Attacking Syria May be the Right Thing to Do, but There Will Be Consequences...

It's amazing what short memories people have. John McCain is calling Obama's failure to act on Syria "disgraceful." But a decade ago, John McCain and George Bush had their way: they invaded Iraq based on false claims of "yellowcake" and a pack of lies told us by an Iranian spy (Ahmad Chalabi) and an informant named "Curveball" (who the Germans knew was lying).

Now Iraq is an Iranian ally and China is getting all the Iraqi oil we "liberated" from Saddam.

Osama bin Laden ran planes into buildings on 9/11 because we had left American troops in Saudi Arabia after the Gulf War. The Tsarnaev brothers bombed the Boston Marathon because they were angry about the innocents Americans had killed in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Nearly all the recent terrorist attacks (Fort Hood, Times Square, etc.) have been in retribution for the wars. And we can't forget the almost 10,000 American troops who have died, and the hundreds of thousands who have been maimed and scarred for life.

Attacking Syria will mean killing Hezbollah fighters who are coming from Lebanon to help Assad. Americans will be directly responsible for the deaths of Hezbollah fighters. Thus far Hezbollah has left Americans pretty much alone unless we've stationed troops there. Remember Saint Ronald's biggest foreign policy disaster was his response to the bombing of the marine barracks in Beirut in 1983. Almost 300 American and French troops were killed by Hezbollah. Reagan talked tough, but eventually turned tail and pulled them all out. The attack was apparently motivated by the deaths of innocent by-standers by an American missile.  Sound familiar?

If we attack Syria in any significant fashion, we will kill hundreds if not thousands of innocent Syrians, as well as Hezbollah fighters and, potentially, Iranian and Russian advisers. The survivors will be angry and will want revenge. It may take 10 years, as it did for bin Laden and the Tsarnaevs, but we know for certain that some number of these angry young men will attempt to take revenge on America for these deaths. And we know for certain that some of them will succeed.

We are, at the same time McCain is demanding we invade Syria, deciding that the illusion of safety is more important than our privacy: we think it's okay for NSA to watch every single thing we do. Yet McCain is proposing an action that will inevitably endanger a whole new generation of Americans by making a whole new generation of Middle Easterners in yet another country hate us.

If we make war on Syria, we will make more terrorists. In five or 10 years, those terrorists will eventually try blow up the Pentagon or open fire on crowds of children at Disneyworld with AK-47s they can buy without background checks at gun shows in the United States. (Which they can buy with using a cell phone or the Internet.) Dozens if not hundreds or thousands of Americans will die because of an invasion of Syria. At that point millions of oblivious Americans will wail, "Why do they hate us so much?" just like they did after 9/11.

Well, this is why: when Americans kill people, their friends and relatives want revenge. Obliviously, Americans think that those people should be thanking us for freeing them from tyrants. But they don't see Assad as a tyrant: many Syrians are tied to his regime by inescapable political, family and religious ties. They perceive his acts of cruelty against Syrian rebels as necessary to protect their safety (sound familiar?).

Helping the Syrian rebels might be the right thing to do. But directly attacking Syria with American planes, ships and troops will have consequences: not only will American troops die, but eventually terrorists seeking revenge will kill innocent Americans here at home. And will the people who take power after Assad is gone be any better than he is? Is the current prime minister of Iraq any better than Saddam? Based on the number of Iraqis still getting blown up in the streets every day, it would seem not.

So, I wonder: why is the risk of American deaths from waging war on Syria so much more preferable to the risk of American deaths by having the NSA butt out of our personal lives?

Direct Military Aid to Syrian Rebels

I don't know if this is a good idea at all. I realize the president is feeling pressure from all points across the political spectrum to do something but do we really know who these guys are? There are various reports that claim that they Syrian rebels have been infiltrated by Al Qaeda. We've done this dance before in Afghanistan in the late 1970s and early 1980s and that didn't turn out so well.

And speaking of Russia, the fact that they are now sending missiles to aid the Assad government is perhaps more troubling. So, now Putin is arming the Syrian government and we are arming the rebels. Does anyone else think this situation is likely going to massively blow up at any moment.

No Shit

And....Back to Rape...

GOP congressman: Rate of pregnancies from rape is ‘very low’

Rep. Trent Franks (R-Ariz.), whose measure banning abortions after 20 weeks was being considered in the House Judiciary Committee, argued against a Democratic amendment to make exceptions for rape and incest by suggesting that pregnancy from rape is rare. “Before, when my friends on the left side of the aisle here tried to make rape and incest the subject — because, you know, the incidence of rape resulting in pregnancy are very low,” Franks said.

Rape is like catnip to these guys....they just can't stop talking about it!

The Way out of Poverty!

Did you hear the one about Stephen Fincher, the Tennessee Republican congressman who quoted the Bible to justify cutting poor people off food stamps? From The Tennessean:

During the Agriculture Committee hearing last month, Democrats protested the food stamp cut, citing biblical verses about the need to care for the poor.

Fincher responded, “The Bible says a lot of things.” He added, “So we have to be careful how we pick and choose verses out of the Bible.”

In supporting the food stamp cut, the Tennessee member emphasized verses such as “Matthew” 26:11, in which Jesus said, “The poor you will always have with you, but you will not always have me.” He also pointed to “2 Thessalonians” 3:10, which says “The one who is unwilling to work shall not eat.”

That's bad enough, but that isn't the worst:

Fincher has received $3.48 million in federal farm subsidies since 1999, according to the Environmental Working Group, an advocacy group that annually obtains figures from the Agriculture Department. In 2012, he received $70,574.

He ranks first among current members of Congress in receipt of such money, according to the group.

and

Fincher said in 2010 that farm subsidies don’t go into his pocket because he uses them to pay off agricultural loans.

(The FEC has also found Fincher in violation of federal campaign regulations for accepting a $250,000 loan from his father's bank without disclosing it on his filings.)

So, giving food stamps to hungry Americans is bad, but giving farm subsidies to a rich congressman to pay off a big bank is just fine.

Fincher has discovered the way to end poverty! Poor people should just take out big loans from banks and then get the federal government to pay it back.

But wait -- didn't that just happen five or six years ago to millions of Americans who took out home loans from big banks, only to lose everything when the economy tanked?

The federal government bailed out the banks -- and Fincher -- but the vast majority of Americans got the shaft. Now many of those people who lost their jobs and their homes are on food stamps, and Fincher wants to starve them out as well.

Did They Miss It?

Interesting piece from Martin Sandbu about the Occupy Movement. To a certain extent, I agree with him. They had a chance to become the left's equivalent of the Tea Party but the very structure of the organization lent itself to not quite get there. With the "no leader" pledge, they pretty much set themselves up to be irrelevant in the current socio-political framework.

Yet, they did leave behind the "Legacy of the Percent" meme which ended up defining Mitt Romney (the 47 percent). I think Sandbu and many people who chuckle at the "death" of the Occupy Movement aren't reflecting on just how much awareness they raised about inequality in this country. It's part of our political vernacular and has about as much chance of going away as the words "bloated and ineffective" being used in juxtaposition with "government."

And they remained true to their vision and did not sell out to corporate interests unlike the Tea Party. I certainly thought they would so I was clearly wrong on that one. My chief frustration with them still remains their insistence that physical protesting in the age of social media is still relevant. It isn't. If they want to truly "occupy," something, it should be the next version of Twitter or Instagram. That would get people's attention.

How about an Occupy App? :)

Snowden Shows NSA Can't be Trusted with Our Secrets

Looks like I was wrong about the NSA phone records scandal -- it is all Bush's fault. The massive surveillance programs that Edward Snowden revealed to the world all started under Bush.

Some people are angry about these domestic spying programs: Rand Paul is starting a class action suit (aren't conservatives against frivolous lawsuits?). Apparently Snowden is a big Ron Paul supporter; he appears to have donated $500 to Paul's 2012 campaign. And the ACLU has been beating the NSA drum for years.

But a lot of people don't care, especially on the right. They seem to be just fine with the NSA watching every phone call you make and every single thing you do on the Internet. Which is weird considering how bent out of shape they are over the IRS profiling conservative political groups filing for tax-exempt status (apparently something that a conservative Republican IRS employee started). But people like Marc Thiessen insist that there's no danger from  the NSA because "Big Brother is not watching you."

The thing is, Little Brother is watching you. A lovestruck FBI agent messing with this kind of data took down David Petraeus. There have been numerous stories of state employees rummaging through drivers license records looking at hot women.

The people calling Edward Snowden a traitor and a criminal are missing the larger point. By revealing the secret of this massive surveillance program, Snowden -- a low-level computer system administrator -- proved without a doubt that the "safeguards" against exposure of sensitive data are completely inadequate. And if we can't keep this kind of data safe, should we even be collecting it?

Had Snowden really been the villain his detractors say he is, he could have used his access to look at the phone records and Internet activity for Republican senators, conservative pundits and, say, the offices of right-wing political organizations applying for non-profit status -- data that could help determine whether those groups are really "social welfare groups" or just political operatives trying to evade taxes. Or he could have gotten their credit card and bank account numbers and passwords. Or sold that information to the FSB or Chinese intelligence or the Russian mob.

Even if you put aside worries of rogue government employees blackmailing you or selling your data, there's always the problem of theft, mistakes and incompetence. How many times over the past few years have we heard stories about hackers breaking into websites to steal credit card numbers? How many times have sysadmins screwed up and left a firewall open, or put a file full of critical data on an open website, or lost a laptop with the names and Social Security numbers of thousands of people?

Finally, this incident also shows how flawed the idea is of having massively overpaid corporate contractors handle critical government work. Snowden worked for a private company called Booz Allen Hamilton that gets billions of dollars in contracts from the government every year. Snowden has worked for both the CIA and Booz Allen, recently pulling down $200,000 a year as a computer systems administrator. Snowden doesn't have a college degree; he didn't even graduate from high school. Yet he was paid two to four times the regular salary for such a position. Apparently money does not buy loyalty.

However, there's good news: if you're a sysadmin there's a job opening at Booz Allen that pays really well!

Surprised

Flying under the radar of nearly everyone was the recent SCOTUS ruling on Arlington vs. FCC. The essential question of the case was this: if the law is ambiguous, who gets to interpret it? My local paper details why this ruling was nothing short of stunning.

The divisions within the court defied the usual ideological predictions. In a powerful opinion by Justice Antonin Scalia, the court’s majority ruled that even when an agency is deciding on the scope of its own authority, it has the power to interpret ambiguities in the law. Scalia was joined by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor and Clarence Thomas.

Are you FUCKING kidding me? Clarence Fucking Thomas is saying that a government agency has the power to interpret ambiguities in the law? How can this be?

For almost three decades, the court has ruled that when Congress gives a federal agency the power to issue regulations, that agency is usually authorized to interpret ambiguities in the original legislation. For example, does the word “source” in the Clean Air Act mean each smokestack in a plant or the entire plant? The court has ruled that the agency is entitled to interpret such ambiguities as long as its interpretation is reasonable. The idea is that by giving rulemaking authority to agencies, Congress implicitly delegated interpretive power to them as well. The court also has noted that, compared with the courts, the agencies are politically accountable and have technical expertise.

Scalia contended that Roberts was quite wrong to say that courts could identify a separate category of cases — those involving the scope of an agency’s authority. The question is always whether the agency is acting within the bounds set by Congress. “There is no principled basis for carving out some arbitrary subset of cases,” Scalia wrote. Forcing lower courts to draw ad hoc lines would make the law unpredictable and produce chaos. Scalia also insisted that the danger of agency overreaching is to be avoided, not by an arbitrary carve-out, but by requiring agencies to respect congressional limits on their authority.

So, the government agencies must be watched by Congress, not the courts. This means that the Congress has to start doing its fucking job and actually govern which makes me very, very happy.

The Question They Can't Answer

Simple question, via Salon.com...why are there no libertarian countries?

My answer has always been this: the same reason why socialist fantasies never work in reality is the same reason why libertarian fantasies never work in reality...people. They really suck. If the state planned everything, they'd have too much power and corrupt people would be naturally drawn to it. If the state planned nothing and let the free market just sort everything out, the corrupt people would get away with everything they wanted.

Michael Lind, the writer of the piece, makes a few interesting points on this subject.

When you ask libertarians if they can point to a libertarian country, you are likely to get a baffled look, followed, in a few moments, by something like this reply: While there is no purely libertarian country, there are countries which have pursued policies of which libertarians would approve: Chile, with its experiment in privatized Social Security, for example, and Sweden, a big-government nation which, however, gives a role to vouchers in schooling. But this isn’t an adequate response. 

Libertarian theorists have the luxury of mixing and matching policies to create an imaginary utopia. A real country must function simultaneously in different realms—defense and the economy, law enforcement and some kind of system of support for the poor. Being able to point to one truly libertarian country would provide at least some evidence that libertarianism can work in the real world.

Yet they can't do it. It's been my experience that these same people are often "based in science and logic" and require "hard evidence" before they can justify something. Thus, it's quite odd that they continually perpetuate this myth that a libertarian society would be the best. Where is the proof?

While the liberal welfare-state left, with its Scandinavian role models, remains a vital force in world politics, the pro-communist left has been discredited by the failure of the Marxist-Leninist countries it held up as imperfect but genuine models. Libertarians have often proclaimed that the economic failure of Marxism-Leninism discredits not only all forms of socialism but also moderate social-democratic liberalism.

But think about this for a moment. If socialism is discredited by the failure of communist regimes in the real world, why isn’t libertarianism discredited by the absence of any libertarian regimes in the real world? Communism was tried and failed. Libertarianism has never even been tried on the scale of a modern nation-state, even a small one, anywhere in the world.

Exactly right and there's a reason for that perfectly summed up in one word: anarchy.

Meanwhile...

Oh Really?

An Unwarranted (But Not Warrantless) Invasion of Privacy

The Guardian reports that the NSA has been collecting data on all phone calls placed through Verizon:

The secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (Fisa) granted the order to the FBI on April 25, giving the government unlimited authority to obtain the data for a specified three-month period ending on July 19.

Under the terms of the blanket order, the numbers of both parties on a call are handed over, as is location data, call duration, unique identifiers, and the time and duration of all calls. The contents of the conversation itself are not covered.

Based on the timing this appears to be in response to the Boston Marathon bombings, which took place on April 15th. At that time it wasn't clear whether the Tsarnaevs were acting alone. Given that, it's likely that all carriers are providing the NSA this data; the other court orders simply haven't been leaked yet.

While this total surveillance of everyone all the time is ethically and morally wrong, it isn't illegal, thanks to the Patriot Act that the Bush administration rammed through Congress. That wasn't good enough for George W. Bush, who broke the law and simply issued an executive order for the NSA to conduct domestic surveillance of Americans without warrants from FISA.

People like Ron Wyden and Mark Udall have long been warning against this kind of government surveillance, and they opposed the Bush administration when after 9/11 Republicans used the fear of terrorism to arrogate themselves unlimited surveillance powers.

Republicans are sure to pile on Obama with this. Which is totally ridiculous, because the NSA is acting completely within the laws that Republicans crammed down our throats. Republicans did this, in part, because men like Karl Rove had fooled themselves into thinking that they would have a permanent Republican majority and could never be dislodged from power again. Presidents, when they're Republicans, should have unlimited executive power, but when Democrats exercise that exact same latitude it's an abomination.

If Mitt Romney's NSA had been caught doing this Republicans would be falling over themselves telling us how absolutely necessary this was to protect ourselves from the likes of the Tsarnaev brothers and another Boston bombing. They would be saying, "better safe than sorry," and "you have to break a few eggs to make an omelette."

But even at their worst, the Democrats are still bloody amateurs at privacy invasion compared to the professional Republican lawbreakers who never bothered with FISA in the first place.

Truly Disgusting

In looking at all the recent criticism of President Obama, this travesty is noticeably absent and I'd like to know why. The president is the commander in chief of the armed forces and, on his watch, sexual assaults have gone up by 30 percent. Why?

It's truly disgusting to me on a number of levels. The president claims to be a huge supporter of women's rights but he can hardly claim that after 26,000 incidents of unwanted sexual contact. 26,000....are you fucking kidding me?!? I'd say that this is, hands down, his biggest mistake since he took office. Grade=F.

The media also pisses me off here because they have largely ignored this story and have focused instead on the "scandals" that will generate the most viewers (see: retired old people who have nothing better to do than foam at the mouth about Blackie McBlackerson). Conservatives are also full of crap on this one because they'd rather leave the sacred cow of the military alone not to mention the fact that they probably think this kind of assault is somehow legitimate or that the women were somehow asking for it.

It's one giant shit show from top to bottom with most Americans not really caring at all which, in the final analysis, is truly the most despicable part of all of this.

"Misspoke" = "Accidentally Told the Truth"

A Dallas Tea Party activist has yet again made headlines by accidentally telling the truth. At a GOP event in May Ken Emanuelson said that "The Republican Party doesn’t want black people to vote if they’re going to vote 9-1 for Democrats."

He has since said he misspoke, and sought to explain his comments with the following:

I expressed a personal opinion about what the Republican Party “wants.” That was a mistake. I hold no position of authority within the Republican Party and it wasn’t my place to opine on behalf of the desires of the Republican Party. 

What I meant, and should have said, is that it is not, in my personal opinion, in the interests of the Republican Party to spend its own time and energy working to generally increase the number of Democratic voters at the polls, and at this point in time, nine of every ten African American voters cast their votes for the Democratic Party.

Even in his clarification, he's still saying that he thinks it's in the Republican Party's best interests to minimize the number of African Americans (who in his mind are all Democrats) at the polls. Republican efforts at reducing minority turnout have been fierce, with the scrubbing of blacks from voter rolls in Florida in 2000, the firings of US attorneys for failing to toe the political line, the harassment of voter registration groups like the League of Women Voters, and the passage of Republican-backed voter ID laws across the country that overwhelmingly disenfranchise minority and elderly voters.

You know, it doesn't really matter if it's this guy's personal opinion, if his personal opinion coincides with the personal opinions of all the other guys in his party, and is reflected in the political strategy and legislative actions of their party.

He just screwed up and by saying it out loud.

Bee Stung

Last week I wrote about the Scripps National Spelling Bee, mainly whining that they rely on too many foreign words that are transliterated incorrectly. Well, the organizers of the Bee were stung again.

This time around a lot of other people have been complaining about the Bee spelling a word wrong. The winning word in the Bee was knaidel, a Yiddish word for a type of dumpling. The problem is, that's not the official transliteration of the word. It should be kneydl, according to YIVO, the Yiddish Scientific Institute.

The knaidel spelling came about because some guy decided he'd transliterate it according to "English pronunciation rules." The problem with this idea is that English has multiple ways of spelling the same sound, or phoneme.

That means it could have just as easily been transliterated as knaidle, knaidl, knadel, knadle, knaydel, knaydle, knaydl, kneydel, kneydl, kneidl, kneighdl, kneighdel, kneighdle. Or knödel, which is the spelling of the word in German, where the word comes from. Or קניידל, which is the actual Yiddish spelling in the Hebrew alphabet [1]. (Man, you cannot believe what a pain in the neck it was to copy and paste that single word!)

The Bee defends itself by saying their official dictionary spells it this way. But if Arvind Mahankali had spelled it correctly, with the official YIVO transliteration or the actual Yiddish spelling, would the Bee have ruled him wrong?

This brings up the most basic question about dictionaries, which linguists and lexicographers still debate: should dictionaries reflect how people use, pronounce and spell words, or should they dictate proper usage?

These two camps are the descriptivists and the prescriptivists. Who's right?

In my heart I want to be a prescriptivist: there's a right spelling, there's a right definition, there's a right pronunciation. But in my head I know that's nonsense: a century ago those things were completely different, and in another century they'll have changed again. And even today they're not the same in Boston, Atlanta, LA, London or Canberra. The reality is that dictionaries can only describe currently accepted usage in one place, which will only change as the demands on language change.

So the next time someone corrects your pronunciation or spelling of a word, just tell them, "Stuff it! I'm on the bleeding edge of linguistic evolution, old man!"


Notes

[1] Yiddish itself is an exercise in spelling weirdness. It is a dialect of German spoken by European Jews, but is written from right to left and spelled with the Hebrew alphabet. Its vocabulary is heavily influenced by Hebrew and and several eastern European languages.

The problem is that Hebrew typically doesn't bother to put vowels in their words (neither does Arabic), because they're basically unneeded. When they do feel the need (in children's books, for example), Hebrew writers put diacritical marks or "points" on the consonants to indicate the vowels. Hebrew only has five vowels.

But European languages have many more vowels: modern German has 17 vowels, while modern English has between 11 and 14 vowels depending on dialect (American, British and Australian speakers not only use different pronunciations for the same words, Australians have a wider palette of sounds to choose from).

That means Yiddish had to invent new ways of representing sounds that didn't exist in Hebrew.

It's About Time

A shout out today to Jim McDermott (D-WA) for finally asking why the tea party groups, who supposedly loathe government handouts, wanted to be subsidized in the first place.

“But as I listen to this discussion, I’d like to remind everyone what we are talking about here. None of your organizations were kept from organizing or silenced. We are talking about whether or not the American taxpayers would subsidize your work. We are talking about a tax break”.

Recall that the tea party groups in question were applying to become tax exempt 501(c)4 groups, also known as social welfare organizations. McDermott noted the purpose of such groups was to advance the common good and general welfare a community. Political organizations, on the other hand, are categorized under section 527 of the federal tax code.

“Each of your groups is highly political”, McDermott said. “From opposing the President’s healthcare reform, to abortion restrictions, to gay marriage, you’re all entrenched in some of the most controversial political issues in this country – and with your applications you are asking the American public to pay for that work. Many of you host and endorse candidates. The line between permitted political activity and non-permitted political activity can be very fine, and it’s important that tax payers know which side you fall on”.

Here's the video.

The Pro-Life Thing to Do

Every time there's a natural disaster you get people asking questions like, "Why do people live in Twister-Prone Oklahoma?" It's kind of ironic because a lot of the people asking those questions live in places like California along the San Andreas Fault, or in the hills where mudslides and wildfires are an annual event. Or in Florida or Louisiana, which get hammered by hurricanes. Or in North Dakota, parts of which are constantly inundated by floods. Or in Wyoming, the state with the highest suicide rate. Or in Flint, or Detroit, or New Orleans, or St. Louis, the cities with the highest murder rates in the country.

The fact is, people become complacent about risks they face every day. They have to, otherwise they'd go crazy from fear. Thus, we obsess about the possibility of dying in a plane crash, a terrorist attack, or a crazed gunman, when the fact of the matter is we're much more likely to die in car accident, be shot by a husband, or even hit by lightning.

The question isn't why people live in places that are subject to natural disasters. The answer to that is easy: they have to. No, the real question is why people don't take even the simplest and logical precautions to protect themselves from those disasters.

Moore, Oklahoma, has been hit by four massive tornadoes in recent years: once in 1998, again in 2003 and twice now in 2013. Yet schools don't have underground basements or above-ground tornado shelters. The kids just huddle in the hallways, with only the bodies of their teachers to protect them. As a result seven children died at Plaza Towers elementary school.

Don't the people of Oklahoma care enough about their children to provide shelter for them? These people live in Tornado Alley, damn it. They know the risks better than anyone. But what did the Oklahoma legislature concern itself with in the year following the 2009 tornado in Moore? Forcing women to get invasive ultrasounds and suffer through a grotesque lecture before getting an abortion.

Why do lawmakers in Oklahoma care more about forcing women to gestate unwanted fetuses than protecting living, breathing, talking children whose parents love them dearly?

The sticking point, they always claim, is the money. "Where, oh where, could we possibly get the money to pay for tornado shelters for our children?"

The answer's pretty simple. In the single month of March, 2013, Oklahoma produced nearly 9 million barrels of oil. Production had been averaging around 7 million bbl a month, but it's been growing steadily. At today's price of around $93 a barrel, that's worth almost a billion dollars a month.

Oklahoma should immediately begin issuing "Tornado" bonds to finance construction of tornado shelters for schools. They should also change housing codes to require shelters for all new homes and apartments, improve construction standards to make houses withstand high winds better, and institute a program to provide low-interest loans to people who wish to build tornado shelters for existing homes (these can be had for a few thousand dollars).

To pay for those bonds they should increase their Gross Production Tax rate on natural gas and oil, which is currently 7% per barrel. In  comparison,  the tax rate on gas in Texas is 7.5%, 8% in Alabama, 8% in Kansas, 5% in North Dakota, 8% in California, etc.

Alaska has an incredibly complex tax structure, which appears to be 25 to 50% depending on the oil field, plus a surcharge when the price of oil is greater than $40/barrel, plus a conservation surcharge of 4%, plus an additional 1% if the oil spill fund contains less than $50 million.

What does Alaska use all that money for? They cut $2,000 checks to residents.

And who was the conservative Republican governor behind all that? Why, none other than Sarah Palin, the 2008 Republican candidate for vice president. She increased taxes on oil companies when the state already had a large surplus. She also demanded an extra $1,200 check be cut to every Alaskan just two months before McCain selected her.

If Sarah Palin can get away with a massive program to redistribute wealth from oil companies -- and the rest of the country -- to Alaskans, I don't think the nation or the oil companies would begrudge Oklahomans a minor increase in oil taxes to protect the lives of their children safe from deadly natural disasters.

It's the pro-life thing to do.

And It Continues

Republicans just can't seem to stop talking about their views on women. They simply can't resist letting slip their true feelings on the place of women in our society.

“I’m so used to liberals telling conservatives that they’re anti-science,” Erickson explained. “But liberals who defend this and say it is not a bad thing are very anti-science. When you look at biology, when you look at the natural world, the roles of a male and a female in society and in other animals, the male typically is the dominant role. The female, it’s not antithesis, or it’s not competing, it’s a complementary role.” 

“We as people in a smart society have lost the ability to have complimentary relationships in nuclear families, and it is tearing us apart,” he continued, adding that “reality showed” it was harmful for women to be the primary source of income in a family. 

Fox News contributor Doug Schoen concluded the freak out by claiming all these so-called breadwinner moms “could undermine our social order.”

Wow. I guess they really don't want to hold on to the House in 2014. More amusing, though, is his doubling down.

Pro-science liberals seem to think basic nature and biology do not apply to Homo sapiens. Men can behave like women, women can behave like men, they can raise their kids, if they have them, in any way they see fit, and everything will turn out fine in the liberal fantasy world.

The only fantasy world being bandied about here is the one that Erickson thinks still exists. I'll never understand the perpetual "Golden Age" thinking trap in which the Right seems to be ensnared. They see any sort of change as a threat to a fantasy that never existed in in the first place.

Oh Really?

Facebook=Out

Talk to most kids these days and they'll tell you that Facebook is wayyyy out. Why should they be on the same social network as their parents? Instagram and Twitter rock the shizzle.  I hear this around school all the time and it makes me feel even older than I already am...

Monsanto's Frankenwheat: It's Alive!

Just two weeks ago Monsanto won its case in the Supreme Court against an Indiana farmer for violating their patents by replanting genetically modified "Roundup Ready" soybeans. These seeds make growing soybeans easier because they allow farmers to indiscriminately spray Monsanto's Roundup herbicide on their fields without worrying about killing their crops.

Now Japan and Korea  have suspended US wheat imports from the Pacific Northwest because a strain of GMO wheat that Roundup cannot kill has been found on an Oregon farm. Monsanto supposedly abandoned nine years ago, but Monsanto's Frankenwheat has come back from the dead. And Europe is now threatening to require all US wheat to be tested before being imported.

Other countries are not so sanguine about the safety of genetically modified crops. America has bought into them big time because we care more about profit more than the possible adverse health effects of consuming large quantities of genetically engineered plants.

The scientific jury is still out on whether such crops are safe -- mainly because companies like Monsanto quash that research immediately, just as many states make it illegal to videotape illegal practices on factory farms. Monsanto has soybean farmers over a barrel: the farmers are convinced they need Monsanto's GMO seeds in order to compete, but they have to buy that expensive patented seed from Monsanto. If they replant the seed they'll get sued like the farmer in Indiana.

While it's still not clear that GMO crops are inherently bad, it is becoming more obvious that  insecticides and herbicides (like Roundup) are not as safe as Monsanto pretends they are. There are potential links between pesticide exposure and neurological conditions such as Parkinsons and autism, ADHD in children, Alzheimers in adults, and immunosuppressive disorders. The herbicide Atrazine has been implicated in the feminization of amphibians and potentially humans.

Monsanto wants us to think that the poison in Roundup just washes away and could never be incorporated into the soybeans themselves, but I have my doubts. It's becoming increasingly obvious that even minute concentrations of environmental toxins are behind many of the once-obscure medical conditions that have become so mysteriously prevalent in recent years. Developing fetuses are extremely sensitive to even the most minute concentrations of chemicals that resemble natural estrogens.

Perhaps farmers in Oregon should file a class-action lawsuit against Monsanto for contaminating their fields with weeds that cannot be killed, and sue for damages for loss of income because they can't export their crops.

Becoming China's Pigsty

Shuanghui International, a Chinese company, is going to buy Smithfield Foods, the largest American pork producer,  for $4.7 billion. Chinese demand for pork is ratcheting up and they're going to want it as cheap and fast as possible. Which portends disaster on several fronts.

First, corporate corruption in China is endemic. There isn't a week that goes by without a story of a Chinese official going to jail for accepting bribes.

Then there's the Chinese penchant for placing profits above the health and even lives of their customers. It was just 2008 when a Chinese company intentionally put melamine in baby formula to boost its protein content to fool a quality test, sending 50,000 babies to the hospital with kidney damage and killing at least six. Several Chinese corporate executives have been executed for such crimes.

Then there are disease outbreaks. The first case in the 2009 H1N1 swine flu pandemic was in La Gloria, Mexico, near a Smithfield Farms' Mexican subsidiary. Animal husbandry practices in China already make it the perfect breeding ground for diseases like SARS and bird flu. With a Chinese corporation in charge of the largest pork operation in the world the 1918 flu pandemic may soon look like a case of the sniffles.

Then there's the callous Chinese disregard for environmental quality, most obvious in the noxious pall of coal pollution that constantly shrouds Chinese cities like Beijing. Recently a Chinese company dumped thousands of dead pigs into the Huangpu River in Shanghai. American factory farms and slaughterhouses already have a terrible record when it comes to the environment, with massive repeated spills from manure lagoons that kill millions of fish.

The Texas House and Senate recently passed a law that prohibits citizens from using drones. You would think concerns over geeks spying on women sunbathing in their backyards would have prompted this. But no: a Texas slaughterhouse was recently caught dumping pig blood into a creek by a guy playing around with a drone. This resulted in fines from the EPA and indictments from a Dallas County grand jury. And it prompted the Texas legislature to prevent citizens from monitoring the illegal activities of corporations.

There are laws on the books in several states making it illegal to videotape operations on factory farms and in slaughterhouses after a spate of bad publicity and fines levied on businesses that were caught breaking the law by undercover activists. Crazily, these states have made it illegal to record evidence of illegal activities.

Then there is immigration: Smithfield Foods has already been charged numerous times for violation of immigration laws. The vast majority of its slaughterhouse employees are foreign workers. To increase pork production to meet Chinese demand the new owners are going to need more workers. And they're not going to want to pay them very much. So they'll have to import them. Probably from Mexico and Central America. Combine those captive workers with Chinese labor practices like FoxConn's, and we'll have an epidemic of severed fingers, hands and arms from overworked meat packers. The inevitable squalid conditions in these slaughterhouses will become the perfect vector for introducing E. coli infections and communicable diseases into our food supply.

To keep all these problems under control and to get the laws changed to suit their needs the new Chinese owners will have to exert political power. And the Supreme Court's incredibly naive Citizens United decision gives them the perfect vehicle. The tax-exempt "social welfare" organizations at the heart of the IRS scandal provide will allow Chinese corporations to anonymously affect policy and buy influence in American elections.

If Chinese executives have no compunctions about poisoning Chinese babies, do you think they'll give a damn about breaking campaign finance laws in a foreign country where the only punishment their flunkies will face is just a fine and a slap on the wrist?

Executives of multinational corporations have historically shown a callous disregard for the health and welfare of the people in the countries where their foreign operations are conducted. American corporations have acted with impunity in banana republics for centuries, but with incidents such as the BP oil spill the tide has turned against us.

The usual business cheerleaders who tout how wonderful it will be having a new export market neglect to mention that all the profits will be heading to China. Won't it be great when the United States is China's pigsty?

Amelia Earhart Found?

A sonar image may yield the final piece of the puzzle as to what happened to Amelia Earhart over 75 years ago. This image, in the republic of Kiribati, shows an underwater object that is the right shape and size to match the wreckage of the aviator's Electra plane, according to the specialist who analyzed it.

Interestingly, a man named Richard Conroy found the photo in an online forum sponsored by the International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR). I've always been fascinated by this mystery and it would be cool to find out if this is really her plane.

The Bee in My Bonnet

Another National Spelling Bee has come and gone, and the winner is Arvind Mahankali. Like most years, the winner was of Indian descent, and he won by spelling a foreign word (knaidel).

If you can believe it, the Bee elicited an organized protest outside the Grand Hyatt in Washington. The protesters weren't demonstrating against the South Asian lock on spelling bees (kids whose ancestors hail from the subcontinent have won 11 of the past 15 Bees). No, they're protesting spelling itself.

With the slogan "I'm Thru with Through," members of the American Literacy Council stood outside the hotel and denigrated the efforts of thousands of American kids who study etymology and word lists night and day.

To be honest, I've always thought spelling bees were silly, even though I would have probably done well in them (though like everyone I'm occasionally the victim of a stray typo). I disdain computer spell checkers because they don't catch the most egregious and embarrassing spelling error — the homonym, or my main bugaboos — omitted or correctly-spelled extra words resulting from over-editing.

My problem with spelling bees is that the vast majority of their words are not English: they're just imported foreign words, typically used only in obscure scientific or literary circumstances. If you've ever watched  a bee you know what I mean: the first question a contestant asks after being presented with a word is "Language of origin?"

Since most languages have much more regular spelling rules than English, that single piece of information can be a dead giveaway, even if you don't know the word. That's particularly true for languages such as Spanish and Italian, but it's also true for German and even French. So the spelling bee isn't so much a test of English spelling proficiency, but spelling in any language English has co-opted, which is all of them.

But there's a problem: when words come from languages that don't use the Latin alphabet, such as Russian, Chinese or Japanese, what's the "correct" spelling? There are at least 10 different ways to romanize Chinese. Russian can be romanized in several different ways, depending on the native language of the person who does it. We always spell Tchaikovsky with a T, but we do so because we took the French spelling — the "proper" English transliteration should be Chaikovsky. And you still see it occasionally spelled the German way: Tschaikowskij. To make things even more confusing, Russians usually pronounce it Chikovsky.

The Russian word указ is usually spelled ukase in English, but that's a French transliteration of a Russian word: the English should be ukaz.

And so it was that this year's bee opened with with a Russian word: glasnost. (Glasnost was the policy of openness introduced by Mikhail Gorbachov [1] that ultimately brought the downfall of the Soviet Union.) And here's where that transliteration problem comes in: the spelling proffered by the Bee is wrong [2].

Which brings us back to the spelling reform advocates. The problems with reforming English spelling are threefold.

First is assimilation of foreign words: we literally have millions of them. Reforming English spelling to mangle words of foreign origin such as derailleur, menage à trois and Weltschmerz into duhrayler, menahzh a twah and veltshmairts is just plain silly: no two people will decide on the same spelling.

Second is an issue with language in general: pronunciation changes over time. In words like thought and through the "silent" letters used to be pronounced. You get an inkling of the original pronunciations by comparing them to their modern German counterparts dachten and durch. This process isn't going to stop just because we reformed spelling. Pronunciation will continue to evolve, ultimately rendering the phonetic spellings the reformers want us to adopt just as lacking as our current orthography.

Third is the problem of differences in pronunciation across dialects (which is just the end result of the second problem). The spelling reformers want to spell English the way it's pronounced: but whose pronunciation should we use? Take the phrase Today is a good day to die. Listening to certain Australians you'll hear To die is a good die to doi. Or compare the Midwestern, Boston and Georgia pronunciations of car, or the Eastern and Southwestern American pronunciations of pen and pencil.

If we abandon current English orthography and have everyone spell it the way they say it, written English would degenerate into mutually unintelligible dialects, creoles and pidgins. No one would spell things the same way because everyone pronounces things differently.  I'm not just making dire predictions: it's the natural course of language development. All the Germanic languages started from a common protolanguage that evolved over the centuries into English, German, Dutch, Frisian, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, and several languages that have since died out, such as Gothic and Norn.

The benefit of standard spelling is that it provides a lingua franca that everyone understands. It also pushes speakers back to a common pronunciation. There's a definite tendency for people to pronounce words the way they're spelled. For example, the t in often was dropped over the centuries, but many modern speakers have reinserted it because, seeing it spelled that way, they think it's proper to pronounce the t. Words like waistcoat and mainsail were so commonly used that they became slurred and the "proper" pronunciation became weskit and mainsl. Modern readers, encountering these words long after they've fallen out of common usage, pronounce them as they're spelled.

With increased literacy it seems that the rate of language evolution decreases. We can still read  Shakespeare's plays 400 years after they were written (understanding his literary and social references is another story...). But the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle from 1138, a mere 300 years before Shakespeare, looks like gibberish: "... ] flemden þe king æt te Standard  ] sloghen suithe micel of his genge." [3]

With the popularity of global mass media like popular music, summer blockbuster movies and the Internet it seems that the rate of language evolution should slow even more, as differences between regions are smoothed over quickly and may never have a chance to develop in the first place.

But then you consider the influence of popular cultural phenomena like hip hop music on English, and you realize that instantaneous global communication may actually accelerate language evolution. But at least we'll all be in on it.

Notes
[1] Gorbachov's name is almost always transliterated incorrectly. In Russian newspapers it's usually spelled Горбачев, but the actual spelling is Горбачёв (in the olden days Russian typesetters apparently didn't have enough lead to make a separate letter for the e with two dots). The ё is usually pronounced "yo" (Yo!), but after a ч you don't pronounce the "y" part. So, for some stupid reason the people who transliterated Russian names for American publications used Gorbachev, rather than the actual pronunciation of Gorbachov, which means most Americans pronounce his name incorrectly.

[2] In Russian glasnost is spelled "гласность". If you look carefully, you'll notice that the Russian has one extra letter compared to the English. That extra letter is the "soft sign," which means the final t is "palatized." Russian differentiates palatized consonants in cases where English treats them the same. Palatization in English is usually just part of your accent. For example, an American from the Midwest will pronounce the word "tune" as toon (an unpalatized t) while an educated Briton will pronounce it tyoon (with a palatized t). Americans usually palatize the first n in union (yoonyun), while many Britons don't palatize it, pronouncing it yoo-nee-un.


Thus, the "proper" English transliteration of гласность should be glasnost' (the apostrophe designates the soft sign). The official bee spelling omits the soft sign, surely as grievous an error as spelling derailleur derailer! Yes, that's ridiculously nitpicky. But the whole point of a spelling bee is to be as nitpicky as possible!

Another of the words in the first round of the Bee was perestroika (перестройка), which could just as easily be spelled perestroyka using the standard transliteration of the letter "й".

[3] "... and routed the king at the Standard, and slew very many of his gang"

Fuck This. Let's just sabotage it!!

Now that the Right has finally given up on repealing the Affordable Care Act, I guess it's time for out and out sabotage.

While opposition to the health care program is nothing new, the tactics are changing. Rather than focusing on repealing the law in Congress and the courts, two avenues that have failed so far, the groups are aiming to prevent the cornerstone of the legislation, the insurance exchanges, from succeeding. Their goal is to limit enrollments, drive up costs, and make it easier to roll back all or part of the law later.

It's a good thing they are being mature about it.

No More Asterisk

I think it is now safe to say that our economy has turned the corner and we are doing quite well.

Surging stock prices and steady home-price increases have allowed Americans to regain the $16 trillion in wealth they lost to the Great Recession. Higher wealth tends to embolden people to spend more. Some economists have said the increase in home prices alone could boost consumer spending enough to offset a Social Security tax increase that has reduced paychecks for most Americans this year. 

The Conference Board survey said consumers are also more optimistic about the next six months. That should translate into greater consumer spending, substantial growth in hiring and faster economic growth in the second half of 2013, says Thomas Feltmate, an economist with TD Economics.

The difference this time is that there are so many indicators pointing towards positivity that there really isn't an  asterisk on this news. I wonder how all of this will be spun inside of the bubble.

Well, There Goes Two Talking Points

Unexpected Health Insurance Rate Shock-California Obamacare Insurance Exchange Announces Premium

“One reason for the misplaced expectations may be that actuaries have been making worst-case assumptions, even as insurers—eyeing the prospects of so many new customers—have been calculating that it’s worth bidding low in order to gobble up market share. This would help explain why premium bids in several other states have proven similarly reasonable. “The premiums and participation in California, Oregon, Washington and other states show that insurers want to compete for the new enrollees in this market,” Gary Claxton, a vice president at the Kaiser Family Foundation, said via e-mail. “The premiums have not skyrocketed and the insurers that serve this market now are continuing. The rates look like what we would expect for decent coverage offered to a standard population.”

RatesBig Three automakers, reinvented, eye consumers worldwide

Their evolution has been "transformative, like nothing that ever occurred in the past for the American auto industry," says Mike Smith, a labor historian at Wayne State University in Detroit. "American automobile workers and companies are more efficient than they have ever been during any time in history."

No Shit, Bob

Former Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole says he doesn't believe he could make it in the modern Republican Party. 

"I doubt it," he said in an interview aired on "Fox News Sunday" when asked if his generation of Republican leaders could make it in today's GOP. "Reagan couldn't have made it. Certainly, Nixon couldn't have made it, cause he had ideas. We might've made it, but I doubt it." 

Dole, a wounded World War II veteran from Kansas and icon of the party, said he believes it needs to rethink the direction it's heading in. 

"They ought to put a sign on the National Committee doors that says 'Closed for repairs,' until New Year's Day next year," he said. "And spend that time going over ideas and positive agendas."

How many elections are they going to lose before they get this message? 

The Real Gun Walkers

As I was reading this morning's Times over breakfast, this piece on the gun industry made me realize why the gun community, especially the manufacturers, go into anaphylactic shock when the subject of Operation: Fast and Furious comes up. It's because their entire raison d'etre is one giant gun walking operation.

Think about it for a minute. The gun manufacturers know that their guns are used in violent crimes so they went out and bought protection for themselves from the federal government. The gun community knows that there are a giant collection of criminals and terribly irresponsible people in this country whose gun use results in the death of thousands. This simple fact is the result of a continued and persistent drive to loosen gun laws or, at the very least, prevent new ones from being made.

They are partly responsible for incidents that occur every day in this country because they allow guns to get into the hands of criminals just as the Justice Department did in 2009. Their loudly stated beliefs clearly shows that they are doing this on purpose.

So, the next time you hear someone from the gun community caterwauling about walked guns and the federal government, tell them that they are simply doing what they always do...heading off at the pass.

Honoring Those Who Did Not Come Home With Him...

They're Thinking, "Uh, Oh..."

From The New York Times:

Republican lawmakers on Sunday criticized President Obama’s vision for winding down the war on terrorism, using talk show appearances to accuse him of misunderstanding the threat in a way that will embolden unfriendly nations.

“We show this lack of resolve, talking about the war being over,” Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, said on “Fox News Sunday.” “What do you think the Iranians are thinking? At the end of the day, this is the most tone-deaf president I ever could imagine.”

Republicans haven't learned one damned thing in the last 22 years: they are still being duped by the Iranians and the terrorists. What motivated bin Laden to blow up American embassies and fly planes into American buildings? The massively unpopular presence of US military forces in Saudi Arabia, left there after the 1991 Gulf War, which ejected Saddam Hussein from Kuwait.

What motivated the Tsarnaev brothers to bomb the Boston Marathon? The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. What motivated the underwear bomber? A desire for religious jihad to protest the continued killings of Muslims in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

In all of these cases, terrorists attacked the United States because they felt that we were fighting unjust wars against Muslims or maintaining an unnecessary military presence in their countries. Did we need to station troops in Saudi Arabia, even though we knew our bases there were wildly unpopular with Saudis? No: George W. Bush very quietly pulled them out in 2003. Many of them went to Kuwait, where there was actual public support for their presence as protection against Saddam.

After 9/11 pretty much the entire world was on America's side, and applauded our invasion of Afghanistan. But W. blew all that good will, first by letting bin Laden escape at Tora Bora through incompetent management of the initial phases of the war there, and then by being duped by Iranian agents like Ahmad Chalabi and the infamous Curveball, who gave Bush phony stories of WMDs in Iraq.

The Iranians manipulated the Bush administration into invading Iraq, thereby eliminating their greatest enemy, Saddam Hussein, and saddling the United States with two simultaneous wars that will ultimately cost this nation $2 trillion. The Iraq war proved to be the greatest recruiting tool Al Qaeda ever had. And today Iraq is ruled by a Shiite regime friendly to Iran.

Bush and the Republicans let the Iranians lead them around by the nose. Bush should have finished bin Laden at Tora Bora in 2001 instead of immediately distracting himself with Iraq and letting bin Laden escape to live in luxury with his wives outside Abottabad in Pakistan.

We should have got in, got 'er done, and got out, instead of letting the Afghan war drag out into the longest war in the history of this nation. It should have been obvious from the get-go that a long war is unwinnable: the Soviet Union's 10-year long invasion of Afghanistan was probably the greatest contributor to its breakdown.

Had we not invaded Iraq in 2003 terrorist attacks in the US, Spain, Britain -- and Boston -- would never have occurred. Thousands of American military personnel would not have died. Hundreds of thousands would not have suffered horrible mutilations and PTSD.

Had we pulled our troops out of Saudi Arabia after clobbering Saddam in 1991 bin Laden would not have attacked us on 9/11.

If we had not been caught up in Afghanistan and Iraq the North Koreans might not have dared develop nuclear weapons because the wars so severely limited America's options. Indeed, without Bush's "Axis of Evil" speech and invasion of Iraq, it's quite possible that the North Koreans and the Iranians would not have felt they were going to be invaded next, and wouldn't have felt an urgent need to go nuclear.

Again and again, in their desire to appear strong and resolute and to project power into places where we were simply not wanted or were not specifically needed for our long-term goals, Republicans have only caused foreigners to needlessly hate this country. By frittering away trillions of dollars on pointless and very public wars against "terrorism," Republicans have elevated terrorist criminals like bin Laden to Muslim war heroes and martyrs.

If we weren't fighting giant wars killing lots of Muslims, Middle Eastern governments might find it a lot easier to cooperate with us on catching terrorists who have killed far more Muslims than they have Americans. The NSA, CIA and the FBI should be quietly hunting down these dogs, capturing them with as little "collateral damage" as possible. Then we should very publicly try them like the spineless murderers they are. But when American conservatives dignify these criminals as "jihadis" -- a derogatory term in the minds of Fox News viewers, but a badge of honor to Muslims -- they are only falling into the terrorists' propaganda trap.

So to answer Graham's question: after Obama's speech the Iranians are probably thinking, "Uh, oh... Looks like the bull isn't going to be lead around by the nose anymore."

Adultery Schmultery

I guess adultery is OK now:)

Pat Robertson, the network's 83-year-old founder, was not condoning adultery when he answered a viewer's quesion on "The 700 Club" this week, the network said. 

The viewer said she was having difficulty forgiving her husband for cheating. Robertson said the “secret” was to “stop talking about the cheating. He cheated on you. Well, he’s a man. OK.” 

Robertson went on to suggest the woman focus on why she had married her husband and whether he provided for her needs and those of their children, adding, “Is he handsome? Start focusing on these things and essentially fall in love all over again.” 

“Males have a tendency to wander a little bit. And what you want to do is make a home so wonderful he doesn’t want to wander.”

Oh Really?

Meet the group the IRS actually denied: Democrats!

In fact, the only known 501(c)(4) applicant to have its status denied happens to be a progressive group: the Maine chapter of Emerge America, which trains Democratic women to run for office. Although the group did no electoral work, and didn’t participate in independent expenditure campaign activity either, its partisan status apparently disqualified it from being categorized as working for the “common good.”

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:)