Skip to content

Off to D.C.-and how about that guy Gregg

Thursday, February 12, 2009

We’re off to the Nation’s Capital to visit our first born. If things go as planned, we’ll also be attending a presentation by George McGovern on Abraham Lincoln. McGovern will be speaking at the National Press Club about his Lincoln biography, which is part of the Presidential Biography Series. He certainly drew a winner. Can you imagine being chosen for Pierce, Buchanan or Bush fils?

If possible I’ll be posting from our hotel, assuming they have wireless and assuming that there’s somewhere I can rest a computer. I’ve found in the past that some hotels have wireless, but it doesn’t occur to them that a computer user needs some sort of surface on which to put said computer. Life sure is tough for us bloggers.

Before I go I can’t resist a jab at Judd Gregg. This fellow is just a mite unstable. It would be interesting to knew the backstory on this. We know that he put himself forward for the job. Best guess is that he was surprised that Obama actually expected him to implement Obama’s policies, and not his own. A prediction: this will be played as an Obama failure to achieve bi-partisanship, rather than a sign of the inability of Republicans to transcend partisanship.

For a more extended argument about the bi-partisanship trap, read this and bear in mind that the Republican legislative strategy, when they were in the majority, was to craft legislation that would past with the barest of minorities, precisely to play as close to their base as they possibly could. When they did it, it was brilliant. This is not a case of a double standard. It’s a case of multiple standards, all of which favor the GOP. Luckily, the public appears to be acquiring an immunity to Republican memes. The press may play Obama as a failure, but it’s not likely that will spread to the reality based community outside the beltway.


Filed in Media | | Comments (0)

No experts need apply

Thursday, February 12, 2009

My wife and I have taken to watching Countdown every night. I freely admit that I watch it mainly to have my views reinforced. It’s still a refreshing experience to watch anything on television that isn’t skewed to the right.

I’m not necessarily blind to the shows defects, however. I’ve noticed, for instance, that the show has a limited stable of guest “experts”, only one of whom, constitutional law professor Jonathan Turley, appears to have real credentials in anything. The rests are journalists, who may be well informed, but they have no more expertise in fields such as economics than I. There’s nothing wrong with generalists, of course, but when you start discussing rather arcane economic issues, it doesn’t hurt to reach out to people with some actual expertise. This is especially so with the bailout and stimulus legislation.

The problem, as Media Matters recently demonstrated, is endemic. It recently documented that only 5% of the guest bloviators on the Cable Shows were economists. Media Matters employed a generous definition of economist to reach that figure.

Rubbing salt in the wound, the guy with the best record, just on the numbers, was Glenn Beck:

The show that featured the most guest appearances by economists was Fox News’ Glenn Beck, which featured seven: Arthur Laffer, Stephen Moore (who appeared twice), Barry Ritholtz, Amity Shlaes, Thomas Sowell, and Ben Stein.

Laffer, Sowell and Stein are loons. I don’t know anything about the other four, but the group probably constitutes the majority of economists in the country who oppose the concept of economic stimulus. Laffer invented the infamous Laffer curve, which purported to demonstrate that cutting taxes was an economic cure-all. I’ve written about Stein before. Maybe these are the economists John Boehner found when he went trolling on the internet for stimulus skeptics.

There are probably a lot of reasons for this aversion to expertise. One of the main might be that a competent economist can rather quickly expose the ignorance of our discourse leaders. Like this:

Or like this:

It’s particularly fun to see the pompous know it all George Will get his comeuppance.

Now, I’m not complaining all that much about this, because if the networks decided to change their ways, what we would see is a couple of economists, mostly of the right wing variety (except on MSNBC) that would be the go to guy for every show on their network. They would be as unlikely as the bloviators themselves to represent anything other than the standard inside the beltway point of view. Still, it is amazing to think that these networks, straining to blather for 24 hours, would not think to call in some folks who have some claim to know what they are talking about.


Filed in Economics | | Comments (0)

Republicans Fiddling

Tuesday, February 10, 2009

A little video from a site called While Rome Burns:


Filed in Politics, Video | | Comments (0)

Indulge Me

Tuesday, February 10, 2009

I mentioned a few days ago that Mr. Infallible (that’s the Pope, for you non-believers) has been playing to his base by rehabilitating Nazi loving clerics, among other things. Well now we learn that he’s bringing back some old traditions, namely, Indulgences.

I can still remember trolling through my Missal during Mass, looking at the bright color pictures and checking out the number of days off of my sentence I could get by saying various prayers.

For the untutored, let me explain, as I have done at more length in the pages of my old blog some time ago.

There are three places where we can go after we die, now that the Church has abolished Limbo. Here they are in ascending order of probability:

1. Heaven. Don’t waste your time shooting for heaven. You have to be absolutely sinless to get into heaven, and the fact is that no properly raised Catholic can exist for more than a few minutes without sinning in some way or other. Certainly no male can do it. The average male thinks about sex about every other minute, on average, and every one of those impure thoughts is a sin. Your only hope is to receive absolution and then get shot as you walk out of the confessional.

2. Purgatory. Eminently doable. Just avoid the biggies. The aformentioned impure thoughts are fine. Just don’t kill anyone or miss Mass on Sunday. Those are mortal sins. Downside: you have to endure punishment for eternity, or until the end of the world. After that, having been purged of your sins, and no doubt feeling well disposed toward the god who has been torturing you for the past several eons, you go to Heaven.

3. A piece of cake. Anyone can get in. Downside: You are tortured absolutely forever.

The choices aren’t so great, but it’s pretty obvious that your best hope lies in Purgatory. My ambitions were always modest, so Purgatory was always my objective, which is why I liked the idea of indulgences. What are indulgences, you non-Catholics and under 50s may ask? Well, the Times has it about right:

According to church teaching, even after sinners are absolved in the confessional and say their Our Fathers or Hail Marys as penance, they still face punishment after death, in Purgatory, before they can enter heaven. In exchange for certain prayers, devotions or pilgrimages in special years, a Catholic can receive an indulgence, which reduces or erases that punishment instantly, with no formal ceremony or sacrament.

But not quite right. Take a Hail Mary for instance. That might get you a 300 day indulgence. I can’t remember any prayer getting you much more than that. Nothing got you out completely.

Now, there are a few problems with indulgences, of the logical variety. First, if we assume that we really do have to spend eternity in Purgatory before we get to heaven, and we lop off 300 days at a time from the sentence, how does it get shortened? Isn’t that a bit like subtracting something from infinity? The problem is somewhat amelioriated, of course, if we assume that the maximum Purgatory term is until the end of the world, which scientists currently estimate at a mere 7.5 billion years. If we assume you can say a Hail Mary every minute, and you don’t do anything else (except think about sex once -to qualify for Purgatory in the first place), including sleep, for a life that lasts 100 years, you could successfully reduce your sentence by 43,274,400 years, approximately 0.576992% of your total term, which makes our penal system look generous-time off for good behavior wise. It’s pretty clear that one rosary a day isn’t worth squat.

But wait, the percentage goes up if the end of the world means the end of the existence of humankind, which, with any luck to the folks in Purgatory could come almost any day. In fact, that’s the main objective of the Left Behinders, if I’m not mistaken: To hasten the end time so all the Good Christians can ascend into heaven, and the rest of us can spend eternity in Hell, since at that point there will be no need for Purgatory. If that’s when Judgment Day is held, our hypothetical Indulgence gatherer can accumulate enough good time to get out of Purgatory free, with time to spare to spring a flock of other folks.

Speaking of logic, some might also wonder how it is that the Church gets to control an otherwise omnipotent God. For after all, it’s the Church that decides how many days a Hail Mary is worth, and God just has to go along. Some might think that God would want to preserve a little freedom of action, but apparently that’s not the case. Like so many things Holy Mother Church teaches us, this is a Mystery, that we must take on faith.

For my own part, I think Benedict is being too timid by half. Why go back to the early twentieth century, when you can go all the way back to the 13th. Times are tough, and the Church is having trouble making ends meet, what with all those lawsuits. Why not sell the indulgences, like in the good old days?


Filed in Religion | | Comments (0)

Obama Press Conference

Monday, February 9, 2009

How low our expectations have fallen. I thought Obama did great. Nonetheless, I was struck by the number of comments at Americablog about how refreshing it was to see a president speak in well formed sentences, strung together to form coherent thoughts. Don’t get me wrong. It was refreshing. But how sad is it for us that we have grown to expect anything less.

On another, but related note, I am begining to believe more and more that my wistful hope that Obama is thinking long term is going to turn out to be true. I thought he did a good job of making the Republicans look bad, while being perfectly respectful of them, at least on the surface.

I really wish, however, that he would be a little more forceful on the torture issue. But then again, maybe he believes that’s an issue where he can lead most effectively from behind. Franklin Roosevelt once, or perhaps many times, told groups advocating various reforms that he agreed with them and would like to do what they wanted. His advice to those groups: make me do it. Maybe this is an issue where Obama needs and wants us to make him do it. After all, he never quite closes the door.


Filed in Obama | | Comments (1)

Waterboarding the least of it?

Monday, February 9, 2009

This is one of those stories that you have to hope isn’t true, while more or less assuming that it is. Via Firedoglake from the London Daily Telegraph, writing about evidence that the British government has attempted to suppress:

A British official, who is regularly briefed on intelligence operations, said: “The concern was that the document revealed that intelligence from the British agencies was used by the Americans and that there were British questions asked while Binyam Mohamed was being tortured.

“Miliband is being pushed hard by the intelligence agencies to protect the identity of those involved.”

The 25 lines edited out of the court papers contained details of how Mr Mohamed’s genitals were sliced with a scalpel and other torture methods so extreme that waterboarding, the controversial technique of simulated drowning, “is very far down the list of things they did,”the official said.

The blogger over at Firedoglake makes the point that it would be hard for anyone to believe that an act like that was legal, even if it was blessed by John Yoo. He also points out that Dick Cheney has said that each torture technique was individually approved at the White House. It makes you sick just to imagine Dick and George discussing whether slicing someone’s genitals was torture. It makes you even sicker to think that they may have decided that it wasn’t.

Meanwhile, Pat Leahy has called for a Truth Commission. War crimes trials would be better, but the Truth Commission approach is not unprecedented. We just need to avoid the type of bi-partisan coverup we got from the 9/11 Commission.


Filed in Creeping Totalitarianism | | Comments (0)

Misunderstood

Sunday, February 8, 2009

Those who read the New York Times electronically missed something in today’s print edition: A full page ad “signed” by Wells Fargo President John Stumpf (what a perfect name for the head of a failing bank) bemoaning the mean-spirited public outcry about the Las Vegas junket Wells Fargo was forced to cancel after the aforesaid outcry.

After all, Stumpf said, this junket was not for the executives, it was for the little people; the front line soldiers who did the day to day work that enabled people like him to drive the bank off a cliff. Without “recognition”, in the form of a 12 day Las Vegas bacchanal, how will these precious darlings find the courage to go on? Perhaps they should learn to get motivated by the thing that gets the rest of us out of bed and into our cars every morning: a paycheck.

But no Wall Streeter has completed his work without adding insult to injury. In this case, the insult is to our intelligence. This is an actual quote: “The funds to pay for recognition events such as these do not come from the government. They come from our profits”. To which, of course, the initial response that comes to mind is: What profits? If Wells Fargo is profitable, why did it need $25 billion of our money. Moreover, does he think we are so stupid as to not know that money is fungible, whether we know that specific word or not?

Which all leads up to a final question. Why is this Stumpf spending taxpayer money for full page ads in the New York Times?

UPDATE: Something is strange when this blog gets a slew of comments about anything. My observations stand. That’s our money they’re spending. Whatever Wells Fargo’s motivations, it is getting taxpayer money. I googled the issue raised by the commenters and found that the same sort of pack comments, often using the same or nearly the same language, appear wherever this story is reproduced. In fact, it was almost impossible to find an actual news story that dealt with this issue. Indeed, Wells Fargo is paying a dividend: to the government. It’s also likely to cut its dividends this year and will probably need to enter the capital market. In addition, its purchase of Wachovia was indirectly subsidized by us taxpayers. What I find interesting about this is that this concerted defense, which appears all over the internet, does not seem to be the line the company is officially taking. Who are all these rabid Wells Fargo fans?

UPDATE 2: Wells Fargo Reports $2.6 Billion Q4 Loss:

The company also reported that Wachovia, the struggling bank it bought Dec. 31 and didn’t include in its bottom line, lost $11 billion in the period


Filed in Corporate Crime | | Comments (6)

First as tragedy, then as farce

Saturday, February 7, 2009

In 1633 the Catholic Church put Galileo Galilei on trial for heresy, for the crime of believing that the earth moved around the sun. Somehow, it had become an article of faith to believe that the earth stood still in the heavens, while the sun and the stars swirled around it. Legend has it that after publicly abjuring his statements, which just happened to be true, Galileo muttered, under his breath, “Nonetheless, it moves“. Whether he said that or not, there’s not much doubt that he continued to believe that the earth did move. The Church had done no more than force him to lie to save his skin.

In what is probably the most farcical of many farcical echoes of that famous case, this week the Pope demanded that a recently un-excommunicated Bishop renounce his views on the Holocaust, those views being that the holocaust never happened:

In a move designed to head off condemnation, Pope Benedict XVI ordered Bishop Richard Williamson to unequivocally and publicly renounce his claims that there were no gas chambers and that fewer than 300,000 Jews died in the Nazi death camps instead of the accepted figure of six million.

…

The Vatican said: “Bishop Williamson, in order to be admitted to episcopal functions within the Church, will have to take his distance, in an absolutely unequivocal and public fashion, from his position on the Shoah, which the Holy Father was not aware of when the excommunication was lifted.”

That last statement is no doubt a lie. Williamson’s positions were well known. But that’s not where the farce comes in. Once again we have the Church demanding that someone believe something on command. This time, the Church is right, and the target is wrong, but there’s no difference in principle between the two situations. You can force a person to do something, or say something, but you can’t force them to believe something. Williamson may abjure his public position, or he may not (apparently, he has agreed to look into the question again), but the least likely outcome is that he will actually sincerely change his opinion. If he does as the Church requires, he will, in a weird sort of way, be violating the eighth commandment at the Pope’s insistence. He will be bearing truthful witness while believing he is bearing false witness, which is the moral equivalent of a lie. For like Galileo he will be muttering under his breath, “Nonetheless, there were no gas chambers”.

As to Benedict, he either understands this or he does not. If he does, then he is giving a cynical and sinful (at least according to formal Catholic doctrine) pass to an avowed anti-Semite. If he does not, then he’s a fool . My money is on the first option.


Filed in Religion | | Comments (0)

Friday Night Music-Buddy Holly

Friday, February 6, 2009

A few days ago, February 3rd, was the 50th anniversary of the day the music died, so it seems only fitting that we feature the folks who died that day.

Buddy Holly on, of all things, the Arthur Murray Dance Party.


The Big Bopper:


Unfortunately, I couldn’t find a single video of Richie Valens, (one with actual video footage, as opposed to stills with music in the background) so he’ll have to remain unrepresented.


Filed in Music | | Comments (0)

What’s an Economy For, Anyway?

Friday, February 6, 2009

Periodically my friend Bob Roth contributes a piece of writing. As they are normally much longer than a typical post, I have usually placed them on a separate page, to be forever enshrined as a link on the upper right hand side of the blog. Recently Bob sent me another, in which I think he makes some good points. Unfortunately, I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for the folks in our current Congress to take many of the steps Bob’s advocating, or even think about some of the issues he’s raising, but the more they’re discussed the more chance there is that some of them will seep into the debate. You can read the full piece by clicking on the link at the right, or by reading below and following the link at the bottom.

So what follows is Bob’s latest effort.

A New Political Economy 101

What’s an Economy For, Anyway?

By ROBERT ROTH

It seems to me we need a whole new economy. And to get one we need, as always, understanding, organizing, action. This article gropes toward understanding what an economy is and could be in the context of our present, multi-faceted dilemma, in the hope of facilitating organizing and appropriate action.

The economy – by definition, right? – is that matrix or network of institutions and interactions that meet human needs. Or, is it only about how human needs are met by means of transactions that involve money? Is the economy only about what is bought and sold? If so, what about barter, the exchange of goods and services? What about caring and caring activities that are not valued in the present economy? Where do we draw the lines?

I have thought for years of the economy as the sum total of goods and services exchanged for money. That’s what the Gross National Product is all about, and that’s how it’s measured, right? And the Quest of the Day (and perhaps the Decade) is how we’re going to “jump start” the economy. At present “the economy” is winding down, contracting, with unemployment rising by the hour thereby further decreasing demand for goods and services thus leading to further contraction.

But the idea that we can jump start the economy implies that what we were doing before the crisis began is capable of being continued, of going on as before. The idea that we should jump start it – by any means necessary, it would seem — assumes its operation is critical to our health and welfare, essential to our wellbeing and even survival.

As things now stand, leaving increasing numbers of people without money certainly threatens those people’s health, wellbeing and ultimately, survival. Granted, the Obama administration seems to be making an effort to integrate into the “stimulus package” a great many worthwhile activities, that will produce immediate or even lasting value. But the bulk of it, including the tax cuts, is intended simply to get the economy “going again,” in the same direction it had before the crisis. This will use up increasingly scarce resources on what may well be a fool’s errand. So maybe now is a good time to ask whether the economy we had, which is now contracting, can or should be revived.

Read the full post here.

Filed in Uncategorized | | Comments (0)