Friday Reads: A Brainy Break from the Village

Posted: January 13, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Economy, Egypt, Elections, Foreign Affairs, health hazard, Labor unions, morning reads, psychology | 18 Comments

Good Morning!

I thought I would treat you to some academics this morning starting with two well known economists and their thoughts on 2012. I figured we needed a break from the primary season insanity.  First up is Nobel Prize Winner Joseph Stiglitz on “The Perils of 2012”. The next two offerings are from Project Syndicate.

This year is set to be even worse. It is possible, of course, that the United States will solve its political problems and finally adopt the stimulus measures that it needs to bring down unemployment to 6% or 7% (the pre-crisis level of 4% or 5% is too much to hope for). But this is as unlikely as it is that Europe will figure out that austerity alone will not solve its problems.   On the contrary, austerity will only exacerbate the economic slowdown. Without growth, the debt crisis – and the euro crisis – will only worsen. And the long crisis that began with the collapse of the housing bubble in 2007 and the subsequent recession will continue.

Moreover, the major emerging-market countries, which steered successfully through the storms of 2008 and 2009, may not cope as well with the problems looming on the horizon. Brazil’s growth has already stalled, fueling anxiety among its neighbors in Latin America.

Meanwhile, long-term problems – including climate change and other environmental threats, and increasing inequality in most countries around the world – have not gone away. Some have grown more severe. For example, high unemployment has depressed wages and increased poverty.

While that was what appeared to be Dr. Gloom, here is Doctor Doom.  Dr. Nourielle Roubini writes that the global economy will be “Fragile and Unbalanced in 2012”.

Private- and public-sector deleveraging in the advanced economies has barely begun, with balance sheets of households, banks and financial institutions, and local and central governments still strained. Only the high-grade corporate sector has improved. But, with so many persistent tail risks and global uncertainties weighing on final demand, and with excess capacity remaining high, owing to past over-investment in real estate in many countries and China’s surge in manufacturing investment in recent years, these companies’ capital spending and hiring have remained muted.

Rising inequality – owing partly to job-slashing corporate restructuring – is reducing aggregate demand further, because households, poorer individuals, and labor-income earners have a higher marginal propensity to spend than corporations, richer households, and capital-income earners. Moreover, as inequality fuels popular protest around the world, social and political instability could pose an additional risk to economic performance.

Oops, I mentioned income inequality.  I must hate capitalism and be a collectivist.  Right?  Absolutely not!  After studying markets for as long as I have–and teaching others about them–I have a pretty good understanding about how they work and it’s not based on wishful thinking or trying to hide the woefully low amount of taxes I pay.  Oh, and I betcha that my dad created more jobs in his life time than Willard ever did.  I also know that income inequality is bad for every one and that includes the superrich. That’s why it’s good to ask “Why is Inequality Higher in America?”‘  Henry Farrell of GW–professor of political science–breaks down a study in a series of two articles.  The study looks at the increasing use of veto power by Senators and finds that problems happen as you increase the number of players with the ability to block laws.

Linz and Stepan argue that high numbers of electoral veto players are highly correlated with inequality, and that studies of other systems (Australia, Switzerland) suggests that more veto players create greater lags in introducing welfare systems and block reform (interestingly though, these cases involve referendums as a block to legislation rather than the kinds of vetos seen at the federal level in the US). However, they also claim that veto points are not destiny – the experience of reform in Brazil argues that Barack Obama could have instituted Senate reform and hence reduced down the effective number of veto players from four to one.

The original essay can be found at Cambridge Journals but the authors have published books on the topic as well.  The authors research is mostly in the area of countries transitioning to Democracies.  The Atlantic published an essay of theirs called “How Egypt Can Make Democracy Work” last February.

Regardless of who leads it, there are some things an interim government should not do. Judging by the transitions that we have studied, a successful democratic outcome stands the best chance if the interim government does not succumb to the temptation to extend its mandate or write a new constitution itself. The interim government’s key political task should be to organize free and fair elections, making only those constitutional changes needed to conduct them. Writing a new constitution is best left to the incoming, popularly elected parliament.

Most activists and commentators are now asking who will or should become the next president. But why assume that a presidential political system, headed by a powerful unitary executive, will be instituted? Of the eight post-communist countries in the European Union, not one chose such a system. All of them established some form of parliamentary system, in which the government is directly accountable to the legislature and the president’s powers are limited — and often largely ceremonial.

That was a wise decision. A presidential election at a moment of great uncertainty, and in the absence of experienced democratic parties or broadly accepted leaders, is filled with danger.

Archeologists are examining an interesting time in American history for clues of America’s  largest labor conflict between miners and coal mine owners. An unlikely coalition of people are trying to stop clear mining–and hence destruction–of the site. This article can be found in Archaeology Today.

The archaeology on the mountain, and the story it is beginning to tell, has helped bring together an unusual coalition—including the Sierra Club, the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA), the National Trust for Historic Preservation, and a number of local organizations—in what some are calling “The Second Battle of Blair Mountain.” It is certainly a fight over historic preservation, but for many involved, including local archaeologists and historians, the mountain is symbolic of much more—labor struggle, the social effects of resource extraction industries, and what they see as a century-long class conflict. The mountain’s loss to surface mining, they assert, would be personal, a major blow to Appalachian identity.

Coal mining has always been one of the most dangerous and difficult jobs, and the late nineteenth century in the southern coalfields saw it at its worst. There were few safety regulations for workers—undocumented European immigrants, African Americans, and poor Scots-Irish hill folk—and every aspect of their lives was controlled by their employers. They lived in company towns, bought their own equipment at company stores, and listened to company-approved sermons in company churches. As labor movements picked up elsewhere, even in coal regions to the north, they seemed to pass the southern coalfields by.

Nature reports on the attempts to tighten the use of antibiotics on farm animals.  Just like humans, animals and their diseases are showing an increased resistance to the current medicines.  A new rule will go into effect in April to try to slow down the trend towards increased resistance.  The EU already has stricter rules in place.

 In industrial farming, antimicrobials are commonly given to farm animals to treat infections, and prophylactically to prevent disease or spur growth. But there is growing concern that excessive use on farms is helping to breed antibiotic-resistant microbes, from Salmonella (see ‘Rising resistance’) to Escherichia coli, which are harder to treat when they infect people.
The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is now moving to protect key antibiotics known as cephalosporins, which are used in humans to treat a range of infections, including pneumonia. On 4 January, the agency said that it would prohibit certain uses of cephalosporins in farm animals including cattle, pigs, chickens and turkeys, because overuse of the drugs is “likely to contribute to cephalosporin-resistant strains of certain bacterial pathogens”. If cephalosporins become ineffective in treating human diseases, the FDA said, “doctors may have to use drugs that are not as effective, or that have greater side effects”.

The new rules, to come into effect on 5 April, restrict veterinary surgeons to using the two cephalosporin drugs specifically approved for food-producing animals — ceftiofur and cephapirin — and ban prophylactic use. In animals not listed in the FDA order, such as ducks or rabbits, vets will have more discretion to use the drugs.

Most antibiotic classes are used both in animals and in humans, so the FDA is also considering tightening controls on all classes of antimicrobials used on farms. It is reviewing comments on rules that would prohibit the use of any antimicrobial drug to promote animal growth, a move that would be welcomed by many vets. “We would support greater veterinary oversight of antimicrobial drugs,” says Christine Hoang, assistant director of scientific activities at the American Veterinary Medical Association in Schaumburg, Illinois.

Psychology Today has some interesting information on Deadly Mind Traps. Dr. Boomer knows these as cognitive errors.  Most of us call them self-defeating behaviors.

Intriguingly, research into this kind of self-defeating behavior shows that it is usually far from random. When we make mistakes, we tend to make them in ways that cluster under a few categories of screwup. There’s a method to our mindlessness. Most of the time, we’re on autopilot, relying on habit and time-saving rules of thumb known as heuristics.

For the most part, these rules work just fine, and when they don’t, the penalty is nothing worse than a scraped knee or a bruised ego. But when the stakes are higher, when a career is in jeopardy or a life is on the line, they can lead us into mental traps from which there is no escape. One slipup leads to another, and to another, in an ever-worsening spiral. The pressure ratchets up, and our ability to make sound decisions withers.

These cognitive errors are most dangerous in a potentially lethal environment like the wilderness or the cockpit of an aircraft, but versions of them can crop up in everyday life, too, such as when making decisions about what to eat, whom to date, or how to invest. The best defense? Just knowing they exist. When you recognize yourself starting to glide into one of these mind traps, stop, take a breath, and turn on your rational brain.

There’s a list of the classic errors and explanations in case you want to check it out.  Turning on your rational brain sounds like something the Republican presidential wannabes should do right now.  I think it would surprise every one, don’t you?

So, that’s your brainy break from the mainstream media.  What’s on your reading and blogging list today?

Fact Checking 101 and the Role of the Media

Posted: January 12, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: The Media SUCKS, the villagers | Tags: , , | 14 Comments

One thing about the media that has truly alarmed me is the way that it parrots lies asserted by politicians and public figures without any context. Today, the NYT asked for feed back about this.  The question is  weirdly put, but is still worth a response. Fact checking isn’t being a “truth vigilante”  imho.  It’s about providing context to the story and it’s about informing your reader.  Reporters should not just be parrots of political convenience.  They should report more than verbatim comments.

I’m looking for reader input on whether and when New York Times news reporters should challenge “facts” that are asserted by newsmakers they write about.

One example mentioned recently by a reader: As cited in an Adam Liptak article on the Supreme Court, a court spokeswoman said Clarence Thomas had “misunderstood” a financial disclosure form when he failed to report his wife’s earnings from the Heritage Foundation. The reader thought it not likely that Mr. Thomas “misunderstood,” and instead that he simply chose not to report the information.

Another example: on the campaign trail, Mitt Romney often says President Obama has made speeches “apologizing for America,” a phrase to which Paul Krugman objected in a December 23 column arguing that politics has advanced to the “post-truth” stage.

As an Op-Ed columnist, Mr. Krugman clearly has the freedom to call out what he thinks is a lie. My question for readers is: should news reporters do the same?

If so, then perhaps the next time Mr. Romney says the president has a habit of apologizing for his country, the reporter should insert a paragraph saying, more or less:

“The president has never used the word ‘apologize’ in a speech about U.S. policy or history. Any assertion that he has apologized for U.S. actions rests on a misleading interpretation of the president’s words.”

Yes.  I think that’s appropriate.  I think a lot of people read it in print and assume it wouldn’t be printed if it was a baldface lie.  What do you think?

Huhn?

Posted: January 11, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Surreality, Teddy Roosevelt | Tags: , | 19 Comments

There seems to be a set of “progressive” bloggers who are arguing that democratic voters need to sort and rank their values and decide which ones to “overlook”.  There’s also this accusation of hypocrisy and selling out.   The discussion started with Matt Stoller and Glenn Greenwald and started expanding from there.  They argue that Ron Paul is way more “progressive” than Obama. They argue that liberals sell out all kinds of things to support him.  They supposedly do this without endorsing Paul.  It’s just to point out liberal hypocrisy.  It’s also to further some imaginary conversation in the media happening because of Paul’s bottom line on the war and certain civil liberties. (I’m still trying to find any links to that.)  I first stepped into it when I posted this Ian Welsh blog post with the comment that Welsh had decided women’s rights, autonomy, privacy, and moral personhood weren’t as important as middle east war issues (i.e. abortion vs dead Pakistani wedding guests).   I was accused of being a single issue voter who didn’t care about dead brown people.  Check out the exchange in the comments on this post.

To me, it’s deeper than that.  It’s saying that all kinds of other things aren’t as important as their specific pet prog issues.  It’s also saying that it makes no difference how you morally or conceptually arrive at those positions.  This just doesn’t pass the smell test for me.  So, I’m stepping in it again fully aware of the stank.

Our Quixote already noted that women’s rights–and I might add the rights of minorities in general–were never on any of these guys’ radars.    Cannonfire took up the argument against admiring any Paul position today based on the incoherence of how those positions developed and what the underlying arguments represent.   I do not have to be an insufferable Obot to figure out that Ron Paul’s rationale for ending US military adventurism abroad and stopping certain civil liberty violations domestically come under the heading of two old cautionary tales.   One is the blind squirrel who trips across a nut now and then.  The other one is about the stopped clock being right two times a day. The deal is that the same intellectual concepts that bring him to not supporting the 1964 civil rights act are the same arguments that he makes against presidential overstep.  His reasoning leads to far more bad positions than good and the reasoning should be morally objectionable to progressives, liberals, or for that matter empathetic, caring people. There’s more to a joke than the punch line.

I’d like to say a few things about all these folks suddenly looking at Ron Paul with less than jaundiced eyes. First, they are all white males.  Second, what they suggest every one downgrade to not important (e.g. abortion, civil rights, the entire new deal agenda) aren’t things they need to care about. It certainly is easy to scold others about being single issue voters or being concerned about unimportant things when you have no dog in the hunt.

Stoller’s latest and Sirota’s opportunistic foray into the discussion today makes me realize how much I really hate the “progressive” moniker.  I’ve always thought these guys were poseurs of some kind.  Get this thesis from Sirota.

At the same time, though, when it comes to war, surveillance, police power, bank bailouts, cutting the defense budget, eliminating corporate welfare and civil liberties, Paul is more in line with progressive goals than any candidate running in 2012 (or almost any Democrat who has held a federal office in the last 30 years). This, too, is indisputable.

Evidently, how you arrive at those positions intellectually and conceptually are less important than just having a similar goal.  Again, note the appalling oversight of civil rights which tends to be an easy thing to overlook when you’re young, straight, white and sport that extra, dangly appendage of privilege. Stoller demonizes liberals as being the grease of  the war machine.  I’d like to note that Stoller does in fact share the same bizarre notions about the Federal Reserve Bank held by Ron Paul.  I admit to getting the creeps every time I read him. It’s the same creeps I get when Ron Paul says “We’re all Austrians now” and waves the Von Mises Institute Flag.   Stoller snidely suggests liberal sell out to the war machine while holding up the idea of selling out everything else to stop the war machine.  Sirota jumps on the band wagon to take it to the point where it becomes a multiple choice question.  Which of your deeply held values do you believe is worthy frittering away to a fascist to achieve one or two policies in the agenda that I really care about?

In seeing Paul’s economic views, positions on a woman’s right to choose, regulatory ideas and ties to racist newsletters as disqualifying factors for their electoral support, many self-identified liberal Obama supporters are essentially deciding that, for purposes of voting, those set of issues are simply more important to them than the issues of war, foreign policy, militarism, Wall Street bailouts, surveillance, police power and civil liberties — that is, issues in which Paul is far more progressive than the sitting president.

There’s certainly a logic to that position, and that logic fits within the conventionally accepted rubric of progressivism. But let’s not pretend here: Holding this position about what is and is not a disqualifying factor is a clear statement of priorities — more specifically, a statement that Paul’s odious economics, regulatory ideas, position on reproductive rights and ties to bigotry should be more electorally disqualifying than President Obama’s odious escalation of wars, drone killing of innocents, due-process-free assassinations, expansion of surveillance, increases in the defense budget, massive ongoing bank bailouts and continuation of the racist drug war.

By contrast, Paul’s progressive-minded supporters are simply taking the other position — they are basically saying that, for purposes of voting, President Obama’s record on militarism, civil liberties, foreign policy, defense budgets and bailouts are more disqualifying than Paul’s newsletter, economics, abortion and regulatory positions. Again, there’s an obvious logic to this position — one that also fits well within the conventional definition of progressivism. And just as Obama supporters shouldn’t pretend they aren’t expressing their preferences, Paul’s supporters shouldn’t do that either. Their support of the Republican congressman is a statement of personal priorities within the larger progressive agenda.

Hence, we reach one of those impossible questions: From a progressive perspective, which is a more legitimate camp to be in?

Again, I’d just like to toss that “progressive” label out with the rest of the trash just because people like the intellectually incoherent Sirota overuse it.  I’ve never seen it applied to any one with a cohesive set of values.  I’ve started associating it with facile vapidity.   It’s like those folks that scream they are conservative will trying to pass some of the most radical laws the country’s ever seen.   Oh, like Ron Paul.  Political labels have become a meaningless blob of mushiness which is why I can’t figure out how none of these folks challenge how Paul got THESE positions instead of where they fit.   Paul came to his positions through the back door of Fascism.  He’s heir to arguments made by Von Mises, Pinochet, Mussolini and Jefferson Davis. 

Which brings me to ask why do they keep prolonging this conversation?  Why is this flirtation with the neoconfederate Paul coming from reformed Obots?  I know, they’re all saying they’re not endorsing him. But, isn’t this all just an intellectual exercise to get people to make some kind of Hobson’s choice based on their criteria  and/or beat themselves for not prioritizing the prog list correctly? These guys remind me of the anti-war protestors that quit protesting the war the minute the draft ended.  I keep smelling self interest in all of this which is the same smell that comes off of Ron Paul and his libertarians.  If it doesn’t directly benefit them, they don’t want to pay for it, die for it, fiddle with it.   I think how you arrive at a position is as important as the position itself.  I think your motivation for a position is as important as the position itself.  I think that’s just another door into the hypocrite’s club.  They are accusing every one of selling out without fully exploring the implications of how Ron Paul arrives at is positions. It is just an appalling ego exercise.

It reminds me of the Von Mises apologia for Mussolini and Hitler.  They saved European civilization since they blocked the spread of “communism”. Ignore everything else.

It cannot be denied that Fascism and similar movements aimed at the establishment of dictatorships are full of the best intentions and that their intervention has for the moment saved European civilization. The merit that Fascism has thereby won for itself will live on eternally in history.

Who cares about everything else?  The trains ran on time in Italy and the hyperinflation created by the Weimar Republican ended.  Right?    And GEE, we’re getting so many conversations on CNN and FOX News about the horrors of war and the patriot act, what’s a little snuggle with Ron Paul?

New Hampshire Republican Primary Results Live Blog

Posted: January 10, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Live, Live Blog | Tags: | 63 Comments

New Hampshire’s primary voting began with the nine voters in Dixville Notch cast their votes today.

The polls opened here at midnight and closed less than a minute later, and the tally was final by 12:05 a.m. On the Republican side, Mitt Romney and Jon Huntsman tied, with two votes each. Newt Gingrich and Ron Paul each got one vote. President Obama received his very first live votes of confidence — three of them.

The New Hampshire primary, the nation’s first of the 2012 presidential campaign, is Tuesday. That means the tiny village of Dixville Notch casts the first ballots of the contest just after midnight, a tradition since 1960. (Jan. 10)

In Hart’s Location, another village that traditionally votes minutes after Dixville Notch, Romney was a clear winner. There, the former Massachusetts governor took five votes to four votes for Paul. Huntsman took two votes, Texas Gov. Rick Perry took one and Gingrich took one.

New Hampshire election law permits unincorporated towns of fewer than 100 residents to open for polling at midnight, and Dixville Notch has done so since 1960, at The Balsams Grand Resort Hotel high in the North Country, about 20 miles south of the Canadian border. There were nine votes cast that year, too, all for Richard Nixon.

Most of the polls will close at 7 pm eastern.  A few close at 8 pm.  CNN is reporting that early exit polling show that most voters have at least a $50k a year salary.   Of those voting, 69 percent are concerned about the economy.  CNN breaking news also sent this interesting tidbit to its subscribers.

One in four said the deficit was the most important issue. Also, more than three-quarters of respondents said the series of Republican debates was important to their final decision, while less than half said television ads were important.

CNN also reports they are expecting a record turnout in the Republican votes.  New Hampshire is having ‘unseasonably’ warm weather and that should improve turnout.  That makes me wonder if New Hampshire Republicans are  climate change deniers.  Probably not.  New Hampshire is it’s own little state.  John Avalon tells us that New Hampshire is all about the independents.

While Iowa’s caucuses are disproportionately dominated by social conservatives, in New Hampshire’s open primary, independents can vote — and they make up more than 40% of the local electorate.

That’s right — in New Hampshire, registered independents outnumber Republicans or Democrats.

It’s a libertarian instinct reflected in the state’s motto, “Live Free or Die.” It’s captured in the wonderful fact that in the northern town named “Freedom,” independents make up the bulk of the 1,000-plus voters.

It’s also reflected in the fact that New Hampshire is one of the least religious states in the nation.

Likewise, a Pew Research Center poll conducted before the 2008 primary found that 55% of New Hampshire Republican primary voters believed that abortion should be always or mostly legal, while just 13% of New Hampshire GOP primary voters said abortion should be always illegal — posing a problem for fundamentalists like Rick Santorum who support a constitutional ban on abortion.

Fiscal conservatives rule the roost in the New Hampshire Republican Party, which is committed to the state’s anti-income tax tradition with a focus on balanced budgets and a concurrent aversion to deficit spending.

Events surrounding the Democratic primary in New Hampshire made me very fond of the state four years ago.   This youtube shows them moment that really drove me to firmly support Hillary.  Well, that and her heartfelt speech about why she was really running.

“Some people think elections are a game: who’s up or who’s down,” Clinton said, her voice breaking and tears welling. “It’s about our country. It’s about our kids’ future. It’s about all of us together. Some of us put ourselves out there and do this against some difficult odds.”

I doubt we’ll have any sincere, heartfelt moments tonight, but we’ll be watching!!!  What’s it look like from where you’re at?

Monday Morning Reads

Posted: January 9, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: John Birch Society in Charge, morning reads, Republican politics, Republican presidential politics | Tags: , , | 33 Comments

Good Morning!

Yes, it’s that time of year when Republicans try to convince us that everything old, disproved, and thrown out is shiny, patriotic and new again. Angry sky gods, debunked scientific hypotheses, and myth trump rule of law, science, and reason.  Here’s a few things on their most choice delusions.

We’re not only fighting the war for abortion access and rights, we’re fighting for legal access to birth control.  There’s a group of religious radicals in our country that just won’t take a supreme court case at face value. I was appalled by Romney’s insistence in this weekend’s debate that this really wasn’t a problem and wouldn’t be one. Once again, some pharmacists think they are above the law and know more than doctors because some high priest of ignorance said make it so.  Men trying to buy Plan B are having trouble doing so .

Defenders of Kathleen Sebelius’ decision to overrule the FDA’s decison to make Plan B emergency contraception available over-the-counter without age restrictions floated the specter of 11-year-old girls having sex to justify the decision. (Though, of course, the sex has already happened when the Plan B is purchased, so really, people who float this argument are just arguing that it’s better for the 11-year-old in question to be pregnant than not, which seems really cruel.) The reality is that fewer than 1 percent of 11-year-olds are sexually active, so the real people hurt by these restrictions are the 15- and 16-year-olds having sex with age-appropriate partners and those 17 and older who have a legal right to the pill but find that having to ask for a pharmacist to fetch it  is too much of an obstacle, because either the pharmacy counter is closed or because the pharmacy staff won’t hand it over, either out of ignorance or malice.
For those who would scoff at the chance that these are serious concerns, I give you the story of a Jason Melbourne of Mesquite, Texas  went to the Mesquite CVS to buy Plan B for his wife, who had to stay home to look after their two small children. The reward he got for being a good husband who goes to the drugstore to buy lady things for his wife was resistance from the pharmacy staff, who refused to sell him the drug because they claimed to believe that men don’t have a legal right to buy it. Well, the problem is there are no gender restrictions on access to Plan B, something that Melbourne demonstrated to the staff by use of Google on a smartphone. They continued to refuse to sell to him, making outrageous claims about men supplying the drug to rape victims, even though he got his wife on the phone to explain the situation. Melbourne is the second man who has reported being denied Plan B at a CVS to the ACLU. Considering how many people don’t contact the ACLU after having their rights violated—or who would believe the pharmacy staff’s claims—that suggests this could be a widespread problem.

 The Economist is suggesting that Americans are entering an age where they should lock their doors lest the morality police get inside. There are folks like Rick Santorum that want to control our sex acts, our reproductive processes, and our basic civil rights based on personal bigotry and religious hysteria. They warn us that “Now is the time for consenting adults to lock their bedroom doors”.  Who needs to be concerned about creeping sharia law when we’ve got this set actively pushing their equally creepy religious cult practices?

Last September the former senator was one of nine Republican hopefuls participating in a televised debate in Orlando, Florida. A question was posed over video by a soldier in Iraq who said he had hidden the fact that he was gay because he did not want to lose his job. Did any of the candidates intend to repeal the measure Barack Obama signed into law last year that had at last given gay soldiers the right to serve their country openly? Mr Santorum’s unblinking answer was Yes. Allowing gays to serve in the military was giving one group of people “a special privilege”; it was “social policy” that ought to have no place in the armed forces.

This became a notorious exchange, not least because some members of the ultra-conservative audience in Orlando booed the soldier. But the episode hardly does justice to the depth of the former senator’s feelings about the things gays get up to. The propinquity of the wicked plainly has an unsettling impact on the peace of mind of the virtuous Mr Santorum.

Gays should not only be disqualified from serving their country, says Mr Santorum. They should also be prohibited from marrying one another. Even if unmarried, they would be ill-advised to have sex. To Mr Santorum the Supreme Court’s ruling in 2003 that anti-sodomy laws were unconstitutional was a bad mistake: this was a slippery slope that would establish a right to bigamy, polygamy, incest, adultery—“anything”.

It is not quite clear what Mr Santorum thinks about heterosexuals who have sex for fun—or at least who have it only for fun. The special status of marriage, he told the New York Time, does not exist “because people like to hang out together and have fun”; it is there to provide “a stable environment for the raising of children”. As president, he said more recently, he would at last address “the dangers of contraception in this country”, because contraception is a “licence to do things in a sexual realm that are counter to how things are supposed to be”.
If Mr Santorum has doubts about contraception, he has none about abortion. It is wrong, even in cases of rape or incest, because life is sacred and begins at conception (he does, however, support the death penalty, as it is not the innocent who die). Any doctor who performs an abortion should face criminal charges.

The Economist must feel that we are so confused about the role of religion in the founding of our  country, that they must to show us and the rest of the world that our founding fathers weren’t fundamentalist crusaders. They have a special Religion in America section up about how the founders were trying to avoid having Rick Santorum moments.  Here’s an apt and correct description of the religious philosophy of then Presbyterian Thomas Jefferson.

But Jefferson, like most of the top figures in the American Revolution, was far more of a sceptic in religious matters. He was fascinated by metaphysics but he had no time for the mystical. In contrast with today’s vituperative exchanges, these differences did not stop the two gentlemen maintaining a warm correspondence. But Jefferson’s approach to redacting the Bible involved something more radical than translation. He literally snipped out everything supernatural: miracles, the Virgin birth, the resurrection. The result was his own, non-mystical account of the life of Jesus. He told his old comrade: “I too have made a wee little book from the same materials which I call the ‘Philosophy of Jesus.’ It is a paradigma [sic] of his doctrines, made by cutting the pages out of the book and arranging them on the pages of a blank book…A more beautiful or precious morsel…I have never seen. It is a document in proof that I am a real Christian, that is to say, a disciple of the doctrines of Jesus, very different from the Platonists who call me infidel and themselves Christians.”

If Jefferson was a Christian of any kind, he was an idiosyncratic one. He admired Jesus as a moral teacher but like many of America’s revolutionaries, he had a visceral loathing for priestcraft. Jefferson blamed Saint Paul, the early Church, and even the Gospel writers for distorting the mission of Jesus, which, as he saw it, had been to reverse the decadence of the Jewish religion. Starting from the (correct) proposition that mystical ideas originating from Plato were influential when Christian theology was being developed, he castigated followers of the Greek philosopher for corrupting what he saw as the original Christian message.

Did Jefferson believe in God? Certainly not the Christian idea of a God in three Persons; he saw that notion as incomprehensible and therefore impossible for a rational person to accept. One view is that like many of America’s founders, he was a Deist, believing in a Creator who set the universe and its laws in motion but did not intervene thereafter. (The Deist God has been described as rather like a rich aunt in Australia—benevolent, a long way off, and mostly leaving the world to its own devices.)

Modern fundamentalists are rewriting history in the same way they like rewriting science.  They place dinosaurs and modern people in their garden of Eden panoramas.  Some now argue that the founders didn’t like “Darwinism” which wasn’t even around at that time  Of course, that doesn’t stop Texas putting that kind’ve nonsense in textbooks. This also explains Michelle Bachmann’s odd notion that the founding fathers fought against slavery.

Believers in the idea that America was established as a Christian state scored a hit last year when the Texas school board, a politicised body in which evangelicals control crucial votes, ordered up textbooks laying out this view. Given the size of the Texan market, school-book publishers across the country often follow its lead. The best-known advocate of the “Christian nation” theory is a Texan, an author and evangelist called David Barton, who has been writing on the subject since the 1980s.

Among his recent claims are that the founding fathers rejected Darwinism (although they pre-dated Charles Darwin), and that they broke away from Britain in order to abolish slavery. In fact the southern states only joined the Revolution on the understanding that slavery would not be questioned. Strange as his views may sound to most scholars, Mr Barton’s philosophy is taken seriously in Republican circles. When Rick Perry, the Texas governor and presidential candidate, held a day of prayer for the nation in August, Mr Barton was an acknowledged endorser. One of Mr Barton’s admirers is Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker who argues that American history has been distorted by secular historians to play down the role of faith. “I never listen to David Barton without learning a whole lot of new things,” Mr Gingrich has said.

Here’s another bit of founder philosophy.  This time it’s George Washington.

Virtually absent from Washington’s pronouncements was any reference to Jesus. He did not take communion—for most Christians, the most important rite of their faith—and he did not summon a Christian minister to his death bed. Was Jefferson right, then, to claim that “[Washington] thinks it right to keep up appearances but is an unbeliever”? Washington was certainly a diplomat. Although he remained formally Anglican, as president he wrote friendly letters to many Christian and Jewish communities and attended their services. And when he needed a job done on the estate, he was firm, for his time, about the irrelevance of religion: “If they are good workmen,” he said, “they may be Mahometans, Jews or Christian of any sect, or they may be atheists.”

As every American youngster has been taught, one thing that Washington, Jefferson and all the founders did believe in was religious freedom. They were appalled by the fusion of religious and political power, epitomised by the divine right of kings.

Another example of reheated nonsense popping up in the current Republican primaries is Ron Paul’s obsession This is a completely debunked set of economic philosophies and musings roughly associated with Fredich Hayek who had a few good ideas about the pricing mechanisms of the market that were completely contorted by some fascists.  If you ever hear any one say anything about Mises, cover your ears.  It’s basically akin to learning  astrophysics from a flat earther who denies the theory of gravity.  No amount of historical data deters these people.  This description is from Matt Yglesias.

But “Austrians” in Paul’s sense refers to something narrower, specifically the thought of Ludwig Von Mises and his student Murray Rothbard. It is a form of capitalism that is even more libertarian and anarchic than that espoused by many libertarians. Rothbard‘s followers, most prominently longtime Paul associate and founder of the Mises Institute Lew Rockwell, have been waging a decades-long war against the Koch brothers and the more mainstream form of libertarianism the Kochs represent.

“Austrian economics,” in this sense, goes beyond standard-issue free market thinking in a number of ways. Most notably, it seeks to build a strong ethical case for strict libertarianism without admitting that this would lead to any practical problems whatsoever. Therefore, along with rejecting the legitimacy of any intervention to protect the poor or regulate anything (a position much more extreme than even the Hayek of Road to Serfdom), Austrians reject the idea that there is anything at all the government can do to stabilize macroeconomic fluctuations. This, to be clear, is different from the mainstream Republican view that the stimulus bill enacted by Congress in 2009 and signed into law by President Obama was wasteful or ineffective. Austrians also believe that cutting taxes to boost economic activity doesn’t work either. And they disagree with Milton Friedman that appropriate monetary stimulus by the Federal Reserve could have prevented the Great Depression. Indeed, they disagree with even the least controversial of all stabilization measures, the ordinary tweaking of short-term interest rates that all modern central banks use to try to prevent either inflation or deflation. In the view of the Austrians, practically every economic policy pursued by the federal government and Federal Reserve is a mistake that distorts markets. Rather than curing recessions, claim Austrians, stimulative policies cause them by producing unsustainable bubbles.

Not only did the analysis of the Great Depression thoroughly debunk this school of thought’s ridiculous hypotheses, the only places in the later part of the century that tried to implement the weirdness were countries like  Pinochet’s Chile.  Most of the Austrian Schools founders admired Mussolini so this as really not as big a leap as one would think for these guys.  I know I always associate liberty with fascist dictators and authoritarian regimes, don’t you?  It worked so well that the entire financial system there collapsed in 1982.   In fact, when Pinochet disappeared, one of his cabinet members showed up at the Cato Institute and even helped Dubya Bush with his efforts to privatize social security  His name is José Piñera .  I guess just crashing the economy and safety nets of the Chilean people just wasn’t enough.

You may wonder why I associate Ron Paul with the idea of a neoconfederacy.  Believe me, I’m not stretching on this either.

When it comes to American history, libertarians tend retrospectively to side with the Confederacy against the Union. Yes, yes, the South had slavery — but it also had low tariffs, while Abraham Lincoln’s free labor North was protectionist. Surely the tariff was a greater evil than slavery.

The posthumous induction of Jefferson Davis into the libertarian hall of fame was too much for David Boaz, a vice president of Cato. In a 2010 essay in Reason magazine titled “Up From Slavery: There’s No Such Thing as a Golden Age of Lost Liberty,” Boaz observed that even whites in the antebellum North “did not actually live in a free society … Liberalism seeks not just to liberate this or that person, but to create a rule of law exemplifying equal freedom. By that standard, even the plantation owners did not live in a free society, nor even did people in the free states.”

Boaz asked his fellow libertarians, “If you had to choose, would you rather live in a country with a department of labor and even an income tax or a Dred Scott decision and a Fugitive Slave Act?” It says something that in 2009 this question stirred up a controversy on the libertarian right.

Libertarians and conservatives, to be sure, can point to many examples of naive liberals in the last century who embarrassed themselves by praising this or that squalid, tyrannical communist regime, from the Soviet Union and communist China to petty police states like North Korea, communist Vietnam and Castro’s Cuba. But the apologists for tyranny on the left were always opposed by anti-communist liberals and anti-communist democratic socialists. Where were the anti-authoritarian libertarians, denouncing libertarian fellow travelers of Pinochet like von Hayek and Milton Friedman?

For that matter, where was the libertarian right during the great struggles for individual liberty in America in the last half-century? The libertarian movement has been conspicuously absent from the campaigns for civil rights for nonwhites, women, gays and lesbians. Most, if not all, libertarians support sexual and reproductive freedom (though Rand Paul has expressed doubts about federal civil rights legislation). But civil libertarian activists are found overwhelmingly on the left. Their right-wing brethren have been concerned with issues more important than civil rights, voting rights, abuses by police and the military, and the subordination of politics to religion — issues like the campaign to expand human freedom by turning highways over to toll-extracting private corporations and the crusade to funnel money from Social Security to Wall Street brokerage firms.

So, I’ve obviously gone a bit over my usual acceptable word count, but believe me, in all my years of education, I would never believe that so much debunked tripe would form the central arguments of so many people running for president.  They will not be happy until everything is returned to the days of Dixie or pyramid building.   I’m having a hard time figuring out how far back in time they would throw us. It’s enough to make me run for the hills.

What’s on your reading and blogging list today?

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