Acceptable Collateral Damage?

On Friday Jeffrey Johnson shot a former co-worker to death on a New York street. Then he walked to the Empire State Building, still holding the gun, where police killed him. The police also shot nine other people on the street.

This is a tragedy, of course. But it also exposes the fantasy is that guns provide "protection." Every time there's a shooting, like in a movie theater in Aurora, or a Sikh temple in Wisconsin, or a strip mall in Tucson, some gun-hawking numbskull insists that lives would have been saved if only more people carried concealed weapons. The shootings on Friday show exactly what would happen if more people were carrying guns: more innocent bloodshed. Or, as the NRA apparently believes, acceptable collateral damage.

The police are trained in the use of weapons in pressure situations. In this case the shooter was standing on the street in broad daylight with a gun (unlike the darkened smoke-filled theater in Colorado). Yet the cops hit nine other people on the street. And the shooter did not even fire at the police:

[Police Commissioner Raymond] Kelly added: “As far as shots being fired yesterday, we had a witness that said that Johnson fired at the police. But the final count of the shells, it appears that that is not the case.”

Why were so many innocent people hit in the crossfire? (Well, since the guy didn't fire at police, I guess it wasn't really crossfire.) Most rounds fired from pistols miss their target. Pistols are inaccurate even at relatively short range and accuracy is further reduced in pressure situations. Bullets often pass through their targets and hit others. Ricochets can give bullets multiple chances to hit innocent victims.

Which means it's almost certain that if others actually did have concealed weapons and brought them out, there would have been many more dead and wounded. There's no way to tell crazed gunmen from pistol-packing vigilantes after the shooting starts: untrained vigilantes would be even more likely than the police to hit unintended targets. And then  the cops, who may have had no idea who the original aggressor was, would start shooting at them. And then the vigilantes would return fire at the cops. And then you have a big pile of corpses in front of the Empire State Building. And the original shooter may simply escape in all the confusion, smoke and blood.

Now, I'm guessing that this happened because mass shootings are in the forefront of everyone's mind. The cops, hearing gunshots in a crowded place, automatically assumed this guy was nutso and trying to take out as many people as possible. But it looks like Johnson wanted only to kill his lone archnemesis. The police apparently used maximum force to stop him as soon as possible, assuming that he was about to start shooting everyone around him.

I'm not going to criticize the cops here because there's still not enough information to know exactly what happened, and what information they had at the time, or exactly what Johnson might have said or done. Eyewitnesses at the scene may have given the cops bad information. We don't know yet, and we may never know.

But the main point is that more guns in this situation could have made a bad situation into a total bloodbath. For that reason, cities like New York, Washington and Chicago should be able to make their own laws about who can have and use guns. Gun laws that make perfect sense in rural Texas and Montana make no sense whatsoever in crowded cities like New York. If you don't like big city gun laws, don't go to big cities.

We should register each gun sale with at least as much rigor as we register voters. And make gun owners take personal responsibility for what happens to the guns they buy.

It's perfectly reasonable for a Texas rancher to carry a pistol, but a gun owned by a New York housewife will almost never protect her. It will far more likely be used to commit suicide, shoot her or her estranged husband during a domestic spat, kill one of her children when they find it loaded and play with it, or be stolen while she's at work and used to rob a liquor store, or kill a cop.

Police in big cities have long fought against liberal concealed carry laws. That's because they know how unreliable guns are as protection, and they don't want to shoot the wrong guy in a already dangerous situation.

Or get shot in the back by some vigilante who thinks he's the second coming of Clint Eastwood.

Breaking Even

If 316,000 jobs are added between now and November 6th, the president will break even on jobs since he took office. Included in their 13 slide display on the basic facts of the Obama economy, CNN illustrates in a very plain and simple way, where the president stands on jobs.

Here's the math: 4.316 million jobs were lost in the first 13 months of Obama's presidency. Since he took office, 4 million net jobs have been added back.

Given that the job losses occurred during the first year of his presidency, it's obvious that he's done a great job cleaning up the mess that was left for him.

The slide show contains several key data points for those of you who truly want to gauge the president's performance and the effect on the economy that his policies have had.

Romney Says Big Business Is Doing Fine: He Should Know

This week at a campaign fund raiser in Minnesota Mitt Romney committed a classic gaffe. He accidentally told the truth:

"Big business is doing fine in many places," Romney said during a campaign fundraiser Thursday. "They get the loans they need, they can deal with all the regulation. They know how to find ways to get through the tax code, save money by putting various things in the places where there are low tax havens around the world for their businesses."

Mitt should know: he's been evading taxes by parking his money in Swiss and Cayman Island tax havens for years. When President Obama said that the private sector was doing fine earlier this summer Republicans howled like a troop of wounded baboons.

Romney spokeswoman Andrea Saul tried to cover for her boss, saying Romney "has long said we need to simplify the tax code, close loopholes and create a more level playing field for American businesses."

But the simple fact is, Romney's campaign and the Super PACs that are carpetbombing the country with negative ads against President Obama are funded by Sheldon Adelson's Macau casinos and other big businesses that use those overseas tax havens to evade taxes that should pay for the US Defense Department, among other things.

Romney's tax proposal has been quite specific about lowering corporate and capital gains taxes, but he categorically refuses to say which loopholes he'd close. Independent analysis of his plan concluded the only possible way to make his budget numbers work was to eliminate the "loopholes" that middle-income earners use: mortgage interest deductions, employer health care deductions, deduction of state income and property taxes, municipal bonds, and so on.

Does anyone seriously believe Romney would bite Sheldon Adelson's hand after Adelson spends a hundred million bucks to put Romney in the White House? Get real...

Civil War?

Well, another one of those right wingers has gone a little funny in the head. 

Lubbock Country Judge Tom Head (no, I am not making up the name) said that President Obama will "try to give the sovereignty of the United States away to the United Nations. What do you think the public's going to do when that happens? We are talking civil unrest, civil disobedience, possibly, possibly civil war. ... I'm not talking just talking riots here and there. I'm talking Lexington, Concord, take up arms, get rid of the dictator. OK, what do you think he is going to do when that happens? He is going to call in the U.N. troops, personnel carriers, tanks and whatever."

I haven't heard a good mouth foam about the UN in a while so this was certainly a breath of fresh air. I wonder if he is one of Kevin Baker's regular commenters?

A Perfect Summation

Andy over at ElectoralVote has a great paragraph up about Mitt Romney's taxes.

Gawker.com has published 950 pages of internal Bain Capital documents involving Mitt Romney's finances and investments. The information is extremely complex but shows that one of Romney's driving forces was (legal) tax avoidance at all costs through the use of exceedingly complex financial instruments (often in the Cayman Islands), use of the carried interest provision in the Internal Revenue Code, and other similar maneuvers. 

Even if all these things are legal, one can ask the question of whether a person who has apparently devoted much of his life to paying the absolute minimum tax possible by using every trick in the book is setting a good example for everyone else. The document dump also exposes the lengths to which the very wealthy will go to avoid paying taxes by using methods available only to the very wealthiest Americans. It also raises the question of whether the laws should be changed to prevent this kind of tax avoidance.

I couldn't have said it better myself!

God Bless America

Despite the continued efforts to get the country to believe that our economic woes are the fault of the president, our middle class blames Congress, the finance sector, private corporations, the Bush Administration, and foreign competition before they blame the president...just as they should.

Perhaps I need to rethink some of the themes of my posts. The people of this country aren't buying the bullshit that is being spewed about Barack Obama so why do I need to discuss it?

Argument over.

Finally An Answer!

There seems to be very little if nothing we can talk about when it comes to Mitt Romney. We can't talk about his taxes (even though he wants to change the rest of ours). We can't talk about his time at Bain (even though he is using it as a reason as to why he'd be able to turn our economy around). We can't talk about the Ryan Budget (even though he chose Paul Ryan to be his VP).

So what can we talk about?

Ah, got it!

The Conservative Case for Abortion

In recent years conservatives have proclaimed themselves to be a party of ideology. They have set up dozens of "think tanks" where they pay academics to justify selfishness and greed with policies like supply-side economics, denying climate change, and eliminating taxes on capital gains.

It's been reported that Republicans will again include in their party platform a constitutional ban on abortion with no exceptions. But this is completely arbitrary. After all, conservatives claim they believe all life is sacred, yet they favor the death penalty, limiting appeals in capital cases, summary execution of suspected terrorists, proactive wars with collateral damage (i.e., children killed by American bombardment), and Stand Your Ground laws that give people license to kill anyone they feel threatened by.

Conservatives could just as easily support abortion as they oppose it. So I will now present the conservative case for abortion, using the same sort of logic and rationalizations that conservative think tanks use to justify their other positions on killing, along with a smattering of religious and folk wisdom in the spirit of Pat Robertson and Rush Limbaugh. 

Fair warning: these arguments may well revolt you.

Number 1 Think Tank Argument:

The government has no right to tell a woman what to do with her body. A woman's person is completely inviolable, even more so than a man's home in the Castle Doctrine. Natural Law dictates that a person has total responsibility for and dominion over their own bodies, and an unborn fetus, which derived all matter and nourishment for growth from the mother, is essentially another bodily organ, like an extra spleen, until such time as it becomes an independent and sentient human being capable of survival outside the womb. As such, an abortion is just another medical procedure, like removing a benign tumor.

Number 1 Limbaugh Argument:

The government ain't gonna tell your woman she can't have an abortion. You're gonna tell her what to do. If you don't want her to have that baby, she ain't gonna have that baby. She probably got pregnant to trap you anyhow. If you're gonna be on the hook for child support, you're gonna decide whether she has it or not.

Robertson arguments:

Because Eve ate from the Tree of Knowledge, all men are born with original sin. Aborted children are guilty as sin, by definition. Any argument that unborn children are "innocent victims" is inherently flawed.

The Bible says unborn children do not count as real persons, nor do they have any significant value:

According to Exodus 21:12-13, killing another man is punishable by death or exile: "Death is the punishment for murder. But if you did not intend to kill someone, and I, the Lord, let it happen anyway, you may run for safety to a place that I have set aside." But the penalty for killing an unborn child is a mere fine, as indicated in Exodus 21:22: "If men, while fighting, do damage to a woman with child, causing the loss of the child, but no other evil comes to her, the man will have to make payment up to the amount fixed by her husband, in agreement with the decision of the judges." Since the husband decides the worth of a fetus, the husband can decide whether the wife will have an abortion.

"And if it be from a month old even unto five years old, then thy estimation shall be of the male five shekels of silver, and for the female thy estimation shall be three shekels of silver." -- Leviticus 27:6. Newborns and fetuses are worth nothing.

"Number the children of Levi after the house of their fathers, by their families: every male from a month old and upward shalt thou number them. And Moses numbered them according to the word of the LORD." -- Numbers 3:15-16. Newborns and fetuses don't count.

Original Intent:

If the Framers of the Constitution intended that the unborn have rights, they would have included it in the Constitution. Just as it's wrong to invent new rights for gays out of thin air, something the Framers would never have agreed to, it's wrong to invent new rights for the unborn, who aren't even living, breathing real people capable of independent thought or existence. After all, if a slave was counted as 3/5 of a person, an unborn fetus is obviously zero.

Rape:
There's no question that abortion should be allowed in the case of rape, if not required: a rapist can't be rewarded by allowing the child of his evil act to be born. And the child born of that evil seed will probably be evil as well: like father, like son.

Furthermore, the rapist's child is occupying a woman's womb where another man's child could be hosted. This represents a large lost opportunity cost, since the market price of a surrogate mother can run into six figures. The rapist is therefore literally stealing a small fortune should his bastard be allowed to come to term.
Personal Responsibility:

If people can't afford to provide for a child, they've got to do what's right and get rid of it. Putting their unwanted bastard up for adoption is pointless as well: it'll turn out to be a loser like its folks.

Economics:

Stand Your Ground laws allow you to pursue and kill someone who has stolen something from you, even if the thief is fleeing and you're completely safe. Since it costs hundreds of thousands of dollars to raise a child, an unwanted child is like a thief who just keeps stealing from you for 18 years, presenting a grave threat to your economic livelihood. Since that unborn thief doesn't even count as a person, the government has no business telling you that you can't get rid of it.

Safety:

Women are 14 times more likely to die from childbirth than they are from abortion. It makes far more sense to abort an unwanted child than to chance death, serious injury or economic ruin. Why risk making a woman's children orphans and her husband a widower out of a cockamamie liberal concern for the non-existent rights of a non-person?

Welfare Reform:

People on welfare are a tremendous drain on the economy, sucking the life out of hard-working taxpayers. These welfare queens have oodles of kids and the rest of us are on the hook to pay for them. Kicking them off welfare isn't good enough: their kids will wind up in school, at least for a few years while they drag down the performance of non-welfare kids, and after that they'll drop out and become drug dealers, or get pregnant and go on welfare, repeating the cycle.

Therefore, in line with states' rights and in the interest of reducing costs, states should be able to use Medicaid funds to provide welfare recipients with free abortions so that the rest of us don't have to pay for the consequences of their fun. In addition states should be able to use Medicaid funds to incent welfare recipients to have abortions. Spending a few bucks up front will save hundreds of billions of dollars in the long run: most of those welfare queens would jump at an extra hundred bucks for their crack habit. Plus, it'll reduce the number of Democrat voters.

Finally, activist judges and the federal government should stop interfering with states who are trying to balance budgets. They should allow states to resume sterilizing women with multiple children on welfare, a practice which meddlesome Northerners forced Southern states to stop in the 1970s.

Yes, these arguments are shallow and hateful. But that's what conservative think tanks do for a living: rationalize the irrational and justify the unjustifiable.

He's Not The Only One

Todd Akin isn't the only one who lives in some bizarro universe in which women can't get pregnant from rape. Representative Steve King from Iowa:

KMEG 14 - News, Weather, Sports for Sioux City and Siouxland |

He hasn't heard of statutory rape or incest? The United Way must be making things up, I guess. 
These people should not be allowed to run anything. Ever.

The Republicans' Akin Heart

Swarms of Republicans are now calling for Todd Akin to withdraw from the Senate race in Missouri. Akin is drawing fire for comment he made on a television show about pregnancy resulting from rape:

From what I understand from doctors, that’s really rare. If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down. But let’s assume that maybe that didn’t work or something, I think there should be some punishment, but the punishment ought to be of the rapist, and not attacking the child.

Republicans are worried that Akin will lose his race against Claire McCaskill, reducing the chance of a Republican takeover in the Senate, and that his continued presence will allow the Democrats to characterize him and other Republicans as continuing the war on women. Worse, they're afraid that this may influence the attitudes of women in general, possibly costing the Romney/Ryan ticket the election.

So now Republicans are falling over themselves to distance themselves from what Akin said. But many of them have been advancing this very idea. For example, Paul Ryan co-sponsored legislation in 2011 that would strengthen federal prohibitions on abortion funding, redefining rape so that only "forcible rape" (Akin's "legitimate rape") would be exempt. That is, if you go out on a date with a guy and he rapes  you, or a coworker rapes you in the office, or your brother rapes you at home, tough luck: you've got to bear the scumbag's child.

Republicans thought they had put the war on women behind them. The public's memory is fleeting, and the all-male Congressional hearing on birth control was months ago, as were Rush Limbaugh's despicable comments about Sandra Fluke, the elections in which states tried to define human life as beginning at conception, effectively outlawing all abortion, and so on.

But now Akin has committed the unpardonable sin of saying out loud what so many Republicans believe in their heart of hearts: that women who get raped deserve it, that they should suffer the consequences for tempting men, and all women should pay the price for Eve eating the apple and bringing all this sin down upon mankind.

The Generosity Gap

A new study claims that religious people and Republican-leaning states give more money to charity than the non-religious. Like most such studies there are some picky details that undermine the entire gist of the report.

The study found:

The most generous state was Utah, where residents gave 10.6 percent of their discretionary income to charity. Next were Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee and South Carolina. The least generous was New Hampshire, at 2.5 percent, followed by Maine, Vermont, Massachusetts and Rhode Island.

Hmm... 10.6%. Why does 10% sound so familiar?

In Mormon teachings, for instance, Latter Day Saints are required to pay a 10% tithe to remain church members in good standing, which helps explain the high giving rate in heavily-Mormon Utah.

In other words, the people who contribute the most to "charity" are actually giving their money to their church, which threatens them with eternal damnation if they don't fork over the cash. This is like the bad old days when the Catholic Church offered "indulgences" to the wealthy, in which their "pardoner" would hold their soul hostage for the sins they had confessed, exchanging cash to avoid harsh penance.

Giving money to a church isn't charity. It's primarily an insurance plan for your immortal soul. It's also a fee-for-service arrangement that pays for the minister to act as an adviser and weekly stand-up comic. It's mostly used to pay for mortgages, building maintenance, operating expenses, and salaries, and sometimes subsidizes day care and education for church members. In large church organizations the local franchises send money off to headquarters to maintain the central hierarchy in the style to which it is accustomed and round up more customers ("missions"). Appeals for money for actual charitable works, such as the "poor box" and assistance for natural disasters, are made separately from the normally expected donations.

In other words, churches are and always have been big businesses. The ascendance of brazen money-grubbing televangelists is simply the logical extension of the model.

The article doesn't have enough detail to know for sure, but the numbers in Utah suggest that charitable giving is pretty much the same across the country, if you discount contributions to churches, or at least the portion that used for hierarchical overhead and services provided directly back to customers.

So it doesn't seem that the unchurched and Democrats are any less generous. In addition:

Alan Wolfe, a political science professor at Boston College, said it's wrong to link a state's religious makeup with its generosity. People in less religious states are giving in a different way by being more willing to pay higher taxes so the government can equitably distribute superior benefits, Wolfe said. And the distribution is based purely on need, rather than religious affiliation or other variables, said Wolfe, also head of the college's Boisi Center for Religion and Public Life.

People who live states with higher taxes fund the support infrastructure for better education, better roads and public welfare. That helps all people regardless of race, color or creed. Doesn't that seem more generous?

Wrong on Wind, Right on Ethanol

In a recent opinion piece George Will blurted out the following as if it were the most elementary truth you learn in grade school:

This may seem a minor matter, as well as an obvious and easy decision for a conservative. The wind tax credit is, after all, industrial policy, the government picking winners and losers in defiance of market signals — industrial policy always is a refusal to heed the market’s rejection of that which the government singles out for favoritism.

This is a completely fatuous proclamation, ignorant of history. The federal government has always picked winners and losers when setting industrial policy.

When the government wanted to expand westward it picked winners and losers by granting railroads rights of way that ran roughshod over anyone who happened to be in their way.

When the federal government built the freeway system it picked winners and losers by building a transportation system for the trucking industry, completely undermining the rail system that it has subsidized only decades before and giving automobile and oil companies huge market opportunities.

Oil companies reap huge subsidies from the government, thousands of times greater than the subsidies that wind power receives.

But what about Will's infamous "market signals?" The market has been sending signals about the price of oil for decades. In the Seventies the Arab oil embargo sent a huge shock through the American economy, and allowed the Japanese to gain entry into the American automobile market and almost crush Detroit. Saddam's invasion of Kuwait sent a signal strong enough for us to start a war. Every time Iran says boo about the Straits of Hormuz the price of oil spikes.

Every year or two there's another massive oil spill, sending another market signal. This summer's drought and the high price of corn sends another market signal: the warming climate, caused by excess CO2 from burning fossil fuel, will increase the cost of food and reduce yields.

Will is right about one thing: not all subsidies are equal. But instead of worshiping at the altar of the market, he should pay some attention to the sciences of geology, agronomy and physics. He lumps together the wind tax credit and subsidies for the production of ethanol, which is usually made from corn. He's dead wrong on wind, but right on ethanol.

Geology: there's only a finite amount of oil, and it's going to run out in our lifetimes, especially as Asia and Africa begin to demand the lifestyle Americans enjoy. Its price fluctuates wildly and constantly, and because it mostly comes from countries antagonistic to the United States (the Middle East, Venezuela, Russia), it's critical to ensure that we have other sources of energy.

Agronomy: corn-based ethanol is just about the worst form of fuel possible. It's made from a foodstuff, so every bushel of corn turned into ethanol is a bushel of corn that people and livestock can't eat. Corn requires massive amounts of water and often requires more energy (usually from oil) for cultivation, fertilizer, transport, and so on, than it produces as ethanol.

Physics: once the infrastructure in place wind power is essentially free. The wind will still be blowing strong across North Dakota long after the oil boom there busts and the derricks fall silent.

The government has to be responsible for setting industrial policy for the long term, because multinational corporations have no concern about the future of the United States. They only care about profits in the next quarter and whether the stock price gains will garner the CEO his bonus. Wind power subsidies are ridiculously cheap compared to the amount of money the government spends subsidizing the oil and automobile industries with the highway system alone.

The only reason to oppose wind power subsidies is to hammer political opponents who support them. Wind power isn't some distant pipe dream. The United States has about 48,000 megawatts of installed capacity. That powers tens of millions of homes.

Wind: it's the conservative choice.

See, This Is What Happens...

The first term Senator from Missouri, Claire McCaskill, was pretty much toast this fall. Even with the nomination of the extremely conservative Todd Akin, she was likely going to lose the election.

Funny things always happen, though, when you have a far right wing candidate...things like them opening their mouths and talking. 

First of all, from what I understand from doctors [pregnancy from rape] is really rare…If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.

Wow.

Do we really want to trust someone this ignorant with the task of running our country?

He Built It And He Had Help

James C. Roumell, one of those wealthy job creators, has a brilliant piece in The Washington Post which pretty much puts the last nail in the coffin on all the mouth foaming about President Obama's recent comment on having help to build a business. He also breaks a few myths about Detroit but I'll leave the denizens of Bill Whittle to continue to live in their fictional world on that subject.

First, let's find out a little about Mr. Roumell.

Today, I own a small business, an asset management firm with $300 million in assets. Last year we launched the Roumell Opportunistic Value Fund (RAMSX) and hired three more people. We’re growing and creating jobs.

Sounds like someone Mitt Romney would like to cozy up to as an example of what's great about America. But wait!

I suppose I could pound my chest and take credit for my journey from Detroit to Chevy Chase, from working class to professional. I could say I built it myself. But this wouldn’t be true.

Aw, snap. Well, fuck this guy. He's a collectivist!

It gets worse.

I went to college with the help of Pell Grants and government loans. Twenty years ago I met Claiborne Pell and was able to thank the former Democratic senator from Rhode Island for introducing the Higher Education Act of 1965, which allowed me to go to college. 

My business has been made possible by the Investment Company Act of 1940 and the Investment Advisers Act of 1940. These laws created practices and transparency that enabled a financial services industry to emerge. After the stock market collapse of 1929, the public rightly did not trust Wall Street and needed assurances that the industry would operate within a reliable set of rules.

A collectivist and a statist. Is he even an American?

Since Mr. Roumell is an investor, doesn't that mean he is a victim of Barack Obama's policies that have created uncertainty in the marketplace?

Nope.

Nothing in terms of “regulations” or “business uncertainty” has stopped me from investing capital for a return. In fact, the stability that government involvement brought to the capital markets over the past three years, evidenced by a 100 percent increase in the Standard and Poor’s 500-stock index since March 2009, probably enabled my business to survive. The federal government’s back-stopping of money market funds in the fall of 2008 ended, effectively in one day, what was turning into a 1930s-style bank run.

I thought the government was supposed to just let the free market do its thing. Otherwise, it always makes things worse, right? Oh, and on Friday, the S&P closed at 1418.16, near a four year high. 

Mr. Roumell closes with two simple facts.

The countries that spend the least on government as a percentage of their economy (gross domestic product) are countries with little business success. Haiti, Bangladesh and Afghanistan spend 16, 13 and 9 percent of their GDP, respectively. Our federal government has spent around 20 percent of GDP since World War II. Europe typically spends slightly over 50 percent, so we’re a long way off even after factoring in an additional 15 percent for state and local government spending.

Yep.

And to those people who still can't understand President Obama's comment?

I did work harder, and perhaps more imaginatively, than many colleagues. But does that mean I built it myself? Does it diminish my success to be grateful for the public investments that so clearly contributed to my success? Every successful person knows, and will admit if he is honest, that luck played a role in his good fortune.

Why is it so difficult for the right to admit this?