Month: March 2015

Piketty: “Some billionaires consume academics”

by Gaius Publius

The above quote is part of a quip by Thomas Piketty (him) at a gathering of economists that included a number of right-wing ideologues like Greg Mankiw. The writer Masaccio tells the tale:

Piketty Gets A Laugh At Mankiw’s Expense

… One of those panels, packed with right-wing economists, was set up by Mankiw, who used it as a stage to attack Piketty. He and his fellow ideologues decided unanimously that the best thing to do is to impose a consumption tax, presumably as part of a package to lower taxes on the top earners and to keep capital gains taxes low and corporate taxes at their lowest level in decades.

Masaccio then mentions a joke Mankiw made publicly at Picketty’s expense (I’ll send you there to read that). The result:

Then someone asked Piketty what he thought about the consumption tax idea. Collins reports his reply:

“We know something about billionaire consumption,” Piketty observed, “but it is hard to measure some of it. Some billionaires are consuming politicians, others consume reporters, and some consume academics.”

Ideologue (my characterization above) or operative (Piketty’s)? Feel free to decide for yourself. Masaccio’s response: “Sweet.”

GP

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That they should believe a lie
by Tom Sullivan

In the car last night, my wife mused on why many struggling to remain in the middle class speak so harshly of the worse off who accept public assistance, you know, for food. Given last-place aversion (see Saturday’s post), isn’t it a small price to ensure there are people below you on the social ladder to look down on?

I shouted, “You want me on that dole! You need me on that dole!”

In a bit of serendipity later, up popped Heather Cox Richardson’s piece in Salon featuring a photo of Jack Nicholson from “A Few Good Men,” about how Movement Conservatives can’t handle the truth.

Beginning in the 1950s, she writes, William F. Buckley formulated a strategy for pushing back against the popular New Deal. It was “an attack on the Enlightenment principles that gave rise to Western civilization.” Truth no longer served. Instead, “a compelling lie could convince voters so long as it fit a larger narrative of good and evil.” The Cold War provided the growth medium.

By the George W. Bush administration, Richardson concludes,

Buckley’s intellectual stand had won. Facts and argument had given way to an ideology premised on Christianity and the idea of economic individualism. As Movement Conservatives took over the Republican Party, that ideology worked its way deep into our political system. It has given us, for example, a senator claiming words he spoke on the Senate floor were “not intended to be a factual statement.” It has given us “dynamic scoring,” a rule changing the way the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates the economic impact of tax cuts, to reinforce the idea that cuts fuel economic growth despite the visibly disastrous effects of recent tax cuts on states such as Kansas. And it has given us attempts in Oklahoma, Texas, North Carolina and Colorado to discard the A.P. U.S. History framework and dictate that students learn instead the Movement Conservatives’ skewed version of the nation’s history. Politicians have always spun information to advance their own policies. The practice infuriates partisans but it reflects the Enlightenment idea of progress through reasoned argument. Movement Conservatives’ insistence on their own version of reality, in defiance of facts, is something different altogether.

Examples are legion. And when confronted publicly? Double down on the lie.

Last year I wrote about the popularity of “pass-it-on” email, a phenomenon of the right all but absent on the left:

Some of us are old enough to have seen Superman on black-and-white TV defending truth, justice, and the American Way. That was then. The saddest part of pass-it-on propaganda and AFP disinformation is that the people who raised us at the height of the Cold War warned us that commies would use propaganda and disinformation to destroy America from within. Now, many of those same Real Americans™ consider trafficking in propaganda and disinformation good, clean fun for the whole family. They know it’s wrong and they don’t care.

There’s an end-times passage in the New Testament about this:

2 Thess 2 (KJV)
11 And for this cause God shall send them strong delusion, that they should believe a lie:
12 That they all might be damned who believed not the truth, but had pleasure in unrighteousness.

Historical revisionism for 400 Alex

by digby

All day long I’ve been hearing how unprecedented it is for anyone to be critical of Israel and how there’s always been bipartisan support for Israel no matter what. For people born yesterday, that might sound reasonable. For the rest of us, not so much:

BAKER CITES ISRAEL FOR SETTLEMENTS

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
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Published: May 23, 1991

WASHINGTON— In an unusually blunt criticism of the Israeli Government, Secretary of State James A. Baker 3d said today that nothing has more complicated his efforts to convene Middle East peace talks than Israel’s continuing settlement building in the occupied territories.

Mr. Baker’s declaration marked something of a shift in stated American policy on this issue by singling out Israeli settlement building. It was prompted, the Secretary said, by his four trips to the region in the last two months, during which the Israeli Government initiated or expanded Jewish settlements on each trip, antagonizing Arab leaders and making it more difficult for them to show flexibility.

“Nothing has made my job of trying to find Arab and Palestinian partners for Israel more difficult than being greeted by a new settlement every time I arrive,” Mr. Baker said during testimony before the House Foreign Affairs subcommittee on foreign operations. “I don’t think that there is any bigger obstacle to peace than the settlement activity that continues not only unabated but at an enhanced pace.”

His remarks came at the end of two hours of testimony in which he explained to the legislators that his inability to organize an Arab-Israeli peace conference, despite 36 days of shuttling around the region, was primarily due to Syria and Israel not being able to agree on what role the United Nations should play at a conference and how often it would reconvene. Blames Israel and Syria

Throughout his testimony Mr. Baker seemed to lay the blame evenly on Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir of Israel and President Hafez al-Assad of Syria, and suggested that if they could overcome these procedural issues, all other elements of the peace conference would fall into place.

He detailed several areas where agreement has already been reached between Arabs and Israelis: that the conference will aim to achieve a comprehensive settlement through direct talks between Israel and Arab countries, and between Israel and the Palestinians; that negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians would first address an interim self-government solution and then the permanent status of the occupied territories, and that “Palestinians would be represented in the process by leaders from the occupied territories who accept the phased approach and who commit to living in peace with Israel.”

Administration officials said President Bush has still not decided whether to send Mr. Baker back for yet another push to close the remaining gaps, or to invite the parties involved to Washington for a high-pressure sales pitch or to quietly drop the issue at least for a while.

At the close of today’s session, the subcommittee chairman, Representative David R. Obey, Democrat of Wisconsin, held up a copy of a recent dispatch from Israel in The Washington Post, detailing a large-scale expansion of Israeli settlements in the West Bank and Gaza Strip since the end of the gulf war, and demanded to know Mr. Baker’s assessment of the situation on the ground and its implication for the peace process. Congressman Is Incensed

Mr. Obey said a report from the State Department last year indicated that there are now more than 200,000 Jewish settlers in the occupied territories, including East Jerusalem, with an increase of 9,000 to 10,000 in the last year.

“Frankly, it gets under my skin,” Mr. Obey continued, “because my understanding is that this activity is in violation of U.S. policy. What bothers me is the Israeli Government says that they desperately need funds for other purposes, including bringing Soviet Jews to Israel for resettlement. But then they appear to be spending money like this, which I don’t think they ought to be spending.”

Responding to Mr. Obey’s remarks, Mr. Baker said: “Every time I have gone to Israel in connection with the peace process on each of my four trips, I have been met with the announcement of new settlement activity. This does violate United States policy. It’s the first thing that Arab governments, the first thing the Palestinians in the territories — whose situation is really quite desperate — raise with us when we talk to them.”

The Secretary added: “The Arabs and the Palestinians, of course, argue that this proves that the Israeli Government is not interested in negotiating outcomes, but it’s really interested in creating facts on the ground. And it substantially weakens our hand in trying to bring about a peace process, and creates quite a predicament.” Extra Efforts, Baker Says

Mr. Baker said he had raised this point any number of times with the Israeli leadership but “to no avail.”

The Secretary said he even tried to arrange a deal between Israel and her Arab neighbors, whereby the Arabs would suspend either their boycott of Israel or their state of belligerency in return for Israel’s suspending settlements. He was rebuffed by both the Israelis and the Arabs, he said.

“I have about decided that we’re not going to get any movement on settlement activity before we have an active peace process going, and it’s going to be just that much more difficult to get a peace process going if we can’t get any action on settlement activity,” Mr. Baker said.

Just saying …

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Those poor kids

by digby

Mother Jones talked to the millennial conservatives at CPAC. It’s just …

[T]he candidate who aroused the most intense enthusiasm was Ben Carson. Evan, a 17-year old proudly wearing a “Run Ben Run” sticker on his lapel, was effusive in his praise. “He’s not run by lobbyists,” he said. “His policies are going to be what he believes in…he has integrity.” A group of college students relaxing on couches in the expo hall agreed that if the GOP wants to win in 2016, Carson needs to be a factor. “I love Ben,” said Blake, a college student from Illinois. Carson is, he said, “the Ben Franklin of our time.” Others in the circle agreed: “Ben Carson is almost too smart” for the American voters to truly understand him, another student said. An idea began to form: what about Carson as VP, and Walker as president? The group howled in approval: “Yaaaass!”
[…]
“This is my first time here,” said a 20-year-old College Republican. “But I heard it’s easier to get laid at CPAC than on spring break.”

Those poor, poor kids …

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It’s amazing how much he has lied about

by digby

It’s pretty much everything at this point:

One evening in March more than 30 years ago, Gaeton Fonzi received a call from a man whose voice and name are now instantly recognizable.

“Hi Gaeton,” the caller said. “Bill O’Reilly.”

The year was 1977. O’Reilly, a young television reporter in Dallas, was chasing a story about a figure in the investigation of the JFK assassination who had killed himself in Florida.
He was calling Fonzi, a congressional investigator, to confirm the suicide.

“You hear anything about it?” O’Reilly asked, according to phone recordings provided to CNN by Gaeton’s widow, Marie Fonzi.

The phone recordings indicate that O’Reilly learned of the suicide second-hand and was in a different location at the time.

Years later, however, O’Reilly would repeatedly claim to have been at the scene.

In his 2012 book “Killing Kennedy,” O’Reilly wrote that he knocked on the door of a South Florida home when suddenly he “heard the shotgun blast that marked the suicide” of George de Mohrenschildt, a Russian immigrant who knew Lee Harvey Oswald.

While promoting the book, O’Reilly said on Fox News that he “was about to knock on the door” when de Mohrenschildt “blew his brains out with a shotgun.”

The discrepancies were first reported by JFK researcher Jefferson Morley in 2013. His fact-checking didn’t get much attention at the time, and the low-quality recordings he posted on his website made it difficult to understand what O’Reilly and Fonzi were saying.

Earlier this week, amid scrutiny about how O’Reilly has recounted some of his journalistic exploits, the liberal watchdog group Media Matters for America drew new attention to Morley’s fact-checking.

CNN then obtained higher-quality recordings from Fonzi’s widow.

In the conversations with Fonzi that night in 1977, O’Reilly never once indicated he was anywhere near the scene of the suicide — much less that he heard the fatal gunshot.

On the call, O’Reilly initially tried to confirm the suicide.

“What’s the story?” O’Reilly asked.

“They don’t know,” Fonzi said.

“Nobody knows,” O’Reilly replied.

O’Reilly can also be heard detailing his travel plans. Although he never said where he was calling from, O’Reilly made it clear where he was not.

“I’m coming down there tomorrow,” he said. “I’m coming to Florida.”

Moments later, he elaborated on his itinerary.

“Now, okay, I’m gonna try to get a night flight out of here, if I can,” O’Reilly told Fonzi. “But I might have to go tomorrow morning. Let me see.”

Fox News declined to comment on the contradiction in O’Reilly’s accounts. The channel referred questions to a spokesperson for Henry Holt, the publisher of O’Reilly’s book.

Earlier this week the publisher said “we fully stand behind Bill O’Reilly.”

“This one passage is immaterial to the story being told by this terrific book and we have no plans to look into this matter,” Henry Holt added.

At what point is it clear that he is not just a bombastic pundit but a pathological liar?

And at what point does Fox have to deal with this? Ever?  Isn’t it time for people to start asking the allegedly straight reporters Brett Baier, Ed Henry and Chris Wallace what they think about this?

Will the Supremes put another nail in their coffin?

by digby

Just in case you weren’t aware of it, here’s the background on this typo case coming before the Supreme Court this week to dismantle the subsidies in the federal ACA exchange:

Shortly after the A.C.A. passed, in 2010, a group of conservative lawyers met at a conference in Washington, D.C., sponsored by the American Enterprise Institute, and scoured the nine-hundred-page text of the law, looking for grist for possible lawsuits. Michael Greve, a board member of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a libertarian outfit funded by, among others, the Koch brothers, said, of the law, “This bastard has to be killed as a matter of political hygiene. I do not care how this is done, whether it’s dismembered, whether we drive a stake through its heart, whether we tar and feather it and drive it out of town, whether we strangle it.” In time, lawyers hired by the C.E.I. discovered four words buried in Section 36B, which refers to the exchanges—now known as marketplaces—where people can buy health-insurance policies. The A.C.A. created federal tax subsidies for those earning less than a certain income to help pay for their premiums and other expenses, and, in describing who is eligible, Section 36B refers to exchanges “established by the State.” However, thirty-four states, most of them under Republican control, refused to create exchanges; for residents of such states, the law had established a federal exchange. But, according to the conjurings of the C.E.I. attorneys, the subsidies should be granted only to people who bought policies on the state exchanges, because of those four words in Section 36B. The lawyers recruited plaintiffs and filed a lawsuit; their goal is to revoke the subsidies provided to the roughly seven and a half million people who were left no choice by the states where they live but to buy on the federal exchange.

Also too: these same lawyers heavily lobbied the Republican states not to build exchanges.

This case will rank up there with Bush vs Gore which means most people assume the court will not do it. But everyone assumed that they would never rule the way they did on Bush vs Gore.

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Sunday Funnies

by digby

I love that “guess who almost has WMDs now!”

It reminds me of that famous (perhaps apocryphal) quote from an unnamed neocon Bush official: “Anyone can go to Baghdad, real men go to Tehran.”

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QOTD[ecades]: John Kerry

by digby

Kerry on ISIS 2015:

it is on a “rampage reminiscent of Tamerlane and Genghis Khan.”

Kerry on US 1971:

“They told the stories at times they had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage of war, and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of this country.”

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See PAC run scared
by Tom Sullivan

It’s important to be a victim these days and, boy howdy, they do it right at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in National Harbor, MD.

Raw Story’s Tony Ortega reports on a panel titled, “Religious Freedom in America: Would the Pilgrims Still Be Welcome Here?” Conservative columnist Cal Thomas, Rep. Randy Neugebauer of Texas, and Family Research Council President Tony Perkins seemed to agree with talk radio host Dana Loesch that it’s “a badge of honor to be persecuted” and that Christians in this country should be a protected class:

“And since we have the victim competition in the United States,” Loesch added, “I think we win.”

And thus a religious super majority in America transubstantiates itself into a persecuted minority. Genuflect, genuflect, genuflect, as Tom Lehrer sings.

But it’s men, really, who are most persecuted. Why, “feminist ideologues and gay marriage supporters” want to make men irrelevant:

It’s going to be hard to argue that “fathers are essential” if gay-marriage laws say “they are optional,” said Jennifer A. Marshall, vice president for the Institute for Family, Community and Opportunity at the Heritage Foundation.

At “The Future of Marriage” panel, the Washington Times reports, Marshall called gay marriage the “final nail in the coffin” in the fight against fatherless homes. (Presumably, two-father homes violate code.) And just yesterday, I thought “being picked last in gym class” was their biggest motivating fear.

The Guardian’s Jeb Lund offers a more satirical take on the marriage panel, observing that political movements can seem “nonsensical to outsiders because groupthink elides the needs for certain connective thoughts to be voiced aloud.” We know who the good guys are and that the bad guys are bad. It goes without saying (and does) that effects have causes. There’s no point wasting time demonstrating what they are.

Yet, even thorny conservative social issues ultimately come down to money. It was just a matter of time. Lund writes:

… Wade Horn, former assistant secretary for children and families, weighed in with the observation that marriages save money and diversify productivity because “marriages allow for economies of scale and specialization” within the household. (For those scoring economies of scale at home, presumably because specialization has made one of you an actuary: economies of scale good when you are married to someone; bad when buying prescription drugs for nations.) When your bridesmaids give you bewildered looks at the altar, point at your groom and cross their eyes while miming throwing up, just hold your hands apart to show how much he scales your economy.

To a cynic, that might read like a heartless thought. But do you know what’s really heartless? Government. “Children need their mothers and fathers. There is no government program that can possibly substitute for the love and guidance and sense of place in the world that parents provide,” MacDonald explained. “What we’re seeing now in the inner city is catastrophic. Marriage has all but disappeared. When young boys are growing up, they grow up without any expectation that they will marry the mothers of their children.” And she’s right; people who think government will love you or your abandoned children are idiots. The Department of Love has been a failure since 1967, and large faceless institutions will never care for human beings no matter how well they claim to mean. Those “inner city” people shouldn’t have been trying to hug America. They should have hugged something more practical like each other and that smiley face from Wal-Mart.

If only those people were less urban. So it goes.

Gene Roddenberry’s universally beloved creation has become so ingrained into our pop culture and the collective subconscious of Boomers […] that the producers of the latest installment didn’t have to entitle it with a qualifier. It’s not Star Trek: Origins, or Star Trek: 2009. It’s just Star Trek. They could have just as well called it Free Beer, judging from the $80,000,000 it has rung up at the box office already.

His artistic pursuits — poetry, photography and music in addition to acting — ranged far beyond the United Federation of Planets, but it was as Mr. Spock that Mr. Nimoy became a folk hero, bringing to life one of the most indelible characters of the last half century: a cerebral, unflappable, pointy-eared Vulcan with a signature salute and blessing: “Live long and prosper”.

But back to the pointy-eared gentleman, an early and critical role model for me as a child. Keep in mind, at the time of the TV show’s initial run (1966), I was all of 10 years old. Also, note that I was kind of a weird 10 year-old. I wasn’t that keen on hanging out with kids my age; I always had an easier time relating to elders (my best friend at the time was 13). To me, children were silly, immature creatures; I generally found their behavior to be quite “illogical” (believe me…it took years to de-evolve into the silly man-child I am today; to quote Bob Dylan, “Ah, but I was much older then, I’m younger than that now”).