Religion Pimping: Secessionists and Proselytizers on the Public Dole

Posted: April 3, 2013 | Author: | Filed under: Civil Liberties, Civil Rights, religious extremists, Vagina, War on Women, We are so F'd, Women's Healthcare, Women's Rights | Tags: | 46 Comments

perry-jesus.gifI’m not the the resident psychologist here, but I really feel hyper-religiousity is a fricking mental disease.  I know it is a social one.  I have no idea why some people feel they have the right and duty to plaster their religious beliefs all over the rest of us, but it is clearly not an American idea.  Here’s the latest whackadoodle attempt to do an end run around our constitution by a cluster of bananas in North Carolina.

The Constitution “does not grant the federal government and does not grant the federal courts the power to determine what is or is not constitutional” according to a resolution sponsored by North Carolina House Majority Leader Edgar Starnes (R) and ten of his fellow Republicans — a statement that puts them at odds with over 200 years of constitutional law. In light of this novel reading of the Constitution, Starnes and his allies also claim that North Carolina is free to ignore the Constitution’s ban on government endorsement of religion:

SECTION 1. The North Carolina General Assembly asserts that the Constitution of the United States of America does not prohibit states or their subsidiaries from making laws respecting an establishment of religion.

SECTION 2. The North Carolina General Assembly does not recognize federal court rulings which prohibit and otherwise regulate the State of North Carolina, its public schools, or any political subdivisions of the State from making laws respecting an establishment of religion.

This resolution is nothing less than an effort to repudiate the result of the Civil War. As the resolution correctly notes, the First Amendment merely provides that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion,” and, indeed, the Bill of Rights was originally understood to only place limits on the federal government. For the earliest years of the Republic, the Bill of Rights were not really “rights” at all, but were instead guidelines on which powers belonged to central authorities and which ones remained exclusively in the hands of state lawmakers.

In 1868, however the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified for the express purpose of changing this balance of power. While the early Constitution envisioned “rights” as little more than a battle between central and local government, the Fourteenth Amendment ushered in a more modern understanding. Under this amendment, “[n]o State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States,” nor may any state “deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” The Fourteenth Amendment completely transformed the nature of the American Republic, from one where liberties were generally protected — if at all — by tensions between competing governments to one which recognized that there are certain liberties that cannot be abridged by any government.

So, a few folk want a state religion in North Carolina because sectarian opening prayers just aren’t pious enough for them.

A bill filed by Republican lawmakers would allow North Carolina to declare an official religion, in violation of the Establishment Clause of the U.S. Bill of Rights, and seeks to nullify any federal ruling against Christian prayer by public bodies statewide.

The legislation grew out of a dispute between the American Civil Liberties Union and the Rowan County Board of Commissioners. In a federal lawsuit filed last month, the ACLU says the board has opened 97 percent of its meetings since 2007 with explicitly Christian prayers.

Overtly Christian prayers at government meetings are not rare in North Carolina. Since the Republican takeover in 2011, the state Senate chaplain has offered an explicitly Christian invocation virtually every day of session, despite the fact that some senators are not Christian.

In a 2011 ruling on a similar lawsuit against the Forsyth County Board of Commissioners, the Fourth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals did not ban prayer at government meetings outright, but said prayers favoring one religion over another are unconstitutional.

“To plant sectarian prayers at the heart of local government is a prescription for religious discord,” the court said. “Where prayer in public fora is concerned, the deep beliefs of the speaker afford only more reason to respect the profound convictions of the listener. Free religious exercise posits broad religious tolerance.”

Supplanting modernity, science, rationale thought and replacing it with government mandated religious views is the agenda here. Here’s another good example.  RNC Chair Reince Preibus thinks he knows more than doctors.  He equates letting doctors and women decide about the outcomes of late term abortions–and possibly pre-term births–to infanticide.

In an article published Wednesday on the conservative website RedState, Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus blasted Democrats for supporting Planned Parenthood, while floating the damning suggestion that the likes of President Barack Obama and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) support infanticide.

“The President, the Senate Majority Leader, the House Democratic Leader, and the Chair of the Democratic National Committee (in whose home state this hearing occurred) made funding Planned Parenthood an issue in the 2012 campaign,” Priebus wrote. “They should now all be held to account for that outspoken support. If the media won’t, then voters must ask the pressing questions: Do these Democrats also believe a newborn has no rights? Do they also endorse infanticide?”

Priebus appeared to predicate much of his piece on recent testimony from a Planned Parenthood lobbyist before the Florida legislature. The lobbyist was posed a number of hypotheticals on what the women’s healthcare organization would do if a baby survived a botched abortion.

“Not once in her testimony did the Planned Parenthood representative say the newborn baby has a right to life. Not once did she say anyone has a duty to care for the child,” Priebus wrote. “Whether the living, breathing child survives is up to the adults in the room because, as we now know, Planned Parenthood doesn’t believe the baby has rights.”

Who better knows the outcome of this situation?  The State?  Priestb00 and his merry band of republican religious nuts?

borsThis reminds me of the attempts in Louisiana and other places to drain money from public schools to religious-based schools.  Republicans are horrified to think that religions other than their own might have access to the funds. This is playing out in Tennessee right now.

Republican lawmakers in Tennessee are threatening to block Republican Gov. Bill Haslam’s school voucher bill over fears that Muslim schools could receive funding.

The Knoxville News Sentinel reported on Monday that Haslam hinted that he would withdraw his bill after objections from Republican lawmakers that it was not broad enough and that the vouchers could be used by Islamic schools.

Over the weekend, state Sen. Jim Tracy (R) had told The Murfreesboro Post that he had “considerable concern” that tax dollars could go to schools that teach principles from the Quran.

Tracy, who is on the Senate Education Committee and identifies himself as a member of the Church of Christ, insisted that Islamic school funding was an “an issue we must address” before the voucher bill can go forward.

“I don’t know whether we can simply amend the bill in such a way that will fix the issue at this point,” he said.

Yes, there is one Muslim school in Memphis that would have access to state funds under the bill.  So, it’s wrong to fund Muslim schools, but you can guess which religious schools should be the only ones funded by government.

Look, I have nothing against other people’s free practice of religion.  There are at least two great places for that to happen.  The places are called THEIR home and THEIR place of worship.  Every place else should be a religion-free zone.  It’s obvious these folks didn’t get a very good education in American history or political thought.  For that matter, the don’t appear to have been well-educated in much else.  OR, they are just plain crazy.  I’m going with the latter.

Wacky Reads for a Surreal Saturday

Posted: March 30, 2013 | Author: | Filed under: morning reads, Real Life Horror, Republican politics, Surreality, U.S. Politics, We are so F'd | Tags: , , , , , , , , | 36 Comments

easter-bunny reading

Good Morning!!

Things are looking a bit surreal to me this morning. I babysat for my nephews last night and they managed to stay up until almost midnight! I sent them to bed around 10PM and they both claimed they couldn’t get to sleep. So I was up till all hours watching some strange kid show–a cartoon version of those “Survivor” reality TV programs. It was veeerrrrry strange. I slept too late, and when I checked the news headlines, I saw lots more strange stuff.

So What’s the deal with North Korea anyway? Kim Jong Un seems even crazier than his dear old dad. Supposedly North Korea is now “entering ‘state of war’ with” South Korea.

North Korea said on Saturday that it was entering a “state of war” with South Korea, following a call to arms by the country’s young leader Kim Jong Un and days of increasingly belligerent rhetoric from the isolated state.

The North’s official news agency KCNA published the joint statement issued by the government, political parties and other organizations.

“From this time on, the North-South relations will be entering a state of war and all issues raised between the North and the South will be handled accordingly,” it said.

The statement also warned that if the U.S. and South Korea carried out a pre-emptive attack, the conflict “will not be limited to a local war, but develop into an all-out war, a nuclear war.”

WTF?!!

According to an unnamed “senior administration official” it’s all a bunch of hooey.

“North Korea is in a mindset of war, but North Korea is not going to war,” said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to offer insight into the latest administration thinking on the volatile situation on the Korean Peninsula.

The official said North Korea is doing two things that signal it is not spoiling for war: maintaining continuous and unfettered access to the Kaesong Industrial Complex six miles north of the Demilitarized Zone and by continuing to promote tourists visits to North Korea, even amid its banging of war drums.

“There is pot-banging and chest-thumping, but they have literature attracting tourists that explicitly says pay no attention to all that (public) talk about nuclear war or another kind of war,” the official said.

Kaesong is a hive of business activity and about 200 South Koreans travel there daily. It produces about $2 billion of annual trade and commerce revenue for the North. Many experts consider its fate and status the best signal of North Korea’s hostile intentions.

On Saturday, the North renewed its threat to close the complex, reportedly saying through its state-controlled news agency that references to its ongoing operation as a source of capital “damages our dignity.”

I wonder why this “senior official” felt he/she had to remain anonymous?

Some “analysts” who didn’t feel the need to conceal their identities told NBC News that North Korea[‘s] threats [are] predictable but Kim Jong Un is not.

Read the rest of this entry »

Obama Suggests He’ll Include Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid Cuts in 2014 Budget Due in April

Posted: March 29, 2013 | Author: | Filed under: Medicaid, Medicare, open thread, Social Security, U.S. Economy, U.S. Politics, We are so F'd | Tags: , , , | 14 Comments

obama_cuts

Thanks to Susie Madrak and Joseph Cannon for catching this White House trial balloon–naturally floated right before a long holiday weekend. From The Wall Street Journal:

The White House is strongly considering including limits on entitlement benefits in its fiscal 2014 budget—a proposal it first offered Republicans in December. The move would be aimed in part at keeping alive bipartisan talks on a major budget deal.

Such a proposal could include steps that make many Democrats queasy, such as reductions in future Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security payments, but also items resisted by Republicans, such as higher taxes through limits on tax breaks, people close to the White House said.

These measures would come as President Barack Obama continues his courtship of the Senate GOP in an effort to thaw tax-and-spending talks. The White House’s delayed annual budget is scheduled to be released April 10, the same day Mr. Obama plans to dine with a group of Senate Republicans to discuss the budget and other issues….

People close to the White House believe a proposal to slow the growth rate of such benefits would use a variant of the Consumer Price Index to measure inflation. The new inflation indicator would cut overall spending by $130 billion, according to White House projections, and raise $100 billion in tax revenue by slowing the growth of tax brackets. The White House earlier called for an additional $800 billion or so in cuts on top of those resulting from the inflation adjustments.

“We and all of the groups engaged on this are starting to feel it may well be in the budget,” said Nancy LeaMond, executive vice president at AARP, an advocacy group for seniors that opposes such changes.

According to the WSJ article, the White House would “insist” that if cuts to safety net programs are included, the entire budget package would have to get an up or down vote. I’m not sure how they would enforce that.

From Susie’s post at Crooks and Liars:

Get your dialing fingers ready. There’s a reason they let this story out on Good Friday, they’re counting on you not noticing or being too busy to do anything about it. The White House switchboard is 202-456-1414, the comments line is 202-456-1111 (be prepared to hold) or you can email here.

ChainedCPI

Muck Mills and teh Derp

Posted: March 5, 2013 | Author: | Filed under: The Media SUCKS, We are so F'd | Tags: , , , , , | 35 Comments

barnumI came of age during the Watergate hearings and the fall of Saigon.  I’d like to say that the constant bombardment of  news surrounding incredible levels of deception during my status of adult-in-process gave me a jaded eye and sensibility.  I have to admit that I haven’t trusted much of anything coming from self-appointed authority figures since I figured out the Santa/Easter Bunny scam some where around nursery school.  I’ve since extrapolated those lessons to any concept of a ‘supreme’ being and a noble fourth estate.  I might as well worship and read the World According to the Great Pumpkin.

The entire Clinton penis obsession in the 1990s sewed up a lot of my earlier hypotheses.  Recent events have caused me to consider them good theory.  There is way too much evidence now.   We even know now that Woodard of Woodard and Bernstein might as well sport a set of fluffy ears and hop on down that bunny trail. I seem to have a friend in Charles Pierce.  There are no more Studs Terkels or Jack Andersons and we might as retire the term muckraker  and create a new one, say, Muck Mill.

Derp.

Pierce writes about the Conservative News Media–e.g. Muck Mills–that exist to Donald Segretti our policy conversations, news, and current events. As always, his blog post is glib and biting.  It is also a disconcerting reminder of the power, audacity, and hubris of Muck Mills like Fox “News” and what ever it is that republican court eunuch Tucker Carlson has created in his out-of-the-mainstream media reincarnation. Carlson’s lack of genitals and gray matter has been out on display all week.

Pierce believes the Muck Mills are imploding. Afterall, Limbaugh has lost many patrons after attacking a young law student who argued that all insurance policies should include access to birth control, Rove is trying to remain relevant since his meltdown last election season, and Snowflake Snookie can only get a gig at CPAC now.  Some of these things do carry the frankincense whiff of the beautiful hands of a divine and just goddess. However, I prefer the wisdom of the great American Saint  P.T. Barnum and the catechism of “There’s a sucker born every minute.”  Wherever there are suckers, there will be religious viewers of Fox News and readers of Red State.

First, there was the embarrassing revelation that a host of rightwing bloggers — and one from the port side, Jerome Armstrong —  were on the fiddle with the Malaysian government to the tune of almost 400 large. (One of them, Ben Domenech, was a recidivist embarrassment, having previously lost a sweet gig with the endlessly credulous Washington Post because he was a proven thief of other people’s work.) Then, last night, it was revealed that Tucker Carlson’s vanity project, The Daily Caller, appears to have been caught trying to sucker its audience regarding the tale of New Jersey Senator Bob Menendez’s patronizing of prostitutes. (TDC is standing by its reporting for the moment, although its explanation is rather heavy with the squid ink.) This is hardly the way you want to celebrate Holy Week commemorating The Passion Of Andrew Breitbart. On the other hand, maybe it is.

This has been coming for some time. The conservative media establishment is so self-contained as to be positively incestuous, so it can’t be any surprise that, sooner or later, there are some two-headed cousins gamboling over the public landscape. There is no internal governor to its enthusiasms; there are only wealthy sugar-daddies pushing the boundaries gleefully outward. There is the very strange and self-fulfilling sense of both victimhood and outlawry, that the people who cash checks from the Koch brothers, or from some shadowy Malaysian fixer, are the true revolutionaries. There has been no accounting because there has been nobody to call them to account, and that is not entirely the fault of the conservative movement. Actual journalists have taken a dive as well.

There’s been a little crowing in the establishment media over the accumulated comeuppance. On the liberal MSNBC last night, Lawrence O’Donnell went to dinner on the Menendez material. But return with us now, if you will, to those thrilling days of yesteryear — to the 1990s, to be precise, because that’s where it all began, and it began with the complicity, and the active participation, of the respectable press. This is one of those moments in which Bill Clinton must chuckle ruefully to himself before he gets on with his day.

The pursuit of the Clintons — which morphed into the pursuit of the president’s penis — is where it all began.

I guess I don’t quite feel the white hot cleansing heat of the implosion quite yet.  Let me offer up a few chomps and bits just from searching around the headlines today.  For example, Pierce offers up the the clown car side of the Muck Mills. This is James O’Keefe who has to be the posterboy for the DSM of Mental Disorder’s entry on pathological narcissism and lying. He’s the edit happy pimp court enuch of ACORN fame. Now, we all know that ACORN disappeared from the face of their flat earth after the Muck Mill Meme production spit out a lot of its usual lies and outrage.  Why on earth should poor people be allowed to vote or have an advocacy group? However, sucker exhibit one is this weird item: ACORN, In New GOP Budget Bill, Would Be Defunded Again, Even Though It No Longer Exists.   One can only reason that defunding of the Friends Of Hamas and the Junior League of Al Quaida is next.

Rogers’ bill also explicitly bars the use of the funds it appropriates for computer networks that do not block the viewing and exchange of pornography. It further bans the transportation of detainees from Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to facilities in the United States, even though the Obama administration has not transferred any detainees from Guantanamo since 2009 and has announced no plans to do so.

What can you say to the ongoing placement of conspiracy theories into US Law by crazed Republican Congresscritters?  Derp.

Meanwhile, we continue to watch The Daily Caller try to weasel its way out of the Menendez Prostitute Fantasy.  If only they were around to actually chase David Vitter who really did have a series of paid liaisons to investigate and likely use of public funds or assets supporting his diaper fetish.  Vitter has gubernatorial ambitions now while Elliot Spitzer still can’t get a real job. Derp.

Then, there’s the current Pressketeer Anything can Happen Day where MSNBC declares Joe Scarborough an obvious winner of a Charlie Rose finagled debate between Dr. Paul Krugman, acclaimed economics professor and said morning hack.   Yes, Joe clearly won because he can interrupt folks with gusto and read decades old news and declare them Bazinga!  worthy.  This quote is an example of Joe’s debating skills? Derp.

Krugman: If it wasn’t for me and a few people who are loudly saying, ‘the deficit is not a problem’ without first qualifying it with three paragraphs of–’well, you know, longer term it is a problem.’  I don’t think this message that spending cuts are hurting the economy would be getting across at all.

Scarborough (laughing): By the way, Paul, it’s very important to note:  Paul just agreed that only three people agree with him and are saying this.

Krugman: No, no, only three people–I said only three people are saying it without prefacing it with the obligatory three paragraphs. On the substance–Ben Bernanke gave a speech last week that was, for all practical purposes, saying the same thing I’m saying.  He said–you know, the deficit–the outlook looks relatively okay for the next ten years.  Now, we would like it to be lower, but it’s relatively okay.  But spending cuts right now are a really bad thing.

Yes. It some point we had real intellectuals writing and editing newspapers.  Ben Franklin comes to mind.  Now, we are regaled by the random Muck Mill-inspired propaganda of news readers–like Tom Brokaw–who would prefer they were the only ones with serious answers.  Yes, even when those serious answers are clearly made-up, invented, woven from thin air, and against all data, evidence, and reality.  I’m sticking to my atheist, science-based, jaded sensibilities. Here, there be Muck Mills.

Derp.

The Agony and the Idiocy

Posted: February 16, 2013 | Author: | Filed under: Catfood Commission, Domestic Policy, Economy, Federal Budget, Federal Budget and Budget deficit, We are so F'd | Tags: , , , , | 38 Comments

Some one needs to take the shovel away from Joe Scarborough.  He’s about ready to wind up in Siberia with that hole he’s digging himself.  I’ve joe_scarborough_cardnever seen such obsessive compulsive self-destructive behavior.  The man cannot admit he’s wrong and knows nothing about economics.  He also doesn’t appear to know the difference between an economist and a lawyer and a foreign policy expert.  I expect that one of these days he’ll have heart failure then go to his Politico blog to instruct another lawyer on how to do his surgery correctly.  Maybe, he’ll start giving lectures on the origins of the universe to Neil Degrasse Tyson next.

Who knew one man could become apoplectic convincing every one he wasn’t beaten up in a one-sided match of wits by Nobel Prize Winning Economist and ubernerd Paul Krugman over 2 weeks ago?  He’s written the second of two  “I know you are, but what am I?” blog threads at Politico in two days.   What Scarboroughs’s become is your run-of-the-mill internet troll who is now blog stalking Dr. Krugman.  Only “Tiger Beat on the Potomac” would continue to give this pathetic man a platform for what looks like a developing psychological disorder. We thought he’d over done it on Nate Silver and the presidential poll analysis.  But, nope, he’s back and convinced he knows enough about investment and econometrics to analyze the whims of investors.

021613krugman1-blog480Yesterday’s Scarborough rant was so bad and so wrong, I actually stepped into it.  Scarborough relentlessly insists that Krugman is wrong and that all the rest of us economists think he’s wrong too.  To prove his point and to try to get back for being shown up on his show, Mourning Joe used an article written by  Princeton economist and Paul Krugman colleague Alan Blinder.  The only problem is that Blinder is basically saying the same thing Krugman’s been saying all along.   Scarborough not only proved Krugman’s point, he totally missed the point–and the headline–of the Blinder article as well as ascribing the article to the wrong publication.  Mourning Joe must’ve read only a sentence and ignored the rest.  Does that first sentence not read “Today, there is no deficit crisis” or do I need to up my script for my reading glasses?

 Today, there is no deficit crisis. Tomorrow, there will be no deficit crisis. But in ten years, we will have a massive problem of exploding health care costs. Now that’s a crisis to worry about.

But, to Mourning Joe, this means:

But the same could not be said of a fabulously misleading Business Insider post that claimed to list 11 economists who shared Krugman’s debt-denying views. Never mind the fact that most of the links provided actually undercut Krugman’s reckless position and supported my view that the most pressing fiscal crisis is not next year’s deficit but next decade’s debt.

The Business Insider link to an Alan Blinder piece was particularly supportive of the “Morning Joe” panel’s view. Blinder, a former Fed vice chairman and Princeton economics professor, warned of “truly horrific problems” caused by long-term debt, health care costs and interest on the debt. Paul Krugman’s Princeton colleague even shared my conclusion that the coming Medicare crisis will be so great that Democrats won’t be able to tax their way out of it.

Far from supporting Mr. Krugman’s extreme position, the link to Professor Blinder’s New Yorker article undercuts his Princeton colleague’s exaggerated “In-the-end-we’ll-all-be-dead” approach to U.S. long-term debt.

Then he added a short list of noneconomists--including Ed Rendell who is paid lobbyist for deficit hawk group Fix the Debt associated with Simpson &  EB who make about $40,000 a speech as travelling austerians–as proof that all economists think Krugman is as extreme on economics as Wayne LaPierre is on gun safety laws.  Considering Krugman’s name resides on a well-known trade model, he’s published in just about every prestigious peer-reviewed journal possible, and he’s got one of the best-selling set of text books in the country right now, I’d say Joe just won’t admit he’s way out of his league.  Krugman calls Scarborough desperate.  Frankly, he gone way beyond that to pathetic to me.

First up, the sad story of Joe Scarborough, whose response to my anti-austerian appearance on his show has been a bizarre campaign to convince the world that absolutely nobody of consequence shares my views. Why is this bizarre? Because while I could be wrong about macroeconomics (although I’m not), it’s just not true, provably not true, that I’m alone in arguing that the current and near-future deficit aren’t problems.

I actually wrote about all of this over two weeks ago (1/30/2013) when the incident first happened, so it seems all deja vu to be at this again.  But let me tie this to a bigger problem again.   Hillary Clinton left the Benghazi hearings uttering something profound.  These hearings were some of the more bizarre things I’d ever watched until the Hagel hearings started and the obsession with conspiracy theories went nuclear.  Clinton said some ‘‘just will not live in an evidence-based world’.  This includes Joe Scarborough who thinks his “analysis” in his latest little short blog blurb shows Krugman as being wrong, wrong wrong. This is what he thinks is a “TA DA”! moment.  I would expect better analysis from Macro 101 students.  I would also expect any student in basic statistics or econometrics to have a hey day with his methodology which doesn’t even broach the high school level.  But, he’s real proud of it and thinks it puts Krugman in his place.

Investors may be growing skittish about U.S. government debt levels and the disordered state of U.S. fiscal policymaking.

From the beginning of 2002, when U.S. government debt was at its most recent minimum as a share of GDP, to the end of 2012, the dollar lost 25 percent of its value, in price-adjusted terms, against a basket of the currencies of major trading partners. This may have been because investors fear that the only way out of the current debt problems will be future inflation.

More troubling for the future is that private domestic investment—the fuel for future economic growth—shows a strong negative correlation with government debt levels over several business cycles dating back to the late 1950s. Continuing high debt does not bode well in this regard.

I can tell you that the minute all the econ and finance professors who blog get a hold of this, there will be laughter so loud that it will leave the blogosphere and escape to a permanent home in the universal annals of Pathos.  Frankly, I can already see using this in a first level, midterm statistics class, corporate finance class or economics class.  How many wrong things can you point to in this analysis in just 45 minutes?  Go!

Joe probably eyeballed domestic investment numbers and debt levels then labelled it correlation so he can jump an infinite number of sharks to go AHA!!!!  GOTCHA PROFESSOR MORIARTY errr Krugman!!   He also appears to be blissfully unaware of Fed policy concerning the dollar which basically sets the supply of our currency and the fact that supply interacts with the demand for our currency to set exchange rates. Oh, and the dollar’s been up against the major currencies (especially the EURO) since Dubya left office, so one of his arguments is just factually wrong.  The USD has been up against the Yen for well over a year and then up then flat against the Pound Sterling for years so I’m not sure which currency he’s worried about in that basket.  It’s even been flat against the Cayman Islands Dollar which I’m sure is more of interest to him than anything else.  It’s way down against the Chinese Yuan but then, I wouldn’t consider that a problem at all.

I’m tempted to go there and there and all the places I  could go with this, but  I won’t because most of you probably don’t want a stats lecture and I don’t have all day.  Let me just say that there are a lot of factors that drive investment, which is the least logical component of the national income accounts; and to single out one possible factor without controlling for any of the other factors is a fool’s errand. It shows complete ignorance of investment, finance, and economics so we can add a few more things to the list called what Joe doesn’t know.  Actually, worse than that is that he appears to have gotten this blather from an anonymous “senior economist” from the Rand Corporation.  Is he misquoting another economist or did some one actually write this for him?  Worrying either way!!

Joe, however, is more importantly a symptom of the much bigger problem identified by our former Madam Secretary.  We have an entire political party that insists it’s right when clearly, the overwhelming amount of evidence says its wrong.  For this analysis, I’m closing with something by Kevin Drum who occasionally can find the nut. We deserve a better press.  We deserve better than Joe Scarborough littering up the air waves under the guise of “news” instead of misguided memes and propaganda.

It seems to me that something has happened over the past three months: the nonpartisan media has finally started to internalize the idea that the modern Republican Party has gone off the rails. Their leaders can’t control their backbenchers. They throw pointless temper tantrums about everything President Obama proposes. They have no serious ideas of their own aside from wanting to keep taxes low on the rich. They’re serially obsessed with a few hobby horses — Fast & Furious! Obamacare! Benghazi! — that no one else cares about. Their fundraising is controlled by scam artists. They’re rudderless and consumed with infighting. They’re demographically doomed.

Obviously these are all things that we partisan hacks in the blogosphere have been yapping about forever. But the mainstream press, despite endless conservative kvetching to the contrary, has mostly stuck with standard shape-of-the-world-differs reporting.

Recently, though, my sense is that this has shifted a bit. The framing of even straight new [sic] reports feels just a little bit jaded, as if veteran reporters just can’t bring themselves to pretend one more time that climate change is a hoax, Benghazi is a scandal, and federal spending is spiraling out of control. It’s getting harder and harder to pretend that the same old shrieking over the same old issues is really newsworthy.discuss!!!

This brings me back to Boston Boomer’s Valentine’s Day morning rant based on a phone discussion we had the night before.  Why-oh-Why am I writing about this again?   Why-oh-why can’t we put this kind of nonsense to bed like all sane people who know the earth is not flat, an apple will fall to the ground if dropped from a tree, and if you every one stops spending and only a few families have decent incomes, the economy will contract and say stay contracted? Don’t folks like Scarborough and the AEI know we buried Say’s Law  Failed Hypothesis a  long time ago?  (Kinda like we buried that zombie Laffer curve! But some folks just want to believe the universe revolves around the earth and the entire set up is only a few thousand years old. Hmmm, like Mark Rubio.)

I’m not sure that last question was rhetorical or not, but hey, it’s a thread and there’s a discussion, so discuss amongst yourselves …

Here’s the topic:

Joe Scarborough, pathetic or desperate?  or   Why oh Why can’t we Have a better press corps? Joe Scarborough edition

or  The Deficit Hawk Delusion: What the Krugman-Scarborough Slugfest Is Really About?

DISCUSS!!!

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