Democrats: We Have To Destroy The Country To Save It

I have no idea what this is all about. I can only assume they hyperventilated so much last week they suffered a lack of oxygen to the brain: Impeach the Supreme Court Justices If They Overturn Health-Care Law

The problem with the current court is not merely that there is a good chance it will strike down a clearly constitutional law. The problem is that this decision would be the latest salvo in what seems to be a sustained effort on the part of the Roberts Court to return the country to the Gilded Age.

Uh, ok. Good luck with that "argument." The problem with all of this is it is imbecility bordering on madness. Actually, in the case of historian David Dow, the author of the above, I'm pretty sure he jumped over the border, moved right into looney-toonsville, and built a duplex.

Why are we supposed to think Obamacare is "clearly" cconstitutional? Well, because Dow says it is. After all, who is the Supreme Court to argue with an historian!?! If only Dow had issued his inerrant proclamations earlier we could have foregone all these hearings and court dates and legal briefs and such.

Also, you may be surprised to know that in all the years before Obamacare was passed we were practicing "Social Darwinism." Yes, because those are the only choices. Obamacare or letting babies die in the streets. Who knew?

I'll tell you who it is a shame we cannot impeach; idiot professors whose intellectual dishonesty is only matched by their, to get all urban dictionary here, dumbassery. There are historical analogs to the good professor here. All of the blindly partisan Southern Democrats who sowed discord, bad logic and set the stage for the Secession movement and the Civil War would find a kindred spirit in David Dow. For all of their certainty in their moral righteousness they did nothing but harm to their country. The Dow's of our day haven't reached those depths yet, but they are working on it.

UPDATING:

More craziness:

Here is CBS News's Jan Crawford on a federal appeals court's angry response to the gauntlet Pres. Obama threw down:

...Overturning a law of course would not be unprecedented -- since the Supreme Court since 1803 has asserted the power to strike down laws it interprets as unconstitutional...

What Jan Crawford does not mention here is that the judicial right that 1803 ruling asserted -- Marbury v. Madison -- has only been invoked once since 1803.

This seems to be claiming that the Supreme Court has only struck down a law as unconstitutional once in 209 years. Uh, wow.

I've tried to figure out an alternative rational meaning for this statement... I really have... but, damn it all, I can't come up with one. I've even considered the possibility they were trying to say something else and this just inexplicably appeared. No dice there either. The only thing I can think of is they were hacked and some devious person posted this to make them look like utter fools.

Sadly, I believe they mean every word of this.

Wherein Joe Nocera Makes A Really Dumb Argument

See if you can follow this: Orwell and March Madness

If you’ve been watching the N.C.A.A. men’s basketball championship — a k a March Madness — you’ve undoubtedly seen the commercial. It’s an N.C.A.A. ad that shows college athletes pumping iron, running sprints and playing games. The voice-over, though, talks not about athletic achievement but academic accomplishment. “African-American males who are student-athletes are 10 percent more likely to graduate,” says the narrator. As the ad concludes, a female athlete looks into the camera and says, “Still think we’re just a bunch of dumb jocks?”...


Is it true that black male athletes have a higher graduation rate than other students? It is not.

Notice the pea getting moved? Nocera say the ad is making a claim the ad certainly does not make. The ad only claims that black male student athletes graduate more often than black make non-athletes, which is interesting to know. Nocera misrepresents the ad in order to say it is lying, but the only person lying here is Nocera.

In fact, Nocera goes off the deep end and claims:

The N.C.A.A. has created several other Orwellian concepts, such as an Academic Progress Rate, which allows it to use data to create the illusion that athletes are doing better academically than their peers.... ...In comparing college basketball players with their true peer group — full-time college students...

What? So comparing black males athlete with black male non-athletes is not a "true peer" group comparison? On what planet? Really, Joe says comparing black athletes with, for example, white suburban kids who graduated in the Top 15% of their high school class would be a "true peer" comparison, while comparing a black football player from Detroit with other non-athletes blacks would be "Orwellian." Uh, OK.... good luck with that. Look there is plenty to criticize the NCAA for, but you don't have to do it so ineptly, or so dishonestly.

Updating Gleick-Fest 2012

I never did get around to redoing the post I lost the other day, and now there is very little need. Megan McArdle has done all the heavy lifting on the subject. The only people defending Gleick now are the cranks, the loonies, and the really quite unstables.

It is one of the good things about these kinds of episodes; it reveals those who are so far beyond the realm of rational discourse that one can dispense with worrying about them, at least in an intellectual capacity. It's like trying to reason with a neo-Nazi skinhead. Such people are not amenable to reason so you don't have to worry about trying to convince them with facts or logic. Though one does still have to worry about their propensity to violence, of course. Indeed, violence is the next step down the road once people embrace the irrational as their guide. The Green movement has long displayed fascistic elements, as anyone who makes a study of "Earth First" ideology can discover for themselves, in that it explicitly rejects rationalism, presents an organic view of society, and advocates a new "warrior culture" to produce social and political change through violence. (In case you are not aware, that is three for three in the "fascist ideological tendencies" category.)

You may think I'm overreacting here, but I must say I am shaken by the defenses being offered in this case. The flight from reality and reason needed to make these defenses are truly frightening to behold. If they are willing to justify and praise this, what won't they condone?

UPDATE:

To wit: Woman accused of hiring hit man to kill random fur-wearer

A self-proclaimed animal rights activist in Ohio has been charged with soliciting a hit man to kill a random person wearing fur, either by shooting the individual or slitting his or her throat.

Meredith Lowell, 27, of Cleveland Heights, is accused of creating a phony Facebook profile with the intention of contacting a would-be killer, according to the affidavit filed in an Ohio district court.

Lowell allegedly posted on the social media website the following request: "I would like to create an online community on facebook which would allow me to find someone who is willing to kill someone who is wearing fur toward the end of October 2011 or early November 2011 or possibly in January 2012 or February 2012 at the latest."

...

She then allegedly requested that the murder take place at a local library and that she be present so that she could then hand out documents about animal cruelty after the homicide.

"Bring a sharp knife that is at least 4 inches long, it should be sharp enough to stab someone with and/or to slit their throat to kill them," Lowell allegedly wrote in an e-mail, according to the affidavit.

The individual should be at least 12 years old, but "preferably 14 years or older," Lowell allegedly wrote.

Slitting the throat of a 14 year old girl or boy so she can hand out literature on how it is inhumane to wear fur.

How David Frum Convinces Me He Is In Fact Lazy

This is embarrassing: Is the White Working Class Coming Apart?

Charles Murray's Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010 is an important book that will have large influence. It is unfortunately not a good book—but its lack of merit in no way detracts from its importance. If anything, the book's flaws add to its power, by enhancing the book's appeal to the audience for whom it is intended. Coming Apart is an important book less because of what it says than because of what it omits; less for the information it contains than for the uses to which that information will be put...

Coming Apart details the social problems that have overtaken the poorer half of the white American population over the past generation. This population is less committed to the workforce than its parents and grandparents were. It has more trouble with the law. It has more children outside marriage.

None of this information comes as news to anybody. Social observers have been making these points for years. The novelty of Coming Apart is Charles Murray's remarkable—and telltale—uncuriosity as to why any of this might be happening.

I should probably pause to note here that Charles Murray and I have had our personal innings. When I was sacked from the American Enterprise Institute in 2010, Murray posted a blog insisting that I had been fired—not for writing this blogpost—but for laziness...

Well, now is your time to shine Davy my lad. Show me what you got:

Here is the book's one discussion of the idea that the social troubles of lower-class America might be related to the (rather notorious) economic troubles of lower-class America. It's such a revealing and fascinating statement that I will quote at length, both on the passage's own merits and to ensure that the argument is given its full context.

A natural explanation for the numbers I have presented is that the labor market got worse for low-skill workers from 1960 to 2008. More [working-class white] men worked short hours because they couldn't get work for as many hours as they wanted; more of them were unemployed because it was harder for them to get jobs; more them left the labor market because discouraged by the difficulty of finding jobs.

In one respect, the labor market did indeed get worse for [working-class white] men: pay. Recall figure 2.1 at the beginning of the book, showing stagnant incomes for people below the 50th income percentile.** High-paying unionized jobs have become scarce and real wages for all kinds of blue-collar jobs have been stagnant or falling since the 1970s. But these trends don't explain why [working-class white] men in the 2000s worked fewer jobs, found it harder to get jobs than other Americans did, and more often dropped out of the labor market than they had in the 1960s. On the contrary: Insofar as men need to work to survive - an important proviso - falling hourly income does not discourage work.

Put yourself in the place of a [working-class white] man who is at the bottom of the labor market, qualified only for low-skill jobs. You may wish you could make as much as your grandfather made working on a General Motors assembly line in the 1970s. You may be depressed because you've been trying to find a job and failed. But if a job driving a delivery truck, or being a carpenter's helper, or working on a cleaning crew for an office building opens up, why would a bad labor market for blue-collar jobs keep you from taking it? As of 2009, a very bad year economically, the median hourly wage for drivers of delivery trucks was $13.84; for carpenter's helpers, $12.63; for building cleaners, $13.37. That means $505 to $554 for a forty-hour week, or $25,260 to $27,680 for a fifty-week year. Those are not great incomes, but they are enough to be able to live a decent existence - almost twice the poverty level even if you are married and your wife doesn't work. So why would you not work if a job opening landed in your lap? Why would you not work a full forty hours if the hours were available? Why not work more than forty hours?

Murray is baffled that a collapse in the pay and conditions of work should have led to a decline in a workforce's commitment to the labor market.

Really? C'mon Davy. I mean I'm pretty certain you haven't read all of the book, but I'd have thought you would at least read the part of it you quote. When Murray says... "On the contrary: Insofar as men need to work to survive - an important proviso - falling hourly income does not discourage work." What the hell else is Murray supposed to do? Put in an alarm to sound when the page is reached? Obviously Murray is suggesting men no longer have to work (or at least work as hard) to survive, and this fact shows up in the numbers. Murray suggests in an interview this fact may have something to do with the Great Society programs of the 1960's, which causes Frum to get his panties all in a wad.

Here Frum attempts to mock Murray's argument:

Now look at you. Yes, unemployment is high right now. But if you keep pounding the pavements, you'll eventually find a job that pays $28,000 a year. That's not poverty! Yet you seem to waste a lot of time playing video games, watching porn, and sleeping in. You aren't married, and you don't go to church. I blame Frances Fox Piven.

Yeah, it doesn't work so well when you have had trouble convincing your reader you have even read Murray's book. But I'll cut Frum some slack and suggest it wasn't because he was playing video game and watching porn. Maybe he was busy reading Dostoevsky. (You never know.)

Ah, but Frum has an alternative explanation, one he has seemed to glean entirely from reading signs at Occupy protests:

Across the developed world, we see the wages of the bottom half (and in some cases more than half) have stagnated, even as gains have accrued to the top 20%, bigger gains to the top 5%, and the biggest gains to the top 1%.

This trend toward inequality varies from country to country—more extreme in the United Kingdom, less extreme in Germany. The subsequent destabilization of working-class social life likewise varies from country to country. But if the trend is global, the cause must be global too. Yet that thought does not trouble Murray.

OK, so the person with less than a high school education won't work because he has an inchoate sense that on a global scale, people are doing better then he is?

That's your "explanation"?

Are they being moved by the Hegelian world defining spirit? Or are they on the verge of revolutionary class consciousness brought about by their immiseration, possibly brought on by video games and porn?

Look, no one has to like Murray's book, but to write an honest to goodness critique of the thing means you have to actually engage with what it says; not what it would be convenient for it to have said. The sad fact is Frum's entire screed is so shoddy the conclusion is quickly reached that it is a product of intellectually laziness.

The word simply fits.

ADDING:

This isn't the first time I've found Frum's social science skills, shall we say lacking?

Sometime I Hate Being Against The Death Penalty...

...because of how freakishly stupid so many anti-death penalty advocates are. The trouble is they are so stupid they have no idea how much damage they are doing to the cause. The recent example in the case of Troy Davis proves my point.

Its depressing. It begins with an assault on the very idea of reasonable doubt. Yes, eyewitness testimony can be tricky, but the lengths people are willing to go to exonerate Davis in this case is ludicrous. The argument they are making is "sophisticated" in the same way "it depends on what your definition of 'is' is" was sophisticated, and it doesn't help.

Second, this emphasis on portraying these criminals as innocent victims has to stop. The point of being against the death penalty is that you are against it even when the person involved is guilty as sin. If you cannot make the hard argument, but instead try to only make the case that innocent people ought not to be executed (well, yeah), then you have lost the argument before it even started. This is particularly the case when in your zealousness you whitewash actual guilt, as is happening in the Davis case. No objective reading of the evidence leads to Davis' exoneration. You only look like a fool if you insist it does.

I'm sorry but the argument that says "we ought not to have the death penalty because we could make a mistake" is a dumb argument. It invites the rejoinder, "Well, what if we reserved it only for the cases we are really sure of." The response to that has been, "But, how can we ever really be sure of anything..." and BOOM!!!!!! The sound you are hearing is the sound of the minds of millions of Americans closing against you...and, if that is the best argument you can come up with, rightfully so.

The real argument is its unnecessary... its barbarous, as witnessed by the fact it is the way the Taliban does business... and its uncivilized. Actually, I'd argue it is worse than uncivilized, it is anti-civilization. In philosophical terms it is a remnant of the closed society. It appeals to our hive/pack instincts, and not to the rational parts of our being. Lots of people will disagree with me, but at least that is an argument worth having. It helps that that it also the only kind of argument we have a hope of winning. Until we are willing to have that argument we will continue to lose, and we will deserve to lose.

Marxist Times Columnist Longs For The Revolution

The nitwits are out again: When Democracy Weakens

As the throngs celebrated in Cairo, I couldn’t help wondering about what is happening to democracy here in the United States. I think it’s on the ropes. We’re in serious danger of becoming a democracy in name only.

While millions of ordinary Americans are struggling with unemployment and declining standards of living, the levers of real power have been all but completely commandeered by the financial and corporate elite. It doesn’t really matter what ordinary people want. The wealthy call the tune, and the politicians dance.

Uh, yeah. Thanks "Karl" but I'm not buying any "up the proletariat" today. Using the measure of median household income, the United States ranks anywhere from second to fifth worldwide. The vast majority of our "poor" are only poor relatively speaking. Nearly 50% of households earning under $18,500 a year own their own home. Just as a point of comparison, worldwide the median income is $850. Roughly 95% of American households make over $10,000 a year.

Yes, people can and do struggle in this country. However, the largest part of that struggle is not for mere subsistence. It is instead the struggle to get to where people aspire to be for themselves and their families. As a result the severity of the struggle is defined not by some objective standard, as would be Marxists have it, but by the varying standards of those subjective aspirations. It so happens that many people see little or no connection between their personal aspirations and the political process. In effect, they have decided they do not need governmental help in order to get to where they want to go. They may be right or wrong in this belief, but that it exists is beyond doubt. Voter apathy is what it is called.

Don't you fret, however, our Marxist friend knows why this is so.

So what we get in this democracy of ours are astounding and increasingly obscene tax breaks and other windfall benefits for the wealthiest, while the bought-and-paid-for politicians hack away at essential public services and the social safety net, saying we can’t afford them. One state after another is reporting that it cannot pay its bills. Public employees across the country are walking the plank by the tens of thousands. Camden, N.J., a stricken city with a serious crime problem, laid off nearly half of its police force. Medicaid, the program that provides health benefits to the poor, is under savage assault from nearly all quarters.

The poor, who are suffering from an all-out depression, are never heard from. In terms of their clout, they might as well not exist. The Obama forces reportedly want to raise a billion dollars or more for the president’s re-election bid. Politicians in search of that kind of cash won’t be talking much about the wants and needs of the poor. They’ll be genuflecting before the very rich....

In the mad rush to privatization over the past few decades, democracy itself was put up for sale, and the rich were the only ones who could afford it.

Well, let us look at the amount of money we have been spending on Mandatory Spending (i.e. Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Other Means-tested entitlements, Pensions, Debt Payments):

According to Congressional Budget Office records, federal outlays for mandatory spending were 33.8% in 1965 vs. 59.9% in 2005. They were highest in the Clinton years: 60% in 1995 and up to 62.6% by 2000.

It is even worse than this as we spend more as a percentage of GDP now than we did in 1965. Total government spending was only 16.44% of GDP in 1965. It was 24.67% in 2009. So, we spend more of a larger pie.

So where exactly is this screwing over of the poor?

As if the corporate stranglehold on American democracy were not tight enough, the Supreme Court strengthened it immeasurably with its Citizens United decision, which greatly enhanced the already overwhelming power of corporate money in politics. Ordinary Americans have no real access to the corridors of power, but you can bet your last Lotto ticket that your elected officials are listening when the corporate money speaks.

When the game is rigged in your favor, you win. So despite the worst economic downturn since the Depression, the big corporations are sitting on mountains of cash, the stock markets are up and all is well among the plutocrats. The endlessly egregious Koch brothers, David and Charles, are worth an estimated $35 billion. Yet they seem to feel as though society has treated them unfairly.

As Jane Mayer pointed out in her celebrated New Yorker article, “The Kochs are longtime libertarians who believe in drastically lower personal and corporate taxes, minimal social services for the needy, and much less oversight of industry — especially environmental regulation.” (A good hard look at their air-pollution record would make you sick.)

Got that? Because the Koch brothers are wealthy and libertarian we have had no pollution standards in this country.

AND this Marxist has a bridge he'd like to sell you.

I'm sorry, but what planet is this person writing about? Because it isn't the one I live on. Last time I checked libertarians have held a majority position in the government of the United States for exactly zero days. This guy is seriously pissed off because in this country as presently constituted people are allowed to have a different conception of politics than he has. AND they are allowed to advocate for their vision! Oh. My. God. How can democracy survive?!?

Oh, wait a second. People with differing conceptions of the good competing for power via elections. Actually, that doesn't sound like a threat to democracy. It sounds like democracy in action.

Hey. Are you a little guy? Do you want to have influence and be heard in the political world? Well, there is an avenue open to you. An avenue almost entirely devoid of scary things like "corporate money." Its called local politics. You know, those elections with ludicrously low voter turnout rates? They actually make up a large part of our democratic process. What's that? You are not all that interested? What is wrong with you? Do you hate democracy or something!? Oh, I see. You simply do not see how it really benefits you to be involved in that way and, besides, Jon Stewart rarely mentions local politics on his show. That's cool. Just remember its there if you ever need it.

Look, do immensely wealthy people have an easier time of it than you or I? Absolutely. Do they enjoy more influence? They sure do. Has there ever been a day in the history of the world when this was not true? No, there hasn't. So what do you call this state of affairs? I call it "life."

Our revolutionary continued:

I had lunch with the historian Howard Zinn just a few weeks before he died in January 2010....

I'm sure you did. I can hear your battle cry ringing in my ears.....

Viva la stupidité!

Sadly, This Passes For Logic These Days

From the Getaloadofthisload file:

For the past 16 years, news organizations have been repeating an obvious falsehood about the 1992 Democratic convention. According to countless news reports -- in The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Associated Press, ABC, NPR, Time, Newsweek, CNN, MSNBC, The Wall Street Journal, and on and on and on -- then-Pennsylvania governor Bob Casey was denied a speaking role at the convention because he opposed abortion rights.

Really? Give us your evidence.

It's also important to keep in mind that Casey didn't merely want to speak at the convention. He wanted to devote his entire speech to opposing the Democratic Party on a single issue. After the convention ended, Casey released the text of the speech he would have delivered had he been given the chance. The speech ran more than 1,000 words -- and not one of those words was "Clinton." Nor was the word "Gore" mentioned. Casey's speech did not include a single word of praise or support for the ticket being nominated at the convention he wanted to address. Instead, it accused the party of being "far out of the mainstream and on the extreme fringe" on abortion. That's what the entire speech was about: disagreeing with, and insulting, the Democratic Party on abortion.

Ah, so the Democrats didn't want to keep Casey from speaking because he was Pro-Life, they wanted to keep him from speaking because he wanted to speak about Pro-life views.

I'm supposed to believe this amounts to a real difference?

Last time I checked many other things go on at a party convention than the ritual back slapping of the Presidential nominee, including the setting of the goals of the party as a whole. If Casey wanted to address the convention's role in writing the party platform, which it seems clear he did because he didn't address the presidential race at all, then why shouldn't he have been allowed? The notion that he wasn't allowed to speak because because he didn't add to his remarks a stroking of the nominee, regardless of the rest of the content of his proposed talk, is asinine. Even if you granted this rather dumb suggestion it still amounts to silencing Casey because he wasn't going to say what the party bigwigs wanted him to say. Once again, that's a meaningful difference how?

The intellectual shallowness of Media Matters is staggering.

The whining is also a little disconcerting:

Yet here's The New York Times, just last week: "Sixteen years ago, the Democratic Party refused to allow Robert P. Casey Sr., then the governor of Pennsylvania, to speak at its national convention because his anti-abortion views, stemming from his Roman Catholic faith, clashed with the party's platform and powerful constituencies."

No. That is not true. That cannot be true. It cannot be the case that he was not allowed to speak because of his views -- other people with the same views were allowed to speak. [ed. The petulant emphasis is in the original.]

Did the other people speak about abortion at the convention? Why, no they didn't. So, it seems the policy was that Pro-life Democrats could be seen always, but heard only when they didn't speak about abortion. Nothing presented by Media Matters disputes that in the least.