Monthly Archives: April 2012

From a purely objective and scientific viewpoint, I have the world’s shapeliest butt

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So the “scientifically proven” most beautiful face in Britain/the world (depending on which media source you’re looking at) just happens, by sheer coincidence no doubt, to belong to a pasty white, blonde-haired, blue-eyed woman.

Now, I’m not denying that Florence Colgate is beautiful. She is. She’s gorgeous. Let’s get that out of the way and leave it aside, because it’s completely irrelevant. This “scientific formula for beauty” notion has always struck me as unscientific fluff at best, and this latest media bandwagon about it does nothing to change my perception.

First, you have the fact that the new definition of “scientific” is apparently “devised by the ancient Greeks” (exact quote from ABC News). That’s not how science works. The fact that someone in ancient Greece decided (on whatever basis) that certain facial proportions are the most beautiful does not make it a scientific fact. But this is how the media does science, after all. If there are numbers or even just big words involved, it’s “scientific.”

Second, it’s a little too convenient that “science” supposedly proves exactly what the media, cosmetics companies, and our capitalist overlords in general desperately want us to believe: that there’s one rigid standard for beauty in women, and it just so happens to be so narrow as to exclude the vast majority of women on the planet.

Hence you have these “find the beautiful people!” contests that pop up in the news about once a year and shows like America’s Next Top Model, all predicated on the notion that beautiful women are mythical creatures that have to be sought out because in everyday life they’re just nowhere to be found.

Patriarchy demands that women must always feel like they should be doing more to serve men, that whatever they’re doing right now isn’t enough, and how dare a woman have the nerve to not look like a runway model, or if she does then geez, that woman needs to eat a sandwich, but either way the important thing is that she is never beautiful just as she is. But don’t worry! The media is only too happy, for your own good of course, to provide the role models for you to strive for (see picture above).

Right-wing Mythology #1 and #2

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Contrary to the implication of the title of the game (to which I would like to see a sequel, hint hint Ensemble Studios… oh wait, Ensemble Studios doesn’t exist anymore), the age of mythology isn’t in the distant past. Mythology just takes a different form these days. Republican mythology is a particular brand of mythology in which socialists are a genuine threat rather than a largely ignored smattering of academics, and Newt Gingrich is a towering intellectual giant rather than a complete dumbass.

So I’m starting a new series called Right-Wing Mythology, in which I debunk a particular tenet of right-wing belief in the US. (Speaking of serieseses, I’ll probably do more Emphases on Twit here and there, but I don’t pay nearly as much attention to Twitter as I did back when I was unemployed, so, y’know.) Now, the focus here will be very specific: I won’t challenge every single untrue thing some wingnut commentator says. And I won’t address patently obvious things like “Obama is a Muslim,” because a) duh, he’s not, and b) even if he were it would influence my opinion of Obama to a slightly lesser degree than his preferred brand of soap.

No, the focus will be on “facts” that pretty much every conservative takes for granted, things that seem like common sense to them, if only because they’ve been living in the Fox News bubble for too long. Things like “the government is inefficient at everything ever” (to be addressed in a future entry) or “the Chinese are about to plunge their hands into our chests a la Temple of Doom and pull out all the money we owe them” (already addressed that, try to keep up). Other future topics will include Social Security, taxation, and maybe Ayn Rand or something, who knows.

Today, to start off, I’ll address two myths. The second one’s on the house. As is the first one.

Right-Wing Myth #1: Obama has massively expanded the federal government

How do you measure the size of the federal government? For simplicity’s sake let’s go with the two most obvious: federal budget and number of federal employees.

Conservatives do love to talk about Obama’s alleged fiscal irresponsibility. And indeed, the federal budget increased by about $452 billion between 2008 and 2011. That proves it! Well, not really.

Suppose a year ago it cost you $20 to fill up the gas tank of your car. Now it costs you $35 to fill up the gas tank of that same car. Is that because you expanded your gas tank? Of course not. It’s because the cost of gas increased.

Similarly, one of the biggest drivers of the budget increase since 2007—before Obama took office, one should note—has been the increasing cost of existing government programs, most significantly welfare and other need-based programs. And the reason those costs are rising is because more people need welfare. You may recall that we’re in a recession. How you feel about whether or not they deserve that welfare is irrelevant; despite Gingrich’s bloviations, Obama didn’t initiate or even grow those programs. They simply serve more people now, because more people live in poverty. Let’s look at the breakdown:

But whoa thar! you might say. Why is the “Other” category so enormous in 2009? Well, because of the stimulus, of course. But not so fast—it’s not Obama’s stimulus, it’s Bush’s. It’s the TARP program initiated under President Bush in 2008. It gets factored into the 2009 budget because the 2008 budget was passed back in 2007. You know how it is. In fact, the entire 2009 budget was passed back in 2008, when Bush was President, and as you can see, the budget did not suddenly balloon as soon as Obama signed his first budget for 2010. That’s all that really needs to be said about that.

But what about federal employees? Well, let’s look at dat chart too.

I guess you could say so, but Obama isn’t presiding over a government any larger than the one Reagan and H.W. Bush did. Incidentally, the vast majority of the increase in employees went to two departments: Health and Human Services (thus implying that the hirings there are the result of the same increase in welfare needs brought on by the recession and not by any deliberate action on Obama’s part), and Homeland Security. Say, that reminds me, who was the last president to add an entire executive department to the federal government? (Hint: it wasn’t Obama.)

Right-Wing Myth #2: The US government oppressively over-regulates business and stifles competitiveness on the global market

This is an easy one. The conservative trope, as you probably know, is that business regulation in the US is just redonkulous, and it’s totally punishing our valiant Galts, and that’s totally why they can’t hire more people, and also it makes America less competitive and it’s probably also why we, unlike Iran, have gays in our country.

Let me introduce you to something called the Ease of Doing Business Index, measured by the World Bank. This index ranks the countries of the world (except the ones where you can’t really do business, so North Korea’s out) in order of how “business-friendly” their regulations are. The US is fourth. Fourth most business-friendly. In the world. Only Singapore, Hong Kong, and New Zealand outrank us.

Those countries that are supposedly welcoming business with open arms, thereby just forcing US corporations to fire a bunch of Americans and hire a bunch of outsourced workers? Well, China is 91st in the world. India is 132nd.

Yeah, the US is ridiculously lax on business. Businesses get away with a lot, in case you haven’t noticed, such as bringing the economy to the brink of collapse and then facing absolutely no consequences for it.

Well said (re: Mass Effect 3)

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I’ve deliberately avoided wading into the waters about the ending of Mass Effect 3, if only because I’m pretty sure nobody cares about my opinion on it. Suffice it to say I fall on the “displeased” side of that spectrum. Anyway, Ethan Gach sez:

To my mind, to disparagingly call those consumers who are petitioning BioWare for a new ending “entitled” is not only extreme, but misguided. It fundamentally misunderstands the business relationship that gaming companies have actively sought to foster with their customers. Companies like EA expect consumers to spend extra money for content that is arguably part of the “core” gameplay experience. Why shouldn’t consumers seek to shape the kinds of DLC that are released in response? For while some are arguing that frustrated consumers are asking BioWare to sacrifice its creative vision and authorial integrity, the truth is that most video games already did that a long time ago, and of their own accord.

Even in these formal shorts, I feel like a failure

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I feel compelled to correct the record on my brief post about LightSquared. It’s easy enough to see why I wanted to believe the narrative posited in the story I quoted, and indeed it’s not like I’ve changed my mind about the broadest points of the post—namely, upper-class conservatives’ hypocritical approach to “free market” economics. But this is a good example of why you shouldn’t believe a story just because it fits neatly into your existing worldview.

Commenter “voynix” on that post claimed:

It should be noted that the issues that stymied LightSquared were technical, as their transmission system was shown (in testing) to seriously interfere with portable GPS devices. Thus, the FCC’s denial was at the very least partially based on technical criteria and not pure political influence-swinging.
I personally agree with you that LightSquared should have succeeded, but this one is not pure politics.
See this article for a good summary: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2012/02/why-lightsquared-failed.ars

In attempting to learn from my mistake, of course, I probed beyond just that one comment and the accompanying Ars Technica article (that said, it’s a good article). And in my admittedly casual research I couldn’t find much to support the “AT&T and Verizon killed LightSquared because they’re assholes” narrative (though it should be noted that AT&T and Verizon are, in fact, assholes), while I found plenty to support the GPS interference narrative.

Politically, the issue is not simple. There’s money flowing from both sides, including from Philip Falcone, billionaire and manager of Harbinger Capital, a hedge fund company which, in addition to having a weirdly ominous name, is the owner of LightSquared. In fact, most of the claims that LightSquared was killed by political pressure from existing cell phone giants seem to trace right back to Falcone himself. While that doesn’t make such claims untrue, it’s worth noting that Falcone’s hands are by no means clean in this regard. (To wit, where LightSquared is concerned, his political donations always seem to be directed at whichever party is in charge of the executive branch, and thus the FCC.)

Technically, the issue actually is fairly simple: LightSquared was designed to operate on frequency bands immediately adjacent to GPS signal bands, and LightSquared’s signals would have been literally millions of times more powerful than the GPS signals even at a distance of a mile from the nearest tower. In testing, the LightSquared signals interfered with GPS receivers in a large majority of cases.

In comments on pretty much any article about LightSquared, you see a lot of people who really want to believe that none of this is LightSquared’s fault. Maybe they’re politically motivated, maybe not, but either way they’re just factually incorrect. The most common claim I saw, for example, is that it’s GPS receiver manufacturers’ fault for straying beyond GPS’ designated frequency bands. This makes no sense, as the issue isn’t with the signals GPS receivers are sending, but with their ability to receive GPS signals from orbit, which can easily be overpowered by terrestrial transmissions in immediately adjacent frequencies. The GPS satellite network itself, of course, is operated by the Department of Defense, and thus the frequencies it sends and receives can’t be expanded by civilian GPS receiver manufacturers. Many of the pro-LightSquared commenters appeared unaware of this basic fact.

The other most common argument in favor of LightSquared is that it’s the GPS manufacturers’ fault for not equipping their receivers to filter out non-GPS signals. Given the strength of the LightSquared signals in question, this seems akin to blaming me for not putting up enough insulation in my apartment to block out the rock concert going on next door.

But anyway, the ultimate point is, capitalism sucks, but if someone tells you that capitalists eat babies for breakfast, don’t believe it just because you want to. That is a lesson I frequently have to remind myself of.

Republican spokeswoman: A vote for the GOP is a vote for unemployment, recession

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Apparently Alexandra Franceschi, Specialty Media Press Secretary of the Republican National Committee, came out and said that the Republican Party wants to push economic policies that are demonstrably bad for the economy and workers. I think such a gaffe speaks more to the tone-deafness of the GOP than anything else. They can spout a few stock lies about trickle-down effects and such, sure, but at the end of the day, they still don’t get what was so bad about the Bush years.

Which is why, on a radio show last week, after Franceschi explained the GOP’s economic platform—which you’ll be surprised to hear primarily involved tax cuts and austerity and at least one reference to the mythical “deficit crisis”—this revealing exchange occurred:

ESPUELAS: Now, how different is that concept from what were the policies of the Bush administration? And the reason I ask that is because there’s some analysis now that is being published talking about the Bush years being the slowest period of job creation since those statistics were created. Is this a different program or is this that program just updated?

FRANCESCHI: I think it’s that program, just updated.

“So it’s like that time when the economy sucked and nobody could get a job?”

“Yeah, like that! ROMNEY 2012 WHOOO!”

Well, Bush’s policies didn’t turn out badly for anyone who mattered, after all, so Republicans just can’t figure out why they’re so unpopular.

Probably because of this:

As a result of the Bush economic platform, “growth in investment, GDP, and employment all posted their worst performance of any post-war expansion,” while “overall monthly job growth was the worst of any cycle since at least February 1945, and household income growth was negative for the first cycle since tracking began in 1967.” Meanwhile, the deficit and debt exploded. It would have to be quite the update for the GOP to make anything better happen this time around.

The US Constitution? Yeah, I’ve been meaning to get around to reading that

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John Roberts, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, appears to have no idea what the Constitution actually says:

When the case came before the Court, Roberts asked the state of Arizona’s lawyer, “I checked the Citizens’ Clean Elections Commission website this morning, and it says that this act was passed to, quote, ‘level the playing field’ when it comes to running for office. Why isn’t that clear evidence that it’s unconstitutional?”

Because we all remember that important Constitutional amendment that says, “Congress shall make no law leveling the playing field, or in any way loosening the plutocratic grip that billion-dollar corporations exert over American democracy.”

Seriously, how far up your ass do you have to shove your head before you’re capable of believing that enabling non-wealthy people to campaign for office isbad for democracy? It’s not like anybody’s forcing people to vote for them. The fact that twits like this—like Roberts, Scalia, and Thomas—are justices in our nation’s highest court is just scary.

“Leveling the playing field” has become synonymous with socialism in the minds of conservatives, even in contexts where it makes no damn sense. Do none of them ever stand back and say, “Okay, maybe the amount of money you have isn’t the sole quality by which your fitness for everything ever should be judged”?

Failing that, they should at least stop treating the Constitution the way conservative Christians treat the Bible, imagining that it dictates whatever it is they happen to believe about a subject. “Leveling the playing field is unconstitutional” is such a non-sequitur that it’s clear that Roberts doesn’t give a shit what the Constitution actually dictates. He’s on that bench to push his own ideological agenda, and the least he could do is be honest about it.

Two girls, one Cupp

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Quote of the decade:

[W]hile liberal women may praise Ann for (at least) getting herself an education, where is the praise for Ann’s best decision of all — to marry well?

(h/t Digby)

Bonus:

But as I sit in a cramped New York apartment, surrounded by bills, drowning in a sea of deadlines, the conventional life of a stay-at-home mother actually sounds pretty nice.

So wait, I’m confused, is being a stay-at-home mom hard work, or is it basically an extended vacation? Make up your mind, conservatives! At any rate, the notion that it’s Republicans who respect and value the hard work of stay-at-home moms rather falls apart when people like Cupp are constantly jabbering about how awful feminists are for expecting women to be able to handle the rigors and challenges of, y’know, everyday working life. “Bills?! Deadlines?! Argh, it’s just too much for my uterus! I should have gotten married and let my husband handle all this!”

The free market is a cake, which in turn is a lie

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It’s funny how, as far as Republicans are concerned, you shouldn’t go asking the government for help, unless you’re a billion-dollar corporation. The reason the free market is great, according to Republicans, is that you have to provide quality, competitive goods and services, thus allowing the cream to rise to the top… unless you’re a billion-dollar corporation.

Last year, a new company called Lightsquared promised an innovative business model that would dramatically lower cell phone costs and improve the quality of service, threatening the incumbent phone operators like AT&T and Verizon.  Lightsquared used a new technology involving satellites and spectrum, and was a textbook example of how markets can benefit the public through competition.  The phone industry swung into motion, not by offering better products and services, but by going to Washington to ensure that its new competitor could be killed by its political friends.  And sure enough, through three Congressmen that AT&T and Verizon had funded (Fred Upton (R-MI), Greg Walden (R-OR), and Cliff Stearns (R-FL)), Congress began demanding an investigation into this new company.  Pretty soon, the Federal Communications Commission got into the game, revoking a critical waiver that had allowed it to proceed with its business plan.

And so Americans continue to have a small number of expensive, poor quality cell phone providers.

It’s almost like all this “free market” talk goes out the window when the plutocrats’ billionaire buddies need a helping hand from the government.

Lately I feel like the world just isn’t violent enough

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Oh lawd, that is some batshit wingnuttery:

Appearing before the National Rifle Association annual meeting this afternoon, Newt Gingrich called for a new United Nations treaty that would give the right to bear arms to every person on the planet.

“The right to bear arms comes from our creator, not our government,” Gingrich said. The NRA “has been too timid” in promoting its agenda beyond American borders. The Bill of Rights was not written only for Americans, he said. “It is a universal document.”

(h/t David Atkins)

That’s… an interesting perspective to hear from the mouth of someone who holds a degree in history. My current working theory is that Gingrich forgot his history lessons so hard that he actually flew right past ignorance and into the territory of what I’m tentatively calling “antitruth.” Newt “knows” many antitruths about history, like someone who just stumbled in from Narnia and wants to start teaching biology classes about the myriad species of talking animals.

I could get into the silliness of claiming that the Bill of Rights wasn’t written only for Americans, or the monstrosity of wanting to dump (at minimum) six billion more guns into an already violent and fractured planet. But I wouldn’t best David Atkins, so just click on his name up there.

Meanwhile, the original Newt.org article contains the following adorable little tidbit:

Newt’s reception from the crowd of 5,000 people was more enthusiastic than Governor Romney’s.

Mommy loves me more!

Stay-at-home moms are lazy, unless they’re rich Republicans

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I’ve written before (though not nearly enough) about the ease with which Republican ideology moves from one fundamental, self-evident truth that all Real Americans embrace to a new, entirely contradictory fundamental, self-evident truth that all Real Americans embrace, without a hint of self-awareness on the part of the GOP’s pundits and politicians.

The essence of the thing is simply that David Javerbaum’s Quantum Romney is actually a major underpinning of the modern GOP. Certainly Romney is the apotheosis of the quantum wingnut, the Kwisatz Haderach – he who can believe many worldviews at once – to which decades of ideological breeding and social engineering having aspired. But the ability to believe, with conviction, whatever is most politically convenient at the moment is hardly his exclusive domain.

This time, the Republican bandwagon makes its whiplash-inducing 180 on the issue of stay-at-home moms. The motivator, of course, is the Hilary Rosen spat, in which (as most of you know) Rosen stated that Ann Romney has “never worked a day in her life.” Rosen’s ambiguity was unfortunate, because her actual point, that Ann Romney has never in her entire life had to worry about earning a paycheck to feed herself or her family, is entirely correct. Republicans latched onto the broader, admittedly reasonable interpretation that Rosen was dismissing Ann Romney’s many years of child-rearing.

So, as Republicans are wont to do when dealing with Democrats, they immediately took the exact opposite position with no regard for how it related to their formerly stated ideological tenets. And so you have:

There’s so, so much wrong with this whole thing, starting with the fact that Barack Obama has absolutely no connection with Hilary Rosen and had nothing to do with her comments about Ann Romney. But these are conservatives we’re talking about; they’re not big on nuance.

But Fred Clark really hits the mark on why this campaign, coming from the GOP, is so hilariously galling:

The “welfare reform” passed during the Clinton administration was based on the idea that welfare recipients would be required to work.

Welfare reform was billed as the end of the free ride for all those lazy moms sitting at home doing nothing except raising their kids and cashing their AFDC checks. The new law replaced the old Aid to Families with Dependent Children with TANF — Temporary Assistance for Needy Families. And TANF meant those lazy moms were going to have to earn that assistance.

Those of us who objected to this new law at the time argued that, actually, those moms already were doing work — they were raising their kids. This objection got slapped down by, among others, the Republican Party, which insisted at the time that raising kids wasn’t real work and didn’t count.

But that incredible screeching of tires you hear isn’t the Republican Party Line Car turning away from their platform of 16 years ago. Oh no, that car can turn on a dime, a dime four months wide, no less:

Romney and allies cried that Democrats had declared “war on moms” after a Democratic strategist said Romney’s wife hadn’t worked a day in her life. Romney’s camp said this meant Democrats don’t value stay at home moms and motherhood, while they believe that women who stay home are doing real work.

But for every Romney action, there is an equal and opposite Romney reaction, and this morning, MSNBC’s Chris Hayes dug up a video of Romney from just January in which the Republican presidential candidate said he wanted to require women who receive welfare to work outside the home, even if their children are very young. He told a New Hampshire audience:

“I wanted to increase the work requirement,” said Romney. “I said, for instance, that even if you have a child 2 years of age, you need to go to work. And people said, ‘Well that’s heartless.’ And I said, ‘No, no, I’m willing to spend more giving day care to allow those parents to go back to work. It’ll cost the state more providing that daycare, but I want the individuals to have the dignity of work.”

As digby said, “It sounds as though he believes that being a wealthy stay at home mom is a full time career while being a poor stay at home mom is undignified and lazy.”

This fits neatly into one of those bedrocks of Republican ideology, the ones that don’t whip about in the wind – namely, that having little money is a sign that you’re lazy, while having lots of money is a sign that you’re hard-working. The fact that this is no way correlates with reality has never stopped Republicans from believing it, and it’s not going to stop them now.