Speaking of football, Jonathan Bernstein has long been making the argument that the Washington Redskins should change their name simply based on the issue of etiquette. This isn’t to say that there aren’t a whole lot of other issues, but you don’t even need to go there. The Native American community finds the name offensive. It’s as simple as that. So change the name.

Well, today I made the mistake of reading the comments of his most recent iteration of this argument, About That Washington Football Team. Well, apparently he has a troll that has nothing better to do than spout his ignorant opinions hour after hour. He goes by “Elesis” (a female name, but I don’t buy it) and I wouldn’t have even noticed him except that he kept making the same argument again and again and again.

And what an argument it is! Basically, “Sure ‘redskins’ can be a pejorative, but it isn’t a pejorative when the Washington football team uses it!” This is kind of like someone calling you “stupid.” When you complain, they say, “Hey, I know ‘stupid’ is generally a bad thing, but I don’t mean it that way when I refer to you that way!” In fact, here is an actual quote:

This made me think of a line from the film Pulp Fiction. What if Daniel Snyder decided that he wanted to name his team the “Washington Hard Pipe-Hittin’ Niggers”? I mean, in the movie, Marsellus doesn’t say that as a pejorative. He means he’s gonna bring in some hardcore guys who are going to “go to work on the homes here with a pair of pliers and a blow torch.” I can hardly think of a better name for a football team that is going to open up a can of whoopass every time they hit the field!

By Elesis’ logic, that would be a perfectly fine name for a football team, “Rather than denegrating [!] African Americans, the Hard Pipe-Hittin’ N…..s (or just the N…..s for short) are in fact honoring them.” Why would African Americans have any reason to complain?

The only reason that occurs to me is that it is a totally racist name regardless of what Snyder and Elesis claim. And that’s be just as true of the Redskins as the Pipe-Hitters. So I think we can get rid of the whole idea that “Redskins” is an honorific moniker. I’m still with Bernstein: it’s just a question of etiquette. But obviously, for people like Snyder and Elesis, etiquette doesn’t matter. I think I’ve dispensed with the pejorative and racist arguments. I wonder what they’ll come up with next?!

I noticed something interesting in Dean Baker’s vicious but fair review, Stress Test: The Indictment of Timothy Geithner. It is a long and detailed review going point by point over how Geithner is nothing more than a hired gun for the banks who didn’t didn’t give two bits for actual homeowners or the real economy except in the sense that they might hurt his banker friends. Go read his article, or my discussion, Tim Geithner: Grifter of the Power Elite. But here I am interested in one very small thing.

I’m used to politicians cherry picking whatever data is useful to them. But Geithner is supposed to be an economist—sort of a scientist. I understand that in his book, he would want to present himself in the best possible light. But to be actively deceptive? That goes way beyond what is acceptable. He really is an evil little man.

Geithner provided a graph of housing prices up to 2010 and claimed that it was his policies that caused the rapid drop in prices to stop in 2009 and then start rising. But this was actually a bad thing. The reason the prices of houses stopped falling was because the administration provided an $8,000 new home buyer’s credit. I have friends who used this to be able to buy their first home, and that’s great. But what the policy did on the macro-scale is to create another mini-housing bubble. The truth is that home prices had not yet reached their correct prices.

But you would never know that because Geithner decided to end his graph at 2010. He left out the part of the graph that I’ve shaded in grey when prices when down by about 6.5%. And this is just the overall price of houses. As Bake pointed out, Minneapolis saw a fall of almost 29% and Atlanta saw a fall of almost 52%. So a lot of homeowners got really screwed and Geithner is being extremely deceptive about it:

Now to be fair, after 2012, house prices did finally start to increase. But that doesn’t change the fact that many people paid more for their houses than they should have. And it doesn’t change the fact that Geithner is a liar who will say anything and present data in a totally dishonest way just to make himself look good. But lest we forget: Geithner is part of the power elite. Incompetence and outright villainy are rewarded in the power elite because the power elite are always rewarded no matter what they do. See, for example, Paul Wolfowitz.