Flannel Shirt

I'm really embarrassed

A relative of mine on a social media site linked to a very racist, ignorant webpage. It's embarrassing. Here's a sample:

Apparently, there are still people, I'm presuming mostly older white people living in the former Confederacy, who think that Obama was born in Kenya. Many think he is an anti-Christ (although at the site there was some disagreement on when the end times were coming), that he wants to take away their guns and all sorts of other crazy things. For example, Paula Deen didn't get fired from the Food Network because she was oblivious to events of the last fifty years regarding race and society and was saying offensive things that hurt the network's ratings, but rather because her high-calorie recipes offended the First Lady. Actually, the website didn't use "First Lady" but an offensive term which I won't repeat here.

When I was in the army at the end of the Vietnam War I was stationed at Fort Devens in Massachusetts. I was a clerk but was temporarily assigned to the Headquarters on base to help with a race relations program the army was instituting then. Racial tensions were boiling in the military and someone in Washington decided it would be a good idea to spread some sensitivity and understanding among the troops.  When I returned to my job in personnel the warrant officer in charge of my unit was extremely cool to me. He wouldn't release me to work full-time for race relations because I was "too valuable" but as soon as he saw the opportunity he moved me to an engineering battalion to be their company clerk. The base commander plucked me up within a week and assigned me as an instructor with the race relations program. 

During the week I was in the engineering company I had to pull CQ duty one Saturday. CQ means "charge of quarters" and by definition means defending the base or something, but it really meant that I sat in the battalion headquarters and answered the phone while everyone was off for the weekend. Someone must have known of my teaching role because the desk where I was assigned was covered with racist literature. I moved it all to the side and did my shift. A week later I was reassigned to the base headquarters and finished my active duty in the army as an instructor in race relations. 

That was forty years ago, in 1973.

1973 was the last of George W. Bush's six years he contracted to serve in the Air Force National Guard. While I was in Fort Devens George W. Bush was in Harvard's Business School forty miles to the east. He wasn't attending National Guard meetings. He hadn't done that for quite awhile. He wasn't excused from his commitment. No, he was AWOL. Actually, when you're AWOL over thirty days you're considered a deserter, but when your dad is a rich man with powerful political connections someone somewhere papers over that kind of thing. 

At some point during his time in the National Guard, before he stopped going to meetings and doing his service commitment, he was relieved of flying. Why? There's some evidence that he had lost his nerve. Then again, there was some evidence that he couldn't pass the drug test. There is no evidence that Obama ate a dog while he was growing up. 

So what do I do? Do I ignore the racism and ignorance this relative is spreading around? Mostly, that's what I do. But sometimes I can't. I'm embarrassed for my relative. But at this late stage in our lives there is nothing I can do to change her. 

It's too bad because there are plenty of things to discuss politically. I've got plenty of complaints about the Obama Administration, but when my relative deals in fantastic, insane fear-mongering instead of what's actually happening in Washington, D.C. there really is no point of engaging in a dialogue. The shame of it all is that she is now at an age where she is dependent on things like Social Security and she keeps voting for the same people who keep voting to cut it. (Really, look at Paul Ryan's budget that the Republicans passed in the House.)

These two illustrations, and many more, were at that website. It's not just the "media" that calls Obama the President. It is a majority of the voters, the Electoral College, and it's the rest of the world. Except for those living in the Confederacy of the Mind.

When economics bend to politics and personal pride

Here.

Am I (and others on my side of the issue) that much smarter than everyone else? No. The key to understanding this is that the anti-Keynesian position is, in essence, political. It’s driven by hostility to active government policy and, in many cases, hostility to any intellectual approach that might make room for government policy. Too many influential people just don’t want to believe that we’re facing the kind of economic crisis we are actually facing.

And so you have the spectacle of famous economists retreading 80-year-old fallacies, or misunderstanding basic concepts like Ricardian equivalence; of powerful officials instantly canonizing research papers that turn out to be garbage in, garbage out; and so on down the line.

Ten years ago

March 19, 2003:

 

Louisiana's schools

This does not reflect well on Bobby Jindal.

Here’s what 8th graders in Louisiana know, for sure, about the 1960s rabble-rousers better known as hippies (emphasis mine):

They went to Canada or European countries to escape being drafted into military service.

They went without bathing, wore dirty, ragged, unconventional clothing, and deliberately broke all codes of politeness or manners. Rock music played an important part in the hippie movement and had great influence over the hippies. Many of the rock musicians they followed belonged to Eastern religious cults or practiced Satan worship.

 How do they know it? Because their history textbook — “America: Land I Love” — told them so!

Dirty hippie-gate is just one of many reasons the quality of the Louisiana school system’s voucher program has been called into question. Other schools involved in the program have taught students that dragons are real and that, except for the whole owning human beings as property thing, slave owners were actually pretty nice guys.

Considering the egregiousness of a textbook extolling the community service works provided by the Ku Klux Klan, calling hippies smelly Satan worshipers feels benign in comparison. All the same, it doesn’t belong in a history book.

A Louisiana state court declared the voucher program unconstitutional in December 2012, but the state is currently appealing that decision.

In the meantime, enjoy this helpful illustration about hippies.

Satan? Heck, I was still technically a Lutheran.

Krugman: Fiscal Affinity Fraud

Why the wall around some is so hard to break.

Innocent that I am, I never heard the term “affinity fraud” until the Bernie Madoff affair hit the news. But once you hear it, the concept is obvious: people are most easily conned when they’re getting their disinformation from someone who seems to be part of their tribe, one way or another.

And I found myself thinking about that reality when the predictable reaction to today’s column came in: irate and, I believe, sincere if often incoherent voice mails etc. declaring that I must be an idiot, evil, or an evil idiot for saying that the budget deficit isn’t a big problem. They know that I’m completely wrong.

But how? Have these callers gone through the numbers themselves? Of course not (although I have also gotten some sophisticated ignorance from people who don’t know the difference between a current-law and a current-policy baseline). No, they know I’m an evil idiot because they heard someone they trust say it — maybe Rush, maybe someone on Fox, maybe CNBC (which is often indistinguishable from Fox).

The question then becomes, why do they believe their sources? For on matters economic, the right-wing media have had a spectacular track record for at least 7 years, having been totally wrong about everything. Remember, Rush and others furiously denied that there was a housing bubble — that was all made up by the liberal media. Then they denied that we were in a recession. Then they insisted that expansionary monetary and fiscal policy would lead to soaring inflation and interest rates. Boy, you could have gotten rich just by taking their implicit investment advice and doing the opposite.

So why does anyone listen at all to these sources? The answer, surely, is a feeling of affinity — mainly, I’d say, based on shared anger and dislike. Rush hates snooty professors who presume to know something about economics, or climate, or whatever, moochers living on public aid (except Medicare and Social-Security-receiving conservatives, of course), and, above all, Those People. Hey, he’s their kind of guy! And the fact that he’s always wrong doesn’t register at all.

Do accountability moments ever arrive? Unclear. It’s true that ratings for people like Sean Hannity who were predicting a Romney blowout plunged right after the election. But my guess is that they’ll come back as the shock fades. Certainly Fox doesn’t believe that total loss of credibility matters: it has just renewed Karl Rove’s contract.

I don’t have any answer to this phenomenon. I don’t think playing up my regular-guy aspects would help; the affinity runs a lot deeper and nastier than mere mannerisms. All I can do is notice what’s going on.

Chutzpah

This guy.

An Eagan lawyer is suspended indefinitely after having an affair with a client whom he represented in a divorce, then billing her for time they spent having sex.

Thomas P. Lowe, 58, won't have a chance for reinstatement for at least a year and three months after the decision, filed Thursday, Jan. 10, by the Minnesota Supreme Court.

Lowe, an attorney since 1985, had known the client for many years. Both are from Valley City, N.D. The woman met with Lowe in August 2011 to discuss pursuing a divorce from her husband.

He agreed to represent her. During a phone call days later, Lowe asked about her sexual relationship with her husband, commented on her appearance and asked if she was interested in sex with him.

The following month, they began an affair that lasted until March. At various points, Lowe billed the woman for legal services on the dates of their sexual encounters, coding the time as meetings or drafting memos.

In March, after several arguments with the woman about the affair and his own marriage, Lowe said he was breaking things off. Two days later, he said he was withdrawing as her attorney.

That day, the woman, who was considered vulnerable because of past abuse and mental health treatment, tried to kill herself. While hospitalized, she disclosed the affair.

The Office of Lawyers Professional Responsibility brought the petition against Lowe in July. He initially denied much of it, but now "unconditionally admits the allegations," according to court filings. A man who answered the phone at Lowe's office Monday said Lowe was unavailable.

In addition to a few previous citations for issues of decorum, Lowe was placed on probation in 1997 for using cocaine and being involved in purchasing the drug from a client.

The difference between Italy and America

In America it's the fault of gays, atheists, blacks and Latinos. In Italy it's the fault of women. Especially because of the cold meals. And if you don't agree then you're gay.

A Catholic priest in Italy has created a firestorm by claiming that women bring violence on themselves by serving cold food and dressing provocatively.

Father Piero Corsi of Liguria sparked outrage after members of his congregation posted his Christmas bulletin onto Facebook. The flyer, entitled “Women and femicide – healthy self-criticism. How often do they provoke?” said victims of domestic and sexual violence should question if they were themselves to blame for the incident.

The flyer said women “provoke the worst instincts” and “should search their consciences and ask: did we bring this on ourselves?”

“The fact is that women are increasingly provocative, they become arrogant, they believe themselves to be self-sufficient and end up exacerbating the situation,” Corsi added. “Children are abandoned to their own devices, homes are dirty, meals are cold or fast food, clothes are filthy.”

He later added fuel to the fire by suggesting an Italian reporter must be gay if he wasn’t enticed by a picture of a nude woman.

Following the uproar in Italy, Corsi said he plans “to take a period of rest.”

 

Here come the death panels

Republicans are pushing raising the age for Medicare to 67. That will kill people. It may kill many older white people who were tricked into thinking that Obamacare would somehow create "death panels". So now that the official Republican position is to kill seniors in order to keep the tax rates low for the richest Americans how can any of these people support the GOP? 

Paul Krugman keeps laying it out for people to read and digest, and while three-quarters of Americans apparently get it, there are still holdouts out there who would rather risk their health and the health of their loved ones in order to cling to their dying political party.

Here's an op-ed explaining it one more time. Again, if rational thinking doesn't work then please read "A Good Man Is Hard To Find" by Flannery O'Connor.

Yes, remember when Sarah Palin and the Republican amen choir were claiming that the Affordable Healthcare Act was creating death panels for Americans?  It became the meme with Rush Limbaugh, other members of the right wing media echo chamber, and the members of the FOX News political farm team.

So now, as the National Journal points out, John Boehner and his band of Tea Party brigands and his corporate cheerleaders for the plutocracy want -- it appears -- to raise the Medicare qualifying age to 67.  

Now that would be creating a real de facto death panel. 

Many seniors find it hard or don't make it to the finish line of reaching 65 and being on Medicare.  The cost of health insurance for those over 50 rises to nearly the cost of a condo in Trump Towers by the age of 64, let alone 66 (the year prior to the GOP House proposed enrollment age of 67 for Medicare).

The National Journal scathingly attacks the Republican move (which unfortunately some Democrats also appear to support, with the final negotiated position of the White House still uncertain on cuts in Medicare for beneficiaries):

Raising taxes on the rich alone won’t close the deficit or erase the national debt, as Republicans superciliously inform us over and over again. But in their negotiations with the White House to avert the so-called fiscal cliff, congressional Republicans seem obsessed with a change in Medicare eligibility whose budgetary impact (when compared with ending the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy)  is truly negligible — but whose human toll would be immense….

The impact of raising the Medicare eligibility age by two years will fall most heavily upon older African-American and other minorities, as they are still known.  The projected damage is summarized clearly in a chart posted on Monday by Sarah Kliff at The Washington Post’s Wonkblog. The number of uninsured among the elderly will be increased for all groups, but the greatest increase will be among minorities, who will also become more likely to postpone medical care because they lack coverage. The net effect of those changes, to project from what we already know about people who lack of insurance and postpone care, will be earlier deaths and much suffering.

Even more broadly, delaying eligibility is a direct assault on the standard of living of working-class Americans, especially those who have earned their way through physical labor.  By age 65, people who have spent decades engaged in hard physical work – such as firefighters, nurses, or other first responders, to consider the most obvious examples – are ready to stop working. Medicare is a critical element of their ability to retire, but Washington elites, especially on the right, are obtusely unsympathetic to their conditions.

Medicare was enacted in 1965 because seniors were literally dying from lack of healthcare or they were going bankrupt paying for insurance or medical care at an age when the highest rate of disease and mortality occurs. Prior to Medicare, elderly Americans were often mired in poverty due to the amount of their money that was spent on healthcare insurance and costs.

And we can presume that a significant number of Americans prematurely died because they could not afford to seek medical attention for serious conditions.

The Republicans want to restore a death panel by legislation by raising the age of eligibility for Medicare.

Sarah Palin: it's time to denounce the death panel creators in your own party.

There's a lot of American lives on the line, people who have given their labor and their service to the nation.

McConnell... ugh!

Yeah, let's run the car off the cliff. That'll show 'em.

Sometimes it’s worthwhile to zero in on an egregious misstatement before it passes into the ether. Consider this gem from last Thursday.

Minority Leader Mitch McConnell took to the floor of the Senate to further perpetuate a myth about the debt ceiling. While discussing a bill that would permanently allow the president to raise the debt ceiling, McConnell had this to say:

By demanding the power to raise the debt limit whenever he wants by as much as he wants, he showed what he's really after is assuming unprecedented power to spend taxpayer dollars without any limit at all.

Two points here. When the GOP nearly threw the country into default during the summer 2011 debt-ceiling standoff, the party contended that raising the debt ceiling encourages more spending. But that of course is not what the debt ceiling does. The debt ceiling does not permitfuture spending, but rather it deals with the debt accrued by past government spending—including the wild and unfunded spending of the previous Republican administration.

Second, even if this bill were to pass, the power to raise and spend money would still lie solely with Congress. That is in the Constitution: The executive branch can only spend as much money as Congress tells it to. Sen. McConnell knows all this, which is why he proposed last year the very idea President Obama endorsed this year.

It's about jobs, not the deficit

For those who don't understand.

It’s easy to get confused about the fiscal thing, since everyone’s talking about the “fiscal cliff.” Indeed, one recent poll suggests that a large plurality of the public believes that the budget deficit will go up if we go off that cliff.

In fact, of course, it’s just the opposite: The danger is that the deficit will come down too much, too fast. And the reasons that might happen are purely political; we may be about to slash spending and raise taxes not because markets demand it, but because Republicans have been using blackmail as a bargaining strategy, and the president seems ready to call their bluff.

Moreover, despite years of warnings from the usual suspects about the dangers of deficits and debt, our government can borrow at incredibly low interest rates — interest rates on inflation-protected U.S. bonds are actually negative, so investors are paying our government to make use of their money. And don’t tell me that markets may suddenly turn on us. Remember, the U.S. government can’t run out of cash (it prints the stuff), so the worst that could happen would be a fall in the dollar, which wouldn’t be a terrible thing and might actually help the economy.

Yet there is a whole industry built around the promotion of deficit panic. Lavishly funded corporate groups keep hyping the danger of government debt and the urgency of deficit reduction now now now — except that these same groups are suddenly warning against too much deficit reduction. No wonder the public is confused.

Meanwhile, there is almost no organized pressure to deal with the terrible thing that is actually happening right now — namely, mass unemployment. Yes, we’ve made progress over the past year. But long-term unemployment remains at levels not seen since the Great Depression: as of October, 4.9 million Americans had been unemployed for more than six months, and 3.6 million had been out of work for more than a year.

When you see numbers like those, bear in mind that we’re looking at millions of human tragedies: at individuals and families whose lives are falling apart because they can’t find work, at savings consumed, homes lost and dreams destroyed. And the longer this goes on, the bigger the tragedy.

There are also huge dollars-and-cents costs to our unmet jobs crisis. When willing workers endure forced idleness society as a whole suffers from the waste of their efforts and talents. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that what we are actually producing falls short of what we could and should be producing by around 6 percent of G.D.P., or $900 billion a year.

Worse yet, there are good reasons to believe that high unemployment is undermining our future growth as well, as the long-term unemployed come to be considered unemployable, as investment falters in the face of inadequate sales.

So what can be done? The panic over the fiscal cliff has been revelatory. It shows that even the deficit scolds are closet Keynesians. That is, they believe that right now spending cuts and tax hikes would destroy jobs; it’s impossible to make that claim while denying that temporary spending increases and tax cuts would create jobs. Yes, our still-depressed economy needs more fiscal stimulus.

And, to his credit, President Obama did include a modest amount of stimulus in his initial budget offer; the White House, at least, hasn’t completely forgotten about the unemployed. Unfortunately, almost nobody expects those stimulus plans to be included in whatever deal is eventually reached.

Read it all.