Monthly Archives: June 2011

Just to recap

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This piece, run by the editorial board of the St. Louis Dispatch, has been making the rounds this week, and for good reason. It’s a nice, succinct rundown of some of the many ways that the GOP detaches itself from reality for the sake of ideological purity, notable primarily because you don’t see this kind of unmitigated honesty about Republicans very often in the modern mainstream news media.

Consider the mythology that makes up GOP orthodoxy today. Imagine the contortions that cramp the brains and souls of men and women of intelligence and compassion who seek state and national office under the Republican banner.

• They must believe, despite the evidence of the 2008 financial collapse, that unregulated — or at most, lightly regulated — financial markets are good for America and the world.

• They must believe in the brilliantly cast conceit known as the “pro-growth agenda,” in which economic growth can be attained only by reducing corporate and individual tax rates, especially among the investor class, and by freeing business from environmental rules that have cleaned up America’s air and water and labor regulations that helped create America’s middle class.

• Though rising health care costs are pillaging the economy, and even though health care in America is now a matter of what you can afford, Republican candidates for office must deny that health care is a basic right and resist a real attempt to change and improve the system.

• GOP candidates must scoff at scientific consensus about global warming. Blame it on human activity? Bad. Cite Noah’s Ark as evidence? Good. They must express at least some doubt about the science of evolution.

• They must insist, statistics and evidence to the contrary, that most of the nation’s energy needs can be met safely with more domestic oil drilling, “clean-coal” technology and greater reliance on perfectly safe nuclear power plants.

• They must believe that all 11.2 million undocumented immigrants living in the United States can be rounded up, detained, tried, repatriated and kept from returning at a reasonable cost.

• Even though there are more than four unemployed persons for every available job, GOP candidates should at least hint that unemployment benefits keep people from seeking jobs.

• They must believe that the Founding Fathers wanted to guarantee individuals the absolute right to own high-capacity, rapid-fire weapons that did not exist in the late 18th century.

By no means is this list complete. It almost makes you feel sorry for the people who pretend to believe this stuff. Almost.

(h/t )

Privatizing prisons just incentivizes imprisoning people

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File this under “obvious facts that get ignored for profit and political expedience.” As much as conservatives blather on about privatization being a more efficient and cost-effective alternative to government administration (which is wrong at face value anyway), they ignore one crucial concept: Some things, housing a prisoner chief among them, aren’t supposed to be made as cheap and efficient as possible. Prisoners should be a burden on the state, because that motivates the state to contribute to conditions that produce fewer prisoners, via education, social safety nets, and even less obvious things like health care. (Just watch John Q, and then wonder why you just watched such a mediocre movie.)

But let’s do a quick thought experiment here: What happens when a private corporation is contracted to run our nation’s prisons, and that corporation is paid on a (roughly) per capita basis, meaning the more prisoners they have, the more government money they get? No cheating and pretending we live in a truly free market where corporations can’t use their money and influence to affect government policy!

If the outcome of your thought experiment is that corporations will use their influence to ensure that more people end up in jail, then congratulations – it’s not just a thought experiment, it’s reality:

Yesterday, the Justice Policy Institute (JPI) released a report chronicling the political strategies of private prison companies “working to make money through harsh policies and longer sentences.” The report’s authors note that while the total number of people in prison increased less than 16 percent, the number of people held in private federal and state facilities increased by 120 and 33 percent, correspondingly. Government spending on corrections has soared since 1997 by 72 percent, up to $74 billion in 2007. And the private prison industry has raked in tremendous profits. Last year the two largest private prison companies — Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) and GEO Group — made over $2.9 billion in revenue.

How else do you explain that crime rates are dropping:

While imprisonment rates are rising:

In other words, if you’re wondering why we’re having such a hard time ending the War on Drugs, it’s in large part because keeping a bunch of people in prison is profitable for these corporations, and locking up people on drug charges is a great, easy way to inflate the prison population and wage war on minorities at the same time. Ah, freedom.

A trip down conservative talking point memory lane just might give you whiplash

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Alicublog reports that “Michele Bachmann attacks Obama for an alleged lack of ‘empathy’ for the little guy,” and the wave of concern over Obama’s alleged emotional detachment from the Average Citizen rolls through the obedient wingnut punditry.

The idea that Republicans have even the slightest shred of “empathy for the little guy” is incredibly laughable, but what’s more interesting is the fact that the wingnutteria seems to have done a complete 180 on the value of empathy. In their typical fashion of seizing whatever talking point is convenient for the moment, they’ve forgotten that two years ago, they were up in arms when Obama stated that empathy was an important quality for a Supreme Court justice.

They were drawing cartoons like this:
Or they were disingenuously pretending that Obama had said “empathy for minorities at the expense of white people” (which would only be a bad thing if minorities and white people were already accorded equal standing under the law, of course, but try explaining that to a conservative).

And once Sotomayor was announced as Obama’s nominee for the Supreme Court, they began immediately with the racist dog whistles about how a female Hispanic justice would only have empathy for minority women. (The article on the other end of that link is particularly vile in that it pretends that white male justices never, ever let their race or gender influence their judgments, which only makes sense if you imagine that white men are generic people and everyone else is Other, which is the essence of privilege.)

Or they’d quote comments from Obama like this one…

[W]e need somebody who’s got the heart—the empathy—to recognize what it’s like to be a young teenage mom. The empathy to understand what it’s like to be poor or African-American or gay or disabled or old—and that’s the criteria by which I’ll be selecting my judges.

…put them in scare italics, and leave them there expecting us to be horrified that Obama might choose someone who regards teenage moms, poor people, and racial or sexual minorities as full humans.

And two years later, now that the infamous empathy debate is out of the news, they’re suddenly very concerned that Obama might not have enough empathy for this job. What the hell, guys? You practically ran as the anti-empathy party last election cycle. Hey, I get that you Republicans don’t often stick to the same talking points over long periods of time – your long-term attention span appears to have only enough capacity to hold “invisible hand” and “taxation is theft” – but at least try to avoid talking points that are a complete reversal of a prior talking point, or at least wait more than two years.

Although the notion that Michelle Bachmann has more empathy than Obama is actually a lot more laughable, but that’s obvious on its face.

Emphasis on Twit #3

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In which conservatives remain convinced that even liberals admire Reagan.

I haven’t seen anyone outside of the Newsweek editorial pages comparing Obama to Reagan, but I assure you, if any liberal has done it, it was not intended as a compliment.

You’re trying to explain, but Rand Paul is just sticking his fingers in his ears and humming

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Senator Rand Paul

Note to Rand Paul: Tax cuts don't work, and neither does that hair cut.

Washington Monthly ran an article a few days ago entitled “Explaining ‘Penny Wise, Pound Foolish’ to Rand Paul.” And indeed that sounds like a difficult proposition, but not because Rand Paul is dumb, but because he’s not listening.

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), labeled “America’s Dumbest Senator” by some, was flabbergasted. “It’s curious that only in Washington can you spend $2 billion and claim that you’re saving money,” he said. “The idea or notion that spending money in Washington somehow is saving money really flies past most of the taxpayers.”

Yes, that is some incredibly stupid stuff, but let’s pause to consider here: is it really, genuinely possible for Rand Paul to believe this nonsense? Does the senator not have a single insurance policy, investment, even a single savings account? Of course he does. Senator Paul, an ophthalmologist, ran a private practice at some point in his life, so presumably he’s familiar with the principle of spending money to make money. After all, you have to buy a bunch of ophthalmology equipment in order to run a practice, and you may even have to (gasp!) go into debt to do so.

If you were to couch the principle of spending money now to save even more money in the future in business terms, in other words, Rand Paul would agree unquestionably. And yet he’ll stand there and say astoundingly stupid things like, “It’s curious that only in Washington can you spend $2 billion and claim that you’re saving money.”

I believe that these kinds of statements come naturally to Paul, and I believe that he really believes them on some level, which does make him profoundly stupid. But I don’t believe he’s stupid because he’s stupid. I believe he’s stupid because he’s a self-interested liar.

Rand Paul doesn’t want to spend billions of dollars to prevent seniors from starving, and the reasons he doesn’t want to do that are far too unpleasant and inhuman for him to actually articulate. That’s all “fiscal responsibility” has ever been for conservatives, after all – a veneer to mask the fact that they’d rather see old people starving in the streets than let a single tax dollar go to some unwashed prole.

Shorter Matt Yglesias: “I’m not rich, so I might as well be liberal”

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Via Sadly, No!, I find that Matt Yglesias is being an idiot again. Yglesias is a liberal blogger who’s more popular than he deserves to be, and every once in a while that veneer if intellectually honest liberalism cracks. His response to Mark Kleiman’s article about rising income inequality is this:

To be perfectly honest, it seems to me that I’d rather be a tenured professor at UCLA like Mark Kleiman than be CEO of a Dallas-based dairy company like Gregg Engels. The professor does more interesting work, has less day-to-day stress, lives in a much better city, and has much more opportunity to form meaningful social relationships with colleagues and students. I don’t even slightly envy the idea of membership in multiple golf clubs. I’ll admit that I would love access to a corporate jet, but I’d like the flexible schedule and ample opportunity for travel that academia provides even more. Now of course if you offered me Engels’ job, I’d say yes. But I’d try to do it for a year or two, put millions away in the bank, then quit to become an independently wealthy political blogger who’s working on a book about his fake life as a dairy company CEO.

In other words, “Hey, if I could, I’d be a rich bitch, too!”

But seriously, the enormous margin by which Yglesias missed the point here is breathtaking. Missing the point this widely, especially on economic issues, is generally a conservative trait. What happened, Matt? At what point, over the course of reading Kleiman’s article, did you get the impression that your personal lifestyle preferences have fuck all to do with economic injustice?

Oh, but, Yglesias argues, “Whose life you’d prefer really has to do with your tastes and preferences.” Sure, of course it does. And that fact alone erases economic injustice! Wait, no… no it doesn’t. Seriously, I wouldn’t want to be a CEO, either – does that mean I’m no longer in a position to fight against the political manipulation, class warfare, and massive theft via tax dodges that rich people routinely engage in? After all, what right do I have to criticize the chosen lifestyle of the top 1%? They’re just going about their preferred way of life of screwing over the other 99%, and hey, it’s not like life is all roses and cupcakes for them!

Yglesias ends with what must seem in his mind to be a Serious Point, given the Serious Language he couches it in, but it’s actually just as stupid as what came before:

The diminishing marginal utility of money means there’s a strong case for redistributing funds from people who have a lot of it to people who’ll get more use from it. But that very same diminishing marginal utility of money means that there’s little reason to believe that inequality in real living standards among the elite is nearly as big as the inequality in income.

I’m sorry, did you already forget about the corporate jet? And the $6 million home in Dallas as well as the 64 acres in Colorado? Is Engels happy? That’s immaterial. There may be happy poor people here and there, but that has absolutely no bearing on the fact that they’re suffering injustices perpetrated either by or at the behest of those top 1%. Engels can “frequently” leave home and work behind to visit his 64 acres in Colorado, and you’re telling me that maybe his living standards aren’t that exceptional? Engels has freedoms that are foreign to lower-class people – the freedom to travel whenever the hell he wants, to fly to another city on a whim, to take a day off work and still be able to afford groceries that week. In American capitalism, Matt, money is freedom. It shouldn’t be, but it is

Taxation is equivalent to theft, slavery, and any other bad nouns you care to throw out there

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Free to pursue liberty as a matter of pure principle, Nozick let nothing stand in his way. Should we tax the rich to feed the poor? Absolutely not, as “taxation of earnings is on par with forced labor.” (Or more precisely: “Taking the earnings of n hours of labor is like taking n hours from the person.”) Well, isn’t at least some redistribution necessary on the basis of need? “Need a gardener allocate his services to those lawns which need him most?”

Okay, Nozick, let’s make a deal. No more taxation whatsoever – for those who actually do labor. Workers, laborers, the people on the factory floors or in the mine shafts? We won’t tax them. Wouldn’t want to steal their labor, after all. But we’ll continue taxing owners, investors, capitalist masters in general, since they don’t actually do any labor. (Well, for those who both own a company and actually labor for it, as is the case with many small businesses, we’ll let them report separate labor hours and management hours or something. It’ll all be very complicated, but I’m sure you’ll agree that it’s worth it in the name of LIBERTY.)

There, now that we’re not taxing labor anymore, nobody’s getting robbed! So you’re with me on this, right, libertarians? What? You’re not? Could it be that you’re using a completely mendacious definition of words like “labor” and “productive” and that all your bloviating about liberty is just a sham to advance the interests of those who already have piles of money? Why I never!

(Source of quote)

Just so we’re clear, Bill Cosby is an asshole

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Bill Cosby

Asshole.

Conservatives have this thing where they think that liberals are all posers who are trying to be hip and tolerant by never, ever criticizing black people who aren’t Clarence Thomas. (I’ll give them credit for noticing that we think that Clarence Thomas is also a gigantic asshole.) It’s not, by and large, true, of course, but that goes without saying. Anyway, the reason I mention this is because I’m bringing up the fact (or my opinion, I suppose) that Bill Cosby is an asshole not in response to anything Bill Cosby has done lately but in response to Ben Shapiro and his latest delusional ramblings.

Shapiro’s on another kick about how Hollywood is run by liberals out to destroy traditional values, and this time he’s talking about how those filthy, man-hating liberals have used TV to tear down our cultural construct of the father figure. Alex Pareene at Salon does a good job taking apart Shapiro’s arguments (to use the term loosely). I wanted to zone in on a particular father figure that Shapiro mentions:

Cliff Huxtable (The Cosby Show, 1984-1992)

The last gasp of the conservative father on television came not from a retrenchment of conservatism but from liberals who wanted to assure blacks that not every television show about blacks had to take place in a junkyard or the streets. The result was one of the great conservative characters of all time: a traditional father who is successful in his career and authoritative at home.

Shapiro’s notion that Bill Cosby’s career was itself a liberal plot is actually pretty mind-bogglingly racist on its own, but skip that for now. What I find striking here is that Shapiro thinks that Cliff Huxtable is some kind of liberal hero just because he’s a successful black character. If anything, Cliff Huxtable is a character designed to let privileged whites feel not-racist by presenting them with a black character who has enough middle-class and male privilege that they can palate watching him on TV.

Those shows that Shapiro refers to that take place “in a junkyard or the streets” were actually a damn sight better as a portrayal of black people than what came before them. Prior to shows like Sanford and Son, black characters pretty much only got significant air time if they were appropriately subservient to whites (see: Julia, Beulah). When Red Foxx and others like him came along in the 70s with a willingness to put black characters on TV who weren’t in white-approved roles, that was what I would regard as a step forward. Black people who work in junkyards are people, too, after all. But Shapiro doesn’t really think so – he’s only willing to give a black guy a pass if that person is “a traditional father who is successful in his career and authoritative at home.”

I suppose my point is that liberals – at least ones who aren’t themselves suffused with middle-class privilege – are likely to be more interested in a portrayal of a working-class character like Fred Sanford than Yet Another Middle Class Character (But Black!) like Cliff Huxtable. That alone probably wouldn’t make Bill Cosby an asshole, but let’s be serious, the dude is a privileged motherfucker who criticizes lower-class black people for not having the foresight to be born with access to a well-funded magnet school and get an athletic scholarship for college. That’s why conservatives love him, of course, because when they hear a black guy saying it they get to feel less racist for feeling the same way, but Cosby’s skin color doesn’t make him any less wrong. So, y’know.

Emphasis on Twit #2

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In which Obama’s former profession is yet another of those malleable “facts” that you can alter or ignore to suit your ideology.

And as an added bonus, President Bartlet’s response to Romney’s initial tweet was far better than mine. This is why he was a two-term president (just kidding, it’s because they wanted to do four more seasons).