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So many liars, so little time

Saturday, April 10, 2010

A few minutes ago one of my wife’s friends forwarded an email to her filled with what appeared to be ludicrous claims about the cap and trade bill. Among the obvious whoppers:

Beginning one year after enactment of the Cap and Trade Act, you won’t be able to sell your home unless you retrofit it to comply with the energy and water efficiency standards of this “Cap & Trade” bill, passed by the House of Representatives. If it is also passed by the Senate, it will be the largest tax increase any of us has ever experienced.

The Congressional Budget Office (supposedly non-partisan) estimates that in just a few years the average cost to every family of four will be $6,800 per year. No one is excluded.

The emphases are in the original, but they are only that. There are no links. The email suggests:

Take a look at H.R. 2454 (Cap and Trade bill).

Well, my wife’s friend was somewhat concerned (she was dubious) that this load of crap might be true, so I decided to look into it. And, silly me, I took the emailer’s advice. I “took a look at H.R. 2454”, a daunting task, considering it is 1427 pages long. I downloaded a PDF and started searching for the obvious key words and, predictably, found no evidence for the email’s claims. Finally I got smart, and pasted one of the above quotes into google, where I found this article debunking these claims.
Turns out this email has been circulating for awhile. It’s of a piece with the others that are forwarded to my wife on a regular basis. It’s rather amazing that otherwise intelligent people are ready to give credence to these sort of absurd claims simply because they get an anonymous email, and are ready to forward them to others, thereby giving an implicit endorsement of their contents1 .
I’m sure it has happened, but I’ve never heard of stuff emanating from the left. It appears to be a device of the right. We are all ready to believe what we want to believe, but the ignorant masses to which this sort of thing is addressed are more susceptible, since they never question something that is both written (and therefore authoritative) and consistent with their paranoid world view. One would think, however, that it would at least occur to them that if even Fox isn’t spreading it, it must be a whopper indeed.

UPDATE: As a partial response to a comment, I think it’s a bit inaccurate to say that the article merely says that the $6,800.00 number was not generated by the CBO. The CBO actually did come up with a per person number for the cost of the bill-about minus 40 dollars for the poor to about plus $340.00 for the very wealthy. That doesn’t take into account, of course, the benefit obtained by way of a salvaged (we hope) environment. The article also links to another article, in which it debunked the additional claim that you would need a license to sell a home. My own efforts to determine the truth of that claim were limited to doing a search for “license” and “retrofit” in the bill, both of which terms appeared multiple times, but never in relation to single home sales. I think it would be nice if the bill was “transparent”, if that means easy to understand, but that’s an impossibility when you’re talking about a highly technical bill. The Obama administration has made a lot of mistakes, but a lack of honesty about what they are trying to do in major legislation is not among them. As with the health care bill, the cap and trade bill has been deliberately misrepresented. Given the total lack of intellectual honesty on the part of present day Republicans, that would happen if the bill consisted of a single paragraph with words of no more than two syllables.

  1. I don’t include my wife’s friend in this bunch; she was clearly unconvinced and made that know.??


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Ipad-First Impressions

Saturday, April 10, 2010

This is a bit late of course. The Ipad is so last week. Mine arrived with the first batch delivered, but I was away so I didn’t get to play with it until yesterday. It’s not an original observation, but I’ll make it anyway: it’s great at providing content, but the jury is still out on whether you can use it effectively to create anything. It’s pretty difficult, for instance, to create a blog post, at least using WordPress in Safari, and it’s not possible to add picture to a post at all. At least for the present, there is no way to navigate through the file structure to, for instance, get a photo to insert.

The on screen keyboard takes some getting used to. I’m not sure if it’s really feasible to use it for serious typing, primarily because the screen is so touch sensitive than it’s difficult to avoid “hitting” keys by accident.

All that being said, the thing is great for surfing the web, reading and responding to email, watching movies, and, yes, reading books. There’s a huge number of free books (classics, etc. ) available, by the way. It would have been perfect to bring on our recent vacation, in lieu of a computer. It’s also great for draining your wallet a few dollars at a time, though I have taken a vow that (after just one more) I won’t be downloading any more paid apps at least through the weekend.


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A few pictures from our Nation’s Capital

Saturday, April 10, 2010

Some picture taken Thursday, the one full day we spent in DC. Since pretty much everyone has seen the major landmarks, I’ll stay away from those, and in fact, we stayed away from the physically as well. We went to the Natural History Museum to see what turned out to be rather disappointing exhibit on Darwin. Elsewhere in the museum I was struck by this, a 35,000 year old sculpture. It’s age alone is rather awe inspiring:

Next door to the museum is the sculpture garden. I don’t know if the sculptures there are permanent or temporary exhibits. Many of them are whimsical. Among my favorites:

Lastly, what looks like a naked Uncle Wiggily pondering the idiocy swirling around him at the Imperial Capital.

We did make one foray into a souvenir shop. Normally these shops make an effort to be bi-partisan, but we chanced to stumble on one that made no such pretensions.

No “Don’t blame me, I voted for McCain” shirts here. The only Republican in sight was on a deck of cards featuring a cross-dressing George Bush.


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Ted Mann does it again

Saturday, April 10, 2010

Best reporter in the state.


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Confederate History Month

Saturday, April 10, 2010

Now I know how John Stewart or Stephen Colbert must feel when all kinds of crazy things happen while they’re on vacation. Of course, politics being what they are in this nation, at this time, just about any week you pick is chock full of events proving beyond doubt that we are a nation infested with lots of crazy people in high places.

One of the latest examples is the governor of Virginia’s attempt to reinstate a hallowed Virginia tradition: Confederate History Month. One would think that after George Allen had his macaca moment, Virginia Republicans would have learned that times have changed a bit since 1964 and that even covert appeals to racism might no longer be politically astute moves, at least outside of the Deep South, where racism still appears to be a winning strategy. It’s interesting that these politicians still try to perpetuate the myth that the Civil War was about more than just slavery. It is surprising how these myths can have such staying power when one really need only go back to what was actually being said at the time to demolish them. Witness this brilliant post by my second born here (picked up by TAP, no less) which presents some pertinent quotes from the various declarations of secession. There’s also an interesting discussion here of the Confederate Constitution, the authors of which seemed quite obsessed with preserving the South’s way of life through eternity. A noble document indeed.
There are a lot of what-ifs in history, and there’s been no end of speculation about what would have happened had the South won, or simply been allowed to secede. My own opinion is that we in the North would probably have benefitted tremendously, had we simply let them go, since the cultural drag that the South has been (Southerners have wielded disproportionate political power for a number of reasons, e.g., control of chairmanships, group think, etc.) on this country has deprived us of the ability to keep pace with enlightened regions of the world, though they likely would have made common cause with Nazi Germany, which might have been inconvenient. Without them we’d probably have universal health care and a whole lot more. Judging by the sections of their constitution quoted in the article I’ve linked to, the South itself would have become a third world nation, if it managed to stay together at all. Just as an example, their constitution forbade the Confederate government from “appropriat[ing] money for any internal improvement intended to facilitate commerce”. No highway system, no effective rail system, etc. It would have been a reactionary government in the extreme, founded on economic and political theory that was outmoded when it was written, though, crazy as it sounds, it is the same theory the Republicans are trotting out to have the health care law declared unconstitutional.


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New toy

Friday, April 9, 2010

This post written on my new Ipad, which I’ve been playing with for the past few hours. Back to serious business tomorrow.

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Philosophical question

Wednesday, April 7, 2010

In the land of the batshit crazy, is the merely half insane man king?

(Only in America is it news when a politician tells his supporters that the other side is not composed of demons. )


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Greetings from North Carolina

Monday, April 5, 2010

As I threatened or promised (take your pick) on Friday, this week will be given over to pictures, since I’m on vacation and sort of cut off from the world, although I did get the story that the Red Sox beat the hated ones, and John McCain was never a maverick and not only that, never said he was. Look for Wolf Blitzer and the gang to buy right into that.

Anyway, we spent most of Saturday and Sunday on Amtrak, with a brief stopover in DC. I didn’t take any pictures there, but herewith some pictures of our present location, Fayetteville, North Carolina, where we are visiting my brother in law, who lives in nearby Hope Mills.

This, I am told, is military country, as the local economy is dependent on a nearby military base. I didn’t see any more sign of it than I see of the sub base presence in Groton, but then, I’ve only been here for a day. Downtown Fayetteville certainly compares favorably to downtown New London (it actually has a bookstore, which doesn’t sell porn), and it was a pleasure sitting outside at an outdoor cafe to eat, something that is perhaps still a few weeks away in our neck of the woods.

Below is a picture from the Cape Fear Botanical Gardens. Fayetteville is inland, but the Cape Fear river, which runs through it, drains into (no surprise here) Cape Fear.

This is downtown Fayetteville. The building in the middle is the old market which, unfortunately, is no longer used for that purpose (or so I am informed).

No pictures of the South taken by a Yankee would be complete without some proof that this is in many respects a foreign country. Let’s start off slow with this, a picture from an exhibition of high school art, much of which was quite good, by the way. Is this patriotic, or sacrilegious? Maybe it depends on whose ass sits on the Stars and Stripes.

Proof that paranoia is alive and well down here:

The gun merchants must have been overjoyed when Obama was elected. It’s been a bonanza for them.

Lastly, as it was Easter, this sign informing us that it changed everything, just like 9/11.

Another church sign, which we weren’t quick enough to stop for, proclaimed that Jesus had changed the world with two boards and 3 nails. Thank God (or the Roman system of justice) they didn’t hang the man; people would be wearing nooses around their necks. No matter where you stand around here, there’s a Church within spitting distance, one of the reasons there really is no long range hope for this country. Just by way of contrast, here is a picture I took in Boston that I meant to post last week.

We’ll be spending one more day in this God drenched land, and then return to Washington, where many pay him tribute, but no one really believes in him.


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Friday Night Music

Friday, April 2, 2010

This being Good Friday I was once again toying with the idea of posting “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life” from The Life of Brian. However, starting with that song, I began playing the links on youtube. I can’t begin to reconstruct the stream of consciousness that led me to this, but I thought it was great, so Monty Python, as well as any religious reference (snarky or otherwise) will have to wait until next year.

There are probably a thousand versions of the House of the Rising Sun out there, but I think you’d have a hard time finding one better than this version by Odetta.

Speaking of the rising sun, shortly after it rises tomorrow my wife and I will be hitting the road for a weeks vacation to visit our son in DC and my wife’s brother in North Carolina. We just found out that the train we were supposed to take from New London is cancelled, so we have to leave early for New Haven to get a substitute. For the next week or so this blog will probably be non-political. I’ll probably be posting pictures and little else.


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Drinking Liberally-the Hangover Report

Friday, April 2, 2010

Last night we had a two-fer at Drinking Liberally. Kevin Lembo joined us at around 6:30 and left around 8:15. Denise Merrill joined us a few minutes later and stayed until after 10:00.

Lembo does the near impossible: he makes a compelling case for running for the office of Lieutenant Governor. As reported here earlier, he has been endorsed by the GDTC and is apparently picking up individual commitments state wide.

Now, an aside. Below a picture of each, with state Reps Betsy Ritter and Elissa Wright. Taking pictures of politicians is an entirely different experience than taking snaps of ordinary people. With a group of three such as this someone is usually bound to have their eyes closed, or their mouth open and looking ridiculous, etc. With politicians that never happens. They always seem to be able to smile directly at the camera. I was speculating to my wife this morning that maybe there is some sort of gene for that talent associated with the gene that predisposes people to be politicians.

Now, getting back to the politicians. Denise Merrill was on the verge of getting an official CTBlue endorsement, but she may have blown it when, to my shock and chagrin, she rejected my idea for a JJB Dinner goody bag (dark chocolate covered almonds, if I recall correctly) and said she was going to commit the cardinal sin of diverting the funds she would otherwise use for these small scale bribes to some charitable organization with a suspiciously Catholic sounding name. Well, naturally I was taken aback, shocked in fact. Here she was, shamelessly admitting to an intent to break with sacred tradition just to accomplish something worthwhile. What if every politician did that?

Speaking of the JJB Dinner, we liberal drinkers will have a whole table at the dinner, stocked exclusively with DL regulars.


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