That's interesting...

Money Talks - The Haves & the Soon-to-Haves

Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c

"We've always been a nation of haves and soon-to-haves." Heh, heh. Honestly, how gullible would you have to be to buy that? Is anyone actually dumb enough to buy what the Republicans are pushing here?

It's mathematically impossible for 100% of the people to be in the 1%. It will never happen. And you know the Republicans aren't talking about increasing income and wealth equality! Just the reverse, in fact. They call that "socialism." So these "soon-to-haves" are a complete fantasy.

How dumb would you have to be not to see that? Maybe conservatives aren't particularly bright, but they can't be this dumb, can they?

We could, indeed, have more people better off. We could go back to the days of a strong middle class, where it's not just the wealthy who are doing well. But that's the exact opposite of what Republicans are calling for, and it would require policies the exact opposite of what Republicans have been pushing for years.

"Why do you think we came up with all this, uh, uh,... "soon-to-haves" and "job creator" nonsense? It's to make these people think that we're their heroes. Then they'll blame themselves for not being rich. And we keep them in a state of consumers' torpid depression, until they die of Type 2 diabetes on a pile of scratch-off lottery tickets. It's perfect!"

You know, this would be a lot funnier if it wasn't so true.

Billionaires buying America

2012-02-03T17:15:00.000-06:00

America's Biggest Super PAC Donors

Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c

"Half of the candidates' SuperPAC money - $67 million - came from just 22 individuals." Yeah, just imagine that! What do you think those people are buying with their money? (And note that, thanks to the Supreme Court, some of those "people" are corporations.)

The Supreme Court's Citizens United ruling - a 5 to 4 decision, with Republicans and Democrats on opposite sides - overturned precedent and gave us this mess. In the Republican Party, money = speech. In fact, in today's GOP, money trumps everything.

TPM has an article about this, too. They set the bar a little lower, just $100,000 - which is still more than the vast majority of us can afford to donate.

Six major “super PACs” backing former and current Republican presidential candidates were almost entirely funded by massive contributions from individuals and corporations of at least $100,000, according to a TPM analysis of campaign finance data.

Take Restore Our Future, the super PAC supporting but totally not coordinating with Mitt Romney: 58 donations of over $100,000 given to the super PAC made up 82.59 percent of its intake during the second half of 2011.

It shouldn’t come as much of a shock that big donations as opposed to a large number of small or medium-sized donations are really what matter most to independent expenditure-only political action committees. But the numbers really demonstrate just how little moderate donations — the kind typically touted by political campaigns proud of their grassroots support — are playing a part in the new age of unlimited campaign cash.

Restore Our Future probably wouldn’t care much about, say, Massachusetts man Jonathan Whitesell, who donated $17.76 to Romney’s super PAC in September. The group could focus its efforts on attracting 56,306 donors just like Whitesell, or they could just focus their efforts on one rich individual like Paul Singer, a principle of Elliott Management Corp., who gave $1 million to the group. ...

Other super PACs associated with former or current Republican presidential contenders were in the same ballpark. Rick Perry’s Make Us Great Again came in at 86.59 percent; Jon Huntsman’s Our Destiny PAC at 87.19 percent; Newt Gingrich’s Winning Our Future at 96.14 percent; and Ron Paul’s Endorse Liberty at 88.23 percent. Rick Santorum’s Red White and Blue Fund came in with the lowest percentage of dollars from donors who gave in the six figures at 79.59 percent.

Republicans - specifically, those right-wing Supreme Court justices appointed by Republican presidents - are destroying our democracy. The GOP is creating an America of the rich, by the rich, and for the rich.

Romney's unconcern about the very poor

2012-02-03T13:19:00.000-06:00

Another week, another gaffe from Mitt Romney. This time, it's "I'm not concerned about the very poor."

Like "I like being able to fire people," this is made to order for being taken out of context. But just like that gaffe, there are big problems with his thinking even if you do consider it in context.

For example, here's Bloomberg (hardly a bastion of liberalism):

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s statement that the “very poor” don’t concern him comes at a time when the portion of Americans living in deep poverty is the highest in more than a generation while assistance varies widely and is often inadequate.

“Virtually any food bank in any city in America would tell you that they have not been able to keep up with the demand,” said Bill Shore, founder and chief executive officer of Share Our Strength, a national charity that fights childhood hunger. “That means more rationing of food, not allowing families to take as much as they would have before and being open shorter hours.”

More than 20 million Americans live in a household with income of less than half the federal poverty rate, the level social scientists often use as a category for the very poor, according to census data for 2010. Last year that meant an annual income below $11,057 for a family of four.

The portion of the population in that category was the highest in at least 35 years and has almost doubled since 1975, from 3.7 percent then to 6.7 percent in 2010.

At a time when the wealthy - and note that Romney was born into wealth - have made out like bandits, the percentage of Americans dropping into the "very poor" has nearly doubled. Don't you think a presidential candidate should care about that?

And here's the Atlantic:

The social safety net does a lot. But does it do enough?

To begin to answer that question, it's worth pointing out that today's social safety net isn't tomorrow's social safety net. The 99-week unemployment benefits will end as employment grows, and they should. Expanded income security measures will fall away as we whittle down domestic spending under the Budget Control Act of 2011 (the debt ceiling deal) and other laws. Republicans want to pare it back even further with cuts to Medicare, Medicaid, and domestic spending.

This is what austerity does. It forces us to make tough choices about who wins and who loses. Mitt Romney has made his choice. His tax plan is basically today's tax policy with more support for businesses and investors, and less for the poor. First, he makes investment income tax free for the middle class. Second, he cuts corporate income taxes. Third, he repeals the estate tax. And fourth, he does not extend the tax cuts created by the 2009 stimulus bill, which Obama has proposed keeping. Romney's tax proposal would "raise taxes for households in the bottom two quintiles, relative to what they're paying this year," wrote Roberton Williams of the Tax Policy Center, even as it cuts taxes for middle class investors.

Romney's tax plan - indeed, the tax plans of all the Republicans - would slash taxes on rich people like himself, even from his already low, low rate. He would cut taxes for the wealthy far more than for the middle class, and he would actually raise taxes for the poorest 40% of Americans.

And note that this is from a guy who makes more than $50,000 a day, without working. Yet he pays only 13.9% in federal income taxes (and since he's "unemployed," he pays nothing in payroll taxes).

Even if you don't take this out of context, even if you look at the full quote ("I'm not concerned about the very poor. We have a safety net there. If it needs repair I'll fix it."), it's crazy, because Republicans like Romney are actually proposing to shred that safety net.

In fact, the right wing is also mad at Romney, just for suggesting that those "safety nets" do any good. And as Paul Krugman points out, Romney himself made that argument just a few days ago:

First of all, just a few days ago, Mr. Romney was denying that the very programs he now says take care of the poor actually provide any significant help. On Jan. 22, he asserted that safety-net programs — yes, he specifically used that term — have “massive overhead,” and that because of the cost of a huge bureaucracy “very little of the money that’s actually needed by those that really need help, those that can’t care for themselves, actually reaches them.”

This claim, like much of what Mr. Romney says, was completely false: U.S. poverty programs have nothing like as much bureaucracy and overhead as, say, private health insurance companies. As the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has documented, between 90 percent and 99 percent of the dollars allocated to safety-net programs do, in fact, reach the beneficiaries. But the dishonesty of his initial claim aside, how could a candidate declare that safety-net programs do no good and declare only 10 days later that those programs take such good care of the poor that he feels no concern for their welfare?

Also, given this whopper about how safety-net programs actually work, how credible was Mr. Romney’s assertion, after expressing his lack of concern about the poor, that if the safety net needs a repair, “I’ll fix it”?

Romney really isn't concerned about the very poor, or about the middle class, either. Do you think the middle class doesn't rely on Social Security and Medicare? Do you think the middle class doesn't ever need unemployment benefits?

Frankly, a lot of the lower middle class is desperately concerned about dropping into that "very poor" category themselves. All it would take for many of them would be losing a job in this terrible economic environment of high unemployment. All it would take is a medical emergency, especially one not covered in what health insurance they can afford. But Republicans actually want to raise their taxes!

This is a gaffe, but it isn't just a gaffe. Republicans actually think this way, and it's especially wrongheaded now, after decades of the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer.

But as I've noted many times before, Republicans are faith-based, not evidence-based. They believe what they believe, and they'll never change course, because evidence means nothing to them.

Blame Jesus for low teacher pay?

2012-02-03T11:36:00.000-06:00

From Indecision Forever:

It's a common refrain among education reform advocates that the best way to improve teacher performance is to increase teacher pay. So what's the hold-up — low budgets, sexism, market forces?

Nope, it's the Bible…
According to Alabama state Sen. Shadrack McGill (R), the Bible says that increasing teacher salaries would only lead to less-qualified teachers…

"If you double a teacher’s pay scale, you’ll attract people who aren't called to teach. To go in and raise someone's child for eight hours a day, or many people's children for eight hours a day, requires a calling."

"And these teachers that are called to teach, regardless of the pay scale, they would teach. It's just in them to do. It's the ability that God give 'em… If you don't keep that in balance, you're going to attract people who are not called, who don't need to be teaching our children. So, everything has a balance."

Funny, isn't it? These same Republicans will defend to the death those multimillion dollar bonuses to bankers, since without that, we wouldn't get the very best. Of course, they care about bankers. Who cares about teachers? Who cares about education?

Why do we always hear these guys defending tax breaks for hedge fund managers? Hey, if that's your calling, you'd be a hedge fund manager no matter how much money you get, right? Giving such lucrative tax breaks to bankers, to hedge fund managers, to vulture capitalists will just ensure that those professions will "attract people who are not called."

I'm sure that no one who enters a teacher college is concerned about actually making a living in their profession, no more than someone who enters a business college, right? We're not going to attract the best people to certain professions, which is why everyone in America earns the minimum wage. Don't they? After all, corporations won't want to pay extra to anyone, because otherwise they'll get employees who aren't "called" to the profession.

Whenever I think I hear the craziest thing ever from a right-wing Republican, another one opens his mouth. It's just incredible, don't you think?

The Muppets respond to Fox News

2012-02-03T11:04:00.000-06:00

"It's almost as laughable as accusing Fox News of being, you know,... news." :)

Lefties

2012-02-02T19:14:00.000-06:00

What can I add to this? It really doesn't need any commentary, does it?

Did you know?

2012-02-02T18:58:00.000-06:00

I stumbled across this at Think Atheist. Nice, huh? (Click image to embiggen.)

Jumping on the blandwagon

2012-02-02T18:50:00.000-06:00

Indecision 2012 - Jump on the Blandwagon

Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c

Here's the part of this that got me. Did you hear those quotes from Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich? Tell me, what universe do they live in?

Romney: "President Obama has adopted a policy of appeasement and apology." Um, say what?!? Appeasement and apology? Tell that to Osama bin Laden. Tell that to Muammar Gaddafi. Tell that to Anwar al-Awlaki. Tell that to Abu Ayyub al-Masri. Tell that to Atiyah Abd al-Rahman.

Need I go on? I could. Whatever you think of the "war on terror," Barack Obama's foreign policy has been about as far from appeasement and apology as you can get.

Of course, we should be apologizing for invading Iraq, an innocent country which had never attacked us, which was no threat to us at all, and which did not have those WMDs which was supposedly Bush's excuse for the war.

Note that Saddam Hussein was not trying to get nuclear weapons, either. Remember how we didn't want that "smoking gun" to become a "mushroom cloud"? Well, the only mushrooms were apparently what all those loyal Bushies were eating. And the smoke was what they were blowing up our ass. All that turned out to be a complete hoax!

OK, OK, don't get me sidetracked here. The point is that Republicans are living in their own little fantasy world. It's not just Obama's foreign policy, either. The White House reflects the worst of Europe? Um, in what way, exactly? And when did Europe become the bogeyman, anyway? Can't they find something scarier - like Canada, maybe?

Oh, and Barack Obama is taking all of your money and giving it to teachers? I wish! Barack Obama has been cutting taxes for three years now! I don't know what world Romney lives in, but it's not the real one. But Republicans have become not just anti-science, but anti-education. Yeah, smart people are those nasty "elites." Oh, that's going to turn out well for our country, huh?

Then there's Megamind,.. excuse me, Newt Gingrich: "On the very first day, I will sign an executive order repealing every anti-religious act of the Obama administration." Well, that won't take long, will it? Considering that there haven't been any anti-religious acts from the Obama administration. Are you kidding? Obama has been bending over backward trying to convince the loons he's not a Muslim, for chrissake!

I can only guess that this is the kind of crazy pushed day and night on Fox News. And since that's the only "news" outlet the Republican base believes, they do live in their own little fantasy world. But please tell me the rest of America isn't dumb enough to buy this. Please!

Lincoln Atheists

2012-02-01T18:24:00.000-06:00

When I was growing up, I didn't know a single other atheist. In fact, as far as I knew, I didn't know a single other person who wasn't a Christian.

I was always a reader, so I knew other non-believers existed. But it wasn't like today, with frequent bestsellers by "new atheists." And, of course, there was no internet.

These days, it's easy to find atheists online. You have your pick of atheist, agnostic, skeptic, or humanist groups online, and you can join as many as you want. I must say that there are real advantages to online communities, too.

But most human beings want more than that. Sometimes, you just want that personal contact, face to face, with people who understand what it's like being an atheist in America. Well, that's becoming easier, too.

Here in Lincoln, Nebraska, for example, we have the Lincoln Atheists, a small group which meets for coffee on Sunday mornings (every other Sunday) and for supper once a month. (I'm a member, though I haven't yet attended any meetings.)

There is also the Lincoln Secular Humanists, though I'm not sure if they're still active. That website doesn't appear to have been updated in a long time. They seemed to be mostly into left-wing politics when I discovered them a few years ago (they even considered me to be hopelessly conservative!).

If you're still in school, you can check out the Secular Student Alliance. As far as I can tell, there's no affiliated Lincoln group, but there is one at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. And groups seem to be starting at the University of Nebraska at Kearney, Wayne State College, Chadron State College, and even Crete High School. Gee, what happened to Lincoln?

Well, there are groups, not of atheists, but where you might find compatible people. The Nebraska Citizens for Science is based in Lincoln. And there's R.E.A.S.O.N. - Rationalists, Empiricists and Skeptics of Nebraska - but that's based in Omaha.

Well, it's not much, not yet, but it's a lot better than it used to be. And there's the internet, which tends to suit me just fine. :)

What a friend you have in Jesus!

2012-02-01T12:42:00.000-06:00

If you're easily offended, I'd skip this one! I'm not a huge fan of Betty Bowers, myself, but this is pretty funny.

Of course, there are arguments that ridicule is counterproductive. I don't think I agree with that, but ridicule is impolite. That bothers me a little more.

But then I see things like this - ultra-orthodox Jews spitting on a little girl for dressing "immodestly." Suddenly, I feel like I did after the 9/11 attacks, that religion deserves all the ridicule it can get!

Oh, sure, that isn't your religion, right? Heck, your religion doesn't even burn women alive, not anymore. (That's generous of you, I'm sure.)

Yeah, that's sarcasm. So why am I ridiculing your religion? Don't atheists do bad things sometimes? Yes, of course we do. But as I see it, there are two issues here.

The first might not apply to you, but it applies to many Christians - those right-wing Christians trying to use the Republican Party to destroy the separation of church and state in America. These ultra-orthodox Jews are such a problem in Israel because they're favored by the government.

They don't work. They're exempt from military service (despite being rabid hawks, doing their best to foment war). They expect Israel to exist for them. But there's no separation of church and state in Israel, so this kind of thing can happen.

This is what right-wing Christians are trying to bring to America. It's our own Taliban. Of course, it's a different religion which will be calling the shots, but if you think that's going to matter much, you're naive.

OK, you might be a liberal Christian. You might support the separation of church and state. Many - perhaps most - Christians do, and I certainly appreciate that. But... I'm sorry to tell you that there's still a problem.

The problem is faith-based thinking in general. Your beliefs might be perfectly innocuous. But if you believe them because of faith, how can you criticize others for believing something different, also because of faith? After all, they believe for the same reason you do.

The 9/11 hijackers were people of perfect faith. They knew what their god wanted them to do, just like you know what your god wants you to do. And they knew it for the same reason you do, because they'd been raised to believe it and because they had faith.

These ultra-orthodox Jews spit on little girls because they have faith. It's not your faith, but it's still faith-based.

Now, atheists can do terrible things, too. I might argue that Stalin - who attended a church school, and then the seminary, for ten years - simply switched his faith to Communism, and wasn't actually evidence-based at all. Nevertheless, evidence-based people can be wrong. And being evidence-based won't necessarily keep all people from doing terrible things.

The difference is that evidence-based people come to a consensus on what's right and what isn't. We might not all agree, but by using evidence, we can come to a clear consensus. But faith-based people won't ever come to a consensus. That's why there are so many different religions in the world, but only one science.

Furthermore, evidence-based thinking - especially as formulated in the scientific method - is the best way we've ever discovered of determining the truth, the best way we've ever discovered of distinguishing the truth from wishful thinking. Faith is indistinguishable from wishful thinking. That's why there are so many crazy religions in the world (but, as I say, only one science).

And if your faith can't withstand a little ridicule, it's a pretty thin reed, don't you think? You can ridicule atheism all you want, I don't care. Feel free to ridicule evidence-based thinking. It's not going to bother me. I might even change my mind, if you have a good argument to go with it.

But I wouldn't count on that. I think I've heard all the arguments many times before.

PS. My thanks to Jeff for the link to the Israeli story. (Be sure to watch the video there, not at YouTube, in order to get the English subtitles.)

More political cartoons

2012-01-31T12:27:00.000-06:00

(Clay Bennett)

Well, today is the Florida primary, so I figured it's time for some more political cartoons.

Of course, since it's Florida, Republicans are all rushing to bash Fidel Castro, instead of Hispanics in general, for a change.

(Jim Morin)

Funny how that works, isn't it?

Mitt Romney's SuperPAC has spent a fortune in Florida, and he's long had a commanding lead there. But there have been grumbles of discontent.

(Tom Toles)

Luckily, Mitt is all rested up, ready for a fight. Or at least, his money is.

(Pat Bagley)

But Newt Gingrich, after crashing and burning twice before, is coming on strong. Well, I guess third time is a charm for him, huh?

(John Cole)

However, it's not as though he hasn't run into opposition, himself.

(Mike Luckovich)

And gee, I think there might be some others in the running, too. Or in the walking. Or whatever.

(Bob Englehart)

And you've got to wonder how much this really matters.

(Clay Bennett)

Luckily, we're all cheering for America, right? Can we agree on that much?

(Jim Morin)

Rectal probe amendment fails

2012-01-31T10:46:00.000-06:00

From Indecision Forever:

With polls showing voters are most concerned about jobs, economic growth and the continuing foreclosure crisis, state governments have responded in their usual fashion: with anti-abortion bills and "personhood initiatives."

While the latter have failed in state after state, with voters probably realizing that recognizing a bunch of blastocyst persons would be hell on a state's unemployment rate, legislation mandating trans-vaginal ultrasound has been debated from Texas to Kentucky. Virginia is the latest to ride the sonogram emotional-extortion bandwagon, but not before one State Senator suggested that what's good for goose is good for the anus…
To protest a bill that would require women to undergo an ultrasound before having an abortion, Virginia State Sen. Janet Howell (D-Fairfax) on Monday attached an amendment that would require men to have a rectal exam and a cardiac stress test before obtaining a prescription for erectile dysfunction medication.

"We need some gender equity here," she told HuffPost. "The Virginia senate is about to pass a bill that will require a woman to have totally unnecessary medical procedure at their cost and inconvenience. If we're going to do that to women, why not do that to men?"

The amendment failed on a 21-19 vote, while the underlying mandatory sonogram bill was adopted, but at least the bill's opponents got to say "Up yours" in the snarkiest way possible.

Heh, heh. This is why we need more women - progressive women, at least - in public office! Right-wing men have no problem mandating these medical procedures for women - or forcing women to undergo an unwanted pregnancy - because it doesn't affect them in the slightest.

Women might look on these things a little differently... Not all women, of course, but diversity is valuable. I've never in my life had to worry about rape, and certainly never about getting pregnant. I can go anywhere I want here in Lincoln, at any time of the day or night, and not have to worry about my personal safety.

It infuriates me that women can't say the same, but that's not my point here. My point is that women tend to have somewhat different concerns than men. Most of our concerns are the same, no doubt, but women might look at some things differently (just as members of racial or religious minorities might look at some things differently).

This amendment made that point pretty well, don't you think? Too bad the Virginia senate as a whole wasn't smart enough to see that.

The Atheist Experience: don't care if your beliefs reflect reality?

2012-01-30T22:03:00.000-06:00

This is from the Atheist Experience TV show, episode #640, hosted by Matt Dillahunty and Martin Wagner.

It's funny, but they tend to get variations of this call, where a theist admits that he doesn't care if his belief is true, as long as it makes him feel good.

That's just an incredible admission to make, don't you think? I really can't understand it. I care about the truth. And if I knew I was just believing something to make myself feel good, I wouldn't feel good. I'd feel like a complete coward.

Most of these callers back off a bit when questioned, but not this one. Apparently, he just doesn't care if he's believing complete nonsense. Well, he's honest, I guess. But this is really hard for me to understand.

QOTD: impeachment is not a toy

2012-01-30T17:25:00.000-06:00

Quote of the Day:

Grover Norquist, the Republican uber-activist, sat down with National Journal last week, and shared some thoughts on what he expects to see in Washington after the November elections. His use of the "I" word was rather striking.
NORQUIST: If the Republicans have the House, Senate, and the presidency, I'm told that they could do an early budget vote -- a reconciliation vote where you extend the Bush tax cuts out for a decade or five years.... And, if you have a Republican president to go with a Republican House and Senate, then they pass the [Paul] Ryan plan [on Medicare].

NJ: What if the Democrats still have control? What's your scenario then?

NORQUIST: Obama can sit there and let all the tax [cuts] lapse, and then the Republicans will have enough votes in the Senate in 2014 to impeach.

By all indications, Norquist wasn't kidding. From the perspective of this leading GOP powerbroker, presidential impeachment is on the table in 2014 unless Obama extends Bush-era tax cuts.

There are three larger angles to this to consider. The first is that Republicans, 14 years after an impeachment crusade against President Clinton, seem a little preoccupied with the subject. Rep. Trent Franks (R-Ariz.) has raised the specter of Obama impeachment over DOMA; Fox News has brought up impeachment over immigration policy; Herman Cain wants to see the president impeached over the Affordable Care Act; and not too long ago, Rep. Michael Burgess (R-Texas) said he likes the idea of impeaching Obama simply because "it would tie things up" in Washington for a while.

The second angle to keep in mind is that if GOP officials and their allies are serious about this, they might want to give additional thought to the meaning of the phrase "high crimes and misdemeanors."

And third, Norquist's impeachment talk may seem ridiculous on its face -- and it is -- but that doesn't change the fact that this is a powerful figure in Republican politics. It was, after all, Norquist's anti-tax pledge that played a direct role in scuttling any possible super-committee agreement.

The point isn't that presidential impeachment is a serious idea; it clearly is not. Rather, the point is it's unsettling to have a major GOP insider, with considerable influence throughout the party, talking up nutty ideas like this.

As Ed Kilgore explained, "[W]hen it comes to taxes and the long-term drive to 'starve the beast' of the New Deal/Great Society legacy, Norquist still walks tall in the GOP. So when he lays out getting rid of Medicare as we know it, or a drive to impeach Barack Obama, as strong alternative possibilities for the years just ahead, we should probably pay attention." - Steve Benen

Are conservatives just dumb?

2012-01-30T07:39:00.000-06:00

(Simpsons Trivia)

We'd all like to believe that the people who disagree with us are stupid, right? Maybe it's not just that they're wrong, but that they aren't very bright in the first place.

So here comes a study which claims that low-intelligence is correlated not just with prejudice, but also with socially conservative beliefs. From LiveScience:

There's no gentle way to put it: People who give in to racism and prejudice may simply be dumb, according to a new study that is bound to stir public controversy.

The research finds that children with low intelligence are more likely to hold prejudiced attitudes as adults. These findings point to a vicious cycle, according to lead researcher Gordon Hodson, a psychologist at Brock University in Ontario. Low-intelligence adults tend to gravitate toward socially conservative ideologies, the study found. Those ideologies, in turn, stress hierarchy and resistance to change, attitudes that can contribute to prejudice, Hodson wrote in an email to LiveScience. ...

"They've pulled off the trifecta of controversial topics," said Brian Nosek, a social and cognitive psychologist at the University of Virginia who was not involved in the study. "When one selects intelligence, political ideology and racism and looks at any of the relationships between those three variables, it's bound to upset somebody."

Polling data and social and political science research do show that prejudice is more common in those who hold right-wing ideals that those of other political persuasions, Nosek told LiveScience.

"The unique contribution here is trying to make some progress on the most challenging aspect of this," Nosek said, referring to the new study. "It's not that a relationship like that exists, but why it exists."

Earlier studies have found links between low levels of education and higher levels of prejudice, Hodson said, so studying intelligence seemed a logical next step.

As Hodson himself pointed out, this doesn't mean that all conservatives are stupid and all liberals are brilliant, nor even that all conservatives are racist and all liberals racially tolerant. These are averages. But still, it sounds like just what I want to hear.

So maybe I should remember that I'm supposed to be a skeptic, huh? What would I say about this if it wasn't what I wanted to hear?

Obviously, the biggest problem is that this is just one study. It's not the scientific consensus, and it may never be. As far as I can tell, their findings haven't even been confirmed by independent researchers, not yet. So, at the very least, it's too early to give this much credence.

I'm also skeptical about "intelligence" as a single, overall measure. What was it that was really being measured - problem-solving, memory, vocabulary? And note that most of this research was conducted in Great Britain, so certain factors could possibly be specific to the United Kingdom.

Finally, it's just correlation, not causation. In other words, this research didn't necessarily find that low intelligence causes people to lean right. Instead, assuming this research is correct, low intelligence and conservative ideology could be linked in another way (something else causing both, for example - see below).

If you're a liberal like me, this study might make perfect sense to you,... but then, it would, wouldn't it? :)

As suspected, low intelligence in childhood corresponded with racism in adulthood. But the factor that explained the relationship between these two variables was political: When researchers included social conservatism in the analysis, those ideologies accounted for much of the link between brains and bias.

People with lower cognitive abilities also had less contact with people of other races.

"This finding is consistent with recent research demonstrating that intergroup contact is mentally challenging and cognitively draining, and consistent with findings that contact reduces prejudice," said Hodson, who along with his colleagues published these results online Jan. 5 in the journal Psychological Science.

Hodson was quick to note that the despite the link found between low intelligence and social conservatism, the researchers aren't implying that all liberals are brilliant and all conservatives stupid. The research is a study of averages over large groups, he said. ...

Nonetheless, there is reason to believe that strict right-wing ideology might appeal to those who have trouble grasping the complexity of the world.

"Socially conservative ideologies tend to offer structure and order," Hodson said, explaining why these beliefs might draw those with low intelligence. "Unfortunately, many of these features can also contribute to prejudice."

In another study, this one in the United States, Hodson and Busseri compared 254 people with the same amount of education but different levels of ability in abstract reasoning. They found that what applies to racism may also apply to homophobia. People who were poorer at abstract reasoning were more likely to exhibit prejudice against gays. As in the U.K. citizens, a lack of contact with gays and more acceptance of right-wing authoritarianism explained the link.

I've already explained why I'll be reserving judgment here. Other than that, I'll let conservatives fight their own battles. I'm sure they'll be eager to do so. :)

Right now, I want to go in a little different direction, myself. Note this quote: "This finding is consistent with recent research demonstrating that intergroup contact is mentally challenging and cognitively draining." Assuming that this research is accurate, could it be that the causation is actually the other way around, that conservatism and prejudice cause low intelligence?

I was struck by a recent remark by Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum:

Rick Santorum's crusade against higher education continues. The presidential hopeful explained Wednesday that President Obama doesn't want all Americans to go to college simply because he's a snob. It's also because he wants them to be pushed into liberalism. Because that's what American colleges and universities do. "It's no wonder President Obama wants every kid to go to college," he said while campaigning in Florida. "The indoctrination that occurs in American universities is one of the keys to the left holding and maintaining power in America. And it is indoctrination. If it was the other way around, the ACLU would be out there making sure there wasn't one penny of government dollars going to colleges and universities, right?"

This seems to be pretty typical of the right-wing, at least in America. Conservatives are often terrified of the "indoctrination" that threatens their children, meaning that they might encounter someone who thinks differently than their parents do.

They can go to great lengths to keep their children isolated. They may home-school, or send their kids to private religious schools. They'll socialize within the church. They want their children to hear nothing which might cause any doubts.

Often, their kids grow up among people just like them - the same race, the same socioeconomic background, the same religion. And as I say, much of that is deliberate. Their parents are scared to death that their child might start to think for himself. Heck, among the more cult-like religions, this voluntary segregation extends to the adults, too.

It's a scary world out there. The Devil is everywhere - some Christians think so, literally - and you mustn't listen to him. As Rick Warren says, "Don't ever argue with the Devil. He's better at arguing than you are, having had thousands of years to practice." Think about that message. Don't even try to think about what you believe. Certainly don't try to defend your thinking. That's just Satan's trap!

But if you never use your brain, except for rote memorization, how is that going to affect your intelligence? If you aren't challenged by people who think differently, you don't get to exercise your thinking skills.

Liberals tend to be more open to diversity, and their kids aren't as sheltered from diverse opinions. Their children still tend to believe what their parents believe, but at least they have to think about why.

Frankly, I'm often astonished at some of the crazy things conservatives believe. Frequently, when they argue about evolution or religion, they don't seem to know the first thing about the subject. I keep thinking that they must have led very sheltered lives, and I just don't think that makes for a healthy brain.

Rick Santorum is a good example, I think. Right-wingers like him are just terrified of universities, where their kids might finally get to hear diverse views. They call it "indoctrination," but isn't it easy to inoculate a kid against indoctrination? Just let them experience diverse views right from the start, so they're not completely unprepared for such things. And maybe that will encourage them to think, increasing their intelligence a bit, too.

Well, I don't know if prejudice and social conservatism cause stupidity, or if it's just the other way around. Heh, heh. Yeah, as I said above, I don't even acknowledge the correlation of low intelligence, prejudice, and conservative ideology, not yet. It might be true, but so far, it hasn't been conclusively demonstrated. This is just one study, not the scientific consensus. Not yet, at least.

But it's something to think about, isn't it? It's good for our brains to be challenged. When you have to think for yourself, it can't help but strengthen the little gray cells. It can't hurt, anyway, can it?

But if your beliefs are foolish, if they can't hold up in the free marketplace of ideas, thinking about them risks the danger that you might see how foolish they are. Well, that's the danger many on the right fear, though they may not put it exactly that way.

Snopes: the wordy cabbage

2012-01-29T13:13:00.000-06:00

I've been thinking of posting an occasional piece of urban legend, email rumor, or other misinformation from Snopes.com.

I mean, have you seen the crazy stuff that gets passed around in email these days? And not just in email. Bloggers pick up these things. Politicians pick up these things. Even the news media, to their shame, repeat some of this stuff.

And in many cases, all it would take is a quick check of Snopes.com to determine the truth. But no matter how often I point that out, the crazy keeps coming (though not to me, often enough, which is one advantage of replying to those emails!).

At any rate, I get the Snopes.com newsletter, so I might pick out an occasional piece of misinformation to highlight here. Today, let's look at cabbages:

Pythagorean theorem: 24 words
The Lord's Prayer: 66 words
Archimedes' Principle: 67 words
The Ten Commandments: 179 words
The Gettysburg Address: 286 words
The Declaration of Independence: 1,300 words
The US government regulations on the sale of cabbage: 26,911 words

The wordy cabbage memo is often held up as a telling illustration of needless verbosity and prime example of the sort of pointless government spending everyone is in favor of seeing cut from the bone. It's a shame such an archetype is naught but pure invention, yet it appears it was never anything other than the product of someone's fertile imagination.

Versions of the showcased list have been around for at least a half a century, with earlier ones decrying a memo by the government of France specifying the price of duck eggs, a British one referring to "shell eggs," and an American one (from 1953) about fresh fruits. While not all accounts agree on the precise number of words used in the various religious and patriotic texts pointed to as effective models of brevity, the 26,911 words expended in the cabbage tome eerily remains almost constant. [Funny, huh?]

In 1977, Mobil Oil was fooled by this thing — it vectored the legend in its "Pipeline Pete" print advertisement as a bit of revealed truth. Mobil had found the item in a house organ published the year earlier by FMC Corporation, an agricultural concern in Chicago. That version went back to yet another publication that had found it printed on a card someone was carrying in his wallet.

A 1987 book (Pearls of Wisdom: A Book of Aphorisms) claimed an "EEC [European Economic Community] directive on the import of caramel and caramel products requires, apparently, no fewer than 26,911 words." Once again, someone was so charmed by a bit of authoritative-sounding apocrypha that he chose to pass it along as revealed truth. ...

(We note that a U.S. Dept. of Agriculture document from 1945 which details "Standards for the Grades of Cabbage" falls about 26,000 words short of being a 27,000-word memo.)

Funny, isn't it? But this fits the meme that many people believe, and which many politicians want to spread, that of hopelessly incompetent government bureaucrats and the over-regulation stifling business in America. The fact that it's not true,... well, who really cares about the truth?

The fact is, there's plenty of incompetence in government, just as there is everywhere else, too. With a little effort, these people could probably find examples that were real. Apparently, that's too much effort. But is it too much effort for the rest of us just to make a quick check at Snopes.com?

Or just do a search on Google. You'll find plenty of websites which repeat that misinformation - without attribution - but you'll also find plenty of places which express doubt about it. At the very least, you might realize there's reason not to just forward that anonymous email to everyone in your address book!

PS. While looking around, I stumbled across this and thought it was pretty funny:

If a bureaucratic document is one that takes tens of thousands of words to describe how to do something in stultifying detail, here’s my revision of the document, taking out the fake cabbage claim and putting in reference to a document with which most of us are familiar:
All you Need to Know about Bureaucracy:

* Pythagorean theorem:………………………………………..24 words.
* Lord’s prayer:…………………….…..……………………….66 words.
* Archimedes’ Principle:………………………………………67 words.
* 10 Commandments:……………………………………….179 words.
* Gettysburg address:……………………………………… 286 words.
* Declaration of Independence :…………………….1,300 words.
* US Constitution with all 27 Amendments:…..7,818 words.
* God’s Biblical instructions for building a place of worship and making sacrifices:…............. 18,672 words.

SORT OF PUTS THINGS INTO PROPER PERSPECTIVE, DOESN’T IT?????

Sources: King James Bible,
Exodus 23:14-19… 161 words
Exodus 25:1 to Exodus 31:11… 6201 words
Exodus 35:4 to Exodus 40:30… 4872 words
Leviticus 1:1 to Leviticus 10:15… 7438 words

(Note that I didn't fact check that. I just thought it was funny.)

Jessica Ahlquist

2012-01-28T14:21:00.001-06:00

(borrowed from The Wayward Willis)

I haven't blogged about this before now, because it's everywhere on atheist blogs. What could I say about it that Pharyngula hasn't? I'd feel like a male mosquito, buzzing impotently, not even able to draw blood, next to that huge, lurking PZ Myers beast, with his sharp, glistening fangs. :)

But now it's in the New York Times, so I can't just ignore it. Besides, this is a brave and honest girl. My praise may not be worth much, but she deserves all of the praise she can get.

She is 16, the daughter of a firefighter and a nurse, a self-proclaimed nerd who loves Harry Potter and Facebook. But Jessica Ahlquist is also an outspoken atheist who has incensed this heavily Roman Catholic city with a successful lawsuit to get a prayer removed from the wall of her high school auditorium, where it has hung for 49 years.

A federal judge ruled this month that the prayer’s presence at Cranston High School West was unconstitutional, concluding that it violated the principle of government neutrality in religion. In the weeks since, residents have crowded school board meetings to demand an appeal, Jessica has received online threats and the police have escorted her at school, and Cranston, a dense city of 80,000 just south of Providence, has throbbed with raw emotion.

State Representative Peter G. Palumbo, a Democrat from Cranston, called Jessica “an evil little thing” on a popular talk radio show. Three separate florists refused to deliver her roses sent from a national atheist group. The group, the Freedom From Religion Foundation, has filed a complaint with the Rhode Island Commission for Human Rights.

“I was amazed,” said Annie Laurie Gaylor, co-president of the foundation, which is based in Wisconsin and has given Jessica $13,000 from support and scholarship funds. “We haven’t seen a case like this in a long time, with this level of revilement and ostracism and stigmatizing.”

Crazy, huh? This prayer banner - titled "School Prayer" - starts with "Our Heavenly Father" and ends with "Amen." In a public school. Open and shut case. And that's exactly how the federal judge saw it:

According to the Justice’s decision “The purpose of the prayer banner was clearly religious in nature,” and that “No amount of debate can make the school Prayer anything other than a prayer, and a Christian one at that.”

The school board could have avoided all this if they'd removed the prayer when a parent - not Jessica - objected. But no, they wanted to spend tax money in a futile quest to force their own religion on everyone else. I guess Rhode Island is still struggling with this whole religious freedom thing, huh?

And what's been the result? The whole town has gone batshit crazy! State Representative Peter G. Palumbo - a Democrat, no less - called this 16-year-old high school girl an "evil little thing" for standing up for the U.S. Constitution. (Some clever atheists are now selling t-shirts to support Jessica's college fund.)

(Evil Little Shirts)

Cranston florists refused to deliver flowers to Jessica, she'd become such a pariah in the town. And she's even needed police protection in school:

Ahlquist was at the meeting and said she would "definitely" do what she did again, even if she has been getting frightening threats.

"A lot of people are saying that they hope I get beat up," she told [ABC News' affiliate] WLNE. "That they would hurt me physically in school if they could. It is hurtful. It kind of disturbed me. It's mostly hurtful when it comes from students in the school."

Ironically, lawyers for the city and school claimed in the lawsuit that she was acting as a "zealous advocate," not a "frightened student." As PZ Myers put it:

If the prayer were a problem, students would be cowed and fearful, and would not be complaining. A student is complaining, therefore she isn’t fearful, therefore it’s not a problem.

That’s some catch, that Catch-22.

But you know what this is about, right? They can't intimidate Jessica Ahlquist. But they can make it clear to everyone else the penalty they'd pay for rocking the boat. Not everyone is as brave as Jessica. Whenever the Christian Taliban makes it tough for someone who stands up for her rights, they keep everyone else in line.

And Jessica is only 16 years old. She has to live in this town. She has to go to this school. Most of these Christians won't harm her, I'm sure. But they'll do their best to create an environment of fear. And if someone else harms her, oh, well, that's terrible, right? But she should have expected it...

Maybe the next person tempted to stand up for the U.S. Constitution will have second thoughts. That prayer banner wouldn't have remained in the school this long if someone had stood up and objected previously. The law hasn't changed, only the willingness to stand up.

Because rights on paper are worthless if everyone is too cowed to do anything when they're violated. The Soviet Union, too, recognized civil rights,... on paper. But everyone knew what would happen if they'd actually demanded those rights for real.

Jessica was standing up for everybody.

Does she empathize in any way with members of her community who want the prayer to stay?

“I’ve never been asked this before,” she said. A pause, and then: “It’s almost like making a child get a shot even though they don’t want to. It’s for their own good. I feel like they might see it as a very negative thing right now, but I’m defending their Constitution, too.”

A very, very smart 16-year-old, isn't she?

Freedom to beat your spouse

2012-01-28T10:56:00.000-06:00

Ilya Gerner, at Indecision Forever, makes a good point:

One thing to keep in mind whenever a presidential candidate suggests that some issue is best handled at the state or local level is the fact that this relegates lawmaking to state and local legislators and absolutely nothing about the history of governments suggests that is a good idea. Our "laboratories of democracy" are basically 50 self-contained arguments against federalism.

I think of this whenever I hear the arguments against "professional" politicians, too. We want amateurs writing our laws, just like we want amateur surgeons, and amateur financial advisers, and even amateur plumbers, right? After all, why would we want people who actually know something about government?

And in many states, including my own, state legislators are very poorly paid. The intent, I'm sure, is so only rich people can run things. But all too often, we end up with retired people with too much time on their hands, obsessed kooks riding their particular hobbyhorse, and others who give us the kind of government we deserve (unfortunately).

Yeah, anyone can write laws, huh? It's not like driving a cab, where you need a license. It's not like hauling garbage, where you need some knowledge of what you're doing. If anyone can vote, it follows that anyone can legislate, right? And have you seen the terrible job these people do? They don't deserve more money! (I think you can see the logical flaw in that without me pointing it out to you, can't you?)

And even in the best of circumstances, it's easier to get crazy legislated locally, or even at the state level, rather than nationally. I know it doesn't always seem like that, but historically, that's been true. Sometimes, the states can work as laboratories for civics experiments, but the federal government still needs to maintain an oversight role.

Anyway, what's the particular crazy here?

Take New Hampshire, which in some populist conceit has decided that every dozen residents need their own severely under-resourced and under-paid state legislator, who will somehow remain "close to the people." Of course, the natural conclusion of "citizen legislatures" isn't home-spun wisdom and incorruptibility, insomuch as a bunch of part-time real-estate agents throwing monkey feces at a wall and calling the result a "House Bill."

The latest in the New Hampshire legislature's attempt to beclown their state as the Arizona of New England is House Bill 1581, which would stand up to lobbyists from Big Battered Spouse and prevent police officers from making an arrest in a domestic violence case without first getting a warrant unless the officer witnessed the crime. The Concord Monitor explains…
An officer is called to a home where she sees clear evidence that an assault has occurred. The furniture is overturned, the children are sobbing, and the face of the woman of the house is bruised and bleeding. It's obvious who the assailant was, but the officer arrived after the assault occurred. It's a small department, and no one else on the force is available to keep the peace until the officer finds a judge or justice of the peace to issue a warrant. The officer leaves, and the abuser renews his attack with even more ferocity, punishing his victim for having called for help.

... The legislative mastermind behind H.B. 1581 is Republican Representative Dan Itse, whose own political philosophy he explains in ways only a guest on the Glenn Beck and Alex Jones Shows can…
Today our nation, though still the freest in the world, is in danger of sliding into tyranny. The reason is best explained in the prelude to the movie "Fellowship of the Ring." The elf queen Galadriel is giving a discourse on the history of the ring, and man's lust for power over other men. Near the conclusion she states "…and some things that should not have been forgotten were lost. History became legend, legend became myth…"

Naturally, Itse's conclusion is that Galadriel should shut her elf queen mouth and go back to making him a Lembas bread sandwich.

If you think we Americans know little about our national government, try us on state politics. Most of us are concerned with our own lives, and we spend little time or energy doing our civic duty. All too many of my fellow citizens don't even vote. And when we do vote, we generally vote our prejudices and our ignorance.

Well, to paraphrase what I said earlier, we tend to get the kinds of politicians we deserve. It's probably a miracle we manage as well as we do.

Terry Gross, NPR's attack dog

2012-01-27T09:13:00.000-06:00

Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c

Terry Gross

This clip is actually from two nights ago. But it stuck in my mind, because I thought it was kind of funny that this is the bully Bill O'Reilly whines about.

If you've ever seen how O'Reilly behaves on Fox "News," it's hard to believe he'd have the gall to complain about anyone else, let alone this woman. But the right-wing loves to play the victim card. Even the wealthy, politically powerful right-wing.

So here's the monster from National Public Radio. Don't get too scared. It's just a video clip.

QOTD: a dogfight with... this guy?

2012-01-26T16:08:00.000-06:00

Quote of the Day:

Buzzfeed reporter McKay Coppins asked an anonymous Mitt Romney adviser tonight if he’s worried about the South Carolina primary results. "Oh God, no," he sneered. "I mean, to face Newt Gingrich?"

The man has a point. Newt Gingrich? Tubby, philandering (and note that the most famous philandering pols, unlike Newt, generally have the compensating trait of physical attractiveness) has-been, unelectable, distrusted by conservatives Newt Gingrich?

But if you turn the same thought around, it leaves you wondering: How can Romney be in a dogfight with this guy?

My view all along has been that any remotely plausible candidate could beat Mitt Romney. My current view is that there are no remotely plausible candidates, which leaves us with Newt. So we have the immovable object meeting the irresistible force, except the exact opposite. Like almost everybody outside Gingrich's immediate family, I had already written him off twice. But he really seems okay. If some really crazy rich conservatives decide to write him some seven- or eight-figure checks, who knows? - Jonathan Chait

Protecting cherished beliefs

2012-01-26T16:00:00.000-06:00

(Jesus and Mo)

This is an issue in Great Britain more than here. It's not that we don't have crazy and viciously stupid believers in America, but we're somewhat protected by the Bill of Rights.

Criticize my beliefs all you want. If they can't withstand a little criticism, what good are they? In fact, I'd thank you for convincing me I'm wrong, because the truth matters more to me than my feelings.

Ridicule my beliefs, if you think they deserve ridicule. I don't care. As far as I'm concerned, only ridiculous beliefs need protection from ridicule. If my beliefs can't withstand a little ridicule, what good are they?

Attack me with a stone, a gun, or a bomb, and I'll object. Attack me with words and I'll give them the consideration they deserve (i.e. none, if they're just epithets; serious thought if they're based on reason and evidence).

Do you think my beliefs don't matter to me as much as yours do to you? In fact, it's just the reverse. My beliefs matter so much to me that I want to be sure they're true, and not just wishful thinking. Can you say the same?

You have the right to believe whatever you wish. But you don't have the right to be free from criticism or ridicule, because that infringes on the rights of the rest of us. And if you actually care about what's true and what isn't, you shouldn't want to be protected from criticism or ridicule.

Mr. Deity and the quitter

2012-01-26T15:59:00.000-06:00

I never saw the first part of this, if there even is a first part. And I have to admit, it's the sly digs at Republicans that I especially like in this one.

Scapegoating immigrants

2012-01-26T14:21:00.000-06:00

Last summer, I hired a locksmith for a minor problem. He was a young guy, pleasant and personable (admittedly, I think he was cheating on his taxes, because he wanted the check made out to him personally, not to the company he owned).

But just before he left, he got a phone call, which he put on speaker. It was a prospective customer, a guy with a pretty strong accent who struggled a bit with English, wanting to hire the locksmith. So this contractor just hung up on him. "Hey, if they want to hire me, they need to learn to speak English!"

Think about that. As an American, my contractor was the descendent of immigrants himself, some of whom probably didn't speak perfect English themselves. My own ancestors certainly didn't, not all of them. This is America, the land of opportunity. We're pretty much all descended from immigrants (even Native Americans, arguably).

And learning to speak a foreign language as an adult is hard. Here in Nebraska, that might be easy to forget, since we can go a thousand miles in any direction without needing to speak anything but English. But I know how I struggled just as a tourist in Europe, despite my high school Spanish and a some German, French, and Italian in college. Learning to actually use a new language is hard.

As I say, our ancestors went through all that, so if any people on Earth should be sympathetic to immigrants, it should be us Americans. I really don't understand it.

When my mother was a little girl, her great-grandmother lived with them for awhile before her death. The old woman couldn't speak English, despite living in America for most of her life. And my mother couldn't speak any German. They couldn't communicate at all, except with hugs and other gestures.

A hundred years ago, there were German-language newspapers in America, German social clubs, German-language schools. For the most part, that ended when America went to war with Germany in World War I. It wasn't considered patriotic then (and, as usual, we got a little hysterical about the enemy - in this case, even renaming sauerkraut "liberty cabbage"). But today, the descendents of those German-Americans, many of them, just hit the ceiling about using Spanish in America. Funny, isn't it?

My grandfather fought in Germany (for our side, I assure you) in World War I, suffering poison gas damage which affected his lungs for the rest of his life. He was an American citizen, but all of his grandparents had come from Germany. They came here for the reason all immigrants come to America, to make a better life for themselves.

But these days, we're not even willing to grant permanent residence to soldiers who fight and sometimes die for us, if they were brought to America illegally as children. How crazy is that? We won't even reward the very best of them who struggle against overwhelming odds to get a college degree. Yeah, we don't want no furriners here, do we? It's absolutely insane!

When my Irish ancestors arrived in America, there were riots against them in some American towns. I used to hear stories about the discrimination they faced. But their descendants, many of them, are all too eager to discriminate against immigrants now. P. J. O'Rourke once said, "We are, after all, a country full of people who came to America to get away from foreigners." Maybe that's it.

Sure, the right-wing claims that they're only against illegal immigrants. Is it their fault that you can't tell a legal brown person from an illegal brown person? Besides, they're all just "Mexicans," right? We all know how lazy they are...

Yeah, here in Nebraska, at least, it's all about the "Mexicans." Wonder how that happened? When I was a kid, Iowa Beef Processors built a big packing plant just outside my hometown. There were a lot of problems with the plant (including a horrible stench when the wind was from the north), but at least it was a union plant and the jobs paid pretty well.

Unfortunately, IBP found a way to make more money. They sent buses to the Mexican border to find workers desperate enough to work for peanuts, then used them to break the union. Nearby towns saw a huge influx of poor Spanish-speaking people, which cost taxpayers more in school and social services costs. Meanwhile, those well-paying jobs had disappeared, so the taxes from them did, too.

And who do the locals blame? Those wealthy executives at IBP who made out like bandits? Not hardly. Most blame the Spanish-speaking workers who were simply desperate for work. Well, it's easy to scapegoat people who seem different from you, isn't it? Those executives were white and spoke perfect English. And we all know how the "job creators" deserve everything they get, right?

Generally speaking, the real hysteria about immigration, here in Nebraska and nationally, focuses on the "Mexicans." But discrimination hardly stops there. That guy on the other end of the cell phone sounded like he had a Pakistani or Indian accent, as far as I could tell from the speaker. But it was enough that he spoke English with an accent. Obviously, he was just another no-good foreigner, huh?

The fact that all of us, pretty much, are descended from "no-good foreigners" ourselves doesn't seem to matter to these people. Well, bigotry is alive and well even in good economic times. When times are bad, that's when you really see the hysteria. And the average middle class American has seen his standard of living decline since the late 1970s (funny, that coincides exactly with the start of "trickle down" economic policies favoring the wealthy).

It's especially bad in the GOP, of course, since the Republican Party has been deliberately wooing racists with their "Southern strategy" for decades. Politically, that was a huge success, since they succeeded in taking the South from the Democrats. But now, the racists are the Republican base. And you know? When you take most of the crazies from one political party and combine them with all of the crazies from your own, you get a lot of crazy.

Now, all of the Republican candidates for president must try to appeal to those people. Mitt Romney, mostly because of his flip-flopping, has to be especially vigorous. And, although Newt Gingrich is holding his own when it comes to implicit racism, Romney is setting a whole new standard for crazy when it comes to immigration.

Mitt Romney unveiled a novel solution for illegal immigration during Tuesday night's GOP debate, saying that he'd rely on "self-deportation" to reduce the number of unauthorized immigrants in the US. ...

This is the right-wing's answer to the question of how you deport 11 million unauthorized immigrants: You don't. You force them to "deport themselves." Although immigration reform advocates would prefer a solution that involves a path to citizenship for unauthorized immigrants already here, Romney and his top immigration advisers believe they can remove millions of people through heavy-handed enforcement that makes life for unauthorized immigrants intolerable. This approach is notable for its complete lack of discretion and flexibility. Unauthorized immigrant parents with citizen children who need to go to school? Americans who are married to an undocumented immigrant who needs medical treatment? "Self-deportation" hits them all with the same mailed fist.

We can see how this concept has been applied in states like Arizona and Alabama, where local authorities have been empowered to act as enforcers of immigration law. Alabama takes the choke point theory even more seriously than Arizona—everything from enrolling in school to seeking health treatment has been turned into a so-called choke point. The moral, social, and economic consequences of the strategy are secondary to inflicting enough suffering on unauthorized immigrants in order to force them out of the country. ...

Alabama's immigration law has actually been such a disaster that the state is trying to figure out a way to repeal parts of the law. But make no mistake, when Romney is discussing "self-deportation," he's talking about creating a United States where parents are afraid to register their kids for school or get them immunized because they might be asked for proof of citizenship. He's talking about the type of country where local police can demand your immigration status based on mere suspicion that you don't belong around here. "Self-deportation" is just a cleaner, less cruel-sounding way of endorsing harsh, coercive government polices in order to make life for unauthorized immigrants so unbearable that they have no choice but to find some way to leave. The human cost of such an approach, let alone what it might do to American society, is viewed as a price worth paying.

Brilliant, isn't it? We're going to make America such a hell-hole that no one will want to live here! Wow! Why didn't we progressives think of that?

And if you're enjoying the "war on terror," then you'll really be in for a treat. We're going to make sure that American kids - children legally American, but born here of illegal immigrant parents - are going to hate America with a passion. Well, at least future terrorist groups won't have to worry about recruiting American citizens, huh? They'll be lining up to attack us.

Navy SEALs rescue hostages in Somalia

2012-01-25T14:58:00.000-06:00

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

This is gutsy! A lot of things could go wrong in an operation like this. Politically, the safe bet would probably be to do nothing at all.

I've got to say it's impressive that Barack Obama hasn't been taking the easy option, the safe option, neither here nor in getting Osama bin Laden.

Shit skeptics say

2012-01-25T14:13:00.000-06:00

A few of these might be more obscure than others, but if you're a skeptic, you should find most of this pretty familiar.

2012 State of the Union highlights

2012-01-25T09:46:00.000-06:00

And here's the Young Turks' analysis. Note that Cenk Uygur isn't a big fan of Barack Obama.

Well, I've been disappointed, too (though not as disappointed as I am in the American people in general), but I'm not the kind of progressive who's willing to cut off his nose to spite his face.

Mitt Romney's taxes

2012-01-25T09:08:00.000-06:00

Indecision 2012 - I Know What You Did Last Quarter

Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c

This sums it up pretty well, don't you think? Unfortunately, the rest of us just don't have enough high-powered lobbyists.

Incidentally, Elizabeth Warren was Jon's guest last night. She's really impressive. If you're interested, here's the interview (Part 1 and Part 2).

These are a couple of lines that really got me: "It comes out that 30 of the largest companies in the United States are now spending more on lobbying than they pay in federal taxes." ... "Right now, the people who are sucking up the real resources in this country are the people who can hire the lobbyists."

This is all because money has become all-powerful in our political system - and even more-so since that lunatic Citizens United decision from our Republican Supreme Court. Heck, billionaire Stuart Adelson's money has kept Newt Gringrich's presidential campaign afloat almost single-handedly. What kind of influence do you think he's buying with that?

But libertarians completely miss the boat, too. They fail to remember that we're social animals. We're all in this together. Elizabeth Warren is absolutely right about this: "Government is what we do together. Government is the part that lets us come together and build the basic conditions - the infrastructure, the education, the research - the basic pieces together that let us build a future for ourselves and for our kids."

QOTD: the GOP's radical transformation

2012-01-24T19:20:00.000-06:00

Quote of the Day:

The nation is still recovering from a crushing recession that sent unemployment hovering above nine percent for two straight years. The president, mindful of soaring deficits, is pushing bold action to shore up the nation's balance sheet. Cloaking himself in the language of class warfare, he calls on a hostile Congress to end wasteful tax breaks for the rich. "We're going to close the unproductive tax loopholes that allow some of the truly wealthy to avoid paying their fair share," he thunders to a crowd in Georgia. Such tax loopholes, he adds, "sometimes made it possible for millionaires to pay nothing, while a bus driver was paying 10 percent of his salary – and that's crazy."

Preacherlike, the president draws the crowd into a call-and-response. "Do you think the millionaire ought to pay more in taxes than the bus driver," he demands, "or less?"

The crowd, sounding every bit like the protesters from Occupy Wall Street, roars back: "MORE!"

The year was 1985. The president was Ronald Wilson Reagan.

Today's Republican Party may revere Reagan as the patron saint of low taxation. But the party of Reagan – which understood that higher taxes on the rich are sometimes required to cure ruinous deficits – is dead and gone. Instead, the modern GOP has undergone a radical transformation, reorganizing itself around a grotesque proposition: that the wealthy should grow wealthier still, whatever the consequences for the rest of us. ...

The staggering economic inequality that has led Americans across the country to take to the streets in protest is no accident. It has been fueled to a large extent by the GOP's all-out war on behalf of the rich. Since Republicans rededicated themselves to slashing taxes for the wealthy in 1997, the average annual income of the 400 richest Americans has more than tripled, to $345 million – while their share of the tax burden has plunged by 40 percent. Today, a billionaire in the top 400 pays less than 17 percent of his income in taxes – five percentage points less than a bus driver earning $26,000 a year. - Tim Dickinson

Minecraft fortress

2012-01-24T16:13:00.000-06:00

(click images to embiggen)

Note: This is the second dispatch from my latest Minecraft world. The first is here.

This is a cold land, but rich. My crops grow well, despite the occasional snowstorms. My livestock seem to need little care. So I've had a lot of time on my hands.

Too much time, probably, since I've started an absolutely massive stone fortress. It really is pretty ridiculous, isn't it? I can't even claim that it's for protection, since these walls enclose only a small part of my homestead. With the time I've spent building those vast towers, I could have enclosed the whole place with sturdy walls.

Indeed, I'm still having immense trouble with creepers. The other day, one sneaked inside my stone wall and ran up behind me. Only at the last minute did I hear it hiss, and the explosion tossed me clear across the room. Luckily, I've taken to wearing armor, even inside. But I was badly injured, even so.

And I'm still living in a shack, little more than a lean-to against the south wall, while I spend my time creating this monstrosity! It really is pretty ridiculous, don't you think? I haven't even explored this land, not very far, not further than I can see from the top of one of my towers. I've just been laying stone.

Whenever I run out of stone, I head into the caverns below for more - and for more coal, too, which is the bigger problem by far. I've got lots of trees, so I've used some wood to fire my forges, but that seems wasteful. Yes, trees are a renewable resource, while coal isn't. But I still hate to burn wood.

Besides, I need to explore the caverns, anyway. They are really extensive. Previously, I mentioned that deep crevasse that bisects the upper caverns. But I'm beginning to wonder if it's just one crevasse or two. Or more. I don't know. It gets really confusing, as those caverns twist and turn.

I've gotten to the bottom of at least one crevasse, maybe more. The problem is that I haven't been able to walk along the bottom. It's not just the obstacles, but the darkness that's a problem. I can use torches to light my way, but there are countless dark ledges above me, and those ledges can pretty much rain monsters.

Again, creepers are my biggest problem. I've had creepers drop out of the dark almost right on top of me. And I've been badly injured a few times there, too. Again, my iron armor has saved my life, but I've had far too many close calls. Frequently, I've had to stay holed up in the caverns until I recovered enough to limp on home.

For a long time, skeletons were a problem, too. I couldn't seem to find bowstring material, so an archer on a ledge or across a ravine could shoot at me with impunity. It's not that I like spiders all that much, but their webbing can be very useful. Unfortunately, spiders don't seem to be very common in this cold land.

When I got deep enough, I discovered another danger. There's lava just everywhere. Even without monsters, it would be very, very dangerous to explore the depths of these caverns. But as it is, pretty much anything could knock me off a narrow path into lava, if I'm not careful. And my armor wouldn't help me at all, then.

So I've had to be very, very careful. There are caverns stretching for miles and miles, lava and waterfalls everywhere, and multiple levels, all the way up to the surface. Even without making a misstep into lava, even without the ever-present danger of creepers and other monstrosities, I could get hopelessly lost at even a moment's inattention.

On the bright side, there are many valuable resources down there. I've found lots of coal and iron, some gold and some redstone, and even a couple of diamonds. And I've only just begun to explore the place. But it's sure been rough on my nerves!

So I think I need a break. I recently built a compass, so I should be able to explore this land without getting hopelessly lost. I think I'll take my dog and explore on the surface a bit, maybe even draw a map as I go.

I wonder what lies on the other side of the eastern desert? I wonder how far this pine forest extends to the west? I stopped at the river's edge to my north, but I could certainly craft a boat without too much trouble. And there are mountains to the south. I'll bet I could get a pretty good view from up there.

And yes, I'm sure there will be monsters, but maybe I won't have to worry that my next step will put me neck-deep into lava. And I could always try taming another wolf or two. At the very least, it will be a break, and I think I need a break. I really, really think I need a break.

Gingrich can't imagine anything more despicable

2012-01-24T11:35:00.000-06:00

Indecision 2012 - The Gingrich Who Stole South Carolina

Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c

Sure, I blogged about this a few days ago. But I love how worked up Jon Stewart gets about it. Hey, I know exactly how he feels. It's just incredible, isn't it?

So much for those right-wing "values," huh?

This part was great, too:

"You're not a small-business owner. Your 'small business' involved selling access to the insides of Washington!

You're not a Washington insider? You, the former Speaker of the House and Freddie Mac-consulting millionaire, are the Washington insider. When Washington gets its prostate checked, it tickles you!"

Stewart's final line is also pretty good!

So much for global warming

2012-01-24T11:12:00.000-06:00

Last year was actually cooler than the previous year. So much for global warming, huh?

True, 2010 tied for the hottest year on record. And 2011 was still in the top 11 (by other measurements, the top 9) hottest years on record, warmer than any year in the entire 20th Century except 1998.

But hey, clearly we're on the downward path now, right? I mean, what other explanation could there be? :)

One reason 2011 was milder than recent years was the La Nina cooling of the central Pacific Ocean. La Ninas occur every few years and generally cause global temperatures to drop, but this was the warmest La Nina year on record.

Bertrand Russell on God

2012-01-23T20:52:00.000-06:00

From 1959, apparently. More that 50 years ago, but still just as valid as ever.

"Religious people, most of them, think that it's a virtuous act to tell lies about the deathbeds of agnostics and such." Yup. Because although the Ten Commandments states that "thou shalt not bear false witness," it's OK when you're lying for God, huh?

Non-Belief, Pt. 8: Obeying God

2012-01-23T15:16:00.000-06:00

An acquaintance - let's keep this completely anonymous - asked me a question this morning. I'm paraphrasing, but basically, he said, "If you believed in God, if he appeared to you and convinced you he was real, you'd do what he said, right? If he told you to kill someone, wouldn't you do it?"

Those aren't his exact words, and if you think he's implying something with that, you'd probably be wrong. But I thought it was an interesting question, interesting enough to blog about and, indeed, to add to my Non-Belief series.

Let's mention the obvious problem with this, first. I'm supposed to assume that - somehow - I was convinced the Christian God actually exists and that he wants me to kill someone (that he wants me to do anything, actually, but killing someone is something I wouldn't normally do).

Suppose I was absolutely convinced of this. Well, I could still be mistaken. I'm not infallible. No matter how sure I was, I'd still have to consider the possibility that I was wrong. (I haven't lost my mind, right? I've just become convinced that this is God?)

In this particular case, how would I know I wasn't delusional? Just because I see and hear God, that doesn't mean he really exists. I might be absolutely convinced of that, but still wrong. It's one thing if he doesn't want me to eat shellfish - or even bacon, I guess - but when he wants me to murder someone, I have to consider the possibility that I'm just hallucinating.

I don't actually see how a god could convince me that I couldn't be wrong, do you? OK, God is supposed to be omniscient and omnipotent, so by definition, he can do anything he wants. If that's true, then he certainly could make me believe that he exists. Could he make me absolutely certain that I wasn't just delusional? I don't know how, but if he's truly omniscient and omnipotent, he can do anything.

I don't think I'm going to be murdering anyone, or doing anything else really bad, just because I think I'm right. No matter what, I always have to consider the possibility that I'm wrong. (This is something fanatics throughout history have failed to understand.) But let's assume otherwise. Let's assume that I have been convinced and that I'm absolutely certain that I couldn't be wrong. Would I do what God told me to do?

Well, why would I? Suppose I accepted Christian mythology lock, stock, and barrel. God created the universe just for us. He created Adam and Eve, then kicked them out of the Garden of Eden for disobedience. He flooded the whole world once, drowning men, women, and children, when there were only a handful of righteous believers left. And he sent his only son to die on the cross for us.

Assuming that I believed all that, should I obey God? Should I do whatever he says, without question? Why would I?

My parents did create me. They sacrificed for me. They raised me, they fed me, they protected me. They loved me, and they taught me right from wrong. Should you obey your parents then, without question? No matter what they tell you to do? Of course not!

Naturally, I'll hand a mugger my wallet, if he holds a gun to my head. If we're talking about threats, then I might obey out of fear. I would hope that I wouldn't murder someone, just because God threatened to torture me if I didn't obey. But heck, I don't even like hangnails. With enough torture, I'd probably do anything to make the pain stop.

I'm not even particularly embarrassed by that. No one could hold out against an infinity of torture. Some of us might break sooner than others, but we'd all break.

If God threatened me, I'd absolutely obey him, at least to some extent. I'd hand him my wallet, if he wanted it, just like I'd do to any mugger. But in neither case would I murder someone, not just because of threats to my own well-being. Torture would break me, I'm sure, but threats alone wouldn't do it (not threats to myself, at least).

But what if it's liberal Christianity I believe in? What if there is no Hell? What if God isn't threatening me, but just asking me to kill someone? Or to stop eating bacon, for that matter? Would I obey God, just because he is God?

Remember, the assumption is that I'm absolutely certain this is God, with no possibility that I could be mistaken. But even so, why would I obey him, necessarily?

I'm going to need a good reason, even from God. Heck, I already know that I shouldn't be eating bacon, but I'm not willing to stop. Does God have a better reason than the ones I already know? I'd certainly listen to him, and I might even agree to stop.

But if he wants me to kill someone, I'm going to need a very good reason. Why would I obey God for no reason? Assuming that I'm not being threatened or forced to obey, why would I obey just on his say-so? Why would God want my obedience, anyway? If he's got a good reason for me to obey, then I want to hear it.

An omniscient god would be vastly smarter than me, of course. But maybe my father was smarter than me. I still wouldn't have killed someone just on his command. I loved my father, but I would have needed a very good reason before agreeing to kill for him. I owe my father a lot, but I don't owe him my complete, unquestioned obedience.

So no, I wouldn't kill someone just because God told me to do it, even if I believed wholeheartedly that he actually existed. I wouldn't even give up bacon because he told me to do it, not without a good reason. And I'd need a lot better reason before agreeing to commit murder.

Islam is supposed to mean "submission," apparently. But even in Christianity, believers are supposed to obey God. Why would you do that? If God wants me to do something, I want to know why. If anyone wants me to do something, I'd like to know the reasons why. If your reasons are valid, I'll probably do it. But I'm not a slave. And I am going to think for myself.

What I don't understand is why believers think that obedience is a virtue. Obedience is a virtue in a slave, no doubt, although only from his master's point of view. But why would a free man or a free woman think that obedience is a virtue?

If you believe that God created us, why did he give us brains, if we're not supposed to use them? The Bible praises obedience, but not rational thought, not doubt, certainly not skepticism. Why not? Were our brains just a error then? Did God screw up? I guess he isn't omniscient after all, huh?

In fact, if he does ask me to kill someone, without having a very good reason for that request, then that will prove he's not omniscient. Because I'm going to say no.

Fox News really admires Newt's cheating

2012-01-23T12:07:00.000-06:00

(Indecision Forever)

So, South Carolina Republicans decided they didn't care about Newt Gingrich's serial philandering, about his cheating on his first two wives, about his hypocrisy.

The latter is my big problem with this. His personal life is his own, but not when he's criticizing others for what he does himself, not when he's campaigning as a "defender" of traditional marriage, not when we're supposed to think that his supporters are "values" voters. If those are your values, you should be ashamed of yourself!

But apparently, Fox News disagrees with me. Hmm,... fancy that.

From Indecision Forever:

Let's get clarification from the values upholders over at Fox News…
Here's what one interested in making America stronger can reasonably conclude—psychologically—from Mr. Gingrich's behavior during his three marriages:

1) Three women have met Mr. Gingrich and been so moved by his emotional energy and intellect that they decided they wanted to spend the rest of their lives with him.

2) Two of these women felt this way even though Mr. Gingrich was already married.

3) One of them felt this way even though Mr. Gingrich was already married for the second time, was not exactly her equal in the looks department and had a wife (Marianne) who wanted to make his life without her as painful as possible.

Conclusion: When three women want to sign on for life with a man who is now running for president, I worry more about whether we'll be clamoring for a third Gingrich term, not whether we'll want to let him go after one.

You got that? The issue isn't that Newt Gingrich "broke his marriage vows" or "led a life of lies/hypocrisy." It's that women–with their superior insight–recognized the inherent goodness of Newt Gingrich, his raw intelligence, his ability to last for hours whenever there was a premise to be challenged.

The real shock here is that Fox News suddenly thinks that women's opinions are important, especially when one of them is lacking in the looks department.

Funny, yes, but note that there were additional points and additional conclusions in that column at Fox News. For example:

4) Two women—Mr. Gingrich’s first two wives—have sat down with him while he delivered to them incredibly painful truths: that he no longer loved them as he did before, that he had fallen in love with other women and that he needed to follow his heart, despite the great price he would pay financially and the risk he would be taking with his reputation.

Conclusion: I can only hope Mr. Gingrich will be as direct and unsparing with the Congress, the American people and our allies. If this nation must now move with conviction in the direction of its heart, Newt Gingrich is obviously no stranger to that journey.

I don't know about you, but I'd worry that President Gingrich would "follow his heart" to another country and not tell us about it for years. I'd worry that he'd be cheating on America, and especially that it would take him years before he came clean about it.

Is he, in fact, cheating on America now? After all, everything Republicans propose seems to be designed to bring us down. Is that deliberate? Most of what they propose was tried during the Bush administration, with truly disastrous results for our country.

And Newt even wants to bring child labor back to America. Is he clueless, or has he just fallen for one of America's competitors? Will we find out in six years or so that he's been sleeping with a younger, hotter country?

It's not just that we have to worry about Newt "following his heart" elsewhere, but that it might already have happened. After all, Newt didn't sit down with his wives, delivering his "incredibly painful truths," until he'd been cheating on them for years. So when Newt whispers sweet nothings in our ears, is it some other nation he's really thinking about?

Defending our freedom to share

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

Note that this clip is also available on YouTube here.

This is an interesting talk. SOPA and PIPA were pushed as anti-piracy measures, and that might seem reasonable. Certainly, copyright holders are being ripped off by organized criminal operations, usually based in China or elsewhere overseas, that often sell movies and games even before the legitimate products are available.

But these bills won't do anything about that. In fact, from what I can tell, so far nothing has had much of an effect on piracy. This is the excuse for these bills, but is that the real reason? In this TED talk, Clay Shirky explains why we should doubt that.

Do you ever watch YouTube videos? YouTube makes it very easy to create and share your own videos. But every amateur video clip you watch on YouTube is time you could have spent watching a commercial television show or movie.

Is that what really has Hollywood running scared? Most of that amateur content isn't very good, but there's a lot of it. At the very least, it's a real time-waster. And some of it is pretty good. Either way, it's competition that big media companies don't want.

At the very least, it's competition for your time. As Shirky says, it used to be that television networks had only two other shows as competition in each time slot. Sure, you could do other things, rather than watch TV at all. But you didn't have the internet, with a pretty much unlimited amount of content available.

This reminds me of Digital Rights Management (DRM) in computer games. That's also claimed to be an anti-piracy measure. Mainstream game developers, huge multinational corporations which spend hundreds of millions of dollars developing a computer game, want to protect their investment.

That seems reasonable enough. And piracy is rampant. But DRM doesn't work on pirates, since they always crack the code pretty much immediately. Generally, what it does is cause lots of problems for legitimate users, the people who actually purchased the game. How is that a good thing?

But there's something else it does. When you buy a game these days, you don't actually own it. You can't sell it to someone else when you get tired of it, or if it turns out you don't like the game. All you're buying is the right to play the game for awhile. How long? Well, as long as the game developer wants you to play it.

Now me, I often play old games. These are games I bought years ago, games which don't have DRM. I do own those games. But when I'm happily playing an old game, that means I'm not buying a new one. And game developers, reasonably enough, want us to buy new games.

So, is DRM really about piracy, as they say? If so, it's completely ineffective. Or is it about planned obsolescence? Is it about making sure that no one can keep playing old games, that we have to buy new ones, instead? After all, as soon as a company stops supporting that DRM, the game is useless. (Unless you'd bought a pirated copy, of course.)

I don't know. Maybe that's just a crazy conspiracy theory. Maybe these multinational corporations are so inept that they keep using DRM for piracy, just as they say, despite the fact that it doesn't work. I don't know. All this is pretty new, so we'll just have to see how it plays out.

When it comes to SOPA and PIPA, those bills have been pulled from consideration, at least for now. Internet users organized a mass protest, a flood of complaints to their senators and their congressmen, that was very effective. But this issue isn't going to go away.

Big media companies have a lot of money to throw around, and Citizens United has basically made it legal to buy politicians. Corporations, after all, are just people, too, right? Thanks to that ruling, money is more powerful politically than it's ever been before.

The people still have the final say, but we're going to have to watch this. And we're going to have to contact our representatives, when necessary. Apathy isn't going to cut it.

30 writers speaking about religion

2012-01-22T16:03:00.000-06:00

Speakers in order of appearance:

1. Sir Arthur C. Clarke, Science Fiction Writer
2. Nadine Gordimer, Nobel Laureate in Literature
3. Professor Isaac Asimov, Author and Biochemist
4. Arthur Miller, Pulitzer Prize-Winning Playwright
5. Wole Soyinka, Nobel Laureate in Literature
6. Gore Vidal, Award-Winning Novelist and Political Activist
7. Douglas Adams, Best-Selling Science Fiction Writer
8. Professor Germaine Greer, Writer and Feminist
9. Iain Banks, Best-Selling Fiction Writer
10. José Saramago, Nobel Laureate in Literature
11. Sir Terry Pratchett, NYT Best-Selling Novelist
12. Ken Follett, NYT Best-Selling Author
13. Ian McEwan, Man Booker Prize-Winning Novelist
14. Andrew Motion, Poet Laureate (1999-2009)
15. Professor Martin Amis, Award-Winning Novelist
16. Michel Houellebecq, Goncourt Prize-Winning French Novelist
17. Philip Roth, Man Booker Prize-Winning Novelist
18. Margaret Atwood, Booker Prize-Winning Author and Poet
19. Sir Salman Rushdie, Booker Prize-Winning Novelist
20. Norman MacCaig, Renowned Scottish Poet
21. Phillip Pullman, Best-Selling British Author
22. Dr Matt Ridley, Award-Winning Science Writer
23. Harold Pinter, Nobel Laureate in Literature
24. Howard Brenton, Award-Winning English Playwright
25. Tariq Ali, Award-Winning Writer and Filmmaker
26. Theodore Dalrymple, English Writer and Psychiatrist
27. Roddy Doyle, Booker Prize-Winning Novelist
28. Redmond O'Hanlon FRSL, British Writer and Scholar
29. Diana Athill, Award-Winning Author and Literary Editor
30. Christopher Hitchens, Best-Selling Author, Award-Winning Columnist

I've always been a reader - as far back as I can clearly remember, anyway. So perhaps this interests me more than most people. I value books and I value authors, even when I don't agree with them.

I agree with these authors, for the most part, at least. I'm poorly read in modern fiction. I haven't read most of these authors at all. But I value thinking, I value writing, I value their profession.

At the same time, it doesn't matter what 30 writers think. Or 300 writers. Or 3000 writers. This is interesting, but the truth isn't a matter of majority rules. Even smart people can be wrong.

So I don't agree with them because they're authors, and I don't agree with them because of what they say here. I'm not even sure I do agree with them, not all of them, not from the brief comments in this video. I have my own reasons for what I think, reasons based in logic and evidence, and it really doesn't matter who agrees with me and who doesn't.

But when we see atheists - even schoolgirls - facing hatred and discrimination in America, I think it's useful that people see how common atheism is.

Most atheists who deal with the public, at least in an overwhelmingly Christian America, are careful to hide their non-belief, for fear of the consequences. (Atheists in Muslim countries have even more reason to stay hidden.) So I think it's especially important that admitted non-believers become well-known as such.

These days, atheists know they're not alone. That's a lot different than when I was a kid, and I want to do what I can to keep it so.

Humility

2012-01-22T13:34:00.000-06:00

That's Andrea Tantaros, in a panel discussion on Fox "News," who thinks that the worst economic collapse since the Great Depression is a good thing, since it teaches humility. She looks pretty humble, herself, sitting there, doesn't she?

And that blonde panelist (I don't know her name) wants to tell her kid that his crayon drawing is crap. Hey, that's just tough love, right? I can hear it now: "You're four years old and this is the best you can do? When Picasso was four, he was painting real art, not worthless garbage like this! Clearly, you need a lesson in humility!"

The guys there aren't any better. One of them criticizes the Occupy Wall Street movement as people who don't want to work. (Obviously, that's why the unemployment rate is so high, because all these lazy people don't want work.)

But he's just parroting the ~~Republican~~ Fox party line. He's almost reasonable, compared to Tantaros. Yeah, isn't it wonderful how this economic collapse has eliminated so many jobs? Now, people her age have to move back home with their parents, with the whole family struggling for money! OK, OK, it's not as wonderful as the Great Depression, no doubt, but it's still pretty great.

After all, there's nothing worse than uppity serfs. College kids were actually expecting to get jobs when they graduated, if you can believe that! Maybe this will teach them to be humble, to accept with humility whatever crumbs the wealthy might toss their way. Minimum wage? You demand minimum wage? Maybe you need a lesson in humility!

You see, the Republicans actually did us a favor by collapsing our economy. And today, they're not trying to delay the recovery just for their own political advantage, oh, no. They just want us to stay humble.

I wonder how the discussion continued? Did they pontificate on how black people need to work for a living, rather than depending on government handouts from our "food stamp" president? Hmm,... can five white people at Fox have a panel discussion without pandering to racists? I guess we'll never know.

This is the right-wing mindset these days. The people on top deserve to be on top - even if they just inherited their wealth. The little people on the bottom need to be humble. They certainly need to shut up about it. Don't they know how annoying that is? Serfs should be seen and not heard.

And children, well, they need to have the "self esteem" beaten out of them, if necessary. No, no violence. We all know how "politically correct" we have to be these days. But constant humiliation will do wonders in keeping them humble, don't you think?

Now me, I don't like egotism, but I don't see humility as being such a great virtue, either. I'd like to see us return to a time of broadly shared prosperity. Is that too much to ask? Am I not being humble enough?

How Newt Gingrich connects

2012-01-21T23:22:00.000-06:00

(Mike Thompson)

How does Newt Gingrich do it? No, I'm not talking about his three wives. I don't even want to think about that. But how does such a morally and ethically corrupt bag of sleaze appeal to those self-proclaimed "values" voters on the right?

Apparently, Gingrich won big in the South Carolina Republican primary today, even after one of his ex-wives reminded everyone of what a slime-ball he is. True, I suppose we have to consider the competition. But still,... Newt Gingrich? Really?

When it comes to Gingrich, there have been no new revelations. His character has been evident for decades. Here's an article written in Mother Jones almost thirty years ago which reads like it could have been written today:

I was unprepared for what I found in Carrollton, the prosperous west Georgia town where he launched his bid for Congress. I expected great pride in a native son; instead, I found great bitterness. To many of his former supporters, Newt Gingrich is not the cutting-edge politician one sees in Washington. He is a man who campaigned on themes of ethics and morality, then betrayed his words; a candidate who speaks constantly of restoring traditional values, but whose private life tells a very different story. ...

L.H. Carter was among Gingrich's closest friends and advisors until a falling out in 1979. "You can't imagine how quickly power went to his head," Carter says. The first time Gingrich flew back to the district, Carter remembers, he "pitched a fit" because Carter was still walking up to the gate to greet him when he arrived, rather than standing and waiting for him. Soon after, they were discussing a supporter who had complained to Gingrich about one of his votes. "I was sort of chiding him about not staying in touch with 'the people'," Carter says. "He turned in my car and he looked at me and he said, 'Fuck you guys. I don't need any of you anymore I've got the money from the political action committees, I've got the power of the office, and I've got the Atlanta news media right here in the palm of my hand. I don't need any of you anymore.'"

"The important thing you have to understand about Newt Gingrich is that he is amoral," says Carter. "There isn't any right or wrong, there isn't any conservative or liberal. There's only what will work best for Newt Gingrich.

"He's probably one of the most dangerous people for the future of this country that you can possibly imagine. He's Richard Nixon, glib. It doesn't matter how much good I do the rest of my life, I can't ever outweigh the evil that I've caused by helping him be elected to Congress."

Gingrich pioneered the kind of vicious, mendacious politics which is destroying our country today, and he's all too skilled at it. Steve Benen showed how this worked two nights ago:

The very first question in last night’s debate was directed to Newt Gingrich, and it dealt with the gossip that had generated so much chatter throughout the day. CNN’s John King noted that Gingrich’s second ex-wife claims he asked for an “open marriage,” and asked the disgraced former House Speaker, “Would you like to take some time to respond to that?”

The answer led to two standing ovations from the Republicans in the audience. ...

Gingrich clearly expected the question, and swung at it as if it had been set on a tee for him.
“I think the destructive, vicious, negative nature of much of the news media makes it harder to govern this country, harder to attract decent people to run for public office. And I am appalled that you would begin a presidential debate on a topic like that.

“Every person in here knows personal pain. Every person in here has had someone close to them go through painful things. To take an ex-wife and make it two days before the primary a significant question for a presidential campaign is as close to despicable as anything I can imagine…. I am frankly astounded that CNN would take trash like that and use it to open a presidential debate."

When King mentioned that the story didn’t come from CNN, Gingrich hit him again, saying, “John, it was repeated by your network. You chose to start the debate with it. Don’t try to blame somebody else. You and your staff chose to start this debate with it.”

Gingrich then denied the allegations, before concluding, “I am tired of the elite media protecting Barack Obama by attacking Republicans.”

Over the course of just three minutes, we learned exactly why Gingrich is a competitive presidential candidate: he understands the Republican id perfectly.

The right really does believe they’re victims. As Steve Kornacki explained very well, “It’s no mystery why the audience of Republicans so instinctively and passionately rallied to Gingrich’s defense. His final line was the key: that the liberal media is out to get Republicans and will stop at nothing to destroy them is an absolute article of faith on the right…. What Gingrich did brilliantly on Thursday night is to articulate this paranoid victimhood in a clear and compelling (for his audience, at least) way. It’s the same basic trick he pulled in this week’s other debate, when he connected with another strain of the persecution complex: that honest, tax-paying Republicans are the victims of a dependency class of poor people and minorities that Democrats intentionally enable.”

Conservative voters hate the media, so Gingrich exploits that hatred. Conservative voters don’t like feeling defensive about race and policy, so Gingrich tells them why they shouldn’t. His debate performances are like dopamine for the right-wing soul.

And because Gingrich understands this so well, the nature of the story shifts — it’s not about Gingrich’s scandalous personal life and his habitual adultery; it’s about those media scoundrels trying to keep Republicans down. GOP voters should feel sorry for Gingrich, the argument goes, because they feel sorry for themselves.

Gingrich can apparently play the right-wing like a fiddle.

And he knows his audience. Here's Kevin Drum:

Public Policy Polling is out with their 3rd annual TV news trust poll. Among Republicans, as the chart [below] shows, the shape of the river is simple: they don't trust anyone except Fox News, who they adore. These numbers are spreads, with NBC, for example, garnering 17% trust vs. 69% distrust. Fox News, conversely, garners 73% trust vs. 17% distrust.

Well, you say, maybe this just means that trust in the media is really low these days? Nope. Democrats and Independents may not trust Fox, but they do trust everyone else. The percentages vary, with more skepticism toward some outlets than others, but what non-Republicans don't do is simply dismiss television news en masse as a bunch of lying corporate shills. ...

Liberals don't immediately dismiss as a conspiracy everything they hear from the news media that doesn't fit their preconceived notions. They might downplay unwelcome news or even ignore it, but they're still willing to listen to it. Increasingly, conservatives simply aren't. They want to believe the world is a certain way, and they're just flatly not willing to countenance anything that might challenge those beliefs. This is not a healthy development for a modern democracy.

Well, the same people who somehow believe they have to "defend" the institution of marriage from homosexuals, who just want to ... get married themselves, are eager to let a slime-ball like Newt Gingrich, who cheated on his first two wives (at least), do the defending.

It's completely crazy, yes, but that's the Republican Party these days. I just hope it's not America.

Leadership you can believe in

2012-01-21T10:15:00.000-06:00

Newt Gingrich - Man Of Many Wives from Horatio Sanz

"And, going by history, she'll probably get some disease anyway." Well, remember that Newt Gingrich is a historian, after all.

Obama Girl with the dragon tattoo

2012-01-20T23:02:00.000-06:00

Not as sexy as her usual videos, but pretty darn funny, don't you think?

How Rick Santorum ripped off American veterans

2012-01-20T17:06:00.000-06:00

From Mother Jones:

Like any good presidential candidate, Rick Santorum heaps praise on America's soldiers and veterans. He's pledged to "make veterans a high priority" if elected president, adding, "This is not a Republican issue, this is not a Democratic issue, it is an American issue." But as a US senator, Santorum engineered a controversial land deal that robbed the military's top veterans' home of tens of millions of dollars and worsened the deteriorating conditions at the facility. ...

Under one scenario, by leasing the parcel of land and letting it be developed, the Home could pocket $105 million in income over 35 years for its trust fund, David Lacy, then-chairman of the Home's board of directors, told Congress in 1999. Lacy stressed that the Home wanted to keep the property, and not offload it to a buyer. "Once land is sold," he said, "it is lost forever as an asset."

Enter Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Penn.). At the behest of the Roman Catholic Church, and unbeknownst to the Home, Santorum slipped an amendment into the 1999 National Defense Authorization Act handcuffing how the home could cash in on those 49 acres. The amendment forced the Home to sell—and not lease—the land to its next-door neighbor, the Catholic University of America. Ultimately, the Catholic Church bought 46 acres of the tract for $22 million. The Home lost the land for good, and by its own estimates, pocketed $27 million less than the land's value and $83 million less than what it could've made under the lease plan.

Of course, Santorum is a Catholic himself. In fact, he wants to write Catholic dogma into U.S. law. Taking land from U.S. veterans and giving it to the Catholic church is what God would want him to do, right? So why would a little thing like the U.S. Constitution stop him?

And how is this retirement home doing now?

Financial records, court documents, and government reports from the 2000s show how the Home cut back on the services it provided veterans as it grappled with funding problems. The slashing of services got so bad that in 2003 veterans living at the Home filed a class-action suit against the Home and its director, Timothy Cox, alleging shoddy health care and less access to that care. As a result of cutbacks and declining quality in care, the suit claimed, the suicide rate at the Home spiked from 59 in 2000 to 131 in 2003.

In 2007, an investigation by the Government Accountability Office came to similarly troubling conclusions. The watchdog's head, David Walker, reported that one Home resident had been admitted to the hospital with maggots in a wound. Other vets were admitted with bad pressure sores, suggesting they'd been left unattended for dangerously long stretches of time by the Home's health care employees. ...

Yet today, despite some improvement in the Home's financial health, its campus is pocked with boarded-up, decrepit buildings. All but one of the Home's gatehouses is shuttered, as are some of the Home's more elegant buildings, including the historic Grant building (named after the Civil War general) and the red-brick hospital that now sits empty, bearing a sign warning off trespassers.

Welcome to Rick Santorum's America. This is how the whole country will end up, if he and the other Republicans get their way.

Rick Perry's 15 minutes of fame

2012-01-20T12:43:00.000-06:00

(John Darkow)

Well, Rick Perry finally saw the writing on the wall and dropped out of the Republican presidential campaign. It took him awhile, didn't it?

The rest of us saw it very clearly weeks ago, but apparently the writing needed to be very large, and using very simple words, before Perry could understand it, himself. Maybe the fact that he was polling third in Texas finally got through to him?

At any rate, I thought this three-cartoon retrospective captured his would-be presidential career pretty well. The cartoon at the top was from when Perry was considering entering the race. What could go wrong? Indeed...

(Jeff Danziger)

Funny, but I was expecting Michele Bachmann to be the comic relief in the GOP primary. But as it turned out, they all were. But none more than Rick Perry. (OK, OK, maybe Donald Trump. But Trump is a professional clown.) In fact, Bachmann struggled to get noticed at all.

I guess crazy doesn't stand out when you're in a room full of crazy people. Well, Perry's immigration stance wasn't so crazy (and he took heat for that from the Republican base). His problem was more that he seemed like Bush's dumber brother.

(Clay Bennett)

And so Perry is carried from the ring, mangled and bleeding. But at least it's just figuratively. Unlike Bush, Perry never got to be president, so we didn't get mangled and bleeding bodies literally - our young men and women sent to war for no reason.

We won't have Rick Perry to kick around anymore, and that's a shame. But Rick Perry will never become president, and that's very, very good.

What could go wrong? In the last decade, we've seen what could go wrong - and what could still go wrong if one of Perry's Republican competitors actually becomes president.

Our Bain Capital problem

2012-01-19T20:25:00.000-06:00

Exclusive - Joe Nocera Extended Interview Pt. 1

Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c

This is the first part of Jon Stewart's extended interview with Joe Nocera, business columnist at the New York Times (here are part 2 and part 3).

I don't usually post these. Normally, I don't even watch them. But I thought this was interesting, and I just had to blog about it. Believe it or not, that ungodly long post I wrote earlier today was merely an introduction to this one. (I promise that this post won't be quite so long.)

That was about Bain Capital as a political problem for Mitt Romney. This is about why we should all have problems with Bain Capital, at least to some extent. Note that I'm not an expert in private equity investments, far from it. And I don't want to pretend otherwise. So please keep that in mind.

According to Wikipedia, Bain Capital is an asset management and financial services company which specializes in private equity and venture capital deals, as well as other investments. Romney has taken criticism primarily from Bain Capital's leveraged buyouts, I think (and also because he's a very wealthy man who apparently pays little in taxes and wants to cut taxes even further for rich people like himself).

Leveraged buyouts occur when wealthy investors acquire control of a company by borrowing most of the purchase price, generally using the assets of the company they're acquiring as collateral for the loan. Usually it's a troubled company, because they're cheap. But the buyers end up with a troubled company and an enormous debt.

You might well wonder how that would pay. Typically, the new owners don't plan to run the company, or not for long. They'll try to get the company back on its feet, and that usually involves slashing costs - laying off workers and closing factories - as well as selling off parts of the company (or sometimes buying other companies to merge with it). Then they'll try to sell the company and start over again somewhere else.

Meanwhile, they generally suck all the money they can out of the company. They pay themselves lavish management fees, while loading up the company with debt. If they're unsuccessful, the company will go bankrupt, and they'll lose their ownership stake. But they'll keep their multimillion dollar fees.

And they probably won't have much of an ownership stake by then, anyway, since they'll have loaded the company with so much debt. It's like owning a house with an enormous mortgage. If you walk away from that, the bank will likely lose more than you will, since you won't have much cash in it.

If they're successful, they'll sell the company to someone else. And it might survive and even thrive. But it will have to make interest payments on that debt. That's an extra cost, of course, which probably didn't go to investing in the company itself, but only to enrich the leveraged buyout people.

I want to acknowledge, right from the start, that there are good things about this kind of economic activity. It's tough when people lose their jobs. It's tough when businesses fail. But, overall, it's a very good thing that business can fail.

American business has been strong because it continually reinvents itself. Some businesses thrive, others go bankrupt. Some businesses are purchased, others purchase them. Businesses merge or sell off pieces of themselves. Creative destruction is a very good thing, in general.

And yes, it's a good thing that people can be laid off or fired. It's hard on them, of course. No one wants to lose his job, and it can be positively disastrous for some people. But what does that mean?

It doesn't mean that we should guarantee lifetime employment, because the cure would end up worse than the disease. Instead, it's just a very good reason to have a strong social safety net. And it's probably a good reason to have adult education and training programs, too.

Maintaining a dynamic business environment, keeping that creative destruction, is a good thing, despite the very real costs to very real human beings. But that's where things start to get a little weird, at least when it comes to right-wing thinking.

The same people who shrug off the firing of thousands of workers typically don't want to spend a nickel on a social safety net which would help them get back on their feet. At the same time, wealthy executives make sure that their own contracts includes a "golden parachute," so they won't suffer even if they're fired for poor performance.

And when it comes to leveraged buyouts, it's almost a win/win. Even companies that went bankrupt still produced a huge profit for Bain Capital, because they weren't the ones left holding the bag. Here's an example:

According to this information from the Boston Globe, Bain Capital used only $5 million of its own money to buy Ampad (American Pad & Paper). Seven years later, the company went bankrupt. Ampad's workers lost their jobs, and Ampad's stockholders ended up with nothing.

But Bain Capital made more than $100 million on the whole thing. Not a bad return on a $5 million investment, huh? A 2,000 percent return in just seven years? True, the story of this apparently cost Romney a U.S. Senate seat. But other than that, they made out like bandits. And this was one of their failed investments! And yeah, it's all legal, too.

In fact, it's not just legal, we actively encourage it by giving these wealthy investors a huge break on their taxes. For one thing (I mean, in addition to myriad deductions and loopholes), we let these people pay the long-term capital gains rate on their fees, and that reaches a maximum of 15 percent (a minimum of zero).

On the other hand, if you work for a living, you pay income tax rates of 10% to 35%, plus another 7.65% (currently, Obama's temporary payroll tax reduction has dropped that to 5.65%) on payroll taxes on your first $106,800. (Yes, if you're a high-earner, you actually pay a lower effective payroll tax rate than those who make less than that, but that's a subject for another post.)

It's not that all of these people do nothing of value. Good management is valuable. And taking a troubled company and making it profitable is a good thing. But they call these people corporate raiders for a reason. This isn't about good management, certainly not for the long haul. This is about raking off all the cash you can, and then escaping with the loot before the consequences hit home.

Even so, I'm not saying that it should be illegal (not with appropriate safeguards, at least), but why should they pay a lower tax rate than you do? Is this so valuable to our country that we actually need to give them tax breaks?

Jon Stewart and Joe Nocera mention some of these things in that extended interview. As Stewart says, we value capital over labor. We give investors, who tend to be the wealthiest people of our land, a huge tax break from what they'd pay if they worked for a living.

Is that justified? Maybe it is, but why? Why isn't work valued? Why should we deliberately favor the wealthy? (Not just the wealthy, of course, but overwhelmingly so.) Capital gains rates are at record lows these days.

Here's the Center for American Progress:

The benefits of preferential rates for capital gains are enjoyed by the wealthiest Americans because they’re the ones who tend to receive this type of income. More than 70 percent of the benefit goes to taxpayers with annual income of more than $1 million, a group that comprises only about 0.3 percent of all taxpayers.

Our income tax system is designed to be “progressive.” That is, we generally agree that people with higher incomes should pay a greater percentage of their income in federal income taxes, because they can afford to pay more. But because capital gains are concentrated at the highest levels of income and taxed at favorable rates, many of the most affluent taxpayers pay a lower effective tax rate than those beneath them on the income scale.

The low rates on capital gains (and dividends) are the reason why billionaire investor Warren Buffett reportedly pays the lowest-overall tax rate of all the people who work in his office, including his receptionist.

Tax data show that Buffett’s informal office poll is, in fact, representative of average tax burdens. The richest 400 U.S. taxpayers in 2007 paid an effective tax rate of just 16.6 percent. That’s largely because more than two-thirds of this group’s income—which averaged [my emphasis] $345 million—was in the form of capital gains and dividends, while most Americans are paid in salaries and wages.

This select group probably includes some managers of hedge funds and private equity funds, who enjoy another special loophole allowing them to treat most of their investment-management compensation as capital gain instead of ordinary income—vastly lowering their taxes.

As Stewart says, you're called a "socialist" these days for even wondering out loud about these things. In this age of vastly increasing income and wealth disparity, at a time when the 400 richest Americans own more of America than the bottom 50% of us, when the poor are getting poorer and the middle class are struggling, yet the rich are making out like bandits, why can't we even question this?

(TPM - click chart to embiggen)

We can't have a social safety net, because that will make the poor lazy. Yet we should eliminate estate taxes entirely, so that wealthy heirs never have to work for living? Somehow, we're not so concerned about their moral fiber, are we?

And we're right to worry about moral hazard. But why don't we ever worry about moral hazard when it comes to the wealthy? Well, the people who run our country tend to be wealthy. Their friends are wealthy, their business associates are wealthy, and they're quick to recognize the problems of the wealthy.

Now, Democrats at least try to think about the middle class. They may not be very good at it, but at least they usually try. Republicans tend to be nothing but class warriors. They care only for the wealthy.

Creative destruction is a good thing. That's one of real strengths of America's economy. But the pain of it falls entirely on the workers. Meanwhile, we taxpayers actually subsidize these leveraged buyout investors who tend to win even when everyone else loses. Should we be giving those Bain Capital people such huge tax breaks? Is what they do really that valuable to our nation as a whole?

Don't you think they'd be able to make money - maybe not quite so much money - if they had to pay normal tax rates? And is what they do so much more valuable to America than what you do that we have to give them preferential treatment? I just don't see it, myself.

And make no mistake, if they're paying less, you're paying more. If someone else gets a tax break, you help pay for that.

And when it comes to Mitt Romney,... well, anyone who keeps his money in the Cayman Islands, to avoid paying taxes in America, should be disqualified from becoming President of the United States, don't you think? Taxes support our country. Even if you value nothing but the military, you should recognize that it's taxes that pay for it.

Mitt Romney's Bain Capital problem

2012-01-19T15:17:00.001-06:00

(Jim Morin)

This is basically the introduction to my next post. You probably know all this, since it's certainly been in the news lately. But please bear with me, because I do plan to go somewhere with it. eventually.

Mitt Romney is a very rich man. He was born rich, and he made even more money at Bain Capital. How rich is he? Well, he's apparently rich enough to think that $370,000 a year is "not very much":

Mitt Romney revealed for the first time today that his effective tax rate is “closer to 15 percent,” suggesting that he pays less in taxes than many middle income Americans despite being worth an estimated $250 million.

“What’s the effective rate I’ve been paying? It’s probably closer to the 15 percent rate than anything,” Romney said during a press conference after an early morning rally. “Because my last 10 years, I’ve…my income comes overwhelmingly from some investments made in the past, whether ordinary income or earned annually. I got a little bit of income from my book, but I gave that all away. And then I get speakers fees from time to time, but not very much.”

According to his personal financial disclosure report released in August, Romney was paid more than $370,000 for speaking appearances in the 2011-2011[February, 2010 to February, 2011, I think] filing period.

It's comments like this which make Mitt Romney seem out of touch. Well, the rich aren't like you or me. Romney claims to be "unemployed," when he's actually independently wealthy, living off passive investments. He thinks nothing of making a $10,000 bet on the spur of the moment. And he doesn't imagine that "firing people" - or getting fired - could be traumatic at all.

Well, he's never in his life had to worry about losing a job, because he's always been wealthy. Ordinary middle class worries are foreign to him. He's an anthropologist - a rather clueless anthropologist - studying a primitive culture. Despite his studies, he has a hard time taking our concerns seriously.

And as a wealthy man, of course he's taken advantage of all the tax breaks, the loopholes, and the myriad other advantages wealthy investors get. Why wouldn't he? But now that he's running for office, he's realizing that - oops! - maybe ordinary middle class voters might not be too happy to see that he's been making out like a bandit.

(Steve Benson)

Sure, all rich people do this. But Warren Buffett, for example, speaks out about how wrong this is, that he shouldn't be paying a lower tax rate than his secretary. Romney, on the other hand, proposes a tax plan which will further slash taxes on the wealthy, while raising taxes on the less affluent (and causing a massive increase in our budget deficit, too).

From Greg Sargent:

The revelation that Mitt Romney pays a tax rate of around 15 percent opens the door to another question: How much would his own taxes fall under the tax plan he would pass if elected president?

Here’s the answer, according to a new analysis by Citizens for Tax Justice that was provided to me this morning. Under his plan, Romney in 2013 would see his taxes cut by nearly half of what they would be if you use current law as a baseline. ...

“This doesn't even include Romney’s proposal to cut corporate taxes from 35 percent to 25 percent, which would primarily benefit wealthy shareholders like himself,” Robert McIntyre, the director of Citizens for Tax Justice, tells me.

Going back to that ABC News article:

What Romney admitted is exactly what billionaire Warren Buffet has railed against – the fact that many multi-millionaires actually pay far less in taxes than the people who work for them.

In addition to hinting at his tax rate, Romney suggested that if he does release his returns, he will only release those from 2011 and not those from years prior.

Romney admitted that his tax rate is "probably closer to the 15 percent rate than anything." That gives him a bit of wiggle room. And after constant pressure to release his tax returns, he's reluctantly planning to release his 2011 return this spring, when his accountants finish preparing it.

What do you want to bet that they'll be desperately looking for ways to increase Romney's taxes? If he's not going to be releasing his prior returns, you have to wonder just how low a rate he's been paying. Maybe 15 percent actually looks good, compared to the truth.

Jamison Foser, in fact, wonders if Romney has been paying anything at all. Some millionaires don't.

Incidentally, Romney has been misleading about that "tradition" of presidential candidates releasing their tax returns. From a different post at ABC News:

By the way, President Obama released his tax returns in March 2008, well before he clinched the Democratic nomination. And George W. Bush, as governor of Texas, released his returns before he was even a candidate.

And from Steve Benen:

Barack Obama released nearly a decade’s worth of tax returns in 2008. When George Romney ran for president, he released 12 years of returns. Disclosure for one year won’t exactly meet any fair standard for transparency.

Clearly, this worries Mitt Romney. Should it?

But tax experts tell ABC News there are other reasons Romney may not want the public viewing his returns. As one of the wealthiest candidates to run for president in recent times, Romney has used a variety of techniques to help minimize the taxes on his estimated $250 million fortune. In addition to paying the lower tax rate on his investment income, Romney has as much as $8 million invested in at least 12 funds listed on a Cayman Islands registry. Another investment, which Romney reports as being worth between $5 million and $25 million, shows up on securities records as having been domiciled in the Caymans.

Official documents reviewed by ABC News show that Bain Capital, the private equity partnership Romney once ran, has set up some 138 secretive offshore funds in the Caymans.

Romney campaign officials and those at Bain Capital tell ABC News that the purpose of setting up those accounts in the Cayman Islands is to help attract money from foreign investors, and that the accounts provide no tax advantage to American investors like Romney. Romney, the campaign said, has paid all U.S. taxes on income derived from those investments. ...

Tax experts agree that Romney remains subject to American taxes. But they say the offshore accounts have provided him -- and Bain -- with other potential financial benefits, such as higher management fees and greater foreign interest, all at the expense of the U.S. Treasury. Rebecca J. Wilkins, a tax policy expert with Citizens for Tax Justice, said the federal government loses an estimated $100 billion a year because of tax havens.

[Jack] Blum, the D.C. tax lawyer, said working through an offshore investment vehicle allows the investor to "avoid a whole series of small traps in the tax code that ordinary people would face if they paid tax on an onshore basis."

Wilkins agreed, saying the "primary advantage to setting those funds up in an offshore jurisdiction like the Cayman Islands or Bermuda is it helps the investors avoid tax."

"It helps U.S. investors avoid U.S. tax," said Wilkins, "it helps foreign investors avoid taxes in their home country, so it's not illegal or improper to set those funds up in a foreign jurisdiction, but it makes it more attractive to investors because it helps them avoid paying taxes on that income."

Sure, many - probably most - wealthy Americans use such techniques. But as Blum said, "His personal finances are a poster child of what's wrong with the American tax system."

Furthermore, this tax system has been heavily promoted by the Republican Party, and by Romney himself. Remember how the rich are supposed to be the "job creators"? Remember the promise of an economic boom if we just slashed taxes on the wealthy? Well, the Bush administration did just that. How do you like the results?

(Chris Britt)

Romney's remark about liking to fire people was taken out of context, but there are real reasons, valid reasons, why Mitt Romney has a Bain Capital problem.

The so-called "carried interest" rule has been the source of extensive debate in Washington, with opponents criticizing the allowance to tax those earnings at 15 percent a glaring loophole that benefits only the wealthiest Americans. Under the carried interest rule, income that is determined to be capital gains – like the profit reaped by hedge fund managers -- is subject to the lower 15 percent rate.

Wilkins said Romney's arrangements reminded her of the now famous remarks by billionaire financier Warren Buffet, who revealed in 2007 that he was paying taxes at a lower rate than his receptionist.

"Well, I think it's the issue that is sort of on the front page every day, when we look at the Occupy Wall Street movement and that people are really losing patience with the idea that a lot of multinational corporations have and a lot of wealthy people have that while they benefit from everything this country has to offer … they don't seem to be willing to pay their fair share," she said.

Romney's campaign objected to that ABC News article, but since we haven't seen his past tax returns, even the Wall Street Journal is wondering:

But the campaign’s assertions may be wrong or misleading. Tax experts said some of the offshore holdings are likely intended to help Mr. Romney avoid paying an obscure but hefty tax of as much as 35% on some of those investments, held in a tax-deferred retirement account.

As The Wall Street Journal reported in Thursday’s paper, many of Mr. Romney’s offshore investments are held through his individual retirement account, which has grown to between $20.7 million and $101.6 million. IRAs are tax-deferred accounts, in which earnings accrue tax-free until the money is withdrawn during retirement. ...

However, tax experts said that had Mr. Romney’s IRA invested in Bain funds in the U.S., he would likely have been forced to pay an obscure levy called the “unrelated business income tax,” also known as UBIT.

This tax, assessed for individuals at a maximum 35% rate, is meant to discourage tax-exempt entities such as an IRA or college endowment fund from unfairly competing with for-profit, taxpaying entities by operating a business without paying taxes on it. Investing in a partnership such as a Bain Capital fund that uses debt to buy companies would trigger the tax, experts said.

For this reason, the experts said, it is very common for private-equity funds such as Bain to set up vehicles in offshore locales such as the Cayman Islands. Such a structure allows American tax-exempt entities, including IRAs, to avoid paying UBIT.

Hmm,... I'm kind of wondering how you'd get as much as $100 million in an IRA when the maximum annual contribution limit is only $5,000 (OK, $6,000 if you're over 50). That's some return, don't you think!

But that's the point. I'm sure there are loopholes. The rich aren't like you or me. And for decades, our tax code has been increasingly focused on benefiting the rich. Yet today's Republicans think that we haven't gone far enough at benefiting the wealthiest of the wealthy, and they've convinced a lot of our most gullible citizens that we really need to help the "job creators."

Well, all of this stuff normally stays under the radar. Your tax returns are private. Yet there's a tradition that presidential candidates show they have nothing to hide by releasing past tax returns. And now Mitt Romney is probably wishing he'd done things differently. (But maybe not. He did save a hell of a lot of money by not having to pay taxes like those of us in the middle class.)

Again, from Steve Benen:

It’s hard to say with confidence exactly what Romney’s up to with these investments since he won’t release his returns and as the AP added, “Neither Romney nor his campaign are providing details, including how much he has invested there, or why, or if any of his money is invested elsewhere outside the United States.”

But the story itself has the potential to do some real damage to Romney. Even if we assume the typical voter doesn’t know or care about the nuances of offshore banking strategies, I suspect when the American mainstream hears “guy who keeps money in the Caymans,” questions about trust necessarily follow.

It’s also part of a larger picture. Again, the Republican frontrunner amassed a vast fortune after laying off thousands of American workers, he now pays a lower tax rate than most of the middle class, he wants to give himself another tax cut, he owns multiple luxury homes, and stashes cash in the Caymans — all while pursuing an agenda that would make things tougher on American’s working class.

And the same guy wants to keep the details from the public and refuses to release his tax returns.

This is Mitt Romney's Bain Capital problem. In my next post, I'll talk about why the rest of us might have a problem with Bain Capital.

The Tax Cut Fallacy

2012-01-18T22:14:00.000-06:00

Hmm,... check out this post by my brother, Gregg, on why the "tax cut cheerleaders" are wrong. He's a smart guy with a great turn of phrase.

For example:

Now, don't get the idea that I think the country would be better off if everyone spent their whole paycheck every week - far from it! We're talking about the best way to heat up a sluggish economy here, and the best way to do that is to pump up demand and create jobs. Swimming lessons are important if you want to keep your kids safe from drowning, but if they fall in the lake, throw them a life preserver! Long-term investment is important, not only to the financial health of the individual, but also to the economic security of the country as a whole, but nobody can worry about their retirement income if they can't afford to put bread on the table today.

The whole thing is well worth reading.

You knew this was going to happen

2012-01-18T16:23:00.000-06:00

(the Onion)

Well, it's finally happened, just what we should have been expecting. From the Onion:

Striking down the judicial precedent that established the legal supremacy of right over wrong more than two centuries ago, the U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday overturned Right v. Wrong.

The landmark reversal—a bitterly contested 5-4 decision that has been widely praised by murderers, rapists, bigots, usurers, and pro-wrong advocates nationwide—nullifies all previously lawful forms of right and makes it very difficult for Americans to make ethical decisions or be generally decent human beings without facing criminal charges.

"It is the opinion of this court that the Constitution was crafted in such a manner as to uphold and encourage practices that are not right and, ideally, are very wrong," Justice Antonin Scalia wrote for the majority, which also included Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Anthony Kennedy, and John Roberts. "Despite the compelling case for goodness, truth, and justice made by our predecessors in the case of Right v. Wrong, we firmly believe that malice, dishonesty, and injustice were the framers' original intent." ...

The ruling in Right v. Wrong was handed down in 1790 by the Supreme Court's six original members, all of whom sided with the plaintiff, prompting Chief Justice John Jay to write, "It is the emphatic province and duty of this highest judicial tribunal to rule in favor of Right, as the argument in support of Right is the right one, and the argument in support of Wrong is the wrong one."

Since that time, the verdict has been cited in most legal rulings at the state and federal level, and has been upheld by the Supreme Court numerous times, most notably in a 1974 opinion overturning a Six Circuit Court of Appeals decision that would have re-segregated the nation's schools, abolished the minimum wage, legalized evil, and allowed law enforcement officials to conduct searches and seizures without a warrant. ...

Justice Stephen Breyer chose to read his dissenting opinion aloud before the court, a rare gesture apparently aimed at expressing the full measure of his disgust with the verdict.

"The court needs to overturn this ruling immediately because, simply put, it's the right thing to do," said the associate justice, who, along with his colleagues joining him in the minority, was then arrested by Capitol Police, placed into custody, and is currently awaiting trial.

I can't say this surprises me. Every since that 2010 Citizens United decision, where Justices Scalia, Thomas, Alito, Kennedy, and Roberts decided, also against precedent, that corporations were people, I've been expecting something like this.

I mean, it's been clear that the Republican majority on the court has been headed in this direction for some time. Heck, what do you call that 5 to 4 decision which gave us President George W. Bush in 2000 but a strong step towards wrong and against right? Citizens United just confirmed it.

This decision, too, could be overturned someday, but it puts wrong in a strong position going forward. And considering the huge advantage that Citizens United has also given to wrong, as we've clearly seen in the two years since that decision, it's likely that right will have a tough time making a comeback.

Of course, we can't give up. Never say that. But Republicans have indeed given a huge boost to wrong and a severe setback to right. So it's going to be an uphill fight going forward.

Cartoon or Fox News? You decide.

2012-01-18T14:06:00.000-06:00

My brother just sent me this, so that's my excuse for posting a video clip that's almost five years old. :)

Actually, it's just too good to miss. And the message is still timely. In fact, I think it's amazing how much today's Republican campaign commercials look like that ad for Crusty the Clown. Couldn't you just picture Rick Perry there?

So maybe Fox News was right to worry? OK, for the record, the right-wing clowns running for office for real usually don't wear clown makeup. And Fox doesn't normally admit that it's "the voice for evil." The real Fox News probably just assumes that's obvious. Those are the two main differences.

Oh, and after you watch that clip once, go through it a second time, so you can concentrate on the news crawl at the bottom of the screen. My favorite is "Oil slicks found to keep seals young, supple."

Southern discomfort

2012-01-18T12:18:00.000-06:00

Indecision 2012 - Southern Discomfort

Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c

South Carolina Republicans cheer the idea of war against America's federal government, but boo the Golden Rule. That tells us all we really need to know about the Republican base, don't you think?

Abraham Lincoln must be turning over in his grave. But, of course, these people are the old-time Dixiecrats, white southern bigots who abandoned the Democratic Party when it stood up for civil rights in the 1960s.

The Republican "Southern strategy" to deliberately woo white racists gave them the South, which used to be solidly Democratic and is now solidly Republican. But you reap what you sow. Politically, the Southern strategy was wildly successful. But now, the crazies are the Republican base.

[Please keep in mind that, just because Ron Paul is right about his Golden Rule comment, that doesn't mean he's not completely crazy himself. I've blogged about that before (here, here, and here). If that still hasn't convinced you, here's Mother Jones on why crackpots don't make good messengers.]

Anyway, at the end of this clip, Newt Gingrich doesn't understand why his comments were insulting, especially, but not exclusively (I was certainly offended by them), to African Americans. And surprise, surprise, that overwhelmingly-white Southern audience didn't understand it, either.

But note that a few people even in that audience did appear to understand it (before they were drowned out by the roar of applause at Gingrich's reply). That's progress, I guess.

Meanwhile, Newt Gingrich is going to teach black people how to get a job - cleaning toilets, no doubt. Oh, no, Gingrich wants to teach black children how to clean toilets. He actually wants to fire the adults who've managed to get that job. (Do I really have to tell you how stupid that is?)

Signs I'm blogging too much

2012-01-18T10:18:00.000-06:00

(Alex Gregory)

#1 sign that I'm blogging too much? I didn't post anything yesterday, so my brother called this morning to see if I was still alive. :)

Don't worry, I'm still alive and I'll get back to pointless, incessant barking right away.

I remember

2012-01-16T15:36:00.000-06:00

I still remember exactly where I was when I heard that Martin Luther King, Jr. had been shot and killed. I still remember that sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach.

And although I heard the news on the radio, not the TV, I still feel it when I watch this clip. Even today, I get that same sinking feeling.

That horrible feeling was only compounded when Bobby Kennedy was shot, just a few weeks later, while celebrating his victory in the Democratic primary in California. (And I remembered my shock at hearing of President Kennedy's assassination less than five years previously.)

For awhile, in 1968, it seemed like the lunatic right-wing was targeting those progressives who could actually lead our country forward. And when Richard Nixon was elected in November, it felt like all hope had disappeared in America.

In a way, it's funny, because Nixon would be far too liberal for the GOP these days. But that just shows what a horrible turn to the right America has taken in recent decades.

It was, in fact, the Republicans' "Southern strategy" of deliberately appealing to white racists, wildly successful in a political sense, which gave the party national dominance - despite a momentary interruption after the scandal-plagued Nixon administration - and caused this lurch to the extreme right, too.

What would America be like today if these progressive leaders had survived? Well, it's impossible to say, isn't it? But I still get that same sinking feeling in my stomach when I think about those events.

But although we've gone in a completely wrong direction economically, we've progressed quite far culturally. The fact that we've got a black man in the White House - however hysterical Republicans get about it - is proof of that. And think of how far we've progressed when it comes to gay rights!

The hysteria in the right-wing over these "culture war" issues shows that they know they're losing. And in the long run, they may lose on the help-the-rich, kick-the-poor, corporations-are-people front, too. But they'll do a lot of damage to America in the meantime. Heck, they've already done a lot of damage!

So, sure, it's easy to get depressed these days. But I remember 1968.

A new start in Minecraft

2012-01-16T14:44:00.000-06:00

(click to embiggen)

Note: I enjoyed my moss-draped clifftop home (here and here), but I wanted to try something different, and I couldn't find the terrain I wanted in that Minecraft world. I'm sure the perfect spot was there somewhere, but I couldn't seem to find it. So I decided to create a new world, and after a couple of tries, I found one that really seems to fit the bill.

I don't know how I got here. I remember a raging storm, and me in my little boat, but then I came to my senses here, my clothes torn and ragged, no supplies at all, and a big gap in my memory. So be it. I've started from scratch before, and I knew I could do it again.

I decided to settle in this old flood plain. At least, that's what it looks like. There's a river to the north and some hills to the south, but in between, it's flat and heavily forested. In fact, this pine forest extends to the west as far as I've explored, so far.

To the east is a vast desert, and to the south, past the wooded hills, there seems to be a range of mountains. I don't know how far that extends. To the southeast, at the edge of the desert, there's a native village. They seem uninterested in my presence. But then, it's hard to communicate without a single language in common.

So I settled in this pine forest, all green and beautiful in the sun. There was a crust of ice on the pond, which should have given me a clue, but I was still taken by surprise at the first snowstorm. It was a real blizzard, and I was lucky to be inside when it started. The snow still hasn't melted off most places.

One of the more interesting things about this location is the vast hole in the rock just south of my farmstead. I discovered that it leads down into an expanse of caverns - and those caverns themselves are bisected by a deep crevasse. Actually, it looks deep, but I don't know how deep it really goes, because it's too dark to see very far.

And the caverns are infested with monsters. Luckily, most of them seem to be stuck on the other side of the crevasse. But I've kept my underground exploration to a minimum, so far. First things first, and I needed to concentrate on basic survival.

(the NPC village)

So I built a little shack, where I could sleep in safety, and set about building my farm. Despite the cold weather, my wheat is doing well, though I have to go to extraordinary lengths to keep even running water from freezing. And I may end up building a greenhouse for the sugar cane.

There were sheep everywhere, so wool hasn't been a problem. But I had to search to find a few cattle and chickens, and I haven't found any pigs at all. Well, the forest to the west is positively infested with wolves. I've never before seen so many wolves in one place, and maybe for that reason, there's little other life there.

But although I'll definitely miss bacon - ahhh,... bacon! - I can survive without it. And I was able to tame one of the wolves for a pet. The rest of them don't bother me, and I don't bother them.

The monsters are a worse problem, especially the creepers. I've always been rather inept at combat, and I've had a hard time preventing creepers from blowing the hell out of everything I've built here. Still, they haven't gotten me yet, and everything else can be rebuilt.

Nevertheless, I've started building a stone wall around my settlement. Maybe, someday, it will be a real fortress, a vast structure of stone to keep out all possible enemies. Heh, heh. Sure, it's only me, so I don't exactly need such a place. But as long as my crops and my livestock do OK, why not? I've got plenty of time for a hobby.

I'll explore when I get tired of stonework. I'll need to find more coal - and mine lots more stone - anyway. I must say that I'm curious about those underground caverns. I wonder how far down they go?

PS. I don't know how long I'll play this. I've got lots of different games to play. But I'll probably post more again, sometime.

Winter

2012-01-15T13:18:00.000-06:00

I grow fruit, as a hobby, so I'm always really busy in the spring and summer. By fall, I'm generally pretty sick of it, but I'll still have a lot to do outdoors.

So I tend to look forward to winter, when I'll have plenty of free time to read, to play computer games, and to get some things done around the house. But you know? It doesn't work out like that.

Oh, sure, I blog a lot more in the winter (I don't know if that's good or bad), but I still can't keep up with my email, and I can't visit all of the good websites I've found over the years. And I can play computer games, but I don't have time to play all I want to play. Besides, games take time away from reading, and vice versa.

My point is that I still can't do everything I want, not even close. And as far as getting anything productive done, well, that comes after everything else. So unless I absolutely have to do something, it tends not to get done at all.

Winter never ends up being what I think it will be. And all too soon, it's over. It won't be long before I have to start pruning my fruit trees - especially if I don't want to get as far behind as I was last year - and winter, for me, will be over.

And I'll wonder where it went. I'll wonder why I didn't get anything productive done. I'll wonder why I read so few books. I'll wonder what happened to all that time I thought I'd have. It just slips away...

Heh, heh. If you're not retired, yourself, you may think I'm crazy. How about all that time when I used to be at work? Or going to work or coming from work? But you know, I swear I'm busier now than I was before I retired. It's crazy, I know, but that's what it feels like.

Mitt the Ripper

2012-01-15T12:19:00.000-06:00

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

This is the latest ad from the Colbert... excuse me, the Definitely Not Coordinating with Stephen Colbert Super PAC.

If corporations are people, isn't it murder to kill one?

An atheist's fear

2012-01-14T21:33:00.000-06:00

Note that Amy is talking about the fear that she's betrayed her parents and her community because she "doesn't believe it anymore." I'd say that it's guilt, more than fear.

I never had this problem, because my childhood was different. I don't ever remember believing. But I sympathize. I know it's hard for people who did believe everything they were told.

Well, it's also the fear of causing her mother pain. She doesn't want to wrong someone she loves. I can understand that, too. But does that mean she has to live a lie?

This is an excerpt from the Atheist Experience TV show, episode #593, with Matt Dillahunty and Tracie Harris. (Note that, earlier, I posted a different excerpt from this same episode, here.)

American optimism 2012

2012-01-14T20:19:00.000-06:00

(Tom Toles)

I like being able to fire people

2012-01-14T20:16:00.000-06:00

I didn't like this video from the Democratic Party, when I first saw it. "I like being able to fire people"? That was taken completely out of context.

Here's what Mitt Romney really 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 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 a good service that I need, I want to say I'm going to go get someone else to provide that service to me.

OK, true, Mitt Romney has done far worse than that, himself:

From Barack Obama, in Mitt Romney's latest ad:
If we keep talking about the economy, we're going to lose.
What Obama actually said, campaigning against John McCain on October 16, 2008:
Senator McCain's campaign actually said, and I quote, "if we keep talking about the economy, we're going to lose."
Just out of curiosity: How flat-out, knowingly false does something have to be before the press is willing to just call it a lie? We're about to find out!

Now that was bad! And the Romney campaign actually defended it:

You may recall a couple months ago, when Mitt Romney released an ad showing President Obama in 2008 quoting John McCain, but presenting it as if it were Obama describing his own position now. Romney’s campaign fiercely defended the violent wrenching of Obama’s words out of context, arguing at one point, “He did say the words. That's his voice.”

And, of course, it's Republicans who think that corporations are just people, too. Romney himself has claimed that "Corporations are people, my friend." Aren't Democrats just taking him at his word? If corporations are people, then Romney clearly said that he likes firing people.

So it's hard to think that Romney deserves better. He doesn't. However, we deserve better.

And the thing is, Romney was wrong, anyway. They didn't have to distort what he said. They could have just explained why he was wrong. Admittedly, that wouldn't fit into a sound bite nearly as well.

Here's Jonathan Cohn:

But the argument that Romney was trying to make, about health care policy, deserves some scrutiny of its own, because you’re going to hear it again. Conservatives frequently claim that the health care system will be better off if people act more like consumers, shopping around for the best insurance plans. The best way to accomplish this, they say, is to transform Medicare into a premium support system and to repeal the Affordable Care Act, putting in its place a deregulated market with more insurance options. Romney has endorsed all of these ideas.

But unfettered choice is not a good thing in health care policy. One reason is that getting good, reliable information about insurance plans is difficult – as anybody who has ever tried to buy coverage on his or her own can attest. Another is that, even in a world with perfect information, the insurance market is prone to a particular kind of failure. Insurers don’t want to pick up bad risks and will do whatever they can to avoid them. Absent regulation, that makes it virtually impossible for people with serious medical conditions to get coverage. As Ezra Klein put it a while back, when Republicans were talking up this idea, "It's a great proposal if you don't ever plan to be sick, and if you don't mind finding out that your insurer doesn't cover your illness. And it's the Republican plan for health-care reform."

The thing is, you generally don't want to "fire" your health insurance company until you've got reason. When you're healthy, you don't have a reason. It's only when you get sick that you might discover how bad your insurance is.

But when you're sick, insurance companies want to be fired. Sick people cost them money. They only want healthy people as customers. In fact, before the Affordable Care Act ("Obamacare") made it illegal, health insurance companies would fire you when you got sick with something expensive, like cancer.

And then, it was good luck finding another health insurance company which would cover you at all, let alone cover your "pre-existing condition." They don't make money from sick people, they make money from healthy people.

This was the crazy thing about the House Republicans' plan to end Medicare. (And yes, PolitiFact be damned, giving the elderly vouchers and telling them to find their own insurance, if they could, is "ending Medicare." That might have been a health care plan of sorts, but it wasn't Medicare!)

Anyway, how many health insurance companies would be wanting to insure my 85-year-old mother, do you think? At any price, pretty much. There's no way they could make a profit from that! That's the whole point of Medicare, in fact. Health insurance companies never were clamoring to cover the elderly, for obvious reasons.

Right-wing ideologues have their pie-in-the-sky theories, but they're not backed by evidence. Conservatives just believe what they believe. Well, they're faith-based, not evidence-based.

Here's Igor Volsky:

Conservatives have long claimed that giving Americans more “skin in the game” — that is, increasing their sensitivity to prices — would encourage individuals and families to make more informed health care choices, avoid costly treatments and eventually lower health care costs. But there is very little evidence to suggest that asking people to pay more out of pocket would actually reduce health care costs, particularly since most of the spending is concentrated among the sickest Americans (those who suffer from multiple chronic conditions and cannot choose to forgo care).

As Yale professors Theodore Marmor and Jerry Mashaw pointed out in the Philadelphia Inquirer last year, “if free medical care led to more reckless overuse, countries like Canada and Germany, where patient costs are either zero or minimal, would suffer disproportionate inflation in expenditures or severe access pressures. They don’t.” Indeed, the theory doesn’t even hold up in the American health care system, where individuals with higher cost sharing in the employer based system with higher cost sharing don’t seem to spend less than Medicare enrollees with smaller cost sharing.

Derek Thompson makes a good point, too:

Romney says "the insurance company will have an incentive to keep people healthy." That's not true. The insurance company, as Romney knows, has an incentive to make a profit. One way to make a profit is to have way more healthy clients than sick clients. But that's not the easiest way. The easiest way is to rescind coverage when your healthy clients get sick, or to refuse coverage or discriminate on the basis of preexisting illnesses to ensure your group has only healthy people. Without regulation to prevent insurers from discriminating against or pushing off the sickest policyholders, healthy patients would all belong to cheaper plans and sick people would all get stuck in the same insurance program that death-spirals toward bankruptcy.

An individual market that moves away from company-defined health care requires group-underwriting regulations to prevent these kind of death spirals. But once we require insurance companies to accept all comers, we risk driving up premia unless we also compel all adults to buy health insurance whether or not they're sick. Otherwise, all healthy people could abstain from insurance until they contract an illness, knowing the insurance companies would accept them. Thus, you have the case for an individual mandate to make up the third leg in health care reform after government regulations and an "exchange" market for individuals.

Romney wants to give families the power to choose and fire insurance companies. That's commendable. It's also unworkable in a market where "people [only] own insurance if they wish to." That's the real gaffe from this morning.

I'm not sure if that was the "real gaffe," because I think the whole thing was wrong. But yes, that's another problem with Romney's new plan. (Obviously, his "old" plan is "Obamacare.")

Now, I realize that these arguments don't make a good political sound bite, not compared to "I like being able to fire people." And I also realize that Republicans seem to do very well by lying through their teeth like that (indeed, worse than that).

But do Democrats really have to choose between being inept and being dishonest? I don't think so. But maybe that's just what I want to believe, I don't know.

President Obama's anger translator

2012-01-13T10:40:00.000-06:00

What can I say? I thought this was funny.

Happy is a choice

2012-01-13T10:11:00.000-06:00

(Last Kiss)

There's something about this comic that really appeals to me. In a nutshell (yeah, inevitably, I'd be a lot wordier about it if I ever did try to give advice), it's what I'd say to a gay kid, I think.

But it's damn good advice for everyone else, too, don't you think?

Newt Gingrich and the Southern strategy

2012-01-13T09:49:00.000-06:00

Indecision 2012 - Black to the Future

Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c

Is this just Newt Gingrich being "condescending and dickish"? Is it just an old, wealthy, white Republican being clueless?

I guess I'm not as charitable as Jon Stewart. I think that Gingrich knew exactly what he was saying, and that he said it for political effect in an overwhelmingly white Republican Party in a southern state.

Anyone who'd be upset about implied racism wouldn't be voting GOP in the first place. And very few African Americans will be voting in the Republican primary. (Gee, I wonder why?)

All of the Republican candidates are trying desperately to appeal to the Republican base, and their notorious "Southern strategy" of deliberately appealing to white racists is which attracted those people to the GOP in the first place. So it's hard for me to believe that this wasn't also deliberate.

It's not that I don't think that Gingrich is clueless, generally speaking. But in this case, I think he knew exactly what he was doing: he was trying to appeal to the Republican base. And he was doing it in the same way Republicans have been wooing those people since the 1960s.

As Charles M. Blow says, "Playing to racial anxiety and fear isn’t a fluke; it’s a strategy that energizes the Republican base."

A system that doesn't work

2012-01-12T18:54:00.000-06:00

Is this all true? How would we know? We don't take these people to court. We don't give them a trial. We don't let them have representation. Our government can do anything it wants and keep it all a secret. So how would we know?

Once they're taken to Gitmo, often on extremely flimsy evidence, that's it. And now they can take American citizens there, too. They can even take American citizens arrested on American soil. No trial. No habeas corpus. No rights at all. Whomever government officials want to lock up, they can.

President Obama did try to close Gitmo, I'll give him that. Of course, the Republicans wouldn't go along with it. The Republicans automatically oppose anything the president wants to do. And the Democrats themselves were too cowardly to support him in this. Big surprise, huh?

But Obama gave up pretty easily, too. You know, he should never give up. He's supposed to be a constitutional scholar, so let's see him stand up for the constitution!

Republicans are going to hate him no matter what he does, so why doesn't he stand up and fight for our side? I don't care if the rest of the Democrats are complete cowards. I don't care if it's unpopular. I don't care if Fox "News" goes ballistic. They will, anyway.

This was one of the great errors, one of the great tragedies of the Bush administration. We must close Gitmo! And if Obama can't close Gitmo, then he should never stop trying.

The fact that he failed doesn't bother me, not really. What bothers me is the fact that he gave up.

The American system of justice works. But what we're doing in Gitmo isn't American, isn't justice, and doesn't work.

My investment plan, pt. 3

2012-01-12T15:46:00.000-06:00

This is the conclusion (here are Part 1 and Part 2) and the reason why I wanted to write this investment plan post in the first place.

Even before I retired, I'd been keeping notes on my investments, and afterwards, I've continued, every year or two, to review what has happened and record my current thinking. To me, this is a great learning tool, and I thought it particularly interesting to review at the end of last year.

Our memories are malleable. You may think you remember your worries and your expectations of a few years ago, but your memory is probably not completely accurate. Re-reading what you wrote years ago is likely to make you cringe, but it can be useful.

We have to remember our mistakes if we ever hope to learn from them. And even when you made the right decision, it's helpful to remember how difficult it was, how fearful you might have been, how uncertain you almost certainly were. Well, that's my opinion, anyway.

After I retired, I reorganized my investments - consolidating some of them, rolling over my 401-k and deferred compensation plans into an IRA, and moving my holdings to a fund supermarket. (When I was working, I invested directly with individual mutual fund companies, but retirement meant that I needed a simpler system to move money around.)

So this note was written almost a year and a half from when I retired, but only a year or so from when I got all that settled:

Nov. 1, 2007

So far, so good. The market has done far better than I expected this past year, even including the increasing volatility. I really don't expect this to last (I'm getting increasingly pessimistic), but my net worth has increased by xxx over the past year. Can't beat that! My biggest fund, xxx, has been my top performer, but even xxx has continued to do well. Oakmark Select is the only real dog this year, though I still have faith in the manager (xxx Real Estate has been weak, but that was entirely expected).

[Note that I'm censoring all of the financial details, and even the names of funds which did well for me. But I'll leave the ones which did really poorly, since I don't suppose you'll take that for a recommendation. :) ]

I spent more than xxx in the past 12 months, including taxes. That's considerably more than I'd expected, especially considering there were no big-ticket items this past year. I spent almost xxx on xxx, which had not been budgeted. This might slow down in future years, but it seems that this is an expensive hobby. Considering how well the stock market has done, income taxes (more than xxx) might tend to average less. But I'd rather make more and pay the taxes. Nothing else really stands out, but it feels like I've been spending money like water. It's hard to cut back, when you get away from pinching pennies. We'll see what happens when the stock market turns down.

My financial plan below still looks good, though I'm more concerned these days about the risk of a real meltdown, unexpected or otherwise (black swans, fat tails on the probability distribution, or however you want to put it). Bush has really been a disaster to our country, and it won't get better any time soon. I took my taxable dividends in cash last December, so I've been keeping almost xxx in my Internet savings account (interest rate has dropped to 4.75%). Though the market has gone up, I can't really feel that this was a mistake, and indeed I plan to do the same this year (hoping like crazy that the market stays high that long). Is that timing the market? Or just being prudent? I'm expecting huge mutual fund distributions again this year.

OK, this is exactly as I wrote it, emphasis and all, in 2007 (except where I excised the details, of course). I also added an addendum to my investment plan then, but that's not what I want to talk about here.

I was lucky. The first year and a half after I retired went really, really well. But note that I was already starting to stray from my investment plan, at least a bit. I'd told myself that I wasn't going to try to time the market, but only to take advantage of any irrational behavior.

But I was taking cash out of the market, not because of "irrational exuberance" - although prices had increased considerably - but because of my general pessimism. At least, that's how it seems to me as I read this now.

As it turned out, that was a very good thing. But was it a wise thing to do? I wasn't sure then, and I'm not sure now.

My next note was less than three months later:

Jan 28, 2008

Stocks have dropped considerably (though I suspect there's plenty more to come), so how do I feel about my plan at the start of a bear market? First, it's tough to see my net worth evaporate like this, even though I expected it. It's not easy, and it's never going to be easy. When I was working, I could at least figure that I was buying cheaper stocks during a downturn, but I don't have that consolation now. All I've got is my conviction in my strategy - a thin reed, indeed.

After taking dividends in cash again in December, I'm holding a lot more cash than usual (about xxx, not counting xxx in I-Bonds). The interest rate has dropped to 4.3%. I've still got the vast majority of my money in stock mutual funds, so if the market goes right back up (the least likely scenario, I'd say), then I'll be quite happy. If the market continues to drop, I'll be very glad to have cash (wishing I had more), though it will be difficult to know when to invest it again. And if the market goes sideways, I'll probably make as much income holding cash (though, admittedly, the tax treatment isn't as favorable). Some of America's best money managers hold cash for opportunity purchases, but I'm not sure I'm willing, or able, to give it that much attention. We'll see. So far, taking my dividends in cash hasn't been a bad move. And actually selling funds would really be trying to time the market.

My net worth increased by about xxx in 2007 - not bad, though down considerably from October. But I've dropped another xxx since then, wiping out most of my gains since I retired (though I've paid living expenses out of that, too). My mutual funds are down more than xxx in the past four weeks,... Most of my investments are quite volatile, and they've shown it. And as I say, I suspect we haven't seen the half of it yet.

For now, I'm sticking with my original plan, though I should make a few observations. My 'diversified' portfolio hasn't made the slightest difference, with stocks everywhere crashing at once (as I should have expected). And my hedges were far too small to have any impact. (Note, too, that Morningstar's Risk Analyzer is completely bogus. Just before this, it was showing a gain as my 25% risk chance in a down market.)

Going forward, I should feel more comfortable holding cash. You just never know. But I'd like to put more money in xxx, in particular, and really, nearly all of my funds still have my full confidence. Over the long term, I'm sure they'll do better than average. Nevertheless, I'm expecting this year to be bleak, indeed.

Heh, heh. I hadn't seen anything yet. The year was going to be far, far bleaker than I expected!

But I did expect that this was just the start of a bear market, and I was prepared for further losses (just, maybe, not such big losses). I was glad to be holding extra cash, and I was beginning to consider that as a deliberate policy.

But note the problem with timing the market, that you have to be right twice, once when you sell and then when you buy back in again. And if you're selling in a taxable account, you'll probably have to pay taxes on your gains (certainly if you're buying low and selling high). So you have to be very right to make it all worthwhile.

If I thought January was bad, how about October?

Oct 12, 2008

OK, things have become REALLY nasty. I've lost massive amounts of money - more than I made in most years - in each of the past two weeks. My portfolio has dropped to xxx, which means that I've lost nearly xxx,... so far. Except for xxx, which has been almost fully hedged, my mutual funds have lost between 21% and 55% YTD. Quicken shows a -38% average! And that doesn't include what I lost at the end of last year!

As I noted in January, everything has dropped at once. Value funds have been particularly bad this time, since banks are failing. (Washington Mutual, among others, went completely bankrupt, and 15% of Oakmark Select was in that stock, at one time.) xxx was a nice hedge (it's down only 4% YTD), but I didn't have enough in that fund to matter much. And xxx has done what it was supposed to,... but it's still down 21% YTD. My extra cash is the only thing that's saved me.

So,... now what? This has been worse than even I expected, and I have no idea how much longer the market will drop. The whole financial system is melting down, and there's panic everywhere. Well, I can understand that. But it's time to start buying more, I think. I'm transferring xxx to xxx, and I'll try to do that a couple more times over the next few months. (But I've got to live on something, so I'd better not be too eager.)

It's also a good time to move funds around, since I don't have to worry about taxable gains! Actually, I'm still happy enough with my selection of funds, though some have performed much worse than the market lately. But I think it makes sense to concentrate my picks. Spreading my investments around too much will tend to give me average performance, and I'd like to beat that. Of course, as we've seen this year, I will be risking underperformance, too. But I can't think that my managers have lost their abilities, even if they've made some big mistakes this year.

Bottom line: as bad as things look, companies are cheaper now than they've been in years. True, the near future looks horrible, and prices may continue to drop (and companies even go bankrupt), but that's why the prices are low. And at this point, what choice do I have?

PS. Note that deflation might be more likely than inflation right now. Yeah, energy prices are still very high (though much less than they were), but we're looking at a severe recession, if not a depression. And also note that my foreign holdings have crashed even worse than the domestic stuff, though they've both been disasters.

This was shortly after Lehman Brothers went bankrupt, and everyone seemed to be panicking (for good reason, no doubt). As I noted above, for two weeks in a row, I'd lost more money in the stock market than I'd made in most years. I'd known my portfolio was risky, but still, that was a shock.

But still, as Warren Buffett has said, be fearful when others are greedy, and be greedy when others are fearful. I had absolutely no idea if the stock market would keep falling, but with most people trying to sell, the price of stock looked cheap to me.

And I had my plan. I had enough in cash and other secure holdings to live for several years, at least. I was lucky enough to have some additional cash, and if I wasn't going to invest it then, when would I? Well, it sounds reasonable now, but it's harder when there's blood in the streets.

Mar 31, 2009

As planned, I transferred xxx on Oct 13, 2008, and another xxx ten days later, as the market continued to crash. I also sold three funds ... to concentrate on my favorite picks. (Note that all three funds had some taxable gains, but I expected to pay no taxes on long-term gains in 2008.)

I added to my holdings in xxx, but I put the bulk of the money into Fairholme, making it one of my largest funds. [Fairholme has been a disaster this past year, so I don't have to censor that one, I think!] It had done quite well YTD and over the long haul, and I didn't want to get too concentrated in my top holdings. In my roll-over IRA, I sold xxx (my holdings were too small to matter much), and added to xxx. Again, just concentrating my picks.

Without trying to "time" the market, I rather thought that things were oversold, and I expected that forced selling might abate at the end of the year. Well, the market turned around almost immediately and had a solid advance by the first of January. (Barack Obama was elected president, too, which probably helped.) In November and December, I took my dividends (no removing cash this year!) and another xxx in cash (getting mighty low now) and added to my holdings in xxx.

[Sorry, but my notes are full of details of individual funds - so I could remember exactly what I was doing - and I really don't want to share that. So I'm cutting a lot here.]

No big surprise, but the market turned south again almost immediately at the start of the year (so much for my idea about forced selling) and dropped back to the October lows - or even lower - by early March. I was really running short of cash, but I took the last of it and bought more of xxx. (This means that I'll have to sell [some of my emergency stash] to live on this year, since my bank accounts are completely depleted.) I also sold xxx, my most conservative fund and one which has weathered the crash better than anything but xxx, in all of my accounts, and bought more xxx. I like the balanced fund, but I figured it was time to be really aggressive.

I made my last purchase March 9, and the market has boomed in the three weeks since then - up more than 20% (it had dropped more than 25% in the first two months of the year - this is a volatile market). It could easily be a bear market rally, of course, just like at the end of 2008. I hope not, but it wouldn't surprise me one bit. I can't ever hope to time the market in the short run. I doubt if anyone can, not reliably. And really, I've done surprisingly well (relatively-speaking) the last few months, generally buying at the very bottom. I've got no cash left at all, just xxx. That's about xxx years worth of living expenses (I'm cutting my spending to the bone), but it's probably not wise to invest any more money in stocks. Since I'm happy enough with what I've got (though Fairholme has done rather poorly since I bought more - just reverting to the mean, no doubt), I'll simply be sitting tight and seeing what happens now.

Currently, my biggest holdings (top down, 11% to 8% of my portfolio) are xxx. So I'm positioned VERY aggressively right now, even more than I have been. And I'm much more concentrated, with 64% of my portfolio in just these seven funds. We'll see.

I expect that the incredible volatility will continue this year, and we might even set new lows, but I think that the worst is behind us. I don't expect much, though - certainly not a quick recovery. But I should be able to live for about xxx years without taking anything out of the market, and I really do expect to be in better shape by then. The near-term danger is the backlash against "bailouts" and deficit spending. Well, most people are economic illiterates, if not [oh, that really wasn't a nice thing to say!].

I cut a lot of this, but I hope it gets the general idea across. I continued to buy as the market (for the most part) dropped, until I reached the point where I had nothing left to invest. I still had my emergency stash, of course. I expected that I could still survive until the market recovered, but I was about as aggressive as I could possibly get.

I had no idea that early March would be the market bottom, and certainly not that the market would scream upwards from there. That was pure luck. I was simply positioning myself more and more aggressively as stocks got cheaper and cheaper. If you're going to buy low and sell high, you've got to buy when no one else wants stocks.

Yet, it's easy to forget now (I think all Republicans have forgotten it), but when Barack Obama took office, the economic collapse seemed to have no bottom. And the stock market collapse, likewise. There was no telling just how far we'd drop or how bad things would get. It's not easy to buy at a time like that.

I'm not trying to pat myself on the back here, but just to point out that I was following my investment plan. And I had enough confidence in that plan to continue to follow it, even when things looked bleak. Maybe that was foolish. I mean, yes, it worked this time, but will it work the next time? There's just no way to know.

I was lucky. I was very, very lucky. I can't count on that luck the next time. So what I really need to ask myself is if my investment plan still makes sense. That's always what I need to ask myself, year after year. I can never stop asking it.

It was almost two years before I added another note (well, I did say that I was bad at consistency), and that was just recently:

Dec 31, 2011

OK, it's been a long time since I updated this. Briefly, my previous investments, in October, 2008 and March, 2009, were among the best investment decisions I've ever made. March was the absolute bottom of the market crash. At that point, my net worth had dropped in half. Well, I've always known I was taking a risk. But within a year and a half, I'd made it all back up and then some. It's been a wild ride!

I've been much less successful this year, so I've dropped back nearly to the net worth I had when I retired five and a half years ago. (Considering everything, that's not so bad, though.) The S&P 500 ended the year about even, but my holdings have done far worse than that. Partly, that's because I'm well-diversified globally, and international stocks have recently done much worse than American companies. And partly, it's because I'm still heavily overweight in small-cap - and especially micro-cap - stocks, mostly the result of xxx being so astoundingly successful for years.

But my biggest problem was owning so much of the Fairholme Fund, which really blew up this year. It ended the year down 32%, far and away my worst performing mutual fund. And it was one of my biggest holdings, too. Adding money to that in 2008 seems to have been a big mistake (admittedly, it did well until 2011). Well, that's nothing new. I'm used to making big mistakes. In fact, I've come to expect it. I seem to do OK anyway, or I have so far. One of the problems with concentrating my holdings is that when one blows up, it really, really hurts. Of course, when one does well, it makes a big difference, too. That's the same trade-off I accept when I invest in volatile funds. They tend to go down even faster than they go up - just, hopefully, not as often.

The combination - concentrated investing in volatile funds - requires an iron stomach. But, so far, I don't see any reason to change my investment plan significantly. I would never recommend it to anyone else, but it seems to work for me. On the other hand, my holdings are even more volatile now than they were when I retired. I took on more risk at the bottom of the stock market crash, and I still haven't managed to revisit that.

Going forward, I'm very pessimistic. I have no idea what the stock market is going to do, but I'm pessimistic for my nation. We don't seem to have learned anything from the mistakes of the Bush administration. But I have no idea what that means for my investments. I can't be optimistic, but I'm going to stick to my plan. In general, I think that stocks are relatively cheap right now, but not screaming buys. Given that Republicans are deliberately trying to sabotage our economy for their own political advantage, we could see another huge collapse in 2012. There is that risk. So holding a little extra cash might be prudent.

But interest rates are at record lows, so cash is making nothing right now. And bonds would seem to be extremely risky. Everyone is scared of the volatility in the stock market, so they're buying Treasuries like crazy. Following the herd is almost always a recipe for disaster. But I'm not sure if anything looks really cheap, either. Maybe I'll punt.

So that's it. As usual, I don't have a clue what's going to happen next. I don't see any especially good places to invest, but bonds and cash are paying nothing. I couldn't give you any advice if I wanted to, because I just don't know.

But what I do know is that following an investment plan has worked for me, so far. And being able to go back and read my notes (I've got notes from further back than this, and I keep excerpts from what other people are saying, too) has been very interesting - to me, at least - and valuable, too, I think.

Barack Obama sings Lady Gaga's "Born This Way"

2012-01-12T11:18:00.000-06:00

Some people have too much time on their hands, don't you think? Still, it's kind of funny.

The New Hampshire primary

2012-01-12T11:12:00.000-06:00

Indecision 2012 - New Hampshire Primary Results

Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c

So, the empty suit with "realistic" promises - smaller government, a balanced budget, and a massive military - won the New Hampshire Republican primary, as expected. Ho, hum.

But yeah, how about that Huntsman? He's really got a ticket to ride... home, doesn't he?

And it is pretty funny how the media dismisses Ron Paul, although, seriously, he's never had the slightest chance of actually winning the nomination. And he's still a complete fruitcake (although that's pretty much a requirement in today's GOP).

Anyway, I'll skip Ron Paul here, too, since I think I've written enough about him recently. Really, what else do you need to know? So let me go back to Huntsman again, just briefly.

The South Carolina primary is next, and guess which fresh Republican face is polling higher than Huntsman in South Carolina? :)

Fox host Eric Bolling tells the truth

2012-01-11T22:40:00.000-06:00

That's Fox Business host Eric Bolling saying, "We're all on board if Mitt's it [the Republican nominee], but until then, we just have to make sure he stays as far right as possible. That's my job."

Funny, huh? Bolling isn't even pretending to be a journalist anymore. He's admitting what everyone knows, that his job on Fox - everyone's job on Fox - is to elect right-wing Republicans.

Well, it's refreshing to see someone from Fox being honest, isn't it?

QOTD: a bipartisan consensus on health care

2012-01-11T22:14:00.000-06:00

Quote of the Day:

Igor Volsky flagged a great piece from Nancy French, who reported the other day that Rick Santorum supported an individual health care mandate when he ran for the Senate in 1994. His primary opponent, Joe Watkins, supported the same policy.

French highlighted this report from April 1994:
Santorum and Watkins both oppose having businesses provide health care for their employees. Instead, they would require individuals to purchase insurance.

And this report, published a month later:
Santorum and Watkins would require individuals to buy health insurance rather than forcing employers to pay for employee benefits.

For those keeping score at home, that means there are six Republican presidential candidates, and four of them, at one time or another, supported an individual health care mandate — an idea GOP officials now consider an unconstitutional, authoritarian nightmare.

Given Santorum’s far-right ideology, does this news come as something of a surprise? Actually, no. Santorum’s position in 1994, and that of his primary challenger, was entirely in line with mainstream Republican thought.

In case anyone’s forgotten, this was a Republican idea in the first place. Nixon embraced the mandate in the 1970s, and George H.W. Bush supported the idea in the 1980s. When Bob Dole endorsed the mandate in 1994, it was in keeping with the party’s prevailing attitudes at the time. Mitt Romney embraced the mandate as governor and it was largely ignored during the 2008 campaign, since it was such a common GOP position.

In recent years, the mandate has been embraced by the likes of John McCain, Orrin Hatch, Bob Bennett, Tommy Thompson, Lamar Alexander, Lindsey Graham, John Thune, Scott Brown, and Judd Gregg, among many others. Indeed, several of them not only endorsed the policy, they literally co-sponsored legislation that included a mandate.

In the summer of 2009, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), one of the leading Republican lawmakers in the talks over health care reform, told Fox News, “I believe that there is a bipartisan consensus to have an individual mandate.” Did Fox News freak out? Did GOP leaders immediately distance themselves from the comments? Was Grassley forced to immediately backpedal? No, none of those things happened. Grassley said there was a bipartisan consensus to have an individual mandate because there was a bipartisan consensus to have an individual mandate.

But that was before Republicans decided they’re against the ideas they’re for, and this issue could be twisted into a political weapon to be used against the president. - Steve Benen

Warren Buffett calls the Republicans' bluff

2012-01-11T22:00:00.000-06:00

(photo by Jim Ruymen, via TPM)

From Time magazine:

Warren Buffett is ready to call Republicans’ tax bluff. Last fall, Senator Mitch McConnell said that if Buffett were feeling “guilty” about paying too little in taxes, he should “send in a check.” The jab was in response to Buffett’s August 2011 New York Times op-ed, which made hay of the fact that our tax system is so unbalanced, Buffett (worth about $45 billion) pays a lower tax rate than his secretary. Senator John Thune promptly introduced the “Buffett Rule Act,” an option on tax forms that would allow the rich to donate more in taxes to help pay down the national debt. It was, as Buffett told me for this week’s TIME cover story, “a tax policy only a Republican could come up with.”

Still, he’s willing to take them up on it. ... So Buffett has pledged to match 1 for 1 all such voluntary contributions made by Republican members of Congress. “And I’ll even go 3 for 1 for McConnell,” he says. That could be quite a bill if McConnell takes the challenge; after all, the Senator is worth at least $10 million. As Buffett put it to me, “I’m not worried.” ...

Buffett doesn’t want to sound ungrateful, especially since McConnell and other Republicans have lobbied to keep taxes low for the über-rich, saving him between $6 million and $7 million this year. Oddly, though, conservatives can’t seem to make up their mind about taxes. On Wednesday in the Wall Street Journal, supply sider Arthur Laffer bashed Buffett for, among other things, shielded income, because he doesn’t pay taxes on unrealized capital gains (currently taxed at 0%) or charitable contributions (which are tax deductible). “Well, I had a net unrealized loss in 2011,” says Buffett. “But if Arthur has a plan for how he wants to tax unrealized capital gains, I’d love to hear it — it’s an interesting thing for a Republican to put forward!”

If Buffett had his way, he’d pay more than the 17% rate he currently forks over on his net adjusted income — and he’d have the government put that additional money to work by making sure that whatever portion of the 99% that isn’t thriving in the market economy gets some help. As Buffett wrote in Fortune a few years back, “I’ve worked in an economy that rewards someone who saves the lives of others on a battlefield with a medal, rewards a great teacher with thank-you notes from parents, but rewards those who can detect the mispricing of securities with sums reaching into the billions.”

I especially like that part about how taxing unrealized capital gains is "an interesting thing for a Republican to put forward." Heh, heh. No kidding!

Laffer - any Republican leader, I suspect - would sooner cut off his own arm than tax unrealized capital gains. And if he didn't, the rich would cut his throat. And he's actually criticizing Warren Buffett for charitable donations?

Well, that was clearly a desperate attempt to attack Buffett,... somehow. It's not real easy to attack a man with $45 billion, especially when that man is busy trying to get his own taxes raised, for the good of the country. And when he's a noted philanthropist, too.

I'd like to note, proudly, that Warren Buffett is a fellow Nebraskan. We're not all as bad as you might think from my state's political leaders.

Arrogant atheists and not collecting stamps

2012-01-11T20:24:00.000-06:00

My investment plan, pt. 2

2012-01-11T14:25:00.000-06:00

As I noted in Part 1, I wrote down a detailed investment plan before quitting my job at age 55. Well, I've known a lot of people who retired early and ended up looking for work again remarkably soon.

Sometimes, that was because they were bored with retirement. (Honestly, I can't understand that at all. Retiring early was one of the best moves I've ever made, and I seem to be busier now than before I retired. But people are different.)

For most, though, it was because they'd ended up in financial difficulties - often enough, in just a year or two. And so they went back to work, but in jobs that paid a lot less than the one they'd just quit. I didn't want that to happen to me!

But I'm wary of sharing the details of my own investment plan, because I don't want to give you financial advice, even by implication. For one thing, I'm not qualified to give you such advice. And if you're in the habit of taking investment advice from your neighbor or some random guy on the internet,... well, good luck with that!

Besides, I wouldn't recommend my own plan to anyone else. I'm certain that no reputable financial adviser would recommend it to anyone! After five and a half years, I'm still convinced that it works for me. But my situation is not yours.

Let me just leave it at that. I'm a very private person, and although I'm sure I end up sharing far too many personal details in this blog, I'm not actually comfortable with that.

But let me just say that I'm not wealthy. I could only retire at all because my expenses are low. But I was looking at years without Social Security or Medicare (indeed, retiring early will drop my eventual Social Security payments drastically), and certainly no pension. So it was a pretty significant step to quit my job and decide to live on my investments.

Now, I didn't actually expect the worst economic collapse since the Great Depression. You have to expect bear markets, but frankly, the reality exceeded my worst projections. Given all that, I can't be too unhappy at the results. I'm just slightly ahead of where I was when I retired, but that's after paying all of my living expenses for almost six years. Therefore,... so far, so good.

My written goal on my financial plan was very simple: "To survive without depleting my savings." (Remember, I said that my plan was far simpler than yours would need to be.) My expectation: "That I can live on my earnings while growing my financial assets (after inflation)."

What I needed to know first was the amount of money I would need for living expenses each year, on average. Well, I've kept my financial records on Quicken for many years (and I've avoided paying cash, wherever possible, so I could tell where my money went).

It was easy enough to average my expenditures over the previous decade, even adding a little extra for inflation, but I needed to look into it a bit deeper than that. For one thing, I could subtract from that the amount I was adding to my investments each month, and I could subtract most of the amount I paid on income taxes, too. (If I did better than expected, paying extra taxes would not be a problem!)

My health insurance costs would increase dramatically, though. And I had to expect occasional big expenditures on home repair and car purchases. I thought I was being very conservative, but I've actually been spending more than I expected. However, I wasn't too far off, I guess.

From Quicken, I knew my net worth, of course. My house isn't a big part of that, but it still needed to be subtracted from the equation. (I wasn't going to get a mortgage just to invest that amount in the stock market.) But I was left with a very rough idea of what percentage return I would need, on average, just to survive.

As you might imagine, it wasn't that simple. First, in order to survive for long, that percentage return needed to be after inflation. When you're working, you can usually count on your pay increasing every year, to at least cover inflation, So it's easy to overlook that. But once you were retired for ten or twenty years, you'd probably be shocked at how inflation adds up. (I'm shocked already at the increased cost of food and health insurance.)

And all these were just averages, too. This past year, I've had some major home expenses. With any luck, it will be a few years before something like that happens again, but I still had to pay them now. And that money is no longer available for investments.

The stock market, of course, is notoriously volatile. That was obvious even before the recent crash. Volatility isn't a problem, unless you need to sell before the market recovers again. And that could take years. On the other hand, if you avoid volatile investments, you'll be lucky to even match the inflation rate (very lucky, right now), let alone make something above that.

My point is that there's a lot to think about. And you cannot reliably predict the future. No one can. As I said, I don't want to tell you the details of my own solution (really, I'm not giving investment advice here), but I will say that it's mostly stock investments (in mutual funds, for reasons I noted previously), with a large emergency stash, so I don't have to sell when those investments are down.

Anyway, after I set out my requirements in that investment plan, and looked at the risks, I decided how I wanted to apportion my money - how much I needed to keep in cash, for immediate expenses; how much I needed for an emergency stash, and where I'd keep it; how much I needed in more conservative investments, in case even that emergency stash wasn't enough; and how much I could truly think of as entirely a long-term investment.

In my case, the vast majority of it was in the latter category. Well, it had to be that way. I really didn't have any choice, because you pretty well need to accept volatility in order to get a return that's above inflation. Again, that's just an average return, and it might be a very long-term average, too. It doesn't help much if the stock market recovers after you've already gone bankrupt.

On the other hand, if you keep too much in "safe" investments, you won't make anything. Indeed, you'll probably lose money, after inflation.

Younger people, working people, don't have to worry about this. (I know, they have other things to worry about.) If the market crashes, they'll just be buying stock at a much cheaper price. Indeed, for a young person with a secure job, a stock market crash might be the best thing to happen. (But note that "secure job" part again.) When the stock market drops, that's when you want to put more into it. (Unfortunately, that's just when it's the hardest to do.)

But if you don't have a job, you won't have that income to be buying cheap stock during crashes. And sorry, but I don't think that anyone can reliably predict the direction of the stock market. Some people do get lucky, true. If you have a roomful of monkeys throwing darts at stock listings, a few of them, just by the laws of statistics, are going to look like investing geniuses. But they probably won't do so well the next time they throw those darts!

On the other hand, it's not impossible to recognize the extremes of either irrational exuberance or panic. It's just likely to be very, very hard to act as a contrarian at such times. When everyone you know is talking about how much money they're making from tech stocks, can you avoid the temptation to jump in, yourself?

What if it continues for two or three years, with everyone but you making money? How will you feel then? As... someone said, the market can stay irrational for longer than you can stay solvent.

When the whole country is panicking and there seems to be no bottom to the stock market crash, can you decide that stocks are just too cheap to pass up? Even knowing that they'll likely get cheaper, because you have no idea where the bottom is, either? "Buy cheap and sell high" is a nice slogan, but investors usually do just the reverse.

There's a good reason for that. It's hard to be a contrarian. And contrarians are often wrong. In fact, they're almost always wrong, at least at first. So how long can you stand to be "wrong" before deciding that, yes, you really were wrong? As it turns out, most people are contrarians right up until the worst possible time to change their mind.

And no, I'm not going to tell you what an investment genius I am. I'm just as human as everyone else. When everyone else gets afraid, so do I. When everyone else is irrationally exuberant, I feel great about my investments, too. It feels good to make money and it feels bad to lose it. It doesn't make any difference how much of a contrarian you want to be, you'll still feel those emotions.

Sorry, I get carried away. This post has not gone where I expected it to go. I thought I'd write more about my actual plan - if not the details, then at least some of the general advice I gave myself (like "Diversify - but remain skeptical of the latest fad"). But those things look more like obvious platitudes, now.

I thought maybe I'd talk about different risks - volatility (or market risk), inflation, deflation, recession, stagflation, terrorism - and my predictions of what they'd mean to different kinds of investments. There are risks in everything. Even government-secured investments have a great deal of risk (inflation risk, in their case). If something looks risk-free, think again. You can't eliminate risk, but you can try to manage it.

But much of that gets into the details of my plan - how I planned to manage those risks, as much as possible. And the details are just what I don't want to give. Seriously, my investment plan won't work for you. It might not even work for me, not for long. I just don't know. But I do know that I'm not qualified to give advice.

Yeah, this probably wasn't what you expected. Heck, even I'm bored by it. :) But I think you might enjoy Part 3 a little more. I'm going to look back at what I wrote in my notes, every year or two, and see how things actually turned out during the past five and a half years.

Well, it's been a wild ride, so you might find it interesting. I hope so.

Malice in blunderland

2012-01-11T11:38:00.000-06:00

Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c

Malice in Blunderland

Crazy, isn't it? I keep wondering how insane the right-wing can get, but they keep exceeding even my expectations.

Washington Monthly talked about this yesterday, too:

Even for conservatives, this is pretty thin. The White House did, in fact, host a Halloween party for the kids of military servicemen and women in 2009. Conservatives may have found the event needlessly showy — filmmaker Tim Burton reportedly helped decorate, and gave the party an “Alice in Wonderland” theme — but given that we’re talking about the White House doing something nice for military families, the right really shouldn’t raise such a fuss.

As for the notion of keeping this “secret,” White House spokesman Eric Schultz said yesterday, “If we wanted this event to be a secret, we probably wouldn’t have invited the press corps to cover it, release photos of it to Flickr, or post a video from it on the White House website.”

But the really funny part of this came yesterday when Dana Loesch warned that the entire story may well be a nefarious “set up” crafted by the White House. She wrote:
One could beg the question that the White House and media didn’t disclose this because they knew it was wrong. Why would it be wrong? Because of public reaction? This is where it gets sneaky. It’s a set up: The narrative will be that details weren’t released because the White House didn’t want folks freaking out over extravagances for military families provided by a Hollywood director and his actor/muse. The narrative will progress into a notion that conservatives are tight-fisted when it comes to providing military families with a nice Halloween, one that wasn’t even at the conservatives’s expense. It will reinforce the stereotype that conservatives and Hollywood will always be at odds, and can’t a film director throw a party for the military if he wants? GOSH. [emphasis in the original]

That east wing of the White House sure is sneaky isn’t it? In 2009, it looked as if officials were just doing something nice at Halloween for military families. But more than two years later, conservative media figures have gotten to the heart of the scheme — this was a “secret” and a “set up” intended to make the right look bad.

It’s increasingly difficult to understand how the right views reality.

Amen!

The Obamas handed out treats to local schoolchildren on the steps of the White House, then hosted a reception for military families inside. It was widely reported at the time, and they even posted a video on YouTube.

This is about as far from a secret conspiracy as it's possible to get, yet nothing stops the crazies on the right. It's just incredible, isn't it? What next?

How the debt limit debacle hurt the economy

2012-01-10T23:13:00.000-06:00

(click image to embiggen)

From TPM comes this great graph that shows what last summer's debt limit fight did to our economy:

Last week’s surprisingly positive jobs report overshadowed another bit of good news for the economy: last November showed the biggest growth in consumer credit in 10 years. Typically that’s a sign that consumer confidence is up, banks are willing to lend, and demand is on the rise.

If you look back at recent monthly data, though, you’ll see that this particular green shoot should have poked through the ground months ago, but was stymied by the GOP’s debt ceiling hostage drama.

If you recall, that debt ceiling debacle was a completely manufactured crisis - manufactured by House Republicans - which ended up dropping America's credit rating for the first time in our history.

Raising the debt ceiling has always been a routine matter - if one which frequently gives rise to plenty of partisan rhetoric - under both Democratic and Republican presidents. Sure, both parties make political hay with it when they're in the opposition, but until now, there's never been any question that it would ultimately pass.

After all, it doesn't affect government spending in the slightest. This is just saying that we'll pay the bills we already owe. And if we defaulted, it would be positively disastrous for our country. Until now, politicians have tended to put America first, when it really mattered.

But a continued bad economy helps the Republicans. Partly, that's because the president is a Democrat, and no matter what, the president almost always gets the blame for a poor economy (even when he inherited an even worse economy, as President Obama did).

But Republicans also run as the anti-government party. So everything they can do to make Americans disgusted with their own government actually helps the GOP.

After three years of Republican obstructionism, only about 9% of the American people approve of Congress. But since Republicans campaign on how bad the government is, this actually helps them. Yes, it helps the very people who make Congress so dysfunctional in the first place. Ironic, huh?

In this case, we've been trying to claw our way out of the worst economic collapse since the Great Depression. As back then, this happened on the Republicans' watch. When Barack Obama took the presidency, the collapse was in full swing and appeared to have no bottom.

Well, he quickly stopped the collapse, although lagging economic indicators, like unemployment, continued to get worse for awhile. The deficit increased, too, because an economic collapse automatically increases expenses (like unemployment benefits) and decreases revenue (when incomes drop, so do income taxes). And although he gets no political credit from this, Barack Obama has actually been cutting taxes, mostly on the middle class.

But these things are working. We've been climbing out of this deep, deep hole. Unfortunately, the Republicans have been dragging their feet every step of the way, so it's been painfully slow. And in that graph, you can see the dent the debt limit fight did to consumer credit. It seems to have cost us a good three months of progress, minimum.

It also caused the stock market to crater, which certainly didn't help. And it could have - probably should have - increased our borrowing costs. However, the global economy is in such bad shape that interest rates are near zero (contrary to the regular forecasts of the right-wing). And the American dollar is still the soundest, the safest, and the most respected currency in the world - though maybe not for long, if this keeps up.

Because this is all deliberate. Republicans are desperately trying to sabotage the recovery, or at least to delay it until after the 2012 elections. As they've said many times, their #1 objective isn't jobs or even the deficit. It's to make sure that a Republican takes the presidency back this next fall.

It's hard to make much headway when one political party is actively trying to sabotage the recovery. As far as I know, this is unique in our history. And if Republicans aren't punished at the ballot box - indeed, if they're actually rewarded for this behavior - I fear for my country.

Rick Santorum on gays and bla.. people

2012-01-10T12:13:00.000-06:00

Rick Santorum on Gays & Bla People

Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c

I blogged about this before - I mean, when Rick Santorum said, or certainly seemed to say, "I don’t want to make black people’s lives better by giving them somebody else’s money." (I mentioned the homophobia then, too, as well as here.)

Now, Santorum claims that he didn't say "black." He says he meant to say some other, unspecified word, but changed his mind and garbled it, so that it just sounded like "black." OK, maybe. But two things come to mind when I watch the video clip of his speech.

The first is that there's no hesitation when he says the word. Normally, when you garble a word, when you start to say something and then change your mind, there's a pause, a hesitation, a momentary break in your sentence. But I don't see anything like that here, do you?

It's true that the last consonant sounds a little weird, maybe a slight accent, maybe a bit of phlegm. But the "bla" part certainly seems plain enough. And that brings me to my second point, one that Stephen Colbert makes, quite humorously, in this video clip. If Santorum didn't say "black," he certainly meant to say it, before - possibly - changing his mind at the very last second.

If he wasn't deliberately saying - for political effect in the overwhelmingly white GOP base - that black people just get handouts from the government, from white people's tax money, then he must just assume that, himself. It must be his own automatic assumption, then.

So is this just a Freudian slip, where Santorum accidentally said something he really thinks, instead of what's "politically correct." Or was it actually a deliberately racist statement?

And either way, does it make much difference? Not that I can see.

The homophobia, well, that speaks for itself, doesn't it? "Even fathers in jail who had abandoned their kids were still better than no father at all to have in their children's lives." Yeah, even fathers who beat their children, who rape their children, are a good thing, huh? Because that's what God wants.

When I was in grade school, in my small Nebraska town, the father of one of my classmates would regularly get drunk and beat his wife and kids. Back then, that was just a thing everyone deplored, but did nothing about.

The kids in that family were little sociopaths themselves, as I remember from those childhood years. Much later, I heard that my classmate was in the state penitentiary, having been convicted of some violent felony (admittedly, I don't remember the details, if I ever heard them - it could have been just third-hand gossip).

But let's hope that he had kids first, huh? And that maybe he got to beat them around a little bit before the big, bad government locked him away? After all, kids need a father.

Kids need parents. Two is better than one, no doubt, but only if they're both good parents. That's saying nothing against the millions of single parents raising kids. I just suspect that parenthood is difficult enough that, ideally, two people sharing the duty might lessen the burden a bit (at least the financial burden, which is considerable).

But there are a lot of things that go into that, and in many cases single parenthood is preferable. In many more cases, it's just necessary. Being a single parent is difficult, but most single parents work hard to do it well.

Heck, it's tough enough even for a couple, I know. And all the studies I've seen indicate that children raised by homosexual couples - or biracial couples, for that matter - are just as happy and well-adjusted as those raised by white, heterosexual couples. OK, maybe they tend to be less racist and homophobic, if that's a problem for you.

Evidence, of course, means nothing to the faith-based. But how about this? It's none of your business! Yes, we all have a duty to see that children aren't abused, either physically or mentally. We all have a duty to see that children get a good education, that they get enough to eat, that they have a secure place to live.

But if your idea of what God wants is different from someone else's idea - whether or not they even believe in a god - that's none of your business. If two adults want to get married, that's none of your business. It's their business.

I don't want to return to the days when a drunk could freely beat his wife and children because it was no one else's business. But that doesn't mean I want the government in the bedroom, either, or local busybodies in charge of every detail of a person's life. There is a happy medium, you know.

Republicans seem to be so eager to run everyone else's life for them. Gee, that's real generous, I'm sure. But considering David Vitter, Mark Foley, Newt Gingrich, Ted Haggard, Larry Craig, Bob Allen, Mark Sanford, Ed Schrock, Rush Limbaugh, and many, many more, maybe these people should worry more about running their own life.

Back to the future in "moderate" New Hampshire

2012-01-10T10:39:00.000-06:00

Indecision 2012 - New Hampshire GOP Debates - Moderate Extremes

Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c

Republicans take looking back at the past through rose-colored glasses to a whole new level, don't they?

Sure, the party generally targets the elderly, working to attract people who are easy to scare, gullible enough to believe Fox "News," and with social opinions formed when America was far more racist and homophobic. But the Magna Carta? Are they going after the vampire vote now?

But Stephen Colbert explains it: "Remember, the Magna Carta was written by angry rich men who believed their ruler was an illegitimate usurper." Heh, heh. Makes perfect sense now, doesn't it?

Note that this was Colbert's second segment of the night on the New Hampshire primary. The first is here. I didn't include it, because I'm shortly going to be posting yet another video clip from last night's show. Yeah, the Colbert Report is an embarrassment of riches.

Punishing success

2012-01-10T10:07:00.000-06:00

Indecision 2012 - Extremely Loud & Incredibly Wealthy

Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c