How Far Should They Go?

A recent piece in the New York Times echoes what I said yesterday.

With the House set on Friday to convene the first of its hearings into the targeting of conservative groups by the Internal Revenue Service, the lessons learned from the impeachment of President Bill Clinton, which cost Republicans in elections in 1998, have been on display in recent days. Republicans took obvious pains to balance their investigatory zeal with a promise to stay committed to a legislative agenda.

“Our job is to legislate, and we’re trying to legislate things that will help create jobs in our country,” Mr. Boehner said. “But we also have a responsibility, under the Constitution, to provide oversight of the executive branch of government.”

It's going to be interesting to see if they can control themselves.

Scandals Redux

Now that all the dust has settled down from the "big" three scandals things have pretty much played out like I predicted. Conservatives don't really give a shit about the AP phone tapping flap because they hate the media anyway. Hasn't the media always been comprised of traitors and always been a threat to national security? Yes. Yes they have.So no mas on the AP shizzle.

And the IRS flap was greeted by people with a resounding ho hum. The president's approval rating has remained about the same...a little lower of a little higher depending on which outfit you are looking at. It's pretty clear at this point that the IRS was put in a really crappy position by Citizen's United and then went off the rails after that. Had Citizen's not turned out the way it did, the targeting of Tea Party groups would likely have not happened as there would not have been as much pressure to root out the tax dodgers (side note: I'll have post about Apple coming in the next few days).

Benghazi, of course, is still going strong inside the bubble even with people outside of the bubble not really caring about it all. Clearly, this is all the Right has to stop a Hillary Clinton presidency so they are getting an early jump. It continues to amaze me how tone deaf conservatives are on the priorities of voters. This simple fact was summer up recently in my Honors Civics class when students in all three blocks wondered why DC was talking so much about scandals and not actually governing. Even the libertarian kids find the continued personal attacks on the president and Democrats to be counter productive and have wondered to me many times if Republicans simply want to keep losing election after election.

Voters want to see action on immigration, the budget, and jobs. Some Republicans are getting this message and don't want to see a repeat of 1998. But far too many want to "win." That's why I say, keep it up, dudes! We'll take back a few more seats in the House and hold the Senate in 2014 followed by a Hillary Clinton presidency and full control of both houses in 2016 at this rate.

Is It Time For Graphene?

I ran across this piece a few weeks ago and thought it time to share it as I'm still not really in the mood to talk about politics all that much.

Graphene is the thinnest material in the world, basically a sheet or layer of carbon only one atom in thickness, which has led it to be described as the world's first two-dimensional material. It's transparent, yet it's a superb conductor of heat and electricity. It's stretchy and flexible, yet it's harder than a diamond and hundreds of times stronger than steel. And it's so cheap and easy to make that a smart high school student probably could create a sample of graphene.

Well, that's cool but what could it do?

Among the few ideas being suggested for potential uses of graphene are flexible electronics, such as a cellphone that you could fold or roll up into a tube or a piece of clothing or a even a potato chip bag that could function as a digital device. Rust-proof metal coatings, medical sensors, seawater desalination, even a potential replacement for silicon in semiconductors are among the ideas being considered as graphene applications.

Wow. A cellphone you could roll up....crazy!

There is no doubt in my mind that, in the next 25 years, we are going to see some of the most amazing and awe inspiring innovations the world has ever seen.

Was the IRS Scandal Just "Stop and Frisk" for Rich White Guys?

The two-month-long Stop and Frisk trial in New York is winding down:

Plaintiffs in Floyd v. City of New York claim the New York Police Department, its supervisors and its union pressured police officers to stop, question and frisk hundreds of thousands of people each year, even establishing quotas. They argue that 88 percent of the stops involved blacks and Hispanics, mostly men, and were in fact a form of racial profiling.

This idea of profiling is not limited to stopping black and Hispanic men on the street. Conservatives like Ann Coulter think random searches of airline passengers are ludicrous. They're convinced we should stop wasting time searching random passengers and concentrate on ethnic profiling, which means going after any young men who look vaguely "Muslim," whatever that is.

So in the conservative mind, the New York cops were just doing their jobs: catching the bad guys.

It's therefore ironic that conservatives are outraged. The IRS was just conducting their own form of profiling. The people in the Cincinnati determinations office claim they had no partisan motivations whatsoever. The claim is plausible. They were overworked and doing a terribly boring job that no one in the IRS wants to do. Naturally they're going to take some shortcuts.

Just like beat cops "know" that blacks with droopy pants and Hispanics with loads of tats are carrying illegal drugs and guns, isn't it completely possible that IRS employees think they "know" that angry white conservatives constantly screaming about taxes are trying to cheat the IRS? Their profiling may have nothing to do with politics and everything to do with prior experience.

Think about it. If it was your job to ferret out non-profit tax cheats and you saw an application from a liberal group clamoring to increase taxes on corporations and the wealthy, and then one from a Tea Party group that's bitching mightily about taxes, which one do you think is more likely to be a tax-evasion scam for wealthy billionaires spreading anonymous propaganda to get their guys elected?

Non-profit social welfare groups are supposed to promote social welfare issues, not get involved with electoral races. But many of these conservative groups, including the American Future Fund and the Government Integrity Fund, explicitly stated on their IRS applications that they would not spend money  politics and then immediately ran political ads in favor of specific candidates. Is it any surprise that the IRS would then view similar groups with suspicion?

The IRS's singling out of "Tea Party" and "9/12" named organizations was just as wrong as the actions of cops who harass men on the street based on their skin color. But so far the IRS case appears to be nothing more than misguided profiling, a concept that conservatives wholeheartedly endorse when applied to Muslims, blacks and Latinos.

So, when Ann Coulter starts expressing sympathy for the thousands of minority men minding their own business getting hassled, beat up and jailed by cops trying to fill out a quota, I'll start expressing sympathy for all those poor billionaires and corporations who were subjected to filling out more forms and answering more questions in order to anonymously buy tax-free TV ads for their political minions.

What We Do

"We had to pull a car off a teacher and she had three little kids underneath her," one first responder, in tears, told KFOR. "Good job, teach." 

"I was on top of six kids," one sixth grade teacher said, working her way across the rubble. "I was lying on top. All of mine are OK." 

Teachers helped tear through several feet of rubble to rescue sobbing students, some of them injured.

Senator Tweedledum and Senator Tweedledee

Yesterday Oklahoma got hammered by a mile-wide F4 tornado. Hundreds of homes, businesses, hospitals and schools were destroyed. There's confusion over the actual death toll, but hundreds are injured and dozens are dead, including many children.

Oklahoma's junior senator, Tom Coburn, wants "offsets" for any federal aid sent to Oklahoma. That is, he wants to take money directly away from other Americans and send it to his state to pay for tornado damage.

Human-induced climate change caused by excess CO2 in the atmosphere has increased the intensity and frequency of severe weather like hurricanes, tornadoes and thunderstorms that have been hammering the country -- in recent years we've been getting tornadoes as early in January and February. The hurricane season has been starting earlier and lasting longer. Then there are the persistent droughts and constantly recurring floods and wildfires. The insurance industry knows just how real climate change is: they foot a lot of the bill. But the taxpayers pay the rest.

Yet Oklahoma's senior senator, James Inhofe, has been leading a jihad against climate scientists, claiming that global warming is a hoax. He and other shills of the petroleum industry have been trying to destroy the EPA, the National Weather Service and NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration). Inhofe, Coburn and other Republicans in Washington have been gutting funding for climate research, including climate-tracking satellites.

Those same satellites are needed to predict and track severe weather like hurricanes and tornadoes. In their lust to deny scientists data that proves the reality of climate change, Republicans are destroying the very agencies that can help to save the lives of the people Inhofe and Coburn represent.

Oklahoma is in the heart of Tornado Alley. It's also the number five oil producer in the country. Inhofe and Coburn want the rest of the country to pay for damage they've suffered. I'm okay with that. But burning all that oil has a lot to do with the uptick in severe weather disasters and drought in Oklahoma and across the country.

Senator Tweedledum and Senator Tweedledee need to acknowledge the part their oil industry plays in climate disasters, and they need to fund the research, the equipment, the policies and the personnel needed to predict and mitigate those disasters in the future.

Barely Any Words

I don't have many words after seeing the recent scenes in Oklahoma City. I will say that I am sick and tired of seeing stories on the news about kids being killed in a school and I don't really feel like posting much for the next couple of days.

Honestly, after this, I can find little comfort in anything...

What Happens When You Raise Taxes?

This.

The Congressional Budget Office said the unanticipated $203 billion cut to the current-year shortfall -- a 24 percent drop from just three months ago -- comes from higher-than-expected individual and corporate tax payments and $95 billion in expected dividend payments from mortgage-finance companies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.   

The $845 billion in red ink in February would have put the deficit at 5.4 percent of economic output. The new projection would put the deficit at 4 percent of gross domestic production. The deficit was 7 percent of the budget in 2012 and 10.1 percent in 2009.

I'm confused. I thought that raising taxes and bailing out Fannie and Freddie would make things worse.

An Example of Good Parenting

The Eternal Free Market

Conservatives may think that climate change is a plot to take away their freedoms but their is one very large and influential group of Americans that know just how serious climate change is...the insurance industry.

And the industry expects the situation will get worse. “Numerous studies assume a rise in summer drought periods in North America in the future and an increasing probability of severe cyclones relatively far north along the U.S. East Coast in the long term,” said Peter Höppe, who heads Geo Risks Research at the reinsurance giant Munich Re. “The rise in sea level caused by climate change will further increase the risk of storm surge.” Most insurers, including the reinsurance companies that bear much of the ultimate risk in the industry, have little time for the arguments heard in some right-wing circles that climate change isn’t happening, and are quite comfortable with the scientific consensus that burning fossil fuels is the main culprit of global warming. 

“Insurance is heavily dependent on scientific thought,” Frank Nutter, president of the Reinsurance Association of America, told me last week. “It is not as amenable to politicized scientific thought.”

Yes...scientific thought:)

How Many Times Does this Have to Happen?

A story in the Denver Post about a woman who shot herself in the head with her own assault rifle epitomizes why the NRA's position on guns make us "safer" is so silly:

Adair and her husband, Dana "Shane" Adair, 40, were drinking beer in the garage with three other people — described as housemates — when Anastasia went into the home to get her recently purchased rifle to show it off, Toldness said.

Witnesses told investigators Anastasia Adair was coming downstairs back into the garage and was handing the rifle to Dana Adair when she slipped or stumbled. The rifle discharged and she was hit in the head. Dana Adair was close enough to his wife that he caught her as she fell.

Another incident in Colorado occurred just days before, when a school employee shot a kid in the parking lot of a school:

About an hour after school let out for the day, the student was getting a ride home from a school employee who also works a second job as an armed security officer, according to police. The employee was trying to put his gun into the glove box of the car when the weapon fired, hitting the student in the leg.

This happens several times a day. Your average kid is at much higher risk of getting shot by their dad, their friends, a security guard dropping trow in the john, or by a random drive-by in front of their house targeting someone else than they are of being shot by the likes of Adam Lanza. More guns in schools won't make kids safer -- every time someone touches a gun there's a small but non-zero chance they'll screw up and shoot themselves and or an innocent bystander.

The obvious conclusion is that way too many people who own guns are oblivious and incompetent dolts. This is exemplified by the ammunition shortage that has hit several police departments recently.

Apparently people are hoarding ammo because they've been listening to NRA propaganda. They're afraid that Obama's going to take away their ammunition TOMORROW!!!

This is utter nonsense. If they had a brain they'd know that the GOP controls the House of Representatives, and there's no way that any kind of legislation controlling ammunition could even reach the House floor until 2015, and that's only if wildly liberal Democrats staged victories in every state south of the Mason Dixon line in 2014. And that would happen only if known Al Qaeda terrorists committed half a dozen mass shootings across the country with guns and ammo bought at gun shows that flout the background check process.

The honest truth is Obama is not interested in forcing members of his party to take votes on even the most mild gun control reforms beyond beefed-up background checks, for fear of losing ground in the House in the 2014 midterms. So gun-lovers rejoice: as long as Obama is in office there is absolutely no chance whatsoever that any meaningful nationwide gun control legislation will pass. You've won!

Meanwhile, gun manufacturers are laughing all the way to the bank as the people being duped by NRA propaganda are crying all the way to the hospital. And the cemetery.

Peanuts

A lot of people are fretting about the way the president is handling the raft of scandals that have hit him this week. The fact is, Obama's scandals are peanuts compared to W's scandals, not to mention Watergate and Iran-Contra.

Benghazi: four men died because terrorists attacked an American consulate in Libya. Security wasn't up to snuff in part because the Republican-controlled House had stiffed the State Department for years, preferring to spend more money on bombs than on diplomacy. Republicans apparently got the result they were aiming for: they brought a scandal down upon Obama by getting four Americans killed by hamstringing State's budget. Release of emails leading up to the talking points show that there was confusion and disagreement between State and CIA, but no master plan from the administration.

Contrast this with 9/11: 3,000 Americans died in New York just a month after the damning "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S." memo hit Bush's desk and was roundly ignored because he was on vacation. In seven bloody years 5,000 American soldiers died in a pointless war in Iraq, started on a pack of lies sold by Bush and the neocons, who were either duped by Iranian agents like Ahmed Chalabi, or complicit with them. Dozens of American diplomats were killed on Bush's watch in incidents nearly identical to Benghazi.

The real difference? The Bush administration was eager to instantly blame "terrorists," rather than ascertain actual responsibility and plan a response before opening their yaps.

The IRS scandal: apparently some IRS employees took shortcuts, subjecting conservative groups to more questions and longer waits based on their names. This occurred after it was painfully obvious many of these so-called "non-profit social welfare" groups were patterned after Karl Rove's organization and were just fronts for billionaire trying to get taxpayers to foot the bill for their propaganda. The most salient fact is this: no Tea Party groups were denied tax-exempt status. However, the IRS did deny a Democratic group such status.

Obama has (correctly) condemned the Cleveland office's actions and fired the interim IRS director. Maybe if Republicans had let Obama appoint a real director this wouldn't have happened. It's like they're trying to sabotage the administration by preventing them from getting properly staffed and organized.

Contrast this with the Bush administration's handling of the firing of US attorneys. Certain Bush appointees were fired by Alberto Gonzalez because they weren't working hard enough to sabotage registration of voters from certain ethnic groups. The firings eventually resulted in Gonzalez' resignation. But the Bush administration never admitted any wrongdoing.

Republicans have long used the IRS to attack their enemies, going back to at least Nixon.  During the Bush administration the IRS harassed the NAACP, Greenpeace and even a California minister for speaking against the Iraq war.

The real problem here is with the Supreme Court's fallacious Citizens United decision. None of these groups should be tax-exempt. If they are trying to influence elections they should -- be they conservative or liberal -- pay taxes and reveal all their donors. Unless we have that kind of transparency we can never be sure that foreigners aren't buying American elections -- and that's a very serious concern with guys like Sheldon Adelson's mountains of Chinese cash towering over us.

The very existence of the IRS scandal shows how monumentally naive (to be kind), monumentally stupid (to be honest), and monumentally greedy (to be cynical) the Citizens United decision was. Why greedy? One of the very first Tea Party organizations to cash in on this scam was formed by Virginia Thomas, wife of Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas.

The only reason Benghazi gained any traction at all is that the Obama administration has been nearly scandal-free for five years. Like Dr. Frankenstein, Fox News has been trying to shock its viewers to life with Benghazi lightning, but many of the inarticulate creatures on the Fox slab don't even know what country Benghazi is in.

The IRS scandal is much juicier and fits into the scary big government anti-tax motif, so now Republicans have been saved from running out of ridiculous things to be outraged by. Huzzah! Let's celebrate by wasting another couple million dollars of Congressional man-hours to vote to repeal Obamacare for the 37th (literally) time!

Whew! It was beginning to look like they'd have to go back to birth certificates and Saul Alinsky.

Born This Way?

Just after Minnesota became the next state to legalize gay marriage, a story about a child who was born with two sets of genitalia appeared that puts another spin on the same-sex marriage debate:

A South Carolina couple is suing the state's Department of Social Services, a hospital, a medical school and individual hospital employees, alleging that a "medically unnecessary" genital removal surgery violated their adopted intersex child's constitutional rights.

Mark and Pam Crawford say that their child, identified as M.C., is now 8 years old and chooses to identify as a boy, despite doctors deciding that M.C. should be a girl at 16 months old. The couple say that they chose to adopt M.C., who was in state custody at the time of adoption, knowing about the intersex condition.

Intersex conditions occur about one percent of the time according to the Intersex Society of North America. There is a spectrum of intersex conditions, usually caused by genetic errors or minuscule imbalances in hormone levels during fetal development..

This begs the question: are gays and lesbians simply on the subtlest end of the intersex spectrum, in which only the brain is affected?

There's been a good deal of research that shows the brains of gay men more closely resemble straight women, and the brains of lesbians resemble straight men. All fetuses start out essentially neuter (but to all appearances are female) and are differentiated by increasing levels of either testosterone and estrogen. If those levels are out of kilter at specific times during gestation, genital and fetal brain development will be affected. That may result in an intersex or a gay/lesbian child depending on what stage the hormone imbalance occurs at.

Opponents of same-sex marriage insist being gay is a choice and a moral and religious issue. But if people are "born gay" or intersex because of hormone levels in the uterus, they will be hard-wired for a certain sexual orientation. It makes no sense to stigmatize and punish them for a genetic condition that is no more under their control than being nearsighted, being genetically predisposed to breast cancer, having blue eyes -- or dark skin.

Disallowing same-sex marriage is no different than the genetic logic embraced by miscegenation laws that used to prevent blacks and whites from marrying. It's tantamount to racism.

Opponents of gay marriage will immediately object to this. They will insist that this condition is an error and not a badge of honor. Maybe so. But once someone is born this way, there's no way to "fix" it.

The question opponents of gay marriage might ask is what's causing these developmental errors, and if there's anything we can do to prevent them from occurring.

There are many common chemicals, such as BPA, that break down into synthetic estrogens. These have been shown to cause feminization in fish and amphibians, which has raised a great deal of speculation about whether BPA is contributing to the feminization of male humans and shrinking their penises. And maybe making them gay?

BPA is in thousands of products, from plastic bottles, to linings of Coke cans, to cash-register receipts. Perhaps the best thing we can do to stop the "gay plague" is to force companies to prove that the chemicals they use are safe, and to remove them from the market when they're shown to affect fetal development.

Damn. Nothing is worse than having to choose between two firmly held dogmas...

Oh Really?

Interesting piece in the Times yesterday on the origin of the IRS controversy.

Any group claiming tax-exempt status under Section 501(c)(4) of the internal revenue code can collect unlimited and undisclosed contributions, and many took in tens of millions. They are not supposed to spend the majority of their money on political activities, but the I.R.S. has rarely stopped the big ones from polluting the political system with unaccountable cash.

Right. So, the initial motivation for this was the Citizen's United decision and the fallout that has come since that time.

So, my question is this: would all this have happened if Citizen's United had not passed and the IRS was not tasked to get tough on the tax cheats?

Indeed

So Proud!

Dayton signs same-sex marriage law at outdoor ceremony

I am so proud of my state today. See Nikto's story below for more in depth coverage.

Gay Marriage and the Real Job of a Senator

Yesterday the Minnesota Senate passed a gay marriage bill, following the House's vote last week. Governor Mark Dayton is set to sign it tonight. The bill passed the Senate by a 37 to 30 margin, mostly along party lines, with three Democrats voting against it and one Republican voting for it.

Just last November Minnesotans rejected a constitutional amendment that would have banned gay marriage. There had already been a law against it, but Republicans did an end-around the governor and tried to write a discriminatory law into the constitution.

One of the Democrats voting against the marriage bill that just passed was Dan Sparks, from rural Austin:

Sparks, a four-term Democrat, said he voted against the bill to align with his southeastern Senate District 27, which voted about 60 percent in favor of the constitutional amendment last fall. Sparks and nine other rural Senate Democrats hail from districts that voted in favor of the constitutional amendment in November.

“At the end of the day it wasn’t a personal vote for me, it was a vote about representing my district,” Sparks said. “Today I still wasn’t positive after hearing some of the emotional speeches. It was weighing heavy on myself and my family.” Sparks said it was “by far” the most difficult vote he has taken as a senator.

Voters in my district voted against the constitutional amendment by a 3-2 margin, but my senator, David Hann, announced he would vote against it the day before the vote.

The lone Republican who voted for the bill, Branden Peterson, co-sponsored it. Members of his own party vowed to defeat him in the next election. On the floor of the Senate he said:

“I stand here, quite honestly, more uncertain about my future in this place. When I walk out of this chamber today, I know that I’m standing on the side of individual liberty.”

Scott Dibble, of Minneapolis, was a Democratic sponsor of the bill. Most of his constituents supported its passage.

Which of these men did the right thing, and why? It depends on what we think a senator's job is in the first place:

• A: A senator is an employee of all the people in his district. He should vote the way the majority of his constituents want him to. In that case, Dibble and Sparks did the right thing and Hann and Petersen did the wrong thing.
• B: A senator is an employee of just the people who voted for him. Sparks may have done the wrong thing (because he's a Democrat, and it's possible the majority of them wanted the bill passed), Petersen did the wrong thing, and Dibble and Hann did the right thing.
• C: A senator is an employee of his party. Sparks and Petersen did the wrong thing, and Dibble and Hann did the right thing.
• D: A senator is just a job. Sparks and Dibble did the right thing (because they voted the way the majority of the voters in his district voted, and that may get them reelected). Petersen did the wrong thing. Hann may have done the wrong thing if the constituents in my district voted against the constitutional amendment because they felt gay marriage should be allowed. If those constituents thought it was wrong to hack the constitution every time the legislature can't get their way through the normal legislative process (which was why I've voted all recent amendments), then Hann may have done the right thing.
• E: A senator is a moral and ethical leader who is supposed to make this country a freer and fairer place, in a truly libertarian sense. Sparks and Hann did the wrong thing, and Dibble and Petersen did the right thing. Because prohibitions against gay marriage are exactly the same as anti-miscegenation laws that banned interracial marriage, which have now all been struck down in all the states.
• F: A senator is religious leader who is supposed to obey the commandments of whatever religion holds him captive. Sparks may have done the right thing depending on his religion, Petersen probably did the wrong thing (if he's a typical Protestant Republican), and Dibble and Hann did the right thing (assuming their religions support their votes).
• G: A senator is an employee of the people who paid for their election. Sparks and Petersen did the wrong thing (members of their parties almost certainly contributed the majority of his funds), and Dibble and Hann did the right thing.

Judging by the behavior and rhetoric of Democrats, most of them seem to perceive their job to fall into one or more of A, C, D, and E. Republicans seem to favor B, C, D, F and G. This difference might be at the core of why Republicans seem to think governing should be so easy while Democrats find it so complex.

This makes me wonder if the vast majority of people have ever considered what the job of legislators is supposed to be. They just get mad when someone votes in a way they don't like. But having no common definition of what the hell a politician's job should be may be the reason we're so dissatisfied with their performance.