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Follow those Bishops!

Tuesday, March 18, 2014

The American Prospect reports that American Evangelicals are creeping toward adopting the Catholic Church's position on birth control. The writer, Amelia Thomson-Deveaux, speculate that should the Evangelical leaders go that route, that they may be able to herd their flocks more effectively than have the Bishops:

Given its pervasive use, it will be much more difficult to convince evangelicals that contraception carries as much of a moral stain as abortion. But if more evangelical leaders begin to conclude that birth control does, indeed, violate the “culture of life,” they may have a more receptive audience than their Catholic counterparts. American Catholics routinely ignore doctrinal commands; majorities favor abortion and gay marriage. But right-leaning evangelicals are primed, after years of anti-abortion activism, to reconsider the uncertain boundaries about where life begins. A small but vocal minority of evangelicals could turn contraception from a foregone conclusion into a potent political force.

via The American Prospect

Well, it's quite true that Catholics have a long and (I would say) proud history of ignoring the absurd dictates of the (alleged) celibates that lay down the law. But I would argue that in the end, evangelicals will be no different. Believe it or not, and it's often hard to believe, at bottom they are people too. It's easy enough to condemn abortion, because for the most part it's not your ox being gored, and, if push comes to shove you can put aside your scruples when it suits your purpose, have an abortion, and then return to the fold. After all, it's not like you have an abortion every day.

But you do take the pill every day. The same financial and social pressures that cause Catholics to ignore the Bishops will, eventually and fairly quickly, lead to the same result among the Evangelicals. I'd argue that the Evangelicals are playing with fire by even thinking about coming out against the pill. Catholics are perfectly comfortable ignoring the Bishops about birth control, but they don't stop there. They ignore them (probably were before birth control was legal) about divorce and about sundry other issues. Most importantly, they care not a whit how the Bishops want them to vote. The end result has been a loss of moral authority so far as the Bishops are concerned. If the Evangelical Bishop-equivalents make demands upon their flock that the flock resists, they too will lose the moral authority they currently, and inexplicably, exercise over their flocks, including their current ability to get them to consistently vote against their own interests. (And here, I must pause to beg pardon of the four legged sheep for comparing them to Evangelicals. ) This will be especially true among the lambs, as they enter their child bearing years. Like all the other young people in this country, they are facing incredible odds trying to make it financially, and having families of eight or nine children (or sexless lives) imposed upon them by the people who live comfortably off their tithes will not sit well for long. They will drift away, and we'll all be better off. So, here's hoping the Evangelicals will follow the Bishops down the path to irrelevance.

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Evidence 101

Monday, March 17, 2014

As most politically aware people know, Paul Ryan recently blamed inner city poverty on “culture, in our inner cities in particular, of men not working and just generations of men not even thinking about working”. It has been pointed out, entirely fairly, that this is a clear signal to the racists in his party that Paul Ryan is on their side.

It is not often that I disagree with Paul Krugman, not being an economist, but I disagree with this statement from this morning's column about Ryan's statement:

Just to be clear, there’s no evidence that Mr. Ryan is personally a racist, and his dog-whistle may not even have been deliberate. But it doesn’t matter. He said what he said because that’s the kind of thing conservatives say to each other all the time. And why do they say such things? Because American conservatism is still, after all these years, largely driven by claims that liberals are taking away your hard-earned money and giving it to Those People.

via the New York Times

This is a very common trope among the punditocracy. When a politician (almost always a Republican) says something racist, or designed to appeal to racists, the pundits may condemn the statement, but often add a caveat to the effect, as Krugman does here, that there is no evidence that the speaker “is personally a racist”.

We'll, I'm not an economist, but I am a lawyer, and I say there is evidence that Ryan is a racist.

Krugman appears to be saying that we don't know what is in Ryan's heart of hearts, and unless we did, we cannot know whether or not he is a racist. That may be true on some sort of theoretical level, but it's not true in real life.

We can't listen in on someone's thoughts, or know what is in his heart of hearts. Only the mythical God can do that. The only “evidence” available to us to judge whether a person is a racist is his or her words, and his or her actions. While it is quite true that a person may say one thing and believe another, it is nonetheless also true that a person's words are one of the only two classes of evidence that we have to make a judgment on this, or any, issue.

So, do we have evidence that Ryan is a “personally a racist”? Yes, we do, right from his mouth, for he endorsed what is by any measure a racist canard. Does this prove he is a racist, either by a preponderance of the evidence (the civil standard) or beyond a reasonable doubt (the criminal standard)? Well, if, in a court of law, the question of whether a person was a racist were before a judge or a jury, this statment, standing alone, might not carrry the day, but it would certainly be admissible as evidence against Ryan. If you verbalize agreement with racist statements (Ryan also endorsed the views of the racist Charles Murray), then there is evidence that you are a racist. At some point, the burden shifts. Has the burden shifted to Ryan to prove he is not a racist? I'd say that since this is just the latest in a series of coded statements, that it most certainly has.

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Spring cometh, at least we hope

Friday, March 14, 2014

My wife and I are in the midst of our annual pilgrimage to the Boston Flower Show. Herewith a few pictures to give all of you other folks afflicted with Seasonal Affective Disorder hope.

 

Edited with BlogPad Pro

 

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None so blind..

Thursday, March 13, 2014

Here's an actual quote from this morning's New York Times:

Money laundering, market rigging, tax dodging, selling faulty financial products, trampling homeowner rights and rampant risk-taking — these are some of the sins that big banks have committed in recent years.

Now, some government authorities are publicly questioning whether such misdeeds are not just the work of a few bad actors, but rather a flaw that runs through the fabric of the banking industry.

via New York Times

Here's a made up quote that never appeared in the New York Times sometime in the 1950's, though I can't imagine why:

Money laundering, drug dealing, tax dodging, selling faulty financial products (protection rackets), shooting competitors-these are some of the sins that Vito Corleone Enterprises has committed in recent years.

Now, some government authorities are publicly questioning whether such misdeeds are not just the work of a few bad actors, but rather a flaw that runs through the fabric of the Mafioso.

Filed in Corporate Crime | | Comments (0)

What do the CIA and the lowliest bureaucrats have in common?

Wednesday, March 12, 2014

This morning I perused this post at Rolling Stone, highlighting 11 “Jaw-Dropping” lines from the recent speech by the loathsome Dianne Feinstein. You know the speech; the one in which she condemned CIA spying in the strongest terms, those terms operative only when they are spying on her. As for the rest of us, her advice to the CIA: go to it.

Anyway, I was struck by this jawdropper:

  1. When the Intelligence Committee launched a full-fledged investigation into what Senator Feinstein describes as the “the horrible details of a CIA program that never, never, never should have existed,” the CIA unleashed documents as if it were trying to bury needles in a haystack.

The number of pages ran quickly to the thousands, tens of thousands, the hundreds of thousands, and then into the millions. The documents that were provided came without any index, without organizational structure. It was a true “document dump” that our committee staff had to go through and make sense of.

via Rolling Stone

This is a great example of the phenomenon I mentioned in a recent post:

If you've ever been on a Town Council, Board of Education or other governmental body, you know it is not unusual for town officials to send board members giant packages of written materials shortly before a meeting. One can hardly complain about getting all relevant information, but the fact is that the members, most of whom have jobs and lives, don't have the time to read through what they're given to find the hidden gems the bureaucrats don't want them to notice.

So, it looks like the CIA is on to the same tricks as Groton's Town Manager, except apparently the Senate Staff has more time on their collective hands than the typical town council member, and they found some of the hidden gems, which were then promptly stolen back by the CIA.

Now, on another, but related, note: What are the odds of someone in the media to whom Feinstein will make herself available asking her about her monumental hypocrisy?

Filed in Creeping Totalitarianism, Politics | | Comments (1)

What ever happened to the liberal media?

Tuesday, March 11, 2014

David Sirota recently reported that an anti pension billionaire fronted the money for PBS to produce a series pushing his viewpoint as objective journalism. Now he's reporting that the McNeil-Lehrer NewsHour is actually owned (did you know someone could “own” a PBS show?) by the for profit right wing Liberty Media Company.

Most Americans likely assume that the NewsHour (which, after all, is made with support from viewers like you) is actually owned and produced by PBS. It is an understandable assumption considering PBS’s own president declared that the NewsHour “is ours, and ours alone,” and further considering that the program receives millions of public dollars every year.

However, since 1994, the NewsHour has been produced and primarily owned by the for-profit colossus, Liberty Media. Liberty, which is run by conservative billionaire John Malone, owns the majority stake in MacNeil/Lehrer Productions – the entity that produces the journalistic content of the show. While other standalone public television projects are often produced by small independent production companies, the NewsHour stands out for being owned by a major for-profit media conglomerate headed by a politically active billionaire.

via Pando Daily

He goes on to make a strong case that those contributions from “viewers like you” have fattened the wallet of John Malone, Liberty's billionaire owner.

Now, you may know someone who watches the NewsHour. You may watch it yourself, and you may be saying: “Gee, I haven't noticed a right wing bias at the NewsHour. I mean, it's not like Fox News”.

That statement may be true; I don't watch it myself, though I've learned a bit about it just by the process of osmosis. But, there are subtler ways for billionaires to propagandize than what passes for news on Fox. In the case of the NewsHour, the best way to do it is in the way Malone apparently has: capitalize on its reputation for objectivity. There is more than one way to propagandize, and one very effective way (and one used a lot in this country) is to restrict the range of views that are presented to the American people as responsible and worth listening to. Nudge the boundary of acceptable discourse a smidgen to the right each year, and after a while you have effectively silenced those who were once considered relatively mainstream.

We see it all the time. It is simply not acceptable in mainstream discourse to fail to genuflect at the altar of deficit reduction, particularly when there is a Democratic President. Similarly, there is unanimity in discussions about social security. All responsible pundits must agree that benefits are too generous, and we must all tighten our belts (some belts, of course, start out a lot looser than others). No one is allowed to argue that deficits might be a good thing when, as now, we suffer from a lack of demand, or that maybe we should be talking about increasing Social Security benefits. These voices exist out there, but how often do they get on the NewsHour. You can exercise power both by including certain voices and excluding others. Malone and Liberty Media serve the right wing cause by excluding views from what is perceived by almost everyone as the responsible mainstream. The national conversation moves ever rightward. It's not as loud or obnoxious as Fox, but it may be more effective.

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Some etymology

Saturday, March 8, 2014

Paul Krugman links to a blog called The Monkey Cage, by a political scientist named John Sides. Mr. Sides points out something that many of us have known for a while: that while people in this country call themselves conservatives, on the issues they tend to come out as liberals. Sides points out that most polling simply asks people to self identify; if a person calls him or herself a conservative, they are marked down as such; their actual political views notwithstanding.

Sides explains the disparity this way:

This raises the question: why are so many people identifying as conservative while simultaneously preferring more government?  For some conservatives, it is because they associate the label with religion, culture or lifestyle.  In essence, when they identify as “conservative,” they are thinking about conservatism in terms of family structure, raising children, or interpreting the Bible. Conservatism is about their personal lives, not their politics.

But other self-identified conservatives, though, are conservative in terms of neither religion and culture nor the size of government.  These are the truly “conflicted conservatives,” say Ellis and Stimson, who locate their origins in a different factor: how conservatives and liberals have traditionally talked about politics.  Conservatives, they argue, talk about politics in terms of symbols and the general value of “conservatism” — and news coverage, they find, usually frames the label “conservative” in positive terms.  Liberals talk about policy in terms of the goals it will serve — a cleaner environment, a stronger safety net, and so on — which are also good things for many people.  As a result, some people internalize both messages and end up calling themselves conservative but having liberal views on policy.

via The Monkey Cage

There is another reason that Sides sort of approaches, but never really articulates. The right wing has a vastly greater message machine than the left, as he acknowledges. That machine has been demonizing the word “liberal” since at least 1969, when Spiro Agnew (or his writers) coined the term “radic-lib”, in an attempt to associate liberalism with dirty hippies, an association that continues to this day. Over the years, Republicans continued to use the term as shorthand for “radical”, “un-American”, “weak on foreign policy”, “irreligious”, etc. At the same time, they repeatedly defined the term “conservative” to be the equivalent of God, Mom, apple pie and the flag. Indeed, they have claimed ownership of the flag and patriotism, and that ownership has been largely conceded in our media (“Values voters” are fundamentalist Christian bigots; people who believe that we should feed the hungry or heal the sick are not “values voters”) .

Naturally, Democrats did what they always do. They took up defensive positions and ran away from the word and the label. Not a single Democrat, so far as I can recall, pointed out that it was liberals that gave people programs such as Social Security and Medicare (to name just the top two), that people continued to support as they began to self identify with the conservatives that wanted to destroy those very programs. After all, most people are not political junkies, and they get their cues from the media. Given the relentless demonization of liberals and liberalism; given the lack of any effective defense by liberal politicians, given the medias complicity with the Republicans in giving the word an unsavory connotation, it is truly remarkable that anyone continues to self identify as liberal. It is a tribute to our much maligned educational system that 30% of the population (probably a higher portion in the rational states) has resisted more than forty years of propaganda by the right and the mainstream media that it dominates and persist in applying the term to themselves. Even without a compliant media, the Democrats could pull the same trick and turn “conservative” into a dirty word, merely be associating the term with the actual policies of conservatives. Naturally, that has never occurred to them.

Filed in History, Language | | Comments (0)

Most hypocritical statement in history?

Wednesday, March 5, 2014

John Kerry on Russia:

“it is not appropriate to invade a country, and at the end of the barrel of a gun dictate what you are trying to achieve. That is not 21st-century, G-8, major nation behavior.”

Iraq, anyone?

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Must be true-it’s got footnotes

Tuesday, March 4, 2014

Paul Krugman writes about Paul Ryan's latest flim-flam, replacing magic asterisks with mis-citations:

Give Ryan some points for originality. In his various budgets, he relied mainly on magic asterisks — unspecified savings and revenue sources to be determined later; he was able to convince many pundits that he had a grand fiscal plan when the reality was that he was just assuming his conclusions, and that the assumptions were fundamentally ridiculous. But this time he uses a quite different technique.

What he offers is a report making some strong assertions, and citing an impressive array of research papers. What you aren’t supposed to notice is that the research papers don’t actually support the assertions.

In some cases we’re talking about artful misrepresentation of what the papers say, drawing angry protests from the authors. In other cases the misdirection is more subtle.

Take the treatment of Medicaid and work incentives. I’m going to teach the best available survey on these issues tonight, which looks at the research and finds little evidence of significant disincentive effects from Medicaid (or food stamps). That’s not at all the impression you get from the Ryan report. So I looked at the Medicaid section, and found that it contains a more or less unstructured listing of lots of papers; if you read that list carefully, you find that there really isn’t anything in there making a strong case for large incentive effects.

In other words, the research citations are just there to make the report sound well-informed; they aren’t actually used to derive the conclusions, which more or less come out of thin air.

via Paul Krugman's NY Times Blog

Well, this sounded familiar to me. It brought to mind Ann Coulter's defense of her own work, in which she also makes things up. According to Ann, the numerous footnotes proved beyond doubt that her arguments were sound. But, not so much:

On July 7, Media Matters for America asked Random House Inc. whether it would investigate charges of plagiarism lodged against right-wing pundit Ann Coulter's latest book, Godless: The Church of Liberalism (Crown Forum, June 2006). Steve Ross, senior vice president and publisher of Crown Publishing Group and publisher of the Crown Forum imprint – divisions of Random House Inc. – responded to Media Matters by stating that charges of plagiarism against Coulter were “trivial,” “meritless,” and “irresponsible,” and defended Coulter's scholarship by stating that she “knows when attribution is appropriate, as underscored by the nineteen pages of hundreds of endnotes contained in Godless.”

This was hardly the first time Coulter and her defenders have offered the large number of footnotes contained in her book as “evidence” of the quality of her scholarship. Also on July 7, Terence Jeffrey, editor of conservative weekly Human Events, defended Coulter's book on CNN's The Situation Room by citing her “19 pages of footnotes.” And when similar questions were raised about her 2002 book, Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right (Crown, June 2002), Coulter repeatedly cited her “35 pages of footnotes” as evidence that her claims were accurate.

In response, Media Matters decided to investigate each of the endnotes in Godless. We found a plethora of problems.

Among other things, Coulter:

misrepresented and distorted the statements of her sources;
omitted information in those sources that refuted the claims in her book;
misrepresented news coverage to allege bias;
relied upon outdated and unreliable sources;
and invented “facts.”
What follows is documentation of some of the most problematic endnotes in Godless.

via Media Matters

That's from way back in 2006. You can read on at the link if you really care to read Media Matter's refutation. Maybe they need to do the same exhaustive job on Ryan. The problem is that it takes more time and effort to refute bullshit assertions than to make them; it's a problem I come up against in legal work all the time. This reminds me of another manipulative technique that I've run up against, and,in part, it's something Ryan is relying on here, at least insofar as the treatment he expects from the regular media. If you've ever been on a Town Council, Board of Education or other governmental body, you know it is not unusual for town officials to send board members giant packages of written materials shortly before a meeting. One can hardly complain about getting all relevant information, but the fact is that the members, most of whom have jobs and lives, don't have the time to read through what they're given to find the hidden gems the bureaucrats don't want them to notice. Ryan is pulling the same thing here; he knows that other than a few wonks like Krugman, the media will simply accept the thing (after all, there are footnotes); not bother to examine it; and report it in just the way Ryan wants.

Filed in Language | | Comments (1)

An anniversary

Tuesday, March 4, 2014

Seven score and ten years ago, an American president delivered the finest inaugural address in history, and perhaps the greatest political speech in that same time span. A bit heavy on the god, but we can over look that. Well worth reading. Still has the power to evoke strong feelings.

Filed in History | | Comments (0)