Rhetoric & Rhythm

Movie List 2011

2012-01-23T23:50:00.000-06:00

I'm late getting my year end movie list up.
Here are the 2011 movies I have seen so far:
Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides
Cars 2
Thor
Captain America: The First Avenger
Kung Fu Panda 2
Rio
The Smurfs
Super 8
Rango
Hugo
Winnie the Pooh

And here are the movies I expect that I will see eventually:
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2
Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol
Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows
Rise of the Planet of the Apes
Puss in Boots
The Help
X-Men First Class
Cowboys and Aliens
The Muppets
The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo
Moneyball
The Adventures of Tintin
War Horse
We Bought a Zoo
Midnight in Paris
Arthur Christmas
J. Edgar

Election analysis Dec. 2011

2011-12-01T14:00:00.001-06:00

It would seem to me that there were only ever two candidates in the Republican presidential race who got in with any serious expectations of actually winning. That would be Mitt Romney, who never stopped running for president since 2008, and Rick Perry, who came into the race with strong poll numbers and truckloads of campaign cash. The others had entirely different motivations for getting in the race. Some, like Tim Pawlenty, Rick Santorum and Michelle Bachmann hoped to further their political careers down the road and saw raising their profiles though a presidentail campaign as the way to do it. Others, like Herman Cain and Newt Gingrich saw it as a way to boost and/or develop their name brand and increase their personal worth in the form of increased speaking fees and book sales. And then there is Ron Paul who is an old-fashioned perennial candidate representing a small but devoted minority faction. But now, due to the stubborn resistance to Romney and Perry’s spectacular flameout, less-than-serious candidates have been allowed to rise to the surface rather unexpectedly. I’m sure no one was more surprised than Herman Cain when he became the frontrunner and suddenly was expected to know things like where Uzbeki-beki-beki-stan is and what U.S. policy in Libya has been. And the “9-9-9” plan was never meant to be anything more than a soundbite to drum up interest in his books and pump up his future lecture fees. And, of course, the fact that his personal life had never been fully vetted out is the biggest clue that he was never intending to be anything more than a novelty candidate so that he could cash in on the free and initially benign media exposure of a national campaign.Gingrich too was just looking to maintain his brand name and keep his foot in the ring so that he could continue to play the role of “seasoned political insider” which is what fuels his private enterprises. That was apparent when his campaign staff abandoned ship halfway into the race. But Gingrich is also just enough of an egomaniac that he will probably continue the charade, pretending that he is a serious candidate right up until the bitter end.Now, to be fair, one could say that Barack Obama would have probably fit into the category of someone just trying to advance their political career and build name recognition for a future race back in 2008. But he ended up winning the primary and had to ramp up quickly to show that he could be a serious and substantive candidate. I think Tim Pawlenty could have done something similar if his campaign had caught fire early on, and maybe even Rick Santorum (who might have fared better had he not lost his last election). But Bachmann, I believe, was never more than just a fringe candidate, not unlike Dennis Kucinich was for the Democrats in 2008.So what happens now?If Gingrich actually wins this thing then Republicans can kiss their chances of victory in November goodbye. There is no way someone with as much baggage as Gingrich could survive a national race that is not dominated by Tea Partiers the way the Republican primary is.Perhaps if by some miracle the entire nation suffers mass amnesia and forgets the past three months, then maybe Rick Perry could come back and win the nomination. Maybe.But most likely it will be up to Mitt Romney to carry the Republican banner next year and his best chance of winning will depend on circumstances largely beyond his control. Only if the economy starts to tank again and/or shows no signs of improvement before the election will Republicans have a chance. That is why they are so adamant about refusing to support recovery efforts today. Anything that boosts the economy between now and next November will also serve to boost Obama’s re-election chances.

My new iPod

2011-08-27T23:35:00.002-05:00

I saved up my birthday money from the past two years and bought myself a new iPod. My old iPod, which I treasured, was an iPod mini and had just 4GB of space. That is about 1,000 songs worth and when I got it, it seemed like plenty. But after awhile I began to want more. I created a Great Songs list that had a broad mix of rock, country and jazz with lots of Beatles, Bob Dylan and Bing Crosby as well as the Ken Burns Jazz collection. But then I began to get into classical music and the more classical pieces I would add to the iPod, the more of the other songs I would have to pull off. Before long I had nothing but classical music on my iPod and even then not enough room for all that I wanted to put on it. Plus, I should note, my iPod mini did not have video capability, not that I would have had room for any videos anyway.
So I solved all those problems with my new iPod which has 160GB. Let me repeat that.... 160 GB. Wow! Now I have all my music on my iPod, and I do mean ALL of my music - or at least all that I want to put on it. ALL of my classical music - and I've got a lot of classical music after spending the past year raiding the San Antonio Public Library for everything it has to offer. I've got all my Ken Burns Jazz collection plus lots more jazz music to boot; I've got all of my Beatles, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Bing Crosby and the Police. I've got almost my entire rock collection, most of my country and folk collection, even my collection of Broadway musicals. I may eventually put my Christmas music on there too as the holiday gets closer. So far I have more than 10,000 "songs" on the iPod.
And then there are the videos. I have two movies which came with digital copies that I had no use for previously and now I have loaded on my iPod - Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland and the 2010 version of Karate Kid, both of which are pretty good movies. And I have downloaded half a dozen free TV episodes off of iTunes mostly to entertain my kids - several cartoon shows, a National Geographic special and an episode of Top Gear. And I have a whole mess of Podcasts that update everyday including NPR news updates, lots of old time radio shows and the entire Rachel Maddow show downloaded everyday. On top of all that I have downloaded all the digital pictures from my computer at work - mostly pictures of my kids.
But the best part is that even after all of that, I still have more than 67 GB of free space on my iPod.
I agree completely with this article in the Economist.
The iPod is definitely the best thing Steve Jobs ever did. While it would be nice to access the Internet or make phone calls, I would never give up my iPod for an iPhone or an iPad. Having all my music in one place, easily accessible by searing or playing randomly is just too much fun.

Failed monetary policy

2011-08-10T15:27:00.002-05:00

Disagreeing with Paul

2011-06-06T13:07:00.000-05:00

"I disagree with that. I think Paul is wrong on this point."
It was a shocking thing to say in a Sunday school class. Especially one led by a group of people who fervently believe the Bible is the infallible word of God. But I couldn't keep quiet and concede the point. Besides, they brought it up and asked my opinion. So I hope nobody was too terribly shocked and offended. I'm pretty sure they already see me as the token liberal in the class and they haven't run me off yet.
The topic today was about gays in the church. Methodist doctrine currently forbids gays from taking any kind of leadership role in the church. A person in the class who sits on a committee that will represent our church at a conference where they will discuss making changes to the church bylaws brought up a proposed amendment that would prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation. She asked what we all thought. The class quickly divided into two groups - one that wants to keep the doctrine the way it is and says the amendment is not needed, and one that believes the doctrine is already too tolerant of gays in the church.
Then I spoke up and said I support the amendment and furthermore, I did not believe that being gay was a sin. This caused a flurry of page flipping as people dove into their Bibles to call up Leveticus and First Corinthians to "prove" to me that being gay most certainly is a sin. Our class leader found it first and proceeded to read the entire section in Paul's first letter to the Corinthians where he condemns homosexuality in no uncertain terms.
That is when I interjected my shocking statement. "I disagree with that. I think Paul was wrong."
Gasp!
I didn't get a chance to say much more because the class time was over so I thought I would elaborate here on my blog.
Paul was clearly influenced by the Old Testament writings in Leveticus. What's more, he had no knowledge or conception about biology. Sexual orientation is a biological function, not unlike being left or right-handed. A person can choose to suppress it or ignore it, but they cannot change it.
But back in Biblical times they had no idea about this and just assumed that people were choosing to do "unnatural" and thus sinful things. But note that God never directly addresses this as a problem - it is not part of his Ten Commandments and he never mentions it as a problem to any of the prophets. Instead, he seems to be much more concerned with idolatry and other forms of wickedness.
Likewise, Jesus never broaches the topic in any of his stories or sermons. One would think that if it was such a heinous sin meriting death and isolation from the church that they might have made some effort to mention it rather than leaving it to be addressed in the multitude of laws listed in Leveticus most of which we ignore today. But for some reason, this particular "sin" is given a higher status among believers. They are not so much concerned about other forms of adultery and have pretty much forgotten about the bromides against eating pork, shellfish or of touching women when they are menustrating.
No, gays are definitely singled out for special mistreatment. And yet, despite all of this condemnation we find that roughly 5 to 7 percent of the population in every community throughout time "chooses" to be gay. A most remarkable persistence and amazingly consistent as well.
So I disagree with Saint Paul and instead agree with Lady GaGa in my belief that gay people were "Born That Way." I think I have more scientific evidence on my side than Paul did and I dare say if he were still around today he might even change his mind.
But the more distrubing thing I think for my Sunday school classmates is my clear rejection of Biblical authority. When they show me a quote in the Bible I am only allowed one of two options: I can claim that the quote is misinterpreted or taken out of context, or I can prostrate myself before the Good Book and swear allegiance to whatever it says. Instead, I chose a third option. I disagreed. I don't think we are misinterpreting Paul, I just think he is wrong on this point. I agree with him on most everything else he has to say, but on this one point I think he was off base. But, if I'm correct and Paul is wrong, that would mean that the Bible is not 100 percent true and correct. And if we can't trust the Bible, what can we trust? Are we just going to pick and choose what we believe in the Bible???
Yes and yes. The Bible is not 100 percent true and correct. It has lots of factual errors and contradictions. It reflects many of the prejudices and biases of the times that it was written. So what can we trust? Trust your God-given brain and think things through. That's what you do.
My faith is with God. I do not rely on any intermediaries between me and God. I do not confess my sins to a priest. I do not look the the Vatican or the Pope for spiritual guidance. The Bible most certainly guides my faith, but it does not dictate my faith. My faith is with God directly.
I believe God made the entire Earth and all the people in it. I believe he cares for and loves ALL the people and not just some lucky few. I believe he accepts us the way we are and wants us to do the same. We constantly fall short in our love. God does not fall short in his.

Tea Party vs. al-Qaeda

2011-03-09T08:27:00.003-06:00

Q: What is the difference between the Tea Party and al-Qaeda?

A: One hates the United States government with a white-hot, purple passion .... and the other is a group of international terrorists.

Carole Keeton Strayhorn gets to say “I told you so”

2011-01-17T11:48:00.000-06:00

Interesting story in the Express-News over the weekend.
It turns out that this $20-plus billion deficit that the state is facing should not have been a surprise to anyone, least of all Gov. Perry and Lt. Gov. Dewhurst. The two individuals most responsible for our current predicament were warned that this would happen more than five years ago. Yet they did nothing.

Comptroller Carole Keeton Strayhorn didn’t win friends five years ago when she warned Gov. Rick Perry and state lawmakers they were writing the “largest hot check in Texas history” during a tax overhaul that resulted in lower property taxes and a revised business tax.
Strayhorn told them their plan would fall about $23 billion short over a five-year period. Five years later, state leaders are staring at an estimated budget shortfall of nearly $27 billion.

Yeah, Perry and Dewhurst didn’t care because they knew that cutting taxes would make them popular, consequences be damned. But now that the time has come to pay the piper, Perry is pretending like it’s no big deal and all we have to do is trim a little here and cut a little there.
At least Dewhurst is acknowledging the problem while trying to blame it all on Bush....

At the time, Dewhurst called huge budget shortfall projections “hypothetical and speculative.”
He now says he knew that revenue projections from the revised business franchise tax “were inflated” and told Senate members in closed door caucus meetings at the time that the business tax would not perform as advertised “and that we were going to create a structural funding deficit in state government.” But Dewhurst said he also believed at the time that “we would grow out of it by now.”
He blames the nation’s economic collapse in 2008 for contributing to the state’s projected budget shortfall today.

Strayhorn acknowledges that Bush is partly blame, but shouldn’t get all the blame:

The nation’s economic collapse three years ago contributed to some of the state’s revenue troubles, but the biggest problem is that the new business tax did not generate enough money to pay for the school property tax cut, Strayhorn said Friday.

Don’t blame us!

2011-01-10T07:52:00.005-06:00

That’s the message we are getting today from leaders of the Tea Party movement in the wake of the mass shooting in Arizona over the weekend that killed six people and critically injured a Democratic Congresswoman.
After a particularly vicious and nasty (and largely successful) campaign to defeat Democratic lawmakers across the country in which violent imagery and slogans were constantly referenced, should we be surprised that a deranged individual decided to take matters into his own hands and carry out a “Second Amendment remedy” against one of the Tea Party’s top targets who barely managed to hang onto her seat?
Certainly it is unfair to spread blame to everyone involved with or connected to the Tea Party movement. Most, I’m sure, are gentle, peace-loving folks who wouldn’t harm a fly, much less shoot a moose. And only a handful would be radical enough to purchase and wear a provocative t-shirt like the one shown above.
But is it too much to ask that this tragedy at least serve as a wake up call to those out there who have been far too willing to tolerate hateful, violent, anti-government rhetoric in order to advance their political causes? Can we quit referring to the federal government as “the enemy”? Can we quit with the paranoid, alarmist crys that THEY are “out to take your guns”? Can we quit scaring people with hyped-up fantasies about “death panels” and “terror babies”?
Sadly, I am afraid that it IS too much to ask. The initial response from folks on the right has been angry denunciations of those on the left for having even dared suggest such a thing. Their immediate response was to deny any connection whatsoever with the deranged shooter and claim he is some kind of left-wing anarchist who was never influenced by their campaign against the congresswoman.
And, I am afraid, that there will be continued resistance to restoring common sense gun laws such as the Clinton-era Assault Weapons Ban that Republicans allowed to lapse in 2004. If that law had been in place, the deranged gunman would not have been able to buy a brand new extended clip with 30-rounds for his Glock 19 which he purchased without any need for a license or a waiting period or a background check.
What exactly does anyone outside of the military or law enforcement need with an extended clip for a Glock 19 other than to make it easier to commit mass murder?
But getting common sense gun laws through this current Congress is now likely impossible since voters, in their inestimable wisdom, decided to reward the Tea Partiers big victories in the last election and hand control of the House back to the Republicans again.

My basketball obsession

2011-01-04T10:43:00.002-06:00

I’ve always considered myself to be a big fan of baseball above any and all other sports. Ever since I was a kid starting out in Little League, collecting baseball cards and rooting for my beloved Cincinnatti Reds of the Big Red Machine era, my enthusiasm for baseball has been very high. But recently it has become apparent to me that while my love of baseball has not abated, it has been eclipsed by a fresh new enthusiasm for basketball.
Perhaps it is due to living for the past 10 years in the largest U.S. city without a Major League Baseball team (or NFL team, for that matter). But I have simply been completely won over by the local pro basketball team, the San Antonio Spurs. I find myself following the Spurs much closer than I have followed any baseball team at least since the 1998-03 Yankees, if not the ‘73-’76 Reds.
I was happy when first the Houston Astros and then the Texas Rangers made their first ever appearances in a World Series these past few years. But I had not really followed either team that closely and couldn’t name most of the players beyond the few standout stars. With the Spurs, however, I find myself following every player, game-by-game, down to the lowliest bench warmer.
Now I’m keenly interested in any news of personnel shifts or trade talks. I look forward to the sports news after the weather and get irritated when the local station leads with news about the Cowboys before getting to the Spurs. I will sometimes read the sports section in the local paper before I turn to the editorial page or even the comics (Gasp!). I try to watch every game I can and record those I can’t for later viewing. I even find myself following all of the other NBA teams and not just the Spurs, rooting for certain teams to lose so that the Spurs will advance further.
It’s clear that I’ve become somewhat obsessed with Spurs Fever, though I’m still not as bad as some. I don’t own a Spurs jersey (though I do have a couple of t-shirts). I don’t drive around with a Spurs flag flying on my car. I don’t wallpaper my cubicle at work with posters and newspaper clippings of the Spurs. I will actually talk about and pay attention to other things that are non-Spurs related. And I won’t be going downtown to celebrate in a mass frenzy should the Spurs win their fifth championship this year.
But still, I’ve got it pretty bad and I suppose that admitting to the problem is the first step in the long road to recovery.

2010 Year End movie post

2010-12-31T23:55:00.002-06:00

2010 movies I've seen

Toy Story 3
Alice in Wonderland
How to Train Your Dragon
Tangled
Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga'Hoole
Yogi Bear

2010 movies I own and will see eventually

Iron Man 2
The Karate Kid
Robin Hood
Percy Jackson & The Olympians: The Lightning Thief
The Sorcerer's Apprentice

2010 movies I still want to see

Inception
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1
Despicable Me
Megamind
Shutter Island
Tron Legacy
The Social Network
Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time
The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader
Knight & Day
True Grit
Secretariat
The King's Speech

God Bless America

2010-12-16T17:04:00.001-06:00

Healthcare is too damn high

2010-11-17T23:31:00.000-06:00

Midterm results

2010-11-04T12:07:00.003-05:00

Well the midterm election was every bit as bad as I had feared.
There were only a few bright spots to cheer me up such as the losses by Tea Party stalwarts Christine O’Donnell, Ken Buck, Joe Miller and Sharron Angle.
There were the heart-wrenchingly close losses by Joe Sestak in Pennsylvania and Alexi Ginniaoulis in Illinois; Alex Sink in Florida and Ted Strickland in Ohio.
And there were those who just squeaked by such as Michael Bennett in Colorado, Patty Murray in Washington and Joe Manchin in West Virginia.
Harry Reid held on in Nevada while Russ Feingold was toppled in Wisconsin.
Some Democrats weathered the storm with little problem. Richard Blumenthal easily held on to Chris Dodd’s seat in Connecticut. He had been the state’s attorney general when I lived there in the early ‘90s and was being touted even then for higher office. Glad he finally made it.
Chuck Shumer and Kristin Gillibrand had little trouble keeping their New York Senate seats and Andrew Cuomo steamrolled over the obnoxious extremist Carl Paladino. Vermont elected a Democratic governor for the first time since Howard Dean. And Connecticut elected a Democratic governor for the first time since I don’t know when. Since I lived there the state house has either been held by an Independent or a Republican.
Jerry Brown easily reclaimed the governors office in California that he held 20 years ago despite a mountain of money spent by his Republican opponent Meg Whitman. And Barbara Boxer withstood a multi-million dollar campaign by former HP CEO Carly Firorina.
But elsewhere the tidalwave of corporate cash was too much for Democrats to withstand. The U.S. Chamber of Republicans spent millions of dollars to defeat Democrats all across the country dipping into a big pool of corporate cash that was supplemented by donations from foreign entities. And it was all carefully orchestrated by Rupert Murdoch’s Faux News and the rightwing radio jocks who instructed their brainwashed minions that voting for Democrats was unpatriotic and unAmerican.
Republicans picked up more than 60 seats in the House giving them control again after just four years out of power. During that time, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi accomplished a tremendous amount - only to have the bulk of her legislative achievements watered down or buried in the Senate where Republicans took obstructionism to new heights by misusing and abusing that institution’s archaic filibuster and hold rules. But even with all the obstructionism, Democrats somehow still managed to pass major pieces of legislation such as health care reform and banking/finance reform.
But ultimately by abusing Senate rules the way they did, Republicans have set the new standard that Democrats will follow meaning that no partisan legislation will pass without a 60-vote supermajority. Even relatively benign, non-partisan legislation will have to meet the 60-vote threshhold each time because in essense every piece of legislation and, indeed, every action the Senate takes is now dictated by an unspoken filibuster rule.
So what that means is that the Republican takeover of the House will result in near total gridlock. The Republicans have swelled their ranks with radical Tea Party extremists who have some seriously flawed and absurd views of the government and who will insist on stopping even the most basic functions of government on the grounds that it doesn’t pass muster with their fundamentalist reading of the Constitution. As such, there will be little room for compromise as Republicans continue to adopt the “My way or the highway” attitude. They will insist that Democrats kowtow to their demands and be submissive in light of the fact that “the people have spoken!” Nevermind the fact that Republicans themselves did nothing of the sort during their time in the minority, which, by the way, was an even tinier minority than Democrats have now.
And will Obama now be a “lame duck” president and cast aside his agenda in deference to the newly empowered House Republicans? Was Ronald Reagan a lame duck in 1982 after his party shrank down to just 166 seats in the House? Of course not. As everyone well knows, Reagan went on to win a landslide re-election two years later and reshaped the political landscape for the forseeable future. So people who want to count Obama out at this point need a serious history lesson.
I think the thing that was the most disheartening about the election was the Republican onslaught in local races. I really hated losing my local congressman Ciro Rodriguez. After spending most of my adult life being represented by Republicans like Joe Barton, Lamar Smith, Larry Combest and Henry Bonilla, I was thrilled four years ago to finally get someone to represent me who I could relate to. But now I will be stuck once again with someone who will automatically vote against everything I deem to be important. It is very depressing.
But, alas, the tide will turn again at some point and in the meantime I will just have more things that I can gripe about on my blog. So if there is any silver lining in this election it is the endless fodder of blog material that it will bring for the next two years.

Vote, Vote, Vote

2010-11-02T10:25:00.002-05:00

I cast my vote today for Bill White for governor and Ciro Rodriguez for Congress. Those were the two “big” races I had a say in.
In addition, I supported mostly Democrats all the way down the ballot with the exception of Susan Combs, the Republican comptroller, who did not have a Democratic opponent but was facing candidates from the Libertarian and Green parties. Since I think most Libertarian candidates are a bit nutty and because all (Get Republicans Elected Every November) GREEN Party candidates are dupes and imbeciles, I cast my vote for Combs. Besides that, I’ve always thought she was a nice person and she seems to have done a decent job in a relatively non-partisan office.
Beyond that, I voted for Carlos Uresti for state senate, Massarat Ali for state representative and Rebecca Bell-Metterau for state board of education.
After that, I had little interest in the remaining races and feel that most of them should be appointed or hired positions anyway.

Republicans benefiting from mass confusion and ignorance

2010-11-01T13:25:00.004-05:00

I guess it is appropriate that the election falls so close to Halloween this year because it promises to be a real horror show. Even though a few of the Tea Party’s scariest candidates don’t have a chance of winning – like Christine “I’m not a witch” O’Donnell and Carl “I’ll Take You Out” Paladino — there are plenty of others like Sharron Angle in Nevada, Rand Paul in Kentucky, Joe Miller in Alaska and Ken Buck in Colorado who have a very good chance of winning. And then there are the ones who are already shoo-ins for election like John Boozman in Arkansas and Mike Lee in Utah.
Suffice to say that the Senate is going to get a lot crazier even if it stays majority Democratic. But the really sad news is what is likely to happen to the House. A Republican takeover in the House, which seems all but assured, pretty much guarantees legislative gridlock for the next two years. What this means is that any kind of progress on legislative issues will be stymied and, worse, there will most likely be a number of confrontations over the debt ceiling and threats to shut down the government. At the same time, we can all enjoy the spectacle of partisan witchhunts as Republican lawmakers use their new powers to pursue vendettas against the Obama administration.
What is hard to understand is why people would want to choose this course. I chalk it up to flat-out ignorance mixed with a good deal of Faux News/Wingnut Radio brainwashing.
‘Unfair,’ you say! Perhaps in some cases there are people who have thought these things through and believe for their own reasons that it would be best to return to the policies of the previous 10 years. But some recent studies have revealed that too many people seem to be seriously confused about some of the key issues.
Steve Benen addresses those studies here and here.

In a democracy, the system breaks down and produces counter-productive results when those in charge -- the voters -- are uninformed. And the fact is, a whole lot of Americans are deeply confused about the facts.
The Obama administration cut taxes for middle-class Americans, expects to make a profit on the hundreds of billions of dollars spent to rescue Wall Street banks and has overseen an economy that has grown for the past four quarters.
Most voters don’t believe it.
A Bloomberg National Poll conducted Oct. 24-26 finds that by a two-to-one margin, likely voters in the Nov. 2 midterm elections think taxes have gone up, the economy has shrunk, and the billions lent to banks as part of the Troubled Asset Relief Program won’t be recovered.
Public perceptions aren’t even close to reality -- by a 52% to 19% margin, for example, likely voters think their federal tax burden has gone up over the last couple of years, even though it hasn’t. Indeed, Democrats approved one of the largest middle-class tax cuts in American history, and the public has no idea that it even happened.
The same is true of the strength of the economy in general -- the economy stopped shrinking and started growing more than a year ago, but 61% of respondents in this poll said the economy continued to shrink in 2010, even though it hasn’t.

Needless to say, it is hard to win an election when people are this confused about things.
And then there is this...

After a historic legislative session that saw the passage of health care and Wall Street reform bills, most Americans think Congress accomplished less than or the same amount as usual.
In a new Gallup Poll, 37 percent said Congress did less than what is accomplished in a typical session, while 35 percent said it did the same amount.
Only 23 percent said Congress accomplished more than usual.

So people think taxes have gone up when they have not. They think the economy is worse than it really is. And they think Congress has done very little when it has actually accomplished more than any other Congress before it.
When people go to the polls holding such backwards and upside down assumptions, it is no wonder that they end up voting against their interests.
All I can say is that the rightwing campaign to keep people ignorant and misinformed has been highly effective. Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly, et al. are very, very good at their jobs. That is why they get the big bucks, no doubt.
Meanwhile, the rest of us are going to end up with a country that is hamstrung and dysfunctional for the next two years, if not longer. It is highly depressing especially after the promise of what could have been after the big blowout Democratic victories in 2006 and 2008.
But Republicans managed to hold fast even with one of the smallest minorities in history and by massively abusing Senate rules on filibusters and secret holds. Thus they were able to stall, stymie and kill large numbers of bills and change others far beyond what would have easily passed on a straight-up, majority vote.
So the new standard now is that 59 votes in the Senate is not enough to do anything, therefore nothing will get done until we actually get a party with a lopsided majority in Congress or until reason and rationality breaks out and we finally reform the Senate’s antiquated and undemocratic (not to mention unconstitutional) filibuster rules.
Alas, the former is much more likely to happen in my opinion before the latter.
Good luck, my fellow Americans. We are all going to need it.

Too many have apparently forgot....

2010-10-29T16:02:00.001-05:00

Cell phones in 1920!!!

2010-10-28T14:54:00.001-05:00

Don't you just love stuff like this?

Don't ask, don't tell repeal

2010-10-21T11:12:00.002-05:00

Since I don’t have any close friends or relatives who are openly gay and because I am not gay myself, it would be easy to simply ignore the whole controversy surrounding gays in the military and gay marriage.
But I can’t. It still ticks me off to no end that such a basic issue of civil rights continues to be such a hotbed of controversy today.
I am disappointed that the Obama administration is fighting against the latest court ruling striking down the antiquated “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” law. This idea that the military needs more time to study the matter and adjust and prepare is all a lot of bullshit. If you are in the military, you deal with it. End of story. If you can’t handle it, then get the hell out.
There will always be rightwingers who will claim that integrating the military will have adverse impacts on troop readiness and cohesion, whether we are talking about race, ethnicity, religion, gender or sexual orientation. And every time their prognostications have proven false and their fears unfounded.
What’s more is that it seems like such a simple issue to me. Sexual orientation is a matter of biology, not choice. Throughout history, in every society and every culture, there has always been about the same percentage of the population that is homosexual. It is simply part of the natural balance of life. Put another way, it is the way God set things up.
I am well aware of the fact that the Bible condemns homosexuality. I’ve been reading the Bible straight through recently (I’m up to Nehemiah) and what strikes me about it is the huge swath of things in the Bible that we completely ignore and blow off today. Sure, the ancient Israelites condemned homosexuality (and by extension believed that God did as well), but they also condemned eating pork and touching a woman while she is menustrating and a long list of other “abominations” that we conveniently overlook today. And then there are all the things they condoned or tolerated that we now find insufferable and wrong. Things such as slavery, polygamy, animal sacrifice, and much more.
It is not fair to ignore the parts of the Bible that we personally find inconvenient while strictly enforcing other parts when they happen to mesh with our favored ideology. The best thing is to consider the Bible in its historical context and weigh it against the teachings of Christ who called on us to put aside our judgmental ways and focus on neighborly love and forgiveness.
Homosexuality is a fact of life and we really need to evolve as a society to the point where we are not always freaking out about it.

A new favorite John Wayne flick

2010-10-14T14:04:00.002-05:00

I’ve always loved John Wayne movies and have been collecting them on DVD now for several years. But only last night did I take the time to watch “Hondo” for the first time.
I was greatly surprised by how much I liked the movie. It has now vaulted to the top tier of my list of all-time favorite John Wayne movies along with “The Searchers,” “Stagecoach” and “Rooster Cogburn”.
The iconic photo of John Wayne carrying a saddle and walking next to a dog hung on my dorm room wall for four years in college. But I did not know until the other day that the image came from the movie “Hondo”.
My favorite scene in the movie is when Wayne has his first confrontation with the absent father at a nearby outpost. As the man storms out of the tent he finds his way blocked by Wayne’s dog “Sam” who growls menacingly. He prepares to kick the dog and then stops when he hears Wayne protest and cock his rifle. The man glares back at him and Wayne says “Walk around him.”
The man spits back that he would never walk around a cur dog and Wayne responds with this classic line, “A man oughta do what he thinks is best.”
The man looks back at the growling dog and then walks around.

Balanced Budget craziness

2010-10-07T16:09:00.001-05:00

There is a cute video up at the Cato Institute purporting to show how simple it would be to balance the federal budget without any tax increases and without allowing any of Bush’s tax cuts for the rich to expire next year.
Daniel Mitchell, the president of Cato, starts out in a folksy manner explaining that all we need to do is “go back” to the Constitution and only fund those federal programs specifically authorized in Aticle 1 Section 8 of our founding document.
And then “Voila!” No more budget deficit. Because what that would mean is that we would eliminate a huge swath of government departments and programs that were unknown or not deemed necessary 250 years ago. Mitchell rattles off the following departments that would be wiped out under this scenario:

• Agriculture
• Energy
• Housing and Urband Development
• Small Business Administration
• Education
• Transportation
• National Endowment for the Arts

The very fact that Mitchell is proposing such a course of action with a straight face and expecting people to take it seriously is very disturbing. That is because it takes a high level of willful ignorance to buy into that nonsense.
Turn back the clock to the horse-and-buggy era and all our problems would be solved, Mitchell is saying. Seriously.
Let’s just take Transportation as an example. What does he expect would happen? Do we shut down all the airports when we disband the FAA and fire all the air traffic controllers? What happens to the U.S. Highway System? Will each state set up tolls for non-state residents to drive on their roads? If coastal states have to pay for the upkeep and maintenance of sea ports will they then charge tariffs to inland states before goods and services are delivered? How long before our entire economy collapses in a jumble of feuding municipalities?
Or how about the Agriculture Department? No more ag subsidies? Sounds great, unless you live in a farm-belt state that relies heavily on these subsidies to get by, especially when the weather is uncooperative. And if the Ag Department is gone, what happens to the School Lunch Program which is financed by USDA? Tough luck kids, you go hungry now?
What about the research that USDA does on farm and livestock pests? How expensive will our grocery bills get once all this federal coordination goes away? Do you think the invisible hand of the market will step in and make everyone right?
This is crazy stuff that is not even worth anyone’s time to refute. If you think we can just wipe out all these federal programs, get a big fat tax cut in the mail, and then go on with our lives like nothing happened, they you clearly don’t understand what is at stake here.
We live in a very complex, highly evolved society that has gone through multiple decades of trial and error getting to where we are today. There is always room for budget cuts and operational efficiences that can eliminate waste and save money. But a radical overhaul of our system of government as the Cato wingnuts are advocating would shred our society and result in chaos and disaster.
There is no question that we have a big government that spends lots of money. We have a large welfare state and have had one for decades. But name a single country that doesn’t have a large welfare state where you would be willing to live today and raise a family. There are none that I know of and tiny little desert islands don’t count.

Obama-Reagan parallels

2010-10-06T15:47:00.002-05:00

Republicans need to win 39 House seats this fall to take control of the House and a lot of political prognosticators think they can do it.
But even if the Republicans’ wildest dreams come true and they ride a tidal wave of voter resentment back to power in the House, it will ultimately mean very little.
President Obama may seem to be in a precarious position with his low poll numbers and his party possibly slipping into the minority, but he would still be better off than Ronald Reagan was at the same point in his presidency.
During the 1982 midterm elections, two years after Reagan swept to victory over former President Jimmy Carter, his poll numbers were almost identical to what Obama’s are right now. Furthermore, his party lost 27 seats during that election. But the big difference for Reagan, was that his party was already in the minority at that point. They lost 27 seats when they didn’t have that many to begin with. Republicans had 192 seats and fell all the way down to 166. By comparison, Democrats currently have 256 seats and even the most optimistic forecasts for Republican election prospects don’t have them dropping below 200. So, even in a worst case scenario for Obama, he will still have more allies in the House than Reagan did after his mid-term fiasco. And we all know what happened to Reagan two-years after that. He won one of the biggest landslide elections ever over a major Democratic establishment candidate.
Republicans will be lucky if they can even get one of their better candidates through the primary process which is likely to be controlled by the extremist Tea Party faction.
So while things might look bad for Obama in the short-term, his long-term prospects are likely to improve as the economy continues to recover.

Tax cuts explained

2010-09-30T11:37:00.000-05:00

Racist lies from Mallard Fillmore

2010-09-20T11:11:00.002-05:00

Here is another letter I sent to the San Antonio Express-News concerning the Mallard Fillmore strip. The last letter I sent was never published.

“People who adopt black children” are, according to the Mallard Fillmore strip in Monday’s San Antonio Express News, “mostly white”.
This is a blatant lie. When you look at all the transracial and transcultural adoptions of anykind in this country it comes to less than 14 percent, and the percentage of white families adopting black children is well below 10 percent which means that more than 90 percent of black children are adopted by black families.
But telling blatant lies is standard operating procedure for the rightwing Mallard Fillmore “comic” strip. The author was apparently annoyed that some liberal commentators pointed out that Glenn Beck’s latest rally in D.C. a few weeks ago was made up mostly of white people, so he decided that gave him permission to make a bunch of “jokes” riffing on racial stereotypes such as the false notion that black people don’t like to go bowling or cycling. But the kicker was the mean-spirited suggestion that black people leave it up to whites to adopt black children. That is absolutely false.
Whenever Bruce Tinsley, the far-rightwing author of the humor-free Mallard strip, tires of drawing grotesque caricatures of politicians and celebrities he does not like — with their eyes crossed and their noses and chins stretching off the page — Tinsley typically turns his wrath on postal workers, school teachers, labor unions, immigrants or any other group of people to serve as the scapegoats of his twisted ideology.
Why does the Express-News continue to publish garbage like Mallard Fillmore everyday?

Music cloud on the horizon

2010-09-01T15:57:00.002-05:00

When I was in college in the mid-to-late 1980s, the digital music age was in its infancy. Compact discs or CDs - introduced in 1982 - were just starting to make an impact on the market although it would still be several years before I would buy my first CD player.
During this time, my friend Joe Johnson and I got into a discussion about digital music and the possibilities it entailed. Joe had an idea for a device he called the “digibox” which would essentially be a juke box with a hard drive containing far more music than could fit in a conventional juke box of the day.
I had a different idea. I figured why not build one giant computer hardrive and load up all the music that you could get permission for and then set it up like a cable TV subscription service. I imagined a firm that would run a cable into your house and plug it into your stereo. Then you would get a large catalog listing all the available music and some kind of interface device where you could type in the numbers of whatever songs you wanted to hear and Voila! instant music. For that, I figured a person could pay a monthly fee like getting HBO or something.
Unfortunately, neither Joe or I ever seriously pursued our ideas. Years later when the first iPod came out from Apple, I immediately recognized it as a mini-version of Joe’s Digibox.
So Joe’s idea turned out to be a huge success while I figured that mine was just a dead end that never would have got off the ground.
But just the other day I heard a story on NPR about a cloud-version of iTunes that is still in the planning stage and I was immediately reminded of my variation on the digibox idea.
I have a basic iPod which I love but which is woefully too small for my music collection (4GB). I used to have a diverse selection of Rock and Jazz music loaded up on it, but since I’ve recently been on a Classical music kick I have no room for anything else. So the idea of a cloud service where you could put all your digital music and have ready access to it at the push of a button is very intriguing and falls right in line with what I was thinking about back in college. Unfortunately, it appears that the music cloud is still a long ways off as the music industry tries to figure out how it can get the biggest possible cut from it.

The foul fowl's stench gets worse

2010-08-30T12:11:00.003-05:00

The following is a Letter to the Editor that I sent to the San Antonio Express-News this morning...

The foul stench emitting from the Express-News comics page was even more odorous and offensive this past week as the “Mallard Fillmore” strip launched a vicious and nasty week-long attack on public school teachers to mark the beginning of the new school year.
Why the Express-News editors tolerate this nastiness is a mystery to me. Whenever the Doonesbury strip has anything even remotely controversial they are quick to yank it and run replacement strips. But I suppose a mean-spirited “comic” strip that mocks public school teachers as being stupid and lazy is perfectly fine with them.
The public school system is a favorite target of Bruce Tinsley, the far-rightwing author of the humor-free Mallard strip. Whenever he tires of drawing grotesque caricatures of politicians he does not like — with their eyes crossed and their noses and chins stretching off the page — Tinsley typically turns his wrath on postal workers, school teachers, labor unions, immigrants or any other group of people to serve as the scapegoats of his twisted ideology.
Real conservatives should be just as offended by Tinsley’s hateful diatribes as the people who get slapped in the face everytime they open their newspaper. They should demand that the Express-News follow the lead of its sister paper in Houston and dump the foul fowl and replace it with a conservative strip that does not bring shame and dishonor on their side of the political spectrum. Prickly City, which already runs in the E-N, is one example and there are many others.
I am not a teacher, nor am I employed by the school system or any part of the public sector. But I send my kids to public school and I respect the good work that their teachers do to give them an excellent education. It is too bad that our teachers have to be denigrated everyday in their daily newspaper’s so-called funny pages.

How awfully convenient for Rick Perry!

2010-08-27T14:49:00.001-05:00

Former Houston Mayor Bill White will need a lot of votes out of Harris County if he is going to win a statewide race for governor. How incredibly convenient for Rick Perry that all the voting machines for Harris County would be destroyed in a mysterious fire just a few weeks before election day.
It boggles the mind.

How I despise judicial elections!!

2010-08-24T16:34:00.003-05:00

It's election time again and the street corners are filling up with campaign signs mostly for the dozens of judicial races up for grabs.
And despite the fact that I am a voracious reader of the "news" and follow politics at all levels as a hobby, I have no clue as to who any of these people are.
Oh, sure, I could probably tell you which person is the incumbent and maybe even which party they come from. But that's about it. And that is pretty sad to base an election on. Then you consider that most people know even less about the candidates than I do and you realize it is nothing more than a name recognition contest which comes down to who can raise the most money and get the most campaign signs up, and who can saturate the airwaves with the most advertising.
Enough!
We have no business electing judges in the first place! Judges should be appointed and approved by the people we elect to represent us. Once appointed, judges should be completely independent and not beholden to any political party or interest group with the power to lavish or withhold reams of campaign cash.

We have too many elections as it is. The only people we should be electing in a democracy are the ones who actually "represent" us at some level of government: Presidents, Senators, Congressmen, state Reps. and senators, County judges and commissioners, Mayors and councilmembers, school board members and so forth.
But county clerks, treasurers, sheriffs, comptrollers, dog catchers and so forth should be appointed and/or hired by the local governing bodies, not elected by the citizenry.

Hounding celebrities, ignoring crimes

2010-08-20T16:06:00.002-05:00

Why federal prosecutors are pushing a perjury case against former baseball star Roger Clemens is beyond me. I have little sympathy for prosecutors who pursue these high-profile, celebrity cases which have little, if any, value to the larger community. I feel the same way about the big, overblown Blagojevich trial in Chicago.
What possible difference would it make if they could actually prove to a jury, beyond any doubt, that Clemens lied in his testimony to Congress? Who cares either way? He’s retired from baseball already. Are they worried that he might get into the Hall of Fame? At this point, I really don’t care. Clemens’ reputation has already been so smeared and drug through the mud already that there is little chance he could win over enough votes to get into the HOF anyway.
Clemens is getting the same smarmy treatment that Pete Rose did. Rose had a gambling addiction that he refused to fess up to for years and years. But it never impacted his playing or any of his historic achievements in baseball and should therefore not be a consideration for his eligibility for the HOF.
I don’t know if steroids affected Clemens’ playing career or not. A lot of people suspect it did and they won’t take his denials as a definitive answer.
Meanwhile, Karl Rove is scot free after lying his rear off to Congress. Same with Dick Cheney and dozens of other Bush-era officials and Scooter Libby got himself a nice pardon.

At least he's not Ben Quayle

2010-08-13T09:28:00.000-05:00

2010 Senate elections

2010-08-11T16:37:00.001-05:00

The 2010 elections will undoubtedly see some victories for Republicans. There are at least four Democratic-held seats that are almost guaranteed to flip to Republicans for the next cycle: Arkansas, Indiana, Delaware and North Dakota.
North Dakota is a clear give-away to the Republicans. Byron Dorgan’s decision to step down now set up a cakewalk for popular Republican Gov. John Hoeven to waltz right into the seat with little opposition.
In Arkansas, Lt. Gov. Bill Halter’s primary loss to incumbent Blanche Lincoln pretty much sealed the fate of Democrats there. It is very likely that Halter would have lost as well, but Lincoln is almost a lock to go down to defeat.
In Indiana, Republican former Sen. Dan Coats is nearly a lock to take the seat being vacated by Democrat Evan Bayh. I had hope that U.S. Rep. Brad Ellsworth could put up a good fight, but the polls aren’t reflecting that. Unless something changes, he looks like toast.
And it is highly frustrating that a reliably Blue state such as Delaware is all set to replace Vice President Joe Biden in the Senate with a Republican. What a slap in the face! Thanks a lot, you Delaware losers! That’s almost as bad as Blue Massachussetts replacing Ted Kennedy with Republican Bozo Scott Brown.
The only semi-bright spot is that Republican Mike Castle will join Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins in the Almost-Non-Existent, Blink-And-You’ll-Miss-Them Moderate Wing of the Republican Tea Party.
In the other races, I am fairly confident that Democrats will be able to hold on in most cases and may even have an opportunity here or there for a pickup of their own.
I think Richard Blumenthal will have little trouble hanging on to the seat in Connecticut being vacated by Chris Dodd. I also think Michael Bennet’s chances of re-election in Colorado are now greatly improved thanks to the Tea Party nominating a wacky candidate in the Republican primary. The same goes for Harry Reid’s chances in Nevada.
What this will all mean, unfortunately, is that Republicans will have an even easier time filibustering everything under the sun and forcing the entire United States government to near gridlock. If something doesn’t give soon, I fear that our whole democratic system of government will bust apart at the seams.

Boy Scout Jamboree

2010-07-29T16:58:00.003-05:00

My nephew Zach Wright of Crowley, La. is attending the Boy Scout National Jamboree outside of Washington, D.C.
Following is his first dispatch sent to his hometown newspaper.

Hello, my name is Zach Wright and I’m attending the Boy Scout National Jamboree. I’m a 14 year old freshman at Notre Dame High in Crowley, LA. I am the senior patrol leader in Troop 70 in Crowley. We are sponsored by the United Methodist Men of the First United Methodist Church of Crowley. With me is Eagle Scout Steven Dial, a senior at Crowley High and fellow troop member. For the Jamboree we are in troops representing the Evangeline Area Boy Scout Council. Altogether there are about 70 Scouters from our council and 45,000 Scouters at the jamboree.
The 2010 Boy Scout Jamboree occurs about every four years, so it has taken lots of planning.
The staff here is nice, and everything is going smoothly. There are 21 subcamps divided into four geographical regions of the U.S. Each subcamp has troops from various councils and each troop is divided into patrols. We’ve built a huge tent city with many campers. Fortunately our tents are big enough so that we could get two cots inside. Our lunches are provided as a bag lunch we can eat on the run, but our breakfast and dinners are cooked in the campsite by each patrol. We’re all eating the same menu, and the Jamboree staff distributes the food supplies. So far the best meal has been the July 28th. dinner of jambalaya.
Just like the staff has been planning and training for four years for this event, the scouts have spent months planning, preparing and training. We all took Emergency Preparedness Merit Badge and first aid lessons. While here we will attend a CPR/EAD training course and hope to set a world record for the largest ever held.
The variety of Scouts here is amazing. I’ve meet scouts from Japan, Canada, Egypt, Barbados, Sweden, Great Britain, South Korea and some Scouts from a little island in the Caribbean Sea near the coast of Venezuela. We’ve encouraged to mingle with the aid of a jamboree wide game of trading cards.
We each have a deck of 21 cards representing our subcamp. The idea is too meet and trade cards with a Scout from each subcamp. By the end of the Jamboree we should have a card from each subcamp. So far I have 6 out of the 20 other subcamps.
I’m also trading patches with other Scouts. Friends and family members have been collecting council strip patches from out of state for me for a year, so I have a head start on that collection, but I’ve added lots more!!!
While at jamboree, Scouts are trying to earn five rockers that will ever after be worn on their uniform around a National Jamboree patch. These rockers represent effort in core value areas of Scouting, and several requirements must be met in each area to earn a rocker.
The first rocker is for a 5k run/walk which was scheduled on the 30th. of July.
The second rocker is Duty to God. We’ve been leading grace at meals and sharing Scout devotionals in our patrols every evening. Attendance at a religious service, meeting our subcamp chaplin and visiting the exhibit table of our denomination are also required.
The third rocker is for participating in the outback centers. This area includes lots of fun aquatic activities like fishing, snorkeling, scuba diving, canoe races, kayak races and rafting. My favorite will be scuba because I have not been able to go to any of them yet, but I cannot wait.
The fourth rocker is for participating in the activities centers. These include a merit badge midway where professionals lead Scouts in earning any merit badge available. I’ve earned engineering, and I’ve seen a promotion for a merit badge called robotics (which I loved), but for now I am not working on any merit badges.
Other activity areas include an American Indian village display that is run by the Order of the Arrow (the Boy Scout honor society).
I can’t wait to see the pow wow dances. I’ve heard they’re amazing. There’s also a replica of the Brown Sea Island, the first Scout camp held in England by Lord Baden-Powel, founder of scouting. Scouts from Canada and Britain are running that display area.
The final rocker is for participating in the action centers. This area hosts friendly Scout competition in new areas for me including mountain boarding, trapshooting, muzzle-loaded gun shooting and a bikathlon – mountain biking and air rifle shooting.
Every evening there are area shows. So far we have seen the author of the book series “Eragon”. Tuesday, July 27th. many musical groups performed, but my favorite was a Trinidad and Tobago group. Wednesday, July 28th. another author talked to us about his “Alchemyst” series (which I started reading that night). Until next time from the Hill, Good bye.

A new blog

2010-07-15T10:49:00.004-05:00

I've launched a new blog, entirely for my own edification, as I take part in a Bible study class at my church. We will be attempting to read the Bible through from cover to cover over the next year and I decided to start a blog where I could post my thoughts and commentaries as we go along. Here is the link:

Bible Reader

I've already got a jump start on Genesis and will keep plodding along as best I can.

Resisting the facts

2010-07-12T10:04:00.002-05:00

From The Boston Globe

This explains a lot...

How facts backfire
Researchers discover a surprising threat to democracy: our brains

By Joe Keohane | July 11, 2010

It’s one of the great assumptions underlying modern democracy that an informed citizenry is preferable to an uninformed one. “Whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government,” Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1789. This notion, carried down through the years, underlies everything from humble political pamphlets to presidential debates to the very notion of a free press. Mankind may be crooked timber, as Kant put it, uniquely susceptible to ignorance and misinformation, but it’s an article of faith that knowledge is the best remedy. If people are furnished with the facts, they will be clearer thinkers and better citizens. If they are ignorant, facts will enlighten them. If they are mistaken, facts will set them straight.

In the end, truth will out. Won’t it?

Maybe not. Recently, a few political scientists have begun to discover a human tendency deeply discouraging to anyone with faith in the power of information. It’s this: Facts don’t necessarily have the power to change our minds. In fact, quite the opposite. In a series of studies in 2005 and 2006, researchers at the University of Michigan found that when misinformed people, particularly political partisans, were exposed to corrected facts in news stories, they rarely changed their minds. In fact, they often became even more strongly set in their beliefs. Facts, they found, were not curing misinformation. Like an underpowered antibiotic, facts could actually make misinformation even stronger.

This bodes ill for a democracy, because most voters — the people making decisions about how the country runs — aren’t blank slates. They already have beliefs, and a set of facts lodged in their minds. The problem is that sometimes the things they think they know are objectively, provably false. And in the presence of the correct information, such people react very, very differently than the merely uninformed. Instead of changing their minds to reflect the correct information, they can entrench themselves even deeper.

“The general idea is that it’s absolutely threatening to admit you’re wrong,” says political scientist Brendan Nyhan, the lead researcher on the Michigan study. The phenomenon — known as “backfire” — is “a natural defense mechanism to avoid that cognitive dissonance.”

These findings open a long-running argument about the political ignorance of American citizens to broader questions about the interplay between the nature of human intelligence and our democratic ideals. Most of us like to believe that our opinions have been formed over time by careful, rational consideration of facts and ideas, and that the decisions based on those opinions, therefore, have the ring of soundness and intelligence. In reality, we often base our opinions on our beliefs, which can have an uneasy relationship with facts. And rather than facts driving beliefs, our beliefs can dictate the facts we chose to accept. They can cause us to twist facts so they fit better with our preconceived notions. Worst of all, they can lead us to uncritically accept bad information just because it reinforces our beliefs. This reinforcement makes us more confident we’re right, and even less likely to listen to any new information. And then we vote.

This effect is only heightened by the information glut, which offers — alongside an unprecedented amount of good information — endless rumors, misinformation, and questionable variations on the truth. In other words, it’s never been easier for people to be wrong, and at the same time feel more certain that they’re right.

“Area Man Passionate Defender Of What He Imagines Constitution To Be,” read a recent Onion headline. Like the best satire, this nasty little gem elicits a laugh, which is then promptly muffled by the queasy feeling of recognition. The last five decades of political science have definitively established that most modern-day Americans lack even a basic understanding of how their country works. In 1996, Princeton University’s Larry M. Bartels argued, “the political ignorance of the American voter is one of the best documented data in political science.”

On its own, this might not be a problem: People ignorant of the facts could simply choose not to vote. But instead, it appears that misinformed people often have some of the strongest political opinions. A striking recent example was a study done in the year 2000, led by James Kuklinski of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He led an influential experiment in which more than 1,000 Illinois residents were asked questions about welfare — the percentage of the federal budget spent on welfare, the number of people enrolled in the program, the percentage of enrollees who are black, and the average payout. More than half indicated that they were confident that their answers were correct — but in fact only 3 percent of the people got more than half of the questions right. Perhaps more disturbingly, the ones who were the most confident they were right were by and large the ones who knew the least about the topic. (Most of these participants expressed views that suggested a strong antiwelfare bias.)

Studies by other researchers have observed similar phenomena when addressing education, health care reform, immigration, affirmative action, gun control, and other issues that tend to attract strong partisan opinion. Kuklinski calls this sort of response the “I know I’m right” syndrome, and considers it a “potentially formidable problem” in a democratic system. “It implies not only that most people will resist correcting their factual beliefs,” he wrote, “but also that the very people who most need to correct them will be least likely to do so.”

What’s going on? How can we have things so wrong, and be so sure that we’re right? Part of the answer lies in the way our brains are wired. Generally, people tend to seek consistency. There is a substantial body of psychological research showing that people tend to interpret information with an eye toward reinforcing their preexisting views. If we believe something about the world, we are more likely to passively accept as truth any information that confirms our beliefs, and actively dismiss information that doesn’t. This is known as “motivated reasoning.” Whether or not the consistent information is accurate, we might accept it as fact, as confirmation of our beliefs. This makes us more confident in said beliefs, and even less likely to entertain facts that contradict them.

New research, published in the journal Political Behavior last month, suggests that once those facts — or “facts” — are internalized, they are very difficult to budge. In 2005, amid the strident calls for better media fact-checking in the wake of the Iraq war, Michigan’s Nyhan and a colleague devised an experiment in which participants were given mock news stories, each of which contained a provably false, though nonetheless widespread, claim made by a political figure: that there were WMDs found in Iraq (there weren’t), that the Bush tax cuts increased government revenues (revenues actually fell), and that the Bush administration imposed a total ban on stem cell research (only certain federal funding was restricted). Nyhan inserted a clear, direct correction after each piece of misinformation, and then measured the study participants to see if the correction took.

For the most part, it didn’t. The participants who self-identified as conservative believed the misinformation on WMD and taxes even more strongly after being given the correction. With those two issues, the more strongly the participant cared about the topic — a factor known as salience — the stronger the backfire. The effect was slightly different on self-identified liberals: When they read corrected stories about stem cells, the corrections didn’t backfire, but the readers did still ignore the inconvenient fact that the Bush administration’s restrictions weren’t total.

It’s unclear what is driving the behavior — it could range from simple defensiveness, to people working harder to defend their initial beliefs — but as Nyhan dryly put it, “It’s hard to be optimistic about the effectiveness of fact-checking.”

It would be reassuring to think that political scientists and psychologists have come up with a way to counter this problem, but that would be getting ahead of ourselves. The persistence of political misperceptions remains a young field of inquiry. “It’s very much up in the air,” says Nyhan.

But researchers are working on it. One avenue may involve self-esteem. Nyhan worked on one study in which he showed that people who were given a self-affirmation exercise were more likely to consider new information than people who had not. In other words, if you feel good about yourself, you’ll listen — and if you feel insecure or threatened, you won’t. This would also explain why demagogues benefit from keeping people agitated. The more threatened people feel, the less likely they are to listen to dissenting opinions, and the more easily controlled they are.

There are also some cases where directness works. Kuklinski’s welfare study suggested that people will actually update their beliefs if you hit them “between the eyes” with bluntly presented, objective facts that contradict their preconceived ideas. He asked one group of participants what percentage of its budget they believed the federal government spent on welfare, and what percentage they believed the government should spend. Another group was given the same questions, but the second group was immediately told the correct percentage the government spends on welfare (1 percent). They were then asked, with that in mind, what the government should spend. Regardless of how wrong they had been before receiving the information, the second group indeed adjusted their answer to reflect the correct fact.

Kuklinski’s study, however, involved people getting information directly from researchers in a highly interactive way. When Nyhan attempted to deliver the correction in a more real-world fashion, via a news article, it backfired. Even if people do accept the new information, it might not stick over the long term, or it may just have no effect on their opinions. In 2007 John Sides of George Washington University and Jack Citrin of the University of California at Berkeley studied whether providing misled people with correct information about the proportion of immigrants in the US population would affect their views on immigration. It did not.

And if you harbor the notion — popular on both sides of the aisle — that the solution is more education and a higher level of political sophistication in voters overall, well, that’s a start, but not the solution. A 2006 study by Charles Taber and Milton Lodge at Stony Brook University showed that politically sophisticated thinkers were even less open to new information than less sophisticated types. These people may be factually right about 90 percent of things, but their confidence makes it nearly impossible to correct the 10 percent on which they’re totally wrong. Taber and Lodge found this alarming, because engaged, sophisticated thinkers are “the very folks on whom democratic theory relies most heavily.”

In an ideal world, citizens would be able to maintain constant vigilance, monitoring both the information they receive and the way their brains are processing it. But keeping atop the news takes time and effort. And relentless self-questioning, as centuries of philosophers have shown, can be exhausting. Our brains are designed to create cognitive shortcuts — inference, intuition, and so forth — to avoid precisely that sort of discomfort while coping with the rush of information we receive on a daily basis. Without those shortcuts, few things would ever get done. Unfortunately, with them, we’re easily suckered by political falsehoods.

Nyhan ultimately recommends a supply-side approach. Instead of focusing on citizens and consumers of misinformation, he suggests looking at the sources. If you increase the “reputational costs” of peddling bad info, he suggests, you might discourage people from doing it so often. “So if you go on ‘Meet the Press’ and you get hammered for saying something misleading,” he says, “you’d think twice before you go and do it again.”

Unfortunately, this shame-based solution may be as implausible as it is sensible. Fast-talking political pundits have ascended to the realm of highly lucrative popular entertainment, while professional fact-checking operations languish in the dungeons of wonkery. Getting a politician or pundit to argue straight-faced that George W. Bush ordered 9/11, or that Barack Obama is the culmination of a five-decade plot by the government of Kenya to destroy the United States — that’s easy. Getting him to register shame? That isn’t.

}"Obama snub" email debunked

2010-07-11T00:34:00.003-05:00

I got this video e-mailed to me today by my brother-in-law because he likes to needle me about Obama.

And here is the text of the email that accompanied the video (NOT by my brother-in-law since he just forwarded it):

I guess to some people you cannot bow...
Keep your eye on Obama's hand and face
Watch this 10-second video where a lineup of leading Russians refuse to shake his hand. Did you see this on ABC,
CBS, NBC, CNN or MSNBC? NO!
This is "hard ball" Soviet Style. After the third handshake refusal,,,it becomes obvious. The facial expression is priceless.
"I guess we're no longer in Chicago."
And, how in the world did Katie Couric, Charlie Gibson, Diane Sawyer et al, miss this? If it had been Bush, think the media would cover it??
Anyone ever seen a Head of State snubbed like this? It speaks volumes.
Maybe Obama should apologize for the U.S. some more. It sure seems to be working great so far!

OK, then.
But the problem with the video, it seems is that it does not show Obama being snubbed by Russians at all. In fact, in the video it is the American delegation that is not shaking the president's hand - and for good reason! Because he is introducing them to the Russian leader and gesturing with his hand - not trying to shake their hands.

Snopes does a good job debunking this particular email. They also show an unedited video from the meeting in which you see Obama enter the room and immediatley shake hands with all the members of the Russian delegation.

Another irony is that while the email claims you did not see this on MSNBC among other stations - the video is, in fact, a close up of a broadcast off of MSNBC which you can see if you search "Obama snub" on Youtube.

OK, so I understand why people fall for this stuff. It's because it shows them or tells them something that they WANT to believe and therefore they eagerly grasp it.
But who is behind emails like this? Whe makes this stuff up? It seems unlikely that it was a benign mistake. Rather, based on the careful editing and zooming in to obscure the context, they must have known that it was B.S. And yet, they put it out anyway. Why? Were they paid to do so? It would seem that there is whole cottage industry out there churning this stuff out to feed the innumberable outlets for rightwing media - including the near monopoly on Talk Radio and the dozens of rightwing shows on cable news channels - particulary phony Faux News.

King James abdicates his throne

2010-07-09T07:58:00.002-05:00

LeBron James' cowardly decision to turn tail and run out of Cleveland should make it clear to everyone that he is not and never will be as good as Michael Jordan or dozens of other past NBA stars as well.
What James is telling us by going to Miami is that he doesn't think he is good enough to win a title by himself and needs to stand on the shoulders of Dwayne Wade and Chris Bosh.
While I'm sure the decision will make lots of people in Florida happy, I think it has seriously tarnished LeBron's national reputation. He can't even use the excuse of money because he would have been paid more - $30 million more - to stay in Cleveland. But that would have also required him to do more work and take on more responsibility for pulling a team together that can win a championship. When that didn't happen this year, LeBron gave up. Now, he will have no excuses, but likewise he will receive a lot less credit if his new superstar team fails to meet gargantuan expectations.
I know that I, for one, will be rooting for LeBron and the Miami Heat to fall flat on their asses. I now have a team that I can dislike even more than the Lakers.
Maybe now the sports world will start to give more credit to Tim Duncan, who quietly and efficiently led his team to four championships without the spectacle of needing to bring in two other top-tier draft picks.

A good graph to keep in mind

2010-07-01T11:54:00.001-05:00

Defining the modern "conservative" movement

2010-06-30T16:48:00.001-05:00

Andrew Sullivan has a bleak assessment of our current political discourse.

When Andrew Breitbart offers $100,000 for a private email list-serv archive, essentially all bets are off. Every blogger or writer who has ever offered an opinion is now on warning: your opponents will not just argue against you, they will do all they can to ransack your private life, cull your email in-tray, and use whatever material they have to unleash the moronic hounds of today's right-wing base.

Yes, the Economist was right. This is not about transparency, or hypocrisy. It's about power. And when you are Andrew Breitbart, power is all that matters. There is not a whit of thoughtfulness about this, not an iota of pretense that it might actually advance the conversation about how to deal with, say, a world still perilously close to a second Great Depression, a government that is bankrupt, two wars that have been or are being lost, an energy crisis that is also threatening our planet's ecosystem, and a media increasingly incapable of holding the powerful accountable.

Meanwhile, the GOP leaders, having done all they can to destroy a presidency by obstructing everything and anything he might do or have done to address the crippling problems bequeathed him by his predecessor, are now also waging a scorched earth battle to prevent the working poor from having any real access to affordable health insurance.

This is what the right now is: no solutions, just anger, paranoia, insecurity and partisan hatred.

Smokey Joe Barton apologizes to BP

2010-06-17T13:14:00.000-05:00

Movie making story followup

2010-06-10T11:17:00.001-05:00

When I was working as a reporter for a chain of weekly newspapers in Connecticut in the early 1990s, I had the opportunity to write many interesting stories. One that I recently dug out of my files that was published in the April 23, 1992 edition of the Durham Gazette was about a New York film crew that came to Middlefield, Conn. to do some on-location filming for an independent feature-length movie.
It was a low-budget production (about $200,000) and involved mostly no-name actors and a writer/director fresh out of film school by the name of Deirdre Fishel. The working title of the film was “Maya” and I was told that it was the story of a young woman whose life and career had stalled until she met a charming vagabond named Joe on a New York subway. He convinced her to escape with him to the country. Thus the need for on-location filming at Happy Acres Resort, a small collection of rental cabins in a remote, wooded area outside of the small community of Middlefield (near Durham).
My story focused mainly on the “gypsy” lifestyle of the film crew and their reaction to the scenic and rustic environment of rural Connecticut compared to New York City. I talked with the associate producer who had scouted the location and several low-level crew members including a “2nd electric” and a “2nd grip.”
It was raining and sleeting for much of the time that the film crew was in town and they did a lot of the filming inside the cabins while the crewmembers huddled under the eaves trying to stay warm and dry.
I never knew what happened with the movie after they left. I kind of assumed that it did not get a theatrical release. But recently I decided to dig up the old story and using the magic of the Internet I discovered that I was wrong. The film actually did get a theatrical release in 1994 under the name “Risk.” It was entered into the Sundance Film Festival and even got a somewhat decent review in the New York Times (Oct. 5, 1994).
What kind of shocked me, however, was that the film is described as an “erotic thriller.” So that’s what they were doing in the cabins with the windows all covered with blankets! I should have known. The associate producer told me at the time that “We needed someplace that was isolated so we can do our work undisturbed and also so we won’t bother others.”
OK, then.
The film is described on the web today as “a powerful drama about an artist who enters into a turbulent love affair with a troubled and unpredictable young man.” The cover of the video on Amazon is a bit too risque for me to post on my blog.
The star of the film, Karen Sillas, went on to do a few more low-budget movies before getting her “big break” in television. She has since appeared in a number of popular TV series in bit roles including CSI, The Sopranos, and a recurring role in the TNT crime drama “Wanted”. The director went on to do several documentary films and then joined the faculty at the New School University in New York.

Cato's false dichotomy

2010-05-26T14:10:00.002-05:00

It is entirely understandable that the chairman of the Cato Institute would feel the need to stand up and defend Rand Paul, the Republican Senate candidate from Kentucky who caused a political firestorm last week after insisting in a series of interviews that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 should not have been used to enforce anti-discrimination laws against private businesses.
That is because Paul’s position is entirely consistent with those put forth by the Cato Institute, a rightwing Libertarian think tank.
Robert A. Levy, in a column for Politico, called Rand’s stance “principled” but also “politically incorrect.” This, in and of itself, is rather outrageous. To suggest that the only thing wrong with supporting private-sector apartheid is that it is “politically incorrect” and not morally and ethically abhorrent is quite a feat of political spin.
But Levy doesn’t leave it there. He goes on to make the argument that the Civil Rights Act “has a disputable constitutional pedigree.”

The Civil Rights Act addresses the conduct of private individuals, so it is not easily shoehorned into the 14th Amendment, which constrains only government conduct.

So what Levy is saying is that the 14th Amendment does not give the government the authority to pass laws that might constrain the conduct of private individuals.
Really??
Here is what the 14th Amendment says:

Section 1. All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

So Levy is trying to do a little Constitutional jujitsu here, by pretending that the 14th Amendment only applies to the State being discriminatory and not private individuals.
But what of the last part of Section 1, the so-called equal protection clause? How can a state not deny equal protection of the laws without enforcing those same laws on private individuals?
If a shop owner wants to discriminate as to who their customers will be, or a businessman wants to discriminate as to who he will hire and employ, or a housing developer wants to maintain segregation in certain neighborhoods... does it then follow that certain citizens are being denied equal protection of the laws should the state choose not to act?
Clearly the Supreme Court thinks so, if the Cato Institute does not.
And remember that Section 5 of the 14th Amendment reads:

The Congress shall have power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.

So it would seem then that the Civil Rights Act is not on shaky or problematic ground with regards to the 14th Amendment.
One of the problems, I believe, is with the extreme view that Cato takes when considering the issue of private vs. public. They assume that a private business should enjoy the same protections from government intrusion as a private home.
However, there is a public element to any business transaction that is being disregarded by Mr. Levy. By going into the public sphere to seek clients, customers, employees, investors and so forth, a businessman has crossed a line that necessarily invokes a degree of government intervention and regulation.
If someone wanted, for example, to keep black and brown people from entering their home, few would argue that they have no such right. But to make that same demand in a business environment is unacceptable because such a demand necessarily requires backing and enforcement from the government.
For example, if you were a business owner who wanted to prohibit people of color from entering your establishment, how would you enforce such a rule assuming that someone chose to ignore it? Call the police? File a lawsuit with the courts and demand redress? Or maybe you would hire a private security team to forcibly remove such individuals, but one could see how such actions could quickly get out of hand and once again require the intervention of law enforcement entities.

And this leads to my next point which is that libertarian freedoms, such that they are, could not exist outside the framework of a collectivist society.
When Levy says at the end of the article that “The essence of collectivism is force. The essence of libertarianism is choice” he is creating a false dichotomy that assumes that one part could exist without the other.
But outside the mythical fantasy of living on a desert island like Robinson Crusoe or Swiss Family Robinson, there is no place on earth that one can go to escape the confines and influence of collectivist society.
Contrary to popular myth, the United States was NOT founded by a bunch of “rugged individualists,” but rather by people working together to build communities and societies that could support our ideals of freedom and justice.
Without this collectivist framework, the rugged individualists would have been quickly stripped of their “private property” by Native Americans, the French, the British, the Germans, criminal elements or whatever other “collectivist” entities came along to fill the vacuum.
The point is that the only reason we enjoy the freedoms that we have is because we have a government that is strong enough to protect them.

Rand Paul's shallow philosophy

2010-05-20T16:38:00.002-05:00

Rand Paul is already making a splash as the new rising star of the Republican Party. Last night on the Rachel Maddow Show, he reiterated his views that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 should not prohibit private businesses from discriminating on the basis of race.
If that is his position and he’s sticking with it, then Ezra Klein has a few more questions for him:

For instance: Can the federal government set the private sector’s minimum wage? Can it tell private businesses not to hire illegal immigrants? Can it tell oil companies what safety systems to build into an offshore drilling platform? Can it tell toy companies to test for lead? Can it tell liquor stores not to sell to minors? These are the sort of questions that Paul needs to be asked now.

And Steve Benen has a few more:

If we follow the logic he’s already articulated, Paul must necessarily oppose the minimum wage, for example. The Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act, in light of their burdens on private companies, would be equally problematic. Social Security must be out of the question. Child-labor laws would obviously be a problem, as would workplace safety regulations and OSHA.
We can even start exploring more details on discrimination. Paul talked about segregated lunch counters yesterday, but let’s also explore employment discrimination. If a private company decided to fire a woman for getting pregnant, Rand Paul would necessarily conclude that it’s not the government’s business. If a private employer refused to hire Jewish applicants, that, under Paul’s worldview, would be legally permissible, too.

I eagerly wait to hear Rand’s answers to these questions and many more.

Rand is an interesting guy. As the son of radical rightwing Libertarian Congressman Ron Paul of Texas, he has an unusual poltical pedigree, but one that makes him popular with the current day Tea Party crowd. His Dad’s sterling reputation among the far-right Tea Partiers and his unusual first name made him the odds on favorite to win the Republican primary in the wingnutopia that is Kentucky. (Afterall, he is running to replace one of the looniest far-right Republicans in office today - Sen. Jim Bunning).
With a first name of Rand, many people are left to assume that he was named after the rightwing objectivist philosopher Ayn Rand, who is exceedingly popular among Tea Party cultists. Rand has not tried very hard to deny that he was named after the Goddess of Greed, even though it is not true. As it turns out, his birth name is Randall and he went by Randy for years before deciding at some point to shorten it to Rand. But he is without question a big fan of Rand and her objectivist philosophy.

I think there is a good chance that Rand will win in November in spite of the brewing Civil Rights controversy. And that will NOT be good news for the Republican Party as they try to distance themselves from his extremist views.

Who is Jean Pierre Godet?

2010-05-18T17:16:00.002-05:00

Don McLeroy is at it again. The lunatic, lame duck, former chairman of the Texas State Board of Education has a new list of amendments and changes he wants to make to the guidelines that dictate how public school textbooks are written.
His latest list of demands includes this gem:

RECOMMENDED CHANGE
B) *evaluate* contrast the *impact* tone of muckrakers and reform leaders such as
Upton Sinclair, Susan B. Anthony, Ida B. Wells, and W. E. B. DuBois *on American
society; and* versus the optimism of immigrants including Jean Pierre Godet as told
in Thomas Kinkade’s The Spirit of America.

JUSTIFICATION
Diversity of opinion and balanced presentation.
The words of Godet and immigrants like him were, “I love America for
giving so many of us the right to dream a new dream”. Such words
were as lost on the muckrakers as they are on many modern
historians obsessed by oppression.

What makes this proposed change interesting is that McLeroy apparently wants to downplay the accomplishments of four of our nation’s most prominent Progressive era reform leaders by contrasting their views with those of Jean Pierre Godet, an immigrant that McLeroy read about in Thomas Kincade’s book. McLeroy apparently likes Mr. Godet because he has this quote about how much he loves America for giving him the right to “dream a new dream.”
So rather than “evaluating” the “impact” that Sinclair, Anthony, Wells and DuBois had on American society, we are just going to contrast their rather downbeat and dispirited assessments of American life with those of Mr. Godet, the ever so happy-go-lucky immigrant. Gosh, those reform leaders were such downers, all obsessed with oppression and all. Why couldn’t they just be thankful for what they had like Mr. Godet?

But wait a minute! Who is this Mr. Godet anyway? Where did he come from and why was he always so happy? Seeing as how Mr. Godet would be elevated to a status equal if not superior to that of Sinclair, Anthony, Wells and DuBois in our students’ textbooks, shouldn’t we know a little more about him?
A Google search doesn’t come up with much. So what about that Kincade book? Who is this Thomas Kincade fellow anyway? Isn’t he that painter? Why, yes, as a matter of fact he is, but he did write a book called “The Spirit of America,” however it was a work of historical fiction. And, as it turns out, our Mr. Godet is a fictional character in Kincade’s book.
So, there you have it. Don McLeroy wants to take all these progressive era reform leaders and put them on par with a fictional character invented by the sappy, syrupy pop artist Thomas Kinkade.
No problem with that, is there?

Why we read “terrorists” their Miranda rights

2010-05-11T11:56:00.000-05:00

I don’t understand why reading Miranda rights to a “terrorist” suspect is so controversial.
I think it is because people on the right immediately hear the word “terrorist” — ignore the word “suspect” — and then demand to know why we are “giving rights” to terrorists who are trying to kill us.
But that is not the way one should look at it. We are not “giving rights” to criminal suspects. We are agreeing not to take away rights which we rightfully believe belong to all people regardless of their guilt, innocence, nationality or immigration status. These “rights” are not for the criminal suspects, they are for us. They are not meant to shield the guilty from facing justice, but rather to shield us from the shame and stigma of putting innocent people behind bars.
You see, these “rights” say more about us as a people than they say about the criminal suspects. We won’t take these “rights” away because of who we are. We are good people who do not believe in putting innocent people in jail and we will take the necessary steps to help insure that such mistakes are rarely made and are quickly rectified when they do occur. At least, that is the noble of intent of reading suspects their ‘rights’.
So if the thought of giving a criminal undeserved rights makes you agitated, just remember that is not what it is all about. We do it because we are a great country. So stop telling me that is not how they do it in other countries. Those other countries should strive to be more like us, not the other way around.

RNC shoots own foot with first attack on Kagan

2010-05-10T13:44:00.001-05:00

One of the first attacks by the Republican National Committee against Elena Kagan, Obama’s Supreme Court nominee, is embarrassingly misguided and profoundly stupid.
They are trying to score cheap points by tying her to a quote that former Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall made in which he said that the U.S. Contitition as originally written was “defective.” Kagan, who once served as a law clerk for Justice Marshall, made a reference to that speech in a paper she wrote honoring Marshall shortly after his death.
“Does Kagan Still View Constitution ‘As Originally Drafted And Conceived’ As ‘Defective’?” the RNC asks ominously in its new line of attack.
Why yes, you MORONS! It most certainly was defective considering that it tolerated slavery and considered black people to be only 2/3rds a person for purposes of representation. That is the “defect” that Marshall was specifically referring to. We don’t even have to get into the fact that women were not allowed to vote or participate in government or any of the other myriad problems which have been addressed over the years by the Constitutional amendment process.
What IDIOTS!!! But I guess that they know who their audience is and that there will be plenty of rank-and-file GOP voters who will be “outraged” when they are told that Kagan thinks the Constition was flawed.

Comic of the day

2010-05-07T16:45:00.000-05:00

Broken promises and lies: Defending Obama's veracity

2010-05-07T10:57:00.004-05:00

A recent exchange with one of my Facebook friends has prompted me to finally put a new post on my sadly neglected blog.
My friend Kristen is NOT a big fan of Barack Obama and went so far as to denounce him as a methodical liar.

“Obama and honest shouldn’t even be used in the same sentence. I don’t hate him, I have no respect for the man, he is a joke and you cannot believe a word he says,” she said.

To which I responded: “If you have some specific examples of Obama being purposefully deceitful then please share them with us. But I really have no use for these broad, over-the-top denunciations of our president...”

And so Kristen came back with a long list of “lies” that she believes Obama is guilty of foistering on the American people. I will run through the list below and attempt to address each one as best as I can.

The Alleged Lies:

• we can start with his statement that our premiums will go down 3000% if his healthcare bill was passed (numerically impossible but he said it over and over)...

The 3,000 percent decrease in healthcare premiums was a statement that was widely mocked on rightwing blogs as a quick Google check confirms. Clearly, however, it was a simple case of a misspeak on Obama’s part in one speech. What he meant to say was that the plan includes a $3,000 per employee credit for the employer to provide health insurance, not a 3000 percent reduction for the employer. If you look at the full context of what he was saying, just a few sentences earlier he had said that insurance premiums could fall 14 to 20 percent. So obviously the second reference to falling premiums was a misspeak.

• and how about the no tax increases for 95% of Americans, that lie was exposed almost immediately.....

As the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities reports, Federal Income Taxes on Middle-Income Families are currently at Historically Low Levels. They were low to start with under GW Bush and Obama has lowered them even further with his first budget proposal and the stimulus plan that included even more tax breaks. While it is true that Obama said earlier this year that he may have to reneg somewhat on that campaign promise in order to address the budget deficit problem, so far that has not happened and there have NOT been any federal tax increases on the middle class. If Kristen insists on believing otherwise then she needs to at least produce some source or citation backing up her belief.

• “i didn’t know bill ayers”

This item from FactCheck.org evicerates the bogus claim that Obama lied about his relationship with Bill Ayers. Anyone still harboring doubts about this non-event that was unsuccessfully hyped by the McCain campaign should read the article in full.

• “i don’t share the views of rev white”

That would be Rev. Jeremiah Wright, and I believe Obama more than adequately addressed the situation with his now famous A More Perfect Union speech during the presidential campaign.
The irony is that once the Obama haters failed to pin Obama to the radical Christian views of Rev. Wright, they then set about trying to label him as a radical Muslim.

• my government is the most transparent ever

Obama has indeed taken significant steps towards opening up the government to make it more transparent as this story details. And while some critics say it hasn’t gone far enough, it is still an improvement on the policies of past presidential administrations.

• i will have the entire healthcare debate on cspan

This overly broad campaign promise was a bit naive on Obama’s part and he has admitted as much Obama acknowledges broken C-SPAN promise. It is not unusual for a candidate to promise things with all sincerity on the campaign trail only to find out later that they are impractical once they are in office. But without question, there has been more open debate televised on C-SPAN than in years past.

• no backroom deals for me

I cannot find a specific instance of Obama making such a statement. Nevertheless, while most politicians would object to the negative connotations of the term “backroom deals,” it is without question part of the way things are done in any large entity whether it’s a government or a corporation. Compromises are made, allliances are formed, deals are cut and things get done. That is the way the world has always worked.

• i will not take money from lobbyists

Obama made this pledge during the campaign and based on strict definitions of “registered Washington lobbyists” was able to stick to it. Of course, as Columbia Journalism Review reported at the time, that accounted for only about 1 percent of the available money in the race.

• i post bills online for 5 days before i sign them so people can read and give feedback

Yes, this is another naive promise made on the campaign trail that ran counter to the scheduling realities of Washington. But as I noted before, being forced to break a promise made in all sincerity due to the constraints of real life is not the same as telling a malicious lie with the intent to deceive. It was one of those promises that sounded good at the time, but doesn’t make a lot of sense when you consider that these bills have been debated for months and months by the people’s representatives and once they are passed are not going to be changed anymore. They either get signed or vetoed at that point. So putting everything on hold for five days and forcing people to juggle schedules and delay overseas trips makes little sense.

• i am a moderate

Within the context of the Democratic Party, Obama is very much a moderate. Ask any Democrat on the left who has a long list of gripes and disagreements with President Obama.

• i am not a socialist

Of course he is not a socialist. That is an ignorant statement. If one assumes that Obama is a socialist then every president we’ve had from Roosevelt through Clinton is a socialist as well.

• i’m not looking to run insurance companies out of business (many times he is on video saying he wants a single payer system)

First, while he may have expressed support for a single payer system at one time, the reality in Washington right now is that it would not pass so he has shifted his position on that point. That is not lying, it is being practical and is something that I can respect. Secondly, why would having a single payer system run insurance companies out of business? Taiwan has a national healthcare single-payer system and they still have an insurance industry Taiwan Insurance Report - Business Monitor International. If we ever did implement a single payer system here, U.S. insurance companies would adapt.

• I do not want to own GM

And how is that a lie? GM has paid back its loans to the federal government and is starting to rehire workers around the country. If we had allowed GM to fail it would have been a huge blow to our already weakened economy and would have extended the recession for much longer and could have even pushed us into a depression.

• i will recognize the armenian genocide

Once again political reality has forced Obama to backpedal on a campaign promise. Once again this is not the same thing as a lie. I’m sure Obama would like to formally recognize the genocide, but to do so now would jeapordize U.S.-Turkey relations at a time when we are depending on that country’s support for our ongoing operations in Iraq and Afghanistan and to help pressure Iran on nuclear deterrence.

• i will have no earmarks in the stimulus (there are 9000 from what i can find)

This is simply a matter of semantics. One person’s “earmark” is another person’s vital program. Practically anything you put into any bill can be called an earmark. What Obama was trying to stop were the last-minute additions that get inserted without review or debate, and in that respect he largely succeeded.

• hell he even lied about quitting smoking

Low blow. Clearly he is trying to break a 30-year habit and that does not come easy.

The modern day Anti-Federalists

2010-04-22T17:06:00.003-05:00

Tea Partiers would seem to have a special affectation for the U.S. Constitution seeing as how they are always saying they want to “get back to it” and the way they like to accuse President Obama of “shredding” it.
But the great irony, I think, is that if these same Tea Partiers had actually been around back when the Constitution was first written, they would most likely have been opposed to it.
The philisophical underpinnings of the Tea Party movement, that which there are, are rooted not in the words of the Founding Fathers and the Constitution, but rather in the words of those who opposed the Constitution and fought against its ratification — the Anti-Federalists, as they were known.
Like the Tea Partiers today, the Anti-Federalists were opposed to having a strong central government. They wanted a system of government where the federal part would be equal to or lesser than the sum of its parts. They wanted the states to have the final say in most matters and feared that a strong central government led by a strong executive branch could result in a dictatorship or a new monarchy.
There was something to be said about their concerns at the time and that is why Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay wrote The Federalist Papers. It was their response to and argument against the points being raised by the Anti-Federalists.

Ode to Delwin Jones

2010-04-14T14:03:00.004-05:00

The runoff elections the other day had both good and bad results.
On the good side, Francisco "Quico" Canseco, the two-time loser, won the Republican primary race to face Congressman Ciro Rodriguez in November. I wanted Canseco to win because I believe he was the weakest of the two runoff candidates. Will Hurd, a former Texas A&M student body president, seemed to have an enthusiastic support base that included the San Antonio Express-News which had endorsed him and written several glowing articles about him. Hurd had also been endorsed by his other primary rivals after the election, so having him fall short in the runoff was a lucky break. Now, perhaps, there may even be a slim chance that the Republican-endorsing E-N might even skip this race.
More good news was the victory of the relatively moderate Republican Deborah Lehrman for a Supreme Court seat over right-wing Tea Party nutjob Rick Green.

Unfortunately, Republicans in my former hometown of Lubbock did not show the same good sense in two state rep. runoffs. Most disappointing for me was the loss of Republican State Rep. Delwin Jones to Tea Partying novice Charles Perry (who no doubt picked up a lot of votes because of his last name) in the District 83 race.
Delwin is 86 and was first elected to the Texas Legislature in 1965, the year I was born. He was a Democrat back then and lost when the Republican tide swept the Panhandle in the early 1970s. He made a comeback in 1989 as a Republican and had held the seat ever since. But during that time, Jones was clearly more interested in representing the best interests of his district rather than doing the bidding the Republican Party in Austin. So when he backed South Plains Democrat Pete Laney for Speaker over Republican Tom Craddick it created a lot of animosity. That animosity carried over after Craddick finally persevered in becoming Speaker only to have Jones throw his support to moderate San Antonio Republican Joe Straus in a successful coup at the beginning of the last legislative session.

So it was no surprise that these developments led to having the wingnut faction of the GOP placing a big target on Jone's back for his most recent election. And this time it worked.
Jones is 86 years old and I'm sure his wife is happy that he will be stepping down even if he is not. My wife's aunt and uncle live down the street from the Jones and have been good friends with them for years. When I worked at the local paper in the late '90s I had several opportunities to meet and interview Delwin and I could not help but like him. He was honest, straightforward and dedicated to his work. I'm sure that Delwin wanted to serve at least one more term so that he could once again chair the redistricting committee. Now the decades of institutional knowledge - especially with regard to redistricting - will be lost.
It is a sad turn of events for Lubbock.
At the same time, another wingnut Tea Partier won the District 84 seat being given up far-right wingnut Carl Isett. So no change there.

When I first moved to Lubbock in 1995, they had two relatively moderate Republican state reps. - Delwin Jones and Robert Duncan. But when then-state Sen. John Montford was tapped to become the chancellor of Texas Tech University, it set off chain reaction of races as Duncan and the then-mayor of Lubbock faced off for the senate seat and a moderate Democrat and wingnut Isett faced off for the District 84 House seat.
I remember that the Democrat in that House race had the backing of all the major power players in Lubbock and a big financial advantage - unusual even then for the Republican-dominated city - and I was naively confident that the Democrat would pull it off. But then shortly before the election I saw Delwin and asked him what he thought about the race. I remember that he just shook his head and said the demographics just weren't there for a Democrat to win no matter how many endorsements he piled up. Too many straight-ticket Republican voters, he said. And he was right. And that was too bad for Lubbock because Isett was a particularly awful representative and now they will be getting a double-dose of that kind of representation in the next term.

Supreme Court unlikely to change

2010-04-09T11:29:00.000-05:00

There is absolutely no good reason why replacing John Paul Stevens on the Supreme Court should generate a fight with Republicans. The court currently has a conservative majority and replacing Stevens, who is considered to be the leader of the liberal wing, with another liberal would not shift the balance on the court one iota.
And yet, Republicans are already talking about filibustering any nominee put forward by President Obama, unless, I assume, he were to pre-approve his choice with Republicans first. As the minority party that lost the last two elections, Republicans are in no position to be dictating to Obama who his Supreme Court pick can or cannot be. But it shouldn’t matter, because as I noted, he can’t change the makeup of the court with this pick regardless. Unless, of course, he were to pick a more moderate replacement and thus make the court that much more conservative than it already is.
It should be no surprise that Stevens has decided to step down. He is by far the oldest justice on the court at (nearly) 90, and as a liberal, one would assume he would want a Democratic president to choose his replacement (even though, oddly enough, he was appointed by a Republican - Gerald Ford).
The next most likely justice to step down is yet another liberal, Ruth Bader Ginsberg, who is the second oldest justice at 77 and has had health problems recently. So, concievably, Obama could make three Supreme Court selections during his first term without altering the ideological makeup of the court one bit. His first choice of Sonia Sotomayor replaced liberal justice David Souter.
The only way the balance on the court could shift would be if one of the older conservative justices - Antonin Scalia (74) or Anthony Kennedy (73), both Reagan appointees - were to suddenly experience health problems and step down unwillingly. Then one might expect a fight as the ideological balance of the court would be at stake.
But as it is, things are not likely to change even though Republicans are promising to put up a fight as if they were.
Last time I guessed correctly that Obama was going to choose Sotomayor. This time I have no clue, but I am betting he will pick another woman - possibly Elena Kagan or Diane Wood.

The Art of Non-compromise

2010-04-01T12:37:00.002-05:00

President Obama's recent announcement that he will open up portions of the Atlantic coast to offshore drilling, coupled with previous announcements about funding construction of new nuclear power plants, is his first step in laying the groundwork for a broad, comprehensive energy bill that will put this country on track to reduce carbon emissions that are contributing to global warming.
It is Obama's hope, I imagine, that these moves will help peel away a few Republican votes so that climate change legislation can overcome the inevitable Republican filibuster.
The sad thing is that it may not work. Republicans have perfected the art of the non-compromise as demonstrated during the year-long debate over health care reform. Even though Democrats incorporated many Republican ideas into the final package - so much so that it closely resembles the Republican alternative to Hillarycare proposed back in 1994 - not a single Republican in the House or Senate cast a vote for the bill in the end.
And that is the way it has gone for most of Obama's presidency. The Democrats are willing to barter and trade and do whatever it takes to get legislation passed that will be beneficial to the country. Republicans, on the other hand, have taken a rigidly partisan, ideological approach where they refuse to accept anything short of "my way or the highway." It is all-or-nothing for the GOP these days. If you give them 99 percent of what they want, they will fillibuster the bill because they didn't get that last 1 percent. Their idea of bipartisanship is for the President and the Democrats to give them everything they want and get nothing of what they want in return.
So instead, Democrats have been forced to go it alone and pass legislation in the face of unprecendented minority opposition. We essentially have two political parties today - the Grown-up party that is tasked with the responsibility of governing the country; and the Whiny Spoiled Child Party that pouts, throws temper tantrums and refuses to compromise on any issue.
Republicans today do not concern themselves with governing. The worse the government functions, the better as far as they are concerned because they are the anti-government party whose base is the radical Tea Partiers who claim to love their country in theory but hate every aspect of it in reality. They love the symbolism but hate the substance.

Pop culture touchstones of my youth

2010-03-25T22:59:00.002-05:00

You can't escape the influences of pop culture. How much are we shaped and defined by this stuff that makes its first impressions on us during our youth?
Here are some of the things that made an impact on me during the first dozen or so years of my life...

Topps baseball cards
G.I. Joe
Elvis Presley
Scooby Doo
The Big Red Machine (Cincinnati Reds)
Apollo astronauts
Godzilla
Silly putty
Evel Knievel
Harlem Globetrotters
The Flintstones
The Jackson Five
Speed Racer
Walt Disney
Bugs Bunny
Skateboards
Cub Scouts
Mad Magazine
Star Wars
KISS
Disco/Bee Gees
Peanuts/Charles Schultz
Happy Days/Fonzie
Carol Burnett Show

Overlooked Rock Hall of Famers

2010-03-16T13:42:00.003-05:00

The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inducted its newest members the other day. You can see a list of the current Rock Hall members here.

The new inductees included Abba, Genesis, Jimmy Cliff, The Hollies and The Stooges.
Needless to say, I was rather underwhelmed by this group. I like Genesis OK and agree that they are deserving but I was never a big fan and never bought any of their albums (To be fair, I did record one of their albums from a friend). Likewise, I can appreciate ABBA and I do have a greatest hits collection of theirs. But I am completely unfamiliar with Jimmy Cliff who I believe is a reggae singer and I have never been interested in Iggy Pop and the Stooges.
So 2 out of 5 isn’t too bad, I suppose. Last year the Hall inducted Jeff Beck, Little Anthony & the Imperials, Metallica, RunDMC and Bobby Womack. I can honestly say that I don’t own any albums by any of those artists.
What is most striking to me about these inductions is when you consider the group of eligible artists who have NOT been inducted. There was a bit of a fuss in recent years about the fact that KISS has not been inducted, but just look at who else they have to share that status with:
Peter Frampton; Stevie Ray Vaughn; Hall & Oates; Boston; Cheap Trick; Heart; Rush; J. Geils Band; Deep Purple; Def Leppard; REO Speedwagon; Journey; Electric Light Orchestra; Styx; Bon Jovi; Steve Miller Band; Bachman Turner Overdrive; Jim Croce; Neil Diamond; Los Lobos; Cat Stevens; The Cars; The Go Gos; Billy Squier; Yes; INXS; Devo; Steppenwolf; Pat Benatar; Loverboy; Rick Springfield; KC and the Sunshine Band; The Doobie Brothers; Tears for Fears; Eddie Money; Peter Gabriel; Huey Lewis and the News; Cyndi Lauper; George Thorogood....
And the list goes on, including some long-neglected older acts like Humble Pie, The Faces and Paul Revere and The Raiders. And then there is the Red Hot Chili Peppers who were first eligible last year and not selected.
I could easily cull out five deserving nominees from that list who I would put in the hall before any of the acts selected over the last couple of years.
Some acts are not in the Hall yet simply because they are not eligible yet. The current rule is you have to wait 25 years after your first song is published to be eligible. Assuming they do not change that criteria by shortening it to 20 years (which I believe is being considered) here are the artists I would consider shoo-ins for induction over the next half dozen years based on their popularity with both the masses and the critics:

Guns N Roses (2011)
Public Enemy (2012)
Nirvana (2013)
Green Day (2014)
Smashing Pumpkins (2015)
Pearl Jam (2016)

That leaves four open slots each year to consider the neglected artists listed above - not to mention the dozens and dozens of other acts which will come eligible with each passing year. At this rate, I don’t hold out a lot of hope for getting a lot of my favorite overlooked artists in the Hall because I am also certain based on past experience that there will be many more acts that I disagree with that will be chosen before mine.

Glenn Beck and the Greedy Old Party

2010-03-11T23:33:00.002-06:00

It was once explained to me that it was unfair to call conservatives greedy and uncaring because they oppose welfare and other government programs to help the poor. You see, it was not that they did not care about the poor... they were just expressing a philisophical difference over the proper role of the government. The care of the poor should be left up to the churches, they said. That way people could choose how much to give and what kind of programs to support, rather than having those decisions foisted upon them by the government.

But now, we find conservative icon and rightwing hero Glenn Beck denouncing churches that practice "social justice" and advocating that people abandon churches that do so.

Senate reform proposal

2010-03-05T11:34:00.000-06:00

Election day

2010-03-02T10:25:00.002-06:00

I cast my vote today in the Democratic primary. Most of the excitement seems to be taking place on the Republican side and I was somewhat tempted to cross lines and cast a vote for moderate Republican Tim Tuggey in the Board of Education race just to get that lunatic Ken Mercer off the board.
I voted for Bill White for governor and it was no contest as far as I am concerned. Farouk Shami may have good intentions, but he is just another wealthy businessman who thinks he should start at the top rather than working his way up through the system. Bill White is clearly the most experienced and best qualified candidate to take on Governor-for-life Rick Perry.
Kay Baily Hutchison is toast.
She is also a liar. I don’t believe for a second that she is going to give up her Senate seat. I’m sure that shortly after she gets smoked in the gubernatorial primary she will announce that Texas needs her back in Washington and then slink away. That will be a real shame because Texas could sure use a good person in the Senate like John Sharp.
Our other U.S. Senator, John Cornyn, just demonstrated once again how much of an extremist, rightwing, teabagging nutjob he has become by defending the mentally unstable Senator from Kentucky Jim Bunning in his abuse of the filibuster rules to block a temporary extension of unemployment and COBRA benefits for out of work Americans.
The only real choice I had to make was in the Lt. Gov. race between former Austin DA Ronnie Earle and labor leader Linda Chavez-Thompson. I went with Earle largely because he didn’t blow off the League of Women Voters Guide like Chavez-Thompson did. Bad move Linda.
I am very much interested in the Republican primary race for the 23rd Congressional District where about a half dozen Republicans are vying to take on Ciro Rodriguez this fall. I halfway expect Quico Canseco to win because he has run before and has the benefit of name recognition. Will Hurd, a 30-year-old “retired” CIA agent, made the Express-News editorial board swoon and won their endorsement. But the one I am watching the closest is Dr. Robert Lowry, whose biggest claim to fame is that he received the endorsement of CPAC straw poll winner Ron Paul. Lowry is a far-right socal conservative with some Libertarian tendencies (he favors legalization of marijuana, for instance) and we are polar opposites on almost every issue, but he is in my Sunday School class at University United Methodist Church and I’ve gotten to know him and his family during the past few months. So, while I think he is a little bit out there (OK, a WHOLE LOT out there), I at least know him to be a really nice person and if anybody were to beat Ciro (God forbid) it might as well be him. Still, if he loses then at least I won’t have to feel guilty about voting against him in November.

Top Liberal Journalists

2010-02-18T15:10:00.003-06:00

Interesting list of the “Top 25 Liberal Journalists” from The Daily Beast.

Jessica Valenti - Feministing
David Rieff - NYTimes Magazine
Eric Alterman - Altercation
Deborah Solomon - NYTimes Magazine
Adam Moss - New York Magazine
Katrina Vanden Heuvel - The Nation
Matthew Yglesias - Think Progress
Christiane Amanpour - CNN
Jane Hamsher - Firedoglake
Franklin Foer - New Republic
Ezra Klein - Washington Post
Thom Hartmann - Radio Talk Host
Steve Coll - New Yorker
Josh Marshall - Talking Points Memo
Rachel Maddow - MSNBC
Jonathan Chait - New Republic
Hendrik Hertzberg - New Yorker
David Leonhardt - New York Times
Frank Rich - New York Times
Markos Moulitsas - Daily Kos
Fred Hiatt - Washington Post
David Shipley - New York Times
Arianna Huffington - Huff Post
Paul Krugman - New York Times
Jon Stewart - Daily Show

A little "New York" centric, No? Especially considering that The Nation and The New Republic are both published there.

But the first thing that jumps off the list is the inclusion of the neocon Fred Hiatt who helms the now conservative editorial pages at the Washington Post. An influential liberal??? Oh, but wait, the author protests, he is still liberal on domestic issues! Yeah, right. That's what they said about Joe Lieberman too.

And among the snubs and oversights is Keith Olbermann, whose success paved the way for Rachel Maddow.
Other egregious oversights include
Glenn Greenwald - Salon
Joe Conason - Salon
Thomas Frank - Wall Street Journal
Steve Benen - Washington Monthly
Duncan Black (Atrios) - Eschaton
Kevin Drum - Mother Jones
Andrew Sullivan - Daily Dish
Michael Kinsley - Washington Post
E.J. Dionne - Washington Post
And, since they left out anyone of color, how about:
Eugene Robinson - Washington Post
Bob Herbert - New York Times
Clarence Page - Chicago Tribune
and Leonard Pitts - Miami Herald

Newspaper endorsements go unheeded by Repubs

2010-02-17T15:43:00.003-06:00

What does this say about Republican voters?
So far, Kay Bailey Hutchison has swept the field on newspaper endorsements across the state.
All the major papers have endorse Hutchison, and yet she is trailing Gov. Rick Perry badly in the polls.
On the other hand, all the same papers also endorsed Bill White in the Democratic primary and he is leading in his primary race quite comfortably.
So does this mean that newspaper editorial boards have more influence today with Democratic voters rather than with Republicans?
I think so to a degree. But I also think that in general most people are less influenced today by newspapers in favor of other mediums such as TV, Internet, social media, billboards, mass mailings, robo-calls, etc.
Which is also one of the main reasons why I want to see a lot less so-called "democracy" in this country where we depend on uninformed and indifferent voters to select judges, constables, state board of education members and many other offices that would be better served by a system of appointments.

Rewarding idiocy

2010-02-10T15:29:00.002-06:00

Great column by Michael Kinsley taking on the charge that liberals are condescending to conservatives.

Everybody thinks what they believe is correct or else they would not believe it. Likewise, they will also believe that anybody who disagrees with them is incorrect and there are three possible reasons why (assuming they REALLY are correct and ther other person is mistaken) and those are:

"...that they are misinformed, they are thinking poorly, or they are blinded by self-interest. Or, to put it crudely, they are ignorant, stupid or selfish."

Of course, "ignorant, stupid and selfish" are the terms that first come to my mind when arguing with wingnuts, so does that make me condescending?

Moving on...

Steve Benen makes a point today that fits in well on this topic about the general public's tendency to reward idiocy...

By most measures, Republicans have spent the last year acting like children -- reckless, disturbed children who fiddle with matches and take pleasure in playing in traffic.

For nearly 13 months, GOP officials on the Hill have engaged in unprecedented abuse of the political process, blocking good legislation, offering insane ideas to major national challenges, rejected their own ideas when embraced by Democrats, and generally being an embarrassment to themselves and the country.

Naturally, then, Republicans are making major gains in the polls.

Republicans have significantly narrowed the gap with Democrats on who is trusted to deal with the country's problems and have sharply reduced several of President Obama's main political advantages, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.

The survey paints a portrait of a restless and dissatisfied electorate at the beginning of a critical election year. More than seven in 10 Americans disapprove of the job Congress is doing, and as many say they're inclined to look for new congressional representation as said so in 1994 and 2006, the last times that control of Congress shifted.

Asked how they would vote in the November House elections, Americans split evenly -- 46 percent siding with the Democrats, 46 percent with the Republicans. As recently as four months ago, Democrats held a 51 to 39 percent advantage on this question.

Dems still enjoy an edge on problem solving, but the margin has shrunk considerably. When asked, "Overall, which party, the Democrats or the Republicans, do you trust to do a better job in coping with the main problems the nation faces over the next few years?" respondents preferred Dems, 43% to 37%. It's the closest margin in four years.

President Obama is still more trusted than the GOP to handle every polled area of public policy -- the economy, health care, budget deficit, combating terrorism, and creating jobs -- but the president's lead over Republicans is the smallest it's been since he took office.

Reality should suggest the opposite. As Republicans grow more irresponsible, and become less coherent, their numbers should drop. But as the economy continues to struggle, and congressional Dems prove unable to govern in the face of obstructionism at levels unseen in American history, the public has soured on those trying to clean up the messes Republicans left in the wake of the Bush/Cheney fiasco.

But let's be clear: literally the only way for Republicans to shake off their madness and grow up would be for them to face an intense backlash from the public. Poll results like these send the opposite signal -- Americans are encouraging the GOP to keep up the bad work.

Senate not bound by past screwups

2010-02-08T16:57:00.002-06:00

This story in the WaPo today scared me because it seems to say that the only way the Senate can change its rules is by a supermajority vote...

Under long-standing resolutions, the Senate considers itself to be a "continuing body" whose parliamentary rules remain in effect unless a two-thirds supermajority votes to change them.
The more authoritarian House, whose entire membership stands for election every two years, sets its rules at the start of each Congress by a majority vote.

Based on that I feared the worst. If that is the case, then we are screwed and have no way to fix our broken Senate and our dysfunctional government. In other words, we are going to go the way of the the Polish legislature, the Sejm, as Paul Krugman warned today.

But then with a little more research, that the WaPo reporter obviously did not do, I was reassured that such is not the case...

From Wikipedia:

In 1892, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in United States v. Ballin that both houses of Congress are parliamentary bodies, implying that they may make procedural rules by majority vote. In 1917, Senator John J. Walsh contended the majority of the Senate could revise a procedural rule at any time, despite the requirement of the Senate rules that a two-thirds majority is necessary to approve a rule change. "When the Constitution says, 'Each House may determine its rules of proceedings,' it means that each House may, by a majority vote, a quorum present, determine its rules," Walsh told the Senate. Opponents countered that Walsh's "Constitutional option" would lead to procedural chaos, but his argument was a key factor in the adoption of the first cloture rule later that year. In 1957, Vice President Richard Nixon issued an advisory opinion stating that no Senate may constitutionally enact a rule that deprives a future Senate of the right to approve its own rules by the vote of a simple majority.[5] Nixon's advisory opinion, along with similar opinions by Hubert Humphrey and Nelson Rockefeller, has been cited as precedent to support the view that the Senate may amend its rules at the beginning of the session with a simple majority vote.

So, thank God there is a precedent for the Senate to still sets its own rules by majority rule. Now we just need to hope there will be enough Democrats left standing after the mid-term elections who will vote to change the rules at the start of the next session.

Gays in the military

2010-02-04T11:00:00.003-06:00

It looks as if the stars may be aligning to the point where the U.S. will finally end its ban on gays and lesbians serving openly in the military.
It is long overdue.
The other day, the Top military officer in the country, Admiral Mike Mullen, and the Secretary of Defense Robert Gates both said the ban should be repealed.

The interesting thing about those two, aside from the fact that they are highest ranking authorities in the military today, is that they are both holdovers from the Bush administration and were first appointed by Republicans.
Their assessment was quickly seconded by Colin Powell, another Republican-appointee. Former Joint Chiefs chairman John Shalikashvili, came to the same conclusion several years earlier.

The evidence in favor of allowing gays to serve in the military is overwhelming. But that has never stopped Republicans before, (i.e. Global Warming) and we can be assured that they will do their best to drum up fears and resentments to oppose any changes and/or take political advantage of such changes when they do occur.

If asked, most people who oppose gays in the military would probably cite Biblical passages that denounce homosexuality as a sin. But then shouldn't they also expect anyone guilty of adultery to be banned from the military as well? Or how about people who take the Lord's name in vain?

Here is an interesting exercise:

Check out the list of countries that currently allow homosexuals to serve openly in the military:

Argentina
Australia
Austria
Belgium
Bermuda
Brazil
Canada
Czech Republic
Denmark
Estonia
Finland
France
Germany
Ireland
Israel
Italy
Lithuania
Luxembourg
The Netherlands
New Zealand
Norway
Peru
Philippines
Romania
Slovenia
South Africa
Spain
Sweden
Switzerland
United Kingdom
Uruguay

Now compare it with the list of countries that do not:

Cuba
China
Egypt
Greece
Iran
Jamaica
North Korea
Pakistan
Russia
Saudi Arabia
Serbia
Singapore
South Korea
Syria
Turkey
Venezuela
Yemen
United States

Pretty striking isn't it? Doesn't the U.S. look a little out of place in that second list? Most of our NATO allies have ditched their antiquated anti-gay policies long ago. It is time for us to catch up and set an example for the rest of the world.

Popular films return to the Oscars

2010-02-02T08:51:00.002-06:00

Expanding the Best Picture nominees from five to 10 worked out well this year, I think.
For the first time in six years we have a Best Picture nominated film that cracked the Top 10 at the box office - actually, we have three of them: Avatar, Up and The Blind Side. And we have five films that have already grossed more than $100 million, with Inglorious Basterds and District 9 joining the three films above.

As I noted last year, that has not been the case in recent times. In fact, not counting the Lord of the Rings films from the beginning of the decade, there was only one Best Picture film during the past decade to crack the Top 10 (Chicago, which was No. 10 in 2002.)

And we still had room for the five films favored by the critics: The Hurt Locker, Precious, Up in the Air, A Serious Man, and An Education.

Without the expansion to 10 films, those bottom five would likely have been the Best Picture nominees this year continuing the Academy's tradition in recent years of snubbing popular films. I suppose there is a chance that Avatar may still have squeaked in to a spot, kind of like LOTR did, in place of say An Education or A Serious Man, but there definitely would not have been room for Up, The Blind Side, Inglorious Basterds and District 9.

As it is, I think there will be much more interest in the Academy Awards this year because they will be honoring films that people have actually seen, and they will be doing it without sacrificing any of the honors due the more high-brow, artsy films. Good news all around.

What do they think "socialism" is anyway?

2010-02-01T16:52:00.002-06:00

A new poll by Research2000 of 2,000 self-identified Republicans reveals that 63 percent think President Obama is a Socialist.
Which begs the question - What on Earth do these people think a "socialist" is anway? I would be interested to find out, because I don't think they have a clue.
Socialism is an economic system where the government owns the means of production.
Recently, as a result of the grossly negligent and wrongheaded Republican policies of the George W. Bush administration, the federal government was forced to invest considerable sums of taxpayer dollars into the banking and automotive industries to keep them from collapsing and throwing the whole country into a second Great Depression.
Now the government is trying to recoup its money and get back out of the bailout business as quickly as possible. To call this arrangement - where the government is forced to take extraordinary measures to prop up a capitalist system - "socialism" is astoundingly ignorant.
And yet that is the claim that has been made consistently on Faux News and Rightwing Radio in an effort to tar Obama with the "socialist' label.
But I think a lot of the people on the right don't stop there. They have been throwing around the "socialist" charge long before the Bush/Republican economic collapse of 2008/09. I dare say many of them would label as "socialist" anyone who supports Social Security and/or Medicare. Anyone who supports a progressive tax system and any domestic/social spending by the government.
Apparently, as far as these people are concerned, the United States has been a "socialist" country since Roosevelt's New Deal pulled us out of the first Republican-caused Great Depression.
And so did this sharp turn towards "socialism" result in an economic catastrophe for our nation as they predict? Why no. Instead, our economy grew so rapidly that we became the most powerful nation on the planet - all under what they deem to be a socialist system.
Idiots.

Cheer up, Liberals!

2010-02-01T12:59:00.004-06:00

If the video of President Obama taking Republican lawmakers to task last week isn't enough to cheer you up, then consider this:

Things are not as bad as they might seem right now for Democrats. Sure, there have been some setbacks recently, but taken as a whole this has been one of the most productive Congresses since the New Deal era, while giving President Obama the most legislative successes of any modern president...

A very productive Congress, despite what the approval ratings say

...this Democratic Congress is on a path to become one of the most productive since the Great Society 89th Congress in 1965-66, and Obama already has the most legislative success of any modern president -- and that includes Ronald Reagan and Lyndon Johnson. The deep dysfunction of our politics may have produced public disdain, but it has also delivered record accomplishment.

The productivity began with the stimulus package, which was far more than an injection of $787 billion in government spending to jump-start the ailing economy. More than one-third of it -- $288 billion -- came in the form of tax cuts, making it one of the largest tax cuts in history, with sizable credits for energy conservation and renewable-energy production as well as home-buying and college tuition. The stimulus also promised $19 billion for the critical policy arena of health-information technology, and more than $1 billion to advance research on the effectiveness of health-care treatments.

Education Secretary Arne Duncan has leveraged some of the stimulus money to encourage wide-ranging reform in school districts across the country. There were also massive investments in green technologies, clean water and a smart grid for electricity, while the $70 billion or more in energy and environmental programs was perhaps the most ambitious advancement in these areas in modern times. As a bonus, more than $7 billion was allotted to expand broadband and wireless Internet access, a step toward the goal of universal access.

Any Congress that passed all these items separately would be considered enormously productive. Instead, this Congress did it in one bill. Lawmakers then added to their record by expanding children's health insurance and providing stiff oversight of the TARP funds allocated by the previous Congress. Other accomplishments included a law to allow the FDA to regulate tobacco, the largest land conservation law in nearly two decades, a credit card holders' bill of rights and defense procurement reform.

The House, of course, did much more, including approving a historic cap-and-trade bill and sweeping financial regulatory changes. And both chambers passed their versions of a health-care overhaul.

And consider this as well....

The Quiet Revolution

These days, liberals don’t know whether to feel betrayed by or merely disappointed with Barack Obama. They have gone from decrying his willingness to remove the public option from his health care plan to worrying that, in the wake of Democrat Martha Coakley’s defeat in Massachusetts, he won’t get any plan through Congress. On other subjects, too, from Afghanistan to Wall Street, Obama has thoroughly let down his party’s left flank.

Yet there is one extremely consequential area where Obama has done just about everything a liberal could ask for--but done it so quietly that almost no one, including most liberals, has noticed. Obama’s three Republican predecessors were all committed to weakening or even destroying the country’s regulatory apparatus: the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), and the other agencies that are supposed to protect workers and consumers by regulating business practices. Now Obama is seeking to rebuild these battered institutions. In doing so, he isn’t simply improving the effectiveness of various government offices or making scattered progress on a few issues; he is resuscitating an entire philosophy of government with roots in the Progressive era of the early twentieth century. Taken as a whole, Obama’s revival of these agencies is arguably the most significant accomplishment of his first year in office.

Oh, and by the way, the economy saw its biggest jump in growth during the fourth quarter in the past six years. Expect more news like that in 2010.

Too many things to vote on

2010-01-29T12:35:00.001-06:00

I agree with Yglesias. We need fewer things to vote on.
Today we have too many elections for too many offices that people could care less about. And many are not even for positions which are desgined to be representative. Think about it.

Who represents you?

Can anyone name all the people who are elected to represent them in various forms of government?
Let’s start from the top and see how well I do:

President Barack Obama
Sen. John Cornyn
Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison
U.S. Rep. Ciro Rodriguez
Gov. Rick Perry
Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst
State Sen. Carlos Uresti
State Rep. Frank Corte Jr.
County Judge Nelson Wolff
County Commissioner Kevin Wolff
Mayor Julian Castro
City Councilman W. Reed Williams
School Board Rep. Karen Freeman

Those are just the direct representatives and I’m sure there are others. There is the Texas State Board of Education, the Railroad Commission, the River Authority, the Underground Water District, and the Hospital District and who knows what all else? And then there are the other positions we are forced to vote on which are really not representative positions such as the State Comptroller, the Agriculture Commissioner, the Land Commissioner, the Attorney General; the County Tax Collector, the County Clerk, the District Attorney, the Sheriff, the Constables, the Justices of the Peace and, of course, all the myriad judges at every level.
It is far, far, far too much for the electorate to have to deal with. Do you want to know why we have such a low turnout in most elections? This is why. Too damn many things to vote for that people can’t keep up with.

We need to eliminate many of these from the ballot and make them appointed positions. The state and county governments are the worst offenders. They should follow the models set by the federal and city governments. We don’t elect the Secretary of State or the Secretary of Defense or any of the other federal cabinet positions. Why do we elect them at the state level? Let the governor appoint those positions.
Likewise at the county level. Why do we elect a County Clerk or a Sheriff? These positions should be hired by the county commissioners just like the City Council hires the chief of police and other city executive positions. And it would also eliminate problems such as this, where unqualified people are being elected to positions that they have not business being in.
And, of course, the judges should be appointed as well, just like the Supreme Court and all the other federal court positions area. It is ridiculous that we vote for these offices today. Nobody knows who most of these people are and whether or not they are qualified or if they do a good job. Only in a few rare cases where there has been a scandal does it ever come into play.
We need to clean up our ballots and only vote on the direct representatives who would then be tasked with filling the other positions through appointments or hiring. Then if they make bad choices we will hold our representatives responsible. That is the way it should work. Once we do this then we can get a lot of this political money out of the system which leads to so much of the graft and corruption.

SBOE bans Bill Martin Jr.

2010-01-25T14:45:00.002-06:00

"Brown Bear, Brown Bear" is one of my kids' favorite books growing up. Now the far-right conservatives on the State Board of Education have voted to remove it, and all the other works by that author, from our public school classrooms. Why? Because they stupidly confused his name with that of another author who wrote a book titled "Ethical Marxism." So first off they acted impulsively, which is typical of rightwing reactionaries, and failed to do their homework.

But to understand further how stupid this is, you have to understand that they were not voting to remove what they thought was a book about Marxism from a 3rd Grade curriculum, which would have been somewhat understandable. They knew very well that they were voting to remove "Brown Bear, Brown Bear" which has nothing to do with political or economic theories. They voted to remove all books by Bill Martin because they mistakenly thought he had written a book about Marxism at some time, which they admit they had not read, and was not being distributed to public school classrooms.

So, they are essentially trying to enforce a rigid ideological purity by purging any works by authors who might hold views contrary to theirs, irregardless of what their books are about. But in this case at least they screwed up because they were too stupid and lazy to figure out that there might be more than one author with the name Bill Martin.

I just hope they don't figure out that Dr. Seuss was a liberal before we have an opportunity to vote these idiots out of office later this year.
One of the far-right idiots who voted to ban "Brown Bear, Brown Bear" is Ken Mercer, a former Republican state representative who represents the San Antonio area where I live.
Fortunately, Mercer is being challenged by a more moderate Republican - Tim Tuggey - in the primary and then Democrat Rebecca Bell-Metereau in the general.

Save Democracy! Kill the filibuster!

2010-01-22T11:45:00.003-06:00

Matthew Yglesias makes a good point about the filibuster's negative effect on the whole legislative process:

A minority of 40 or fewer Senators can, by engaging in filibustering both a motion to proceed and the bill itself can cause it to take about a week between when the majority rounds up its 60 votes and when the bill actually passes. First you need to file cloture on the motion to proceed. Then it takes about a day for cloture to “ripen.” Then there’s the cloture vote. Then a 30 hour waiting period. Then the vote on the motion to proceed. Then, even if there’s nothing left to debate, you need to do the whole thing over again. File for cloture. Take a day for cloture to ripen. Then the cloture vote. Then 30 hours. Then you vote.

One consequence of this is that if you have 100 small ways to improve the health care system, each of which piss off some small interest group, you can’t do the sensible thing and just bring each small idea to the floor separately and pass it. The sheer amount of time it takes to overcome some random bloc of Senators’ opposition makes it not worthwhile for most members. To get an idea enacted into law over determined opposition, you not only need at least 60 Senators to agree with it, you need them to be enthusiastic enough to let your pet plan eat up all this time.

Consequently, if you want to do something, the smart way to do it is to fold it into some larger endeavor. And that’s why you get things like a 2,000 page health care bill or a monster omnibus or weird things attached to appropriations bills.

This is crazy. It is absolutely nuts. These Senate rules have got to be changed. First, you should only be allowed to filibuster actual legislation, not a bunch of procedural motions, so that they can't force half a dozen votes requiring a supermajority each time for one single bill. You get ONE cloture vote and that is it. End of story.

Furthermore, the filibuster was never supposed to be about killing legislation. It was about extending time to allow for more debate. So Sen. Tom Harken's proposed rule changes make perfect sense. If the minority wants to have more time to debate, then they filibuster and the first effort at cloture needs 60 votes. But then one week later the threshold drops to 57 and then one week later down to 54 and finally, one-week later the bill could be passed on a majority vote of 51. By that time the minority would have had plenty of time to make their case and get their views expressed, but they would not be able to hold things up indefinitely and thus thwart the will of the majority which is intrinsically undemocratic.

The Harken bill would require 67 votes to pass and I don't see that happening because Republicans are more concerned about regaining power by any means necessary than they are with fixing a dysfunctional legislative system that is unable to govern. Republicans are essentially anti-government radicals today, so they don't care if the government can't function.

But at the start of the next legislative session, after the mid-term elections, if the Democrats are still in the majority they will have one last chance to change the rules to something more like what the Founding Fathers intended and do it by a majority vote.

A very sad day

2010-01-21T16:07:00.002-06:00

This has been an absolutely horrible, sad, depressing day. First, House Leaders announce that they don't have the votes (with a 40-seat majority) to pass the Senate version of Health Care reform. If it goes back to the Senate with any House chanages, it will face yet another Republican filibuster and will be dependent on a Republican defection to pass.
Why is it that the Democrats can have control of the White House and huge majorities in the House and Senate and still be unable to accomplish their agenda?

Steve Benen sums it up well...

If a majority of the House and a majority of the Senate could approve legislation -- if, in other words, Congress could function the way it used to and the way it was designed to -- Democrats would have finished an ambitious heath care reform bill months ago. The stimulus would have been bigger and more effective. The prospects for a climate bill and reform of Wall Street would be excellent. The progressive productivity of this Congress would rival that of the New Deal and Great Society eras.

But that's not the legislative dynamic we're dealing with. Instead we have unprecedented obstructionism from a right-wing minority, which tries to block voting on literally every bill of any significance -- a situation that has never existed before in American history -- and a small handful of Senate Democrats -- including Mary Landrieu and her "wing" -- willing to help them.

The principal hurdle, in other words, standing in the way of the party delivering on its agenda is a dysfunctional system that empowers a small congressional minority to kill the majority's agenda -- and creates an electoral incentive for the minority to do just that.

And then, as if all of this wasn't bad enough, the Supreme Court comes down with its decision to cede our elections to the corporate interests for the next several generations.

And Conan O'Brien's last show is tonight.

And, to top it off, I just learned that Air America (which wasn't broadcasting in San Antonio anyway) is going bankrupt and ceasing broadcasting today.

The Supreme Court decision will haunt us for years to come, but I think the most discouraging thing right now is what is happening in the House. I just can't watch as they screw this up. It's like watching a Spurs game when they are playing horribly. I just have to turn off the TV and quit watching. It is less painful just to read the score in the next day's paper.

Worst Supreme Court Decision Ever

2010-01-21T14:26:00.002-06:00

Or at least one of the worst.

By a 5-4 vote, the Reagan/Bush wing of the Court has very likely screwed our democracy for a generation or more. As if we didn't already have enough corporate special interest money in politics, they have now opened up the floodgates to unlimited spending on election campaigns by allowing unlimited corporate spending on campaigns.
What this means is that within the next 10 or 12 years, every politician in Washington will either be wholly owned and paid for by the corporate interests, or will be subservient to them for fear that they might dump money into their district in opposition.
Oh, so what else is new, you say?
Trust me, it can and will get worse.
They may not always win every election, but they will be able to set the terms of the debate.

Dumber than Rocks

2010-01-20T16:44:00.002-06:00

This poll of Massachusetts voters is very interesting in that it shows that a lot of the people who voted for Brown or who chose not to vote said they did so to protest Democrats not being hard enough on Wall Street.
Also, while some said they opposed health care reform, many others said they voted the way they did because they thought Democrats didn't go far enough with reform and another big chunk said they don't even know why they are opposed.

So, essentially, we have a lot of voters who are dumber than rocks. That is the problem with democracies I guess. Lots of poorly informed, ignorant and, in some cases, downright stupid, people marching off to the polls and voting contrary to their interests.

And that is the secret to Fox News' success. They have learned how to manipulate and take advantage of these people and use their stupidity and ignorance to advance a rightwing agenda.

Liar!

2010-01-20T16:37:00.001-06:00

From Political Wire:

A memo from Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX), head of the Senate Republican campaign effort, says of yesterday's election result that "voters realize that there is only one party who bailed out the automakers and insurance companies..."

It's interesting how soon Republicans have forgotten that it was actually President Bush who orchestrated the bailouts of both AIG and the automakers at the end of his term.

Oh, please! Cornyn didn't forget! Give the man some credit. He's not stupid. He is simply LYING.

Can't win 'em all

2010-01-19T21:19:00.003-06:00

I knew Democrats (or any party for that matter) would not be able to hang on to a 60-vote supermajority for long. That is why it is imperative to reform Senate rules and end this recent abuse of the filibuster where the Republicans are using it to require a supermajority for nearly every single vote.

But I did not expect that it would be Massachussetts that would take the 60th vote away. It is sad and depressing to see the late Sen. Ted Kennedy's lifelong struggle to pass health care reform suddenly imperiled by his own untimely death. Just another Kennedy family tragedy, I guess.

But, of course, health reform is not really imperiled. It has already passed in the Senate and there is no reason for it to go back there again if the House will accept the bill as is. That now seems like their only option since the incoming Sen. Brown will be a committed 'No' vote even though his state already has universal health coverage far more liberal than the bill under consideration in Congress.

The House should pass the Senate Bill as is and send it to Obama for his signature in advance of the State of the Union address next week. Then they can push the things they wanted to change and improve in the bill through on a reconciliation vote which cannot be filibustered under Senate rules. And I would hope that the Democrats will start doing a lot of things under reconciliation rules from now on.

This whole idea that Obama's agenda is stymied now because he ONLY has a 59-vote majority in the Senate is absolutely ridiculous. Ronald Reagan had a Republican Senate during the first six years of his presidency, but never more than 54. And he had a Democratic House to contend with at the same time. Yet he was able to get most of what he wanted during those years because Democrats did not abuse the filibuster rule then like Republicans are doing today.

Imagine if Democrats had treated Reagan back then the way Republicans today are treating Obama. He would not have been able to put any of his policies in place. Most of his nominees would have been easily rejected. But it would not have been right then just as it is not right now.

But back to Massachussetts for a minute. A lot of Democrats are blaming Coakley for her defeat. One site pointed out that she only had 19 public events between the primary and the election while Brown had 66 during the same period. The conclusion - she took the election for granted while he worked his butt off. There is something to be said about that. But there was also a lot of other factors at work as well. Any other year and those 19 events would have been more than adequate.

You kind of have to feel sorry for Coakley too. A few weeks ago it was assumed she would be the next U.S. Senator and now her political career is in shambles. The Bill Buckner of politics, they are calling her. Ouch! But that is really neither here nor there.

Democrats still have large majorities in the House and Senate. Obama will be president for the next three years at a minimum and probably seven. Because I believe the economy will continue to improve and by the time the next election rolls around it will be "Morning Time in America" again. A lot of people have been pointing out recently how closely Obama is tracking Reagan in the popularity polls. Reagan slowly lost favor as the economy soured during his first term, but it turned around just in time for him to win a humongous landslide re-election victory. And that is what I see in Obama's future as well. And that will be good for the long-term health of our nation.

Defining "Tea Partiers"

2010-01-16T23:41:00.001-06:00

This is about as good a definition of the "Tea Party" movement as I've seen yet...

"...a well-intentioned, passionate, and deeply confused group of people -- the folks who believe Democrats are "fascists," the president is Hitler, and programs like Social Security and Medicare are socialist, unconstitutional boondoggles that need to be abolished -- who are now intent on dragging an already far-right party over the cliff."

SBOE hearings on Social Studies standards

2010-01-14T11:53:00.002-06:00

The Texas Freedom Network has been liveblogging the Texas State Board of Education hearings on setting new standards for social studies textbooks.

Testifying were a mix of academics urging the board to not politicize the social studies textbooks, a number of people representing Latino groups urging more inclusion of Hispanic culture and history in the textbooks, and a bunch of ignorant teabaggers ranting about "socialism" and failing to provide any specific examples of their criticisms.

The part I found most interesting was at the end when the board closed promptly at 6 p.m. leaving many people who had waited all day to testify hanging...

6:10 – The board is closing today’s testimony. SBOE Chair Gail Lowe notes that Gov. Rick Perry today made an announcement on federal Race to the Top funding. In fact, Gov. Perry said Texas will not seek the $700 million that would be available through that funding stream.

6:13 – The board is getting angry comments from people who waited all day to testify. They’re demanding that the board continue hearing testimony. (We sympathize. After all, the board isn’t often asked to listen to their constituents on these issues.) A motion to extend the hearing fails on a tie vote. In the chaos, it’s hard to tell how all of the board members voted. But most of the “no” votes appear to have come from the board’s far-right faction. Surprised?

6:18 – Now would-be testifiers are shouting in anger. More chaos. The chair, Gail Lowe, has to break a tie on a motion to adjourn the meeting. Could there be a clearer representation of the indifference some board members have for the concerns of their constituents?

UPDATE: After adjournment, the state board’s five Democrats remained to continue listening to testimony from those who were unable to speak before the hearing ended. Many of the remaining testifiers were Latinos, some of whom had traveled from across the state to the hearing.

2010 = Twenty Ten

2010-01-11T17:07:00.003-06:00

I hope that people will start calling this year Twenty-Ten rather than Two Thousand and Ten.
Otherwise, you better get used to using the construction "Two Thousand and ..." for the rest of your life.
Seriously. Nobody today says "I was born in One Thousand Nine Hundred and blah-blah." That would be weird. We say Nineteen-whatever. Much simpler.
So why, then, would we want to go away from that for the next hundred (thousand!!) years?
I understand that you had to say the year Two Thousand at the turn of the Century. And then it just became ingrained to say Two Thousand and One and so forth. But now is the last obvious chance we have to switch over to the simpler construction.
So please! For the sake of your children and your grandchildren and your great-great grandchildren, stop saying Two Thousand and Ten.
It's Twenty Ten.

AEI confirms stimulus success

2010-01-07T11:23:00.003-06:00

Even the conservative "think tank" AEI admits in a recent report that the stimulus helped grow the economy.

The real economy ... responded to the massive stimulus but remained heavily dependent on it. In the United States, growth during the second half of 2009 probably averaged about 3 percent. Absent temporary fiscal stimulus and inventory rebuilding, which taken together added about 4 percentage points to U.S. growth, the economy would have contracted at about a 1 percent annual rate during the second half of 2009.

Imagine how much worse things would have been had the Tea Partiers been in charge!

Happy New Year!

2010-01-04T11:12:00.003-06:00

It's my first post of the new year and here is what's on my mind:

Good article in the Washington Monthly on the Texas Board of Education's continuing crusade to indoctrinate our schoolchildren with their far-rightwing ideology.

Don McLeroy is a balding, paunchy man with a thick broom-handle mustache who lives in a rambling two-story brick home in a suburb near Bryan, Texas. When he greeted me at the door one evening last October, he was clutching a thin paperback with the skeleton of a seahorse on its cover, a primer on natural selection penned by famed evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr. We sat down at his dining table, which was piled high with three-ring binders, and his wife, Nancy, brought us ice water in cut-crystal glasses with matching coasters. Then McLeroy cracked the book open. The margins were littered with stars, exclamation points, and hundreds of yellow Post-its that were brimming with notes scrawled in a microscopic hand. With childlike glee, McLeroy flipped through the pages and explained what he saw as the gaping holes in Darwin’s theory. “I don’t care what the educational political lobby and their allies on the left say,” he declared at one point. “Evolution is hooey.” This bled into a rant about American history. “The secular humanists may argue that we are a secular nation,” McLeroy said, jabbing his finger in the air for emphasis. “But we are a Christian nation founded on Christian principals. The way I evaluate history textbooks is first I see how they cover Christianity and Israel. Then I see how they treat Ronald Reagan—he needs to get credit for saving the world from communism and for the good economy over the last twenty years because he lowered taxes.”

Sigh. I so with that my fellow Texans would quit electing these insane people to serve on our state school board.

Meanwhile, Andy Sullivan shows how Rasmussen Polling veers far off from every other polling outfit in the nation making it the favorite of Faux News and the NRC.

I hope everyone saw this article in the WaPo last week.

The past decade was the worst for the U.S. economy in modern times, a sharp reversal from a long period of prosperity that is leading economists and policymakers to fundamentally rethink the underpinnings of the nation's growth.

And finally a great in-depth article in Chemical & Engineering News about the whole climate change controversy.

2009 Movies recap

2009-12-31T11:49:00.002-06:00

2009 was another strong year for the movie industry with 29 films crossing the magic $100 million domestic gross barrier so far (and Sherlock Holmes almost certain to make it 30 very soon). 2008 had 29 $100M-plus films total, so it looks as if 2009 will be the best of the decade in that respect - despite being an awful year from an economic perspective.
I personally cannot take credit for the Hollywood windfall this year. The list of 2009 movies that I have seen so far is quite small:

Up
G Force
Planet 51

That's it. I actually own copies (*) of several more 2009 films but have not had time to watch them yet. Here is the list of 2009 movies that I still plan on seeing at some point:

Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince
*Star Trek
Avatar
*Monsters vs. Aliens
*Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs
*X Men Origins: Wolverine
*Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian
A Christmas Carol (Disney)
*Angels and Demons
Terminator Salvation
Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs
Inglorious Basterds
District 9
Watchmen
Public Enemies
Julie and Julia
The Proposal
Blind Side
Sherlock Holmes
Where the Wild Things Are
The Princess and the Frog
Men Who Stare at Goats
Up in the Air
Invictus
Fantastic Mr. Fox

And revisiting my list of 2008 films that I had seen at the end of last year:

*WALL-E
*Kung Fu Panda
*Iron Man
*Horton Hears A Who
*Speed Racer

I can add the following:

*Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
*The Dark Knight
*Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian
*Hancock
*Journey to the Center of the Earth
*Hell Boy II: The Golden Army
*Bolt
Burn After Reading
Curious Case of Benjamin Button
*The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor
The X-Files: I Want To Believe

And 2008 movies that I still intend to see at some point:

*Gran Torino
*Frost/Nixon
Quantum of Solace
*Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa
W.
*Appaloosa
*Body of Lies
*The Day the Earth Stood Still
*Valkyrie
*Nim’s Island
*Bedtime Stories
Australia
*The Tale of Despereaux
*The Pirates Who Don’t Do Anything
*Space Chimps
*Fly Me to the Moon
*Clone Wars
Tropic Thunder

Paging Art Hall

2009-12-30T10:14:00.003-06:00

Some interesting and mostly positive local political developments are currently churning.

My State Rep. Frank Corte Jr. has announced that he will step down and not run for re-election.
This is great news since Corte has been a terrible representative for the district. An ideological rightwinger, Corte's only apparent concern in the Legislature has been to try and strip women of their legal rights to abortion and promote "property rights" as the end-all, penultimate answer to every problem.
Now the bad news is that the 122nd District is so full of wingnutty teabaggers that it is unlikely to elect a good government Democrat. And former County Commissioner and failed Republican congressional candidate Scott Larson has already jumped into the race.
My only hope is that he might not be as bad as Corte. Maybe Larson might even support San Antonio Speaker of the House Joe Strauss rather than serving as a lapdog for paleocon rightwinger Tom Craddick.

Here is hoping that a strong Democrat like former City Councilman Art Hall will jump into the race and give the electorate a legitimate choice this fall.

Another positive development is that two of the looniest rightwingers on the Texas Board of Education have drawn strong primary challengers from the moderate wing of the Republican Party. Ken Mercer, who unfortunately represents my district, is being challenged by local attorney Tim Tuggey.
And Don McLeroy, the ousted former chairman of the board is being challenged by Thomas Ratliff.

Unless a good Democrat comes along soon, I am inclined to throw my support to Tuggey just to get the loathsome Ken Mercer off of the board and away from any position of authority where he could continue to screw up my childrens' educational future.

Krugman sums up the past decade

2009-12-29T12:11:00.002-06:00

The Big Zero

Yikes! A net decrease in private sector jobs between 1999 and 2009!?!
Those Republican tax cuts and deregulation sure did a bang-up job on our economy this past decade.

From an economic point of view, I’d suggest that we call the decade past the Big Zero. It was a decade in which nothing good happened, and none of the optimistic things we were supposed to believe turned out to be true.

It was a decade with basically zero job creation. O.K., the headline employment number for December 2009 will be slightly higher than that for December 1999, but only slightly. And private-sector employment has actually declined — the first decade on record in which that happened.

It was a decade with zero economic gains for the typical family. Actually, even at the height of the alleged “Bush boom,” in 2007, median household income adjusted for inflation was lower than it had been in 1999. And you know what happened next.

Yeah, everything went straight down the tube. I cannot stress enough how much this should be blamed sqarely on Republican economic policies. Republicans were in control of the federal government for the majority of the past decade, and even when they weren't, managed to use veto threats, filibusters and other obstructionist measures to keep Republican policies in place and prevent any kind of liberal reforms.

We have had 10 years of tax cuts, deregulation, union-busting, and other forms of Republican economic wonkery in place, all with the promise that it would lift the government boot off the neck of the free enterprise system and allow it to grow and expand and create jobs and economic opportunities, blah, blah, blah...

And instead we got NOTHING. Squat! Nada! No growth. No jobs except for those in the public sector. No increase in standard of living for middle America. We have all fallen behind as a result and are struggling more now than we were 10 years ago.

Now, if we can just manage a few more reforms to slip by the Republicans' filibuster-fueled death grip - like health care reform - then maybe, just maybe, things can start to slowly turn around in 2010 before the ignorant masses send another wave of rightwing, America-hating morons back into office to screw everything up all over again.

Most entertaining movies of the decade

2009-12-24T16:53:00.004-06:00

I like this guy's choices for most entertaining films of the decade.
My list of best films, however, is going to be a bit different because I group them together where applicable rather than trying to distinguish various sequels from one another.

No. 1: At the top of my list, as with the one in the link, is The Lord of the Rings trilogy - absolutely the most incredible cinematic achievement that I am aware of.

In the No. 2 slot I would put the Pixar movies. Starting with Monster's Inc. in 2000, Pixar has had a remarkable record of success with its animated feature films including The Incredibles, Finding Nemo, Cars, Ratatouille, WALL-E and Up.
The only animated film that comes close to the level of perfection achieved by each of these Pixar films was Kung Fu Panda.

No. 3: Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy. The first film in the series was a surprise hit. The sequels got progressively cheesier, but were still enjoyable nonetheless. Johnny Depp almost singlehandedly raised the entire series from the very good to great.

No. 4: The Bourne Identity trilogy. The best contemporary thriller series based on the Robert Ludlum books. Out does the tired, but recently reinvigorated Bond series. Matt Damon is excellent as the brooding superagent. The followup films are as good if not better than the first.

No. 5.: Spider Man trilogy. Raised the bar on the superhero genre and probably paved the way for Academy Award-worthy superhero flicks like Dark Knight and Iron Man.

No. 6.: The Harry Potter series. All of the films maintain a consistent level of quality and credit should probably go to the author of the series. I have yet to see the two most recent films.

No. 7.: Chronicles of Narnia series. The first film was very good. The second fell somewhat short. Hopefully the third will mark a comeback and keep the series going.

No. 8.: National Treasure 1 & 2. The first film was a hoot and Nicolas Cage was in top form. The second film was very derivative and I didn't like how it had to mess up the happy ending from the first movie to give it a setup for the new story, but it was still enjoyable.

No. 9.: Ray/Walk the Line/Capote/The Aviator/The Queen. Call this the Bio-flick category - excellent movies with great performances by people portraying famous historical figures - Ray Charles, Johnny Cash, Truman Capote, Howard Hughes, Queen Elizabeth.

No. 10.: X-Men - The first two movies were excellent. The third was a disappointment. I haven't seen the Wolverine movie yet.

Honorable Mentions:
Minority Report, Emperor's New Groove, The DaVinci Code, Night at the Museum, Seabiscuit, Star Trek.

Health Care bill a huge victory

2009-12-24T15:29:00.002-06:00

Good article from Jonathan Chait explaining Why the health care bill is the greatest social achievement of our time.
This legislative victory ensures Obama's re-election in 2012 and his legacy in history.
The economy is starting to slowly recover (the Stock Market already has recovered). We are slowly withdrawing from Iraq and will be out of Afghanistan over the next couple of years as well. A lot of the stimulus funds will start to kick in next year and provide a needed boost to the sagging job numbers.
And with all these things happening, the reforms to the health insurance industry will reinvigorate the economy as the pressure of rising health costs is lifted off of businesses like a boot being taken off of their necks.
The next challenge will be climate change legislation, but once again the Republican predictions of gloom and doom will prove to be false. I can only hope that more and more people will finally start to recognize this pattern and quit buying into the garbage being spewed daily by the rightwing radio yakkers and Faux News propagandists.

RIP Republican Moderates

2009-12-24T00:31:00.002-06:00

Froma Harrop, whom I am not prone to quote veru often, had an excellent column today that said much of what I had been wanting to say.
Sen. Olympia Snowe's deeply disappointing antics during the health care debate demonstrated that she is no longer someone who can be considered a "moderate" and has instead thrown her lot in with the far-right radicals who control what is left of the Republican Party today.
There is not a moderate wing of the GOP today. The last true moderate left when Arlen Spector switched parties. Olympia Snowe was the last hope for a Republican moderate, but after going along with the filibuster of health care reform it's clear that there is not much difference between her and someone like Kay Bailey Hutchison. I mean, Ben Nelson and Joe Lieberman finally came through in the end and Olympia Snowe still filibustered. Pathetic.
I hope that the good people of Maine are just as disillusioned with her as I am. And that goes double for the worthless Susan Collins.

A bad decade?

2009-12-22T15:55:00.002-06:00

Steve Benen makes a compelling case:

"Was it really that bad? Pretty much, yes. One barely has to give it much thought to remember what made this decade one Americans don't want to remember: 9/11, the Great Recession, two devastating wars, anthrax, Katrina, Tom DeLay and the culture of corruption, Enron, Madoff, sniper shootings, an explosion of debt, the entire Bush/Cheney presidency. Median incomes went down. Poverty went up. Global warming got worse. Fox yanked 'Firefly' after 14 episodes, while 'According to Jim' aired 182 episodes."

Ouch!! Make it stop!
Yes, canceling Firefly was, I'm sure, the absolute low point of the decade.
However, seeing as how both of my children were born during that decade, it still comes out to a net positive.

Krugman on Senate dysfunction

2009-12-21T09:30:00.002-06:00

Krugman is worth posting in full this week.

Unless some legislator pulls off a last-minute double-cross, health care reform will pass the Senate this week. Count me among those who consider this an awesome achievement. It’s a seriously flawed bill, we’ll spend years if not decades fixing it, but it’s nonetheless a huge step forward.

It was, however, a close-run thing. And the fact that it was such a close thing shows that the Senate — and, therefore, the U.S. government as a whole — has become ominously dysfunctional.

After all, Democrats won big last year, running on a platform that put health reform front and center. In any other advanced democracy this would have given them the mandate and the ability to make major changes. But the need for 60 votes to cut off Senate debate and end a filibuster — a requirement that appears nowhere in the Constitution, but is simply a self-imposed rule — turned what should have been a straightforward piece of legislating into a nail-biter. And it gave a handful of wavering senators extraordinary power to shape the bill.

Now consider what lies ahead. We need fundamental financial reform. We need to deal with climate change. We need to deal with our long-run budget deficit. What are the chances that we can do all that — or, I’m tempted to say, any of it — if doing anything requires 60 votes in a deeply polarized Senate?

Some people will say that it has always been this way, and that we’ve managed so far. But it wasn’t always like this. Yes, there were filibusters in the past — most notably by segregationists trying to block civil rights legislation. But the modern system, in which the minority party uses the threat of a filibuster to block every bill it doesn’t like, is a recent creation.

The political scientist Barbara Sinclair has done the math. In the 1960s, she finds, “extended-debate-related problems” — threatened or actual filibusters — affected only 8 percent of major legislation. By the 1980s, that had risen to 27 percent. But after Democrats retook control of Congress in 2006 and Republicans found themselves in the minority, it soared to 70 percent.

Some conservatives argue that the Senate’s rules didn’t stop former President George W. Bush from getting things done. But this is misleading, on two levels.

First, Bush-era Democrats weren’t nearly as determined to frustrate the majority party, at any cost, as Obama-era Republicans. Certainly, Democrats never did anything like what Republicans did last week: G.O.P. senators held up spending for the Defense Department — which was on the verge of running out of money — in an attempt to delay action on health care.

More important, however, Mr. Bush was a buy-now-pay-later president. He pushed through big tax cuts, but never tried to pass spending cuts to make up for the revenue loss. He rushed the nation into war, but never asked Congress to pay for it. He added an expensive drug benefit to Medicare, but left it completely unfunded. Yes, he had legislative victories; but he didn’t show that Congress can make hard choices and act responsibly, because he never asked it to.

So now that hard choices must be made, how can we reform the Senate to make such choices possible?

Back in the mid-1990s two senators — Tom Harkin and, believe it or not, Joe Lieberman — introduced a bill to reform Senate procedures. (Management wants me to make it clear that in my last column I wasn’t endorsing inappropriate threats against Mr. Lieberman.) Sixty votes would still be needed to end a filibuster at the beginning of debate, but if that vote failed, another vote could be held a couple of days later requiring only 57 senators, then another, and eventually a simple majority could end debate. Mr. Harkin says that he’s considering reintroducing that proposal, and he should.

But if such legislation is itself blocked by a filibuster — which it almost surely would be — reformers should turn to other options. Remember, the Constitution sets up the Senate as a body with majority — not supermajority — rule. So the rule of 60 can be changed. A Congressional Research Service report from 2005, when a Republican majority was threatening to abolish the filibuster so it could push through Bush judicial nominees, suggests several ways this could happen — for example, through a majority vote changing Senate rules on the first day of a new session.

Nobody should meddle lightly with long-established parliamentary procedure. But our current situation is unprecedented: America is caught between severe problems that must be addressed and a minority party determined to block action on every front. Doing nothing is not an option — not unless you want the nation to sit motionless, with an effectively paralyzed government, waiting for financial, environmental and fiscal crises to strike.

Busted!

2009-12-19T12:32:00.003-06:00

Sen. Ben Nelson came through late last night and now the Republican filibuster is busted! I wonder if Sen. Olympia Snowe will follow suit as well?
This is the final hurdle for Health Care Reform. The House will now bite the bullet and "ping-pong" the bill - approving it as is - and thus not allowing Republicans another chance at a filibuster. Then the bill will go straight to Obama without going back to the Senate.
This has been a good end of the week for Obama. His health care legislation is set to pass and an agreement was reached at the climate talks in Copenhagen.

Health Care Optimism

2009-12-18T13:01:00.002-06:00

I am optimistic right now that either Ben Nelson or Olympia Snowe will provide the 60th vote needed for cloture on the health care bill.
At this point I think we are just watching the end of a long, slow dance that has already been choreographed behind closed doors.
Right now if I had to bet, I would say that the best odds are on Olympia Snowe to step up. There is no reason at this point for her to oppose the bill since it is essentially the same as the bill that came out of the Finance Committee which she already supported. The public option and Medicare buy-in proposal that she objected to in the interim period have been stripped away. The question is what would Nelson do at that point? I think once the filibuster is moot, he will vote to end cloture but still vote against the bill. Thus the cloture motion will pass 61-39.
Earlier this morning a final hurdle was cleared when Democrats defeated a Republican attempt to filibuster the Defense Appropriation bill. Sens. Snowe, Collins and Hutchison all broke ranks to support the troops, while the rest of the GOP hypocrites did what they usually do.

Climate change ignorance and resentment

2009-12-18T08:51:00.004-06:00

I know it sounds arrogant to say that people don't know what they are talking about when it comes to climate change, but as Gene Lyons points out in this essay, we wouldn't expect to get lectures on physics and chemistry from talk show yakkers and the like.
But what about Al Gore, you say? What does he know? Nothing, of course, but that's just the point. Gore is not spouting opinions off the top of his head. He is referencing well established scientific studies, not industry propaganda.

Global Warming - Salon.com

So what's next? A series of essays by Sarah Palin about the Large Hadron Collider and the mysteries of dark matter? An MIT lecture series by Rush Limbaugh regarding the thermodynamics of black holes? A Festschrift of Sean Hannity's scholarly articles on plate tectonics and volcano formation? Glenn Beck performing live heart-lung transplants on Fox News?

Everybody understands that these things couldn't happen. That when it comes to serious scientific endeavor, years of study and professional apprenticeship are required. In a word, expertise.

Ex-beauty contestants, drive-time DJs, TV sports announcers, hairstylists, newspaper columnists -- basically anybody whose math skills topped out in the 10th grade -- rarely have anything substantive to add to the sum of technical and scientific knowledge. That's what they most resent about it.

It's not impossible that such persons could educate themselves sufficiently to have an informed opinion, but it's rare. Most of us, most of the time, are like historian and blogger Josh Marshall: "The fact that the vast majority of people with specialized knowledge in the field think there's a problem is good enough for me," he wrote. "I can't be knowledgeable about everything. And I'm comfortable with the modern system in which the opinions of really knowledgeable people with expertise counts more in cases like this than people who know nothing at all."

Unless and until, that is, scientific endeavor impinges upon either A) religious belief, or B) the ability of tycoons to keep making money in precisely the way they or their ancestors have always made their money. Then it's every man and woman a climatologist, and every genuine expert an "elitist" enemy of God and the American way -- creationism with a thermometer.

Charles P. Pierce describes what he calls the "three great premises" of talk-radio populism in his acerbic book "Idiot America":

First Great Premise: Any theory is valid if it moves units ... Second Great Premise: Anything can be true if someone says it loudly enough ... Third Great Premise: Fact is that which enough people believe. Truth is measured by how fervently they believe it.

So it was after thousands of private e-mails hacked from the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit in England emerged via the right-wing noise machine into the British and American press. Caught red-handed acting like, well, like professors -- ambitious, idealistic, petty, egotistical, dogged and pedantic -- climate researchers soon got caught up in a media storm rivaling that surrounding golfer Tiger Woods.

Within days, representatives of various Exxon- and Koch Industries-funded propaganda shops like the Heritage Foundation and Competitive Enterprise Institute started braying about "Climate-gate." Fox News headlined "Global Warming's Waterloo." Hannity told viewers, "Now we find out that this institute is hiding from the people of Great Britain and the world that, in fact, climate change is a hoax, something I've been saying for a long time."

Taking time off from her book tour, Sarah Palin wrote a Washington Post piece charging the "e-mails reveal that leading climate 'experts' deliberately destroyed records, manipulated data to 'hide the decline' in global temperatures, and tried to silence their critics by preventing them from publishing in peer-reviewed journals."

Note the scare quotes around "experts." Palin's evidence for this conspiracy? Here's the worst of it: A 10-year-old e-mail from professor Phil Jones to Penn State colleague Michael Mann. You've seen it 10 times on television. "I've just completed Mike's Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years ... to hide the decline."

Read it twice. So Jones brags about hiding a decline in global temperatures by "adding in the real temps"? The allegation's nonsensical on its face. If you read the entire message, Jones is talking about plotting a more accurate graph by throwing out inferential evidence from tree ring studies known since the 1960s to be less reliable. There's an elaborate scientific debate about why. Not one reputable scientist who's looked into this matter has judged otherwise. What's crucial to understand is that if Jones were proved to be faking data, his scientific career would end at once, along with that of anybody who helped him.

Scientists can be jerks too. However, the kind of worldwide conspiracy conjured by global climate change deniers like Palin, Hannity and the rest -- that is, as an evidence-free, religio-political cult that's the mirror image of their own movement -- simply can't exist in a scientific context. Meanwhile, Arctic sea ice is vanishing, glaciers melting, sea levels rising, droughts and floods increasing, and the past decade -- according to the World Meteorological Organization -- was the warmest in recorded history.

But hey, look over there: some elitist e-mails!

Lieberman and other plagues on American Democracy

2009-12-15T23:04:00.004-06:00

Joe Lieberman has burned more bridges with his old party than any politician probably since Theodore Roosevelt.
His latest doublecross on the health care reform bill has made Democrats furious. About 82 percent in a recent poll want him to be stripped of his chairmanship of the Homeland Security Committee. Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut would like to see him recalled (although the Constitution doesn't allow for any such thing.)
On an emotional level, I agree. I was ready to toss Lieberman overboard the minute he endorsed and campaigned for McCain/Palin in the '08 election.
But the one thing to remember about Lieberman after everything is said and done is that he is going to end up voting FOR healthcare reform and that is more than can be said for any single Republican. Even with the public option dead and the Medicare buy-in compromise stripped from the bill, it still doesn't have a single Republican willing to vote for it or even to allow it to go to a vote. So, as bad and as infuriating as Lieberman is right now, he is still better than any of the so-called "moderates" in the Wingnut Party. Every single one of them - Olympia Snowe, Susan Collins, George Voinovich - they are all not only going to vote against the bill, they are supporting a filibuster to prevent it from even coming up for a vote.

There are three major reasons why Healthcare reform has taken so long and is struggling so hard despite overwhelming support in the House and Senate. The first reason is pure political spite from the Republican Party which is only interested in defeating anything and everything that Obama tries to do so as to make him look bad and weaken him before the 2012 elections. The second thing is the filibuster which has evolved and metastasized into a gross, enormous tumor on the body of our American Democracy.
The Republican Party's abuse of the filibuster rule is destroying our democracy as we have known it. The fact that legislation supported by overwhelming majorities in the House and Senate can't even come up for a vote is outrageous. The filibuster rule needs to be cut back to what it once was in the 1970s and '60s and before - a rarely used procedure requiring some amount of effort or sacrifice on the part of those opposing the majority. Instead, today a filibuster requires no effort on the part of the minority party and instead puts all the onus on the majority to come up with 60 votes every time it is invoked - which today is on almost every single piece of legislation.
And finally, you can blame the lobbyists who have poured millions and millions of dollars into campaigns to influence the votes of senators like Joe Lieberman who hails from a state with lots of insurance companies.

The funny thing with Lieberman is that while he has incurred the wrath of his fellow Democrats once again on health care reform, to the delight of rightwingers, he is about to become a key player on the other side by pushing cap-n-trade legislation with John Kerry to address the global warming crisis. I suppose you can chalk that up to the fact that Connecticut has no oil interests to speak of, but does have many days a year where you want to put on a gas mask before going outside because of the smog rolling in from New York. However, at this point I don't know how much I would trust Lieberman to not backpedal and sabotage his own bill.

Nevertheless, the good news is that health care reform looks like it is finally going to pass and even without the watered down public option or the Medicare buy-in compromise, it is still the best and farthest reaching legislation on health care in decades. "As Kevin Drum said:

This is still a huge achievement that will benefits tens of millions of people in very concrete ways and will do it without expanding our long-term deficit. Either with or without a public option, this is more than Bill Clinton ever did, more than Teddy Kennedy did, more than LBJ did, more than Truman did, and more than FDR did. There won't be many other times in our lives any of us will be able to say that. So pass the bill.

Krugman on Republican opposition to bank regulations

2009-12-14T10:16:00.002-06:00

Paul Krugman has a terrific column in today's NY Times.
He gives a good rundown on the last several decades of deregulation mania that has led to one economic disaster after another. And then he goes on to talk about how it is so difficult to fix this problem when dealing with a Republican Party (and Blue Dog Democrats) who live in a Bizzaro alternate universe.

Talk to conservatives about the financial crisis and you enter an alternative, bizarro universe in which government bureaucrats, not greedy bankers, caused the meltdown. It’s a universe in which government-sponsored lending agencies triggered the crisis, even though private lenders actually made the vast majority of subprime loans. It’s a universe in which regulators coerced bankers into making loans to unqualified borrowers, even though only one of the top 25 subprime lenders was subject to the regulations in question.

Oh, and conservatives simply ignore the catastrophe in commercial real estate: in their universe the only bad loans were those made to poor people and members of minority groups, because bad loans to developers of shopping malls and office towers don’t fit the narrative.

The Republican Party today is not interested in governing the country. They are only interested in regaining power so they can go back to enriching themselves and their corporate puppet masters at the expense of everyone else.
If voters allow this to happen, our country will sink so low that I'm not sure anyone will be able to pull us out the next time.

AP analysis deflates "Climategate"

2009-12-12T23:22:00.003-06:00

The AP came out with a thorough and exhaustive analysis of the hacked emails behind the bogus "climategate" non-controversy and concluded that beyond causing some embarrassment for a few scientists, it does nothing to change the overwhelming scientific consensus on the manmade causes of global warming.

E-mails stolen from climate scientists show they stonewalled skeptics and discussed hiding data — but the messages don't support claims that the science of global warming was faked, according to an exhaustive review by The Associated Press.

The 1,073 e-mails examined by the AP show that scientists harbored private doubts, however slight and fleeting, even as they told the world they were certain about climate change. However, the exchanges don't undercut the vast body of evidence showing the world is warming because of man-made greenhouse gas emissions.

The analysis even explains the now infamous email where it talks of using a "trick" to "hide the decline."

One e-mail that skeptics have been citing often since the messages were posted online is from Jones. He says: "I've just completed Mike's (Mann) trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (from 1981 onward) and from 1961 for Keith's to hide the decline."

Jones was referring to tree ring data that indicated temperatures after the 1950s weren't as warm as scientists had determined.

The "trick" that Jones said he was borrowing from Mann was to add the real temperatures, not what the tree rings showed. And the decline he talked of hiding was not in real temperatures, but in the tree ring data which was misleading, Mann explained.

Too bad Jonathan Gurwitz didn't see this before writing his latest regurgitation of wingnut talking points for the Excuse News.

Judge blocks ACORN defunding

2009-12-12T00:55:00.002-06:00

This is good news.

The U.S. government's move this fall to cut off funding to ACORN was unconstitutional, a federal judge ruled Friday, handing the embattled group a legal victory.

It is especially timely in light of the report that exonerates ACORN of any wrongdoing in the Rightwing sting operation.

It was outrageous that ACORN would get completely cutoff over something so asinine while defense contractor KBR gets not even a slap on the wrist for KBR's disturbing behavior in Iraq where the company detained a rape victim and threatened her with firing if she dared to report the crime committed by other company employees. THAT got no reprimand whatsoever.

However, Sen. Al Franken sponsored legislation to make sure such a disgraceful action never happens again only to have 30 Republican Senators - including Texas Senator John Cornyn - vote against it. That group of 30 is now known as the pro-rape caucus.

Bogus climategate controversy slapped down

2009-12-10T08:56:00.003-06:00

Al Gore does not suffer fools lightly. And there are certainly a lot of fools running about with regards to the global warming issue.
In an interview with Slate Magazine, the former vice president, Nobel Laureate and Oscar winner slaps down the bogus controversy over the hacked emails.

Q: How damaging to your argument was the disclosure of e-mails from the Climate Research Unit at East Anglia University?

A: To paraphrase Shakespeare, it's sound and fury signifying nothing. I haven't read all the e-mails, but the most recent one is more than 10 years old. These private exchanges between these scientists do not in any way cause any question about the scientific consensus. But the noise machine built by the climate deniers often seizes on what they can blow out of proportion, so they've thought this is a bigger deal than it is.

Q: There is a sense in these e-mails, though, that data was hidden and hoarded, which is the opposite of the case you make [in your book] about having an open and fair debate.

A: I think it's been taken wildly out of context. The discussion you're referring to was about two papers that two of these scientists felt shouldn't be accepted as part of the IPCC report. Both of them, in fact, were included, referenced, and discussed. So an e-mail exchange more than 10 years ago including somebody's opinion that a particular study isn't any good is one thing, but the fact that the study ended up being included and discussed anyway is a more powerful comment on what the result of the scientific process really is.

These people are examining what they can or should do to deal with the P.R. dimensions of this, but where the scientific consensus is concerned, it's completely unchanged. What we're seeing is a set of changes worldwide that just make this discussion over 10-year-old e-mails kind of silly. The entire North Polar ice cap is disappearing before our very eyes. It's been the size of the continental United States for the last 3 million years and now 40 percent is gone and the rest of it is going. The mountain glaciers are going. We've had record storms, droughts, fires, and floods. There is an air of unreality in debating these arcane points when the world is changing in such dramatic ways right in front of our eyes because of global warming.

Q: What's your view on the medieval warm period and the charge that the East Anglia e-mails suggest data was manipulated to "contain" that anomaly?

A: I haven't read those e-mails in detail, but the larger point is that there are cyclical changes in the climate and they are fairly well-understood, and all of them are included in the scientific consensus. When you look at what has happened over the last few decades the natural fluctuations point in the opposite direction of what has actually occurred. When they run the models and plug in the man-made pollution, the correspondence is exact. Beyond that, the scale of natural fluctuations has now been far exceeded by the impact of man-made global warming.

And again, we're putting 90 million tons of it into the air today and we'll put a little more of that up there tomorrow. The physical relationship between CO2 molecules and the atmosphere and the trapping of heat is as well-established as gravity, for God's sakes. It's not some mystery. One hundred and fifty years ago this year, John Tyndall discovered CO2 traps heat, and that was the same year the first oil well was drilled in Pennsylvania. The oil industry has outpaced the building of a public consensus of the implications of climate science.

But the basic facts are incontrovertible. What do they think happens when we put 90 million tons up there every day? Is there some magic wand they can wave on it and presto!—physics is overturned and carbon dioxide doesn't trap heat anymore? And when we see all these things happening on the Earth itself, what in the hell do they think is causing it? The scientists have long held that the evidence in their considered word is "unequivocal," which has been endorsed by every national academy of science in every major country in the entire world.

If the people that believed the moon landing was staged on a movie lot had access to unlimited money from large carbon polluters or some other special interest who wanted to confuse people into thinking that the moon landing didn't take place, I'm sure we'd have a robust debate about it right now.

So to summarize, 10-plus year old emails between a couple of scientists discussing two papers as to whether or not they should be included in the IPCC report are the source for this whole kerfluffle being called "Climategate."
And what's more, those two papers were, in fact, included in the IPCC report when all was said and done.
So this whole stink being raised by the climate deniers is bullshit.
But that should be no surprise to anyone who follows their pattern over the years.

RIP Washington Times

2009-12-08T16:56:00.002-06:00

The Mooney News is apparently being cut off from its crazed, cult-leader sugar daddy. The end of the Wash. Times and Rev. Moon's right-wing charity

With the announcement that 40 percent of the Times' staff is getting pink-slipped, and that the daily's no longer even going to bother with traditional who/what/where/when/why reporting, instead publishing an opinion-heavy publication that will be free of charge at a diminished number of local outlets, Times owners look like they're angling to be a Weekly Standard wannabe, churning out lots of predictable GOP Noise Machine opinion prattle. (Paging Andrew Breitbart!) What is clear is that the daily's days as a functioning newspaper are now over.

Manufacturing Doubt

2009-12-06T22:00:00.003-06:00

This essay lays out the similarities between the tobacco industry's campaign to discredit scientific studies showing links between smoking and cancer with the pollution industry's campaign today to discredit scientific studies showing links between human actions and global warming.

Here is a key quote: "...the industry understood that the public is in no position to distinguish good science from bad. Create doubt, uncertainty, and confusion. Throw mud at the anti-smoking research under the assumption that some of it is bound to stick. And buy time, lots of it, in the bargain". The title of Michaels' book comes from a 1969 memo from a tobacco company executive: "Doubt is our product since it is the best means of competing with the 'body of fact' that exists in the minds of the general public. It is also the means of establishing a controversy". Hill and Knowlton, on behalf of the tobacco industry, had founded the "Manufactured Doubt" industry."

Christmas lists

2009-12-05T23:50:00.003-06:00

Five years ago I made a list of my favorite Christmas music and it hasn't changed much since then.
Today, I might add Burl Ives: The Christmas Collection as well as the trio of classical classics - Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker Suite; Handel's Messiah and Bach's Christmas Oratorio.

Lately, I've seen a number of lists of favorite Christmas movies popping up on the Web and so I thought I would take a crack at my own. First off, I will seperate out the animated TV specials into their own list rather than clumping them together with the feature films like everyone else.
So, here first is my list of the 10 best animated TV Christmas specials.

1. Charlie Brown Christmas
2. How the Grinch Stole Christmas
3. Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer
4. Santa Claus is Coming to Town
5. Frosty the Snowman
6. The Little Drummer Boy
7. Twas the Night Before Christmas
8. The Year Without a Santa Claus
9. Prep and Landing
10. Mr. Magoo's A Christmas Carol

And now my list of favorite Christmas movies - feature length films:

1. It's a Wonderful Life
2. Miracle on 34th Street
3. White Christmas
4. A Christmas Carol
5. Christmas in Connecticut
6. The Polar Express
7. A Christmas Story
8. The Santa Clause
9. A Nightmare Before Christmas
10. Christmas Vacation

For me, a Christmas movie has to be mostly about Christmas in some way and not just be a film about something else that just happens to include scenes during Christmas. So movies like Die Hard, Gremlins and Trading Places, while good movies, don't qualify as true Christmas movies in my book.

Musical interlude

2009-12-03T15:46:00.000-06:00

I'm going to have to get me some Leon Russell music...

Obama: Yes We Khandahar!

2009-12-01T23:42:00.002-06:00

I would have preferred to hear Obama announce the immediate withdrawal of all troops from Iraq and Afghanistan. But I understand why he is moving forward with a "surge" in Afghanistan and, as Steve Benen notes, he told us this is what he was going to do during his presidential campaign.
Military realists generally win out on foreign policy and military issues such as this which is why things don't change that much from one administration to the next. I'm sure Obama is counting on the surge in Afghanistan to provide a level of stability to that country that has been lacking to this point and will then allow us to withdraw with our heads held high. If it works (and health care reform passes) Obama will be unbeatable for reelection in 2012.

Hacked emails and conspiracy nonsense

2009-12-01T11:12:00.001-06:00

The idea that some hacked email accounts at some university in Great Britain have exposed a grand conspiracy among scientists around the globe to manufacture an elaborate hoax about global warming is completely ludicrous. People that are buying into this nonsense are those who don’t care about the science behind climate change and have already made up their minds based in large part on what they have heard from Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and Faux News.
Fortunately, Media Matters for America has done us all a great favor by going through all of the sundry claims and allegations being made by wingnuts in relation to the emails and knocking them down one by one. Not that it will make any difference to brainwashed dittoheads and tea party radicals.

Kevin Drum has more to say on the subject as well.

As near as I can tell, ClimateGate is almost entirely a tempest in a teacup.... So on a substantive level, there’s really very little to this. Certainly nothing that changes the actual science of climate change even a little. The earth is still warming and disaster is still highly likely if we sit around and do nothing.

Former rightwing blogger reclaims his sanity

2009-12-01T10:00:00.002-06:00

Charles Johnson, the man behind the popular wingnut blog Little Green Footballs, has cut ties with the wingnutosphere.

He explained his decision in this post on his blog – Why I Parted Ways With The Right

1. Support for fascists, both in America (see: Pat Buchanan, Robert Stacy McCain, etc.) and in Europe (see: Vlaams Belang, BNP, SIOE, Pat Buchanan, etc.)

2. Support for bigotry, hatred, and white supremacism (see: Pat Buchanan, Ann Coulter, Robert Stacy McCain, Lew Rockwell, etc.)

3. Support for throwing women back into the Dark Ages, and general religious fanaticism (see: Operation Rescue, anti-abortion groups, James Dobson, Pat Robertson, Tony Perkins, the entire religious right, etc.)

4. Support for anti-science bad craziness (see: creationism, climate change denialism, Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann, James Inhofe, etc.)

5. Support for homophobic bigotry (see: Sarah Palin, Dobson, the entire religious right, etc.)

6. Support for anti-government lunacy (see: tea parties, militias, Fox News, Glenn Beck, etc.)

7. Support for conspiracy theories and hate speech (see: Alex Jones, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Birthers, creationists, climate deniers, etc.)

8. A right-wing blogosphere that is almost universally dominated by raging hate speech (see: Hot Air, Free Republic, Ace of Spades, etc.)

9. Anti-Islamic bigotry that goes far beyond simply criticizing radical Islam, into support for fascism, violence, and genocide (see: Pamela Geller, Robert Spencer, etc.)

10. Hatred for President Obama that goes far beyond simply criticizing his policies, into racism, hate speech, and bizarre conspiracy theories (see: witch doctor pictures, tea parties, Birthers, Michelle Malkin, Fox News, World Net Daily, Newsmax, and every other right wing source)

And much, much more. The American right wing has gone off the rails, into the bushes, and off the cliff.

I won’t be going over the cliff with them.

Maybe there's hope for other people who went all looney tunes after 9/11.