Broadly speaking, there are two kinds of conservative pundits. First there is the bloviator that we all know from right wing radio. Rush Limbaugh is the best example of this. In fact, if you do a Google search on “bloviator,” Google offers, “Searches related to bloviator: Rush Limbaugh.” Seriously. The second is the Very Serious Pundit. Two people come to mind here: George Will and David Brooks. These guys seem very smart because they talk nice and for a conservative, that’s saying something.

But if you pay attention to what they actually say, rather than how they say it, you will find that—just like Deep Throat said—these are not very smart guys. Affirmative Action for conservatives! If they were liberals, I’m not sure they would even have been able to write professionally. But they have no lack of pretentiousness. In fact, that’s their brand.

David Brooks has been in the news recently, because he is teaching a course in humility at Yale. That’s right: a course in humility at Yale taught by David Brooks! If you made this shit up, you’d have to be a modern day Jonathan Swift. I don’t know what is more absurd: selling the children of the poor as a food source or creating a course on humility at Yale taught by David Brooks. Let’s call it toss up.

Luckily for us, Scott over at Backslash Scott is a student at Yale. And he attended the first day of David Brooks’ humility course. You know this is gonna be good, don’t you?!

He didn’t write too much. But he did provide some of the highlights:

Hopefully Scott will file more stories from David Brooks’ war on humility. At Yale!

The University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business did a survey of top economists on the issue of the Debt Ceiling. They asked whether those surveyed agreed or disagreed with the following statement, “Because all federal spending must be approved by both houses of Congress and the executive branch, a separate debt ceiling that has to be increased periodically creates unneeded uncertainty and can potentially lead to worse financial outcomes.” Of these people, 84% agreed or strongly agreed.

But you might ask: what about the idiot conservative “top” economists? What about evil conservative “top” economist Glenn Hubbard? I don’t intend to be mean here. It is just that Hubbard’s entire career has been one big money grab. Being rich is far more important to him than doing good work. And he’s right to make this “sacrifice” because he was still Mitt Romney’s top economic guy and he is still asked what he thinks by reporters at the Washington Post.

Case in point, Zachary A. Goldfarb at Wonk Blog ask Hubbard and three other conservative economists what they thought about the whole debt ceiling business. I have very little respect for these men, but even I was surprised at the apologetics that each one of them provided when asked about a government default.

Glenn Hubbard’s answer is telling. It really isn’t about economics at all. Instead, it is just a political attack on the president:

But even while being political, he isn’t accurate. There is no way that the Republicans will name their demands for spending cuts. The president already has stated what tax increases he wants. What’s more, he’s mentioned entitlement cuts. But the Republicans? Nothing.

Whenever I hear the term “conservative economist,” I think of “Nazi science” or “Jewish anthropology.” These aren’t real things. Scientists are scientists. Non-scientists are non-scientists. But in the case of people like Hubbard and Keith Hennessey, we should stop pretending and just call them what they are: conservative apologists.

Over at CNN iReport, the evil blogger TXBlue08 explains, Why I Raise My Children Without God. She does not have to make the case to me. I firmly believe that it is wrong to subject your children to your religious doctrine before they have developed “formal thought” (the ability to think abstractly), which generally occurs by around the time of puberty. Because really: if people got to choose their religion without the propaganda value of having one particular sect crammed down their throats, don’t you think they would pick different religions? The fact that people overwhelming choose their parents’ religion (or one that is closely aligned) does not indicate that one religion is right. Children of Buddhists tend to become Buddhists and children of Catholics tend to become Catholics. They can’t both be the One True Religion!

TXBlue08 gives good reasons for not raising kids to be religious:

• God is a bad parent and role model.
• God is not logical.
• God is not fair.
• God does not protect the innocent.
• God is not present.
• God does not teach children to be good.
• God teaches narcissism.

That last one is my favorite. Humans display so much hubris. Why do we think that we are so important? The universe was most clearly not developed for us. Want proof: we would instantly die almost every place in the universe. If God has a plan, it ain’t for us!

Go read the article, it is good. But it isn’t why I’m writing this. When I first clicked to the article, a splash screen popped up telling me that the article had been flagged. Did I really want to read this terrible article? Absolutely. But I got a tickle out of the warning. Angry theists were doing what they do best: oppressing the non-believers.

But there is good news. CNN posted a very nice update:

So good for CNN and bad for the “believers.” I guess the argument is that believers have the right to raise their children as they wish because, you know, they have God’s ear. This actually brings up an old philosophical idea: in the absence of God, humans must play the role. And most believers play the role perfectly—just as you would expect from a narcissist.

Afterword

I want to head off an objection I might hear to the first paragraph above. Teaching your children that there is no evidence of God is not a religious statement. Even the most hardcore atheists will admit that they don’t know. In fact, that’s the point. But Christians do not tell their children that maybe there is a God. They tell them that there is a God and that He is a very particular God. And that is just teaching kids things you have no right to teach them. It is like his father teaching Calvin that the sun is the size of a quarter. Except not nearly as fun.

It is pure baloney to say we have to pay the bills for things Congress has already approved. We are drawing the line on future spending, not the debt or obligations to Social Security, Medicare and the military, which can all be met without an immediate rise in the debt ceiling.

—Amy Kremer
Quoted by Glenn Kessler in the Washington Post

You may remember my very agitated video from the last time I saw Ms. Kremer:

As I posted last night, the House voted to fund Hurricane Sandy relief with only 49 Republicans. The Fiscal Cliff deal passed the House with only 85 Republicans. Both of these votes violated the “Hastert Rule,” which says that the Speaker of the House should only bring a vote to the floor if a majority of his caucus is in favor. That should mean that for a vote to come to the floor, there should be at least 122 Republican votes. But twice in one month, this has not been the case.

This is good news, and it makes me kind of hopeful about the Debt Ceiling crisis. It suggests that the Republican leadership is not going to allow its extremist caucus to destroy the United States and thereby the Republican Party. Hopefully. But there really is cause to be hopeful. It isn’t just this recent abandonment of the “let the crazies block all legislation” rule.

The whole Republican Party seems to be splitting in half over the issue. Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins have said that the Debt Ceiling must be raised. Admittedly, both of these Senators are of the “not quite so crazy” variety of Republican, but it is always the weakest joists in the ceiling that crack first.

The Hill reports that at the Republican retreat that starts today, they will be focusing on how to deal with the Debt Ceiling going forward. They claim they are considering proposals that would raise the Debt Ceiling anywhere from a couple of months to the end of Obama’s presidency. But we’ve seen this kind of thing before. All that’s going to happen is the leadership trying to convince the crazies that crashing the economy will be bad for the party. Regardless, there is no talk about actually crashing the economy and recently, the Republicans have managed to silence the idiots in their caucus who have been going around saying that maybe crashing the economy just a little bit would totally rock.

In addition to the more restrained Republicans, there is a growing chorus of conservative infrastructure calling for a clean bill. Talking Points Memo goes through the main players: the Koch funded Americans for Prosperity; the National Review; the Wall Street Journal; and even Newt Gingrich.

Even down low, it looks very bad. The people really don’t like the idea of crashing the economy. Greg Sargent provides a good analysis of a Washington Post poll that shows that only 36 percent of Republicans are in favor of a government default. (That’s still pretty high; so Republicans can continue to take pride in being a truly crazy party.)

We will see what the next week brings. I suppose it is fanciful to think that this will not come down to the deadline, but it really does look like the rats are abandoning the ship. And you know what I think: rats are very smart.

When it came to the Fiscal Cliff, 85 House Republicans voted for the deal. (Understandably, given that it was a much better deal than they could have reasonably expected.) Today, the House voted on the remaining Hurricane Sandy relief: $50.5 billion. And only 49 Republicans voted for it. Note that in the Fiscal Cliff vote, most of the Republicans weren’t even willing to save $600 billion by taxing the rich. So you see: priorities! There is something really wrong with these people.

That means 179 assholes voted against it. And one Democrat.

Brad Plumer at Wonk Blog tells us, High-School Graduation Rates Are Rising—But No One Knows Why. He is reporting on a paper by Richard Murnane of Harvard who looked at graduation rates from 1970 to the present. In general, graduation rates declined until 2000 and since then, they’ve be going up—fast. But here’s the thing: no one knows why it went down before. And no one knows why it is going up now. But I have a couple of ideas.

Here is the critical graph:

They can’t explain this graph. But they have some ideas, of course. One is that it is lead. At this point, I’m not going to dismiss any speculation that the removal of lead has made us infinitely healthier, smarter, and less violent. But most of the lead was gone by the 1970s, and I would think we would have seen an effect earlier than 2000. Another idea is students are now being better prepared for tests, so they feel more confident that they can graduate. I don’t know about that: they weren’t testing kids for graduation back in 1980. Or maybe it is just that the moon is in the seventh house or some such.

I would love to dive into the raw data, because I have a few ideas of my own. Starting in 1980, there really is no trend: kids are graduating at the same rate that they always were. But then, in the mid-1990s, graduation levels drop. I remember that time: jobs were for the asking. So it is not surprising that a lot of marginal students would decide they were better off just getting a job. Then the economy goes into recession and thanks to the stewardship of George W. Bush, we pretty much stay that way until the economy implodes. Jobs are harder to find so why not stay in school. (This second part comes from the original paper.)

The data conform very well to this narrative. But the question remains: what happened in the period 1975 to 1980? This is a weird period with low unemployment then high then low then high. Given this volatility, it is hard to imagine students being able to make a rational employment/school decision based upon the economy. I tend to think that something else must have been going on. It was, after all, a fairly gloomy period. Just the same, “morning in America” didn’t cause a further decrease in graduation rates. But that may be because those inclined to despair were already despairing.

Regardless, it is kind of nice to see this improvement. Still, it is hard for me to believe that even now almost 20% of boys drop out of high school.