Cognitive dissonance in Pittsburgh and beyond

Kelly's problem is Kelly

2012-01-29T01:12:00.003-05:00

I have to say that in many ways I don't care about Jack Kelly's column today. Kelly has written columns in the past lecturing us about how much more intelligent Sarah Palin, Rick Perry and Rick Santorum are smarter than smug liberals think. Now he is sorting out in his own mind but aloud to all of us how Romney could win Florida and cinch the nomination.

Actually, it is not at all clear to me whether Kelly really wants Romney or would be willing to accept Newt Gingrich despite his having "more baggage than Amtrak". Kelly mentions "They know Mr. Gingrich is bombastic, stretches the truth, been a jerk to his ex-wives, and been known to modify his principles when his palm was crossed with enough silver.". Yet Kelly also talks about how Gingrich stands up to "Wall Street-Washington elite" and "Mr. Gingrich stands up to biased, condescending journalists who slant questions and play gotcha.". Apparently it's OK when Kelly describes Gingrich's faults, but when a journalist who is not a self-described conservative does the same, he/she is biased and condescending.

By the way, "Wall Street-Washington elite"? I mean, he's got a point, a lot of Obama's economic advisors are from Wall Street, but as Bill Maher put it "Hank Paulson". But then I guess Jack Kelly has thrown George W Bush under the bus. Or maybe not, we don't know, he ignores the inconvenient.

Kelly finishes by quoting extensively from Andrew McCarthy of the National Review. Romney can't win by attacking the competition, and Romney needs to convince us that he is the most conservative candidate who can win. Why didn't the PG just print Andrew McCarthy's piece from the NRO, since apparently Jack Kelly has no original thoughts of his own.

But more than that, the primary is about selecting a candidate for the general election. So, fine, the Republicans can select a conservative to run against Obama's supposed liberalism, but what ever happened to having ideas? After all, Romney was not a public servant when he worked at Bain Capital, and it shows. They created few, if any, jobs, and for every company they "turned" around, there is at least one and maybe more that they simply carved up and disposed of. And in any event, Republicans keep saying the government can't create jobs, yet they want to present Romney as a jobs creator?

Kelly says Romney will do better if he "clearly, concisely, constantly on jobs, spending and debt, corruption, crony capitalism, national defense". But when Kelly says that, he doesn't mean present the facts, he means present the lies.

Obama could be vulnerable on Civil Liberties, and to some extent on the way Obama chose to try to accommodate Republicans rather than to push his own agenda. But to attack Obama on those points would be to risk Democrats bringing up George Bush's record on civil liberties, and to risk admitting Republicans did not even try to compromise just to help struggling American citizens. It doesn't work for Republicans to say to voters ‘We couldn't let you have that temporary highway construction job because government can't create jobs; you will get a much better job eventually when the government no longer protects worker safety and the air we breathe and the water we drink’. Well, Republicans can’t say that to voters, although they may well be saying something like that to (wealthy) donors.

And maybe that is the point. Republicans need to find the candidate most acceptable to the Koch Brothers, and then let Frank Luntz use a couple of billion dollars to find the right lies about Obama to make the Republican candidate slightly less distasteful.

And Jack Kelly’s seemingly beloved Tea Party are simply the “R” button pushers, kind of the same way Republicans complain about unions. Except that unions were born out of a desire of workers to help each other, while I would argue that the Tea Party was born of anger and resentment, partially at wealthy elites and also the urban poor. Republican elites will focus that anger at the poor, and deflect the anger at the rich. And Jack Kelly will be part of that.

A glaring inconsistency ...

2012-01-28T07:52:00.002-05:00

Friday nights, when I can stay awake, I watch Bill Maher's "Real Time". I am somewhat impressed with Maher's practice of having conservatives and liberals on the same three member panel. Conservatives can roll out their talking points, but for a change there are liberals sitting right there to respond. Mind you, the quality of the talking points and the response varies widely.

Last night, Maher had Dana Rohrabacher, a Republican Congressman from California who is a libertarian (like Maher himself). Maher also had Martin Bashir and former MTV VJ Kennedy (another libertarian). Rohrabacher's Wikipedia page is actually somewhat interesting, he is a surfer and in favor of medical marijuana (quite possibly the reason Maher had him as a guest). But despite being a real person with perhaps moderately complicated views, unfortunately he managed to seem more like a Republican caricature.

Which brings me to the reason I was moved to post. Rohrabacher complained early in the panel discussion about the five trillion dollar debt Obama is leaving to our children. Maher responded that Obama's share was 1.7 trillion, George Bush was responsible for the rest, and there was no economist in sight to explain automatic stabilizers, declining revenues and deficit spending to stimulate the economy. But the real thing I wanted to say is that a few minutes later (or maybe it was before) Rohrabacher was complaining that Obama is "slashing" the defense budget. So Rohrabacher is complaining about the defict, but also complaining about attempts to reduce.

To be fair, Rohrabacher claimed to be in favor of "modest" cuts to defense, but he offered no specifics. My point is simply to point out once again a pretty glaring example of a Republican wanting to have it both ways, simply to pander to voters.

I wonder if ...

2012-01-26T19:40:00.002-05:00

I am generally not a fan of conspiracy theories. I don't think there is a vast Republican conspiracy anymore than there is a vast Democratic conspiracy. Yet the Republicans do move together; the Democrats not so much. The Republicans do not have a conspiracy, but they don't seem to tolerate dissent. I don't know why Chuck Hagel quit active political life, but I suspect he came to dislike the behavior of his party (although for I know he shares their less than sophisticated approach to economics).

So like I said, I don't believe in conspiracy theories, but it really looks to like many groups tend to move together. I don't think they collude per se, but I think they cooperate, and they don't tolerate dissension well. Look at how Republicans/conservatives have turned on Newt Gingrich (who I am tempted to call Gingrinch). Republicans move together, Democrats try, I think oil traders move as a group. What about ... well, the 1%? How could they move as a group? What would they do and why? Well, in the era of super pacs and Citizens United, the 1% and the corporations they control have a powerful tool in how much money they can donate.

Now, let's look at the way things are right now. Everybody, including the 1%, got a shellacking in 2008. Everybody's wealth went down when the stock market went down, and when home values plummeted. Now, when Obama was campaigning and then elected, we all expected Obama would take action. Pecora Commission. Instead, almost all of Obama's economics staff and a lot of other people in his administration came straight off of Wall Street. Not surprisingly, there have been almost no prosecutions of Wall Street bankers. Record bonuses have returned. Obama has talked about raising taxes on the 1% (income, capital gains, interest carried forward), but with a Republican House and an easily filibustered Senate, the odds Obama will be able to carry out his threats are quite small. Basically the best Obama can do is maintain the status quo. I suspect that is quite satisfactory to the 1%. Obama seems like a genuine Democrat populist, but in reality he has been pretty generous to the 1%, and it seems like he can be counted on to continue to do that.

By contrast, if a Republican gets in the White House, there might be literally be unrest in the cities. Everybody would expect a Republican President would overtly help the rich, give them even more breaks, or at least keep them the way they are. It seem like a bad idea for the 1% to have a Republican President.

How could the 1% keep a Republican out of the White House, especially if they don't conspire and plot together. Actually it is pretty simple, they could simply not donate to candidates who might be serious contenders, like a Mitch Daniels, a Tim Pawlenty or a Chris Christie. They have solid records and actually somewhat moderate records. By contrast, the people who have raised money, some familiar and some not, are less impressive. Donald Trump? Herman Cain? Ron Paul? Michelle Bachmann? Newt Gingrich? Even Mitt Romney? A lot of these people seem almost like clowns.

And maybe that's the point. Maybe the 1% are exercising their power to do what they can to keep Obama in office. Even Romney seems pretty questionable for President. Their chances of getting elected seem less that a Mitch Daniels running against Obama's record. Mind you, Mitt Romeny will run on Obama's record, as Gingrich would do. But Romney's record is complicated, and Gingrich's record is strange. The 1% are actually doing what they can to put up a clown against Obama, maybe.

But I don't believe in conspiracy theories. Not a fan.

Kelly's world view

2012-01-22T19:05:00.012-05:00

Sorry this thing is so late, I really have had very little time in the last couple of weeks, including the past few days.

A couple of commenters have asked why I comment on Jack Kelly so religiously (which is to say every Sunday?). There are a couple of thoughts there. First, I am interested in international affairs, including security studies, which also seems to be Kelly's first love (so to speak). Second, since he is ostensibly a Pittsburgh columnist (although he is also published in Toledo), I feel someone from Pittsburgh should comment on him (and yes, Dayvoe from 2PJ's would surely do this if I didn't, or even sometimes still does, but so what - I wanna). But the final reason is that Jack Kelly often presents a neat little case study of what I understand cognitive dissonance to be. He takes the facts of a situation and finds way to explain them that fit his view of the world. Like today's (er, Sunday's) column.

Kelly has three sort of central premises. First is that the Muslim Brotherhood (or Ikhwan, apparently) is likely to win enough elections in Egypt to control the government. Second Kelly draws a connection between the Muslim Brotherhood and Hitler, as well as quoting the current "supreme" leader that the Brotherhood wants to establish a "caliphate" in Egypt and achieve mastership of the world. Third Kelly asserts that A) it will be bad for the US if this happens, B) he implies we can do something about this and C) he implies we should if we can.

As to the question of whether the Brotherhood is likely to take of Egypt's government, that seems as likely as not. As to how bad the Muslim Brotherhood is, I am sure they want to be bad to the bone. They survived underground in Egypt, according to Kelly they have no love (and a certain degree of animosity) for Israel, the Shiites in Iraq (or where ever), or America.

On the last point, it should be pointed out that the US supported and by extension defended Mubarak for as long as he has been in power. While Mubarak was in power, there were elections, but everyone understood that the elections were rigged, and everyone understood that the US supported Mubarak. Why should Egyptians in general, much less the Muslim Brotherhood in specific, feel any great love for the US? Are they supposed to somehow understand that our foreign policy is shaped by the power of the Israeli lobby, so that while we support the idea of democracy everywhere, we will support with money and arms those dictators who do things that make the Israeli lobby happy in the US?

Jack Kelly does not come out and say we should control Egypt's democracy, he just says it will be bad if the Muslim Brotherhood takes control of the Egyptian government. He doesn't even say specifically how bad, he just talks a lot about how Hitler rose to power and took over parts of Europe because England and France appeased him. So how could Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood rival the destructive force Germany was able to wield in Europe in the thirties? What might Jack Kelly be thinking when he is giving us these dire warnings?

Two thoughts come to mind. First, (theoretically) the Muslim Brotherhood could achieve what Iran (and the Taliban in Afghanistan) failed to in the 1980's. Possibly they could encourage the people in other Muslim countries in the region to rise up against their current governments and create fundamentalist Muslims theocracies. Kelly specifically mentions Libya and Syria, where in one the government has already been toppled and in the other mass protests threaten the government. If an Islamist wave swept the Middle East, both Israel and the flow of oil to Europe and the US could be threatened.

While that would be really bad, that doesn't seem close to the "mastership" of the world the Brotherhood claims as a goal. How could the Muslim Brotherhood gain control in the world considering the power of China, Europe and the United States? I mean, Kelly talks about how Jimmy Carter misunderstood the Iranian revolution and Obama seems to be doing the same thing with the Brotherhood. But how much a dupe could Obama be, I mean, it's not like he spent a significant part of his childhood in a Muslim country, attending a Muslim Madrassa.

Yes, I am saying that I believe Jack Kelly is, between the lines, suggesting that Barack Obama is a sort of Muslim Manchurian Candidate. At best, Obama might be a well intentioned but dangerously naive dupe, and at worst might sap the power of the US by waging class warfare against the rich, while destroying our families by forcing gay marriage and gay teachers on us as well as giving Sharia law first equal power and then dominance in our legal system.

While Kelly does not come out and say Obama is a Muslim plant, he certainly complains about the rise to power the Muslim Brotherhood seems to be achieving. Its amusing to me that the same conservatives who cheered George Bush when he talked about bringing democracy to the Middle East complain loudly when the effects of democracy come to fruition. The conservatives who support Rich Santorum (an openly religious candidate for President here) decry the religious beliefs of the Muslim Brotherhood. Obviously its not that religion is being pushed into politics, its which religion is taking on a political role. And mind you, right now we are talking about the government of Egypt, not our government. How do the Egyptians feel about this?

For Jack Kelly, clearly American interests (as he defines them right now) trump any rights of the Egyptian people to self determination. Thinking like that is what led us to support the Shah of Iran all those years. Of course, the Shah often had his own plans, but we might have been OK with the Shah absorbing smaller gulf states as long as he accommodated American interests in the region. Just like we supported Saddam Hussein in the 1980's after the Shah was deposed, particularly when Saddam went after Iran, to the point of turning a blind eye at that point when Saddam used nerve gas on the Kurds in Iraq.

Those are the kinds of actions that make the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt more popular than groups we might prefer. Not solely, of course, but our history in the Middle East makes anything we advocate there automatically suspect to most of the population there.

For all of Jack Kelly's knowledge of the specifics of the history of the Muslim Brotherhood, I don't think he has a very good knowledge of the politics of the area. The US really can no longer afford to bluster around the area, removing people we don't like and putting in people who will give us what we want (as we turn a blind eye to what they do to their own people).

If we want to protect ourselves from the effects of our past actions in the Middle East catching up with us, there are things we could at home. A 55 MPH speed limit on the highway, much higher cafe standards, tougher vehicle inspections - all could reduce our dependence on foreign oil (long before we would have to drill, baby, drill). But Jack Kelly will never suggest personal responsibility.

Capitalism run amok ...

2012-01-18T23:23:00.004-05:00

I think I was supposed to go dark today. Hey, I have enough trouble keeping my passwords straight, bringing down my blog temporarily would be near impossible. And would my two readers notice .... (Car talk reference, right?)

When I was in college thirty some years ago, studying economics, it was simply understood that if there was a problem, like, say, air pollution, the government needed to address it. After all, one of the basic components of capitalism is (private) property rights. If you dump a bag of garbage on my lawn, I will take you to court. But if your factory spews smoke out, who takes you to court? Who "owns" the air, or the water? So the government has to step in. A slightly more complicated case involves, say, companies that get "too big to fail". When you think about it, too big to fail means that if a big bank fails, a lot of people get real hurt. In the case of the recent financial meltdown, the collapse of Lehman Brothers because of the toxic assets of the same type that were held by other big banks sent a shiver of panic through the financial industry. So the failure of a big bank can harm not only its own depositors, but also start a domino effect in the industry.

These problems I describe are in fact problems of distortions of the free market, where either companies are unable to find a price for a negative byproduct of production (pollution) or companies getting so large as to reduce real competition to almost nothing. That they occur pretty much indicates how the free market is unable to address these problems, and for the longest time were considered to be the responsibility of the government. That was the automatic assumption in the halls of academia in the early eighties.

But now a-days Republicans say that there are too many regulations,and that wealthy people drive job creation in this country. Sorta the opposite of what I learned when I was young.
But that leads some to say the private industry successes of a Mitt Romeny inform and improve his (potential) performance as President. But maybe we should see some (or all) of the actions Romney took in any given private sector situation as showing some sort of success.

Reuters filed this report (In the spirit of not being an online pirate ... I forget where I got this from, I thought it was Greenwald, but as far as I can see Greenwald is mostly only pointing out Chris Dodd's current hypocrisy).

Isn't this a legitimate criticism?

2012-01-15T06:17:00.007-05:00

I don't think Jack Kelly reads anything I say. Which is fine with me, I am going to say what I say regardless of that. But one might wonder where Jack does get his ideas for his columns. I suspect, given his fondness for referencing them, that Jack draws his inspiration(s) from right wing publications and/or blogs. So some on the right wing must have noticed that President Obama is following in the (negative) tradition of George Bush, in grabbing (or just retaining) a lot of power in the Presidency. Maybe people on the right are starting to read Glenn Greenwald.

Today's Jack Kelly column is (sub)titled"A constitutional crisis looms as the president flouts the law". I have been saying for (I believe its) months that while most (or, well, all) of Mr. Kelly's previous criticisms where wrong (based on faulty information, faulty economics, what have you), there were/are legitimate criticisms from the left. Today Jack Kelly get the closest to making those criticisms as I can remember seeing him do. Mind you, he does essentially fail, but today's criticisms are similar to legitimate ones.

I don't think, or would like not to think that this is some sort of "even a stopped clock is right twice a day". Although I will also say that Kelly manages to absolve George Bush even as he slams Obama, supporting the liberal phrase, "its all right if a Republican does it".

So to get to brass tacks, the two allegations I can tease out of Kelly's column are first that a) Obama was ignoring the will of Congress when he attached a signing statement to the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) that said he would not enforce a particular provision of that law and b) that when Obama made a recess appointment of Richard Cordray for head of the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the Senate was not in recess. Kelly also takes pains to say that most mainstream and/or liberal members of the press did not take any note of these attacks on the constitution.

There's probably something to the last point, but two of the media sources I consult regularly, Glenn Greenwald at salon dot com and the Daily Show, covered these issues. Greenwald covered the NDAA and also has spent time recently in particular discussing how much of the press is giving Obama a pass when he clearly violates parts of the constitution.
The Daily Show, for its part, mentioned both issues in (what else) fairly funny bits. For the recess appointment issue, they showed the clip from C SPAN where the Senate's President Pro Temp or whichever appointed stand in gavel-ed in a session and a second later recessed it for the rest of the holiday. Stewart made a quite comical arm's spread and "what?" gesture for that particular maneuver.

The Daily Show also took note of Obama's signing statement for the NDAA. As I understand it, the NDAA allows for indefinite detention of American citizens. Obama, in his signing statement, said that this provision of this law would not be enforced in his administration. The Daily Show said something about how Obama put a sad face next to his signature, and I believe also something about how Americans were lucky that the Obama administration would continue forever (Stewart did it funny).

I think the National Defense Authorization Act issue is a constitutional failure in more than one way. Authorization for indefinite detention, which should be, under our constitution, illegal, was passed by Congress. At the very least Obama should have vetoed it for that reason. Is the signing statement unconstitutional, in this particular case or in general? In general there have been signing statements dating back to James Monroe, although I am given to understand they didn't generally have instructions until starting in the Reagan era. For this specific case, it seems to me that the President, as chief executive of the federal government, can choose how to enforce laws to at least some degree. But putting in the signing statement is a poor excuse for allowing a flagrant violation of constitutional provision come into law.

As for the recess appointment, yes, in a technical sense clearly the Senate was not in recess. But the Senate was not actually doing anything (I am sure the majority were home relaxing or raising money), and then there is the issue of the abuse of the filibuster by the Republicans since they lost the Senate in 2006. Of course, I can see why Kelly is complaining about this particular recess appointment. Conservative Tea Party types are bitterly opposed to the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau, and would have preferred to indefinitely block the appointment of a director.

As I said, Kelly repeatedly defends George Bush's actions as not stepping over the constitutional boundaries. Obviously a lot of liberals would disagree with that, but one liberal (Greenwald) asserts that Obama also steps over a similar line. Which raises an inevitable question, who's worse, Obama or Bush. Frankly, I can't really say. Bush being a Republican, it is tempting to simply say he's worse, but in many ways Obama is more disappointing. At the end of the day, Bush and Obama are both so guilty of stepping over the line. Bush should be prosecuted, but he is out of office and not really able to do anymore damage. Obama is still in office, and could easily get re-elected.

So that's Jack Kelly's column today. He still gets it wrong, but I gotta say that he's getting closer.

Jack returns to his roots (not that it works well)

2012-01-08T17:35:00.005-05:00

(edit point: this post has a timestamp of Sunday at 5:30 because I started it then; I finished it Monday at lunchtime, which is when it appeared on my blog)

A funny thing happened this morning around 7:00 am when I went to post my weekly screed about Jack Kelly's column. When I went to my blog's address, a screen came up that said my blog had been deleted. To back up a little, yesterday afternoon I was surfing the web while doing other things, and went to check my gmail or something. I got a message blocking me at that point (I might have type in a wrong password, I do that all the time). The message said something about suspicious activity on my account.

So to go back to this morning, I tried to figure out what the deal was about deleting my account. But I had to go help with training for new VITA volunteer tax payers, so I couldn't pursue it in any depth. I did use Google's message system to ask a question of their help people. When I came home after training (around 5:30), my blog was back. But I have to say this is making me think I might have to look at Word Press or some other blogging software.

Anyway, I want to say something about Jack Kelly's column this week. He returns to his national security roots, although he is still slanting his columns to carry water for the Tea Party.

Kelly basically accuses Obama and his administration of trying to get out of Afghanistan before the war has been won (hence the title of the column "Surrender in Afghanistan"). His "proof" boils down to three ideas, two of which I researched slightly.

First Jack quotes Joe Biden saying ""The Taliban per se is not our enemy,"" and then immediately says "We went to war in Afghanistan to oust the Taliban regime because it had sheltered al-Qaida. Perhaps Mr. Biden forgot." Really? I think it is Jack Kelly who is showing a selective memory. We went to war, as I remember it, to demolish al qaeda, particularly Osama bin Laden. Now, to the extent the Taliban got in the way of that goal, we were happy enough to oust them from power. But I think if you asked most Americans whether it was/is a good idea to get involved in a ten year war in Afghanistan at I have no idea what cost in dollars, and 1864 dead Americans, I think most Americans would say no.

And there is the point that the 800 pound gorilla in the corner might want to draw attention to. To repeat myself, we have been involved in Afghanistan for ten years or so, roughly the fist seven of which under President Bush. Apparently holding President's responsible for military success only applies to Democrats. Of course, even then, Kelly should but chooses not to grant that Obama was in office when bin Laden was killed, the thing that was essentially our ultimate motivation for invading Afghanistan.

The second issue Kelly raises is to comment on a story in an Indian newspaper about how the Obama administration is using someone named "Yusuf al-Qaradawi" to negotiate with the Taliban for the US to withdraw from Afghanistan. Interesting story, so I googled this guys name and the word Afghanistan to see what the Washington Post or Chicago Tribune thinks of it. Well, the story was there on google, but the sites that carried were all conservative sites, like the National Review or (one of my favorite site names) "Hot Air". When a story is carried only by conservatives, that immediately makes me doubt it's legitimacy.

The third issue Kelly brings up is a Reuters story that the administration is considering turning over from Guantanamo to Afghanistan someone named Mohammed Fazl, a senior Taliban official, and four other people. He's been held since 2001, and in Guantanamo since 2002. Afghanistan was requesting him since 2005 apparently. The man is accused of particularly brutal behavior (not a surprise to anyone who knows anything about the Taliban), but we are talking about turning ah Afghan national over the the Afghan government for them to decide what to do with. Seems totally unreasonable to me.

Kelly goes on about how Afghans who don't want to live under a brutal Taliban dictatorship would be the losers if the US withdrew. I certainly agree that life under the Taliban would be miserable (in my opinion), but I have to wonder how much the Afghans prefer whatever it is we are trying to accomplish there. After all,
we have been in Afghanistan since 2001, and we are apparently no closer to total victory than we were in 2001. How much are the civilians and Afghan government trying to help us? Perhaps the air strikes that hit civilians, often using drones rather than manned aircraft, has something to do with why the Afghans are no better than suspicious of us.

In addition, I do firmly believe the Afghans are worth helping, but how is it that they are the beneficiaries of soaring rhetoric while the citizens of, say, Zimbabwe are not. The hypocrisy of Republicans during the Bush administration and still today is staggering. To talk about bringing Democracy to Afghanistan or Iraq and then slaughter Afghani's or Iragi's with airstrikes (either poorly aimed, based on faulty intelligence or both) requires an incredibly selective view of the world (not to say cognitive dissonance).

What is most ludicrous about Kelly's column is that he is accusing Obama of wanting to slink away from Afghanistan and I believe he is implying (at the very least) that Obama has no stomach for winning the war in Afghanistan or fighting the war on terror. For anyone actually paying attention, Obama has been very aggressive about Afghanistan and in trampling on civil liberties. How does he compare to George W Bush? I have to say that in my opinion the comparison is too complicated, but Obama and much of the Democrat party (elected and voters) have been astounding in simultaneously pursuing aggressive action in Afghanistan and elsewhere in the world against "terrorists" (too often innocent civilians), trampling on civil rights (such as due process, habeous corpus, actually granting detainees trials and attacking whistle blowers and more), and yet pretending that nothing that is being done is contrary to the values of the US. Much the same can be said about the Obama administration's policy towards Wall Street, by the way. Glenn Greenwald has documented much of this, most recently here, but all through his Salon columns going back.

It's staggering that Kelly (in a manner that is typical of conservatives/Republicans/Tea Party people)asserts Obama is either somehow a wuss who doesn't want to fight a war to victory or perhaps in league with al Qaeda, when in fact Obama is ordering the killing of people in Afghanistan and elsewhere at least as aggressively as Bush did, and trampling civil rights at least as aggressively as Bush did. Kelly not only fails to elevate the debate, he actually makes it worse by concocting this fairy tale. Of course, very little of the rest of the media is doing anything to hold Obama accountable for those things he is doing.

Santorum tries to be the man ...

2012-01-01T16:56:00.005-05:00

I watched Rick Santorum on Meet the Press this morning. It was pretty interesting watching Santorum bob and weave through the usual sort of questions any hardcore, purist conservative candidate might get. Santorum tried to justify supporting measures that merely make it more difficult to get an abortion versus wanting a total ban on abortion ("any measure that moves the country in the right direction" I recall Santorum saying). He also justified trying to get earmarks for Pennsylvania in particular while opposing earmarks in general (I remember conservatives complaining relentlessly about Obama having got earmarks for Illinois; I can only assume they will complain just as hard about Santorum).

But the most interesting things Santorum said this morning were about what his Iran policy would be (as captured partially by Slate). Although David Gregory pointed out that the Obama administration is quite aggressive in pursing an anti-nuclear policy in Iran, both overt and apparently covert, Santorum proceeded to whine that while we know the Israeli's are acting against Iran, we don't hear anything about US actions. Ignoring the recent drone crash, what part of "covert" does Santorum not understand. Actually, probably all parts of covert, as Santorum said on MTP that he would make sure the Iranians knew the US was acting covertly in Iran (how? by allowing our operatives to be captured?).

I suppose some conservatives might be impressed by Santorum's posturing. I don't expect Santorum to actually spell out what he would want the CIA or whomever to do in Iran. But does he really think that acting like a bully will impress on us how tough he is?

A time for reflection ....

2011-12-31T21:53:00.005-05:00

I was struck that this week's Jack Kelly column doesn't really have any distortions of general history or reality. He talks about the Republican candidates and the race in Iowa. He confesses at one point to not being for any of them (but ...). On the other hand, I was also struck by how much Kelly seems to be toeing the Tea Party line. Kelly expresses no interest in ideas or policy; his primary criteria for evaluating the candidates is how conservative they are. He goes through each of them, eventually declaring Santorum the least objectionable.

Kelly evidently doesn't think much of the libertarian Ron Paul; describing him in this way in this paragraph: "Rep. Paul has zero chance to win the nomination. His libertarian positions on economic issues are popular, but his anti-military, anti-Israel foreign policy views appeal mostly to crackpots."

Kelly goes on to dismiss Paul as not able to even be nominated, let alone elected. I am not sure whether Kelly's evaluation of Paul's positions amount to distortions of reality (partly because I have trouble understanding what constitutes Paul's view of libertarianism), but apparently they don't work for the Tea Party.

Glenn Greenwald takes an interesting view of the comparison of Ron Paul's and Barack Obama's respective foreign and domestic security policies. He stridently claims that he is not endorsing or even supporting any particular candidate in that column. Which makes me feel a bit better, because Greenwald totally slams Obama, especially in comparison with Ron Paul.

Greenwald's column at some point almost sounds like the Declaration of Independence in listing Obama's ... well, essentially crimes against humanity and liberty. "He has slaughtered civilians", "He has institutionalized the power of Presidents — in secret and with no checks — to target American citizens for assassination-by-CIA, far from any battlefield", "He has waged an unprecedented war against whistleblowers" and "His obsession with secrecy is so extreme that it has become darkly laughable" This goes on for a couple more paragraphs, complete with links to more in depth pieces on each issue. The point Greenwald goes on to make is that (ironically?) Ron Paul essentially opposes each of the things Obama has done, yet progressives support Obama (essentially without qualification) and oppose Rom Paul (essentially without qualification).

Now, I have to say we do not live in a fantasy world; I do not believe there will ever be a candidate or elected President who absolutely embraces all the values of progressives (or conservatives or whomever). Actually, there are (as there surely must be) a couple of purist candidates - Dennis Kucinich and Ron Paul come to mind. Both have devoted and dedicated followers, but I have to say that it seems unlikely either would ever get a majority of American voters behind them. You know, there is always the idea people have that if all of the American voters were exposed to Kucinich's views or Ron Paul's views ... yada yada. I think that even a majority of American voters don't care that much about politics, which by the way is why it usually works better to scare people than to give them issues in depth. Not that voters are stupid, they just aren't that interested in economic schools of thought, for example.

I have to say that at one point Greenwald does make the lesser of two evils argument, sort of acknowledging that it is somewhat legitimate. What apparently bothers Greenwald the most is that national Democrats and the press won't even mention the actual evils that Obama has embraced.

Our country is in trouble economically, there are problems abroad economically and yes, there are still foreign policy challenges. But the economic debates do not involve what might be actual solutions (according to Paul Krugman) and the real foreign policy and domestic rights issues are not even being raised, according to Glenn Greenwald. So what happens if you are interested in real solutions for our real problems?

Trib complains about Obama, makes same mistake ...

2011-12-26T22:06:00.004-05:00

So the Trib today (Monday) takes a shot at Barack Obama's comments about the rich in his speech in Osawatomie. Now, Obama did make a mistake in saying that some some billionaires pay only 1% in federal income taxes (the one percent only paying one percent, somewhat lyrical). Apparently there is no specific data to back up that claim, but Politifact still rated the Obama claim was only "mostly false". As I said , there is no specific data, but Politifact noted that according to the IRS 30 of the 400 billionaires paid (at some point, I don't know what year) an effective tax rate of between 0 and 10 percent. Further, Politifact noted that Bloomberg reporter Gigi Stone made the specific statement about the billionaires only paying the one percent on a TV interview. That doesn't mean the white House should have put it in a speech given by the President (or not at least without attributing it specifically to Ms Stone), but at least it can't be said the President just made it up.

On the other hand, the Trib asserts the nebulous statement that income inequity "n 2007 had fallen to its lowest level in six years" per the Census Bureau. I could not verify that statement searching on "income inequality in 2007 Census". Of course, not being specific as to whether they are talking about the top 20% versus the bottom 20%, or the top .01% versus the bottom 50%, the Trib makes it impossible to evaluate their statement.

And in any event, a particular fluctuation in one of many ways to look at income inequity that dips to the slightly lower number than a number five years earlier says nothing about sixty some years of increasing income of inequity. But the Trib doesn't say anything about that. Because even though the Trib expects the President to be absolutely accurate, it does not feel it has to do anything like the same.

Jingle whether you want to or not

2011-12-25T10:55:00.003-05:00

Oy.

Happy holidays to you and yours, Merry Christmas if that is what you celebrate. Jack Kelly wishes you only Merry Christmas (if you don’t like it, convert and become a Republican as well, or you will go to haich eee double hockey sticks).

Jack Kelly has a sort of Christmas theme column today, which would be nice if he weren’t kind of mean about it.

He starts by talking about how many Christians there are, in the US and around the world. Nothing he says is particularly surprising. He talks about how Africans are adding converts rapidly, which I have heard from several sources.

But then he starts looking at the US and that’s when he gets mean, or at least predictably partisan. We are told that Christianity in the US has faltered because “It began with banning the singing of carols in Christmas pageants at elementary schools, then banning the pageants themselves. Creches on public property were next.”. I was not aware that religion had to be present in the schools to prosper.

Of course, the removal of Christmas from the schools and the proliferation of “Happy Holidays” is the fault of the liberals, according to Jack. Mr. Kelly tells us that liberals say that what the First Amendment says about religion means that we can’t allow Christmas in the schools. Kelly says that is a misreading of the First Amendment, and what the founders intended.

But even though Kelly talks about different religions early in his column, it misses a crucial point. If we push Christmas on all school children, then Jewish and Muslim and what have you children feel like there is something wrong with them. If you got Jack Kelly drunk and therefore loose of tongue, he would say that is exactly what has in mind. If Kelly were being totally honest, I think he believes Jews and Muslims need to convert (and become Republicans, if they aren’t already). It is really hard to read Kelly’s column and not reach that conclusion.

Which is totally at odds with how and why this country was founded, starting with the Pilgrims fleeing religious persecution (although they promptly started the campaign of genocide against the Native Americans). The founding fathers took pains to say that we could not pull a Henry the Eighth and create Anglicans 2, or tell the Anglicans they have to become Catholics (‘cause really it would be simpler). Now, maybe we didn’t start out as a multicultural society, but our democracy and values were so attractive that people came from all over the world. Jack Kelly seems to want to tell all those immigrants that they need drop their own heritage and culture and become more like us. Kelly does not say, but I think the liberal message is that they are welcome just as they are. Which one sounds more like what we think of as America?

Pay attention, or we'll be fooled again ...

2011-12-24T09:05:00.002-05:00

Who was it Who said "we won't get fooled again"?

Yes.

Sorry, indulging myself in the tiniest bit of Abbott and Costello like shtick, but I think we do need to pay attention to the stories coming from the right and the left (or in this case from the left about the right). Joe Nocera at the NYTimes has (I believe it's)yet another good explanation of both what conservatives are saying about and the reality of Freddie and Fannie's role in the financial meltdown. Nocera concentrates on the particular people who generated what he calls "The Big Lie", detailing how they spun it and how conservatives and Republican politicians including presidential candidates have rushed to repeat it. Nocera does pause to mention that Freddie and Fannie did get involved with sub-prime mortgages, but on the back side of the bell curve of the market. Which is to say Nocera does not let Freddie and Fannie off the hook, but he points out they were not driving the market for bad loans. By contrast, the big lie lets Wall Street off the hook, the crisis was the fault of the government.

Along the way Nocera has some killer links, like this one (admittedly from a Media Matters related website, but go ahead and produce data that proves their statements wrong). I might quietly point out that putting those kind of links in a column (like Frank Rich used to do) allows those of us who are curious to evaluate what the columnist considers to be back up sources, which is exactly what Jack Kelly of the PG doesn't do (yes, I will almost undoubtedly comment on tomorrow's column).

I also want to note the latest (surprise) Paul Krugman column where he points out that, in his particular example, Mitt Romney is being allowed to lie outrageously about Barack Obama. Now, thinking back to Bill Clinton, conservatives certainly lied outrageously about him. I think of the very tragic Vince Foster thing being spun into a claim that Democratic operatives actually killed him. Mind you, Clinton managed to provide enough actual dirt with his personal behavior to enable the Republicans to impeach him (but not convict him in the impeachment process, the language of which process is always confusing and hurts my head). But I do wonder if some (or maybe all) Republican politicians think they can be extra nasty to Obama because Obama is black. In particular I think of the phrase Rush Limbaugh uses to as a get out of jail free card for his responsibility in repeating whatever lie: "Just sayin'". Just sayin' that Obama wants to redistribute money so that everyone has the same amount, says Mitt Romney. Just sayin' that Obama is going to put free enterprise on trial, Romney opines in an interview.

Obama as President has been moderate to the point of alienating many of his supporters. Which is fine, he did not make campaign promises written in stone and/or blood, and besides, at least one of his promises was to reach out to the the other side. But what Krugman (and I) objects to is not that Obama broke his promises to be more aggressively liberal or even that the Republicans are lying about what kind of President Obama is, he (and I) objects to the media not screaming about how huge these Republican lies are. Of course, Obama himself has only recently began to push back ever so slightly (despite what my conservative friends might say). If Obama were a bit more like Clinton (by which I guess I might mean simultaneously thin skinned and tough) and responded as quickly as possible to any Republican attack, the media might be more inclined to fact check everybody, and grudgingly admit the truth gap between the two sides.

But it is a shame that mostly the mainstream media only repeats Republican attacks without any examination. Of course there are liberal blogs (such as the Huffington Post, Daily Kos, 2 Political Junkies and my own blog), but you the reader have to be a bit careful since we bloggers don't necessarily feel the need to try to be "fair and balanced", or even acknowledge there might be another point of view besides our own.

Speaking of not necessarily balanced, Gail Collins has another funny (not to say snarky) column today in the NYTimes, largely a summation of a moderately exciting political week. Yes, she slips another reference to Mitts' dog on the roof of the car (and I still laugh every single time). This time, she managed to find a recent Romney response to the story "“Uh — love my dog. That’s all I got for you,” Romney responded.".

Gail Collins knows what's important.

The flaw in the logic ...

2011-12-23T13:12:00.002-05:00

This Sally Kalson column appeared Sunday, when it was well worth commenting on. But today's decision by both UPMC and Highmark focuses more attention on the conflict. Yes there was a Ruth Ann Dailey bit of lunacy about preferring a Romney-Rubio ticket over Gingrich, as if there is any difference, and there was today's House Republican turnabout on the payroll tax and unemployment compensation. But the Kalson column has unexpected depth. The column is certainly worth reading, first for her emotionally raw description of her struggle with cancer. She also perfectly characterized the roles of both UPMC and Highmark in this situation, how Highmark is no company of angels, sitting on billions in what I believe they characterize as "excess revenues" while UPMC is exploiting its unique position as both insurer and near monopolistic healthcare provider to black mail Highmark.

Now, as I remember it, Republicans who continue to oppose the Affordable Care Act say that an unregulated free health care/insurance market would work better than increased regulation. Of course, we've just seen how reduced regulation worked for financial markets. I think that the situation in Pittsburgh exemplifies how the unregulated free market might work. I mean, right now health in is somewhat regulated. Rates are regulated at the state level, and people can complain about decisions made by insurers that they think are unfair. My own experience is that our state's regulators are fairly weak and ineffective in curbing cost-cutting excesses. Also mostly insurers can only operate in one state, although I know that both Aetna and Cigna have small operations in Pittsburgh. I will say that the "Blue's", Blue Cross and Blue Shield, although present in most, if not all, states, are in fact all independent operations who only coordinate in the slightest manner.

The current battle between UPMC and Highmark is evidently something that escapes regulation, yet it seems possible that UPMC could emerge as the hands down dominant player in our region. They would be limited in rate and price increases only by their ability to justify to them our weak regulators. This strikes me as an unsurprising consequence of allowing a healthcare provider to set up an insurance arm. If we couldn't see it before it was done, we should at least acknowledge it now.

At the national level Republicans are still claiming that free markets would make healthcare better and cheaper. Pittsburgh's experience with the current low level of regulation should be held up as a counter argument.

Freddie and Fannie discussed

2011-12-20T22:20:00.002-05:00

Of course according to any right thinking person, the New York Times not only has a liberal slant, but lies to make that slant seem reasonable. So we can't believe any of Joe Nocera's column he titled "An Inconvenient Truth" (the title itself a slap in the face of right thinking people). Sure Nocera acknowledges how Freddie and Fannie not only wrote their own legislation and ignored attempts to regulate them, but had the well known accounting scandals in middle of the last decade. He even admits they made a "belated, disastrous foray into subprime mortgages" which ended up costing us all about $150 billion. But Nocera claims that Fannie and Freddie were not at the center of the financial meltdown. How can he make such a preposterous claim?

All parody aside, I found Nocera's column to not only a clear (and very fair) examination of both the virtues and recent faults of Fannie and Freddie, but also a good explanation of their place in the alternative (fantasy) history that Republicans have constructed. One local conservative commenter recently claimed that the Community Reinvestment Act was at the heart of the 2008 financial meltdown, that making sure that poor people of color could get affordable mortgages had somehow turned into liberals forcing banks to sell McMansions to blacks who could make the mortgages and bankrupted the banks. When I copied and pasted a passage from the Wikipedia page on the CRA about how (according to Paul Krugman among others) the CRA had had little effect on the meltdown (compared to mortgages given to more affluent people and for commercial property), this local conservative commenter stated that Obama and Krugman (!) had "cooked" the books at the Fed, just like the Soviets used to do.

My point being, not just the Republican Presidential candidates or the Republicans in Congress with their identical Climate Change denying or new found adherence to the Austrian school of macroeconomics (with its simplistic monetary theories that they cling to even though the real world behaves just the opposite of what they say it is doing - have you noticed our current hyper-inflation?), but even local conservative columnists and commenters on blogs all say the same things in the same way. Some times it seems like Democrats almost admire the way the Republicans march in lockstep. I think they are no more than a third of the country (Democrats and independents are each also about a third), but their very unity gives them an inordinate amount of power. But I wouldn't want the Democrats to be that united, since it might mean all Democrats would have to believe something like creationism, or all have to be pro-choice, instead of thinking for themselves. I think Democrats should have principles, but should always be open to discussing ideas. At least that's the way I want to be.

Kelly's title says it all...

2011-12-17T20:45:00.010-05:00

Today Jack Kelly wants us to understand that the drunk on power but failed politicians the Democrats are will do anything to keep power, including stealing elections. This is especially true for Obama (who already stole the 2008 election), who "trails in all swing states" according to Mr Kelly.

Trails who? That's a good trick, to trail a nonexistent nominee. Especially considering the current crop of Republican hopefuls, each of who has his or her own particular baggage. It took Newt some four years to be chased out (by his fellow Republicans) of the Speaker's job, but chased out he was and someone is likely to remind voters why.

I have to pause and say that you just have to read the title and sub heading: "Voter fraud is real And voter ID laws are really needed; they are not racist" and it's like the desperation is almost palpable. Having to prove all three remarks essentially makes a strong prima facie case for the current racist and anti-democratic views of the Republican/Tea party.

Today's column is vintage Kelly, he raises an issue that is not entirely without merit but not really a crisis, and then discusses it entirely in terms of how the Democrats are both committing fraud and trying to block reforming legislation. And Kelly gets to mention ACORN once again.

Truth to tell, there is probably something in Kelly's quoting as accusation that LBJ stole his first Senate election (though I know no details). I've certainly heard the rumor/accusation that Illinois was stolen for JFK. Democrats, having the support of labor, have historically often been in a good position to control urban poling places.

But in terms of recent electoral theft, where the popular vote went one way and the election went another, I have two words for Jack Kelly: Al Gore. No one disputes that the popular vote went for Gore. Yet Kelly fails to mention Gore once in his column.

Kelly does make several assertions, and I internet-researched some of them. I found them to be classic cases of where Kelly either doesn't tell us all the facts or ties things together that are not related. Kelly's lead off statement, for example, mentions the impending resignation of the Indiana State Democratic Chair and a probe of signatures for to get candidates on the primary ballot in the 2008 election. The way the paragraph is written, one would naturally assume the two statements were linked, and Dan Parker's resignation would be a tacit admission of guilt.

Or the Indiana Democrat Party's decision to keep Parker as chair could have nothing to do with this probe, which may not deserve to be called vote fraud anyway. The fact that Republicans are in the Governor's and Secretary of State's offices makes this probe that much more suspicious.

Kelly also mentions this: "Former Democratic Rep. Artur Davis, who is black, said vote fraud is rampant in African-American districts like his in Alabama."

Newspapers in Alabama naturally wanted to hear names, yet Mr Davis refused to give even one. Davis may be telling the truth, but the way he has told it so far only serves a Republican agenda (having only vague and impossible to substantiate allegations).

The Brennan Center for Justice at the NYU School of Law has issued a report of a case by case analysis of vote fraud, finding them to be at best much ado about nothing. It looks like the report was dated 2007, but I find little reason to think its conclusions have since been invalidated.

As I said, Kelly again mentions ACORN: "Of 1.3 million new registrations ACORN turned in in 2008, election officials rejected 400,000." Once again, I will point out that ACORN itself had a quality control process, where it would examine each registration for completeness and call the phone number on each registration to make sure they were valid. If the form was incomplete or the registrant could not be reached by phone, ACORN would still turn in the form, but with a big red flag on it. Did ACORN red flag 400,000 new registrations? Thanks to the Republicans hounding ACORN out of existence, we may never know. Maybe it is not funny how Jack never mentions ACORN's quality control process, since (according to Jack) ACORN (I suppose by virtue of its mission to help the poor) must have been trying to steal elections for its Democratic co-conspirators.

I haven't said anything about whether voter ID laws might be racist or not. I believe it is accepted that historically after the Civil War that in the South poll taxes and ID requirements for former slaves who might not have such documents were considered racist. I ask you, is it possible that an African American living today might have been born not in a rural hospital but at home with his/her mother assisted by an illiterate midwife, who was unable to fill out a birth certificate? If it is possible, does this person deserve to be denied the right to vote?

I urge you to read this book (of which I myself only read a portion, I found it tough going). It does not have to do with voter registration per se, but it certainly bears on the relationship between African Americans and federal, state and local governments.

Before closing, I just want to note one more set of statements Kelly made about how voter ID requirements don't affect turnout: "In Georgia, black voter turnout for the midterm election in 2006 was 42.9 percent. After Georgia passed photo ID, black turnout in the 2010 midterm rose to 50.4 percent. Black turnout also rose in Indiana and Mississippi after photo IDs were required." In that statement, Kelly compares 2006 to 2010. In between was the 2008 election between Obama and McCain, which saw large voter registration efforts. For all three of Georgia, Indiana and Mississippi, that registration effort may have out weighed the disenfranchisement effect of those laws. Also for Mississippi and Indiana, these could be comparisons between a midterm and a Presidential election, which always sees a higher turnout.

But that's Jack Kelly; only some of the facts, some of the time.

Climate change's turn

2011-12-10T23:02:00.012-05:00

This week Jack Kelly returns to his attacks on climate science. Before I address his column directly, I wanted to make a couple of related points.

First, how come when Julian Assange gets hold of State Department cables and emails, he is is traitor who deserves to be executed, but some unnamed thug can steal University of East Anglia emails, and that is described as a leak. Kelly wants to pretend this is some whistle blower who is disturbed by what (s)he sees. I think it is some paid hacker financed by the Koch brothers or Rupert Murdoch (go ahead, prove me wrong). It's funny to me that conservatives lose all there libertarian principles when it is liberal's privacy rights being discussed.

And also, there is more involved with energy extraction and consumption than just climate change. Oil,natural gas and even coal are essentially scarce resources. We use oil not just to power our cars, but for fertilizer, plastic and I believe several other things. We still import middle eastern oil, even though doing so is involving us in a seemingly intractable set of conflicts. So switching over as much as is feasible to alternative energy systems is highly desirable. It might well be that our grandchildren would thank us, certainly our great great grandchildren would.

So, as I say Jack Kelly today gives us a gleefully gloating column announcing the "impending collapse of one of the most brazen scams in the history of the world" (climate change,in case you hadn't guessed). Kelly asserts that the participants at the climate change conference in Durban, South Africa are showing signs of sadness that their scam will be exposed. Although apparently it is possible Kelly wrote his column too soon, if we can believe an article from the Guardian shortly before midnight on Saturday.

Kelly trots out a lot of the same old evidence and a few new items. He starts with a report from Canadian Donna LaFramboise, which found that of the 18,531 references in the 2007 IPCC report, some 5,587 were from non-peer reviewed sources, such as "newspaper and magazine articles written by non-experts, unpublished theses and pamphlets produced by environmental groups".

By the way, let me pause here to say that since Jack Kelly gives us the benefit of all this great research he does, the online edition of the Post-Gazette should make these sources available as hyperlinks.

That is a really interesting claim, these 5,587 non peer reviewed theses and pamphlets. How many of each. Well, I found a website which described this effort, and as you click links, you can find the lists of references and what LaFramboise thought were peer reviewed or not. I looked at three of some 133 different reviews of references for the chapters of the IPCC report. I didn't see much in the way of pamphlets or newspaper or magazine articles written by non-experts (not that I could known whether a person is an expert or not). I saw several books on climate science and other topics in the references that were marked as not peer reviewed; I guess no one reviews books at all. I did see some tourism reports in one chapters references; evidently the chapter was discussing the impact of climate change on tourism and Stewardess Review (not an actual journal name I saw) is not peer reviewed.

So LaFramboise went through hundreds or maybe even a few thousand references on our behalf herself, right? Actually, she solicited volunteers through her climate skeptic website. So of course she assembled a team of academics well versed in the peer review process. Judge for yourself. Me, of her more than forty volunteers I count at least six "names" that are essentially anonymous (including two anonymous-s), although I will say there was at least one person who could be said to be expert in science (although probably not in the top tier of climate scientists). I might also mention that concerning people solicited through a climate skeptic blog, let's just saw I am skeptical of their impartiality.

In the references I saw, I did not see any examples of obviously bad sources. Reports from congressional hearings, working papers from conferences, the occasional unpublished paper; these did not send up any red flags. So how should we look at this? Well, LaFramboise complains that Rajendra Pachauri, the IPCC chairman has repeatedly said that the IPCC only takes information from peer-reviewed sources. Here's a list of quotes from various persons that LaFramboise provides us, judge for yourself.

Kelly also gives us various "facts" that he says few journalists have reported: "Temperatures in the lower atmosphere this October were just one- tenth of one degree Celsius warmer than in 1979, according to data from weather satellites. Temperatures haven't risen in 13 years, according to measurements from ground stations. Data from tree rings and ice cores show no warming since 1940." I tried to google the first two claims (using Kelly's words), found nothing for the first and a connection to Richard Mueller's BEST study recently completed. Notice the qualifications, satellites, a specific date and lower atmosphere in one case and ground stations in another. Judith Curry dwells on the 13 year numbers, although again I wonder about the qualifications.

Kelly mentions Curry in another context, commenting on LaFromboise's book. Scientific American did an in depth article on Judith Curry, where they assert that Curry is a skeptic in that she questions the care with which the IPCC selects, handles and presents data, but she herself believes the world is warming. This is what the selective quoting does for Jack Kelly, creating climate deniers out of people who actually believe in climate change. Instead of the positive contribution Curry could make in trying to make the IPCC better, she becomes a stooge for the Koch brothers agenda.

Kelly has this near the end of his column "There never was a consensus among scientists in support of anthropogenic global warming." Well, I haven't and do not have the ability to interview all "scientists" to find out if what Kelly says is true, but I don't think it matters. First of all, does Kelly mean among climate scientists or among all scientists? I suspect engineers, chemists and quantum physicists may not have a professional opinion about an issue outside their specific field. But I suspect all scientists have at least some professional respect for national academies of science and other professional scientific organizations. They have, as I understand it, all signed on to climate change which is caused by man. But Kelly never mentions that.

By the way, Dayvoe of 2 PJ's has a good take on this column as well, including some things I missed.
Ask him why.

A quick thought

2011-12-10T19:12:00.002-05:00

Apparently recently, thanks to Bloomberg news, we found out that instead of just getting 800 billion in TARP funds, the banks and (possibly) other financial institutions had access to seven trillion dollars in bailout money.

Now, in the last year to eighteen months, when Republicans/conservatives have said the word "stimulus", they have prefaced it with the word "failed" (like in the nineties Mohamed Farah Aidid's name was prefaced with "rebel warlord"). Some Democrats/liberals argued the stimulus had kept the economy from tanking completely, but was too small to turn things around. Now we find out that banks had access to ten times the bailout money we thought they had received. We were that close to another depression, but Republicans/conservatives not only do not want the government to help the economy, but scream bloody murder when it is suggested the rich could do their (patriotic) part for the economy. Didn't our parents or grandparent sacrifice in World War II (after having had to sacrifice in the Great Depression)?

No real disagreement ....

2011-12-04T08:18:00.003-05:00

Since I comment on Jack Kelly every week, I feel compelled to say something about this week's column. But this week Kelly is talking about the Penn State mess, and the failure of leaders there to act. It seems he is basing his column on a sermon given by (what I assume is) his pastor. And frankly, I don't have any major disagreement with what Kelly says in his column.

To me, the only discussion that makes sense is whether McQureary should have physically defended the boy that particular night and then called the cops, or only called cops, University or town. Of course, as we know he did neither, and nobody thinks what he did was adequate. Frankly Joe Paterno should have never been involved, but since he was, he is fair game for what he failed to do as well, as is the athletic director and the University President. As Kelly says, the powerful protected each other and I will add another entity they tried to protect, the all powerful football program. Of course, because of McQreary's, Paterno's and Curley's failusre to act they end up dragging the football program into the scandal.

Kelly takes pains to say that Sandusky and this fellow Bernie Fine are not victims but victimizers. I might be inclined to say the two are somewhat victims, but agree that mostly they are victimizers and that what they did to those boys was far worse than any pain they themselves have experienced. They are the textbook definition of one type of criminal, someone who knows right from wrong but gives into what they know is an illegal sexual impulse.

I remember an interesting discussion/argument between two co-workers (which I involved myself in on the periphery). One is a male Muslim and the other a woman (Christian, I am not sure whether Catholic or Protestant). The woman was complaining about Muslin treatment of women, and the Muslim brought up how the ancient Greek adult males interacted with young boys. The Anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss surveyed as many cultures as he could find and found that the one (and only) taboo he could find across all cultures is incest. Despite that fact, no one in the history of America would make an argument that adult males interacting sexually with male children is in any way acceptable. I have no doubt that Sandusky and Fine knew that, and should have sought therapy or some type of counseling instead of acting on their impulses.

I think we call all agree on (at least) that.

One quick other take

2011-11-28T12:02:00.002-05:00

Paul Krugman talks about the importance of perception in looking at the economy (something this blog appreciates). Krugman talks about this in terms of deregulation, and I can see where he sees the continued support for deregulation as affected by who is doing well, considering the financial meltdown we just experienced (the continued support for deregulation in the alternate selective fact Republican/conservative universe). But I think the specific numbers in the table in his column - from 1947 to 1973 versus from 1979 to 2007 - say a lot more about the top tax bracket than about deregulation per se. Which, to me, explains Republican's desperation to make the Bush tax cuts permanent; their insistence, for example, that the top 1% are "job creators". Of course, those job creators are making more money than they ever have, but unless they see they can continue to make that money (without fear of additional taxation), then they will continue to not hire new workers.

Brief takes

2011-11-28T07:36:00.002-05:00

Just a couple of random but connected thoughts, Glenn Greenwald frequently points out the evil that Obama is doing (drone attacks, civil liberties). Ironically, no conservative seems to quote Greenwald, since Bush did as much evil, and any of the current crop of Republican candidates (with the possible bizarre exception of Ron Paul) would also cheerfully do the evil Obama is doing and more. What Republicans do accuse Obama of (spending wildly) is in turn neatly disproven by Paul Krugman. I suppose we can’t have that actually respect the constitution and try to help the poor. Even Jimmy Carter, the nearest we have come perhaps to that ideal, ever, wasn’t really Jimmy Carter

OWS's turn

2011-11-27T07:22:00.004-05:00

I don't like to say that any particular current trend in politics is something we have never seen before in history. The current animosity and therefore paralysis in Congress, for example, is at least matched if not exceeded by the tensions before the Civil War. The power of the wealthy is something we saw before in the late eighteen hundreds, a running battle all the way up to 1929. On the other hand, I would agree that TV, the internet and even smartphones have had new impacts on politics, at least in my opinion.

The Occupy Wall Street folks want to claim they are something new under the sun. Of course, there was the Bonus Army and Hoovervilles between the Wars. But OWS's interesting approach to political demands is somewhat different.

One way I wouldn't characterize it is with the class card as Jack Kelly does: "Who'da thunk a protest movement composed largely of ignorant and arrogant rich kids with no coherent agenda who deliberately disrupt the lives of working people, urinate and defecate in public, steal from street vendors and assault old ladies and little children would become unpopular?"

Kelly has been alternating between defenses of Republican candidates, attacks on government support of higher education and this week's topic, attacks on OWS and the Occupy movement. Kelly's contempt is well symbolized by this paragraph, the central theme of this week's column: "So when Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich said OWS protesters should "go get a job right after you take a bath," he was offering sound advice. But cable news anchors took umbrage."

When I repeated Newt's quote to a friend, she commented that the point was that the protesters can't get a job, and many can't even take a bath. In my opinion, the view of the Occupy movements Kelly wants to portray is of recent college graduates who have moved their kegger downtown, and are simply going wild, stealing food and pretending to be 60's type hippies.

That's easy for a comfortable newspaper columnist who apparently answers not to an editor but rather to the Tea Party to say. But I think that we need to take a closer, more logical look if we want to understand what is really happening.

I mean, we all know that in the last forty years there have been huge increases in productivity due in part to huge increases in technology. We should all also know that middle class (and below)'s wages have not increased by very much over that same time period, sometimes barely keeping up with inflation. These are numbers easily verifiable on the internet. We are the only industrial nation that did not have universal health care/insurance, and even the recent measure passed is in danger of being repealed before it can be implemented. And it was largely the financial sector of our nation that simultaneously caused hundred of millions of Americans to suddenly lose half or more of the value of their homes and/or have their mortgages double or so in cost and for hundreds of thousands of Americans to be foreclosed on, and to set of a worldwide recession where the GNP's of almost all countries went negative for a few quarters, and we still haven't recovered from. Now we have nine percent unemployment (much higher for people with less education) and a President who first tried to find bipartisan solutions with opponents who still call him a socialist and say no to everything.

The first recent US populist protest movement that responded to at least some of these issues, the Tea Party, almost immediately became a tool of conservatives and the super rich. So (for example) despite the fact Tea Partiers themselves often do not have health care or jobs, they rail against the Affordable Care Act and stimulus spending, and concentrate their focus on reducing spending to reduce debt (a strategy that consistently backfires around the world). Some American's have embraced the Tea Party as representing their concerns, but for many the fact the Tea Party obviously wants to control the Republican Party makes clear how little the Tea Party cares for poor people.

Given that is where we found ourselves, it is not surprising (at least to me) that some few ordinary people might take to the streets and literally camp out on the doorstep of corporate America. I think the political naivety claimed by the Occupy movement may be somewhat overstated for some if not many of its members, but I think I get that its concerns have been expressed in terms that ordinary people would understand.

Addressing Kelly's seemingly main charge, that the Occupy movement in general is a magnet for crime, is somewhat complicated. Kelly starts his column with allegations about human waste at Occupy Santa Cruz and OWS; the Santa Cruz allegations are at least credibly disputed. And Kelly's allegations about arrest numbers bear thinking about. These are protests, after all, and protesters do things to attract the attention of the media, which often attracts the attention of the police By the Googling "Occupy Wall Street murders" brought up one account in Oakland of a murder "near" the occupy camp. By that logic, a murder in downtown Pittsburgh could be pinned on Luke Ravenstahl as much as anyone.

Personally, I think that Jack Kelly's contemptuous dismissal of the Occupy Movement does nothing to help PG readers understand things, although it does advance the Republican/Tea Party/conservative's agenda. You may disagree, but how long can we claim the debt is more important than both the recession and the huge income inequity?

Outrage feigned ....

2011-11-20T12:48:00.003-05:00

Paul Krugman was on ABC's "This Week" (with Christiane Aman-purr - a Colbert joke), so I watched that "This Week". The round table conversation started with a discussion of what Rahm Emmanuel said about the Republican candidates in a previous interview. Peggy Noonen, before Krugman even got a comment in, started with a statement that this showed us what the Democratic strategy is, this is going to be a demolition derby on the part of the Democrats, in which they simply try to tear the other guy down (I paraphrase).

Excuse me, what have the Republicans been doing since mid summer of 2008, and every day since?

Personally, I think Noonen's comment is fairly typical, especially when some pundit or reporter shows a hint of fairness and talks about Republican intransigence on economics or science.

Kelly says "Don't go to college" ...

2011-11-20T09:38:00.003-05:00

Today Jack Kelly doubles down on what apparently is his new anti-college stance. He complains that students don’t take the right classes, and apparently that they dare to go to college at all. He suggests that a third of students shouldn’t even be in college.

Kelly starts by repeating a story from “The very left-wing Nation magazine” about some guy who gets a masters in puppetry (apparently leaving his job to do so), then can’t return to his job as teacher because of budget cutbacks. Would he have lost his job in those same budget cutbacks if he hadn’t got the masters? Maybe, maybe not, and certainly Kelly doesn’t and maybe can’t tell us. Does he even care about the whole truth?

And stepping back, even as Kelly gives us lots of numbers, maybe we can give him a few as well. When I googled around the internet, I found plenty of confirmation for Kelly’s statement that about 45 percent of students who start college drop out. But in the PG I found a 2008 article that stated “60 percent of respondents reporting a "B" average or higher when they left school”. I have to wonder if that 60 percent number might be higher now as the great recession drags on.

By the way, something else Kelly doesn’t tell us is that the average unemployment rate for people with BA’s is 4.5 percent. The rate for people with some college is higher, I am not sure quite what, but the rate for people who (might take Kelly's advice and) never go to college is somewhere around 9 to 10 percent. For people of color with only a high school degree or who dropped out of high school, we start to see the unemployment rates of 12, 15, maybe 20 percent. And I suspect those rates are not going to come down much when the recession ends. In other words, how many students had to leave school because family money ran out because of parental unemployment.

I find it interesting that Kelly identifies “business” as the most popular major, and promptly slams as not very bright the students who choose it. He only mentions engineering once as a superior choice to business or education. He does spend two paragraphs heaping scorn on education majors, essentially calling them the stupidest of college students.

I have to say that there probably is something to Kelly's complaint about the lack of engineers in schools, and (though he doesn't bother to mention) the lack of chemists, physicists, biologists, mathematicians and so on. I sympathize with those who are intimidated by science and particularly math. I was certainly intimidated by math in high school, but even more important to me was my passion for political theory, which in turn led me to economics (and a couple of calculus classes). I wish that there might be more outreach, especially to groups that are stereotypically considered not to have technical skills such as African Americans and women. Kelly doesn't address this, although he does identify gender and ethnic studies specifically as college majors to eliminate, and thus areas of study at all. Kelly strongly implies that women and African Americans are the people who should not be in college as all.

Yet, I have to question whether Kelly is even serious about the lukewarm endorsement he makes of sciences as better majors for students. After all, both Republicans and especially the Tea Party have strong anti-science credentials. Does Kelly want more Americans who look at evolution versus creationism through the prism of science? Does he want more Americans who consider Climate Change in terms of what science academies say? And what jobs will there be for civil engineers or University researchers in the sciences if the Republicans take power?

No, all the advice Kelly gives is oriented toward students not going to college. Mike Rowe of Discovery Channel's "Dirty Jobs" is campaigning for "skilled labor" jobs which do not necessarily require college degrees. They may only require trade school educations, or even some sort of apprenticeship. I think this is a great thing, although I think students need to look carefully even at trade schools, which can cost fifteen thousand or forty thousand dollars for degrees to be a cook or auto mechanic.

The cost of higher education is a big issue that costs across party lines. But Jack Kelly does the readers of the PG a disservice by presenting the issue in ideological terms. Apparently the Tea Party wants less educated Americans, easier to lead astray.

Occupy Wall Street is evicted ...

2011-11-15T17:47:00.003-05:00

Several times I wondered (on at least other blogs, if not this one) what the endgame for Occupy Wall Street might be. Perhaps today we found out, when Mayor Bloomberg had them evicted (at 1:00 am, to avoid a public disturbance). Apparently there were (entirely predictable) incidents of excessive force, including forcibly keeping the press away from Zucotti Park (some were arrested).

But many others have commented on that, so I won't address that. What I did want to say was to wonder if maybe this was the/a plan. Of course, having a plan implies there were people coordinating OWS. Human microphones, funny hand gestures and consensus needed for decisions? Kind of makes some sort of puppet masters seem less likely.

Regardless, perhaps the OWS protestors sort of lucked out, in the sense of having been handed (forcibly) an out. Mind you, as of this moment as I understand it, the OWS protestors do not have access to their own possessions (including soggy clothes, tents and expensive computers and generators). Also, many of them are unemployed and perhaps homeless because of it. But to some extent the movement may now be able to claim to have been victimized by the one percent (to which group Michael Bloomberg surely belongs) and the OWS protestors and now to some extent martyrs.

I have to say I hope that this incident does not come to dominate the discussion. The current huge income inequity in the US is a topic worth discussing. Reasonable discussion may yield answers acceptable to all (yeah, hoping for reasonable discussion between Republicans and Democrats may be a bit much) instead of more painful, poorly executed policies.

We'll see.

Tax anyone but the rich ...

2011-11-13T13:51:00.003-05:00

I found this column really interesting. I don't know what Adam Davidson's politics are, and maybe they shouldn't matter for an economic analysis (although they often do seem to matter.) But Davidson repeats the annoying Republican/conservative straw man argument that taxing the rich at one hundred percent would not raise enough money to close the deficit (over what period of time? One year? Ten years? They never say.) Davidson also argues, somewhat more convincingly, that corporate taxes are too high, although he goes on to say that indeed many big corporations pay zero taxes with loopholes, and essentially says that there is no way to remove those loopholes. Davidson finishes by asserting that taxes on the middle class most be dramatically raised to close the deficit.

Look, my personal opinion is that taxing anyone's income over 50% is too onerous, and currently I want to see the top tax bracket at 40%, no more but no less. Do I think that will close the deficit? No, almost certainly not. But I think that it would a good symbol, the rich setting aside greed for patriotism. Meanwhile, I think for at least a year no other personal income taxes should be raised. After all, part of the problem with the economy is a lack of demand for goods and services.

I am not sure about corporate taxes, lowering them and removing various loopholes seems like a good idea. But a lot of tax loopholes have some logic behind them. The problem is I have little faith Congress is currently capable of make smart, good choices about removing some, but not all, corporate tax loopholes. As galling as it is, it strikes me that big corporations will still pay zero corporate taxes for some time to come.

As I understand it, our economic situation has not really changed since January 2009. Apparently US treasury bonds are selling briskly, even though the effective interest rate is negative (we are sort of making money of selling bonds.) Because of that, there could be another, larger stimulus to jump start the economy. After the economy recovers, we can have a national debate about the debt. Now, it is reasonable to say the the debt and deficit are larger physically than they ever have been before, so they should be addressed sometime (and by the way, big parts of the deficit right now is unemployment benefits and reduced tax revenues cause by the high unemployment rate.) But again raising taxes on the middle class and/or the poor will hurt that demand thing, and possibly push us into a double dip recession. And the deficit/debt are not an excuse to act as though teachers, police or whole government departments are somehow leaches on society. If you want to say the poor need some "skin" in the game (because social security, Medicare, state and local taxes don't count,) then I want to talk about whether the rich are patriotic or just greedy.

In any event, I think that this Sunday NY Times article is nothing more than a restatement of Republican talking points disguised as "thoughtful" commentary, and a major disservice to the Times' readers.

A dog of a column ...

2011-11-13T10:57:00.003-05:00

In Jack Kelly's column today, he raises (once again) the notion of (liberal) media hypocrisy, then proceeds to attack the women who accused Herman Cain of sexual harassment/assault with his own fairly slimy innuendo.

Let me say upfront, I don't know if Herman Cain sexually harassed or even sexually assaulted any women. We probably won't know for months. And the fact that the National Restaurant Association settled out of court with two women for "five figures" makes me think they wanted to avoid a trial, but also that the women themselves did not think they would win a trial (and the NRA also thought that) and both sides just wanted this to be done easily. Doesn't mean it didn't happen, but it does mean that either there were no witnesses or witnesses that were that impressed.

That said, it is disturbing that apparently four women have accused Cain of harassment or assault. One or two accusers could be "gold diggers" (as Kelly quotes an "anonymous" New York Post source), but four, who likely didn't know about each other (one or two might have).

Bill Clinton gave us plenty of clear signs that he was a womanizer (although not to my knowledge a harasser). Voters, after twelve years of Republican Presidents, decided to elect Clinton anyway (kind of puts Reagan in perspective, doesn't it). I have to say that unless for all four accusers it can be proven beyond a doubt that Cain is entirely innocent, that I suspect a majority of voters would reject him. Although it is possible that if a majority of Republican voters can get past their racism concerning Cain (putting their nih ... black man against the Democrat's nih ... black man), then they might be able to forgive him some minor sexual issues. Hell, it might make them more comfortable, since it would like confirm their stereotypes about black men. A Cain/Gingrich campaign could work like the Bush/Cheney campaign worked (Republicans might also embrace a Cain/Perry candidacy, but not, I suspect, a majority of American voters).

Of course even Kelly says (at the end of his column) "There are many reasons for not supporting Herman Cain for president.", and I agree. Cain's s embracing of his status as a Washington outsider comes pretty close to contempt for various reasonably popular ideas such as lower taxes for the poor ("God must love the poor, he made so many of them"). Since I am not a Republican and unlikely to become one soon, I don't really care about the Pennsylvania Republican primary whenever next year. So I am content to wait and see if anything more develops with the accusations. I suspect something will come of them, although probably nothing legal. But we will see if they are the cannon ball that sinks Cain's candidacy, or if it is something else.

Meanwhile, Kelly's defending Cain in light of what happened at Penn State strikes me as rather inappropriate.

Kelly gives school hard knocks ....

2011-11-06T09:22:00.001-05:00

I have to tell you, I agree with some of what Jack Kelly says today. He is complaining about the cost of higher education today and student loan debt (how very 99% of him). But predictably he misplaces at least some of the blame, and finds wrong villains.

In fact Kelly's first sentence displays his odd perception of things: "The biggest consumer ripoff in America today -- and the next economic bubble to burst -- is higher education." I don't know that higher ed is actually the biggest consumer ripoff, but I think by any reasonable measure it has gotten too expensive in the last twenty years (even as it as been opened to many new groups of students). And the next bubble to burst? Well, if Republicans somehow eliminated the student loan program, that would drive many colleges and Universities into bankruptcy, but that would not be so much the bubble bursting as the floor being knocked out beneath the schools. But I am getting ahead of myself.

So as I said, I am in agreement that higher ed schools have gotten too expensive. I have to agree that one of the culprits has to be student loans, what grants there were and are, along with the tuition and fees tax deduction and/or the various education tax credits available. Clearly schools used the availability of these things to jack up their prices. Most all the Sophomores, Juniors and Seniors would not want to leave, even for a ten percent tuition increase, and incoming students would likely face the same tuition increases at all the schools they were looking at.

And I, like Kelly, would blame the government's assistance to students for the price increases. This is the same sort of example of the law of unintended consequences as what happened to American health care since World War II. In the case of health care, health insurance companies would pay what doctors and hospitals charged (because the patient must need it, right?). So doctors and hospitals started jacking up the prices and numbers of procedures need for adequate and thorough care (almost all of them simultaneously). When health insurance companies started only paying 805 of charges, that was an incentive to raise the price higher still. And of course health insurance companies had their own non profit "excess revenue" motive. And here we are.

Back to higher ed, student loans were at first a god send, in allowing students to bet against their future earnings as a college/university graduate. And mostly that has worked out well, at least until now. I keep repeating that college graduates are faring much better in this recession than high school graduates or high school dropouts (4.55 unemployment versus 10% or more).

Of course, that number says nothing about how college graduates are employed, or about whether recent graduates (the last few years) are finding jobs. Kelly says something about how 60% of the increase in the number of college graduates since 1992 work in low skill jobs; a figure I doubt anyone could actually derive with any confidence. Kelly also gives us numbers of food servers with college degrees, without saying how many total food servers there are. But I certainly think that this recession has forced college graduates to work in lower skill jobs, so I don't really care about Kelly's numbers.

Except to say that it strikes me Kelly is suggesting there should be fewer college graduates. Obviously some sort of restriction in aid to students would hit the poorest students first and hardest. Which is apparently Kelly's intention.

Kelly also complains that students don't learn enough, that some drop out and then he goes on to blame professors for both the tuition hikes and the failure of students. I will say that I agree somewhat that higher ed standards for what students have to take might well could be tightened. I think we can all agree that K-12 education could stand some reform as well, although I would probably approach it differently than Kelly (I would think identifying successful teachers and trying to disseminate their styles would help, Kelly would close the public education system, fire all the teachers and make K-12 something you would have to pay for). I will say I have little sympathy for those who drop out of college, especially now. But I would say Kelly is almost entirely wrong about the role of professors in this situation.

College professors do not detirmine their own salaries in all but the rarest situations. And they certainly do not detirmine the cost of tuition (yes, their salary affects the cost of tuition, see previous sentence). For that Kelly (and us) should look at college/university presidents or chancellors and their provosts. They are the people who make tuition recommendations to the boards of trustees. I think Kelly is right, schools did use the additional federal aid to raise (some) professors and particularly top administrators salaries and to increase bureaucracies (although not so much in the last ten years). But again blaming professors for that is ignoring who actually made the decisions.

Which brings us to Kelly's concluding points. He suggests that Obama will make things worse: "College tuition can't keep rising twice as fast as family income, but President Barack Obama wants to keep the scam going a little longer. He's proposed a student loan forgiveness program, with taxpayers eating the difference. It would save students about $8 a month, but the kids are too innumerate to figure that out."

Leaving aside the unnecessary snarks ("scam"? "innumerate" from the man who doesn't understand economics?), the plan is already out there, Obama just wants to accelerate forgiveness part. It apparently saves some students a bit more than $8, and might mean the difference between living their lives or going bankrupt.

A more interesting question is whether anything reasonable can be done about the increase in the cost of tuition. I fear that is something that we will not be able to address until we emerge from this recession. Which, if the Republicans continue to have their way, will not be for a long, long time.

a Maher report

2011-11-05T13:55:00.002-04:00

Besides commenting on Jack Kelly, I often enjoy making observations about what I see on Bill Maher's "Real Time". Maher has for a long time invited a mix of liberals and conservatives on his various talk shows, which I have to respect. Sometimes the discussions are sophisticated, just as or more often they are fairly superficial, but at least the Republican talking points are aired in a forum where they will be challenged. Maher himself started out as a libertarian to at least some degree, I think in part because libertarians come closest to providing a philosophical justification to his idea that marijuana should be legal (an idea I think most economists would support). Maher seems to have moved almost entirely to the left, perhaps because of the way thing have gone in the country in the last eleven years. If Al Gore had been elected, I can see where Maher might well be on the right.

So last night Bill Maher had a typical guest list, including Beau Biden (Joe's son, now the Delaware attorney general who is suing some Delaware based corporations for the Wall Street misdeeds), Darrel Issa (Republican Representative from California) and David Patterson (former New York Governor, Democrat). Those who were seated around the same table all got along and mostly laughed at Maher and each other. Maher also had Bill Engvall, the comedian, on. I like Engvall, think his work is funny. He turned out to be a fair bit more conservative than I might have thought he would be. He even confessed to liking the way Herman Cain talks, and thus having some affection for him as a candidate.

Of course Democrats are accustomed to mocking Herman Cain (as Bill Maher was doing last night). Those strongly interested in politics (like myself) are also horrified by Cain, who seems to take pride in not knowing what he is talking about (uz beki beki stan stan?). I notice that while Rush Limbaughm, Ann Coulter and much of Fox News are fans of Herman, Karl Rove and some of the Fox people who have interviewed him are not. Perhaps that is because Herman Cain is folksy to the level of being incoherent, not the best situation for making decisions and speaking on behalf of the country.

But I understand, most Americans do not pay attention to politics, and also don't vote. If they follows the national news at all, it is all about sports, music, movies ... or the Kardashians. Of people who do vote, most couldn't tell you the name of more than one or two of the people on the ballot, much less what their positions are on most if not all the issues. Most American have formed their political beliefs (to the extent they have any) through watching "Mr Smith Goes to Washington" (older Americans) and/or "Dave" (younger Americans) or perhaps "The Distinguished Gentleman". Admittedly there was a time when West Wing was among the most popular shows on TV, but that was short lived. Most of like and to some extent buy into the notion that if an ordinary, decent person got into politics, they could solve our problems using common sense.

That was what Bill Engvall hinted at on Maher's show. He outright said that he thought a business man would make a good President. Of course, this shows a lack of understanding of a) the role money is playing now in politics and the resulting power the rich have and b) the level of complexity involved in both the theoretical and practical aspects of being President. If you can't understand Keynesian economics you can't argue for it, but also if you don't understand that complicated arguments are hard to sell, you won't be able to tailor pitching the idea to us.

So I can see the appeal of Herman Cain, even or especially to the almost entirely white Tea Party (which often proves pretty racist in their views of issues concerning Obama). Cain plays into the myth of an everyman fighting for decency in Washington, and being attacked by the bad guys with a trumped up charge. Normally a charge of sexual harassment would kill the chances of the supposedly decent man, but the Republican base has moved past the charges straight to the the discovery that the evil opposition is behind them (either the Democrats or Rick Perry or both), and made it all up. That is, of course, pure Hollywood in playing on our shared narrative of how what seems like fiction turns out to be true if you have enough information (everybody loves a good conspiracy).

I think Herman Cain still has a good chance to be the nominee. Look how far Bill Clinton went. As for becoming President, I will paraphrase Miracle Max from the Princess Bride "It'd take a miracle".

Jack Fracking Kelly

2011-10-30T00:47:00.004-04:00

Today Jack Kelly departs from the Occupy movements to lecture on energy history and economics, specifically shale gas. Kelly wants to tell us that shale gas is the end to all of Pennsylvania's problems. But I would say that Kelly deliberately glosses over several points that change the economics of his claims.

Before looking at that, I want to look at Solyndra,which Kelly holds up as an example that "renewable energy" firms are not economical, "despite massive subsidies". First of all, Kelly does not mention (as conservatives never mention) the "massive subsidies", on the order of billions a years, that go to oil, coal and other "traditional" energy sectors. But Solyndra was a special case, using a non silicon based solar panel that was supposed to be much more efficient. They then rolled these panels up, which was supposed to held with problems involved with wind blowing through solar installations. However, turning the panels into tubes had a negative effect on that higher efficiency, and apparently the price of silicon dropped. Thus Solyndra became non competitive and eventually went bankrupt. Should the government have lent them money? Well, they might well be called genuinely innovative, but it is not clear their business model was ready for prime time. One thing I can say is that I have not seen one conservative who looked at the complexity of the Solyndra issue.

And I would say for all the words in Kelly's lecture/daitribe, he's not trying to infrom so much as bully/frighten. A brief bit of research did confirm that the EIA thinks solar is currently too expensive (although predictably even simple costs are more complicated than Kelly says), but I will again raise the issue of subsidies (millions for solar versus billions (thousands of millions) for conventional power) plus the fact that conventional energy sources don't pay for the negative health effects that come from burning those fuels. This is not to mention (well, OK, I am mentioning it) climate change. We have come to accept that tobacco eventually had to help the bills for the ill health effects that we knew cigarettes caused. We know that coal, oil and yes, even natural gas cause ill health effects. Have we forgotten the pictures/paintings of Pittsburgh of the past, dark at mid day?

Kelly claims that shale gas also creates jobs. Perhaps, but Pennsylvania is less than a percentage point under the national average in unemployment. In fact, Kelly's own paper raises questions about shale gas employment.

For shale gas, there is also the lingering question of what effect fracking has on groundwater. I realize conservatives/Republicans dismiss the movie "Gasland" as at best mere anecdotes and for them more likely lies and distortions. Well, if it is only 50% true, shale gas would still be a disaster, poisoning untold numbers of Americans. I almost hate to say it, but I think there might be enough preliminary evidence that Democrats should take a page from the Republican playbook and say that more study is needed before fracking is allowed to go any farther. I don't know about you, but I want to be able to drink tap water and take showers without risk of catching on fire (or being poisoned).

One thing neither Kelly nor I (till now) touched on is taxing shale gas extraction. I think that at least taxing shale gas is a no-brainer. The taxes could go into a health trust fund, to be used to compensate poisoned Pennsylvanians or if there are none, then to provide additional funds to Medicaid or Pennsylvania Adult Basic.

Finally, I think that solar technology is advancing to make it more efficient and cheaper, although because of our short sighted energy policy a lot of development is taking place overseas. I think that it matters where you place large solar installations, that they could be very useful in places like Arizona, Texas and also in Hawaii (where they have to import energy). I still think that correctly designed and installed small, personal solar installations at the home level all across the nation could be huge, although to be clear that will need a lot of government support since the breakeven number in decades, not just years. I think that combinations of solar installations with vertical axis wind turbines may well be the way to go for both roof top and large scale installations. I notice Kelly didn't mention wind power. Is that because wind has a much lower breakeven number?

Kelly is once again naked shilling for Republicans (I guess particularly Tom Corbet) and ignoring any issues that might dilute or dispute his arguments. Don't we deserve better, a more realistic analysis that actually seriously acknowledges other points of view and analyzes their ideas using objective tools?

Apparently not.

Kelly's take two on OWS

2011-10-22T23:53:00.006-04:00

If you were sick yesterday of hearing one more thing about OWS/OP, unfortunately Jack Kelly's choice of for his column today won't make you any happier. But OWS provides Jack Kelly with so many things to show contempt for: the President, Democrats, colleges/universities, the protestors themselves, and besides, I have been writing every week about Jack.

Kelly starts and ends with a poll taken of OWS protestors by "Democrat" Douglas Schoen who works for Fox News and published the results in the Wall Street Journal. He starts by telling us that OWS protestors demand ""free college education" and the forgiving of all student loans (and all other debt)". Kelly goes on to say recent college graduates have a higher rate of unemployment than the national rate of unemployment, and then blames the graduates for studying "gender studies". What is funny is that Gail Collins had a similar but more detailed complaint about higher education. Nobody thinks that the exponential increase in college tuition is a good thing, although Kelly decides to blame both the schools and the students. He points out that Wall Street had nothing to do with the increase in college tuition (duh), but then we all know not everything that is wrong in this country is centered in or because of Wall Street (just a lot of things).

Kelly spends a couple of paragraphs talking about his contempt for the comparison of OWS and the Tea Party. Of course Kelly sees the Tea Party as law abiding and OWS as law breakers rightfully being arrested by the hundreds, and not using toilets or cleaning up after themselves. Of course, I am unaware of any extended stay in tents by the Tea Party (perhaps they aren't that motivated).

Kelly skips from there to an attack on Obama, as the person he blames for giving the bankers bailouts. Kelly admits that the bailout was "proposed" by the second Bush, but "most Republicans in the House opposed it while most Democrats supported it". In other words, House Republicans wanted the financial sector to crash, and for there to be another great depression. Jack Kelly is here to tell us who the true patriots are (and I am surprised that Kelly belatedly throws George Bush under the bus).

Then Kelly gets to something that I would have to agree with, that the Obama administration has an unfortunately close relationship to Wall Street banks. This situation was detailed in Charles Ferguson's Inside Job, how first the Bush administration and then the Obama administration staffed the treasury department and Presidential economic advisers with individuals who came from the ranks of executives or sat on boards of the largest financial institutions. Even the best known economists in academia often sit on boards of financial institutions. Kelly also makes the charge that Dodd-Frank actually protects Wall Street banks at the expense of other, smaller banks. I wouldn't say that Dodd-Frank was totally friendly to Wall Street banks, but I do believe there was pressure from banks directly on both Republicans and Democrats and also filtering through the Administration itself during the crafting of and the debate on the bill. Still, it is interesting to me that Kelly slavishly follows the doctrine of his Tea Party masters. He slams the economic knowledge of the OWS protestors (who are composed of long time political agitators and political neophytes in unknown proportions), yet he has no word for what would happen if, as he apparently wishes, Dodd-Frank nationalized the Wall Street banks instead of "protecting" them.

Certainly I (absolutely) think the Obama administration should not be exempt from criticism. In fact, there are plenty of critics of the President, including an entire TV network seemingly devoted to that (Fox News), and the rest of the media generally repeats all the criticisms of the right. Which is unfortunate, because the narrative of the right generally includes this idea of reversing the deficit and lowering the debt. I would agree that in the long run, our country should be borrowing a much smaller amount of money each year, which by the way says nothing about how taxes should be structured. But now concentrating on the deficit/debt is telling the unemployed that we are going to do nothing for them, and in fact may make their lives even worse. Conservatives have shown no sign that they want to do anything but transfer even more money away from the poor towards the rich.

All of which is to say that honest criticism is one thing, but distorting information is quite something else. Remember the Schoen poll I mentioned at the start of this post? A journal Capital New York was given the raw numbers from the Schoen poll, and found that conclusions reached by Schoen (and repeated by Kelly) were simply not borne out by the actual poll numbers. For example, Kelly repeats Schoen's claim that the OWS protestors believe in "radical redistribution of wealth", although in fact only 4% believe that. Yes, 98% do belive in civil disobedience (duh, that's what they are doing now) and 31% could support violence in some undefined future. But, as I understand it, all the Occupy movements around the country have been scrupulous in policing their own protestors to prevent any violence, at least on the part of the protestors. Kelly's demonizing of the protestors is simply not very credible. But the PG doesn't rein him in.

Another Occupy Wall Street/Occupy Pittsburgh post

2011-10-22T11:56:00.004-04:00

OK, so you are probably sick of hearing about OWS/OP (Occupy Wall Street slash Occupy Pittsburgh) by now. But I am still thinking about it, and here are some of my thoughts...

First, I still want to say that I think that some, perhaps many of the people who are occupying probably volunteered for Barack Obama in 2008. They might not have participated in politics before, but the two wars and collapsing economy got their attention, and the election left them energized. Now a bit over two and half years later, Obama has turned out to be a major conciliator with the Republicans (he did say he wanted to be bipartisan) and not effective at helping the economy. He did keep us from collapsing completely, but we are not making progress towards improving things. So, disillusioned, some Obama supporters and other rather ordinary people have taken to the streets to protest.

Second, I guess I get the hands fluttering thing, certainly the human microphone thing (silly but I suspect rather effective ... OK, Life of Brian). I am conflicted about the requirement for absolute consensus. On the one hand, what planet are these people living on? On the other hand, people who are not authority figures (authority figures being bankers, politicians, pundits, even some self serving bloggers like myself ...) being ignored, their opinions being discounted is part of what got us here in the first place.

I have heard OWS described as democracy in its purest form., perhaps there is something to that. But more important is that apparently this was the only that poorer people could get their voices heard. Maybe we shouldn't care about their method of voting so much as what they are saying.

Third, I read/heard something interesting in the last day or so, I forget where. It might have been Bill Maher's show this week (which I highly recommend) or an article on the "austerity class", those politicians who want to cut government spending. By the way, they not only want to cut spending to zero out the deficit and start to work on the debt, but they also want to cut taxes for rich, so their wealth can trickle down on us (really, the worst metaphor). Anyway, the interesting thing is that war spending, infrastructure, education, unemployment and pollution generally do not get discussed until the "austerity class" sees a way to attack them as reckless spending. Can we believe that the austerity class wants allow more pollution, because that will create more jobs? Krugman does a good job demolishing that argument.

Fourth, I still have to wonder if their is an end game/exit strategy with OWS/OP. Is there a way they can declare victory and allow the people to go home? To me, there are actually eerie parallels to Afghanistan and Iraq. Iraq and Afghanistan had had no recent experience with democracy, but plenty of experience with strong men shoving democratic institutions aside. Plus, the people trying to install democracy, the Bush administration ... not so good at it them selves.

For the OWS people, the problem is that Wall Street is not capable of policing themselves, despite what conservatives would have you believe. It makes me think that we are looking at another endles occupation, like Iraq/Afghanistan. I mean, the inability to police themselves is obvious. Just about exactly ten years after Glass Steagall was repealed, the resulting housing bubble and massive fraud burst, wrecking the economy. We need Glass Steagall back, but I don't know that Congress can, will or even should react to OWS. After all, how many voters from how many districts are camped out in Zuccotti Park?

Fifth, that actually an unfair question brings up a bigger problem. there may be (relatively) few phyical protestors, but a majority of us agree with them. Right now, in my estimate, the problem is the money in politics. Still, in a country where politicians turned a blind eye to the growing bubble because their big donors (business, especially the financial sector) wanted them to, how can we expect these same politicians or any other newly elected politician who has accepted corporate money, to address the too much money in politics. I will say it again, our problem is too much money in politics from corporations, from the 1% or the top 15%. It is the genie let out of the bottle and stuffing the genie back in is probably impossible. But these are the issues that we have to grapple with. Is OWS/OP/Occupy anywhere the tool to do the job? Maybe not, but anyone have a better idea?

And now for something completely different ...

2011-10-18T18:34:00.002-04:00

Something occurred to me recently, unrelated to OWS or the Republican Presidential side show (freak show? that would be unkind). You remember the first Reese's Peanut Butter Cup commercials, where the guy eating the candy bar runs into the gy eating peanut butter?

Well, I have an electric bike, and it occurred to me that electric bikes are a lot like a Reese's Peanut Butter Cup collision of an electric golf cart and a regular bike (I believe most golf carts are electric).

If we recast the commercial with a bike and a golf cart, I can just imagine the reactions of the cyclist and cart-ist (?) - "Hey, you got an engine and battery on my bike (wow, what a boost)" "Hey, I'm not as comfortable here, and you want me to pedal? (yeah, it is more efficient and cheaper than my cart)".

Why not a moped colliding with a bike? Well, a moped is actually already a bike/engine hybrid, it's just that most, if not all of them are gasoline powered. Mopeds are hugely efficient vehicles in MPG, but I suspect the electric motor on the bike is almost, if not more, efficient than the moped in terms of energy used.

If Reese's (Hershey?) permitted, I can see a cool riff on the original Reese's ad campaign for any particular electric bike company using a generic bike and a generic golf cart.

Hey, some company is brnging back the Commodore 64, albeit with an Intel dual core Atom or core i7 processor and a Linux OS with a shell that is supposed to (or will in the future) mimic the old Commodore OS. If we can bring back the '64 for aging Boomers, let's revive the old Reese's commercials (complete with bad hair and polyester) for 21st century electric bikes.

Kelly on OWS

2011-10-16T10:15:00.002-04:00

If it is fair for Jack Kelly to assert intentions, actions and feelings that he thinks Democrats have/do, is it fair to ask Kelly to show some proof, show where some Democrat verifies his assertions? Kelly makes these assertions in his PG column today "Occupied by crazies", where even the title of column is insulting and rude.

Kelly says that “Democrats envy and fear the tea party, a grassroots movement that arose spontaneously after CNBC editor Rick Santelli's epic rant on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange Feb. 19, 2009.” and “Envious Democrats tried to Astroturf a liberal alternative, the coffee party, founded by Annabel Park, an organizer of the United for Obama video channel.”. I have often heard that the astroturfing was done by FreedomWorks, an organization created out of organizations the Koch Brothers funded to the tune of 13 million dollars (and Richard Scaife was involved as well), all of which is documented. In contrast, the Coffee Party appears to have no particular funding from any big donors, though by their own admisson, they used some technology from a site Soros helped fund. Probably not 13 million dollars worth.

Maybe Democrats should envy the massive funding furnished by the 1 percent to their Tea Party puppets.

When Kelly mentions reporters at ABC News, NBC News and the Washington Post, he calls them “Mainstream” journalists (his quotes), as if you aren't a real reporter unless you work for the Wall Street Journal, Fox News, The American Thinker or Big Government (and I believe Kelly has quoted Hot Air and Pajamas Media in the past). Kelly asserts (with plenty of qualifiers such as “likely” and “many” - not even most) that the Tea Party is composed of people wealthier people, while Occupy Wall Street is composed of poorer people who do not pay (federal income) taxes (though the poor do pay Social Security and Medicare taxes and state and local and property if their house has not been foreclosed on). So Kelly thinks that the opinions of wealthier people are more valuable than the opinions of poor people, because the poor are just trying to get free things. Because the poor can afford lobbyists to give Congresspersons golfing trips to Scotland, and use that power to force the government to give money to unemployed people (who paid into the Unemployment Compensation fund) when unemployment goes through the roof.

Kelly quotes George Will comparing the various Occupy events to the September 12 2009 Tea Party event (sponsored by Fox News, FreedomWorks and other billionaire funded organizations). Will says that the this one Tea Party event dwarfs all the Occupy events. Which numbers is he using, or is he relying on the picture of the 1997 Promise Keepers event on the mall?

Kelly also says the OWS people are messy and get arrested by the hundreds. Well, sure, the Tea Party knows that it doesn't need to camp out to get its message heard, they just need to reach for their (collective) check books and release a statement to Fox News. Although the actual first Tea Party risked arrest and imprisonment, like the OWS protesters do now.

Kelly even says that some OWS protesters advocate violence (any citation … I thought not). Obviously Kelly doesn't remember the furor that erupted when Obama was elected, over the the idea Obama would pursue increased gun control. Richard Poplawski thought Obama was coming for his guns when he opened up on Pittsburgh Police. Of course, I guess I would have to say Poplawski was likely too poor to be in the Tea Party.

Personally, I t can't see where the various Occupy movements in various cities can ever declare victory. Wanting something like a redistribution of income, jobs, and cheaper if not free higher education simply won't happen in the short term, and won't happen without a sustained effort made from both the outside and the inside. Tents in parks do not lend themselves to that sort effort. Still, I think we can all agree that Jack Kelly is not improving the situation which his distortions.

Kelly's scandal

2011-10-09T08:14:00.002-04:00

So today Jack Kelly again goes after the "Gunwalker" scandal. Kelly calls for Eric Holder to be impeached, and calls the scandal "one of the bloodiest scandals in American history.". OK, so there might be something there. Now, an AP article from the end of July described the effort (which they called "Fast and Furious") as having "loftier" goals, but describes the awful consequences of not arresting people right away when illegal purchases were made. I can understand trying to get the bigger fish, but it sounds like the plan was just to allow guns to be sold and then see if they can tied later to a higher level criminal. Not surprisingly considering guns that were bought to be used in crime, there were (actually predictable) consequences that occurred. It does seem likely that Holder would have been told about the plan early on, although I wouldn't be surprised if his subordinates would have become more reticent as the negative consequences started rolling.

So is this a thing that Eric Holder should be impeached for? Well, maybe, although don't treat us like we are stupid, Mr Kelly. Your motivation for your complaints is purely political. Have you or would you call for charges against President Bush and Vice-President Cheney with regard to the invasion of Iraq, where the various justifications given - Weapons of Mass Destruction, connection to al Qaeda and spreading freedom across the Middle East - all justifications the administration knew ahead of time were false. How many Americans, let alone Iraqi civilians, died in Iraq?

I will say that I think it is fine to call attention to real scandals, whether they are "Gunwalker" or invading Iraq, torturing "detainees" or wiretapping the nation. And by the way, I want to call attention to on lonely paragraph in Kelly's column "ATF whistleblowers have been fired or transferred to dead end jobs. Agent Newell was promoted.". As I have pointed before, Glenn Greenwald has been pursuing the issue the current Justice Department's harsh attitude toward whistle blowers as well as continuing wiretapping programs. But the problem for Kelly is that talking about whistle blowers means blaming the administration when it covers up its own scandals, but agreeing with them (or at least remaining silent) when they mistreat Bradley Manning and go after Wikileaks. And Kelly can't condemn Obama for wiretapping programs if he praised Bush for it (or he can, but he only makes his hypocrisy more apparent).

Jack Kelly takes an important issue and, by being partisan, manages to make it seem trivial.

Only ordinary distortion ...

2011-10-02T10:50:00.002-04:00

Jack Kelly today engages in what I would call only an ordinary level of distortion of reality, an ordinary level of misinterpreting statistics to try to mislead his readers. Kelly's basic assertions are that a) the President is in trouble with voters according to polls, b) that Republicans are not as hated as liberals would like to say and c) that Herman Cain is actually a viable candidate. All these statements are, to some extent, true, although in my opinion they are not an accurate portrayal of reality.

How much trouble is the President in? Well, obviously, a fair amount. Any time you have to explain how we misunderstood "Yes we can" to Americans, as Van Jones did on Bill Maher's Real Time, that's a bad sign. Jones explanation, by the way, was the phrase is yes we can, not yes I can, which I find somewhat persuasive. This President has shown an almost pathological need to at least thwart the accusations of conservatives that he is a socialist, if not actually be appreciated by Republicans for moving more than half across the center to show bipartisanship. Maybe Obama feels he needs to be liked by people who dislike him. Maybe that's why he has returned to the campaign rhetoric, to win back now disaffected Democrats.

Maybe, and really I don't care, as long as Obama pushes policies that help the economy. But one thing I have to say is that we can count on Republicans not to propose anything that will help unemployment, which brings us to Kelly's second thought. I am not a registered Republican, I would not be among the 11 percent that are very dissatisfied with the current field (although I would find Michele Bachmann somewhat insulting to me). I searched and found (despite Mr. Kelly's usual lack of citation for his references) polls from Suffolk University. The one I looked at (which might be the one Kelly looked at, or slightly more recent). In that poll, the callers somehow reached a population that was only 9% Democrat and 87% Republican or Independent. Maybe that's reality in New Hampshire, or maybe they had a way of polling people who vote in the Republican primary. Either way, about 30% of those polls were moderately or very dissatisfied with the field of Republican candidates. I just suspect that by late October next year, after the debates and assuming nothing dramatic happens, Barack Obama will have looked more competent in the debates (assuming he finds a way to finesse the questions about his own Presidential performance) than who ever the Republican candidate is.

Which is my sort of long range response to the viability of Herman Cain as a candidate. Kelly's points that Cain's lack of political office experience doesn't have to be a negative is a reasonable one, although Cain will have to be an exceptional debater to persuade a majority of Americans that his understanding of the complexity of our problems is the same as their understanding. Which is to say that if Herman Cain wants to sell our problems as "simple", he will have to convince us to ignore any complexity that others might raise. Maybe he can, but I wouldn't think that was a good bet. Yeah, stranger things have happened, (even to say Reagan and Clinton) but I would take that bet.

Which really applies to all the Republican candidates. Unless the Republican is willing to beak with the party and offer a plausible jobs plan (and I wonder how they would pay for it), then the current party inclination is to ignore the unemployed (as a policy matter) and essentially shift even more wealth to the rich. While Kelly says that Democrats can't win on issues, I don't think the Republicans can win on their own issues. We'll all see.

Whose recession?

2011-09-28T06:41:00.004-04:00

Picturing the world if Hilary had been elected President instead of Barack Obama, or if John McCain had been elected running against Hilary, is always a fun and interesting game. But here we are, with the President we have. We've had a stimulus that was too small, a conservative, barely adequate health care/insurance reform package passed, and in the past twelve months a series of confrontations where Republicans got most of what they wanted in exchange for not making millions of Americans suffer more than they are.

You may disagree, but I think that among educated people paying attention, many if not most are turning to Paul Krugman for guidance, unless they are locked into a conservative view that only allows truth to come from the Wall Street Journal. But although there are many conservative pundits, as far as I know there is no particular conservative economic authority, no individual to rival the status of Krugman. It has been pointed out that almost (if not) all the high level economists who work for the President and the government sit on boards of banks and other financial institutions, and so have perhaps not pursued financial reform with the sort of zeal required by the current recession (see the movie "Inside Job").

So this is the stage we find ourselves on, with Krugman on one side advocating a stronger Keynesian approach, and Republican politicians and conservative pundits arguing for lower taxes (on the rich) and less regulation as a panacea on the other side. David Brooks fancies himself a smart pundit, trying to find truth by politely listening to liberals before dismissing their views. His column yesterday, titled "The Lost Decade", by it's very title evoked the notion of the Japanese economic crisis of the 1990's, which Paul Krugman has written about. Was Brooks going to suddenly start advocating further stimulus?

Well, no. Actually, Brooks raises the "false equivalency" specter, that neither conservatives with their cuts or deregulation nor liberals with their stimulus have the complete answer. He seems to argue that both approaches should be attempted, although in complaining about how the current jobs bill is too small, Brooks doesn't actually call for a larger one. Instead he pivots and calls for the full menu of Republican proposals.

All of which is no surprise. I don't believe Brooks has any advanced training in economics, I suspect he would call his approach "common sense" (i.e., unpolluted by academic tools of analysis using history and models). I What did surprise me, after I had read the whole thing, was that I realized David Brooks did not mention the unemployed or unemployment once, and used the phrase "job growth" only once, in his lead paragraph. In the paragraph where he describes the "currents" of this recession. Unemployment is conspicuous by its absence.

I remember that before the midterm elections, Republicans hammered the Democrats over unemployment. Since the midterms, Republicans have forgotten about the unemployed. Except last December, when they wanted to cut off unemployment benefits to millions of Americans with out a job since Bush was President.

Krugman here responds to Brooks (at least partially). Personally, my thoughts turn to Joseph Welch when he famously said to Joe McCarthy "Have you no sense of decency" (which I tend to remember as "have you no shame", but I suppose accuracy is better).

Kelly's whine about scandals ...

2011-09-24T18:45:00.004-04:00

So Jack Kelly starts this week's column with the suggestion that Barack Obama has had more scandals than any other President in our history ... one more than two, or ... three. He also suggests that the main stream media (other than Fox News, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Times, Ann Coulter, Michelle Malkin (and their ilk) and the various Breitbart sites) ignores Obama scandals. So I couldn't have seen seen stories on Solyndra or Gunwalker on Yahoo news or the New York Times.

But you know, no matter. I am not going to bother disputing Kelly's claims on Solyndra, LightSquared or GunWalker, in part because he doesn't bother to give us details on what actually happened (for example, why did Solyndra go bankrupt). What I find interesting is a) how Kelly looks at scandals and b) what Kelly doesn't include in his scandal list.

I have to say Kelly's concern for human life in his discussion of the GunWalker scandal is admirable (although I might admire it more if I didn't suspect that he is only concerned for American lives). But then I have to wonder, what does Kelly make of the tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians who died during the Iraqi occupation? Remember, no WMD's were found, there was no link to Al Qaeda until after the occupation started and the Bush administration lied to the American public (cynically playing on our reaction to 9/11) to build support for the war. But Kelly doesn't care about scandals (or dead people) unless a Democrat is involved.

And then there are things Kelly won't write about, such as the government imprisonment of Bradley Manning, the administration's determination to kill an American citizen without due process, the administration's refusal to look at the crimes of the last administration, the administration's persecution of whistle blowers, etc. If you doubt these things exist, take a look at what Glenn Greenwald writes. The problem is that Greenwald is a liberal journalist, therefore his concerns are simply not relevant to Jack Kelly. But that's OK, the reality that counts is the reality Jack Kelly sees.

But does he understand GNP versus GDP?

2011-09-18T15:40:00.003-04:00

Jack Kelly today takes on the President's jobs bill. Predictably he slams it, and I have to say he may be right about it's chances for passage (at least in the form Obama submitted it to Congress). Kelly both quotes negative comments from Blue Dog Democrats and harps on negative things about the President. And yes, many Democratic voters are disenchanted with the President, not to the degree that they would ever vote for one of the lunatic Republican candidates (or any of them), but to point where they might stay home in 2012.

But let's be clear, Jack Kelly is no economist, and does not understand economics. His flat statement that the first stimulus failed betrays his lack of knowledge, and more importantly, once again misleads his readers. The first stimulus certainly did not do what any reasonable person would have wanted, but never the less it did keep the economy from dropping like a stone into a depression. No deflation, no 33% unemployment.

The current jobs bill still has more tax cuts than I would like. I mean, it is fine for me to have a few more dollars in my pay check, and I hope the increased spending will have a stimulative effect. And keeping or rehiring laid off teachers and other state and local employees will help communities. But better in my opinion would be to hire people to work on bridges and roads. Unfortunately not only would Republicans scream that Obama is only helping his union cronies and spending money recklessly, they would also play the race card, and claim that Obama is helping African Americans over whites (because it is the fault of African Americans without a high school degree that they are out of work in such high numbers, although we are also spending too much on inner city schools).

Yeah, the President has not been doing a great job, according to progressives. But that doesn't mean conservatives are doing better. In fact, Republicans/conservatives/Tea Party types have offered no jobs plan of their own, no economic program. But they howl with rage when progressives suggest that means they embrace George W Bush's economic program (such as it was, giving tax breaks to the wealthy, transferring wealth upwards). Actually, though they claim otherwise, increased income inequity is exactly what they have been advocating for the last year or so (or resumed advocating).

It is a dismal sort of prospect, a President who is maybe going too far to counter the claims of Republicans of his racism and socialism, and an opposition party that is actively trying to make the rich richer at the expense of the poor. Too few Democrats and no Republicans are trying to actually fix the problems of the economy, and help the poor. Jack Kelly is definitely not in that number. I have to question how much he actually loves America.

Jack Kelly yesterday...

2011-09-12T19:34:00.002-04:00

My brother was in town this past weekend, so I didn't have as much time to post (these things happen). It's funny, my 40th birthday was close to, but after, 9/11/01. My (now-ex) wife had a surprise birthday party for me, and invited my brother. Now, I will say that if it had been me, I would not have hesitated to fly then, but, you know, he went ahead and flew up here and I was impressed.

I was always annoyed by the statement that 9/11 changed everything. But only a moron would suggest that 9/11 was not a very important event. After all, religious extremists in the Middle East were willing to kill themselves to kill thousands of Americans, in America. Clearly if aL Qaeda had attacked a chemical plant in the US, they might have killed thousands or perhaps ten of thousands of Americans. I think it was very appropriate for the PG to dedicate almost all of yesterday's paper to 9/11.

One glaring exception, you guessed it, was Jack Kelly's column, "Sad times for unions". He starts with an extended whine about how mean Hoffa junior was he said (use the ballot box) to take out Republicans in a speech on labor day. Kelly's hurt feelings are particularly ironic considering how often he has said that the liberal media has mus-charecterized Republicans and Tea Party types. That drifted into gloating about how little Obama has done for unions. I suppose we are not supposed to think about what role Republicans in policies Obama was not able to get passed (including a large enough stimulus to actually help the economy).

Kelly then quotes George Will, who points out that states that have removed automatic payments for public sector unions have seen a large drop in those union's membership. Now, I didn't research that, but it seems like George Will probably wouldn't make stuff up or misquote stuff. Anyway, it is not hard to imagine that state governments might well have taken advantage of the change in status for the unions to intimidate union members, or also possibly workers could simply prefer to keep the money for themselves (even thinking they would still be protected by and benefit from the union).

I was struck that Kelly chose to ignore the ten year anniversary of 9/11. But even more than that, it is as though, on this anniversary, Kelly is sending us a meta-message. Of course there is the usual message that union leaders are evil, but also there is this suggestion that public sector union members realize they are being paid too much, have too high of benefits and want to do their jobs for less. Those jobs, by the way, involve teaching our children (determining our future, except where they are hamstrung by school boards that don't want to teach science or literature, etc). Even more significant, some of the jobs are people who race to our rescue when we are hurt, who (hopefully) race to protect us when we are in danger or race into burning buildings we are running out of. Like the Twin Towers, where some firefighters did not come back out of.

Jack Kelly has thrown true heroes under the bus in the service of the Tea Party. Which actually means in the service of the super rich, who pull the puppet strings of the Tea Party.

And Again ...

2011-09-04T10:44:00.002-04:00

Yesterday I posted about the attack Jack Kelly mounted against unionized public school teachers in specific and government unionized employees in general. Today Kelly essentially tells us that the media is out to get Rick Perry, but his real message to his readers is to trust only "true" conservatives (as opposed to "East Coast Republicans" like journalists David Brooks and Peggy Noonan) or perhaps really only Kelly himself. Actually, between that claim of general media opposition and the title of today's column "Kicking Rick", Kelly raises the memory of another Republican, "Dick" Nixon. Kelly's assertions that Perry (and also Sarah Palin) are targets of the media, as well as being mis-charecterized and underestimated evoke nothing so much as Nixon's paranoid line about the east coast intellectual elite.

It might be fair to say that the thing most Americans associate with Rick Perry is his statement (threat) that if Ben Bernanke "printed more money before the election", and that if Bernanke happened to visit Texas "we would treat him pretty ugly down in Texas". CNN Money suggests that Perry was talking about quantitative easing, and I suppose I have to agree or Kelly would say I have some sort of anti-Perry agenda. Kelly himself quotes a former Republican Texas communications director Bryan Preston "While what Perry said struck some as over the top, it focused all the GOP primary attention on him and pulled the media into covering him, immediately". Again, in Kelly's new media regime I suppose we are supposed to appreciate all the media attention (because we love Perry so much) but we are also supposed to understand the actually sophisticated economic message in Perry's suggestion that the Fed prints money (what does the Treasury department do again?). This was the same sort of thing conservatives tried to say about Sarah Palin in 2008. Actually, what mattered in the 2008 election was the debates between Obama and McCain, where Obama looked better because McCain looked pretty nuts. Palin was no more than a sideshow that made the Republican party look bad.

Perry obviously does have some popularity with at least a part of the Republican base. But I wonder how independents would look at Perry's some extreme rhetoric if Perry did get the nomination. If Perry uses such extreme language in a debate with Obama, it is possible that we will see a repeat of 2008.

I thought that Kelly's closing shot that Perry has a decisive leadership style compared to Obama "the Last Responder" was particularly in bad taste. First of all Kelly ducks responsibility for the "Last Responder" comment by attributing it to a newspaper. And second, considering the assault Kelly is mounting on unionized government employees, which would include real first responders, maybe Kelly should stay away from lines about any kind of responder.

Kelly's particular game ...

2011-09-03T18:08:00.004-04:00

I had wanted to respond to Jack Kelly's column last Sunday, although with one thing and another I have been rather busy this week. But it has been on my mind. One thing I have found in looking at Jack Kelly's particular style of writing is that while he doesn't necessarily out and out lie, he certainly twists and/or cheery picks facts, omits other important information, and repeats other peoples lies (thus giving him an out). I didn't do a whole lot of research, looking at Kelly's education column, though. I read (or probably re-read) the Paul Krugman column he cites, and glanced a bit at the NAEP, which was not particularly illuminating.

But I don't really think I need much research to address Kelly's arguments, simple logic will do. For example, the Krugman column said simply that Texas schools have this high drop out rate (43 out of 50). Kelly does not dispute this point, rather he
gives us cherry picked numbers: "According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, fourth- and eighth-graders in Texas score substantially better in reading and math than do their counterparts in Chicago. The high school graduation rate in Texas (73 percent) is much better than Chicago's (56 percent)." Kelly also says that 3 of the top ten high schools in the country are in Texas (according to Newsweek).

Now consider a comparison between, say, the Mt Lebanon and the City of Pittsburgh school districts. Mt Lebanon might have a lower tax rate, but higher revenue stream because the home values are so much higher. Mt Lebanon teachers might be unionized or not, might or might not be higher paid. But Pittsburgh school teachers might be assigned to some literally dangerous schools to teach in, something Mt Lebanon teachers likely would not face. And Mt Lebanon students likely do better on average and at the margins than Pittsburgh students do.

That Texas as a whole would do better than the City of Chicago should not be a surprise. The City would have large numbers of ghetto students, and the best students of an ethnicity in the City limits might well go to private schools. A whole state includes wealthy communities that would pull the averages upward. Kelly is comparing one apple (and a pretty beat up one at that) to the average of a whole apple tree.

Kelly also quotes David Burge, whom I know nothing about. The best I can say is he appears to be contemptuous of Paul Krugman (rather like Jack Kelly). Maybe the stats he quotes about Texas versus Wisconsin are accurate, possibly even relevant. But since Burge is also quoting someone else's work, I will take it all with a grain of salt.

But, as it happens, it may not matter. Kelly's main idea is that unionized teachers don't want to teach. I don't see where Burge or Kelly has made that case, comparing particular states to each other, or to particular cities. Kelly ends with this paragraph: "The unionization, centralization and politicization of education may have been the biggest mistake we've made in the last half-century. We should take control of schools away from unions and Washington bureaucrats, and restore it to parents and local governments." Actually, as far as centralization is concerned, what he describes does not exist now. The fact the Texas can be compared to Wisconsin or Chicago proves it. States and local governments already control education. The politicization part is no more the fault of Wisconsin or Washington, DC than it is of Austin, Texas (or Kansas, for that matter). Deciding to over-rule accepted science happens at the local or state level.

As for unionization, well, how much should the people who educate our kids, who basically determine a fair bit of the future of our nation, be paid? For that matter, how much should cops, firefighters or paramedics, the people who run into places we run out of, who help us when things are dark and terrible, get paid?

According to Jack Kelly, apparently not much.

Science or ... what?

2011-08-21T09:38:00.002-04:00

I can believe the country is turning more conservative. Conservatives, with their maximize the GDP no matter what kind of philosophy, simply don't seem to care if one of their gurus has a scandal. George Bush runs the economy off a cliff, and Republicans blame Democrats. Rush Limbaugh becomes a drug addict, and after slamming drug addicts on his radio show, Limbaugh claimed the victim card for himself. The Bush administration invaded Iraq with multiple justifications, none of which (Iraq's role in 9/11, weapons of mass destruction, bringing democracy to the Middle East) turned out to be true. The Bush administration both tortured prisoners and initiated spying on US citizens. And yet Republicans are perfect content to blame Democrats for any negative press.

Liberals, on the other hand, often take their sides' scandals to heart. Glenn Greenwald has made a cottage industry of holding Obama to at least the same standard Bush had been held to, which is to say that Greenwald has repeatedly complained about Obama continuing Bush administration policies in domestic spying and holding detainees at Guantanamo, and increasing prosecutions of government whistle blowers. And of course the economy has not recovered under President Obama, and indeed Obama seems to have caved to the minority party repeatedly, often before the debate even brings. And many Democrats were bitterly disappointed when Bill Clinton lived up to his worse impulses during his administration. I think liberals take it to heart when their few national figures make mistakes and/or disappoint them. But more than that, liberals think that they want to help at least ease the pain of poverty, and do what they can to help persons of color to have a level playing field (apparently we can't talk about past racism, which could cover up to yesterday). Yet they are baffled and ultimately hurt that most of the people they are trying to help view them with such scorn (from Reagan Democrats to the that part of the Tea Party that is rural poor). Conservatives, on the other hand, are relentless in their exercise of cognitive dissonance. They are relentless in their alternative views of reality and history - that the only racism that still exists is discrimination against white males, that tax cuts and elimination of all regulations have in the past and will now fix the economy, and that climate change is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on Americans.

Which brings us Jack Kelly's column today. Let's be clear, Kelly is dropping to the level of Rick Perry, and saying essentially that NASA, NOAA, the (US) National Academy of Science and essentially the vast majority of the world's scientific community are perpetrating the "the most harmful hoax in history". Kelly is accusing science of lying to us, although Kelly gives us no motive for science to do this. But make no mistake, Kelly is telling us to trust Rick Perry over Phd's when it comes to climate issues.

And make no mistake, Kelly tells us this as he repeats lies (or at best half-truths). "Global temperatures peaked in 1998". There is a basis for this claim, but Kelly clearly did not give us anything close to the whole story and it's worth knowing scientists have a different view. "Polar ice caps are larger". Again, there is a fraction of truth in this, but that hardly tells anything close to the whole truth. The National Snow and Ice Data Center says that since 1979, the largest size of the Arctic sea ice pack has shrunk 10 percent each decade. So if it started at a level of (MADE UP NUMBER) 100, then three decades later (at 2007) it is now at 70. According to the NSIDC, it has recovered in 2008 to 77, and then increased some unstated amount in 2009. However, it is also thinner than ever before, a worrying development. "The rise in sea levels -- which has been going on since the end of the last ice age -- is slowing." I gather some people are saying something like this, but something different is being observed.

I won't try to track down too much of other Kelly statements, except to note that he doesn't explain why (or more importantly provide citations for his statement) "Industrial wind turbines -- a favorite of Mr. Obama's -- cause real environmental harm." and I might question how much oil company tax breaks and direct subsidies increase the costs to taxpayers of each oil industry jobs (versus his charge about European "green" jobs). But the most interesting or amusing thing Kelly does is to suggest that the science of Climate Change should be determined by opinion polls. I suspect cancer would not be positively viewed in an opinion poll, yet I don't think wishing it away would actually cause it to cease to exist.

Now, I think that while Jack Kelly is simply and without question lying to us, there is discussion that could take place about climate change. To start with, Kelly spends considerable effort to tell us that there have been other warm periods in history, as well as other periods where there was more CO2 in the air (apparently not necessarily the same periods). Now, as far as I know no climate scientists deny that those statements are true. I think the difference for current climate change is that it is occurring more rapidly than otherwise in history, sped up by our burning dinosaurs (or plankton) at an increasing rate (something that was not done in history).

Still, do we know what the severity of climate change will be? Will there be widespread drought, or if there is will there also be new regions of arable land that could compensate for the drought? What will the effect of rising seas be, perhaps on places like Venice, Italy? Are we looking at extinctions of large numbers of species (fauna, flora?). These are reasonable points of discussion, although in regard to fossil fuels I have to point out that a) they are not infinite and b) as they get more scarce, they will cost more. So the notion of carbon taxes to encourage less driving does not bother me in the least. The fact that encouraging a conversion from fossil fuels to more efficient consumption of solar, wind (solar-type) and tidal power electricity facilitates the possibility of a more or even an entirely sustainable world economy, well, it seems where we have to get to there anyway at some point. When would you suggest?

Possible, feasible ...

2011-08-16T23:26:00.002-04:00

Bismark, or possibly Machiavelli wrote the Politics is the art of the possible. Galbraith, perhaps more cynically wrote that Politics is not the art of the possible, it consists of choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable (I would add that only works if legislative leaders can get their members to fall in line).

I am beginning to think that Obama sees politics as the art of the feasible. The difference between possible and feasible is the difference one might see if one is a black man making proposals to white men.

But here's the thing (to put it in West Wing speak), those of us who voted for Obama, we really wanted the possible thing, and we are not at all happy about the feasible thing (things like massive budget cuts that the Republicans should vote for, but still won't not just because there are tiny rollbacks of taxes to the pre-cut levels, but also because Obama is black). We thought change we could believe in was about new sustainable energy policy, not just that there would be a black man in the White House (we could have voted for Colin Powell if that's all we wanted)

A couple of interesting things ...

2011-08-15T00:19:00.002-04:00

There are a couple of interesting things I think are worth a read. First my mom (!) asked me if I had this story about Pennsylvania shifting away from encouraging green/clean energy. Yeah, wind and solar are probably not as efficient as we would like yet, but they are certainly not going to get more efficient if they don't have buyers now. Governor Corbett wants the state government to use shale natural gas for energy. there are several problems with that. First, natural gas is cleaner burning than cola or oil, but it still causes greenhouse gases. Second, yes there is a lot of gas in the Marcellus Shale, but it is still finite, and who knows, our great grandchildren may have need of it and develop a way of extracting without harming the environment. Which leads me to my third point, which is to assume we will have great grandchildren, that is assuming we are not poisoning them right now.

The second good read is a guest post on Glenn Greenwald's blog (he is away this week?). It is from Yves Smith, titled Why "business needs certainty" is destructive. A few weeks ago I remember on a Sunday morning talk fest the moderator pointed out to a conservative guest that American corporations are sitting on huge cash reserves, yet refuse to hire people. The conservative guest replied the business right now faces regulatory uncertainty in the form of Obama-care and the Dodd-Frank regulatory reform bill (I have heard this "uncertainty" thing since several times, in many places). I thought to myself, don't corporations have legal departments or lawyers and analysts that could read the bills and tell the bosses what the bills will do? Smith in fact suggests regulatory issues and the supposed uncertainty have been a stated concern for business since the Bush years. If I had to guess, though, I'd bet you could find these kind of complaints back in Teddy Roosevelt's administration.

Anyway, I think Smith does an excellent job of of looking at this canard that businesses refuse to hire because of uncertainty .

Kelly must be dizzy, but ...

2011-08-14T10:24:00.003-04:00

Today, out of all the week's possible issues to choose from, Jack Kelly chose to look at the Wisconsin recall elections. Kelly of course sees a failure in the Democrat's efforts, and spins it as being an indication of the imminent death of the Democratic party. I think Kelly is simply repeating GOP spin messages and drawing his interesting (ridiculous?) conclusions.

But the fact of the matter is that the Democrats fell short of what they wanted to accomplish. First of all, doing my own (limited) research, I find someone with a math degree who claims the Republicans somehow stole the four Wisconsin elections they won (to be clear, he apparently claims the Republicans stole 2004 and I think other elections as well). Now, of course, thinking about it, if someone mounted a recall effort to replace Mike Doyle for voting against the debt ceiling, or to recall Luke Ravenstahl for holding on to the anti fracking referendum, how successful do you think that would be? Democrats and/or unions were really upset by what Scott Walker and the Republican legislature had done, but they already hadn't voted for them. The hope Democrats had was that independents and maybe even moderate Republicans would feel outraged over what Walker and the other Republicans had done, and in two out of six elections that hope was borne out. We have this interesting contradiction, that Democrats were more successful in overturning any of the candidates elected just some nine months ago, yet they were not able to achieve their desired goal of creating divided government in Wisconsin.

Kelly's larger conclusions strike me as a big disservice to his readers. For Kelly's analysis to have any strength, voters still need to be angry at unions (to the extent they ever were), and I think people are now (for better or worse) much more focused on (sick of?) the debt ceiling, whether cutting spending will help the economy, and indeed where the jobs might be (what it will take for business to hire). To add to that is the downgrade of the US's credit rating and what happened in the stock markets in the last eight days or so.

Yet I will present my own thoughts about the Wisconsin election results, despite what I said right above. I wonder if the elections could be tied to the popularity of the President, in the sense that even though voters are not happy with Republicans, the President seems to be moving more and more to the right himself. Voters, particularly Democrats, could not be blamed for thinking that voting for Democratic politicians is less and less justified.

The problem with my theory is that it should lead to smaller turnout in elections, yet apparently the Wisconsin elections had a high turnout. So this is something we (I) will have to continue to look at, and consider.

Meta-whatever

2011-08-13T13:12:00.005-04:00

I do like looking at current political issues and crises, but I don't like tying crises to meta-analysis. For example, as appalling as Dick Cheney's comment to Pat Leahy was, or Joe Wilson's shouted "You lie" to Obama during a healthcare legislation speech were, I won't say that politics is getting less civil than ever before. I remember, for example, that one Congressman attacked another with a cane in the run up to the Civil War. The same with polarization of politics, we have seemed pretty polarized for as long as I can remember (maybe a lot of people really did like Eisenhower, since then ....

Still, as a piece of meta-analysis I was impressed by this blog post by Paul Krugman. I have certainly seen conservative commenters, local and national, claim that Democrats simply want to raise taxes and spend money as ends in themselves, not for any particular purposes. Now I suppose you might get kind of close to the idea of tax and spend if Democrats propose raising taxes on the rich and using money specifically for programs for the poor (essentially close to income redistribution). But even then the taxing and spending do have a goal, related to leveling the playing field or redressing past injustices or something.

Do I fall into the same trap Krugman suggests conservatives are in, if I think that all Republican politicians want to reduce taxes only for the wealthy, reduce government spending for the poor and indeed if possible raise taxes on the poor and middle class while reducing them for the rich? Maybe, but Republicans make it pretty easy to fall into that trap. Among the Republican candidates running for their parties nomination to run for President, there seem to be conservatives (Bachmann, Santorm, Perry, Cain and Palin's shadow) and moderates (Romney, Pawlenty, Huntsman) and other fringes (Gingerich, Ron Paul). But Pawlenty was on Meet The Press a few weeks ago and boasted about allowing his own state government to shut down rather than accept a Democratic legislature's budget. And Huntsman and Romney both raised their hands (along with all the other candidates) pledging not to raise taxes ... ever. There are some ideas like never raising taxes, only slashing spending and ending support programs for the elderly that they all parrot. How are we supposed to look at that?

I like the way Krugman discusses Keynesian ideas for the economy. Krugman has talked in the past about how Keynes had fallen out of favor in DC as Republicans embraced economic theories that supported policies they favor. Even still/now the idea that the wealthy are "job creators" is presented as the default position on taxes. But Keynesian economics has gained clear traction in the Great Recession, even if only for conservatives to claim that Keynesian ideas such as economic stimulus have been discredited by the "failure" of the current stimulus. Certainly it would be hard to portray the stimulus as a success, but it did keep us from going into a full blown depression. However, with the current budget cuts, there is the real possibility that we will fall into depression. Apparently in the twisted reality of conservatives, if we do slide into economic depression, it will be because we didn't cut enough.

But there is hope. The debt ceiling debate/debacle made Congress as a whole but particularly the Tea Party look so bad that Tea Party support has dropped by a third, and people with an unfavorable view of the Tea Party have increased by a third. It turns out that maybe you can't just ignore that 10 million Americans are officially out of work, millions more have either given up looking, or are working only part time (when they want full time work) and that as a whole roughly 200 million Americans feel the anxiety of economic insecurity, while only 30 million or so are actually doing well.

Occasionally some meta-analysis is a good thing.

We reap what we sow ...

2011-08-08T20:23:00.002-04:00

One of Krugman's complaints is that Obama is actually more conservative than anyone thought. Now, I am not an African American, and absolutely not an African American (pretty literally) who was raised by a white mother in Indonesia and Hawaii, and was one of three black students (out of three thousand) in an elite private high school in Hawaii, etc etc. Krugman thinks that in fact Obama wants cuts in the federal spending. Personally I have no idea what Obama wants, but no one can deny that a lot of his rhetoric on the campaign trail has to be said to be just that, rhetoric. He is still a better choice than McCain, but by less and less with each passing month. Obama won by getting out the youth vote in unprecedented percentages. That ain't happening in 2012. He will have to find another way to win. Good luck.

Meanwhile, on the other side, losing 500 points on the stock exchange on Friday and 600 today had an effect. I have no idea how much effect, but I suspect we are talking about a lot of money. Now a fair bit of stocks are in retirement funds and mutual funds, but a whole bunch of stocks are owned by the wealthy. Now, who was it who funded the Tea Party? And what did the Tea Party in the debt ceiling debacle? By the way, the S $ P downgrade was not really strictly related to the amount of spending that was cut in the sense that not enough was cut. Apparently the downgrade could well be related to the notion that too much was cut, and also to the inflexible position taken by the Congressional Tea Party members during the debacle. As I understand it, as the deadline approached and it became clear that Obama was not going to use some trick and also intended to allow the nation to default if Congress didn't get its act together, financiers on Wall Street began to pressure the Republicans to get the deal done. Obviously now those financiers are suffering the consequences of their previous actions. Sometimes we reap what we sow.

Record profits, yet businesses refude to hire ...

2011-08-07T11:44:00.008-04:00

Record profits.

Businesses refuse to hire the unemployed.

I guess pundits, if not candidates, did start talking about deficits before the 2010 midterms, since Krugman said we have a revenue problem (instead of a spending problem)in October of 2010. We do understand why this is important, yeah?

Another thing causing the deficit I have read about, but I don't think I can find a satisfactory link for, is "automatic stabilizers". This is the notion that when the nation goes into recession, the demand for unemployment benefits goes up, and as the recession lasts longer, demand for poverty services such as food stamps starts to rise. Do we blame Obama for this component of increased spending (of course, silly blogger)?

Standards and Poor's downgraded us, but why? The implication CBS (Robert Hendin) gives us is that perhaps we were downgraded because we don't play well with each other. Of course Republicans blame the President, say that he never actually put deals on the table, just talked about them, that he and the Democrats are addicted to spending (see Krugman above). If you read and agree with my blog, then you can guess what my opinion is.

Bill Maher's three guests on Friday were Neil Degrasse Tyson, Joan Walsh of Salon.com, and a Tea Party person who I guess produced the film about Sarah Palin (Stephen Bannon something?). From what I remember, he said only three things of note, but I can only remember two (I'll update when I remember the third). He called the stimulus a) failed, b) the biggest Keynesian stimulus ever tried, bigger proportionately than the Great Depression and c) a billion dollars (with interest?). He also said that Tea Partiers feel like the government tax structure/economy is socialist for both the rich and the poor, but brutally capitalist for the middle class.

For his part, Jack Kelly this week suggests the the cuts in the debt ceiling deal might be too small to make much of a difference. From his point of view, I can see where he might think that, and with some justification. The cuts will reduce the increase in the deficit over the ten years, not really the deficit, not to mention the debt at all. All that will happen is the debt will grow more slowly.

Although when I say all that will happen ... This is not to mention the coming double dip recession, the worsening crumbling of our infrastructure, kids dropping out of college because they don't have enough money (but will now have college loans to pay off) and poor and middle class families falling further behind. The rich will be doing OK, of course, thanks to Kelly's Tea Party pals. Then there is the awful precedent itself (never tried when a Republican was President) of forcing the President to come up with a deal to pass the increase in the debt ceiling. And Kelly suggests that Democrats want to increase spending and regulations just because they do. Apparently Kelly is unaware of the current recession, or the financial meltdown that occurred at the end of the Bush administration. I think the term for what Kelly says is slander.

Meanwhile, what does all this mean to this point on the road to the 2012 elections? Republicans (like Kelly) are sure that no matter how bad the crisis is that they provoke, the bulk of the blame will stick to Obama as President. I am not sure about that, but it is clear that the Democratic party voters are becoming disheartened. Obama won in 2008 as an unknown with a fairly narrow margin because he was able to get young people to vote in record percentages. Now Obama is a known quantity, seemingly ineffectual but still relatively well liked. But I can't see those young people coming out to vote again, while the Tea Party will get all of their relatively limited numbers to the polls. Which means ,,, I dunno.

Spending or revenue?

2011-07-30T19:03:00.004-04:00

So not only do I read Jack Kelly and watch Meet the Press, I also like Bill Maher's Real Time on HBO on Fridays. On the most recent episode, Maher's discussion panel had the co-founder of FreedonWorks, Matt Kibbe (FreedomWorks is Dick Armey's astroturf (as opposed to grass roots) organization that helps/funds the Tea Party). It also had Margaret (I believe) Hoover, grand daughter of Herbert and employee at the Hoover Institute (in other words, a Republican) and also Elliot Spitzer (no introduction needed). The Hoover woman harped and interrupted about government spending (in response to Maher's initial comment about the debt ceiling). Maher responded that the stimulus is only 4% or 7% of our current debt and Spitzer tried to get her (or anyone) to admit our situation is Bush's fault. Then later Spitzer suggested that instead of a spending problem, we have a revenue problem. The economy has not rebounded from the contraction during the financial crisis at the end of the Bush administration, so tax receipts are down. This shut up the Hoover woman, but it is not as though she walked back her claims about a spending problem. By the way, Krugman talked about revenue here.

Which brings us to Jack Kelly's latest column. He regales us with the story of the Gordian knot, which is a perfectly fine little story. He also complains that in a recent poll a majority of Americans think things will get worse next year. Kelly doesn't say anything about whether that poll or any other recent poll says who Americans think can handle our problems (Democrats including Obama come off badly, but inevitably Republicans come off worse).

In any event Kelly goes on to choose 1960 as his point of comparison (fifty years ago, admitted a nice round number) and makes negative comparisons in terms of spending, debt and regulations. Of course, Eisenhower had really wanted a balanced budget, and we were yet to get concerned about having clean air and water (anyone remember Pittsburgh in the sixties, or the burning Cuyahoga?). So, in the immediate actual context of the events of 1960, in the previous eight years the government had been trying to create an optimal financial situation. Interestingly, that was not enough to get Richard Nixon elected, instead the American public elected a Democrat.

But the important point, I think, is that always the strength of the American economy is the product of the actions of the most recent administration, at least in the early years of a new administration.

But past the lack of validity of Kelly's comparison between 1960 and 2011 is that he is mis-characterizing our problems, just like the Hoover woman did on the Maher show. Again, our problem is not spending but revenue. Of course, revenue is a tricky thing in a recession. But at least we could look at the high end of the Bush tax cuts before we ct aid to the poor, infirm, unemployed and elderly. And let's keep in mind that those low tax rates (really low marginal tax rates), the zero percent tax collected from corporations and the subsidies to oil companies (and no doubt others) are not helping our revenue picture. These are the places we should look, not at agencies, spending or any of the rest.

The problem is spinning ....

2011-07-24T06:52:00.003-04:00

In regards to (the economist) Jack Kelly's column today, the Washington Post's Matt Miller has an intelligent comment on the credit agencies threatening the US with downgrade if it does not reduce its debt.It's worth emphasizing his point that if the credit agencies had done their job in, say, 2005, that we might not have had the financial meltdown, which was the reason for the stimulus, etc, etc.

As for Mr Kelly's assertion that President Obama had not released details of his debt cutting plans, the NYTimes discusses how a) these plans were still in ongoing discussion with Speaker Boehner (until Boehner walked out) and b) that Boehner did not want details to get out, so he would not have to face another rebellion of the freshmen Congresspersons in his party.

Observations on the debt crisis

2011-07-18T21:57:00.002-04:00

I like to watch "Meet the Press" Sunday mornings. It keeps me out of church (whatever church I might go to), perhaps endangering my immortal soul, but sometimes I learn an interesting thing or two.

A couple of weeks ago Tim Pawlenty was on MTP, obviously to sell himself as a Presidential candidate. His take on the debt crisis was interesting, to say the least. He literally boasted about a time he allowed the Minnesota government to shut down during a budget impasse. He emphasized and repeated that the shutdown caused no harm, and suggested the same would hold true for the federal government.

Last weekend Jim DeMint, Republican Senator from South Carolina, was one of the guests. He took the line Democrats have been repeating about credit rating agencies (Moody's, etc) downgrading the credit rating of the US, and gave it an interesting spin. DeMint claimed that Moody's actually will downgrade our credit rating if the government does not cut spending (according to how the Republicans want it cut) with no tax increases. In other words, Moody's is saying (according to Jim DeMint) that unless the Democrats give exactly what Republicans want, the world will punish us.

It's not just that Republicans are engaging in mental gymnastics to find ways to talk themselves into believing a default would not hurt us, it's as though they are competing to see who can come up with the most elaborate (not to say far fetched) spin on reality.

How well are the States doing?

2011-07-17T07:47:00.003-04:00

I'm not sure if Jack Kelly understands the complexity of the situation he is writing about this week. Early in his column he writes "With Washington gridlocked, much of the action on the fiscal crisis has moved to the states." So many conservatives, including commenters on local blogs, keep blathering about how the stimulus failed. Paul Krugman lets us know how much of that stimulus in fact was tax cuts and aid to states to keep them going (although Obama foolishly steered those tax cuts to lower income people, who of course do nothing more than spend money instead of buying the more sensible Wall Street stocks). Krugman said back in 2009 that the stimulus was not only too small, but had too little in the way of direct spending ("shovel ready projects") and too much in those tax cuts and aid to the states. Although both those components helped, direct spending would have helped more.

But we all know that that the stimulus was supposed to be temporary, and so now the aid to the states is running out. What Kelly suggests is related to Washington gridlock is in fact the planned end of the temporary stimulus. I suppose you could say that gridlock is involved in the current fiscal problems the states are having. Republican intransigence in the healthcare debate, financial reform and in general in the Senate has slowed down the process of repairing the economy the Bush administration left us with, although Obama was at least able to wrangle enough out of the Republican two year old's masquerading as Congressmen to save us from a complete depression. So without the gridlock caused by the Republicans, the State's would probably not be ending public education, Medicaid and food assistance for the poor.

Well, maybe not ending quite yet, but I do think the actions of these states with Republican governors will make nigh impossible for new people to get into food and health aid programs, will bring many people closer to hunger, will hurt the education of poor kids in public schools and college. Am I right, or is Kelly's implication that the Republican governor's actions are just dandy actually true? Newspapers report here, here, here and here. Of course, the media I am quoting includes a Mother Jones piece, and anyway we know the "lame stream media" is not connected to reality as Jack Kelly understands it.

You decide.

Whose unemployment ...

2011-07-12T15:20:00.001-04:00

While reading a post on Paul Krugman’s blog, a thought (not strictly about his topic) suddenly struck me. You may remember conservatives not wanting to extend unemployment benefits because they claimed that people on unemployment do not look for jobs, instead they sit around and watch TV and drink beer until a week before their unemployment runs out, then they look. Many liberals, particularly anyone who has looked for a job (like myself), spoke up to point out how terrifying being unemployed is, and how hard we actually worked while unemployed to look for a job (six hours a day was what I heard recommended).

The thought that just occurred to me is – what if the converse is true right now? What if companies are not hiring because they know that workers have unemployment insurance (who may own houses and in any event have little reason to travel when there no job boom anywhere in the US). Companies and corporations may well figure that because there is unemployment insurance, voters will think that the unemployed are just fine. US businesses may be willing to gamble and see if Barack Obama is kicked out, replaced by a sympathetic Republican. Besides, companies are posting record profits by terrorizing their remaining workers with the prospect of losing their jobs.

This possibility makes even more sense if you think about the shape of unemployment these days. It is the people who did not better, and frequently worse, than finishing high school who have the 20% unemployment numbers. The people who got the college degree are only facing a 4.5% unemployment rate, the ones with a graduate degree seeing a 4% unemployment rate. So the people who look more like corporate officers who are having the easier time right now.

There has been lots of speculation (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/12/opinion/12tue1.html?_r=1&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/11/opinion/11douthat.html?partner=rssnyt&emc=rss) about why Republicans are refusing to allow any tax cuts in the debt ceiling deal. I believe Democrats are not happy that Obama put Medicare and Social Security on the table, but Obama was sort of saved when the Republicans refused to trade dismantling part of the safety net for any tax cuts at all. But I have to say I have no idea what is going to happen with the debt ceiling.

Kelly's expose of what the lamestream media won't cover (sort of)

2011-07-10T10:35:00.004-04:00

I can't link to this week's Jack Kelly column, because first the PG website wasn't working, and right now it is down for maintenance.

This week he covered an emerging story about an ATF program that monitored guns moving to Mexico. I don't know much about the story, but after reading Kelly's column, I feel like I know less. His disjointed grammar and vague sentences and paragraphs remind me nothing so much of that original Tea Party leader (and Kelly favorite) Sarah Palin. Maybe Kelly has decided to write specifically for his Tea Party readers, in a disjointed, incoherent dialect that only they understand (does he bully the PG's editors?). I would respond to the story itself, except I can't follow it. I will say that a google search revealed that the story is being covered by Fox News and several conservative print media journals, contradicting Kelly's claim that the media isn't covering this story. But it is more fun for Kelly to further the Tea Party's conspiracy theories about the media, that a vast left-wing conspiracy.

Kelly and the rest of the conservative media themselves ignore that Glenn Greenwald has been covering the Obama administration's war on whistle blowers, as well as other Obama misdeeds. But Greenwald also defends the actions of Julian Assange and Bradley Manning. Presumably Kelly would find Manning and Greenwald himself particularly unpleasant since both men are gay (although to be fair, I can't recall Kelly saying anything about homosexuality, the only evidence I know is that Kelly never quotes Greenwald).

Kelly returns to Sarah Palin.

2011-07-03T10:41:00.003-04:00

Apparently we have found solutions for the debt ceiling, our wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya and unemployment in America, all (arguably) national security issues, since the PG's "national security" columnist wrote a second column on Sarah Palin in the span of three weeks. Kelly once again complains (literally whines) about media coverage of Palin. The thing is, though, that it is not like the media is being inaccurate when a clip is played of Sarah Palin. If somehow she is reading something her speechwriters wrote that is blatantly wrong, then she needs to fire her speechwriters (and hire the person who ghostwrites her Facebook posts).

Actually, my experience with Palin has been that the more I listen, the worse she sounds. For example, the speech she gave when she resigned as governor is filled with incoherent soundbites, but I would say the cumulative effect (sum of the parts) is even worse than each part taken separately. And again, she is person who said these things, no one in the media put words in her mouth. If asking "what magazines and/or newspapers do you read?" is a gotchya question, then it is a good thing for Palin that she bypasses the media and goes straight to Twitter or Facebook or whatever. Except that she used the phrase "blood libel" in a clip released after the shooting of Gabrielle Giffords, essentially taunting Jews in America and implying that the media is inextricably connected with Judaism.

Thinking about Palin's treatment in the media, if Jack Kelly thinks that reporters should behave differently about Palin, ignore seemingly incoherent quotes and instead mindlessly repeat her campaigns talking points praising her abilities, what about the targets of Fox News and other conservative "news" outlets? What about the "Swift Boating" of John Kerry? Should the news outlets showed that Swift Boat thingie commercial have investigated and explained the commercial. Should they have simply described the clip as false, drawn conclusions for us? And what about Jeremiah Wright, was the context of his remarks explained every time the "God Damn America" clip was shown, or explained even once (well, yeah, probably once or twice)?

It sounds good to say your candidate is the underdog, maligned by a vast conspiracy of elitist snobs arrayed against her. In fact, the Tea Party declaration of independence says they reject "self-styled “educated classes” and so-called “experts”" (specifically in the context of "socialist schemes" proliferated to cause dependence of Tea Party people on the State). Republicans, conservatives and Tea Party types wrap themselves in the flag and claim to be true Americans and patriots. Really, though, conservatives are no different than their liberal counterparts. Barack Obama, Bill Clinton and Anthony Weiner along with many others also claim to be patriots, but have had both political and personal failings. The difference between flawed liberals and flawed conservative in my opinion is that at least the liberals try to hep poorer people while conservatives almost always try to do more for the rich. But certainly neither party is free of these sorts of flawed politicians; neither "Republican" nor "Democrat" is a label that guarantees also sort of moral purity.

Jack Kelly decides which laws he cares about ...

2011-06-26T10:14:00.002-04:00

Today Jack Kelly calls the President a lawbreaker. Well, anyone reading my posts knows I have been referencing Glenn Greenwald so in some sense I agree with Kelly. But Kelly starts his column suggesting that Obama is the biggest lawbreaker since Richard Nixon, and that's where I immediately diverge with Kelly. We had a President immediately before this one whose advisers invoked the concept of the "Unitary Executive", virtually making the President a king.

Now, Greenwald might agree in general with Kelly, although I suspect he would scoff at Kelly's details. Apparently all Presidents generally consider the War Powers act to be unconstitutional in its details. Never the less, I suspect most Americans now, having suffered through ten years of Middle Eastern war, feel that maybe it is time to invoke the War Powers act and rein in those wars. So it is a complicated issue, but most everyone would have to agree that President Obama has violated the letter of the law in US action in Libya.

Past that, Kelly starts picking and choosing his attacks on Obama, complaining that Obama is issuing illegal instructions to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency not to aggressively pursue college students or immigrants with relatives in the military. Also Kelly complains about civil rights enforcement issues, the General Motors bailout, whatever moratorium on offshore drilling may or may not actually exist or had existed and finally waivers granted for the healthcare legislation. Now, I am not a lawyer and am not so familiar with these situations that I can say categorically that these are or are not a case of a law being broken. I will say I think Kelly is blowing smoke up our collective ... um, behinds.

What Kelly doesn't say about Obama is Obama's continuation of Bush's domestic surveillance programs and the Obama Justice Department's strong attacks on whistle blowers. I assume that's because Kelly is not willing to complain about these things because doing so would also indict Bush. You know, healthcare waivers could be important, but I think people get really upset if they think the government is spying on them 24/7, or that if they see a (financial) crime and report it, that they might end up going to jail instead of the boss or co-worker that committed the crime.

It seems to me like a lot of Presidents skirt the edge of the laws on various issues. Obama has done his share of this, and they may hurt him politically (along with other things like his seeming willingness to compromise/cooperate with Republicans), but I think comparing Obama to Nixon ignores the other elephant in the room, George W Bush. Interesting who Kelly chooses to ignore.

Palin as victim ...

2011-06-19T09:49:00.003-04:00

I am not much of a fan of conspiracy theories. I mean, I acknowledge the things that are, like that Congressional rooming house run by a conservative christian group (mentioned on 2PJ) and this "The American Legislative Exchange Council" (also mentioned on 2PJ). But I don't see these things as larger or more organized than they are.

I do not think that Jack Kelly says that there is a vast left wing conspiracy against Sarah Palin. However, I can't help but think that Kelly wouldn't mind if you connected dots and drew that conclusion. Translation: Jack Kelly hopes you are stupid.

Meanwhile, Kelly treats the notion that Palin was a reformer (of sorts) who took on members of her own party and oil companies as news to us (because of the recent release of Palin emails from her term as governor). I remember reading about these things back in 2008 when she was chosen as John McCain's running mate. I also remember reading she made some clumsy moves in her various jobs in Alaskan government, things like inquiring about possibly removing books from the Wasilla library and conducting investigations not only into other Republicans but also into subordinates (when she didn't simply fire subordinates). Sarah Palin was largely a popular governor, she was capable enough to take a state that has incredible advantages and do a decent job as governor.

At the same time, it was Sarah Palin who did the Katie Couric interview. Now, I will admit, I am not sure how it would have played if Palin has said she reads very few national magazines and newspapers (although if she had said she is very busy as the governor of Alaska, people (independents) might understood and forgiven her that). But Palin chose to tough out the interview, and ended up pretty obviously painting herself into a corner. Palin was the one who resigned the governorship (with an incoherent speech), and has made all the comments and tweets. In point of fact, Palin's mis-statements might well serve a purpose, fitting into the Tea Party anti-intellectual theme (as expressed in their declaration of whatever). Interestingly, Kelly plays it cleverly, describing Palin as damaged by the negative press. He suggests that it will come out (because of these emails) that Palin is so much more competent than she is made out to be, and that her "adversaries in journalism" will be shown to be partisan. Kelly casts Palin as the underdog, in fact explicitly bringing up Reagan at the end of his column. Thus if Palin does not get the nomination or chooses not to run, the media can be blamed for it. But if she wins, it will be another case of the superiority of conservatism.

It doesn't hurt that Palin was the original darling of the Tea Party.

There are irony and lies, if you look for them ...

2011-06-15T21:53:00.005-04:00

There's irony in the world if you look for it. I happened to "like" something on Facebook called The Urban Commuter. They mentioned that tomorrow is national "Dump the Pump Day", an attempt to make a statement about how we waste gas in commuting by car (save us some money and save the country some oil). Meanwhile, even as we are trying to wean ourselves from our cars (a bit), Maureen Dowd has an opinion column on how Saudi women are trying to achieve some small increase in their rights. Among other things, she mentioned that Saudi women are being encouraged to participate in a national "drive in" on Friday. We are stepping out of our cars as Saudi would like to step in. Well, I guess they have enough oil to run the things.

I have to say I think that there are counter arguments to make when liberals (unfavorably) compare American health care to that of other industrial nations (Europe/Japan/Canada/Australia/New Zealand and probably some others). Maybe a case can be made that other countries government run health care con only exist if there is a US for profit health care system to handle their most expensive cases. Maybe. But you can't reasonably just ignore the existence of the health care systems of these other countries, and the fact their public health stats and costs are better than ours.

Unless you are a Republican named Paul Ryan. (To be fair, I suspect all Republicans and even at least a few Democrats would cheerfully ignore other countries health care successes). (I came by this thing via Paul Krugman's NYTimes blog)

I still think about the conservative commenter on 2PJ's who complained that liberals/progressives are not serious, and conservatives can not have a discussion with them. Apparently it works the other way as well.

Adult conversation? ... Not quite convinced

2011-06-12T07:03:00.006-04:00

So this weeks' Jack Kelly column seems like he might be trying for an adult conversation. However, just like Tim Pawlenty's economic proposal (really just like it), Kelly's version of an adult conversation requires you to be half asleep.

Kelly starts his column by noting and then attacking a recent Obama speech in Toledo about the state of the auto industry. Kelly delights in the fact that the Washington Post "fact checker" found what he considered to be various inaccuracies in Obama's speech. I would suggest they might be closer to caveats, in any case I would suggest you read the piece for yourself, including the linked White House response. In any event, Republicans (or in Kelly's case, a conservative pundit) coming back to talking about unemployment is at best ironic. The Republicans made great noise about unemployment last summer leading into the midterms, and then abruptly stopped talking about it. I am aware of no bills coming out of the (Republican controlled) House of Representatives that address unemployment, unless you count Paul Ryan's fantasy budget (I wouldn't). Late in his column Kelly mentions an unnamed "corporate CEO" who tells Yale Law professor Stephen Carter (sitting next to him on a flight) that demand for his company's products is up, but the CEO will not hire new people, because he doesn't know what they will cost in some indeterminate future. This should be a huge red flag. First of all, CEO's have lost a lot of credibility in employment matters since their average salaries have ballooned so much compared to what ordinary workers make. Second, any intelligent observer of current American politics knows that with the House currently in the hands of the Republicans, there are not going to be any new radically strong government regulations of business; any uncertainty on the part of business is just posturing. Which leads me to my final point, business (in the form of the Chamber of Commerce person on "ABC's This Week" last Sunday) has taken up the Republican's talking points, essentially removing any credibility they might have had. Business is indeed refusing to hire people, forcing their current employees to work that much harder to keep up with rising demand and pushing profits for a number of industries to higher levels. To me, this is the Republican version of patriotism.

But to me what is worse than Kelly's essentially encouraging business to sabotage the economy is Kelly's discussion of taxes and tax rates. Kelly sort of barely broaches the idea of raising taxes to address our deficit and debt before pivoting to attack new business regulation (which I will come back to), I guess to establish his "adult" status and that conservatives are far more willing to compromise than those evil Democrats. But even before that, he responds to an Obama statement that current taxes are lower than they were in the Reagan administration. Kelly goes into detail about how by the time Reagan left office, there were only two tax brackets, 15% for incomes up to $17,850 and 28% for incomes above that. Since Kelly rarely goes into detail in any matter (most Republican proposals can't stand too much scrutiny), I suspect his departure from his usual form is no accident, especially since I believe Tim Pawlenty also recently proposed reducing the tax brackets to just two, very similar to the 1987 setup. We may remember that the first George Bush pledged not to raise taxes when he came into office, and then decided he had to anyway (presumably not because of overspending on social programs by Saint Reagan, those were the years when Congress could easily raid the Social Security trust fund).

I guess Republicans sell these simpler and fewer tax brackets by playing on the difficulties average voters have in filling out and filing their taxes. Also, fewer tax brackets would make our income taxes less "progressive" (a tax term meaning that the poor are not hit so hard by taxes), anytime the Republicans can make something less progressive I imagine their hearts must sing. But the real reason for trying to insert this two bracket tax system into our consciousness is that the top bracket of 28% is lower than the current top bracket of 35%. Sure, the real beneficiaries would be people making over 250 grand a year (500 grand for married filing joint), but those are the people who feel they are paying too much in taxes already. They would rather give Republican Congresspersons five grand for campaign funds than give the government an extra ten grand in taxes. That the poor and middle class would pay more in taxes, and also pay more percentage wise on total revenues is o more than incidental.

Finally, the idea implied in the title of Kelly's column that business is too regulated is truly laughable at this moment in history. Given what happened in the housing market and with the banks, it takes true brass balls to insist that industry is too highly regulated right now. The main stream media is now asking (in polling questions) whether people expect another great depression to occur soon, and the number who do is going up. Yet Republicans actually think they can sell us on the idea the less government is the solution for that and all other problems. This is doubly laughable when we remember the spending orgy during the Bush administration.

How serious are we?

2011-06-04T16:52:00.009-04:00

You might know I comment on a couple of blogs around Pittsburgh. On one blog (an unabashed liberal one), a particular conservative commenter complained that he wanted to a have a discussion of policy and ideas, but that liberals do not want be serious, they just make fun of people like Sarah Palin and Rick Santorum (who are, one has to admit, easy targets). Well, fair enough, I say, but when we talk about policy and ideas, what common ground are we using? Republican or Democratic talking points? Or perhaps economics? Whose economics, one might reasonably ask. Isn't there some level of economics we could reasonably agree on, such as the texts written in the 1970's by Paul Samuelson or William Baumol? The thing is, those texts would say that government spending during the Great Depression helped ameliorate that Depression and revive the economy. Which means that Republicans either have to say those icons of economic thinking (Samuelson, Baumol) were/are wrong, or concede that Obama and the Democrats had the right approach with the stimulus.

So we have these twin notions, whether we are going to talk about actual issues, and whether any Democrats can be serious. Into this conversation comes a man who has a big soapbox. Jack Kelly's column today is about the Anthony Weiner scandal, and then he turns to a peripheral point in the discussion of the Republican assault on Medicare. The Republicans may not like the fun Democrats have talking about Palin, Santorum, Trump, Gingrich and Bachmann, although it is not the Democrats fault that the Republican base makes people like that popular by paying attention to them.Yet the Republicans also want to claim to be the adults in the room, taking serious stands on government spending and the economy. Well, if you turn around and want to talk about Anthony Weiner's tweet of his erection, then you want it both ways. And saying the Democrats did it first is kind of the opposite of being the adults in the room.

Meanwhile, I have no idea about the comment that Kelly says Debbie Wasserman-Schultz made about Paul Ryan's plan. I assume that he is telling the truth, that she suggested insurance companies would be able to deny coverage and drop them for pre-existing conditions. Why wouldn't private health insurance companies be able to do these things? Could it be the "Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act"? The one passed by the Democrats in Congress, and signed by President Obama? I can see where Republicans would want to stress how silly it is for Representative Wasserman-Schultz to be saying that, after all, its not like the Republicans want to repeal the "Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act"...

Jack Kelly has no respect for his readers, he actually thinks they're (you're) stupid. He undermines any thought of having an "adult" conversation about what Republicans claim are important matters. The issues they are using to justify laying off thousands of public employees.

To me, the real story about Ryan's plan is the performance of the private health insurance corporations when they were contracted by Medicare to administer Medicare plans on behalf of the government (they ended up costing more than regular Medicare). I am sure that conservatives/Republicans will talk about that in the 2012 campaign...

In today's PG Forum pages, there is also an interesting piece on taxes by Bruce Bartlett, sort of the exact opposite of Kelly's column. Bartlett worked in the Reagan White House and for Bush one, but apparently is interested in how the economy really works. So his essay on taxes is a good reminder of how a "progressive tax" structure really works. To use income taxes as an example, let's say you make thirty grand a year as a single person. The first $8,500 is taxed at 10% and the dollars from $8,501 to $30,000 are taxed at 15%. The effective tax rate ends up being 13.5%. Bartlett argues that current US corporate taxes are at a historic low, and share the lowest rate with Turkey among OECD nations. Based on that fact and Republican rhetoric, our economy should be roaring instead of limping along with 9% unemployment (not counting the long term discouraged unemployed) and a 2.6% growth rate (negative last year, zero the year before).

I am sure that conservatives/Republicans will discuss the difference between our actual tax rates and our lack of strong economic performance (as predicted by their talking points) as they press their calls for lower taxes ...

The PG Fourm pages today ...

2011-05-29T12:30:00.003-04:00

The Post Gazette's forum section today contained (as it usually does) several interesting items. I thought it would be interesting to look at several of them, especially since a couple are related.

First, Jack Kelly took off on how many of the Republican candidates (or possible candidates) are superior to Obama. Actually, Kelly's favorite candidate turns out not to be an American at all: Benjamin Netanyahu. Kelly delights in pointing out how many standing ovations Netanyahu got when he spoke to Congress (hint: more than Obama in the State of the Union). Of course, that is all tied up in the brush up about Obama's remarks about how Israel's negotiations with the Palestinians need to *start* with looking at the pre-1967 borders. Now, the Palestinian/Israeli situation is really complicated, and of course passions run high, and tend to run across party lines. I will say Glenn Greenwald takes pains to point out that Republicans used the opportunity to overly applaud Netanyahu and in the process stick it to Obama.

Does Kelly have a point about the superiority of Republican candidates over Obama? Hell, even liberal pundits are speculating about possible similarities to 1992, when Clinton came from obscurity to whatever you want to call his status. On the other hand, Clinton was something of a populist with appeal for some wealthy donors (much like Obama). I think that come from nowhere sudden popular support usually needs a populist component, although a Presidential run requires that populism to be sustained for months. I know that on the surface, Republican ideas about small government and low (or no) taxes have some populist appeal (see The Tea Party). But if Herman Cain either mis-identifying quotes or making things up about the constitution is typical of Republican populism, then I am not too afraid of how far it will get. Besides I think that orthodox Republican talking points are not consistent with a populist stance (beyond the superficial). I think money (big single checks) and party leadership support would dry up pretty quick. Can you be the Republican candidate for President and put yourself at odds with the party (could you even get nominated?)?

Meanwhile, two other items on the Forum pages caught my attention. There was an essay on the successes of Principal Doris Brevard in the Hill district in reducing the racial achievement gap. In my opinion, the piece was short on detail, but it certainly indicated that some attention should be paid to her record and efforts. By contrast, there was also a piece on how Pennsylvania should implement school vouchers. Some of the detail was a bit confusing (a lottery for voucher applicants?), but parts seem pretty clear (the vouchers should pay for the private school, meaning they pay a lot, even though the essay's authors identified an eight grand state payment per student. Anyway, I felt the voucher essay was much closer to the opposite of a solution.

But at least the PG is trying somewhat. I think education is a very important topic for the long term health of the US. It is as important an investment in infrastructure as money for a bridge or a highway, maybe more. Yet I gather Republicans/conservatives will not be happy until all teachers either quit (and are replaced will low paid non-union) or are stripped of their retirements and have their wages slashed to half or less of what they make now. How dare teachers think they are as valuable as people who do real work, like make money out of nothing.

A bit more on Obama ...

2011-05-24T13:01:00.002-04:00

SO in my last post I expressed some concern that Obama is behaving so much like W that he will not attract independents, and will not mobilize younger voters like he did in the last election. I stand by those thoughts, but I think the Republicans could be in as much trouble as Obama.

The problem the Republicans face is, simply put, the Tea Party. The TP, in any given state primary, is going to vote for the candidate that most closely reflects their rather extreme views. I think that means that Ron Paul is probably unacceptable to them, although they might accept a Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann or Herman Cain (ironically two women and an African American). If the Republicans do end up nominating someone who is deemed moderate enough to appeal to a large number of independents (i.e. more likely to beat Obama), then I suspect the Tea Party may well nominate their own candidate.

So the Republicans may face two rather unpleasant choices: either the Tea Party forcing them to nominate an extreme candidate who has little chance to win, or they may see large numbers of party conservatives desert the party to vote for a third party Tea Party candidate in the general. Either of these scenarios might be enough to save Obama in 2012. These possibilities might explain why both Mitch Daniels and Mike Huckabee decided not to run this time.

Three thoughts ...

2011-05-22T10:37:00.004-04:00

So I have three things I want to talk about today.

First, Jack Kelly today is ... what ... going "all in" on Pakistan today (or maybe the correct phrase is double down, or raise the stakes - whatever). As I said last week, I pretty much agree with the idea that our relationship with Pakistan is no better than troubled, perhaps very toxic. Kelly claims that a former head of Pakistani intelligence "midwifed" Al Qaeda, and (seeing how vague that statement is) I could easily believe that, although given our role in encouraging Afghan mujahideen against the Soviets, we were at least in the delivery room of the birth of Al Qaeda (and might be the daddy). And I will say, having studied a bit of international relations theory, that American foreign policy (and generally any countries foreign policy) never uses academic foreign policy theory, and in fact maybe the most important thing in any foreign policy decision is the domestic political climate. But Kelly seems to again showing an astonishing level of naivete in his foreign policy analysis. There are reasons why we might want to distance ourselves from Afghanistan, since our continued military presence there does not seem to be producing positive results, and for whatever reason, we do not seem to be putting effort into the nation building that might help Afghan citizens might think better of us (which is to say I do not think Muslims in Afganistan or elsewhere want to live in the stone age, contrary to what conservatives like to say). But we need to keep some engagement in Afghanistan, to act if new terrorist camps are set up.

And we need to keep engagement with Pakistan, even if their intelligence service is more interested in helping terrorists (maybe especially if they are). Kelly suggests that we don't need to care about Pakistan's nuclear weapons, but if parts of Pakistani intelligence are helping enemies who killed thousands of Americans on American soil in 2001, I would suggest we do need to care.

Now, I will say I don't know exactly what our policy in the region should be, maybe something involving giving fairly large chunks of money coupled with working with local intelligence and law enforcement to attack terrorists in their countries. This kind of policy would be tough to sell to average American citizens, although bin Laden's death might make that (coupled with a return of tens of thousands of American soldiers) more palatable. By the way, the KD/PG edition had an interesting discussion connected to this issue, with a former fairly high level CIA official with a book.

And bin Laden's death is the second issue I wanted to talk about. The former CIA officer on the KD/PG program said that he thought bin Laden would not have any worthwhile intelligence personally, so there was less incentive to capture bin Laden alive. Ironically, when talking about his own ability to talk on the KD/PG program, the CIA official said "we are a nation of laws" ... meaning that the CIA does not issue propaganda (and of course he would tell us is they do) and while h has to clear expected answers, the CIA doesn't tell him what to say.

But the "nation of laws" remark is interesting. Shouldn't any employee of the government (law enforcement or military), when coming into contact with the mastermind of I guess the greatest crime committed on American soil, try to find a way to have that person stand trial in an American court? Surely there would be enough evidence against bin Laden such that the government would not have to reveal classified intelligence in open court.

So I was trying to think whether something happened during the mission that caused the SEAL team to decide to kill bin Laden . Just to say, I understand there were six SEAL members, a small number on two helicopters that between them are equipped to carry 22 people. There may have been some medics, some other people to guard the helicopters while on the ground. But then there was the stash, the loot to be taken from the bin Laden compound, so maybe not. When the one helicopter crashed and became inoperative, that meant reduced capacity to take materials out, especially considering that there was at least one extra crew member (the pilot and maybe a co-pilot of the crashed helicopter) to take away from the compound. Does that mean that a captured live bin Laden couldn't fit on the remaining helicopter? well, supposedly his body was taken out the compound, so his weight was apparently not the issue. We may never know why bin Laden was killed instead of captured. The answer may lay in the calculation Barack Obama of what would serve his re-election goals best.

Which brings me to the final issue I have been tossing around in my head, Obama's chances in the 2012 election. Of course, for Democrats there is no other choice. It is impossible to conceive of putting up a different candidate if your party has the White House now. I'll come back to my take on the Vice Presidency.

But my big question is who does Obama think is going to vote for him this time? Remember, last time saw record turn outs of young voters for Obama (although they didn't turn out as much as their grandparents do every election), and independents went for Obama (surprisingly). And yet Obama only won by a relatively slim margin. Now Democrats will vote for Obama in the general (what choice do they have?) although it is possible Obama could be defeated in primaries (even if only by Mickey Mouse written in). But independents? If they are unemployed and poor, why should they vote for Obama? And if they are wealthy, why should they vote for Obama? Not to mention that the young may well have been disheartened by Obama's various policies (or lack thereof in the case of Wall Street).

The Republican field is pitiful, but Obama appears to quite possibly handing the election to whoever the Republicans nominate. Even thought the Tea Party is literally turning the Republican party into a party of lunatics, there is every indication that Barack Obama is handing the Presidency to whatever lunatic the Republicans put up. This at a time where humanity is affecting the climate of the world, unless we start to alter our behavior.

Maybe the apocalypse is coming, just in somewhat slower motion than we expected.

Oh, by the way, Obama could re-energize the 2012 race if he dumped Joe Biden and offered Hillary the Veep slot. Sure, she seems to be enjoying being Secretary of State, but she might be able to have input as Veep, push Obama to actually stop negotiating with himself and do the things that need to be done to help the unemployed and the poor (who might reward Hillary with the Presidency in 2016)(Al Gore could be her Veep, if he could stand to do it again).

Kelly's Pakistan Take

2011-05-15T12:33:00.002-04:00

As I have in the recent past, I find myself in partial agreement Jack Kelly's column this week. It really should not be news that the Pakistani's have no better than mixed feelings about the US. I have heard the stories about Pakistani intelligence for years, and the stories about a radical Muslim current running through Pakistani society have been there for years. So yeah, there are good reasons to question the motives of the Pakistani government, has influenced by there desire to play to the Pakistani public on whatever levels.

Still, are we supposed to be that Jack Kelly is so dim that he doesn't understand why our government (under both Bush and Obama) is courting and essentially paying off the Pakistani? Besides basically paying Pakistan to inform on Muslim radicals, we have been begging the Pakistanis to allow us to supply US troops in Afghanistan (crossing their territory and airspace). This brings up another can of worms. Yes, there are good reasons to question whether we should still be in Afghanistan. Should we have gone in, in the first place? (To go in after Al Qaeda, probably) Did we create a mess by dismantling the Afghan (and Iraqi) government(s), that maybe we should clean up (to show we can actually accomplish important things, like fixing governments we break). Obama, now, has a tough balancing act between finishing the wars he inherited (so to speak) from Bush, being forced to continue to deal closely with the Pakistanis or hold them more at arms length, and addressing both international concerns and domestic sensibilities. Those domestic sensibilities are of course influenced dimly by sophisticated analysis and more strongly by simplistic comments like Jack Kelly's.

Which is where I part with Kelly. As I said above, I agree that our relationship with Pakistan is complicated and troubled, and needs to be looked ad closely. But if Kelly won't acknowledge the complexities Obama faces in the US's dealings with Pakistan, then he does no one among his readership any favors with this column.

The death of bin Laden

2011-05-08T14:19:00.003-04:00

Make no mistake, Osama bin Laden was an enemy of the United States, someone determined to do us harm. Of course, he had reasons why we wanted to do that, and we should understand those reasons. As i understand it, some of it had to do with US military personnel wandering holy cities in Saudi Arabia. For that, hundreds of thousands, Americans, Iraqis and Afghans, have died?

That said, we are now dealing with the aftermath of the death of bin Laden. Mostly, which is to say almost overwhelmingly, Americans are pretty close to ecstatic that bin Laden was killed by the US. But a few journalists have expressed contrary opinions. Glenn Greenwald desperately wants to know if bin Laden was in custody before being killed, and wants to talk about the implications of that in terms of what America is supposed to stand for. Jack Kelly, on the other hand, wants to complain about how the Obama administration talked about the bin Laden operation. In fact, Kelly apparently wants suggest that maybe Obama didn't want to or even didn't give the order to kill bin Laden:

"The bold risk taker is so different from the passive, tentative, risk-averse president we'd seen before that some doubt Mr. Obama played as substantive a role in the bin Laden hit as the White House is claiming."

When liberals questioned evidence for invading Iraq, they were accused of being unpatriotic or even traitors, but I guess Jack Kelly operates under a different standard.

Meanwhile, just to return to an earlier thought, I am still disturbed by the notion that we could have captured bin Laden and instead deliberately killed him. I heard David Frum complaining to Glenn Greenwald (in the small part of a Blogginhead.tv thing I watched) that it might have taken months or even years to bring a captured bin Laden to trial. I say - yeah, and so what? Isn't that part of what makes America great? To strongly defend the rights of all defendants? I mean, I could have seen bending some trial and detention rules for bin Laden, keeping him incommunicado, assigning him counsel, etc. But summary execution isn't the American way, any more than mobs lynching blacks was/is the American way. But Jack Kelly wants to nit pick about how Obama talked about the operation.

Kelly know economics ...(?)

2011-05-01T08:44:00.002-04:00

Jack Kelly thinks you are stupid. He wants you to blame Barack Obama for gas prices, based largely on the notion he thinks Obama is arrogant. What was such a desirable quality in George Bush is held against Barack Obama. Of course, George Bush's arrogance manifested itself in swaggering and lying to the American people about why the sons of the poor were being sent to their deaths, while Kelly's anecdotal example of Obama's arrogance could also be seen as suggesting Americans could take responsibility for their own foolish choices. But Kelly is counting on your stupidity.

Kelly blames Obama for high gas prices for three ways: the declining value of the dollar, turmoil in the Middle East and because Obama has restricted new drilling. These reasons show a pretty profound lack of understanding of how economics work, and/or Kelly's general contempt for his readership.

A declining dollar could have an effect on the price of oil, but it is worthwhile to remember that cheap dollars make our exports cheaper. Our economy is supposed to be recovering, and a strong export sector would mean jobs, including for poor people of color without high school degrees. It is a helluva thing to want the unemployed to suffer so that middle class and wealthy people who bought SUV's can continue to waste gas without paying for (pushing the costs onto our grandchildren).

As for the turmoil in the Middle East, I have one word for that: Iraq.

And thinking about drilling domestically, Kelly leaves out a crucial step, the refining process. That has as big an impact, maybe more so, as the supply of oil. there has been something like two requests (to the EPA) for new refineries in the last thirty five years, although there are requests for modification and expansion of existing refineries. The refineries we have can adjust the capacity they at which they operate, and apparently are not, right now, operating at as high a capacity as they could, while apparently crude oil inventories have been rising (piling up?). Of course, refineries have maintenance cycles and unexpected outages, but it is at least as an important factor as drilling in setting the supply.

And of course, all Kelly is writing about is supply. He wants cheap gas delivered to us on a silver platter. He doesn't care how difficult oil is to extract, what environmental, social, political or future costs there might be in drilling for oil (or converting oil sands or "gasifying" coal). Kelly doesn't think about the other component in gas prices, demand. To me, two times that gas prices have fallen are important to look at. First, when highway speeds were reduced to 55, there were relatively significant drops in US oil consumption. And of course the last time gas prices spiked this high, demand fell considerably, and not long after gas prices fell. Which means that if, when those prices fell, we could had imposed a gas tax that could have kept demand reduced. We could have given tax rebates when people file taxes, large ones for the poor and smaller ones for the middle class, to ease the "pain at the pump". But that opportunity might have slipped from our grasp, as the prices have risen. My personal feeling is that oil speculators are behind the current price spike, and I don't know if the speculators will keep the prices high this time. So instead of lowering demand by intentionally raising prices in a controlled fashion and returning a large chunk if not all the money to consumers, we are allowing the oil companies to pick our pockets. If fact, by driving 70 mph, we are encouraging the oil companies to take our money (even while they pay no taxes).

Jack Kelly thinks you are stupid.

Kelly plays the Nazi card

2011-04-24T09:33:00.003-04:00

I don't know how many wars are going on right now, beyond the three we are involved in. There have been wars going on since there has been writing to record them. Yet which war, which theater and army did Jack Kelly today choose use as a metaphor for the state of unions today? World War II, the Russian front and the Wehrmact. Kelly chose to compare American unions, public service unions including the police, fire personal and emergency medical technicians who ran into the twin towers to the Nazis. Actually, it must be a delicious comparison, the Nazis and communists killing each other.

All right, so maybe I am going a bit overboard there. But in all of Kelly's column today, he never once mentions that the unions he is talking about include public service unions we used to consider heroes. Police, fire, emergency medical services and teachers. Either we think they are doing important work (sometimes heroic) or not. At the very least, I take exception to comparing police and teachers to Nazis (OK, so I didn't like some of my teachers, but they weren't that bad).

Now, I have admit the collective bargaining model appears to have some problems. Unions have certainly shown the tendency to act in their own interest over their employer, and to some extent to act in the interest of their most senior members over the membership as a whole. This can be particularly problematic when the employer is the taxpayers of a city, county, state or the nation.

That said, I think that if governments, local or national, made promises in the past, even if they were merely passing the buck to the future, we need to honor the promises. They won't last forever. For current public service employees, we do need to transition to defined contribution in health and retirement benefits. And although I am not sure what this would means for collective bargaining, but possibly salaries for public service employees need to be tied in some fashion to local salaries in private industry for people with similar qualifications (in experience and education). Of course, doing that might bring the salaries up for teachers, but if that's fair?

Kelly may be right, that public service unions are in danger of being dismantled, and thus the Democrats may lose a lot of funding. And I guess since Kelly seems to have bought into the Tea Party ideology, he thinks having just one party would be just fine. We could call the party the Nationalist Capitalist party.

Watch out, Sudetenland.

Earth day 2011 - I burn all three

2011-04-22T06:33:00.002-04:00

I freely confess I don't know the history here; is Earth Day always on Good Friday? Seems like it would violate some part of the lib'rul ten Categorical Imperatives (apologies to Kant), like separation of the hated organized religion (as opposed to the disorganized Uni- Uni-'s) from all that is good and sweet in the world. But hey, if we have to celebrate the death of a messiah, might as well celebrate the planet too.

Of course environmentalism has changed somewhat since 1970, when the emphasis was (as I understand it) on pollution, and perhaps somewhat on recycling. Now the deleterious effects of greenhouse gases on the climate have pushed environmentalism towards reducing energy use (to avoid producing those gases by burning fossil fuels). The funny thing about that is that energy use reduction through more efficiency is something that an economist ought to be able to wrap his/her head around. If Compact Fluorescent's use few watts to provide the same light, and last much longer, they save the user a fair bit of money. If hybrids drive much like a regular car, but use half as much gas, they will save you money (eventually). So being a thoughtful consumer of energy means you have more money for other things. Yet environmentalism has successfully been tied to sacrifice (or at least discomfort) by the Republicans. So many people are losing out by not buying into conservation.

I myself burn natural gas to heat my apartment and the water I use, coal (probably) for electricity and oil (gasoline) to get places. My natural gas use will drop to nothing for the summer (the building pays for the hot water heater and the stove's gas). I am already using all CFL's (except for two LED lamps and an incandescent in the fridge), although there is probably more I could do to reduce my electricity usage. As for driving, I drive a hybrid, but I have been driving to work recently. I would like to start taking the bus where possible, and riding a bike when I can otherwise. Perhaps I will share the outcome of these resolutions here. What do you do to reduce?

Kelly, Tea Partier ...

2011-04-17T09:43:00.002-04:00

So I didn't post last week on Jack Kelly. Although I thought his column lacked any sense of history or circumstance, I found myself somewhat in agreement with the thought that it might be time to leave Afghanistan some time soon (it doesn't look like there is much we can do, short of taking action like replacing Karzai summarily, that will change the equation there).

This week Kelly is using facts to make his accusations. Now, I am not sure the accusations Kelly make are actually legitimate, but I will point out that Glenn Greenwald has made similar accusations. So, I won't take on Kelly line by line; Obama certainly has things of the sort Kelly mentions to answer for.

That said, where I do take issue with Kelly is in his total lack of a historical sense and no sense of perspective about the situation in government. The second Kelly mentions the constitution (as in "Our Constitution permits Congress to delegate ..., but makes no provision for waivers ..."), I think back to George Bush (or more accurately his advisers) advancing the "Unitary Executive" theory of the Presidency. Complaining about waivers for the healthcare bill ("Obamacare" as Mr Kelly so disrespectfully and tellingly puts it) make me think about Cheney's secret meetings with energy industry executives, and the mineral rights essentially given away to industry during the Bush administration.

Kelly's references to the constitution and his accusations that Obama has broken the law are, to me, clear signs that Kelly is in the bag for the Tea Party. This kind of blatant pandering is offensive to me, to present issues as facts when in fact they are actually in support of an agenda. To only complain when a Democrat is in the White House is reprehensible. And before anyone accuses me of the same thing, I would point to my linking to and talking up Greenwald. Also I will express my hope that Obama will make good on some of the things he said in his speech on Wednesday. Let's repeal at least the Bush tax cuts for the rich.

Kelly, monotonous ...

2011-04-03T08:23:00.002-04:00

Today's Jack Kelly column is essentially a retread of last week's, although Kelly notices Obama spoke on Monday to the nation. Kelly's take-away from Monday's speech was for his eyes to glaze over and hallucinate George Bush. By contrast, on Tuesday or Wednesday Jon Stewart's Daily Show had a much more sophisticated analysis, where Stewart noticed both the soaring rhetoric and the qualifying phrases, and declared that Obama was actually being relatively honest with us, more so than any President in the last fifty years (OK, he didn't include Nixon, Johnson or Kennedy, I guess because we are pretty clear about their honesty). Plus Stewart ended the segment noticing a Palin unforced error ("sqermish"?).

Kelly took pains to say that Obama sounded a lot like the most recent George Bush, until he quotes a former Bush speech writer who says that Obama did something no other President has ever done. In between, Kelly references himself (apparently we weren't paying attention, since we hadn't stormed the White House in the last week).

Kelly also says this "It's easier to get into wars than out of them. Regime change in Iraq took about three weeks. It was the unforeseen aftermath that took eight years, thousands of lives and nearly a trillion dollars.". Incredible. Did Kelly say anything like this in 2003? Or did he blindly buy into Condelezza Rice's logic "We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud."? And before you say that Iraq had not occurred yet, I will say we could look at the Vietnam War, in which US involvement started in a limited fashion during the Eisenhower administration (1955).

Kelly is actually right that the US is headed into uncharted territory. Qaddafi has been in power since 1969. 42 years is a long time to have no practice at democracy, and some of the most powerful non governmental organizations in the Middle East are ones we designate as terrorist. Now, maybe Qaddafi would have slaughtered thousands if we had waited one more day, although we have to admit Obama and company waited for the UN Security Council to deliberate. Is that better or worse than what bush did? We have to admit that Obama has started this process without really having a plan for what might happen after. Is it better or worse that Obama has dragged the UN into this (although I gather Bush's initial "coalition of the willing" was larger).

The thing is, Kelly is not really helping us see the nuances. If the reader has to work it out for him/her self, then they have the option to not work it out, so Kelly is not doing his readers any favors. Consider the difference in this, this, this, this, or this. A liberal who admits to have been a supporter (he thinks Obama is smarter than McCain) but now is examining all the issues through the prism of the constitution and the rulings of the Supreme Court might be a better critic than conservative whose view of the world apparently needs to be shoehorned into Tea Party doctrine. It is disappointing that the PG could have intelligent criticism of the President, or it can have Jack Kelly.

We need real wars, fought by real warriors ...

2011-03-26T23:32:00.004-04:00

I swear I had not seen Jack Kelly's column today when I wrote my last post yesterday. I had been thinking about that post for a week or so, after hearing about Helene Cooper's article in the NYTimes about the role Rice, Power and Hillary Clinton in persuading Obama to take action in Libya. But it is ironic that some of the facets of this intervention I thought Obama could be praised for are ones that irritate Kelly.

Apparently Kelly wants wars to conducted as serious business, with only the most serious of commitments. I guess he wants to see proper troop deployments, ground forces commanded by American officers marching into Tripoli (as I believe American Marines did a couple of hundred years ago). I have to say I think the subtext of kelly's column is saying that while liberals might have complained about George Bush's unilateral approach in Iraq in 2003, our actions in Libya show the downside to a multilateral approach (or say I think Kelly is saying).

Except that Iraq is not going particularly well, even eight years later. The government is still shaky, and it remains to be seen whether we can ever leave. One thing that might be keeping us there is the possibility Iran might try to move in if we did leave.

Kelly is annoyed that Obama has not stated unambiguously that Qaddafi must be removed. But I point again back to our actions in Iraq. While one could say that the goals for combat operations were pretty clear (capture the country), our over all goals in Iraq suffered from the lies told be the administration, such as about weapons of mass destruction. I think that ultimately Obama will emerge from this Libyan action more popular abroad and at home.

Kelly seems upset that the group contributing to the no fly zone in Libya is made up of volunteer nations. Except that in the real world that is the way things should work, and that generally seems to be both be and have been the case. George Bush did call the allies for his invasion and occupation of Iraq the "coalition of the willing". Of course, after it became clear that Saddam Hussein did not have weapons of mass destruction and also had nothing to do with 9/11, our allies became less willing quite quickly. It is possible that this time around, our allies will appreciate that Obama is not stretching the truth the way his predecessor did. Of course, events in Libya will follow their own course, but at least our allies are not likely to complain about how Obama mislead them.

On the other hand, Mark Bittman has a food manifesto in the editorial section well worth reasoning.

Obama and Libya

2011-03-26T14:53:00.002-04:00

It is interesting watching the media address Obama's handling of the Libya situation. Obama's stated reason for getting the UN resolution that established the "no fly" zone was to prevent a massacre of Libyan citizens, although Obama has also said quite plainly that he would like to see Qaddafi go. The genesis of the desire to prevent a humanitarian disaster was rooted in the Clinton administration's experience in Rwanda. To which I say, fair enough. I have heard pundits kind of smirk and wonder how many people would be killed if Qaddafi crushed this rebellion. In response, I wonder how many people have to die before we decide we should do something.

The other interesting thing is that (again) pundits are eagerly expressing their doubt that the US can a) turn over leadership of this operation to some other country's general and b) that the US will not have the overwhelmingly largest number of fighters and bombers in the operation, and that the US will not send troops to Libya. It is certainly true that while other countries could send a few fighters and/or soldiers to Libya or anywhere else in the world, probably only the US can send major invasion forces and aircraft anywhere, with an almost certain guarantee of being able to win any fight. But we are also the only country who could provide the logistical support for a UN operation made up of troops and/or aircraft from other countries. In other words, when our pundits (and Republicans) ask why the US always has to be the country providing 99% of the troops, this could be our chance to show we don't.

The story in the NYTimes was that Susan Rice and Samantha Power (who has written on genocide) first convinced Hillary Clinton and then the three of them convinced President Obama to work toward the UN resolution and subsequent "no fly" zone and bombing. Rice and Secretary Clinton were both fairly close to the Rwanda situation, which likely left a bad taste in their mouths. This was a chance to rework the limited interventions tried during the Clinton years, to find a formula that produces results without getting Americans killed.

Personally I find myself persuaded by the notion of America as the refueling tanker provider, making it possible for French and English fighters and bombers to operate over Libya. Will this limited intervention succeed in toppling Qaddafi, and if so, will we like his replacements? Those are more complicated questions, but I don't think acceptable answers would be more likely if we committed more American soldiers and/or pilots (see Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq).

signs of wind ....

2011-03-24T17:24:00.002-04:00

Last Friday I wandered over to the Waterworks, had a salad at the the Giant Eagle salad bar (which I suspect is the cause of the stomach flu I had Saturday) and noticed something new (to me) at the (relatively) new Eat N Park at the Waterworks: a wind turbine. The thing was spinning up a storm while I sat eating and watching it. It is one of those vertical turbines that is much safer for bats and birds (I believe). This is the sort of thing that could be installed on houses, apartment buildings and commercial building with relative ease. However the debate is now about whether to have nuclear power (which I suspect will involve corporate subsidies), not whether to help people install wind turbines.

Kelly today: bland yet also silly

2011-03-20T08:58:00.002-04:00

I have to say that Jack Kelly's column today is actually relatively reasonable. He basically says that for Democrats to successfully recall three Republican state senators, much less the eight they are hoping for, will be very difficult. Apparently it is pretty rare when more than one legislator has been recalled in the US. Fair enough.

Kelly also tells us that (self described) conservatives outnumber (self described) liberals in Wisconsin. As far as I can see that is essentially true. But what Kelly doesn't mention is that (self described) moderates and what ever other category out number both liberals and conservatives. So obviously in a recall it will matter most what the moderates do. Kelly thinks that the passions of February will have faded by June, and he may be right. A good ad campaign from the unions might make the difference, but that is hoping that political operatives in Wisconsin will luck into an Obama effect that Democrats were unable to create last November.

Of course, at the end of his column, Kelly himself over reaches, suggesting that Wisconsin's vote signals the coming end of public sector unions, and perhaps the end of the Democratic party and liberalism as a whole. I suspect Republicans/conservatives will be more careful than that, although the loose cannon Tea Party might try to push things.

Only the "right" opinions ...

2011-03-13T09:17:00.002-04:00

Today Jack Kelly is upset that NPR and PBS still exist. I suspect that he and other conservatives have long held this desire, but the latest impetus is James O'Keefe's lstest (edited) "sting" operation. We are shocked to find that when NPR fund raising executives think they are in private, they have opinions!!! In this case, the objectionable opinions are about the Tea Party and Republican voters.

Kelly once again betrays what I think can only be seen as Tea Party influenced view of the world with this statement: "NPR listeners and CPB viewers are mostly upper-middle-class people who can afford to pay for their mass media of choice." Once again rich liberals are stealing the public's money to get the elitist entertainment fix. What should we think about Republicans/conservatives demanding tax cuts (almost always and almost totally) for wealthy business owners, which I (in a Jack Kelly fashion) will suggest are mostly Republicans/conservatives. What should we think about Republicans/conservatives demanding cuts in funding for the poor in heating assistance, education and other areas, and forcing public employees such as teachers to take pay cuts and taking away their right to collective bargaining? What should we think about Republicans/conservatives demanding that oil companies continue to receive billions in subsidies, even while the price of gas goes through the roof? Apparently Republicans/conservatives don't believe in shared sacrifice.

Kelly wants us to believe that a) NPR employees are diehard liberals (not to say communists) and b) that NPR employees let their private opinions influence their public reporting. Now, I think it is reasonable to say that an organization that is funded even partially by the government should not have a political agenda, but I would say that NPR and PBS meet that criteria. I will say that NPR and PBS do run stories about the poor and disenfranchised sometimes. Do those stories, in and of themselves, indicate a political agenda? I would say not, and I will say that private sector news outlets are unlikely to run such stories, for fear of upsetting advertisers and/or corporate owners. Now I won't say that the Wall Street Journal (particularly editorial board), National Review and Fox News are the same as a partially funded government operation, but I will point out that at least Fox News claims to be "Fair and Balanced". Glenn Beck? Bill O'Reilly? Oh, they're "entertainment". Maybe you can't make an equivalency here, but I have to say O'Keefe seems to indicate that when the tables are reversed (so to speak), Republicans/conservatives have no trouble connecting dots. Given politicians like Michele Bachmann and Peter King, I can see why Republicans/conservatives would want to eliminate even unbiased reporting like the sort that I believe NPR/PBS provides.

One final thought, Kelly slips in at the end of his column a shot at Obama in complaining that the deficit in 2007 was much smaller than our current deficits. I would point out that Republicans/conservatives also were in charge of regulating financial companies, which I think they failed spectacularly at. Obama's first fiscal year had the stimulus (which was a third tax cuts, although for the wrong (poor) people). Trying to fix the mess the Republicans/conservatives caused has made the economy worse. That Republicans/conservatives have shown a huge lack of patriotism and accused Obama of being a Kenyan, a Muslim and a communist, encouraging American business not to hire employees and/or outsourcing jobs. Of course, Kelly doesn't even care about jobs (like a typical Tea Partier/Republican/conservative).

Observations ... gas prices ...

2011-03-06T12:23:00.005-05:00

To get out of the Jack Kelly rut I am in, I thought I would look at some other issues that Instead of responding to someone else's writing, I want to comment on the world around (mostly).

So last time I looked, the Shell station on the corner was at $3.55 per gallon for regular. It has gone up, what, twenty cents or more in the last week or so. Since Libya had only a small percentage of the world oil market (although it apparently may have huge reserves), it seem unlikely that actual supply shortages account for the rise in Like 2008, speculation seems to be the cause of this increase.

I have long advocated European levels of taxation on gas. I believe that a system could have been set up to transfer maybe five or six hundred dollars back (from the gas tax revenues) to people whose income is below the US median (or some other number designed to keep from punishing the poor) as part of a tax refund. Thus, the higher price at the pump would have made people think twice about unnecessary driving, but the poor would not have suffered. However, if the price continues to rise on its own, we may soon reach European gas prices without having their taxes.

When I had suggested taxes at European levels, some conservatives have suggested they would be delighted to see that, hoping it would undo Obama and other Democrats in 2012. Now we say those prices, but we can be sure that the Republicans will blame Obama anyway.

One thing I find interesting is that US car companies had decided to start offering more fuel efficient cars about when Obama was elected. I guess they thought that Obama and the new Democratic majority would mandate stringent new fuel standards. In fact, most car companies have models sold in Europe which get better still mileage, which might be offered in the US as a last resort (although it does not look like this will happen). But I am fascinated by the new Ford Fiesta and the Chevy Cruze Eco, not to mention the Fusion hybrid (and of course the foreigners like the new Honda Insight). The non hybrids that eke out high mileage on the highway don't do nearly so well in the city, where many of us do a lot of our driving. I will say that obviously the people who live in the ex-urbs do quite a lot of highway driving, but except for the few who choose hybrids, I can't see ex-urb dwellers driving Cruzes or Fiestas. They are more SUV types.

Meanwhile, the cheap Cruze and fiesta may well be the choice for less wealthy urban residents, which is unfortunate, since they will get less than optimal mileage. By contrast, the relatively cheap Honda Insight would be a great choice for a city car, since it gets almost as good of mileage in the city as it gets on the highway. Pity the American hybrid sedans, the Volt and the Fusion, while getting good mileage, are expensive and big.

There is alternatives to car travel worth considering. We don't and won't have high speed for some time to come, and even if we do get, it will be designed like airports, with stations far from neighborhoods. But for day to day travel, if we choose to live in the city, where apartments are much more energy efficient. Often, we can walk to stores or work (I am that lucky). Or we can take public transportation (light rail or more often buses), or ride a bike. On that score there are some interesting alternatives. I like electric bikes mostly because there is a good chance you can arrive at your destination less sweaty. Bikes with lithium batteries have come down in price in the last three or four years (the time frame I have been looking at them). The lithium batteries are lighter (which is nice but not that important), hold a bigger charge and thus have a longer range, and do not need to be recharged immediately after use. This last point makes the bike more than just a commuter (to be recharged at work, and then immediately after returning home). Instead, the bike can also be used to visit friends or for light shopping trips. That's why I really like any bike I buy to have a rear rack, that you hang various types of panniers from. Walmart offers three models of bikes from Currie Technologies that would meet the needs of commuters as well as those who might stop at a store or a friends some time. I believe the two higher levels of models at Walmart are last year's models, and will not last forever. Meanwhile, Currie has a new model: the Skyline for eight hundred. I hope it has provisions for a rear rack. This is the cheapest price for an electric bike with a lithium battery I have seen from a manufacturer.

Well, those were my thoughts.

Kelly pushes stereotypes

2011-03-06T09:03:00.002-05:00

All Presidents are interesting, I guess. I mean, when things happen, the President reacts or doesn't, and sometimes (perhaps often) the actions of the President (whether reactive or proactive) can have dramatic effects across the country. I think no other single job title consistently has this effect.

That said, I have to say that Jack Kelly's column today is somewhat appropriate, in examining aspects of President Obama's character, specifically his seeming willingness to accommodate republican ideas when considering policy. Of course Obama is a first in at least one respect as President, so I think it is safe to say that his actions would get a special scrutiny. Certainly I remember Pittsburghers were posting to blogs claiming Obama was going to create a secret police force and round up Republicans, and/or claiming that Obama is a socialist and/or a Muslim. Now, I still maintain my private theory that some of the actions Obama takes, he does with at least partially the intention of defying the assumptions made by those Pittsburghers and around half of the rest of the country. But while you might expect he would get praise for, say, the amount of tax cuts he put into the stimulus bill, instead that component of the stimulus is ignored by Republicans/conservatives, and Obama is blamed because the stimulus did not have that big an effect (as also predicted by liberal economists like Paul Krugman). Essentially the accommodations that Obama makes for Republicans (often before a policy is formally proposed) have been reinterpreted, with conservatives crowing that Obama is disappointing his supporters, or weak, or something.

Jack Kelly spends his whole column on that today. In doing so, he pushes some stereotypes that quite frankly I find offensive. Don't get me wrong, some of what he says about Obama I agree with, but some seems to be right out of the Palin/Tea Party playbook. His third paragraph starts with a grammatically bizarre sentence and then has a huge stereotype that is obviously false: "The desire among whites to rid themselves of racial guilt crossed party and ideological lines, but was felt most strongly by white liberals. White liberals could relate to Barack Obama because -- as a product of elite private schools and Ivy League colleges -- he was much like them." Ok, first, does no one edit Kelly's work? Is this writing something the Post Gazette would want to represent them to the country? And second, to be a white liberal, you have to be the product of an "elite" private school and an Ivy League college? Sorry, Bill Peduto, Pat Dowd, or anyone who didn't go to Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Penn, Brown, Columbia, Dartmouth or Cornell, you can't call yourself a liberal. This sort of bigotry based on education is straight out of the Tea Party's own version of a Declaration of Independence, which stated among other things, (from possibly faulty memory) that they would not be controlled by the educated elites. It reminds of nothing so much as Richard Nixon's railing against the "East Coast intellectual elite".

I won't spend much more (of your) time on this, except to note a few more whoppers. Near the end, Kelly starts to summarize Obama's misdeed, noting that he reneged on a promise to close Guantanamo (true) and on a promise not to raise taxed on the middle class (hunh?). What tax? Without listing a specific, and without noting the taxes lowered for everyone in the stimulus, this sounds like a made up attack, again straight out of the Palin/Bachman/Tea Party playbook.

Then in the next two sentences Kelly gives what is maybe the biggest whopper of them all: "He has even reneged on his implicit promise to be a racial healer. His administration has been the most racially polarizing since Woodrow Wilson's." I won't even dignify that with a comment.

Kelly finishes talking about how the media deceived us about Obama's brilliance (according to Kelly), finishing with "It's time now for them to show us the little man behind the curtain.". Totally silly, and demanding the media explain Obama to his satisfaction is just insulting to Kelly's readers.

The real agenda.

2011-02-27T13:56:00.002-05:00

Today's Jack Kelly column is interesting. Kelly talks about how evil public sector unions are in Wisconsin, particularly taking aim at teachers (Governor Walker has largely exempted police and firefighters from making cuts in their wages or benefits, evidently because police and firefighters are more likely to give money to Republicans). Kelly cites a CPA (!) who says "If government workers were paid the same as equivalent private sector workers, no state would have a budget deficit". In point of fact, the Center for State & Local Government Excellence found in 2008 that state and local workers made around 11 percent less than comparably educated private sector workers.

In a rare display of honesty, Kelly does note that Wisconsin public employee unions have offered to meet the governor's financial demands, although Kelly fails to note the governor has simply refused to talk to them. Kelly instead rails against the evils of collective bargaining, implying the unions will simply demand more money and reversal of the concessions next year. But these same unions have had no raises in two years, and at least one year in the past accepted an unpaid furlough that amounted to a three percent pay cut. And this was with a governor who is a Democrat.

Plus, Wisconsin is not currently bankrupt. In fact, before announcing this bill, Walker pushed through tax cuts benefiting big business. Further, the pension fund that Kelly talks about in vague, general terms is in fact fully funded. As so many Democrats and labor leaders have said, this is not about the budget.

I have heard several pundits/reporters suggest the Republican motivation in this case is to bust public sector unions, with the goal of reducing union influence in general. And some of that may be true, but today on "Meet the Press" I heard that Howard Fineman has proposed a slightly more limited but focused goal. Pubic sector unions are known for giving money and labor to the Democrats. Changing public sector unions by eliminating the automatic contribution from members (and reducing the income of members) will remove public sector unions as factors in elections. This would pave the way to change the financial equation, where Republicans will be able to receive essentially unlimited amounts of money from corporations while Democrats will have many fewer and smaller sources of financing.

Meanwhile, Kelly goes on about how Milwaukee teachers are paid, on average, $100,000 for nine months work in wages and benefits. By the way, that doesn't taking home a hundred grand, it means taking home maybe sixty, seventy grand (how much does Kelly make for working one day a week?). But Kelly says, eight of the 100 worst performing schools are in Milwaukee.

My question is, by cutting teacher pay and benefits forever more, does Kelly think Wisconsin (and the rest of the country) is going to get better job applicants? That paying less will make the city's schools better?

Apparently, in their desire to gain power in local, state and the federal government, Republicans are willing to permanently damage the public school system, and much of the rest the government (I haven't even mentioned cuts to the SEC, the IRS and the EPA).

The little engine that couldn't ....

2011-02-20T13:39:00.005-05:00

So today in his column, Jack Kelly essentially said that while freight trains are fine, passenger trains are pretty useless, and the government shouold not spend extra or perhaps any money on them. Before I look at the gaps in his argument, I should probably look at where I might agree with him. Kelly states that right now passenger rail accounts for a small percentage of all of travel in the US, and I have no doubt that's true. I suspect Amtrak has been given an impossible task, ordered to charge ticket prices that reflect as a large a part of costs as possible, and then given a subsidy that allows the trains to (just barely) continue running. I believe the trains between DC and New York/Boston are somewhat popular, but I would be surprised if any other routes could say even that.

So when Kelly compares passenger mile prices between driving, flying and taking the train, he is looking at just the cost of gas for driving, and the for flying the ticket price for a flying cattle car (full capacity seating) as compared to the less than full trains. Of course the driving cost ignores maintenance, insurance and other incidentals, and the cost of both driving and flying ignores their greater effects on the environment. But what really caught my eye was that Kelly ignores the fact that train ridership is higher in Europe (in absolute and percentage terms). Why would that be the case? I am not absolutely sure, but I'll bet a lot of the train tracks in Europe wee laid after world war II, and can accommodate faster trains (which they run). Oil being highly taxed there probably makes train travel more attractive pricewise, especially if the trains have more passengers, and so can better leverage the higher fuel efficiency per passenger mile of trains.

Amusingly Kelly also complains about the time it would take to go to a train station, without once mentioning the time it takes to go to airports, including larger parking lots and of course the wait at security checkpoints. But despite the fact I disagree with Kelly on theoretical grounds, I think he may have a point. Unless we throw maybe ten times what the President wants to spend, we won't be able to fund more than one or two projects, a drop in this bucket. Americans seem in love with cars (and/or SUVs and pick-ups) and flying, and even if Congress were to increase the gas tax (though I don't that coming to pass), I don't think Americans will give the cars and planes easily or soon.

Still, the ultimate point in Kelly's column, for my money, was where he said he had read somewhere that the Denver airport covers more land than would be required to build an Alaska to Miami rail line. First of all, hunh? And second, if anything, that meaningless factoid supports rail construction. But Kelly tries to present it as the opposite, as he so often does.

Kelly and Islam

2011-02-13T12:41:00.008-05:00

Jack Kelly continues his campaign of indirect attacks on the President while also implying conservatives would do a better job of running things, all vis a vis Egypt. He is snidely implying both that Obama has no influence in Egypt and that Obama is making missteps that endanger American interests and threaten to help the (according to Kelly) fundamentalist and terrorist Muslim Brotherhood take over the country. I can't help but wonder which is true.

Now, I think there is a danger the Muslim Brotherhood could wield significant or even dominant power in a future Egyptian government. I think that is the case because the Muslim Brotherhood is identified as a group that opposed Mubarak (or that Mubarak opposed, which ever). I think this is a possibility regardless of what the administration has said or will say. But Jack Kelly thinks it is important that you know to blame Obama if anything bad does happen, and to give neocons and Republicans credit if Egypt turns out OK.

Anyone who would describe Mark Steyn as a "humorist" has major issues (at least in my book).

Addendum to Kelly on food prices

2011-02-08T10:30:00.003-05:00

Interestingly, Paul Krugman wrote yesterday about much the same topic that Jack Kelly had on Sunday. Krugman mentioned the same basic ideas, that high food prices are putting the world's very poor at considerable risk. Krugman also mentioned, as Kelly did, that some people blame the Fed's "easy money" policy, although Krugman dismissed the notion. But Krugman also looked at a cause for the current spike in food prices that Kelly did not consider: climate change. Krugman suggested that droughts (in Russia) and floods (in Australia) are the sorts of weather we might expect to see becuase of climate change.

I notice that the PG did not reprint Krugman's column on Monday, as I believe they often, if not usually do.

Als0 in the Sunday NYTimes was a review of a book "Hot: Living Through the Next Fifty Years on Earth". Now, I haven't read this book, but I was struck by how (as communicated through the review) the book emphasized that we are handing off a lot of misery to our children. Our blinders (as indicated by the House of Representatives) towards climate change is increasing the depth and length of the problems that will be caused by climate change. We can't wish away the problem, neither religion or capitalism will save us. The price of oil will inevitably go up, whether we try to mange the increase or not (it is looking like we will not try).

Perhaps there is a similarity between our head in the sand behavior about climate change and the behavior of businesses in not hiring workers, in demanding to be able to avoid paying workers healthcare benefits, and in keeping executive compensation so far above average employees. There is that sense in both climate change and the business world that we have ours, and see no benefit in sharing or helping others. That worked well for the French monarchy and aristocracy in 1789.

Kelly on Egypt

2011-02-06T12:18:00.002-05:00

In today's Jack Kelly column, Kelly engages in innuendo and implies all sorts of negative things about Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood and Obama. To be fair, our experience with the Iranian revolution should let us us know that it is possible for revolutions in countries that have dictators we supported can turn out very bad for us. Kelly's various quotes indicate worst case scenarios for Egypt, and I will say that Americans should be reassured that Mohammad El-Baradei appears to be the leading figure to replace Mubarak. But Egypt will need to develop Democratic processes as rapidly as possible, or risk falling prey to another totalitarian regime.

I do want to note one paragraph in Kelly's column:

"President Barack Obama belatedly has concluded a lack of democracy is the source of instability in Egypt. The neoconservatives who were architects of President Bush's "freedom agenda" for the Middle East (which Mr. Obama sidetracked) wonder why it took him so long."

While Kelly is busy trying to pin this on Obama, let me ask, where was the neocon "freedom agenda" for Egypt during eight years of the Bush administration?

Kelly doesn't really rise to the occasion

2011-01-16T10:11:00.002-05:00

Today Kelly is somewhat complimentary to President Obama. But he also gives us numerous examples of Democrats who tried to pin Loughner to right wing lines. The funny thing, for me, is that Kelly closed with "In the debates to come, let us focus more on the policies and the facts supporting them, and indulge less in name-calling and finger-pointing.". Fair enough, except that Kelly just spent a entire column pointing fingers.

The talkfest ...

2011-01-10T12:12:00.005-05:00

Over on Two Political Junkies Maria posted rather angrily about Gabrielle Giffords. I don't blame her, and I am not happy that conservatives and Tea Party types have spent the last 24 months making relatively frequent veiled violent threats. What I found somewhat appalling is that the first and several more comments suggested Loughner is/was connected to the left. In other words, liberal complaints about the right's violent rhetoric are totally unjustified, and the right's claims that the left is plotting the overthrow of t he government are vindicated by Loughner. It has turned into a heated comment fest, 26 at last look.

Similarly, but in a more subtle way, the New York Times columnists have joined the national debate. Paul Krugman, not surprisingly, blames the culture of anger (indistinctly) cultivated by conservatives aand Tap Party types. To his credit, he does not specifically say the shooter was a Republican or Tea Party type, somewhat less to his credit he singles out Bill O'Reilly an Glenn Beck as two of the figures responsible for the "Climate of Hate" we are experiencing. I say somewhat less because while I personally don't like either man, there is a large group on the right involved in reckless rhetoric.

By contrast, Ross Douthat concentrated on the nuttiness of the Tucson shooter. He brings up the Communist connections of Lee Harvey Oswald, and the nuttiness of other assassins. He also noes the accusations of the left (he could almost be talking about Krugman's column). While I agree thee Loughner certainly looks like a classic nut, his apparent anti-government rantings certainly seem more at home on the right. And then there is Republican opposition to gun control.

Which brings Gail Collins. who makes what I feel are the most sensible points. Collins is appalled (as am I) that Loughner could purchase a (concealable) handgun capable of firing 30 bullets without reload. Collins notes the Giffords herself is opposed to gun control, But Collins also notes that Giffords is practical Democrat who likes to find compromises that allow legislation to go forward. So maybe Giffords would have supported a limited gun control, one where maybe the next nut might only shoot six people, instead of eighteen. Which is to say that Collins tries to find solutions that might reduce the level of violence, instead of pinning or denying blame. Which no one besides myself will praise her for.

Kelly today, and other matters

2011-01-09T20:49:00.002-05:00

Howdy all, Sorry I missed last week's Kelly. I had a bit of surgery done, and now I am home recuperating.

But I couldn't ignore Jack Kelly's column today. In fact, if it were up to me, I would not have chosen to publish that column today, in light of the events in Tucson yesterday.

I am not going to go into great detail about the column, I think the obvious is enough without detail. If Kelly was right that there are the two kinds of Muslims, wouldn't we see civil wars across the Middle East? Yes, Pakistan has something of a civil war going on, and it is caused by the Taliban moving over from Afghanistan.

There is unrest in the Middle East, caused by occupations, poverty, repressive governments, etc. There is also anger at the way the US has behaved in Muslim countries. And some of that anger has made it to the our shores. Still, let's think about this. Eric Holder says that 50 of the 125 arrested in the last two years are American citizens. That's with the current administration still using Bush era wire-tapping and surveillance techniques. Given how much damage twenty terrorists did on 9/11, 50 citizens is nothing to sneeze at. But given how hard the government is working on this, should we suspect their might be hundreds or thousands more out there? Do we want McCarthy-like witch hunts, with persecution of Muslims throughout the US?

I think the answer is obvious.

Education as the boogeyman

2010-12-26T09:10:00.003-05:00

Last week Jack Kelly claimed everyone hates "Obamacare" (well a majority of right thinking people hate it) and that it costs too much and takes away our freedom. This week Kelly is going after education; it costs too much and yields to little reward for people who study humanities or social sciences. This is an issue that strikes close to home, as my Dad is a retired math professor and I work at a local University. Now, I will say that in some respects I agree with him, but mostly Mr Kelly is full of ... well, you know.

There are funny meta-aspects to Kelly's argument, which I will get to after saying far too much. He says that since 1981 the cost of colleges/Universities has increased "sixfold", while the Consumer Price Index has only increased 2 and a half fold. What's interesting to me about that is that since 1981 a Republican has been in the White House for twenty of the last twenty nine years. Now Jack Kelly writes an essentially political column, so one would assume Kelly thinks this is a political problem, with political solutions. So why have the Republicans been so mean to college students (or allowed colleges to be so greedy)? Of course, indeed if the government stopped providing (or insuring or whatever) college grants and loans and tax credits, undoubtedly only the rich would go to college. And many colleges would cut back and many would close up shop all together. This apparently would suit Kelly just fine.

Now, for myself, the job I do could absolutely be done by someone who does not have a college degree. But they hired someone with a degree over all other applicants (me), which is the trend these days in a number of jobs. I suspect (although I do not know) that many of my work colleagues who have been on the job for twenty years or more do not have degrees, but all the more recent hires do seem to have them.

Part of my job involves verifying receipts and insuring that purchases are legitimate ones, following accounting rules. I am only part of that mechanism, and if I wanted to cheat the University (and the taxpayers and students and donors), I would have to enlist the help of several people, some who I know only barely. I would like to think that my college degree also makes me a more conscientious employee, one who is better able to see the big pictures as I perform smaller tasks. But I am probably not working all the way up to my potential, so I might be the poster child for Kelly's argument.

Except that I am working at a University, where we are supposed to be fleecing the public. Well, I have good hours, good benefits, a comfortable office, a gym I can workout at, good (but not great) vacation benefits. If I take classes, the tuition is free, but at the graduate level the taxes on that tuition are literally supposed to be crushing. And to be clear, my pay does not reflect the fleecing part. My dad, the math professor, received what one might call comfortable wages. I suspect he made as much as a plumber or an electrician, maybe a tad more, maybe a tad less.

It is true that the costs of Colleges, Universities and technical schools such as the Art Institute, Kaplan/ITT something or other and Rosedale Tech have all increased. There are two aspects to the increase, in my opinion. One is the commitment the government and sometimes the nation made to helping level the playing field for minorities, and the other is Bill Clinton.

During the seventies I think that there was an increase in both minority scholarships and assistance for low income people in general, which might well
disproportionately benefit minorities (who have higher rates of poverty). And Bill Clinton greatly subsidized higher education through new tax credits for attending school. And since the seventies, I think the government system of guaranteeing student loans has also increased the number of people attending higher ed of one form or another.

This is all related to what Kelly was getting at, that everyone has to admit higher ed costs have gone up. I will say he is wrong that educators and administrators are making out like bandits. But schools have gone on a property buying spree (probably more expensive during the bubble), and tried to sock money into endowments (consisting of investments ... uh oh).

But here's the thing. I think Kelly's argument that people with non science degrees are not getting the benefit of their degree by taking lower skilled jobs overlooks the fact that many companies are choosing to hire college in preference to high school grads, even if the job doesn't require the degree. And the college grads can advance, where the high school grad might not be able to (unless they use Clinton type tax credits to get the degree @ night). So although it is not an ideal situation, the reality on the ground is that if a person takes Kelly's apparent advice, saves money and does not have a degree, (s)he may lose in the competition even for the jobs that ostensibly don't require a degree.

But there are two further issues. As I have mentioned before, the unemployment rate for people without a high school degree is 15%, for those who have only a high school degree the rate is 10%, while for those with a college degree the rate is 4.5% (I am not sure for those with an associates or "some college/university"). Having a degree means that it should be easier to get at least some job, if you try, while not having a degree makes that much more problematic.

And of course we know that the unemployment rates for young African-Americans are often much higher, although I suspect having the degree makes an even bigger difference there. I wonder if that is something Kelly has taken into consideration when seeming to recommend young people not get degrees. His suggestion could set one or even two generations back, considering how little progress has really been made in achieving equal rights for the vast majority of African Americans.

Now, anyone who reads this blog knows I have linked Kelly to the Tea Party movement. Unfortunately, the semi-racist narrative I described above fits with the views of at least some Tea Partiers. But there is an additional ominous element here. The Tea Party "declaration of independence", which presumably some number, possibly a majority or even all Tea Partiers agree with, includes a line complaining that the government is trying to bankrupt the country using socialist schemes so that the peasants will have to beg for sustenance from self styled "educated classes" and so-called "experts". There is also an line about the Tea Party rejecting "transformational change" performed on the nation by (as they put it) smug elites who call them "educated classes".

I believe the Tea Party has made it's position clear on intellectualism and education. So why should I not believe Kelly is subtly advancing the Tea Party position even while claiming to look out for the interests of young people. And as side consequence, out and out torpedoing the chances for employment of young African Americans and other disadvantaged minorities. Which is the final meta-aspect to Kelly's column for me.

Want to die?

2010-12-19T10:24:00.002-05:00

Jack Kelly would like you to risk death so that he can keep some tiny measure of freedom that he doesn't need anyway. Today in his column, Kelly tells us a federal judge in Virginia struck a blow for freedom; also the often partisan Rasmussen polling organization found that when they ask the questions, Americans don't like "Obamacare".

The thing is (and I can't believe I have to say this again), health care reform is good for everyone in almost every way you look at it. When the uninsured poor go to the emergency room (as George Bush obliviously suggested they do), they literally face bankruptcy, and since hospitals don't have to admit people without insurance, they simply have to stabilize them, going to the emergency room does not necessarily solve health problems. But of course past that, there is that bankruptcy (whatever loans and credit card debt being swept into the un-payable healthcare debt), the higher costs hospitals charge to address unpaid bills, the absenteeism, the loss of potential productive labor to untreated illness and possible death. By the way, as a PG employee, I suspect Kelly has perfectly good health care benefits, which I am strongly suspect he would be unwilling to give up as a matter of principle (Go ahead, Mr Kelly, prove me wrong).

Now I will grant you that the wealthy enjoy a great health care system, possibly the best in the world. If adding health-care insurance for those without it and adding new regulations about whose coverage can be canceled and also limiting lifetime maximums mean that the health care of the wealthy would suffer, I can understand why they (and thus the Republicans) would object. But as far as I can see, the only way the wealthy suffer is if the small (or large) business they own has to buy health insurance for their (low level) employees (which they could make those employees pay a huge portion of). I assume these are low paid employees like cleaning or clerical staff in law firms or medical practices, employees who see how much the professionals are making in profits. If it is suffering to provide employees with a benefit that you yourself enjoy, and would help keep them at work and not bankrupt, then I think a little suffering is in order.

So (noted constitutional scholar) Kelly spends time giving us his (actually the Tea Party's) view of the commerce clause of the constitution. Of course, the Supreme's have shown the ability to accommodate the modern world in their rulings (Scalia: handguns are constitutional because you can hold a handgun in your other hand); so I think the idea of balancing economic needs with the constitution is not beyond them (unless they start getting death threats from Tea Party members).

Kelly also whines about costs (ignoring the cost of no health care reform to the country in terms of both dollars and lives), and Kelly emphasizes that 222 waivers from health care provisions have been granted to various entities including "many to labor unions that fought for passage of the bill". Kelly states that more than a million workers have been exempted, says this a lot, but tellingly he doesn't say what the waivers are for. Are they for minor provisions? Is Kelly saying that the only good laws are ones with no flexibility (the kind of laws republicans like are the ones they can force down everyone's throats)?

At least smart Republicans are talking about alternatives, though not Tea Party types. Again tellingly, Kelly offers not a word about alternatives to Obamacare, he only cackled about what he thinks is momentum against it. Of course, the Republicans/Tea Party have been fairly successful in turning their stories (which sometimes could be characterized as out and out lies) into some people's view of reality (see Two Political Junkies).

Leaks-redux

2010-12-13T12:07:00.003-05:00

I am still turning Wikileaks over in my mind.

I suspect some people will now choose not to defend Wikileaks because Julian Assange is accused of rape. Except that I think what he is really accused of is consential sex gone bad. The two women he had sex with went with him willingly, undressed and started the process (so to speak) willingly. At some point in one case a condom broke and in the other the woman wanted to stop and Assange didn't. So, I don't think you can call Assange some sort of sexual predator, although I would be willing to stipulate Assange is an asshole of a Bill Clinton degree.

The point is, though, whether Assange's character has anything to do with whether the cables in the latest Wikileaks release are true or not. It puts me in mind of the ACLU defending Nazis (or the KKK) having marches. As long as the Nazis don't violate any laws, don't throw rocks or firebomb synagogues, you kind of have to let them march. That's because you want to make sure that the government couldn't use anti-Nazi rally rules to silence anti war or anti racism protesters. Yet that effort by the ACLU was what has really done them in as a national organization.

So too, I gather American politicians (most notably Hilary Clinton) have been screaming that the Wikileaks release will destroy our ability to conduct diplomacy. I say that being able to say one thing publicly and another privately between government employees and politicians is what gets us bad policy and even into wars. There was one politician I had met years ago and had the rare opportunity to ask him first if he knew protectionist steel policy was bad for the economy (he did) and then why he supported it. He basically admitted it was for the votes (a politician being kind to a student intern). My point being that if more politicians (and for that matter economists) told the truth as they understand it, we would be less happy in the short run but maybe much happier in the long run.

This Wikileaks release exposes the fact that our diplomats don't think much of some politicians in some government, that we spy even on allies as a matter of course, and that some of our allies privately want us to do things they won't admit to wanting publicly. And Yeman agreed to claim credit for things we did. Whoopee.

This release has nothing to do with the much more important financial industry situation, where the industry is fighting many reforms, and many, perhaps most politicians are assisting the financial industry. In other words, this Wikileaks has nothing to do with the most important issues facing us, yet some politicians and some of the media act as though it is the Apocalypse (and almost all the rest talk about it with a sneer).

I suppose that's the point. Wikileaks is a wedge into a world outside our view. With that wedge, we can do one of two things. We can put in more wedges at other places in that shadowy world, or we can kick the Wikileaks wedge out, and forget we ever saw anything.

Kelly's Hero

2010-12-11T22:57:00.004-05:00

So, I guess there is a new thing in the world: the Jack Kelly Presidential fantasy scenario. Kelly is trying to be a calm, rational prognosticator, to help us by noticing things we may have missed, and guiding us to their true meanings. He identifies Michael Bloomberg as a possible candidate for President. He notes Bloomberg's contempt for Republican voters and the current Democratic President. And Kelly notes that if Bloomberg ran, he would hurt a candidate like Mitt Romney most, perhaps because he and Romney are similar in being wealthy and regarded as intelligent. According to Kelly, Bloomberg would hurt Sarah Palin the least, because Bloomberg is more like Obama than he is like Palin. So ipso facto if the Republicans want to retake the White House and Bloomberg runs, then they should nominate Palin

The helpful Jack Kelly, pretty much proving what I have been saying about how he wants to get involved with and shill for the Tea Party (two words he never says once in today's column; did he think he could fool us). To be sure, Ralph Nader had a majorly bad effect on Al Gore's campaign and probably cost him the election. Still, I would be shocked if Palin made it past the first hurdle, getting nominated as the candidate. It would prove all the negative things that have somewhat jokingly said about the Tea Party and the Republicans were in fact true.

By the way, I skipped last week's column (I guess I just wasn't in the mood). It wasn't as political as usual, more of a defense oriented column. Kelly thinks we should leave South Korea to defend itself. I disagree, I think defending South Korea continues to send a positive message to the rest of the world.

Wikileaks

2010-11-30T12:19:00.002-05:00

One of the stories I have let sail past me is the Wikileaks story. This issue strikes right at the heart of the sorts of cognitive dissonance we live with now. Which is to say one of, perhaps the biggest, disappointments with the Obama administration has nothing to do with increasing the deficit to stimulate the economy, or health care. That disappointment is the large scale continuation of business as usual in the executive branch. Now, the current Afghan surge is possibly part of that situation (that is sort of ambiguous), but the sorts of things revealed in the Wikileaks dump clearly is. Without having gone through them, I gather there have been secret talks where our middle eastern allies are pushing us to at least bomb Iran.

Glenn Greenwald has been covering this story, and delves into government and media reaction to the Wikileaks release. And to me, that is where things get interesting. The government is objecting to this theft of secret documents and the media is largely agreeing with them. Bill Keller admits to checking with the administration as it went to publish parts of the release, to make sure lives would not be endangered. So how is that different than Judith Miller publishing information about WMD's that she got from the (previous) administration without independent confirmation in the run-up to the Iraq war?

However, since this is the Obama administration, many people are caught between their automatic support for a Democratic administration and their desire to support whistle-blowers standing up to authority. Actually, I'll allow that any given person's support for Obama may be more nuanced than "automatic", but any one who steps back and tries to look at this situation dispassionately has to wonder why the Obama administration is acting so much like the Bush administration. Most nobody is stepping back. And that is a problem because it will have a further chilling efect on whistle blowers elsewhere in the government and in private industry.

The movie "Inside Job" also noted that many of Obama's top advisers, including Timothy Geitner and Lawrence Summers, have strong ties to banks and Wall Street (including sitting on boards). Now, I won't say that Obama's administration should have been a complete break with the past. But I think that an attempt at more balance, bringing in some people who were less inclined to place the financial industries' interests over the rest of the country, would have been a good thing. Increasingly, Obama is inhabiting the worst of all worlds. He is villainized by the right, excoriated by the Tea Party, and yet serves the interests of super rich and the military industrial complex. Can we get something, either Obama cutting his ties to industry and secrecy, or for the right to acknowledge Obama has done them a lot of good?

Back in time for Kelly

2010-11-28T20:45:00.004-05:00

Back???

Yeah, I was out of town, visiting my brother, dad and cousin in the sunny South (where it was under 30 this morning). My brother asked if I would blog about my trip, and I may.

Meanwhile, though, I could chat a bit about Jack Kelly's Column today. My overall reaction is to say a word that Mr Kelly does not: "deficit". So many of the Republicans in general and Tea Party people in specific ran on reducing the deficit. Here's Jack Kelly suggesting the Republicans hold the Start Treaty hostage to a commitment to spend huge new amounts of money to modernize our nuclear arsenal. Kelly is worried that our aging arsenal will not be seen as a credible threat (because nukes deteriorate). Yeah, buit what would be the reaction to our suddenly having a new set of nukes compared to the Russian's old set. Kelly expresses concern about China being a threat, which it is to some degree. However, I am not sure that giving the Chinese a new reason to fear us is necessarily a good move. Our previous President showed a willingness to invade one country based on a flimsy excuse, and we could elect another Republican in 2012 or 2016. Perhaps Mr Kelly is thinking about a near version of mutually assured destruction, one where our nukes are weighed against our debt that China is holding. Except that in that case we have an incentive to nuke China to cancel the debt (probably what Kelly has in mind).

In any event, Kelly thinks the Senate should wait until January to vote on the Start treaty. After all, the people have spoken in that they elected Republicans such that they are a majority in House, and six new members in the Senate. The people have spoken, and certainly would not want the current Senate to do anything until it's new members are there. Except I think the people were lied to ("the Democrats have done nothing/have expanded government to a larger size than ever before") and misled. Now, you may disagree with that assessment, or say "so what, too bad". But I think I am entitled to say the Democrats should do now what they can as much as Mr Kelly is entitled to say Congress should defer to the (supposed) will of the people.

Kelly pretty much tries to mislead us in this column as well, intentionally or otherwise. For example, he takes pains at the beginning of the column to tell us the treaty itself is a bad treaty (not in our national security interests), and that he will get back to that. Then a bit later he says something about how progressives are frozen in cold war thinking, and repeats that the treaty is bad, as if he had made his case. Now granted, he then complains about China and about how ballistic missile defense might be harmed by the treaty, but if that is part of his case, he makes it in the most confusing manner possible.

And as far as ballistic missile defense goes, I have not heard of a successful test ever since the program was started during the Reagan administration. All it seems like is corporate welfare for defense manufacturers. Maybe it is time to scrap the program (remember - "deficit"?).

Kelly tries to flash his "national security" credentials today, but mostly shows himself to be a transparent shill for the Republicans. I do have to say, though, he risks angering those new darlings of the Republicans, the Tea Party, some of whom are ready and willing to cut defense as well as Medicare and Social Security.

You can't always get what you want ....

2010-11-21T09:35:00.002-05:00

but if you try sometimes, you just might find, you get what you neeeeeeeeeeee-ee-eeeeeee-ee-eeeeeed (ooooooo oo oo oooooooo). *grin*

What to say about today’s Jack Kelly column ? Well, I majored in econ (as well as poli sci) as an undergrad (a quarter century ago) but would not call myself an economist. But I wouldn’t call Mr Kelly one either.

I will bring up my own favorite left field loony idea. Kelly brought up numerous critics to “quantitative easing”: the Chinese, the Germans, Republican leaders, the Chamber of Commerce and somebody called Charles Hugh Smith. The one group he failed to mention is the one group I have been suggesting he is court (although I confess I don’t know why he is doing that). And mind you the group is more of a loose movement that doesn’t have specific leaders or anyone that can set specific policy or even articulate agreed upon goals; they’re more like a mob that picks up a chant. The group of which I speak is of course the Tea Party. Both Sarah Palin and rand Paul have spoken out incoherently against Fed Policy. I couldn’t say whether any of Bristol’s dance numbers were supposed to be interpreted as comments on Fed Policy (instead of comments on how dumb we really are).

So can I say Kelly is wrong about the effects “quantitative easing” will have? No, I am not that smart, and to be fair, there are a fair number of critics besides the obvious opponents of the Obama administration like Republican politicians and their patrons the Chamber of Commerce. I can not see how the Fed’s ultimate articulated goal of stimulating commercial lending will affect the extremely high unemployment rate (15%) of Americans without high school degrees. As I have said before, spend money (maybe the same amount as would be spent on quantitative easing) on transportation projects that give hiring preference to people without high school degrees (if that is feasible to do). As an executive department decision, call it a defense priority (national emergency highway system) and let Defense run it.

And something like that may still happen if Congress gridlocks next year. Meanwhile, though, after watching “Inside Job” I am unhappy about feeding the banks even more money, especially since they aren’t lending with the first round of money they were given. But the banks are where commercial lending takes place, so I suppose we still need to deal with them.

Back again ...

2010-11-14T10:14:00.001-05:00

Back again. I still remember the podcamp speaker who said she hates when bloggers apologize for not posting. Never the less…

I went to a movie yesterday – “Inside Job”. Do you know the story? It is a documentary on the financial collapse. Yeah, I knew a lot of the material, but hardly all. The movie was well put together. Perhaps in some ways too well, but mostly it was words speaking for themselves (if you will forgive the phrase). They had many of the individuals in the crisis, not necessarily the CEO’s of Morgan Stanley or Lehman Brothers, but they had the guy who designed the Bush tax cuts. They had a major financial lobbyist. So I think it is fair to say they had the other side (as well as Barney Frank and others). The movie maker (Charles Ferguson?) asked the questions, to be sure, but there was the other side. It is at the Manor and a Bridgeville Destina theatre right now, and well worth seeing.

By the way, the movie spared neither Bill Clinton nor Barack Obama, they both subscribed to what is becoming our prevailing wisdom of deregulation and coddling the damn financial companies. And speaking of the prevailing wisdom, the movie reserved a chapter (one of six or seven) to talk about how economics has been co-opted, how economists are literally bribed by financial corporations. As someone who hopes that academia can help us understand and find solutions, it was really disappointing to hear (I think it was) the chair of economics at Harvard say that he didn’t think professors should have to disclose their possible conflicts of interest.

Needless to say, at this moment I am even more suspicious (and disgusted) with the prevailing wisdom(s). I don’t like how the Democrats are echoing Republicans, and I am really, really pissed about what the Republicans said before and still say after the election.

And I will pause and pivot here a minute to give my usual Sunday comment about Jack Kelly. I didn’t comment on last Sunday’s column in part because it wasn’t that interesting. He wants Obama to set aside in 2012. How should I interpret that? He talks in a Republican tinged prevailing wisdom, so already his view of reality appears distorted. Is it that he just doesn’t like the black man? He says the Democrats (which by the way I think he means Obama) lost working class whites; but since he doesn’t have a citation, I would wonder who he means – actual Democrats or just independent working class whites. One thing to consider is that apparently Obama only won white males under 30 in 2008. A majority of white males above 30 supported McCain, so Obama and the Democrats never had them to begin with.

This week’s column does much the same for Nancy Pelosi. He suggests she should not run for minority leader, and as proof he says that she might be the most unpopular figure in the country – only 8 percent of independents approve of the job she is doing.

“Independents”? Are they somehow more important than the rest of us? Any discussion of independents makes me think of a character in “12 Angry Men”. The “ad” man (George Webber) was swayed by the last authoritative argument that he heard, so he switched his jury vote a couple of times. Independents were clearly swayed by the Republican’s version of “prevailing wisdom” in the recent election. I already mentioned what I think about the prevailing wisdom, even or perhaps especially if supported by academic economic opinion (especially a Martin Feldstein, although Bernanke and even Laura Tyson did not come off well in “Inside”.

Kelly said a couple of interesting things in the last couple of weeks. Last week he said (and I agree) he foresees gridlock in Congress for the next two years. This week he came roaring back to courting the Tea Party with this final remark:
“We cannot restore the republic our forefathers intended unless we limit the terms of members of Congress, and limit their ability to sell favors.”
Yeah, I don’t like earmarks much, although I understand that politicians first and foremost do want to be re-elected (for better *or* worse), and so want to bring home presents for their constituents. But at a deeper level, Kelly’s folksy BS not only doesn’t help address the current financial crisis, it actively prevents our finding real solutions.

That would be a good place to stop, but there is one more thing I want to put out there, a general proposal to alleviate unemployment. I believe I have mentioned before that the middle and of course upper classes are not suffering as an aggregate group, 4.5% and 4% unemployment for bachelors and graduate level degree holders. But for people who do not even have a high school degree: 15% unemployment. We also know we need to at least shore up if not improve our infrastructure. Let’s put them together, manual labor jobs with preference given to people targeted as need job experience and training for projects working on our roads and bridges. In fact, I could also see public/private partnerships for solar, wind or tidal power corporations. A win win that would help the people really hurt by the recession. Therefore without a chance.

Two days ....

2010-10-31T12:15:00.002-04:00

This post was inspired by a Paul Krugman column.

So the election is in two days. In Pittsburgh, Mike Doyle is likely to be relected, it is a possibly toss up between Toomey and Sestack, but apparently likely to be Toomey, and the same for Corbett and Onorato (Corbett winning). Now here’s a question: what do you think will happen when the Republicans take the House, and perhaps the Senate?

My answer: nothing. If you thought we did not see much progress on the economy in the last two years, get ready for less in the next two years. Some Republicans claim vaguely they want to reduce spending, and certainly they want to cut taxes for the rich. But most Republicans (besides some Tea Party fanatics) don’t describe specifics, even to the point of not pledging to reduce earmarks.

But assuming that Republicans can overcome their lack of enthusiasm and their history of spending during the Bush years, and pass bills in the house, how well things go in the Senate. The Republicans may or may not get a majority there, but we now know that 60 votes for cloture is the new standard for passage of legislation. What is to stop the Democrats from picking up the habits of the Republicans of the last four years? Personal holds and filibusters are absolutely possible. And if the Republicans change the rules to prevent Democrats from doing these things, then when the pendulum swings again, the new rules will apply to them too.

And at the end of the process, there is still Obama, who can veto legislation. And whatever else might be the result from Tuesday’s election, I don’t think the Republicans will have two thirds majorities in both houses.

So what will happen next January when the new members take their seats in Congress. My guess is nothing. I think the House may do some things, nothing that would help people who are actually unemployed. I don’t think a repeal of healthcare will pass the Senate, although some tax breaks for corporations and the rich might (and might be signed by Obama). I think the remaining middle class and those who do make more than a hundred grand (whom I classify as at least upper middle class) will continue to do OK. But I think the poor face more tough years, out as far as I can see.

Of the races, I am not a huge fan of Onorato, but I guess he would be better than Corbett. I am also not a fan of Doyle, but that race doesn’t matter (the primary was more important, but I don’t even remember if Doyle had a challenger). But the important vote is for Toomey or Sestak. Yes, it may not matter if I am right that the Republicans can never get enough of a majority to do anything. But I gotta say why give the Republicans reason to think they might be able to roll back the Democrat’s accomplishments. Plus, despite the Republicans/Tea Party’s overheated rhetoric, I don’t think either Obama or Sestak is that radical. But Toomey might be.

You will have to decide for yourself. I hope you read/watch more than one source, and if you have a job now, you ask yourself how much Republicans have tried to help the poor in the past.

Yeah, Kelly today ...

2010-10-31T10:41:00.002-04:00

Yeah, so I haven't posted for a couple of weeks. I am hoping to get better about that.

I didn't bother with Jack Kelly's column last week, because he was blaming everyone for intelligence failures (except "Able Danger", an apparently muscular data mining program). I am a little baffled by Kelly's column today. He cites a report by Neil Barofsky, Treasury’s Inspector General for the Troubled Assets Relief Program. Now, apparently Congress saddled the TARP not only with saving Wall Street (a reasonable enough goal, or have we forgotten the Great Depression), but also with having banks lend to small business and even bring unemployment down. Now those were laudable goals but as Obama was elected Wall Street decided to refuse to play along. They have loaned little, and apparently are still engaging in risky behavior (as financial regulation slowly gets implemented). Loaning almost no money means that of course that there was not extra cash to expand business, which is how TARP would help unemployment fall.

But what is amazing is that in the interest of criticizing Democrats and especially Obama in any way possibly, Kelly is agreeing with this report from the TARP IG. He is agreeing with the idea that banks should have been forced to loan money to business. What happened to the free market, to shrinking the government, to getting the government off our backs? I mean, I might go for forcing the banks to loan money, but even I would have trouble with what mechanism would be used to decide where loans would be made (how the businesses would be approved and how much).

Kelly disguises his desperate embracing of any criticism of Obama as a criticism of the media. He claims that the “liberal” is deliberately ignoring the TARP IG’s report, because it criticizes the President. Maybe that’s true, although the media (liberal or otherwise) has not really been a friend of the President, with all the coverage of the President’s low approval ratings and sketchy coverage of the health care bill. But here’s a couple of questions: what about the people in government who eliminated the regulations that would have prevented the financial crisis? What about the banks that decided not to lend money?

As I said, TARP’s goal was laudable enough, but perhaps unrealistic. And as Democrats all over the country have done, I have some complaints about the President. But in this case, I think that the “crime” of not meeting unrealistic goals should take a back seat to other “crimes” that have been committed, such as getting us into this mess and those that have done little to nothing to help us get out of the mess.

It's Sunday ...

2010-10-17T10:29:00.003-04:00

So today's Jack Kelly column has one interesting element. It has no pandering specifically to the Tea Party that I can see. Kelly does take a number of shots at a sitting United States Representative, and makes assertions that may not be fact.

Barney Frank is a interesting character. I realize saying that paints a big target on my (somewhat out sized) stomach, but I will make the obligatory statement that I have nothing against, and indeed have been friends with gays (although I am lousy about maintaining friendships with everyone, including my gay friends). I don't begrudge Barney Frank being angry if he thinks he is being attacked because he is gay. The reason I say that is because Frank was apparently really pissed when Stephen Colbert did a profile on Frank. Of course you should know what you will get when Colbert asks to do a profile of you (an often cringe-worthy event) and although I haven't seen it I believe Colbert went all out (I have seen clips of Colbert sashaying behind a striding, glaring Frank). What was interesting to me was that for months after words Frank emphasized in his appearances how he has a sense of humor. He even told a few jokes here and there (I think one on "Wait Wait, Don't Tell Me") that were OK, not knee slappers. As I said, an interesting character.

Of course, Kelly said absolutely nothing about Frank being gay, which is no more than as it should be. What Kelly does say is that Frank is “The member of Congress most responsible for our current economic troubles” (and possibly in trouble) right off the bat. This is the alternate reality that conservatives live in. Kelly also identifies Chris Dodd and Kent Conrad, and also (interestingly) parts of the financial industry as villains in the economic collapse. Of course in the financial arena Kelly focuses on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, claiming their “bankruptcies accelerated the economic collapse”. Well, yes, that statement is obviously true, but to what degree did their collapse affect the recession as a whole? I would say not too much, but it fits Kelly’s view of the world to say the vast bulk of the recession is due to the Democrat created, assisting the poor Freddie and Fannie. In fact, Kelly re-writes history in saying that in 2003 and 2005 Bush proposed tighter regulation of Fannie and Freddie (read: gutting their mission of helping the poor get mortgages). I don’t remember Bush doing that, although I am sure he did, he just didn’t push very hard. Remember, Republicans held Congress in those years, and could have passed Bush’s regulations the way they passed the Bush tax cuts, through reconciliation.

I found it interesting that Kelly also blamed “Wall Street bankers” for their “bizarre financial instruments which were supposed to reduce risk, but multiplied it instead.”. He specifically mentioned Countrywide mortgages as a villain, a safe target since it is now defunct. I guess Republicans have taken a page from the Obama campaign playbook and now its ok for financial firms to be cast as villains in this election. After all, if Republicans take the House they can pass all sorts of deregulation and see if the Democrats in the Senate have the balls to stop them. The prospect of getting rid of Frank would be a big bonus for financial firms, since he has been a long time thorn in their sides.

EXTENDED THEME

The larger sociological questions of what is going on in this election are quite interesting too. How many people, in 2008, voted not for Obama but against McCain, especially after his poor debate performance? If Obama had tried to keep more of his campaign promises, such as to release more of the “detainees” (read prisoners) at Guantanamo, to stop being so secret about torture and wiretapping and to get us out of Afghanistan and Iraq, would the Democrats be more popular? Mind you, I would argue Obama has taken a half step on all of these (and Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell repeal, which has passed the House), but for every half step, there are more steps where Obama has allowed the Bush programs to continue, or even expand somewhat (predator drones). Mind you, these programs have nothing to do with jobs, and one might argue that the predator drone program, if correctly used, could be very effective against terrorists (even as one concedes it has not been effectively implemented). And speaking of jobs, what if Obama had not been distracted by health care for a year, what if he had made the stimulus larger and perhaps taken out some of the tax cuts in favor of spending on state and local government jobs. Would he have been a lightening rod for Republican fury such that Americans would not vote for a black candidate for President for decades?

Understand that in some ways Republicans won in 2008 in losing. They have been able to make wild accusations against Obama, the Democrats and what legislation has passed (health care reform, the stimulus) while using (abusing) the rules of the Senate to hold up hundreds of pieces of legislation. If Republicans win the House in the midterms and especially if they win the Senate, they will be expected to get things done. This will be a chance for Democratic Senators to take a page from the Republican play book and place holds on legislation, and use cloture against Republican legislation (especially if Democrats retain the Senate).

Meet the Press today implied that Obama may start to behave differently after the midterms (it’s not clear whether this depends on the outcome of the midterms or not). About time, I say. I think that Obama would re-energize his original followers if he became calmly strident towards the Republicans. He tried the reach across the aisle thing, and I will give him credit for that, but clearly the Republicans have rebuffed every effort (almost totally).

Tea Party in a bit more depth

2010-10-16T22:12:00.002-04:00

I've been watching Bill Maher's "Real Time" (which I want to call "Politically Incorrect") when I remember to catch it. I have to say, Maher makes a habit of having conservatives on, such as Andrew Breitbart sometime one, two weeks ago. Unfortunately since he usually has celebrities on, whether left or right, the discussions never resolve anything.

This past Friday (yesterday) Maher had a young woman on who was in charge of the St Louis Tea Party. Maher had evidently been looking for a Tea Party person to come on this show and somehow connected with this young woman. At the risk of being sexist or giving offense I will say she is an attractive young woman (whose name totally escapes me) but also, I was perhaps as curious as Maher about what she would have to say.

So I remember maybe the first thing Maher asked her concerned why all the Tea Party candidates are Republicans. Personally I think it is to get the votes of people who wouldn’t vote for a third party candidate or for a conservative unless the only other option was a liberal. But this woman’s response was, as I remember, to say that she had been a Democrat in college, and was an independent before joining the Tea Party. In other words, se simply didn’t answer Maher’s question. He didn’t press enough, but the rest of the program also went like that. When the Stimulus was brought up, she said it failed, she said we spent more on the Iraq war than on the stimulus, she threw in the phrase “out of control spending”. In other words, whether she was making points or defending herself, she simply used little Republican/Tea Party phrases.

A lot of politicians give interviews in sound bites, but I thought the Tea Party was/is supposed to be the antidote to politics as usual. It was/is supposed to be a breath of fresh air, a cleaning out of the old boys and bringing in people who might not be operators in the political world, but are good honest folk looking out for the little guy.

That’s saying nothing of how the Tea Party manifesto states that the Tea Party doesn’t trust or intend to obey the Republican party. Except that they really are identical to them.

What I'm Reading

2010-10-15T08:26:00.003-04:00

Nick Hornby, one of my favorite writers, used to write a column for the Believer magazine entitled "What I'm Reading". Basically the Believer paid him to read books and write witty things about them, and he did. In fact his columns were compiled into very good books.

In lieu of a proper post, I am going to point to some very good columns by other people I have stumbled across recently. Maybe I will write more about them later.

There was a fascinating review of/interview about a new documentary (coming to Pittsburgh in November) called "Inside Job" in Salon; the movie is yet more about the financial collapse. It is mostly an interview with the film maker; about midway through the interview he compares the last twenty years of popular economic thought to the intellectual decline of communist thought in the Soviet Union. Interesting stuff.

Glenn Greenwald is one of my new favorite writers. Paul Krugman has a blog entitled "The Conscience of a Liberal", but really that title should belong to Greenwald's column in Salon. Just recently he had a column where he describes the war on drugs and the war on terror as mirrors. Just before that, Greenwald continued the role he has taken up, as a very intelligent and fair critic of the Obama administration. In this case, he took Robert Gibbs to task for accusing the Chamber of Commerce of behavior that Gibbs had himself had participated in 2004. My dad used to say (and probably still does) that the Democrats did the same thing in the sixties that Nixon did in the seventies, its just that the Democrats didn't get caught (I should write more about this in the future). Greenwald's column on Gibbs does not let the Chamber off the hook, he simply also takes the Chamber's accusers to task for (a) the sloppy tenor of their accusations and (b) the messy past of some of those accusers.

Finally, the NYTimes has its share of good articles and columns (more than I actually read). Paul Krugman has a good column on mortgages and the financial industry in general today (a tad bombastic, but then again if an economist can't get upset about wasted money ...). Some more detail about how the banks engaged in the bad mortgage to toxic asset process itself is detailed here.

Next thing I plan to read is details about Pittsburgh's parking/pension mess.

Air Traffic Controllers and teachers ...

2010-10-11T21:08:00.003-04:00

Sometime around 1982 I took a class in labor economics. The labor professor, Hirschel Kasper, I think, was considered the best of the econ department. Of course when you study labor economics, you have to look at unions. At the time, unions were getting the bad rap, what with the decline of manufacturing in the 1970's and the firing of the Air Traffic Controllers. Kasper liked to tell anecdotes as well as give us the statistics and graphs. He recounted the story of railroad "firemen" whose were still "working" on diesel locomotives because of the union rules, despite having no wood or coal to shovel into a (non-existent) fire to run the (non-existent) boiler on the train. But Kasper pointed out that statistically train accidents (big, ugly expensive things) went down for those trains. Those firemen, sitting around doing nothing, looked out the window and spotted the potential accidents before they became accidents. Not that that is a very productive use of labor resources, but, you know, big ugly expensive accidents.

So I learned a long time ago to try to keep an open mind about unions (if nothing else). Historically of course they were the counter weight to companies who saw workers as faceless, easily replicable inputs into the assembly line. By the 1970's, though, as I said, unions were blamed for the decline in US manufacturing. Since then we have seen service unions, including or particularly teacher's unions, come under attack. The teacher's unions are seen as the primary culprit in the decline in public education.

Now, the rules of employment are interestingly complex in education, both at the university and grade school levels, though for obviously different reasons. Tenure is the big issue for post secondary institutions; for better or worse, it preserves academic freedom or perhaps it protects bad professors. In secondary education there is also tenure in at least some districts, and also usually unions. Again there is the question of whether unions protect bad teachers, or help keep classes smaller, or do both simultaneously.

Without even attempting to answer any of those questions, I will step right up to a bit of what the government has done in the last ten years. I assume we all understand that “No Child Left Behind” (NCLB) was an anti union bill. Lower performing schools (ie, those in poor neighborhoods) would be shut down and parents would be “allowed” to send there kids to better schools. No mention of who was going to pay for this, or how better schools would react to or even be able to accept a large number of new students. But that wasn’t the federal government’s problem; the important thing is that schools were held accountable. No one looked at or even mentioned 25% unemployment rates, single moms only fourteen years older than their children (and thus not having even a high school degree) or any of the other problems of low income neighborhoods. I have to say what I found most amazing was that Teddy Kennedy was a cosponsor on this bill.

Flash forward nine years and the new big thing is charter schools. There is that documentary “Waiting for Superman”, which has already had caveats assigned to it. Just today Ross Douthat wrote a column which had faint praise for charter schools, but claims this does not damn them; it shows they are sufficiently superior we should embrace them. Douthat says that charter schools may not outperform public schools in test scores, and in fact a week or so ago Gail Collins wrote that 17% outperform public schools, while roughly a third trail them, although she didn’t reveal what that meant specifically (test scores, grades, graduation rates?), But Douthat tells us Charter Schools have other value, including “money saved (both charter and private schools usually spend much less per pupil than their public competitors), in improved graduation rates, and in higher parental and student satisfaction”. I would highlight the money saved part, and further point out this Douthat’s second paragraph, “the plight of children trapped in failing schools with lousy, union-protected teachers”. Charter schools as a group are well known for being almost entirely non-union shops.

Douthat’s source for this column is Frederick Hess, who wrote an essay recently “Does School Choice Work?”. Hess is an ‘education scholar” at the American Enterprise Institute. Hess (via Douthat) says that instead of (tax) money going to school boards and thus schools, it should go to students, who will bring it to the school of their choice, whatever that school may be.

Bad enough that Douthat is trying to get private or even religious schools funded with taxpayer money (and public schools defunded), but I can’t help but think that Hess and Douthat have brought us to a hop and a skip of saying that not only should the student’s school money stay with him, but his or her parents specific tax should stay with the student (only fair, after all, mom and dad (or great grand dad, but whose counting) bought that mansion and pay taxes on it; why shouldn’t Thurston junior benefit from those taxes?), We have certainly heard similar logic used in talking about double taxation in the inheritance/estate tax and capital gains taxes.

Meanwhile, behind the rather overt attempt to privatize education is an additional more subtle attack on unions, the teachers union in particular. Now, I am as willing as anyone to say bad teachers should be weeded out of the profession. What may surprise you is that the anyone in this case are the leaders of the teacher’s unions. Whether it is because they see the handwriting on the wall or because they truly are dedicating to providing the best education for our children (your children, I have none), union leaders have made a point of saying they support local district goals of getting specific bad teachers out of the classroom.

In this kind of battle/war, however, perception often trumps reality. I urge all of us to step back and look and think and consider what’s best for all children, maybe particularly the ones that don’t get that high school diploma, and grow up to be the group that has the 14% unemployment now.

Back to basics

2010-10-10T14:40:00.002-04:00

You may have heard of Podcamp, an annual meeting and educational conference for "social media". I go to learn more about blogging and other kinds of electronic communication. I've been at least twice, and each time I remember always hearing someone say "never apologize for not posting on a blog". Never the less, I am not happy I didn't post since last Sunday.

But at the minimum, I like to look at Jack Kelly's weekly column. This week Kelly seems to return to his roots, raising questions about how much the defense intelligence community knew about 9/11 before 9/11. I think we all know Kelly is a hawk, but he also seems to like David and Goliath stories of patriotic soldiers standing up to a faceless bureaucracy determined to protect itself. Kelly seems to have no sources of his, instead he does the sort of summary that most anyone with an internet connection could do. Granted, Kelly is only columnist, not an investigative reporter, but I believe Kelly has been working on variants of this story for a long time (thus having old stories and information he can reuse). Is there something there? I dunno, maybe. The Justice department and the Defense department have been just as secretive and I guess vicious under Obama as they were under Bush. In fact, many of the events Kelly talks about took place during the Bush administration, something Kelly acknowledges late in his column (after taking his obligatory shot at Jamie Gorelik).

Actually, his saying Bush might be involved in this cover up is the one thing about this column that is relevant for today's political situation, and is interesting in itself. Although the Tea Party professes itself to be independent, they were of course guided by people like Dick Armey behind the scenes and Sarah Palin very much out in front, and funded to some extent by the conservative billionaire Koch brothers. So the Tea Party has ties to the Republicans, and it is really Republican or right leaning independents who are interested in the Tea Party. Tea Party backed or endorsed candidates are running as Republicans, not as third party candidates. But where the Tea Party parts ways with the Republican party is in their demands for ideological purity. Apparently George Bush has failed that test, and Jack Kelly is, if not throwing him under the bus, at least giving Bush a bit of a shove. I guess Kelly is still angling to become a local voice for the Tea Party.