Something really interesting happened this morning on Up With Chris Hayes. One of the guests was Veronique de Rugy, who was repeatedly referred to as a researcher at George Mason University, but who seems more correctly called an adjunct scholar at the CATO Institute. She is clearly a smart woman—she has a PhD from the University of Paris—Sorbonne. And yet, she was slapped down multiple times over factual errors.

This starts in the very first segment where she claims that we are focusing on the trees instead of the forest, “Which is this gigantic crisis in entitlement spending that’s coming.” That line made me jump out of my chair, but luckily, Chris Hayes was there to save the day, “There’s not a gigantic crisis in entitlement spending.” She responds, “Oh really?! Have you looked at the numbers going forward?” And he has a simple retort, “The projections right now for the Medicare trust fund, for instance, is solvency for the next 13 years, which is above what the projection has been for the life of the program.”

The point here is not, “Oh look at the conservative embarrassing herself.” It is that this is a smart and well educated woman. But she lives and works in the conservative bubble where everyone just knows things that simply aren’t true. One of those is: entitlements are bankrupting us; be afraid! And this just shows that even for the smart people at the most prestigious conservative think tanks, their conservative beliefs are faith based, not fact based. I occasionally see a liberal politician or pundit get information wrong, but not a liberal intellectual. If the data do not support their positions, they usually change their positions. And when they don’t, they at least know where the weak points of their arguments are.

The show continued on with the addition of Bruce Bartlett. I’m going to attack him in an article later tonight, so let me say for the record: there is no better conservative. He really does know his stuff. And it was nice to see him slap down de Rugy multiple times. She claimed that Grover Norquist is right to hold taxes and spending as a single issue. She used the same old Republican canard that, “Well, those Republicans that came before weren’t really conservative!” Bartlett slaps her down. She then doubles down on this idea and then Barlett kind of loses it. He says, “Your idea is so God damned dogmatic. You’re living in this fantasy land where we’re going to balance the budget by abolishing Medicare and other ludicrous ideas.” She keeps fighting. “There won’t be enough tax revenue to pay for the large spending increases…” He cuts her off, “That’s not true! That’s a factually incorrect statement.”

It was wonderful to watch. Bartlett has clearly had it with all this conservative nonsense. And part of his anger certainly comes from being drummed out of the inner circle of the conservative movement for his apostasy. What I think I’m seeing is what happens to any small extreme group: they purge themselves. And after a while, you are only left with those who (voluntarily or not) are willing to drink the kool-aid. Clearly, de Rugy has drunk the kool-aid. What is a mystery is how the elites of a major American political party could exhibit this kind of behavior.

Watch this clip. It is fun:

Paul Finkelman has written a most striking OpEd in the New York Times about that great writer of God given liberty, Thomas Jefferson. The title of the article will give you some idea: The Monster of Monticello. I have to admit, I have tended to give Jefferson the benefit of the doubt over the years. I know that I rarely if even live up to my ideals. Just the same, I’ve never been a total dick.

Finkelman presents a very callous man—one who truly saw his slaves as property. He presents a man who sold 85 slaves to buy luxury goods. (That’s a lot of luxury goods.) He sold slaves as a form of punishment. And most shocking of all (I knew of this but not the stark numbers), when he died he only freed 5 of his slaves. The remaining 200 (including his mistress Sally Hemings) were to be sold.[1] In all of my misspent life, I have never done anything as bad as any part of this. It is despicable.

When I was young, I was briefly involved with an older woman who was fond of saying that a man couldn’t be held accountable to mores of his time, but he could be held accountable for his own mores. Over time, I came to see that she was wrong. We are all products of our times. But even with my more liberal view of personal ethics, Jefferson looks very bad.

Compared to the men of his day, he was still conservative at best when it came to the issue of slavery. Compare him to his friend Thomas Paine, and you can only conclude that Jefferson was nothing but a selfish asshole. Even compared to John Adams, himself quite the asshole, Jefferson looks terrible. But as Finkelman shows, it is much worse than even this. He really did think that Africans were subhuman.

Of course, I can’t help but wonder which way this works. I tend to think that Jefferson was the same as all rich people. He came to believe that he was entitled to his wealth. His wealth was dependent upon the enslavement of Africans. But he could see how unjust this was. So he had to justify it. And there is no better way to justify it than to “prove” that your slaves are in no important way different from your cattle.

Let’s not forget that slavery was not about racism. It was about profits. There are historical reasons why slavery eventually was limited to Africans. But the slaveholders kept slaves for the money, not for any of the theoretical reasons they developed to justify the practice. So I tend to think this is what was going on with Jefferson. And what is particularly bad about this way of looking at the man is that it tends to undermine all of his work. It isn’t just that he had a personal failing or a blind spot when it came to slavery. It is that what he wrote he only ever meant to apply to men like himself.

Given that most of the founding fathers were of similar dispositions, even if they weren’t in favor of slavery, it means the whole founding of the country was less a revolution and more a change of ownership. It is only step by step that we make a more perfect union. People like Jefferson were never really in favor of equal rights for the “help.”

H/T Corey Robin

[1] Jefferson’s daughter Martha Randolph stopped Hemings from being sold.

You may remember Andrew Sullivan. He is a conservative Obama supporter. And after the first presidential debate, Sullivan had a very public freak out. That was understandable, a lot of liberals were similarly concerned, although he was much more ridiculous than most.

Now that Sullivan has got the president he wanted, Sullivan apparently thinks that Obama shouldn’t do anything as rash as govern on his campaign promises. In a blog post yesterday, he writes, Meeting In The Middle. In it, he quotes Ezra Klein and Michael Tomasky, basically saying the same thing: it is good to see that Obama has learned how to negotiate. Tomasky writes, “If the White House had instead yesterday offered a modest set of specific entitlement cuts and domestic spending cuts, that would have started the negotiations on GOP turf, since those are the two things the GOP wants.” Exactly!

But Sullivan thinks this is all wrong:

There is an easy retort to this: we saw the “new politics” over the past four years and it didn’t work. In fact, if Obama had offered the modest set of spending cuts that Tomasky mentions, the Republicans would be saying the exact same thing. About the only person who might have applauded such magnanimity from the president would have been Andrew Sullivan. And even in his case, I suspect all that would have happened was that Sullivan wouldn’t have written this one blog post.

Negotiation is a game. The Republicans know it. The president now knows it. Andrew Sullivan needs to learn it. And he also needs to stop whining.

For much of the media, the David Petraeus story never gets old. In fact, it seems that some of them are still hoping that they can convince the country that he has been unfairly victimized. There have even been calls to put him back in charge of the CIA. You see: he’s blackmail proof. (Did you know that the only things people are ever blackmailed over are affairs? And that Petraeus could never have another affair? Neither did I.)

Let’s take the basic facts of the Petraeus affair and see how we can turn it into the most cliched story imaginable. The story itself is really very simple and a cliche in its own right: an old married man has an affair with a younger woman. Now let’s expand this into five all new cliches:

1. He ended the affair because it was the right thing to do.
2. He’s a great guy—really.
3. The wife is standing by her man just like the great gal he married.
4. He was never a skirt chaser—this is an anomaly.
5. It wasn’t his fault—he just fell for the younger woman’s charm.

This is the story we get from New York Post writer Chuck Bennett in his article, David Petraeus Says He ‘Screwed Up Royally’ in Letter to Old Army Buddy. It doesn’t get better than this!

In addition to being a laundry list extramarital affair cliches, it tends toward the hagiographic. Even after the mighty hero’s fall, the mainstream media just can’t let go. We are still greeted with pieces saying nothing other than, “Petraeus is great and what he did was minor.” I agree about his affair being minor. He has committed far worse sins in public view to applauding media. But since we will never get this kind of discussion, we can at least hope that reporters will shut the fuck up about the man.

Petraeus has retired. It is time for the press to let him go.

H/T Reed Richardson

Update (29 November 2012 9:46 pm)

Michael Stickings at The Reaction where I blog has a slightly different take on this news, Petraeus: “I screwed up royally.”

The House Progressive Caucus has long had a lot of good ideas. But in general, they get little coverage. For example, while all the media were going gaga over Paul Ryan’s budget, the Progressive Caucus released the People’s Budget, which was ignored except when it was used to ridicule its name. Whereas the Ryan budget was just a Trojan horse meant to justify huge tax cuts for the wealthy, the People’s Budget actually balanced the budget.

The line from the mainstream press was always the same: the People’s Budget was a non-starter. No one would ever take it seriously. On the other hand, Paul Ryan’s budget was very serious because people took it seriously. Of course, the people who took it seriously were primarily the usual suspects (wealthy people who want to reduce their taxes) and the mainstream press itself. It is interesting that reporters claim they should only report what the two sides say and never comment that one side is wrong. And yet, when it comes to something like this—budget proposals on the right and left—they choose to not even report on the left side.

In this context, I am pleased to see some actual liberal budget proposals seeing a little media light. As I’ve been screaming for years, a good way to fix entitlements is to actually fix them and not destroy them. On the right (and sadly, in the White House), we mostly see proposals to cut benefits—directly, through cost of living declines, and through increased eligibility requirements. What exactly is getting fixed here? I think it is the problem that Social Security and Medicare even exist. Those on the right and in the middle see that as the problem: government was just too generous in the past and now we need to do something about it. This is why their arguments are generally so weak or flat out wrong, like the argument that Social Security was only meant to support a population that had a life expectancy below 65. (This argument is literally wrong and weak: it is not true and even if it were it would be a terrible argument.)

Last week, Senator Mark Begich has introduced a bill that would eliminate the payroll tax cap that makes Social Security the ridiculously regressive tax that it is. Similarly, the Progressive Caucus, led in part by Keith Ellison, is pushing the same idea in the House.

I don’t expect these proposals to get much traction. But the fact is that at least the radio silence on them is starting to lift. More reporters are covering this stuff. I suspect that most people think that ideas to “fix” entitlement programs only come from the right. The fact is that only ideas to destroy entitlements come from the right. Ideas to truly fix entitlements come exclusively from the left. And the only way anyone will know this is if we talk about it in the public square and don’t relegate it to rooms so quiet no one can hear.

Nate Silver tweeted this morning that we should not give Dean Chambers of Unskewed Polls any of the attention he so clearly craves. But this is like crack—it’s hard to resist. Chambers has started a new website, Barack O’Fraudo. On it, he offers up the following graph (thanks for Digby):

This is ridiculous, of course. But I still have a question, “Where did the other 73 votes go?” You may remember Unskewed Polls’ second to last election prediction (They put out a last-minute face-saving prediction that weren’t based upon new poll results.):

So if Obama stole those states, giving Romney 286 electoral votes, what happened to the 73 votes that would have brought Romney up to 359 votes? It just doesn’t make sense. But then it isn’t suppose to. I think that Chambers is just using his celebrity to make money off gullible conservatives—just like Fox News.

Derrick Belcher claims to be a libertarian. If I could, I would get rid of the word “libertarian” because it is just a meaningless word that conservatives use. Sure, there are libertarians who hate the Republican Party as much or more than they hate the Democratic Party. But such people are very rare and with notable exceptions, hidden. So it is better to think of Derrick Belcher as a conservative and not the “absolute Libertarian” he calls himself.

He lives in Alabama and, like so many other conservative loons, he wants to secede from the union. The reason I know he is just another conservative is what he says about secession, “I don’t think any one state can stand alone. But if we’ve got 20 of them, then that starts to be something.” He means 20 red states, of course (more on that in a moment). “Libertarian” is not the first word that comes to mind when you think of Mississippi, Arkansas, and West Virginia. “Poor” might be the first word, given that they are the poorest states in the union.

But Belcher has an answer to that! “If you look at a map of the red states, we have all of the oil and we produce all of the food. We’re the ones that are carrying the rest of the nation.” You didn’t expect him to be right did you? Of the top six agricultural states, three of them are bright blue. And combined, they produce more food than the three red states. Of oil producing states, two of the top six are blue. Same for natural gas. And the same for coal. (Surprisingly, bright blue Illinois produces twice as much coal are red West Virginia.)

Of course, none of this really matters. Energy and food are transported. But I suspect that Belcher wants his new confederation of states to be truly independent. Good for him! And good luck to him, because it is a stupid idea as any economist will tell you.

What Mr. Belcher seems most upset about is that back in 2001, the government shut down his topless car wash.[1] He said, “The government ripped my business away, and now they’re choking America to death with rules and regulations.” According to the article:

This is typical of conservatives. It is very frustrating to talk to conservatives about the Middle East because in their minds, there are only two kinds of people there: Israelis and Not Israelis. This is also true if you include India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. And here Belcher doesn’t seem to understand that there are different levels of government. They must all be the feds! It wasn’t the federal government which shut down his “nasty wash”; it was the state of Alabama.

The truth is, if Derrick Belcher were a libertarian as he claims, he would be worried that big liberty-killing laws would be enacted by the social conservatives in an independent Alabama. But that is doubtless not what this is all about. He said he is angry. And when a conservative is angry, they don’t really care if, say, they attack the wrong country. So what the hell: the state passed a law he doesn’t like; separate from the nation!

[1] In many ways, I am a very naive man. When I read he had a “topless car wash” I thought it was a car wash for convertibles. All of my readers are hereby on notice that this is charming and not pathetic! (BTW: the image above is from a “topless” car wash where they the bottom part of your car for free but charged $5 to do the top. So there!)

I like to drink while I cook—generally a nice pinot noir like the 2011 Hahn Winery. But I’m not a big drinker, so I often end up leaving half a glass of wine undrank. Most of the time, this results in one or more house flies dead in the wine the next day. I’ve thought about this a lot and I have a hypothesis that I plan to test next summer when the flies come back.

According to Fruit Fly Traps (which deals with fruit flies, but I doubt it matters), flies like liquids like vinegar, apple cider, orange juice, and wine. Thus they land to drink it and drown because they are stupid. I am skeptical.

I think that flies are significantly less likely to die in orange juice than in wine. The alcohol in wine vaporizes at a significant rate. I think that while drinking the wine, the flies pass out from lack of oxygen and thus drown.

This is pure speculation. If anyone knows anything about this important scientific question, please let me know. Otherwise, when the flies return I will present my results.

The picture above is from the Daily Mail, “This close-up picture shows a house fly drenched in water vapour, which look like large globules of water under the intense magnification.” It is from an article A Little Too Close For Comfort? It has a number of really great close-up pictures of insects.

Marco Rubio has made a bit of a stir with comments about his young earth belief. It isn’t so much the beliefs; they are standard fair in the conservative movement. What is most appalling is his relativistic statement in support of these beliefs, “At the end of the day, I think there are multiple theories out there on how the universe was created and I think this is a country where people should have the opportunity to teach them all.” If I didn’t know what he was thinking, I would yield the point. The truth is there are different theories and I think it is a great idea teach them all. But I’m talking about actual scientific theories and this is not what Rubio is talking about. He wants the Genesis myth to be taught as science.

I’m not kidding about this. He goes on to say, “I think parents should be able to teach their kids what their faith says, what science says. Whether the Earth was created in 7 days, or 7 actual eras, I’m not sure we’ll ever be able to answer that. It’s one of the great mysteries.” No. It isn’t one of the great mysteries. The earth was not created in 7 days and I don’t know what an “actual era” is. These are the words of a man who can not back up his beliefs. His religion tells him that the universe is not the way we know it to be so he claims that we should teach “all sides of it”: the side that’s true and the fantasy he wants to believe. This isn’t even handed. This is simple distortion of the truth.

Digby dug up a 2009 article about what Rubio was saying then, via Little Green Footballs:

What I find most offensive about these words is how they fit into the context of my lifetime here in the United States. There is only one party that ever acted in this way. It was the Republican Party under Reagan and Bush that encouraged children to turn their parents in for drug use and dealing. I remember Bush praising a grammar school child for having turned her cocaine dealing parents into the police. So to have a Republican claim that teaching evolution is somehow going to turn children against their parents when his own party worked to do that very thing in the name of their useless Drug War makes my blood boil.

It would be nice to think that anyone as delusional as Rubio couldn’t become president. But we know that isn’t the case. Well over half the people of the United States believe the same disproven rubbish that he spouts. There really are facts in the world, however. But the modern Republican Party will have none of it. And as we know from Charles Krauthammer, the only thing the Republicans need to change about themselves is to be a little less vile regarding Latinos. So don’t be surprised if roughly 50% of the country votes for a Cuban young earth proponent in 2016.

Jonah Goldberg has written the kind of article that liberals just love, Compassionate Conservatism Redux. In it, he admits that this election has taught him a valuable lesson: as much as he and the other evil men at National Review may love their “Give me low tax rates and give them death” ideology, they need a kinder, a gentler conservatism if they are going to convince the rubes to vote for them. And what is the kinder, gentler conservatism? Certainly not George Bush Sr. He wants to take us back to George Bush Jr. and his idea of “compassionate conservatism.”

Quick: what made Bush’s conservatism compassionate? Bmmpth! You couldn’t think of it quickly, because he never actually governed that way. But let’s go back to the way that he claimed he would govern. Goldberg reminds us:

Let’s see here: would a man who cared about, say, seniors, pass a law that was first and foremost a giveaway to drug companies? Would a man planning on a “humble foreign policy” have Dick Cheney as Vice President? It doesn’t really matter. The truth is that I have no memory of a Republican ever governing based upon his campaign. Sure: they all promise tax cuts and they almost always pass them. But other stuff? Not really. Remember Reagan? Remember how terrible the federal deficit was and how he was going to knock it out with those three 10 percentage point tax cuts? I do.

When a Republican promises something like fiscal restraint or human compassion, I know they are lying. So when Jonah Goldberg says that the Republicans need to revisit “compassionate conservatism,” what he means is that they need to sound more compassionate. And once in office, they can devastate the poor and start a bunch of new wars. In other words, what Goldberg is really saying is that he’s been too honest in the past.

“Another heavenly day.” That’s the first thing that Winnie says in Happy Days, one of Samuel Beckett’s most disturbing plays. Every day is heavenly in Ireland, because they are a Roman Catholic country. And as such, abortion is illegal in that God fearing country.

You know what really makes for a heavenly day? Carrying around a dead fetus in your womb. It’s heavenly is so many ways. First, you can feel the honor of doing something totally useful for the sake of God. (Although, I still find the logic against abortion and condoms kind of circuitous owing to the fact that neither of them are in the Bible.) Second, you get to suffer—just like that Jesus guy. And third, you get to see God so much sooner.

Savita Halappanavar had many heavenly days before her 28 October death due to blood poisoning resulting from her dead fetus. She was 17 weeks pregnant. And she tried to get an abortion because the fetus was not viable. But the good Christian doctors of Ireland wouldn’t provide that service. Mustn’t offend God. Or something.

Halappanavar was a 31-year-old dentist from India. So if this is what happens to rich educated women, you can imagine the situation for the poor and uneducated. Of course, Ireland has public funding of healthcare so that helps. Imagine the situation in another country, say, the United States. The problem with Ireland is not that it’s Catholic. After all, in Italy, they allow abortion for the first 3 months of a pregnancy. The problem is that Ireland is parochial. A much bigger problem is that the United States is even more parochial.

Add to that, major politicians like Joe Walsh who said the “death of the mother” exception for abortion was just a loophole to allow women to get more and more abortions. He claimed that there was no such thing, “With modern science and technology, you can’t find one instance.” Thankfully, Walsh lost his re-election bid, but I fear he will be back.

I have long been of the opinion that we as liberals should not be in a discussion of rape or life exceptions. But that is because cases like these shouldn’t even be open to discussion. The Halappanavar case shows that this isn’t just an issue of politics or even individual rights. When we allow the debate to be framed by those on the right, lives are at stake.

According to Wikipedia, the “Hospital is being subjected to several investigations.” Does anyone really think the problem here is medical malpractice? This is political malpractice. No amount of hospital reform will prevent this from happening again. Hopefully, Savita Halappanavar’s death will do some good. It seems there is some push back against these medieval laws. But this is an unnecessary tragedy caused by extremists who think that zygotes are more important than living, breathing women.