Government Created Wealth

A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of watching a documentary about the Grand Coulee Dam. It was part of PBS's American Experience series that I have enjoyed for many, many years. Here is the program in its entirety and I recommend watching the whole thing before you comment on the rest of this post.  

Watch Grand Coulee Dam on PBS. See more from American Experience.

My initial awe at what went into this project and the enormously positive outcome gave way to a profound sadness because a project like this could never happen today. Why? Because "the GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.." (Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein)

Before the dam's construction, the likely ancestors of the Tea Party behaved in a similar fashion as described by Mann and Ornstein, shouting all too familiar cries of dissent. Proponents of the dam were called "crackpots" and "Coulee Communists." Big private power interests fought fiercely against it. Collier's magazine downgraded Grand Coulee and, as the structure rose higher, it was labeled as "socialistic, impractical dam-foolishness." Even experts, engineers and geologists debated its usefulness. The president of the American Society of Civil Engineers branded Coulee as "a grandiose project of no more usefulness than the pyramids of Egypt." A Spokane paper sneered. "Baron Munchausen," it said, referring to the legendary liar, "thou wert a piker."

They were all wrong.

The Grand Coulee Dam, a taxpayer funded, government project, resulted in millions of dollars for the defense industry (60,000 planes and the creation of plutonium-239 were built using the power from the dam) and an explosion of agriculture in the state of Washington due to irrigation of a once arid, massive area of land in the Northwest. In fact, it provides irrigation to 2,000 farms in the area. The Grand Coulee Dam is one of the top produces in the country of hydro-electric power.Entire towns...economies...grew up around the building of the dam as thousands of people and a massive amount of materials were needed in its construction. The entire region was changed and became very prosperous as a result of the dam.

So, the Grand Coulee Dam is an example of how the government can create wealth. I realize this is sacrilege  for the right wingers out there but the facts are the facts. So, why again can't we do something like this today?

Looking deeper than the reasons I listed above, one becomes even more confused. Economic conditions were worse back in the 1930s. Unemployment was higher. The private sector had been shown to be a collection of greedy buffoons who were, in essence, addicted to gambling and using the nation's (really, the world's) economic structure as collateral. People put their faith in government and it paid off. The same thing should be able to happen today, right?

No. Because the last 30 years have seen a systematic attack on the institution of government that is so egregious...so profoundly inaccurate...that I fear the national perception is forever changed. Even as little as two years ago, I have caught myself saying (in derision), "Well, this must be a government operation." It's become part of our zeitgeist to hate the government and yet we so desperately need its structure and organizational principles right now to get ourselves out of this sluggish funk. Combine this with near worship we have of the real Gordon Gekkos of our country and our federal government doesn't stand a chance.

Yet, it's terribly obvious that the private sector is not going to be able to improve our economy on its own. Their motivation is for profit. That's great when you are exclusively operating in the free market. As we have seen far too many times, the free market isn't a universal panacea for all things economical. This is especially true because the government...our government and the governments of the world...are partners in the economy. They have to be because governments can sometimes improve market outcomes. And the Grand Coulee Dam is an excellent example of exactly how this works.

President Obama has been trying to do this for the last 3 1/2 years and has been massively derided for it. He's a "big government liberal" who wants to blah blah blah...have any of the people who say this ever taken the time to see the results of a project like Grand Coulee?

In truth, we don't even have to do something as massive as the Grand Coulee Dam to get our economy moving again. We could simply start with a massive repair plan for our nation's highways and bridges. That would put people to work which would, in turn, generate revenue for the government and the private sector. In essence, I'm talking about the president's jobs plan. 

Of course, the Republicans will never pass anything that could signal a success for the president in an election year. To put it simply, they, like the detractors of the Grand Coulee Dam, have a vested interest in the failure of such policies which essentially means they have a vested interest in the failure of our economy.

And, since the perception of our government is not what it was in 1933, they may very well succeed.

Yep

The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition. ---Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein

Should Corporations Be Accountable for What They Say?

In a democracy the business of government needs to be open and transparent: we need to see what our elected representatives are saying and doing to make sure that they have our best interests at heart.

Given that, shouldn't the process we use to select those representatives be equally open and transparent, to make sure that we know who got those representatives elected and can judge what their motivations might be?

Since the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision, unlimited corporate spending on political ads has become a major influence on the outcomes of elections. To make sure that the electoral process remains open and fair, the FCC recently ruled that TV stations have to put detailed information on political ad purchases on line.


But Republicans in the House are trying to prevent the FCC from enforcing that rule. For people who claim to believe in personal responsibility, Republicans sure do want to make it hard to hold people accountable for the things they say in public.

Stations are already required to make this information available, but only in paper form at the stations. These stations frequently charge a substantial fee to copy the information, making it hard for non-profit public interest groups to obtain it.

Everything about Republican opposition to this transparency rule is bogus. It's not a burdensome new regulation: they already have to provide this information in hard copy. Every TV station has a website, and it's much easier to slap data into an HTML file and stick it on the website than it is to hire someone to be responsible for producing, maintaining and copying paper documents. A web-based solution can be automated to be made cheap and effortless, while hard copy will always be expensive and personnel-intensive.

The stations claim it's bad because it allows competitors to find out what their advertising rates are. But competitors can already get the data by sending a secretary over to make a paper copy; and they can deduct any costs as a business expense.

The conceit of the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision was that speech is money, and multinational corporations are people. The former is debatable, but the latter is specious nonsense: corporations are a legalistic creation of government; if you prick them they do not bleed. They do not have birth certificates. They cannot vote. Why should they be able buy political campaigns?

And why are these corporate "citizens" so afraid of being identified with the ads they're running? Why do they cower in the shadows instead of bravely speaking their minds? Why don't they want to be associated with the negative half-truths they pay to have spewed over the airwaves? Are they afraid of the wrath of well-informed voters? Or are they really shills for foreign-owned corporations (like, say, TransCanada, which is the force behind the Keystone XL pipeline)?

Due to the the lax disclosure rules after Citizens United, there's already no way to know for sure whether foreign money from multinational corporations owned by the Chinese Red Army or Cayman Island banks is influencing American politics.

And after all, the Constitution doesn't say that you have to be a citizen to enjoy free speech: the First Amendment just says "Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press," without mentioning anything about the nationality or citizenship of the purveyors of that speech.

Thus, the prohibition against foreign campaign spending doesn't descend from the Constitution, it's just one of those pesky nanny-state FEC regulations.

In time Republicans will come to bitterly regret the Citizen's United decision. Corporations are fickle; they are becoming increasingly stateless, owned by foreign interests and only care about money. In ten or fifteen years, when the Republican Party consists of nothing but old, white and wizened men, the dynamic new power players from Brazil, India and China may anonymously use their fiscal might to back Democrats and shout down Republican candidates on the American airwaves.

After all, it's completely legal for foreigners to do it even today. All they need is a green card.

Bril!

The End of the Princess Fantasy?

Can you imagine? Donald Trump is involved in another controversy that has nothing to do with Barack Obama's birth certificate!

Miss Pennsylvania has stepped down because she believes Donald Trump's Miss USA pageant was rigged:

A posting on Miss Pennsylvania Sheena Monnin's Facebook page claims another contestant learned the names of the top 5 finishers on Sunday morning — hours before the show was broadcast.

Trump responded in his inimitable style, saying, "We're going to be suing her now," and "[F]rankly, in my opinion, I saw her barely a second and she didn't deserve to be in the top 15." And here I thought Miss USA was all about poise, talent and character.

Trump claims that Monnin stepped down in protest over his decision to allow transgender contestants (one such entrant in the Miss Canada pageant forced the issue). This was echoed by the winner of this year's Miss USA contest, Miss Rhode Island Olivia Culpo. In the so-called "make-or-break" interview round Culpo bravely sucked up to Trump, saying she believed transgender contestants should be allowed.

This makes me wonder: why do we still have beauty pageants like Miss USA and Miss America? I don't question it because Trump's Miss USA pageant now allows those people in, in the same way some some people believe allowing gays to marry somehow negates the meaning of heterosexual marriage.

But in this day and age what is the point of lining up a bunch of women in bathing suits, then evening gowns, then have them do a little talent show, and then ask them a bunch of questions to find out if they're really as vapid as they look?


In the early days of television beauty pageants were a great excuse for TV execs to show lots of scantily clad women. But these days we've got an infinite supply of Victoria's Secret and Sports Illustrated swimsuit specials, salacious network shows, cable porn channels, and an entire Internet dedicated to serving up pictures of naked women.


In its heyday the beauty pageant was the American princess fantasy, one of the few venues where "ladies" could compete against each other. But these days women participate in sports, go to college and med school, compete with men for the same jobs in the real world and by some measures are starting to outperform them. And though I'm no fan of them, highly-produced "reality" shows like Dancing with the Stars and American Idol have supplanted the princess fantasy with dreams of success that require real talent.

Beauty contests like Miss USA are dinosaurs from a bygone era. The only apparent point of Trump's pageant is to scout for his next wife.

Wisconsin Post Mortem

Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker survived the recall effort and won 1,334,430 to Barrett's 1,161, 870. These results pretty much jibe with the polls and are nearly identical to the 2010 election with about 300,00 more people voting. So, what does all this say? Nikto has offered his take below and here's mine.

First of all, Walker may not have an across the board GOP legislature with which to work. In District 21, John Lehman (a Democrat) has prevailed over Van Waggaard in the town where I grew up (Racine). Of course, this matters little unless there is a special session before November when 11 of the 16 seats will be up again for election before the session next year. But it is something. The Democrats have control of the State Senate pending a recall.

In addition, I don't think this means much for the national election as these exit polls indicate people who voted for Walker also will vote for President Obama.

The president polled ahead of Mitt Romney by a wide margin – 51 percent to 44 percent, according to the exit poll conducted by Edison Research

Wisconsin voters also preferred Mr. Obama over Mr. Romney to deal with the economy, 43 percent to 37 percent, according to the ABC News exit poll. 

On “helping the middle class,” Obama beat Romney, the presumptive GOP presidential nominee, 47 percent to 36 percent.

The polls also show that 18 percent of the people that voted for Walker support the president. Why is this? My thought is that both Scott Walker and Barack Obama have effectively captured the perception that each of them are for the working man. Obviously, the former is not true. It will be interesting to see how or if the numbers change in Wisconsin over the next few weeks. If you click on the icon to the right, you can see the latest polls show Wisconsin to be a "Lean Democrat" with the president ahead 50 to 43 percent, according to the latest Marquette poll.

Bottom line, Romney is a weak candidate in Wisconsin and has a lot of work to do. The last time the GOP won the state was in 1984. Heck, the GOP couldn't even win it when Bush the elder beat the snot out of Tank Boy! The next few days will see a lot of hay made by the right wing media industrial complex but just like hay, it will be light in actual substance. People simply like the president more than the like Governor Romney.

Some other thoughts...

As Nikto said below, you don't run the same candidate twice. You think the Democrats would have learned their lesson 60 years ago with Adlai Stevenson. Barrett was a poor candidate.

Is Wisconsin the first state to be purchased by the Koch Brothers? In this day and age of Citizen's United, it sure does look that way. I am seriously bummed about this.

It's going to be interesting to see what comes out of this criminal investigation with Walker. Could it end up being Nixon lite? I guess time will tell...

Even though there are a few rays of light out of all of this, I'm still pretty bummed. For those of you who are happy about this, where's the victory?

Wisconsin: a Referendum on Unions

I was expecting Scott Walker to survive the Wisconsin recall vote, and he did. There were basically three reasons:

First: money, money, money, money, money, money, money. Walker took in seven times more money than his opponent, Tom Barrett. Most of that money came from outside Wisconsin, from corporate honchos like the Koch brothers.

Second: Walker just got done beating Barrett in 2010. It was a mistake for Democrats to rerun the loser of the last election.

Third: the election was really Walker vs. The Unions. Walker won by turning the election into a referendum on unions.

Unions aren't very popular these days. Private-sector unions are nearly extinct, and people like Walker are well on their way to castrating public-sector unions. The problem is inherent: the only real bargaining chip unions have is the strike, and strikes inconvenience everyone. Strikes make union members seem selfish and obstructionist. No one remembers how company thugs, often with the help of law enforcement, beat and killed union organizers back in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. These days people perceive union members as thugs who threaten people at picket lines.

Unions don't help themselves by pushing for work rules that appear to be featherbedding, demanding unsustainable levels of retirement and health care benefits and opposing changes necessitated by new technologies and shifting business conditions worldwide. The past association of some unions with organized crime is a stigma that is hard to beat, no matter that corruption in corporate management is far more pervasive.

Unions are messy democratic institutions that hold elections and conduct most of their business in public. Corporations are tidy oligarchic dictatorships that do all their conniving out of the public eye, have slick PR people issuing carefully crafted statements, and plenty of money to pay off anyone who might reveal embarrassing facts (as. for example, Rupert Murdoch has spent millions upon millions of dollars in hush money to cover up the phone hacking scandal in Britain).

To survive, the labor movement has to turn public sentiment around and convince Americans that unions are a public good. As union membership has declined, so has the average worker's salary, in real terms. It's simple economics: if there are fewer high-paying union jobs, other employers will be able to offer lower salaries, which non-union workers will have to take. American workers have been in this downward wage spiral for the last 40 years.

Many people perceive union members as doing less work for more money. The truth is that union workers did work harder to earn higher salaries: they organized and used their collective power to achieve better pay and working conditions.

Most of us think of our workplaces as a home away from home and consider our coworkers to be friends or family, and some even consider employers to be like parents. But non-union workers who put all their hard work into doing the actual job in the hopes that they will be rewarded for their devotion and loyalty are making a sentimental mistake.

At the end of the day employers, particularly large corporations, don't care about loyalty. It's all about the money. I'll be the first to admit that it has to be that way. But they will fire your ass the instant it pays for them to do so. Your immediate supervisor might be a nice guy and almost like a father, but he takes his orders from the guys on top, and if he won't fire you his replacement will.

But money also perverts good corporate stewardship. Many corporations will fire your ass even if it materially harms the ability of the company to do its work, as long as it makes the stock price jump and earns the CEO a multi-million dollar bonus.

If it's okay for employers to have this mercenary money-money-money mindset, why shouldn't employees have it as well? Unions do: they're essentially employee-owned corporations that sell labor. They know that employers will pit employees against each other and pick them off one by one unless the employees are organized and stick together.

But until unions clean up their act and show Americans they are a force for economic growth and fairness, corporate surrogates like Scott Walker will continue to make unions the issue. And Americans will be forced to work longer hours, for lower salaries, under even less desirable conditions.

Hey, Check Out The New Sidebar

Thanks to Nikto (and me a little) we have a link to Electoral-Vote.com, the premier site for election year goings-on. Andy does a great job of keeping his polls and numbers up to date as well as offering a no nonsense look at election news. The numbers for the presidential race and the Senate change frequently so enjoy!

You will also notice The Most Popular Posts list as well as a Google share thing. Isn't the most popular one interesting? That one has had over a thousand page loads since I put it up. Crazy!

Not Coming From The White House

The editorial board of Bloomberg News put up a recent piece which perfectly summarized the answer to "Who's to blame" for our economy.

CEOs broadly point to overregulation as the biggest economic damper. But the raw numbers of new regulations don't support the uncertainty purveyors, either. The Office of Management and Budget says 931 major regulations -- those with enough economic significance to require OMB review -- were issued by the executive branch during the first three years of George W. Bush's first term, more than the 886 from Obama's first three years.

Right. So why wasn't this a problem during the Bush Administration? But let's get to the main answer.

Companies are also sitting on cash or refusing to hire because, paradoxically, unemployment is a drag on consumer demand, a problem they lay at the president's feet. It's important to note that historical data collected by economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff show that it takes almost five years for employment to recover from the wreckage of a deep financial crisis. 

Hiring is down because consumer demand remains low as households continue to deleverage. Employers are also using technology and other productivity enhancements to make do with fewer workers.

If there are fewer workers in an economy that is 70 percent consumer driven, then demand is going to suffer because there are less consumers. If the government does not stimulate demand, what entity does it?

The article also has a couple of other things to say of note.

Much of the problem is self-inflicted by Congress. Lawmakers are putting off until after November's elections a crush of expiring Bush-era tax cuts, the payroll tax reduction and dozens of other tax breaks and spending programs. If they expire, and if an approved $100 billion in spending cuts occur at the same time, economic growth would slow to 0.5 percent next year, the Congressional Budget Office says.

This is the elephant in the room that no one wants to tackle. Letting all the tax cuts expire and cutting spending would be a disaster for our economy and we would likely dip into another recession.

Those invoking the uncertainty principle fail to mention that inflation and interest rates are historically low. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke has repeatedly pledged not to raise rates at least through late 2014 -- a gold-plated certainty guarantee if we ever saw one.

Yeah, where's the uncertainty again? And how about all those folks that keep saying that inflation is going to happen? Any day now...

So, the issue of uncertainty is not coming from the White House. It's coming from the private sector and, to a certain extent, Congress, for failing to move before the election. Of course, we all know what the goal of the House is so I guess I don't blame them:)

Uh...I'll go out on a limb here and say...because he's white?

Who Would Be Able to Fix Our Finances?

Over at the Washington Post, Fred Hiatt asks whether Obama or Romney would be more likely to fix the nation's budget problems. He spends an entire column without arriving at any conclusion, though he does define success as a budget resembling the Simpson-Bowles plan. That plan involves a combination of increased revenues and entitlement cuts.

In the piece Hiatt basically accuses both Obama and Romney of being morally weak. Then he says:

Both men surely understand what has to be done, and both would have an incentive to do it. You could argue that Obama, believing in a larger role for government, has a larger incentive; none of his “winning the future” agenda will be imaginable except on a foundation of stable long-term finances. But no more would Romney want to govern through four years of recurring debt-ceiling crises and rising interest costs.

It's ridiculous to talk about Obama's and Romney's incentives: of course they want to fix the budget. But it's really about what's possible. The practical politics of the situation will decide what will happen, not what the president wants.

In a second term, Obama is freed from the pressures of reelection and having to cater to every special interest group in the Democratic Party. Like most moderate and Blue-Dog Democrats, Obama has already accepted the premise of the Simpson-Bowles plan. Which means that even if he can't get the most intransigent Democrats to work with him, with the help of a relatively small number of reasonable, truly patriotic Republicans could get some significant entitlement cuts enacted.

Romney, on the other hand, has already rejected the Simpson-Bowles plan out of hand because it includes tax increases. So, out of the gate, Romney simply cannot be successful by Hiatt's standard. Romney is campaigning with promises of even more tax cuts and increased military spending. These will vastly exceed the savings we could get from even the most draconian entitlement cuts. Romney can't flip-flop on these promises because he would have the cloud of a 2016 reelection run hanging over him. People like Grover Norquist would never allow Romney and the Republicans in Congress to consider anything remotely resembling a tax increase.

But let's say Romney does the unthinkable and proposes something like Simpson-Bowles. The vast majority of his party would revile him. Thus, just like Obama, Romney would have very little Republican support and would have to count on Democrats to provide most of the votes. The problem is, those Democrats would have no incentive to help Romney. For the last three years they've suffered from Republican filibuster, sabotage, obstructionism and intransigence. And because Romney's first actions in office would be to gut many of the programs Democrats favor (health care, etc.), they will be in no mood to compromise with him.

But that's all moot, because there's zero chance Romney would ever propose a plan like Simpson-Bowles in the first place. Which makes me wonder why Hiatt even bothered to ask the question.


In the end a lot will depend on what happens in Senate and House elections, and whether the Senate fixes the filibuster rule. But as long as Grover Norquist and the Tea Partisans control the party, any future under Republican control looks bleak.

Uh...Huh?

Chamber’s Donohue Grades Obama on Economy: C+

Not an F? Not Armageddon? I don't get it.

Considering the source of this rating, the president should consider this winning the jackpot!

:---)

Capitalism is too important to be left to ... capitalists.

It turns out that capitalism is a marvelous creation for efficiently producing and distributing goods and services. It is the genius that unleashes creativity through human energy and effort. It satisfies the human need to build something, for people to say "this is what I accomplished."

Yep.

But there is also a dark side of capitalism. When its excesses have been left unchecked, as they have been at times in our history and were again preceding the Great Recession, government leadership has emerged to save capitalism from itself. It took the analyses of historians to appreciate what Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Franklin Roosevelt accomplished. At the time of their courageous leadership, they were hated by business leaders. It is a classic case of the dogs of capitalism biting the hand that preserved their existence. 


Hmm...that sounds familiar:)

Unfortunately, the previously mentioned dark side of capitalism is the outcome of a system without constraints, the necessary regulations that serve to check the negative consequences. The harm to society has been legendary. Examples are child labor, acid rain, rivers catching fire, destruction of our atmosphere's life-protecting ozone, lead poisoning, black lung disease, mountaintop removal, the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico, toxic waste dumps, selling lethal tainted meat and produce, the destruction of urban rail transit systems, and lung cancer induced by cigarettes. This last example calls to memory the tobacco CEOs arrogantly telling Congress that "no, we don't believe cigarettes are addictive or cancer causing."

Yep.

You see, capitalism is too important to be left to the whims of capitalists. When Barack Obama took the oath of president, his inbox came straight from hell. Over the objections of a GOP that wanted government to imitate the disastrous inaction of Herbert Hoover, Obama and the Federal Reserve unfroze the panicked financial system and averted a collapse into another economic depression. The lessons of the 1930s were not forgotten. 

These lessons again teach that the temptation to put a businessman in the White House should be rejected. It would be courting disaster.

No shit. And it's nice to hear that what I have been saying all along comes from a retired engineer and business executive.

Since It Is OK to Compare the Federal Budget to a Family Budget

The Alternative?

Yesterday's tough economic news has sent the media into a tizzy. How can the president possibly win re-election now? After all, it's June...five months before the election...and this is when voters make up their minds, right? Hee hee hee....

I've always been amazed by the emotional maturity of the media (see: 13 year old girl) but I guess I'd like to look at this from a practical point of view. Let's assume that our economic woes are all President Obama's fault. His policies have brought us to this sluggish place and we need a change. So...what's the alternative?

First up, we have Mitt Romney. Here is his plan to fix our economic woes.  After reading all of his various ideas, the first question that came into my head was...how is this different from President Obama's plans exactly? Oh, right. Less spending and less taxes.

But wait. That doesn't make any sense because we are still under the Bush Tax plan and look at the results. We also are spending less than in the past so where's the growth? Moreover, nowhere do I see a scoring by the CBO or any other neutral entity that gives us an idea as to what Mitt's plan will do for the economy.

The other main alternative we have is Paul Ryan's budget.  This offers even less than Mitt's plan in the way of a real plan and reads more like a cross between Ayn Rand and Thomas Sowell. Again, where's the scoring of this plan by the CBO or a similar entity?

Further, neither of these plans cut defense spending-a key contributor to our nation's debt and deficit-so how can anyone take this stuff seriously?

Looking past Romney and Ryan, what do we have? Well, we have the anarcho-capitalist views of the right wing blogsphere. Does anyone really think that a return to the 1890s is a good idea?  So, really, we don't have much in the way of a substantive alternative to the Democrat's policies.

To put it simply, no one on the right really knows what the fuck to do. Please correct me if I am wrong or offer a plan (of your own or someone else's) that I may have missed because I don't see it. All I see is the president's jobs bill stalled out in Congress because they are more concerned with beating him than enacting policies that would help the economy.

Meanwhile, Paul Krugman continues to call for increased government spending in the short term as the only real solution. Is he right? If not, why not?

Here Comes Their Hero

I'm still amazed when I hear the right whine about the liberal media. To begin with, isn't that playing the victim card?

Yes. Yes it is.

But the real stunner is that they think it even exists in the first place. Take a look at this recent piece about Scott Walker in The New York Times.

On a recent afternoon, Mr. Walker, who is only the third governor in the nation to face a recall election, dashed onto a makeshift stage on a loading dock here as supporters screamed, the song “Only in America” pounded from loudspeakers, a bank of television cameras rolled and Mr. Jindal, the governor of Louisiana, beamed behind him. 

With the remnants of a sinus infection and round-the-clock campaign stops lingering in his voice, Mr. Walker urged the crowd not to let up, declaring that union bosses were pouring money into the state to remove him because, he said, “they don’t like the fact that we’ve got a governor here who stood up and took on the powerful special interests.”

That sounds to me more like a description of Bruce Springsteen's latest concert than a political event. I'll leave Walker's line about special interests and pouring money alone...for now:)

Of course, the Times isn't the only paper doing it. My local paper, the Minneapolis Star and Tribune, which has been called the Star and Sickle on more than one occasion, has this article in today's paper.

The right finds its champion: Wisconsin Gov. Walker

"People recognize you've got to have bold and courageous people in politics to take on the status quo and say, 'This isn't working,'" said Kurt Bauer, president of the organization. "If we can't do it in Wisconsin -- if we recall Governor Walker for doing something that was difficult but necessary -- it's a bad omen for the rest of the nation."

The whole piece is one giant love fest for Governor Walker.

Here's another piece from Politico  which essentially makes Scott Walker look like a victim. And here's a list from RCP with the same general themes I have mentioned thus far.  Hell, even the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel has endorsed Walker! 

So, I'm wondering...where's that liberal media again?

Need or Greed?

A central tenet of Mitt Romney's presidential campaign and conservative orthodoxy in general is that taxes on wealthy "job creators" at the very top must be lowered, preferably to zero. It is their contention that given this extra money these "job creators" would immediately turn around and invest this money in extra productive capacity, which would require them to hire additional workers.

The logic is that high taxes discourage these guys from working, and low taxes lure them to work harder to get even richer. Since these folks already have all the money they could possibly need, so their primary motivator must be greed.

Other tenets of the conservative orthodoxy are that even the poorest people should be forced to pay taxes to make them feel "vested," that they don't need the payroll tax cut President Obama instituted, that the minimum wage should be eliminated and that unemployment and welfare benefits are inherently evil. Even Medicare and Social Security should be abolished in the long run.

The logic is that the more money these lazy poor people have, the less inclined they will be to work. That is, their primary motivator must be need.

This is a false dichotomy. People are people, and their motivations are the same no matter what their income level. The real difference is the means that they have at their disposal to act upon their motivations.

Corporate profits have been up in the last few years and many companies are just sitting on tons of cash. Tax rates are down significantly from what they were 15 years ago (halved on capital gains!). That was the last time our economy was doing really well, and people at all income levels were doing better.

The fact is, dozens of large corporations already pay no taxes at all and hundreds pay very little. Lowering their taxes will provide no additional motivation. But corporations are not creating lots of jobs in the United States, even though they could easily afford to. Why?

They don't need to. CEOs are swimming in corporate profits and getting bonuses out the wazoo. It's easier for them to sit on their duffs, make their current employees work more hours, offshore more jobs, and take no risks.

As a motivator, need trumps greed every time. By conservative logic, since greed is failing as a motivator we must enlist need. In other words, the laziness and overweening sense of entitlement that conservatives insist permeates the lower classes has become even more pervasive in the upper crust "job creators," and should be slapped down with equal force.

The obvious answer? Raise taxes on "job creators" unless they actually create jobs. In particular, companies that funnel jobs and profits overseas to escape US taxes should be hammered. That will make them work harder, the same way cutting off welfare and unemployment benefits forces the poor to work harder. To maintain profit margins the CEOs will have to expand their businesses and create more jobs. And if they're like Ayn Rand's ostensible heroes and just take their ball and go home? Corporate shareholders will just replace them, or ambitious newcomers will rise up to do the job they're too lazy to do.

There's plenty of evidence that higher taxes (within reason) don't hurt the economy. The US economy performed much better from the 1950s through the 1990s when taxes were higher (much higher in the 50s) than after the Bush tax cuts. As Paul Krugman points out, high-tax Sweden and Austria are doing better today than the United States and the rest of Europe.

With more people earning more money, there will be more customers for those companies, which will mean more profits.

Thus, satisfying need and greed at the same time.

What amazes the most about these figures is not the disparity but the willful ignorance of the right and the cries of "class warfare" and "wealth envy." With an economy that is 70 percent consumer spending, it's no wonder ours is stagnant with so much wealth at the top.

In addition, I fear that if this trend continues we may indeed have a socialist revolution and it will be the real ones, not the make believe ones that exist only in the minds of guys like Bill Whittle and Kevin Baker.

And it will all be because we had to manage their fantasies...

Oh Really?

Senate Republicans Signal Big Shift On ‘Obamacare’

With a Supreme Court decision looming next month, House Republicans are privately weighing a plan to reinstate three popular elements of the law if it’s struck down — guaranteeing coverage regardless of pre-existing conditions, allowing young adults up to 26 years old to remain on a parent’s insurance policy, and closing the Medicare prescription drug coverage gap known as the “doughnut hole.”

Sen. Roy Blunt (MO), vice chair of the Senate GOP Conference, offered a ringing defense of the “Obamacare” under-26 provision, and said he wouldn’t oppose ideas he previously supported simply because President Obama adopted them. “I believe that’s one of the things that the Congress would surely reinstate,” Blunt told the St. Louis radio station KTRS in an interview last Thursday, pointing out that he has offered similar legislation in the past. “It’s a way to get a significant number of the uninsured into an insurance group without much cost. … It’s one of the things I think should continue.” 

“I’ve been in a couple meetings lately and there’s some general understanding that that’s one of the things … and there are other things like that as well,” the senator added.

Yet they are against a mandate. So how are they going to pay for this again?

Get the Donald on the Case

Here's a trivia question: which presidential candidate this year has a father who was born in a foreign country, goes by an alias, may have an ominous middle name linked to the devil, and  refuses to release his long-form birth certificate?

If you guessed Willard Milton "Mitt" Romney you win the prize!

The foreign-born father? According to Fox News:

Romney's father, former Michigan Gov. George Romney, was born in Chihuahua, Mexico, where Mormons fled in the 1800s to escape religious persecution and U.S. laws forbidding polygamy. He and his family did not return to the United States until 1912, more than two decades after the church issued "The Manifesto" banning polygamy.

The alias? Romney's real first name is Willard, which is seered into the conscious of a generation as the name of a horror flick from 1971, when Romney was 24. In the movie Willard learns to control rats and uses them to attack this enemies. In the end the rats turn on Willard and eat him alive. Now, any parallels between Willard's rats and Romney's political minions are purely incidental...

The middle name? Willard Milton "Mitt" Romney was named after J. Willard Marriott and George Romney's cousin, Milton (nicknamed "Mitt"), who played for the Chicago Bears.

The link to the devil? John Milton wrote Paradise Lost, considered one of the greatest works in the English language, which is about Satan's fall from grace.

The birth certificate? Romney says his middle name really is Mitt, but he refuses to produce his long-form birth certificate to prove it.

Donald Trump should get on this case and dispatch some private investigators to Michigan to dig up Mitt Romney's purported birth certificate. But instead Trump is still blathering about Obama being born in Kenya. The simple truth is, Obama's mother was an American. Ergo, he's an American. End of discussion.

Now, thousands of people are after Romney to make him prove he's not a unicorn. Of course that's just a joke, just like the whole birther conspiracy. But with all these Republicans around the country demanding that states pass laws that require presidential candidates produce their birth certificates, why haven't we seen Romney's?

It may be that he really does have something to hide...

Give 'Em Hell, Harry

This would be why Harry S. Truman is in my top five.

Oops!

Mitt Romney, Horse Trader

Remember a while back when some Democratic talking head said Ann Romney had never worked a day in her life, and the Fox News exploded, trying to get stay-at-home moms riled up about it? As if Ann Romney was one of them?

Let's for a moment ignore the fact that the life of a stay-at-home wife of a multimillionaire is nothing like the life of a real stay-at-home mom who stays home and bakes cookies and can't afford maids and gardeners and private schools and a couple of Cadillacs and the peace of mind that near-infinite amounts of money can buy.

It turns out that Ann Romney did have a job, of sorts, as a member of that notoriously dishonest profession of horse trader.

An article in the New York Times describes Ann's involvement in the sport of dressage, the buying and selling of horses, and her relationship with a German dressage trainer, Jan Ebeling.

Ann Romney took up dressage again at age 50, after learning she had multiple sclerosis. This sort of activity helped her deal with the disease. She became quite good at it and her physical condition improved. She took several trips to Europe with Ebeling to buy top-drawer dressage horses for herself and her trainer. These horses cost upwards of $100,000 apiece, and she bought several.

Now, there's nothing intrinsically wrong with a high-falutin' sport like dressage or Ann Romney spending her free time doing it, or buying expensive horses, or footing the bill for her trainer's horses, or lending him half a million bucks to buy a horse farm where she can vacation. But it doesn't end there.

According to the article:

On the Romneys’ 2010 tax returns, they reported a loss of $77,000 for their share of the partnership that owns Mr. Ebeling’s top mount, Rafalca. Mrs. Romney owns the horse with Ms. Ebeling and a Romney friend, Beth Meyers. Sponsorship arrangements are not unusual in dressage, where riders who want to climb to the top look to wealthy backers.

Yes, the Romneys lowered their tax liability by claiming a loss for the expenses of Ann's very expensive hobby. I bet you wish you could use your hobbies to reduce your taxes.

In 2003 the Romneys bought a horse named Super Hit in Germany for $100,000. They bought the horse even though X-rays showed he had a bad coffin joint. Horses with this flaw often go lame, cannot be ridden and must be turned out to pasture.

And indeed, Ann learned she couldn't ride the horse for this reason:

Though Mrs. Romney loved the horse, calling him “Soupy,” she decided to sell him in late 2007. Riding him, though meant to soothe her multiple sclerosis, had in fact become painful. “I frequently was getting back spasms when I rode Soupy,” she said.

The Romneys sold Soupy because he'd gone lame. Knowing this they still found a buyer, Catherine Norris. Ebeling told the buyer that Super Hit was the soundest horse on the farm. The buyer did what she was supposed to do: she had X-rays taken and had a vet look at the horse. She found out about the coffin joint, but the vet told her it was fine, no problem there. But the vet had a conflict of interest--he was Romney's vet. He even sent out emails telling people to vote for Romney on Super Tuesday in 2008.

The buyer paid $125,000 for the horse but quickly discovered that he was lame, something Ann Romney obviously knew because that was why she sold him. The problem was apparently masked during the evaluation by injecting the horse with four tranquilizers. The buyer sued the Romneys, Ebeling and the vet. The suits were eventually settled out of court.

Now some people will say that this is just a case of caveat emptor. The buyer should have known what a bad coffin joint meant, shouldn't have trusted Romney's vet, and should have demanded to see the tox screen.

So, yeah, the buyer screwed up. She trusted the wife of a guy who'd already been running for president for years at the time. A guy who claims we can trust him. Yet this man who would be president let his wife screw someone out of $125,000.

And then there's this:

Asked if she was ever unhappy with Mr. Ebeling’s instruction, Mrs. Romney said in a deposition in the lawsuit, “I think that is not a fair question because we all get upset at certain times with anybody that is — you know, especially a German.”

The casual, matter-of-fact racism is so heart-warming. It's good to know what kind of people Mitt Romney shares his most intimate moments with.

In the final analysis Ann Romney bought a horse with a bum leg for way too much money, lied about the true condition of the animal, doped him up for the test, got a vet to lie about the animal's condition, dumped him on someone else for a 25% profit, then refused to fess up when she got caught.


But it's no surprise. Mitt made his money pretty much the same way. Romney was essentially a horse trader, buying up companies with bum bottom lines and selling them again to unsuspecting investors, only to have some of them go lame — err, bankrupt — after Mitt had cashed out. I guess Ann learned from her husband well.


If this is how Romney treats people in his private life, and how he treats people in the business world, why would he treat the American people any differently?

A Kinder, Gentler Cult

Take a look at this video below.



This is the first volley against Obama by American Crossroads, a Super PAC run by Karl Rove and some other like minded individuals. The ad is running in swing states like Florida and Ohio. It struck me as interesting for several reasons.

First of all, where's all the Barack X stuff? Well, apparently it's gone because it doesn't play very well. 

Middle-of-the-road voters who said they thought the country was on the wrong track were unmoved when they heard arguments that the president lacks integrity. And they did not buy assertions that he is a rabid partisan with a radical liberal agenda that is wrecking America.

Well, that's because it's not true and doesn't exist in reality. The fact is that even though many people don't agree with the president's policies and/or feel disappointed, they still like him personally. If he is attacked in a manner that was recently floated by some high level conservatives, you can say buh bye to the independents and swing voters. This would be why Mitt Romney always inserts that line "The president is a nice guy but..." into most of his stock answers to questions. He, like McCain before him, knows about the dark side to American populism.

Another thing that struck me was where was the husband? The ad obviously intimates that this is a single woman as she complains about her life and struggles in the job market. VERY interesting considering this is from a conservative group. Have they seen the writing on the wall and know they can't win without the women's vote? This, along with the leaving behind of the Barack X garbage, is a sign of progress. Even though I realize that there are millions of Americans who need to have Barack X to get out of bed and identify themselves every day, themes like this give me hope. Sorry, fuckos, I guess you can't win by calling the president a Kenyan socialist who constantly apologizes for America, spent more than anyone ever in the history of forever, raised taxes, is destroying free enterprise, and is making us weaker.

Yet neither of these points can hold a candle to the two more subtle messages contained therein....two messages that hilariously expose the metaphorical slip, if you will, of the right's dress. Remember all that talk about how if people are having financial problems, it's THEIR fault and blaming others for their own shortcomings is sacrilege? Well, I guess that's gone now because none of this woman's problems are her fault. The fact that she is low on cash and has adult children living at home is the fault of the government.

Wow.

Truly, one of the most titanic examples of hypocrisy I have seen in awhile. And, uncharacteristically, a complete capitulation.

Diving deeper, we can clearly see the Michael Jordan Generation on full display. The reason she has two adult kids living at home is because she has done a poor job in raising her children. Like many in her generation, she has babied her kids to the point where the can't function outside of her home. And without a two parent home it was likely made worse. But that's all the fault of the liberals and their social agenda, right?

No, it's not. This is how our culture is right now and it's truly awful. It's not because of the government or the education system (whose job it is most certainly not to parent or nanny) or the unions made up of people who make 50K a year or less. It's the fault of all of us because we have allowed our culture to be mostly socialized by the corporate owned media who tell us that the definition of success is a guy like Michael Jordan.

And not the winner of the science fair. Or the mathlete. Or the Model UN winners. Or the...well, I think you get the idea.

Still Not So Much

Remember how the whole one percent-ninety nine percent narrative was dying? Or dead? Yeah, still not so much. Take a look at this photo that I snapped near my house.

Safe? Safe from what exactly? Financial sector guys running an anti-Wall Street ad to get people to invest...I love it!

And their company name isn't bad either:)

Another Example Of How Wrong I Am!!

Challenge Accepted

Put this column in a drawer and take it out on the date below. Let me know how many of these predictions I got right.

You got it, Bill!!

I wonder what is going to happen when this particular Cult member is proved wrong. I predict he will....MAKE A BUNCH OF SHIT UP AND SAY IT HAPPENED JUST LIKE HE SAID.

Fun Math Facts

To go along with the post below...

And those are Fun Math Facts!!!

The Future is Now!

Sometimes it seems like the future will never get here. We don't have flying cars, or personal jetpacks, or vacations on the moon. Well, today the future is now!

This morning the first commercial spacecraft docked with the International Space Station. SpaceX's Dragon capsule was captured by the station's robotic arm after performing several maneuvers to demonstrate the safety and maneuverability of the spacecraft.

SpaceX was founded in 2002 by Elon Musk, one of the cofounders of PayPal, the online payment service. Musk was originally from South Africa. In 2008 SpaceX got a NASA contract to delivery supplies to the space station.

Musk also founded two other companies: Tesla Motors, which makes electric cars, and SolarCity, which builds solar power systems. He recently joined the Giving Pledge, founded by Bill Gates and Warren Buffett.

How are other high-tech millionaires moving us into this brave new world?

After leaving Microsoft Bill Gates has worked full-time at the Gates Foundation. The organization is focused on improving global health, agriculture, and financial services for the poor, and libraries and education in the United States.

Peter Thiel is another of PayPal's cofounders. Originally from Germany, Thiel was recently in the news for his support of Super PAC supporting Ron Paul. Thiel is now a hedge fund manager and venture capitalist. He has also donated half a million bucks to the Seasteading Institute, which envisions building platforms out in the middle of the ocean to form independent micronations and abandon their home countries to avoid taxes and regulations.

Facebook cofounder Eduardo Saverin got very rich when Facebook went public. He recently came under fire for giving up his American citizenship (he was originally from Brazil) and moving to Singapore to avoid paying capital gains taxes on the Facebook IPO. Note that capital gains are taxed at the measly rate of 15%.

Saverin came under fire by many, including New York Senator Charles Schumer, for dodging $67 million in taxes. Schumer has proposed legislation to hold ex-patriots accountable for skipping out on taxes. This prompted Grover Norquist to defend Saverin and compare Schumer's proposed legislation to Nazi-era German law.

One issue in the 2012 election is the huge disparity of wealth in his country. Conservatives seem to now believe that the wealthy don't owe anyone anything. Republicans who once prided themselves as the party that stood for patriotism and loyalty now think it's just fine to desert their country for a few bucks.

Being rich in and of itself doesn't make you good or bad. It's what you do with the money that matters. Gates and Musk are helping their country and the world by improving education, energy efficiency, creating new technologies and opening a new frontier in space.

Conservatives like Thiel and Saverin's defenders seem to feel no responsibility toward the country that made their vast wealth possible. They see no problem jetting off to Singapore or setting up their own island fiefdoms to avoid the taxes that pay for the defense, education and infrastructure of the country that made their great wealth possible.

To make this concrete, Saverin's flight to Singapore means the Defense Department will be out about $13 million. That would buy a lot of body armor for our troops in Afghanistan.

Musk and Gates are working to make this country and the world a better place, while Thiel and Norquist seem to be all about the Benjamins. Who are the real patriots?

A Really Big Lie

These days, when someone from the right will make a statement, the first thing that pops into my head is a question.

"Do I really want to waste my time researching this when I know it's likely completely bullshit?"

Take, for example, the assertion by Mitt Romney and virtually everyone on the right that President Obama has been spending like crazy. An "inferno" is what Mr. Romney called it.

Well, a new piece by Marketwatch has this to say.

Of all the falsehoods told about President Barack Obama, the biggest whopper is the one about his reckless spending spree.

But it didn’t happen. Although there was a big stimulus bill under Obama, federal spending is rising at the slowest pace since Dwight Eisenhower brought the Korean War to an end in the 1950s.Even hapless Herbert Hoover managed to increase spending more than Obama has.

There damn well better be some numbers to back that up!

• In the 2009 fiscal year — the last of George W. Bush’s presidency — federal spending rose by 17.9% from $2.98 trillion to $3.52 trillion. Check the official numbers at the Office of Management and Budget. 

 • In fiscal 2010 — the first budget under Obama — spending fell 1.8% to $3.46 trillion. 

 • In fiscal 2011, spending rose 4.3% to $3.60 trillion. 

 • In fiscal 2012, spending is set to rise 0.7% to $3.63 trillion, according to the Congressional Budget Office’s estimate of the budget that was agreed to last August. 

 • Finally in fiscal 2013 — the final budget of Obama’s term — spending is scheduled to fall 1.3% to $3.58 trillion. Read the CBO’s latest budget outlook. 

Over Obama’s four budget years, federal spending is on track to rise from $3.52 trillion to $3.58 trillion, an annualized increase of just 0.4%. 

Huh. I guess we can put the lie away now along with the raising taxes and apologizing to everyone nonsense.

This would be why I don't like to waste my very valuable time. It always turns out to be another bullshit lie.

Still Waiting

I'm still waiting (and so is Guard Duck, apparently) for retractions from Kevin Baker on the out and out lies in the image he put up last Sunday. Since he can't be bothered to check the veracity of those statements, I will offer another link which demonstrates that the list contained in the image likely originated in this very much false Columbo email which made the rounds TWO YEARS AGO.

Foreign student aid' as a college student? Nope. April Fool's Day Hoax.

Foreign Passport in Pakistan? Nope. Complete BS. 

The Birth Certificates? Proved time and again to be real. 

Michelle can't practice law? Not true. The Illinois bar lists her as being voluntarily inactive. (The president is listed as voluntarily retired)

Michelle has 22 assistants? No.Actually, she has 24 and Laura Bush had 18.

College Records? Well, as FactCheck notes, this would be illegal under federal law ((the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act of 1974). This, along with the medical records, is odd coming from the far right as they are supposed to be champions of right to privacy.

Oh, and he never did a thesis at Columbia so it's not sealed.

Illinois State Senate Records and Schedule? All available here. 

As to the remaining claims not listed on FACTCHECK...

Selective service registration? Yep. Right here courtesy of (wait for it) Volokh and Pajamas Media! 

Law practice client list? Uh...anyone every heard of attorney-client privilege? Again, the right to privacy thing apparently only applies to libertarians, not statists like Barack Obama.

All that leaves is the baptism record which I'd put under the birth certificate category.

So, there you have it. One giant list of complete lies and Kevin has yet to retract a single one.

For more insane Obama conspiracies, check out this site (my third link with supporting evidence). 

An Anarcho-Capitalist Pleasure Palace

With the Wisconsin recall election less than two week away, it looks as though Scott Walker will hold off the recall efforts. I predict he will win. Of course, he may not be able to govern in the way he would like because I also predict that one of the four senate recall elections will flip back to the Democrats and tie him up at the State House. Honestly, though, I don't think this matters to him as he now has his sights set on the national stage.

Politico has a great piece on how the recall elections have turned Walker into a conservative hero. Indeed, the right wing media industrial complex with its all too willing audience will welcome him with open arms and shower him with money on how he stood up to the evil teachers and civil servants who are ruining our economy on a daily basis.

So why did the recall effort fail? Again, Politico lays it all out here.  In my view, there were several factors that inhibited the Democrats. Tom Barrett is a great guy and would be a magnificent governor but he already lost that election once. The alternative (Kathleen Falk) was far too liberal. Had the Democrats put up a great candidate...someone like Russ Feingold, for example....Walker would have been toast. There was also the issue of recall fatigue. People these days just can't pay attention that long and give a shit. Believe me, I know, I'm a teacher:)

I guess what frustrates me the most about all of this is the ignorance of the facts. When it comes to jobs, neither side in the recall election can claim victory. The latest jobs numbers show no real significant movement either way. Certainly Walker is well short of the 250,000 jobs that he promised to create but no one really thinks is was serious (he is a politician, after all) and it won't matter if he ends up with a net loss. His supporters will still be there because they don't want to admit they were wrong (shocking, I know).

Lost in all of this is Walker's promise to create 10,000 new businesses in his first term with his private sector friendly policies. How's that going? Well, not so good. 

The scorecard: After one year of the Walker era, there were 9,485 fewer businesses than at the end of 2010, Gov. Jim Doyle's final year in office. It's improved somewhat in recent months, but the total of existing entities was still down 4,338 as of April 30, 2012, compared with December 2010. The picture is worse if you look only at Wisconsin business entities doing business here, and exclude out-of-state businesses that must register here to transact business. Those "domestic” business entities were down 10,189 after Walker"s first year, and down a total of 5,741 after 16 months. So the numbers have gone backward.

Hmm....sort of reminds me of all the numbers I have been putting up about how the economy does worse when there is a Republican in the White House. Of course, this doesn't matter, though. Again, to admit fault....

The one thing that I do feel pretty good about (aside from one of the state senators likely getting the boot) is that guys like Walker always end up with the same fate. Indeed, the FBI probe that is currently going on in Wisconsin may come back to haunt him if not something else. But for now, though, it's a pretty bitter pill considering the nearly one million people in Wisconsin who are currently cheering to be ruled by the Koch Brothers.

Hey, maybe Wisconsin could be part of RandLand as well. I'd have to get my mom and John Waxey out of there first, though, before it turns into an anarcho-capitalist pleasure palace!!

The Obama Vetting Obsession

I had been working on a post about the vetting obsession that seems to be going on these days with President Obama but then I read this.  Paul Waldman seems to have stolen my thunder. Oh well. It's everything I wanted to say and more.

So on the right, the desperate search for the appropriate "vetting" material continues. For instance, the late Andrew Breitbart's constellation of web properties continues in its founder's spirit, breathlessly promoting one "revelation" about Obama's pre-political life after another. Obama was friendly with a Harvard Law School professor with strong views on race! In 1991, Obama's literary agency mistakenly said in a promotional brochure that he was born in Kenya! There is so much to be learned that breitbart.com has created a whole series entitled "The Vetting."

Sadly, this is all true. I don't get it.The president has been pretty forthcoming about his past both in his books and interviews. There have been thousands of stories about folks like Jeremiah Wright, Bill Ayers and the president's college years and birth certificate. Why?

The mistake that so many conservatives make is in believing that in some (or all) of these details of his life lies the key to Obama's undoing. If only we can find the radical mentor, the girlfriend holding on to a decades-old secret, or the revealing document, then Obama will be unmasked, his true horrifying self revealed at last for all to see. Then the scales will fall from the voters' eyes and they'll boot him from the office he never deserved to occupy in the first place.

This is so incredibly odd. The latest polls show the race is pretty tight in the swing states and the election is 5 months off. People are unhappy about unemployment and uncertain about the economy. Certainly, they can win on that, right? Are they that insecure about Mitt Romney?

In my view, they don't want to beat him that way. They have to personally destroy him because that is what the right has become today. They did the same thing with Bill Clinton (now, of course, they love him in typical juvenile emotional fashion and will likely be the same way with President Obama someday) and many other Democrats. Funny, the same thing is done to me in comments on a regular basis:)

I guess they don't know any other way.

Keystone XL Pipeline Will Make Gas Prices Go Up

For some time now I've been contending that the Keystone XL pipeline would cause the price of gas to go up because the fuel refined from it would be shipped off to China at world market prices instead of being "stuck" in the American Midwest where it winds up being sold as gasoline, often at lower prices than those paid on all three coasts.

Now we have confirmation. According to an analysis from the NRDC:

The Keystone XL tar sands pipeline would divert oil from the Midwest to refineries on the Gulf Coast of Texas. Midwestern refineries produce more gasoline per barrel than refineries in any other region in the United States. That gasoline is then sold to U.S. consumers. In contrast, refineries on the Gulf Coast of Texas produce as much diesel as possible, much of which is exported internationally. By taking oil from midwestern gasoline refineries to Gulf Coast diesel refineries, Keystone XL will decrease the amount of gasoline available to American consumers. 

Meanwhile the Keystone XL pipeline will increase the price that gasoline producing refineries in the Midwest pay for crude oil. TransCanada, the company sponsoring the pipeline, pitched the pipeline to Canadian regulators as a way of increasing the price of crude in the United States (emphasis mine).

Right now, Midwestern refineries are buying crude oil at a discount—a deep discount. This allows them to produce products more cheaply than they would otherwise be able to. Building Keystone XL would change that. If TransCanada’s analysis is accurate, under current market conditions, Keystone XL would add $20 to $40 to the cost of a barrel of  Canadian crude—increasing the cost of oil in the United States by tens of billions of dollars

I was unaware of the propensity for diesel refining of the Gulf Coast, but that only increases the likelihood that Canadian oil will be sold to China. Most interesting is TransCanada's selling point to Canadian regulators was that it would increase gas prices for Americans.

The lesson: don't believe anything the oil industry says about oil prices. Their goal is to maximize profits, which means they want to maximize prices.

The Definition of the Election

I've never understood the Republican obsession with thinking that a successful CEO would make a good president. The two jobs are completely different. Yesterday, the president eloquently illustrated this in Chicago.

If your main argument for how to grow the economy is 'I knew how to make a lot of money for investors,' then you're missing what this job is about. It doesn't mean you weren't good at private equity, but that's not what my job is as president. My job is to take into account everybody, not just some. My job is to make sure that the country is growing not just now, but 10 years from now and 20 years from now. 

This is what the election is going to be about.

I Stand Corrected!

As I have said many times in the past, I'm happy to be wrong!!

Planet of the Valley Girls?

Last week Facebook went public. Its IPO netted the company $38 a share, making it worth more than $100 billion (and earning $176 million for the banks that handled the underwriting). That's more than companies that sell real products to real people, like McDonald's, VISA, Volkswagen and Disney. Even after Disney made hundreds of millions of dollars worldwide with a single smash hit movie a couple of weeks ago.

But at this writing Facebook's stock is worth $33 a share. Many people expected its share price to jump tremendously in value, like LinkedIn's did. That hasn't happened yet, and the banks who issued the IPO may be betting against people who bought the stock. Facebook has yet to come up with a way to make the kind of money off its users that such a high value could justify. It doesn't yet push ads to mobile devices, and more than half of Facebook users access the social network through their phones. Yet doing that could alienate users and discourage them from using the service.

Facebook likes to brag that it's got almost a billion users. That number is deceptive. You can make any number of Facebook accounts, so that number could be almost anything. This is an important point because advertisers pay for their ads to be seen by real people.

Companies generate buzz on Facebook with "likes." They often have promotions to get people to like them, giving them something in an on-line game or entering them in an iPad drawing.

There are also companies that for a fee will generate likes for companies that want to increase their apparent Facebook popularity. The question is, how real are those likes? Are they simply thousands of phony Facebook accounts, or thousands of real Facebook users who are liking someone because they're paid to? It seems that if you're paying for likes, they're all fake, no matter how they're generated. Facebook is trying to root out fake likes, but it's a non-trivial problem.

So what's the point of Facebook for companies? Does it have any real value, or is it just another MySpace or AOL?

Then there's the question of what people actually use Facebook for. Every time I look at my feed I see that several friends checked in through FourSquare. I see pictures of pets and kids and what people ate for dinner. I get harangued by friends to try out some on-line game. I see articles that other people read. I see political rants. I see cryptic numbers from a neighbor that might be geo-tagging or bible study or a terrorist plot.

This is what thirteen-year-old girls do: obsess about what all their friends are doing and wearing and saying. Now full-grown adults are fretting about how many friends they have. Just recently a friend wondered why a mutual friend had defriended him. Is Facebook devolving the entire planet into, like, Valley Girls? Don't we have more important, or at least interesting, things to do?


Facebook is extending their grasp beyond their site into every nook and cranny of the Internet. Your Facebook login can be used on thousands of websites, allowing Facebook to track your every move. And this grasp is extending into the real world, because millions of people are using their mobile phones to tell Facebook where they are at every waking moment.


My Facebook feed also tells me what videos one friend watched, that another friended someone I've never heard of and another liked some company. And yesterday I saw an ad for Zoosk that said one of my acquaintances was looking for single women. I wonder if he has a girlfriend who saw the same ad?

It's these things that may ultimately be Facebook's downfall. Facebook plans to make its money by pimping out your personal data. Do you really want to be Mark Zuckerberg's whore?

Well, I Guess It Had To Happen

Kevin Baker has gone Birther.

(sigh)

I suppose it was inevitable. Here is a list from Snopes that shows that many of these claims are completely  false.  I expect retractions, Kevin.

Too Political?

My oh my, what an interesting turn of events.

The sticking point appears to be Hanauer assertion that "rich businesspeople like me don't create jobs," but rather it's the middle class consumers who fuel business growth and subsequent job creation by spending their hard earned money on stuff.

How exactly is the illustration of a simple fact considered political?

(sniff sniff)

Smells to me like the Cult of Both Sides is up to its usual tricks again.

A Trifecta of Tactics

In the past few months, the tactics the right uses on a regular basis have been laid plain for all to see. First we had the 14 points, nearly all of which I saw on The Smallest Minority during my time there. Then we had the purest definition of The Rove, as explained by Richard Clarke. That one we can see nearly every day, squirting forth from the right wing media industrial complex and all the way into my comments section.

But there has always been something missing...a tactic that I've experienced many times. It's kind of like "Projection/Flipping" but not quite. Sort of like  The Rove but not nearly there. Some recent comments have lead me to an epiphany. Here's how it works for you first time users.

Step 1: Whether knowingly or unknowlingly, use ad hominem attacks, genetic fallacies, straw man arguments, hand waving, and any other sort of nonsense that pops into your head.

Step 2: While the liberal is reflecting (silly liberals), accuse HE or SHE of using any or all of those tactics.

Step 3: As the silly liberal sputters out a comment which will likely be along the lines of "But wait, that's what you are doing" laugh, point at them and reply, "BWAAHAHAHA! That's your response? 'No, YOU are!' Hahahahahaha! What a child!"

Congratulations! You have just completed The ARWB Three Step (that's arrogant right wing blog or blogger, depending upon on your situation).

Add this to the 14 points and The Rove and you have pure magic, my friends.

Pure Magic