potentially dangerous) demagoguery coming from a candidate for the Presidency of the United States of America.

Political Decadence

2011-06-10T03:55:00.000-07:00

Andrew Sullivan asks the question "At what point do we decide that a political system has become decadent?"

For Sullivan it was the moment that Congress assented to torture in 2006 and Sarah Plain was nominated for VP in 2008. I'll give a slightly longer answer with a more historical perspective, focusing on what I feel was the watershed event that led us to our current, dysfunctional political reality:

I suspect that the decline of the political process in this country can probably be traced back to George Herbert Walker Bush's defeat in the 1992 elections, not so much the fact of his defeat as the interpretation that was attached to it. This was widely interpreted as Republican voter backlash for Bush's broken pledge not to raise taxes. Bush did so, of course, because he saw looming catastrophic debt on the horizon if revenues weren't raised to tame the budget deficit. Nonetheless, Republican politcians got the message their core constituency was sending: don't raise taxes or we'll vote you out of office. This is the point at which the GOP adpoted a strategy of simply denying reality when it didn't suit their narrative. George H.W. Bush lost his job by being honest and doing something that was necessary but unpopular. The GOP resolved to not repeat that mistake. To justify the anti-tax stance demanded by their core voters while pretending to care about our mounting national debt, the GOP adopted the dogma that reductions in tax rates always pay for themsleves by fueling economic expansion. This is patently untrue, as any honest assesment of the data will show, but you'll never see a GOP pol on T.V. assert otherwise. From here on out the GOP became a party where ideology always trumps pragmatism. Meanwhile, the rise of Fox News gave the GOP a popular outlet in which to promote an alternative narrative of events that was completely divorced from reality. And so taxes must be lowered to pay off the debt, waterboarding is no longer torture, global warming is a hoax, or at the very least a subject of scientific dispute, and illegal immigration is the single greatest threat to our nation after Al Quaeda. It's what Sullivan and other heretical conservatives have been calling "epistemic closure," and I'd say that it's the greatest threat to our national unity since the Civil War. If you and I can longer agree on the basic facts underlying our national predicament, how are we supposed to work together, to compromise in order to find a solution? When both parties are inhabiting the same epistemic universe, you can reduce the national debt by reaching a compromise where you raise taxes more than the GOP would like and cut spending more than the Democrats would like. But what happens when one party holds to the dogma that raising taxes will counteract the spending cuts, so the only effective solution is spending cuts and tax cuts? No compromise is possible then, and the system begins to break down.

Priorities

2011-06-07T05:06:00.000-07:00

An Episcopalian congregation in Maryland has decided that it would rather join a church that tolerated, enabled, and covered up rampant paedophilia in its ranks than remain with a church that condones gay marriage and the ordination of women.

Choosing between the twin evils of civil rights and paedophilia must be tough, no?

A Bypass Road Around Reality

2011-06-06T04:39:00.000-07:00

Two must-read editorials in the Times today.

The first is a piece by Paul Krugman detailing how the mainstream media and the commentariat is colluding with the GOP in an attempt to silence those who would state the plainly obvious truth that the Ryan "Medicare reform" plan replaces the current medicare insurance system with a system of vouchers to buy private insurance (though I prefer to call them gift certificates).

The next one is by Nobel Prize winning economist Peter Diamond, and details his dismay at being denied a seat on the Federal Reserve by Republican politicians who did so under the laughable pretense that he was unqualified for the position.

A common thread joins these two columns: American politics has become a completely subjetive, relativistic, perspectivistic exercise. When it becomes unacceptable to call a voucher program a voucher program, when a Nobel prize winning economist can be deemed unfit to serve as a government economist, we have entered a twilight-zone in which there is no such thing as objective "truth" or "falsity." There are only things that are true for you, and things that are true for me. It's ironic, really: my vivid recollection of the 1980s academic culture wars were of conservative "textualists" battling liberal "deconstructionsts" over the question of whether there was such a thing as "truth." Conservative textualists took a roughly "Kantian" position, arguing for objective, eternal, reality grounding truths that no amount of disingenuous sophistry could undermine. Liberal de-constructionists followed the Nietzschean tradition, arguing that "truth" was a concept that was intimately intertwined with and irrevocably bound to relations of power. From the current state of politics and our intellectual tradition, I think we can come to two conclusions: (a) the textualists won the argument, and (b) the deconstructionists were right.

Bin Ladin Capture Victory for Bush (And Geraldo Rivera)

2011-05-02T07:51:00.000-07:00

At least that's the idea you'd get by surfing over to Fox News this morning. The sitting president is noticeably absent from Fox News coverage of the capture and killing of Osama Bin Ladin. Wouldn't want the anti-colonialist son of a Maori tribesman Barack Obama getting too much of an opinion poll bump from these developments, would we? (Click images to enlarge)

And this:

And this, of course, was inevitable (via Crooks and Liars):

And World Net Daily (your source for all things birther) knows that the announcement of the killing of Osama Bin Ladin deserves smaller size type than the annoucement that one of their "experts" has decided that Barack Obama's long-form birth Certificate has been "changed."

Meanwhile, 11:38 AM, EST and Rush Limaugh's website has still not reported on the news of the day (Via Andrew Sullivan):

The Banality of Fox

2011-04-07T07:13:00.000-07:00

It's is as predictable as it is pathetic. The moment a Republican loses a closely watched race, the propagandists at Fox start running stories alleging election fraud.

Quote(s) for the Day

2011-04-04T04:33:00.000-07:00

...I'm prepared to accept whatever result they produce, even if it proves my premise wrong.

-Anthony Watts, prominent global warming denier, 3/6/2011 expressing confidence that a scientific study by a leading global warming skeptic, would rebut the global warming trend observed by mainstream climate scientists.

With his testimony, Dr. Muller has totally destroyed any credibility he might have had with me.

-~~Anthony Watts~~ (CORRECTION*: Guest Blogger Willis Eschenbach), prominent global warming denier, 3/31/2011 expressing outrage upon learning that the results of the aforementioned scientific study tended to confirm, rather than rebut the global warming trend observed by mainstream climate scientists.

(Hat Tip: Salon, and Paul Krugman)

*I should scan my commnets sections more regularly. It appears that Anthony Watts has noted that the second quote should be attributed, not to him, but to a guest blogger who posted on his websits. the correction is duly noted. I assume that, given the new data, Mr. Watts has now accepted the overwhelming evidence in favor of man-made global warming and is no longer a climate skeptic (heh).

Beneath Contempt

2011-03-23T05:11:00.000-07:00

QUESTIONER: “What is more important though to American values–being friends with Israel still or knowing there are jailed dissidents and journalists [in Egypt]?” the woman asked.

ANN COULTER: “What do you mean knowing that there are jailed journalists?” Coulter said. “I think there should be more jailed journalists.” This prompted a huge round of applause from the crowd.

Ann Coulter answering a question at the CPAC conference held earlier this year.

Tyler’s hands were bound by a strip of a scarf. A soldier took off Lynsey’s gray Nike shoes, then bound her with the shoelaces. “God, I just don’t want to be raped,” she whispered to Steve.

“You’re the translator!” a slight soldier screamed at Anthony. “You’re the spy!”

A few seconds passed, and another soldier approached, demanding that we lie on our stomachs.

All of us had had close calls over the years. Lynsey was kidnapped in Falluja, Iraq, in 2004; Steve in Afghanistan in 2009. Tyler had more scrapes than he could count, from Chechnya to Sudan, and Anthony was shot in the back in 2002 by a man he believed to be an Israeli soldier. At that moment, though, none of us thought we were going to live. Steve tried to keep eye contact until they pulled the trigger. The rest of us felt the powerlessness of resignation. You feel empty when you know that it’s almost over.

“Shoot them,” a tall soldier said calmly in Arabic.

A colleague next to him shook his head. “You can’t,” he insisted. “They’re Americans.”

...

A new group seized us, and they were rougher. They blindfolded us, tied our arms and legs and beat us. They then stuffed us into an armored car, where Lynsey was groped. She never screamed but instead pleaded. A soldier covered her mouth, tracing his hands over her body. “Don’t speak,” he warned. Another soldier tried to shove a bayonet into Steve’s rear, laughing as he did it.

A half-hour later, we arrived on what we thought were the outskirts of the other side of Ajdabiya. A man whom soldiers called the sheik questioned us, then began taunting Tyler.

You have a beautiful head,” he told Tyler in a mix of English and Arabic. “I’m going to remove it and put it on mine. I’m going to cut it off.” Tyler, feeling queasy, asked to sit down.

We were finally put in a pickup where a soldier taunted Lynsey.

“You might die tonight,” he told her, as he ran his hand over her face. “Maybe, maybe not.”

Excerpts from a recent New York Times piece detailing the treatment of four reporters who were recently abducted, beaten, sexually assaulted and subsequently released by forces loyal to Libyan dictator Mohamar Khaddaffi.

Krugman on Greenspan's Latest

2011-03-22T03:32:00.000-07:00

Apparently, the guy who was minding the ship while our economy had a meltdown (and who actually encouraged ordinary consumers to buy exotic mortgage instruments) has advice for President Obama on how to lead the economy into recovery. And, as you might expect of Alan Greenspan, it's little more than a rehash of current right-wing doggerel (short summary: stop spooking the markets by being such a socialist). Paul Krugman is not impressed:

Greenspan writes in characteristic form: other people may have their models, but he’s the wise oracle who knows the deep mysteries of human behavior, who can discern patterns based on his ineffable knowledge of economic psychology and history.

Sorry, but he doesn’t get to do that any more. 2011 is not 2006.

Greenspan is an ex-Maestro... He’s no longer the Man Who Knows; he’s the man who presided over an economy careening to the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression — and who saw no evil, heard no evil, refused to do anything about subprime, insisted that derivatives made the financial system more stable, denied not only that there was a national housing bubble but that such a bubble was even possible.

If he wants to redeem himself through hard and serious reflection about how he got it so wrong, fine — and I’d be interested in listening. If he thinks he can still lecture us from his pedestal of wisdom, he’s wasting our time.

Brad DeLong adds his two cents:

Greenspan writes:

What is most notable [about today]... is the unusually low level of corporate illiquid ong-term fixed asset investment.... This contrasts starkly with the robust recovery n the markets for liquid corporate securities.... What, then, accounts for this xceptionally elevated level of illiquidity aversion?... I infer that... the effect can be explained by the shock of vastly greater uncertainties embedded in the competitive, regulatory, and financial environments faced by businesses... deriving from the surge in government activism...

I don't see how this hangs together in any coherent fashion at all.
...
Private investment is low because aggregate demand is low and so capacity utilization is low--and is not expected to get better anytime soon. Full stop. That is an explanation that is coherent and fits the facts in the way that Greenspan's Randite claim that it must somehow be the fault of the gummint does not.

What's perhaps most irritating about right-wing critiques of Democratic economic policies is that they so often rely upon the "analyst" reading the minds of business owners, with no actual survey data to back up the claims presented. How many times have you heard Right-wing mouthpieces blather on about "regulatory uncertainty" unsettling businesses and the markets? And yet, as DeLong here again shows, when you actually ask business owners why they are acting the way they are, "uncertainty" almost never comes up as an answer.

A decent press corps, of course, might make it more diffcult for disingenuous pundits to get away with this sort of thing, but you'll die of old age waiting for the American media to do anything other than parrot official press releases and the talking points developed by the sophists turning the bog wheel at you typical right-wing "thinktank/propaganda mill"

Squezing Blood from the Middle Class Turnip

2011-03-11T03:49:00.000-08:00

The recent events in Wisconsin are, on one level, baffling. Somehow the GOP has convinced voters that the best way to balace state budgets is to squeeze the wages of middle class families, in this case public sector workers, while keeping taxes low for the wealthy. Today, a story on school property taxes in the New York Times sheds more light on this peculiar direction our country has taken. The article focuses on the decidedly upper crust community of Bronxville, New York, and the desire of its residents to maintain high academic standards and good schools, but not have to actually pay for them:

Most family incomes in Bronxville, about 15 miles north of Midtown Manhattan, are in the six and seven figures, ranking the village among the wealthiest enclaves in America. But even an additional $100 to $200 tacked on, in a village where the typical homeowner already pays $43,000 in annual property taxes, has met enough resistance to make town officials think twice.

Some residents argue that the town should be more businesslike, cutting other costs to offset the outlay for smaller classes. Peter P. Pulkkinen is one. A 40-year-old investment banker, he and his wife, Sarah, moved here in 2004 from the Upper East Side and their two oldest children are now in the first and third grades. He wants small classes for them. But rather than raise taxes, he would restrict teacher compensation— particularly their benefits.

So here we have a wealthy investment banker looking to slash middle-income teacher salaries rather than pay a dime more in taxes. Meanwhile, hedge fund maangers still pay taxes on million dollar incomes at a mere 15% rate. Class warfare is not dead in America, my friends. Far from it. It's just that at the moment, it's a very one-sided war.

(EDIT: More on this in an excellent Salon piece by Robert Reich.)

Quote for the Day

2011-03-09T05:55:00.001-08:00

If civilians are killed in an attack on a military installation, it is certainly regrettable, but I will not morally blame the I.R.A. for it.
-GOP Rep. Peter King

NY Representative Peter King is holding hearings on the "radicalization" of American Muslims, using fabricated statistics to create the impression that American Muslims are on the whole supportive of terrorist violence against US interests. Yet his own past support for IRA terror campaigns against the British, including the above quote explicitly absolving of the IRA of responsibility for civilians killed in IRA terror bombings campaigns drives home the extent to which Republican posturing on the "war on terror" is little more than a hypocritical exercise in bigotry and demagoguery.

The Face of the GOP

2011-03-08T05:09:00.000-08:00

Don't let anyone tell you that the GOP has abandoned bigotry and racism. Nothing could be further from the truth, as GOP rep. Steve King's scheduled congressional show-trial of Muslim-Americans clearly demonstrates:

Mr. King, a Republican whose district is centered in Nassau County on Long Island, says the hearings will examine the supposed radicalization of American Muslims. Al Qaeda is aggressively recruiting Muslims in this country, he says. He wants to investigate the terror group’s methods and what he claims is the eagerness of many young American Muslims to embrace it.
Notice that the hearing is solely about Muslims. It might be perfectly legitimate for the Homeland Security Committee to investigate violent radicalism in America among a wide variety of groups, but that doesn’t seem to be Mr. King’s real interest.
Instead, he is focusing on one group that appears to have obsessed him since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, resulting in slanders and misstatements that might have earned him a rebuke from his colleagues had they been about any other group. More than 80 percent of the mosques in America are run by extremists, he has said, never citing real evidence. Too many American Muslims are sympathetic to radical Islam, he said.

And don't let anyone tell you the GOP is a proponent and promoter of democracy. Rather, the party's modus operandi involves dis-enfranchising voters who support their opposition. In this the GOP is no different from third-world despots who make outward assurances that their nations are democracies, while jailing opposition leaders and pronouncing their parties illegal:

New Hampshire's new Republican state House speaker is pretty clear about what he thinks of college kids and how they vote. They're "foolish," Speaker William O'Brien said in a recent speech to a tea party group.

"Voting as a liberal. That's what kids do," he added, his comments taped by a state Democratic Party staffer and posted on YouTube. Students lack "life experience," and "they just vote their feelings."

New Hampshire House Republicans are pushing for new laws that would prohibit many college students from voting in the state - and effectively keep some from voting at all.

Being Sarah Palin Means Never Having to make Sense

2011-03-03T07:52:00.000-08:00

Salon reports on Sarah Palin's response to the recent Supreme Court ruling on Westboro Baptist's protests at funerals (tweeted, of course):

Common sense & decency absent as wacko "church" allowed hate msgs spewed@ soldiers' funerals but we can't invoke God's name in public square

I have a feeling that twitter is the best thing that ever happened to Sarah Palin. The medium's restrictions (140 characters) allow Palin to issue pithy little proclamations whose underlying assumptions are so convoluted, inconsistent and absurd that they would never survive a longer, more carefully considered exposition. In the above tweet, for instance, Palin is lamenting that the Supreme Court allows private citizens to voice their religious opinions in public, but bars the government from making religious proclamations.

Of course, you have to actually think through what Palin is saying to realize it. Those glassy eyed zombies that react instantaneously and mechancially to every word their oracle tweets would never get the inherent stupidity of what she's saying.

Say Anything

2011-02-23T07:09:00.001-08:00

The Washington Post runs a fact check on a popular right-wing meme: that since becoming president Barack Obama has travelled around the world apologizing for U.S. conduct. Unsurprisingly the Post awards the claim it's highest dishonesty rating of 4 Pinocchios. But what struck me as most peculiar about the examples that the Post culls from right-wing websites and mouthpieces was this statement by Karl Rove:

In London, [Barack Obama] said that decisions about the world financial system were no longer made by "just Roosevelt and Churchill sitting in a room with a brandy" -- as if that were a bad thing.

So, wait... Karl Rove is nostalgic for a (probably mythical) time when decisions about the world financial system were formulated and negotiated in private by two heads of state? Silly me: all this time I thought government intervention was bad and the markets were supposed to organize themselves?

I think what this example shows is that conservatives can make the most absurd, foolish, nonsensical and contradictory claims in the service of attacking the President. It doesn't matter what Obama says. If he said it, it's wrong.

Hyperbolize Much?

2011-02-11T07:55:00.000-08:00

Oh, this is nice. Here's a Fox headline describing illegal immigration as "America's 3rd War:"

Yeah, that's right, Murdoch's propaganda network is comparing undocumented workers coming to the US looking for work to armed, violent insurgents in Iraq and the Afghan Taliban. Stay classy, Fox, and next time armed border vigilantes murder a 9 year old girl as she pleads for her life, remind us how you had nothing to do with it.

GOP Family Values

2011-02-03T14:22:00.001-08:00

So, according to the GOP now, it's not really "incest" if she's over the age of 18.

The new version of the [GOP abortion] bill apparently retains the clause that limits the incest exemption to girls under the age of 18 and language that makes it tougher for women to obtain abortion coverage through their private insurers.

My guess is they're just trying to cover their tails.

VIA: TPM Cafe.

SNOOKERED

2011-01-28T04:37:00.000-08:00

Rememeber the last two of years when Dick Army's Tea Party engineered massive astroturf rallies against the Obama Administration by scaring seniors into believing that the President was going to implement large funding cuts to Medicare? The nation saw scenes of seniors on electric scooters attending anti-government TEA party rallies terrified by the prospect that the Obama administration was threatening their access to a Socialist, government run health insurance program.

The juxtaposition was incongruous, to be sure. But nonetheless, there they were wit their government supplied scooters and their signs, proving that in politics it is far more effective to scare people with lies than try to convince them of the superiority of your actual policy positions by explaining the intricacies and nuances of your plan.

Well, now that they finally have control of the House, GOP leaders are not only threatening Medicare with cuts of their own (you mean the party that has derided Medicare as Socialism for 60 years didn't really mean to strengthen and protect the system?) they are floating a plan to do far worse: they want to privatize the system, effectively ending Medicare altogether.

Interestingly, it appears that the GOP is now a subsidiary of the radical, far-right TEA Party, and cannot even impose the discipline necessary to quiet the radicals until after the 2012 election when they might actually have the political power to start putting some of these ideas into effect.

I have a feeling that the Obama administration is salivating at the prospect of running in 2012 against the party that wants to not only give health insurers the right to discriminate against people with pre-existing medical conditions, cap lifetime medical benefits, and raise rates on a whim, but is also the party that wants to end the Medicare system altogether, replacing it with fixed payments that seniors must use to buy a policy from these same insurance companies that have just been given the green light to screw their customers seven ways to Sunday.

The only question that remains is whether Democrtas will take the opportunity that's been handed to them and hammer this message 24/7 over the next two years, or whether they'll shrug their shoulders and continue to "play nice," virtually assuring that Barack Obama will be a one-term president.

More Race Baiting from Fox

2011-01-25T04:30:00.000-08:00

Does it surprise anyone that Fox News has decided to launch a salvo against the latest call for political civility --the suggestion that Democrats and Republicans sit side by side at the State of the Union address, as opposed to gathering in separate camps-- by making a mocking, sardonic reference to the anthem of the Civil Rights Movement? (Click the image at left to expand the headline that reads "'Kumbaya Seating' at State Of the Union a Distraction?")

Two years ago, a Republican congressman from South Carolina enthralled the Tea Party faithful by shouting out the words "you lie" as our nation's first African American president delivered the traditional State of The Union message to Congress. For showing such infantile disrespect to president Obama, congressman Joe Wilson was hailed as a hero, and came to embody and give voice to the hateful bigotry of those who cannot accept that our nation, the world around them and the times, have changed.

I have little doubt that many of those who question Barack Obama's citizenship and country of birth do so because they see in their fanciful conspiracy theories a vain hope of clearing America of the "stain" of having been governed by a black president. if Obama is illegitimate, then he never was president in the first palce, and America's history governance by white males remains unbroken.

Kumbaya, people.

Seething, Idiot Rage.

2011-01-17T10:08:00.000-08:00

If you want a good sense of the irrational, seething hatred the right has for President Obama, there's no need to look any further than the latest unhinged conspiratorial ravings of Gateway Pundit, Pajamas Media, Doug Ross and Michelle Malkin.

While President Obama's address to the nation in the wake of the murder of six people and the attempted assassination of Democratic Representative Gabrielle Giffords was widely praised in the media (even by Glenn Back), the rabid partisans of hate on the Right would simply have none of it. Unable to attack the president for what was an almost unanimously praised performance, right-wing bloggers spit their poisonous venom at the crowd that attended the service, frothing at what they felt were inappropriate whoops and oddly timed applause.

And it would have ended there had the geniuses at Gateway Pundit not stumbled upon a stunning photograph that proved, beyond a shadow of a doubt that, in fact the Obama Administration instigated the inappropriate applause through the nefarious technique of television broadcast. Reproduced below is the unassailable proof (click picture to enlarge).

Now, those who would counter that what the jumbotron is showing in that picture are not instructions to the crowd, but rather simple closed captioning for the deaf, clearly suffer from a surfeit of intellect and a paucity of stupidity. Or to put it in simpler terms, they must surely be liberals.

It was Gateway Pundit who first produced this stunning evidence of the White House's purposeful deceit. The post was picked up and commented favorably by Pajamas Media's Ed Driscoll, and blogger Doug Ross, and if we are to believe Ross, Michelle Malkin also linked to the story (though I can find no such link currently on her website).

I think my favorite chain of reasoning (once commenters started enlightening these right-wing geniuses on the meaning of the term "closed captioned") is Driscol's.

First the image was proof of Obama Adminsitration duplicity as it gave unassailable proof to the lie that the Administration did not explicitly elicit the crowd's reaction:

“If White House Was Surprised by Applause at Tucson Pep Rally.” Jim Hoft asks, “Why Did They Ask For It On Jumbotron?”

Click over for the damning photo.

Once commenters explained the meaning of "closed captioned" Driscol realized that OMG, that's even worse:

"Many on the left were quick to point out that the “applause” that appears on the screen are not prompts but closed-captioning. Really? ... I think it’s WORSE that it’s closed-captioning. ... Had some ass prompted the people to cheer, boo, applaud, act like morons and completely inappropriately, I would still have a scintilla of hope that maybe the left could be rehabilitated. Nope. Sadly the screen was merely reporting the goings-on. Scary, huh?."

So there you have it: damned if you do, damned if you don't. If it appears the Obama administration elicited the crowd's reaction, then they are contemptible liars. If, however, it turns that Driscol, Ross, Gateway Pundit, and Michelle Malkin are complete idiots who see Obama Administration villainy around every corner and under every rock, then it's even worse for liberals!

(Hat Tip: Wonkette)

Tom DeLay Sentenced: 3 Years in the Slammer

2011-01-10T13:38:00.000-08:00

A Texas judge has sentenced former GOP majority leader Tom DeLay to three years in prison for his role in a scheme to launder corporate money to Texas candidates in contravention to state law.

AUSTIN, Texas —Tom DeLay, the former House majority leader, was sentenced to three years in prison on Monday after convictions for money laundering and conspiracy stemming from his role in a scheme to channel corporate contributions to Texas state races in 2002.
...
After listening to Mr. DeLay say he felt he had done nothing wrong, Judge Pat Priest sentenced him to three years in prison for the conspiracy count and 10 years’ probation for the money laundering count. The judge rejected arguments from Mr. DeLay that the trial had been a politically motivated vendetta mounted by an overzealous Democratic District Attorney.

“Before there were Republicans and Democrats, there was America, and what America is about is the rule of law,” the judge said just before pronouncing the sentence.

Amen!

Oh yeah, Fox News is running a story on this event, too. I'll give you one chance to guess what word does not appear once in the article... that's right, it's the word "Republican."

(EDIT: Since it originally ran, the Fox story has been updated, significantly lengthening it and adding mention of DeLay’s party affiliation. This is the full text of the original Fox story:

Begin----------

AUSTIN, Texas -- A judge has ordered U.S. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay to serve three years in prison for his role in a scheme to illegally funnel corporate money to Texas candidates in 2002.

The sentence comes after a jury in November convicted DeLay on charges of money laundering and conspiracy to commit money laundering. DeLay was once one of the most powerful men in U.S. politics, ascending to the No. 2 job in the House of Representatives.

The former Houston-area congressman had faced up to life in prison. His attorneys asked for probation.

Senior Judge Pat Priest issued his ruling after a brief sentencing hearing on Monday in which former U.S. House Speaker Dennis Hastert testified on DeLay's behalf.

Priest declined to hear testimony from the state's only witness.

-----End)

Red State Justice

2011-01-07T10:33:00.000-08:00

They were imprisoned for life for a crime that, at most, should have netted them a couple of years behind bars. When they were young, Jamie and Gladys Scott facilitated a robbery that netted the robbers $11. The women had no prior criminal history. No one was killed and the boys who actually committed the robbery escaped with a few months in jail after fingering the young women in a plea-bargain. But the sisters were sentenced to life.

Now, sixteen years later, Governor Haley Barbour is releasing the Scott Sisters from prison. But it's not for the reasons you might suspect. They aren't being released to right a long-ago wrong. They're being released because the eldest sister, Jamie Scott, requires dialysis treatments which are costing the State of Mississippi about $200,0000.00 a year, and the younger of the two sisters has agreed to donate one of her kidneys to her sister in exchange for their freedom:

After mulling over the matter for several months, Gov. Barbour announced in late December that he would not pardon the sisters, but would instead indefinitely suspend their sentences.

Gov. Barbour said he had acted in part out of concern over Jamie Scott’s health, but also to relieve the state of the cost of her dialysis treatment, approximately $200,000 a year.

“The Mississippi Department of Corrections believes the sisters no longer pose a threat to society,” Mr. Barbour said in a Dec. 29 statement. “Their incarceration is no longer necessary for public safety or rehabilitation, and Jamie Scott’s medical condition creates a substantial cost to the state of Mississippi.”

That's some mighty fine Christian compassion for ya!

Making the Case for the Public Option

2011-01-06T18:27:00.001-08:00

A newly elected GOP congresswoman from Tennessee makes the best case yet for the need for a Public Option in the Health Care Reform Act... but, of course, being a Republican she's completely oblivious to that fact.

The importance of the public option for Health Care Reform is nowhere more evident than here: the Public Option wasn't intended merely as a way for the Government to get involved in the business of providing health care insurance. It was needed to prevent health insurance providers from blackmailing the government by threatening to rescind coverage to certain groups, or pull out of certain markets altogether. With a public option in place, the government could have called their bluff, inviting insurance companies to forgo the profits they might gain from servicing a particular market. As it is, health insurers now have enormous leverage over future legislation regarding coverage and pricing.

(Via: Daily Kos)

Censoring the Constitution

2011-01-06T11:33:00.001-08:00

As you've probably heard by now, one of the first moves of the new GOP majority in congress was to call for a reading of the U.S. Constitution from the House Floor. And if you weren't paying attention, that's probably what you though happened today. The Las Vegas Sun, for instance, reported on the incident thusly:

Despite it being the government’s founding document, it’s the first time it’s been read out, every article, signature, and amendment, on the floor of the House of Representatives. But the event wasn’t just in homage to the founding fathers. It was also a sign of the new influence of the Tea Party, for whom adherence to the Constitution was -- as Nevadans will remember from Sharron Angle’s senatorial campaign -- a major rhetorical campaigning point during the 2010 midterms.

But was that what really happened? Was every article, signature, and amendment read on the floor of the House of Representatives? As a matter of fact, no, that's not what really happened. Rather, the Constitution of the United States of America was pushed aside so that members could instead read aloud the Constitution of... I don't know: La La Land, maybe? Whatever it was, it wasn't the Constitution of the United States of America that was read aloud today:

A Goodlatte aide explained that the Constitution will be read in its most modern, amended form. This will prevent lawmakers from having to recite politically uncomfortable portions, notably the provisions on the “three-fifths compromise” under which slaves were counted as three-fifths of a person for the purposes of taxation and representation.

So wait... what we're getting from the Party of Constitutional Originalism is a reading, not of the Constitution of the United States of America, but rather, of a literary doppleganger that whitewashes this nation's history of institutionalized racial oppression?

Why doesn't that suprise me?

Another Fox Non-Story

2011-01-04T10:28:00.001-08:00

Fox News has found one single, solitary Democratic congressman who is "leaning" towards voting for the GOP's proposed Health Care Reform repeal resolution, and "several" who want to read the proposal before deciding how they'll vote. But still, the question must be asked: is the HRC repeal proposal "Picking Up Democratic Votes"?

Let me answer that question for you, Foxies: No, it is not.

But thanks for playing.

When it's OK to raise taxes.

2010-12-23T09:28:00.000-08:00

Q: When is it OK for a conservative to propose raising taxes?

A: When it involves raising taxes on Ameica's poorest citizens to facilitate the lowering of taxes on the wealthiest.

George Will writes approvingly of the tax "reform" plans of GOP representative Dave Camp:

[GOP congressman Dave Camp's] aim is "fundamental" tax reform, understood the usual way - broadening the base (eliminating loopholes) to make lower rates possible. He would like a top rate of 25 percent - three points lower than Ronald Reagan achieved in 1986...

Many conservatives, including Camp, believe that although most Americans should be paying lower taxes, more Americans should be paying taxes. The fact that 46.7 million earners pay no income tax creates moral hazard - incentives for perverse behavior: Free-riding people have scant incentive to restrain the growth of government they are not paying for with income taxes.

...In addition to the one-third of the 143 million tax returns filed by individual earners for 2007 that showed no tax liability, additional millions of households have incomes low enough to exempt them from filing tax returns.

It couldn't be plainer than that. The GOP is not the anti-tax party it makes itself out to be. It's the tax burden shifting party, and the thing that most distresses them about the working poor is not the difficulty they have making ends meet, or gaining access to health care, or paying for college for their kids. No, the thing that most distresses conservatives about the working poor is that they pay no income tax.

If Democrats had a clue... any clue at all, they would make an issue of this sort of thing.

Tactical Obstructionism

2010-12-23T05:23:00.000-08:00

A couple of weeks ago, the Senate's passing of both the Don't Ask Don't Tell repeal and the START treaty ratification was in serious doubt. Simply lining up 60 votes in favor of cloture, to allow a vote on both propsals, seemed a Herculean task whose outcome was by no means assured. And yet, in the past two days both measures made it through the Senate. The former by a vote of 65 to 31 and the latter by a vote of 72 to 26.

So why, in the end, was it so difficult to acheive cloture on bills that received overwhelming support in the senate (far more votes than the cloture battle would suggest)?

My interpretation (and this goes especially for the START treaty vote) is that the GOP is playing a game whereby they intend to make the president expend as much time, effort and political capital as possible to pass any legislation at all, even legislation that the GOP supports and that a good number of Republicans fully intend to vote for when it does come to the floor.

Is this a winning strategy or will it ultimately cost the GOP what little goodwill they have from the American people? I think it still remains to be seen. I do believe that the GOP is playing with fire, though, and may well get burned. After all, I suspect that the impression of the GOP that the American public is going to come away with from these last few weeks of the so-called "lame duck" session is this: the GOP is the party that simultaneously backed Obama into a corner and forced him to agree to give huge tax breaks to millionaires and then turned around and argued that we can't afford to provide needed health care for the policemen, firefighters, paramedics and ordinary citizens whose long-term health was compromised when they rushed to the scene of the 9/11 attacks and dug through dusty rubble and breathed in toxic air to rescue survivors.

I've got a pretty strong feeling that the same conservative pundits who loudly crow about congress' low approval numbers will prove notably silent on this issue in the coming months as an obstructionist Republican House of Representatives gains the ire and contempt of the very same people who voted them in, frustrated as they were by the glacial pace of our current economic recovery.

Senate Republicans cut 1st responder health care by 3.1 Billion

2010-12-22T11:13:00.001-08:00

Senate Republicans have agreed to the passage of a bill intended to help cover the medical bills of the heroes who worked to rescue survivors of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, but only if 3.1 billion dollars was first stripped from the bill.

These are the same guys who had no problem spending some $200 billion every year for the last seven years supporting the war effort in Iraq and Afghanistan. But apparently, finding $7.4 billion to cover the medical expenses of wounded rescuers is just too expensive.

Imitatio Latvia

2010-12-21T08:43:00.000-08:00

Iceland experienced a bank-sector driven financial collapse and seemingly insurmountable debt load. It responded by screwing wealthy investors and defaulted on its debts. The country experienced a 10% drop in employment, but has been recovering since Q1, 2010. Latvia did not default on its debts, experienced a 20% drop in emplyment and has been recovering since Q1, 2010.

Guess which model financial columnists are urging Ireland to emulate?

It's absurd advice of course, but then with per capita obligations of about 1/2 million US dollars, Ireland probably has no choice but follow the Icleandic model eventually. I suspect that the financial press it simply trying to help investors squeeze Ireland for all they can before the inevitable default.

Things The Tax Cut Could Have Paid For

2010-12-17T16:53:00.000-08:00

Another entry for our continuing feature "Things The Tax Cut Could Have Paid For." According to the Huffington Post, Republican lawmakers have blocked a bill that would have proclaimed child marriage to be a human rights violation:

The bill would ensure that child marriage is recognized as a human rights violation, and develop comprehensive strategies to prevent such marriages around the world. The legislation seemed likely to garner strong bipartisan support in Congress, and in the Senate, it did. But last night, the bill was voted down in the House by Republicans who argued the bill is too costly and could lead to increased abortions -- gripes the measure's supporters say have no basis in reality and are just excuses to kill the popular bill.

The CBO estimates the cost of implementing the bill at about $60 million over 5 years, whereas the GOP is estimating the cost at $108 million. Nonetheless, the cost of this bill comes in somewhere between 1/70th and 1/100th the cost of the upper income tax cuts the GOP demanded.

Berming For You

2010-12-17T07:38:00.001-08:00

Remember when the BP oil spill was being touted as "Barack Obama's Katrina"? Despite the fact that Coast Guard vessels were on site working the spill from day one, and the Federal government mobilized heavily to contain the disaster, partisan critics of the Obama Administration insisted that not enough was being done to prevent oil from reaching Lousiana shores. And because it is an article of faith among the news media that every instance of Republican incompetence, corruption or greed must be counterbalanced by a corresponding incidence of Democratic incompetence, corruption or greed much of the new media and the chattering classes seemed perfectly happy to g along with the idea that the BP oil spill was, indeed, "Barack Obama's Katrina." Of course, to sucessfully argue this point it was necessary to show that there were effective countermeasures available that the administration, either through sloth or incompetence, was failing to implement.

Enter Lousiana Governor Bobby Jindal. Always ready to savage the government for doing too much useless volcano monitoring, Jindall took to the airwaves to denounce the administration for not doing enough useful berm building. Berms, we were told over and over again, were the immediate, desperately needed, effective solution to the oil spill problem that the Administration was, for inexplicable reasons, failing to implement. There was only one little problem with this urgent claim: the experts disagreed. The building of berms, they told us, was an expensive way to accomplish very little. But never mind. All we heard from Jindall, the right-wing talks shows and much of the media was berms, berms, berms... and so under pressure from local legislators and the relentless, right-wing message machine, the Obama administration relented and pressured the Army Corps of Engineers to approve Jindal's dubious project.

Well a post-spill report is out examining the effectiveness of the berms and guess what... the experts were right. The berms were very expensive at over $200 million dollars and counting, but ended up collecting almost no oil.

By October, about 10 miles of berms had been built several miles from the gulf coastline at a cost of $220 million, with construction paid for entirely by BP.
Louisiana officials estimate that the berms stopped 1,000 barrels of oil from the spill. By contrast, more than 800,000 barrels were captured at the wellhead, and roughly 270,000 barrels were burned off by Coast Guard vessels. Skimming operations recovered at least 34 million gallons of oil-water mixture.
“$220 million for a spill response measure that trapped not much more than 1,000 barrels of oil is not a compelling cost-benefit tradeoff,” the commission staff wrote.

On the plus size, Louisiana did manage to get free funding for miles and miles of berms that might potentially help stop coastline erosion. But this was certainly not the way the project was sold to the American people.

(This post also apears on Stinque).

Things The American People Are Sick Of...

2010-12-16T06:12:00.000-08:00

...according to Jim DeMint.

It's a new post of mine up on Stinque. Go check it out.

Good Read

2010-12-16T05:29:00.000-08:00

E. J. Dionne has a good column today on the new No Labels political movement that has recently taken shape, and why this movement's existence is premised on a widely disseminated fallacy: that political polarization in this country is a result of the left moving too far to the left while the right has moved too far to the right. As Dionne notes, while the right has, indeed, gravitated to extremes that would even surprise Ronald Reagan, the left (and by this he means, not just Democrats, but even ideological socialists) have come to occupy the middle ideological ground in America. There is no such thing as a radical left anymore in this country.

It's worth a read.

Fox Strikes Again

2010-12-15T09:15:00.000-08:00

Media Matters For America has gotten its hands on another internal Fox memo. This time newscasers are urged to cast doubt on the science behind global warming:

...we should refrain from asserting that the planet has warmed (or cooled) in any given period without IMMEDIATELY pointing out that such theories are based upon data that critics have called into question. It is not our place as journalists to assert such notions as facts, especially as this debate intensifies.

The memo, from Bill Sammon came moments after a Fox News reporter, discussing the so-called climategate incident, had noted that the data that provides evidence of global warming was consistent across various sources beyond the beseiged Climatic Research Unit of East Anglia University, including NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. This, apparently was alarming to Sammon, since an appeal to respected scientific authorities on the subject does tend to undermine the mercenary criticisms of paid Oil Industry shills and lobbyists.

There is a big difference between "asserting notions as facts" and manufacturing controversy where there really is none. What Fox seeks to do, with respect to the issue of global warming, is clearly the latter, and their motivations are indisputably ideological ones.

Fox: Not Even Trying

2010-12-14T09:52:00.000-08:00

It wasn't too long ago that the website Media Matters for America got hold of internal memos from Fox News brass ordering on-air newscasters and personalities to stop refering to the proposed public option as the "public option" and instead refer to it as the "government option." Seems GOP pollsters had discovered that the American public was less supportive of the public option if it was, instead, referred to as the "government option."

The revelation was just another in a long list of examples of the supposedly "fair and balanced" Fox propaganda channel taking orders from the GOP an skewing its coverage for ideological reasons. The channel's public relations staff, meanwhile, countered that they were not showing bias, but were instead simply trying to employ "an accurate, fair, objective term."

Yet, if accurate, fair and objective terminology is the goal of Fox producers, how do you explain this front page story on the Fox news website?

It is hardly "accurate" or "objective" to refer to the current health Care Reform law as "Obamacare," given that the legislation was crafted by congressional leaders with little guidance from the President. And as for fairness, only a deaf-mute hermit doesn't realize that the term "Obamacare" as applied to the Health Care Reform act is used exclusively by opponents of the legislation, as the following selection of Tea Party signage clearly shows.

It really shouldn't be necessary to write posts like these "exposing" Fox News propagandistic mission. Really, the only reason I do so is because so many people, including members of the press and political class, continue to act as if it weren't so, granting interviews, access and perks that the propaganda network clearly does not deserve.

In Which The GOP Cuts Off Its Nose To Spite Its Face

2010-12-13T11:35:00.001-08:00

You've really got to marvel at the absurd degree to which Obama Derangement Syndrome has taken hold of the GOP. The latest example manifests itself in a classic case of cutting off one's nose to spite one's face. The New York Times is reporting that a George W. Bush appointed Federal judge has declared the individual mandate portion of Health Care Reform to be unconstitutional:

In a 42-page opinion issued in Richmond, Va., Judge Hudson wrote that the law’s central requirement that most Americans obtain health insurance exceeds the regulatory authority granted to Congress under the Commerce Clause of the Constitution. The insurance mandate is central to the law’s mission of covering more than 30 million uninsured because insurers argue that only by requiring healthy people to have policies can they afford to treat those with expensive chronic conditions.

Of course, without the Individual Mandate, several key provisions of Health Care Reform are impossible to institute. Most significantly, without the individual mandate, it becomes economically impossible to legislate that health insurance companies be prohibited from denying coverage to individuals who suffer from pre-existing medical conditions. That is because, without the individual mandate, widespread gaming of the system would lead to the financial ruin of health insurers. And yet the decisions made possible by the individual mandate are among the most popular provisions of the law: At 71% support, a desire to see insurance companies prohibited from discriminating based on pre-existing conditions means its not even close.

The uninsured are not going away, and even if it were to be withheld at the Supreme Court level, this decision does nothing to ameliorate their plight. Indeed, the numbers of uninsured are only projected to rise without implementation of the current Health Care Reform law. So what would be the upshot of a Supreme Court decision upholding this ruling and killing the Individual Mandate? The upshot would be this: the problem of the uninsured only gets worse. More and more people fall off the insurance rolls. As health insurance becomes more expensive, healthy people take their chances and drop coverage. As health insurance rolls are increasingly composed of ill people who simply cannot afford not to have health insurance, prices for health coverage begin to spiral out of control. Eventually, public anger leads to a Democratic wave sweeping both houses of Congress and the Presidency with an unambiguous mandate to fix the broken health insurance system.

Democrats must now craft a new Health Care Reform act that solves the problem of vast numbers of uninsured Americans. Many options are explored. One possible avenue, a system made up of private insurers delivering universal coverage buyoed by an individual mandate that makes it profitable, has already been declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. Right-wing political pundits fulminate at even the slightest mention of a single payer system such as exists in Europe and Canada. There is, however, one potential venue to universal coverage that relies upon an institution that is beloved of its participants and is as American as apple pie: Medicare For All.

It's single-payer, universal coverage through the back-door. And if the GOP continues in its ultimately self-destructive path of putting up roadblocks to a Health Care Reform act that is modelled on (or at least very similar to) proposals that were developed by the American Enterprise Institute in the 1990's, than that's exactly where we are headed.

Honestly, the only reason I don't rejoice at this prospect is that I suspect it will take between 10 and 20 years to get there if we follow this path, and during that time millions of uninsured Americans will lose their homes, their belongings, their loved ones and their lives.

How They Get Away With It

2010-12-11T04:51:00.000-08:00

From a story on Leo Berman, a Texas legislator who is promoting a bill that would make it a crime in Texas for individuals to take actions that would further the implementation of the Federal Health Care Reform Act:

Berman said, "I don't think it's extreme at all. I think it's more extreme for Texans who have to pay $27 billion to put over 2 million illegal aliens on Medicaid. That's what's extreme," Berman said.

This is a pretty good example of everything that's wrong with the current state of journalism in this country. Here we see a politician making an outlandish claim that has no basis in law or fact, and the newspaper simply reproduces his comment with no attempt whatsoever to fact check. In fact, under the Health Care Reform Act, undocumented immigrants are prohibited from participating in the health care exchanges that provide subsidized coverage even if they spend their own money to do so. The bill in no way requires that these people be put on Medicaid. In fact, Medicaid only covers the U.S. born (and thus U.S. citizen) children of illegal immigrants, and reimburses hospitals for expenses related to providing emergency care to illegal immigrants. Hospitals are not going to turn away critically injured accident victims whose immigration status cannot be determined, and so Federal law recognizes this fact and reimburses them for such treatments. This is current law, the Health Care Reform Act does not change it, and expenses associated with such treatments come nowhere close to $27 billion annually (and certainly not for the state of Texas alone).

The GOP benefits greatly from party discipline. Messages are developed, tested in polling, and repeated ad-nauseum by politicians and conservative pundits alike. But a good part of the reason that the GOP message tends to resonate so widely, is that the mainstream media cannot be bothered to do even the most basic fact checking. This frees the GOP to say anything it wants, confident that mis-characterizations will go uncorrected, lies unchallenged and dstortions unanswered.

(Via: Wonkette)

Things the GOP tax cut could have paid for.

2010-12-09T10:25:00.001-08:00

I think I'll make an occasional feature of legislation that the GOP has scuttled in favor of giving tax breaks to the top 2% of income earners.

Let's start with this: Republicans Block U.S. Health Aid for 9/11 Workers

Republican senators blocked Democratic legislation on Thursday that sought to provide medical care to rescue workers and residents of New York City who became ill as a result of breathing in toxic fumes, dust and smoke from ground zero.
...
In a vote largely along party lines, the Senate rejected a procedural move by Democrats to end debate on the 9/11 health bill and bring it to an up-or-down vote; 60 yes votes were needed, but the move received only 57, with 42 votes against.

Republicans have been raising concerns about how to pay for the $7.4 billion measure, while Democrats, led by Senator Kirsten E. Gillibrand of New York, have argued that the nation had a moral obligation to assist those who put their lives at risk during rescue operations at ground zero. The bill is known formally as the James Zadroga 9/11 Health and Compensation Act, named after a New York City Police detective who participated in the rescue efforts at ground zero. He later developed breathing complications that were common to first responders at the site, and he died in January 2006.

If the Democrats and their supporters fail to bring up these outrages over the next two years, and point out that they could easily have been paid for with the $75 billion dollar payout that the GOP handed to its wealthiest supporters, then they don't deserve to govern, let alone win the 2012 elections.

How To Go on Fox

2010-12-09T09:21:00.000-08:00

This video should be required viewing for anyone who is preparing to go on Fox News:

Sadly, I have a pretty strong feeling Rep. Anthony Wiener won't be invited back on the network any time soon.

Via: Crooks and Liars.

Et Tu Fox?

2010-12-06T11:07:00.000-08:00

As right wingers around the country fulminate over Wikileaks' publishing of secret Government comuniques and denounce the New York Times for reprinting excerpts from materials provided by that website, it is amusing to note that, far from ignoring the leaked materials, the most prominent conservative propaganda outlet in the nation seems just as eager to dig into the stolen government secrets and publicize their contents as anyone.

None other than Fox News is currently running a story entitled U.S. Documents Detail how Arab Allies Fund Terror Groups, whose findings are based on an examination of those same documents.

But then, is this really so surprising? After all conservatives got a head start on the game of spilling U.S. secrets for political advantage back when Dick Cheney sent Lewis "Scooter" Libby on a mission to expose Valerie Plame Wilson's CIA status to a willing right-wing media. What's a little national security breach between friends?

Death Panels Come to Arizona

2010-12-03T05:26:00.001-08:00

Remember Sarah Palin's infamous death panels lie which was intended to derail the Health Care Reform Act? The charge was that under so-called "Obamacare" government bureaucrats would have authority to determine which needy patients live and die based on an economic calculus that weighs those individuals' potential benefit to society against the cost of their treatment. The lie grew out of a dishonest representation of the President's call for comparative effectiveness studies on medical treatments that would save the government money by identifying and steering patients towards the most effective treatments for their illnesses. The theory was that ineffective treatments are simply a waste of money, and patients will most likely benefit from avoiding them. The death panel lie was so outrageous yet so pervasive that it was crowned Politifact's Lie of the Year for 2009.

Well, fast-forward a year and guess what: we've finally got those death panels Sarah Palin warned us of. But don't expect Palin, the GOP leadership or Dick Armey's FreedomWorks to raise a fuss. That's because these death panels are in Arizona and are a result of the GOP led legislature deciding that discontinuing Medicaid funding for certain organ transplants --even though this would mean almost certain death for some 100 indigent patients-- was well worth the $4.5 million a year savings it would bring:

Effective at the beginning of October, Arizona stopped financing certain transplant operations under the state’s version of Medicaid. Many doctors say the decision amounts to a death sentence for some low-income patients, who have little chance of survival without transplants and lack the hundreds of thousands of dollars needed to pay for them.

“The most difficult discussions are those that involve patients who had been on the donor list for a year or more and now we have to tell them they’re not on the list anymore,” said Dr. Rainer Gruessner, a transplant specialist at the University of Arizona College of Medicine. “The frustration is tremendous. It’s more than frustration.”

Organ transplants are already the subject of a web of regulations, which do not guarantee that everyone in need of a life-saving organ will receive one. But Arizona’s transplant specialists are alarmed that patients who were in line to receive transplants one day were, after the state’s budget cuts to its Medicaid program, ruled ineligible the next — unless they raised the money themselves.

And in typically cowardly fashion Republicans who approved the cuts, when faced with public outrage, have since sought to blame the Obama administration for them:

The Republican governor has in turn blamed “Obamacare,” meaning the federal health care overhaul, for the transplant cuts even though the Arizona vote came in March, before President Obama signed that bill into law.

This episode is revealing, and likely portends the GOP legislative agenda that awaits the nation in January, and much more alarmingly in 2012 and beyond should the GOP gain control of the presidency and perhaps flip the Senate. Riding to political victory on a wave of populist anger over imaginary health-care cuts and large budget deficits, the party's proposed legislative agenda would only exacerbate the problem. It's unwavering devotion to the reckless Bush tax cuts guarantees budget deficits far into the future, and proposals to replace Medicare and Medicaid with voucher programs mean that future beneficiaries of these two programs would get, not necessarily the medical attention they need, but only what they can buy with the limited funds the government has alloted them. Whether it be by explicitly denying coverage for expensive procedures (as in Arizona) or a refusal to pay more than a set amount for health coverage, the GOP plan amounts to the same thing: death panels by another name.

(This article also appears in Stinque)

Sign of the Times

2010-11-30T09:20:00.000-08:00

The rhetoric from the right, which is all to often echoed by the maintream media, is that the Obama administration has moved policy so far to the left that it produced a backlash from a traditionally right-of-center populace. The latest object of right-wing scorn is the Federal Reserve's program of Quantitative Easign, meant to fight the growing specter of deflation while hopefully promoting employment. This policy has been roundly criticized by right-wing luminaries as varied as Ron Paul, William Kristol and Sarah Palin. So how far to the left is this policy? It is so leftist that in 2000 the policy was promoted, in an almost identical economic circumstances as a way of helping Japan out of its economic mailaise by no less prominent and raging a leftist than Milton Friedman:

David Laidler: Many commentators are claiming that, in Japan, with short interest rates essentially at zero, monetary policy is as expansionary as it can get, but has had no stimulative effect on the economy. Do you have a view on this issue?

Milton Friedman: Yes, indeed. As far as Japan is concerned, the situation is very clear. And it’s a good example. I’m glad you brought it up, because it shows how unreliable interest rates can be as an indicator of appropriate monetary policy.
During the 1970s, you had the bubble period. Monetary growth was very high. There was a so-called speculative bubble in the stock market. In 1989, the Bank of Japan stepped on the brakes very hard and brought money supply down to negative rates for a while. The stock market broke. The economy went into a recession, and it’s been in a state of quasi recession ever since. Monetary growth has been too low. Now, the Bank of Japan’s argument is, “Oh well, we’ve got the interest rate down to zero; what more can we do?” It’s very simple. They can buy long-term government securities, and they can keep buying them and providing high-powered money until the high powered money starts getting the economy in an expansion. What Japan needs is a more expansive domestic monetary policy. The Japanese bank has supposedly had, until very recently, a zero interest rate policy. Yet that zero interest rate policy was evidence of an extremely tight monetary policy. Essentially, you had deflation. The real interest rate was positive; it was not negative. What you needed in Japan was more liquidity.

All that's missing is a quote from Das Kapital, wouldn't you agree?

(David Beckworth via Brad DeLong)

Magic Spending Cuts

2010-11-30T04:40:00.000-08:00

Fox News is touting a new AP-CNBC poll by loudly proclaiming that the public prefers the government balance the budget through spenindg cuts rather than by raising taxes: Poll: cut govt services to balance budget. But when you click through and actually read the article you find something quite different:

To ease surging budget deficits, Americans prefer cutting federal services to raising taxes by nearly 2-1 in a new poll. Yet there is little consensus on specific, meaningful steps — and a wariness about touching two gargantuan programs, Social Security and Medicare.
...
As for detailed cures, the poll shows little agreement — a problem that has long bedeviled lawmakers who often speak about taming federal deficits but seldom vote to do so. Given more than a dozen options for helping balance the budget, majorities backed just four: Reduce the number of federal workers, trim their salaries, cut overseas military bases and eliminate the tax deduction on home mortgage interest in exchange for lower income tax rates.

So as is typical with these things, the poll showed that the American public wants to eliminate the Federal deficit by taking measures that would barely put a dent in government spending while leaving the largest entitlement programs unchanged. On Social Security, for instance, the public is strongly opposed even to raising the retirement age:

There are some other interesting results, however, and some rather peculiar ones. For one thing, I'm not sure what the poll question about eliminating the mortgage deduction in exchange for lower tax rates has to do with balancing the Federal budget. As written the question seems to suggest a budget-neutral change in tax law. I'd wager that the response to the poll reflects the percentage of taxpayers who are currently servicing a mortgage vs. those who have paid off their homes or who rent.

More interesting, however, is the poll respondents' enthusiasm for cutting our foreign military presence. Given that Americans are opposed to cuts in Medicare and Social Security (even to raising the retirement age) the only big budget item still left on the table is defense spending. If the results of this poll are indicative, taxpayers are much more open to cutting the defense budget than out political leaders. This, seems to me, provides an opening for real spending reform some time down the line. I suspect the American public will have to wait for our political class to catch up, though. Defense spending is a peculiar "third-rail," more hallowed by the political class, it would seem, than by the public at large. No doubt the massive defense industry lines more than a few politicians' pockets in exchange for their fawning adoration.

Finally, though the Fox article suggests that Americans prefer cutting services to raising taxes "by a 2-1 margin" the poll actually reveals that 65% of American believe taxes "will have to be raised" to cut the deficit.

So 65% of the American Public isn't buying GOP nonsense about tax cuts "paying for themselves." This is good news for Democrats and the President... if they're paying attention. One of the most fiscally irresponsible policy decisions we could take at the moment would be to extend the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy. Sadly, the wheels of government seem to be turning in just that direction.

Question of the day: what is a terrorist

2010-11-29T08:54:00.000-08:00

Fox News asks:

The dictionary says:

ter·ror·ism :
/ˈtɛrəˌrɪzəm/ Show
Spelled[ter-uh-riz-uhm] Show IPA
–noun
1. the use of violence and threats to intimidate or coerce, esp. for political purposes.
2. the state of fear and submission produced by terrorism or terrorization.
3. a terroristic method of governing or of resisting a government.

So the answer is, no, Fox News. Those guys aren't terrorists.

Did Low Corporate Taxes Kill Ireland? (Or Did Feminism!)

2010-11-23T13:47:00.000-08:00

It is obvious to me that the Irish-British model is the way of the future, and the only question is when Germany and France will face reality: either they become Ireland or they become museums:

-Thomas Friedman, in 2005

Here is a staggering fact: right now, as I write this, every single citizen of the Republic of Ireland owes foreign creditors over $535,000.00.

How did this happen in a nation that free marketers from the CATO instutute to Thomas Friedman were just recently holding up as a model of 21st century economic development, and whose laissez faire policies were held in stark and favorable contrast with the Social Democratic welfare states of Germany and France?

Hery Farrell at Crookerd Timber thinks he knows: the genesis of the Irish economic catastrophe lies in the country's corporate tax rate. More speficially, Farrell finds fault in Ireland's low corporate tax rates:

The simplified political economy story goes as follows. Ireland had low nominal and even lower effective corporate tax rates. It also had low personal taxes, both because of the belief that this would foster entrepreneurship etc, and because the government used to periodically sweeten bargains between business and labor by promising tax cuts (which of course favored the rich more than the poor), inter alia buying off unions who might otherwise have started getting feisty about organizing the unorganized bits of the new Irish economy.
The result was that even with booming economic growth, the government faced a fiscal hole. This hole was filled by taxes on property transactions which, as the property market got ever more bubbly, became an ever more important source of government revenue. This provided the government with an extremely strong incentive not to deflate the bubble, reinforcing the already considerable incentives towards inaction resulting from cronyism between politicians and property tycoons, ideological notions about not interfering with ‘free’ markets etc.

Ireland followed the free marketers mantra to the letter: low taxes, lower taxes, even lower taxes, especially corporate taxes! But a government simply cannot function without some sort of revenue stream, so to make up for the revenue lost to lowered corporate taxes, the Irish government taxed property sales instead. And this new revenue stream proved so critical to the state that the Irish government was loath to turn down the tap when it became apparent that its tax base was over-reliant on a huge property bubble. There's no free lunch, as the Irish people have discovered much to their chagrin.

This may not be the whole story, but if even a libertarian like Megan McCardle thinks corporate taxes sunk too low in Ireland and produced an unmanageable investment surge, then its bound t be a very important piece of the puzzle.

Meanwhile, Ross Douthat offers another explanation:

To the utopians of capitalism, the Irish experience should be a reminder that the biggest booms can produce the biggest busts, and that debt and ruin always shadow prosperity and growth. To the utopians of secularism, the Irish experience should be a reminder that the waning of a powerful religious tradition can breed decadence as well as liberation. (“Ireland found riches a good substitute for its traditional culture,” Christopher Caldwell noted, but now “we may be about to discover what happens when a traditionally poor country returns to poverty without its culture.”)

That's right: Ireland's economic collapse owes as much to the ravages of unfettered capitalism as to a society that had pushed aside the simple, timeless truths of traditional religion and found itself adrift in a materialistic sea bereft of the guidance once offered by its moral compass. And how did Ireland lose its moral compass? By accepting birth control and allowing women to work outside the home:

Progressives and secularists suggested that Ireland was thriving because it had finally escaped the Catholic Church’s repressive grip, which kept horizons narrow and families large, and limited female economic opportunity.

There are times when Douthat comes accross as a rare island of nuanced subtletly in a sea of spittle covered, right-wing bloviating. There are other times, ilke this one, for instance, when you'd much rather put yourself in the path of Bill O'Reilly's spittle for an hour than read another sentence of Douthat's disingenuous, patronizing, moralizing, garbage.

Coulter Pwned

2010-11-19T05:30:00.000-08:00

Ann Coulter gets her lunch eaten by a former Bush administration official in the following clip. The issue concerns the new TSA screening devices that have proven controversial because they can see through passengers' clothes.

It's good fun to watch:

Coulter's objection to the screening machines is typically vapid, Ann Coulter racist garbage: we shouldn't be screening everybody who goes into airports, just the swarthy foreigners.

I don't think it takes a genius to grasp the stupidity of Coulter's proposal: there's nothing a terrorist organization would love more than to know exactly what sorts of people will get screened by ariport security and what sorts will be let by with little more than a cursory glance.

Chump Change

2010-11-18T10:39:00.001-08:00

In their first big vote since the 2010 elections, Republicans, who took over the U.S. House of Representatives riding a wave of (misplaced) populist anger over the U.S. debt, have shown their commitment to fiscal austerity by... voting to defund NPR? (and failing)

I'd like to believe that the Tea Party faithful who voted these clowns in to office are going to revolt when they realize that proposed GOP budget cuts over the next few years are nothing but a series of sad little partisan gimmicks that do nothing to bring down the deficit (or absurd proposals specifically designed to fail). However, eight long years of Bush deficits have taught me that these same people who were marching on Washington protesting the national debt will quickly lose interest in our soaring tax-cut fueled deficits once the GOP holds the purse strings.

Nancy Pelosi Keeps Leadership Post

2010-11-18T04:43:00.001-08:00

Nancy Pelosi has been elected incoming House minority leader. This is a welcome event, in my opinion. For all the carping about Democratic losses in the House and Senate, it would be folly and wholly unjust to place the blame on Pelosi's shoulders. In fact, Pelosi showed effective and courageous leadership in the House, marshalling support for Democratic initiatives that progressives saw as important. It was the Senate, and particularly Blue Dogs in the Senate who ultimately let us down. Senate Bluedogs are responsible for the death of the Public Option in health care. They are the ones reponsible for the inadequate stimulus. They are the reason DADT has yet to be repealed. Pelosi delivered on all these priorities in the House. It was the Senate's failures that dismayed traditional Democratic supporters, and it is because of them that depressed turnout in the latest elections directly contributed to the recent electoral bloodbath. Had Senate Democrats shown half the spine of Pelosi and supported Democratidc positions and proposals with half as much enthusiasm we would not be looking at two awful years of gridlock and mindless, politicized investigations.

So keep up the good work, Nancy. Hopefully you'll be majority leader again in two years.

Put a Fork in Him

2010-11-17T05:44:00.000-08:00

Joe Miller, the Tea Party backed, would-be Senator from Alaska is down by more than 10,000 votes against write-in candidate Lisa Murkowski, and there are just a few thousand more votes left to count. This figure is doubly significant given that the sum total of votes in that election was in the neighborhood of 200,000. It's very unlikely Miller can overcome this lead absent a shocking legal ruling that would invalidate more than 5% of all votes cast in the election.

In a curious little irony, Miller has filed a lawsuit in Federal court seeking to force Alaska to adhere to a strict vote count that would reject Murkowski votes in which the candidate's name was misspelled or in which sloppy handwriting could lead to ambiguity. The Alaska courts meanwhile are likely to favor a looser standard in which clear voter intent is all that is needed to count a ballot one way or another. The irony, of course, is that Tea Party members claim to oppose Federal power in favor of "States Rights." However, as several issues (such as statewide marihuana decriminalization movements and the 2000 presidential recount) have shown, "States Rights" generally plays second fiddle to conservative's broader ideological agenda and desire to exercise political power. Thus Miller's appeal to Federal courts in this case doesn't come as much of a shock, regardless of how hypocritical it might strike a casual observer.

Though a Murkowski victory issn't really all that much to celebrate for progressices, the likely results of the Alaska race do provide some comfort in that they demonstrate that even in a state like Alaska, Teabagger Krazytime doesn't play much beyond the GOP base.

The Priviledged Classes

2010-11-16T08:56:00.001-08:00

The irony is delicious: a Freshman GOP representative who ran on a platform opposing the Federal government's plan to expand health care insurance coverage to 30 million uninsured Americans is incensed that his new Congressional health care plan will not take effect for 28 days after his swearing-in:

Republican Andy Harris, an anesthesiologist who defeated freshman Democrat Frank Kratovil on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, reacted incredulously when informed that federal law mandated that his government-subsidized health care policy would take effect on Feb. 1 – 28 days after his Jan. 3rd swearing-in.

What will he do? Uh, I dunno... maybe he can drive to a Hospital Emergency room when he gets sick (like the millions of uninsured who have little other option). And it's not like he's not eligible for COBRA coverage to tide him over for the next month.

Of course, Harris had a disingenuous explanation when confronted with his hypocrisy and sense of entitlement:

[Spokeswoman Anna ]Nix said Harris, who is the father of five, wasn’t being hypocritical – he was just pointing out the inefficiency of government-run health care.

Actually, there's no inefficiency here. This beginning coverage period is mandated by Federal law.

Harris' sense of entitlement is sickening, of course. It's nice that he's facing the same conundrums that many ordinary Americans who aren't wealthy doctors face every day. Also, let's face it. The guy's still got it pretty easy. he can easily afford COBRA and he at least knows for sure he'll be getting coverage in 28 days. I know of a woman whose employer informed her that she was being reduced from full time employment to part-time employment soon after the COBRA benefits from her previous job ran out: the new employer did not want to have to offer her the full benefits (including health care) that she would have been entitled to as a full time employee. Like Harris, her new employer had a probationary period during which she was not entitled to full benefits coverage. Unlike Harris, once she became eligible, her employer found a way to yank the benefits anyway. The cruelest irony, of course, is that she had already exhausted COBRA and was now left to fend on her own. (I know these details to be true because my wife was HR manager for the company and was instructed to change the woman's employment status by the company president for the aforementioned reasons).

UPDATE: Jonathan Chait gets the Gold for this one-liner:

I think we finally have a working definition of a health insurance crisis--when a member of Congress has to go a whole month without coverage.

(Via: Wonkette)

Our Pathetic Mainstream Media

2010-11-10T06:47:00.001-08:00

Andrew Sullivan reprints the following chart of polling data on the new Health Care Reform law from the Kaiser Family Foundation:

Following Ezra Klein, Sullivan feels that the chart illustrates the difficulty Republicans will have in pursuing a repeal of the new law: almost all elements of the law are very popular (with support in the 70% range).

But something else about the chart stood out for me. Its inherent contradictions, I believe, serve as a clear illustration of the mainstream media's continuing failure to educate the American people on matters of public interest. Furthermore it is a failure that transcends partisan differences.

What caught my eye, primarily, were two items on the list:

A) 71% support for prohibiting insurance companies from denying coverage for people with pre-existing medical conditions.
B) 68% opposition to the public mandate.

The reason these two points are important is because, as any economist can tell you, you can't have one without the other. Requiring insurance companies to cover people with preexisting conditions while not simultaneously requiring conumsers to purchase insurance when they are well would lead to a wholesale bankruptcy of the insurance industry as consumers held off on buying medical insurance until the very moment they need it --secure in the knowledge that coverage, by law, could not be denied them.

Now, typically, the way that serious, self-important, political commentators treat data like this is to scold the American people for "wanting to have their cake and eat it too." But isn't it just as likely that the real problem is that Americans by and large have not been made aware of the essential link that holds between the insurance mandate and the prohibition against denial of coverage for pre-existing conditions? After all, in my personal experience, Americans are fairly reasonable individuals and are possessed of enough innate intelligence to grasp the essential conflict between point A and point B once it is explained to them. And in view of the well documented and widespread public belief in falsehoods as wide ranging as the "death panel" myth and the fantasy that Barack Obama raised taxes, I don't think it can be denied that the media does an awful job of educating the public (as opposed to merely reprinting disingenuous, dishonest, misleading, partisan talking points).

The reason why I think this particular issue escapes the partisan divide is this: whether you are opposed to the new Health Care Reform law or whether you support it, you need somehow to account for Americans' incompatible views on point A and B above.

If you're opposed to the law, then you probably feel that Americans' desire to see a prohibition on coverage exclusions for pre-existing conditions is predicated on their ignorance of the essential link between this provision and the provision that they be required to purchase coverage. Once Americans realize how closely tied they are, you might surmise, support for the pre-existing condition portion of the law would drop accordingly.

And vice versa: if you support the law then you probably believe that most Americans would have less of a problem with the individual mandate if they realized that it's essential to ensuring that insurers cannot deny you coverage for a preexisting condition.

Regardless of where you fall on the political spectrum teh end result is that what you are objecting to is not the fact that Americans want the impossible. It's the fact that they don't realize that they want the impossible. They simply haven't been educated on the link between provision A and provision B. And that, my friends, is a failure of the mainstream media to do its job.

Glenn Beck's Herd of Suckers

2010-11-10T04:52:00.000-08:00

Megan McArdle sees a nasty bubble in gold prices. The key paragraph:

It's not that quantitative easing may not cause inflation--it might. In fact, that's sort of the point; the Fed wants a little more inflation in the money supply, in order to ease the unemployment rate. But consider how much inflation there would have to be for this gold price to make sense. Even assuming that something like the July 06 price of $550 is a more natural price, the price of gold is now almost triple that. Are we going to get 10% inflation a year for a decade or so out of this quantitative easing? Not really very likely. Especially since what the Fed giveth, the Fed can take away--if inflation spikes that high, Uncle Ben will convert to an inflation hawk.

Limbaugh's Disingenous Diet

2010-11-09T07:18:00.000-08:00

So Andrew Sullivan links to this stunning segment from a recent Rush Limbaugh show:

Michelle Obama's on this big obesity kick, right? Gotta eat healthy stuff, gotta eat the garbage that she grows in the garden, nothing but fruits and vegetables.
...
Okay, along comes Mark Haub, professor, human nutrition, Kansas State University, who ate a Twinkie every three hours, and when he got tired of Twinkies, he ate Doritos, sugar cereals, and Oreos. And he was out there to prove that pure calorie counting is what matters most, not the nutritional value of the food. And the premise held up on his convenience store diet available in what Michelle calls food deserts. He lost 27 pounds in two months eating Twinkies, Doritos, Oreos, and sugar cereals. "For a class project, Haub limited himself to less than 1,800 calories a day." He didn't care where they came from. It was 1,800 calories. "A man of Haub's pre-dieting size usually consumes about 2,600 calories daily. So he followed a basic principle of weight loss: He consumed significantly fewer calories than he burned. His body mass index went from 28.8, considered overweight, to 24.9, which is normal. He now weighs 174 pounds." He weighed 201.

"But you might expect other indicators of health would have suffered. Not so. Haub's 'bad' cholesterol dropped 20 percent on a diet of --" Dawn, are you listening to this or are you ignoring me on purpose? Kathryn, you hear this? She sent me a note up there, "Don't get any Twinkie ideas." (laughing) When I first mentioned this in the first segment she sent me an instant message, "Don't you get any Twinkie ideas." Kathryn, are you hearing me on this? Nothing but Twinkies.

So I went and read the whole article on CNN. As expected, Limbaugh's description of the diet is seriously flawed. For one thing, the guy didn't just eat Twinkies. He ate a can of vegetables, a protein shake and a multi-vitamin every day. Limbaugh doesn't mention those trivial details in the transcript. The Twinkies provided the diet's caloric content. The nutrition came from other sources. So, refering to it as a Twinkie diet is somewhat disingenuous. Another point Limbaugh fails to mention: when you do the math, the guy only ate five individual Twinkie cakes a day. That's not exactly stuffing your face with Twinkies.

Finally, I decided to reasearch what's actually in a Twinkie. Though the pastries have a reputation as being tiny cakes of death, they're really nothing more than 150 calories of flour, sugar, eggs, and lard (plus a bunch of flavor and texture additives with scary names, that are nonetheless ubiquitous in processed foods). The fat content is 4.5 grams, so eating five a day amouts to 22.5 grams of fat intake a day, significantly less than the 30 grams that constitute a low fat diet. And the Cholesterol content? A mere 20 mg, or 7% of the RDA. Multiply that by 5 and you've got a grand total of 35% of your daily recommended cholesterol content. No wonder his cholesterol count improved!

Limbaugh mentions none of this, of course. Instead he uses this diet to attack Michelle Obama, and reinforce his listener's need to be told that everything those danged liberal authority figures have told them up to now is false, and the way to really lose weight is to stuff yourself with Twinkies, Doritos and Cheese Puffs.

(VIA: Andrew Sullivan)

New Post on Stinque

2010-11-08T03:48:00.000-08:00

I've got a new post up on Stinque.

(Blame daylight savings for me posting that darned thing at 5:00 AM)

Fox "Experts"

2010-11-05T06:55:00.000-07:00

Gotta love Fox News. Today they're running a story about Barack Obama's impending Trip to Asia. The front page blurb reads:

Bruised by Tuesday's election losses, President Obama heads to Asia today in an effort to improve U.S. trade relations — but experts say the trip probably won't benefit the American economy.

And who are these experts? Open up the article and those "experts" magically shrink down to one, Daniel Griswold, who works for the CATO instiute --not exactly a non-partisan source. And furthermore, Griswold does not actually make the claim that the trip "probably won't benefit the American ecnomy." In fact, nowhere in the body of the article is such a claim made by anyone, expert or not.

I've seen this sort of move from Fox before. My suspicion is that the propaganda ministers at Fox realize that many of their readers don't actually scan beyond the front-page blurb, so it's essential to trash the President there, even if the claims are unsupported in the body of the article itself. An added bonus is that it's not possible to create a permanent link to the front page blurb, so these are lies that won't live on for future fact checkers to reference.

Omnipotent FAIL...

2010-11-04T14:09:00.000-07:00

So Jesus went mano-a-mano with Barack Obama and the best he could do was flip the House of Representatives? He couldn't even deliver the Senate?

(Via Wonkette)

The Other Big Loser

2010-11-03T03:50:00.001-07:00

Maybe I should have titled this post simply "The Big Loser." Because, let's face it: everyone expected the Democrats to get hammered. After all, the economy is still on the rocks, unemployment remians high, and Wall Street and Big Business, having gotten what they wanted out of the Obama adminsitration (a bailout and a stabilized economy) now want to get the party back in power that will allow them to go back to doing what they were doing before the economy collapsed, and thanks to the Supreme Court's recent Citizens United decision, they had carte blanch to throw money at the race. Seen in historical context, then, the Democratic losses are about what one would expect from the party in power during a mid-term election taking place before the backdrop of a very sour economy. This really is little different from what happened to Bill Clinton in 1994. So all in all, it's not a terrible night for the Obama adminsitration. And it should not be forgotten that keeping the Senate in Democratic hands was a major plus for the Administration.

Which brings me back to the real loser of last night: Sarah Palin. Because, let's face it, Democrats kept the senate largely by winning races Nevada and Delaware, two states where the most extreme of Palinite, Tea Party candidates faced off against mainstream Democrats. Nevada is perhaps the most important bellweather. Harry Ried was (unfairly) highly disliked in Nevada, but apparently voters were even more mistrustful of the radical right-wing candidate with the Sarah Palin press strategy (run awaaaaaaay!). And in Delaware, Chris Coons, the Democratic candidate soundly trounced a pretty, perky and oh so dumb Christine O'Donnell (basically a younger version of Sarah Palin). These were races the Democrats would probably have lost if Republicans had chosen a more moderate opponent. As much as the Tea Party movement helped energize Republicans, last night's elections proved that there is definitely such a thing as too much tea in many parts of the country (even in Alaska, it seems, where Lisa Murkowski's write-in candidacy appears to be on a path to defeat Joe Miller, for whom Sarah Palin campaigned exhaustively). So I think we can officially announce, from this, that last night constituted the nail in the coffin of any presidential aspirations that Sarah Palin may have harbored.

Yes, gridlock will be the order of the day for the next two years, but it's not all bad. After all, despite what you may have read, the Democrats actually managed to push through a pretty astonishing agenda these past two years, including an ambitious health care reform package that will bring coverage to 95% of Americans for the first time in history, important Wall Street and Financial industry reforms, the rescue of the U.S. and World Economies from a potential depression, the rescue of General Motors (a leaner, more survivable company) and a host of smaller issues as well. Ezra Klein has a good summary of what was accomplished here.

These next two years are going to be rocky, but at least the Democrats don't have to deal with the illusion (and it was really more illusion than reality) that they have a fillibuster proof majority in Congress and can get anything they want. It's going to be interesting seeing things unfold.

On the economic front, however, things look much gloomier. If Paul Krugman is right (and he's been right about almost everything so far) then we're looking forward to a decade or two of high unemployment, rising debt and slow economic growth. My guess is that the debt situation will only be exacerbated by the resulting swings in voter loyalty over that time as the country bounces between Democratic administrations pushing stimulus and successive Republican administrations chocking off whatever green shoots might sprout by mandating austerity when it's their turn to govern.

HCR in action

2010-11-02T10:16:00.000-07:00

For all the handwringing about Health Care Reform, it looks like the law is starting to have a positive effect on people's lives. According to the Wall Street Journal:

The number of small businesses offering health insurance to workers is projected to increase sharply this year, recent data show, a shift that researchers attribute to a tax credit in the health law.
Many small businesses, however, remain opposed to the law. Some small businesses are benefiting from portions of the law, which includes a tax credit beginning this year that covers as much as 35% of a company's insurance premiums.
According to a report by Bernstein Research in New York, the percentage of employers with between three and nine workers and which are offering insurance has increased to 59% this year, up from 46% last year. The report relies on data from a September survey by the nonprofit Kaiser Family Foundation.

This strikes me as especially significant in an economy characterized by high unemployment, a situation that naturally reduces the need for employers to provide new incentives to find good workers.

Of Ladybugs and Hypocrisy

2010-10-29T04:26:00.000-07:00

Yesterday afternoon, the gossip website Gawker posted a rather tawdry, crude and tasteless account of an evening that a shamless sleazebag of a man spent with Christine O'Donnell, the current GOP candidate for U.S. Senator from Delaware. And while the story does reveal a certain hypocrisy on O'Donnell's part when it comes to the issue of sexual morality, on the whole it says much more about the writer's low ethical standards and classless conduct than it does about Ms. O'Donnell. And I say this as no fan of the dangerously unqualified and recklessly incompetent Pepublican Senate candidate.

Yet with all that, it took the O'Donnell campaign very little time to respond to the story in such a fashion as to erase any sympathy I might have developed for her in the course of these sadly uneccesary events:

Wilmington, DE – Communications Director Doug Sachtleben stated in response to the universal condoning of the Gawker story:
"This story is just another example of the sexism and slander that female candidates are forced to deal with. From Secretary Clinton, to Governor Palin, to soon-to-be Governor Haley, Christine's political opponents have been willing to engage in appalling and baseless attacks — all with the aim of distracting the press from covering the real issues in this race. Even the National Organization for Women gets it, but Christine's opponent disturbingly does not. As Chris Coons said on September 16th he would not condone personal attacks against Christine. Classless Coons goons have proven yet again to have no sense of common decency or common sense with their desperate attacks to get another rubber stamp for the Obama-Pelosi-Reid agenda. Such attacks are truly shameful, but they will not distract us from making our case to Delaware voters — and keeping the focus on Chris Coons' record of higher taxes, increased spending, and as he has done again here, breaking his promises to the voters."
The National Organization for Women (NOW) on Thursday condemned the tabloid website Gawker for publishing an anonymous account: NOW issued a statement late Thursday stating that "sexist, misogynist attacks against women have no place in the electoral process, regardless of a particular candidate's political ideology."
"NOW repudiates Gawker's decision to run this piece. It operates as public sexual harassment. And like all sexual harassment, it targets not only O'Donnell, but all women contemplating stepping into the public sphere," said NOW president Terry O'Neill.

And so with this statement Christine O'Donnell continues in the great tradition of Repubilcan hypocrites who spend careers savaging civil rights and civil liberties organizations such as the National Organization for Women, but then embrace these groups when doing so suits their immediate purposes. Anyone remember Oliver North, the darling of the crypto-fascist Right and current Fox News "analyst", who nonetheless gladly accepted the help of the ACLU lawyers who helped overturn his perjury convictions in the Iran Contra affair? And one sees echoes of Sarah Palin's hypocritical play for female votes in O'Donnell's sisterly embrace of Hillary Clinton. One recalls that in Palin's case, the former half-term Alaska governor first criticized Clinton for her feminist "whining" until she was tapped as John McCain's running mate and decided to make a play for disaffected Hillary Clinton voters. From then on (and once it became clear that Barack Obama was to be the Democratic nominee for president) Palin spoke of Clinton as a fellow traveller unjustly slandered by a sexist press establishment.

And finally there is the purely political attempt by the O'Donnell campaign to turn the episode around and use it to attack Chris Coons by baselessly suggeting that the Coons campaign was somehow behind the story. Not only does O'Donnell provide no proof of these allegations, but Coons was running 20 points ahead of O'Donnell long before the story surfaced. He gains nothing from promoting these tawdry revelations, and indeed and would risk turning off women voters by doing so.

I don't want to suggest that this episode is a case of the chickens somehow coming home to roost, but the fact is that Ms. O'Donnell's private behavior is far more responsible for this episode than anything Chris Coons appears to have done.

All The News That's Fit To Print (And More!)

2010-10-27T08:20:00.000-07:00

Are PBS characters Ernie and Bert gay lovers? That's the pressing question that Fox is pursuing on the FoxNews website today. Their evidence:

On June 11, the famous puppet tweeted about the recent "A-Team" remake by comparing himself to A-Team star Mr-T, saying, "Ever notice how similar my hair is to Mr. T's? The only difference is mine is a little more 'mo,' a little less 'hawk.'"
To some the comment was just a cute quip about hairstyles, but to others, "mo" was short for "homo" and this was Bert's way of coming out at the perfect time.

Typical Fox News petty vindictiveness in the wake of the Juan Williams termination. Ooooh, PBS (and by extension NPR) are secretly trying to gay your kids!

More on WIlliams

2010-10-26T04:18:00.000-07:00

James Fallows has a long post on the Juan Williams affair in which he outlines objections to Williams' association with NPR while working for Fox that are simliar to the ones I voiced earlier on this blog:

I care about NPR not because of my minor role as a contributor but because of their major role in the American journalistic landscape. To hear the Fox/DeMint attack machine over the past week, NPR is simply a liberal counterpart to Fox -- a politically minded and opinion-driven organization that is only secondarily interested in gathering news. I believe that the mischaracterization is deliberate, and I know it is destructive and wrong.Fox is unmatched at what it does, which is to apply a unified political-cultural world view to the unfolding events of the day. To appreciate its impact, you just have to think about how much more effective it is than the various liberal counterparts -- the now-departed Air America, the Olbermann-Maddow bloc on MSNBC. Rush Limbaugh isn't on Fox, but he showed them how it's done. Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert are technically as effective as Fox, but they are nowhere near as reliably pro-Democratic as Fox is pro-Republican. And they're only on for one hour total a day, weekdays only, rather than 24/7 for Fox."News" in the normal sense is a means for Fox's personalities, not an end in itself. It provides occasions for the ongoing development of its political narrative -- the war on American values, the out-of-touchness of Democrats -- much as current events give preachers material for sermons.

Fallows also adds some interesting historical tidbits, such as the fact that the Bush Whitehouse was fond of Williams as an interviewer because of his softball questioning of the president:

The only interview George W Bush gave to NPR while in office was with Juan Williams in 2007. It is general political-world knowledge that the White House's condition of the interview was that Williams conduct it... later in 2007 the White House offered NPR another interview with Bush, but only if Juan Williams would again do it. NPR said No, we won't take it on those terms; we want to choose the interviewer. Williams did it instead for Fox. Story here.

It's interesting to add that the narrative coming out of Fox is that Juan Williams was fired from NPR for being a "Bill Cosby Liberal," by which Fox means a Liberal who departs from common Liberal shibboleth on cultural issues. Of course another way of putting it is that Williams is a Liberal who is useful to Fox insofar as he puts up only weak and half-hearted defenses of Liberal opinions and positions and can just as often be counted on to attack the left for its supposed ideological intransigence and extremism. In other words, Williams is the only kind of Liberal allowed on Fox: the kind that furthers the station's dishonest ideological narrative. But the most important point to take away from the reaction from Roger Ailes' lackeys is that for Fox, Juan Williams was clearly the token Liberal, and he was presented as such in discussion panels. For NPR, which employed Williams as a correspodent, and not as an opinion journalist, this was simply unacceptable. One cannot imagine ABC, CBS or NBC in their heyday tolerating Dan Rather, Peter Jennings or Tom Brokaw doing ideological driven political commentary on the side? NPR is no different in this respect, because they truly value impartiality.

Chinese Imports as a Percentage of the Total

2010-10-25T06:47:00.000-07:00

A very interesting analysis courtesy of Matthew Yglesias: for all the worry about Chinese imports, the fact is that combined imports from Canada and Mexico are nearly 1 1/2 times as large. Yglesias wonders why China gets so much media coverage.

...I’d say following the news probably leads to a mistake overestimation of how important China is to the US economy. I’d say China accounts for much more than 20 percent of total trade-related media coverage, even though the PRC is just 18.5 percent of our imports and less than 17 percent of our total trade.

This is true, but it seems to me that it's the imbalance going the other way that is most worrisome, and likely accounts for much of the media's focus. While we maintain slight trade imbalances with Mexico and Canda, we, in fact, import about 4x as much from China as we export to China.

Juan Williams

2010-10-22T09:28:00.000-07:00

An e-mail I sent to Andrew Sullivan's blog that pretty much sums up my feeling on the Juan Williams affair:

In discussions of the Juan Williams/NPR dust-up I think one of the big issues is being missed here. Williams' omnipresence on Fox was a concern for his employer for reasons that go well beyond Williams' expressed opinions in one show. Fox News is a propaganda outlet moreso than a proper news organization and one of its primary missions is to discredit objective reporting in order to tilt the country's political discussion to the right. It does this by propagating the myth that mainstream media organizations like CNN and NPR tilt to the left, whereas Fox is neutral in its coverage of the news. And one of the many ways that Fox spreads this distortion is by holding roundtable discussions featuring right-wing partisan political hacks on one side of the table (Wm. Kristal, Charles Krauthammer) and mainstream media journalists on the other. Rarely will you find the editor of the Weekly Standard debating the editor of the Nation on Fox. You are much more likely to see Kristol facing off against Wiliams or Cookie Roberts of NPR. And this very format produces two fundamentally dishonest, desired results for Fox: (1) the disingenuous right-wing propaganda of Kristol et al. is countered by milquetoast commentary from mainstream journalists who don't want to come off as partisans defending left-wing positions (2) the mainstream journalists and their primary employers nonetheless do come off as "liberally biased" because the physical and ideological context demands it: they have been set up to counter the assertions of right-wing partisans.

Mainstream media organizations like NPR fiercely protect their reputation for balance and objectivity. A couple of weeks ago NPR sent out a missive to all of its employees warning them against attending John Stewart and Stephen Colbert's upcoing rally on the mall. This contrasts noticeably with Fox News reporters who can be seen egging on crowds at Tea party rallies (the videos are all over YouTube).

So it's hardly surprising to me that NPR would take this opportunity to divorce itself of Williams. His presence on Fox does not project the image that the news organization wants to present to the public.

Pride (The Bad Kind)

2010-10-22T08:19:00.000-07:00

Quote:

Rick Hoskins told KFVS that he puts the decorations up every year as a sign of "white pride."
"There's been a bunch of people that's stopped by since I put them up," explained Hoskins. "Said they want to shake my hand. They said they're glad to see a little white pride is still left in this country."

The decorations in question? A Halloween display featuring figures depicting a KKK member lynching a black man.

(Wia: Wonkette)

Privatize Social Security?

2010-10-18T11:18:00.000-07:00

Here's an eye opening statement that should trouble anyone who's contemplating a privatized Social Security System:

The decline has been painful for the Japanese, with companies and individuals like Masato having lost the equivalent of trillions of dollars in the stock market, which is now just a quarter of its value in 1989, and in real estate, where the average price of a home is the same as it was in 1983.

Imagine having to rely for your retirement on investment vehicles that are now only 25% as valuable as they were 11 years ago.

The Tennets of Marxism

2010-10-14T07:55:00.002-07:00

Here is a video of Christine O'Donnell stating that "raising taxes" and not eliminating estate taxes are "tennets of Marxism."

This would be comical if O'Donnell didn't actually believe it.

Pure Genius

2010-10-13T05:09:00.001-07:00

Add this one to the list of world's worst ideas. Apparently someone at a school district in Pennsyilvania thought it would be a fine and dandy idea to remotely monitor students who had been lent laptops by activating the integrated webcam and sending pictures back to the school servers. Students and their parents were understandably upset, and sued the district. Now the Lower Merion School District has been ordered to pay students $610,000.00 for invading their privacy. And quite honestly, that's a slap on the wrist compared to what they deserved. That no one ended up in jail, or at the very least on probation, for this is really quite amazing to me. This is the sort of thing sex offender registries were made for.

(Via: Engadget)

Blowing out the cobwebs

2010-10-13T05:06:00.000-07:00

OK, it's been almost a year since I stopped blogging on Patriot's Quill. In that time I've contributed a few pieces to Stinque, but very little here. I think it's time to maybe blow out the cobwebs and ramp this blog up. Let's see how it goes over the next few days.

New Post on Stinque.

2010-09-05T11:48:00.000-07:00

Haven't added much here lately. I have posted the occasional piece on Stinque, though, and here's my latest.

Win for the White House

2010-02-26T03:34:00.000-08:00

Paul Krugman's got a great column this morning on yesterday's health care summit. It's worth a read and makes the obvious point that it has set in motion the best prospects yet for passage of a bill. The Huffington Post reports that 3.9 million people streamed the summit on their web browsers, so it was clearly a closely watched affair. For my part, I found it tremendously refreshing to catch a glimpse of the old Barack Obama. This is the guy we voted for: sharp, intelligent, a very strong debater with legions of facts at his fingertips ready to refute dishonest GOP talking points. As a former college professor, this style of open but managed debate is clearly his strong suit. He is in his element at the front of a class, making an argument, fielding questions and disabusing students of erroneous beliefs and mis-perceptions. Faced with lies and distortions about the Democratic health care plan, he never flinched, never lost his cool, and simply responded by disabusing Republican leaders of their errors (as when schooling Lamar Alexander on his dishonest claims about premium increases) or brought them back on track when they started to go off on irrelevant tangents (as when chiding John McCain for acting more like a campaigner than an honest broker trying to solve a problem for Americans).

This is how liberals win the war of ideas: by staging an open debate in a respectful forum charged with defending claims and counter-claims by appeal to facts and reasoned argument. Contrast this with the way in which conservatives do: last summer Tea Party activists descended upon Democratic healthcare Town Hall meetings and yelled insults at participants, shouted down speakers and made claims about planned bills that had nothing to do with what was actually contained in them.

My only worry is that Democrats, through their cowardice and inability to come together around a single bill for so many months may have damaged their brand to such an extent that they will face devastating losses in 2010 elections. It would be a real irony if Democrats rescued an economy that Republicans nearly destroyed, and gave the American people real, workable health care reform, only to find a mended nation handed back to the GOP for governance. It would be like a hospital discharging a victim of brutal spousal abuse back to her husband as soon as she's well enough to go home.

Sadly, if this happens, it's the feuding, unmanageable and sometimes cowardly Democrats themselves who will be largely to blame.

In Which I Try To Play Nate Silver

2010-02-11T04:11:00.000-08:00

Meandering over to Wonkette yesterday I ran across another amusing tale of Fox News much vaunted ~~propagandizing~~ balance falling flat on face. It comes in the form of a poll published in the Fox Forum that gives some remarkably non-foxy results. I'll go ahead and reproduce the poll results as of 7:00 this morning (click image to enlarge):

Now, it's certainly amusing to see Fox publish a poll in which a full 75% of respondents characterize the Tea Party movement as a "fruitless mix of racism, conspiracy theories." It was, no doubt not the results that the creator of the poll was hoping for. Most likely, once the poll began yielding unexpected results it got picked up by the liberal blogs who then sent it waves of traffic, further skewing the results in a direction the poll creators were neither expecting nor hoping for. These sorts of things have a way of snowballing once they reach a certain critical mass, and currently there are over 155,000 responses to the poll --by my count more than three times the number of responses for the previous two polls. It bears mentioning, furthermore, that this is an unscientific, self-selecting, internet poll. So the results would have been dubious at best no matter how they came up.

That said, Fox News does have a storied history of FAIL when it comes to charts and basic math. The most notorious example of which I have taken the liberty to reproduce below:

If you successfully completed 1st grade, you've probably realized that the percentages in the above poll add up to 193%.If you've gotten as far as 2nd grade then you know they should add up to 100% But if you were home schooled by parents seeking to shield you from Satanism in the form of the Theory of Evolution (as the Fox News intern who produced the above chart likely was) then you're probably pretty comfortable with the results.

But the tragedy of Fox News' epic stupid doesn't end there. As I mulled over the amusing results of the first poll, I realized that the creators of the poll, in their propagandistic zeal and lack of basic math competence had drafted a poll that actually favored the sort of result they were hoping to avoid. How so, you ask? Let me explain:

One of the surest ways to guarantee a position a strong showing in a multiple-choice poll is to provide several subtly different alternatives for opponents of your position to chose from, while providing only one choice for proponents to pick. So, for instance, if I wanted to prove the superiority of hamburgers over pasta in a population of evenly divided hamburger lovers and pasta lovers, I would produce a poll such as this:

Now, assuming these pasta lovers all love different kinds of pasta, I can expect a poll result like this:

Though poll responses are evenly divided between pasta lovers and hamburger lovers, the way this poll was constructed, and especially the bar graph format gives the false impression that the overwhelming majority of respondents are hamburger lovers. And this is exactly what Fox has done, crafting a poll that gives the president's opponents three options to chose from, but supporters only one (we can pretty much disregard the meaningless 5th "other" option).

So why did editors who produced this poll for Fox News make such a basic mistake? I have a theory that goes beyond their appallingly obvious lack of basic math competence. My suspicion is that the producers of the graph are so blindly driven in their ideological partisanship that they can think of all sorts of reasons to hate President Obama and the Democrats and have a hard time narrowing it down. But when it comes to providing the opposite choice, they find the idea so distasteful that they can bring themselves to provide only one pro-Obama option, and that only to avoid producing a poll so ridiculously partisan in its framing that it makes a complete mockery of Fox's disingenuous "fair and balanced" mantra. You can't defend a poll that doesn't give the opposition at least one voting option.

And what happens then, is that the few liberals who do hang around at Fox can more easily tilt the poll in their favor. Once this starts to happen the unexpected results get linked to by some high-volume liberal blogs and before you know it 75% of respondents think the movement you're trying to promote is made up of racists and crazy conspiracy theorists.

Nice going Fox.