I just watched Futurama, episode “Hell is Other Robots.” It has one bit that really made me laugh. After Bender finds religion, he takes the crew out to dinner. But he insists upon saying grace, stopping everyone from eating. I think this is something that religious people don’t see: just how narcissistic are their ostentatious displays of religiosity.

Anyway, Bender says, “To quote the prophet Jerematic, ‘one-zero-zero-zero-one-zero-one-zero-one-zero-one-zero-one…” And then there is a dissolve to apparently much later, “Zero-zero-one-zero-one-one-zero-zero-one-two. Amen.”

A little before the meal, Bender is baptized in “high viscosity baptismal oil.” In the background is a religious sign:

For the record, this is old fashioned BASIC. Nerd humor.

Paul Krugman wrote a blog post this morning, Varieties of Error. In it, he highlights two kinds of predictive failures: those that indicate the fundamental thinking (or “model”) is wrong and those that just show that predictions are predictions. Think of football, for example. The Texans is a much better team than the Chiefs. In general, the Texans will beat the Chiefs. But if the Texans commits a number of turnovers, the Chiefs will win. The prediction was wrong, but the basic idea is correct: the Texans is a better team than the Chiefs. On the other hand, if your model was that the Chiefs is better than the Texans, there is something wrong with the model. What’s more there is something wrong with you if, after 10 match-ups between the Texans and the Chiefs in which the Texans won 9 times, you still claim that the Chiefs is the superior team.

We see this a lot in politics and economics. Conservatives have been screaming for years that hyper-inflation is just around the corner. Every time someone writes a column about budget hysteria, there are always loads of comments reading, “But Greece!” We have explained for years why Greece is not the same as the United States. (We have our own currency!) I think that the United States could continue to not become Greece for another 100 years and this would still be a common conservative retort.

What I find fascinating is the divide between the certainty of liberals versus conservatives. This brings to mind Nate Silver. Even when his model was predicting a 90% likelihood of Obama winning, he was still cautious. He always pointed out that his model was basically just a poll aggregator and that the polls might be wrong. Contrast this to the conservative loons who were just certain that they were right.

For years, Krugman has been saying that we would not see inflation so long as the economy was depressed. But during that time, he has always added caveats. In particular, he’s noted that there may have been some kind of economic mechanism that he’s missing. Contrast this with, say, Niall Ferguson. For years, he would brook no doubt: inflation was on its way. (Eventually, he had to admit that he was wrong. Since then, he’s just become a general purpose conservative hack.)

This divide is not due to the humble characters of people like Nate Silver and Paul Krugman. As far as I can tell, both these men are as (rightly) filled with themselves as anyone. I think the divide comes from the acceptance of facts and the rejection of authority. The modern Republican Party is an authoritarian group. The truth is whatever their leaders say it is. Democrats still expect proof. And this gets to the heart of what it is to be a member of either group. Liberals could not live with themselves if they didn’t think that what they believed was in some fundamental sense true. Conservatives depend upon group identification. This is why Fox News exists: people want to be told that belonging to their group is right and true. Their position in the hierarchy is what matters.

As a result of this, we should not be surprised that conservatives continue to hold long discredited ideas. As long as the party accepts it, all is good. On the other hand, if the party suddenly believes something different, the members will change on a dime. This will eventually happen to the Republican Party on the issue of global warming. Of course, by then, it will be too late. In fact, it already is.

Afterword

I’m generalizing here a bit. !rtists and scientists are liberal. Those who aren’t tend to be libertarians, rather than the more vile forms of conservatism. It is hard to be a creative thinker when you feel obliged to groupthink.

I first really took notice of Robert Reich many years ago when he said he was no longer for a balanced federal budget. He had been Labor Secretary under President Clinton, and he had seen how it was to work with Republicans. The way he saw it (I think this was in 2003), what was the point of Democrats accepting cuts in programs they believed in for the sake of balancing the budget? Once the Republicans got into office, they would unbalance the budget with tax cuts for the rich and unnecessary wars. When I heard that, I knew I had found someone who could cut through all the bullshit that covers political reporting.

I would go further, however. As you probably haven’t heard (except maybe here), Obama has greatly cut the federal deficit over the last three years. And yet, what did we hear throughout the campaign with almost no push back: Obama has exploded the debt! And Republicans will always run on this kind of stuff. It doesn’t matter how much they have to distort what’s actually going on. It is like a lot of other issues. The Democrats will never get the NRA endorsement, regardless of how nutty pro-gun they become. So what is the point of pandering?

Yesterday, Matt Yglesias made pretty much the same argument about the desire for a “grand bargain.” He isn’t making a partisan argument (as are Reich and me). There can be no “grand bargain” because current legislatures cannot bind the hands of future legislatures:

This is serious stuff. All this talk of a “grand bargain” is hurting our country now and could be much worse later. But what I find most interesting is how no one in the mainstream call out the hypocrsy of the austerity crowd. Pete Peterson has long been for a “grand bargain” to “fix the debt.” Yet when a situation comes along that quickly gets the debt on a much firmer footing, he’s against it. Why? Because that’s not how he wants to do it.

Peterson and all the people like him are just conservatives. Like Paul Ryan, they want something other than they claim. In Peterson’s case, he clearly doesn’t like Social Security and Medicare. Yglesias discussed this earlier in a different article:

Now, all these people are trying to use the crisis that they had a large hand in creating to justify fixing the (actually minor) problem by enacting policies they want for other reasons. It’s too bad we can’t try these people for treason.

I think the way it works—and I think Romney’s comments were very telling in this regard—there are two differences in the mind of this class. First, they’re absolutely convinced that they’re not asking for special privileges for themselves. They’re convinced that it just so happens that their self-interest coincides perfectly with the collective interest. That’s where you get this idea of the “job creators.” The view is that to seek a low tax environment or less regulation, that’s not special pleading for yourself, it’s not transactional politics. It’s that this set of rules is the most conducive to economic growth for everybody. It will grow the pie. Now, it also happens to be an incredibly convenient way of thinking. If you’ve developed an ideology that what’s good for you personally also happens to be good for everyone else, that’s quite wonderful because there’s no moral tension.

—Chrystia Freeland, author of The Plutocrats
Interview with Ezra Klein

Alec MacGillis at The New Republic has now written about, Paul Ryan, Global Thinker? In the article, he alerts us to a new list from Foreign Policy, 100 Top Global Thinkers. Such exercises are always stupid. Earlier this year, I wrote about The Rolling Stone 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time, Pathetic Rock Journalism at Rolling Stone. In that article, I was particularly upset that George Harrison was listed at number 11. But I have to give The Rolling Stone credit: George Harrison was, in fact, a guitarist. I don’t think that Paul Ryan qualifies as a global thinker.

The article starts by listing Ryan’s bona fides as a budget guy: cut Medicaid by a third—check; privatize Medicare—check; savage all remaining programs other than the military—check! According to Foreign Policy these are “bold” ideas that Ryan gradually got the Republican Party to embrace.

Wait, wait, wait! Just hold the fuck on there! Stop!

We haven’t even gotten to the foreign policy part of the argument and the magazine has already piled the bullshit so high I can’t see. What they fail to mention is that the first step in Ryan’s budget balancing plan is to cut income tax rates. So let’s look at this plan. It lowers taxes (especially on the rich) and cuts spending on programs for the poor and middle class. This is what Republicans always want. This is not a budget; this is a Republican wish list. So Foreign Policy magazine gets a very slow start by not understanding anything about Paul Ryan’s domestic agenda.

Half way through their argument, the editors finally get to Paul Ryan’s global thinking. They do this by lying, “In the 2012 presidential election, contender Mitt Romney didn’t just champion Ryan’s ideas—he tapped the 42-year-old libertarian-leaning lawmaker as his running mate, catapulting the debate over the size and scope of the U.S. government to the top of the political agenda.” This one isn’t even close. MacGillis responds, “Well, not exactly—Romney tapped Ryan and didn’t champion his ideas.”

But Foreign Policy isn’t done yet:

You see it, don’t you? Ryan gave a speech—at the RNC. And it was in front of a big debt clock! Q-E-Fucking-D!

There is even more though. And this is great because you can tell this was written before the election by someone who thought that Romney would win.

There are a couple of things here. First, the quote from Ryan’s “budget”: I’m sure this is what the Soviet leaders were saying as they watched their infrastructure crumble—”Mustn’t cut the military!” You would think that the editors of Foreign Policy would have noticed the parallels. Second, those last two sentences! I’m sure they originally read, “And now that Romney will be president, those ideas will lead the country going forward.” Instead, they “might” “very well” prove “prescient.” Three weasels in one short sentence! At least Foreign Policy has something it can be proud of.

Matt Taibbi took one for the team; he read All In, Paula Broadwell’s biography of General Petraeus. He referred to the book as “slobberific”—a new word worth repeating.

The point of his article—One Interesting Thing About Paula Broadwell’s Petraeus Biography—is that it is perfectly in keeping with authorized biographies generally. And that is a big problem. He even quotes Glenn Greenwald’s well known observation about media bias in modern America, “The overwhelming, driving bias of the US media is subservience to power, whoever happens to be wielding it.”

Of course, Taibbi has his own way of getting his point across:

He ends the piece with a contrast between journalists of today and those of not that long ago. It is just sad:

What’s happened to us?

We have very low expectations of the rich. If they aren’t complete assholes, we heap praise on them like they were curing lepers in Calcutta. Take Warren Buffett, for instance. Liberals just love him because he thinks maybe he shouldn’t pay less income tax on his billions than his secretary pays. How fucking magnanimous! I’m sure if he had a beard and wore linen, people would form a religion around him. Certainly, if he were Catholic, they would have beatified him by now.

There are a couple of other things that Buffett has said that make him not a complete dick. He has at least some humility about his position, having noted that he’s been lucky to live in a place that allows him to make a lot of money at the one thing he seems to be good at. He is also in favor of the Estate Tax. But other than this, there isn’t much else to love about the man. For example, he isn’t in favor of a wealth tax that might chip away at this $50 billion net worth. And he is ultra-critical of inflation. In fact, moderate inflation is a good thing and is especially helpful to the young and in debt. It is only people who own for a living—people that are mostly bad for the economy—who hate inflation.

Then there is the issue of Warren Buffett’s secretary. He has noted that he should pay a higher tax rate than she does, because she only makes $60,000 per year. I find this salary offensive. Buffett’s secretary must have a very hard job. And Buffett could certainly afford to pay more. But he doesn’t, because he doesn’t have to. This reminds me of a doorman who was interviewed in Park Avenue. He said that he figured when he first started working at the building that he would get great holiday tips because the people who lived there had so much money. But the tips were exactly the same as they were at less affluent buildings because these rich fucktards knew what the going rate was and that was all they were going to pay. Ditto with Buffett.

The reason that Warren Buffett is on my mind today is that on Monday, Charlie Rose asked him if he thought that replacing Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner with JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon would send a bad message. Buffett didn’t even seem to understand the question. He just started gushing about the evil Mr. Dimon, “I think he’d be terrific… If we did run into problems in markets, I think he’d actually be the best person you could have in the job.” Yeah, that’s just what we need, more foxes in charge of the hen house so they can keep handing out greater and greater numbers of hens to foxes milling around outside.

What do you give the man who has everything? You give him effusive praise—you tell that he isn’t just rich and powerful, he is also good. But not being as bad as other evil people doesn’t not make a man good. And Warren Buffett is not good. He’s just a little less vile than most of the men in his circle.

Last night on Colbert Report, there was Reihan Salam explaining how the Republicans are going to win the hearts of the working class. And he had the book he wrote with Ross Douthat, Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream. Ah yes, the Grand New Party. The book is described as, “Two of the Right’s rising young thinkers call upon the GOP to focus on the interests and needs of working-class voters.” The basic idea is simple: the Republican Party should reinvent itself as the party of the working class and focus on making the base of the party the married heterosexual couple.

There is a fundamental problem here: this is already what the party claims to stand for. All Salam and Douthat are calling for is a continuation of the same except that Republicans should stop getting us into wars all the time. While I admit that this would be an improvement, I doubt that it would do much to make the Republican Party more appealing to working class Americans. This comes back to the issue I talk about over and over again: it’s the poor, stupid. The problem with the Republicans is not cosmetic nor is it focus. The American people didn’t vote for Obama while thinking, “You know, if it weren’t for Romney’s hateful rhetoric and terrible foreign policy, I’d vote for him!” The Republican economic policies are toxic.

But this doesn’t stop the mainstream media from going all gaga over young Republicans offering up a vision of a Republican Party that doesn’t seem quite so horrible. At The Daily Beast, Michael Moynihan writes about, The New Populism of the Right. In it, he offers up tired observations as though they were cutting edge:

Notice: the new generation doesn’t want to fight over whether they should lower the top tax rate. But somehow they do not want to consider whether they should raise it, even though the Republicans will be forced to do exactly that. But most of all, they want to learn how to talk to the lowlife moochers who can’t be convinced to take responsibility for their own lives. And what would this talking entail?

As cynical as I am, I have a hard time believing that these young Republicans don’t know that working class voters aren’t already well aware that the system is stacked against them. The Republicans don’t need to explain this. If they really want to get votes, they need to do something about it. As bad as the Democrats are, they are infinitely better than the Republicans. And this gets to the core interests of the Republican Party: if they want to win the working class vote, they need to change their allegiance to the wealthy at the expense of everyone else. And if they did that, how exactly would they be any different from the modern Democratic Party?

What I find most interesting is that there is all this buzz about these young Republicans. Salam and Douthat did not just write Grand New Party. It was published in 2009, in response to Obama’s first win. And what effect did it have on the party generally? That was the year that the Grand Old Party because the Grand Older Party with the mobilization of the Tea Party: those social conservatives masquerading as economic conservatives. I’m sure over the coming years, we will see a similar trend in the GOP—regardless of what journalist at The Daily Beast think is cutting edge.

For a long time, my position on the filibuster is that we should do it to them before they do it to us. The main liberal argument against filibuster reform is that at some point (likely soon) the Democrats will be in the minority and thus will rue the day when they limited the use of it. This is typical liberal nonsense. It shows a complete lack of understanding about who exactly the Republicans are. Consider this:

If Romney had won and the Republicans had taken control of the Senate, on the first day of Congress, the Republicans would have completely eliminated the filibuster.

And as soon as it is to their political advantage, the Republicans will get rid of the filibuster. So Democrats gets nothing from leaving this damnable process in place. What’s more, I think that Harry Reid is making a big mistake by only reforming the filibuster. There are three primary reasons for this:

1. The reforms won’t do that much to solve the problem of filibuster abuse.
2. The Republicans are behaving exactly the same over these minor reforms as they would have over the elimination of the filibuster.
3. The Republicans will use these reforms to justify eliminating the filibuster once it is to their political advantage to do so (even though they would have done it anyway).

Yesterday, Ezra Klein wrote an article, What Mitch McConnell Fears, where he provides three reasons that the Senate Republican leader is against these minor reforms. These three reasons come from “Senate staff,” so we know they are largely bullshit. All three of the reasons are that the reforms will make it a lot harder for the minority party to stop legislation. Instead of just dictating that all the work of the Senate must stop, the minority will actually have to work to stop legislation. I think this is correct: the reforms will do some good and will certainly stop McConnell from blocking every judicial nominee who comes along. But I don’t accept that this is really what’s behind the Republican freak out regarding filibuster reform.

McConnell and company are against filibuster reform for the same reason that they have abused the filibuster so much in the first place: they are against anything that the Democrats propose. And, as I have argued in the past, the reason is that the modern Republican Party does not have an ideology as we normally think of it. They are an authoritarian group which exists only to perpetuate itself. Their core belief is that they should have power. (Note that this is one of the main reasons they are so incompetent at governing: they have no interest in it; to them it is about getting to govern, not the actual governing.)

I think it is a big mistake to assume that Republicans at the federal level are interested in anything other than the next election. Regardless of how successful Reid’s minor filibuster reforms are, they will demonstrate that the Democrats in the Senate are not impotent. They can and do make changes that improve the government. This is bad for a party that depends upon voters thinking that the government is useless.

Afterword

The idea that the Senate needs the filibuster so that the minority will have rights is ridiculous. Because of gerrymandering, even that most democratic of institutions, the House, is undemocratic. Without the filibuster, the Senate is not only hugely tilted toward the minority, it is tilted toward the conservative minority because of the way that bright red low population states get equal representation to blue high population states. We really could use a bit more democracy in our democracy.

Stop the goddamn presses! Angus T. Jones of Two and a Half Men: My show is “filth”

Please people! Cut the kid a break. Remember the stupid shit you believed and shared out loud when you were 19? Youthful exuberance aside, Angus is new to self-righteous Christian zealotry. Hopefully he’ll grow out of it before he becomes a total dogmatic douche.

I have to admit though, I do agree with him — although for very different reasons — that television is generally bad for you. It’s like Happy Meals: you won’t starve eating them all the time, but those empty calories will kill you in the end.

Taylor Swift is amazing. She’s a tall, slender blonde with a face that can sell beauty products. She is also — if aggressive marketing is to be believed — a gifted singer, a profound songwriter, and an intermediate guitar player. At the tender age of twenty-one, she is more than just fair game for men who haven’t utterly surrendered to their inner pedophile; Taylor is also smart. This astonishingly astute observation says it all:

If only God had blessed me with such a wondrous child, oh the conversations we could have had!

That Mitchell and Webb Look is a favorite of mine. I don’t think there has ever been better sketch comedy. What’s more, their social satire is very incisive.

I noticed this last night when I happened upon their version of the Abraham and Isaac story from Genesis. What I think I missed the first time I saw it is how it spoofs what is one of the most sophisticated apologia for Christianity. In the skit, God says, “You would say… If you thought I was asking you to do something that was, you know, wrong.” To which Abraham replies, “If I thought it was wrong? Like I’d know! Like I have any chance of forming an independent basis of right and wrong outside the instructions of some supervisory being.”

This is a straight lampoon of the standard theodicy: we don’t have to explain the existence of evil because anything that God does is by definition good. This is just a more involved version of, “God works in mysterious ways.” The reasonable rebuttal to this is that if God’s ways are so inscrutable, why is he worth worshiping. Indeed, this gets to the contraction of Christian faith: we should worship God because he is the only basis for morality but then we don’t hold him to any moral standard that we can understand.

Of course, aside from the question of evil, this skit is funny as hell: