Sarah Palin's Arizona

(From a Discovery Channel press release scheduled for publication on Nov. 6, 2011)

The Discovery Channel announced today that it has begun production on a new reality series starring former Alaska governor Sarah Palin. Called Sarah Palin's Arizona, the series will air in the fall of 2012, during the heat of the presidential race.

Ms. Palin's previous show, Sarah Palin's Alaska, was discontinued because the former half-term governor of Alaska moved to Arizona to be closer to large media markets. A key factor in the move was the change in time zone, which allows Ms. Palin to appear with other talking heads on early-morning Fox News programs without having to wake up at 3AM. Said Ms. Palin, "I like sleeping in, and Alaska's time zone really sucks the big one. And Arizona doesn't use socialist Daylight Savings Time, dontcha know."

The Arizona production includes many new activities that Ms. Palin has taken up since moving to her new home state. These include trudging through the desert in smart dun-colored fatigues with matching automatic weapon accessories, making beef jerky, harvesting peyote buttons, and vegging out in front of the TV with the air conditioning on full blast saying, "At least it's the heat, and not the humidity!"

In the opening segment of the first episode Ms. Palin participates in a new game that's become popular on the streets of Maricopa County, something called "Wetback Bingo." Ms. Palin is challenged to decide whether random pedestrians are illegal aliens or real Americans. Those she decides are real Americans get to choose a square on a giant bingo board. Guest star Sheriff Joe Arpaio selects Bingo numbers and the lucky real Americans have a chance to win fabulous prizes if their number is chosen. The suspected aliens are given a free trip to historic Nogales, Mexico, courtesy of Sheriff Arpaio.

New fashion statements are being made as well, including the moistened floral bandana worn over the mouth and nose to guard against the smoke from the massive fires that have scourged Arizona in recent months, and the fine particulates from the dust storms that have also hit the state.

In one memorable scene, Ms. Palin refers to the Arab term for dust storm that raised a controversy earlier this year. Pointing to her chest she jokes, "The only haboobs the weatherman should be talking about are right here."

The most exciting segment filmed thus far is a helicopter chase of illegal aliens across the Rio Grande. In the sequence, spotters on the ground scare up a herd of aliens in the underbrush on the north bank of the river. The helicopter's powerful engine roars and the chopper swoops out of the sky, scattering the aliens into the muddy brown water. Ms. Palin leans out of the chopper door, hanging on to the frame with one hand while wielding a sequined machine gun in the other. As the copter banks sharply, its blades skimming the water, Ms. Palin cuts loose with a burst of suppressive fire. The rounds pound the water mere inches from the aliens as they splash madly back towards Mexico.

"I loved shooting that scene," Ms. Palin gushed. "I loved the way the mama grizzly so fiercely protected her young as she fought through the water with the baby on her back to get to the safety of her legal homeland. And did you see those big brown eyes on the baby? She was soooo cute!"

Critics of Ms. Palin attacked the episode even before it aired, pointing out that the Rio Grande River isn't in Arizona, pedantically insisting that the river flows from Colorado through New Mexico and then forming the border between Texas and Mexico. Said Ms. Palin, "These know-it-alls just don't get the real America. It's not about geography and facts, it's about the bigger truths, like Paul Revere and his famous charge of the Light Brigade. One if by land, two if by sea, and three if by air!"

Discovery Channel's initial order of six episodes of Sarah Palin's Arizona will begin airing Tuesday, October 9, 2012, and will conclude November 6 when Ms. Palin is elected president. The show will go on hiatus for two years, resuming when she resigns the presidency to write her memoirs and escape the toxic atmosphere of Washington and the liberal media that hounds her incessantly.

Bastardi!

When I was in college thirty years ago conservatives were making one of their regular attempts to discredit evolution. They called themselves "creationists" then, and their big "discovery" at that time was the laws of thermodynamics. The creationists said that evolution was impossible because the law of entropy forbade it. Entropy dictates that order will dissolve into disorder over time.

The problem with their argument was that they omitted key facts from the laws. Yes, order dissolves into disorder over time, in a closed system with no energy inputs. The earth, however, is not a closed system. It is an open system that constantly receives more than a kilowatt of solar energy per square meter.

It is this external solar input that provides that the energy for chemical and biological systems to grow and increase in complexity, and what makes evolution and life possible. This is not a violation of the laws of thermodynamics.

Well, the conservatives are back at it again. Weatherman Joe Bastardi was featured in a Fox News segment attempting to discredit global warming. He said, "It contradicts what we call the first law of thermodynamics. Energy can neither be created nor destroyed. So to look for input of energy into the atmosphere, you have to come from a foreign source. It's already out there, carbon dioxide being part of it."

He lapses there into incoherence. Global warming does not contradict the laws of thermodynamics: the sun constantly pumps energy into our atmosphere. In fact, we are alive today because of global warming -- without an atmosphere containing greenhouse gases like CO2 and water vapor, the average temperature of earth (the blackbody temperature) would be much colder, somewhere around 1 degree Celsius or colder, depending on the albedo of the surface.

To his credit, one of the interviewers chimed in, "Maybe the sun?" was the source of the energy causing global warming. But Bastardi just ignored this, going on to talk about Le Chateliler's principle, which he says is the tendency of a system in distress tries to return towards normal.

But this idea of "normal" doesn't work if you change the basic rules of the game by overloading the system beyond its capacity. It's true that if the concentration of CO2 increases some carbon sinks will absorb more. But those sinks have a finite capacity. The ocean, for example, loses its ability to absorb CO2 as temperature increases. And ocean temperatures and acidity are increasing.

Furthermore, if you actually read what the studies found, temperatures did in fact increase in the last 10 years, just not as fast as they did the 30 years before (the infamous decrease in the rate of increase). Why? Several reasons: aerosols injected into the stratosphere by relatively small volcanic eruptions which climate modelers did not consider have moderated the increases somewhat, and substantial increases in sulfur particles that Chinese coal plants have been emitting in greater and greater quantities have further cooled temperatures. But that sulfur doesn't stay in the air: it eventually comes down as acid rain. There was also some unaccounted-for heat exchanges with the ocean.

These are not really surprises: the reason scientists are so hesitant to state things in the categorical black-and-white mode that conservatives always want to hear, is that reality is complicated. Scientists don't know everything and don't pretend to. But the point is that these new results don't disprove global warming; it's still true that global temperature will go up in the next 50 years; just not at the same rate some models predicted. Any number of things could happen that could increase or decrease that change: volcanic eruptions that emit a lot of aerosols of the right composition could slow down the warming, but another eruption emitting a lot of CO2 could accelerate it. The key thing is that we know our actions will have a bad effect if nothing else changes, so the conservative thing to do is avoid causing serious problems.

But back to the reality of greenhouse warming, which conservatives seem to discount on a visceral level. Consider Mercury and Venus. Mercury is 58 million km from the sun. The mean temperature varies from about -70 C to +70 C, depending on latitude, with a low of about -200 C and a high of +400 C. Venus is 108 million km from the sun, more than twice as far. But its mean temperature -- pretty much everywhere, all the time -- is 460 C. How can Venus be twice as far from the sun but so very much hotter? Well, Mercury has almost no atmosphere, while Venus is covered with a thick blanket of CO2 at a pressure of more than 90 atmospheres. It's the greenhouse effect on steroids. (And no, I'm not saying that Earth will turn into Venus. It just shows that the greenhouse effect exists and is not some made-up mumbo jumbo).

If you think of Mercury as a Mini Cooper zipping around on the freeway with the windows hanging wide open, and Venus as a Lincoln Navigator parked in the sun with the windows rolled up you get the picture. Earth is somewhere in between Mercury and Venus: we're parked in the shade, but slowly cranking the windows shut by pumping more CO2 into the atmosphere than the system can absorb.

But when you come right down to it, Bastardi's argument is the same as every other global warming skeptic's: they think that natural processes put out and absorb so much CO2 that the "tiny" amounts we puny and insignificant humans emit couldn't possibly affect the climate. But this drastically underestimates the number of humans alive today, and their impact on climate.

First off, climate is always a delicate balance. Systems do tend to equilibrium, but only within bounds. Natural systems don't have an overriding intelligence guiding them, they can't adapt infinitely. If you heat a pot of water it reaches equilibrium with the air by boiling out of the pot.

In many epochs equilibrium climate states lasting thousands and millions of years were quite inhospitable to modern human life: there have been ice ages during human tenure on Earth, and there have been periods where the climate allowed three-foot long dragonflies, armadillos the size of houses and flying dinosaurs to flourish. Those were all "natural" climate equilibriums, but they would have been bad for technological humans because they make it hard for us to grow food and sustain a population of seven billion people.

Second, we control vast amounts of energy. If we detonated every nuke on the planet, there's no question we could make a big change in the climate, easily triggering an ice age with all the aerosols injected into the stratosphere. But if you look at the amount of energy we're using on a daily basis, it's equally staggering: the equivalent of hundreds of Hiroshima nukes detonated every day. We are using an incredible amount of energy, and generating nearly all that energy from coal, gas and oil, releasing an incredible amount of CO2 into the atmosphere that had been locked up in the earth's crust for billions of years. All released within a tiny span of a century, and most of that in the last 30 years.

Third, we just don't get how many people there are on this planet and what kind of an effect we can have on it. The United States is 3.79 million square miles in area. There are 310 million Americans. That means there's only about eight acres of land per person (given that there are 640 acres per square mile). Eight acres is one or so city blocks.

Even if all you had was an axe, you could cut down every tree on that block in a few weeks or months, and spend another couple of weeks chopping down the trees for your little kids and grandma. Or if you had a torch you could burn all those trees down in a day. We are so numerous and technologically adept that could intentionally deforest the entire continent in less than a year, drastically altering the climate.

And we can and have altered the climate. Just look at the Dust Bowl in the 30s, which Bastardi mentioned. That was caused by a drought in the plains states exacerbated by farmers plowing up the long-rooted grasses that held the soil down. Without us the dust bowl doesn't happen. We've been doing the same thing in the Amazon rain forest for decades, and there's some evidence that humans helped the Sahara get where it is today.

There are seven billion people on Earth. Humans are always bad at understanding big numbers, so let's put that in the same personal perspective. The total land area on this planet is about 56 million square miles, or 124 people per square mile, or just five acres per person. Yes, if you spread all of humanity out evenly across the entire planet, we would all still be within shouting distance of another person.

That's including all the land that's useless (the Sahara, the Antarctic, the sides of all those mountains in the Himalayas and Japan). That's not a whole lot of land for all the farming, and mining, and driving, and golfing that we like to do. Imagine what it'll be like in another 50 or 100 years. Conservatives love to knock Malthus, but there are obvious limits here, and we're fast approaching them.

We ourselves are now that big incomprehensible number.

They Really Aren't Any Different

There is a long history of conservatives inveighing against lazy lay-abouts. In the Bible sloth was one of the seven deadly sins. Amos complained of the rich committing lechery on ivory beds. In the 17th century authors such as Isaac Watts said that Satan finds mischief still, for idle hands to do. And American conservatives still revel in the Reagan trope of welfare queens and baby machines.

The problem, as conservatives seem to see it, with welfare benefits, unemployment and the social safety net is that they allow people to become lazy. If we don't have to be responsible for ourselves and rise or fall on own own initiative, people will naturally slough off. They will sit around doing nothing, leaching off the rest of us, simply pretend to be busy, or make half-hearted attempts to find work while wasting most of their time watching television or some such.

I was reminded of this while listening to Bethany McLean (author of All the Devils Are Here: The Hidden History of the Financial Crisis). The subject of corporate boards came up, and why they did nothing to stop the CEOs at the investment banks from making their hideously stupid mistakes. (Short answer: It's hard.)

She said they've tried all manner of incentives for CEOs to tie compensation to performance: huge pay packages, golden parachutes, stock options. And none of them have worked. She compared stock options to someone giving her five millions dollars, promising her another five million dollars in 10 years if she stopped eating chocolate.

Sure, there would be some incentive to abstain. But not a whole lot. You've got five million dollars!

That's the situation we have with CEOs. Most of them make so much money -- many in a single year and some even in a few days -- that they would be able to live out their entire lives never having to work another day. A single year's salary is enough to make them independently wealthy of the corporation, no matter how bad a job they do. (Democrats wanted some bonus claw-backs, but Republicans successfully beat that off.) In short, highly paid CEOs don't have any skin in the game any more.

These CEOS are far cozier than any welfare queen. No matter what mistake they make, they've already come out on top. Even if they break laws, they are usually able to cover everything up and buy their way out of it (like Rupert Murdoch and his various companies).

This self-satisfied complacency is the worst enemy of a good leader. Yet many turn themselves into pampered queens, with servants, maids and gardeners ready at their beck and call, private jets, million-dollar corporate apartments and gold toilet seats.

If you believe in welfare queens, then you have to believe in corporate queens: the logic is inescapable. The same human frailties and dynamics are at work for the welfare queen as the corporate queen. It's more insidious, though. The corporate queens have the appearance of respectability; everyone is fawning over them, constantly telling them how smart and fabulous they are, while everyone looks down on the lowly welfare queen. Welfare queens actually have an incentive to get off their duffs and do something to regain the respect of their fellows, and ultimately their benefits end (courtesy of Clinton era welfare reform).

Corporate queens enjoy the envy of others, who all lust for the same easy life. They gain coteries of sycophants who echo what the queens want to hear. Real criticism is silenced; only fools contradict the man in charge. Anyone who's worked at a big company knows what I'm talking about. The VPs who regularly sneak out for one o'clock tee times. The CEOs who take three-hour liquid lunches. The sales guys lounging in luxurious corporate boxes at Knicks games. The execs who always manage to book business trips to Florida and Hawaii in the winter. These guys don't actually do any real work, after all. It's not like anyone is going to miss them.

Corporate governance has been abysmal in recent years. Boards have tried everything to get some kind of responsibility out of their execs, except one thing: paying them less. If a CEO actually depended on the company for his future income, odds are he would do a better job. But if you give him enough money in a single year to make him independently wealthy, what hold do you have on him? He doesn't need your job, and he knows a hundred other companies would snap him up in an instant. Even when CEOs do screw up, the disaster is usually covered up because it will reflect poorly on the company. These guys are rarely called to account, and go on to wreak havoc over and over.

CEO compensation relative to average worker salaries has gone through the roof in the last 40 years. But CEO performance is certainly no better, and is probably much worse. That's a lot of money that companies could use to make better products, make their products more competitive (reducing prices to consumers), or at least return to the shareholders.

If we can scream bloody murder about overpaid Wisconsin teachers who make all of $50,000 a year, can't we take a little umbrage at the guys caused the financial meltdown, or filled the Gulf of Mexico with oil, and are still pulling in tens of millions of dollars a year?

14 Points

Cynthia Boaz's recent post regarding the 14 propaganda techniques used by Fox News to brainwash Americans should be extended to the entire right wing pundit machine...especially the right wing blogsphere. Here are a few that jumped out at me.

3. Projection/Flipping. This one is frustrating for the viewer who is trying to actually follow the argument. It involves taking whatever underhanded tactic you're using and then accusing your opponent of doing it to you first. We see this frequently in the immigration discussion, where anti-racists are accused of racism, or in the climate change debate, where those who argue for human causes of the phenomenon are accused of not having science or facts on their side. It's often called upon when the media host finds themselves on the ropes in the debate.

Hilarious! And very true. This happens on my site constantly and when it occurs from now on, I'm simply going to respond by cutting and pasting this paragraph. In fact, many of her points are salient when it comes to some of my regular readers so I foresee much cutting and pasting in the future.

Here are some other notable mentions.

4. Rewriting History. This is another way of saying that propagandists make the facts fit their worldview. The Downing Street Memos on the Iraq war were a classic example of this on a massive scale, but it happens daily and over smaller issues as well. A recent case in point is Palin's mangling of the Paul Revere ride, which Fox reporters have bent over backward to validate. Why lie about the historical facts, even when they can be demonstrated to be false? Well, because dogmatic minds actually find it easier to reject reality than to update their viewpoints. They will literally rewrite history if it serves their interests. And they'll often speak with such authority that the casual viewer will be tempted to question what they knew as fact.

Several of my readers suffer from this but this is part and parcel to the adolescent power fantasy.

All in all, I found her points to be completely accurate and an excellent summation of the conversational framework with the right these days. Sadly, I don't see it changing any time too soon but her points have inspired me to summarize something that has been kicking around in my head right now.

Why is that the money of wealthy people is "hard earned" yet the money of poor people, who often work two or three jobs, is not?

Crandall and Putnam

People of the same trade seldom meet together, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some diversion to raise prices.

---Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations.

A recent post by Nikto entitled "The Tax Cut Experiment" provoked an interesting discussion in comments and it made me think of the quote above. Clearly, Smith was well aware of corporate force even that long ago. The comments in that post also sparked a memory of the phone call between Robert Crandall, president of American Airlines, and Howard Putnam, president of Braniff Airways, in 1982.

Crandall: I think it's as dumb as hell...to sit here and pound the #$%#$ out of each other and neither one is making a $%#$ dime.

Putnam: Do you have a suggestion for me?

Crandall: Yes, I have a suggestion for you. Raise your #$%#$ fares 20 percent. I'll raise mine the next morning.

Putnam: Robert, we...

Crandall: You'll make more money and I will, too.

Putnam: We can't talk about pricing!

Crandall: Oh, ##$%$, Howard! We can talk about anything #$%$ thing we want to talk about.

If Crandall were around today, he'd be running a Tea Party organization.

The simple fact is, folks, that the government can sometimes improve markets. Never is this more true than with the airlines. Time and again we see that if left to their own devices they will collude against the public and produce a market that is not efficient...in other words, less consumer surplus.

In so many ways, this accurately describes the problem we have right now. We have a decided lack of aggregate demand with consumers (two thirds of our economy) not spending money. The main reason for this is prices from food to gas to health care are completely ridiculous.

With government effectively ball less (vasectomy courtesy of the Tea Party), it's only going to get worse.

If The Tea Party Ran Things...

...our country would look like Kemp, Texas. The town of Kemp recently had its water turned back on after residents experienced several days without running water. Apparently the town turned to prayer rather than raising taxes to pay for new pipes. As John Thorpe put it in the second link

Aah yes, prayer — the last refuge of the truly desperate. Perhaps these Texans could try something the rest of the civilized world does, and raise tax revenues to pay for infrastructure improvements. Why? Their infrastructure dates back to the 1930s. Most of the water system's 30 miles of pipes haven't been updated in decades.

I'm wondering why they didn't turn to the job creators, captains of industry, or wealthy fellow Texans to help them out. I have been assured by the right that some sort of invisible hand will always be there to help out.

What makes this story even more interesting is that Kemp is located in US Congressional Representative Jeb Hensarling's district. Hensaring is a Tea Party darling who firmly believes in less government spending. I guess we can see now the result of less government spending. NO FUCKING WATER.

Oh, and Mr. Hensaring has just been named to the 12 person Super Congress charged with tackling the debt.

Super. Not.

Victory?

Today I'm wondering where the victory is that both sides are claiming in the recall elections in Wisconsin last night. The Democrats fell one short of the three elections they needed to take back the Senate and the GOP lost two seats. Yet both sides are claiming victory.

The only victory I see is a win for polarity. Take a look at the results from last night's election. Granted, this is a special election which means only the most dedicated turn out but I think we can see from the numbers how evenly split the state is when it comes to politics.I suppose the saving grace in all of this is that the Democrats are more mobilized going into 2012. And they did take two seats away from the GOP so I guess that's something.

A victory in my eyes would be for all the working class people who voted for the person with the R next to their name realize two things. One, Republicans and the "job creators" that support them are not going to shower you with magical job dust because they don't believe in middle class driven economies. To put it simply, they don't give a shit about you and have brainwashed you into your vote. Two, you are not going to someday be one of these people and then have to fend off poor people trying to steal your money.

Your anger and fear are being manipulated into hate. Time to wake up, folks!

The Tax Cut Experiment

Last month the Republicans inadvertently conducted a test to see how tax cuts affect pricing. The result undercuts their own arguments.

Last month the FAA's authorization to collect taxes on airline tickets lapsed. According to who you ask, this was the result an argument over welfare for rural airports or another of the right's never-ending attempts to destroy unions in America.

When the tax was removed, the airlines quickly raised ticket prices to their previous levels, pocketing the tax money instead of passing the savings on to consumers. Now that agreement has been reached in Congress, the FAA has been reauthorized and the ticket tax has been restored, airlines have been rolling the fare increases back, so that ticket prices remain the same.

The airlines have essentially swallowed the tax increases, reducing their own profits. There are lots of reasons for this, but the simple fact is that companies generally charge as much for things as they can get away with.

The larger lesson is that raising corporate taxes does not mean that the companies will automatically raise prices for consumers, or that the companies will go out of business, or they will flee to other states and countries.

Pricing is a very sensitive issue. Prices cannot rise too high otherwise demand will crater. Most people do not have to fly on airplanes: people can vacation closer to home, and businessmen can choose to use teleconferencing instead of meeting clients face-to-face. So airlines constantly monitor and tweak fares to maximize profit, keeping the planes as full as possible while keeping costs like fuel as low as possible.

Profitability at corporations varies widely. Some industries don't have intense material or capital costs. Lady Gaga can reduce the price of her latest album from $8 to a buck on amazon.com and still make millions, while a grocery store chain's ability to sell food cheaply depends on weather, colony collapse disorder in bees, immigration law, political instability in the Middle East and oil spills in the Gulf of Mexico. Legal and financial products are even more flexible: they're intangibles that only have the value that we arbitrarily assign them.

What this means is that taxes on highly profitable industries that don't have large capital expenses can be raised without really affecting their prices, because they have the flexibility to reduce salaries but their prices are already maxed out. For example, law firms that charge $1,000 an hour could easily pay much higher taxes by cutting the salaries of lawyers who make 10 times what an average person makes. The financial industry could easily pay higher taxes by cutting salaries of hedge fund managers who make millions of dollars a year and pay taxes at the outrageously low capital gains rate of 15%.

All tax cuts and tax increases are not created equal. Since the US economy is driven by consumer spending, tax policies that put more money in the hands of more people provide the biggest boost.

The Bush tax cuts have not done that. The S&P downgrade acknowledges this. The stock market understands this. Everyone knows these things are true, but the Republicans stubbornly refuse to acknowledge reality purely for political gain.

To fix our problems some taxes have to go up, government expenditures (especially defense and entitlements) have to come down , as does the cost of medical care, and more money has to wind up in the hands of the bottom 90% of the US population, instead of just lining the pockets of the wealthy.

He Is Not Hu Jintao

As the world watched the Dow plunge over 600 points today, most of the blame has centered on President Obama. This blame is coming from all sides of the political spectrum and, in particular, the left, who think that he needs to lead more strongly. The right is currently skipping with glee as their central mission (Obama must fail), in their eyes, is working. Neither of these perceptions are accurate reflect reality, of course.

To a certain degree, some people will always blame the president. Those that don't like him anyway didn't give him credit when the Dow surged over the time of his presidency so why would they now? It's ridiculously predictable that they will now blame him when it falls. He loses with these folks no matter what he does. The people that do like him seemingly want him to lead in a king like fashion and begin executing jobs plans as well as ordering a single branch overhaul of the economy.

Someone needs to throw some cold water on these folks and make them realize that the president is not Hu Jintao. People from the left and the right complain that he doesn't "have a plan." It's not his fucking job to have a plan. That's the job of Congress. The people on the right are doing it because it helps them in their mission to see him fail. The people on the left are doing it because they want more government control over our country. Again, neither can happen. Again, Barack Obama is not Hu Jintao.

We don't live in a centrally planned economy, folks. Oddly, both sides think we do.

This might be a good time to decimate the lie that has been floating around the right wing blogsphere that President Obama hasn't delivered a budget for the last two years. He has and the evidence for it is right here. Let me repeat this again for those that have trouble hearing. President Obama has delivered a budget every fiscal year since he has been in office. 

The problem with the budget is the same problem with our economy and it's a big reason why the stock market is falling off a cliff right now: Congress. In 2010, Congress failed to adopt a budget resolution because of political cowardice. That's on the Democrats. in 2011, Congress failed to adopt a budget resolution for 2012 because of the true believers running the House presently. That's on the Republicans.

So, Congress is a big part of the fucking problem, folks and, by extension, that means us. We all love our Representative but hate everyone else. Current approval ratings of Congress are in the teens but nothing will change. We can't vote for other districts. We can only work within our own which means Tip O'Neill was right: All politics are local. Until we stop loving our guy no matter what (AKA completely lacking in motivation to change), we should expect the same results.

Honestly, though, much of our economy is beyond the control of the government so Congress isn't the only reason why we are at fault. It is a free market, after all. A big part of our economy (nearly two thirds) is consumer confidence and that's very low at present. Yet we still can't offer this as a substantive reason for why things are all balls right now. So why do we blame the government?

Because we're lazy and we worship rich people. Nothing is ever our fault so why should we have to work to fix things? And being critical of the wealthy these days is tantamount to asking a black guy why he likes to hang out on the porch all day eating fried chicken and watermelon.Most of us lack the ability to seriously reflect on what has to be done to fix the problems we have. Blaming the president and, to a certain degree, blaming Congress for the Dow dropping over 600 points makes no sense when you consider these things, Essentially, we have become Frito Pendejo from the film Idiocracy.

Go away...'batin'...

Oh, Really?

Citigroup Plutonomy Reports No Longer Available at CPS News.

Now I wonder why that is? Could it be because it contained the following paragraph?

Economic growth that is powered and consumed by the wealthiest upper class of society. Plutonomy refers to a society where the majority of the wealth is controlled by an ever-shrinking minority; as such, the economic growth of that society becomes dependent on the fortunes of that same wealthy minority.

With many people in this country still carrying water for them, it's no wonder they want to squash it.

Name Change

I've been thinking about this for awhile and decided that it was time to retire the "Notes From The Front" moniker. This site started out as an email list in the days following the 9-11 attacks. At the time, we all felt like we were on the front lines. Things have changed in ten years and, in keeping with that change, a different name was in order.

Although the name "Markadelphia" does have my name in it, the new name is not meant to be me. It's simply meant to a place where politics, religion, and sex are always polite to discuss..just like it was under the old banner. This was the original intent of the email list and then later the site. This new name seems more in keeping with that and parallels my continued commitment to let anyone say whatever they want (minus span for boner pills, financial scams, and porn...unless it is home made by a readers:)) without fear of having their comment deleted.

Welcome (again) to Markadelphia, folks. With an average of 200 unique daily readers and rapidly approaching 100,000 page loads since I started, I thank you all from the bottom, baby...from the bottom...

Downgrade

As many expected, Standards and Poors downgraded the United States' credit rating to AA plus. The other rating agencies (Moody's and Fitch) have kept the United States at AAA. So, what does all this mean? Here are my initial thoughts.

First of all, S&P can go fuck themselves. Where were they during 2007, for example, when losses on $340.7 million worth of CDOs issued by Credit Suisse Group added up to about $125 million, despite being rated AAA by Standard & Poor's? S&P are paid to rate the debt of companies so they are honestly more beholden to the private sector than the government.

S&P also made a two trillion dollar error in their latest assessment of US Debt but they still didn't change the rating. My opinion is that they were hell bent on the downgrade regardless of what sort of deal was made in DC. To put it simply, their rating should be taken with a grain (ton) of salt.

All of this being said, their criticisms are fair. The deal that was made was not enough. As President Obama stated plainly several times, it needed to be larger and include revenues. Due to Republican extremism, the political sedimentation that resulted played a heavy role in S&P's decision.

“More broadly, the downgrade reflects our view that the effectiveness, stability, and predictability of American policymaking and political institutions have weakened at a time of ongoing fiscal and economic challenges to a degree more than we envisioned when we assigned a negative outlook to the rating,” S&P said.

This should be a wake up call to the intransigent people in Washington DC. You are going to have to start thinking outside of the box and come up with innovative solutions. Repeating the same old tired lines about spending isn't going to cut it. In fact, I'll go as far to say that all available and traditional economic theories should be thrown out the window.

We need to say goodbye to trickled down, supply side, and yes, even Keynesian economic theory. Either these theories have never worked, completely failed, or don't belong in the new global economy. A call should begin today for innovative and "width of vision" economic thinkers who are not tied to old dogma.

Any volunteers?

Pre-1967?

Remember all that hoopla a while back about President Obama throwing Israel under the bus?

TV: Israel agrees to negotiate over pre-'67 lines

Oh, really?

In a dramatic policy shift, Israel's prime minister has agreed to negotiate the borders of a Palestinian state based on the cease-fire line that marks off the West Bank.

Up to now, Benjamin Netanyahu has refused to spell out his plan for negotiating the border. A senior Israeli official would not confirm outright that the prime minister was now willing to adopt the cease-fire line as a starting point, but said Israel was willing to try new formulas to restart peace talks based on a proposal made by President Barack Obama.

As I suspected a couple of months back, there was (and still is) a lot of local Israeli politics involved in this and not the "throwing to the wolves" that was inaccurately relayed by the faux outrage machine of the right.

As much of an Israeli supporter as I am, they need to budge a little on these issues and they are the ones right now that are holding up serious movement towards peace in the region.

Will The New Carl Sagan Please Stand Up?

A recent opinion piece in the Christian Science Monitor echoes some things I have been saying recently about climate change skeptics. As is often the case with their other views, the climate change skeptic locks in and does not waver. There is no point in bringing up evidence, facts, peer reviewed journals or any other information grounded in the scientific method. They will always have an answer that contradicts because that's what true believers do.

Instead, heed the points of Andrew Hoffman. He begins be defining the playing field.

One of the strongest predictors of an American's beliefs about global warming is political party affiliation. According to a 2009 Pew survey, 75 percent of Democrats believe there is solid evidence of global warming compared with only 35 percent of Republicans.

Climate change has been enmeshed in the culture wars where beliefs in science often align with beliefs on abortion, gun control, health care, evolution, or other issues that fall along the contemporary political divide. This was not the case in the 1990s and is not the case in Europe. This is a distinctly American phenomenon.

I find this terribly sad but it is true. Moving on....

For skeptics, climate change is inextricably tied to a belief that climate science and policy are a covert way for liberal environmentalists and the government to diminish citizens' personal freedom.

True but that's how they are with everything. They's a comin' to gin us!

A second prominent theme is a strong faith in the free market, an overriding fear that climate legislation will hinder economic progress, and a suspicion that green jobs and renewable energy are ploys to engineer the market.

This is even more prevalent than the first point. Odd, because one would think that an emerging market would be something they would get behind. Of course, they wouldn't if it meant they were proved wrong about something.

The most intriguing theme is strong distrust of the scientific peer-review process and of scientists themselves: "Peer review" turns into "pal review," and establishment scientist-editors only publish work by those whose scientific research findings agree with their own. Scientists themselves are seen as intellectual elites, studying issues that are beyond the reach of the ordinary person's scrutiny. This should not come as a surprise, although it seems to have mystified many climate scientists.

This is what I hear the most on here. It's an excellent example of propaganda and extremely disappointing that many people have fallen for this. That's what you get with Jupiter size hubris.

So what do we do about it?

The focus of the discussion must move away from positions (climate change is or is not happening) and toward the underlying interests and values at play. It must engage at the deeper ideological levels where resistance is taking place, using new ways to frame the argument to bridge both sides.

For example, when US Energy Secretary Steven Chu refers to advances in renewable-energy technology in China as America's "Sputnik moment," he is framing climate change as a common threat to economic competitiveness. When Pope Benedict links the threat of climate change with threats to life and dignity, he is painting it as an issue of religious morality.

When the Military Advisory Board, a group of retired military officers, refers to climate change as a "threat multiplier," it is using a national-security frame.

And when the Pew Center refers to climate change as an issue of risk management, it is promoting climate insurance just as homeowners buy fire insurance. This is the way to engage the debate; not hammering skeptics with more data and expressing dismay that they don't get it.

Completely true. If we frame the issue as one of economic competitiveness, morality, national security, and insurance, we take the reality of what is happening into realms that clearly affect people's lives. Having a socially awkward person of science trying to explain climate change to your average citizen-especially one who believes we are becoming Russia-will fail every day. If, however, they see how our society's various institutions are reacting to this and they hear it from someone who is socially easy to deal with, the paradigm shift we need will occur.

As Hoffman says, we need another Carl Sagan.

Oh, and as a simple PS, I thought I would throw in this quote from his piece.

I and many of my colleagues are regular recipients of climate-skeptic hate mail and a few of us have even received death threats.

Hmph. Must be another "Voice Inside My Head."

Super Powers

At first I thought the following was an Onion headline.

Super Congress Getting Even More Super Powers In Debt Deal

Sadly, it's not.

Am I the only one that has a problem with this? I don't get it, folks. Congress is filled with intransigent members so let's put some of them on a committee and that will somehow magically work more better?

Even more perplexing is that the right (or at least many of them) are the ones pushing for this. Huh? I guess it is smaller government with only 12 people making key decisions now.

Voices in My Head

Ah, the adolescent power fantasy on full display. Isn't Kevin Baker a fan of Allen West? Makes perfect sense.

One Giant Shit Show

Our nation's leaders have finally come together and will pass a bill at some point soon to raise the debt ceiling. The last few weeks have been one giant shit show and, now that it's all over, I thought it prudent to devote a post to the various thoughts I've had over the course of all of this. As always, I welcome your summative comments as well:)

To begin with, I am SO fucking tired of the "Washington's Broken' story line. It's not even remotely true and it's just a bunch of media drivel. Government ain't pretty, folks, and it never has been in our history. "Broken" was the Civil War, not an argument over spending and taxes. Let's declare a moratorium on this, shall we?

And while we are on the subject of whining, the professional left can go fuck themselves. They are disappointed in Obama and are "abandoning" him. To go where, exactly? Rather than wasting energy complaining, they should use that energy to go and find the 45 percent of the people in this country that don't vote and light a fire under their collective asses. Don't blame the president for the fact that he has to deal with a large bloc of completely intransigent people. Transform the Tea Party into a massive minority, send them back to their short wave radio set, and then maybe some of your wishes for government will come true. AP News had a good story on this recently.

Here's the truth: The overwhelming majority of senators and House members do what their constituents want them to do. Or, more to the point, they respond to people in their districts who bother to vote. Nothing is dearer to politicians than re-election, and most have a keen sense of when they are straying into dangerous waters.

A McClatchy-Marist poll this year found that 71 percent of registered voters want political leaders in Washington to compromise to get things done. If those voters skip key primaries, however, they may have little say in the matter.

Exactly right. Not only do these complainers have to get out and vote themselves, they have to get 10 other people to vote as well. That's how it fucking works so if you don't like the outcome, do something about it. No one said it would be easy.

Getting back to the media...what a load of shit they were during this debate. Paul Krugman absolutely nailed it perfectly in this recent piece.

News reports portray the parties as equally intransigent; pundits fantasize about some kind of “centrist” uprising, as if the problem was too much partisanship on both sides.

Some of us have long complained about the cult of “balance,” the insistence on portraying both parties as equally wrong and equally at fault on any issue, never mind the facts. I joked long ago that if one party declared that the earth was flat, the headlines would read “Views Differ on Shape of Planet.” But would that cult still rule in a situation as stark as the one we now face, in which one party is clearly engaged in blackmail and the other is dickering over the size of the ransom?

To me, this is essentially what happened. The current form of the GOP basically got everything they wanted. There was no additional revenue at all because of the anti-tax catechism of the right. They wouldn't even allow subsides to in the final plan even though basic economics proves that they too distort markets just like taxes. And what more proof do we need that the Bush Tax Cuts didn't work? We extended the cuts last year. Where are the jobs? In fact, our economy is stalling. That's not what I was told would happen. As Krugman notes in his piece, reality doesn't seem to matter.

From this point forward, we need to decimate the Cult of Balance. As Krugman notes,

For when reporting on political disputes always implies that both sides are to blame, there is no penalty for extremism. Voters won’t punish you for outrageous behavior if all they ever hear is that both sides are at fault.

But making nebulous calls for centrism, like writing news reports that always place equal blame on both parties, is a big cop-out — a cop-out that only encourages more bad behavior. The problem with American politics right now is Republican extremism, and if you’re not willing to say that, you’re helping make that problem worse.

This is what I have been saying for quite some time on here and it is now time for people, and especially the media, to accept this reality. We are spending far too much time managing the fantasies of the right and coddling their paranoia. In trying to be fair and think that "everyone's a winner and correct," we are holding back our country from solving the problems we face.

We can't continue to work with people who are closet fascists. Heck, some of them aren't even in the closet. They want everything exactly their way and are, conveniently, never wrong. Krugman summarizes this well.

As you may know, President Obama initially tried to strike a “Grand Bargain” with Republicans over taxes and spending. To do so, he not only chose not to make an issue of G.O.P. extortion, he offered extraordinary concessions on Democratic priorities: an increase in the age of Medicare eligibility, sharp spending cuts and only small revenue increases. As The Times’s Nate Silver pointed out, Mr. Obama effectively staked out a position that was not only far to the right of the average voter’s preferences, it was if anything a bit to the right of the average Republican voter’s preferences.

Remember, though, he must fail...even if reality is starkly different.

We already have a centrist president. Indeed, Bruce Bartlett, who served as a policy analyst in the Reagan administration, argues that Mr. Obama is in practice a moderate conservative.

Mr. Bartlett has a point. The president, as we’ve seen, was willing, even eager, to strike a budget deal that strongly favored conservative priorities. His health reform was very similar to the reform Mitt Romney installed in Massachusetts. Romneycare, in turn, closely followed the outlines of a plan originally proposed by the right-wing Heritage Foundation. And returning tax rates on high-income Americans to their level during the Roaring Nineties is hardly a socialist proposal.

While I'm not happy with the way things turned out, I'm not going to blame the president. At the end of the day, he has to govern. And when you are dealing with a large, immovable object that the American people (the ones that could be arsed to vote, that is) put into office, you have to do the best you can. He did.

This entire affair should serve as an excellent example of what the GOP is all about these days. If you don't like it, do something about it.

Love, Liberals and Conservatives

I was reading an article about the algorithm match.com uses to make "fuzzy" matches. The interesting thing they found is that people's stated preferences often diverge quite drastically from what they actually want. That is, people say they want one thing in another person, but very frequently they will wind up marrying someone who doesn't meet all those criteria. For example, people will actually marry someone who a few years older, or black instead of white, or stocky instead of athletic, even though their preferences would have ruled that person out. The trick is to write an algorithm that will suggest dates with people the person will actually like, whom they apparently think they shouldn't.

One quote from a developer of the matching algorithm caught my eye:

Indeed, says Thombre, “the politics one is quite interesting. Conservatives are far more open to reaching out to someone with a different point of view than a liberal is.” That is, when it comes to looking for love, conservatives are more open-minded than liberals.

I generally avoid making generalizations about conservative vs. liberal personality traits, but I wondered if this was really true. The conclusion of the article's author is that "conservatives are more open-minded than liberals." This is a typical "gotcha" kind of comment that conservatives love. "Liberals think they're so tolerant, but they won't even consider marrying conservatives."

But thinking it over, I don't really think that "open-minded" is really the right word. I think "naive," "short-sighted" and "delusional" are more apropos.

I am reminded of all the conservatives (Gingrich, Limbaugh, Beck, Reagan, etc.) who have been married two, and three or more times, yet they keep carping about the sanctity of marriage. Yeah, liberals divorce too. But they're not hypocritically calling for more onerous divorce laws. There have also been many stories over the years (such as this one and this one) that find the divorce rate in liberal Massachusetts is almost half the divorce rate in conservative Texas.

There are many suggested reasons for this: shotgun weddings for unexpected pregnancies rarely work out in the long run. The conservative delusion that abstinence-based sex education is in any way useful: it takes two minutes to explain that you shouldn't screw someone you don't want kids with, don't want to get pregnant with, or get a disease from. Marriages of older and wealthier couples are less likely to result in divorce. The old conservative saw, "Liberals just live together in sin instead of getting married" (I don't know if that's true, but conservatives love to say it even though it doesn't seem to true from the out-of-wedlock birthrates). The various conservative fatwas against premarital sex, birth control, the morning after pill and abortion will tend to cause marriages of younger and poorer couples, which will more likely end in divorce.

But in all honesty, the "liberal" vs. "conservative" divide is mostly about women having more freedom vs. men having more power. If you're a self-identified liberal woman, how likely is it that you'll want to marry a self-identified conservative man who thinks you shouldn't have control over your own body, aren't fit to make your own decisions, own property, vote, hold public office, and that you should just shut up and do what you're told because that's what the bible says?

Michele Bachmann famously made some comments in a church about how the bible tells us that wives should be submissive. She studied tax law -- something she never wanted -- because her husband told her to. How could any self-respecting moderate or liberal woman even consider marrying a jerk like that? (And how could anyone elect a woman to Congress who told that story? Who's making the real decisions in Congress? Michele or Marcus?)

Then there's the whole droit du seigneur mindset that so many conservative men have: conservative Muslims and Mormons believe in multiple wives, and so many conservative men think it's okay for them to have sex with other women, before, during and after marriage, but the woman is chattel, must remain pure, yada yada yada. Real men boff lots of chicks, you know, so when a conservative luminary like Rush Limbaugh was caught at an airport with a prescription for Viagra labeled as being issued to his physician, fellow conservatives winked and nodded and give Rush the thumbs up.

My own personal experience squares with national statistics. By coincidence, both my parents and my wife's parents had six kids; four daughters and two sons each.

The most conservative daughter on my side, the second oldest, has now been divorced three times (her even more conservative ex-husband has been divorced twice now). The second-most conservative son-in-law was married once before marrying my third-oldest sister, who is not as conservative as her older sister and is still married. My brother and oldest sister will likely never marry, and the youngest daughter (the one whom my arch-conservative father disowned for marrying a Hispanic guy from Texas), is still married. My wife and I have been married for 32 years.

On my wife's side, the most conservative brother-in-law is now in a very messy divorce with the youngest and most conservative daughter. This divorce has devolved into a ugly fight over money, most of which is tied up in the family business, the house, and secret investments the husband hid from the wife, and has going on two or three years now. His very conservative family has gone through three or four equally messy divorces, beatings, visits by cops, trips to jail, and so on. These people are very well-off owners of several businesses in multiple states. The rest of my in-laws are all moderate to liberal, and have all been married for 25 to 30 years. My wife's mother died 20-odd years ago, and her father remarried.

Then there are all the obnoxious comments I hear from conservative friends and family members about "the wife" and "the old ball and chain." The whole objectification of women gets old real quick. And I really hate the way my Tea Party dad treats my mom like a servant. He was an old-school conservative (i.e., a closet racist) and now a new-school Tea Partyer, and she's apolitical.

They're still married, but it was very rocky for a couple of years when I was 8 or 9. My mother had joined the Jehovah's Witnesses, and my dad was up in arms about it. She refused to do . . . certain . . . things that the Witnesses claimed were forbidden by the bible. My dad shopped around for various religions and eventually settled on a church a block from his office (which was coincidentally owned by one of my wife's divorcing sister's in-laws). Ultimately he convinced my mom that she had to leave the Witnesses because one of the Witnesses' central tenets was that the wife had to be submissive to the husband. (Have I mentioned that I find religion to be illogical in so many ways?)

And it's not just conservative men who think that women are somehow not equal to men. I have a conservative woman friend who told me in all seriousness that she thought women were too emotional to hold elected office (during a discussion about Sarah Palin).

If you have strong political views, enough to categorize yourself as a liberal or conservative, how can you really not care what your spouse thinks about them? I suppose it's easy to imagine a conservative man saying,"Yeah, she's a stupid liberal bitch, but she's got nice tits and is a great lay. And I can just trade her for a younger model when she starts to sag. Ha ha." And it's easy to imagine a conservative woman saying, "Yeah, he's a real creep, but I just married him for his money, and the prenup expires in two years so I'll just suck it up and then soak him for child support." But it's hard to imagine a liberal man marrying a conservative woman ("Everything is Jesus this and God that, and now that we're engaged it's not like I'm asking to get the milk free forever, but I want to make sure she's not frigid") or a liberal woman marrying a conservative man ("He hates everything I believe and say and do").

So is it really open-minded to think that you can marry someone who has diametrically opposed views on so many practical issues of married life and expect the union to last in the long term? Or is is just foolish and short-sighted?

The idea that opposites attract is a fairy tale. Yeah, sometimes love conquers all. But unless two people have a basic agreement on the important issues in their lives -- kids, sex, money, religion, the role of women -- the marriage isn't going to work in the long run. So, yeah, liberal/conservative marriages will work if there's agreement on the key issues. But that reduces political affiliation to something pretty meaningless, along the lines of "I like pizza."

Conservatives also like to bitch endlessly about the rise in divorce being the fault of no-fault divorce and the economic independence of women (as if somehow forcing two people who hate each other to live together is a good solution).

The divorce rate debate totally misses the reality of history. In times past, when divorce was not easily available, outright desertion was common, as were mutually agreed separations. People were for all practical purposes divorced: they moved out, they fell in love with other people, had sex, moved in with their new loves, and many even had children, all appearing to their new neighbors to be married. In every practical sense they were divorced and remarried. And sometimes they even remarried, committing bigamy. This was usually very hard to catch, because if you moved to another town there was almost no way of finding the records of previous marriages. But recent digitization of court records from London allowed the discovery of an increase of bigamy in late 19th-century England, especially among women.

Why? That was when the modern "liberal" concept of mutual love as the basis of marriage gained primacy, instead of the conservative notion that marriage was merely an economic union with the primary purpose of procreation, often arranged by parents for monetary gain through the exchange of dowries.

The mistake that liberals do make is that mutual love is all that matters in a marriage. Conservatives are right that it is an economic and social union, often for the purpose of procreation. But the days of dowries and arranged marriages are long gone in this country, and mutual love, respect, and a desire that your spouse be happy are just as important.

And, then we get to the personality end of things. Conservatives are more likely than liberals to be demanding, critical, uncompromising, rigid, angry and spiteful. It's all well and good to talk of open-mindedness and tolerance in others, but if you're actually going to marry someone, would you really want to live with someone who displays the emotional maturity of the Tea Party members in Congress who want to throw the government under the debt-ceiling bus?

Not wanting to date conservatives doesn't make liberals intolerant. The willingness to try something that is most likely to fail spectacularly is not a hallmark of tolerance, but of foolhardiness. Liberals, especially women, will naturally be more inclined to marry a man who believes in true love and mutual respect and the right of the women to make her own decisions, rather than a man who thinks any female body will do as long she can get knocked up and do the laundry.

Fifth Largest

With all the talk on the debt lately, it seems like our country has a lot of problems. One would think that our debt is worse than other countries if you listen to the pundits. "We're going to become like Greece," is the phrase we hear most often.

Greece is actually second among the bigger economies of the world if you measure debt to GDP standing at 161 percent. We are at 95 percent of our GDP which is actually the fifth largest in the world today. So we have quite a ways to go to "become like Greece" although we might get there if people continue to be ridiculously unapologetic about dodging their taxes here as they do there.

If people really wanted to use scare tactics, they should say we could "become like Japan" which has a debt to GDP of 245 percent. Wow! Given this ridiculously high number, why are they still even functioning as a country? My buddies in the Tea Party have assured me that if we go over 100 percent, our nation will be ruined (never mind the fact that we have been over 100 percent before, have a 15 trillion dollar GDP, and have 65 trillion dollars of wealth in this country).

Given these figures and the fact that these countries, while in bad shape for a variety of reasons, are not ruined, should we completely lose our head about our debt?

Baby, You're A Star! (A Voice Inside My Head Story)

And one more for to make it three for Thursday....

Check out this recent post from Politifact.

Comedian Victoria Jackson, a Saturday Night Live alum and tea party supporter, recently penned a column titled, "The 3 scariest things about Obama." Jackson is a regular WorldNetDaily columnist and is slated to attend the WND Tea Party at Sea cruise of Alaska later this summer.

To quote the piece, the three scary things are "private army (like Hitler), socialist (like Hitler), media control (like Hitler)."

She continues: "A clause hidden in the Obamacare bill, which is now law, gives Obama the right to form a private army. Why isn't anyone freaking out?"

My first reaction was...they have Tea Party at Sea cruises now? I suppose it fits given the demographic.

I think I'll pass on the totally insano comment about private armies in lieu of what really struck me. Apparently, if you are a D lister these days, a surefire way to get back on top is to become a right winger. Dennis Miller....Janine Turner...and now Victoria Jackson. I can't say as I blame them with the built in audience but it really makes me crack up. They don't really stand for anything anymore. They just play the hits. Here is a sample set list:

La-la-la-lamestream media
They's A Comin'!
From My Cold Dead Hands
Barack, The Magic Negro
RINOS In The Rearview
Hopey Changey Stuff (A Medley)
Missing Bush (The Good Years)
Uncertainty (All Obama's fault)

Encores:
Houston, We Have A Spending Problem
Don't Retreat, Reload (Never Surrender)