That magic, magic gold

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Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor & Satire Blog</a> March to Keep Fear Alive

I mentioned a small part of that a few days ago, but it also reminds me of this post by PZ Myers the same day:

I just saw a commercial peddling gold coins, going on and on about how the price of gold was soaring above $1300 per ounce, and showing this fancy glinting well-lit shiny gold coin and telling everyone the cost of gold meant the $50 price could only be guaranteed for 7 days. This coin is 14 karat 0.9999 pure gold clad! A little deeper in to the spiel, they mention that it contains 14 milligrams of pure gold.

Using their own numbers, by my calculation that means the $50 coin contains about 64¢ worth of gold.

It sounds like a tax on dumb people, to me. They're probably snaring people who watch Glenn Beck and read the Wall Street Journal.

Yeah, a tax on dumb people is a pretty good way of putting it. That is, after all, why Glenn Beck peddles gold on his show, why his sponsor is there at all.

The problem is that they're making more dumb people every day, with their attacks on science and on education in general. OK, ignorant people, rather than "dumb," perhaps. But the effect is the same.

It's to the advantage of Fox "News" that their viewers remain ignorant, and from studies I've seen, they do a pretty good job of it. Their viewers are the least informed - and the most misinformed - of all cable news viewers. (No, you can have different opinions, but you're not allowed to invent your own facts.)

Republicans, of course, want to turn back the clock on everything, back to some mythical past, an idealized past, not the real one. (As I noted previously, they certainly don't want to return tax rates on rich people to the 1950s!) Still, fighting against paper money seems backward even for them, don't you think? Do they know anything about economics?

The Fed has made a lot of mistakes over the years, but compare that to the mistakes made by politicians. Well, that's the whole point, I think. Republican politicians are simply trying to find a scapegoat to direct attention away from their own culpability. It's just sad to realized that that kind of thing still works, even in the 21st Century.

It's like we climbed down out of the trees only yesterday.