My third calendar month of doing this thing.

Polly Wanna a Good Economy?

J. Bradford DeLong has written a really good article Economics for Parrots on Project Syndicate. In it, he attacks the idea that we are seeing more and more: high unemployment is structural. By this, people mean there isn’t unemployment because everyone is afraid and won’t spend and thus there is low demand. No. These people claim that there are plenty of jobs out there: it is just that the current workforce doesn’t have the right skills or aren’t willing to move to the right places (like Nebraska). Dr. DeLong obliterates this argument, showing that a parrot trained to say, “Supply and demand! Supply and demand!” is a better economist than these fools.

You see, the point of all this “structural unemployment” business is a way for these people to say that the government doesn’t need to do anything. It is the only reasonable-sounding argument that people can make against stimulus spending. And I do mean “reasonable-sounding” because the arguments are not reasonable at all. I believe these people don’t want anything done, because any kind effective measures taken by the legislature or the Fed will naturally cause inflation to rise. That is the last thing millionaires and billionaires want. (Well, maybe the second to last thing Meg Whitman wants.)

The End of The Shock Doctrine

I finished The Shock Doctrine today. I was particularly struck by a small part in the conclusion where Klein is quoting an editor of a Spanish newspaper: “‘In every act, in every gesture, in every sentence, Aznar told the people he was right. That he was the owner of the truth, and those who disagreed with him were his enemies.’ In other words, the very same qualities that Americans identified as strong leadership in their president after September 11th, were, in Spain, regarded as ominous signs of a rising facism.” Yep.

Meg Whitman

I more or less believe Whitman about the housekeeper thing. I’ll bet her husband got the initial letter, hoped it was nothing, and gave it to the housekeeper to work out. (The issue about possible future letters is more troubling.) What is bad about this situation is how it shows Whitman and husband to be above such matters. “Oh, you take care of this! I’m too important.” It also shows Whitman to be a hypocrite, but not in the way most people think. Her statements about the housekeeper being “part of the family” are shown to be hollow. She was “part of the family” for nine years and Whitman never learned that she was undocumented? She wasn’t part of the family. She was part of the staff: one of many people Whitman employed to do her dirty work.

Some time ago, I promised that I would write about Janis Bell’s Clean, Well-Lighted Sentences. And I haven’t yet. And I won’t today. The truth is that I had an idea for an article about this book and some disagreements I had with it. Unfortunately, I never wrote them down. So now I’ve read the book a second time to see if anything reminded me. It didn’t. I still have some things to say about it, but I find that I don’t disagree with Ms. Bell very often or (more important) very passionately. But I’m getting to it. I’m getting to it.

I do want to discuss a little grammar, however. It came out of the coverage yesterday of Margaret Witt’s case against the US Air Force and the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy. In the decision, U.S. District Court Judge Virginia Phillips ruled that Witt should be reinstated as soon as “practicable.” This was not the first time that I have read or heard that word. But I don’t recall ever hearing it outside of a legal context. A friend of mine is having a well drilled on her property, and she doesn’t say, “It will be drilled as soon as practicable.” No one but lawyers and people quoting lawyers use this word! (All right, that’s an overstatement, but if you can’t tell the difference between my considered writing and my rants, then get the hell off my website.)

Being a practical man (Or is it a “practicable man”?), I have never researched the difference between these words because I knew that I didn’t need to use the word “practicable”—unless I became a lawyer or was quoting one. But the day has come for me to end my ignorance—and yours, whether we like it or not. And I do not.

You see, there really isn’t much difference between these words, except that “practicable” doesn’t mean as much as “practical.” “Practical” has a number of definitions: five according to Merriam-Webster and only two (but it should be one) for “practicable.” They both mean, “Capable of being put to use.”

You might think this would be an issue like Enunciating and Annunciate where I think it is high time to ditch the latter word. But alas, it is not so simple. Encarta makes a strong case [Note: no longer available online. -FM] for retaining the two words, and especially their anti-versions: impractical and impracticable:

So there you go. But! If “impracticable” just means “impossible,” why do we need it? In fact, I would say we can get rid of it because its use will not mean “impossible” to 99% of English speakers. Instead, they will just hear “impractical” and think you are a weirdo. So I say we jettison that garbage. For the time, let’s hang on to “practicable” as being the non-judgmental version of “practical.”

It is practicable to maintain the lawn with kitchen shears, but I’m not sure it’s practical.

War Heroes

I constantly hear of “war hero John McCain” but almost never “war hero John Kerry.” But I had never heard anything about what made McCain a hero other than being a POW and passing up early release available to him because of his powerful father. Thus, I looked up his war record. There is a lot of George W. Bush in the young McCain, but he did receive a Bronze Star and the Navy Commendation Medal—an award considerable less prestigious than the Bronze Star. His Bronze Star was for dropping bombs on Viet Nam—not exactly what I think of as heroic, but okay: he got the award and I guess we can call him a hero.

John Kerry, on the other hand, won both the Bronze Star and the Silver Star—for acts of heroism that I could never see myself doing. By any definition, Kerry is as least as big a war hero as John McCain. And yet, during the 2004 election, Republicans were more than willing to shit all over Kerry’s heroism in the name of politics. And to this day, McCain is the “go to” man in the Senate when it comes to the military—not John Kerry. Could it be that we are not forever hearing about “war hero John Kerry” because he happens to be a member of the Democratic Party? That he is generally against war?

Is it any wonder that we are perpetually at war when the only people we look to are warmongers who mostly have never seen war. And I include people like McCain who only saw the war from a horrible POW camp and a mile above land?

The Daily Show

Just when I hit Jon Stewart, he puts out a good show. Of course, it was easy for him: he got to make fun of Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the Republican’s silly Pledge to America. But it was good—at least until the third act when he had a really boring interview with King Abdullah II of Jordan.

Of course, there is that other problem: Colbert was still a hell of a lot better. “Lingo is a term for an Australian lesbian.” Need I say more?

More Self-Torture

I read Parts 3 and 4 of The Shock Doctrine this morning. It is heartbreaking. It is hard not to be self-loathing. Eastern Europe wanted to reform itself, and what did the West offer: economic shock and awe; the looting of their economies; the impoverishing of their people. We suck.

Pithy Hypocracy You Already Know

A woman in Montana was charged by a black bear while she was in her back yard. Thinking quickly, she picked up the closest weapon to defend herself: a large zucchini, with which she fended off the bear. All I can say is that had she grabbed a zucchini, this story would not have ended so well. I hope that I don’t have to explain why!

Show Sucking Daily

For about six months now, The Daily Show has been really pissing me off. John Stewart and company really go out of their way to be “even handed.” This might be okay if both sides of the political debate were equally ridiculous. But as we know, this is not the case. In fact, Glenn Beck has already tried to turn the “Rally to Restore Sanity” into some kind of conspiracy to whip up young people into a frenzy right before the election. Who on the left is anywhere near this paranoid and just plain nutty? And yet, on last night’s episode, Stewart bent over backwards to make an equivalence between the Democrats and the Republicans on the issue of the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” Almost no mention was made to Republican hypocrisy on this issue, and absolutely no mention was made to John McCain’s towering hypocrisy. Stewart rarely makes me laugh any more, and we he does, it is because of his silliness. The Colbert Report has been consistently better for the last six months. So has The Rachel Maddow Show! Stewart’s satire just isn’t working—I think because satire can’t be “even handed.” Anyway, we already have enough of that: it’s called the mainstream media.

Regarding the “Rally to Restore Sanity”: it is almost certain that it will draw far more people than Glenn Beck’s rally. The Daily Show has as many viewers as Beck at a time when far fewer people are watching TV. Those viewers are far younger, and thus more likely to go out to a rally—or free live comedy show, depending upon how you want to look at it. And the rally is taking place in a liberal area. It will be interesting to see how many people show up, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it gets well over double Beck’s paltry 87,000.

This is Rich

On the day that important health care reform goes into effect, the Republicans are presenting “A Pledge to America.” In reporting about it, the New York Times waits until the fourth paragraph to get at the heart of it: “The blueprint was also clearly intended to provide fresh ideas to answer allegations by Mr. Obama and Democrats that Republicans simply want to return to the policies of the Bush administration. Still, many of the proposals represent classic Republican ideals of small government and low taxes pursued for generations by George W. Bush and other party leaders.”

The document (pdf) is rich in that it contains the same welfare for the rich policies that we always get from Republicans. But what is even more rich is the whole tone of the piece, especially the introduction. Take for example, this gem where they talk about the need to address, “Rising joblessness, crushing debt and a polarizing political environment”! Rising joblessness? Who forced the stimulus to be cut and to be distributed in the least stimulative way? The Republicans! Crushing debt? Who wants to extend tax cuts for the rich that will increase the budget deficit by $700 billion over the next ten years? The Republicans! Who has created a polarized political environment? Oh please! Was it Obama because he had the audacity to be black?! The Republicans have been in lockstep in opposing anything the Democrats want, even when it was originally a Republican idea—like McCain’s health care reform, which is what we got stuck with, even though he voted against it. The Republicans: they’re rich in more ways than one.

But let John Boehner get to the heart of the matter:

Self-Torture

For whatever reason, I decided to torture myself yesterday—but it didn’t start until this morning. I picked up a copy of The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein, from the library. I’ve already read the book; Andrea sent it to me as a “gift” about two years ago, after she found she could not make it past the first chapter. It is perhaps the most important book I’ve read in the last ten years, but it is also an extremely unpleasant one. Well, those two aspects of the book are tightly linked. I could not bring myself to read the first chapter about Ewen Cameron again, so I started on the second chapter and read all of the second part about Milton Friedman’s and Augusto Pinochet’s two pronged torture of the Chilean people. It is so sad and it makes me so ashamed to be an American. None of this is what we are supposed to be. None of this is what I was taught in civics classes. But more and more, this is what the conservatives in this country explicitly claim. This is not to say that the liberals are not also very much to blame (although less so), but they don’t hold up such despicable behavior as ideals of our nation.

Ayn Rand

I heard about this from Paul Krugman, but it is originally from King Fu Monkey: “There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.”

On the same page is a statement that makes it clear that Kung Fu Monkey is a kindred spirit, “The news that there is now a retractable version of the Uniball Vision pen matters to no one … except those few of us to whom it matters more than our mother’s love.” Of course, I would never use such a pen, but it is not the taste that matters so much as the fact that taste matters.

Christine O’Donnell ditched appearing on Face the Nation on Sunday—no surprise there! But she also ditched Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace. You may remember Wallace as the one guy on Faux News that occasionally asks real questions of conservatives. As Media Matters put it, “However, faced with the prospect of having to answer questions from Chris Wallace—who unlike Hannity sometimes plays the role of an actual journalist on television—and faced with the prospect of likely being asked about her recently discovered comments about how the proud conservative Christian candidate had once ‘dabbled in witchcraft,’ O’Donnell backed out to [run] back to Delaware.” Some of this campaign is fun, but I do wish Media Matters would learn how to format their m-dashes. I’m not talking New York Times wrong here—which is bad enough; I’m just talking wrong wrong; I’m talking hitting the streets with Lynne Truss!

It is another sad day when Lady Gaga makes more sense than 90% of the national politic leaders. “We are not asking you to agree with or approve the moral implications of homosexuality. We’re asking you to do your job.” Amen.

For three years, Billy Bob Neck has been on YouTube spreading the love and wisdom of Jesus. Before I say any more about him, however, here he is with “The Burn a Koran Song”:

Okay. Billy Bob Neck is a character created by comedian Paul Day. This is the best satire since A Modest Proposal. He has 130 similar videos—always wearing the same clothes—on his “The USA Patriotic Freedom Channel.” They just get funnier. “George W. Bush is the best President since Winston Churhill!”

I discovered him via The Rachel Maddow Show which ran his The Shocking Truth About Rachel Maddow where he proves conclusively that Rachel Maddow is not just a lesbian, but a vampire.

Most people think that Billy Bob Neck is for real. Based upon the comments, I would say about 80%. When I first saw him, I didn’t know for sure and I had to do a bit of research—even watching several of his videos did not nail it for me. In the age of Terry Jones (not the guy from Monty Python) and the Westboro Baptist Church’s “God-Hates-Fags-Dot-Com (Not even Dot-Org!) it is hard to tell. But many people when first presented with A Modest Proposal don’t see the irony. But once you see what Paul Day is doing, it is hilarious. I hope you enjoyed the song!

Elizabeth Warren!

It amazes me that the Republicans won’t allow Obama to have anything he wants. It is clear that Elizabeth Warren should be nominated to head the Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection. But we know that the Republicans will filibuster her nomination, because she might actually be effective and Wall Street and big banks might actually have to start playing a little more fairly with all their customers. So for now: no nomination.

So instead, Obama just appointed her to set up the agency. You know: to structure it and to hire the people working in it. Damn! That President of ours is a smart guy. I’m totally serious. This was brilliant.

God Hates Fags!

You might think that Fred Phelps’ Westboro Baptist Church (WBC) would have a URL like www.WestboroBaptistChurch.org or even www.WestboroBaptistChurch.com. But no. They are Christians, and if there is one thing that Christ was really clear about, it is that God Hates Fags! But that is not all that WBC knows Christ believed. They also know Jews Killed Jesus and a charming country-by-country explanation of why God Hates the World! But mostly, God hates fags—that’s their main site.

It amazes me looking at the comments on conservative blogs. There are a number of somewhat reasonable old-school Republicans, but at least half the comments are from delusional teabaggers. Here is one such comment:

So Democrats, who are angry at Obama for not being liberal enough, are going to flock to ultra-conservative O’Donnell (She is an outspoken opponent of–wait for it: masturbation!) rather than vote for the Democratic nominee Chris Coons. Unbelievable, especially when DailyKOS reported that Tom Jensen of Public Policy Polling is releasing poll numbers today that say that Coons has a 44-28 lead over O’Donnell–again, wait for it: among Mike Castle voters! Admittedly, after they calm down and after the big-time Republican media machine comes in an gives O’Donnell a make-over, those numbers will shift. But Delaware is a blue state. Mike Castle was a sure winner because he is an old-style, moderate Republican who has been in Delaware politics for decades (I think he has won a total of 30 different times—really).

Like I said: delusional. You know, my politics are out there on the fringe—but at least I know it. It isn’t like I think my neighbors believe what I do. These people think everyone agrees with them. Of course, they only talk to people who agree with them. One person responded (sort of) to a comment I made on some other blog by relating a story of how nice everyone was at the Glenn Beck Rally. She was looking for a water fountain and asked someone who didn’t know where one was but who gave her a bottle of water. I responded that I’d had that exact same experience at a rock concert. I pointed out that with few exceptions, people are pretty nice. What I wanted to say, but didn’t was: isn’t it easy to be nice to one another when you are all white, rich, and ignorant. Truly, I don’t think that water giver would have be a tenth as likely to give water to a homeless black man. It is easy to be generous to people you consider part of your tribe. And the bad thing about the teabaggers (and I did say this) is that they consistently define liberals as not just people they disagree with, but as people who want to destroy the country. They don’t think for a second that they just might be a tad bit wrong about what America is.

Newt Gingrich is going around saying that Obama conned his way into the Whitehouse. He’s just an opportunistic liar. The woman who posted the comment above is just ignorant. People like her don’t seem to know that if voting were required by law (as it is in 32 countries including Australia, Brazil, and Singapore) that there would be a huge political shift to the left. American’s are far more liberal than their politicians. But no. They want to claim that people who say Obama is not a US citizen are equivalent to people who (rightly) said that George W. Bush was not a legitimate president (by popular vote or electoral college).

The teabaggers can go on about their conspiracy theories all they want. What makes me mad is that they think they somehow speak for America. Or that they even know what America is. They are yet another anti-intellectual group that has decided what they want to believe and the facts be damned. They are no different from the Intelligent Design crowd or the Global Warming Deniers or the Flat Earth Society. (I always thought the Flat Earth Society was just a joke. It is no joke. They have a very nice website.)

Anyone who thinks at all knows that the new plug-in hybrid and electric cars are not zero-emission vehicles. (Solar cars are, however.) The July 2010 issue of Scientific American has a nice short article on this called The Dirty Truth about Plug-In Hybrids. (Note: link does not include entire article.) What the article shows is that just how green a vehicle is depends upon where it is. For example, in California where 99% of our electricity comes from natural gas, plug-in hybrids and all-electric vehicles emit far less carbon and save huge amounts of gasoline compared to ordinary hybrids. On the other hand, in Illinois, where roughly three-quarters of the electricity comes from coal, these vehicles produce way more carbon, even though they still save about as much gasoline as they do in California. On the third hand, in New York, where two-thirds of their electricity comes from oil, these vehicles produce a bit more carbon, but save only a little gasoline: about 10%.

This is all very interesting, but it doesn’t provide the reader with a lot of context. (And to be honest, I think I just provided you with all you need to know from the article in a much more understandable way. But we must remember that only the best writers get to work at Frankly Curious!) The electricity that these cars require has to come from somewhere and that somewhere is a power plant near by. This power plant is necessarily going to (1) be more efficient at turning raw materials into energy and (2) less polluting—especially in areas where we care about pollution, like downtown Los Angeles. Even in those few places where plug-in hybrid and electric cars produce more carbon than regular hybrids, they only produce slightly more and they produce quite a lot less than old-fashioned gasoline engines. What’s more, if every car in the US was a plug-in hybrid or electric car, the net result would be a huge reduction in carbon emissions (not to mention emissions that affect local air quality).

We are not going to cure our global warming problem on the backs of cars, anyway. As a result, the bigger issue to me is gasoline. Regardless of where you live in the US, these vehicles greatly reduce oil consumption. Most of our electricity comes from natural gas and coal. We produce 84% of our own natural gas and 100% of our own coal (that link’s a PDF). What all these new car technologies mean is that we are less dependent on oil and that is a good thing, because we don’t have a lot of oil. So this makes us more self-sufficient. And that’s a good thing.

Getting off coal (which creates 52% of our electricity) is going to be harder. But we can do that too.

Who would have thought I would still be doing this? Certainly not me. Nor do I know why I continue, except for my addictive personality.

Prayer Rooms In World Trade Center

Samuel J. Freedman reported in the New York Times on Friday, that there was an official Muslim prayer room on the 17th floor of the south tower and an unofficial prayer room in the stairwell between the 106th and 107th floors of the north tower. This unofficial room was created by roughly three dozen Muslim staff members who worked at Windows on the World. At least two of these staff members died on 11 September 2001—very likely in their makeshift prayer room. Please, read the story; and pass it on.

Budget Deficit Lower Despite Stimulus

This fiscal year’s budget deficit is supposed to be almost 10% lower than last year’s. Despite the fact that the media keep claiming the everyone cares deeply about the deficit (they don’t), that very same media don’t seem that interested in reporting this surprisingly good news.

We All Wish We Were as Smart as Paul

For some time, Paul Krugman has been pushing the fact that the main long-term budget problem we face is Medicare and medical cost eating up a bigger and bigger part of our income. But there is a bigger picture here. In his blog yesterday, he said, “And let’s be clear: you could not have gotten the cost savings without the move to near-universal coverage, for both political and technical reasons. This thing really is a package—a package that, with all its flaws, both makes our society more decent and improves our long-run budget outlook.” Amen.

Extraordinary Rendition

The “liberal” Ninth Circuit Court found 6-5 that victims of extraordinary rendition cannot sue the government because national security concerns trump the rights of the tortured men. I don’t have time to go into this and reading the link will not give you nearly enough information. The take-home message is clear: this is about not embarrassing the government, not about protecting our security. This reminds me of the Doonesbury comic where someone is visiting Asia and says, “This is the site of the secret Cambodian bombing!” Then a local man says, “It wasn’t secret to us; I said to my wife, ‘Look at those bombs exploding!'”

Moderate Republicans

Meghan McCain was on the Rachel Maddow Show last night and it really bugged me. She’s a nice young woman and all, but she talked about remaining a Republican and fighting for moderation in the party. What was she talking about? The Democratic Party is the pragmatic party—they’re the ones who do things that work. The Republican Party is the idealistic party—they’re the ones who are supposed to do things because they are right. Setting aside the fact that the Republicans have an incoherent ideology (personal freedom for corporations, personal slavery for people), how do they moderate their platform. Is it: instead of Park51 being ten blocks from Ground Zero, it can be eight blocks? Is it: instead of the top income tax rate being 35.0% it will be 35.2%? I simply do not see how any reasonable person can be a Republican at this time. In 1970? Okay. In 1980? Okay. Even in 1990? Okay. But not now. And not for the last ten years—at least.

Richard Nixon would be a moderate Democrat today. Ronald Reagan would be a liberal Republican—maybe even a conservative Democrat. Glenn Beck would call Barry Goldwater a fucking socialist!

Ladies and Gentlemen: Your NEW Republican Party!

Trust me, you gotta watch this. Minerva, Ohio councilman Phil Davison gave an impassioned speech last night at the Stark County Republican Party’s executive committee meeting to be their nominee for county treasurer. Sadly, he will not be their nominee. See if you can tell why:

I read the entire Constitution of the United States today for a regular article that I’m about to write. What I found was that there are a total of 22 references of “citizen.” And pretty much without exception, these references have to do with voting: who can be president, senator, representative, and who can vote for them. I bring this up because back a while, I heard some people talking about how only citizens have rights of Habeas Corpus. This is what the Constitution says about this in Article I Section 9: “The privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it.” You see: no “citizen” there. Conservatives really like to say that the Bill of Rights is just about citizens. It isn’t. This goes back to the Declaration of Independence (and further), where Jefferson (well, actually Thomas Paine did the first draft) wrote, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal…” That’s “all men” and not “all men who just happen to be born in a particular place.” (I don’t have time to get into the sexism and racism of these documents—but I will!)

You remember Terry Jones, pastor of the Dove World Outreach Center in Gainesville, Florida who is planning an International Burn a Koran Day, right? Well, in an interview with the Wall Street Journal, General Petraeus said that such a stunt would put American troops in danger. Conservative Christian bloggers are going nuts over this. They only like Petraeus when he just shuts up and kills people. The pastor is going to “pray on it.”

Obama is coming out swinging. This is long (almost an hour), but man oh man, am I proud to call him my President. If you have the time, watch it.