Earlier this week, Suzy Khimm (the only member of the WonkBlog staff to respond to my request for a WonkBlog twitter account) wrote, The Inconvenient Truth Facing Deficit Hawks. In it, she noted that for all of the squawking of the deficit hawks—”Any day now, bond interest rates will skyrocket!”—the bond markets themselves show no concern about government credit worthiness.

In addition, today, Paul Krugman wrote, Franc Thoughts on Bond Vigilantes. He goes further, noting that if bond prices did as the deficit hawks claim, it wouldn’t be bad for the economy at all:

He then goes on to talk about the fact that there is neither theory nor historical example that indicates anything else.

This brings to mind an idea that I’ve been thinking about for a while: owners can predict their futures. Rentiers—people who own for a living—know that inflation is bad for them. If they have loaned, say, $100,000 at 10% for 30 years, any rise in inflation is bad for profits. But for actual entrepreneurs, the future is unpredictable. High inflation? Low inflation? These are not primary concerns, if they are concerns at all.

So of these two groups, one has a very real incentive to try to control politics: the rentiers. So all of the deficit hawks running around talking about how inflation is just around the corner and how horrible this is going to be are just rentiers and their propagandists. We get into trouble when we assume that they speak for business interests broadly. They only speak for the least useful of the business interests—in fact, business interests that are often harmful. These are not the people who will bring us the next Big Thing, unless that Big Thing is another financial crisis.

On Monday, Bill O’Reilly went after some of the people who complained that his comments on the changing demographics of the country were racist. I don’t actually think that Bill O’Reilly is a racist. He’s just a dick—to everyone. He is an angry and hateful man who seems to be very sure that, against all evidence, he has a good bead on reality. But none of that really matters. What does matter is that he is wrong about his comments Monday.

He starts off his “Talking Points Memo” by supposedly defending Mitt Romney against those who are attacking him. I don’t particularly care. On the one hand, I don’t think Romney did a worse job running for president than anyone else; on the other, why should anyone care if some plutocrat gets his feelings hurt? But I do care that O’Reilly doesn’t have enough honesty in him to come out and say what’s really on his mind: he’s angry that people are calling him a racist. Before he gets to that, he trots out the standard conservative line about the election: Obama ran a great campaign. Yeah, that was it; it couldn’t have anything to do with ideology or policy.

Eventually, O’Reilly gets to the core of his argument: he isn’t racist, the world is. It isn’t that he claimed the poor were voting for Obama because the president was giving them gifts, it is that the president was giving the poor gifts and that’s why they voted for him. He then goes on to note that many of those making less than $30,000 per year, “Receive entitlements—food stamps, housing subsidies, that kind of thing.” And this is why they voted for Obama.

O’Reilly’s point is not that there’s anything wrong with this; he pointedly doesn’t say any such thing. But it is clear enough what he’s saying: the votes were bought explicitly. Sure, saying this kind of thing is offensive. But is it really any more offensive than the guy usually is? I don’t think so.

What really bugs me is that it is nonsense. People don’t vote this way. Despite what I’ve heard from conservatives privately over the years, everyone I know (and this includes a lot of low-information voters) takes the process of voting very seriously. I don’t know any “single issue” voters. And I certainly don’t know of any people who vote because of the hope of “gifts.” People vote for the candidate they think is best.

The poor do indeed vote for people who speak to their concerns. But these are also the concerns of everyone they know. Poor people don’t spend Christmas with the Romneys, unless they are working for them. And the poor understand what policies would be best for all of the people they know.

I can’t speak as well for the rich, since I don’t know them. I do, however, know quite a bit about their voting patterns. I know a lot about how politicians promise and deliver huge gifts to them. They most likely think that tax cuts for the rich are good for society, but then they most likely think that whatever is good for them is good for America.

The policies that help the poor are cheap. The policies that help the rich are expensive. Why is it that people like Bill O’Reilly focus on the policies that help the poor while rarely even admitting to the existence of policies that help the rich? I think I know the answer: conservatives hate the poor. And this is the problem they have going forward, because their policies of the last three decades have made a lot more of them.

We certainly should be trying to help underwater homeowners as a simple matter of fairness. We bailed out Wall Street billionaires, it seems a pretty minimal proposition to offer assistance to homeowners who bought into a bubble that all the top economists insisted did not exist.

—Dean Baker
Underwater Homeowners Cannot Explain the Weak Recovery

I was recently at the local CVS, and I saw the following sign on the bathroom door. It seemed very strange to me. Unless you read the fine print, this is very confusing. It certainly looks like CVS is offering to text you when the bathroom is available. What’s next? Those little buzzer devices they have at The Olive Garden? (By the way: don’t do business with them.)

For the record, CVS is actually offering to text you when a sale item is in the store. They still only provide old-fashioned bathroom queuing.

I am very fond of turkeys. They are nice animals. So I’m glad that President Obama pardoned not one but two turkeys yesterday. But this reminds a bit too much of Charlie Costello in Seven Psychopaths—the guy who will kill another human without a thought, but who dearly loves his Shih Tzu.

As I reported two weeks ago, President Obama has pardoned fewer people than any modern president. Out 1,041 cases that have come to his desk, he has found only 22 compelling enough for a pardon. When you consider just how much injustice is done in our so called justice system, the president’s lack of action is an outrage.

Let me list a few of the people via Propublica who President Obama didn’t feel as deserving of his attention as the turkeys Cobbler and Gobbler:

• A former brothel manager who helped the FBI bust a national prostitution ring.
• A retired sheriff who inadvertently helped a money launderer buy land.
• A young woman who mailed ecstasy tablets for a drug-dealing boyfriend, then worked with investigators to bring him down.

We’ve had three consecutive presidents who committed felony drug possession. All of them seem to think that the reasons they didn’t do any time in a federal prison is their moral rectitude, rather than dumb luck. These men should have have been grateful to society for the grace that they were shown. Instead, they show the arrogance of the entitled. Instead of “There but for the grace of God” it is “Of course God protected me.”

It is nice that yesterday, President Obama pardoned more than the requisite single turkey. But it doesn’t do a thing for the unfortunate humans rotting in jail because the president wants to look tough or something.

With Thanksgiving comes not one, but two Charlie Brown specials. As I was cooking in preparation for tomorrow’s thang, I watched them—mostly. The first one was the traditional A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving. This is an interesting film because Lucy is not in it. As a result, it seems that Charlie Brown is meant to act the part of the asshole. He treats Snoopy and Woodstock as though they are slaves. And then, when everyone heads off to Grandma’s condo for dinner, the animals are left behind to fend for themselves. I was outraged. Really.

Snoopy has a turkey dinner all ready to go in his dog house, of course. But then, after all the animal slavery, something happened that bothered me even more. Snoopy serves Woodstock part of the bird and Woodstock eats it! I know this is technically not cannibalism, but it is close enough. This is supposed to be a children’s show. What is wrong with these people?!

The second Charlie Brown special was so much worse. I didn’t even make it to the first commercial. It is the first episode of This is America Charlie Brown: Mayflower Voyagers. It pissed me off right away. Here were Charlie Brown and Linus in their iconic modern dress. But the girls were all in period costume. Why? How the hell should I know?! One thing I do know: it was offensive for vaguely sexist reasons.

But the reason I turned away was that the show told the same lie that most people continue to believe: the Pilgrims came over on the Mayflower to find religious freedom. I’m so inspired. Wait! I feel a song coming on:

And the la-hand of the Freeeeee!
And the hoooome, of thhhhhe, braaaave!

And the crowd goes wild. Of course, this is total bullshit. The Pilgrims left England because the English were a bunch of intolerant assholes. They moved to Holland and got all kinds of tolerance. Too much tolerance! Their children were starting to behave is bizarre ways: being open minded and shit. They were hanging out in the hash bars. Okay. There were no hash bars, but if the Pilgrims were there today, that is exactly the kind of place their kids would be hanging out. So the Pilgrim elders thought, “What we really need is to find a place that is tolerant of us but of nobody else.” And if they could find such a place, there would be no one to get in the way of their occasional witch hunts.

The solution: America! Which is perfectly fine. I don’t particularly have a problem with people going off alone and doing their creepy shit. (Well, actually, I do; but I don’t think I can do much to stop it.) What does really bother me is when their bigoted offspring claim that they were all about freedom. Fuck that! The Pilgrims came to America to escape freedom. In large parts of America, we managed to move beyond their small minded beliefs.

Here’s the thing: I think it is good to hide unpleasant things from kids. If I were a parent, for example, I would wait until my kids were at least six before showing them Night of the Living Dead. (The remake, of course, because it is totally awesome!) But I don’t believe in lying to children. So fine, don’t teach second graders that the Pilgrims were a bunch of narrow minded assholes. But don’t teach them that they were some kind of noble freedom seekers. And if you do, expect that forty years later, you’re going to have listen to some disappointed old man rant on about why he couldn’t get through that Charlie Brown special.

I recently wrote about a documentary Park Avenue that used the game of Monopoly to illustrate some facts about capitalism. Mack, the same guy who called my attention to that video, sent me to the very short video embedded below, Back in the Box. It is just some graphics put together to go along with a three and half minute talk by John Ortberg, author of When the Game Is Over, It All Goes Back in the Box.

In this case, the video uses the game of Monopoly to illustrate the most important fact about life. There are two ways to think about this, I think. On a profound, but simple level, it is about stuff. I’m not that interested in stuff. On a more complex level, it is about who we are. And this is what I care about. Two and a half years ago, I wrote about this very briefly:

But there is more to it than this. While other people fear death, I take great solace from it. I have no illusions that my life is a particularly important work of art. But it could be just terrible. I could have taken fairly good materials and made a total mess of them. But within 75 years at the most, it will not matter in the least. And that makes me feel much better.

Regardless of what you have that you will have to put back in the box, I think you’ll enjoy this short video:

Your name is Elinor. Your sister Marianne is sick because she was dumped by the love of her life and wandered in a storm. You are watching over her—fearful that she may die. There is a knock at the door. It is John Willoughby—your sister’s philandering ex. He must see her! But you won’t allow it. She is too sick. He will tell you his tale of woe and asks that you tell Marianne. You say you will, if you think it is right. You say this, because in your own way, you are a bitch.

It is quite a tale, the details of which are not important. Except for this: the story will make your sister feel much better. Willoughby really did and still does love her! What’s more: he is now stuck in a terrible marriage with a woman he can’t stand. He leaves, you tell Marianne, and she gets better.

This is very moving. You can imagine how great it would be in a movie. There is a storm outside. A loud knock echos through the mostly empty house. In steps a soaking wet Willoughby, half crazed. It’s great in a book, but in a movie it could be overpowering. But if you watched Emma Thompson’s 1995 film based on Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, you were not overpowered. This is because Thompson chose to deal with this sequence in a very strange way. She got rid of Willoughby’s entire scene. Before Marianne is even sick, Colonel Brandon mentions that he has learned that Willoughby was planning to propose to Marianne, and thus he wasn’t such a bad guy after all. Then Marianne gets sick. And finally, Marianne gets better for no particular reason.

I have no idea why the very smart and capable Emma Thompson made this change. It introduces a fundamental flaw into what would normally be quite a good film. What is supposed to be the climax of the story, from which the plot resolves itself, is instead this 5 minute sequence where Emma Thompson is shot from various angles looking very concerned. There is a technical tern for this: boring. But it is more than that: it’s wasteful and it deprives Willoughby of his very best scene.

Nonetheless, the film is quite good. Hugh Grant as Edward is wonderfully twitchy and nervous. Alan Rickman as Colonel Brandon is perfect as the guy any woman should love but just doesn’t. Kate Winslet is perfectly annoying as Marianne—although I’m not sure that’s acting. And as I implied above, Emma Thompson is very good at standing around looking concerned. Of course, it is all leading up to this sweet and funny scene that is entirely typical of most of the film:

And yes: it makes me cry and laugh at the same time, which is (Repeat after me) charming and not pathetic!

Now that McCotter has left Congress, I’m not sure what he is going to do. Unfortunately, he was replaced by someone as bad or perhaps worse than he is. But perhaps it is a boon to the music industry. “Conservative Rock” could certainly use the help.

A year and a half ago, I wrote that Thaddeus McCotter should leave the House and do music full time:

Here he is with a kind of Fox News house band. I still think that McCotter is rather good (despite this performance), but this band isn’t. Have you ever heard a full tilt rock number like this sound so anemic?

I don’t know that much about Lincoln. But I do know a fair amount about his assassin. This is primarily because he was the brother of the great Shakespearean actor Edmund Booth. And knowing what I know, the flaming rhetoric of people like Ted Nugent concerns me greatly.

Most people pass off the right wing’s talk of tyranny and socialism as nothing but overblown rhetoric. But there is a consequence of this. Booth and all of his comrades spoke the equivalent language about Lincoln. In his mind, killing the president was not a crazy thing. He was surprised that the people did not rise up and proclaim him a hero.

This is why the right wing echo chamber most concerns me. I don’t think that Ted Nugent would try to kill the president. (Although it isn’t out of the question: John Wilkes Booth was a minor star like Nugent.) The problem is that when viewers only hear others calling President Obama a tyrant, they can very easily believe that it is not only true, but is also what everyone believes. And that is very dangerous.

Of course, others might note that I commonly say that the Republicans are a proto-fascist party. I think there are two key differences. First, I never call for violence; I flirt terribly with pacifism. Second, I never claim that my beliefs are what everyone believes. And third, I am making a fine distinction. I don’t claim that the Republican Party is a Nazi group or that they are even fascists. They have fascist tendencies: nationalism, crony capitalism, anti-egalitarianism, anti-science, anti-minority. They aren’t to full-blow fascism yet and hopefully they never will be.

There is a fundamental difference between being the loyal opposition and, well, the disloyal opposition. The loyal opposition takes it for granted that the other party may be terribly wrong about policy, but they are not trying to destroy our very democracy. Of course, such disloyal opposition causes the Republican Party to do things that make the Democrats mistrust their motivations as well. Witness the “voter fraud” campaign of the Republicans. Because they believe that real Americans could never vote for that Kenyan socialist baby killer Barack Obama, they want to invalidate the whole concept of democracy. Many of them, anyway.

But the bigger issue is that such talk and behavior on the right can and does lead to violence. I feel very confident that the Secret Service are able to protect the president. But what of others not so highly placed? For many people the only reason they are Republicans is that they believe (wrongly) that Democrats want to take away their guns. Given that, there’s no end of nonsense that can be drilled into their heads. Take Byron Williams, for example. He is the guy who was going to assassinate the people at the Tides Foundation because he believed that Glenn Beck was singling for him to do this. In the interview with Media Matters, Williams did not seem insane. His reading of Beck’s ranting seems reasonable to me.

And that is the problem.

I just read The Christ-Myth Theory and Its Problems by Robert M. Price. I was disappointed that the book was not an integrated overview, but a large number of papers that Price had previously written. In terms of covering the whole subject, the best chapter is the second: “Jesus at the Vanishing Point.” Unfortunately, I had already read this in the excellent The Historical Jesus : Five Views.

The majority of the book is taken up with Price’s very detailed “New Testament Narratives as Old Testament Midrash” from Encyclopedia of Midrash. At over 200 pages, this is an excellent resource, but not exactly fun reading. And honestly, I just browsed it.

The most interesting part of the the book was Price’s paper at the 2007 “Scripture and Skepticism” conference: “James the Just: Achilles’ Heel of Christ Myth Theory?” In this chapter, he lays out what seems to be the most compelling argument against the Christ Myth Theory: the Caliphate of James. Basically, this is the idea that there was a power struggle for who was the natural successor to Jesus after his death. As Price points out, there are lots of recent examples of this kind of thing. The conflict between James and Peter is much like what one saw, for instance, after the death of the Honorable Elijah Muhammad in the Nation of Islam. The argument is that there would have been nothing to fight over if Jesus had not actually existed. There are many counter arguments to this, but it is a reasonably strong argument.

For people who are really interested in this subject, the book is a must buy. For those new to the subject, it is pretty technical. On the other hand, there aren’t really any good, simple introductions to the subject. You really have to just jump in and try to get up to speed on the subject. I’ve found that’s worked well enough for me. It is also good to listen to Price’s podcast The Human Bible.

And Now for Something Completely Different

The Christ-Myth Theory and Its Problems is published by American Atheist Press—a small press out of New Jersey. I’m fine with that; the more publishers, the better. But I do wish that these companies would learn the basics of their trade. The typesetting of this book is horrible. Text is constantly pushed together to make it hard to distinguish between new text and quotes, footnotes are often not clearly distinguished, line spacing is inconsistent. It is just a mess and it offends me. Interestingly, the ebook looks pretty good. But if you are going to sell printed books, don’t be an embarrassment to hundreds of years of a great tradition!