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Confessions of a Tea Party casualty

Bob Inglis is a Republican Congressman from South Carolina with a 93% lifetime rating from the American Conservative Union. But on June 22nd this year, he was defeated in the primary runoff for re-election 29% to 71% because he wasn't sufficiently loony conservative enough for the crazies who now control the GOP.

Hey, I can't feel too sorry for Republican leaders who've been hoist with their own petard. The GOP has been wooing the crazies for more than forty years (beginning with their "Southern Strategy" of appealing to southern white racists after the Democrats outlawed official segregation, and continuing with fundamentalist Christians during the Bush years). But here's a fascinating article about a right-wing politician who discovered that the lunatics really have taken control of the asylum:

It was the middle of a tough primary contest, and Rep. Bob Inglis (R-S.C.) had convened a small meeting with donors who had contributed thousands of dollars to his previous campaigns. But this year, as Inglis faced a challenge from tea party-backed Republican candidates claiming Inglis wasn't sufficiently conservative, these donors hadn't ponied up. Inglis' task: Get them back on the team. "They were upset with me," Inglis recalls. "They are all Glenn Beck watchers." About 90 minutes into the meeting, as he remembers it, "They say, 'Bob, what don't you get? Barack Obama is a socialist, communist Marxist who wants to destroy the American economy so he can take over as dictator. Health care is part of that. And he wants to open up the Mexican border and turn [the US] into a Muslim nation.'" Inglis didn't know how to respond.

A lesser man - say, nearly any other Republican politician - would have simply agreed with them and sent them away happy. I've got to give Inglis that.

Shortly before the runoff primary election, Inglis met with about a dozen tea party activists at the modest ranch-style home of one of them. Here's what took place:

I sat down, and they said on the back of your Social Security card, there's a number. That number indicates the bank that bought you when you were born based on a projection of your life's earnings, and you are collateral. We are all collateral for the banks. I have this look like, "What the heck are you talking about?" I'm trying to hide that look and look clueless. I figured clueless was better than argumentative. So they said, "You don't know this?! You are a member of Congress, and you don't know this?!" And I said, "Please forgive me. I'm just ignorant of these things." And then of course, it turned into something about the Federal Reserve and the Bilderbergers and all that stuff. And now you have the feeling of anti-Semitism here coming in, mixing in. Wow.

OK, so he didn't try to set them straight, either. But he apparently had some qualms about this kind of thing. Unfortunately, he was just about the only one.

Inglis found that ideological extremism is not only the realm of the tea party; it also has infected the official circles of his Republican Party. In early 2009, he attended a meeting of the GOP's Greenville County executive committee. At the time, Republicans were feeling discouraged. Obama was in the White House; the Democrats had enlarged their majorities in the House and Senate. The GOP seemed to be in tatters. But Inglis had what he considered good news. He put up a slide he had first seen at a GOP retreat. It was based on exit polling conducted during the November 2008 election. The slide, according to Inglis, showed that when American voters were asked to place themselves on an ideological spectrum—1 being liberal, 10 being conservative—the average ended up at about 5.6. The voters placed House Republicans at about 6.5 and House Democrats at about 4.3. Inglis told his fellow Republicans, "This is great news," explaining it meant that the GOP was still closer to the American public than the Democrats. The key, he said, was for the party to keep to the right, without driving off the road.

Inglis was met, he says with "stony" faces: "There's a short story by Shirley Jackson, 'The Lottery.'" The tale describes a town where the residents stone a neighbor who is chosen randomly. "That's what the crowd looked like. I got home that night and said to my wife, 'You can't believe how they looked back at me.' It was really frightening." The next speaker, he recalls, said, "'On Bob's ideological spectrum up there, I'm a 10,' and the crowd went wild. That was what I was dealing with."

Still, I don't want to give Inglis too much credit. As I say, this stuff has been building for years, and Inglis was right in there urging the crazies on:

Inglis acknowledges he's intimately familiar with extreme politics. He was part of the GOP gang that went after Clinton and impeached him for the Lewinsky affair:

I hated Bill Clinton. I wanted to destroy him. Then I had six years out [after leaving Congress in 1999] to look back on that, and now I would confess it as a sin. It is just wrong to want to destroy another human being and to spend so much time and effort trying to destroy Bill Clinton—some of it with really suspect information. We went on and on about Whitewater. We had talked about the strange things about Vince Foster's death. The drug dealing at Mena airport. So in the six years I was out, I looked back and realized, "Oh what a waste."

It's easy to say that you're sorry afterward. Meanwhile, you've gotten exactly what you wanted. Likewise, these are the statements of a man who knows that he has no political future. I give Inglis some credit, certainly, but he's no hero.

After all, this is what the Republican Party has been working towards for decades now. This is where their sick relationship with Fox "News" has led them. This is what comes from sucking up to white racists and right-wing religious fanatics. They tried to use the lunatics, and now they find that they're riding the tiger and can't dismount.

So I don't feel sorry for Republican politicians, not at all. I feel sorry for the rest of us.

Pocket protector

Ed Stein's commentary:

I’m still trying to get my head around how anyone can support the Republican Party in the upcoming elections. I know they have a big lead in the polls, and I understand that the party in power usually takes it on the chin when the economy is bad, and this economy is REALLY bad. Still, what has the GOP done to merit our trust? To date, opposed extending health insurance to the almost 50 million Americans without it, opposed the climate bill (Republicans supported cap and trade when it was their idea), opposed toughening offshore oil drilling regulations (even in the wake of the BP disaster), opposed extending unemployment benefits during the worst recession in our lifetime, opposed further stimulus (even though it clearly kept the economy from tanking even further), and the latest outrage, opposed transparency in campaign funding. The only thing the party has come out in favor of is extending the Bush tax cuts to the wealthiest Americans, even though that giveaway to the rich, enacted while we were fighting two unfunded wars, is largely responsible for the massive deficit the GOP now swears is our biggest problem. This is the same party, if you remember, that told us, when the tax cuts were enacted, that deficits don’t matter.
Somehow, though, they’ve persuaded a majority of Americans that they deserve another shot at wrecking the country. If you like oil in your oceans, melting ice caps and rising seas, larger deficits, greater unemployment, cuts in Social Security, Medicare and little what remains of the safety net, a shrinking middle class, the wealthy grabbing an ever larger share of the pie, and are fine with not knowing who funds political campaigns, then by all means, put these guys back in power. You’ll get what you deserve.

What can I add to that? I agree completely. How can anyone still support the Republican Party? They nearly destroyed our country during the Bush years,... and they haven't changed their policies one bit! Meanwhile, they're doing their best to keep the Democrats from accomplishing anything productive, because they know that ignorant voters will blame the party in power when things are bad.

So, not only has the GOP nearly destroyed our economy, our military, our system of government, our honor, and our national reputation, they're trying to make things even worse, just to advance their own political ambitions. Frankly, I don't know how Republican politicians - not to mention everyone working for Fox "News" - can look in a mirror these days. And I really don't understand how these cynical tactics could possibly be working!

But I disagree about one thing. Those Americans who vote to put these people back in power - not to mention those too lazy or apathetic to vote at all - may deserve what they get, but I don't. Nor do all the other sane people in America. Unfortunately, we're all in this together.

Dummies United

Epistemological relativism

(Jesus and Mo)

Teaching nonsense

In Australia, fundamentalist Christians are teaching complete nonsense to elementary school children in public schools - yes, in public schools - in their Religious Instruction classes. Here are some excerpts from the article:

Primary school students are being taught that man and dinosaurs walked the Earth together and that there is fossil evidence to prove it.

Students have been told Noah collected dinosaur eggs to bring on the Ark, and Adam and Eve were not eaten by dinosaurs because they were under a protective spell.

Set Free Christian Church's Tim McKenzie said when students questioned him why dinosaur fossils carbon dated as earlier than man, he replied that the great flood must have skewed the data.

PhD researcher Cathy Byrne found in a NSW-based survey that scripture teachers tended to discourage questioning, emphasised submission to authority and excluded different beliefs. She said 70 per cent of scripture teachers thought children should be taught the Bible as historical fact.

A parent of a Year 5 student on the Sunshine Coast said his daughter was ostracised to the library after arguing with her scripture teacher about DNA.

"The scripture teacher told the class that all people were descended from Adam and Eve," he said.

"My daughter rightly pointed out, as I had been teaching her about DNA and science, that 'wouldn't they all be inbred'?

"But the teacher replied that DNA wasn't invented then."

Crazy, isn't it? Apparently, "any interested lay person" can conduct these half-hour classes. Although parents can opt out, their children tend to be ostracized and discriminated against. Well, sure. It's always difficult for any child who appears different than the rest.

According to the article, three in ten Australians think that dinosaurs and people coexisted in the past! Hard to believe, isn't it? But I'd hate to see the numbers here in America. At least we don't have religious nuts teaching this kind of lunacy in our public schools, not yet, anyway. But I hate to think of what children are being taught in private schools, or when being home-schooled.

Target donating to right-wing candidate

Now that the Supreme Court's conservative wing has decided that corporations are just people, too, Target has donated $150,000 to the campaign of Tom Emmer, Republican candidate for governor of Minnesota. This is a homemade video by a Minnesota grandmother - and the mother of a gay son - who wasn't willing to let that go without protest.

Think about it. Even if you support Emmer, how do you think your $50 donation to his campaign stacks up against $150,000 from Target? Do you really think that Emmer will care two hoots for what you think, compared to the views of his corporate benefactor?

From Target's point of view, purchasing a politician might be just a good business investment. Or, alternately, this could be just because of the right-wing political views of its CEO, using corporate money to advance his own agenda. But what if you own shares of the company, perhaps through a mutual fund in your IRA. Technically, you're a part owner of the company, so it's partially your money going to fund this right-wing politician. But you've got absolute no say over the decision. (You'd have very little say over the decision even if you owned shares directly, not compared with, say, wealthy investors in Saudi Arabia or Hong Kong, who might be able to influence Target management.)

According to the right-wing fanatics on the Supreme Court (as usual, the Citizens United decision was 5 to 4), multinational corporations and their wealthy CEOs apparently didn't have enough power in our political system as it was. And the fact that such corporations are foreign-owned, at least in part, didn't dissuade them, either. Well, what's good for multinational corporations is good for America, right? Heck, why don't we just let them run for office themselves, and skip the middle-man?

The fact is, corporations aren't people. Corporations don't make decisions, their management does. Furthermore, ownership isn't control. You may own shares in a corporation without having any control over what they do. In fact, for most of us, that's almost always the case. So a CEO can give your money to a right-wing candidate who'll pledge to lower the CEO's taxes, and there's absolutely nothing you can do about it.

Well, you can protest. You can contact Target. You can cut up your Target charge card, like this woman did. But for the most part, you probably won't know when corporations do this kind of thing. And when they all start doing it, you might have trouble shopping anywhere.

Long-term, you can simply vote for progressive politicians, especially for President. The Supreme Court is making such loony decisions - this is far from the only one, all made on a 5-4 vote - because past Republican presidents have appointed far-right extremists to this lifetime position. Now, their decisions are making it easier to keep electing corporate shills. We're paying for our previous mistakes - paying in so very many ways.

For decades now, we've been on the wrong path in America. When will we citizens wake up and change course?

We need more Democrats like this

Sometimes we need to get angry. We need this passion. Frankly, the whole country should be angry about what the Republicans are doing, putting partisan politics above our country. I don't know how Weiner's outburst will play out politically, and I don't care. Sometimes, you just have to do the right thing.

In this case, it was a bill to provide health care aid to 9/11 rescue and recovery workers who've faced health problems since the attack. Republicans claimed that they supported the bill, but voted against it for "procedural reasons." In reality, the GOP is trying to stop - or at least delay - all legislation, simply because the Democrats are in charge. If it hadn't been this excuse, it would have been another.

There's an editorial in my local newspaper today which praises Sen. Mike Johanns (R - NE) for voting against the DISCLOSE Act, the current campaign finance bill. No, Johanns didn't actually vote against the bill, because - as usual - Republicans didn't even allow the bill to get a vote. (It would have passed easily if they'd permitted a vote.) He joined every other Republican in their filibuster, and his excuse was the exception carved out of the bill for the NRA. Seriously. That was his excuse.

Leaving aside the laughable suggestion that any Republican would object to giving the NRA exactly what it wanted, the fact is that Johanns, like every other Republican, would have filibustered the bill no matter what it included - just like they've filibustered everything. It has nothing to do with the contents of the bill and everything to do with partisan politics. After all, Republicans could always have proposed an amendment removing the exemption. Why didn't they, if that was their real objection?

Indeed, the only reason the exemption was included in the first place was in a vain attempt to get some Republican to put our country above partisan politics (and because, while the GOP continues to play its partisan political games, bills must try to get every single Democratic vote - even those from very conservative Democrats). That means that bills are weakened, and loaded with exemptions, in order to get every single Democrat in agreement - including some who are Democrats in name only - and in the further hope of getting just one Republican to do the right thing.

The pattern has been that one or two Republicans - no more - indicate that they might be willing to break a filibuster if the Democrats accede to their every whim. So the Democrats compromise, and the Republicans find new objections. Eventually (all this takes time, which is the whole point), there's only a small kernel of value still remaining in the bill,... and then the Republicans don't break the filibuster after all. It was all just a head-fake, just a political game, just a way to keep the Democrats beating their heads against a brick wall.

This is not how our government was ever designed to work, and it has never been this way in the past. Our democracy is broken because Republicans are playing political games and we citizens aren't holding them accountable. Indeed, hard as this is to believe, their disgusting political tactics actually seem to be working. How dumb can we be to not just let this continue, but to actually reward them for it?

Normally, when a political party moves to the extremes, as the Republican Party has, they lose in the general election. Normally, when a political party plays partisan games instead of working for the good of our country, they fail to get majority support. This tends to keep both parties near the political center. But when the economy is hurting like this, when times are really bad, voters almost always punish the party in power,... even when it was the other party which collapsed the economy in the first place!

Furthermore, these days we've got Fox "News" pushing right-wing propaganda day and night. Thanks to previous Republican administrations, we've got the Supreme Court packed with right-wing extremists who've decided that multinational corporations need even more power to influence our elections. Sure, none of this would work if we Americans were smart enough and courageous enough, but it seems that we're not. And with our first non-white president in office, racism is also a big part of this. It's easy for many whites to believe the worst of blacks, even when it's nonsensical.

But the biggest problem right now might be the enthusiasm gap. After nearly destroying America in recent years, thanks to the worst presidential administration in U.S. history, you'd think the right-wing would be hanging their heads in shame. But given this bad economy (which the Republicans are doing their best to prolong) the extremists sense blood in the water.

Progressives, on the other hand, are discouraged. Government is harder than they expected. Americans are dumber. And Democratic politicians are all too eager to compromise with people who have no interest in compromising. Democrats, you need to start behaving like Anthony Weiner if you ever hope to bridge this enthusiasm gap. Progressive politicians need to start fighting for what is right. What's the worst that could happen, you'd lose? You're losing already.

Ticking tax bomb... with lime

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I feel like such a geek

OK, The Guild must be about the geekiest thing in the world anyway, but this takes it to a whole new level, don't you think?

I don't play these kinds of games, but I'm close enough to the gaming world to get a real kick out of The Guild. If you've never heard of it, check it out on YouTube . You'll want to start with Season 1, Episode 1. Don't worry; each episode is only a few minutes long.

It's a web series about obsessive gamers who get to know each other in real life, and if you have any online friends at all, you'll start to wonder how real this might be. Heh, heh. Well, maybe not, but it is pretty funny - at least if you're a gamer yourself.

Note the balding gamer with a toaster, microwave, and refrigerator, all within reach. Maybe I need to set up something like that.  :)  And there's the neglectful mother, with her kids gnawing on a power strip or locked away in the kitchen. (Let's hope that's not realistic!) Really, the characters are all strangely plausible.

Apparently, they're up to Season 4, but I haven't seen it since... Season 2?  So I guess I'll have to get caught up now.

Race baiting

(Ed Stein)

I've been wanting to post about the Shirley Sherrod incident, but what can I say that's not obvious? This isn't the first time Andrew Breitbart has published a fake video. Remember that fake ACORN video which destroyed that non-profit community organization? So why did everyone automatically believe it this time? Was it just that no one could believe that even he would be this blatant, to manipulate a video so that it would give the exact opposite impression from what was really being said?

That does take gall, I must admit. But why not? Breitbart hasn't seemed to suffer a bit from either shameful incident. In fact, he's the new hero of the far-right. David Frum talks about the shame of conservative media, but he's very much an exception (Frum has suffered already for being a conservative honest enough to tell the truth):

By the morning of July 20 the Sherrod-as-racist narrative had collapsed.

What is most fascinating about that second day, however, was the conservative reaction to the collapse. At midday on the 20th, Rush Limbaugh was still praising Breitbart: "I know that Andrew Breitbart's done great work getting this video of Ms. Sherrod at the U.S. Department of Agriculture and her supposed racism and so forth saying she's not gonna help a white farmer."

By the evening of the 20th, however, conservatives were backing away, acknowledging that an innocent women had been defamed. ...

But you’ll never guess who emerged as the villains of the story in this second-day conservative react. Not Andrew Breitbart, the distributor of a falsified tape. No, the villains were President Obama and the NAACP for believing Breitbart's falsehood.

Breitbart went almost universally unmentioned. Erickson even justified Breitbart's falsehood as a tragic but necessary and justifiable measure of conservative self-defense...

Progressives aren't any too happy with Barack Obama on this one, either (aren't, indeed, overly happy anyway, having gotten a far more moderate president than they expected, and one apparently so intent on getting along with his enemies that he won't fight for what's right), but there's an obvious reason why race baiting works with this administration. It's not admirable that they were so willing to believe the worst, especially on the shaky evidence of a man already proven to post fake videos, but this kind of narrative is kryptonite to our first black president. (And all too many white people are shamefully eager to believe that whole "reverse racism" thing.)

When it comes to the NAACP, you've got to contrast their response - quickly denouncing an apparent instance of black racism - with the right-wing response to Breitbart's shenanigans (he's now headlining a Republican National Committee fundraiser in California). The NAACP may indeed have shown gullibility, but at least they were eager to do the right thing. Republicans, on the other hand, seem to have no problem with deliberate falsehoods (having become inured to such things from many years of watching Fox "News," I suppose).

At any rate, the fact that the right-wing is trying to blame Barack Obama and the NAACP for this incident is just disgusting.

Politico blames partisanship. It's "the age of rage." Yes, yes. Always, when we see something like this from the right-wing - something deceitful, something shameful, something beyond all reasonable standards of correct behavior - we inevitably get the response that "both sides do it." Yes, it's terrible how partisan politics plays out in America, isn't it?

But this kind of response excuses the inexcusable. No, both sides don't do it, certainly not to this extent. If, whenever something shameful like this is discovered, we "tsk, tsk" about politics in general, we are just giving a free pass to the worst people in our society. We don't excuse a murderer by regretfully noting the general amount of violence in America. Some things are wrong, and the perpetrator should be soundly condemned.

I like how Alex Pareene puts it in this jab at Politico:

Real-life reporters are supposed to be baffled as to how to respond to this fact-lite outrage? Shouldn't they have just found the full video, or interviewed Sherrod, like the Atlanta Journal-Constitution did? If you have to write about the latest Breitbart outrage RIGHT THIS SECOND, you write, "Bomb-throwing propagandist with history of disregard for factual accuracy posts race-baiting video intended to score political points against NAACP and black people in general." It was a really easy story! And the next Andrew Breitbart outrage will be the same story! It is not "partisan" or "biased" to call Andrew Breitbart a liar, because he lies.

Now, right-wingers apparently have a new strategy, to call Shirley Sherrod a liar because she claimed that her father was lynched, when he was actually beaten to death. As TPM points out, these lunatics need to buy a dictionary. "Lynch" means to kill without a legal trial. You don't have to hang a man in order to "lynch" him.

But still, what kind of mindset would think that an appropriate take on this situation in the first place? Sherrod's father was murdered by white men. And later, when working for a non-profit organization (none of this happened when she worked for the government), she felt some reluctance, at first, in helping a white couple save their family farm, especially when so many black people had lost theirs. But she overcame that natural feeling.

It's a truly inspiring story,... and then for race-baiting purposes, a right-winger deliberately edited the video to make it seem just the reverse. So now they're going to argue - erroneously, like all of their arguments, it seems - about the meaning of the word, "lynch"? You've got to be kidding me!

Here, incidentally, is a video interview of the white couple Sherrod helped:



As it turned out, both Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert were on vacation when this story broke, but each had something to say about it last night. I'll embed the video clips below the fold. Click to continue.

The fierce competition for crazy

TPM points out the fierce competition for crazy in GOP primaries around the country, with Republican candidates desperate to prove there's no one loonier than they are. In the three-way struggle for governor of Tennessee, Lt. Gov. Ron Ramsey suggests that Islam is not "actually" a religion, and therefore might not be entitled to First Amendment protections. Incredible, isn't it? Yeah, big deal, huh? It's just the Constitution.

Remember the effort after 9/11 to convince Muslims that we weren't a Christian nation waging a "crusade" against their religion. Well, that's too reasonable for the right-wing crazies who've taken over the Republican Party these days. The hot topic in Tennessee right now is the community center which Muslims in the state propose building. How dare they!

Well, Ramsey has to out-crazy his competition. You can't afford to appear lacking in the crazy department in the GOP this year. Just a few days ago, one of his opponents, Rep. Zach Wamp warned that states might have to secede from the Union if the health care reform bill isn't repealed. He's echoing Texas governor Rick Perry on that. Apparently, secession is how real patriots show their patriotism (kind of like how Sarah Palin demonstrated that she wasn't a quitter by... quitting). But clearly Ramsey was feeling the heat and needed to demonstrate real lunacy himself.

Earlier this month, Bradley Byrne lost the Republican gubernatorial runoff in Alabama. You see, in May, he was hit by accusations that he actually supported... teaching evolution in public schools! Yes, shocking, isn't it? He fought back, vehemently proclaiming his belief in creationism and the "infallible truth" of the Bible, but apparently just the hint that he wasn't loony enough sealed his doom.

Not all Republican politicians are dumb enough to actually believe what they're saying, but they'll say anything they have to say - and support whatever policy they have to support - to keep the real crazies happy. (Actually, they've been doing that since they adopted the "Southern Strategy" of appealing to white racists forty years ago.) Ken Buck, who's actually supposed to be the Tea Party candidate in Colorado's Republican senatorial primary, was just caught on tape saying, "Will you tell those dumbasses at the Tea Party to stop asking questions about birth certificates while I'm on the camera?" That's probably not going to do him a lot of good among his fans, is it?

Now, ordinarily, any political party that goes off the deep end like this loses in the general election. When the crazies select their favorites in the primary, or when politicians at least have to kowtow to the crazies, it usually spells doom for their party. But it doesn't seem to be working like that now. Mostly, that's because we're still in a terrible recession. Sure, it's the GOP that gave us this recession - and the record-breaking deficit and the never-ending war in Afghanistan - but voters just aren't that smart.

But I've got to think that racism is working here, too. Republicans from Fox "News" on down have been pushing racial fear and animosity like, er, crazy. There's a reason why that fake video pushed by Andrew Breibart targeted a black woman in the Obama administration. And sadly enough, with our first black president, it seems to be working. Apparently, it's easy to think the worst of people who aren't white like us, even when the accusations are laugh-out-loud ridiculous.

I fear for my country, I really do. I thought that, after the Bush administration, we might have learned something. But it sure doesn't look that way now. Republicans aren't even bothering to propose new policies. They're simply proposing the same policies that already failed - thoroughly and undeniably - in the Bush years. I don't know if the craziest stuff can get through Congress, but that might not matter. This country needs to change course. If we do nothing, that will destroy us just as effectively - if a bit more slowly - as the worst GOP policy.

In fact, despite Fox "News," the loonies aren't a majority in America. But younger progressives just don't VOTE like the elderly white folks - easily frightened and oh, so gullible - targeted by the right-wing. After all, you might not have voted for George W. Bush, but if you were too lazy to vote at all, you're just as much at fault. And if you don't vote going forward, no matter how discouraged or unhappy you might be, the results will be your fault, too. A democracy requires an intelligent, informed, and active citizenry, and two out of three ain't any good at all.

If Jeopardy was run by Fox News

(The Far Left Side)

Anxiously awaiting the next bubble

Ed Stein's commentary:

Financial reform actually passed. Another victory for Obama, despite the furious objection of the other party and their Wall Street masters. Much too late, of course, and not strong enough, but at least they’re turning the Titanic slowly away from the deregulatory daze that got us into this mess in the first place. That’s little solace to those of us who have watched our investments dwindle. We could use a little old-fashioned irrational exuberance. Where’s the next bubble going to come from if Wall Street is held accountable? I’m going to have to go back to making money the old-fashioned way, by working for it. And I don’t like it one bit. Let’s have one more round of insanely inflated stock prices. This time I’ll get out when I have enough to retire, and I won’t care when the inevitable bust comes. Then you can regulate all you want. Sound like a plan?

Heh, heh. I thought this was funny, because I'll bet there are a lot of people with the same idea. But irrational exuberance doesn't work that way. When the next bubble comes along, more people will be getting in at the top than will be getting out. That's just the way it works.

Of course, you don't have to be one of them. But tell me, in March of last year, when pretty much no one was optimistic, were you scrambling to put as much cash into the market as you could? That's when you need to invest, you know, when the sky is falling. But it's not easy. And you can't expect to time the market exactly. It's quite likely that you'll invest and then see the market continue to fall. Do you have the courage to accept that?

When Lehman Brothers collapsed in the fall of 2008, panic struck the stock market. Stock prices seemed to be in free fall. But following Warren Buffett's dictum to be greedy when others are fearful, I was a buyer. Prices rose again almost immediately, but in a few months, the market tanked, going even lower for awhile. Again, we were in panic mode, and again, I tried to scrape up some cash for more investments.

I was lucky. There were good reasons to be fearful (there always are), and the market could have continued to drop. Heck, we could easily test those lows again, since we may well be dropping back into recession (not enough stimulus spending and the deliberate attempt of Republicans to sabotage our economy for political purposes). My point is that it's not easy going against the crowd. Good investors make their money when everything seems to be going to hell (and through patient accumulation the rest of the time).

Bad investors, on the other hand, cash out at the bottom and then jump back in when everyone is talking about the easy money to be made in the stock market. Well, they don't call it irrational exuberance for nothing. It's when prices go up - and up and up - that you should start to get worried. But again, that's not how it works.

"This time, yes, give me a bubble and I'll get out at the top." But you probably won't. For one thing, it's seldom easy to tell that we're in a bubble, not ahead of time (hindsight is always 20/20). For another, irrational exuberance can go on for a long, long time. What if you get out and the market continues up for another year, or two? And for a third, seriously, no one can reliably predict such things. Getting out of the market at the top of a bubble is probably not anything you should even attempt.

Don't take financial advice from me. I'm nobody, and I've certainly made my share of mistakes. But here's how I do it. As a general rule, I stay diversified and fully invested (except for an emergency cash reserve). I don't think that anyone can reliably time the market, not in ordinary circumstances. After all, you're competing against the wisdom of crowds.

People are always buying and selling, so no matter what happens, some people will always get it right. But you can't predict that ahead of time. If monkeys were throwing darts to make investment decisions, you'd see the exact same thing. Some of them would look like great investors, at least in the short term. It's simply a product of statistics.

But in times of widespread panic - and also in times of irrational exuberance - the wisdom of crowds breaks down. Crowds turn into mobs. You lose diversity of thought. You lose independence. People tend to follow the mob, because of either fear or greed. You need to take advantage of these occasions, at least to some extent. When it looks like a bubble, I try to take some cash out of the market. I never get out completely. After all, I could be wrong. And I'd have to pay taxes, which means that I'd lose some of my return right off the bat. But when times are really good, it never hurts to accumulate a bit of cash. (The market may continue to rise, sure, but you probably won't make the big money from that point on.)

For the rest of it, I try to underweight what's really been booming and overweight what has lagged the market. During the tech stock mania at the end of the 1990's, I took some profits in the tech sector and invested in small-cap value stocks, which had been lagging badly. When the tech bubble collapsed, small-cap value stocks rose strongly, at least the first year. There were several bad years then, but they were far, far worse for tech stocks than for other parts of the market.

One of the problems with timing the market is that you have to be right twice. You have to get out of the market at the right time, and then you have to get back in the market at the right time. Neither of these are easy, not at all. If the market goes down, you might be tempted to buy again. And you might be right. Or it might be the very beginning of a terrible bear market. It's just really hard - nay, impossible - to tell. But when you need to buy again is when panic strikes. If everyone is running for the hills, that's the time you can find some real buys.

Of course, you have to have the cash in order to buy. One of the problems at market bottoms is that cash can be hard to come by. If you've taken some cash out of the market during the bubble (and resisted the urge to reinvest at the first sign of weakness), that will help. But when times are bad, your job may not be secure. You might just need that cash. None of this is easy. Do not expect to get it perfectly right, and do expect for things to go horribly wrong sometimes. (Note that I recommend keeping an emergency cash reserve at all times. How much depends on your own circumstances, but the volatility of the stock market will hurt you badly if you're forced to sell at a low point.)

This is more than you wanted to hear, no doubt. If you're still with me, are you looking for my current forecast? Frankly, I have no idea. I'm not optimistic, not in today's political climate. As a people, we're apparently not smart enough to learn from experience. We learned during the Great Depression that government stimulus was the best answer to an economic collapse. Since private demand evaporates, with people either losing their jobs or worried about the future (and therefore saving what money they have), government must temporarily step in. This gets people working again, and money going to low and middle income people will get spent, which doubles and triples the effect. (Extra money for the wealthy is almost useless, since they won't spend much of it.)

But Republicans see a political advantage in keeping us in recession. The average voter isn't too bright, and we tend to blame the party in power for bad times. Of course, these bad times were caused by Republican policies, not by Barack Obama. And the deficit - which the Tea Party movement supposedly abhors - is the result of actions taken during the Bush administration: tax cuts for the rich (which were supposed to pay for themselves with a "trickle-down" effect, but didn't), two unnecessary wars (fought on credit, since they were also supposed to "pay for themselves" - needless to say, this was just fantasy, too), the economic collapse itself (due to their mania for deregulation and the bubbles created by those tax cuts for the rich), and the interest payments for all this.

The GOP isn't even bothering to change policies. They're pushing the exact same policies that were proven failures during the Bush years. Hard to believe, isn't it? What's even harder to believe is that we seem to be dumb enough to buy it! I don't care how hard Fox "News" pushes this stuff, it's still incredible. How can we be this dumb? Or is it more a matter of cowardice? We Americans seem to have become hopeless cowards in recent years. Is fear simply making us irrational?

At any rate, I'm not optimistic right now, not at all. But I certainly don't see irrational exuberance in the market, either. For the most part, I'm hearing doom and gloom, and that tends to be a positive indicator. The stock market always "climbs a wall of worry." If people are worried, they don't create bubbles. But that's not to say that they're wrong to worry, either.

In times like these - which is pretty much the normal state of affairs for the stock market - I'm quite willing to admit that I have no idea. Whatever happens, I'll ride it out. Stocks are volatile. I know that, and I'm prepared for it (or I think I am). At the moment, I can't see any part of the market that seems exceptionally cheap, so I don't intend to move things around, either.

Deflation or even a double-dip recession would be bad for stocks but good for long-term government bonds. But bond yields are already so low that it's hardly worth the bet. Inflation (which appears less likely to me) would be bad for bonds, but possibly good for stocks, at least in moderation. Stagnation would be good for no one. But in the short-term, at least, I just don't know.

In the long-term, things don't look good if we don't wise up. Here in America, we've been on the wrong path for decades now. Since the 1970's, we've been ignoring the energy crisis. We've stuck our heads in the sand in regards to global warming (and we'll have to pay for that, eventually). We've let the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. The average worker was better off in the late 1970's than he is today - actually, than he was even before this economic collapse.

We no longer lead the world in education, and we're becoming virulently anti-immigrant (odd for a nation of immigrants, isn't it?). We've stopped creating anything but arcane financial instruments - which have just been shown to be mostly a scam. And the Supreme Court has decided (5 to 4, as usual) that multinational corporations are people, too. If you're extremely wealthy, you're probably happy as a lark. But how long can that last if America slowly disintegrates into bigotry, fear, and superstition?

Yes, I'm pessimistic. But frankly, long-term pessimism doesn't make sense. Pessimistic people never accomplished anything. America used to have that can-do spirit, that sense of optimism that often seemed crazy to other people. How could we be optimistic when the future looked so black? But optimism is necessary for change. No matter how bleak things might seem, we can't lose that. And there is a lot of good in America yet. Turn off Fox "News." Ignore the Tea Party. And kick yourself in the butt, if necessary, to lose that apathy. Vote, damn it! The future is ours to make. So let's make sure that it's a good one.

Girl raised by Wolf

Girl Raised From Birth By Wolf Blitzer Taken Into Protective Custody

It's simple

(Jesus and Mo)

Superheroes vs. the Westborough Baptist Church

Fred Phelps and a handful of anti-gay loonies from his Westboro Baptist Church decided to picket Comic-Con in San Diego, but the nerds were ready for them:

Unbeknownst to the dastardly fanatics of the Westboro Baptist Church, the good folks of San Diego's Comic-Con were prepared for their arrival with their own special brand of superhuman counter protesting chanting "WHAT DO WE WANT" "GAY SEX" "WHEN DO WE WANT IT" "NOW!" while brandishing ironic (and some sincere) signs. Simply stated: The eclectic assembly of nerdom's finest stood and delivered.

There are more photos of the counter protest at the above link. It's really pretty funny - not as weird as the Westboro Baptist Church itself, but much more fun.

Dummies, take back America!

Check out How Dummies Protect Marriage, too. Actually, they're all pretty funny.

Is experience the best teacher?

We often hear that experience is the best teacher. Of course, no one actually believes that. If we did, we wouldn't teach our children. We certainly wouldn't send them to school for so many years. Experience is one of the worst teachers, in fact.

Do you tell your children to look both ways before crossing the street, or let them learn from experience? Do you warn them against eating holly berries and drinking antifreeze, or do you let them learn from experience? Do you caution them about pots on the stove, perhaps filled with boiling hot liquids, or let them learn from experience?

Obviously, one of the problems with learning from experience is that you first have to survived the experience. If the only way we can learn not to jump from a tall cliff is by experience, few people will learn not to jump from a tall cliff. If you expect your children to learn by trial and error, they may or may not learn to look both ways before crossing the street. And if they do learn it, they might not survive long enough for it to matter.

But there's another problem with learning from experience, and that's what you learn. If you vaccinate your kids and, soon after, one of them is diagnosed with autism, what do you learn? You should learn nothing from that, since there's no evidence vaccines cause autism. Children are given vaccines and children sometimes get autism, but that doesn't indicate a link between the two. You might as well connect autism with drinking milk or playing games.

If you have a bad cold, and you go to a homeopath, an acupuncturist, or a faith healer, after which you feel better, what have you learned? Again, nothing. Obviously, there's no evidence that the treatment actually cured the cold, especially since colds normally go away on their own. (Experience might teach you that, true enough, but if you catch something serious, it could easily be another story.) Or maybe it was simply the placebo effect.

In the Middle Ages, if you were very lucky, you might have survived the plague, but what would you have learned from it? Since the Jews were frequently blamed (human beings are always eager to find a scapegoat), you might have "learned" to burn the ghetto and keep Jews out of your town. Jews tended to avoid the worst of the plague, simply because they were cleaner than Christians. They had fewer fleas and their homes had fewer rats. But, ironically, you might have "learned" to stay dirty, so that you wouldn't be mistaken for a secret Jew.

We human beings have language and culture, so we don't have to learn from experience. We teach our children. We learn from others. We all stand on the shoulders of giants. We build on our store of knowledge, so that we know far, far more than any individual could ever learn from his own experience. And one of the things we've learned is a better way of acquiring knowledge: science.

The scientific method is easily the best way we've ever discovered of determining the truth. We've almost certainly learned more from a few hundred years of the scientific method than from all of human history - and prehistory - before it was developed. We've learned more than faith has ever taught us. And experience,... well, experience is part of the scientific method, no doubt, but we don't each have to learn from experience ourselves. And experience without the scientific method is unreliable.

Experience is not the best teacher, far from it. Sometimes, people refuse to learn any other way, but even then, they might well learn the wrong thing (i.e. not really "learn" anything at all). Most people, in fact, will cling to their own biases, rather than learn from their experiences. We need to recognize that, and guard against it happening to us (another reason to value the scientific method).

Here's an interesting take on this, with a slightly different perspective:

The old joke says "Experience is the worst teacher. You get the test first, and the lesson after." And that little jest has more than a grain of truth. Many people assume, as you do, that you learn by doing, that reading is a poor substitute. But reading allows you to learn how many people in many different circumstances have lived their lives and dealt with the complexities of life. You get to experience what it is like to be another person, to live in different centuries, to be old, or young. or dying or in battle. The really important lessons of life have been explored and re-told for centuries. Why should you blunder ahead and make the same mistakes others have made (for the "experience") when a thousand books can bring you the wisdom to make wiser choices. Learning trivial things (how to tie shoelaces) are probably best learned first hand - but the really big things, how to think or love or be kind or value what's important - first get some advice from Shakespeare and Moliere, from Dickens and Updike, from Frost and Tolstoy and a thousand others.

I've always been a reader, so I certainly agree with this. I doubt if reading can ever give the full experience of some things - like dying - but then, I doubt if we really want to learn those through experience. This is a more literary take on the question, while I focused on the scientific. But with either perspective, experience is not the best teacher.

ShakesPalin

But soft, what light from yonder window breaks? It is the East, and I can see Russia from my front porch. (freehawk)

No doubt you've already heard about ShakesPalin on Twitter, but it's just too funny to pass up. Here's Matt DeLong in the Washington Post with a succinct explanation:

A Twitter posting Sunday from former Alaska governor Sarah Palin, in which she claimed common ground with Shakespeare, started the blogosphere's week in rollicking fashion.

Palin tweeted that "peaceful Muslims" should "refudiate" the New York mosque being built near Ground Zero. This prompted plenty of retweets at her expense -- "refudiate," of course, is not a word.

After deleting the offending tweet, Palin replaced it with another, calling on "peaceful New Yorkers" to "refute the Ground Zero mosque plan" -- although the word she was apparently looking for was "repudiate."

Then came the kicker: To quell the ribbing she was receiving on Twitter, Palin  posted another tweet: " 'Refudiate,' 'misunderestimate,' 'wee-wee'd up.' English is a living language. Shakespeare liked to coin new words too. Got to celebrate it!"

This spawned plenty of scorn Monday in liberal blogs, as well as a new meme on Twitter,  #ShakesPalin, in which participants revamped classic Shakespeare quotes, Palin-style.

It's not just liberals, either. The following tweet is by Julian Sanchez of the Cato Institute:

To suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous liberals, or to quit halfterm, and by opposing, rake in speaking fees. (normative)

IMHO, this shows both the power and the limitation of new media, not just Twitter, but cell phone and internet-driven communication in general.

Mine is a tale told by an idiot — full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. (lesleyabravanel)

On the one hand, it's not just a handful of reporters, these days, watching politicians and other celebrities. And where reporters often need to maintain a friendly relationship with the people they cover (or, being human, just want to be liked by the people they're with), ordinary citizens are less likely to practice self-censorship.

Neither a thinker nor a reader be / for thought oft loses both itself and friend / and reading dulls the edge of Fox TV. (djsamk)

And when something breaks, it can be all over the internet in a flash. Plus, we see the incredible creativity of ordinary people. These tweets aren't all great, but the gems certainly do rise to the top. And this is only a sample of the humor - text, videos, cartoons - which is widespread on the internet these days.

To be, or not to be...wait, I wrote the answer on my hand someplace. (Archer070)

It's not just humor, of course. Political commentary is becoming ever more democratic in general. But let's not dismiss the value of ridicule. After all, do we really want another political leader as dumb as George W. Bush - or even dumber? We hear a lot about "elitists," but I want my president to be better educated, more experienced in government, and, yes, smarter than I am. Our founding fathers weren't a bunch of uneducated, inexperienced hicks.

Is that a book deal I see before me? The contract towards my hand? Come let me clutch thee. (phuul)

But there's a limitation to modern technological devices, and Sarah Palin demonstrates that, too. Yes, she's tweeting, but her supporters tend to be the elderly, not the internet-savvy young. And her fans are almost proud of their ignorance. How many of them even know that "refudiate" is not a word? How many care? How much will this really hurt Palin's popularity? Very little, I suspect.

If this were played upon a stage now, I could refudiate it as an improbulous fiction. (dceiver)

But these things certainly cheer me up, and that's not bad, not bad at all. The election this fall is looking bleak, not because so many people have lost their minds, but because of the enthusiasm gap. Republicans plan to vote. Democrats are discouraged - mostly because governing has turned out to be hard work - and discouraged people don't vote. So laugh a little and lighten up. Then, damn it, buckle up and do something! In particular, vote!

The lady doth refudiate too much, methinks. (LonMDR)