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:

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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?

Managing Fantasies Indeed

Last in line asked me yesterday if I wanted to go see Dinesh D'Souza's new film about the president. I told him that I would pass (even if he paid for it) and here's the reason why: I'm not going to be a party to the continued population of a fictional world.

The record of the last decade or so suggests that the party these days is animated by two main goals. First, it seeks unchallengeable, absolute power. Its modus operandi for achieving that goal has been to use institutional power—the power of corporations, courts and legislatures—to acquire more institutional power. A recent case is the drive in Republican-dominated states around the country to disenfranchise Democratic-leaning constituencies, such as the poor and minorities, by legislating onerous requirements for voting.

The other goal has been a less familiar one. More and more, Republicans have exhibited a strong desire to take up residence in an imaginary world, an alternate reality—one in which global warming is found to be a fraud perpetrated by the world’s top scientists, Obama turns out to have been born in Kenya and is a Muslim (and a socialist), budgets can be slashed without social pain, firing government employees reduces unemployment, tax cuts for the wealthy replenish government coffers, and so forth. Perhaps it seems odd to identify such an objective as a political goal, but past ideological movements of the left as well as the right offer many examples of the power of such a longing.

There is nothing more dangerous than a very large group of people who refuse to admit error and continue anyway with their meglomaniacal fantasies.

Worse, they seem to slip effortlessly into what I've been calling recently, "Heading Off At The Pass" syndrome. A severely debilitating avoidance reaction, this can take many forms (rest assured, I will be talking about them quite a bit between now and the election). An excellent example of this is Kevin Baker's continued use of the phrase "Do it again, only harder." His complaint is that liberal and progressive ideas have failed and that's why we have all these problems. Liberals want to do more to try to make up for their "failures."

In reality, (not the fictional world in which Kevin, his ilk, and what is now the GOP reside) however, those policies have worked.  Since Social Security first started we've seen our country grow into a massive power in the world. We had massive debt, deficits, high taxes, big government and socialized medicine while we essentially became the financial and cultural hegemenon of the world. We defeated the Nazis, the Communists, and are about to defeat Islamic extremism all with our free market ideals, capitalism, and democracy.

There's no need do any of it again or harder. We've already won.

And by "we," I mean all of us. Of course, people on the right wont't accept this because they can't stand losing an ideological argument (in typical adolescent form). They will have you believe our world is going to end any minute. In a certain sense, THEIR world has ended, in their eyes, because they have been proven wrong.  Their enemy is the truth so they have to invent fiction. Since there is never a shortage of fearful and ignorant people, they have power and here's where the danger comes in.

As the very famous and accurate phrase goes, we hate in others what we fear in ourselves. Yet, it was THEIR policies of deregulation and free market fundamentalism that brought us to the tough economic spot we are in right now. THEY are the ones that want to "Do it again, only harder" because they simply can't stand being wrong or admitting fault.

This is the Romney-Ryan ticket in a nutshell. It's a fantasy world filled with promises of giving failed policies another shot because somehow it was the fault of liberals that they didn't work the first time. I've said this many times and I guess I have to say it again.

The party who champions individual responsibility claims none of it.

Something Doesn't Add Up

The other day when Mitt Romney was whining about how Barack Obama keeps picking on him, he said:

I just have to say, given the challenges that America faces — 23 million people out of work, Iran about to become nuclear, one out of six Americans in poverty — the fascination with taxes I paid I find to be very small-minded.

Small-minded?

• Small-minded is Mitt Romney's insistence on keeping his tax returns secret, in comparison to his father's release of 12 years of tax returns. Most other presidential candidates in the last 40 years have released five to 30 years.
• Small-minded is Mitt Romney's insistence on tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations, even as we were fighting two wars, and recovering from a recession that has hit the poor and middle class especially hard, while corporations have been wallowing in cash.
• Small-minded is the Republican fascination with the personal lives of gay people, and their insistence on dictating who they can marry.
• Small-minded is the majority of Republicans who insist that Obama's Hawaii birth certificate is false, that Obama is a Muslim, that Obama is a anti-colonialist born in Kenya. Apparently, 64% of Republicans are latched on to this fantasy (and still think Saddam had WMDs).

But back to Romney's tax returns: something just doesn't add up. In 2010 and 2011 Romney made $42.5 million, or $21 million a year. Estimates of Romney's wealth are between $190 and $250 million. Now, he's been "retired" since 1999, which means that he's quite probable that he's been making in the ballpark of $20 million a year for the last 12 years.

If you multiply $20 million times 12 years, you get $240 million, or Romney's current worth. What happened to the money that Romney made during the 20 or so years he worked at Bain and other jobs?

Unless Romney's got an incredibly profligate lifestyle, or made a lot of really terrible investments, there seems to be a lot of missing money. It looks like Romney's got a ton of money socked away in places we don't know about.

This is why we need to see Romney's tax returns for the last 10 years, if not 20 years. Something just does not smell right here.

Mitt Comes Clean

So Governor Romney has come clean and said that he looked through his taxes and paid around 13 percent every year for the last 10 years. Harry Reid's response? Prove it.

I'm trying to figure out why he would make any sort of comment at all if he's not going to release his other returns which he says he won't. He did say he would release 2011 but the deadline for that is Oct 15, 2012 (I guess he got an extension). That also makes no sense as it is right before the election. And, what if the returns do come out and Harry Reid is right or partially right? Then Mitt would be caught in a lie.

With the white board weirdness yesterday, their campaign plan seems haphazard bordering on the bizarre. Why aren't they out there talking more about Paul Ryan, who clearly has energized the crowds and the base?