Boehner’s VooDoo Economics Memes

Posted: May 11, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: Domestic Policy, Economy, Federal Budget, Federal Budget and Budget deficit, John Birch Society in Charge, Republican politics, voodoo economics, We are so F'd | Tags: , , , , | 27 Comments

Bloomberg is reporting that “Boehner’s Views on Economy Contradicted by Studies”.  It’s about time some business magazine did this.  Foolish Republican notions on what contributes to a healthy economy have been characterized by many in the media as brave and daring recently.  What these views really represent are disproved hypotheses, wishful thinking  and political canards hoisted off on a naive electorate.

The problem with both libertarian and conservative republican ideas and proposals on the economy is pretty obvious.  They have no basis in fact or data what-so-ever.

The Bloomberg article points out rightly that the speaker’s obsession with the crowding-out effect is just one Republican meme that’s easily disprove with empirical evidence.  Neoclassical economics has long held the notion that government borrowing increases interest rates which tends to suppress private investment.  Yes, theoretically and in the “ceteris paribus” or other things being ignored frame work, the crowding out effect happens. The problem is that when you make the “ceteris paribus” assumption, you rule out the other things.  The other things are what’s important here.  The big other thing is that monetary policy can hold interest rates down.  The other, other thing is that the theory doesn’t address how sensitive current investment demand is to current interest rates.  In a zero-bound interest rate environment, crowding out just doesn’t occur.  Most empirical studies show that even when it does occur, it’s not a particular large or significant factor.  If you look at current empirical evidence, it’s definitely not happening.

Boehner said in his May 9 speech to the Economic Club of New York that government borrowing was crowding out private investment, the 2009 economic-stimulus package hurt job creation, and a Republican plan to privatize Medicare will give future recipients the “same kinds of options” lawmakers have.

With Democrats and Republicans sparring over legislation to extend the government’s $14.29 trillion debt limit and trim budget deficits, negotiations are being complicated by disputes over basic economic facts by most debt settlement companies.

“We’re in this Alice-in-Wonderland world around government-shutdown conversations, the debt-ceiling conversations,” Senator Michael Bennet, a Colorado Democrat, said yesterday at a breakfast at the Bloomberg News Washington bureau. The debate “has not established a shared understanding of the facts” about the nation’s economic problems, he said.

Boehner’s statement in his Wall Street speech that government spending “is crowding out private investment and threatening the availability of capital” runs counter to the behavior of credit markets.

Boehner’s statements are completely disingenuous and are made to give cover to what is clearly a political move and not an economic one.  Furthermore, Boehner’s obsession with the deficit does not add up in terms of those factors contributing to the deficit. Ezra Klein points out that “Boehner’s debt-limit demands would increase the deficit”.  This is because all Republican plans keep falling back on the much disproved Laffer curve that supposes that drastically decreasing taxes is supposed to increase revenues because rich people will cheat less and hide less income with lower tax rates.

John Boehner’s new line on the deficit negotiations is that raising taxes — by which he appears to also mean closing tax expenditures — “is off the table. But everything else is on the table.” This is a bit like telling your doctor, who’s worried that you’ve gained weight and are out-of-shape, that exercise is off the table, but everything else is on the table. Well, it’s nice that you’re prepared to diet, but you need to exercise, too. Otherwise, you’re not going to get where you need to go.

And without revenue, we’re not going to get where we need to go — at least if you think where we need to go is towards a balanced budget. Over the past 10 years, the Bush tax cuts have increased the deficit by about $1.3 trillion. They’re the single largest policy contributor to our recent deficits. Due to the growth of the economy and the creep of the alternative minimum tax, they’ll cost the Treasury closer to $4 trillion over the next 10 years. They’re the single largest policy contributor to our projected deficits.

Extending the Bush tax cuts over the next 10 years, which Boehner favors, will increase the deficit by twice as much as the $2 trillion in spending cuts he’s calling for will reduce the deficit. Conversely, adding the revenue increases in the Simpson-Bowles plan to his spending cuts would bring the deficit reduction to more $3 trillion. But Boehner isn’t using the debt-ceiling vote to reduce the debt. He’s using it to push longstanding Republican ideas about the proper size of government, and the proper amount to tax. This has been clear for awhile, of course, Remember CutGo? But it’s worth being straightforward about it. Boehner’s plan doesn’t get our finances back in shape. He wants us to spend less, but he also wants us to cut taxes by more. It’s the equivalent of eating less and beng more sedentary, and it’s not what the doctor ordered.

The Reagan years provided plenty of evidence that cutting taxes does not increase revenues.  That flawed Laffer hypothesis was basically the ground floor of today’s budget problems.  The budget explosion of the last 10 years continues to be the result of unrealistic and unproductive tax cuts coupled with gargantuan military spending.  Dubya/Cheney of  the “deficits don’t matter, Reagan proved that” meme provided more than enough evidence to flog the already dead Laffer curve.

Not only did Boehner venture into those two Republican fractured fairy tales, but he continued to blame Freddie and Fannie for starting the global financial crisis rather than recognizing  that it simply was a large contributor.  Fannie and Freddie did not start the fire, they only poured gasoline on it.  This oversight allows Republicans to gloss over the real instigators.

Boehner also repeated familiar Republican political criticisms that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two government mortgage companies, “triggered the whole meltdown” of the U.S. financial system.

That differs from the conclusions earlier this year of the Democratic majority on the congressionally appointed Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission. It reported that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac “participated in the expansion of subprime and other risky mortgages, but they followed rather than led Wall Street and other lenders in the rush for fool’s gold.”

Three of the panel’s four Republicans, while faulting Fannie and Freddie, didn’t place the blame squarely on the two mortgage giants.

“They were part of the securitization process that lowered mortgage credit quality standards,” said a dissenting report by Keith Hennessey, Douglas Holtz-Eakin and Bill Thomas, former chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee. In a Wall Street Journal essay, the three said laying primary blame on government intervention is “misleading” and cited 10 reasons, taken together, for the crisis.

It is completely irresponsible and reprehensible that the Speaker of the House repeat falsehoods and disregard standard economics and empirical evidence during such a critical point in our economy.  We have a jobs crisis.  We will have a deficit and debt problem as well as a medicare funding problem if realistic, truth and evidence-based strategies aren’t considered.  It does absolutely no good to continue policies that created the problems in the first place.  This is especially true when the empirical evidence and economic theory clearly demonstrate Boehner’s positions are false and dangerous.

Here’s an example of the data rather than the meme.

The speaker didn’t mention a 1993 tax increase that raised the top individual marginal rate to 39.6 percent, where it stood until 2001. In 1998, the government recorded its first budget surplus in almost 30 years.

The U.S. economy grew at an annual rate of 4.1 percent in 1994, the year after Congress passed the second tax increase of the decade. The growth rate dropped to 2.5 percent in 1995, and thereafter rose to 3.7 percent in 1996. The economy grew more than 4 percent a year from 1997 through 2000.

Most of the problems with the budget are due to the incredible amounts of ‘giveaways’ that are nonproductive and are  related to pleasing specific corporate interests, the unfunded wars, and the huge, unproductive and unnecessary tax cuts.  Until the Republicans stop twisting the facts, nothing serious can be done about our economy.  Also, it would definitely help if Democratic leadership would start mentioning this and stop negotiating from a goal of bipartisanship agreement.  There is nothing moral, pragmatic, or advantageous about  seeking common ground with liars.

The Libertarian Dysfunction

Posted: May 10, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: Republican presidential politics | Tags: , , , , | 46 Comments

Ron Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest the other night at the Republican Debate in South Carolina.

Every time I have any dealings with libertarians, I always wind up saying something to myself to the effect of what is wrong with this people?  Are they the products of a dysfunctional family with parents who don’t show emotion? Did they have problems bonding or with the attachment process as infants?  Libertarians seem like they were all bred in some kind of petrie dish rather than born of flesh and blood people.  They seem so oddly unaware of human nature and empathy. I’ve recently started wondering if it’s not really a symptom of some kind of autism  because there seems to be so much emphasis on a seemingly detached self-identity and a desire for a reality that seems straight of a bad science fiction novella where the main plot is alienation rather than aliens.

So, this WAPO op-ed by “conservative” Michael Gerson got me thinking about Ron Paul’s truly strange statements in that Republican Presidential-wanna be debate the other day. Gerson was using Ron Paul’s thoughts on legal heroin as the basis of the argument that the Republican Party shouldn’t treat Ron Paul seriously because he’s truly not a serious candidate. Advocating legalized heroin–instead of punishing it as bad boy behavior–evidently gives one a lack of gravitas.  I thought this strange.

I have to admit that Ron Paul says things that just makes me think he was hatched from an orphaned egg left in a cuckoo’s nest.  It frightens me that some one with such serious misunderstandings of economics heads a subcommittee over the nation’s monetary policymaker.  It’s like putting a flat earther in charge of NASA.  Paul was so surrounded by other odd birds at that Republican debate however, that he didn’t stand out more than any one else to me.  However, the legalize heroin comment stood out to many of us  including Michael Gerson.  For me however, it stood out because it’s part of the symptoms of denial of social costs and spillovers that you hear coming from libertarians.  Paul really doesn’t appear to know what it’s like to be around the chaos vortex that is an addict.  He has a really odd take on human nature.  Gerson started out with a pretty good description of that before he fell back on hellfire and brimstone.

Paul was the only candidate at the debate to make news, calling for the repeal of laws against prostitution, cocaine and heroin. The freedom to use drugs, he argued, is equivalent to the freedom of people to “practice their religion and say their prayers.” Liberty must be defended “across the board.” “It is amazing that we want freedom to pick our future in a spiritual way,” he said, “but not when it comes to our personal habits.”

Now, I’m of the personal opinion that other people’s religion and practices, can in fact, trample on other people’s rights.  I will only remind you of the time I went out on Sunday in Nebraska to buy creme de menthe to make grasshopper pie and couldn’t.  Also, you have no idea what it’s like to deal with Christmas hoopla when you’re never in the mood.  However, when you are near people, they do have a habit of getting in your way all the time.  What they do impacts you to varying degrees.  So, I didn’t think Paul could possibly have much experience with addicts because it’s hard to avoid the fallout from the disease even if you’re not all that intimately involved with them.  If you work with them or live near them, their addiction and its costs will be felt.

Or, as Gerson puts it:

This argument is strangely framed: If you tolerate Zoroastrianism, you must be able to buy heroin at the quickie mart. But it is an authentic application of libertarianism, which reduces the whole of political philosophy to a single slogan: Do what you will — pray or inject or turn a trick — as long as no one else gets hurt.

Even by this permissive standard, drug legalization fails. The de facto decriminalization of drugs in some neighborhoods — say, in Washington, D.C. — has encouraged widespread addiction. Children, freed from the care of their addicted parents, have the liberty to play in parks decorated by used needles. Addicts are liberated into lives of prostitution and homelessness. Welcome to Paulsville, where people are free to take soul-destroying substances and debase their bodies to support their “personal habits.”

But Paul had an answer to this criticism. “How many people here would use heroin if it were legal? I bet nobody would,” he said to applause and laughter. Paul was claiming that good people — people like the Republicans in the room — would not abuse their freedom, unlike those others who don’t deserve our sympathy.

The idea that there are actions that don’t impact people on any large scale is a weird one to me.  Gerson talks about Paul’s attitude of  “I don’t need laws against heroin because I won’t use heroin” as a form of arrogance.   What really made me think, however, was this paragraph.  This is where Gerson dove off the deep end.

The conservative alternative to libertarianism is necessarily more complex. It is the teaching of classical political philosophy and the Jewish and Christian traditions that true liberty must be appropriate to human nature. The freedom to enslave oneself with drugs is the freedom of the fish to live on land or the freedom of birds to inhabit the ocean — which is to say, it is not freedom at all. Responsible, self-governing citizens do not grow wild like blackberries. They are cultivated in institutions — families, religious communities and decent, orderly neighborhoods. And government has a limited but important role in reinforcing social norms and expectations — including laws against drugs and against the exploitation of men and women in the sex trade.

This is where he lost me completely. The government doesn’t need to reinforce Judeo-Christian norms and expectations.  To me, that’s not the role of government.   The government should recognize that the behavior of individuals and businesses impact others.  Some times, the impact is quite negative.  It doesn’t need to replace some absentee parent as an angry, punishing daddy.  It needs to be more like a judge, a referee, and a prevention coach. Let me explain that.

No one in Love Canal asked to be sold a home sitting on a lot saturated with toxic chemicals.  People actively withheld information to make those business deals and a group of innocents were hurt mightily; both financially and physically. You can read studies dealing with communities that have gambling facilities to determine the social costs of those things.  You get pawn shops and paycheck advance loan shops. There are tons of predatory businesses that pop up out of no where. Communities also get crime because once gamblers run out of things to hock and ways to borrow, they will steal.  Communities will attract prostitutes with accompanying costly public health problems.  Communities eventually wind up with destitute people.  As a result, many businesses and homeowners leave and the city is left with only problems and no revenues.

Just like I can’t imagine drinking day-in-and-day-out, I can’t imagine playing any other gambling games where I don’t know the rules, the odds, and have a strategy to know when to hold them and fold them.  The deal is that I don’t have the addiction gene.  Problem is, that there are a lot of people that can’t either make good decisions or stop.  They become chaos vortexes.  They drain resources from families that eventually need public help. They emotionally and some times physically abuse people which infers the cost of  the criminal justice system.  Relatives of addicts may or may not be able to recover without public assistance or spreading issues further across society.

These behaviors are not just personally destructive, they have social costs.  We frequently have to pay to clean up these messes after these folks have spun out of control.  I also didn’t need the government enforcing ‘Judeo-Christian’ values for me to recognize destructive behaviors and many of these folks with issues had plenty of it.  That’s no solution either.  Frankly, plentiful and good information on statistics and public health should give most people knowledge to make good decisions about prostitution, substance abuse, and gambling.  Neither Gerson or Ron Paul want these provisions either.  They prefer that be left to chance, happenstance, or some imaginary Father Knows Best.

This is what bothers me about both the libertarian and the conservative narrative described above.  You can’t just say let them self destruct and not witness that the fall out from destruction frequently is spread wide and costs a lot of money to a lot of people.  You can’t just say that if some one sits in a pew and hears some kind of moral spew attached to an angry sky god that they’re going to just get in control of themselves.  There’s a genetic component to substance abuse.   Certainly, a faceless corporation that only exists for the purpose of creating profit but yet, is treated as an individual legally,  is not capable of full considering the costs of its actions on others.  Addicts definitely don’t consider the costs of their actions on any one.   Gerson and Paul’s overly simplistic view of people and reality has to come from some blocked pathway in a brain that doesn’t recognize the interconnectedness of people and their actions.

Maybe that’s why they both have fairly useless views of economics too because, at its essence, economics is about human behavior and choices.

It’s not about becoming a national mommy, or daddy, or nanny or whatever.  It’s about trying to prevent the problems, first off, by providing adequate information to people. Then, it’s about judiciously assessing the fall out and compensating society and others for the cost of the chaos. Then, something should be done to try to stop recurrence.

We keep trying permissiveness and punishment.  What we frequently get is recidivism and more spillover costs.  Somewhere in between the models of permissiveness and punishment is a more pragmatic mindset. Laws, regulations, and government are necessary because humans and their corporate counterparts don’t exist in a vacuum and all of them are not good decisionmakers.  Their actions aren’t always a reflection of either enlightened self-control or fear of retribution by an angry sky god or parent.   Of course, government can’t do everything for us.  But, it should be able to prevent the fall out from the behaviors and actions of others and the spillover costs they entail.  That’s the real purpose of regulations. Libertarians seem to disregard a bevy of actions where there are victim’s of people’s individual decisions.  Conservatives appear to think that enforcing some kind of moral code via punishment  is all that’s necessary.  Frankly, I’d rather we use less straight-jacket ideology and use our knowledge to figure out what best prevents a problem.

“Having a Republican Governor is associated with low Economic Growth”

Posted: May 9, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: academia, Domestic Policy, Economic Develpment, Economy, Republican politics | Tags: , , , | 13 Comments

The Miser Brothers as Republican Governors. Honey, we shrunk the state's prosperity but saved us a few pennies in tax dollars.

There’s a new academic study by professors from Tulane University and the Nevada state Department of Planning and Budget that’s sure to become the source of some very hot political debate.  I didn’t bury the lead.  It’s up there in the banner header, however, I’m sure you want to know the supporting evidence and tests.  There’s a brief overview of this study at The Atlantic written by Richard Florida who is the Director of the Martin Prosperity Institute at the University of Toronto

The basic research question for the authors was “What factors influence state economic growth?”.  Basically, the authors look at a state’s fiscal policy and regress it against various policy choices and factors.  Then, they run some Monte Carlo simulations to see what happens under various scenarios. It’s complex statistics but their findings  are somewhat intuitive to me for years as well as true to my experience working with the state of Nebraska as a consultant to its Economic Development Department. However, this is a solid academic study with oodles of data.  It’s the kind of study that will be talked about for some time in economic circles.

This is what I learned from my time dealing with people in state governments whose jobs are attracting and retaining companies.  Businesses tend to relocate to states with good public services and low cost, employees that come from good educational systems.  They look for decent public school systems and state universities that do research in their area.  They want good state recreational facilities and even professional sports teams and cultural venues.  Omaha used to lose out to all kinds of places over things like lack of recreational facilities and cultural venues all the time.  It lost two fortune 100 companies and possible new ones over no recreational facilities or sports venues.  They offered hugely attractive tax packages and ready to build land but they always lost out on the same reason that makes me not want to live there.  There’s really very few things to do there and you don’t spend your life at work.

If you haven’t figured out that all of those things people and corporations seek basically come from public tax dollars, you must be a Republican.  A state’s tax giveaways and tax rates aren’t as high up on the list of things attractive to business as most die-hard Republicans want you to believe.  That’s pretty much what this study shows.

A new study by Tulane’s James Alm and Janet Rogers of Nevada’s Department of Budget and Planning (h/t Ryan Avent, whose deadpan tweet noted that it was likely to spark a “lively discussion”) takes a close look at the effects of tax and spending policies at the state level.  Entitled  “Do State Fiscal Policies Affect State Economic Growth?”, it examines  50 years of data  (from 1947 to 1997),  tracking  the effects of state tax policies, spending policies, and political orientation on economic growth. Looking at the different policy approaches and strategies that have been pursued at the level of states and cities and comparing their results provides a useful lens through which to examine pressing national issues. Alm’s and Rogers’ main findings are certainly interesting; “lively” is quite likely an understatement for the sort of debate their findings should inspire.

There are two major take-aways. First, a “state’s fiscal policies have a measurable relationship with per capita income growth, although not always in the expected direction.” Tax impacts, they report, are “quite variable”; “expenditure impacts are more consistent.”

This particular statement is right up there in the author’s abstract.

Of some interest, there is moderately strong evidence that a states political orientation has consistent and measurable effects on economic growth; perhaps surprisingly, a more \conservative” political orientation is associated with lower rates of economic growth.

Wow. Austerity doesn’t work.  Not only does it NOT work, it’s detrimental to the state’s economic well being and future.  Again this should be pretty intuitive.  If you have a business, you need customers with paychecks. The higher the paycheck, the more they customer spends on nonessentials which  many business sell.  Also, you need good, happy, creative employees.  If you rely on professional people, these folks like good restaurants, entertainment, schools, and sports venues.   Every  one needs good transportation infrastructure like well maintained roads and airports.  Again, a lot of this must be provided by government for a variety of reasons having to do with the nature of public goods.

Their conclusion is pretty damning to current policy prescriptions.

… there is strong evidence that a state’s political orientation, as indicated by whether the governor is Republican or Democrat, whether the state has enacted tax and expenditure limitation legislation, and whether the state frequently elects a governor of the same party as the incumbent, have consistent, measurable, and significant effects on economic growth.  Perhaps surprisingly, having a Republican governor is associated with lower rates of growth.

I’m not the least bit surprised. This is good old fashioned, no-nonsense Keynesian results. Also, growth rates compound over time like interest compounds your savings account.  If the rates of growth are low during one administration, the state will fall farther and farther behind so one or two administrations of bad fiscal policy means that slow growth compounds over time and makes the results more noticeable as you go along.  This seems to be how they capture some of their significant differences.

That trend brings us back to the extremely low growth we had during the Dubya years and the paltry recovery we have now.  Traditional fiscal policy always tells us that the multiplying effects of tax cuts are less strong than increases in government spending because the first round of government spending gets spent 100 percent and because it usually is targeted at infrastructure or other types of spending that has long reaching impact.  Yes, you can actually see economic benefit from building football stadiums or airports.   When you give money to rich people or even business in tax rebates or tax cuts, there’s no way of controlling where it goes  or where  it’s spent.  That degrades the impact of  the stimulus as well as leads to lost revenues.  And, at the moment, those tax cuts at the state level are being coupled with excuses to raid basic government services like public education.  The result is basically a drain on the state’s capacity to grow as well as no stimulation to the economy.

Anyway,  I imagine the Cato Institute or the Heritage Institute will try to rush out some distorted studies of their own shortly depending on how much circulation this gets.  I would like to add that the state of Nevada is not exactly Massachusetts and even though Tulane is referred to as the Harvard of the South, it’s still Louisiana.  Let’s hope this does stir up some debate and that this study attracts attention in all the right places.

Monday Reads

Posted: May 9, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: abortion rights, American Gun Fetish, Barack Obama, Economy, fetus fetishists, GLBT Rights, Global Financial Crisis, John Birch Society in Charge, New Orleans, PLUB Pro-Life-Until-Birth, religious extremists, Reproductive Rights, the villagers | Tags: , , , , , , | 18 Comments

Good Morning!!!

Hopefully, you had a great weekend!  The weather’s been nice here but we’re mostly focused on all that water coming down the Mississippi towards us.  The Bonnet Carrre Spill Way opened today at 8 am to release some of the river water in to Lake Pontchartrain.  The Corps has requested that the Morganza Spillway be opened too.  The last time it was opened was in 1973 when Nixon was still president. That’s more controversial because it will flood farms and land but will help maintain the levees in Baton Rouge and New Orleans.  We’ll have to see who wins that one.

If granted, the Corps plans to open the Morganza Thursday.  This could create water up to 25-feet deep in spots.

In Terrebonne Parish, low-lying areas in the Western end are vulnerable to flooding, up to five feet.  Parish president Michel Claudet tells FOX 8 he’s worried people don’t realize what could happen.  Claudet says there’s a plan to sink a giant barge in Bayou Chene.  Essentially, it would serve as a temporary dam to reduce the backflow of water into St. Mary and Terrebonne Parishes.  Bayous and creeks are already filling up and public works crews were out, looking for low areas to reinforce.

Opening the Morganza Spillway would require the evacuation of people and livestock in the Atchafalaya River Basin.  About 30 miles Northwest of Baton Rouge, West Feliciana Parish is bracing for the worst.  If the Morganza opens, the Corps projects possibly 25-feet of water in some areas.

“We’re going to do what we can you know,” said Brad Smith of St. Francisville.  He was rushing to his Cat Island hunting camp to shore it up, hoping he can get it higher than the water.  “I mean you have money invested in a camp, you know your heart’s there, and you want to save it,” said Smith.

Friday, residents in the Stephensville-Belle River area North of Morgan City built walls of sandbags around their properties.  Saturday, they were being urged to self-evacuate.

Governor Jindal believes that the flooding is certain anyway.

Land and structures in the Morganza Spillway will flood, even if the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers does not open the gates, Commissioner of Agriculture Mike Strain and Gov. Bobby Jindal said today.

“It is inevitable that Morganza will flood and the system will top, regardless of whether they open the system,” Strain said at a press conference at the Governor’s Office of Homeland Security.

Jindal said he has asked the Corps of Engineers to provide maps of areas that are anticipated to flood, with and without opening the gates. He said he wants people who would be affected to be able to prepare before the water starts rising.

“Even without opening the spillway, folks can expect flooding comparable to 1973,” the governor said. “If they decide to open the spillway, it will be more water.”

This will be historical either way.  I remember when they had to open the Bonnet Carre Spillway last spring because the river was so high.  I live a few blocks from the Mississippi.  The river was so high the boats were riding on the river at about the same level as the street.  It look like the oil tankers were traveling on the next road over.  I usually only see the very tops of these ships.  It’s a strange  feeling to think you’re sharing the road with huge ships.

So, since we’re talking about the Nixon years, I might as well offer up the Daily Mail’s first glimpse at the biography of Vanessa Redgrave. In part 2 of a three-part excerpt from the book, the Mail covers Redgrave’s political career.

Vanessa Redgrave as a Workers Revolutionary Party parliamentary candidate in 1974

The article’s interesting title is Vanessa Redgrave and the red sex slaves: How her bid to start Marxist revolution plunged her into bizarre scandal.

Never a shrinking violet, Vanessa Redgrave knew exactly what to do when she found a listening device in an electrical socket at her home. She called a Press conference.

It was common knowledge, she told the world in thrilling theatrical tones, that the internal security service MI5 had been bugging her conversations since she’d been a member of a Trotskyist organisation called the Workers Revolutionary Party.

Well, she wasn’t going to stand for it. So she was making a formal complaint to the European Commission, claiming that MI5 had violated her human rights.

Unfortunately, her grand gesture fell flat. Not only did the EU maintain that bugging radicals such as Vanessa Redgrave was ‘necessary in a democratic society’ — but it turned out that the bug had nothing to do with MI5 in the first place. It had been planted by a rival Left-wing faction.

Anyone else might have been utterly humiliated at making a fool of themselves, but not Vanessa. As her daughter Natasha once said, it never bothered her that she wasn’t liked — because being disliked gives her enormous freedom.

This is one celebrity biography that I can’t wait to read.

I first got the OBL kill news via CNN breaking news.  The NYT is trying to claim the credit for the story.  The truth is that it broke on twitter and was leaked by an aide of Donald Rumsfeld.  Here’s the tick tock according to Felix Salmon.

Brisbane is the NYT’s ombudsman, and today he describes the way that the paper broke the news of Osama Bin Laden’s death. Well, he can’t do that, because the NYT didn’t break the news of Osama Bin Laden’s death. But he ignores the people who did break the news, and just tells the story of how the official NYT machine worked. His story starts at 10:34 last Sunday night, when a source told NYT reporter Helene Cooper that Osama had been killed. By 10:40, an alert was up on nytimes.com. Then, by Brisbane’s account, Twitter got involved:

One minute after Ms. Cooper’s news alert was posted on the Web, Jeff Zeleny, The Times’s national political correspondent, posted on Twitter: “NYT’s Helene Cooper confirming that Osama Bin Laden has been killed. President to announce shortly from the White House.”

At virtually the same time, Jim Roberts, an assistant managing editor, sent a similar Twitter message. Next to come was an automated Twitter post generated by NYTimes.com, regurgitating the original news alert.

Those links are all Brisbane’s, by the way, including the rather hilarious link to the homepage of the very site his column is on. All of the links are internal; none are to the actual tweets in question. But here’s the first tweet that Brisbane mentions, from Zeleny. As Brisbane says, it was posted at 10:41pm.

For a very different look at how the Osama news broke check out SocialFlow’s exhaustive analysis of 14.8 million tweets on Sunday night. As far as Twitter is concerned, the news was broken by Keith Urbahn at 10:24pm. But it really got momentum from being retweeted at 10:25pm by NYT media reporter Brian Stelter, who added the crucial information that Urbahn is Donald Rumsfeld’s chief of staff. Urbahn, here, gets the goal, but Stelter absolutely gets the assist …

The first real interview of the president on the OBL operation was seen Sunday Night. If you want to see the 60 Minutes Interview with President Obama that covers the OBL kill operation you can see it here.

Read the rest of this entry »

TBIF Reads

Posted: May 6, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: morning reads | Tags: , , , , , , , , | 44 Comments

Good Morning!

Today we’re thanking the Buddhas for Friday just ’cause I feel like it!!  Well, not that any Buddhas had anything to do with naming today Friday or inventing the calendar or anything.  Let’s just say I felt contrarian today.

So, some of the Republicans who want to be president had a debate last night and it was all about denial of the last few centuries or progress.  Heck, it was denial of maybe 5 or so centuries.  Here’s a blast from the past from one of the more “credible candidates”.

MR. BROKAW: In the vast scientific community, do you think that Creationism has the same weight as evolution, and at a time in American education when we are in a crisis when it comes to science, that there ought to be parallel tracks for Creationism versus evolution in the teaching?

GOV. PAWLENTY: In the scientific community, it seems like intelligent design is dismissed — not entirely, there are a lot of scientists who would make the case that it is appropriate to be taught and appropriate to be demonstrated, but in terms of the curriculum in the schools in Minnesota, we’ve taken the approach that that’s a local decision. I know Senator Palin — or Governor Palin — has said intelligent design is something that she thinks should be taught along with evolution in the schools, and I think that’s appropriate. My personal view is that’s a local decision —

MR. BROKAW: Given equal weight.

GOV. PAWLENTY: — of the local school board.

MR. BROKAW: And you would recommend it be given equal weight?

GOV. PAWLENTY: We’ve said in Minnesota, in my view, this is a local decision. Intelligent design is something that, in my view, is plausible and credible and something that I personally believe in but, more importantly, from an educational and scientific standpoint, it should be decided by local school boards at the local school district level.

I guess he doesn’t think stuff like science should be left up to scientists.  School Boards know so much more.  But that’s pretty funny, because last night, he couldn’t exit that question fast enough.  He also said he was for cap-and-trade before he was against it.

10:07 p.m. “Do we have to?” Pawlenty’s candid comment before he’s asked to listen to an old interview where he backs the cap-and-trade approach to put a price on carbon. Afterwards, he reiterates he’s changed his mind. “I don’t try to duck it, bob it weave it. I’m just telling you I made a mistake.”

10:05 p.m. Pawlenty pivots off a question about creationism to burnish his blue collar credentials: “My family is a union family,” he said. “It’s not about bashing unions it’s about being pro-jobs…Pressed on to answer the creationism question: “I believe that should be left up to parents and local school districts.”

The shocker of the evening was that  there is another pro-choice Republican politician still standing besides Rudy Guilliani.  It’s Governor Gary Johnson of New Mexico.  Former Senator Rick Santorum is as Spanish Inquisition as ever.

10:00 p.m. Santorum offers a robust defense of the party’s social conservative wing — and takes a direct shot at Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels: “Anybody who would suggest we call a truce on the moral issues doesn’t understand what America is all about,” he says.

9:56 p.m. Johnson acknowledges he’s writing off the anti-abortion vote. “I support a woman’s right to choose up to the viability of the fetus,” he says.

9:54 p.m. Gays could get married if they want to under a President Paul: “The government should just be out of it,” the congressman says of the definition of marriage. “I have my standards, but I shouldn’t have the right to impose my standards on others… Just get the government out of it.”

If you haven’t noticed, Mittens and a few others were AWOL.  The debate was carried by Fox News.  This is interesting.  Gingrich didn’t show up but his contract with Fox was ended as was Rick Santorum’s contract.  How DO they tell the difference between dabblers and done thrown the hat in?  Huckabee still has his program.  Then, there’s the Donald on NBC.  NBC isn’t talking one way or the other about canceling whatever reality show Trump’s cooked up at the moment.

Fox News has terminated its contracts with former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and former Sen. Rick Santorum after the deadline for them to decide on presidential bids passed on May 1, a source familiar with the move told POLITICO.

Fox suspended the two contributors in early March and stopped paying them as they mulled presidential runs, but left them the option of returning to the network. The contracts’ end marks another sign that Gingrich, who has repeatedly delayed his decision citing business obligations, is in the race — though he dropped out of tonight’s Fox debate.

For what it’s worth, the pundits and the focus groups liked former CEO Herman Cain’s debate performance.   For some reason, Santorum came in second with the Fox News debate focus group.  Most of them should just head to the ice floes now for the good of society.

In an interesting twist of fate,  Paul Ryan Agrees That His Budget Includes An Individual Mandate  for Health Insurance.

Q: If Medicare becomes a voucher program, would you require seniors to purchase private insurance and if so isn’t that an individual mandate? If you will not require them to purchase insurance how do you propose to prevent a situation where the costs of uninsured seniors is very expensive and gets passed on to me as a private policy holder? […]

RYAN: Its mandate works no different than how the current Medicare law works today, which is you just select from a wide range of different plans. It literally would be like Medicare Advantage…

So much for the faux outrage on “Obamacare”.  This was the same kind of crap that went on back in the day when it was all called Dolecare.  The centerpiece of all the Republican plans has been forcing people to buy stuff from private businesses.  I still can’t figure out how Obama got the Democrats to go along with it after they’d been fighting it for like 15 years.

The Daily Mail asks “Will Bin Laden’s sea burial backfire?” According to one British scholar, Radical Muslims have already renamed the Arab Sea  location ‘Martyr’s Sea’

Radical Muslims are already calling the site of Osama bin Laden’s ocean burial the ‘Martyr’s Sea’, according to one of Britain’s leading Islamic scholars.

The US said the decision to drop bin Laden’s body into the North Arabian Sea was taken to avoid creating a shrine for the slain Al Qaeda chief.

But Abdal Hakim Murad, Muslim Chaplain at Cambridge University, claimed yesterday that the move could backfire on the Americans.

Speaking on Radio 4’s ‘Today’ programme, he said it was ‘disappointing’ that bin Laden wasn’t taken into custody.

‘By tipping him into the sea, the Americans may have created a kind of shrine. Some radicals are already calling the Arabian Sea the Martyr’s Sea,’ he said.

Okay, here’s a  new study that’s  interesting but maybe not very useful:   WILL a baby be a boy or a girl? If the mother started her period at a young age, it is more likely to be a girl.”

That’s according to Misao Fukuda at the M&K Health Institute in Hyogo, Japan, and colleagues, who found subtle differences in sex ratios of children depending on when a mother entered menarche.

Fukuda asked over 10,000 mothers the age at which they had begun their period and the sex of their baby. Forty six per cent of the children born to women who began their periods at age 10 were boys. This figure rose to 50 per cent when the woman began her period at 12, and 53 per cent when the women entered menarche at age 14 (Human Reproduction,DOI: 10.1093/humrep/der107).

Fukuda points to previous research demonstrating higher levels of the female sex hormone oestradiol in women who entered menarche before the age of 12. This may lead to spontaneous miscarriage of fertilised male eggs, he says. The theory is plausible, says Valerie Grant at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, as male embryos are known to be more vulnerable to hormone imbalances.

WAPO has a very interesting personal feature up on Bradley Manning:  “Bradley Manning is at the center of the WikiLeaks controversy. But who is he?” It basically gives a brief biography of the young solider in the center of so much controversy and trouble.

Despite his struggles, Manning was excited about his future in Army intelligence, a field that suited his analytical mind. “It’s going to be a different crowd when I get through with basic,” he told the friend. “I’m going to be with people more like me.”

He enjoyed classes at the Fort Huachuca, Ariz., intelligence school, where he received a top-secret security clearance, graduated and joined the 2nd Brigade, 10th Mountain Division at Fort Drum, N.Y.

It was here, constrained by the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, that he began speaking out anonymously about gay rights. He attended a rally in Syracuse and noted on Facebook that he had gotten an “anonymous mention” in an article. The reporter wrote of a gay soldier who complained he was “living a double life. … I can’t make a statement. I can’t be caught in an act.”

Manning now had a love interest: Tyler Watkins, a freshman interested in neuroscience at Brandeis University who was an active member of Triskelion, the Brandeis club for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender students. Manning began to make weekend visits to Watkins’s dorm at the tranquil, wooded campus west of Boston. On his Facebook page, Watkins declared that he was “totally in love with Bradley Edward Manning!!!!!!!”

It still seems that TV is centered on OBL.  I’m glad that we’ve been able to scrap up some alternatives around here. Well, that’s enough to get you started today! What’s on your reading and blogging list?

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