Kevin Baker Hits The Big Time

It's been a few weeks since I poked my head in at Kevin Baker's site. I think it's only fair that I check in once in awhile as I know for a fact that he reads my site every day. The first post I saw was this one. It seems that Kevin has finally arrived. Check out the video below.




You know you've hit the Big Time when Colbert makes you look like an absolute fool. I am curious as to what Kevin would have done differently in terms of the Ukraine issue. It sure is awfully easy to be a critic...

Of course, the insecurity is still at an all time high with this post. Kevin, dear, why are you so unsure of yourself? You do realize that I have teenagers in my life who do virtually the same thing when they show me long and antagonistic text conversations to feel better about themselves and their side of the argument. What are you afraid of?

So Much For Freedom of Speech

Louisiana, MoveOn group tangle over political billboard

Guns Don't Kill People...

...Goodwill does! 

What is James Madison's Worst Nightmare?

Rich Yeselson's piece on Republican obstructionism is a must read. The chief author of the Constitution would indeed be disgusted.

Gene Sperling A Go Go

Two noteworthy lines from former NEC director Gene Sperling at his recent Monitor breakfast.

On the ACA.

"I find it unusual that the president goes out of his way ... to have a smoother transition to new policies with less disruption for small businesses and Republicans are complaining."

Yeah, why are they complaining?

On the differences between serving in the Clinton administration and the Obama administration.

"In the Clinton administration, what was often most difficult was having [to deal with] a unified and strong opposition.... This time around, you learn the challenges of having a divided opposition…."

The latter might seem like it would be easier but if you think about it, it's really not.

The Long-Term Solution to the Russia Problem

There are all kinds of people critiquing the president's response to Russia's annexation of the Crimea. Republicans are blustering about it, but what do they expect Obama to do? Target Russians ships in the Black Sea port with cruise missiles? Send Americans troops into Simferopol and take the parliament building? Drop nuclear bombs on Moscow?

As I mentioned previously, in the short term economic sanctions are the only way to make Russia pay.  However, some people believe that Putin is actually losing: the situation in Ukraine is a sign of his weakness, not his strength. In Ukraine Putin is only succeeding in uniting ethnic Russian and Ukrainians against a dictator, and that may be inspiring Russians in Russia to defy Putin's tyranny.

But if they're wrong, and Russia keeps pulling this sort of crap, what about the long term? How do we prevent Russia — and countries like Iran — from throwing their weight around?

Russia is inherently unstable. Its people are unhappy. In the conversion to capitalism the vast majority of Russians have been left out in the cold. They don't live in a democracy. Their elections are rigged, even though Putin would probably still win if they were fair because Russians love strong men and long for stability, and they think he can provide that. Putin throws people in jail for criticizing his government. He lords over an oligarchy of corrupt officials who use their control over state assets to make themselves and their buddies wealthy.

But Russia has power today for one reason alone: oil and gas. It's like the Middle East. If the Middle East had no oil, they'd be an insignificant backwater that no one cares about, instead of the center of a never-ending conflict that keeps drawing us in.

The New York Times advocates using exports of American natural gas to undermine Russia's economic stranglehold over Europe. We need to go much further than that.

Since oil and gas are fungible commodities that can be bought and sold the world over, our dependence on fossil fuels enables the bad actors of the world. Countries like Russia, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Venezuela, Iraq have power over us because they have oil.

If we want to undercut their influence, we need to reduce the importance of fossil fuels. Not simply by producing more oil and gas ourselves — because no matter how much we produce, we'll never be able to fuel the entire world. The best we can do is knock the price down a bit. And those bad actors will simply crank up production to make up for the loss. The price of oil will go down more. China and India will buy up the cheaper oil, build more infrastructure, make their people a little richer, start buying a lot more oil, and then the price goes up again. Then Russia starts using fracking technology and suddenly they have a lot more oil and gas to sell.

No, we need to develop other sources of renewable energy. Not just electricity production from solar and wind, but other alternatives such as fuel production plants that produce methane from bacteria or liquid fuels from algae. Energy production systems that we can build and license to other countries that will free them from dependence on the Middle East and Russia. These efforts have long been undermined by energy companies in the United States; that should stop right now.

As long as we have a fossil-fuel based economy, the oil barons of the world will have outsized influence over the rest of is. Oil is currently the ultimate power, and ultimate power corrupts ultimately.

Good (?) Words

“We fear for the safety of our families. It’s why neighborhood streets that were once filled with bicycles and skateboards and laughter in the air, now sit empty and silent … [For] the things we care about most, we feel profound loss. We’re sad, not because we fear something is going wrong, but because we know something already has gone wrong. That’s why more Americans are buying firearms and ammunition.

The greatest freedom is to have the ability to have all the rifles, shotguns and handguns we want.”

(Wayne LaPierre, at the CPAC Conference, March 6, 2014)

My oh my…Appeal to Fear much?

I don't get it. I thought violence was going down. So why is the Gun Cult still afraid? And why are they lying? Neighborhood streets are not empty and silent and are, in fact, filled with bicycles and skateboards and laughter in the air. What a bunch of hysterical old ladies!

Responsible Gun Owner

Man Shoots Himself In The Head While Demonstrating Gun Safety.

Hmph. I wonder if he was one of those responsible gun owners who want to patrol our nation's schools.

Not around my fucking kids. Ever.

Getting the Other Guys to Fight Each Other

The wealthy are in a high dudgeon today. They don't feel like they get enough respect. They claim their detractors are inciting envy, waging class warfare and hating people for their hard work and success.

But this is simply false. It's not envy. It's anger against injustice. Anger that the same guys who almost drove this country into a depression are making out like bandits. Anger that bonehead CEOs get paid millions of dollars each year, screw up, get fired, get a golden parachute, and then go work for some other company and repeat the process.

They're angry that every time companies have problems, the answer is always to lay off some employees, cut the salaries of the rest and make the survivors work harder, longer and for less money. Then they gloat to the board about how much they increased productivity! And then the board — composed of other CEOs just like them — gives them more stock incentives and pay raises for doing such a bang-up job.

People don't dislike the Koch brothers because they're rich, but because they spend billions of dollars pretending that climate change isn't real, buying off regulators so they can fill the air and water with pollution and toxic chemicals, trying to buy national elections and even trying to stage coups in little towns across America.

But when you listen to conservative commentators and news outlets, you hear a constant din of sneering hatred for the poor. Check out the selection of clips in this Daily Show segment to see what I mean. And that's just Fox News. Talk radio is far worse.

Then there are the usurious payday lenders that are waging all-out war on the poor, charging 200% interest. In some states (Missouri, Oklahoma) they use the court system to harass borrowers, and even get them arrested. And you thought the bad old days of indentured servitude were over.

An article in the New York Times by a former hedge fund manager paints a stark picture of the mindset of the 1%.

IN my last year on Wall Street my bonus was $3.6 million — and I was angry because it wasn’t big enough. I was 30 years old, had no children to raise, no debts to pay, no philanthropic goal in mind. I wanted more money for exactly the same reason an alcoholic needs another drink: I was addicted.

It is self-evident that wealthy are the ones possessed by envy and greed. Like that hedge fund manager, their obsession with class and status motivates them and drives their every decision: where they work, what they do, what clothes they wear, what cars they buy, what houses they own, who their friends are.

There are exceptions, of course. Bill Gates doesn't seem to be driven by those base drives. Nor does Warren Buffett. Not every rich person is an envious scumbag. The ones who started real businesses and actually built something themselves are frequently more humble and down-to-earth. It's the hedge fund managers, investment bankers, traders and hired-gun CEOs who never really accomplished anything real on their own who seem to be most driven by envy and greed.

But you couldn't tell that by listening to Fox News and talk radio.

Why the constant drumbeat against the poor in the conservative media, by people who claim to be Christian? Why do fictitious nickel-and-dime food stamp fraud stories get such prominent play, while stories about corporate malfeasance involving billions of dollars are only barely mentioned in the financial segments on TV?

The reason conservative media outlets are doing this is because they're afraid of a revolution in the ranks. The people they count on for votes are much more like the poor people that they sneer at than the millionaire Fox News hosts doing the sneering.

They paint the poor as living luxurious lives — recycling completely unsubstantiated rumors about people using food stamps to buy sea food and lottery tickets and going to casinos — to generate anger and envy in their viewers. And "the poor," by implication in the conservative media, are always black and Hispanic.

Because if the message that the 1% are undeserving, greedy, envious douche bags whose special treatment should end starts to gain traction with Southern white Americans — many of whom are themselves poor and on food stamps and various forms of public assistance — the Republican party is toast.

That's why the full-court press against the poor. The best way to to keep two guys from ganging up on you is to get them to fight each other.

Kneejeking Obama

Here are two great pieces which more than adequately address the knee jerk criticism of the president.

Who’s the Villain Here?

Blaming Obama First

I don't get it. Half of their base is libertarian now and doesn't give two shits about Ukraine. Ah well, any excuse to bring up Benghazi...

Is The Ukraine Situation A Fight We Can't Win and Russian Can't Lose?

John A. Mazis posits this question in a recent column in the Strib and while I don't agree with everything he writes, he does have a voice that needs to be heard.

While President Vladimir Putin is not a democratic leader, he is elected (voting irregularities notwithstanding) and is still popular in Russia. His reasons for intervening in Crimea, and maybe elsewhere in Ukraine, are grounded in concrete security concerns as well as in history. His intervention aims at securing the safety of Ukraine’s sizable Russian minority and safeguarding his country’s dominance by keeping the West from encroaching on Russia’s traditional sphere of influence.

This is the heart of the matter, really. Ukraine wants to be part of Europe, not Russia. Pro-Russian forces within the country and in Russia. This is more of a European issue than a United States issue. Of course, President Obama is being measured for his manliness right now by some (not all, thankfully) in the Republican Party in how he responds to this crisis. I think that the barometer should be placed firmly on how the EU, particularly Germany, responds. They are the ones on the hot seat, not the president.

Wall Street Journal: Affordable Care Act Effects Account for Most of Income, Spending Increases

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the Affordable Care Act is already boosting household income and spending.

The Commerce Department reported Monday that consumer spending rose a better-than-expected 0.4% and personal incomes climbed 0.3% in January. The new health-care law accounted for a big chunk of the increase on both fronts. On the incomes side, the law’s expanded coverage boosted Medicaid benefits by an estimated $19.2 billion, according to Commerce’s Bureau of Economic Analysis. The ACA also offered several refundable tax credits, including health insurance premium subsidies, which added up to $14.7 billion. Taken together, the Obamacare provisions are responsible for about three-quarters of January’s overall rise in Americans’ incomes. 

Wow. 

Two Close Shaves in Two Days

951 Gaspra

Today an asteroid passed by the earth closer than the moon, at a distance of about 217,000 miles. You read about them every once in a while, but these things zipping by every day! Tomorrow a rock between 7 and 30 yards across will come within 50,000 miles.

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory tracks these Near Earth Objects (NEOs) on a web page anyone can access. Over the next two months more than 80 asteroids will pass by Earth with an average of 40 lunar diameters (9 million miles) at closest approach. That's two or three a day.

Most of them aren't that close -- 9 million miles is a tenth of the distance between the earth and the sun. But that's a lot of junk floating around in space near us.

All of these are too small and dim to be seen with the naked eye. But that doesn't mean they aren't potentially dangerous: five of these 81 asteroids may be as much as a mile across. A strike by an asteroid of that size on earth could kill a lot of people and drastically change the weather.

These asteroids are still being discovered by the hundreds each year. As of March 3rd, JPL was tracking 10,665 NEOs. Even though these asteroids aren't currently on a collision course with earth, we need to keep an eye on them because their orbits can be perturbed by interactions with other asteroids and big planets like Jupiter, which has a tendency to yank asteroids out of the asteroid belt and send them careening across the solar system.

So, no Armageddon this week. But keep your eyes on the skies.

The Minimum Wage, Corporate Welfare and Kids

The Minnesota legislature is currently debating a bill that would increase the minimum wage to $9.50. Recently the president increased the minimum wage for federal contractors to $10.10.

The problem is that the current minimum wage isn't a living wage — especially if you have a family to support. Many minimum wage earners have to turn to the government safety net — public housing assistance, food stamps, Medicaid, home heating assistance, earned income tax credit, etc. — to be able to survive.

By not paying their employees enough to live on, companies are getting subsidies from the government to keep their costs down, and therefore increase their profits. This is corporate welfare, at the taxpayers' expense.

The minimum wage hasn't kept up with inflation; in adjusted dollars it pays far less than when it was first introduced. If the minimum wage had kept pace with worker productivity, it would be $18. The United States has one of the lowest minimum wages among developed economies: $7.25, compared to $9.25 in Japan, $9.57 in the UK, $9.76 in Canada, etc., up to $15.75 in Australia (in 2011, some of these have increased since then).

Opponents of an increase to the minimum wage are slowly yielding to logic, but they still want an exception: a lower minimum wage for workers under 18.

Yes, they want child slaves.

They justify this in a number of ways. "Kids don't have any responsibilities, they don't have to pay any rent, buy food or support children." Or, "Kids don't really need money. They just need a little pocket change to pay their cellphone bills and buy a t-shirt every once in a while." Or, "Kids are so unreliable, I have to train them to get to work on time, they're not worth that much."

The reality is that there are plenty of kids who do have real responsibilities. They have to help their parents — often single moms — pay the rent, buy their own and their siblings' food. But those aren't rich suburban white kids, so they fall beyond the ken of the people who oppose the minimum wage increases.

When I was in school I "lent" my dad money — the real estate market was a bear in the seventies — so I can attest to the fact that kids really do give their parents money, even white kids.

I don't mean to denigrate suburban white kids — they need money too. Have you looked at the cost of college these days? College students are frequently saddled with onerous amounts of debt after four years of tuition — colleges are really expensive these days. The more money they can save before they go to college, the less they'll have to borrow.

The silliest canard is "I have to train them to get to work on time." The average 16-year-old has been going to school for a decade, and has been getting up at 6:00 AM, turned in hundreds of homework assignments on deadline. Many have participated in hundreds of team practices and critical matches, where the success of their team hinged on their actions. They have been dealing with the whims and demands of parents, teachers and coaches their whole lives. It's preposterous that employers think they are teaching these kids anything they haven't been exposed to a thousand times before.

It's a fact: a lot of kids are unreliable. Just like a hell of a lot of adults.  They know what they're supposed to, and when they're supposed to do it. If they can't do the job on time or to your satisfaction, just fire them. Why should the good workers get paid less just because you have problems with the bad workers? Firing them may be the best lesson you can give them.

But if you can pay workers peanuts and invest nothing in them, you don't really care how bad they are, just as long as you can get a minimum amount of effort out of them. Yes, raising the minimum wage will result in some job losses: bad employees who aren't worth what they're being paid will be fired. You will get more work out of your good employees because they'll be more motivated. These are good things: unemployment is still too high, and there are plenty of people who need jobs and are willing to work hard.

Businesses that have good employees making a higher minimum wage will either have to cut their own profits or executive compensation packages (I'm looking at you, Walmart), or raise prices. Companies will have to charge prices for products that reflect the cost of producing them in an economy where everyone can afford to live on what they get paid, instead of depending on the government to step in and prop them up.

Some small number of businesses will fail, because their owners aren't competent to compete without screwing over their employees, or because they're selling products that no one is willing to buy for what it costs to make them — that is, they have a failed business model.

In either case, what's the problem? Those companies are just the corporate version of bad employees.

Obama A Go Go

I've heard a lot of President Obama rage of late. Hatred of this president become a cottage industry. It ranges from the usual conservative rag about how he is commie bent on being an totalitarian dictator to somewhat bizarre liberal mouthfoam regarding how is a magic puppet who dances for an evil cabal of wealthy corporatists who seek to depopulate the earth. Honestly, I have trouble telling who is left and who is right. They all sound the same when their blood gets up.

Yet, if you look at this actual record, you see what you see with most presidents. A list of impressive accomplishments, mistakes, and projects in the works.

In looking at the first link from Washington Monthly, I simply don't understand how anyone on the left can accuse him of being a puppet. He's pissed off a lot of people with these policies so I can see why some on the establishment Right don't like him. But the left? One would think they would be happy. The second link shows his mistakes as well his achievements. Again, not perfect but part of some grand conspiracy? Where is the evidence?

Do Rapists Only Pretend to Be Drunk?

When there are accusations of rape, alcohol is frequently involved. Because of that, many rape cases are never reported, many never go to trial, and many prosecutions fail because the cases devolve into he-said she-said arguments. Defense attorneys claim that both perpetrator and victim were drunk, everything was consensual, no one's at fault and there was no crime.

Even if they believe the woman's accusation, judgmental jurors may decide to punish the woman for going into bars and getting drunk in the first place, or for being a "tease." Women jurors may be the least likely to believe the victim.

But a study conducted by the universities of Toronto and Washington seems to counter some of that narrative:

Young women are often the targets of aggression when they're out in bars, but the problem isn't that guys are too drunk to know better.

Instead, men are preying on women who have had too much to drink.

That is, the perpetrators of sexual assaults may be cynically pretending they were drunk as an excuse for crimes they commit while in full possession of their faculties.

Men may perceive intoxicated women either as more amenable to advances or as easier targets who are less able to rebuff them because they don't have their wits about them, the researchers say.

I believe the intent may be even more sinister: if their victims press charges, they know that intoxicated women are less likely to be believed, and that people will think they deserved whatever happened to them.

I admit I have no personal experience with this; my personal anecdotes about alcohol involve my paternal uncles dying of various diseases caused by alcoholism, the disintegration of my sister-in-law's marriage from alcohol and prescription drug abuse, and my wife's cousin who went to prison after shooting his brother in a drunken fight. I don't drink and I don't frequent bars. They're too loud, too dark, and for most of my life they were smokey. Drunk people get into nasty arguments and brawls. And they kill people by the thousands on the highway.

All I have are the statistics from the National Institute of Health, which indicate that a quarter of all American women have been sexually assaulted, half of all sexual assaults involve alcohol, and 80% occur in social situations.

I am in no way blaming the victims here, but if you're a woman who wants to reduce your chance of being raped, the single best precaution you can take is to not drink in public or on dates. Not only do you keep your wits about you, it deprives rapists of their best excuse, and warns them immediately that you're not easy: they will just seek easier prey. That may mean you won't get as many dates, but you don't want to go out with those guys anyway.

There's a theory that farming was developed not to grow grain for food, but to produce beer, which allowed the development of civilization. If so, it's about the only good thing that came from booze.

Calling Out The Inflation Obsessives

Paul Krugman's recent piece on the inflation obsessives is absolutely correct. Worth of highlighting...

What accounts for inflation obsession? One answer is that obsessives failed to distinguish between underlying inflation and short-term fluctuations in the headline number, which are mainly driven by volatile energy and food prices. Gasoline prices, in particular, strongly influence inflation in any given year, and dire warnings are heard whenever prices rise at the pump; yet such blips say nothing at all about future inflation. 

They should know this but they seemingly don't.

They also failed to understand that printing money in a depressed economy isn’t inflationary. I could have told them that, and in fact I did. But maybe there was some excuse for not grasping this point in 2008 or early 2009. 

It's nothing really but willful ignorance.  It's fundamental economic fact.

The point, however, is that inflation obsession has persisted, year after year, even as events have refuted its supposed justifications. And this tells us that something more than bad analysis is at work. At a fundamental level, it’s political. This is fairly obvious if you look at who the inflation obsessives are. While a few conservatives believe that the Fed should be doing more, not less, they have little if any real influence. The overall picture is that most conservatives are inflation obsessives, and nearly all inflation obsessives are conservative. 

It's also emotional and rooted in profound insecurity. Why are they like this?

In part it reflects the belief that the government should never seek to mitigate economic pain, because the private sector always knows best. Back in the 1930s, Austrian economists like Friedrich Hayek and Joseph Schumpeter inveighed against any effort to fight the depression with easy money; to do so, warned Schumpeter, would be to leave “the work of depressions undone.” Modern conservatives are generally less open about the harshness of their view, but it’s pretty much the same. 

The flip side of this antigovernment attitude is the conviction that any attempt to boost the economy, whether fiscal or monetary, must produce disastrous results — Zimbabwe, here we come! And this conviction is so strong that it persists no matter how wrong it has been, year after year. 

It's truly bizarre. The continue to be wrong...clearly...and yet they continue to assert they are right. I suppose that's the bubble for you:)

Krugman doesn't paint a very rosy picture of the Fed either. At least it's rooted in fact and not moutfoaming moonbattery. 

Are GOP Governors In Trouble?

Unless they go full on moonbat, the GOP has a good chance of making considerable gains in the Senate. But what about the Governor races? Take a look at some of the polls.

It looks like most Democratic challengers beat Tom Corbett in Pennsylvania. Wendy Davis is going to make a serious run in Texas, especially with Abbott running around with Ted Nugent (someone please give him more chances to open his mouth!). Kasich is going to have a tough fight in Ohio. Rick Scott is going to lose. Period. And Snyder is going to struggle in Michigan.

2010 was the year when the states went red in terms of state government. It looks like that's going to change in 2014.

Fannie Mae Pays Back With Interest, US Makes Profit

Fannie Mae has paid back the United States government all of the $116.1 billion dollars it borrowed after posting an eighth straight quarterly profit. Earnings were at $84 billion dollars, the highest ever for the firm. The total amount paid ended up being $121.1 billion dollars.

“Obviously, it’s good news for taxpayers that Fannie Mae is profitable,” Chief Executive Officer Timothy J. Mayopoulos said on a call with reporters.

“For the last five years, the employees of Fannie Mae have come to work with the goal of reaching this accomplishment for the taxpayers,” said Mayopoulos, 54. “I’m very proud of what our employees have achieved and I’m very, very happy for the taxpayers.”

I seem to recall shrieks of doom and rolling in boiling pits of sewage over Fannie Mae. Hmm....