Taking Candy from a Baby

I don't know how much stock I put in studies like this, but I found this article in Scientific American. The study found that wealthy people are significantly less considerate of others, and are much more likely to cut you off with their luxury cars. Yeah, I know this fits into the "well, duh..." category.

But the following part was especially humorous:

In order to figure out whether selfishness leads to wealth (rather than vice versa), Piff and his colleagues ran a study where they manipulated people’s class feelings. The researchers asked participants to spend a few minutes comparing themselves either to people better off or worse off than themselves financially. Afterwards, participants were shown a jar of candy and told that they could take home as much as they wanted. They were also told that the leftover candy would be given to children in a nearby laboratory. Those participants who had spent time thinking about how much better off they were compared to others ended up taking significantly more candy for themselves--leaving less behind for the children.

Yes, the study shows that rich people will take candy from a baby. Shades of Montgomery Burns!

Now, we all know that some rich people are quite generous. Andrew Carnegie and Bill Gates have contributed much of the their time and money to worthy causes. When I was a kid I spent many hours at one of the libraries built by Carnegie throughout the United States and Britain. Gates has spent billions of dollars vaccinating kids in third-world countries.

But we also know that these people are by far the exception to the rule. Most of  today's wealthy are nameless brokers, bankers, hedge fund managers, CEOs and heirs who will never make any significant contribution to society.

But this isn't some abstruse academic question. Republicans are on record against compassion and empathy. When President Obama nominated Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court he mentioned the importance of those qualities and was roundly derided by Republicans.

Why does this matter? If the people who make policy are wealthy, compassionless men like, say, Mitt Romney (who told us he likes to fire people and doesn't care about the poor), they're going to make decisions that benefit the privileged few and damn the consequences for the majority.

Everyone in this country understands this basic fact. It's one of the biggest reasons that many Republicans don't trust Romney, though they don't frame it that way. They usually characterize him as a closet liberal, but the real knock against him is that he is actually a soulless husk and will simply say anything to get elected. He doesn't really stand for anything except money and power. They know he can't relate to them and just doesn't care about them.

And when Romney endorsed the Paul Ryan budget that would give even more tax cuts to the wealthy while cutting spending for everything else but defense, he almost literally declared his support for taking candy from babies.

As the Republican nomination process cycled through the various Romney challengers, Santorum, Cain and Gingrich, the main draw wasn't the tirades about contraception and 9-9-9 and invented Palestinian peoples. No, it was these candidates' middle-class roots that so many Republican voters were attracted to. They knew the non-Romneys could better understand their lives than a guy whose wife drives a couple Cadillacs and whose only knowledge of football and NASCAR comes from his friendships with team owners.

Santorum ultimately did the best against Romney, but finally had to throw in the towel against the rising tide of cash. He represented the average Republican hope that you could start from scratch and make it to the top (though Santorum has distorted his own family history, implying that they were all destitute coal miners: in reality Santorum has always been well off, his father was a psychiatrist at VA hospital and his mother was nurse).

Romney represents the death of that hope: the Republican realization that only massive amounts of cash from Romney's cronies and multinational corporations can unseat a president who started out where where most American did and truly represents the American success story.

An Excellent Job!

Two years ago, during his SOTU address, Barack Obama promised double American exports in the next five years. So far, the first two years of that time period has seen an increase of just under 30 percent or an increase from 140 billion a month to 180 billion a month. At this pace, the president will get close to or achieve his goal. Why is this happening and why is this a cause for optimism?

Tyler Cowen has the answers in his fantastic new piece, "What Export-Oriented America Means."

First, it is the United States that is leading the way in high tech machines that populate the manufacturing industry worldwide. Countries from around the world need to buy them and we make the best ones. But it's not as simple as that.

The more the world relies on smart machines, the more domestic wage rates become irrelevant for export prowess. That will help the wealthier countries, most of all America. This logic works on both sides. America is using less labor in manufacturing, but China is too, even as its manufacturing output is rising. The fact that Chinese manufacturing employment is falling along with ours means that both our higher wages and their lower wages are becoming less relevant for the location of manufacturing decisions. The less manufacturing has to do with labor costs and relative wage levels, the greater the comparative advantage of the United States.

Bingo. But won't this hurt American jobs?

You’ll hear the word “insourcing” more, too, to join the far more familiar “outsourcing.” For instance, in one manufacturing survey from November 2011, almost one fifth of North American manufacturers claimed to have brought production back from a “low-cost” country to North America. The corresponding number from early 2010 was one tenth of those companies, partly because of rising labor costs in developing nations, and partly because labor costs don’t always matter so much anymore.

The core political truth about this, however, is a little awkward: So many of the jobs vulnerable to foreign imports have already vanished that there is little left for voters or less powerful manufacturing-based labor unions to fear from free trade. The new job growth has been in health care, education, services and government, areas that are largely insulated from foreign competition and that will themselves seek out export markets. American higher education is in demand around the world, too, and has little to fear from foreign colleges trying to expand offerings in the United States.

This would be why I constantly harp on education. If you are a low skilled laborer in this country, learning how to operate high tech manufacturing machines should be your number one goal in life-stat! Developing countries of the world will need you to train their workforce.

Second, as I have discussed previously, the US may become the new Saudi Arabia in terms of energy exports. With the shale and natural gas industry starting to boom due to recent discoveries, we are poised to be able to take advantage of world demand and truly become a dominant, energy power.

This demand isn't just limited to energy. The third cause for optimism is that the developing countries themselves As BRICS, for example, continues to develop, their demand for our products to help them in their development is going to grow exponentially.

The leading categories of American exports today—civilian aircraft, semiconductors, cars, pharmaceuticals, machinery and equipment, automobile accessories, and entertainment—are going to be in the sweet spot of growing demand in what we now call the developing world.

That's right. Put all of this together and what do you get?

Export success will resurrect the United States as a dominant global economic power. America will be wealthier, its products will have greater global reach, and it will largely cure its trade imbalance with China. The fear of American foreign policy being determined by Beijing, or constrained by the financial resources of the Chinese central bank, will be forgotten. No one will view the United States as the borrowing supplicant in the U.S.-China economic relationship, and, all else equal, our exports to China will increase friendly feelings toward that country.

No more boiling pit of sewage. Thank goodness!!

All of this shows that we are well on the way to achieving the president's goal and promise that he made. In light of all of this information, saying that he is "destroying free enterprise," is simply not true. In fact, he has shown that his method of governing (the combination of  government partnership and knowing when to stay out of the way) has clearly produced positive results.

When it comes to the issue of helping to increase exports, the president has done an excellent job!

The Wall Street Journal?

I have to echo Joe Scarborough in his recent piece for Politico and go even further by wondering if the editorial staff at the Wall Street Journal has started doing bong hits.

The paper's lead article showcased a study declaring that U.S. companies were emerging stronger from the Great Recession than they were even before the 2008 financial meltdown. The Journal quoted Wells Fargo's former chief economist who said the last few years have made U.S. companies "leaner, meaner and hungrier." That positive sentiment was backed by a WSJ analysis that showed sales, profits and employment higher among the Standard and Poor's companies than in 2007.

This article details how US corporations have returned to pre-recession profits. 

An analysis by The Wall Street Journal of corporate financial reports finds that cumulative sales, profits and employment last year among members of the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index exceeded the totals of 2007, before the recession and financial crisis. 

Deep cost cutting during the downturn and caution during the recovery put the companies on firmer financial footing, helping them to outperform the rest of the economy and gather a greater share of the nation’s income. The rebound is reflected in the stock market, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average at a four-year high.

In addition to hiring overseas, companies have been squeezing more productivity out of their employees. In fact, “in 2007, the companies generated an average of $378,000 in revenue for every employee on their payrolls,” while last year, “that figure rose to $420,000.”

Scarborough goes on to mention an article by Walter Russell Mead whom I've recently started perusing at the insistence of regular commenter, juris  imprudent. His piece, "The Myth of American Decline," offers a very different perspective of how our country is doing in comparison to what Mitt Romney and the Republicans claim is happening.

The United States isn't in decline, but it is in the midst of a major rebalancing. The alliances and coalitions America built in the Cold War no longer suffice for the tasks ahead. As a result, under both the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations, American foreign policy has been moving toward the creation of new, sometimes difficult partnerships as it retools for the tasks ahead.

I agree. He goes on to discuss the changes in the Trilateral system over the years which echoes many things I have said on here. He concludes on a very upbeat and like accurate note.

Despite all the talk of American decline, the countries that face the most painful changes are the old trilateral partners. Japan must live with a disturbing rival presence, China, in a region that, with American support, it once regarded as its backyard. In Europe, countries that were once global imperial powers must accept another step in their long retreat from empire.

For American foreign policy, the key now is to enter deep strategic conversations with our new partners—without forgetting or neglecting the old. The U.S. needs to build a similar network of relationships and institutional linkages that we built in postwar Europe and Japan and deepened in the trilateral years. Think tanks, scholars, students, artists, bankers, diplomats and military officers need to engage their counterparts in each of these countries as we work out a vision for shared prosperity in the new century.

The American world vision isn't powerful because it is American; it is powerful because it is, for all its limits and faults, the best way forward. This is why the original trilateral partners joined the U.S. in promoting it a generation ago, and why the world's rising powers will rally to the cause today.

This is why Mitt Romney (along with various right wing pundits) don't seem to get and it was evident in their childish criticism of the president's conversation with Russian president Dmitry Medvedev. In the final analysis, the American system is the best way forward and because the world is set up the way it is now (liberal economies and free trade), countries will have little choice but to embrace our way of doing things if they want to remain a player in the global marketplace.

Given all of this, how can the right continue to say that America is falling apart and it's all Barack Obama's fault? Now, even the Wall Street Journal (gasp!) seems to be saying that Barack X simply doesn't exist.

The Reasonable Middle Ground on Climate Change

It has become Republican dogma that climate change isn't happening. That it's impossible for puny humans to change the climate of this huge planet. That God wouldn't let it happen because, as James Inhofe says, he made a promise to Noah.

The press, afraid of being accused of siding with liberals, still gives conservative climate change deniers a fair hearing, often referring to climate change as a "controversial theory." The idea is that they have to give equal credence to both "sides" of the debate to be fair.

The problem is that the press has fallen into the Republican trap and let the conservatives define a false equivalence between the hard evidence of all serious climate scientists on one side, and a few hand-waving cranks funded by oil companies who say "we couldn't possibly hurt a planet this big" on the other.

The reality is that acknowledging anthropogenic climate change is the reasonable middle ground. Climate change deniers are on the rightmost extreme, and radical anti-humanists are the leftmost extreme. I was reminded of this by an essay that appeared in the Huffington Post. In it, Peter Jay Brown wrote:

We humans are merely passengers on the spaceship Earth. We produce nothing important for a healthy planet, but certainly spare no expense at taking what we need and then some. We are the ultimate planetary narcissists.

Guys like Brown are just as wrong as Inhofe. They whine when wind turbines kill a few birds. They romanticize nature, implying that animals are somehow nobler than men. The truth is, animals behave like the brutes they are. When random fluctuations in environmental conditions happen to favor one species they drastically over-reproduce and lay waste to the land and other species. Just like we do. The difference is that they're not self-aware and can't stop to think about what they're doing before it's too late. We are. And we need to take responsibility for the problems that we're causing. Now.

As the only intelligent tool-using species on the planet, we have become the owners and operators of planet Earth by default. Short of total thermonuclear war, any ecological damage we inflict on the planet will probably only result in our own demise, and not the end of all life on Earth. Life has flourished with high concentrations of CO2 in the past, and would likely flourish again, albeit after migrations and die-offs of certain species. The biggest effects of anthropogenic climate change will likely be inland droughts and flooding of coastal cities, starvation, widespread plagues, world-wide wars over declining agricultural, water and energy resources, and the decline and collapse of human civilization as we go the way of the dinosaurs.

However, if a big enough asteroid or comet smacked the Earth all life would perish, This has likely occurred at least once in the past. Similarly, when the Siberian Traps (volcanoes) erupted perhaps 90% of all species were killed.

If a comet chucked out of the Oort cloud takes a bead on Earth, only a technologically advanced space-faring human race will be able to prevent the destruction of this lovely blue planet. Countering a repeat of the Siberian Traps would be much harder, but in the long run the human race is the Earth's only hope of saving the planet from total destruction. 

One could argue that the Earth evolved humans as protection against the larger threats that it was vulnerable to in the past. It is thus our responsibility to further develop our technology to a point where we can save the Earth — and ourselves — from certain doom.

But the truth is, right now we are hurting the planet — and ourselves — with our excesses. The 2000-2009 decade was the warmest on record, and this past March was the warmest in history. Tornadoes struck Arkansas, Tennessee and Mississippi in January. They hit Nebraska, Kansas, Missouri, Indiana and Tennessee in February. In March and April tornadoes hammered the nation's midsection again, and Texas too.

Inhofe's invocation of God's promise to Noah is especially striking because Inhofe so completely missed the point. Noah didn't sit around waiting for God to build his ark. Noah built it because a flood was coming.

Climate change — including floods — is coming. The seven billion humans burning billions upon billions of tons of coal, gas and oil are mostly to blame for that change. We can't just sit around and expect God to clean up our mess.

Dedicated To Kevin Baker

Most Pesky

Expect this story to have legs as the general election marches onward.

Why Romney's 'dog on car roof' story makes him unfit to be president 

In addition to being another WTF moment considering the source, I think this story is going to be most pesky for Mitt Romney. Personally, I'm not a pet person so I could give two shits that he put the dog on the roof of his car for a trip. But as Mr. Davis notes, dog owners (and pet people in general) are a BI-PARTISAN and fiercely steadfast lot who do not tolerate this sort of treatment.

It will be interesting to see what happens with this one.

A....What?

Now that the general election has more or less started, I'm trying to figure out how Mitt Romney wins with stories like this.

Romney's plan to renovate his La Jolla, California beach house has been known for months.  But documents first discovered by Politico, which broke the story Tuesday, show that Romney also plans to add a 3,600-square-foot basement, an outdoor shower, and a car elevator. 

Seriously,  a car elevator? Nothing says "I know the struggles of every day Americans and can help" like a car elevator in a 12 million dollar home.

I have to give him credit, though, because there some people that are going to buy the fact that someday this is going to be them if only they continue to vote Republican. The haves and the soon-to-haves....

Party of Fiscal Irresponsibility

Ironically, the self-styled party of fiscal responsibility in Minnesota is unable to pay the rent. As mentioned in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Politico has called the Minnesota GOP a disaster. The state GOP is more than a million dollars in debt only a year and a half after engineering a takeover of the Minnesota House and Senate and only narrowly losing the governor's office.

This comes on top of another story from a few days earlier: fired Senate staffer Michael Brodkorb is suing the GOP-controlled Senate for half a million bucks for defamation of character:

Brodkorb's new claim is that Senate Secretary Cal Ludeman defamed him when he told the press that Brodkorb was trying to "blackmail" and "extort payment from the Senate" through his legal case for wrongful termination. Brodkorb was fired in the wake of Senate Majority Leader Amy Koch's resignation from the leadership after senators confronted her about the affair she was having with him.

Brodkorb was terminated after his affair with former Senate majority leader Amy Koch came to light (both are married to other people), and she resigned under pressure. He's also suing the Senate for wrongful termination and gender discrimination because he claims women who had affairs with male legislators in the past retained their jobs. And he's suing some of the senators for "invasion of privacy" for outing his affair. This is that same "right to privacy" that Brodkorb and other Republicans don't think women have when they're seeking contraceptives and abortions.

Brodkorb made his name for creating the infamous "Minnesota Democrats Exposed" blog. Now he's threatening to expose Minnesota Republicans as well, by airing their dirty laundry in court, bringing into evidence previous affairs that had been uncovered in the Senate (the blackmail and extortion that Ludeman was talking about).

This is exactly the sort of lawsuit that Republicans keep telling us is the absolute worst kind of welfare for trial lawyers. Somehow it's bad for us regular joes to file class action lawsuits against giant oil and gas companies that poison our drinking water, but it's perfectly fine for a Republican to sue his former colleagues in the state senate for getting caught boinking his boss.

The worst part of it is that Brodkorb's lawsuit will cost the state of Minnesota a ton of money in lawyers' fee, even if the state wins. Also quite irksome is the fact that Ludeman refuses to say how much state money he's spending on these lawyers: he's claiming lawyer-client privilege. The way I see it, the state taxpayers are the clients; we should at least have the privilege of knowing how much we're forking out for litigating this ludicrous infighting among Republicans.

Meanwhile, the Republicans are pushing a minority voter suppression amendment to the state constitution thinly veiled as "voter ID," and an amendment to ban gay marriage. Somehow Republicans think that gays marrying will "destroy" marriage, when it's clear that Republicans like Brodkorb (and Gingrich and Limbaugh) are well on their way to destroying marriage all by themselves.

I Should Start Charging Copyright Fees

Well, now Krugman has hopped on the "Cult" bandwagon.

what’s interesting is the cult that has grown up around Mr. Ryan — and in particular the way self-proclaimed centrists elevated him into an icon of fiscal responsibility, and even now can’t seem to let go of their fantasy. 

The Ryan cult was very much on display last week, after President Obama said the obvious: the latest Republican budget proposal, a proposal that Mitt Romney has avidly embraced, is a “Trojan horse” — that is, it is essentially a fraud. “Disguised as deficit reduction plans, it is really an attempt to impose a radical vision on our country.” 

I should start charging copyright fees.

The rest of his column is quite informative, though.

The reaction from many commentators was a howl of outrage. The president was being rude; he was being partisan; he was being a big meanie. Yet what he said about the Ryan proposal was completely accurate. Actually, there are many problems with that proposal. But you can get the gist if you understand two numbers: $4.6 trillion and 14 million..

So, what do those two numbers mean?

Of these, $4.6 trillion is the revenue cost over the next decade of the tax cuts embodied in the plan, as estimated by the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center. These cuts — which are, by the way, cuts over and above those involved in making the Bush tax cuts permanent — would disproportionately benefit the wealthy, with the average member of the top 1 percent receiving a tax break of $238,000 a year.

Gosh I'm shocked.

What about the 14 million?

Meanwhile, 14 million is a minimum estimate of the number of Americans who would lose health insurance under Mr. Ryan’s proposed cuts in Medicaid; estimates by the Urban Institute actually put the number at between 14 million and 27 million.

And that would be why I say that Paul Ryan's budget isn't serious. Of course, he can continue to throw out these sorts of dog whistles because he knows that they will never actually be implemented.

It's fine and dandy to play make believe but when you actually have to govern...well...that's a different story.

Quick, Like A Bunny!

Happy Easter!

Who Will Take That First Step?

When someone like John H. Cochrane, a professor of finance at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and an adjunct scholar of the Cato Institute, says the following

Austerity isn’t working in Europe.

We should ALL listen.

His recent piece for Bloomberg  offers some rare flexibility from the right that is worth noting. He begins by noting a very basic reality.

As incomes decline, tax revenue drops, and it becomes harder to cut spending. A downward spiral looms.

This is the crux of why we should all be concerned about flat lining middle class incomes.

He goes on to point out that spending more (something that I have also said) is not the answer.

Where will the money come from? Greece, Spain and Italy simply cannot borrow any more. So, say the Keynesians, Germany should pay. But even Germany has limits. The U.S. can still borrow at remarkably low rates. But remember that Greece was able to borrow at low rates right up to the moment that it couldn’t borrow at all. There is nobody to bail out the U.S. when our time comes. What should we do then?

Also, a very good point. So what's the solution?

Let’s call it “Growth Now.” Forget about “stimulating.” Spend only on what is really needed. We could easily stop subsidies for agriculture, electric cars or building roads and bridges to nowhere right now, without fearing a recession.

Yep.

Rather than raise taxes further on the “rich,” driving them underground, abroad, or away from business formation, fix the tax code, as every commission has recommended. Lower marginal rates but eliminate the maze of deductions.

I could live with that. It has to be done anyway. Of course, there are difficulties.

“Structural reform” is vital to restore growth now, not a vague idea for many years in the future when the stimulus has worked its magic. It’s also a lot harder politically than the breezy language suggests. “Reform” isn’t just “policy” handed down by technocrats like rules on the provenance of prosciutto; it involves taking away subsidies and interventions that entrenched interests have grown to love, and have supported politicians to protect. They will fight it tooth and nail.

That includes D's, R's and everyone in between.

So, we know what we need to do. Who will be the first person to lead on doing it?

No Fucking Shit

Comparing Pundits

Two dueling op-eds in today's Washington Post are on basically the same topic: how much the other guy is lying. The difference between them is telling.

Dana Milbank's piece describes how Romney tells multiple whoppers one after the other at every appearance, completely mischaracterizing Obama's record, his speeches, and the state of the economy, and the reality of the world as we know it. Milbank also acknowledges that many politicians, including Obama, say things that they know aren't true. In particular, Milbank criticizes Obama's incorrect statement that it would be "unprecedented" for the Supreme Court to strike down the health care law.

George Will begins with the following statement:

Barack Obama’s intellectual sociopathy — his often breezy and sometimes loutish indifference to truth — should no longer startle.

And then goes on to criticize Obama for the same statement about the Supreme Court knocking down unconstitutional laws. For the record, I agree that Obama is wrong on this.

But Will's selective criticism is quite telling. Where Milbank takes a reasoned and honest look at politics and the things both sides say, Will is in full propaganda mode. He doesn't make the slightest nod to the horrific Republican record of lies, from Richard Nixon's "I'm not a crook," to Reagan's "we don't negotiate with terrorists," to George Bush linking Saddam to 9/11, to the litany of misstatements, inaccuracies and outright lies categorized by PolitiFact that Bachmann, Cain, Gingrich, Santorum and Romney have spouted throughout the Republican primary. Ron Paul is the exception to the Republican rule: his misstatements and exaggerations are in line with your average Democrat's, easily attributable to zeal rather than a hypocritical effort to rewrite history and warp reality. His acknowledgement of Republican errors is laudable, though I still disagree with pretty much everything he says. So do most Republicans, but usually for the opposite reason.

Will also says:

Obama flagrantly misrepresented the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, which did not “open the floodgates” for foreign corporations “to spend without limit in our elections” (the law prohibiting foreign money was untouched by Citizens United) and did not reverse “a century of law.”

and

[Obama's] defense will be his campaign because he cannot forever distract the nation and mesmerize the media with such horrors as a 30-year-old law student being unable to make someone else pay for her contraception.

which is an intentional lie about Fluke's testimony in service to perpetuating the Limbaugh/Republican lie that contraceptives are all for fun and games and not real health problems.  Menstrual cramps can be agonizing and some women who never have sex use the hormones in the pill to prevent the pain (no, painkillers just don't cut it). Fluke's testimony wasn't even about that: it was almost in its entirety dedicated to a friend who will never be able to have children because she was denied medication to prevent uterine cysts. That medication just happened to be in the form of birth control pills, and therefore the employer thought she was lying just to have sex.

Will is flagrantly denying reality and displaying the utmost hypocrisy here. He casually calls the president a liar, and then goes on to breezily discuss who would be best qualified to perpetuate Will's Republican hypocrisy.

His take on Citizen's United is a prime example. While it's true that the law against foreign contributions is still in place, many of the organizations spending money on our elections have no requirements to report their donors. Without that information, there is no way to know whether foreigners are funneling cash through dummy shell corporations and then into the electoral process, and thus utterly no way enforce that law. (And we already know there are plenty of people motivated by foreign interests donating money to candidates.)

When there is the appearance and possibility of corruption, and there is no way to even detect that a law is being violated, the presumption must be that corruption is occurring. This is the standard that judges are held to in cases of conflict of interest. It is the standard that Republicans use when they propose laws that require all voters to show ID at the polls, even when there's no evidence of voter fraud. To do otherwise would cause us to lose faith in the integrity of the system, they say. Similarly, Republicans insist that we need to force all workers to prove that they have the right to work in this country to prevent illegal aliens from taking jobs away from real Americans.

Preventing foreign contributions to political campaigns is in exactly the same category as stopping non-citizens from voting and working. Requiring full disclosure of campaign donors' identities (not just their dummy shell corporations) would be a good first step. Yet Republicans oppose this simple and straightforward solution because they say they believe that corporations have right to free speech, that money is speech, and that corporations have a "right to privacy" to prevent them from being unjustly attacked. A right that Republicans don't believe that individuals have when they wish to obtain an abortion or contraception.

Republican are fine with forcing doctors to harangue women, wasting their time and (our) money on useless tests, making them listen to fetal heartbeats and violating them with ultrasound wands. Republicans are completely fine with embarrassing and intimidating women who were raped or can't afford to support another child, but they don't want to embarrass multinational corporations by making them admit they're supporting Mitt Romney.

I used to be a Republican, but this sort of outright hypocrisy drove me out of the party. I was an independent for many years, voting for numerous Republican candidates for the state legislature, governor and congress. But as the years went by the Republican Party has ejected everyone I've ever voted for. They're even going after long-time conservative stalwarts like Dick Lugar. Dick Lugar!

The Republican Party has gone so far off the rails it's no longer safe to vote for any Republican. The enforced loyalty to parochial ideology prevents individual Republicans from voting their own consciences for fear of being stabbed in the back, like Lugar. This lock-step central-committee dictatorship simply doesn't exist in the Democratic Party, which is why I've gravitated there. Democrats, like the Blue Dogs, can still vote their own minds, but individual Republicans can no longer make their own decisions; their votes are dictated by the Powers That Be.

And Grover Norquist is the man that many believe is that Power. He's famous for having said that he wants to shrink the government until it's small enough to drown in a bathtub. By enforcing a tighter and more restrictive notion of what it is to be a Republican, and coercing Republicans at every level of government to kowtow to his demands, Norquist may eventually find himself able to fit the entire Republican Party into that bathtub.

Energy Question

I follow Gallup polls pretty closely as they are usually the best indicator of where people are at on various issues. This one on energy and the environment caught my eye for its apparent dichotomy.

Americans Split on Energy vs. Environment Trade-Off

So, while 47 percent say that energy production should be prioritized, 44 percent say that environmental protection should be prioritized. Basically, we want to have both. This is a closer margin than last year when it was 50-41 for energy production. Both of these numbers mark a shift from the early 2000s when it was flipped in favor of environmental protection.

The good news is that most Americans (by a margin of 59-35 percent) favor alternative energy to oil and coal. So why aren't our leaders taking us there?

And Reality Wins Again!

I hope we see a lot more of these types of videos!

More Like This, Please

I'm hoping that the media runs more stories like this as the election kicks into high gear this year. While I know that nearly all of the base will always believe whatever their leaders tell them, the swing voters need to see the facts and make a more informed decision. The first example is precisely what I am talking about.

ROMNEY: "The president's attention, it was elsewhere, like a government takeover of health care and apologizing for America abroad." 

THE FACTS: Obama's law keeps the private insurance industry at the heart of the health care system and avoids a single-payer government system like Canada's. It seeks to achieve universal coverage by requiring insurers to accept people regardless of medical history, subsidizing costs for many in the middle class as well as the poor, establishing new markets for those who don't get insurance at work and requiring most Americans to obtain coverage, with penalties if they don't. 

That's precisely what Romney did, first, as Massachusetts governor. 

Romney argues that states have the right to establish an individual insurance mandate and Washington doesn't — a question the Supreme Court is deciding. But whether the federal law is found constitutional or not, it does not add up to a government takeover. 

Even when fully implemented, if the court allows that, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates that 58 percent of working-age Americans and their families will be covered through employer plans — about the same as now. 

In his world travels, Obama has said at times that the U.S. acted "contrary to our traditions and ideals" in its treatment of terrorist suspects, that "America has too often been selective in its promotion of democracy," that the U.S. "certainly shares blame" for international economic turmoil and has sometimes shown arrogance toward allies. 

Obama's statements that America is not beyond reproach in its history usually come balanced with praise, and he is hardly alone among presidents in acknowledging the nation's past imperfections. But these were not apologies, formal or informal.

This last bit I will never understand. President Obama has not gone around the world apologizing for the United States. It's just an absolute lie.  I wonder how today's GOP would react to Ronald Reagan formally apologizing to the Japanese-Americans interred during World War II. One more example of how he would be labeled a commie traitor today.

Of course, the president is not above criticism either. As the article notes, SOME Republicans (not all) supported the idea of a mandate. And the president himself was against it as a candidate, although that was because he wanted a public option at the time.

Take note of the contrast here. Romney, a Republican? Out and out lying. The president? Spinning and not telling the full story. This is a great example of what I mean when I say that, while the Democrats are not above fault, they certainly do not engage in absolute fabrication with the intent to magnify hate, anger, and fear.

It's Mitt!

After last nights primaries, it's now very clear that Mitt Romney is going to be the GOP nominee. This means that a conservative will not win the White House in 2012.

All of this makes me wonder how and why people are going to vote for Mitt Romney over Barack Obama. I suppose I would understand if it's purely out of spite or high emotions. Perhaps some have even deluded themselves into thinking that Mitt Romney is actually going to do what he says he is going to do. I had someone tell me the other day (actually, I've had a few people tell me this) that he LOOKS LIKE a president and Barack Obama doesn't. I guess looking the part is of paramount importance.

But these are the only reasons I can think of that would drive people to vote for him. He's not a small government guy at all. More importantly, he's not going to create jobs. His track record shows that he's exactly the type of leader that caused the collapse of 2008. He says he wants less regulation, permanent tax cuts for the wealthy, and trickle down economics. Those policies have been shown to be failures.

Last night, he said that the president doesn't know anything about private sector job growth and has, in fact, been poor at it.

Really?

Sadly, there is no doubt in my mind that this campaign is going to be filled with "inside the bubble" statement and thinking just like this. Take a look at how the president's policies affected job creation with this interactive page. 

These are the facts on job growth during the Obama administration. Add in the stock market gains (perhaps RECORD gains) and 3 percent real GDP growth in Q4 of 2011 and Romney's statement is just plain wrong.

So, why would he be a better economic president?