Category Archives: Short Notes

A weekly feature that collects interesting links and adds a paragraph or two of content.

It’s Mitt Romney’s Economy

October 31, 2011 – 12:14 pm

One of the major debates of the 2010 election was about whose bad economy this was: Did the mess belong to Barack Obama now, or was he still just mopping up after the disaster that was George W. Bush? Despite the merits of their case, the Democrats lost that argument, and most of Congress along with it.

As we move towards 2012, the cover article in the current New York Magazine (doesn’t young Mitt look like Mad Men‘s Don Draper?) raises an intriguing third explanation: Maybe it’s been Mitt Romney’s economy all along.

That claim seems like a stretch the first time you hear it, but it makes sense. Our 1% economy didn’t just come from government, it’s also the result of a revolution in the way corporations behave. And one of the most decorated veterans of that revolution is Mitt Romney:

Mitt Romney is the real thing. He was, by any measure, an astonishingly successful businessman, one who spent his career explaining how business might operate better, and who leveraged his own mind into a personal fortune worth as much as $250 million. But much more significantly, Romney was also a business revolutionary. Our economy went through a remarkable shift during the eighties as Wall Street reclaimed control of American business and sought to remake it in its own image. Romney developed one of the tools that made this possible, pioneering the use of takeovers to change the way a business functioned, remaking it in the name of efficiency.

There’s a lot to unpack here. Let’s start with efficiency. Whether or not you think a corporation is “efficient” depends on what you think corporations are supposed to do. Romney’s revolutionary cadre of young management consultants believed that the sole purpose of a corporation was to make money for its owners — a view that is orthodox in American business today, but wasn’t in the 1970s. (It still isn’t in many other capitalist countries, like Germany.)

Whenever you change the definition of efficiency, you’re going to look around and discover lots of inefficiency, because nobody has even been trying to be efficient by your new definition. That’s what Romney saw when he came on the scene in 1975. Corporations were inefficient in all sorts of ways: Too many were unfocused conglomerates, assembled more to gratify egos than to make money. They tried to do too many things and failed to make the most productive use of their resources.

But above all, they had too many employees and paid them too much. Efficiency demanded that this be fixed, and vast profits awaited whoever would fix it.

As the Economist points out, Romney can’t claim all the credit for this transformation — otherwise he’d be Buffett/Gates rich — but nonetheless he is typical of the class of people who can. Romney worked for the consulting group Bain & Company and in 1983 led their spin-off Bain Capital.

Every business story begins with a proposition, and the one that launched Bain Capital was the notion that the partners might do better if they stopped simply advising companies and starting buying and running the firms themselves.

One obstacle to efficiency at the taken-over companies was the loyalty that some managers felt towards their workers and middle managers, but Romney had a solution for that.

In 1986, Bain Capital bought a struggling division of Firestone that made truck wheels and rims and renamed it ­Accuride. Bain took a group of managers whose previous average income had been below $100,000 and gave them performance incentives. This type and degree of management compensation was also unusual, but here it led to startling results: ­According to an account written by a Bain & Company fellow, the managers quickly helped to reorganize two plants, consolidating operations—which meant, inevitably, the shedding of unproductive labor—and when the company grew in efficiency, these managers made $18 million in shared earnings. The equation was simple: The men who increased the worth of the corporation deserved a bigger and bigger percentage of its spoils. In less than two years, when Bain Capital sold the company, it had turned an initial $5 million investment into a $121 million return.

The poster child here is the paper company AmPad. Romney bought it, took it private, re-organized, and then took it public again.

By 2001, five years after the company had been taken public, it had filed for bankruptcy and liquidated its assets. But Bain Capital made more than $100 million from AmPad for itself and its investors.

In just about every way, Romney and Bain Capital were among the trailblazers of the new economy: They destroyed both blue and white-collar jobs, cut pay at the bottom and raised it at the top, and made money even on companies that failed.

How much further ahead of his time could Romney have been?

In 2002, he became governor of Massachusetts, where he turned his attention to health care. In a rational world, RomneyCare would be his political claim to fame. Working with a Democratic legislature, Romney crafted a program that has resulted in only 4.6% of residents under 65 lacking health insurance (compared to 26.5% in Texas). But RomneyCare was the model for ObamaCare, so now Republicans hate it and Romney can’t take credit for it.

But the choice of health care as Romney’s original issue gives a lot of insight:

But what separates Romney’s plan from Obama’s—and gives some clues about his potential presidency—is its almost-accidental origin. Romney did not begin with a philosophical quest to improve American health care. He began with the idea of himself as a problem solver and asked those around him for a problem that he might usefully solve.

The picture that emerges is a little different from the one his Republican rivals paint: It isn’t that Romney changes his principles when the wind changes. It’s that principles are not fundamental to his thinking. He exhibits

the clinical separation of decision-making from ideology, the detachment of those decisions from moral consequence, a persistent blind spot for people as people.

That makes him an odd choice for a Republican Party that is more ideological and moralistic than it has ever been. And yet (though he is persistently mired in second place in the polls — seemingly behind a different leader each month), the InTrade predictive market is giving him a 70% chance to win the nomination, compared to 5.4% for current poll leader Herman Cain.

The Republican electorate longs for an authentic conservative (Bachmann) who has both charisma (Cain) and gravitas (Gingrich). But given that there isn’t one, they may have to settle for an efficient problem-solver who will say whatever they want to hear.

Next summer and fall, there will be a battle of narratives about the economy. Both parties will say that the economy is bad, but they will disagree about why. Is it bad because it is the Obama economy, hobbled by deficits, taxes, and regulations? Or is it bad because it is the Romney economy — the economy of paper profits and no jobs, the economy of the 1%?

By weeklysift | Tagged , , | Comments (1)

Three-eyed Fish and other short notes

October 31, 2011 – 12:07 pm

It’s a Simpson’s world: Somebody really did catch a three-eyed fish near a nuclear power plant.

My Halloween column A Candy Bar for Death is up on the UU World web site.

The Occupy Mordor movement is getting more serious. The Orcs of Mordor have released a statement charging:

The legitimate government of Mordor has allowed itself to be covertly replaced by a “shadow government” comprised of ‘An Eye’ and ‘Nine Mortal Men’, none of whom were elected.

Wonkblog at the Washington Post examines Rick Perry’s “flat” tax plan, concluding that it will collect less revenue and move towards privatizing Social Security.

How it will collect less revenue becomes clear when ThinkProgress computes the Perry tax for Warren Buffett, Dick Cheney, Barack Obama, and Perry himself. All are wealthy enough to benefit, but the biggest winner is the richest: Buffett, who might pay as little as two-tenths of a percent of his $62 million income.

Finally Kevin Drum observes that the vaunted simplicity of the system is also only for the rich:

the rich not only pay lower taxes [under Perry’s plan], they also benefit from having simpler taxes. They do so much better under Perry’s plan that they’ll almost all just fill in his postcard without even bothering to calculate how much they might owe under the current regime.

Low and middle-income taxpayers, however, have no such luck. There’s a pretty good chance they’ll do better under the current system, which means they need to fill out Perry’s postcard and fill out a current 1040 to see which one comes out better. No simple taxes for them.

This photo was supposed to be India as seen from space during Diwali, the Hindu festival of lights. Apparently it isn’t. (Actually it’s an overlay that illustrates India’s increasing brightness from space as its population and prosperity increase.) But it’s still pretty.

Something else that’s pretty: Last Monday’s northern lights, seen across much of the country. This shot was taken near Madison, Wisconsin:

Or you can watch the aurora on video, like this one from Michigan:

Or this one from orbit:

Alabama learned nothing from Georgia’s experience, and so has to repeat the lesson: When you depend on migrant Hispanic workers to harvest your crops, an anti-illegal-immigrant law that motivates even legal Hispanic immigrants to leave your state might not work out for you.

As in Georgia, Alabama’s crops are rotting in the fields. This was entirely predictable, and the logic is simple: First, hand-picking crops really is a skill; you can’t expect a random person off the unemployment rolls to be good at it. So paying by the hour doesn’t work out for the farmers and paying by the box doesn’t work out for the pickers. (An Alabama tomato farmer claimed that inexperienced American replacement pickers who were paid by the box were making $24 a day for back-breaking work. No wonder they quit.)

Second, a skilled American-citizen picker wants more than the no-benefits $8/hour the farmers want to pay. But Alabama produce competes against produce from neighboring states that aren’t hostile to immigrants. So the Alabama farmers can’t just raise prices to pay their workers more.

The week’s stupidest point: Congressman Denny Rehberg argues that a statue of Jesus on public land is not a church-and-state issue because it’s not religious. “Just because it’s maintained and was put up by the Knights of Columbus does not make it a religious statement.”

A Florida high-school teacher breaks the law by helping her students register to vote.

We claim it’s a service economy, so why are we checking out our own groceries? The concept of shadow work.

Jon Stewart: If ClimateGate deserved so much coverage, why doesn’t the final debunking of ClimateGate deserve coverage?

Paul Ryan takes a bold stand for “equality of opportunity” rather than “equality of outcome”. So why does he oppose anything that would actually equalize opportunity? And that point about Americans being more upwardly mobile than Europeans — it ain’t true.

Now Bad Lip Reading has a Herman Cain video:

By weeklysift | Comments (3)

Gracious Statesmanship and other short notes

October 24, 2011 – 12:06 pm

Reflecting on the Republican response to Muammar Qaddafi’s death, following so soon after the death of Osama bin Laden, The New Yorker’s David Remnick wrote:

If a Republican had been responsible for the foreign-policy markers of the past three years, the Party would be commissioning statues. In Tripoli, Benghazi, and Surt, last week, Obama won words of praise; on Republican debate platforms, there was only mindless posturing.

And, noticing the same phenomenon among the Party’s Congressional leaders, Jon Stewart asked: “Is there no Republican that can be gracious and statesmanlike in this situation?”

Vodpod videos no longer available.

Apparently not. But that’s just ordinary partisan politics, right? Democrats who were running against an incumbent Republican president would be the same way. Wouldn’t they?

Well, no. About 30 seconds with the Google led me to what Howard Dean said after Saddam Hussein was captured in December, 2003:

This is a great day of pride in the American military and a great day for the Iraqis and a great day for the American people. President Bush deserves a day of celebration.

So the American war in Iraq is finally going to end on December 31, when our last troops leave.

Juan Cole explains why things turned out this way, even though hawks in the administration and elsewhere clearly wanted to keep thousands of American troops in Iraq indefinitely: When the UN Security Council’s resolution recognizing the US as the occupying power in Iraq expired at the end of 2008, the Bush administration negotiated a status-of-forces agreement (SOFA) with the new Iraqi government. The Iraqis insisted on some deadline, so President Bush accepted 2011, confident that the US could renegotiate later.

When President Obama tried to negotiate an extension, the hang-up was the issue of “extraterritoriality” — American troops’ immunity from prosecution in Iraqi courts. It would have been political suicide for the Iraqi government to grant that.

Why? Because all Iraqis remember the Nisoor Square massacre when Blackwater security guards killed 17 Baghdad civilians in a mistaken shooting spree. Extraterritoriality meant that Iraqi courts couldn’t touch them, and then an American court let them go. No Iraqi politician is going to let that happen again.

Personally, I’ll be glad to have our troops out of Iraq. But if you’re not happy, put the blame where it belongs: on Blackwater’s trigger-happy mercenaries.

Meteor Blades objects to wrap-ups that call the Iraq War a mistake.

Planning for invasion, the concoction of evidence, the ignoring of counter-advice, and the lying to Congress, to the United Nations and to the American people were not “mistakes.”

The war, he writes, was a pre-meditated crime, not a mistake. In a just world, the perpetrators “would some time ago have arrived in shackles at The Hague.”

Harold Camping’s prediction of the Rapture last May got a lot of attention, especially when it didn’t happen. (Or maybe it did, and there were just a lot fewer real Christians than everybody thought — and Camping himself wasn’t one of them.) But the Rapture was always just a prelude to the End of the World, kind of like when “last call” is announced before a bar closes. The real EotW was scheduled for last Friday.

Still here? Back to the drawing board.

Can’t decide between living in a forest or in an urban high-rise? Why not move to Milan and do both?

American feminist bra-burning is a historical myth, but Japanese environmentalist bra-burning is happening now. It even sounds like a pretty good idea.

Hunter on Daily Kos explains Occupy Wall Street to pundits who refuse to understand it.

Thom Hartmann explains the way in which OWS has already succeeded: It forced the media to remember the unemployed, who had been almost completely forgotten during the manufactured “debt-ceiling crisis” last summer.

Occupy Wall Street continues to be a great source of visual humor, most of which just adds to the movement.

And some older images are having a revival:

But the funniest thing I saw this week was this piece by Bad Lip Reading:

By weeklysift | Tagged , | Comments (1)

Blood and Teeth on the Floor and other short notes

October 17, 2011 – 12:41 pm

Whenever I listen to Elizabeth Warren and then try to repeat what she said to somebody else, it always comes out sounding like this parody:

The current Vanity Fair article about Warren is well worth reading, and it recalls a statement she made to Huffington Post a year and a half ago:

My first choice is a strong consumer agency. My second choice is no agency at all and plenty of blood and teeth left on the floor.

I think that’s the only attitude that’s going to get anywhere as the middle class battles to preserve itself against the plutocracy. Trying to play nice hasn’t worked so well.

Hunter on Daily Kos explains why Herman Cain’s healthcare experience as a multi-millionaire CEO has nothing to do with your healthcare — and why his most famous line about it is false:

Cain has said on numerous occasions that he would not have survived cancer had the Obama health care plan been in effect. He got excellent care, you see, and supposedly the new health care plan would have fouled that up in some unspecified way, probably involving “death panels” or the like. … There’s nothing in the health care plan that would affect Herman Cain’s ability to buy exceptional insurance, or to pay untold gobs of money towards his own care. Not a damn thing.  As a wealthy American, he will continue to receive substantially better care than other people simply because he can afford it

Cenk Uygur takes apart a right-wing group’s charge that Occupy Wall Street is anti-Semitic.

Another smear that I’m sure we’ll hear more and more often: the charge that George Soros is “behind” Occupy Wall Street. With standards of proof this loose, there is hardly anything that can’t be tied to Soros.

I tried to watch Wednesday’s Republican debate, but I didn’t have the stomach for it. As soon as Michele Bachmann started blaming the economic crash on affordable housing, and Newt Gingrich joined in with the claim that if anyone should go to jail for the crash, it’s Barney Frank, I couldn’t take it any more.

I leave you with fact checks from The Washington Post (which covers many falsehoods, including Bachmann’s, which it says has been “roundly discredited”) and PolitiFact.

I don’t mind watching people who disagree with me. I watched Ronald Reagan’s State of the Unions and read the transcripts of George W. Bush’s. But the 2012 Republican campaign has gone way beyond spin into a complete fantasy world.

As an aside, this is why I don’t expect the Herman Cain boom to last. The most advantageous position to be in right now is to have no one take you seriously enough to check your nonsense. That way you can say whatever sounds good to the base without worrying about whether it is true or matches what you said last month.

Once you reach the top of the polls, people look at you harder, and that has skewered one Republican after another. Here, Lawrence O’Donnell takes apart Cain’s 9-9-9 plan, which is so simple that Cain can’t understand it himself.

While we’re fact checking, Media Matters lists Fox News’ ten biggest lies about the EPA.

Robert Reich exposes seven popular economic lies.

James Fallows describes exactly what happens when your cloud-based email account gets hacked.

Topeka really did it: They repealed their domestic battery law. But wife-beating is still a state offense, so they claim the cases will still get prosecuted. Unless they don’t. Whatever. It’s somebody else’s problem now.

If you think in terms of charts, this collection explains our economic inequality really well.

More charts: Mother Jones explains who the 1% are and what they own.

By weeklysift | Tagged , | Comments (3)

Palin’s Big Con and other short notes

October 10, 2011 – 11:30 am

I told you almost a year ago why it was obvious Sarah Palin wasn’t running: She was clearly working to build the fan/hater base of an entertainer like Rush Limbaugh rather than the majority coalition of a successful candidate.

Wednesday she finally broke the news to her fans. It was time: The filing deadline for the New Hampshire primary was coming up, and she had already milked her supporters for end-of-the-quarter gifts to SarahPAC.

Jon Stewart makes the case that this was all an intentional con: A lot of SarahPAC money ultimately comes around to benefit Palin personally. Bristol Palin said in June that Sarah had already decided. And yet the September fund-raising letter made it sound as if her candidacy depended on how much money she could raise. “That,” says Stewart, “puts us in Nigerian prince territory.”

Vodpod videos no longer available.

Stephen Colbert worries that he might have offended Karl Rove by suggesting that Rove’s PACs, whose design makes money-laundering possible, might actually be laundering money. “I have hurt Karl Rove,” Stephen laments. “Legends say you need an elvish blade to do that.”

Vodpod videos no longer available.

Last week I reacted to the drone attack that killed unindicted American citizen Anwar al-Awlaki. This week we began to hear about the process for putting Americans on the government’s “kill list”.

According to Reuters, a “secretive panel of government officials” assembles the list.

There is no public record of the operations or decisions of the panel, which is a subset of the White House’s National Security Council, several current and former officials said. Neither is there any law establishing its existence or setting out the rules by which it is supposed to operate.

I feel safer already, especially knowing that this process is authorized by a secret memo from the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel. But why rant, when Glenn Greenwald does it so much better than I do?

I’m starting to get annoyed by all the people who talk reverently about the Constitution without having the faintest idea what it says. Witness Hank Williams Jr., who lost his gig introducing Monday Night Football when his Hitler/Obama analogy was too much even for the hosts of Fox & Friends, and he clarified by referring to President Obama as “the enemy”.

Reasonable people can disagree about whether ABC over-reacted, but Williams’ sacking has nothing to do with his “First Amendment freedom of speech” as he claimed in an indignant public statement.

If the government tried to punish Williams for his statement, that would be a First Amendment issue. But this is just free enterprise. When you’re the public face of a popular product, you have to stay out of controversy to avoid tainting the product with your issues. That’s why you don’t see Tiger Woods in commercials nearly as often as you used to.

Another guy with his foot in his mouth was Massachusetts Senator Scott Brown. I’ll let the Boston.com tell the story:

Brown was responding to a crack [Senate challenger Elizabeth] Warren made in Tuesday’s debate, when the Democrat was asked about Scott Brown using his centerfold spread in Cosmopolitan magazine decades ago to pay for college. Warren said “I didn’t take my clothes off” to pay for school.

Asked by the WZLX disc jockey for a response, Brown said “Thank God,” eliciting laughter from the DJs.

Where to start? (1) For what it’s worth, my hunch is that Elizabeth Warren looked pretty good when she was in college. (2) If Warren had posed nude, we wouldn’t be having this conversation, because she couldn’t be in politics. (3) While no individual male deserves the blame for society’s double standards, at a minimum we ought to be apologetic about taking advantage of them.

All of which leads to (4) Scott Brown is a jerk.

Here’s what I found disappointing in Rick Perry’s response to the Niggerhead Ranch controversy: I’m a little younger than Perry and grew up in a slightly less conservative region (rural Illinois rather than west Texas), but it’s clear in my memory that we were racists. All but a few whites were racists in those days. We said nigger and told nigger-jokes. It was the culture; you breathed it in like oxygen. (I wrote about this in more detail in 2007.)

So why not just admit it? Perry could say: “I grew up in a different era. I had a lot to learn about race and I’ve worked hard to learn it.” Is that too much to ask?

One more thing: Despite what some right-wing commentators are claiming, this has gotten nowhere near the coverage that the Obama/Jeremiah Wright story got in 2008.

The headlines say alarming things like Topeka Considers De-Criminalizing Domestic Violence, but the truth is only slightly better: City and county officials are playing chicken over who is going to prosecute misdemeanor domestic battery. Both think somebody should prosecute it, but they’re both threatening not to, and the side that blinks last will save money.

This is more of that “government waste” you hear so much about. Threatening to let wife-beaters walk is so much better than making rich people pay taxes.

More than half of what looks like investment in the official stats is really consumption in disguise: new houses, home improvements, and more places to shop.

Ezra Klein wrote a great piece on the early economic decisions of the Obama administration. Economists were slow to realize just how extreme the late-2008 collapse had been. That meant that the stimulus was too small and the predictions of the unemployment rate it would produce were too rosy. So it was easy for Republicans to claim the stimulus had failed and to block further stimulus.

By weeklysift | Tagged , , | Comments (2)

The Brilliance/Pointlessness of Occupying Wall Street, and other short notes

October 3, 2011 – 12:35 pm

Occupy Wall Street is starting its third week and I still don’t know what to think. By not putting out a list of demands, it is challenging Americans’ whole notion of what a protest is. This is either brilliant or pointless. Let me think about it some more.

In the meantime, here are some links to help you make up your own mind: The original call to protest is here. Matt Stoller describes OWS as “a church of dissent, not a protest”. Nicholas Kristof provides his own set of demands. Pruning Shears thinks the act of occupying Wall Street says enough by itself: “We object to what has gone on here; we do not agree with it and do not support it; we want it to change.”

But the Mahablog is having none of that: “If you don’t have a clear message attached to an actual call to action, then it’s just protest theater. The dilettantes will make some noise for a while and go home, and nothing will change.”

Continuing the poor-poor-bigots theme from last week: AlterNet debunks another religious-right claim of oppression at the hands of the gay agenda.

Of course, Frank Turek’s Constitutional right to say and write what he pleases is in no danger – there are no thought police after him. But Gallagher apparently wants him to enjoy an additional “special right” that appears nowhere in any Constitution: the right not only to say offensive things, but to do so without others taking offense.

The majority often forgets what majority privilege means: You get used to the idea that your opinions are not controversial, so you assume there is no price to be paid for expressing them whenever and however you want.

If the minority starts speaking up, though, your views become controversial, and then controversy-shunning business clients start shunning you. Suddenly you have to watch your tongue like everybody else does. It feels like oppression, but really it’s just the loss of a special privilege.

Diebold voting machines are even worse than we thought: If you have access to the machines long enough to slip a cheap gadget inside, the gadget’s remote control can change votes as they are cast. Removing the gadget afterwards hides the hack. The machine’s total is what it is and there are no ballots to recount.

These vulnerable machines, Salon says, are used by “as many as a quarter of American voters”. Funny that all the Republicans worried about the kind of vote fraud that never happens aren’t interested in this.

New figures are out on amenable mortality (deaths preventable by health care). The U.S. still ranks last among wealthy nations. Basically, 85,000 Americans died last year because they weren’t French.

Think about the furor over less than 3,000 deaths on 9-11 or 5,000 American deaths in Iraq since 2003. Combine them, add a zero, and you still don’t equal the number who die every year from the inadequacy of our healthcare system.

Cut that wasteful government spending: Texas no longer serves a special last meal to inmates about to be executed. And a Montana Senate candidate is worried about families defrauding the school lunch program.

Your biases are part of all your instinctive decisions. Example: White umpires squeeze the strike zone on black pitchers. Intentionally? Probably not.

Constitution? What constitution? An Alabama town gives low-level offenders a choice between jail and attending church for a year. So far all the churches in the program are Christian.

It’s not class warfare, Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite argues, it’s Christianity.

The Christian magazine Relevant publishes a refreshingly frank and realistic article: Just-say-no abstinence isn’t working even for young-adult Christians. Now what?

And because I’ve been way too relentlessly serious this week, a moment of cute:

By weeklysift | Comments (5)

Poor, Poor Bigots and other short notes

September 26, 2011 – 11:17 am

Whenever human rights advance, bigots feel victimized because they are no longer entitled to treat people badly. Case in point: This editorial is “concerned” about the rights of anti-gay military chaplains now that Don’t Ask Don’t Tell is history.

Glenden Brown wrote a full takedown on One Utah, so I’ll just sum up: At the root of the chaplains’ complaint is a fundamental misunderstanding of their role. Their paychecks are not issued by God or by their denominations. They work for the U.S. military and their duty is to serve our troops. If you bear that mission in mind, all their issues evaporate.

Chaplains who aren’t right-wing Christians have always felt a tension between serving the soldiers and pushing their own beliefs or the dogma of their particular sect. (Examples: this Quaker chaplain and this Unitarian Universalist.) If right-wing Christian chaplains are feeling a tension now too, that isn’t discrimination.

This weekend I attended (via the Web) Lawrence Lessig’s Conference on the Constitutional Convention, which was interesting both for outside-the-box thinking about political change and because it raised the possibility of a left/right alliance for basic reforms. (Lessig’s co-host was Mark Meckler from Tea Party Patriots.) Details next week.

Surprise! Some of the things said by the Republican candidates in Thursday’s debate were not true.

In fact, the moment that “won the debate” for Herman Cain was also the most outrageous lie of the evening: He claimed that if ObamaCare had been in force in 2006, he would have died from colon cancer because “government bureaucrats” would have delayed his treatment.

Reality: Cain is a multi-millionaire businessman with private health insurance. He will continue to have the same insurance under the Affordable Care Act. And even if insurance-company (not government) bureaucrats get in his way, nothing in the ACA prevents Cain himself from paying for whatever treatment he wants.

Kate Conway elaborates:

It’s kind of twisted that Cain uses his against-the-odds recovery to condemn a policy that could help others less fortunate than him beat similar obstacles.

And Kevin Drum draws the conclusion:

[T]his is a real problem for liberals. Sure, we cherry-pick evidence, we spin world events, and we impose our worldview when we talk about policy. Everyone does that. But generally speaking, our opinion leaders don’t go on national TV, look straight into the camera, and just outright lie about stuff. Theirs do. … It’s awfully hard to fight stuff this brazen … especially when the mainstream press no longer seriously polices this stuff, and isn’t much believed even when it does.

I used to worry that the Republican primary campaign would dominate the airwaves the way Obama/Clinton did after McCain locked up the nomination in 2008. But so far that’s working in the Democrats’ favor. Each debate offers new evidence that the GOP has left mainstream America far behind: cheering for executions, calling to let the uninsured die, and (Thursday) booing an American soldier in Iraq because he has come out as gay now that the law allows him to do so.

William Kristol reported getting an email from “a bright young conservative” saying “We sound like crazy people.” Noticed that, did you?

Crazies can infiltrate any crowd, but here’s the real problem: At none of these moments did a candidate stand up to the mob and defend basic decency. How hard would it have been to tell the gay soldier: “Although we disagree on some issues, I honor your service to our country”?

Rick Santorum’s actual answer to the gay soldier was incoherent, and raised the “special rights” canard. David Tharp refutes:

[DADT repeal] doesn’t give gay and lesbian soldiers any “special privileges;” it only allows those soldiers to be honest about who they are. Straight soldiers are allowed to wear wedding rings, talk about their spouses and acknowledge their sexuality. Now, finally, gay and lesbian soldiers have the same rights.

Conservative commentators were ready to bury Rick Perry after three bad debates, and his nationwide standing against President Obama is slipping. There was some question whether rank-and-file Republicans agreed with their commentariat, but after Perry lost a Florida straw poll to Herman Cain and a Michigan poll to Romney, maybe they do.

I ran across a lot of amusing political images this week, like this Rick Perry poster (“because George W. Bush didn’t do enough damage”). Or this pie chart explaining the consequences of gay marriage. The most amusing same-sex marriage signs are collected here.

This looks cool as a poster: “I refuse to believe corporations are people until Texas executes one.” And I loved: “They only call it class warfare when we fight back.“

You should never read too much into the phase-one trials of any treatment, but this NYT story of a miraculous leukemia remission via an immune-system treatment is pretty amazing.

Pro Publica looked at the question of whether regulations kill jobs. Conclusion: Not really.

Add this to my continuing series on Libertarianism: SF author David Brin uses conservative/libertarian principles to argue against “the idolatry of property”.

For Brin, markets are a means, not an end. The Soviet failure taught him that an economy is too complicated for central control; markets allocate resources better through distributed processing. But when a handful of corporations come to dominate an economy and their CEOs all play golf together, you’re back to central control.

Jon Stewart covers the plight of “this nation’s most vulnerable wealthy”. If only a Subway mogul could find some inexpensive way to feed his family …

If you’re feeling excessively cheerful today and want fix that problem, look at Doom by TNR’s John Judis. The governments of the world are repeating the mistakes of the Great Depression, and the only policies that might turn things around are politically impossible.

Surely everybody on FaceBook has seen this by now, since it went viral sometime last week. But new Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren has captured the liberal-populist message better than anybody so far.

By weeklysift | Tagged , , | Comments (9)

Toucan Sam Turns Evil and other short notes

September 12, 2011 – 11:59 am

I had to read three articles before I was sure this story wasn’t somebody’s diabolical hoax. But no: Kellogg has sent a cease-and-desist letter to the Maya Archeology Initiative because their toucan logo looks too much like Froot Loops’ mascot Toucan Sam. (The comparison below is from the Lowering the Bar blog, which specializes in strange-but-true legal stories.)

The MAI is a Guatemalan non-profit that promotes local archeology for children and adults. It uses the toucan on its logo, because Guatemala has real toucans.

It also has real Mayan ruins, which Kellogg also objects to MAI using in its logo, because Toucan Sam is sometimes shown in fake Mayan settings.

Says MAI president Dr. Francisco Estrada-Belli, “This is a bit like the Washington Redskins claiming trademark infringement against the National Congress of American Indians.”

I avoided the 9-11 anniversary coverage. The genuine human tragedy of that day has gotten so abused and debased over the last ten years by bad wars, fear-mongering, hate speech, and authoritarianism that my instinctive response now, when I see images of the smoking towers, is that somebody is probably trying to trick me into doing something bad. I think it will take years for that reaction to fade away.

President Obama made a good speech, and (by most nonpartisan accounts) proposed a good program. But I think this is yet another example of the bad political tactics I talked about two weeks ago.

Obama’s proposal is already bipartisan — full of ideas from both parties. So once again the center has become the leftmost extreme of the possible. Now Congress will push the bill further and further to the right, until we can’t be sure whether it improves the lives of working Americans at all. And then, having made such a strong case that something needs to be done, how can Obama veto it?

If everyone is supposed to be so worried about the deficit, why has the interest rate on 10-year government bonds dropped under 2%?

This sign is apparently genuine, from February, 2010.

Or at least the kind of homeschoolers who can’t spell are for Perry.

This sign fooled me, but a commenter points out it is fake. Still, it’s a good laugh:

Just something to enjoy: Marco Tempest combines the moves of card-magic with some iPod programming to make a very beautiful TED talk.

One of the biggest applause lines of Wednesday’s Republican debate:

[Moderator BRIAN] WILLIAMS: Governor Perry, a question about Texas. Your state has executed 234 death row inmates, more than any other governor in modern times. Have you…

(APPLAUSE)

Williams went on to ask if Perry ever lost sleep worrying that “any one of those might have been innocent.” Perry replied: “No, sir, I’ve never struggled with that at all.”

In at least one case, maybe he should.

Exxon is getting its money’s worth from its climate-denial propaganda campaign: According to Yale’s Project on Climate Change Communication, even Democrats are woefully uninformed about the scientific consensus on climate change. When asked to estimate the percentage of climate scientists who believe climate change is happening, only 18% of Democrats and Independents give the correct answer: 81-100%. Another 20% say 61-80%.

See Kevin Drum for elaboration.

Correct answer: The National Academy of Sciences published a survey of 1372 climate scientists in 2009, and found that 97-98% believed in anthropogenic (human-caused) climate change.

You’d never know it from the media, but there is left-wing libertarianism also. Kevin Carson of the Center for a Stateless Society writes:

Although right-wingers like to present the issue as one of preventing the state from redistributing wealth downward, the real issue is one of stopping the state from redistributing wealth upward.

More technically described as “market anarchists“, I’m not sure why they identify with libertarians at all. But that’s up to them. It’s a free country.

David Atkins explains why conservatives don’t have to win elections to push the country to the right. Rick Perry calling Social Security a “Ponzi scheme” might cost him the presidency. But now the media treats the Ponzi-scheme rhetoric as if it were a credible point of view. Future “centrist” compromises will allow for the possibility that Social Security is a Ponzi scheme.

Mike Tomasky does the numbers to show that bipartisanship is a one-way street. On key votes, Congressional Democrats gave President Bush seven times the support President Obama has received from Republicans.

Which GOP candidate is right for you? Use this flowchart.

Nobody seems to know where this motivational poster came from. I got it here.

By weeklysift | Comments (3)

A ConConCon and other short notes

September 5, 2011 – 11:23 am

In April I told you (“How Money Talks“) about Lawrence Lessig’s organization RootStrikers, which believes that Congress’ dependence on rich donors is the central issue.

Because the Supreme Court has decided that money is speech and corporations are people, Lessig believes the only real change possiblity is to amend the Constitution. And because Congress is the problem, he doesn’t imagine getting an amendment through Congress.

So: a constitutional convention, called together if 2/3s of the states request it. The ConCon’s amendments become law if 3/4s of the states ratified them.

Lessig believes this issue could draw a left-right coalition, which it needs. First step: Together with Tea Party Patriots, he’s hosting a conference at Harvard Law School on the ConCon idea. September 24-25, $40.

I really do want Dick Cheney to tell his story — on a witness stand, not on talk shows.

Cheney and Bush have confessed to crimes: ordering torture, spying on American citizens, denying due process to terrorism suspects like Jose Padilla.

Yes, some dire situations may justify government officials breaking the law and seeking absolution later. But the only American institution that can provide that absolution is a jury. Until 12 ordinary Americans hear all the evidence and conclude that Cheney was justified, I’m going to view him as a criminal at large.

I like Code Pink’s protest: When you find Cheney’s book in a store, move it to the Crime section. Andy Borowitz’s fantasy of Satan writing a foreword is hilarious.

Geo-engineering: If human activity is interfering with the climate, why not interfere some more and undo it? That’s either a brilliant idea or an updated version of “The Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly“.

What could go wrong? In a few months we’ll start to see: A British research team is going to release a bunch of water-vapor into the stratosphere to see whether (1) they can do it, (2) it makes clouds whiter and reflects more solar energy into space, or (3) it unleashes the wrath of God in some unforeseen way.

I’ve been pounding the drum about voter suppression. This week Rolling Stone published The GOP War on Voting. This is the telling detail:

In April 2008, the Supreme Court upheld a photo-ID law in Indiana, even though state GOP officials couldn’t provide a single instance of a voter committing the type of fraud the new ID law was supposed to stop.

A humorous instance of the same phenomenon:

[Kansas Secretary of State] Kobach also asserted that dead people were casting ballots, singling out a deceased Kansan named Alfred K. Brewer as one such zombie voter. There was only one problem: Brewer was still very much alive. The Wichita Eagle found him working in his front yard.

While researching genetically modified corn, I found the blog Techdirt. Check out this post on how convoluted music copyrights are.

No American soldiers died in Iraq in August. Meanwhile, 67 American soldiers died in Afghanistan— about half in one helicopter — a new monthly high.

What does amenable mortality mean? This guy.

Libya: Ruthless dictator gone. No dead American troops, costs estimated under $1 billion at the end of July.

Iraq: Ruthless dictator gone. 4400+ American soldiers killed, $750 billion in direct war costs, another trillion in lifetime medical expenses for injured veterans.

Some follow-ups on Why I Am Not a Libertarian.

If all Libertarians sounded as reasonable as this Will Wilkerson article, we’d have a lot more to talk about. Wilkerson sees property rights as “a means to a peaceful society of mutual benefit, not an end in itself.”

Salon’s Michael Lind explains Why Libertarians Apologize For Autocracy. Short version: They’ll never be a majority, so democracy is out. As if to prove Lind’s point, American Thinker published Michael Vadum’s Registering the Poor to Vote is Un-American.

By weeklysift | Comments (2)

The Great Flabbergasting and other short notes

August 22, 2011 – 12:09 pm

[8/22/2011] Friday, Rachel Maddow coined a humorous term for a serious phenomenon: Republicans’ habit of passionately attacking their own ideas as soon as President Obama adopts them. She called it “The Great Flabbergasting“.

Vodpod videos no longer available.

In her usual manner, Rachel wasn’t content just to float a cute phrase out there, she assembled the research and gave these examples:

  • trade agreements and patent reform that is in the Republican jobs plan.
  • a bipartisan deficit commission
  • pay-as-you-go rules in Congress
  • cap and trade (the original bill was McCain-Liebermann)
  • individual mandate in health reform (Romneycare in Massachusetts)
  • the DREAM Act
“We should have known this was coming,” she says, before playing tape from the 2008 Republican debates where John McCain promises to vote against the immigration bill he wrote.

Thursday Jon Stewart’s show had two brilliant segments. In the first, he answers the charge that billionaire Warren Buffett is a socialist:

You really have no f**king clue what socialism is, do you? “Eh, that George Clooney, always banging different broads — what a queer.”

Vodpod videos no longer available.

In the second, he examines the strange notion that tax fairness should begin with taxing the poor.

So raising income tax on the top 2% of earners would raise $700 billion, but taking half of everything the bottom 50% have in this country would do the same. I see the problem here: We need to take all of what the bottom 50% have.

Vodpod videos no longer available.

Daily Kos’ Mark Sumner zeroes in on the worst thing about Rick Perry’s global warming statement: Without naming a single name or providing an iota of evidence, Perry attacked the integrity of climate scientists in general:

… global warming has been politicized. I think there are a substantial number of scientists who have manipulated data so that they will have dollars rolling into their projects.

To me, this resembles Joe McCarthy’s imaginary list of communists in the State Department. If the media doesn’t pin Perry down on this and make him give at least one example, it’s not doing its job. And if he’s talking about the ClimateGate emails, he needs to address the fact that six separate investigations have cleared scientists of data manipulation.

My advice to reporters with access: The way to get Perry to answer is to attack his manhood. It’s cowardly to slander people vaguely and refuse to back up your claims.


In general I hate the idea that endangered species get better protection if they’re endearing. But damn, sand kittens are cute. Oh, and environmental regulations have brought otters back to England.

You can’ t get much greener than this: a wind-turbine charging station for electric cars. And it looks pretty cool, too.

Happy 90th anniversary to the 19th Amendment and female suffrage.

Were black families more stable during slavery? In a word: no.

Looking at the briefs John Boehner’s lawyer filed to defend the Defense of Marriage Act, you can see why the Obama administration bailed. Here’s what you need to buy to defend DOMA: Gays haven’t faced historical discrimination, sexual orientation is a choice, gays have enough power to defend their interests through the political system, same-sex couples make bad parents, and same-sex marriage damages opposite-sex marriage

By weeklysift | Comments (2)