The New York Dumb Times

I have often lamented that we live in an era of degraded journalism. Journalists of today are less independent, less articulate, less well read, and less intelligent than journalists of decades past. The depth of their deficiencies comes to the forefront when you read, frankly, garbage like the following from the editorial board of the New York Times:

The Supreme Court’s deeply dismaying decision on Monday in the Hobby Lobby case swept aside accepted principles of corporate law and religious liberty to grant owners of closely held, for-profit companies an unprecedented right to impose their religious views on employees. It was the first time the court has allowed commercial business owners to deny employees a federal benefit to which they are entitled by law based on the owners’ religious beliefs, and it was a radical departure from the court’s history of resisting claims for religious exemptions from neutral laws of general applicability when the exemptions would hurt other people.

For starters, in what way does Hobby Lobby not paying for abortifacients "impose their religious beliefs" on anyone? Here is the answer: it doesn't. Hobby Lobby employees are free to spend all their spare time taking abortifacients if that is what floats their boat. They just have to pay for them. Secondly, a mandate is NOT a "federal benefit." If the federal government wants to provide cheap abortifacients to people they can fund a program to do so, if they can get the votes. The moment you require a private party to provide something via a mandate you automatically have the possibility of running against other rights. The idea that the you can make Hobby Lobby or any other private company or organization a de facto arm of the government that is forced to give up ANY constitutional protections by issuing of governmental mandates is simple nonsense. (It wouldn't be in a fascist or communist system, but we don't live in either of those... unless Justice Ginsburg has her way of course.) "The full implications of the decision, which ruled in favor of employers who do not want to include contraceptive care in their company health plans, as required by the Affordable Care Act, will not be known for some time." Of course this isn't what this case was about. None of the three companies involved claimed a right to not cover all contraceptives, nor did the Supreme Court assert any such thing. This is a product of the over-heated imaginations of the chronically stupid and insipid. And, indeed, if you are unfortunate enough to read the rest of the Times' editorial, and you have a functioning brain, you will be left saying three things: 1) What the hell are they blathering on about? 2) I wonder what color the sky is in their world? And 3) When did real journalism die?

The Intellectual Bankruptcy Of (Portions Of) The Left

Go read this long (and long-winded) piece by Ta-Nehisi Coates, but only if you have a half-hour of your life you don't mind throwing away.  And why is that exactly? Well, in this piece Coates basically argues that neither whites nor blacks in America are capable of exercising moral autonomy. For Coates no negative consequence ever faced by a black person in any context can be justified because of the existence of white hegemony, the perpetual existence of which is taken to be axiomatic. Consequently, blacks are assumed to never have free meaningful choices to make which means, of course, that they lack a prerequisite of moral autonomy.

Whites, on the other hand, are denied moral autonomy simply of the basis of needing to fulfill the role as hegemonic oppressors. Whites being "wrong" has nothing to do with decisions they do or do not make, it has to do with the color of their skin. In such a view there is no difference between a white person choosing action A and another white person choosing ~A. By definition each decision is a "product of white hegemonic society" and therefore equally "wrong." So, just as in the case for blacks, whites also lack the ability to make free meaningful choices, and thus are denied a prerequisite of moral autonomy.

This is exactly the sort of situation elites like Coates want, because by denying the existence of moral autonomy in these types of questions they can claim that these issues should be above the ken of normal democratic public policy decision making. There is no room for differing opinion or disparate value judgements, there is only the role of oppressor (or oppressed) to enact.

Of course it is a dream come true to live in a world where one's preferences are impossible to gainsay, and Mr. Coates would probably be quite reluctant to leave the very same world he has constructed for himself, but there is no reason why we need to go and live there with him.

Reason #5634 Why Politfact is Useless

So, we now all know that when President Obama said "If you like your insurance you can keep it," he was lying through his teeth. This made me wonder how those brave souls at PolitFact had graded the issue when it came up in the past.

Well, according to them the President spoke the truth! Yes, they claimed what Obama said was only half true, but that was only because, according to PolitFact, the dastardly insurance companies could change the plans, or, in a completely unrelated aside, people might voluntarily change plans. However, THAT wasn't the point. The claim was "If you like you current insurance you can keep it." . Obamacare, PolitFact insisted, wouldn't alter anything.

PolitFact was, obviously, wrong. But, of course, they had to be wrong. After all, their only source for the veracity of the statement in the first place was the Obama administration itself, which is par for the course as far as I can tell. They obfuscate that fact by prattling on about off-topic issues; a bit of misdirection which is also, sadly, par for the course.

Benghazi: No Heavy Analysis Necessary

So Benghazi. What have we learned?

A) The political people around Obama are a profoundly insecure bunch. Their judgement in the wake of the attacks was just plain dumb. There was no way this could have turned the election. It was a terror attack against the US. When have the American people turned against their leaders in the aftermath of such an attack? (The answer is never.) How out to lunch do you have to be not to know this?

B) Those early mistakes were compounded by the refusal to admit there had been any mistakes. As a controversy this should have been over months ago. They can blame Republicans all they want, if anyone is still talking about this it is the fault of the Obama administration and no one else.

C) The capacity for the unofficial/official propaganda arm of the Democratic party, i.e. The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, etc, to run obfuscating disinformation campaigns for the administration is truly remarkable. And disgraceful.

Thomas Friedman: Wile E. Coyote Op-Ed Writer

From one of the NY Times super-geniuses:

I had to catch a train in Washington last week. The paved street in the traffic circle around Union Station was in such poor condition that I felt as though I was on a roller coaster. I traveled on the Amtrak Acela, our sorry excuse for a fast train, on which I had so many dropped calls on my cellphone that you’d have thought I was on a remote desert island, not traveling from Washington to New York City. When I got back to Union Station, the escalator in the parking garage was broken. Maybe you’ve gotten used to all this and have stopped noticing. I haven’t. Our country needs a renewal.

Gee, that's a coincidence. I too was recently at Union Station in DC having caught the MARC train down from Baltimore where my wife and I stayed while she hits some libraries for a biography she is writing.

For those who do not know DC well, and as someone who lived there for eight years, let me fill you in on a couple things:

A) There is no traffic circle around Union Station (mostly because of all the train tracks coming into it.... duh.)

B) There is a traffic circle in front of Union Station.... well kind of. Columbus Circle isn't a traffic circle the way Dupont Circle is. In fact, it is less a traffic circle and more a traffic ampersand. (Strange but true.)

C) That traffic circle is currently being re-constructed. That is why its so bumpy.

D) Union Station itself is in the middle of a large renovation project. Maybe this could explain why Mr. Friedman was inconvenienced so by that faulty escalator. One can only hope he was able to extricate himself from the station in an unexerted state.

E) The wife and I used our phone, which uses the dodgier Virgin Mobile network to boot, along the line as far as Princeton Junction with nary a problem. Maybe Mr. Friedman should think about switching carriers.

F) I can't say anything about the Acela one way or the other. Normal people like us can't afford to take it. The slower trains we were on were clean and comfortable. Of course, without a quicker train we may have been forced to do without this particular piece of Mr. Friedman's work. Now that would have been a tragedy too terrible to contemplate.

I'm always suspicious of these personal anecdotes used to illustrate whatever point an Op-Ed writer is trying to make. I nearly always suspect they are BS. In this case I know it is BS because I was just there.

And, when we see one of the reasons why the road is bumpy and the escalators aren't necessarily working, etc. is that we are already doing the "renewal" the opinion piece claims we are not doing... well, its enough for me to just shake my head and say "Shut up."

"Political Science A 'Gaffe'" Says New York Times

Who knew? Romney’s Day to Relish Is Marred by Aide’s Gaffe

Mitt Romney sought to use the coveted endorsement of Jeb Bush on Wednesday to amplify his call for Republicans to rally behind his candidacy and get on with the mission of ousting President Obama....

...But if the endorsement held the potential to further choke off the oxygen to Mr. Santorum’s insurgent candidacy, the Romney campaign inadvertently gave Mr. Santorum a new supply when a senior adviser went on CNN and seemed to suggest that Mr. Romney’s conservative positions in the primary season could change like an Etch A Sketch drawing.

“I think you hit a reset button for the fall campaign,” Eric Fehrnstrom, a longtime adviser to Mr. Romney, said in response to a question about pivoting to a matchup with Mr. Obama and appealing to moderate swing voters. “Everything changes. It’s almost like an Etch A Sketch. You can kind of shake it up and restart all over again.”

OK, fine. I realize the Santorum and Gingrich campaigns are desperate, and will say any damn fool thing in a vain attempt to bolster their fading relevance, but why is the Times endorsing such foolishness?

And it is foolish. One thing Political Science has shown us very clearly is that candidates run towards their party's ideological base during primaries and run towards the center in general elections. Every candidate has the "do over" moment, usually on television at the moment of their nomination acceptance speech, where they stop focusing on the base. We all know this. Its a truism of American politics.

How can acknowledging a truism be a "gaffe"? The short answer is, it can't. The more cynical among us might speculate on the motives of the Times in portraying this unremarkable statement the way they are. For example, they may be panicked
at the idea of the GOP coalescing around Romney at this early date - a date far earlier than the Democrats managed in 2008 I might add - so this is their feeble attempt to keep the contest going a little longer. Who knows.

The way it looks, however, is that the Times is simply ignorant of the most basic parameters of American politics.

Sadly, that sounds just as plausible.

News From The Washington Monthly: Democrats Have Never Lied

No, really. That is their "argument".

If you read The Washington Monthly and find it compelling you must be dumber than pigshit; the particularly dumb kind of pigshit at that.

Ideological Coordination And The Media

Anyone who has read this blog would be aware that I am no fan of Rush Limbaugh. He simply rubs me the wrong way. Always has.

That being said, I am also being rubbed the wrong way by the incessant demagoguery of the, so called, "mainstream media" this last week. Indeed, in tone and effect the MSM took their marching orders from the "progressive" (once again so called) blogosphere. Not that this is anything new. It has been apparent for some time that media types folllow the lefty blogs extremely closely and very quickly validate the pet concerns of the ahrd left with front page coverage, framed precisely the same way the lefty blogs frame it. By comparison, the concerns raging in the right leaning blogs are lucky to get mentioned on page 46, under the tide schedules.

In a similar fashion, events that inflame the left will routinely be described by the MSM as a "firestrom" (or some such) supposedly embraced by average Joes and Janes, while conservative concerns will be labelled ideologically as being the sort of thing only "right wingers" are whining about.

The Obama administration has been expert at exploiting this coordination (in effect if not exactly by design - journolist notwithstanding) between lefty blogs and the media, reaping tangible benefits for their political program by the simple fact that they get to frame every debate. Thus we hear about Limbaugh using the word "slut" instead of hearing, well, anything else. Left wing causes across the board are now using the "validation" they get from MSM coverage to shill for money, including Obama's re-election campaign. Thus, the MSM's penchant for accepting left wing framing is producing a political benefit for one party in our political system.

Granted, this isn't the sort of thing a MSM type would be worried about, as they want Obama to win in November.

A Quick Intelligence Test

Here is a one question IQ test. Good luck.

1. Rush Limbuagh's comments on Georgetown Law Student Sandra Fluke are:

A) Really really important.
B) Not important at all.

RESULTS:

If you answered "A" you are really really dumb.

If you answered "B" you are not dumb.

It is also interesting to note how the coverage of this in the MSM is indistinguishable from the Lefty blogosphere. I guess they are all living the Weird Al motto: Dare to be stupid.

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?

Shocker: Social Science Should Be Held To Scientific Standards

From Hot Air: WaPo/ABC ends sample transparency in national polling

The Washington Post and ABC News has a new national poll out today. It purports to show that Barack Obama has a 50% approval rating and that he would beat Mitt Romney in a head-to-head matchup. And heck, that might even be true, except for a couple of problems. First, this is a poll of general population adults rather than registered or likely voters, so it’s not even a proper polling type for the predictive outcome they claim.

More importantly, though, the poll series has dropped its reporting of partisan identification within their samples. It’s the second time that the poll has not included the D/R/I split in its sample report, and now it looks as though this will be policy from this point forward. Since this is a poll series that has handed double-digit partisan advantages to Democrats in the past (for instance, this poll from April 2011 where the sample only had 22% Republicans), it’s not enough to just hear “trust us” on sample integrity from the Washington Post or ABC.

This critique is entirely correct. I teach social science methods for a living, and I tell my charges if an opinion poll does not come clean about its methodology (including the breakdown of party ID) you have to throw it out as being untrustworthy. In fact, the only reason not to give this basic information is you have something to hide.

This Washington Post/ABC poll is neither social science nor journalism. It's advocacy.

The Most Important Story In The Entire World...

..at least according to the MSM is the Komen Foundation not re-gifting donations to Planned Parenthood.

WTF? Who could possibly have a rational reason for giving a shit? Please show me ONE person who gave money to Komen who did so because they thought that money would really go to Planned Parenthood.

Here's an idea: if you want money to go to Planned Parenthood, DONATE MONEY TO PLANNED PARENTHOOD.

"Problem" solved.

And thank you MSM for wasting my time. It's really appreciated.

Dumb Guys Calling Other People Dumb

Really, David Frum has no business calling anyone else on earth dumb... so, of course, he does:

I like walkable urban centers, so I want to take a hopeful view of this Washington Post report about the future of Tysons Corner. Unfortunately for my belief, the story ends with one of the most foolish quotes I’ve ever read about the future of the American city, from Joel Garreau, normally a smart guy.

With broadband, employees no longer need to physically be transported to work. He sees Americans moving to scenic, ideal locations such as the mountains of Montana or the hills of Santa Fe. Garreau splits his time between Fauquier County and Arizona.

“What you’re seeing now is what I call the Santa Fe-ing of the world, or the Santa Fe-ing of America,” he said. “The fastest growth you’re seeing is in small urban areas in beautiful places, because now you’ve got e-mail and Web and laptops and iPhones and all that jazz.”

Here’s one thing we know about the America of the future: It’s going to contain lots and lots and lots of poor, low-skilled people – in percentage terms, many more than the America of, say, 1995. And the America of 1995 already contained tens of millions of poor, low-skilled people. Those people won’t be telecommuting from Santa Fe. If your vision of the future of the American city does not include those people, it’s going to be missing a very large fact.

Which is why, when you look at the actual list of the actual top 10 fastest-growing US cities of 2000-2010, you see no examples of small scenic places (unless you count Orlando, Florida, which I sure wouldn’t).

Frum then gives a list of cities growth by absolute number, and not by the rate of growth, thereby insuring you would not get any smaller areas. Nice going Sherlock.

Gee, I wonder what happens if you look at the actually fastest growing urban areas by percentage growth.

#1 Palm Coast, Fla. - 92% growth
#2 St. George, Utah - 52.9% growth
#3 Las Vegas, Nevada - 41.8% growth
#4 Raleigh, N.C. - 41.8% growth
#5 Cape Coral, Fla. - 40.3% growth
#6 Provo, Utah - 39.8% growth
#7 Greeley, Colo. - 39.7% growth
#8 Austin, TX - 37.3% growth
#9 Myrtle Beach, S.C. - 37% growth
#10 Bend, Ore. - 36.7% growth

Of these only Las Vegas would be in the top ten in terms of absolute numbers. As for the rest of them, they strike me as being a hell of a lot more like Santa Fe than New York or Houston.

Really, David. How dumb can you be?

James Fallows Doesn't Know What He Thinks He Knows

*sigh* 'People Don't Realize How Fragile Democracy Really Is'

Two days ago I mentioned the "Goodbye to All That" essay by Mike Lofgren, a respected (including by me) veteran Congressional staffer who had worked for Republican legislators on defense and budget issues for nearly 30 years....

Among the important aspects of his essay is that it goes beyond one now-conventional point of "the worse, the better" analysis: that the GOP's main legislative goal is to thwart Obama, and if that includes blocking proposals that might revive the economy, so much the better for the Republicans next year.

More fundamentally, Lofgren argues that today's Republicans believe they are better off if government as a whole is shown to fail, not just this Democratic Administration. Republican hard-liners might seem to have "lost" the debt-ceiling showdown, in that they wound up even less popular than the Democrats are. But in the long view, Lofgren says, unpopularity for anyone in Congress, including their party's leaders, helps the Republicans: "Undermining Americans' belief in their own institutions of self-government remains a prime GOP electoral strategy," because it buildings a nihilistic suspicion of any public effort, from road-building to Medicare to schools. (Except defense.)

This is the kind of eau de garbage we readers get when writers become so partisan they cannot see or think straight. Oh, are there people out there who want all government to fail? Sure there are. On the Right various kinds of libertarians hover around the fringes, and you'll find anarchist types floating around the periphery of the Left as well. But the idea that any of these people represent the dominant political opinion of the Republican or Democratic party is nonsense. Actually, it is nonsense on stilts.

When it comes to mainstream political opinion there is no "nihilistic suspicion of any public effort" anywhere except the minds of folks like James Fallows. Sure there is plenty of suspicion about Washington, but Washington (thank God) does not have a monopoly on "public efforts." In fact, a large part of the complaint many people are making is that the Federal government has become far too overweening, and the result has been that our society has become less democratic. By definition most "public efforts" are local affairs, but increasingly we are not allowed to direct our own affairs unless we get the Feds to sign off on whatever it is we want to do, be it build a bridge or update the curriculum of our public schools.

To the degree that Fallows rejects the idea that power should be located in the people and instead embraces the idea that experts in Washington should govern all of our public affairs, Fallows can be said to be anti-democratic, if not by intent certainly by result.

The sad fact is the ruling classes, and the journalists that spend their cushy lives rubbing elbows with them, are not synonymous with "democracy" in any meaning of the word. And really this is what this all comes down to in the end. Fallows despises (and most likely hates) this tea party rabble which won't shut up and let the rulers rule already. That Fallows calls this impulse respect for democracy is the cruelest irony of all.

Moral Equivalency For Morons

Steve Benan (aka the dumbest columnist in America), "informs" his readers today that Republicans wanting to reduce spending is the worst public policy choice in the history of the country, somehow beating out:

A) Support for slavery (Democratic policy)
B) Support for expansion of slavery (Democratic policy)
C) Support for Jim Crow laws (Democratic policy)
D) Entry into the Vietnam war (Democratic policy)
E) Placing of Japanese-Americans into concentration camps (Democratic policy)

That's right, advocating for a reduction of the budget from #3.9tr to $3.7tr is worse.

A Water Carrier Too Far

Here is some “wisdom” for you courtesy of Jonathan Chait: What Caused The Deficit? A Reply To Megan McArdle

One of the most effective Republican themes of the last two years has been blaming President Obama for the explosive growth in the budget deficit since 2009. The accusation that "Obama's spending binge" has blown up the deficit has discredited any further fiscal stimulus, and helped encourage Republicans to use the debt ceiling as a hostage. The White House fought back with a chart showing that its policy changes contributed only a small fraction to the worsening deficit picture:

The chart the White House provides shows that, indeed, when you add up the seven years worth of deficits from the Bush years it is a larger number than the deficits Obama has racked up in three years.

OK, lets look at the deficits from 2001 to 2011.

 

And here are the raw numbers:

Federal Deficit
Fiscal Years 2001 to 2011

Year	GDP-US $ billion	Federal Deficit -fed $ billion
2001	10286.2	-127.89	a
2002	10642.3	158.01	a
2003	11142.1	377.81	a
2004	11867.8	412.90	a
2005	12638.4	318.59	a
2006	13398.9	248.57	a
2007	14077.6	160.96	a
2008	14369.1	458.55	a
2009	14258.2	1412.69	a
2010	14660.4	1293.49	a
2011	15079.6	1645.12	b
Legend: a - actual reported b - budgeted estimate in US fy12 budget

The average yearly deficit for this entire time period is $578bn. 

The average yearly deficit for the Bush years (2001-2008) is $251bn.

The average yearly budget deficit for the Obama years (2009-2011) is $1450bn.

OK, lets try and screw over the Bush numbers. Let’s throw out 2001’s budget surplus saying that was Clinton’s doing and, while we are at it, let’s take 2009 out of the Obama column and give it to Bush (since everything bad on God’s green earth is Bush’s fault anyway.) What do the numbers look like then?

The average yearly deficits for the Bush years (2002-2009) is $433bn.

The average yearly deficits for the Obama years (2010-2011) is $1469bn.

OK, but maybe that doesn’t tell the whole story. Maybe it was all those Bush tax cuts which acted like a poison pill which is only being felt now!

Alright, the Bush tax cuts were implemented between 2001 and 2003, and the Obama administration claims it cost the country $3000bn added to the deficit, or a yearly average of $375bn between 2004-2011.

Let’s see if such a story seems likely (data here.)

From 1996-2000 (the second Clinton term, when all was right with the world and everyone ate rainbows for dinner!) the federal government’s take via income taxes increased at the average yearly rate of  $73bn. Between 2001 and 2003 (when the Bush tax cuts were still in process) the average yearly tax decreased by an average of $73bn, as the recession took its toll. Between 2004 and 2008 after all of the tax cuts had been fully implemented, the average yearly take of the federal government increased by $90bn a year.

Remember, the Obama administration is claiming without the Bush tax cuts the yearly increase for the feds would have averaged not $90bn but instead $375bn. I’m sorry, but on what planet does that seem plausible?

Let’s do an experiment here. Let us pretend there are no such things as recessions, and let us further stipulate the increase in revenues of the Clinton years are a constant of economic reality. So, we will compare this fictional “Clinton number” with the real Bush numbers and see how close we can get to the $3000bn number uncritically accepted by Chait.

Before Bush tax cuts:

2001: C# - $1284bn  B# - $1145bn (+139)

2002: C# - $1357bn B# - $1006bn (+351)

2003: C# - $1430bn B# - $925bn (+506)

After Bush tax cuts:

2004: C# - $1503bn B# - $998bn (+505)

2005: C# - $1576bn B# - $1205bn (+371)

2006: C# - $1649bn B# - $1397bn (+252)

2007: C# - $1722bn B# -  $1533bn (+189)

2008: C# - $1795bn B# -  $1450bn (+345)

Do, in this completely unrealistic scenario where recessions do not exist and revenue growth is as constant a force as gravity, Bush comes up only $2658bn short all together.  The Obama administration and, evidently, the water carrying Jonathan Chait want you to believe the “realistic” number should be $3000bn.

That’s nuts.

Look, the recession has been bad and the recovery not so hot. Obama has every right to say, “Hey, we are really working under some economic constraints here.”  He has the right to say it because it’s true. However, the budgets he has submitted are not examples of constraints placed upon him by George Bush, they are his policy choices. To claim otherwise is simply dishonest.

(Post written using Windows Live Writer. I’m curious to see how this works!)

Michael Isikoff: Investigative Reporter!

From our intrepid Hero: Firm gives $1 million to pro-Romney group, then dissolves

NBC News
updated 8/4/2011 6:01:38 AM ET 2011-08-04T10:01:38

A mystery company that pumped $1 million into a political committee backing Mitt Romney has been dissolved just months after it was formed, leaving few clues as to who was behind one of the biggest contributions yet of the 2012 presidential campaign.

The existence of the million-dollar donation — as gleaned from campaign and corporate records obtained by NBC News — provides a vivid example of how secret campaign cash is being funneled in ever more circuitous ways into the political system.

The company, W Spann LLC, was formed in March by a Boston lawyer who specializes in estate tax planning for “high net worth individuals,” according to corporate records and the lawyer’s bio on her firm’s website.

Can't you just see it? Our hero doggedly filing FOI requests, or peeking into filing cabinets in the dead of the night, or getting behind locked doors to see what nefarious things lurk beyond... or even, and this would have been the most difficult thing of all, reading last Sunday's Washington Times: Romney campaign raises $12 million from just 90 donors

Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney raised more than $12 million from just 90 donations so far this year in an unprecedented use of a fundraising account that can accept unlimited, loosely-regulated contributions in support of a presidential bid.

Disclosures filed Sunday show a supremely flush reserve for the man seeking to lead some 300 million-plus Americans, bankrolled by a few dozen in the finance industry, with some donations coming directly from corporations and others ascribed to near-anonymous addresses in Utah.

The total far overshadows that of similarly-structured funds set up to collect unlimited contributions in support of President Obama’s re-election.

Of four $1 million donations, two came from cryptically-named limited liability companies, or LLCs, sharing the same office suite in Provo, Utah. The only one with a recognizable name attached arrived from the 50th floor of a Manhattan skyscraper: The offices of John Paulson, the hedge fund manager who made millions of dollars an hour betting on the implosion of the housing market.

Illustrating the poor disclosure that accompanies the lack of monetary limits on such accounts, the final million-dollar donation was reported simply as coming from “W Spann LLC” of 590 Madison Ave. in New York, with no suite number or other identifying information. That building has housed offices for Paulson, lobbyists Akin Gump and Bain Capital, the hedge fund Mr. Romney once led.

Indeed, our hero, showing none of the investigative skills of a latter day Sherlock Holmes, has managed to discover less information than was printed in the Washington Times four days ago.

At this rate, by sometime next week Isikoff will be unable to confirm or deny the existence of this person known as Mitt Romney.

Of course there is always the possibility that Isikoff did read the Washington Times piece and this is just a garden variety example of plagiarism.

That is modern jurnalism in a nutshell: incompetence or plagiarism.

What a choice!

House Democrats Are The New Patty Hearst?

I don't blame all liberals as it seems only liberal "journalists" are actually this stupid: The tea party's terrorist tactics

It has become commonplace to call the tea party faction in the House “hostage takers.” But they have now become full-blown terrorists.

They have joined the villains of American history who have been sufficiently craven to inflict massive harm on innocent victims to achieve their political goals. A strong America has always stood firm in the face of terrorism. That tradition is in jeopardy, as Congress and President Barack careen toward an uncertain outcome in the tea party- manufactured debt crisis.

As we stumble closer to Aug. 2, it has become clear that many in the tea party are willing to inflict massive harm on the American people to obtain their political objective of a severely shrunken federal government. Their persistence in rejecting compromise, even as the economic effects of the phony crisis they have created mount, has taken their radicalism beyond tough negotiating, beyond even hostage-taking.

Got that? Tea party types not voting for Boehner's plan equals terrorism bent on destroying the nation.

What about Demcorats not voting for Boehner's plan? If Dems in the House were to vote for the Boehner plan it would pass in the House even if the tea party caucus continued to oppose it. House Democrats were they to join with the Republicans Boehner has on board clearly have the votes to get it passed, yet they refuse to do so. They have even gone as far as to brag that "No Democrats will vote for it."

The funny thing is no journalist is calling them terrorists for not voting for the Boehner plan. No one is calling them ideological for not compromising. Plus, the upshot of House Dems not budging an inch is making Boehner throw in useless crap like a "balance budget amendment" in an effort to appease the tea partiers which does absolutely nothing to move the process forward in the long run as Democrats, last time I checked, still controlled the Senate and the White House.

The reality is "tea party Republicans" cannot do anything unless the Democrats go along with them, which is exactly what they are doing.

Not acknowledging this fact isn't responsible journalism. It is hackery of the most cynical and intellectually dishonest kind.

E.J. Dionne: Lightweight

It is a sad commentary on the intellectual merits of pundit journalism today (or the lack thereof) that in a piece designed to show how stupid we all are for not understanding the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution, Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne expresses his belief that the terms "national government" and "federal system of government" are synonymous.

If this is the best our "betters" have to offer we are doomed.

Feel free to read the whole thing if shallow (a)historical analogy, deficient understanding of political theory, and a thorough lack of comprehension are your sort of thing.