Yes, They Are!!

Fox News VERY Upset That The Economy Is Recovering

A Tale of Two Tapes

Two videos have shaped the political landscape in the last four years: the ACORN "sting" video and the Mitt Romney 47% video. Both have back been in the news in the last couple of weeks, and the difference between them is instructive.

The ACORN "sting" video was made by James O'Keefe, and posted on Breitbart.com in 2009. It purported to show how ACORN employees helped a pimp evade taxes. The video essentially destroyed ACORN. In reality, the video was heavily edited, a complete lie and fabrication. The people at ACORN only pretended to go along with O'Keefe, and immediately reported the incident to the authorities. California authorities cut a deal with O'Keefe and the woman who accompanied him to get at the man who ordered the sting, apparently Andrew Breitbart, but Breitbart died, escaping prosecution. The video is back in the news because O'Keefe finally paid $100,000 for his loss in the civil suit filed by the ACORN employee that O'Keefe slandered. O'Keefe went on to commit a number of other video hatchet jobs on Shirley Sherrod, Mary Landrieu and others.

The Mitt Romney 47% video was back in the news because the identity of the man who recorded it was revealed: Scott Prouty, the bartender at the ritzy fund-raising meeting where Mitt Romney uttered those fateful words about the 47%. Unlike O'Keefe's video, Prouty's involved no trickery or lies. Romney really said all that stuff. The interesting thing is that Prouty didn't think the important part was the 47% part:

Prouty felt Romney's attitude was telling, and didn't like that he made a crack about speeding up his service soon after arriving at the fateful dinner party on May 17, 2012. However, what offended Prouty was Romney's description of touring a factory in China where workers are packed into dormitories surrounded by barbed wire (to keep out all the people desperate to work there, the bosses told Romney). "He just walked though this horrendous place and thought, 'Hey, this is pretty good,'" said Prouty.

The differences in the motivations between O'Keefe and Prouty are telling. O'Keefe was ticked that ACORN registered voters in minority areas, helping increase Democratic turnout in the 2008 election. Prouty was angered at how Romney treated the help like dirt, especially compared to Bill Clinton, who actually acknowledged their existence.

The 47% video wasn't the nail in the coffin for Romney. It hurt, but the last straw was high Democratic voter turnout. In the end, O'Keefe's and other Republicans' attempts to suppress Democratic turnout failed miserably. People like Karl Rove were so confident that the fix was in that they refused to believe the results when Fox News called Ohio for Obama in 2012.

Republicans have a long history of dirty tricks. Watergate was only one of Nixon's many dirty tricks. Nixon's thugs even coined a new term, "ratfucking," for their tactics.

Republicans even use dirty tricks on each other: Bush used them against John McCain in the 2000 South Carolina primary when his pollsters asked voters, "Would you be more likely or less likely to vote for John McCain if you knew that he fathered an illegitimate black child?" That episode provided the impetus for McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform: the only reason McCain was a "maverick" on campaign reform was because he was screwed over by Republican dirty tricks and wanted revenge.

And the dirty tricks keep on coming. The Daily Caller website pulled a Breitbart when it released a video that featured prostitutes saying that New Jersey Senator Robert Menendez paid them for sex. The prostitutes were paid to lie, and apparently The Daily Caller instigated the charade, though there's not yet a smoking gun linking the site to the lawyer who arranged the video, but apparently a mystery man named "Carlos" is involved.

The best example of a Republican dirty trick was in 2004, when CBS newsman Dan Rather was taken in by fake documents about Bush going AWOL from the Texas Air National Guard. It was a perfect ploy, because the falsified documents actually told the truth, but since they were fake and Rather was so easily duped by them, it discredited the entire story, defused the issue of Bush's military service during the Vietnam war, and destroyed Rather's career.

It turns out that Rather was right in the end. Bush really did weasel out of his commitment to serve in the Texas Air National Guard, which his father wangled to keep W. out of Nam. Whether it was because W. was so strung out on coke he couldn't land a plane anymore, or because he went off to play politics we'll never know. The funny thing is, Bush himself doesn't know either.

A Failed State

Rebels have seized control of the Central African Republic and President François Bozizé has fled the country. They met little resistance as the country is one of the most impoverished in Africa.

Once again, a strong man who promised democratic elections has seen power slip away. This cycle has been repeated so many times since the great colonial push at the turn of the last century that it's pretty much routine at this point. As has been the case in the past, the people will end up suffering as the rebels will plunder and loot what little wealth there is in the CAR.

My question is this: what can the Global North do, if anything, to prevent things like this happening? Investment? Their heavy dependence on foreign aid has actually made things worse. We could also simply shrug and say, "Oh well. It's their country. If they fuck it up, so be it."

It seems to me, though, that in 2013 we can come up with a different paradigm and it starts with building a sustainable, free market economy there. France should be heavily involved as they are primarily responsible for leaving a power vacuum upon their exit. The country certainly has plenty of food crops on which it could build an agricultural market. The diamond trade could also be more heavily regulated as 30-50 percent of the country's diamonds leave under illegal circumstances. Improvements in their economy will lead to more democratic policies. Prosperity tends to do that.

Being a landlocked country presents a challenge, of course, but I think that the Central African Republic should be used as an example of moving forward in the Global South. With yesterday's events, I've now seen this film far too many times and it's clear we need to do something different.

Healing

The recent cover story of the Christian Science Monitor is simply magnificent and speaks very deeply to great power of community in times of crisis. The local church as an extension of supportive faith is vital to healing and Newtown United Methodist is an excellent and most illustrative example of how well this can work.

I was very moved by this piece and took a great deal of comfort in how much love there is in Newtown in the face of unspeakable horror.

Logical Fallacies

I came across this site the other day after one of my ex-students (who reads this blog and Kevin's blog) pointed it out to me. She told me that the posters there and here can be characterized by this photo and the caption below it.

MY DAUGHTER NEVER GAVE BIRTH TO A PLATYPUS AND THAT'S WHY YOU SHOULDN'T MAKE CHEESE IN CANADA!

Sadly, that's what it feels like at times.

The GOP's Real Agenda?

Tim Dickinson: "After watching voters punish the GOP in the 2012 elections, Republican elites have been talking a brave game about reforms that would make the party less repulsive to Latinos, women and gay-friendly millennials..." 

"Don't be fooled. On the ground, a very different reality is unfolding: In the Republican-led Congress, GOP-dominated statehouses and even before the nation's highest court, the reactionary impulses of the Republican Party appear unbowed. Across the nation, the GOP's severely conservative agenda - which seeks to impose job-killing austerity, to roll back voting and reproductive rights, to deprive the working poor of health care, and to destroy agencies that protect the environment from industry and consumers from predatory banks - is moving forward under full steam."

I hope he's right because that means we'll take back the House in 2014.

What Do They Do?

Someone asked me in comments a while back just what exactly right to work laws do to a state's economy? Well, here's a pretty good summation. Here's the one that jumped out at me.

2) Under right-to-work laws, workers reap fewer gains from economic growth. Supporters of right-to-work laws often argue that they’ll help attract more businesses to a state. Opponents retort that weakening unions will lead to an erosion of wages. (A large Economic Policy Institute study from 2011 found that, after controlling for a host of factors, right-to-work states have lower wages on average than pro-union states.) 

Both arguments might be correct. One careful study conducted by Hofstra’s Lonnie Stevans in 2007 found that right-to-work laws do help boost the number of businesses in a state — but the gains mostly went to owners, while average wages went down. ”Although right-to-work states may be more attractive to business,” Stevans concludes, “this does not necessarily translate into enhanced economic verve in the right-to-work state if there is little ‘trickle-down’ from business owners to the non-unionized workers.” 

So business owners gain, and workers lose. One possible retort is that these states could simply set up new safety-net programs to compensate workers who are hurt. But that leads to another question: Without strong unions in place, who will push for these policies?

So, more business comes to the state but the gains go right to the owners. Paging Joseph Stiglitz!

What continues to amaze me is how the Right, supposedly "classic liberals" influenced by Adam Smith, vociferously fight for more wealthy for the modern day version of the aristocracy. Somewhere Klemens von Metternich is applauding....

The Most Irresponsible People I Have Ever Seen

When I arrived at school today, the office staff was buzzing. There was a shooting at a school in New Prague, a city 45 miles south of the Twin Cities. Everyone began checking and refreshing their smart phones. The next bit of news we got was that there were hospital staging areas being set up. The principal sent out an email saying that it wouldn't be long before the students started getting texts from their parents making sure they were OK. Our instructions were to tell them that our school was safe and to focus on getting their work done. It was a tense few minutes.

Thankfully, it turned out to be a prank call by a 12 year old and no one was hurt. Yet, this incident is what educators and their support staff now have to deal with every day. People that don't work in a school simply have no idea what runs through your head when something like this happens or even if it is just your standard lock down drill. The simple fact that we have to do it is a really disgusting statement on our culture. Adding to the nausea is that our country is effectively being held hostage by the most irresponsible people I have ever seen: the gun lobby and their supporters. Their view of the American people is FUBAR.

I say this because these are the same people who claim that because human beings are, by nature, corrupt, we should never trust them with the responsibility to govern. They whine like little babies about liberals and how the left's embrace of Jean Jacques Rousseau's social contract is naive and ultimately destructive. Yet, when it comes to guns, suddenly (as if out of someone's ass) people are very responsible and it's, "Fuck you, don't take my gun, Hitler!!"

The irony here is that gun right supporters are fully embracing Rousseau's concept of the general will, whether they want to admit it or not. Recall that Rousseau posited that the general will of the people was to embrace their natural state of liberty and freedom. Any sort of collective action would always be good and further the rights of the individual. In the case of gun rights, it's the second amendment. People will always be responsible and act in their best interests because the general will dictates that liberty must preserved.

Even though today's incident resulted in no injuries nor fatalities, it illustrates just how irresponsible people can be. Most people can't be trusted with a phone let alone a gun. What does that say about the gun lobby and supporters who place so much faith in the American people who continually shit all over them every day with thousands of gun deaths every year? Interestingly, I think that gun supporters were onto something when they suggest we adopt a system that is similar to Israel's gun laws. No one is prohibited from owning a gun but if you want to own one, you have to prove that you can be responsible with one. In fact, I'd go as far to say that would include any gun, automatic or semi-automatic. Go through all the necessary training, mental tests and background checks...all of which will be checked on a regular basis...and you are free to build yourself an arsenal if you so desire.

In short, don't ban the guns (the supply), ban some of the people (the demand). They are not, by nature, responsible nor are they good.

The Liberal Media?

Rockin' The Shizzle

The American manufacturing sector has taken a few hits over the last couple of decades but they are still a powerhouse, according to James Fallows. And the future looks even brighter. The advent of 3D printing, primarily originating from the United States, is going to drastically change manufacturing in the world.

“A revolution is coming to the creation of things, comparable to the Internet’s effect on the creation and dissemination of ideas,” one industrial design expert told Fallows.

Further, with wages in China rising and workers getting pickier about their jobs, American manufacturing is experiencing reshoring. It's also important to note that the American manufacturing sector is still the largest in the world despite all the doom and gloom we see on parade in the media.

Add in the energy boom that is going to happen in the next decade and I think America is going to be even more impressive than we are right now!

Hmm...

And that's the end of the mouth foaming over Benghazi...

The Short-Sighted Opposition to Renewable Energy

These days the future of solar and wind power is in doubt in the United States, because fracking has increased the supply of natural gas and oil. But other countries are not so short-sighted. From a story on NPR:

Abu Dhabi, the most oil-rich of the United Arab Emirates, is now home to the world's single-largest concentrated solar power plant.

Why would a country floating in oil use solar power? From Bloomberg:

Countries in the Middle East and North Africa are developing renewables to meet the growing energy demands of burgeoning populations and economies. Adding clean-power generators may help oil-rich nations in the region to conserve more of their crude and gas for export, reducing their use of the fuels to generate power that’s sold at subsidized prices. [Emphasis added.]

Similarly, the main reason Iran is enriching uranium is to develop nuclear power so they can export oil for dollars instead of burning it to generate domestic electricity. However, I suspect they're jealous of North Korea, Israel, Pakistan, India, South Africa and China, and many in their government may feel they need nuclear weapons to counter the existential threat that George Bush made in his "axis of evil" speech: they don't want to become the next Iraq and may be trying to emulate North Korea.

The United States may soon become a net fossil fuel exporter, but conservative forces in the United States are doing everything they can to sabotage alternative energy sources. For example, Bill Koch (one half of the infamous Koch brothers) has spent more than $1.5 million fighting the Cape Wind project in Massachusetts.

Cape Wind is a proposed wind farm off Cape Cod that was recently approved. It will produce up to 454 megawatts of electricity. That would offset the burning of as much as 100 million gallons of oil, or an equivalent amount of natural gas. Oil and gas that we could export to other countries if we didn't use so much of it ourselves. If you take into consideration the pollution and carbon footprint, it's a no-brainer.

Once the wind turbines are installed, the main costs are maintenance for the machinery and power lines. As long as the wind blows, and it blows nearly all the time off the Atlantic, they'll generate power. It's not free energy, but it's as close to free as you can get.

Contrast that with the oil fields that the Koch brothers have been drilling. Ten and 20 years ago those fields were given up as dry and worthless. But the technology of fracking has changed that, and now they're getting oil literally by squeezing it out of stones. But that's only going to last so long. The oil and gas in the shale is the last dribs and drabs of large deposits that we long ago depleted.

North Dakota is now experiencing an oil boom, and is suffering a great deal of social dislocation as entire towns are overrun by temporary workers moving in to cash in. Towns like Williston have doubled in population. Problems include prostitution, rape and even murder -- Sherry Arnold, a high school teacher, was kidnapped while jogging along a highway. She was murdered by two men looking for work in the oilfields.

The social mess in North Dakota is temporary: in a few years the fields will be completely fracked and the oil companies will pull out, and the oil workers will leave. But the environmental mess will be around forever: toxic spills on the surface and contamination of the aquifer are inevitable, because it's impossible to properly seal every well, as we saw from BP's huge oil spill in the Gulf. Places like Williston may well become filthy, polluted ghost towns where no one wants to live, unfit for raising cattle or growing wheat. That same fate has befallen hundreds of mining and oil towns in the west over the last century.

As off Cape Cod, the wind blows all the time on the plains of North Dakota. It's a prime location for generating wind power. Turbines erected there would continue to produce electricity long after the Koch brothers pull their equipment out of the state and all the temporary workers move on to the next boom town. But the people who would maintain the pollution-free wind turbines would have jobs forever. Which is the better industry socially, economically, and environmentally for North Dakota — and the country — long term?

So when the Koch brothers spend their millions fighting the Cape Cod wind farm, and millions more trying to elect opponents of the wind energy tax credit like Mitt Romney and Scott Brown, we know it's not because they care about the well-being of the people in North Dakota and Massachusetts. It's because they're trying to use the levers of government to prevent a new generation of technology from taking hold, eliminating the competition for their products and jacking up the price of oil and natural gas.

This isn't about government picking winners and losers: government has always invested in the future by promoting next-generation industries and new technologies. That included special treatment for the railroads, special treatment of oil companies with royalty-free leases, special treatment for the automobile and oil industries through the construction of the interstate highway system, special treatment for aeronautics and electronics companies with the space program, and even the development of fracking technology, which the federal government spent billions of dollars on at a time when companies like Standard Oil thought it was too expensive to be practical.

Instead of fighting wind and solar power, the Koch brothers should get in on the ground floor and fund their own research so that they can continue to rake in the dough once they've sucked all those oil and gas wells dry. Because once the oil's gone, it's gone for good. But instead the Koch brothers are poor stewards of their company and their nation's natural resources.

The guys in Abu Dhabi understand this. Why don't the Koch brothers?

Occupy?

Here's an interesting piece from a few weeks ago about the Occupy Movement. While they may appear to have fallen off the map (at least according to the bigger media outlets), stories like this pop up all the time.

“Many participants had a personal connection to the economic crisis that helped spur the Occupy movement,” said Ruth Milkman, sociology professor and co-author of the study, in a release. “You had people graduating from high school and college, only to find that the economy wasn’t working for them.” Professor Milkman, and two other professors, Stephanie Luce, and Penny Lewis, interviewed 729 protesters during last year's May Day events, and conducted longer interviews with 25 people "who were core activists in the movement."

I see this movement perhaps morphing into a student loan/student debt advocacy group. I also give them credit for not making specific demands and staying true to their vision. My only beef remains with the physical occupation meme but it appears that their web site may be changing that.

Defending Tradition or Cashing In?

In this Lenten season Sarah Palin has announced that she's writing a book about the war on Christmas. The cynic in me knows that this is just her attempt to cash in the phony war on Christmas now that her career in politics and phony TV journalism has gone down the tubes. Even so, the idea of the war on Christmas does resonate with a certain segment of the population.

Palin is trying to sell the book as a statement of her religious beliefs:

According to the publisher, the book will advocate "reserving Jesus Christ in Christmas – whether in public displays, school concerts (or) pageants. Palin also "will share personal memories and traditions from her own Christmases and illustrate the reasons why the celebration of Jesus Christ's nativity is the centerpiece of her faith."

The irony is that most of the manifestations of the Christmas season have absolutely nothing to do with Christ. Christmas trees, wreaths, holly, yule logs, egg nog, mistletoe and all the rest are all pagan European traditions. Many of the traditions associated with the Nativity itself are of pagan origin. Even the day — December 25th — is certainly not the date of Christ's birth, but that of the pagan Roman holiday Saturnalia, the celebration of the winter solstice that took place in the temple to the pagan Roman god Saturn.'

December 25th is also the birthday of Sol Invictus, the Roman sun god and patron of soldiers. There has long been disagreement about whether Christians took that day over, or whether they arrived at December 25th by adding nine months to the vernal equinox, when the Annunciation (the knocking-up of Mary) was celebrated.

Many Christian holidays have pagan antecedents and are steeped in pagan traditions. When I was a kid my mother was a Jehovah's Witness (she has since gotten better, thank you), so I got an earful of this. The Witnesses don't celebrate Christmas because it's a pagan holiday, or even birthdays; they believe that Christ commanded them only to celebrate his death and resurrection. That is, Easter.

But even Easter is littered with pagan traditions. The word "Easter" itself derives from Eostre, a pagan Anglo-Saxon fertility goddess. Hence the eggs and bunny rabbits. In most European languages Easter is based on the word for passover: Pascua (Spanish), Пасха (Russian, Paskha), Pâques (French), and so on.

But our pagan past is everpresent in our daily lives. Literally. In the English and Germanic traditions the days of the week are named for pagan gods. Sunday: the sun god's day (in Rome, Sol Invictus), Monday: the moon god's day, Tuesday: Tiw's or Tyr's day (Tyr was the one-handed Norse god of combat), Wednesday: Woden's day (Odin, the primary Norse god), Thursday: Thor's day (the Norse god of thunder — it's Donnerstag or thunder day in German), Friday: Freya's day (the norse god of beauty, love and sex), Saturday: Saturn's day (the Roman god).

The Graeco-Roman tradition is to name days after the planets, but since those planets are named for gods it's really the same as the Germanic. The interesting thing is that in most European languages there is a deviation from the pagan naming scheme: in the Latin languages Sunday is some form of "the Lord's day": dimanche in French, domingo in Spanish, from the Latin dominus. In German Wednesday is Mittwoch, or mid-week. In Norwegian (and other Scandinavian languages) Saturday is lørdag, or "washing day." But in English we honor the pagan gods to this day.

In Russian the days are numbered, which I'm sure Palin would say was a commie plot against religion. Monday, понедельник (ponedelnik), is the first day of the week; Tuesday,  вторник (vtornik), is the second; Wednesday, среда (sreda), as in German is the middle day; Thursday, четверг (chetverg), is the fourth; Friday, пятница (pyatnitsa), is the fifth. And then it gets interesting: Saturday, суббота (subbota), is literally the Sabbath. Sunday, воскресенье (voskresenye), is literally the Resurrection.

So, even Stalin the atheist used Christian names for Saturday and Sunday, while conservative American Christians like Sarah Palin doggedly insist on propitiating pagan deities every single day of the week. These same conservatives attend church on the day reserved for Sol Invictus, the Roman god of the Unconquered Sun, instead of the true Sabbath, which occurs on Saturday.

In their defense, these conservatives are simply ignorant of the facts, and are carrying on ancient traditions whose origins can only be known by hoary old historians or by divining the linguistic roots of day names. Or by searching Wikipedia.

And that's the "why" of the war on Christmas. Conservatives are mired in tradition, even when that tradition runs completely counter to their professed beliefs. Ostensibly Fox News and Sarah Palin are defending tradition when they natter on about the war on Christmas. But it's really about a far older tradition, one that stretches back to the first pharaoh of Egypt and beyond: making money.

Confirmed Kills Are Cool

‘Trained Marine sniper’ threatened to assassinate California Democrat over gun laws

“I have 39 confirmed kills in afganistan [sic],” Basham wrote in his email to Yee. “Don’t make me get to 40.”

What a special guy!