Why Facts Don't Matter to Some People

UPDATE:  "The best explanation of the U.S. government shutdown points to two factors. The first involves information, or what people think they know. The second involves incentives, or what motivates our elected representatives.

From decades of empirical research, we know that when like-minded people speak with one another, they tend to become more extreme, more confident and more unified -- the phenomenon known as group polarization. One reason involves the spread of information within echo chambers. . .

With respect to incentives, elected officials are often motivated by one goal above all: to get re-elected. They are focused on their own electoral prospects, not those of their party. They know they have to answer to their constituents, not to the nation as a whole.

Within the Republican Party, many members of Congress have no reason to fear a challenge from the left. There is no chance that they will lose their seat to a Democrat, and a moderate Republican isn’t going to run against them. The only threat is from the right. With respect to a controversy that the public is closely following, the main question may well be whether, in the view of the most extreme conservative voters, the legislators will 'cave' to President Barack Obama or instead stand up for their convictions. Is it any wonder that many Republican members are willing to run the risks of a shutdown? . .

Read Bloomberg, Shutdown Psychology Made Simple, which notes there will no compromise by "the most extreme members of the Republican Party [unless they] are able to move out of their echo chambers, and unless the incentives of those members are significantly altered."

Why is the U.S. so politically polarized?

"There are two explanations . . .

The first is that if you know a lot about politics, you are more likely to be emotionally invested in what you believe. Efforts to undermine or dislodge those beliefs might well upset you and therefore backfire. The second explanation is that if you have a lot of political knowledge, you are more likely to think you know what is really true, and it will be pretty hard for people to convince you otherwise.

The general lesson is both straightforward and disturbing. People who know a lot, and who trust a particular messenger, might well be impervious to factual corrections, even if what they believe turns out to be false."

Read Bloomberg, Why Well-Informed People Are Also Close-Minded. 

As I noted before, The Great Lecherer, aka Newtenstein, said: "Lincoln once said if a man won't agree that two plus two equals four then you'll never win the argument because facts don't matter . . ."

Who is the Real Obamney?

UPDATE IV: "After an evening of light-hearted jabs, President Barack Obama returned to his cutting criticism of rival Mitt Romney Friday, accusing the GOP nominee of forgetting the hard right positions he took during the GOP primary in order to seem more moderate.

Obama, speaking at a rally in the Northern Virginia suburb of Fairfax, told the crowd his opponent was suffering "Romnesia" after seeming to change his position on contraception, coal, equal pay, and taxes."

Read CNN, Obama diagnoses 'Romnesia'. 

UPDATE III:  "Scrubbing one’s brain clean of previous positions has been Mitt Romney’s stock in trade. In fact, his foreign-policy speech Monday to the Virginia Military Institute was one long gargle-and-rinse of the candidate’s previous positions.

Last year, Romney called the Obama administration’s intervention in Libya 'mission creep and mission muddle.' On Monday, he accused Obama of declining to use 'America’s greatest power to shape history' and of eschewing 'our best examples of world leadership' in that same corner of the world.

Last year, Romney said American troops 'shouldn’t go off and try to fight a war of independence for another nation. Only the Afghanis can win Afghanistan’s independence from the Taliban.' On Monday, he spoke of that same conflict as a matter of the utmost national importance, saying the route to 'attacks here at home is a politically timed retreat that abandons the Afghan people to the same extremists who ravaged their country and used it to launch the attacks of 9/11.'

Last year, Romney reversed his earlier support for the Iraq war, saying, 'If we knew at the time of our entry into Iraq that there were no weapons of mass destruction . . . obviously we would not have gone in.' On Monday, he was back to his original view, accusing the Obama administration of an 'abrupt withdrawal' from Iraq and portraying the situation there as part of 'a struggle between liberty and tyranny, justice and oppression, hope and despair.'

Just a few months ago, Romney said 'there’s just no way' to achieve peace between the Israelis and Palestinians because Palestinians are 'not wanting to see peace.' He said it was necessary to 'recognize this is going to remain an unsolved problem.' On Monday, he said he would 'recommit America to the goal of a democratic, prosperous Palestinian state living side by side in peace and security' with Israel.

Rub-a-dub-dub! Four positions got scrubbed."

Read the Washington Post, A scrubbing on foreign policy.

Read also, Slate, Mitt Romney’s Most Dishonest Speech. 

UPDATE II:  "Romney isn’t an ideological moderate. He’s a pragmatic executive. When he needs to govern from the center, he does. When he needs to lurch to the right, off he goes. So if you want to know how he’ll govern, don’t listen to what he says. Look at who he has reason to fear."  Read the Washington Post, Moderate Mitt isn’t so moderate.  

UPDATE:  Old Obamney couldn't win, so meet new Obamney, who has a history "of shifts, equivocations, and reversals, coupled with ongoing revisions of his image and his autobiography". Read New York Magazine, Can Obama Discredit the New Romney.  

Is he the "severe conservative" he claimed to be in the primary, or the 'spirited' moderate who threw the tea party under the bus by denying policies he promised before the debate?

Read the Washington Post, Romney’s personality shift; Slate, In Domestic Debate, Mitt Romney Shakes The Etch-a-Sketch; The New York Times, Entering Stage Right, Romney Moved to Center and Moderate Mitt Returns!; New York Magazine, The Return of Massachusetts Mitt. 

During the debate I was reminded of what The Great Lecherer, aka Newtenstein, said of Obamney:  "Lincoln once said if a man won't agree that two plus two equals four then you'll never win the argument because facts don't matter, Romney's the first candidate I've seen who fits the Lincoln description."

Obamney has proven he is just another Republi-CON.

The Spin of Pastor 2+2 Does Not = 4, AKA Pastor Dred Scott or Pastor Truthiness (Formerly Known as Pastor Poppins)

UPDATE VII: Birthers rely on "a lie wrapped in an absurdity swaddled in paranoia."

The lie: the birth certificate is a fake.

The absurdity: Obama is not constitutionally qualified to be president.

The paranoia: religious intolerance and racism.


UPDATE VI: For resources to respond to the birther baloney, see The Fogbow, "your best resource for debunking the lies of the 'birther' movement and discussing the birther antics" and WhatsYourEvidence.com, there is even a Birther Case Scorecard, 0-80 for the birthers.

Another resource is Native and Natural Born Citizenship Explored, "[w]here native and natural coincide."

UPDATE V: Pastor Egomaniacal (AKA Pastor 2+2 Does Not = 4, Pastor Dred Scott, Pastor Truthiness, and Pastor Poppins), continued to well advance his "relationship with conspiracy entrepreneur Jerome Corsi, who would very much like to sell you a copy of the birther book he has co-authored with Michael Zullo, the volunteer investigator who took the leading part in the sheriff’s recent press conference. There is a booming business in birther baloney."

The quote is from an article, Conspiracy, Again, in the National Review (which was founded by the late author William F. Buckley, Jr. and describes itself as "America's most widely read and influential magazine and web site for Republican/conservative news, commentary, and opinion." It is usually considered the center of intellectual activity for the American Conservative movement in the twentieth century.")

As the article states, conspiracies "are long-lived because the underlying mental pathologies are long-lived: As T. S. Eliot put it, 'Humankind cannot bear very much reality.'"

In the meantime, based upon the Pastor's self professed 10-year law enforcement background and experience, I'm waiting for the arrests that he claims are imminent.


UPDATE IV: Chase learned yesterday that if you disagree with Pastor 2+2 Does Not = 4 then he'll accuse you of attacking him personally.


UPDATE III: Someone just called me regarding the show this morning and during the discussion of the Pastor's egomaniacal nature, I had an epiphany, Carl Gallups is the leader of a cult, the Cult of Carl (hereafter C Squared, because squaring is so much more than adding).

The proof, listen to the Pastor and his sycophants. It's all about Carl and his alter ego, PPSIMMONS.

He and the ego often state the fundamental tenants of his/their belief system and then claims that those who do not share those very specific beliefs are not 'true believers.'

Ironically enough, the Pastor defines a cult as a group that requires adherence to a specific belief system.

In other words, he acknowledges he belongs to a cult.

And don't try to argue with him. The video includes numerous text warning that if a comment is posted that disagrees with the Pastor, the commenter "will be permanently blocked from commenting."

Just ask Randy.


UPDATE II: I called out Pastor 2+2 Does Not = 4 and he responded claiming that he doesn't mind discussing and debating the issues.

Therefore, I issue a challenge to him to debate the issues. (FYI, I'm not available til mid March.) I'll try to set aside a week for our initial debates. The first issue: the delusion of the birthers. If he's not crying mercy at the end, we can continue regular debates.

How about it Pastor, Mike can moderate.

WARNING, expect a no mercy take-down of his fact-free fantasies, right-wing rhetoric and partisan hackery (all part of his fundamentalist subculture of ignorance that embraces 'discredited, ridiculous and even dangerous ideas'. He panders to fear, anger and hatred.

If you are one of them, watch out because I don't favor America's preference for rhetorical fairy tales to unpleasant realities.

But alas, I expect he's a chicken and will refuse the challenge.


UPDATE: Love listening to Pastor Dred Scott spin the loss. Unfortunately a long time listener, Randy, didn't know better and tried to talk reason with the Pastor.

Randy, remember what Lincoln once said, "If a man won’t agree that two plus two equals four, you will never win the argument because facts don’t matter."

And that's the reason Randy that the Pastor hangs up on people who don't agree with him.

As I've warned before, don't be duped by the Birthers

Well, the Birthers finally got a hearing, and no one appeared for Obama, and no evidence or argument was entered into the record on behalf of Obama. Nevertheless, "a state law judge flatly rejected legal challenges that contend he can not be a candidate." Read The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Judge: Obama eligible to be Georgia candidate.

Can't wait to hear our very own Pastor Dred Scott (you may remember the infamous Dred Scott decision of 1857, which asserted that African Americans were "beings of an inferior order" who "had no rights which the white man was bound to respect." That ruling declared that African Americans could never be U.S. citizens and therefore could never be President) (AKA Pastor Truthiness (formerly known as Pastor Poppins) spin this one.

Expect a missile sighting somewhere over the U.S. to distract you from the news.

The Republi-CON 'Health Insurance is Like Any Other Product or Insurance' Myth

UPDATE IV: "In 2009, millions of Americans lacked any health insurance whatsoever and millions more had private health insurance metaphorically designed to explode at the hint of any serious illness or preexisting conditions or exorbitant medical costs.  So, in 2009, 14,000 Americans were losing their health insurance every single day.  And medical bills were prompting more than 60 percent of all bankruptcies in our nation. In other words, many health insurance policies were patently dangerous and unsafe."

Read Salon, The right’s most loathsome Obamacare lie yet.  

UPDATE III:  "Obamacare's critics are going to town on the cancellation letters millions of Americans are receiving from their health insurers, informing them that their health plans won't conform to the new federal standards for health coverage as of Jan. 1. . .

Back in March, Consumer Reports published a study of many of these plans and placed them in a special category: "junk health insurance." Some plans, the magazine declared, may be worse than none at all.

Consumer Reports is right. Plans with monthly premiums in the two figures marketed to customers in their 30s, 40s, or even 50s invariably impose ridiculously low coverage limits. They've typically been pitched to people who couldn't find affordable insurance because of their age or preexisting conditions, or who were so financially strapped that they were lured by the cheap upfront cost. . .

An example from CR: A plan costing $65 a month held by Judith Goss, 48, a Michigan department store employee. When Goss was diagnosed with breast cancer, she discovered the drawbacks of the policy's coverage limits of $1,000 a year for outpatient treatment and $2,000 for hospitalization -- barely enough to cover a day and half a Tylenol in the hospital. She delayed treatment, so her cancer got much worse before she finally opted for surgery. Those sorts of coverage limits are illegal  come Jan. 1. . .

[Or c]onsider the case of Diane Barrette, the 56-year-old Florida woman whose cancellation horror story was reported by a credulous CBS News and picked up by Fox News, which has been a one-stop shop for your Obamacare misinformation needs. (We mentioned the Barrette case on Tuesday.)

CR's Metcalf examined Barrette's Blue Cross Blue Shield policy and made two discoveries: how junky it really is, and how badly her insurer may have misled her about her options. Barrette's $54 monthly premium bought her almost nothing. The policy pays $50 per office visit (which can run two or three times that) and $15 per prescription (which can run to thousands of dollars a month); above that she's on her own. Nothing for a colonoscopy. Nothing for mental health treatment. Up to $50 for hospital and ER services -- and then only if her treatment is for 'complications of pregnancy.' Nothing for outpatient services.

'She's paying $650 a year to be uninsured,' said an insurance expert Metcalf consulted. If she ever had a serious medical problem, 'she would have lost the house she's sitting in.'"

Read the Los Angeles Times, Obamacare hysteria: Don't believe the canceled insurance hype. 

UPDATE II:  "Republicans are outraged that some Americans must give up their current insurance plans because they don't satisfy Obamacare's new regulations for benefits and pricing. . .

But Republicans are also making a substantive argument here. It’s unconscionable, they say, that lawmakers would force people to give up their current coverage. . .

It’s good politics, I’m sure. It’s also breathtakingly cynical. Republicans have repeatedly endorsed proposals that would take insurance away from many more Americans—and leave them much, much worse off. . .

The real issue here isn’t simply Republican opportunism and hypocrisy—although, please, let’s not ignore that either. The real issue is about the true trade-offs of policy. Both sides offer them. With Obamacare, a small number of people lose their current insurance but they end up with alternative, typically stronger coverage. Under the plans Republicans have endorsed, a larger number of people would lose their current insurance, as people migrated to a more volatile and less secure marketplace. Under Obamacare, the number of Americans without health insurance at all will come down, eventually by 30 or 40 million. Under most of the Republican plans, the number of Americans without insurance would rise."

The New Republic, Guess Who Really Wants to Take Away Your Insurance: Republicans.  

UPDATE:  Speaking of winners and losers, under Obamacare "ninety-seven per cent of Americans are either left alone or are clear winners, while three per cent are arguably losers. . . 'no law in the history of America makes everyone better off.'"

Read The New Yorker, Obamacare’s Three Per Cent.

This is a great explanation of the nature of health insurance:

"[H]ealth insurance isn't like a toaster or, more to the point, . . . like other kinds of insurance.

Most insurance products are designed to turn an individual's risk of loss into a predictable cost. For example, your premium on homeowner's insurance should equal your expected average annual claims plus a profit margin for the insurer. If your home is in a high-crime neighborhood or especially susceptible to natural disasters, you'll pay more.

Because of this, we can more or less let people buy whatever kind of homeowner's insurance they like, or none at all.

But health insurance doesn't just allow individuals to turn risks into fixed expenses. It is also designed to shift costs across individuals, away from the sick and toward the healthy. If you have foreseeably high health costs, your health insurance premium will be less than your expected claims; if you're likely to be healthy, it will exceed them.

This system is a kind of shadow fiscal policy, redistributing income from the healthy to the sick. It can only work if consumer choice is restricted in such a way that many people are induced to buy policies that cost much more than they can expect to get back. . .

[As a  2006 paper from Georgetown's Health Policy Institute noted] 'these rules protect consumers from dramatic premium increases when they are sick, or at renewal after they become sick.' . .

That's a summary of the "private" health insurance system we have today: Subsidize and regulate to push as many people as possible into insurance pools, and shift costs among them so the healthy subsidize the sick. . .

"[C]onservatives will say that health insurance should be a normal insurance product and not a tool of fiscal redistribution. But we have this system for a reason: chronic health conditions are really expensive, and they can't be addressed through one-year contracts. Addressing the problem of uninsurability requires either heavy-handed regulation of the sort we have now and will have under Obamacare, or some other heavy-handed non-market alternative, like a single-payer plan for catastrophic health expenses. . .

[Thje fact is that] health insurance is not really a private product but a government program creating winners and losers, and the terms of the debate are about who will win and who will lose. Democrats want the poor and the sick to win. Republicans want people with existing coverage and high tax rates to win. Neither side is calling for a free market."

Read Business Insider, Here's The Truth About Your 'Private' Health Insurance — It's Already A Big Government Program. 

BREAKING NEWS! -- Sheriff Joe’s Scooby Doo Gang and Pastor Truthiness (aka Huckster and Con Man) Engaged in a Scam and Swindle to Get Birthers' Money!!

UPDATE IV:  Told ya so, it was all about money, and lies to get money.

"After two years of denying he personally profited from the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office investigation into the validity of President Barack Obama's birth certificate, the head of the sheriff's Cold Case Posse admitted to CBS 5 Investigates that he accepted a large monetary gift from one of the sources in the investigation.

Mike Zullo is the man Sheriff Joe Arpaio tapped to head the investigation. Zullo manages the Cold Case Posse and is in charge of the posse's fundraising and financial management.

In response to questions emailed to him last week regarding personal use of the posse's money, Zullo responded on Tuesday:

'My answer to this question is emphatically No! These accusations that you claim you have heard are absolutely unfounded, slanderous and completely fabricated.  They are designed to cast me and this organization in a disparaging light. I am appalled at this accusation!'

One day later, after faced with evidence provided by CBS 5 Investigates, Zullo sent another email. . ."

Read and watch KPHO, Birther posse chief: I accepted $10,000 from source.

UPDATE III:   More Pastor Truthiness (aka Huckster and Con Man) "doublespeak, double-talk and jive" saying nothing, and more proof that  Sheriff Joe’s Scooby Doo Gang and the Pastor are engaged in a scam and swindle.

Listen to Birther Report,  Fireworks: Carl Gallups Takes On Col. Lawrence Sellin; Sheriff Arpaio's Obama ID Fraud Investigation.

Doublespeak is "language that deliberately disguises, distorts, or reverses the meaning of words."

And double-talk is "a form of speech in which inappropriate, invented or nonsense words are used to give the appearance of knowledge and so confuse or amuse the audience."

UPDATE II:  When warned that birther 'nuts' could damage his campaign, 'Sheriff' 'Scooby Doo' Arpaio responded "There ain't gonna be no damage control, you'll get more money [in campaign contributions] than you'll know what to do with."

How much money?  How about $7-8 million!!

Read Obama Conspiracy Theories, Arpaio’s millions.

I wonder what the cut is for Pastor Truthiness (aka Huckster and Con Man)?

UPDATE:  Since breaking the news that Sheriff Joe’s Scooby Doo Gang and Pastor Truthiness (aka Huckster and Con Man) were engaged in a scam and swindle to get birthers' money,  Pastor Truthiness (aka Huckster and Con Man) has gone silent.

What happened to the criminal investigation(s), "the two news conferences, one with Arpaio and one with Zullo", and the universe-shattering disclosures?

 Of course, since it is/was all a scam and swindle to get birthers' money, none of it will ever happen.

Birthers, hear me now, can you say sucker?

"How a power-abusing scoundrel such as Arpaio turned the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office into a 20-year-plus reign of self-aggrandizement is the subject of a new documentary, aptly named The Joe Show, which [had] its world première on Wednesday, February 26, at the Sedona International Film Festival."

Read Phoenix NewTimes News, The Joe Show Documents a Measly Sheriff's Rise to Celebrity and Power-Abusing Tyranny, which notes that part of the show is "declaring Obama's birth certificate a fraud."

An earlier post that discusses a 64 page article with a complete timeline of the delusions and lies promoted by Sheriff Joe’s Scooby Doo gang and Pastor Truthiness aka Huckster and Con Man, and concludes by asking whether Birthers are idiots, racists, or simply engaged in a scam and swindle.

In the movie the Sheriff confirms it is the later, designed to pull in campaign donations. 

From Read Phoenix NewTimes News, Joe Arpaio's Investigating Federal Judge G. Murray Snow, DOJ, Sources Say, and Using a Seattle Scammer To Do It:

"[At] a strategy meeting during Sheriff Joe Arpaio's 2012 re-election campaign that included Arpaio, his top flack, Lisa Allen, Chief Deputy Jerry Sheridan, and campaign manager Chad Willems.

The group huddled in the back of a Fountain Hills restaurant to discuss how to spin Joe's negatives -- the misspending of more than $100 million, the deaths in the jails, the scores of millions in lawsuit payouts -- for the public.

At some point, Arpaio's 'birther' investigation came up. You know, the one in which President Barack Obama's birth certificate gets investigated by both the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office's Cold Case Posse, a nonprofit organization, and MCSO Deputy Brian Mackiewicz, whom Arpaio flew to Hawaii as part of this snipe hunt, at a cost of nearly $10,000 to taxpayers.

Arpaio's March 2012 press conference -- in which the sheriff and the Cold Case Posse's 'lead investigator,' ex-used-car salesman Mike Zullo, declared Obama's birth certificate to be a forgery -- was in the planning stage when the scene was filmed.

At the mere mention of the birther investigation and the future press event, Allen and Willems practically rolled their eyes.

Willems called the birther probe 'nuts.'

Allen said the sheriff might as well go the press conference 'in big ol' clown shoes.'
Arpaio shrugged, literally.

'There ain't gonna be no damage control,' Arpaio promised Willems. 'You'll get more money [in campaign contributions] than you'll know what to do with.'

Wilier than the cartoon coyote, Arpaio had tapped into a nationwide right-wing anti-government, anti-Obama feeding frenzy with his birther probe and with his tirades against the U.S. Department of Justice, which was investigating him for abuse of power and other issues and is now suing him in federal court.

'The DOJ is a hot item everywhere,' Joe told his flunkies.

See, whenever Arpaio's never-ending political campaign sends out an e-mail blast begging for loot from Obama-haters, it reels in contributions from retired, far-right ofays all over the country.

Willems essentially admitted as much in another scene from the film.

'Now, with Arpaio going to battle with Barack Obama,' Willems said, 'it's meant literally millions of dollars for his campaign.'

As everybody knows, Arpaio was re-elected in 2012, but the investigation into Obama's birth certificate continues apace, according to both Arpaio and Cold Case Posse 'commander' Zullo.

At the beginning of May, Arpaio mentioned the birther probe during a speech before a group of Silicon Valley conservatives.

Around the same time, he appeared on The Right Side, a conservative cable-access show in Mountain View, California. He told host Chris Pareja that the inquiry into Obama's birth certificate was going strong.

'I'm not done with that yet,' Arpaio insisted. 'People think I surrendered. No . . . I'm trying to find out who's behind it now. That's the key. You can always have a crime to investigate, but I think you would like to know who did it.'

The sheriff said he was after whoever created this 'forged, fraudulent document,' meaning a computer scan of the president's long-form birth certificate, released by the White House in April 2011.

Arpaio's statements have paralleled assurances from Zullo during periodic interviews with Florida pastor/radio host Carl Gallups that new revelations concerning the Obama birth certificate are on the way.

Critics of birthers regularly mock Zullo's vague pronouncements on Gallups' show as never resulting in any 'new' finds.

Why, even the information disclosed during Arpaio's two birther-themed press conferences in 2012 were a rehash of debunked conspiracy theories. . .

Zullo promised to release 'universe-shattering' results of these investigations in March, a deadline Zullo since has extended indefinitely."

The article goes on to describe how Arpaio is "getting played" by "person who purportedly convinced Arapio of [his] paranoid fantasy . . . [a] computer fraudster [who was ] the subject of a 2010 Playboy exposé titled 'The Man Who Conned the Pentagon', and concludes:

"Arpaio's racist, wing-nut supporters would consider it an act of bravery that their hero is investigating federal officials getting in the way of keeping despised Latinos in their place.

Meaning more money in the sheriff's perpetual re-election kitty and proving that bogus investigations continue to pay off."

From Surplus to Debt, Republi-CON Style

UPDATE II: "Contrary to many [Republi-con] assertions, tax rates in the United States are low, both historically and in comparison with other developed nations." Read The New York Times, Are Taxes in the U.S. High or Low?, which notes that:

The many adjustments to income permitted by the tax code, plus alternative tax rates on the largest sources of income of the wealthy, explain why the average federal income tax rate on the 400 richest people in America was 18.11 percent in 2008, according to the Internal Revenue Service, down from 26.38 percent when these data were first calculated in 1992. . .

The truth of the matter is that federal taxes in the United States are very low. There is no reason to believe that reducing them further will do anything to raise growth or reduce unemployment."

UPDATE: Another graphic reality check regarding Republi-con fiscal irresponsibility, from Pew Trusts, Fiscal Facts: The Great Debt Shift:



The report concludes that "new legislation enacted since January 2001 has been responsible for two-thirds of the debt growth. In the new legislation, roughly three dollars of new spending has been enacted for every two dollars in tax cuts between 2001 and 2011. No single policy or piece of legislation, however, is overwhelmingly responsible for the $12.7 trillion shift in CBO’s debt projections for 2011 that occurred between January 2001 and March 2011."

"The nation’s unnerving descent into debt began a decade ago with a choice, not a crisis." Read the Washington Post, Running in the red: How the U.S., on the road to surplus, detoured to massive debt, which includes the following graph and this note: "In 2000, the United States had $3.4 trillion in debt held by the public. Based on policies in place at the time, the Congressional Budget Office projected in 2001 that the country could pay off its debt by the year 2008 and by 2011 have a $2.3 trillion surplus."

Local Republi-Con Fiscal Conservative Hypocrisy

UPDATE III: Read the Pensacola New Journal, Commissioners vote for investigation; Gibbs to be removed from job.


UPDATE II: Our own local 'I am not a crook' moment. Read the Pensacola News Journal, County Commissioner Robertson: 'I am a man of ethics'.

As I said earlier, Commissioner Robertson should resign and save the voters the trouble of voting him out of office.


UPDATE: More stores. Read the Pensacola News Journal, Wilson Robertson, partner hit with code violations for land used by Forrest Gibbs, Escambia Commissioner Robertson in on internal meeting, and Grover Robinson: Gibbs' hiring 'invalid', which includes this backstory:

"In April, county commissioners created an Equestrian Center marketing and promotions coordinator position with hopes of eliminating the subsidy of the facility.

The job was publicly advertised online from May 27 to June 30, with a salary range of $44,803 to $51,521. The lower amount was more than people in eight other comparable jobs across the state earn, according to the county's survey.

Applicant Forrest Gibbs listed County Commissioner Wilson Robertson as a reference. Gibbs' work background is in road construction and heavy equipment sales; he has virtually no marketing or promotions experience. . .

Assistant County Administrator Larry Newsom, one of three selection committee members, said Robertson contacted him to advocate for Gibbs while applications were still being received. . .

The committee interviewed the candidates during the last two weeks of July, then on Aug. 2 notified Gibbs that he was the No. 1 choice.

Gibbs said the salary range was too low and asked to be paid $75,000. During August and part of September, the committee haggled over how much to pay him and whether it was legal to go over the advertised range.

On Sept. 12, Gibbs was offered the job for $63,000, plus $17,000 in benefits. Newsom made the final decision. . .

Robertson and a real estate partner, Lamar Brazwell, own an undeveloped piece of land on Nine Mile Road from which a pile of milled asphalt is being sold. The asphalt is owned by Brazwell and Gibbs; a sign on the property gives Gibbs' cellphone number for delivery of the asphalt. Robertson and Brazwell are paid $1,250 per month in recent by Gibbs to store the asphalt on their land.

On Sept. 20, County Code Enforcement cited Brazwell and Robertson with code violations because the pile must be screened with a 6-foot, opaque fence or vegetative buffering."

Do Republi-con politicians go to the same school for corrupt stupidness? You may remember this:

In Wisconsin, Republi-con Gov. Scott Walker says that "the state is broke and public employees are overpaid." So what does he do, hire a 20-something year old with "no college degree, very little management experience and two drunken-driving convictions" as the Department of Commerce bureau director of board services, a job that paid $64,728 a year.

Next convert the Department of Commerce to a public-private hybrid and give the young man a pay raise of more than $16,500 a year after only a couple of months with the state.

But this was no 'ordinary' young man, he is the son of an important campaign donor.

Now here locally, we have reports of similar nepotism. Read the Pensacola News Journal, County's new hire for Equestrian Center rides high, Ties to commissioner bring Equestrian Center pick -- and his high salary -- into question and Commissioner Robertson's push for Gibbs not new, Robertson lobbied for Gibbs in 2009, county staff member says.

More proof that "the instinct to favor family [and friends] never disappears and will reassert itself whenever possible."

Be that as it may, Commissioner Robertson should resign and save the voters the trouble of voting him out of office.

Trump's Big CON: The Populist Tax Cuts for the Wealth (AKA The Trump-Bannon Scam)

UPDATE III:  Last wee "the Senate approved its budget blueprint, a critical step in getting to the Republican Party’s most important legislative priority: tax cuts. Their plan now is to rush a tax bill through as quickly as possible so that opponents don’t have time to mobilize, of course without any input from Democrats.

We knew from the beginning that the bill would be a massive giveaway to corporations and the wealthy, because that’s what a Republican tax bill will inevitably be. But if you think this has anything to do with 'tax reform,' you’re going to be sorely disappointed.

The New York Times’ Jim Tankersley has a good description of the Republican strategy:

    Almost no one on or off Capitol Hill has seen the tax overhaul bill that Republicans are drafting behind closed doors. Congressional staff members have not settled on many key details. Yet party leaders are preparing to move ahead on a timeline even more aggressive than their unsuccessful attempts to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act.

    The swift pace to complete, release and quickly vote on a tax cut is aimed at leaving little time for the type of dissent that has scuttled previous tax proposals.

    Senators approved a budget resolution for the 2018 fiscal year on Thursday night, setting up a rapid series of hearings and votes with the aim of getting a bill to President Trump by Christmas.

The most important thing to understand about this process is that Republicans are in a state of near-panic over the prospect of this bill not passing. Having failed to repeal the ACA — or pass any bill of real consequence — they feel that they need to deliver something they can call a victory, or their base will punish them mercilessly in the 2018 elections. They’re already getting nervous about Stephen K. Bannon’s project to run right-wing nut-bar challengers against Republican incumbents. Not passing this bill 'will be the end of us as a party,' said Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), 'because if you’re a Republican and you don’t want to simplify the tax code and cut taxes, what good are you to anybody?' . .

At the end of all this, Republicans are going to have a Rose Garden ceremony vibrating with such celebratory joy that you’d think they just cured cancer, ended global warming and terraformed Mars. The actual bill will be nothing like what they describe — it won’t be aimed at the middle class, it won’t simplify the tax code and it won’t be real 'reform.' Nor will it produce the spectacular trickle-down effects they promise. In other words, it’ll be pretty much like every other Republican tax cut."

Read the Washington Post, The Republican tax scam is about to kick into overdrive.

UPDATE II:  "The Trump administration and its allies are lying about every aspect of their tax plan.

I’m not talking about dubious interpretations of evidence or misleading presentation of the facts — the kind of thing the Bush administration used to specialize in. I’m talking about flat-out, easily refuted lies, like the claim that America has the world’s highest taxes (among rich countries, we have close to the lowest), or the claim that estate taxes are a huge burden on small business (almost no small businesses pay any estate tax).

Nor do I mean that there are just one or two big lies. There are many — so many I literally don’t have space to so much as list them in this column. In a long blog post this past weekend I tried to provide a systematic list; I came up with 10 major Republican lies about tax cuts, and I’m sure I missed a few.

So, politically, can they really get away with this? A lot depends on how the news media handles it. If an administration spokesperson declares that up is down, will news reports simply say 'so-and-so says up is down, but Democrats disagree,' or will they also report that up is not, in fact, down? I wish I were confident about the answer to that question.

One thing we know for sure, however, is that a great majority of Republican politicians know perfectly well that their party is lying about its tax plan — and every even halfway competent economist aligned with the party definitely understands what’s going on.

What this means is that everyone who goes along with this plan, or even remains silent in the face of the campaign of mass dissimulation, is complicit — is in effect an accomplice to the most dishonest political selling job in American history."

Read The New York Times, The G.O.P. Is No Party for Honest Men.

UPDATE: "Alas when it comes to governance, Trumpism turns to have two fatal weaknesses: the dearth of Trumpists among elected Republicans, and the total policy incapacity of Trump himself. So having failed in his appointed role as Trump whisperer and White House brain, Bannon has decided to do the Tea Party insurgency thing all over again, except this time with his nationalist-populist cocktail instead of the last round’s notional libertarianism.

Maybe it will work. Maybe repetition is the charm. Maybe the Tea Party was a dead end, but some Trumpist primary candidates will finally produce a Republican Party capable of doing something with its power.

If you squint at the Bannon vision, you can almost imagine it. His professed nationalism, with its promise of infrastructure projects and antitrust actions and maybe even tax hikes on the rich, is potentially more popular than the Tea Party vision — an easier sell to swing voters than a stringent libertarianism or a zombie Reaganism, a more plausible response to the new political landscape that the stale agenda currently on offer on a Republican-controlled Capitol Hill.

But this imaginative exercise collapses when you look at Bannon’s own record and the candidates he’s recruiting.

The record features big talk about populism and political realignment, plus a dismissal of the white identitarians and racists drawn to his flame as just incidental idiots ... but it never seems to cash out in anything except a return to empty, race-baiting culture war.

At the White House, Bannon did not manage to inject much heterodoxy into any part of the same old, same old Republican agenda. But he did encourage the president to pick racialized fights at every chance. On the evidence so far, his new grass-roots populism promises to be more of the same: a notional commitment to some nebulous new agenda, with white-identity politics and the fear of liberalism supplying the real cultural-political cement.

Especially because the would-be senators he’s recruiting are a mix of cynics and fanatics who seem to share no coherent vision, just a common mix of ambition and resentment. . .

Which is not to say Bannon is delusional. He and his allies are the latest group to recognize the void at the heart of the contemporary Republican Party, the vacuum that somebody, somehow needs to fill. The activists and enforcers of the Tea Party era tried with a libertarian style of populism. Paul Ryan tried with his warmed-over Jack Kempism. My friends the “reform conservatives” tried with blueprints for tax credits and wage subsidies. They all failed, and the Bannon crew actually got furthest, in the sense that they got the most unlikely figure imaginable elected president on something resembling their platform. . .

But if I were Steve Bannon, or any other Republican with a vision for the G.O.P. future beyond the hapless 'governance' on display today, I would not be wasting my time trying to elect a few cranks and gadflies who will make Mitch McConnell’s life more difficult.

Instead I would be looking for the thing that too many people deceived themselves into believing Trump might be, and that Bannonite populism for all its potential strength now lacks: a leader."

Read The New York Times, The Bannon Revolution.

"The Trump administration is set to roll out a new analysis on Monday that supposedly demonstrates that Trump’s proposed tax plan would ultimately boost middle class incomes by thousands of dollars. This is based on the notion that corporations will pass their tax savings under Trump’s plan on to workers, something that other researchers doubt. In reality, this line of argument is really meant to mask the fact that Trump’s tax framework — which Republicans are working on in Congress — would lavish most of its benefits on the very highest earners.

Trump allies and Republicans are so desperate to pass this tax plan that they’re also doubling down on another strange argument: If Republicans don’t get this plan passed, their majority in Congress is doomed — and with it, so is the Trump agenda. Senator Lindsey Graham pushed this line yesterday on 'Face the Nation,' arguing that if Republicans don’t pass tax reform, 'we’re dead.'

But these two lines of argument, when taken together, actually illustrate just how deep the scamming around these matters really runs. In fact, the scamming is so out of control that it has taken on a life of its own, and it is hard to keep track of all of its various components at this point.

Here is the storyline we are being asked to believe. Former Trump strategist Stephen K. Bannon is promoting primary challengers against Senate GOP incumbents, arguing that the GOP establishment has diverted from the 'populist economic nationalist' agenda that powered Trump’s victory. Republicans lament that this constitutes a serious threat to both the GOP and Trump — and now they’re saying that getting the tax cuts passed is the only way to ward off that threat. . .

Really? The only conceivable way for the GOP to save itself from the 'economic populist' ferment among GOP voters is to pass an enormous tax cut for the wealthy and corporations? Can someone explain why we are supposed to believe this?

Read the Washington Post, The scamming runs very, very deep.

Useful or Useless Beer Facts?

Happy St. Patrick's Day. In celebration, what The Opinionated Beer Page calls some useless beer facts:

Unlike wines, most beers should be stored upright to minimize oxidation and metal or plastic contamination from the cap. High-alcohol ales, however, which continue to ferment in their corked bottles, should be stored on their sides.

Studying the experimentally induced intoxicated behavior of ants in 1888, naturalist John Lubbock noticed that the insects that had too much to drink were picked up by nest mates and carried home. Conversely, drunken strangers were summarily tossed in a ditch.

Despite the month implied by its name, Munich's annual 16-day Oktoberfest actually begins in mid-September and ends on the first Sunday in October.

The familiar Bass symbol, a red triangle, was registered in 1876 and is the world's oldest trademark.

According to a journal entry from 1636, farm workers in the colony of Quebec not only received an allowance of flour, lard, oil, vinegar, and codfish; they were also given "a chopine of cider a day or a quart of beer."

In 1965, a Belgian royal decree mandated that lambics must contain a minimum of 35% wheat. It also ordered that labels state the name and location of the brewery.

Beck's in not only Germany's top export beer, it also accounts for 85% of all German beer exports to the United States.

Pennsylvania has had more breweries in its history than any other state. In 1910 alone, 119 of the state's towns had at least one licensed beermaker.

In their efforts to regulate beer quality, the ancient Babylonians, who were among history's earliest brewers, decreed that any commercial beermaker who sold unfit beer would be drowned in his/her own libation.

Bottle caps, or "crowns," were invented in Baltimore in 1892 by William Painter. Painter proved his invention's worth when he convinced a local brewer to ship a few hundred cases of beer to South America and back and they returned without a leak.

Beer advertising matchbook covers have become sought-after collectibles on Internet auction sites. A 1916 matchbook promoting Brehm's Brewery in Baltimore brought $43, while a 1930s cover promoting Eastside Beer from Los Angeles went for $36.

Beer and video games have a long association. Tapper, originally a 1983 arcade game and now a computer one, tests players' skills by challenging them to coordinate the movements of beers, a bartender, empty mugs, and patrons.

An 18-year study by the National Institute on Aging found that 50-plus men who consumed a drink a day during middle age scored significantly better on cognitive tests later in life than did non-drinkers.

Gilroy, home of the Coast Range Brewing Company since 1995, is the self-proclaimed "Garlic Capital of the World."

In ancient Babylon, women brewers also assumed the role of temple priestesses. The goddess Siris was the patron of beer.

On October 17 of 1814, a rupture in a brewery tank containing 3,500 barrels of beer caused a flood of fatal proportions in the London parish of St. Giles. The wave of beer swept victims off their feet, dashed them against walls, and buried them under debris. Two houses were demolished in the sea of beer suddenly loosed upon town, and nine people lost their lives in the flood of suds.

It was the accepted practice in Babylon 4,000 years ago that for a month after the wedding, the bride's father would supply his son-in law with all the mead he could drink. Mead is a honey beer, and because their calendar was lunar based, this period was called the "honey month", or what we know today as the "honeymoon".

There are 19 different versions of Guinness.

According to a diary entry from a passenger on the Mayflower, the pilgrims made their landing at Plymouth Rock, rather than continue to their destination in Virginia, due to lack of beer.

In the US, a barrel contains 31 gallons of beer.

The first beer cans were produced in 1935.

Before thermometers were invented, brewers would dip a thumb or finger into the mix to find the right temperature for adding yeast. Too cold, and the yeast wouldn't grow. Too hot, and the yeast would die. This thumb in the beer is where "rule of thumb" comes from. (Actually, a reader pointed out to us that "rule of thumb" actually comes from some Irish saying regarding beating your wife. However, since this is a beer page and not a wifebeating page, the temperature fact stands.)

In 1788, Ale was proclaimed "the proper drink for Americans" at a parade in New York City.

In English pubs, ale is ordered by pints and quarts. So in old England, when customers got unruly, the bartender would yell at them to mind their own pints and quarts and settle down. It's where we get the phrase "mind your P's and Q's".

The original text of the Reinheitsgebot only had three ingredients: Barley, hops, and water. Yeast wasn't mentioned for another 35 years.

George Washington had his own brewhouse on the grounds of Mount Vernon.

After consuming a bucket or two of vibrant brew they called aul, or ale, the Vikings would head fearlessly into battle, often without armor or even shirts. In fact, "berserk" means "bare shirt" in Norse, and eventually took on the meaning of their wild battles.

The Budweiser Clydesdales weight up to 2,300 pounds and stand nearly 6 feet at the shoulder.

12 oz of a typical American pale lager actually has fewer calories than 2 percent milk or apple juice.

A beer is NOT just a beer. All told, there are 27 different styles of beer, with a further breakdown of 49 substyles.

Actually, some of those facts sounded like they might be pretty useful someday.

The Mess That is the Middle East

UPDATE IV:  Of course maybe "[t]he conflict raging in Gaza is different this time. . .

'This is unprecedented in the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict,' says CNN's Ali Younes, an analyst who has covered the region for decades. 'Most Arab states are actively supporting Israel against the Palestinians -- and not even shy about it or doing it discreetly.'

It's a 'joint Arab-Israeli war consisting of Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia against other Arabs -- the Palestinians as represented by Hamas.'"

Read CNN, This time, Gaza fighting is 'proxy war' for entire Mideast.  

UPDATE III:  Two years later, Israel loses again because:

You only have power over people so long as you don't take everything away from them. But when you've robbed a man of everything, he's no longer in your power - he's free again. – Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Read also Slate, Israel’s Deadly Gambits, which notes that "[t]he Israeli government seems to have forgotten how to think strategically; at the very least, they have a self-destructive tendency to overplay their hands. . .

[T]he Iron Dome anti-missile shield, whose production [Obama] greatly accelerated, has shot down the few dozen—out of several hundred—Hamas rockets that would have exploded in Israeli cities.

As a result, Hamas’ rockets—most of which have landed in the middle of nowhere—have killed just one Israeli, while Israeli air strikes have killed more than 200 Palestinians and wounded another 1,500-plus, most of them civilians, many of them children, including the four children whose deaths while playing on the beach were captured by photographers on the scene.

Fatality ratios mean little up to a point, but a 200-to-1 ratio seems awfully disproportionate. Israeli bombs have struck 1,500 targets in Gaza so far—another remarkable fact: Who knew there were 1,500 militarily legitimate targets in that tiny, impoverished strip of land?"

UPDATE II:  As I first stated more than three years ago, "[t]he reasonable solution has always been obvious: to draw a borderline somewhere between the Mediterranean Sea and the Dead Sea that both sides, however grudgingly, could live with. Yet the conflict casts a shadow over world peace, and continues to fester."

Read The New York Times, The Elephant in the Map Room, which notes that"we need to look at the conflict with fresh eyes. For Jewish Israelis, the Biblical relation with the land of their forefathers is crucial to why they're there. But in his controversial book 'The Invention of the Jewish People,' Shlomo Sand argues that Judaism used to be a proselytizing religion like Christianity or Islam, and that consequently many of today's Jewish Israelis are descendants of converts, without an ancestral link to Eretz-Israel. Inversely, many of the Palestinians may just be the descendants of the large Jewish community who remained to toil the land, even after the destruction of the Temple and the suppression of the Bar Kochba revolt in the first and second centuries, respectively - and who gradually converted to Islam in the centuries after the Arab conquest."

UPDATE: A new foreign policy for the Middle East:

Some, no make that many, took issue with my frank discussion of the options in the Middle East. As I see it, kill them all (one side or the other, right-wing radical propose killing all the Muslims and letting Allah sort it out, but not very Christian if you ask me), relocating one party to someplace outside the Middle East, such as South Florida (again either party makes no difference for the discussion cause it ain't gonna happen), or relocation within the current borders of Israel, I suggest Palestinians to the north.

Of course the discussion wasn't well received. But I think most people fail to understand the situation in the Middle East. As luck would have it, Thomas Friedman, Pulitzer Prize winning New York Times columnist sums it up well in his article today, Don’t Try This at Home:

"Where to begin? Palestinians are now divided between the West Bank and Gaza, with a secular Palestinian Authority based in Ramallah in the West Bank and a fundamentalist Hamas government based in Gaza. But Hamas is further divided between a military and political wing, and the political wing is further divided between a Gaza-based leadership and a Damascus-based leadership, with the latter taking orders from both Syria and Iran.

Are you still with me?

Best I can tell, the Palestinians from Gaza are simultaneously negotiating a cease-fire with Israel in Cairo, pursuing war-crimes charges against Israel in Europe, digging new tunnels in the Sinai to smuggle more rockets into Gaza to hit Tel Aviv and trying to raise money for reconstruction from Iran. Meanwhile, the West Bank Palestinian leaders are busy publicly collecting food and blankets to help all those Palestinian civilians brutalized by the Israeli incursion into Gaza, while privately demanding to know from senior Israeli officials why they wimped out and didn’t wipe Hamas in Gaza off the face of earth — casualties be damned.

Israel, meanwhile, has a government in which the prime minister, foreign minister and defense minister each has a different peace plan, war strategy and cease-fire conditions for Gaza, and the foreign minister and defense minster are running against each other in Israel’s election on Tuesday. Speaking of that election, a whole new party, Yisrael Beiteinu, led by Avigdor Lieberman, which has been accused of having “fascist,” viciously anti-Arab leanings, appears headed to make the biggest gains and possibly become the kingmaker of Israel’s next government. The other day, the Labor Party leader, Ehud Barak, was quoted in the newspaper Haaretz as criticizing Lieberman as a lamb in hawk’s clothing, asking: “When has he ever shot anyone?”

How did this conflict get so fragmented? For starters, it’s gone on way too long. The West Bank is so chopped up and divided now by roads, checkpoints and fences to separate Israel’s crazy settlements from Palestinian villages that a Palestinian could fly from Jerusalem to Paris quicker than he or she could drive from Jenin, here in the northern West Bank, to Hebron in the south.

Another reason is that every idea has been tried and has failed. For the Palestinians, Pan-Arabism, Communism, Islamism have all come and gone, with none having delivered statehood or prosperity. As a result, more and more Palestinians have fallen back on family, clan, town and tribal loyalties. In Israel, Peace Now’s two-state solution was blown up with the crash of the Oslo peace accords, the rising Palestinian birthrate made any plans to annex the West Bank a mortal threat to Israel’s Jewish character, and the rockets that followed Israel’s withdrawals from both Lebanon and Gaza made a mockery of those who said unilateral pullouts were the solution.

All of this has led to a resurgence of religiosity. According to Haaretz, the following questions were posed by a well-known rabbi in one of the pamphlets distributed by the Israeli Army’s Office of Chief Rabbi before the latest Gaza fighting: “Is it possible to compare today’s Palestinians to the Philistines of the past? And if so, is it possible to apply lessons today from the military tactics of Samson and David? A comparison is possible because the Philistines of the past were not natives and had invaded from a foreign land.”

Who in the world would want to try to repair this? I’d rather herd cats, or become John Thain’s image adviser, or have a colonoscopy, or become chairman of the “bad bank” that President Obama might create to hold all the toxic mortgages. Surely, any of those would be more fun. If Mitchell is still up for it, well, then God bless him. My next column will look at some ways we might just start over. "

Here is my suggestion, rearrange the current borders as such:

In short, New Palestine to the north, New Israel to the south, exact borders TBD, BIG wall in between.

Better hurry, before the next war starts.

Trump's Big CON: It's All About the Show, Afghanistan Edition

UPDATE VII"  "To some of the Marines, though, optimism, no matter how cautious, rings hollow after nearly 16 years of war and new approaches that sound a lot like the old ones."

Read the Washington Post, ‘It’s like everyone forgot’: On a familiar battlefield, Marines prepare for their next chapter in the Forever War.

UPDATE VI:  "President Trump proved one thing beyond the shadow of a doubt in his Afghanistan strategy speech Monday night: After nearly 16 years of fighting America’s longest war, there are no new ideas.

He called his plan 'dramatically different.'

It wasn’t. The only thing that seemed a striking change from his two presidential predecessors’ approach to the war launched after the attacks of September 11, 2001, was Trump’s escalatory rhetoric. He repeatedly vowed to 'win' a conflict that his Defense Secretary James Mattis told Congress recently 'we are not winning' and sharply criticized Afghanistan’s neighbor Pakistan, a troublesome ally Trump excoriated for offering 'safe haven' to terrorists. . .

In many ways, the target of much of his speech was neither al Qaeda nor the Taliban but Barack Obama. Trump went out of his way, for example, to criticize his successor for “hastily and mistakenly” withdrawing from Iraq in 2011—without mentioning that he supported that move at the time. In his speech on Monday, he claimed that he now viewed it as a mistake so consequential it had shaped his own determination to fight on in Afghanistan.

Read Politico, America Is Out of Ideas in Afghanistan.

In blaming Obama, there was "one layer of dishonesty piled on top of another."

UPDATE V:  "The president has escalated fights in six countries. Now his supporters are wondering what happened to ‘America First.’"

Read the Daily Beast, Trump’s Base Goes Ballistic Over His ‘Unlimited War’.

UPDATE IV:  "At a low ebb in his presidency, amidst questions about his judgment and mental stability, President Trump on Monday night asked the country to trust him in sending more troops into the nation’s longest war. Coming after his panned tweet to throw transgender people out of the military and his incendiary remarks about Charlottesville, his paean to military cohesion and diversity rang hollow. ('The men and women of our military operate as one team, with one shared mission and one shared sense of purpose,' he said. 'They transcend every line of race, ethnicity, creed, and color to serve together and sacrifice together in absolutely perfect cohesion. That is because all service members are brothers and sisters. They are all part of the same family. It’s called the American family. They take the same oath, fight for the same flag, and live according to the same law.') At times he seemed to be defensively rewriting his remarks on Charlottesville. ('Love for America requires love for all of its people. When we open our hearts to patriotism, there is no room for prejudice, no place for bigotry, and no tolerance for hate.')

What we did learn was the 'America First' has no meaning (other than to deceive gullible isolationists). Aside from that and a general disposition toward 'winning,' we did not hear with any specificity how he intends to achieve victory or even how he defines 'victory.' . .

Unfortunately, the means to achieve victory seemed both vague and insufficient. 'We will not talk about numbers of troops or our plans for further military activities. Conditions on the ground, not arbitrary timetables, will guide our strategy from now on,' he said. (That’s fine, but could we get a ballpark figure to assess whether the commitment is sufficient to obtain the desired result?) One platitude followed another. '“Another fundamental pillar of our new strategy is the integration of all instruments of American power, diplomatic, economic, and military, toward a successful outcome.' But have we not been doing that for almost 16 years? The result hardly sounded like a definitive victory. . .

[Former ambassador Eric] Edelman observed: 'It is hard to call it an approach, it is really more of an attitude. The speech was in keeping with Trump’s approach to everything, which is to say it was more about him than anything else.' Edelman pointed out that from the effort to recover from the Charlottesville debacle to his ''I wanted to pull out' instincts to his pathetic whining about the crappy hand he was dealt — it read less like a carefully thought-out strategy and policy and more like an internal monologue.' He added, 'It was not a compelling argument to the public for continued involvement and sacrifice.'"

Read the Washington Post, A hobbled commander in chief tries to rally the country.

UPDATE III:  "In his televised speech last night, the president flip-flopped his position on the war in Afghanistan. We know this because, to his credit, Trump explicitly copped to it:

'My original instinct was to pull out, and historically I like following my instincts. But all my life, I have heard that decisions are much different when you sit behind the desk in the Oval Office. In other words, when you are president of the United States. So I studied Afghanistan in great detail and from every conceivable angle. After many meetings over many months, we held our final meeting last Friday at Camp David with my Cabinet and generals to complete our strategy.'

There’s a lot to unpack in that paragraph. Watching it live, when he said 'I studied Afghanistan in great detail and from every conceivable angle,' I literally laughed out loud. Let’s be blunt: The only printed material that Trump has studied in great detail from every conceivable angle are periodicals that contain glossy centerfolds.

That said, I do believe Trump’s claim that he preferred to pull out and subsequently changed his mind. The question is why. For all the myriad ways the president tried to claim that his strategy of 'principled realism' was different from President Barack Obama’s Afghanistan strategy, it’s pretty much the same. The Trump administration cares a little less about democracy promotion and a lot less about civilian casualties than the Obama administration. . .

[W]hy the shift? Two big factors pushed him in the same direction. The first, obvious one is path dependence: Given the situation today, there is no magic formula to change things for the better with dramatic action. . .

The second factor is one that I have been hammering again and again, but it bears repeating: Trump is an exceptionally weak commander in chief. He lacks the gravitas and expertise to countermand his military advisers, even when his instincts push him in that direction. . .

What was unusual about this decision is that when faced with a choice between an unappetizing status quo and a future of even worse alternatives, Trump chose the status quo. He does not normally do this — except when it comes to decisions involving the military. That is consistent with what he did in Syria in the spring. . .

The U.S. military is not really all that hawkish, but the armed forces do tend to prefer more firepower to less in those conflicts where they already have a footprint. So while the military might not advocate for any new conflicts, they have and will advocate for more resources to prosecute the conflicts they are enmeshed in.

Which means that, contrary to some who believed that Trump was the less hawkish candidate in 2016, Trump will repeatedly defer to the military in his grand strategy. No matter what he claims, he has no better ideas.

This means longer and bloodier wars."

Read the Washington Post, Why did Trump flip-flop on Afghanistan?

UPDATE II: It's the status quo plus a little more in Afghanistan.

Read the Washington Post:

Trump announces new strategy for Afghanistan that calls for a troop increase,

‘It’s a hard problem’: Inside Trump’s decision to send more troops to Afghanistan,

Trump’s muscular but vague Afghanistan speech, annotated,

In escalating America’s longest war, Trump acts against his ‘original instinct’,

Trump faces the grim reality of Afghanistan: No quick path to victory and no clear way out, and

Bannon’s Breitbart spins Trump’s Afghanistan speech as ‘flip-flop’, which noted:

"Trump — who has for years called for a withdrawal from the war — said during his speech that although his 'original instinct' was to pull out, 'decisions are much different when you sit behind the desk in the Oval Office.'

He provided few specifics about how much the U.S. military commitment would increase."

UPDATE:  The problem with Afghanistan, there are no good options to what is essentially a series of civil war that have been a feature of Afghanistan's history for more than 100 years.

Read:

The Washington Post, Trump’s ‘strategy’ on Afghanistan: Let the next president figure it out, and

NPR, Trump To Deliver Prime-Time Address On Afghanistan.

Trump always has a secret plan, even one to "win" in Afghanistan.

Now, approximately 9 months after the election and 7 months after taking office, he might tell us.

Read the Washington Post, The Latest: Trump to address nation Monday on Afghanistan.

Remember: it's all 'bout the show, 'bout the show, stupid people!!! (Repeat til you get it).

Read also:

Trump's Big CON: 'I Can Win in Afghanistan', and

Trump's Big CON: The Generals Decide How to Fight.

The Republi-CON "The End Is Near" Myth

UPDATE:  Lo and behold, I reference false prophets of doom, and on the same day so does one of my favorite economic op-ed columnist.  Great minds think alike, although he gets paid a lot to write a column for The New York Times and won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences.  I'm just another schlep with an unread blog:

"Once upon a time, walking around shouting “The end is nigh” got you labeled a kook, someone not to be taken seriously. These days, however, all the best people go around warning of looming disaster. In fact, you more or less have to subscribe to fantasies of fiscal apocalypse to be considered respectable.

And I do mean fantasies. Washington has spent the past three-plus years in terror of a debt crisis that keeps not happening, and, in fact, can’t happen to a country like the United States, which has its own currency and borrows in that currency. Yet the scaremongers can’t bring themselves to let go. . .

[T]here are two remarkable things about this kind of doomsaying. One is that the doomsayers haven’t rethought their premises despite being wrong again and again — perhaps because the news media continue to treat them with immense respect. The other is that as far as I can tell nobody, and I mean nobody, in the looming-apocalypse camp has tried to explain exactly how the predicted disaster would actually work. . .

Why, then, should we fear a debt apocalypse here? Surely, you may think, someone in the debt-apocalypse community has offered a clear explanation. But nobody has.

So the next time you see some serious-looking man in a suit declaring that we’re teetering on the precipice of fiscal doom, don’t be afraid. He and his friends have been wrong about everything so far, and they literally have no idea what they’re talking about."

Read The New York Times, Addicted to the Apocalypse.

"Hedge fund billionaire Stanley Druckenmiller is really, really worried about the future of the United States. He is doing an event at Georgetown next week making the case that entitlement spending will form the next mega-financial crisis, and not for the first time.

This kind of quasi-apocalyptic talk is breathtakingly common. His is of a thread with a lot of commentary that suggests that the whole world economy is just a shell game being propped up by profligate government spending and central bank money-printing, that it’s all a scam that will implode soon enough.

It is embedded in the writing of David Stockman, who views the world as being on the precipice of an 80-year central banking bubble that will pop any day now. Hamilton Nolan at Gawker has made an entire side-career out of writing 'Bubble Watch' posts. . .

The poster advertising Druckenmiller's speech last week argues that the "true national debt" is more than $200 trillion. What the sponsor  seems to be doing is looking at the liabilities side of the balance sheet, but not the asset side. Yes, Social Security and Medicare are on the hook to pay out a lot of money in the future. But they are also on track to collect many trillions in tax revenue in the future. . .

Crises are real. And they can be destructive. Policymakers should be on the watch for potential triggers of crises, and thinking deeply about how to avoid bubbles that waste human potential and result in damaging recessions. But when everything is a bubble, and apocalypse is always now, the terms becomes meaningless."

Read the Washington Post, Another billionaire is predicting doom. Ignore him.

Social Security and medicare would remain solvent with some minor adjustments, unless of course you don't want the programs to remain solvent.

Union Busting, Part of the Republi-CON War on the Middle Class

UPDATE VII: "The decline in organized labor’s power and membership has played a larger role in fostering increased wage inequality in the United States than is generally thought, according to a new study." Read The New York Times, Labor’s Decline and Wage Inequality.


UPDATE VI: There wasn't always Republi-con distain for labor unions. in 1983, Ronald Reagan said: “where collective bargaining is forbidden, freedom is lost.” Watch the mythical Reagan says it himself:

The Daily Show - Moment of Zen - Ronald Reagan Supports Unions
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UPDATE V: "Since the early 1980s, when General Electric's widely admired chief executive, Jack Welch, declared that the primary goal of the corporation was to increase shareholder value, America's corporate managers have been faithfully rewarded for treating their employees as necessary - or unnecessary - evils, to be shed whenever possible, or replaced by foreign or temporary workers, and most certainly not allowed to form unions or receive wage increases. Thirty years later, this form of shareholder capitalism has swept the field of nearly all opposition, with results - chiefly, the eclipse of the decent-paying job - that grow more glaring with each passing day." Read the Washington Post, Where's the economic recovery?


UPDATE IV: Stephen Colbert's proposal for two America's -- America Plus and Poor America. Funny, but unfortunately true:

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UPDATE III: "In the raging battle over union rights in Wisconsin, those seeking to curtail collective bargaining for state employees have advanced an argument that seems hard to resist: It will make it easier to reward those workers who perform the best [as judged by a performance review]. What could be fairer than that? . .

Performance reviews are held up as objective assessments by the boss, with the assumption that the boss has all the answers.

Now, maybe your boss is all-knowing. But I’ve never seen one that was."

Read The New York Times, Why Your Boss Is Wrong About You.


UPDATE II: "Madison, Wis., is looking a lot like Baghdad in 2003, with government officials exploiting fiscal crises for fun and profit" to benefit our corporate overlords. Read The New York Times, Shock Doctrine, U.S.A.

The real objective -- "reward the G.O.P.’s wealthiest patrons by crippling what remains of organized labor, by wrecking the government agencies charged with regulating and policing corporations, and, as always, by rewarding the wealthiest with more tax breaks." Read The New York Times, Why Wouldn’t the Tea Party Shut It Down?


UPDATE: Wisconsin Gov. Walker has been caught "eagerly recounting his efforts to crush collective bargaining in Wisconsin to an out-of-state billionaire backer," who supported his election and has current (rules on pipeline transport) and possible future (no-bid sell-off of any state-owned heating, cooling, or power plants) business interest in the state. Read The Business Insider, Why A Reporter's Prank Call To David Koch Is No Laughing Matter.

Here is Jon Stewart's take:

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"Republican talk of balancing budgets is cover for the real purpose of gutting the political force of middle-class state workers." Read The New York Times, Spreading Anti-Union Agenda.

The Banks (and Other Financial Institutions) are Robbing Our Future

UPDATE VII: Another I told ya so. Read the Rolling Stone, The Great American Bubble Machine, about how Goldman Sachs has engineered every major market manipulation since the Great Depression.


UPDATE VI: Ever wonder who the inside man was for the financial industry coup d'état that seized control of the U.S. Treasury. Read The New York Times, Geithner, as Member and Overseer, Forged Ties to Finance Club.


UPDATE V: How much has been looted from the treasury? Read the Washington Post, IMF Estimates Cost of Financial Crisis at $4 Trillion.

And besides paying bonuses, buying toxic assets with government money, guaranteeing loans, and posting huge profits, what else is being done with our money? Read the Washington Post, Bailout Recipients Spent Millions on Lobbying, Records Show.

Once a foob, always a foob?

UPDATE IV: You might not have realized it, but our government was overthrown in a coup recently. Read The Atlantic, The Quiet Coup, and find out how the Geithner, as Member and Overseer, Forged Ties to Finance Club has effectively captured our government.

New York financial institutions are using our treasury to more pay bonuses, buy toxic assets with government money, guarantee loans, and post huge profits.

Read the Washington Post, Fannie, Freddie Budget $210 Million On Bonuses, Draw Lawmakers' Fire and Reuters, US banks with taxpayer money could buy toxic assets, The New York Times, U.S. Program Lends a Hand to Banks, Quietly, and The New York Times, Big Profits, Big Questions.

At the center of it all, Goldman Sachs, the former firm of former Treasury Secretary Paulson. The AIG bailout never made sense, except if you understood that the money was meant to save Goldman Sachs. Since early on it has been clear that payments to AIG were just a cover to get money to Goldman Sachs. And when the original terms of the bailout proved too onerous, the terms were waived for another sweetheart deal.

UPDATE III: In an editorial, Joseph Stiglitz, an economist and professor at Columbia University, and winner of the 2001 the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, calls the Obama plan ersatz capitalism, "a win-win-lose proposal: the banks win, investors win — and taxpayers lose." He says:

"Some Americans are afraid that the government might temporarily “nationalize” the banks, but that option would be preferable to the Geithner plan. After all, the F.D.I.C. has taken control of failing banks before, and done it well. It has even nationalized large institutions like Continental Illinois (taken over in 1984, back in private hands a few years later), and Washington Mutual (seized last September, and immediately resold).

What the Obama administration is doing is far worse than nationalization: it is ersatz capitalism, the privatizing of gains and the socializing of losses. It is a “partnership” in which one partner robs the other. And such partnerships — with the private sector in control — have perverse incentives, worse even than the ones that got us into the mess."

Read The New York Times, Obama’s Ersatz Capitalism.

UPDATE II: An update from on my post in February. Joseph Stiglitz, an economist and professor at Columbia University, and winner of the 2001 the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, agrees that the Obama public-private partnership to buy up to $1 trillion of 'toxic' bank assets "amounts to robbery of the American people." Read The Daily Telegraph, Geithner rescue package 'robbery of the American people.'

The winner of the 2008 the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, Paul Krugman, an economist and professor of economics and international affairs at Princeton University, and an op-ed columnist for The New York Times, also doesn't like the plan. Read The New York Times, Financial Policy Despair.

UPDATE: Next week Uncle Sam is expected to triple down on AIG. Read the appropriately named article in The New York Times, Propping Up a House of Cards, in which the writer predicts that the government will spend "quarter of a trillion dollars" to prop up AIG. All for the purpose of saving Goldman Sacks, the former firm of former Treasury Secretary Paulson, the focus of an initial bailout proposal that never made sense, beneficiary of over a hundred billion bailout dollars, and then a hundred billion more.

It is robbery of the future!

The government is aiding and abetting the robbery of our future by investment banks and other financial institutions. Read The Big Picture, Citigroup: World’s Worst Investment to Get Even Worse, in which Barry Ritholtz wrote:

"Losers double down.

That’s the classic trading rule which the USA is about to violate in an enormous way. According to trading maven Dennis Gartman, one should “never, ever, ever, under any circumstance, add to a losing position.”

And yet that is what we are about to do.

To review: Former Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson made a terrible investment on behalf of the taxpayers by purchasing a 7.8% stake in Citigroup (C) for an initial $25 billion dollars. He further put the US on the hook by guaranteeing against 90% of future losses on $301 billion in assets. Subsequently, we (the taxpayers) injected another $20 billion dollars.

At the time, Citigroup had a market cap of about ~$50 billion dollars. Today, its worth ~$13 billion.

So for about 100% of the market value of Citi, plus insurance guarantees worth of as much as 500% of its value (~$275 billion), we got less than 1/10 of a company that in total was worth 1/5 of our investment.

Pretty good deal, eh?

That $45 billion dollar stake now has a market value of just over a billion.

And, its about to get even worse.

Rather than do what is the FDIC-mandated-by-law thing, we will instead convert the nearly worthless common into preferred shares. The taxpayers stake will rise to near 40% of Citigroup.

NYT:

“Under the terms of the deal, the Treasury Department has agreed to convert up to $25 billion of its preferred stock investment in Citigroup into common stock. It will convert its stake to the extent that Citigroup can persuade private investors, including several big foreign government investment funds, to do so alongside the government, two people close to the deal said.”

What does this do for us? Well, the higher investment stake creates an enormous incentive for John Q. Public to continue to pour money into Citi, regardless of valuation. The inept banking giant then has access to infinite amount of capital, courtesy of you, the 1040 filers.

Its just another example of why these insolvent banks should be nationalized, or for you squeemish free marketers, FDIC mandated, pre-packaged Chapter 11, government funded reorganization.

If Obama continues to listen to the god-awful advice of Larry Summers and Tim Geithner, he will doom his presidency, and finsh marginally ahead of George W. Bush on the list of worst presidents.

This is not change we an believe in . . ."

Let me say again, the taxpayers paid $45 billion dollar for stock in an investment bank that now has a market value of only about $1 billion.

It is bank robbery of taxpayers. The government is robbing our future to save the Ponzi scheme that was Wall Street. The banks know it. Read The Baseline Scenario, Robbery Note - From The Banking Oligarchs This Morning, in which Simon Johnson, former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, a professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management and a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, wrote:

"The modern bank robber calmly hands a note to the teller, asking for money and making a moderately specific scary threat. The robber, of course, expects the teller to hand over unmarked bills without a fuss.

This morning’s “research” note from a major international bank is entitled, “Falling Short: The government needs to buy toxic assets,” and the heart of their one page argument is, with the emphasis as in the original,

One main stumbling block to the purchasing of troubled assets has been pricing, specifically how does the government price a diverse set of assets in a way that does not put the taxpayer on the hook. However, this should not be the standard by which we judge the efficacy of the plan, because a more prolonged deterioration in the economy will result in a higher terminal unemployment rate and a greater deterioration of the tax base. As such, the decline in tax revenues will crimp many of the essential services provided by the government. Ultimately, the taxpayer will pay one way or another, either through greatly diminished job prospects and/or significantly higher taxes down the line to pay for the massive debt issuance required to fund current and prospective fiscal spending initiatives. We think the government should do the following: estimate the highest price it can pay for the various toxic assets residing on financial institution balance sheets which would still return the principal to taxpayers.

Tell me if you think I am overreacting - it has been a difficult week - but I interpret this as saying: “give us as much money as you can, or else.” And the “or else” appears to be unemployment up around 20% and debt/GDP in the red-for-danger zone.

Can bankers really trump the American government in this fashion? It’s painful to read, but probably helpful that the oligarchs put their cards (and notes) on the table so brazenly. This is, after all, a critical fight to save American democracy, and it’s good to know what we are up against."

All the while the investment banks and other financial institutions pay dividends and bonuses, and have lavish retreats and their CEOs get 'golden parachutes.

This is why it is time to refresh the tree of liberty.