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Yep.

2012-02-19T10:53:00.001-06:00

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Well, That Didn't Take Long

2012-02-19T10:24:00.003-06:00

We knew it was only a matter of time.

Santorum says Obama agenda not 'based on Bible'

No, that's not a headline from the Onion. It's real, folks!

Obama's agenda is "not about you. It's not about your quality of life. It's not about your jobs. It's about some phony ideal. Some phony theology. Oh, not a theology based on the Bible. A different theology," Santorum told supporters of the conservative Tea Party movement at a Columbus hotel.

This sounds so familiar....I can't quite place my finger on it...hmm....oh yeah....

10. Invoking the Christian God. This is similar to othering and populism. With morality politics, the idea is to declare yourself and your allies as patriots, Christians and "real Americans" (those are inseparable categories in this line of thinking) and anyone who challenges them as not. Basically, God loves Fox and Republicans and America. And hates taxes and anyone who doesn't love those other three things. Because the speaker has been benedicted by God to speak on behalf of all Americans, any challenge is perceived as immoral. It's a cheap and easy technique used by all totalitarian entities from states to cults.

We're The Ones Who Should Bitch (But We Don't)

2012-02-18T20:29:00.003-06:00

A few days back I posted this graphic which ruffled a few feathers. I always chuckle when this happens because the more acute the mouth foaming, the closer I know I am to reality, facts and bursting the bubble that surrounds the conservative utopia that the base has created for itself. The land where Ayn Rand and Jesus are worshiped side by side every night while the Constitution and the Bible are never EVER questioned. And liberals are statist thugs bent on penetrating that bubble-taking away guns, rights, and letting their women use contraception in their never ending pursuit to bankrupt this country with social welfare programs that take the fruit of hard earned worker's labor and give it to black people who use it to get a flat screen TV.

The simple fact is, as I pointed out the other day, the people who bitch about government handouts are usually the ones that benefit from them the most.

Yet this year, as in each of the past three years, Mr. Gulbranson, 57, is counting on a payment of several thousand dollars from the federal government, a subsidy for working families called the earned-income tax credit. He has signed up his three school-age children to eat free breakfast and lunch at federal expense. And Medicare paid for his mother, 88, to have hip surgery twice.

Oh really? Was this before or after he made his Tea Party T-Shirts? In fact, it was both.

More interesting is this map which shows the areas of the country that take the most money from the federal government. Let's see we have darker red in Mississippi, Alabama, Arizona (really, Jan Brewer?), Florida, Texas, Alaska (hee hee), Kentucky, Tennessee, and Oklahoma-states that always or mostly deep GOP. Scroll over Oklahoma, for example, and see the various counties that are receiving over 30 percent of personal income from programs like food stamps and Medicare.

Dean P. Lacy, a professor of political science at Dartmouth College, has identified a twist on that theme in American politics over the last generation. Support for Republican candidates, who generally promise to cut government spending, has increased since 1980 in states where the federal government spends more than it collects. The greater the dependence, the greater the support for Republican candidates.

Conversely, states that pay more in taxes than they receive in benefits tend to support Democratic candidates. And Professor Lacy found that the pattern could not be explained by demographics or social issues.

As I have suspected, these people are completely full of shit. Bitching about the government is like a hobby for them and, if their little slice was taken away, they'd shit themselves silly. Of course, this is another shining example of the adolescent who bitches about his parents but then comes running to mommy and daddy when he or she gets into trouble.

Lately, the government has been very good, indeed. The county, with federal financing, bought a corner of Mr. Peterson’s farm to build a new interchange for Interstate 35. He used the money to open a gas station at the edge of the farm in 2008 to serve the traffic that rolls off the new ramp. The business is prospering, and he no longer worries that he will need to depend on Social Security.

Yeah, they're "independent" alright.

Given this data, shouldn't Democrats be the ones that bitch considering that OUR taxes are actually paying for several million conservatives on the dole? Nope.

Because we understand what it means to be a grown up.

Yeah...No...Not Really

2012-02-18T13:49:00.000-06:00

If I had a buck for every time I heard a conservative whine to me in the last couple of years about how "the president and the Democrats haven't passed a budget in a thousand days," I'd be a millionaire (and I'd still be a Democrat with all my money:)). The problem with this ripe of piece of poo (like most of the other things they say) is that they aren't really telling the whole story and (as usual) are being childishly dishonest.

To begin with, budget resolutions aren't binding. They're simply parameters for the House Appropriations Committee to use when they actually pass their various bills and spend money. Their actions are what ultimately execute the budget and guess what? They've been doing it all along even with all the acrimony that's been taking place since the GOP took back the House.

More importantly, when the Senate passed the Budget Control Act last summer that resolved the debt limit battle, they passed an actual binding bill that set binding appropriations caps for this fiscal year and the next and instituted a mechanism to contain spending on domestic discretionary programs — education, research, community health programs and the like — through the next decade. This would be why Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid won't bring the president's budget to the floor of the Senate: it's redundant.

So, the next time you hear some ass hat foaming at the mouth about how the Democrats haven't passed a budget in a thousand days, point out these two facts to them.

And remind them that the Republicans did the same thing 1998, 2004, and 2006.

Bril!

2012-02-17T14:27:00.002-06:00

The Obama campaign has seized upon a brilliant way to address the fictional character created by the right known as Barack X. Check out THE TRUTH TEAM.

This site is divided into three sections. The first is AttackWatch which takes all the comments that reside under the "Managing Fantasies" heading and addresses them head on. For example, the Republican Jewish Committee has made the false claim that the president is cutting funding to Israel. Click here and you will see what is actually happening in reality.

The second section, Keeping GOP Honest, looks at their policy points and breaks them down. For example, Mitt Romney has repeatedly said that he would've let GM and the auto industry to fail. Here is some information that illustrates the folly of that idea.

The third section should be dedicated to our very own last in line. Keeping His Word has a complete list of his accomplishments. Click on any of the six sections and see the benefits of his policies.

All in all, a very smart move considering what we all know is coming: more fictional history of the man named (dum dum DAH) Barack X!

If only John Kerry had been smart enough to do this in 2004 then he wouldn't now still be known as a French war criminal.

A Load of Papal Bull

2012-02-17T13:21:00.000-06:00

I heard an interview on the radio today with Michelle Bachmann. During her rant against President Obama's decision on birth control, she characterized the regulation as an attack on religious freedom and democracy. But while pretending to call for religious freedom and democracy, Bachmann is actually giving a foreign dictator the power to control the most intimate part of American life.

The big stink began when American Catholic bishops complained about regulations requiring employers to pay for birth control. Obama relented and said that the insurance companies would pay instead. Why do the bishops oppose contraception? There's a papal bull called Humanae Vitae. It was issued by Pope Paul VI in 1968 and condemns artificial birth control.

In the Catholic Church one man dictates all policy. Tomorrow the pope could issue another bull and say birth control is fine and is necessary because we have fulfilled the commandments of the Bible. We have been so fruitful and so successful at multiplying that there are now seven billion of us. To be good stewards of the earth, he could say, we must prevent overpopulation. He could cite Leviticus and Exodus and justify birth control on the basis of the idea that the fields must be allowed to lie fallow for a time: once we've had two kids, we can use birth control. The bishops would reverse course and accept Obama's regulation the next day, with the proviso that they would only pay for contraception for married couples with children. Yes, this whole argument is that arbitrary and capricious.

It's estimated that between two-thirds and 99% of all American Catholics are using or have used artificial birth control. The majority of Catholics think the pope is wrong, and if they were allowed to vote on this issue the pope would lose. Several of the bishops themselves have disagreed with the pope on this issue in the past, but have been silenced by threats or replaced.

But, you say, the Church isn't a democracy. The people don't get to vote on this. Sorry, that's just not true. The people do get a vote, and they vote with their feet. That's why Moses left Egypt, Christianity separated from Judaism, why there was a Schism between the Orthodox and Roman Catholic churches, and why Luther had a Reformation. The ban on birth control is a major reason why more than 20 million Americans are lapsed Catholics. That's enough to qualify them as the second-largest denomination in the United States.

Now, on the merits, the scriptural argument against contraception is tenuous a best, usually justified with the injunction to "be fruitful and multiply" and the case of Onan spilling his seed.

Onan's story is particularly interesting: when his brother died the law required him to give offspring to his childless widow to preserve the family line. Onan had sex with her several times, but since he didn't want her children to become his heirs he practiced coitus interruptus, "spilling his seed on the ground." For this Onan was sentenced to death. The Catholic Church cites this in their arguments against contraception and masturbation. But they completely miss the real point of this story.

The crimes Onan committed were lusting after another man's wife, incest, adultery, rape and breach of contract by failing to provide agreed-to natural insemination services. Onan was supposed to deliver the semen into her womb, but spilled it on the ground instead. This says nothing about birth control within marriage, or masturbation for that matter.

In fact, the Catholic Church does not forbid all birth control—it encourages the use of "natural family planning," an updated version of the rhythm method. By monitoring a woman's cycle, temperature and cervical mucus you can attain 95-99% effectiveness, which rivals artificial means. Only 75-88% is typical, however, which is about the same effectiveness as the withdrawal method that Onan practiced.

If you limit sexual activity to even more specific times of the cycle you can be virtually guaranteed that pregnancy will not result. What is the difference between spilling seed onto the ground and into a womb that you know has no uterine lining and will not receive an egg for two weeks? Well, one could say, you might still get pregnant by a hitch in the woman's cycle or especially hardy sperm. But the same is true of withdrawal, the pill, condoms, diaphragms, and spermicides. All methods of contraception have non-zero failure rates—even the surgical means of tubal ligation and vasectomy.

If avoiding pregnancy by artificial means is a sin, is not the intent to avoid pregnancy by natural means the same sin? After all, if it's God's will that you become pregnant, condoms can break and pills can fail. And if God is demanding fruitfulness, isn't abstinence in marriage is just as much a violation of His will as contraception?

As the religious right keeps telling us, the institution of marriage is having a tough time. It's particularly galling that a pope who's never known the love of a woman thinks he knows what's best for married folks. Sex binds husbands and wives together. Without it they feel unloved, unfulfilled and alone. Just ask Newt Gingrich.

The three main causes of divorce are money, kids and sex. Since sex the papal way causes kids, and kids cost money, one could argue that it all goes back to sex. Couples with too many kids and not enough money are extremely stressed. Now the pope wants to add even more stress by telling these married couples that they can't have sex?

That's a load of papal bull.

Still A Massive Success

2012-02-16T10:25:00.001-06:00

General Motors reported its highest profit in the history of the company. 2011 saw earnings of 7.6 billion dollars.Strong sales in the U.S. and China helped the carmaker turn a profit of $7.6 billion, beating its old record of $6.7 billion in 1997 during the pickup and SUV boom.

I wonder how this will be spun in the land where Barack X is president. Ah, I'll just wait for the comments below and I'll get my answer.

The Turning of the Fatherland

2012-02-16T10:19:00.001-06:00

Man oh man, people are pissed about Fox News these days. Perhaps Roger Ailes and Co have discovered how far that bearing wall on the right goes before ratings start to suffer.

Adding insult to injury is the latest poll from FOX News. Check out how the president does against any of the contenders in the Dixie States of Virginia, North Carolina, and Florida. And a 50 percent approval rating?

No wonder two thirds of the base want someone else to jump in the race.

Gay And Retarded

2012-02-16T06:00:00.000-06:00

There's not a day that goes by that I don't hear the words "gay" and "retarded" in school. In fact, I myself have said them in the past on several occasions while out at the pub or some other such social occasion.. But something clicked in me many months back and I realized that I just didn't want to say them anymore. If you sit back and think about it, if something is "gay" that means it's stupid. That's connecting stupidity to homosexuality. And if something is "retarded," that's belittling someone who has a disability. So I stopped saying them. Most of my students still do although they know I don't like it. I might throw them a look or make a quick comment which usually elicits a quick apology. They don't really mean much by it and, sadly, it is part of their slang these days.

They may not mean much by it but, people being who they are, will always take things further. What happens at that point? Well, this. I've had several requests to comment on this story and so here it is.

I'll start off by saying that the Anoka-Hennepin School District from the top down has done an awful job of handling this situation. Rather than focus on handling the bullying side of it and adopting a zero tolerance rule for such behavior (as is the case in both my district and my children's district), they chose to give a forum to people who talk of "radical homosexual agendas." (side question: Just what exactly is the "agenda that homosexual activists are seeking to advance?") This lead to the very justified entrance of GLBT and civil rights groups which, in turn, leads to a situation that is FUBAR. In playing the "Cult of Both Sides" game, they ended up losing.

What the school district should have done was tell the No Homo Promo crowd that, under no circumstances, will they tolerate people being treated poorly for any reason. As Howard Stern so eloquently explains at the end of this post, there should be zero tolerance for these people.

Now, to be fair, the situation isn't exactly as depicted as it was in the Rolling Stone article. We have this recent vote in which the policy was changed. And we have another look at the school district in which we see a different angle to what was originally reported. Some of what the school district officials say in this latter article ring true. The original article is distorted and the side of the story that isn't being told is seen in both of above links.

The fact of the matter is that teachers have far too much on their plate to talk as much about sex as all of the stories seem to illustrate. Other than health classes, there really isn't that much cause to talk about homosexuality and kids don't really bring it up-in a bullying environment or otherwise. There is some of random stuff here and there that goes on in most districts but, for the most part, this sort of thing isn't common. Essentially, the Anoka-Hennepin suicides (along with their recently reversed asinine policy) are an anomaly. Just like GSAs aren't "sex clubs," rampant bigotry leading gay kids to suicide is also an outlier.

There are far too many other mountains to conquer such as making sure students achieve state standards, perform well on the various standardized tests they need to take, and trying to inspire and motivate completely checked out parents to give at least one shit about the lives of their children. Tiptoeing around the issue of homosexuality isn't something that most educators have the time for these days. Hell, some days, the simple act of motivating a student to do a simple assignment on the Constitution is nearly impossible. Some are tired, some are ADHD, some are intervention, some are bored, and far too many simply don't care. Again, this all comes back to the parents of the Michael Jordan Generation expecting "The Help" to nanny their kids.

Still, it's tough not to get angry when you hear people like Barb Anderson, the founder of No Homo Promo, Rick Santorum, or Michele Bachmann, whose district is the home to Anoka-Hennepin schools, talk about homosexuals. They sound like fucking Nazis and I'm being kind in saying that. Part of me really struggles to say that this situation is an outlier and I shouldn't take it as the norm which is more or less the reason why I wrote what I did above...to convince myself. And the times they are indeed a-changin' as most younger people don't give two shits about whether someone is gay or not so I'd do better if I thought about that more often.

But 9 kids are fucking dead and people who think that it was their "gayness" that caused it are very, very dangerous people. Gay people used to be subjected to asylums and electro-shock therapy. As Ayaan Hirsi Ali said, "To be tolerant of intolerance is cowardice." Howard Stern expands on this point in this clip.

It's times like this when I have to have patience and remember that one of my biggest heroes is the non-violent Dr. King.

And that people like Barb Anderson, as history has always shown us, end up in a fucking bunker somewhere.

Well?

2012-02-15T14:43:00.000-06:00

Using History to Lie

2012-02-15T14:29:00.000-06:00

Usually politicians use statistics to lie, but the current crop of Republicans have turned to history. The other day Rick Santorum said:

When you marginalize faith in America,. when you remove the pillar of God-given rights, then what’s left is the French Revolution. What’s left is a government that will tell you who you are, what you’ll do and when you’ll do it. What’s left in France became the guillotine.

Despite what Santorum might think, the French Revolution had nothing to do with birth control: it was about overthrowing a corrupt and absolutist monarchy that was inseparable from the Catholic Church. Generations of Catholic French kings and Catholic bishops had persecuted and murdered thousands upon thousands of French Protestants. This oppression was one of the key elements that sparked the French Revolution.

President Obama is not starting a revolution here. All the regulation does is tell church-related organizations (not churches themselves, by the way), that they can't force their employees to obey the dictates of a bunch of crotchety old male spinsters who are beholden to a pope that lives in Rome.

The bishops who are whining about the new regulation all live in the lap of luxury and have life-time appointments to jobs that they'll never have to worry about losing. Men who, should they happen to lose those jobs because of a scandal like, say, covering up sexual molestation of children, will be able to toddle off to Rome to live out the rest of their days in sybaritic comfort. They don't have to make a decent living to feed their families. Because they don't have families. Many non-Catholics and tens of millions of American Catholics who do use birth control disagree with them on this impractical dogma against birth control. Kids cost money. If you have more kids, that's less money to spend on the kids you already have. Not everyone can afford (or survive) having 12 kids.

The fact is, hundreds of other denominations disagree with the Catholic Church about birth control and abortion on scriptural grounds. The compromise regulation requires insurance companies to pay for the birth control of employees who work for Catholic-aligned organizations. Not Catholic organizations themselves. Employees have religious freedoms too. My medical care shouldn't be dictated by my employer's beliefs.

On a practical level, the regulation helps people afford medical treatment that will reduce health care costs for all of us by preventing unwanted pregnancies. It will reduce the number of abortions. And reduce the number of single mothers and kids on welfare, and reduce the number of disaffected youth who become criminals because their single moms never wanted them. It's a win-win-win-win solution.

Now, if Santorum wants to talk guillotines, let's talk guillotines.

Just as Newt Gingrich does all the time, Santorum is making a historical reference in order to lie. He can do this because he knows that no one will understand the reference in its full context, or even bother to look it up. Like Gingrich, he makes the reference to pretend he's got the force of history on his side. When exactly the opposite is true.

During the Reformation, the Catholic Church was allied with the monarchy in France and used its power to oppress a competing religion that was making serious inroads into its base -- Protestantism, whose members in the 1980s made the Republican Party what it is today.

One famous example of Catholic abuse of power in France is the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre, in 1572, when the Catholic king of France had thousands of Protestant Huguenots assassinated and murdered. The Catholic Church was also the biggest single land owner in the country and taxed people as if the Church were the government, while being itself exempt to taxes. The church was an oppressive employer that denied its subjects basic religious freedoms. Thus, the Catholic Church was no innocent bystander in the French Revolution: its persecutions of Protestants were one of the revolution's root causes.

In the broader context of the Reformation the Catholic Church tortured, beheaded, burned or hanged millions of Protestants throughout Europe. The Catholic Church burned people at the stake for saying that the earth orbited the sun. Sir Thomas More, the English Catholic saint, burned people at the stake for denying that the eucharist was Christ's flesh -- even though anyone with taste buds can tell it's not meat (unless the Pillsbury Dough Boy is the second coming of Christ). To be fair, Protestant rulers did the same thing to Catholics when they gained power: witness English history during the period from Henry VIII to Elizabeth I.

The modern secular nations of Europe -- which Republicans insist we are in dire danger of becoming -- have all outlawed the death penalty: their "marginalization" of religion has eliminated the guillotine. Most of the countries where the death penalty is still practiced -- the United States, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Indonesia, China, Viet Nam, North Korea -- are dominated by absolutist conservative religions or doctrinaire ideologies.

Just to be clear, I'm not just picking on Catholicism. Other religions have murdered millions of people as well, and so did Hitler and Stalin and Pol Pot. And, just to be clear, it's not the Catholic faith itself that demanded this murder and mayhem: it was the political hierarchy and moneyed interests who claimed its authority to enrich and empower themselves. Those who demand total obedience to an absolutist interpretation of a faith or ideology to strengthen their grip on temporal power are the ones who ultimately resort to murder to impose their will on others.

The president is doing exactly the opposite. He's saying, "People should be free to use birth control if they want and their employers shouldn't be able to stop them. And, by the way, I'm not gonna make the employers pay for it if they really don't want to."

President Obama is advocating religious freedom for all. The Catholic Church is interested only in promulgating its version of the faith, and denying certain freedoms to others.

Maps Are Always Helpful

2012-02-14T18:41:00.002-06:00

Nope, no racism here, none whatsoever, please move along..

Oopsies!

2012-02-14T13:39:00.000-06:00

John Flemming, Republican Representative from Louisisana, posted a link from the Onion as his status update recently thinking that it was a real story. The story, entitled “Planned Parenthood Opens $8 Billion Abortionplex”, was completely fake (obviously) and Flemming falling for it is a darn fine example of what happens when the froth from the mouth foamers get's extra thick.

The Onion’s editor, Joe Randazzo, said the publication is proud to count Fleming as a reader.“We’re delighted to hear that Rep. Fleming is a regular reader of America’s Finest News Source and doesn’t bother himself with The New York Times, Washington Post, the mediums of television and radio, or any other lesser journalism outlets,” he said in a statement.

Hee Hee...:)

The Still Not Dead Yet Narrative

2012-02-14T13:33:00.000-06:00

The numbers are in on how many people ditched their banks last November and, I have to say, it's pretty impressive. Over 5 million people switched from the big banks to local and community banks and credit unions. Around 600,00 said it was because of Bank Transfer Day. Increased fees were cited as the main reason for people leaving their banks.

“Banks are facing difficult times on multiple fronts: Profits are being squeezed, regulators are more demanding, foreclosures remain problematic, and consumers are fighting back on fees. On top of all this, many banks are losing customers, including defections prompted by grassroots efforts like the recent Bank Transfer Day," ACSI founder Claes Fornell said.

The Occupy camps may be closed down but the banks are still feeling the effects of the movement and, honestly, I think it's going to be permanent. People aren't looking all that kindly at Wall Street and the big banks these days and it's likely going to stay that way.

The Fence and the Market

2012-02-14T10:37:00.000-06:00

Remember the vaunted border fence that would protect us from Mexico? Well, it has a few problems.

Because the border between Mexico and the US is defined by a river prone to flooding, the fence actually has to be built some distance from the border. Which means some Americans wind up on the other side. And that means they have to have a way to get back and forth between their land and the rest of the United States.

The solution is to install gates:

The arrival of the gates will reveal whether the government's solution for this border fence problem will work. Can sliding panels in the fence controlled by passcodes allow isolated workers to cross when they need to while keeping intruders out?

How will the gates work?

Gates will roll open on a metal track after a passcode is punched into a panel on or near the fence. Landowners would have permanent codes and could request temporary ones for visitors. Customs and Border Protection has begun testing its first two gates and plans to install 42 more in South Texas this year at a cost of $10 million.

So, there will be hundreds if not thousands of people who will have the codes to open these gates. And they would never accept bribes for the codes, or could never be coerced on pain of death to reveal them. Brilliant.

And how does the fence work in general?

But farmers point out that there is a lot the agents can't stop. They point out dusty footprints scaling the columns and say illegal immigrants can climb the barrier in seconds flat.

"It's the biggest waste of taxpayer money," said Leonard Loop at his produce stand east of Brownsville, where his family farms and some relatives' homes are in an area between the fence and the river.

I guess that's why Herman Cain wanted an electrified fence and a moat with gators. But unless there are guards along the entire 2000-mile length of the border, even the more severe obstacles are trivial to breach. If Cain were still in the race at this point he'd be suggesting we lay Claymores along the border.

Now, I know what you're thinking: why was Obama so stupid to build the fence on our side of the border? Why didn't he just steal land from Mexico? Well, first off: the fence was started under Bush. And second: taking land from other countries is a dandy way to start a war. Sure, we could win a war against Mexico. But we already had two wars going. And after we won the war against Mexico we'd have to build a giant embassy in Mexico City and spend a trillion dollars rebuilding their infrastructure. And then we'd have to deal with pesky Mexican terrorists for the next century.

So, why are we building the fence again? Generally there are two answers:

1) To keep out illegal aliens out who are willing to do jobs that Americans won't at the wages American employers are willing to pay.

2) To keep out evil murdering drug smugglers who fill the incessant demand of Americans for cocaine and marijuana, while smuggling weapons back into Mexico.

Both these problems seem to be within our control. Illegal aliens wouldn't come here if American employers refused to hire them. And drug traffickers wouldn't smuggle drugs here if we didn't buy them, or smuggle guns into Mexico if we didn't make it so easy to get guns.

These are issues of simple market-based supply and demand. If we eliminate the demand for illegal alien workers and illegal drugs, the supply will dry up. The magic of the marketplace will make the problem disappear.

What, you think getting Americans off illegal cocaine and marijuana is harder than putting down dozens of criminal gangs financed by billions of dollars in foreign drug money and armed by lax American gun laws? You think getting American employers to obey employment law is harder than correcting centuries of intractable poverty and illiteracy?

If we really want to solve these problems, we've got to make hard decisions that require serious tradeoffs. One of them is pretty straightforward: end the war on drugs. Let non-violent drug offenders out of prison, put them into treatment and save billions of dollars a year on prisons. That also ends most gang warfare in the United States and reduces our murder rate. It does increase the unemployment rate. Well, can't win 'em all.

The illegal alien problem is harder, but there are still options: we can more strictly enforce employment laws, which will force many farmers, slaughterhouses, restaurants, motels to either go out of business or raise their prices so that they can afford to employ Americans who need to make a living wage. That would also help reduce the unemployment rate, at the cost of more expensive food, lawn care, restaurant meals, hotel stays, etc.

Or we can reform immigration laws and open the flood gates to accommodate American businesses who want to hire cheap migrant labor while millions of Americans can't find work that pays enough for them to live on.

Or -- and I know some of you are thinking this -- we could take those non-violent drug offenders from problem one and form work camps, selling prison labor to the highest bidders in the private sector. Then we can be just like communist China, using slave labor to do the dirty jobs no one else wants to do.

Or we could let the non-violent drug offenders out of prison on work release and have them do the jobs usually reserved for illegal aliens. Even if the salary needed to be subsidized to make it a living wage, it would still be cheaper than keeping them under lock and key 24/7.

These solutions have trade-offs and winners and losers. But as it stands now, we've got both sides of these problems and none of the benefits. The winners are the drug cartels and private prison industry, while the rest of us are the losers.

Good Grief...

2012-02-13T17:46:00.000-06:00

While I'm always sad at the passing of someone, America...please pull your head out of your overly corporate media influenced ass and get some fucking priorities.

And people wonder why our children don't know who holds the office of vice president.

And the 2042 Nobel Prize for Physics Goes to....

2012-02-13T11:15:00.000-06:00

At the bottom of this post is a list of the 40 finalists in the 2012 Intel Science Talent Search. The competition is sponsored by Intel and Society for Science & the Public, the publisher of Science News. It was started in 1942 as the Westinghouse Science Talent Search. The purpose of the search is to find the scientists of the future:

The finalists “exemplify the promise of young people to bring creativity and innovation to bear to create a better world,” says Elizabeth Marincola, publisher of Science News and president of Society for Science & the Public, which has operated the Science Talent Search since 1942. “We applaud their hard work and creativity, and look forward to their continued contributions to human advancement.”

The 40 students selected were winnowed from 300 semifinalists, who were chosen from a pool of 1,744 entrants. These math, engineering and science achievers join a select group of scientific luminaries: Past finalists have earned seven Nobel Prizes and four National Medals of Science. Physicist and Nobel laureate Sheldon Glashow was a finalist in 1950; in 1980 Harvard University string theorist Lisa Randall was selected. Actress Natalie Portman was a semi-finalist in 1999.

If you examine the names carefully, you'll immediately notice a pattern: most of them are Asian. It's hard to determine actual ethnicity by names -- especially for blacks and American Indians, whose original family names were long ago stripped by slave owners or government edict. So some of the names I've identified as European may actually belong to people who consider themselves non-white. But by my rough estimate only six of the finalists are males of European descent. Five are females of European descent. The rest are mostly Chinese, Indian or other apparent Asian ethnicity.

Thirty or forty years ago, and certainly in 1942, nearly all these finalists would have been males of European descent. Though non-Hispanic whites still comprise 64% of the population of the United States, 73% of the 2012 STS finalists appear to be Asian, who comprise only 4.7% of the population.

This says something pretty dire about white American males: they're getting less education and they're less competitive at the higher levels. Where they used to dominate the fields of science and technology, they're barely keeping ahead of white girls, who have historically shunned math, science and engineering.

Not all these kids will become Nobel prize winners, but they will hold many of the high-paying jobs in medicine, science and technology. They will be the ones developing new medical treatments, new patents and new products. The next generation of technology will be designed by Asian Americans. That means they're going to starting new companies. And running them. And making lots of money.

When we think of the the high-tech nerds who made personal computers, the Internet and mobile computing revolution possible we think of white guys like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. (But, come to think of it, Steve Jobs was actually half Syrian, wasn't he?) Those days appear to be over.

As Charles Murray has noted, lower class whites are falling into the same trap that American blacks fell into decades ago. Conservatives like to blame government largesse, laziness and licentiousness. But we're all living in the same culture with the same access to government support, mind-numbing drugs, sex, sports, television and video games. Yet recent Asian immigrants -- who are almost certainly not very rich -- are able to ignore all that and still strive to work hard and get an education, while whites on the same rung of the economic ladder are falling behind. Why?

The culture of failure became ingrained in black America because no matter what they did, they were kept down. They weren't allowed to vote, get a decent education, hold good jobs or even sit at the same lunch counter as whites. How could anyone succeed in an environment where you're told every step of the way that you're inferior, or strung you up if you just looked at a white girl?

The culture of failure seems to have become ingrained in lower-class white America. Beginning with Henry Ford and the unionization of the work force, lower-class uneducated whites had opportunities to live well and their kids had the opportunity to move up the economic ladder. But for decades now those Americans have seen their lives fall apart. First it was steel mills to Japan, then automobile manufacturing to Japan and Mexico, then general manufacturing to China, then high-tech manufacturing to Asia. Unions have been essentially destroyed and real wages have been in decline for decades. We thought we'd be safe with the high-paying white-collar jobs in technology and finance, but with the rise of the Internet it has become trivial to outsource any job: engineering design, software development, medical imaging analysis, legal research, finance and on and on.

Two and three generations of lower-class white kids have now seen their dads sitting home with nothing to do after losing job after job to foreigners who make 31 cents an hour. How can anyone succeed in an environment where your family's entire life experience proves that no matter how many hours of overtime you put in, the bossman will take it away and give it to someone who's even more desperate than you are?

2011 Intel STS Finalists (listed by state, name, hometown and high school)

ARIZONA Scott Boisvert, Chandler, Basha High School

CALIFORNIA Amol Aggarwal, Saratoga, Saratoga High School;Xiaoyu Cao, San Diego, Torrey Pines High School; Bonnie Lei,Walnut, Walnut High School; Jonathan Li, Laguna Niguel, St. Margaret’s Episcopal School; Selena Li, Fair Oaks, Mira Loma High School; Andrew Liu, Palo Alto, Henry M. Gunn Senior High School;Rohan Mahajan, Cupertino, The Harker School; Evan O’Dorney,Danville,Venture School; Nikhil Parthasarathy, Mountain View, The Harker School; David Tang-Quan, Rancho Palos Verdes, Palos Verdes Peninsula High School; Chelsea Voss, Santa Clara, Cupertino High School

CONNECTICUT Jenny Liu, Orange, Amity Regional High School;Shubhro Saha, Avon, Choate Rosemary Hall

FLORIDA Eta Atolia, Tallahassee, Rickards High School; Elaine Zhou, Winter Park, Lake Highland Preparatory School

ILLINOIS Krystle Leung, Naperville, Naperville Central High School

MASSACHUSETTS Sung Won Cho, Lexington, Groton School

MICHIGAN Shubhangi Arora, Novi, Novi High School

MINNESOTA Prithwis Mukhopadhyay, Woodbury, Woodbury High School

NORTH CAROLINA Si-Yi Lee, Charlotte, North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics; Matthew Miller, Elon, Western Alamance High School

NEBRASKA Emily Chen, Omaha, Brownell-Talbot School

NEW JERSEY Alison Bick, Short Hills, Millburn High School; Joshua Bocarsly, Plainsboro, The Lawrenceville School; Wenyu Cao, Belle Mead, Phillips Academy

NEW YORK Jonathan Aaron Goldman, Plainview, Plainview-Old Bethpage John F. Kennedy High School; Jan Gong, Garden City, Garden City High School; Michelle Hackman, Great Neck, John L. Miller Great Neck North High School; Bryan He, Williamsville, Williamsville East High School; Matthew Lam, Old Westbury, Jericho High School; Grace Phillips, Larchmont, Mamaroneck High School;Alydaar Rangwala, Loudonville, The Albany Academies

OREGON Laurie Rumker, Portland, Oregon Episcopal School; Yushi Wang, Portland, Sunset High School

PENNSYLVANIA Benjamin Clark, Lancaster, Penn Manor High School; Keenan Monks, Hazleton, Hazleton Area High School

TEXAS Madeleine Ball, Dallas, Ursuline Academy of Dallas; Rounok Joardar, Plano, Plano West Senior High School; Sunil Pai, Houston, The Kinkaid School

Yeah...Just What I Thought

2012-02-13T10:04:00.002-06:00

When it comes right down to it, most of the people that bitch a lot about the government are really the ones that benefit the most. Sort of like...hmmm...oh...I don't know...teenagers who bitch about their parents who pay the bills and provide them with a nice place to live?

Sunday Funnies

2012-02-12T11:57:00.000-06:00

Here are a few cartoons that caught my eye this week that are perfect for a Sunday morinng.

Virtually no doubt in my mind that today's conservative would continually criticize Jesus.

Hee Hee

Can anyone explain to me how guys like Paul Ryan and Steve King can claim that Christ is their savior and also espouse Ayn Rand?

The Big Three

2012-02-12T11:42:00.000-06:00

Thomas Friedman hit a grand slam with his recent column in the New York Times entitled, "We Need a Second Party." In so many ways, he echoes much of the analysis that I have been discussing on here for the last few years.

There’s a reason for that: Their pile is out of date. The party has let itself become the captive of conflicting ideological bases: anti-abortion advocates, anti-immigration activists, social conservatives worried about the sanctity of marriage, libertarians who want to shrink government, and anti-tax advocates who want to drown government in a bathtub.

Sorry, but you can’t address the great challenges America faces today with that incoherent mix of hardened positions.

Damn straight.

I predicted after the president got elected that we were seeing the end of the Republican Party. I was wrong in the timing of my prediction and didn't take into account the hate, anger, and fear that would bubble up after we elected Barack Obama. Obviously, I was naive in thinking that we were (ahem) past certain things but we aren't. I also failed to consider such low voter turnout in the midterms (42 percent or less in most areas). That always means a problem for the Democrats as old people are the ones who always turn out and vote and many of them are Republican.

Yet today the writing is on the wall. We are seeing it now with their nominating process in the presidential primaries. They can't seem to settle on one candidate and are now desperately trying to spin their chaos as some sort of fight that will make them all stronger. That's not going to happen.

Instead, what we see are the very serious cracks in a coalition that is at war with itself and cannot survive. Sure, they'll always be able to have a decent showing in Congress but with the current edition garnering the lowest approval ratings ever, how long will even that last? As Friedman notes,

Because when I look at America’s three greatest challenges today, I don’t see the Republican candidates offering realistic answers to any of them.

That's right. Because they are too bent on winning the argument and proving the other side wrong. In short, they are being childish.

Friedman lays out a series of points which I am going to issue as challenges to my regular, conservative/libertarian readers. Here they are.

1. Respond to the challenges and opportunities of an era in which globalization and the information technology revolution have dramatically intensified, creating a hyperconnected world. How would you foster education, innovation in talent for our country? What would you do to be a HIE (high-imagination-enabling countries) as opposed to a LIE (low-imagination-enabling countries)? Do you agree with Friedman's answer? Why or why not?

2. Offer a realistic answer to our debt and entitlement obligations. Do you agree with Friedman's answer? Why or why not?

3. How would you power the future? Again, realistic answers not the current dogma being spewed by conservatives. Do you agree with Friedman's answer? Why or why not?

These are Big Three in a perfectly concise nutshell. What I've seen so far from the split pea soup that is the GOP these days doesn't even come close to addressing any of these issues seriously. I'm hoping that my right leaning readers are better than that and can honestly look at some real solutions.

Well?

What He Did

2012-02-11T12:45:00.002-06:00

Not Coming Back

2012-02-10T12:01:00.003-06:00

About a year ago, a diner was held in Silicon Valley with many of the prominent innovators of our time gathered together. During Steve Jobs' talk, a question was raised by the special guest of the evening.

"What will it take to make iPhones in America?" President Barack Obama asked.

"Those jobs aren't coming back," Steve Jobs replied.

If I had to pin down one major criticism of the president, it's that he isn't being fully honest with the American people about jobs. Those jobs, indeed, are not coming back because we live in a global marketplace now (thanks largely to our leading the rest of the world in adopting free markets and liberal economic theory). I understand why he's not being honest. No one wants to hear that the pool of labor is so great in the world that demand is very elastic and American workers are now a small part of a larger chorus. And, with such a tenuous economic situation, even the slightest perception of negativity can have a major effect on the world markets....especially coming from the leader of the free world.

Most importantly, it's hard to explain to the millions out of work that this is better for the world in the long run.

Of course, the president is not the only one that can't admit what's going on. Paul Krugman, in his recent piece in the Times, can't seem to do so either.

We should reject the attempt to divert the national conversation away from soaring inequality toward the alleged moral failings of those Americans being left behind. Traditional values aren’t as crucial as social conservatives would have you believe — and, in any case, the social changes taking place in America’s working class are overwhelmingly the consequence of sharply rising inequality, not its cause.

As he tries to answer Charles Murray's arguments on morals and inequality, which I commented on the other day, he completely fails to note that the main reason why there is so much rising inequality and the real reason why those jobs aren't coming back. How is it possible that a man so smart can't see the very obvious economic truths?

Instead, he proceeds to one of the things that really piss me off about liberals: make lite of certain moral arguments by those on the right that do actually have some merit.

Mr. Murray and other conservatives often seem to assume that the decline of the traditional family has terrible implications for society as a whole. . Suddenly, conservatives are telling us that it’s not really about money; it’s about morals. Never mind wage stagnation and all that, the real problem is the collapse of working-class family values, which is somehow the fault of liberals.

First of all, it's technically not the "fault of liberals." He might be able to poke several large holes in Murray's argument if the focused on how he and Niall Ferguson blame the government for every little problem we have. And making fun of the "family values" crowd is really bullshit when it comes to inequality because these are the people that do actually help the poor through their churches and communities. They might have a weird and phobic blind spot when it comes to government but that doesn't mean they are all bad.

This is why the left really needs to take Murray's arguments seriously. They have merit. I see the results in school every day. Children do better when they are raised by two, loving and committed parents who make the time to help them develop. And communities and peer groups need to also step it up and do a better job of caring for the development of our children. That's what we all mean by "morals."

No doubt, this is not an easy task and will take some time. As we work on this issue on the local level, we really need to cut the BS and just admit that those jobs aren't coming back. That needs to be the starting point because everything else is really moot if we are not accurately identifying the problem.

A Fine Piece of Fiction

2012-02-09T13:58:00.001-06:00

It makes complete sense to me that Thomas Sowell is so beloved amongst the (ahem) intellectuals and the ones who think they are (see: right wing bloggers) on the right. Take a look at this recent paragrapah from his latest piece for Investor's Business Daily.

But a far more serious issue is ObamaCare, perhaps the most unpopular act of the Obama administration, its totalitarian implications highlighted by its recent attempt to force Catholic institutions to violate their own principles and bend the knee to the dictates of Washington bureaucrats.

Ah, nothing like playin' the hits, eh? Well, he's certainly a good merchant who knows that his audience will pay top dollar for these sorts of comments so you have to give him credit for that.

More importantly, though, this is a fine example of the "fictional Obama." First of all, health care is not the "most unpopular act" of the Obama administration. Polls show a variety of opinions, depending on how the question is asked, and the split is around 50-50. I'd say his most unpopular act (or almost) was the new EPA rules that he ended up caving on in the end.

And totalitarian? Good grief. When will the managing of paranoid fantasies cease to be a part of our political discourse? The recent flap over birth control coverage under the PPACA is completely ludicrous. To begin with, the government isn't forcing anyone to get birth control. The new law simply states that if you are an organization that offers health care, you must provide free coverage for birth control. For some reason, the mouth foamers think that translates into forced birth control for their employees. Users still have A CHOICE as to whether or not they want to use birth control and these religious organizations still have A CHOICE to tell their members that birth control is against their beliefs and they shouldn't use it.

And, in what has to be one of the finest examples of hypocrisy I've seen in awhile, DePaul University and other Catholic institutions already offer free contraception as part of their organizations. So, the screaming by the right is because the government is "forcing" them to do something they are already doing? Huh?

We're basically at the point now where these adolescent power fantasies about government are a gross impediment to progress. We all have to stop what we are doing (see: adults trying to fix real problems) and deal with this bullshit.

Any chance we can get Sowell and his true believers to maybe do some yoga or take a jog to clear their head?

Komen VP Gets Pink Slip

2012-02-08T17:46:00.001-06:00

The big flap at Susan G. Komen for Cure, the breast cancer charity, is coming to an end with the resignation of Karen Handel. Last November Handel, the recently hired vice president for public policy, engineered a funding cut for Planned Parenthood through backdoor coordination with Republicans in Congress. Handel proposed, and Komen's board adopted, a policy that would cut off funding for organizations that were "under investigation." That included politically motivated "investigations" launched by partisan Republicans in the US House of Representatives.

As a failed candidate for governor of Georgia and a strong opponent of abortion, Handel's claims that the defunding of Planned Parenthood was apolitical were disingenuous. After a massive protest that sparked a flood of donations directly to Planned Parenthood, Komen's policy was reversed and Handel resigned.

The policy was poorly considered from the get-go. It violated due process because funding would be cut off as soon as an investigation was started, not when any convictions were made or improprieties were found. Since Handel was a former Republican gubernatorial candidate and her policy was so obviously politically motivated, what if the US Senate or the attorney general had started an investigation into the ostensibly non-profit Komen Foundation's ties to overtly political organizations? Would Komen have to stop funding itself?

I'm glad to see this over with, but it stands as stark example of the problems this country faces.

Planned Parenthood and the Komen foundation have similar goals: the improvement of women's health. Komen focuses on breast cancer, while Planned Parenthood focuses on broader women's health issues, and reproductive services in particular. Planned Parenthood is the country's primary abortion provider not because they love abortion, but because they are one of the few organizations brave enough to weather the political attacks and death threats from abortion opponents.

Planned Parenthood, by its very name, shares Karen Handel's goal to reduce the abortion rate. Not by outlawing abortion, but by preventing unwanted pregnancies. Planned Parenthood wants everyone to have free access to reliable birth control and to use it rigorously. They want emergency contraception to be freely and immediately available when condoms break, people get carried away, or rape and incest occur. All these things will reduce the need for abortion, something which everyone can agree is a good thing.

But instead of seeking common ground and working together with Planned Parenthood on shared goals, Karen Handel instead joined forces with religiously motivated ideologues who wish to sabotage and destroy Planned Parenthood.

This heightened polarization in politics and society is extremely corrosive to civil discourse and good government. By eliminating any possibility of working together, compromise that benefits all Americans becomes impossible.

The Founding Fathers were able to write the Constitution not because they agreed on everything -- they disagreed fiercely among themselves. Their genius was their ability to pull together and come to a reasonable accommodation.

Absolutist anti-abortion, anti-birth-control zealots like Karen Handel and Rick Santorum are nothing like the Founding Fathers. They more resemble Jefferson Davis and the southern secessionists who started the Civil War. With their crusade against abortion and birth control, Handel and Santorum wish to take away our hard-won freedoms and force us to be slaves to biology.

Last Night's Surprise

2012-02-08T10:35:00.000-06:00

It was caucus night last night in my home state and I'm happy to report that my group unanimously supported President Obama in his re-election bid. We also vowed to defeat the gay marriage ban amendment in Minnesota as well as the voter ID law. Our caucus included a man who recently gained his US citizenship after moving here from Kenya (chuckle, chuckle). He was elected our associate chair of the caucus and will be going on to the Senate District convention as a delegate.

I also found out that I might be redistricted into Keith Ellison's district. Goodbye Erik Paulsen and hello someone who actually represents me and my interests. I'll find out soon if that's going to happen.

After listening to Rick Santorum's victory speech last night (and after I spent a significant amount of time scratching my head in bewilderment that people think this guy would make a competent president only to come to the conclusion that this is what happens when you believe instead of think), I'm curious, once again, about this Barack Obama of whom he spoke. Not anyone that exists in reality. Here are some of his quotes from last night, on President Obama.

But then again, I wouldn't be surprised if he isn't listening. Why would you think he would be listening now? Has he ever listened to the voice of America before?

Yes, he does Rick, but it's the majority of the citizens of this country who live in reality. Not the ones that live in the bubble with you and the rest of the apocalyptic cult.

When it came to the problems that were being confronted on Obamacare, when the health care system in this country, did President Obama, when he was pushing forward his radical health care ideas, listen to the American people?

Radical health care ideas...that came from the Republican party.

When it comes to the environment, did the president of the United States listen to the American people, or did he push a radical cap- and-trade agenda that would crush the energy and manufacturing sector of the economy?

Yes, radical, like when he approved off shore drilling only to see it completely bite him in the ass when BP flooded the Gulf of Mexico with oil.

He did say one thing that was pretty interesting, though.

Because I do care about not 99 percent or 95 percent. I care about the very rich and the very poor. I care about 100 percent of America.

(Ahem) Narrative still not dead.

As I watched Santorum's speech, inspiration struck me! If you look down at the labels, you will see a new one called "Fictional Obama." When a GOP candidate says something about the president that is a complete lie or obviously outside of reality, I'm going to put up the quote and illustrate how completely insane it is. Obviously, I won't do this every time this happens as I only have so much time during the day:)

Yeah, Baby!

2012-02-08T10:09:00.002-06:00

In addition to being caucus day in my home state, yesterday the 9th Circuit Federal Court in California struck down Proposition 8, stating that

Proposition 8 serves no purpose, and has no effect, other than to lessen the status and human dignity of gays and lesbians in California, and to officially reclassify their relationships and families as inferior to those of opposite-sex couples.

As long as the government ties certain rights to marriage, two consenting adults should allowed to be married. It seems very likely that this case is going to end up in the Supreme Court but the issue of gay marriage as an amendment on a ballot for everyone to vote on is illustrative of another point that I make on here continually: people don't always act in their own self interest.

As it was with voting for equal rights for blacks, the general population should not be allowed to vote on measures such as this largely because of their ignorance. Most Americans don't take the time to consider the ramifications of how these sorts of laws can affect their fellow citizens and themselves. A ban on gay marriage is clearly in violation of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution.

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

It doesn't get any plainer than that.

So, a ban on gay marriage means that around ten percent of our population has less civil liberties than others. This, in turn, may cause them to make economic decisions like moving their business to states that don't have a ban on gay marriage. Obviously, this would have a financial impact on the state with the ban.

It's going to be interesting to see how this affects the Gay Marriage Ban Amendment here in Minnesota that will be on the ballot in the fall.

The Family Meal

2012-02-07T11:37:00.000-06:00

By today's standards, my family is strange and quite odd. Every night, we sit down and have a family meal. ALL of us. Occasionally some sort of activity may interfere but we seem to always be able to adjust our individual schedules to be able to all sit down together and share time together over dinner.

We go around the table and share what our favorite part of the day was and that usually ends up leading to a broader discussion. We laugh, we work out problems, and we make plans for upcoming events. When I tell people this, virtually all of them can't believe that it happens. Whether they are conservative or liberal or somewhere in between, their comments invariably lead to the same question.

"Where do you find the time?"

I thought about our family meal when I read Niall Ferguson's recent piece "Rich America, Poor America." His thoughts and comments contained therein reveal a much needed alternative to the left's explanation and protestations regarding inequality in this country.

He starts out by detailing the obvious truth.

Adjusted for inflation, the income of the average American male has essentially flatlined since the 1970s, according to figures from the Census Bureau. The income of the bottom quarter of U.S. families has actually fallen. It’s been a different story for the rich. According to recent work by Berkeley economist Emmanuel Saez, the share of total income going to the top 1 percent of families has more than doubled since 1979, from below 10 percent to a peak of nearly 24 percent in 2007. (It has since fallen, but not by much.) The share going to the super-rich—the top 0.01 percent—has risen by a factor of seven.

Americans used to be proud of their country’s reputation as a meritocracy, where anyone could aspire to get to the top with the right combination of inspiration and perspiration. It’s no longer true. Social mobility has been sliding in the United States. A poor kid in America now has about the same chance of becoming a rich grown-up as in socially rigid England. It looks like Downton Abbey has come to downtown U.S.A.

I'm very pleased that someone who identifies as a conservative can recognize this as fact. Looking at the work of Charles Murray of the American Enterprise Institute, we see further evidence of this acceptance by the right.

Murray is no apologist for Wall Street. Looking at the explosion in the value of the total compensation received by the chief executives of large corporations, he pointedly asks if “the boards of directors of corporate America—and nonprofit America, and foundation America—[have] become cozy extended families, scratching each others’ backs, happily going along with a market that has become lucrative for all of them, taking advantage of their privileged positions—rigging the game, but within the law.” There is not much in those lines that the OWS protesters would disagree with.

Rigging the game, but within the law. That's pretty much it and this simple sentence offers an area of ideological overlap between the Tea Party and the OWS movement. Sadly, I doubt that either will take advantage of it especially now that the Tea Party has been more or less co-opted by the Koch Brothers and the rest of the "cozy family" of which Murray speaks.

So, now that we have accepted the problem, how did we get here? Where Murray goes next offers a greater width of vision that I think is somewhat lacking on the left. Murray looks at two towns (Belmont and Fishtown) and compares social trends.

Marriage has declined in both, but it has declined further in Fishtown, where a much larger proportion of adults either get divorced or never marry, so that a far higher share of Fishtown children now live with a lone divorced or separated parent. Unlike Belmont, Fishtown has a sad underclass of “never-married mothers”—who also happen to be the worst-educated women in town.

I have many students in my classes that are "from Fishtown." They are the worst behaved and invariably get the worse grades. Their parents are either exhausted from work or terribly lazy. For whatever reason, they are COP (checked out parents) and the results are lower test scores and a continued feeding of the underclass. Murray speaks of this as well.

Industriousness has scarcely declined in Belmont, but it has plummeted among Fishtown white males, an amazing number of whom are unable to work because of illness or disability, or have left the workforce for some other reason, or are unemployed, or are working fewer than 40 hours a week. The big problem here is not so much a lack of jobs as a new leisure preference (“goofing off” and watching daytime TV). The work ethic has been replaced by a jerk ethic.

I'd actually take this a step further. The "jerk ethic" is there even with people that put in 40 hours of work a week or more. Rather than spend time with their family, many of these parents play video games or wank on their smart phones all night, further detaching themselves from their children's lives. Later in the article, Ferguson mentions a lack of incentive to work (due, of course, to the government but I'll get to that in a little bit) but even the folks that are working full time and providing for their families have a lack of incentive to do little else. People simply aren't active in their communities any longer.

Religiosity has declined in both towns, but much more steeply in Fishtown. Contrary to popular belief, Murray argues, it’s not the elites who have become secularized and the working class that has remained devout. In fact, church attendance is much lower in Fishtown than in Belmont.

Most of you know that I would never behave like many on the right who seek to insert themselves between an individual and the Lord, forcing Republican Jesus on the citizens of the United States. Having some sort of religious outlet, whatever faith that may be, is demonstrably vital to social cohesion. Murray's studies show that this is unequivocally true.

To put all of this simply, it's family values. And the results are plain for anyone to see.

As a consequence of these trends, the traditional bonds of civil society have entirely atrophied in lower-class America. There is less neighborliness, less trust, less political awareness, less of that vibrant civic engagement that used to impress European visitors, less of what the Harvard sociologist Robert Putnam, in Bowling Alone, called “social capital.”

And that, Murray concludes, is why poor Americans are, by their own admission, so very unhappy. Man is a social animal who can only really be happy in four social domains: family, work, local community, and faith. In poor America, all four are in a state of collapse. That is why “Fishtown” is such a wretched dump—the kind of benighted place where gangs of feral teens hang around on street corners trying to figure out what part of the local infrastructure they haven’t yet vandalized. We all drive through such places from time to time. Murray’s point is just how many Americans have to live in them.

All of this ties in to what I talked about in The Michael Jordan Generation. The four domains listed above are essentially the same as four of the five main areas of socialization which have been severely eroded by the corporate owned media. Far too many people have allowed themselves and their children to lose touch with these four pillars and have been completely overwhelmed by the fifth. This is where Murray and Ferguson lose sight of the cause of all this. Sadly, they fall back on all to predictable conservative dogma, blame liberal policies, add to the fictional Obama narrative, and offer the usual panic rip about our country becoming like Europe. In other words, it's all the fault of the government...even though it was this same governemnt that created Social Security which has reduced poverty in the elderly by over 40 percent.

One can only blame our society's institutions so much (and that includes the corporate owned media). For me, it comes down to how you answer the question posed above by nearly everyone I know.

"Where do you find the time?"

It's simple.

You make the time.

In the final analysis, it's up to us.

Fiction V. Reality

2012-02-06T15:31:00.000-06:00

ELIZABETH B. WYDRA at Politico put a great piece up yesterday entitled, "Constitutional fairy tales and the Affordable Care Act" that really deserves as much of an audience as possible so I'm linking it here. Like they do with The Bible, conservatives yell and foam at the mouth about how they (and ONLY they) know the true meaning of the Constitution. The argument I've heard lately is "because we can read." It's as at this point I find myself waiting for a more in depth answer only to hear the sound of crickets.

Wydra makes her case quite simply.

The current nationwide health care crisis, which involves close to 20 percent of the U.S. economy, is exactly the sort of problem the founders would have wanted the federal government to solve under the powers given to Congress by the Constitution. The Affordable Care Act addresses issues of national concern — involving the states as partners but offering federal mechanisms of reform where necessary.

Yep, pretty much. I've always been struck by how many right wingers, when asked what they would do, say, "Do nothing." And their answer to rising costs is..." And their answer to inelastic demand of many health care markets is....? Crickets.

In 1783, soon after the Revolutionary War was won, Washington wrote to Hamilton, “unless Congress have powers competent to all general purposes, that the distresses we have encountered, the expences we have incurred, and the blood we have spilt in the course of an eight years’ war, will avail us nothing.”Washington elaborated on this in a 1783 circular to the states. A sufficiently energetic national government was necessary, he wrote “to regulate and govern the general concerns of the Confederated Republic, without which the union cannot be of long duration.”

If they wanted a small, limited government with no power, than the Articles of Confederation would have been just fine. Perhaps that's what the Tea Party wants. Why, exactly?

Anyway, what does this all have to do with PPACA?

But while the grants of federal power may be “few and defined,” where such authority is given — it is substantial.For example, from these few enumerated powers come the ability to regulate interstate commerce and to tax and spend for the general welfare. Add to that the grant of constitutional authority to pass laws “necessary and proper” to carrying out these “few and defined” powers, and the Constitution’s enumerated powers add up to the energetic federal government our founders thought was necessary to govern the United States.The Affordable Care Act respects this constitutional balance of power by providing federal mechanisms for achieving national health care reform — including the minimum coverage provision and expanded Medicaid coverage. But it also maintains the states’ ability to shape key reform measures that do not need to be uniform, to achieve the act’s legitimate goals.

Exactly. To borrow from Washington, our union cannot be of long duration if we continue to ignore basic truths about health care, particularly the "expences." This is the exact reason why the federal government was created. As Wydra concludes...

The idea that the federal government does not have the power to address a national problem — like the current health care crisis — is a tea party fairy tale with no basis in the Constitution’s text and history.

Fairy tale, indeed. Will there ever be a time when those of us that want to actually solve our nation's problems (using Constitutionally mandated powers) be allowed to do so without interference from people who play dress up and make believe?

The more I think about it, the more I realize that perhaps this election is going to be about fiction versus reality.

Go Ahead, Make His Day

2012-02-06T15:12:00.000-06:00

That's because President Obama's policies were a success.

He Said....What??!??

2012-02-06T09:52:00.001-06:00

First of all, David, I don’t think you’ll ever find me talking about an age of austerity. I don’t think that’s the right solution. I am a pro-growth Republican. I’m a pro-growth conservative. I think the answer is to grow the economy, not to punish the American people with austerity.

---Newt Gingrich, 5 February 2012, Meet the Press

What do you suppose he means by this?

Like!

2012-02-05T11:52:00.002-06:00

President Obama's Job Creation Record

2012-02-04T09:22:00.000-06:00

So, if you live in the bubble, what goes through your head when you see this data?

Download this image and save it on your desktop.The next time anyone needs an answer on Obama's policies, this should be one of your top answers.

Are Foreigners Buying the Election?

2012-02-03T06:00:00.000-06:00

The Supreme Court's Citizens United decision allowed unlimited amounts of money to be injected into American elections. The contributions of Sheldon Adelson and his family are now raising very troubling questions about the wisdom of that decision.

Adelson gave $5 million to Gingrich's Super PAC, Winning Our Future, allowing Gingrich to pull an upset in the South Carolina primary by hitting Mitt Romney with a barrage of negative TV ads filled with every dirty trick in the book. Later Adelson's wife, Miriam, gave another $5 million. After Adelson bought the desired result in South Carolina, Romney's Wall-Street-financed Super PACs returned fire and destroyed Gingrich in Florida, outgunning his TV ads in some markets by as much as 40 to 1.

Adelson is a billionaire who made his money in Las Vegas casinos. It is somehow fitting that Gingrich, the man with the most questionable morals in the Republican party, is bankrolled by a man whose billions are just as morally questionable.

Now it turns out that of the $2 million Winning Our Future received in 2011, half came from Miriam Adelson's daughters and son-in-law, Sivan Ochshorn, Yasmin Lukatz and Oren Lukatz. The daughters are from Miriam's first marriage to a Tel Aviv physician.

Citizens United allowed American citizens and corporations to donate unlimited amounts of money. It's still illegal for foreigners and foreign corporations to give money to American elections.

But reading about Miriam Adelson's daughters makes me wonder if they're real Americans. By real I don't mean that they live in a small town, like NASCAR, and drive a pickup truck. No, I mean real Americans in the sense that they were born and raised in the USA and owe their allegiance to the United States Constitution. According to the Post article:

Little is known about Lukatz, who began making contributions to Republicans in 2007 and is listed in federal reports by campaigns as a homemaker or an executive at the Venetian. According to Haaretz.com, Yasmin Lukatz returned to Israel “to do for military service as an officer in the Israeli Air Force. Afterward she attended Tel Aviv University, studying law and business administration.

Yasmin’s husband, Oren Lukatz, did not make any campaign contributions to federal candidates or committees until late 2010, records show. But since then, he has made nearly $400,000 in donations, including the recent PAC gift.

His Twitter bio says that he was “born and raised in Israel, educated in Europe and in the United States.”

Oren also served as an officer in the Israeli military. Given their parentage and history, I wonder whether these people have American, Israeli, or dual American-Israeli citizenship. If it's the first, everything's fine. If the second, they're clearly violating the law. But if it's the last, are they real Americans?

Many people have dual citizenship, as it may be thrust upon them as children automatically by birth or by marriage. But by definition, anyone who has citizenship in more than one country has divided loyalties, and cannot be considered a real American.

When you're naturalized as an American you must take the following oath:

I hereby declare, on oath, that I absolutely and entirely renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state, or sovereignty of whom or which I have heretofore been a subject or citizen; that I will support and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States of America against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I will bear arms on behalf of the United States when required by the law; that I will perform noncombatant service in the Armed Forces of the United States when required by the law; that I will perform work of national importance under civilian direction when required by the law; and that I take this obligation freely without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; so help me God.

So, are Ochshorn and the Lukatzes Americans by convenience only? Are their loyalties really to Israel, and not the United States? If so, their donations to Gingrich's Super PAC would be legal by only the thinnest of technicalities, by the legal fiction that they are Americans.

If you're going to vote or get involved with American politics your allegiance to the United States should be explicitly stated, and you should take an oath to renounce your citizenship in any other country.

I'm not just picking on Israel. The same should apply to people with dual American-Mexican, American-Canadian, American-Australian or American-British citizenship. You can't be half American.

And this exposes the real problem with Citizens United. The most obvious reason is that corporations cannot be citizens. They cannot take oaths. They cannot vote. They cannot be held responsible for their actions. They cannot hold office. They cannot be imprisoned. They cannot serve in the military. They can be bought from or sold to foreigners in a flash. And often we can't even find out who really owns or controls them.

One of the shell companies that contributed to Romney's Super PAC existed for only four months, but that was long enough to donate a million bucks. It appears this company was set up by a Romney crony at Bain (its address was listed in the same building as Bain).

Given how simple it is to form shell companies and the lax requirements for certain Super PAC disclosures, there's no way to be sure that foreign companies and governments aren't buying American elections. If we can't find out who's really donating to a Super PAC, it's impossible to eliminate the appearance of corruption, and therefore impossible to eliminate the existence of corruption.

Hmm...

2012-02-02T20:22:00.001-06:00

Hmm...Today, Mitt Romney was hanging out in Vegas with Donald Trump while Barack (the Kenyan Muslim Socialist who wants to destroy America) Obama was at a prayer breakfast talking about Billy Graham, loving thy neighbor, and reminding us that Jesus said, ""for unto whom much is given, much shall be required."

Amen

2012-02-02T15:17:00.001-06:00

Not What He Fucking Said!!!

2012-02-02T06:00:00.000-06:00

This is going to be a long election year and the media is going to drive me to pull out what little hair I have left on my hair. Currently, many of the news networks are reporting that Mitt Romney said, "I don't care about the very poor." That's not at all what he said. Here is the FULL quote.

I’m in this race because I care about America. I’m not concerned about the very poor, we have a safety net there, if we need to repair, I’ll fix it. I’m not concerned about the very rich, they’re doing just fine. I’m concerned about the very heart of America, the 90-95 percent of Americans who are struggling, and I’ll continue to take that message across the country.

It's complete bullshit that they are leaving out the rest of the quote. I have no problem with criticizing Mitt for his fictional rants about President Obama, his clear lack of what to do foreign policy wise, or his ever changing position in many policies. But can we please cut him a break and not twist around every single thing he says especially if it's something reasonable like this?

In addition, he's made his point very clearly about his health care plan. It's good for a state but not good for the country. I don't agree with him but (again!) let's please cease with the twisting around of his health care plan and make believe that it's exactly like the PPACA. It isn't because it's a state level initiative.

I know this will fall on deaf ears but we simply have so much other BS to deal with that this is a serious waste of time.

A Matter of Historical Context

2012-02-01T10:33:00.000-06:00

A recent post in comments gave me an epiphany.

If you actually bothered to read the Constitution, Federalist Papers, Anti-Federalist Papers, etc., you will find that none of the Founding Fathers supported anything even approaching the power of the Federal government from the New Deal onward. Claiming that just because they disagreed about how much power the Federal government should have relative to the States and the People, no more means that Hamilton and the other Federalists would've supported Obama's vision of Federal power than that the Anti-Federalists (and most of your commenters) wanted no government at all. That's just more of your dishonest, dick-headed, asinine Calvinball "logic". Hamilton wanted a national bank? Well then obviously he would've supported nationalized/socialized healthcare and all the other apparatus of a semi-socialist state. Riiight. If he or any others did, it should be quite easy for you find where they actually said something like that, right? Right?

Let's take a closer look at the part of the statement I bolded (Obama's vision of Federal Power) because that raises the question: what would the Founding Fathers have thought of Obama's vision of Federal Power? The answer is quite simple and it reveals, quite starkly, why sentences that begin with "The Founding Fathers would have never..." are completely full of shit and (surprise, surprise) have no place in reality.

The Founding Fathers wouldn't given an ounce of thought to Obama's vision of Federal Power because our current president, in their time, would have been three fifths of a person. Granted, this designation was largely used for political purposes but the general view of black people at the time was that they were "less than." Some of the Founding Fathers, including Thomas Jefferson, owned slaves and very likely wouldn't have even been able to get past the fact that a black man was president.

This is why discussion of what the Founding Fathers would have thought about government today are generally ridiculous. Their views on government were a product of their time and their circumstances with England. Certainly, the Constitution and the decisions made by each of them while they were leading this country are excellent foundations from which to work. But they are not intended to be so limiting that they ignore reality...reality in 2012. Health care is a great example of this. How the system currently works is not at all in the best interests or general welfare of the people. It's become a for-profit industry with out of control costs that it would seem completely alien to Josiah Bartlett, Matthew Thornton, Benjamin Rush or Elbridge Gerry. It's nearly impossible to say what they would think of Medicare and it's likely that they wouldn't have the first clue because our historical place would be completely foreign to them.

Yet, we can look to some examples of their time and compare it to our time and see if there is a precedent or similarities. We can also see how difficult it is for words to match actions at times. With health care, one need only look at An Act for the relief of sick and disabled seamen (passed in 1798 and signed by John Adams) which ordered private seamen to pay 20 cents out of their wages to pay for medical care of sick and disabled seamen. Does this translate into a nation wide system of Medicare? I don't think it's possible to answer this because the Founding Fathers would have no adequate frame of reference. They only knew what was crucial to their young country at the time and that was clearly socialized medicine. This also shows how concepts of limited government work in theory but not necessarily in action. Being products of the Age of Enlightenment, they would likely have the humility to admit that they couldn't make an judgement due to ignorance. Heck, the term "economics" wasn't even in regular use during their time! And health insurance?

Of course, if they were all around today, their thirst for knowledge and wisdom (something on which we call all agree) would propel them to eliminate that ignorance and the likely result would be continued debate with the fathers split into various factions...just as they were at the outset of our country's journey. Some would argue that the states should decide. Others would argue over the necessity of insurance and explore free market options of direct consumer to seller relationships. Some would look at the improvement of general welfare because of our social programs (from the New Deal onwards) and find it hard to argue with success.

In the final analysis, we only know what they thought of federal power during their time in history and, as I've demonstrated three times now (the first national bank, the whiskey rebellion, and mandated health care for seamen), even the people that wrote the Constitution didn't rigidly follow it. That includes ALL of their context and virtually NONE OF OURS.

No lo entiendo

2012-01-31T04:00:00.000-06:00

On this primary election day, let's talk about one part of the voting process itself.

An article in Mother Jones claims that Newt Gin.grinch and Mitt R.moneywant to disenfranchise millions of voters by removing the requirementthat ballots be printed in multiple languages if the population of non-English speakers is sufficiently large to warrant it.

I'vegot to say, I agree with R.money and Gin.grinch here. English proficiencyis a requirement for citizenship when you are naturalized. Native-born Americans and foreigners marrying Americans have every chance and incentive to learn English, and have no excuse for not being able to read a ballot. It's really that simple.

If you can'tspeak English, you can't engage in the political conversation.You can't listen to a debate and understand what's going on. If you'redependent on a translator, you'll miss a lot of nuance. Furthermore, translators will put their own personal spin on what thespeaker is saying, and may mislead listeners -- intentionally or not. Ultimately, people who can't understand English are condemned to being told what to think. Worse, they can't participate in the public conversation and make their own views known to others who aren't just like them.

As for the ballots themselves, the article says:

"Some of these ballot measures involve very complex legal language," Camila Gallardo of the Latino civil rights organization National Council of La Raza points out. "Some of the language is hard to understand even for fluent English speakers, let alone if your first language isn't English."

Exactly. How can we trust that the translation of that complex English text is accurate and unbiased? And if the translators themselves don't really grasp the original English, there's no way to ensure an accurate translation.

The legal requirement for multiple languages on ballots is discriminatory in and of itself.

Covered language minorities are limited to American Indians, Asian Americans, Alaskan Natives, and Spanish-heritage citizens - the groups that Congress found to have faced barriers in the political process.

It's an understandable sentiment. But Russian and Somali immigrants living in Miami are forced to learn English (or Spanish) if they want to read the ballot. Just because there are fewer of them doesn't mean they shouldn't get equal treatment under the law. And these days Somali Americans are facing at least as much discrimination as Latino Americans.

Then there are technical problems with multiple ballots and multilingual ballots. The more options you add to a ballot, the more confusing it gets and the more likely it is that your vote will not register as you intend it to. Remember Florida in 2000?

There are several existing solutions to this problem that would eliminate the costs and potential errors of multilingual ballots. People who have trouble reading English can register for an absentee ballot, giving them ample time to go over it and recruit an interpreter if necessary. In most places the blind and physically handicapped can bring a helper of their choice to assist them in the voting. The voter may still be relying on another person telling them what to think, but at least it will be a person of their choosing.

I think a big part of this has to do with language being such an important part of cultural identity. Many immigrant parents bemoan the fact that their kids don't learn to speak their ancestral tongue. Many feel that their culture will slip away completely if they learn to speak English. It's a common and reasonable fear, because it happens with every generation of immigrant Americans. How may proud Irish and German Americans speak Irish or German these days?

But when you come right down to it, if someone isn't comfortable with the culture of the United States and can't understand ninety-nine percent of everything going on in this country, perhaps it isn't the right place for them to live. Or vote.

Election Video Calvacade

2012-01-30T18:43:00.000-06:00

I've been saving a few videos from the last couple of weeks and today I figured I'd put them all up at once.

On a number of levels, it's really been nauseating to watch the Republican primaries. Here's a great example of what I am talking about.

This level of ignorance, anger and hatred simply stuns me. But it's not just this kind of shit because...well...I expect this stuff from the right...the whole Barack X thing and all. What I don't expect is this.

A conservative audience yelling at Mitt Romney for not releasing his tax returns? Wow. Good thing the OWS narrative is dead.

This one blew me away.

Wait, huh? I thought conservatives were all about Jesus. WTF??!!? I submit that nearly all conservatives think that the Golden Rule is a bunch of pussy nonsense and that everything about "loving thy enemy" goes in one ear and out the other.

We've only been through two primaries and one caucus and there's already enough crazy for a whole year. And if you think the rest of the primary is going to be nuts, wait until the general election starts. The Barack X mouth foamers are going to go completely fucking batshit.

Somewhere In Arizona, Kevin Baker's Head Just Exploded

2012-01-29T23:06:00.000-06:00

Narrative=Still Not Dead

A Peak Inside The Bubble

2012-01-29T06:00:00.000-06:00

Bill Maher finally sat down and analyzed the whole Saul Alinsky obsession that the right has with the left and it was fucking brilliant. Among the points answered...

Saul Alinksy liked black people (Uh oh...:(...). He started to organize the Civil Rights movement in the 1930s which, as Newt will tell you, became a huge burden on white people. Alinksy also taught poor people to ban together, improve their lives and fight against slum lords. Oh no he di-ent! That's class warfare!!! Next thing you know we'll all be worshiping Vladimir Lenin!!!!

There's also the most concise explanation to date regarding the difference between Bush critics and Obama critics.

But the best part? Now I know who Barack X is...YES!!!!!

Yes

2012-01-28T10:15:00.002-06:00

Newt's Loony Tunes

2012-01-28T04:30:00.000-06:00

The other day Newt Gingrich announced his bold new initiative: a permanent base on the moon by the end of his second term in 2021.

This is an example of why I used to like Newt, twenty-odd years back. It's also the perfect example of why I despise Gingrich now. Gingrich is a smart guy, and he likes a lot of the stuff that I like. I would like to see a moon base happen, but by putting it out there now Newt has given the idea the kiss of death.

George Bush killed the horse that Newt is now whipping. In 2004 Bush announced Constellation, his program to return to the moon. I was extremely skeptical. I figured it was just a gimmick to pretend that he was about more than death and destruction. At that point it had been eight months since the "cakewalk" in Iraq started, and things were starting to go very wrong. Bush apparently wanted to pull a Kennedy and look visionary.

Predictably, Bush was not serious. The deficit was rising quickly under the weight of two wars and two rounds of massive tax cuts, mostly going to the wealthy. The Constellation program was underfunded and mismanaged, and Bush ultimately wasted at least eight billions dollars on the project, getting little in return. Though the aerospace firms like Lockheed Martin got plenty of that money, and reliably Republican states like Alabama cashed in big time.

Obama canceled the Constellation program in 2010, and since then has redirected NASA to use private firms like SpaceX for space transportation. Many Republicans like Alabama's Richard Shelby hypocritically decried the move, but it's exactly the sort of thing that Republicans have been demanding government do. Gingrich's moon base plan would continue in this vein, using minimal government investment to prod private industry into space. By not mentioning Obama in his speech, Gingrich tacitly admitted that the president is on the right track.

The problem is that Gingrich, like Bush, is not serious. Newt made this promise while campaigning on Florida's space coast, which has been hit hard by cutbacks in NASA's traditional programs. By pandering to to these voters with such a grandiose notion, Gingrich has reinforced his image as a nut case and made space exploration an object of derision during the debate and the butt of jokes on late-night TV.

But the thing that most perfectly encapsulated everything about why I despise Newt was when he said, "When we have 13,000 Americans living on the moon, they can petition to become a state.” Like so many things he says (child janitors, anyone?), this idea is, in Gingrich's own words, "profoundly stupid" and a complete insult to the intelligence of the listener.

As Gingrich well knows, states have at least one representative in the House and two senators in the Senate, giving each state a minimum of three electoral votes. Nationwide the ratio of voters to electoral votes is about half a million to one. Small population states like Wyoming are drastically overrepresented, getting three times as many electoral votes per person as states like Illinois, California and Pennsylvania. It is largely for this reason that Republicans have been dominated the presidency for the past century while Democrats have dominated Congress.

Gingrich's Lunaria would get one electoral vote for each 4333 citizens, or about 125 times the national average. Is Gingrich just crazy, or is this his plan for a permanent Republican domination of Congress and the presidency? The next thing he'll suggest is that people start moving to coral reefs and oil rigs and petition for statehood.

As Jon Stewart mentioned, Gingrich opposed statehood for the Washington, DC, which has as many citizens as Wyoming. It has three electoral votes, but has no voting representatives in the House or Senate and no say over what Congress can do to them. Why is Newt talking about enfranchising people on the moon before enfranchising the people who live in our nation's capital?

And this shows Newt's real lack of vision. Just as the American colonies of the British Empire soon came to desire independence, so would any lunar colony, especially as it drew citizens from other nations. China has plans to go to the moon, and so does Japan, and Russia currently has the only reliable space transportation system. There won't just be Americans on the moon, and the rest of the would certainly have something to say about American claims to lunar territory.

Once they became self-sufficient, lunar colonies would have much more in common with each other than they would with Earth. In the long run they would either become independent nations or form a new federation among themselves, rather than carry over their anachronistic ties to a planet filled with people who have no idea what it's like wondering where you're going to get your next breath of air from.

Complete Agreement with...Ann Coulter?

2012-01-27T10:23:00.001-06:00

Some folks on the right side of the aisle are pretty nervous after Newt's win in South Carolina. Take Ann Coulter, conservative fire brand, for example. In her recent column entitled, "RE-ELECT OBAMA: VOTE NEWT!" she opens with

To talk with Gingrich supporters is to enter a world where words have no meaning.

Well, that's certainly true generally of conservatives:)

She goes on to discuss the circular reasoning of Newt's supporters and then explains Mitt's flip flops. This one really jumped out at me.

Romney's one great "flip-flop" is on abortion. (I thought the reason we argued with people about abortion was to try to get them to "flip-flop" on this issue. Sometimes it works!)

I actually laughed out loud at that one. No shit, isn't that the goal of pro life conservatives? Why are they complaining that Mitt's changed his mind?

She concludes with a line that is...dare I say it...Markadelphia like in its nature.

Conservatism is an electable quality. Hotheaded arrogance is neither conservative nor attractive to voters.

Finally. A conservative with which I agree on virtually nothing defining exactly what is wrong with the GOP today. Somewhere along the line, the base has allowed itself to be overtaken by virulent hubris that one normally associates with right wing bloggers. As I've been saying for the past several days, your average Joe Voter has no idea who Saul Alinksy is nor do will they respond well to another white old guy yelling at Barack Obama. If the right wants to win, Mitt is the best chance they have.

But she does raise a deeper point. Is conservatism an electable quality? It is but only in moderation as this is a center right country for the most part. I think the reason why the GOP is having such a tough time with their candidates is not they they don't like any of the above. It's because they are struggling to define who they are. Are they evangelical? Financial old guard? Libertarians? I don't think they know.

The party can't survive if one drops away so they desperately need all three. Yet they seem to be at odds with each other and don't really work and play well together. Some want to be more moderate so they can win but a very large portion want to go farther right. If the president wins re-election in the fall, this struggle will be one of the big reasons why.

Really?

2012-01-26T10:00:00.001-06:00

Like A Puck...

2012-01-26T09:56:00.000-06:00

Being a Minnesotan, loving hockey is simply expected. So, it's with a heavy heart that I must report that the apocalyptic cult formerly known as the conservative movement in this country has slithered into the National Hockey League like a puck shooting across the ice.

Tim Thomas, the goalie for the Boston Bruins, recently refused a trip to the White House to be congratulated for the Stanley Cup victory last season. He said, in a statement, "I believe the Federal government has grown out of control, threatening the Rights, Liberties, and Property of the People. This is being done at the Executive, Legislative, and Judicial level. This is in direct opposition to the Constitution and the Founding Fathers vision for the Federal government. Because I believe this, today I exercised my right as a Free Citizen, and did not visit the White House. This was not about politics or party, as in my opinion both parties are responsible for the situation we are in as a country. This was about a choice I had to make as an INDIVIDUAL."

Well, he's lucky that he still has that right to refuse because before you know it, men with guns will be coming to his house to force him to meet President Blackie McHitler. Sheesh... I guess you just have to roll your eyes and mourn the loss of yet another soul to the fantasy world of The Tea Party.

Oh, and according the Bruins media guide this year, the person Thomas would most likely want to have dinner with?

Glenn Beck.

SOTU Post Mortem

2012-01-25T10:14:00.000-06:00

As he always does, President Obama gave a great speech last night to Congress. A few things struck me as interesting.

He seemed to back away from partisan attacks (odd, in an election year) using the word "American" over 80 times while making sure to say that we share certain values. That's very optimistic and, from him, I'd expect nothing less. I guess I don't really share his sunny outlook but I do appreciate his populist tone.

What I saw on display last night was the very obvious and monumentally titanic reluctance to accept that the federal government plays a key role in our society and in the world at large. The president presented a balanced and pragmatic approach to government and the private sector. Yet, anytime the government doing something was mentioned, the Republicans sat on their hands. Honestly, they looked like stubborn little children because, sadly, "key role" has somehow magically transformed itself into socialism. This was very apparent in Governor Daniels response and the commentary by folks like Ari Fleischer after the speech.

As Speaker Boehner put it, pre-speech, "The president and the GOP are from different planets." Yes, this is true. The latter resides on one that is a largely created work of fiction that does not exist in reality.

It's obvious to me that the GOP in Congress are going to do everything in their power to deny him any sort of successes this year. Fair enough, I suppose, given that this is an election year. Yet, it's also fair of him to make Congress (and that's D's and R's alike) his opponent. With approval ratings 30 points lower than his, they offer a stark contrast which he illustrated several times last night by saying, "Put it on my desk and I'll sign it." They won't, of course, and that clearly shows which of the two parties actually want to do something. I think we may see some surprises this year in the voting booth come November. Key question to consider: just how little do the American people want Congress to do? We're going to find out.

Although not directly mentioned in his speech, I was also please to hear about another SEAL team success in Somalia. I was wondering why the president told SecDef Panetta, as he was walking in, "Good job, today!" Now we know. This president has been highly skilled in the area of his many duties that fall under the mantle of "Commander in Chief."

The president set an upbeat tone for his reelection campaign and, to a much larger degree, America as a whole last night in the State of the Union. In looking at it in comparison to what Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich have been saying about America, one has to wonder if Speaker Boehner's comment could actually be broadened to two different universes.

Mitt Finally Makes Up His Mind

2012-01-24T11:11:00.001-06:00

After dithering for months, Mitt Romney finally made up his mind and released parts of his tax returns for 2010 and 2011. He really had no choice with Gingrich's hammering.

According to the Washington Post:

Mitt Romney offered a partial snapshot of his vast personal fortune late Monday, disclosing income of $21.7 million in 2010 and $20.9 million last year — virtually all of it profits, dividends or interest from investments. ... According to his 2010 return, Romney paid about $3 million to the IRS, for an effective tax rate of 13.9 percent.

Romney took advantage of the "carried interest" exemption that allowed him to treat his Bain Capital salary as income:

The returns confirm, however, that Romney continues to benefit from his association with Bain Capital, the private-equity firm he founded in 1984 and left in 1999. His earnings through Bain have drawn controversy because they are treated as capital gains rather than wages and thus benefit from being taxed at the lower rate of 15 percent.

This is the same gimmick that hedge fund managers use to avoid paying their fair share of taxes. Yeah, it's legal, and Romney's not wrong for paying the minimum tax. But it shows how eminently unfair our tax system is. Number one on Mitt's list of campaign promises should be to get rid of crap like this in the tax code. All income should be taxed at the same rate, whether you earn it working in a coal mine or clipping coupons while you eat bon-bons.

Part of the reduction in Romney's tax liability were losses carried over from previous years. This can be a legitimate tax break, but one of the most reliable tax avoidance scams is to create phony losses in one year to reduce tax liability in later years. Are Romney's losses real or manufactured?

Returns from 2010 and 2011 are all well and good, but Romney has been running for president for the last six years, which means he's known that one day someone would be looking over his tax returns. I'm more interested in seeing his returns from 1998 and his days at Bain, through 2001 and 2004, when the Bush tax cuts kicked in, and 2007-2009 when the rest of the country got hit by the hammer of the recession. Did Romney made out like a bandit with the Bush tax cuts, and was he unscathed by the recession?

Romney's father released 12 years of returns when he ran for president. Will Mitt honor his father's example? Or does he have something to hide?

A Perfect Picture

2012-01-23T15:25:00.000-06:00

I get a lot of people that rip me for being so tough on the right. One line I hear quite a bit is "If you are so liberal and open minded, how come you don't treat them that way?"

Well...

That's why!

Election Quotes

2012-01-22T10:43:00.000-06:00

“I think Mitt Romney is a good man,” said Harold Wade, 85, leaving a polling place in this picturesque seaside suburb outside Charleston. “But I think we’ve reached a point where we need someone who’s mean."

I can't think of a better example of the right in this country today.

Yet, I'm wondering...perhaps someone can help me out....why? last? just-dave? anyone?

An Actual Derangement

2012-01-22T10:37:00.001-06:00

With Newt Gingrich winning the South Carolina primaries yesterday, the path to the GOP nomination has become quite muddied. It looks like this one is going to go on for awhile and Mitt's inevitability is now seriously in question.

As I watched former Speaker Gingrich's acceptance speech, I chuckled. The right always seems to have a great propensity for characterizing their opponents weaknesses in such a way that they end up explaining their insanity much more clearly. Remember when Charles Krauthammer coined the phrase "Bush Derangement Syndrome?" Well, I think the right (as clearly seen last night in the form of Ginrgrich and his supporters) have some taken their warped perception of this Bush "derangement" and actually achieved more perfectly what Krauthammer was describing but with President Obama instead.Here is Newt's victory speech in its entirety.

At about 12 minutes in, Newt starts talking about President Obama. He says that the "centerpiece of this campaign is about American exceptionalism versus the radicalism of Saul Alinksy?"

Uh...huh?

Who beyond right wing bloggers know what he is talking about? I suppose the Tea Party folks do as Saul Alinksy was required reading, not for "researching the enemy" but for their own organizational purposes.

"Radical left wingers and people that don't like the classical America?" What Obama is he talking about? The one who said this when he accepted his Nobel Peace prize?

The United States of America has helped underwrite global security for more than six decades with the blood of our citizens and the strength of our arms. The service and sacrifice of our men and women in uniform has promoted peace and prosperity from Germany to Korea, and enabled democracy to take hold in places like the Balkans. We have borne this burden not because we seek to impose our will. We have done so out of enlightened self-interest -- because we seek a better future for our children and grandchildren, and we believe that their lives will be better if others' children and grandchildren can live in freedom and prosperity.

And has backed it up with actions in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Libya? I don't know who this Obama is that he is talking about.

"Food stamp president?" Is that the one added 2.3 million private sector jobs and has reduced public sector employment by 600,000 jobs? The one who averted another Depression after the mess Bush and the GOP left us in back in 2008? Again, I don't know who this Obama is that he is talking about.

"An american president who can create a Chinese-Canadian partnership is truly a danger to this country" This is so unbelievably ridiculous that I'm at a loss for words.

"President Obama is a president so weak that he makes Jimmy Carter look strong." Let's see...bin Laden=dead. Al Alawki=dead. Hundreds of sorties by drones in Pakistan. Gaddafi=dead. Al Qaeda significantly damaged with ongoing US attacks. And a back channel warning from the president to the Supreme Leader of Iran which was repeated later in public. “We made very clear that the United States will not tolerate the blocking of the Strait of Hormuz,” Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta said. “That’s another red line for us and … we will respond to them.”Again, I don't know who this Obama is that he is talking about.

It's obvious that Newt and much of the right have created a fictional Obama...one that is all these things...because they can't run against the real one. It's much more appropriate to characterize their's as derangement when you compare their fictional creation with the anger and frustration that formed over the very clear incompetence from the Bush Administration which ended up costing thousands of lives and trillions of dollars of debt, it's not even a fucking contest.

He's Got Soul

2012-01-21T08:40:00.000-06:00

This is so ridiculously wonderful I barely have the words.

Voices In My Head Redux

2012-01-21T06:00:00.000-06:00

As I watched the upteenth GOP debate on Thursday night (for as long as I could stand it, anyway), I once again heard the most insane bullshit about President Obama. "He's the most dangerous president we have ever had," said Newt Gingrich. "Another term of Barack Obama will destroy the free enterprise system in this country," said Mitt Romney. "Our freedom is being taken away by the government," said Ron Paul. None of these things are remotely true and are fine examples of the "voices in my head."

Now, I've been assured by the fine folks that came up with this phrase that these sorts of statements and these candidates are not representative of their ideology. We'll set aside the fact that they have largely said the same things at one time or another and will likely vote for one of the four remaining men in the GOP field, essentially giving their support to such insanity. Today, I'm interested in something else in the interest of personal reflection.

I'd like each of the people who comment here and continually make the accusation that I argue with voices in my head and mis-characterize certain posters to use this thread for the following: lay out, in very simple terms, how exactly I warp your views in comparison to the endless and unhinged views that we hear every day from conservative candidates, pundits and media. Let's use this simple, fill in the blanks form

Mark says that I am________________________
But in reality, I think that _____________________
I differ from (insert GOP candidate or pundits name here) 's statement in that I think________________________
So, that's how Mark is wrong.

As we move forward in the election year, I want to make sure that I am accurately portraying each and every one of your views. If you don't think that the president is destroying free enterprise or is the most dangerous president in history, this is the thread to explain the nuanced differences between yourself and these views. Be prepared to back up your statements with facts. For example, if you do think that the president is destroying free enterprise, then you will have to demonstrate how the 2.3 million private sector jobs he added and the 600,000 public sector jobs that were lost figure into this assertion.

Or, as was recently stated in comments by one of those "voices in my head," how exactly we are headed towards the road to hell and when we will arrive at the fiery gates.

I'll check back frequently to respond and offer mea culpa as needed

Newt's Trifiecta

2012-01-20T09:00:00.000-06:00

The catch-phrase for this blog is "WHERE POLITICS, SEX, AND RELIGION ARE ALWAYS POLITE TO DISCUSS." With Newt Gingrich we have the trifecta.

According to a story in Thursday's Washington Post about Marianne Gingrich's interview with ABC's Nightline:

Presidential candidate Newt Gingrich in 1999 asked his second wife for an “open marriage” or a divorce at the same time he was giving speeches around the country on family and religious values, his former wife, Marianne, told The Washington Post on Thursday.

Gingrich is famous for asking for a divorce from his first wife, Jackie Battley, when she was in the hospital recovering from surgery. At the time he was apparently having an affair with Marianne, whom he married six months after his first divorce was finalized. Battley was Gingrich's geometry teacher, and they married when he was 19 and she was 26. Creepy, huh? According to L. H. Carter, Gingrich's campaign treasurer, Gingrich said of Battley: "She's not young enough or pretty enough to be the wife of the President. And besides, she has cancer." Gingrich has denied saying it.

Gingrich started another affair with Callista Bisek in the mid-1990s. He was having sex with an aide at exactly the same time he was demanding President Bill Clinton be impeached for having sex with an aide. Newt famously blamed his patriotism for the affair in an interview with the Christian Broadcasting Network:

There's no question at times of my life, partially driven by how passionately I felt about this country, that I worked far too hard and things happened in my life that were not appropriate.

Apparently, Newt wanted to screw America but he had to make do with Callista. They married in 2000 after a very messy divorce that was conducted publicly in the pages of the Atlanta newspapers.

In Thursday night's debate Gingrich predictably blamed the media for bringing up his infidelity issue again, saying it was untrue. It got him another standing ovation. But really, who has more credibility on the details of Newt's infidelity? The man who has admitted to lying to and cheating on his wife for six years, or the woman he lied to and cheated on?

The most telling part of the interview for me was this:

“He said the problem with me was I wanted him all to myself,” she said. “I said, ‘That’s what marriage is.’ He said [of Callista], ‘She doesn’t care what I do.’ ”

It's a telling detail that gives the entire account the ring of truth. Like a pernicious little boy trying to get his divorced mother to let him go to an R-rated movie by claiming that "Dad doesn't care if I go," Newt tried to guilt his wife into letting him have a mistress.

Which brings us to the third leg of the Gingrich stool: religion.

Gingrich was raised a Lutheran, apparently became a Southern Baptist in grad school, and converted to Catholicism. According to Gingrich's Wikipedia page, he said:

"Over the course of several years, I gradually became Catholic and then decided one day to accept the faith I had already come to embrace." The moment when he decided to officially become a Catholic was when he saw Pope Benedict XVI on his visit to the United States in 2008: "Catching a glimpse of Pope Benedict that day, I was struck by the happiness and peacefulness he exuded. The joyful and radiating presence of the Holy Father was a moment of confirmation about the many things I had been thinking and experiencing for several years."

To me this just seems crazy. Anyone who was ever a real Lutheran or Baptist and truly believed Luther's teachings in the Reformation could never convert to Catholicism. And how could anyone who's been divorced twice have the gall to convert to Catholicism, a religion which requires the pope himself to grant a dispensation for divorce? I find it even harder to believe that anyone could describe Benedict ("Papa Nazi") XVI's creepy presence as "happy and peaceful." Every time I see Pope Benedict I'm reminded of the Emperor in Return of the Jedi.

But why should Newt stop at Catholicism? Gingrich should go all the way and become an old-style Mormon. Republicans are concerned about Romney's religion, but Newt's the guy in the race who has admitted publicly that he was for all intents and purposes a practicing bigamist.

Thus, it is overwhelmingly apparent that Gingrich has no conviction or commitment to anything except himself, his own pleasure and his own convenience.

Republicans keep telling us that "character matters." Newt tries to finesse the issue by begging the forgiveness of God for the same sins he's repeated again and again over decades. Many envious middle-aged white men are more than glad to forgive Newt for his trespasses. But most Republicans also don't think that felons who've served their time and completely repaid their debt to society should be allowed to vote, a fact Mitt Romney pandered to when he attacked Rick Santorum on the issue.

Over the years Newt Gingrich has shown himself to be a megalomaniacal, mendacious, cynical, flip-flopping, self-serving narcissist. He is the fleshly manifestation of all the worst traits of the political animal.

During Newt's "strong" performance in the Myrtle Beach debate he gained many converts: the audience gave Newt a standing ovation after he slapped down Juan Williams for his uppity question about Gingrich's food stamp president remarks. Is it any surprise that Rick Perry was the first one to stand up and salute Gingrich, considering where Perry liked to hunt?

Newt's underlying argument is that he is the only man in the race who totally lacks integrity, the man for whom no hypocrisy is too great, no blow too low, no shot too cheap, or no lie too big. And the Republicans are willing to follow him down that road to hell.

The real question is, if Gingrich is the nominee will the Republicans be writing off the female vote? Mitt might be a calculating, cold-fish CEO, but at least he's got good hair and stands by his ma'am. Newt is every woman's worst nightmare: a fat, philandering, condescending loud-mouth who betrays his vows when his wives need him the most.

The Ricks

2012-01-19T15:16:00.000-06:00

Rick Perry is out and is supporting Gingrich. Rick Santorum has now won Iowa. It's a day of Ricks that Mitt Romney, perhaps, did not want to happen. What's going to happen in South Carolina? More importantly, is this race now going to be longer than anticipated? It sure looks that way.

The Case Against Liberal Despair

2012-01-19T06:00:00.000-06:00

So, all you Obama critics on the left, kindly pull your collective heads out of your collective arses.

Mitt's Tax Return Waffles

2012-01-18T04:00:00.000-06:00

Despite Newt Gingrich's prodding, Mitt Romney is still waffling on releasing his tax return. But he has deigned us with an estimate of what percentage he's paying in taxes:

“It’s probably closer to the 15 percent rate than anything,” Mr. Romney said. “Because my last 10 years, I’ve — my income comes overwhelmingly from investments made in the past, rather than ordinary income, or rather than earned annual income.”

So, for sitting around collecting dividends, buying and selling stock, speechifying and running non-stop for president for years on end Mitt pays taxes at a rate of 15%, while people who sweat and bleed and risk their lives on oil rigs and in war zones pay 25%, or 30% or 35%, not even including Social Security and Medicare taxes, which adds another 4-8%. That is, unless the Republicans get their way and it goes back up to 6-12%. Meanwhile, Romney doesn't pay a nickel of payroll taxes on capital gains and dividends.

I don't criticize Romney for paying that tax rate, or for making money through long-term investments. It's smart to optimize your income, and I don't begrudge him being rich (Obama paid 26%, which is a lot lower than many Americans). But I do criticize him for campaigning to make the Bush capital gains tax cuts permanent. Romney should man up like Warren Buffett and admit the inherent unfairness of the tax system. Capital gains should be taxed at exactly the same rate as earned wages, as they were before the Bush tax cuts.

In particular, gains on selling non-IPO stock are essentially gambling income, because repurchased stocks are just a bet that the price will go up. Companies never see a penny from repurchased stock, so buying shares on the stock market is not really an investment in the company. In fact, outstanding shares are often a liability because of dividends and loss of autonomy, and many companies have programs to purchase outstanding shares.

Incessant demand for stock price increases from shareholders is the number one cause of poor long-term decision-making in the management of companies. Since most execs have bonus plans linked to share price, their incentive is to do whatever it takes to jack the price up in the short term without regard to the company's future. If things go south, their golden parachute kicks in and they can just move on to the next gig. Most market players plan to sell off their shares at their peak price, and don't care what happens to the company after they cash out.

While it would be interesting so see Mitt's return from last year, I'm more interested in seeing his returns over the past 15 years. How did Mitt's income change before and after the Bush tax cuts, and how has he weathered the Great Recession? Did he make out like a bandit while all the vast majority of Americans suffered catastrophic economic and job losses?

The theory is that capital gains taxes should be low because it spurs investment and job creation. These taxes have been artificially low for 10 years now, and the only investment and job growth they've spurred has been in China.

Since the Bush tax cuts the rich have been getting richer and the middle class poorer. The Bush tax cuts have redistributed wealth from the middle class to the super wealthy like Romney.

It's time to end this welfare for the wealthy.

Fantasies Here, Fantasies There, Fantasies Everywhere

2012-01-17T13:16:00.001-06:00

Since this is an election year, we can all expect a great deal of scrutiny on the issues. The remaining five candidates in the GOP field as well as the president are going to be under a microscope for the better part of the next ten months so we should buckle up and start getting used to it.

Yet the candidates aren't the only ones that are going to be examined and with good reason. Recently, Andrew Sullivan and Thomas Frank are taking a look at exactly what is driving the folks that are rabidly against the reelection of President Obama. I've been doing that as well. For me, it all starts with this. I can't think of a finer example that illustrates the mentality of the conservative movement.

Thomas Frank, in his latest book Pity the Billionaire: The Hard-Times Swindle and the Unlikely Comeback of the Right, makes some points that perfectly illustrate my monumental frustration. In looking at the aftermath of the collapse in 2008, we saw the greatest example of the failure of free market principles that most Americans have ever lived through. Instead of a move towards a balance between regulation and free markets, we got the Tea Party, a hardcore anti-government movement. To Mr. Frank, it's as if "the public had demanded dozens of new nuclear power plants in the wake of the Three Mile Island disaster."

From a recent review of Frank's book.

Until Obama's election, this kind of purist market worship was the preserve of political and economic elites – "propaganda," to use Frank's blunt term, to keepwealth in their own hands. Who knows if even they believed it? And yet in 2009 and 2010, a whole swath of Americans turned to "the sole utopian scheme available" to them, with effects that can only be called perverse. It's one thing for a CEO to declare that "corporations are people," if such an obscene claim leads to greater profits or power. Now, amazingly, the same line could be heard from ordinary voters. Even more strangely, middle- and working-class Americans were defending precisely the multinationals that had triggered the crisis and received the universally reviled bailouts. In the trough of the 2009 recession, Americans whose livelihoods had been destroyed by far-off bankers were actually rallying "to demand that bankers be freed from 'red tape' and the scrutiny of the law." At one surreal moment, Glenn Beck urged his followers to give away their cash to the US Chamber of Commerce, "the biggest, baddest business lobby in all of DC." They donated so much that they crashed its servers.

Indeed. The inmates are running the asylum. But how did all this happen?

If you wanted to learn about the Great Depression you once went to the library to read Arthur Schlesinger; now, your first Google results will teach you that the New Deal was an utter failure and that "Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?" is a Hooverite screed against government handout). By this binary logic, everyone trying to make a buck is united against big bad Washington and its attendant elite institutions. The absurdity that such elite figures as bank CEOs, four-star generals, and Alaskan governors are somehow men and women of the people goes unmentioned.

There is hope, however, and it's this very hope that is starting to piss off the right wing blogsphere. It's simply a matter of people responding to this lunacy and calling it out for what it is. More folks are starting to listen. Andrew Sullivan's recent piece on Obama's Long Game details this quite nicely.

But this time, with this president, something different has happened. It’s not that I don’t understand the critiques of Barack Obama from the enraged right and the demoralized left. It’s that I don’t even recognize their description of Obama’s first term in any way. The attacks from both the right and the left on the man and his policies aren’t out of bounds. They’re simply—empirically—wrong.

No shit, Sully. They are wrong and it's far past time to say it that plainly.

The right’s core case is that Obama has governed as a radical leftist attempting a “fundamental transformation” of the American way of life. Mitt Romney accuses the president of making the recession worse, of wanting to turn America into a European welfare state, of not believing in opportunity or free enterprise, of having no understanding of the real economy, and of apologizing for America and appeasing our enemies. According to Romney, Obama is a mortal threat to “the soul” of America and an empty suit who couldn’t run a business, let alone a country.

Exactly right and I've said as much on here (oddly to be accused recently of bearing false witness). Let's test this theory. I'm going to go and pull a quote from Kevin Baker's site and post it here. Shouldn't take me too long...be right back....

Ah, here we go...here is a quote he put up the other day...

Detroit is North Korea … with the Unions holding the same pride of place as the North Korean Army—keep them happy and they keep the kleptocracy in power. No matter who else starves. --

followed up this comment

But the Obama economic model will make Detroit the model for the rest of the U.S. THAT is what we need to worry about. Later on there will be no other place to leave to.

So, Sully's assessment is accurate. (side note: what is a kleptocracy?)

Now, what actually happened...

Obama did several things at once: he continued the bank bailout begun by George W. Bush, he initiated a bailout of the auto industry, and he worked to pass a huge stimulus package of $787 billion.All these decisions deserve scrutiny. And in retrospect, they were far more successful than anyone has yet fully given Obama the credit for. The job collapse bottomed out at the beginning of 2010, as the stimulus took effect. Since then, the U.S. has added 2.4 million jobs. That’s not enough, but it’s far better than what Romney would have you believe, and more than the net jobs created under the entire Bush administration. In 2011 alone, 1.9 million private-sector jobs were created, while a net 280,000 government jobs were lost. Overall government employment has declined 2.6 percent over the past 3 years. (That compares with a drop of 2.2 percent during the early years of the Reagan administration.) To listen to current Republican rhetoric about Obama’s big-government socialist ways, you would imagine that the reverse was true. It isn’t.

Correct. I highlight this last bit because one would think that the anti-government types would be happy about this. Nope. He's still a socialist who wants a European style government. How can anyone fucking talk to these people?

This next bit I dedicate with love and affection to last in line.

The right claims the stimulus failed because it didn’t bring unemployment down to 8 percent in its first year, as predicted by Obama’s transition economic team. Instead, it peaked at 10.2 percent. But the 8 percent prediction was made before Obama took office and was wrong solely because it relied on statistics that guessed the economy was only shrinking by around 4 percent, not 9. Remove that statistical miscalculation (made by government and private-sector economists alike) and the stimulus did exactly what it was supposed to do. It put a bottom under the free fall. It is not an exaggeration to say it prevented a spiral downward that could have led to the Second Great Depression.

Sully goes on to talk about how a third of the stimulus was tax cuts, another fact ignored by the mouth foamers. And how about that spending?

Under Bush, new policies on taxes and spending cost the taxpayer a total of $5.07 trillion. Under Obama’s budgets both past and projected, he will have added $1.4 trillion in two terms.Under Bush and the GOP, nondefense discretionary spending grew by twice as much as under Obama.

Yep, correct. Health care?

The Congressional Budget Office has projected it will reduce the deficit, not increase it dramatically, as Bush’s unfunded Medicare Prescription Drug benefit did. It is based on the individual mandate, an idea pioneered by the archconservative Heritage Foundation, Newt Gingrich, and, of course, Mitt Romney, in the past. It does not have a public option; it gives a huge new client base to the drug and insurance companies; its health-insurance exchanges were also pioneered by the right. It’s to the right of the Clintons’ monstrosity in 1993, and remarkably similar to Nixon’s 1974 proposal.

Embedded in it are also a slew of cost-reduction pilot schemes to slow health-care spending. Yes, it crosses the Rubicon of universal access to private health care. But since federal law mandates that hospitals accept all emergency-room cases requiring treatment anyway, we already obey that socialist principle—but in the most inefficient way possible. Making 44 million current free-riders pay into the system is not fiscally reckless; it is fiscally prudent. It is, dare I say it, conservative.

Yes, you should say it because that's what it fucking is. Good grief am I tired of people's general ideological delusions and/or paranoid hatred of the president leading to insane and completely untrue accusations.

Sully goes on to talk about Obama's foreign policy successes as well as the equally ridiculous accusations by the left which I may address at a later date but for now I think it's important to reflect on all of these points because they are what actually happened. And the American people need to understand that. But will they?

And I feel confident that sooner rather than later, the American people will come to see his first term from the same calm, sane perspective. And decide to finish what they started.

Man, I love Sully, but I'm afraid I don't share his optimism.

Feet of Clay

2012-01-16T11:38:00.001-06:00

They all stared in disbelief at what they had just heard. The man who had become the center of the civil rights movement had quietly told them that he would not be joining them. Despite their protestations and questions, he said that he didn't want to risk being arrested again. They chuckled derisively as many of them had been arrested several times. Worse, many of their group had just been beaten and were hospitalized.

Yet, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr would not be swayed. The Freedom Riders would continue without him.

Was he afraid he would get hurt? Or worse? It's hard to say for sure but after the first wave of Freedom Riders were severely beaten and one of their buses was firebombed, it would be a massive understatement to say that people were worried. The original intent of the Freedom Rides was to test the 1960 Supreme Court decision, Boynton v. Virginia, which stated that segregation of any kind on buses that traveled across state lines was illegal.

The initial two groups had no idea what was waiting for them when the got into Alabama despite warnings from Dr. King who urged them to call of the rides or at least postpone them until a later date. His organizaton, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), had heard that the Klan had mobilized and was going to stop them by any means necessary. After the two buses had been halted by the Klan and various mobs of people, the group tried to reorganize and met with Dr. King. Nashville student and Freedom Ride leader Diane Nash felt that if violence were allowed to halt the Freedom Rides, the movement would be set back years. But Dr. King still thought it would be better to wait.

And he refused to join them for the second wave.

It was only later in the week, on May 21, 1961, when that Dr. King organized a rally at Reverend Ralph Abernathy's First Baptist Church to honor the Freedom Riders. This rally drew a crowd of more than 1500 people who became trapped in the church as a mob of 3,000 angry whites surrounded the structure. Hours went by as President Kennedy continued to pressure Alabama Governor John Patterson to send in the National Guard. He finally did and the rally attendees were able to leave the church relatively unscathed.

I tell this story because this year, on Dr. King's day, I want to point out that the man wasn't perfect and he certainly isn't the myth that has been created around him. Usually, I post something that contributes to the legend of Dr. King and, no doubt, he was a legendary figure who contributed an enormous amount of service to this country in terms of social justice.

But he was just a man and this year I wanted to illustrate that, like all of us, sometimes even legends have their moments when they have feet of clay.

For more information on the Freedom Riders, check out this documentary that aired on PBS's The American Experience.

Sunday's Message

2012-01-15T10:50:00.000-06:00

11 million hits on YouTube so far. This one is making a lot of people nervous.

Good.

Meanwhile, Iran and The United States...

2012-01-14T11:42:00.000-06:00

With the fifth assassination of an Iranian nuclear scientist this week, relations between Iran and the United States are fairly close to boiling. Some analysts think they are there already. Add in Iran's recent threats to close the Straight of Hormuz and we have a very delicate situation developing in an always destabilized region of the world.

Most of us aren't paying attention to this, of course, and are focused on the election and, more specifically, the economy. Yet I think it's very likely that something is going to happen with Iran this year and it's going to be serious. It will be very interesting to see how this effects the election. Remember that the 2008 election was supposed to be about Iraq but turned out to be about the economy. Could the 2012 election, supposedly about the economy, end up being about Iran?

Clearly, Mossed is behind the targeted assassinations in Iran. Iran is accusing the CIA of being behind it in public but in private they know full well that it's Israel. Perhaps they don't want to admit it. The Israeli government is trying to provoke Iran into taking some sort of action so we'll then have no choice but to get involved and attack them.

This presents a tough decision for the president. Already, he has ratcheted up the sanctions against Iran and issued very blunt warnings about the Straight of Hormuz. What will all of this do to oil prices in a very shaky world economy? In addition, the president already views Israel as not being a true partner to peace in the Middle East and, to a certain extent, he does have a point. Yet Israel is acting in its own self interest. Most of the statements coming out of Iran are simply chest thumping bluster. Their central goal, however, has always been to rid the world of Israel. Make statements of this nature and expect the current response they are getting-dead nuclear scientists.The only certain thing here for the president is that whatever actions he takes, regardless of their success, conservatives and the other assorted right wingers out there will label him a failure.

Given all of this, what would you do?

Firing Your Insurance Company

2012-01-13T14:01:00.000-06:00

A lot has been made of Mitt Romney's "I like to fire people" quote, but most of it is off base. In context, he said,

“I want individuals to have their own insurance. That means the insurance company will have an incentive to keep you healthy. It also means that if you don’t like what they do, you can fire them. I like being able to fire people who provide services to me. You know, if someone doesn’t give me the good service I need, I want to say, ‘You know, I’m going to go get somebody else to provide that service to me.’ ”

I agree with that sentiment, though I wouldn't state it with such dickish Trump-like bluster. But Romney's statement was made to discredit the new health care law and on that score he's wrong. In fact, the new law brings us closer to being able to fire our health care providers than the system we currently have.

Right now very few Americans are in a position to fire their health insurance company.

First off, the vast majority of Americans have no real choice for health insurance, because it's provided by their employer. You might get to pick from a limited set of options, but your company decides what those options are, and if you don't like them, the only way to fire your health insurance provider is to quit your job.

But Mitt doesn't get this, because he's a business owner and has never seen how health insurance works from the employee's viewpoint. Of course Mitt can fire his health insurance provider if their service sucks -- he's the boss. His employees have no such luxury.

And Mitt is also wrong if he thinks that the insurance company has an incentive to keep you healthy: the insurer's only incentive is to make their costs be less than the premiums the employer is paying them, while providing just enough medical care to shut the employees up.

In employer-based health insurance Employer A pays Insurance Company B to pay Medical Services Company C to provide health care to Person D. The amount of overhead and paperwork is insane, and there's no incentive for anyone to get anything right. The biggest incentive is for insurance companies to deny and delay medical care to employees who may not be working for the employer in six months or a year, or for employers who may not renew their contract.

People who pay for their own health insurance can ostensibly fire their provider. But practically speaking, it is all but impossible for anyone over 40 to fire their insurance provider. Insurance companies can turn you down for preexisting conditions, and everyone over 40 has preexisting conditions.The companies also have lifetime limits on coverage, and your insurance provider can fire you if you get too expensive for them. Since the downturn started in 2007-2008, there are literally millions of 40+-year-old Americans who have lost their jobs and health insurance, and can't get private insurance even if they can pay for it, because of preexisting conditions. If 40-year-olds can't get insurance, they're going to be in a lot worse shape by the time they're old enough to get on Medicare, and that will cost a lot more.

A lot of this is changing under the new law, and we'll have more protections and a greater ability to retain and switch coverage. Is it perfect? Nope; it's based on Mitt Romney's Massachusetts plan, after all. It could have been better, but the Republicans in Congress categorically refused to work with the Democrats. The Republicans' self-proclaimed goal was to make Barack Obama a one-term president, and they have done everything they can to torpedo the health care initiative.

In the long run, employers have no business paying for employee's health insurance. It's just an accident of American corporate history that it works this way. It's an unfair burden on companies, and it's a huge competitive disadvantage for American business. Everyone should be responsible for their own health care, just as they are for other necessities like food and shelter.

Yes, such a transition would be messy: it would require everyone who gets health care benefits to get an equivalent raise, and a subsidy for people who can't afford it. In addition, industries that cause health problems should also pay more taxes to counter those effects: that is, fast-food chains, and soda, alcoholic beverage and cigarette companies. There will be many sticking points. Companies will short-change employees, and over time employees will complain that their salaries aren't rising fast enough to cover the constantly-increasing cost of health care. And the right will oppose government subsidies for those who will never be able afford to pay for their own health care because they're stuck in part-time jobs like store clerks, bus-boys, hotel maids and cashiers. Millions of Americans are stuck in minimum-wage jobs that are totally necessary for our country to function, but jobs that will never pay well enough to allow someone to buy their own health care, a car or a house.

Our system is the most expensive in the world, but the aggregate quality of outcomes across all America is inferior to most of the developed world. Under our private insurance model annual cost increases have outstripped the rate of inflation by up to five or ten times, and for decades private insurers have totally failed to achieve the only service they supposedly provide: contain rising costs.

Mitt Romney and the Raiders

2012-01-12T04:30:00.000-06:00

The Republican Party is in a tizzy over the criticisms some of Mitt Romney's opponents are hurling at him. They say he's a corporate raider, while his defenders say he's the perfect example of capitalism at its finest.

But as in all things, there are good capitalists and there are bad capitalists. Just because this is a free country doesn't mean everything you can legally do is moral and ethical, or good for the United States in the long run.

So let's look at a few different kinds of capitalists and see where Mitt fits.

The prototypical American capitalist is one or two entrepreneurs with an idea who start a company their own money or raise money for the venture by selling shares of stock to investors. As the company makes a profit the owners and investors recoup their investment by receiving dividends, or by selling shares of the stock when the company goes public. People like Henry Ford, Bill Gates, and Steve Jobs are generally thought of as the heroes of capitalism for creating new wealth in exactly this fashion.

Over time, the cost of starting many businesses has become a significant hurdle, so a more recent business development model is the venture capitalist. Using their own money, or pooling the money of investors, venture capitalists search for small businesses with great ideas that are going nowhere because they don't have the resources or business acumen. A lot of high-tech startups have been formed this way over the last 20 years. Venture capitalists often help the solitary inventor who lacks management skills hook up with professionals who can make the company grow and create new wealth.

As companies compete in the marketplace based on the strengths of their products and services, there will be winners and losers. If one company stumbles by making bad or over-priced products, or becomes bloated and inefficient, the poorly-run company may go out of business, or it may be taken over by a better-run competitor. That's just how capitalism works.

But it shows one of the weaknesses of capitalism. Over time these good capitalists can turn into bad capitalists if they are a bit too successful and develop a monopoly position, either by a single company or multiple companies making deals to split up the market. Monopolies rest on their laurels, become arrogant and lose their entrepreneurial spark. Their customers suffer from bad products and poor service. The companies maintain their monopoly by buying up potential competitors or litigating them out of existence. In short, large companies need to be watched, and that's what Teddy Roosevelt's trust-busting was all about.

Besides entrepreneurs and venture capitalists, there's another type of capitalist: the corporate takeover artist, personified by Gordon Gekko in the movie Wall Street. You know, the "greed is good" guy.

These raiders borrow money from investors and banks, promising large returns. They look for companies that are having trouble and snap them up at bargain prices. Sometimes they break the company up and sell the business units for more than they paid, or they dissolve the company to acquire real estate holdings or pension funds and cash them out. Sometimes they restructure the company, firing excess employees, or getting rid of the unprofitable parts and refocusing the business, over time making the company more profitable. Some of this is good, some of it is bad.

But since it's easier to take over a company that's in trouble, raiders often take over the poor performers. Using that acquisition as leverage to get more loans, the raider can then take over the better performers in an industry, turning the whole idea of capitalism upside down. Then the raiders pull the money out of the merged company to make their profit, often leaving the company with huge debt. After the raider is gone, the company quickly goes bankrupt. Everyone loses: employees lose their jobs, customers lose the service or product support, distributors lose a product line, retail outlets lose things to sell, suppliers aren't paid for their goods. Everyone, that is, except the corporate raiders.

The difference between corporate raiders and real capitalists is that raiders don't create new ideas or new wealth. This perversion of capitalism is not good for the economy or the United States, and it's what Mitt Romney practiced at Bain. Romney's brand of capitalism concentrates more money in the hands of fewer people, while contributing nothing new. Guys like Romney think of the economy as a zero-sum game and work to take a bigger piece of the pie, while real capitalists create new business and new money to make the pie bigger.

Our intellectual property and incorporation laws were created to reward people for developing new ideas. The "financialization" of the US economy has destroyed that idea, and instead now rewards raiders, bean-counting bankers, stock brokers, wheeler-dealers and hedge fund managers who get rich by betting that companies will fail, rather than working hard to create new products and services.

Romney's brand of capitalism also puts the United States at risk for takeovers by foreign interests, especially if Republicans make good on their promise to eliminate corporate regulations. What if, instead of investing in US Treasury bills, the Chinese decide to go after American corporations through a series of shell corporations? The only thing preventing this are those "job-killing" regulations that Republicans have pledged to repeal. We know we don't want the Red Army owning Boeing, General Dynamics and Lockheed. But do we really want Beijing calling the shots in the boardrooms at Walmart, IBM, Apple, GM, American Airlines, and John Deere?

What if those companies were secretly controlled by foreign interests, and they secretly contributed to Super PACs that spent hundreds of millions of dollars trying to influence American elections?

It makes you ask: who's really buying Mitt Romney's election?

For All You Anti-Statists...the Perfect Home!

2012-01-11T12:40:00.000-06:00

Manufacturing Imprisonment

2012-01-11T11:39:00.000-06:00

Last night I was flipping around the New Hampshire primary coverage and saw one of Ron Paul's spokespeople talking about his candidate's second place finish. The question was put to him as to why Dr. Paul is getting so many votes.

"Well, people are tired of having their freedoms taken away," the young man answered.

Uh...what?

Where? Which ones? I'd like to know exactly what freedoms are being taken away because I think this speaks to the very crux of why right wingers vote the way they do.

Honestly, it seems to me that these "freedoms being taken away" don't actually exist and are made up for an all too willing audience...an audience made up of people that if one spends just a few moments quizzing them about their personal lives, it becomes very apparent that the problem isn't the government but themselves and the choices they have made. Ironic, for a group that espouses individual responsibility yet blames the government for everything. But that's their weird blame thing again...

I find it terribly frightening that many Paul supporters (as well as other conservatives and libertarians) have manufactured a reality in which Americans are a small step away (if not there already, in some minds) from the former Soviet Union. What's more frustrating is that their arrogance somehow translates into derisive comments towards "unbelievers" and it is really us (meaning mentally stable people) that are being naive. These people should not be running anything at all because, to put it bluntly, they aren't right in the head. The world is moving at an ever increasing rate towards free markets and trade. Cuba, for crying out loud, is selling private property. The writing is on the wall for centrally planned economies: they are doomed. And it's only a matter of time.

Yet they will not let go of their paranoia. Why? Are they so afraid of change that they can't accept that many of their stated wishes have come true?

Now, I get that some Paul supporters are young and male so there's the adolescent power fantasy thing at work. That's not so much loony as it is hormones and brains not fully developed leading to a latching on to something that aids them in their rebellion against "Dad." Yeah, my freedoms are being taken away, fucker! But the rest? There's no excuse for them whatsoever.

Folks, the world is becoming a better place, not worse. We don't have the time to play make believe and pretend that our government is becoming a statist regime that is on the cusp of taking away our guns and sending people to re-education camps. We have serious problems to confront as we face a rapidly changing world and, quite frankly, many of these folks need to stop spending so much time living in their fantasy world and join us in reality.

Setting aside the anger, hate and fear is tough, I know. But think of how much time we would save...

Ah, Gip...

2012-01-10T13:37:00.001-06:00

Impressive!

2012-01-10T10:02:00.002-06:00

Just in time for the presidential election this year, some fine folks have created a site devoted exclusively to the president's achievements since taking office. This is a fairly impressive list that offers links after each one to explore the accomplishment further.

The Economy section is replete with items and one in particular caught my eye. This link is an excellent summary of how the president's policies have helped the economy. Some of the charts and graphs may look familiar as I have put them up in various posts here and there but this organizes them all in one central location. We can clearly see the GDP growth, private sector job gains, public sector job loss (good for you libertarian folks who want to shrink the size of government:)) and just how large of a hole we were in.

The last point is very important because there are many out there who continually harp on how the stimulus didn't work. It's goal wasn't to magically turn us back to the prosperity of the 1990s. Given the depth of the problem, which certainly required a greater period of analysis than just a few months, its goal was to prevent another Great Depression. It did that. Pay close attention to Part III of the report as it shows the estimates of what would've happened had there been no recovery act.

From now until Election Day, I will be referring to this site frequently as we explore why and how the president has done a good job and should be re-elected.

Verbatim!

2012-01-09T17:47:00.002-06:00

Tracking the President

2012-01-09T12:51:00.001-06:00

Gallup Tracking has a very cool app that I have been using for the past few months. I highly recommend picking it up for your smart phone if you are interested in seeing the latest polls. Of course, I have been following the president's numbers very closely and for a while there, it was pretty much the same. He'd get up to 44 or 45 percent and then drop back down to 41 or 42.

But then a few weeks ago, he shot up to 47 and his disapproval went down to 45. At first I thought it was an aberration because it dropped again and toggled between 42 and 44. But then he shot back up and has now been toggling between 45 and 47 approval with his disapproval falling at the same time. In other words, he's been trending higher for the past couple of weeks and it seems to be sticking.

These are the same numbers that Rasmussen has had him at for the last several months but, even though they have been more positive for the president in comparison to Gallup, I still don't trust their polling because of how they do their sampling. So, I think it's a safe bet to say that 45 percent of this country approves of the job the president is doing. Not all that impressive but not as bad as it was a couple of months ago.

And it's important to note that are probably 2-4 percent of the "disapprove" folks that are teed off because he isn't liberal enough which means they are still going to vote for him. That puts him the upper 40s and from there it's all going to come down to the independents and who the choice is for the GOP. As I have said before, if it's "Not Romney," then the president wins by a large margin. If it is Romney, it's going to depend on less than a dozen key states.

Hmm...

2012-01-08T22:22:00.000-06:00

The Issue of Fault

2012-01-08T12:39:00.000-06:00

Today, I find myself, as I often do on Sundays, in a reflective mood. Actually, for the past week, I've been ruminating on the issue of fault and trying to figure out how conservatives, generally speaking, really have their head up their collective asses when it comes to that age old question, "Who's to blame?" If someone is poor and struggling to make end's meet, it's their fault. As GOP presidential hopeful Rick Santorum said recently, "People die in America because people die in America. And people make poor decisions with respect to their health and their healthcare. And they don’t go to the emergency room or they don’t go to the doctor when they need to."

So, when someone gets sick or simply can't pay bills, it's all their fault. They made stupid choices which led them to that point, so fuck 'em. Or, it's somehow the fault of the government. The nanny state has led them to believe that they will be cared for or some federal program has been an impediment in their lives and they are forced into submission with the result being a negative outcome.

In sum, the fault is with the person or the government.

Yet the collection of individuals (family, friends, community) or the people that make up the various private concerns that have a direct relation to a person's life are NEVER EVER at fault. Even though health care firms, insurance companies, gas and electric companies, groceries, restaurants, and other organizations have a direct impact on our lives, they are never at fault. It's as if individuals operate in a vacuum. And, regardless of the evidence gathered thus far, climate change is not the fault of mankind. It's simply a natural part of the earth's cycle and we are not to blame whatsoever.

In sum, large collections of people are never at fault (unless it's the federal government) and should never take the blame for bad things that happen.

In looking at this ridiculous dichotomy, I'm wondering...why are conservatives/libertarians so pro-collective? They continually speak of the supporting individual rights and freedoms yet fervently shit all over them. Down on your luck? Tough shit. It was probably some dumb ass decision you made. No hand outs here, buster. Pull yourself up by your bootstraps. And don't go blamin' the rising cost of (insert organization here) for your problems. You are on your own...unless, of course, it's the federal government. Because they are forcing you at gunpoint to do their bidding.

But do not, under any circumstances, blame yourself as a part of the human race for climate change. They are all a bunch of liberals using a pseudo-science rooted in apocryphal religion to hoodwink you into government spending beyond their means. Even though the effects of greenhouse gases warming the earth can be shown in any 8th grade science class, it's not your fault.

Folks, I don't get it. As is usually the case, the right has the issue of fault completely FUBAR. While I do agree that people (especially in this country), have a great deal of control over their lives and do, in fact, make poor choices that lead to negative outcomes, they aren't entirely to blame on their own. This is especially true when it comes to the issue of health care. And if they get laid off from their job, that may also be the fault of the company in general and poor decision making by upper management-a collection of people. It's a combination of both individual fault and the impediments that arise as a result of the institutions (both public and private) that we have in our society.

So, shouldn't those same institutions, which likely helped to cause the problems in the first place, also be expected to to help people?

Positively Brilliant!

2012-01-07T15:27:00.004-06:00

Meanwhile, on the Western Front

2012-01-07T05:00:00.000-06:00

With all the attention focused on the Republican race for the nomination in the midwest and east, two articles about corporations from the Wild West caught my attention last week.

The first isa story by Kelly Carr and Brian Grow of Reuters about a house on a residential street in Cheyenne, Wyoming, where more than 2,000 corporations are registered. These aren't real corporations: they're shell companies like the ones in the Cayman Islands that drug dealers and the mafia use to launder their money. Lax incorporation laws allow people to register their companies in Wyoming and keep the identities of the principles secret so that the money can't be tracked.

Wyoming Corporate Services, as this capitol of crony capitalism calls itself, offers a full menu of deceptive incorporation strategies, including "shelf" corporations. These companies sit "on the shelf" engaging in what appear to be legitimate financial transactions to make them seem like honest, reliable companies. And then someone with a nefarious purpose comes along and buys this phony corporation to give themselves an air or respectability and a fake history. It's all a big fraud, but it's apparently legal.

According to the Reuters article, the company's website boasts:

A corporation is a legal person created by state statute that can be used as a fall guy, a servant, a good friend or a decoy. A person you control... yet cannot be held accountable for its actions. Imagine the possibilities!

I searched WCS's website and couldn't find that exact quote, but perusing their list of services and braggadocio about why Wyoming is so much better for incorporation than Nevada, the quote aptly describes their intent. And the thing is, it's completely true: this is exactly why corporations exist. They almost completely remove personal responsibility and personal financial risk from anyone doing business.

The protections of incorporation are in general a public good, allowing people to take risks creating new jobs without risking their entire future. But Wyoming law allows criminals to hide billions of dollars of illegal income, and for otherwise upstanding citizens to avoid paying billions in taxes. All of which means that the rest of us have to pay that much more to make up the difference.

The second story was from next door: the Montana Supreme Court ruled that Montana's corporate campaign contribution law was constitutional. In a 5-2 opinion, the majority upheld that the 1912 initiative Montana voters passed banning corporate contributions to political candidates and parties.

Echoing what I've long been saying, Justice James C. Nelson wrote:

Corporations are not persons. Human beings are persons, and it is an affront to the inviolable dignity of our species that courts have created a legal fiction which forces people — human beings — to share fundamental, natural rights with soulless creatures of government.

Worse still, while corporations and human beings share many of the same rights under the law, they clearly are not bound equally to the same codes of good conduct, decency and morality, and they are not held equally accountable for their sins. Indeed, it is truly ironic that the death penalty and hell are reserved only to natural persons.

Montana has history on its side in this corporate dogfight. In the early 20th century the "Copper Kings" ran the state. The mining companies bought most every judge and politician in Montana. At a time when US senators were selected by state legislators, banker and mining executive William A. Clark bribed the
Montana legislature to elect him to the US Senate. However, the Senate refused to seat Clark in 1899 because of the bribery scheme, and the incident was the impetus for the passage of the 17th Amendment providing for direct election of senators. Clark was reputed to have said, "I never bought a man who wasn't for sale." Still, he campaigned again and served one term in the Senate, prompting Mark Twain to write:

He is as rotten a human being as can be found anywhere under the flag; he is a shame to the American nation, and no one has helped to send him to the Senate who did not know that his proper place was the penitentiary, with a ball and chain on his legs. To my mind he is the most disgusting creature that the republic has produced since Tweed's time.

The Montana ruling will almost certainly collide with the US Supreme Court's Citizens United decision, which allowed for the public flaying of Newt Gingrich in Iowa by Mitt Romney's Super PAC. Romney's PAC, Restore Our Future, is run by former Romney campaign aides, according to an article in the Washington Post. (Jon Huntsman's Super PAC is mostly financed by his father.)

Gingrich complained bitterly about the "independent" ad campaigns, claiming that he'd been "Romney-boated." This was an implicit acknowledgment that the Swift Boat campaign against John Kerry in 2004 was just a dirty, lying political trick. Which has always been common knowledge, but few Republicans will admit the truth of it to this day. John McCain suffered the same treatment by George Bush's campaign in 2000, prompting him to sponsor the campaign finance reform laws the Supreme Court struck down.

The combination of uncontrolled secretive shell corporations and unlimited secret corporate donations to "independent" political campaigns -- especially in judicial elections -- is a recipe for disaster. Citizens United is making it impossible for the average voter to tell the truth from the lies repeated on the airwaves so often they become a mantra.

Rick Santorum May Not Like All the Attention He's About to Get

2012-01-06T06:00:00.000-06:00

An article by Jake Tapper at ABC News shows why Rick Santorum is unfit to serve as president:

I pointed out that Democrats say that one of the reasons Santorum lost in 2006 was because they say he’s more conservative than mainstream America. One issue was Santorum’s opposition to the Supreme Court’s 1965 ruling that invalidated a Connecticut law banning contraception. Santorum said he still feels that a state should be able to make such laws.

“The state has a right to do that, I have never questioned that the state has a right to do that. It is not a constitutional right, the state has the right to pass whatever statues they have. That is the thing I have said about the activism of the Supreme Court, they are creating rights, and they should be left up to the people to decide,” he said.

“You shouldn’t create constitutional rights when states do dumb things,” Santorum said. “Let the people decide if the states are doing dumb things get rid of the legislature and replace them as opposed to creating constitutional laws that have consequences that were before them.”

So, his argument for allowing states to ban contraception is that the Constitution doesn't ban stupidity?

The Supreme Court's 1965 decision in Griswold vs. Connecticut overturned a law banning contraception. This decision was one of the first to outline a right to privacy in the Constitution. It drew upon the Ninth Amendment, which states:

The enumeration in the Constitution of certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

The intent of this is obvious: there are many rights so basic that no one would think there would be a need to write them down. Those inalienable rights obviously include the most intimate decisions people make in their marriage: whether they have sex, what kind of sex they have and whether they have children.

This amendment also shows the Founders' foresight. They knew that times change, and that the Constitution shouldn't be used as a hammer to destroy current and future freedoms and rights.

The majority (7-2) of the court also argued that privacy is protected by the Due Process Clause of the 14th amendment. It would also seem that the Equal Protection Clause and the Commerce Clause also bear on the issue, since contraceptives are manufactured in other states and countries and people could cross state lines to buy them. If you can buy guns this way, why not contraceptives?

The Fourth Amendment definitely implies a right to privacy, even though it doesn't explicitly mention the word:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

This is practically the dictionary definition of what privacy means.

In Rick Santorum's ideal universe, lack of children would be probable cause to raid your home and search for condoms and birth control pills. He says that we need to pump out more children so that Social Security doesn't go bust. If elected president will Santorum institute a medal of honor for women who bear eight children, along the lines of the Mutterehrenkreuz of Nazi Germany? Heck, if lots of children are important, why aren't Catholic nuns and priests getting busy? They are shirking their duty!

In 1960 many people thought John F. Kennedy couldn't be president because his Catholicism would dictate his decisions. Kennedy went out of his way to reassure the American people that this wouldn't be the case. But Santorum is going out of his way to tell us that his religion will dictate every facet of his administration.

If you think religion mixed with politics is a good thing, read a little history, especially the reigns of King Henry VIII, Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth I. For good measure, read about the Huguenots in France. In those days Protestants and Catholics murdered each other by the thousands. And it's still going on today in Iraq, with Sunnis and Shiites going at it. If you think that only Muslims murder each other over religion these days, you need only look to Northern Ireland, where Catholics and Protestants were still killing each other only 15 years ago.

And if you think it can't happen here, just look at the string of religiously motivated murders of doctors in America, as recently as 2009 when George Tiller was gunned down in a Kansas church.

With all this abortion and contraception posturing by Santorum, the irony is that his wife Karen had a second-trimester abortion in 1996 in order to save her life. I don't criticize him for the abortion, just for wanting to prevent other people from having the same option.

This fact which has not gone unnoticed by the Paul campaign, and I expect things will start to get very ugly very soon.

Frack in Haste...

2012-01-05T06:00:00.000-06:00

The United States is enjoying a renaissance of natural gas exploration with the increased use of hydraulic fracturing (fracking) to extract the gas. There is now a glut of natural gas (methane) on the American market, and prices are way down from what they were a few years ago.

Thus, natural gas is becoming a bigger component of our energy future. It's more efficient and cleaner than coal, producing less CO2 and other toxic waste products like mercury and ash. It's a lot easier to distribute and is much more flexible: it can be used to heat homes, power vehicles and even as a fuel for high-efficiency fuel cells. Because natural gas-fired power plants can be turned on and off almost instantly, they are a necessary adjunct for wind- and solar-generated electricity to balance load. Finally, methane can be produced by biological processes, which means it could eventually become a renewable energy source. So, methane-based technology has great potential.

But this natural gas renaissance is starting to look like the dark ages for some. People who live near fracking operations have had their well water contaminated by methane and carcinogenic chemicals, and many earthquakes have occurred in these areas.

The other day an earthquake occurred in Ohio near a fracking operation. The biggest earthquake ever recorded in Oklahoma occurred Nov. 5 near a fracking operation. Another series of earthquakes occurred in England, and the company says fracking was the cause.

That fracking causes earthquakes is now a well-established fact. Scientists have even developed a model that predicts the size of the earthquakes caused by fracking: basically, the more fluid you inject into the earth, the bigger the quake.

Earthquakes are a relatively new concern with fracking. The best-known problems occur when methane or fracking fluids get into the aquifer and contaminate well water. Sometimes the methane reaches such high concentrations that water coming out of a faucet will burn (as shown in Gasland).

Fracking typically involves injecting huge quantities of fracking fluids into shale beds at high temperature and pressure. The shale breaks up and releases the methane. The fracking fluids consist of water and sand, and the fracking companies' "trade-secret-protected" mix of chemicals, which often include carcinogens like benzene, ethylbenzene, toluene, xylene, and naphthalene. Many people who live near fracking operations blame their unusually high incidence of cancer and other diseases on fracking.

Fracking companies continue to insist that fracking is completely safe, and doesn't contaminate ground water. However, it's already been proved that fracking has contaminated ground water in some cases in Wyoming.

An article in Scientific American entitled "The Truth about Fracking" goes into the subject at length. (Note: Scientific American gets a ton of ad revenue from Shell Oil and car companies, so they're probably giving their sponsors a fair shake editorially.)

The frackers' argument is that fracking is completely safe because natural gas beds are far below aquifers, often separated by thousands of feet of rock. Their contention is that it's impossible for fracking fluids to contaminate aquifers because there's just no way to get there.

The problem with this argument is that it ignores practical realities. Fracking involves punching a hole through the earth into a shale bed, much like an oil well. Just like an oil well, a fracking well needs to be cemented. But fracking wells frequently pass right through an aquifer. If the cementing job is done poorly there will be leaks, like the bad cement job on the oil well in the Gulf of Mexico. That caused millions of gallons of crude oil to spill into the ocean. When fracking fluids are injected into a poorly cemented well, the high pressure can force toxic fluids and methane into the aquifer.

But there are causes other than bad cementing: fracking often occurs in areas that have already been drilled for oil or natural gas, often for more than a century. Many of the older wells have cement jobs that have failed, and the oldest wells have no cementing at all. Fracking fluids and methane can find their way up through the older wells, many of which no one even knows are there.

Additionally, vertical faults occur in the earth naturally. These aren't a problem normally, because the methane is bound in the shale and won't seep into the aquifer. But when fracking fluids are injected and the shale is broken up, the fluids and the methane can travel up through the natural faults, poisoning well water.

And sometimes, as was the case in Wyoming, the shale beds are shallow and the aquifers are deep and fracking occurs right in the aquifer.

It isn't fracking that causes the contamination, these frackers say, it's a problem caused by someone else doing a bad cementing job, not sealing old oil wells properly, or that they just didn't know that there was an old well or a vertical fault. They can't be blamed for their ignorance.

Now they're saying that fracking didn't cause the Ohio earthquake:

The brine wastewater comes from drilling operations that use the so-called fracking process to extract gas from underground shale. But Ohio Department of Natural Resources Director Jim Zehringer said during a news teleconference that fracking is not causing the quakes.

"The seismic events are not a direct result of fracking," he said.

That is, the earthquake was caused by injecting used fracking fluids into the ground. They do this to get rid of the highly toxic fluids, because they can't dump them in a river, or spray them onto the land. And they don't want to spend the money to actually purify the contaminated water.

The companies are still insisting that fracking is completely safe and doesn't cause earthquakes or well water contamination. Instead they blame bad cementing, unknowable geology and drilling history, or fracking fluid disposal. Therefore they shouldn't be held responsible for poisoned water, cancers and earthquakes.

That's like the guy who says fracking, in the Battlestar Galactica sense, doesn't cause pregnancy. It's the broken condom, the woman's fault for not using a diaphragm, or the sperm's fault for traveling an unknown and circuitous path through the cervix and uterus, or the egg's fault for appearing at the wrong time. Therefore he shouldn't be responsible for child support.

To say that fracking doesn't cause earthquakes or aquifer contamination is the worst kind of lying by technicality. If they weren't fracking, there would be no earthquakes and poisoned groundwater.

Fracking should be limited to areas where it's safe and won't contaminate groudwater. Fracking fluids should not contain carcinogens and should be uniquely tagged so we can determine the source of contamination. Frackers should be required to post bonds before drilling to cover potential damages, because they'll just declare bankruptcy if they screw up. Used fracking fluids should be purified so the cleaned water can be safely returned to the environment without having to inject it deep into the earth where it can never be used again, and incidentally cause earthquakes.

Yes, all of these things will make fracked gas cost more. The price of fracked gas should reflect its total cost to society, so that its costs can be better compared to other sources of energy. Right now fracking is another example of companies making private profit with a socialized risk. (Because mineral rights and land ownership are frequently decoupled, many people whose land is being fracked aren't even getting paid for it.)

In many states there has been a big push to get fracking as fast as possible, without making annoying regulations to prevent people from getting cancer. Some of these frackers claim to have a hundred years of natural gas reserves. If that's the case, then what's the rush? Why not take the time to do this right?

But some are questioning the size of the claims of U.S. reserves. There may be only a half to a fifth as much gas in the ground as these frackers are claiming. But why would they lie?

In addition to the uncertainty about shale gas resources and productivity, there are other lingering questions. For one thing, on an averaged annual basis, shale gas has been unprofitable since 2008. Wildcatters—those who explore and sink the first wells in a new location—have been taking on a great deal of debt and risk to discover the plays and produce them at a loss, in hopes that larger, well-funded players will buy them out later. It’s not clear that this gamble will ever pay off.

In other words, these frackers have every incentive to cut corners and lie about the size of their reserves in order to cash in quick and leave someone else holding an empty bag.

But just because we need natural gas doesn't mean we should let these frackers rape our land, poison our water, and turn the very earth beneath our feet into jello.

We should take the time to develop our natural gas reserves the right way. Technology will continue to develop and we may be able to develop fields safely in the future that we'd only screw up if we tried to exploit them now.

If we frack in haste, we won't be able to repent at leisure.

In The Bubble

2012-01-04T13:58:00.001-06:00

Seriously, what planet do these people live on?

Iowa Post Mortem

2012-01-04T10:02:00.002-06:00

I think the results last night in Iowa speak volumes. The GOP is split into three distinct groups. First, you have the business wing/old guard who support Mitt Romney, the winner by a mere 8 votes. Then you have Rick Santorum who represents the conservative evangelical and came in second. Finally, the libertarian wing, represented by Ron Paul who came in third but managed to garner 28, 219 votes (around 3,000 less than Romney and Santorum). I honestly thought that Paul would pull it out considering the lack of campaigning Romney has done in Iowa. If he had won, though, the Iowa Caucuses would've become less relevant and more of a joke. I certainly wouldn't want that as most of my in laws live there and I have grown quite fond of the Hawkeye state.

This split tells me that the right is going to have some serious problems on its hand in the future. Taken alone, each of these wings can't mount a national election capable of beating most Democrats. And they don't seem to function well together with the libertarian wing despising the old guard as much as they do the Democrats. This libertarian wing is also filled with young people who don't much like social conservatism either and they're honest about it as opposed to the old guard who snickers behind their backs at how useful the conservative Christians are as puppets. Yet, they all need each other in order to be a party. It's this sort of dysfunction that usually erodes families to the point of very serious problems.

I still say the Mittster is going to be the nominee but it won't be easy. Two thirds of the base simply don't like him. But they are at least united in their hatred of Blackie McHitler who is on a mission to steal their luggage so at least that's something.

A True Gem

2012-01-03T10:35:00.000-06:00

Krugman's recent piece on debt is a true gem and, more or less, torpedoes much of the doom and gloom we hear from conservatives and libertarians these days. He makes several key points which are worthy of highlighting.

First there is the central question of who owns our debt. Ask someone on the street and their first answer will likely be China. Of course, this is what the media and right wing pundits have conditioned them to believe but it's simply not true. In fact, the majority of our debt is owned by...us. Here is how it all breaks down.

Hong Kong: $121.9 billion (0.9 percent)
Caribbean banking centers: $148.3 (1 percent)
Taiwan: $153.4 billion (1.1 percent)
Brazil: $211.4 billion (1.5 percent)
Oil exporting countries: $229.8 billion (1.6 percent)
Mutual funds: $300.5 billion (2 percent)
Commercial banks: $301.8 billion (2.1 percent)
State, local and federal retirement funds: $320.9 billion (2.2 percent)
Money market mutual funds: $337.7 billion (2.4 percent)
United Kingdom: $346.5 billion (2.4 percent)
Private pension funds: $504.7 billion (3.5 percent)
State and local governments: $506.1 billion (3.5 percent)
Japan: $912.4 billion (6.4 percent)
U.S. households: $959.4 billion (6.6 percent)
China: $1.16 trillion (8 percent)
The U.S. Treasury: $1.63 trillion (11.3 percent)
Social Security trust fund: $2.67 trillion (19 percent)

So America owes foreigners about $4.5 trillion in debt. But America owes America $9.8 trillion.

Even the issue of foreigners holding our debt is offset by US claims on foreigners. Here's a chart that Krugman provides.

The blue line represents income from assets abroad and the red line represents payments on foreign owned assets. Since these assets often take the form of subsidiary US corporations, they often give a higher rate of return than do our liabilities as foreigners tend to put their money in safe, low yield assets, as Krugman notes.

The other thing that makes the doom and gloom crowd predict that we will all be thrown into a boiling pit of sewage is running debt to GDP of 100 percent (as we likely will for the next few years). Yet this chart says otherwise.

Look at all those years of 100 percent (and much higher) debt to GDP in the UK. Are they in a boiling pit of sewage? No. It makes you wonder how much of their current shift towards austerity is politically based as opposed to reality based. I certainly wonder that here although in our case it's more about "winning the argument" and "proving the Democrats wrong."

So, as Krugman aptly notes, nobody understands debt. Those who say that the government should just "live within its means like ordinary Americans do" don't understand that people owe their debt to a bank. American owes its debt to itself which is a very different thing.

First, families have to pay back their debt. Governments don’t — all they need to do is ensure that debt grows more slowly than their tax base. The debt from World War II was never repaid; it just became increasingly irrelevant as the U.S. economy grew, and with it the income subject to taxation.

Second — and this is the point almost nobody seems to get — an over-borrowed family owes money to someone else; U.S. debt is, to a large extent, money we owe to ourselves.This was clearly true of the debt incurred to win World War II. Taxpayers were on the hook for a debt that was significantly bigger, as a percentage of G.D.P., than debt today; but that debt was also owned by taxpayers, such as all the people who bought savings bonds. So the debt didn’t make postwar America poorer. In particular, the debt didn’t prevent the postwar generation from experiencing the biggest rise in incomes and living standards in our nation’s history.

Exactly right.

Where he is exactly wrong, though, is with this line.

So yes, debt matters. But right now, other things matter more. We need more, not less, government spending to get us out of our unemployment trap. And the wrongheaded, ill-informed obsession with debt is standing in the way.

Spend more than we are now? Or much more? How much? Where? This seems too vague and doesn't make much sense considering the unemployment has dropped in the last few months without increased spending. While I don't think we need the Draconian cuts called for by many on the right, we also don't need increased spending. In fact, we could cut spending in the Big Three (Defense, Social Security, Medicare) in a number of ways that won't erode employment as much as Krugman thinks and do quite a bit to reduce our long term debt and deficit. Throw in the end of subsides and tax cuts on the wealthy and things look even better. So, on this point, I simply can't agree with him.

But he is right about everything else. The next time a conservative or libertarian friend starts foaming at the mouth about our debt and how it's going to destroy us, show them this information, tell them to stop reading right wing blogs, and take a fucking chill pill.

Iowa Caucuses Today

2012-01-03T09:37:00.001-06:00

It's caucus day today in Iowa and, even though Mitt Romney has pulled ahead in some polls. I'm still saying the Ron Paul wins it. It looks like Rick Santorum (?) has surged late in the game and might make a decent showing as well. I also think that Bachmann is going to have some sort of psychotic meltdown in the next week or so and really embarrass the Republicans. She's not well in the head and losing is going to send her into a weird place.

I'll be post an update later tonight with the results.

Will He Win?

2012-01-02T11:44:00.003-06:00

As we look ahead to this election year, one of the first questions that arises is will the president win re-election? More importantly, do his accomplishments demonstrate that he deserves to win re-election? On this latter question, I say yes and this list (along with some other things I will be talking about over the next year) is why he has been a good president and should be elected to a second term.

I'll be talking about some of those 159 achievements over the course of the year and why they are significant but let's take a look at that first question: will he win? At this point, I really don't know.

I'd like to be optimistic and say that he will win considering the clown show that is currently going on with the GOP primaries. But I'm not sure I have that much faith in American's ability to overcome their fear and apathy, the two things that are currently working against the president. Of course, it certainly depends on the GOP nominee. For me, this simply comes down to Romney and not Romney.

First, let's take a look at the 2012 Electoral Map The interactive function allows you to click on the states and assign the votes to either party. Now imagine that any candidate besides Romney is the nominee. By my calculations, Obama wins 232 and Not Romney wins 184, leaving Nevada, Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico, Iowa, Wisconsin, Ohio, Virginia, North Carolina, and Florida as tossups. Likely a few of these will go Obama but I'm being conservative here. In looking at these numbers, all the president needs is 38 votes and he has it. This could come from winning the western states, Iowa and Wisconsin. Or the last two and Virginia and North Carolina while losing all the western states as well as Florida and Ohio. Obviously, he will not lose this many states so if it is Not Romney, the president wins handily.

But if the nominee is Romney, the map gets tougher for the president. Now, he has 196 and Romney has 195 with the Mittster taking Arizona out of tossup and winning it as well as putting Pennsylvania and Michigan into the tossup column. So, we're looking at 11 states that are going to be tighter than a frog's ass and where, I believe, the election is going to be won or lost. At this point in time, either candidate could win any of these states. Of course, I'm not taking into consideration conservative distrust/apathy towards Mitt Romney which will likely affect voter turnout in some of these states. But I am confident that the completely irrational hatred that people have towards the president will drive them to the polls.

Reset the map and tell me what you think. How will this all play out?

New Year's Day

2012-01-01T13:00:00.003-06:00

The Best of 2011

2011-12-31T10:24:00.000-06:00

What a great year for music, film and television. There were so many great entries in each category that it was very hard for me to choose this year. But I still managed to do it so here are my picks

MUSIC

Both the track of the year and the album of the year are from the same group this year. Pala, by Friendly Fires is an absolute corker of a record. The soundtrack to my summer and, indeed, the entire year. I think I have played this disc at least 200 times start to finish since it came out and I still find layers to it previously unheard. Pala sets a mood that is sorely lacking today, not just in music, but in our culture in general. I'm not entirely certain I can describe it in words but it's reminiscent of what the most gorgeous flower would sound like as it blooms...in a club at 1:30am with piles of sweaty bodies writhing around to massive and thumping beats. And if it could tell Robert Browning-esque love stories. Like their self titled first release, Pala deserves to be forever enshrined in any Hall of Fame.

And "Blue Cassette" is not simply the best track of 2011, but one of the best of all time. Friendly Fires really outdid themselves with this stunning song that waxes nostalgic about cassette tapes and lost love. My heart melts every single time I listen to it.

FILM
I had the toughest time with this one. Three films came out at the beginning of the year that made my inner geek howl with delight. The Adjustment Bureau, Limitless, and Source Code were all amazing and for several months, I was toggling back and forth between these three as my pick for Best Film of 2011.

But then the Woodman released Midnight in Paris and it was all over. This film crushed me on a number of levels and I think it is one of the most romantic films of all time...right up there with Casablanca. Plus, any film that describes the Tea Party as "crypto-fascist zombie airheads" is going to get my nod!

TELEVISION
Most of you know that I am big sci-fi, comic book, fantasy geek and for the past three years I have watched Fox's Fringe develop into a truly magnificent show. The third season saw the series really hit its stride. Alternate realities...time travel...ancient machines of doom...creepy, weird and fucked up shit...romance and love...and Walter (wonderfully played by John Noble) being Walter. If you haven't seen this show, start watching it immediately.

Those are my picks for 2011. How about you?

How it All Ends

2011-12-30T13:23:00.000-06:00

Among the columnists I usually read, Charles Krauthammer is the one who most reliably galls me. But the other day he wrote a thoughtful column in the Washington Post about why we haven't discovered other intelligent life in the universe.

In the article Krauthammer discusses the Drake equation. The most troublesome term in the equation is the lifetime of a civilization. Krauthammer raises the concern that we don't find other civilizations because they quickly destroy themselves after reaching a high level of technology, when fanatical nut-jobs create plagues, or worse:

And forget the psychopaths: Why, a mere 17 years after Homo sapiens — born 200,000 years ago — discovered atomic power, those most stable and sober states, America and the Soviet Union, came within inches of mutual annihilation.

I finished the article pleasantly surprised that Krauthammer had written it. But the first reader comment was a snide snipe at President Obama and that spoiled my mood immediately. But it got me thinking.

The paragraph above mentions that Homo sapiens emerged 200,000 years ago. The time can't be exact, though the fossil evidence and genetic analysis give us similar numbers coming at the question from different directions.

But the irony is that the Republican candidates for president -- save Jon Huntsman, who has no chance of winning the nomination -- have just fallen all over themselves to assure Republican caucus-goers in Iowa that they don't believe in evolution. Which means they don't believe that Homo sapiens arrived on the scene hundreds of thousands of years ago as Krauthammer stated.

Now, it's obvious that Krauthammer will support any one of these candidates over Obama in the next election. Yet he knows that they have all just rejected one of the most basic tenets of modern science in favor of a 3,000-year-old Egyptian creation myth. How can you trust someone to be president who will make critical environmental and foreign policy decisions based on fairy tales?

Well, because they won't. I'm sure Krauthammer, like all of us, knows that most of these candidates don't really believe that the earth was created by God in six days 6,000 years ago. We all know they're lying when they say they don't believe evolution is true. We know they're just saying it to please bible-thumping fundamentalists, who vote in large numbers. And the candidates know intelligent people will know they're just lying to curry favor. Just like we all know they're lying when they say that humans have no role in global warming. And we all know they're lying when they say that lowering taxes raises government revenues.

And that's what galls me most about guys like Krauthammer. They know better, but they go along with the lie for temporary political advantage. They're smart, well-read, educated people. Yet when their candidates stand there and lie about basic facts to sharpen the political divide — often reversing positions they themselves took only a few months or years ago — the Krauthammers go along with them.

Which leads me to the sad conclusion that civilizations actually meet their doom when otherwise intelligent people go along with the lies that demagogues tell to spur their populations into action against their enemies, foreign and domestic, causing them to unleash the universally destructive forces of fratricide.

Where is the Republican Outrage?

2011-12-29T06:00:00.000-06:00

A sign posted outside a row of temples tells women they cannot walk on the sidewalk outside their doors. An eight-year-old girl who dared walk there is spat on by adult men who call her a whore. Members of this ultra-conservative sect throw rocks and eggs at police. More than 60% of the male members of this sect live on welfare, spending all their time studying holy books, whose restrictive laws they wish to impose on the whole country.

Are these temples madrasahs? Is this country Pakistan or Saudi Arabia? Are these men Muslims? Do they want to impose Sharia law? No, no, no and no.

The temples are synagogues in Beit Shemesh, Israel. The eight-year-old girl is Naama Margolese, who wears glasses, long sleeves and a skirt as she walks by the synagogues on her way to her religious school. The men are haredim, ultra-conservative Orthodox Jews, who spend all their time studying the Torah.

The haredim make up about 10% of the Israeli population, but they have much bigger families on average, made possible by welfare benefits and child allowances. Many in Israel are concerned:

“We have a few years to get our act together,” warned Dan Ben-David, an economist and director of the Taub Center for Social Policy Studies in Israel, an independent research institute.

“If not, there will be a point of no return.”

Several months ago the center issued a report that caused widespread alarm: If current trends continue, it said, 78 percent of primary school children in Israel by 2040 will be either ultra-Orthodox or Arab.

In short, Israel is in danger of becoming like Saudi Arabia, only with the Torah replacing the Koran.

One would think such stories would raise concerns among Republican candidates for president. The United States sends billions of dollars in foreign aid to Israel. I'd expect Rick Perry and Ron Paul to be asking, "Why should my tax dollars help finance all these Torah-reading, high-birth-rate, silly-hat-wearing welfare bums?" But the current field of Republicans have been falling over each other trying to curry favor with Israel and bash President Obama's Middle East policies. Newt Gingrich went so far as to call the Palestinians an "invented people" in his attempts to undermine their push for statehood.

Israel is an important ally in the Middle East, a reliable democratic partner. But after winning an the unprovoked war launched against them, they are still occupying territories they seized more than 40 years ago and are in the process of permanently taking land away from people who have lived on it for centuries. Whether those original inhabitants call themselves Palestinians or Arabs or Philistines is irrelevant. Israel has legitimate security needs, but their sometimes indiscriminate use of force and collective punishments of the people in Gaza and the West Bank have at times been as oppressive as any totalitarian regime in the region. The small, ultra-conservative religious parties in Israel have made it impossible for Israel to resolve the issue, keeping Palestinians prisoners in their own homes. All these things are corroding the soul of Israel.

It would be wrong to condemn all of Israel for the actions of the haredim and the settlers stealing Palestinian land. Just as it's wrong to condemn all Muslims for the actions of Al Qaeda and Iran. Or to blame all of American Christianity for the actions of militias who plot to kill judges, police officers and IRS employees.

I was at a party a couple of months ago where a man recalled fellow Jews welcoming the support of American fundamentalist Christians. He cautioned them against believing Christian Zionists are true allies of Israel. The impetus for their support of Israel does not arise from their love of the Jews, he said, but from their wish to fulfill their interpretations of prophecies in the Bible.

They say they believe these prophecies foretell that when Jerusalem is restored as the capital of Israel Jesus will return and the battle of Armageddon will be joined. That is, these fundamentalist Christians wish to see Jerusalem restored only to be destroyed in the fiery end of the world.

But once Jerusalem becomes the capital of Israel, and the world does not end, will these false friends of Israel become impatient for the Rapture? Will they point to the above stories and turn on the Jews, casting them in exactly the same light that they cast Muslims today: fanatical, intolerant, wishing to impose their laws on others? And will they once again heap upon Jews the scurrilous epithets they freely used not so long ago? And, one wonders, have they ever stopped thinking them?

Is Lying Protected Speech?

2011-12-28T09:00:00.000-06:00

Next month buying airline tickets should become less misleading:

Beginning Jan. 24, the Transportation Department will enforce a rule requiring that any advertised price for air travel include all government taxes and fees. For the last 25 years, the department has allowed airlines and travel agencies to list government-imposed fees separately, resulting in a paragraph of fine print disclaimers about charges that can add 20 percent or more to a ticket’s price.

It seems reasonable to have a more uniform way of advertising ticket prices, since the fees and taxes on air travel aren't as well-known as things like sales tax.

And before anyone gets on their high horse about "government fees," those fees pay for the airport, FAA flight controllers, TSA inspectors, and all the infrastructure that makes it possible for the airlines to do business. Fees on people using government services are preferable to funding them from general revenues, aren't they?

But the fact is, the government fees are actually small potatoes compared to the other fees airlines charge:

Spirit has built its business around advertising $9 fares, then charging additional fees for checked and carry-on bags, advance seat assignments and now a “passenger usage fee” of up to $17 each way for tickets booked online.

Since no one will ever pay $9 to fly on Spirit, advertising a $9 fare is a bald-faced lie. But several airlines are suing to stop the new regulations:

"We think it’s unnecessary and violates the First Amendment," said David Berg, general counsel at Airlines for America. “The D.O.T. simply has not been able to justify that the current advertising is misleading in any way to support a restriction on free speech.”

Does the First Amendment really guarantee companies the right to lie in their advertisements? And now the airlines are saying that the new rule restricts their right to political speech. Are the airlines really saying that "political speech" is lying, and therefore all lies are protected speech?

Spirit has trotted out the hoary old "burdensome consumer protection regulations" argument:

[I]n its S-1 filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Spirit cited “burdensome consumer protection regulations” as a risk factor for its business model, saying, “We are evaluating the actions we will be required to take to implement these rules, and we believe it is unlikely that we will be able to meet the 2012 compliance deadline in every respect.”

Apparently, since everyone "knows" that Spirit's $9-fare business model is based on lying, somehow that makes it acceptable. What does that say about business ethics in this country?

A lot of people are outraged by these sorts of government regulations. Their anger would be better directed at the liars and cheats who make these regulations necessary in the first place.

Racist?

2011-12-27T10:18:00.000-06:00

Recently I had this link sent to me (from one of Kevin Baker's followers) which contained the following quote.

I know that Obummer is taking yet another multi-million dollar vacation with First Wookie to Hawaii on the tax-payer tab.

Is referring to the First Lady as a hairy, giant ape-like creature racist? Again, just checking my gauge to make sure I'm not race baiting.

The Federal Deficit Through The Years

2011-12-26T23:50:00.000-06:00

Eight Days Away

2011-12-26T16:56:00.002-06:00

We are now eight days away from the Iowa caucuses and I predict that Ron Paul is going to win that election with Mitt Romney coming in second. Paul's ground troops are well positioned in many key counties and his supporters are fervent. I also think that we'll see a couple of the lower tier candidates drop out although Michele might stick around and make things interesting from an emotionally hysterical drama angle.

What are your thoughts? Who wins Iowa?

Christmas Night

2011-12-25T08:00:00.000-06:00

"Always on Christmas night there was music. An uncle played the fiddle, a cousin sang "Cherry Ripe," and another uncle sang "Drake's Drum." It was very warm in the little house. Auntie Hannah, who had got on to the parsnip wine, sang a song about Bleeding Hearts and Death, and then another in which she said her heart was like a Bird's Nest; and then everybody laughed again; and then I went to bed. Looking through my bedroom window, out into the moonlight and the unending smoke-colored snow, I could see the lights in the windows of all the other houses on our hill and hear the music rising from them up the long, steady falling night. I turned the gas down, I got into bed. I said some words to the close and holy darkness, and then I slept. " (taken from A Child's Christmas In Wales by Dylan Thomas)

An Eve's Reminder

2011-12-24T07:41:00.000-06:00

"One Christmas was so much like another, in those years around the sea-town corner now and out of all sound except the distant speaking of the voices I sometimes hear a moment before sleep, that I can never remember whether it snowed for six days and six nights when I was twelve or whether it snowed for twelve days and twelve nights when I was six." (taken from A Child's Christmas In Wales by Dylan Thomas)

In the Zeitgeist

2011-12-23T10:31:00.000-06:00

Making folks on the right blow a bowel is a pretty easy thing these days. But, boy oh boy, did a big one explode after this came out.

Time's Person of the Year was The Protester.

They spent most of the last few months trying to shift the narrative away from what is clearly a losing battle for them (inequality). It's a real stinker largely because it's true.

And it's obviously resonated with people. There is very little doubt in my mind that this will be the center issue of the election next year and is now part of the zeitgeist.

But if you read the article more closely you will see that it's not just the 99 percenters that are highlighted. This is an international movement of people with various concerns that have realized that they still have a voice. A Facebook page literally changed the government in Egypt. Libya has a new government. Syria won't be far behind.

All in all, this is a good thing. Change is tough for folks on the right and they don't like to bend much. Yet, as the tide turns, I think many of them are going to realize that if our country is going to remain significant in the world, we are going to have to address the issue of inequality. I'm not a huge fan of Larry Summers and it's fairly clear he had a hand in the Economic Collapse of 2008 but his recent piece in the Washington Post is an excellent primer on how to combat our rising inequality.I'll be talking more about this in the coming weeks as I break out each point and discuss whether or not it's feasible.

In the meantime, well done, people of the Earth. You shouted and now our leaders have to listen.

The Elite Sense of Entitlement

2011-12-22T06:00:00.000-06:00

Like many first-tier airlines, Delta has clubs at airports where members can find a quiet place to plug in their laptops and get free wi-fi, a safe and convenient place to stash their luggage while waiting for their flights, and a comfortable place to rest and get drinks and snacks. It was nice: my wife and I used it a couple of times when she worked for a company that had memberships for their execs.

Recently the airline has discounted the cost of entry through various promotions. Normally it costs $450/year or $50/day to gain entry, but Delta has recently made it cheaper to visit the exclusive lounge by making half-off and $89 five-visit passes available on Groupon.

This has not gone over well with many of Delta's most-frequent fliers:

"The cheaper they make it for somebody to go in, the more it's like the regular concourse," said Rick King, a technology executive at Thomson Reuters. "If it's like the regular concourse, the benefits for me go down."

King, who gets in the lounges free with his Diamond Medallion status, worries that more visitors could make it harder to grab seats with his colleagues before his flights. Some fliers have complained that it's already too packed during peak flying times, with passengers having to wait in line for orange juice in the morning.

"It's like a Greyhound Bus depot. Way too crowded," said Edward Bertsch, a Minnesota IT security consultant. "The club to a certain extent should be a club. It shouldn't be a profit center for the rest of Delta."

Why is Delta doing this?

[The airline] said the expansion into Groupon aims to attract the website's loyal clientele of younger female shoppers. Delta said 54 percent of the Groupon buyers were women and 70 percent were ages 26 to 50.

Like my wife, the majority of the mostly older, mostly male execs in the club probably have their memberships paid for by their employers. The majority of the Groupon customers are probably paying for these one-off memberships with their own money. Why are old men on the corporate dole more deserving of a nice quiet place to wait for their flight than young women who pay their own way?

Airlines are having a tough time of it, charging extra for checking bags, extra carry-on luggage and seat assignments away from the lavatories, ditching food service in coach, and so on. Yet these pampered execs don't think the airline should try to make money from club rooms that stand empty most of the day.

Conservatives have long criticized "liberal elites" for being snobbish and disconnected from the concerns of real Americans. But corporate elites are even richer, more snobbish, and more disconnected from the realities of every-day life. When they fly they go business class, with wide seats, ample leg room and sometimes even beds. They board first, get special check-in lines with no invasive TSA security checks, have private lounges, and get fed decent food. Yes, it costs more. But they're not actually paying for it, their companies are. And since the companies deduct travel from their taxes as a business expense, the rest of us are really paying for all these fabulous perqs.

Now that their cushy private airport hangouts are being forcibly stripped from them by penny-pinching airlines, the trials and tribulations of dealing with the unwashed masses are just too much for these high-flying execs. But the airlines will be sorry: these titans of industry won't take this lying down. They'll go back to flying their own private corporate jets to avoid waiting in line for their orange juice.

Did They Get The Memo?

2011-12-21T16:04:00.001-06:00

Well, it looks like the new saviors of the Republic in the US House of Representatives didn't get the memo on how to govern.

Republicans have also achieved the small miracle of letting Mr. Obama position himself as an election-year tax cutter, although he's spent most of his Presidency promoting tax increases and he would hit the economy with one of the largest tax increases ever in 2013. This should be impossible.

Yes, it should. I've been watching with mouth agape as the House does the exact same fucking thing they did in 1995 which resulted in President Clinton winning a second term in 1996. I mean, when you piss of the Wall Street Journal...well...your butt is seriously in a satchel now!

This Is Going To Be Really Tough

2011-12-20T09:04:00.001-06:00

If Mitt Romney is the nominee, it's going to be very difficult for me to go after him because I like him so much personally. Granted, I only know him by his media personality but I can't help but find him endearing on a number of levels. The video below is a great example of why I feel this way.

Number 9 just about made me wet my pants.

The "Dear Leader" is Dead

2011-12-19T12:37:00.001-06:00

Lots to talk about today but I thought I would start out with the passing of Kim Jong Il. I find it remarkable that this year has seen three truly despicable men (bin Laden, Gaddafi, Kim) depart this plane of existence. The world is most definitely better off without them.

The question now is will North Korea change? My initial thoughts are skeptical. Kim's son, Kim Jong Un, seems more of a puppet of the military so in the short run we won't see much in the way of new policy. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if they decided to flex their military muscle a bit just for show. It's going to be interesting to see what China does in the next few weeks.

Regardless, North Korea can't last much longer the way they are going. With Cuba now selling private property in the hopes of not being left out of the global market, it's only a matter of time before we see serious change in the Korean peninsula. Sadly, it will more than likely be messy.

What are your thoughts?

Oh, Joe, Say Ain't So...

2011-12-19T12:37:00.000-06:00

Speaking of Kim Jong Il, our very own version of him, Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio is having all sorts of problems these days. For those of you who don't know, Sheriff Joe became quite popular several years ago when this email went viral.

Shierff Joe - Re-electedTO THOSE OF YOU NOT FAMILIAR WITH JOE ARPAIO - HE IS THE MARICOPA COUNTY SHERIFF AND HE KEEPS GETTING ELECTED OVER AND OVER.THIS IS ONE OF THE REASONS WHY:Sheriff Joe Arpaio (in Arizona) who created the "tent city jail":He has jail meals down to 40 cents a serving and charges the inmates for them.He stopped smoking and porno magazines in the jails. Took away their weights. Cut off all but "G" movies.He started chain gangs so the inmates could do free work on county and city projects.Then he started chain gangs for women so he wouldn't get sued for discrimination.He took away cable TV until he found out there was a federal court order that required cable TV for jails. So he hooked up the cable TV again only let in the Disney channel and the weather channel.When asked why the weather channel he replied, so they will know how hot it's gonna be while they are working on my chain gangs.He cut off coffee since it has zero nutritional value.When the inmates complained, he told them, "This isn't the Ritz/Carlton. If you don't like it, don't come back."He bought Newt Gingrich' lecture series on videotape that he pipes into the jails.When asked by a reporter if he had any lecture series by a Democrat, he replied that a democratic lecture series might explain why a lot of the inmates were in his jails in the first place.

More than likely, you got this email from that right wing relative or friend who sits up, sticks out their tongue, and pants when hearing such dog whistles.

Problem is, though, Sheriff Joe isn't doing his fucking job and hasn't for awhile now.

In El Mirage alone, where Arpaio's office was providing contract police services, officials discovered at least 32 reported child molestations — with victims as young as 2 years old — where the sheriff's office failed to follow through, even though suspects were known in all but six cases.

I guess he was too busy being a tough guy and proving Democrats wrong to prevent actual crimes from being committed. But here's the kicker.

Many of the victims, said a retired El Mirage police official who reviewed the files, were children of illegal immigrants.

Well, that explains it. Their here illegally...fuck 'em.

Poor Joe, though, because it gets worse.

The report outlines how Arpaio's office has committed a wide range of civil rights violations against Latinos, including a pattern of racial profiling and discrimination and carrying out heavy-handed immigration patrols based on racially charged citizen complaints.

Ah, but that's nothing. Who cares about civil rights? Certainly not 40 percent of this country. How about some real old school stuff?

Apart from the civil rights probe, a federal grand jury also has been investigating Arpaio's office on criminal abuse-of-power allegations since at least December 2009 and is specifically examining the investigative work of the sheriff's anti-public corruption squad.

Abuse of power? Nah, it can't be. The email above says that Joe is cleaning up our country and getting rid of the bad guys. This must all be some sort of liberal plot. I bet Barney Frank is behind all of it!

Also Too Far?

2011-12-19T12:35:00.000-06:00

Apparently, there's a Tea Party guy out in California named Jules Manson who has made quiet a stir on Facebook recently. On his page, he posted his displeasure with the president's signing of the Defense Authorization Bill (he's a Ron Paul supporter) and in a later comment he wrote

“Assassinate the fucking nigger and his monkey children”

Here's the image below that has since been removed.

I guess what I'm wondering is am I playing the race card for calling him out in this? Just wonderin'....

Are Conservatives Sabotaging Marriage?

2011-12-18T13:35:00.000-06:00

I heard an interesting discussion on NPR this morning. The bad economy is hurting both the institutions of marriage and divorce. The marriage rate is down 5% from last year, probably in large part because of bad economic times. Paradoxically, the divorce rate is also down. Researchers have found that as unemployment goes up, divorce rates go down. Opinions are divided: it may be because getting divorced is expensive (who wants to waste thousands of dollars on lawyers?), or it may be because troubled couples are coming closer together and sticking it out.

But one key statistic stands out: the divorce rate among the college-educated is only 11%, much lower than the approximately 50% national average. It's easy to see why: the biggest causes of divorce are money, sex and kids. And since well-educated couples have fewer kids, and kids = money, and more kids = less sex, it's really about the money.

Furthermore, out-of-wedlock childbirth, which used to be considered a "black problem," is becoming common among all low-income Americans. This suggests that poverty was always the reason that many black Americans had kids outside marriage, and now that white America is on the skids the same problems are hitting them.

How much of an effect are the massive disparities between upper- and lower-income Americans having on marriage? Conservatives like to say that income inequality is simply the fault of those people who are too lazy to work. But the fact is that millions of Americans have been losing well-paying jobs for 30 years as American industry has shipped production to other countries in a very successful attempt to destroy unions. That's had the effect of drastically lowering average incomes in the United States. And the recent downturn has hit millions of solid middle-class non-union white-collar workers who toiled hard every day till they lost their jobs because of Wall Street's malfeasance.

As I've noted before, divorce rates are higher in "red" states than "blue" states. Are Republican states less moral than Democratic states? I doubt it; it really has to do with money and education. Blue states have higher incomes and education levels, as a result of blue-state policies and priorities.

One of the reasons marriage rates are down, according to the story, is that many young people, especially men, are deferring marriage. They want to get a good job and build up a nest egg first. But the truth is, two people really can live more cheaply together than they can apart. Working together as a team, couples can do better for themselves than they can alone: they can get a house sooner, build up their savings more quickly, all because there's much less waste and overhead maintaining a single domicile. That's why so many couples cohabitate. How many of them don't get married because they're worried about divorce and all the pain and trouble it brings?

But the conservative sabotage of marriage started in earnest these last few years. To fight gay marriage, conservatives now insist that the only purpose of marriage is procreation. So if you're not having kids right away, you obviously shouldn't get married. The opposition to birth control and abortion by Catholics and many conservatives present further obstacles to getting married. Having kids presents a double whammy: you lose a wage earner and drastically ramp up expenses. Not to mention the stress and tension children cause with their incessant crying and whining...

These conditions force many young people to stay home for years longer than their parents and grandparents did. What effect does this extended childhood have on the quality of mates? Does Mom nagging a 30-year-old man to stop playing video games and make his bed irreparably damage his self-image? Getting married at a younger age has its problems, but it also means you aren't already set in your ways, which means you and your spouse live and grow together before your personalities are set in stone. Are people who get married at 30 less mutable for their mates, and more self-centered and self-absorbed than people who get married at 25?

And then there's the whole notion that gay marriage will destroy the institution of marriage. It's like saying that you can't support the New York Yankees because gays can wear Yankees caps. Or you can't have children because lesbians can have children. Or you can't believe in Christ because the socialist Poles and Germans who've been running the Catholic Church for the last 30 years believe in Christ.

How can gays getting married possibly affect anyone else's marriage? The only effect it can have is the effect you let it have on you. If your faith in your marriage is so weak that it can be destroyed by the fact that a gay person can get hitched, you never really had any faith to begin with.

One could much more convincingly argue that gays aren't destroying marriage, it's conservative opinion leaders like Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Newt Gingrich, Ronald Reagan, Mark Sanford, John Ensign, and David Vitter who are destroying marriage by constantly making a mockery of their vows, who then turn around and mouth platitudes about the sanctity of marriage. Their hypocritical examples do far more damage to the institution than the prospect of monogamous gays.

Monogamous marriage has been an economic, social and political union in most cultures regardless of religion: Judeo-Christianity, Hinduism, Shinto, ancient Roman and Greek paganism, Chinese Taoism, and most nativist religions in the Americas, Asia and Africa. Children were necessary to supply workers and heirs, for very functional non-religious reasons. Religion, love and romance had nothing to do with marriage. Parents and matchmakers and privy councilors arranged marriages and it was simply assumed that you would come to love your spouse in time.

If conservatives really want to improve the marriage rate and reduce the divorce rate, they should stop ranting about gays, birth control and abortion, stop encouraging large families in bad economic times, stop trying to legislate morality, and instead work to create new jobs, increase the quality of education, and reduce the huge income inequalities that are eating away at this country like a cancer.

Another Republican Adulterer Bites the Dust

2011-12-17T13:52:00.002-06:00

Markadelphia has long said that he thinks it's foolish to call politicians out for having affairs. I can see the point: if your spouse can live with you banging the babysitter, what's the big deal? Newt Gingrich's recent rise in the polls indicates that even evangelicals are giving politicians who cheat on their wives a pass. As long as they admit their error and then sign a pledge not to do what they've already done twice...

But there are some times when marital infidelity says something about candidate's fitness to hold office. In Herman Cain's case there were charges of sexual harassment, which he denied, and when it was came to light that Cain was having an affair until very recently those charges gained a lot more credibility. His reaction to those charges told us more about his character than the charges themselves. In hindsight, Cain must realize that he should have acknowledged his harassment of those women, and publicly apologized to them, finessing the issue by calling his advances honest misunderstandings instead of demonizing the women publicly. Had he done that, it's entirely possible his paramour would have kept quiet and he'd still be in the race. But he ticked her off with his rank hypocrisy.

The reason extramarital affairs are bad has nothing to do with the immorality of them, but more to do with how vulnerable they make you to blackmail. One summer in college I obtained an application for the CIA. One of the questions asked about using heroin. That's nuts, I thought. Who would ever admit to using heroin? But answering yes doesn't immediately disqualify you. By answering such a question truthfully you can't be blackmailed by future revelations, and you show a certain ... flexibility that can actually be very useful in CIA operations. The CIA doesn't need angels.

Last Thursday Amy Koch, the Republican Minnesota Senate majority leader, resigned without any credible explanation. Friday the news broke that she was having an affair with a male staffer, and four high-ranking Republicans had demanded she step down immediately. Koch is married and has one child.

Why is this relevant?

In 2010 Republicans won a majority in both the Minnesota House and Senate. They immediately set to shoving their agenda through the legislature, making big cuts to programs, including huge cuts to cities, counties and schools, and making a bunch of gimmicky short-term accounting changes instead of actually solving the problem. Democratic governor Mark Dayton shut down the government to try to force them to give him a decent budget, but the Republicans wouldn't budge.

Another big push was to put an amendment to the state constitution to ban gay marriage on next year's ballot. It's the same old thing about a union of one man and one woman, the sanctity of marriage, blah blah blah.

The question then becomes: if Republicans constantly violate their marital vows, how can they possibly be serious about the sanctity of marriage? To avoid making the argument next year about Amy Koch's violation of her marriage vows, the Republicans had to jettison her as fast as possible. This, along with tidbits like Republicans getting divorced more often than Democrats, Herman Cain's harassment and infidelity, Mark Sanford's Appalachian hike, John Ensign's payoffs, and thrice-married Newt Gingrich potentially winning the Republican nomination, puts the lie to the idea that the Republican Party is the party fighting to preserve the sanctity of marriage.

Instead, they look like the party that won't stick it out when the going gets tough, breasts start to sag, or hubby can't get it up. How can people like this claim the moral high ground if gays want to declare their eternal love for each other? It makes the marriage amendment look a small-minded attempt to stop people Republicans don't like from getting a benefit that the majority of people enjoy. So their answer is to boot Amy Koch out the door and hope everyone forgets her before next November.

The right answer is for us all to cut each other some slack and stop telling people who aren't hurting anyone how to live our lives. How can you preach about freedom when you want to take away the most basic freedom to be with the person you love?

Stopping the Big One

2011-12-16T06:00:00.000-06:00

Last month a 400-yard wide asteroid came within 200,000 miles of earth, inside the orbit of the moon. NASA had been tracking it, so there wasn't any real concern that it would hit us.

But the close approach prompted Edward Lu, a former astronaut, to renew his call for the United States to improve our capabilities for predicting and preventing asteroid collisions. Such a collision is widely believed to have caused the extinction of the dinosaurs by drastically changing the climate in the aftermath of the collision (the Alvarez Hypothesis).

Movies like Deep Impact and Armageddon popularized the threat the earth faces from comets and asteroids. An asteroid the size of 2005 YU55 wouldn't destroy the planet, but it would have the force of small nuclear bomb and could wipe out a city, or inundate several coastal cities with a tsunami if it hit the ocean.

We don't know of any big asteroids or comets that pose an immediate threat, but we aren't tracking many of the smaller objects. Also, the gravity of the outer planets, especially Jupiter, changes the orbits of asteroids and comets in the outer solar system, causing them to drop in on us unpredictably.

The chance of a collision is small, but the sheer magnitude of the calamity has prompted many people to take the issue seriously. Though people like Mitt Romney derided Newt Gingrich's idea of mining the moon for its minerals, there are many conservatives who believe that the United States should take the lead in space with asteroid collision detection and prevention projects, as well as space exploration in general. Not only would it potentially save humanity, but it would help the United States regain the initiative in space by allowing us to develop the technology to do big projects in space. Own the high ground!

Conservatives harshly criticized President Obama for canceling Bush's botched Constellation moon program, and Obama's decision to have NASA do less and private companies do more in space. As recently as last month Herman Cain blasted Obama's space initiatives and blamed Obama for canceling the shuttle program, even though it was Bush who canceled the shuttle in 2004, forcing us to rely on the Russians to get our astronauts to the space station.

But Obama's strategy appears to be bearing fruit: recently NASA announced that the first private launch to dock with the International Space Station was authorized: SpaceX will launch its Dragon spacecraft in February, 2011. Paul Allen and Burt Rutan are building a successor to SpaceShipOne that will have an operational launch in 2016.

Bottom line: NASA scientists predict there's a small but real chance that an asteroid will strike the earth and wreck the earth's climate. So why are conservatives so resistant to NASA scientists who predict that human activity will drastically affect on the earth's climate?

The bigger, more immediate threat to is human-caused climate change, not an asteroid.

Even though Newt Gingrich now says admitting that global warming is real was his biggest mistake, some Republicans like Jon Huntsman are brave enough to acknowledge the truth. (There was a big noise when Huntsman appeared to recant his stand on global warming, but when he reiterated his support for climate science he was roundly ignored.)

The real issue with conservatives and climate change doesn't seem to about the science. As the Gingrich example shows, they know it's real: anyone who's 50-plus years old has seen the changes for themselves and knows it's happening. Their real concern seems to be that the United States will get stiffed in any kind of international agreement and countries like China will cheat, and we'll be stuck paying for it with lower economic growth. That's a legitimate issue. But it's a lousy excuse for inaction, like a ten-year-old saying he shouldn't have to brush his teeth because his baby brother didn't have to.

Climate change won't cause the extinction of mankind. But it will raise sea levels and increase the incidence of extreme weather like hurricanes, floods and tornadoes, as well as cause drought, disease, famine, mass migration and war. Those things will destabilize markets, international trade and our economy far worse than our current troubles have.

If only there were some flashy way to stop global warming by having Bruce Willis nuke something...