Kelly wants the poor and unemployed to suffer

I have said before, Jack Kelly is no economist. Today, he is toeing the Tea Party line about government spending, even to the point of questioning Paul Ryan's conservative credentials, based on the budget the House just passed. Kelly goes so far as to suggest (without attribution to any source) "Trouble starts with sluggish growth, but ends typically with a spectacular crash, hyperinflation and depression". I'm surprised he didn't mention frogs and boils.

Kelly simply makes statements like that throughout his column, lumping together unemployment, slow growth and high gas prices and blaming "chiefly" the government. Since government measures show inflation at no more than 2.9 percent, Kelly references the American Institute for Economic Research which has it's own ""Everyday Price Index"" that says inflation "rose 7.2 percent" (a year, a month; Kelly doesn't say). If what the government says is inconvenient, find someone who says the right things

By the way, Kelly has referenced the American Institute for Economic Research previously. It is described on the internet as centrist, but there are indications of an agenda (involving George Mason University?!).

Kelly keeps on in this vein, quoting Republican donor Ray Dalio among others or making his own interesting assertions: "The nations which recover fastest after a crash are those which sharply restrict government interference in the economy. The "economic miracle" in post-WWII Germany is the most spectacular example, but history is replete with others." I don't know what the government of post-WWII Germany did, but I have to wonder if Jack Kelly has heard of the Marshall Plan?

Kelly's grasp of economics is pretty clearly murky at best. He is trying to appeal to "common sense", that running deficits is not sustainable, that government regulations - rules of behavior, are ruining the free market and thus causing the slowdown and our current massive unemployment. He simply ignores the housing bubble, the incredible fraud amoung financial institutions - a willful blindness. He has no idea what following his advice would actually achieve/cause.

But further there is the sheer meanness of what he proposes. As I said earlier, Kelly apparently can't support the Ryan budget "Yet when times are tough, few propose that government tighten its belt. The budget that House Republicans passed last week is "thinly veiled social Darwinism," Mr. Obama said. But even under the GOP budget, federal spending rises year after year.".

The Ryan budget in fact (vaguely) reduces government spending across the board, including "reforming" Medicare by giving senior citizens a voucher for private care. When that program was attempted during the Bush administration, it consistently lost money (the government had to give the private insurance companies more and more money). The reason the Ryan budget still grows the deficit is that the Ryan budget actually forces the defense department to accept more money than was planned in the event Congress couldn't agree to a budget (at least for next year). Kelly apparently wants defense at least not to grow, if not shrink.

Make no mistake, though, Paul Ryan, Jack Kelly and the rest of Republicans, conservatives and the Tea Party wants domestic spending to largely disappear. Unemployment compensation, aid to families with dependent children, Child's health program, aid to public schools, basic research in health (the National Institutes of Health), aid to poor students to go to higher education of any kind, Mediciad ... all on the chopping block. Think about what the country would look like if we ended unemployment compensation; according to Republicans more American would find jobs, and possibly some few would accept huge cuts in pay, taking a job as a McDonalds fry cook after having made cars. But there are only so many McDonalds jobs, let alone good paying jobs that companies seem to have but don't offer to those who are currently unemployed. Further the ones who didn't find a job before their retirement savings (their dreams for the future) run out, who still can't make ends meet or don't have savings, they would end up perhaps on the street. The country would not have the benefit of the spending fueled by unemployment compensation - the foreclosures our neighbors would suffer and the sales at mostly grocery stores.

Which brings me to my final point (I know, finally). Just before throwing Ryan under the bus, Kelly says "The federal government will spend about 31 percent more in the current fiscal year than was spent in 2008. The president's cronies will benefit. Most Americans won't.". What goes into current federal spending? Is some significant fraction money flowing to liberal-owned solar power companies, like Kelly would like you to think? Not so far as I can see. But what is different between 2008 and the current year. Well, the stock market crashed in the fall of 2008, but the real effects of that did not really hit until Obama took office in 2009. Since then, some say "automatic stabilizers" such as unemployment compensation and food stamps are the biggest part of the what (actually smaller) increase in federal spending has occurred. This as unemployment went from 5% in January of 2008 to near ten percent in January of 2010.

Without this spending, those who were unemployed would have had suffered so much more. The rest of us would not have had the benefit of their spending. Essentially the country would have slipped into a full blown depression. Period. And Jack Kelly's blathering can't change that. The 2009 stimulus was too small, the result of Obama trying to accommodate Republican concerns. But without it and the automatic spending on unemployment compensation and other programs for the newly poor, this would be 1932.

(by the way, state and local spending, especially in Republican controlled states, has contracted, threatening our fragile recovery).

Things sort of environmental, on the personal front.

I have been working on this post for (like) a week.

Earth hour was last Saturday. Just like I am only mentioning it now, I kinda blew it off, watching TV (and later driving over to my girlfriends to walk her dog while she worked). I watched a LCD TV in my apartment which has all CFL's (expect for a couple of LED lights). But do I feel bad I didn't turn off my lights (I can't even remember what I was watching).

I just recently bought a Prius C, which was probably a bad or at least unnecessary decision. The "C" is a new model hybrid, which Toyota says is selling quite briskly. It is smaller, a hatchback built on the Yaris sedan's frame, and starts under 20 grand (mine was around twenty). It is being marketed to people in their twenties getting their first car, which is funny in a way because I am finding that to maximize mileage, you kinda need to drive like a 70 year old on tranquilizers. More on that later.

I am pretty sure I have mentioned I had a 2003 Honda Civic Hybrid with a manual transmission. Was there a problem with the Civic? Well, yes and no. It was starting weirdly, that is, sometimes when I turned the key lights would come on, it would wuh wuh like cars do when the battery is low, then it would catch. Mind you, the auto-stop, which turns the engine off at traffic lights, still worked fine. The starter problem actually scared me some.

Plus, there was a (not really official) mechanism for tracking mileage that was estimating high. The car has a real time mileage horizontal bar graph below the odometer, which was hard to get exact readings from but worked well enough to give me a sense of where I was MPG wise at any given moment. But with the trip odometers there was also an average mileage reading, showing the mileage from the last time you tripped the trip odometer. I would trip the trip odometer every time I got gas (I generally let the tank get pretty low), so I could have a sense of how I was doing. I also tracked my mileage on fueleconomy dot gov, each fill up. Well, the trip odometer was showing mileage higher than what fueleconomy.gov was showing me. And the car's mileage in general was down. I had been in the low 40's pretty consistently (except on trips when I was in the low 50's!), but now I was in the upper 30's.

Bothersome, but these things should not have been enough to make me want to replace what was still quite a good car. I mean, I felt a sense of mortality about the car, but it was/is a Honda, and potentially good for another 100,000 miles (not with those hybrid batteries, though). Still, the Prius C really caught my eye. It appeared to be everything the Honda Insight (second generation) hybrid should have been but was not turning out to be. The Insight (second generation) was the first hybrid to sell under 20 grand. But the Insight (second generation) got only about the same mileage as my 2003 Civic hybrid and it's drive-ability was pretty well slammed by reviewers.

The Prius C (c for city), on the other hand, also starts under 20 grand (my level two was a bit over 20), gets a bit better mileage than a regular Prius and is supposed to be reasonable to drive. As I mentioned, it is built on the Yaris frame (I believe it must be the four door sedan frame), so it is truly a small car. The front seats are roomy, the rears are OK if the front seats are pushed forward by/for short people like me, and the cargo space is pretty small (although you can fold down the rear seats).

But the Prius C is turning out to be a challenge to drive in such a way as to get the EPA rated gas mileage. Let me back track on this issue for a second. With the Civic hybrid, I obsessed when driving about how the hybrid battery was doing. That battery would discharge when one accelerated, and recharge when one "engine braked", which to say let my foot off the gas pedal while the car was going and still in gear. When one did that in the Civic, the car would apparently change to have only one cylinder firing, although the other three kept moving (presumably from the motion of the car), and of course the electric motor was spinning in reverse or something to do the charging and braking. Engine braking gives you fantastic mileage on the Civic hybrid. You could see whether the battery was charging or powering the electric motor by looking at the dash (which once prompted my mother to tell me to stop looking at my dash). So obsessing about the state of the battery was actually a good way to get good mileage out of the Civic, although it tended to make one look for hills to drive down, and make one shudder at big rolling hills on the highway.

But if driving the Civic stick shift hybrid took some skill, the Prius C has brought a whole new set of challenges. So far, the way tracking the gas mileage in the Prius C works is this: every time you start the car, it starts from zero gas mileage. There are ways to set up recurring mileage, but so far I haven't attempted that. But I am using an energy monitor-type thing, that tells you whether the car is running in gas only, gas and electric, electric only, recharging mode, gas and also recharging mode and maybe other modes too (cloaked?). This monitor also displays the mileage for your (my) current trip.

Now, being as it is spring and therefore somewhat cool in the mornings, when you start the Prius C, the gas motor kicks on after about thirty seconds. When the gas motor is on, when the car is warming up, the mileage really sucks. Once the gas motor warms up, you can take off from a stop light using the electric motor if you accelerate really (really, really) slowly. There are times when accelerating that slowly drives my fellows American drivers somewhat crazy, but the more you use the electric motor, the better the city mileage.

Of course, in busier traffic, one feels pressure to accelerate faster. What you can do in that situation is when you do reach 25 MPH, you start to "pulse and glide". To pulse and glide, one needs to let one's foot off the gas and coast and then speed back up at some point. Then if you are coasting/rolling along at, say, twenty three MPH, when you put your foot on the gas (gently) the car will run on electric only, which really helps keep gas mileage up higher despite the earlier faster acceleration.

Now as I said, the Prius C starts gas mileage fresh each time you drive it. Getting up to 40 or (ideally) 50 miles per gallon in any given city trip can be a considerable challenge, especially on trips of three miles or shorter. If I didn't try to drive so gently, if I just put my foot down and went, I suspect my mileage would be in the 30's or (maybe) low 40's. Many people would be happy enough with that sort of mileage, but the person likely to buy a Prius C is likely to expect more. So I roll slowly, keeping an eye on the dashboard energy monitor thingie.

As I said, the "C" is being marketed to people in their twenties, a whole new market for the Prius line. Now, I suspect a significant fraction of the current brisk sales are people like me, mileage enthusiasts excited by a twenty grand hybrid that gets Prius mileage. We will be the trailblazers, who will work at getting the high mileage, who will have the patience and different priorities to accelerate and drive so gently (read: slowly) to get there.

But what of the twenty years olds who are being courted by Toyota? Well, the car has kind of a regular (automatic) gear sift instead of the other Prius model's joystick like tiny gear shift. It also has an almost alarming array of audio type features (as if the energy monitor were not enough to distract you). There is a CD player and of course car radio. The car radio, by the way, sometimes tells you stuff about what song is being played. There is a port for a USB cable (from your iPod or increasingly your smart phone's music player). There is bluetooth as well, to either sync your phone for calls, your phone for playing music, or to sync it for both.

What happens if the twenty year old starts having kids? Time for a Prius V (as in Victor, apparently, since we have forgotten about the Romans, except when counting Super Bowls).

Obama is the worst, says Jack Kelly

The first paragraph in Jack Kelly's column today lays out his view of Obama in history: "The presidency of Richard Nixon was destroyed, and that of Bill Clinton nearly ruined, by scandals that erupted over lies they told. But no president ever before has lied as frequently, as flagrantly or as foolishly as has Barack Obama.".

If you read Two Political Junkies or my past posts, you know that I (and others) think Jack Kelly himself frequently omits important details or selectively chooses "facts" (sometimes myths) to present, at the very least. Given Jack Kelly's extreme partisan beliefs, it is not surprising that he would describe Obama in such extreme terms (can we say cognitive dissonance). The problem with that is that any legitimate criticism (criticism that more than just Tea Party people might agree with) gets lost in the noise. Kelly's last criticism in the column, that Obama has done the opposite of creating an unprecedented level of openness in his administration, is one that probably Glenn Greenwald could agree with. But since Kelly simply throws everything Obama says back at him, no such unified criticism would be possible.

About two thirds into his column, after presenting distorted facts about the Keystone XL pipeline and Solyndra, Kelly says "Mr. Obama lies most often about energy, but not only about energy.". I could mention that there is much more to the Solyndra story than Kelly ever bothers to mention, or that tar sands are considered to possibly be the final straw that pushes man made climate change beyond our ability to reduce.

But I want to talk about energy in general, somewhat separate from either Jack Kelly's accusations of lies or President Obama's somewhat watered down energy policy. As I see it, we have the ability right now to choose one of three possible energy paths. We could continue as we are progressing now, drilling some for oil and natural gas, watching the price rise (seemingly caused by speculator) and I guess eventually adding some solar and wind to electricity and biodiesel to auto fuel. Or we can do what Republicans and conservatives like Kelly seem to advocate, and double down on extraction and consumption, using tar sands for gas and fracking out natural gas frm shale formations. Possibly fuel costs would com down (though personally I doubt it), and we would have both local and possibly global negative environmental effects.

Our third option would be to pursue a more sustainable energy system. We, three percent of the world, consume twenty percent of the world's oil. What we do will not be the absolute factor that will affect climate change, be we have the opportunity to set the tone. Either we will make it clear that modern life requires unlimited consumption, or we can show the rest of the world that mindful consumption is not only possible, but positive. I have seen people say to me that the future will take care of itself, and maybe it will. But there is not certainty that what we are doing now will not cause suffering for many millions, if not the entire planet in the future. Future generations may have some use for the fossil fuels in the ground now (currently we use oil not only for fuel, but also for fertilizer and plastics, and probably other things I forget about). I think we need to start to minimize our use of fossil fuels, transitioning to hybrids, biodiesel vehicles as well starting to increase our use of mass transit, encouraging businesses to locate with walking distance of population centers and setting up incentives to live in walkable parts of cities and disincentives to live further away. but that doesn't mean we need to suffer. I think that internet shopping can replace driving to malls, and for that matter, if the population of the planet declines (which Jack Kelly has addressed in the past), the internet can still provide perhaps even more effective links to keep critical mass of collective discussion, debate and ultimately thinking to move science and culture forward.

It's too bad that Jack Kelly doesn't think our future is an issue worth examining, that he is only interested in advancing the agenda of the Tea Party.

PG, do you think your readers are best served by politically biased columns, that blindly accepts the word of corporations that their practices are safe for the environment. Do you want to encourage the anti-scientific thinking of climate change denialism.

The prism Jack Kelly looks through

What do you think about the US action in Vietnam fifty some years ago? With the cold war long over, it's hard for us to remember why we were even there, and I think most Americans simply follow the story their party advocates (Democrats says evil Republicans took us in, Republicans say Nixon betrayed them), or if they are an independent, blame the politicians. Jack Kelly reminds us today in a column on Afghanistan of his views on Vietnam:

"In 1997, H.R. McMaster, then an Army major, wrote a book about an earlier war in which senior military leaders paid excessive deference to political superiors.

"The Joint Chiefs of Staff became accomplices in the president's deception and focused on a tactical task, killing the enemy," he wrote. "The war in Vietnam was lost ... even before the first American units were deployed.""

Kelly has written in the past about how the US actually won in Vietnam, but decided to throw it away.

I think we have to keep these views in mind when we look at today's column "Delusional about Afghanistan". Kelly first complains about what he sees as overly optimistic testimony to Congress by the NATO commander in Afghanistan. He goes on to note how Afghan soldiers are killing US soldiers, and how Afghan soldiers are of such a low quality. Plus, "The Afghans don't like us, either.". Instead of explaining why that might be so, Kelly complains that there are not enough trainers, and the Afghan soldiers themselves are illiterate and corrupt. The unspoken message so far - US politicians are lying to us, not giving US troops what they need to accomplish the mission and anyway the natives are substandard and evil.

The rest of the column stays in that vein, withdrawing troops on a timetable gives the Taliban a reason to simply wait and that since the surge was was "halfhearted" and troops our being drawn down, our own soldiers "have lost all idealism". The unspoken message is we are losing in Afghanistan because our politicians (specifically the Democrat Obama) are lying to us.

I have to say I agree; I think we are losing in Afghanistan, everything I hear is that our troops have lost any and all idealism they might have had, and that the Afghans don't like us.

But there is everything Jack Kelly doesn't mention.

First of all, our war/occupation Afghanistan started quite a while ago. The Bush administration ran it on the cheap, and allowed itself to be distracted by Iraq (although make no mistake that Iraq was filled with evil people, many of whom we justifiably killed). I vaguely recall Kelly has been willing to throw Bush under the bus for handling of Iraq, and apparently Afghanistan (though I don't think Kelly would call even George "Dubya" Bush a Democrat in Republicans clothing). I suppose that is why in seven Republican administration years the US couldn't win in Afghanistan, although that view requires some pretty spectacular blinders.

Then there is the issue of why the Afghans don't like us. Since the US is self-evidently a global force for good, and the American way of like is clearly so much better than any other, the only reasons the Afghans have for not liking us is that they are illiterate and corrupt (Kelly has some nasty thoughts for Hamid Karzai).

Kelly mentions nothing about our use of drones to hunt the Taliban, how they frequently kill civilians along with suspected Taliban. Further, Kelly mentions nothing about how we then attack the funerals for the suspected Taliban, killing more civilians. I suppose Kelly justifies that to himself (to the extent he thinks about it at all) that the relatives of Taliban members deserve what they get if they don't distance themselves, let alone turn in those Taliban. I suspect the people of Afghanistan see things differently.

So if/when you read this Jack Kelly column, ask yourself, do you think we should have gone into Vietnam at all, and regardless do you think we won Vietnam only to have the politicians throw it away? If you answer yes, then you and I see reality somewhat differently, and I suspect the overwhelming majority of the American people agree with me. Not that history is somehow voted on (well, there are concepts like shared myths, but that is way beyond the scope of this post), but I think the overwhelming majority of historians would not say we won Vietnam (even if we did win a lot of individual battles).

But Kelly's view of Vietnam informs his view of Afghanistan, this is the prism he sees the world through. Who is delusional?

Krugman is back

Krugman is back, and renders an opinion.

I hadn't really noticed ...

The Daily show is in repeats, Krugman is away and frankly I didn't read the Times in any depth in the last couple of days, so I didn't see this. If Reich's numbers are correct, and I see no reason to think they aren't, the Republicans have doubled down and literally declared war on the poor. It is apparently a non-binding resolution, but it is an incredible thing to ask Representatives to commit to impoverish 80% of their constituents, and help one percent of their constituents become much more wealthy.

Prove to me that austerity works. Show me where Krugman is wrong.

Ruth Ann Dailey's weekly ...

Spork in the drawer noticed Ruth Ann's latest column and posted at (unusual for Spork) length about it. I won't add anything to what he said except to say that anyone who thinks that this year's Republican primary race is some kind of epic clash of competing ideologies needs to see a shrink and ask them about cognitive dissonance. I mean, I will admit I am delighted Ron Paul is such a libertarian, because the monied interests get to see what a libertarian is. I admit I have not paid enough attention to know what Paul has said about carving up the government, but you can bet abolishing the FED and going back on the gold standard (how much gold does the government own right now?) would put the economy in some sort of weird tailspin. Personally, I am thinking food and gas riots.

Anyway, any resemblance between Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum and actual political theory is purely coincidental, not the result of any thinking the two men might have done. Wait a week, and Mitt's position will have changed. Maybe he will admit he is a bishop of the Mormon church. Maybe he will promise us all that Mormons will baptize us after our deaths into the Mormon church.

That aside, I wanted to notice one small comment by Ruth Ann that really gets to the heart of Republican/conservative/Tea Party blinders. No conversation is possible between Republicans and Democrats until common ground on essentially the shape of the world can found. I mean, I think there are places where we can talk. Tax brackets and credits to low end people are actually choices, based in part on economics, and things for which there are economic studies and numbers available.

But there are other issues where there are, yes, policy components, but also issues of analysis which should be the responsibility and purview of science. I am talking, of course, of this Ruth Ann Dailey line: "And who can ignore the religious subtext of aggressive environmentalism? The sun is god, the heat of its wrath envelops the globe and it must be appeased by recycling, simpler living and the purchase of conscience-clearing carbon offsets."

'Kay, which party wants to replace evolution with creationism in schools (am I supposed to believe Republicans would be satisfied with just teaching them side by side)? And of course, we should notice Ruth Ann Dailey is lumping the largely mythical tree-hugger in with anyone who expresses an interest in climate change. Largely mythical, but I will admit there are, in fact, domestic terrorists who do things like bombing facilities that, what, test cosmetics on animals, or chain themselves to trees that are going to be logged.

But I should point out that the overwhelming majority of people who think climate change is real are just ordinary, decent people. If they are rather quick to accept the word of scientists, well, you know, biologists tell us which snakes are poisonous, engineers improve cars and SUV'x and make them more safe and powerful, and biochemists find ways to make McDonalds more tasty (although apparently they weren't told to do anything about healthy). I guess when science starts suggest people should find ways to use less oil, coal and yes, natural gas (which is a scarce resource and which would save people money), then all of a sudden it is a religion. And not a Christian one, some kind of pagan (at best) religion at best.

You know, do we need the Pope and Jerry Falwell to step up and say the we should respect certain levels of scientific consensus? I mean, forget the IPCC; pretty much all the national academies of science, the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Meteorological Association all agree on Climate Change. Surely that should mean something. Can Democrats and Republicans agree on Climate Change? Actually Googling it brings mixed results. the most positive suggest half of Republicans believe it has already started. I suspect a number of that half would disagree about how to ameliorate the problem (I am assuming they would agree it should be ameliorated).

I've gone on too long, I will only ask, someone tell me what is wrong with living a sustainable lifestyle? Assuming you don't have to give up vacations, entertainment, good tasting food (along with perhaps better health), etc. And when did we start believing priests and ministers should explain reality to us, not scientists?

Friday night's Bill Maher

There were a couple of interesting things about Bill Maher's Real Time. First, Maher talked just a little bit about how Republicans/Conservatives have latched onto Maher for his remarks about Sarah Palin apparently a year ago (apparently called Palin a stupid cunt, I believe I have heard). Maher has carved out his niche as a troublemaker, but one who has conservatives guests as well as liberals on his discussion panel at the same time. Just as Jon Stewart tries to be scrupulously fair to his guests even if they are as conservative as Jim DeMint, Bill Maher allows conservatives to talk as much as the liberals. Maher does sometimes insist on facts (he sometimes blames the increase in the debt on increases in payments for unemployment and food stamps, because of the bad economy on Bush's watch).

So now conservatives commenters make a token complaint about Limbaugh, and then demand any liberal in reach throw Maher under any available bus. But surely there are some important differences between Maher and Limbaugh. Maher stated that Palin had suggest Maher is the de facto leader of the Democratic party. Maybe Maher was referring to something David Axelrod said, but it is a good point that liberals only laugh at Bill Maher, where conservatives take Limbaugh fairly seriously.

Just think about that for a minute, roll it around in you mouth. Bill Maher as the de facto leader of the Democratic party. Compare that to how the Republicans see Limbaugh.

The other interesting thing on Maher was Alexandra Pelosi. Last week she showed a video of white men from Mississippi, who had nothing good to say about Obama or government programs. I will say at least one of the interviewees are taking that aid, which brings to mind a New York Times article that might have inspired her (that article described how Tea Party types are still taking the Earned Income Credit and other government aid).

So on the latest Maher Pelosi showed a video of what she called "welfare queens" standing outside the welfare office across from where she lives. I gotta say I find the term "welfare queen" (not least because they were all guys), but then I should (and rather secretly do) find the term "redneck" offensive. Actually, I find tea bagger offensive as well, and I at least try to avoid that one (and wince when other people use it).

She talked to the welfare recipients about what they were there for, whether they had a job, would look for a job, etc. Their responses were not surprising; a combination of mugging for the camera and some relatively wise remarks. One guy said he wasn't looking for a job, he was waiting for a career. If you spent a few days preparing taxes for the working poor, the ones that took the plunge and took the low wage jobs they could get, you might have more sympathy for that remark. That's not counting another remark - that is that it is a little tough to get a job when you have been in jail.

I'm sorry, there is a difference between even uneducated white poor people and unemployed African Americans (especially those who saw no point in playing enough of the game to finish high school). Not that poor white people are not deserving of help, but helping them generally does not require a systemic response.

The final thing I will say is that Pelosi predicted that liberals would attack her for making that video. Personally I have no trouble with her making the video, although the "welfare queens" remark (and in fairness what she said about white Mississippi) was pretty ignorant. But it turns out, she was not wrong about liberals.

Kelly sort of gets it right

When I saw the headline of today's Jack Kelly column"Obama can kill you" , my first reaction was - I might have to agree with Mr Kelly this Sunday. If you have been reading my blog over time, you know that I have been talking about Glenn Greenwald's ongoing columns on Obama's targeting particularly American citizens for literal execution without a trial (in addition to columns about using drones to attack groups that include non-combatant civilians). Mind you (to indulge a brief tangent), it annoys me that an accident of where you were born gives you special standing; I think it ought to be a problem when anyone is killed. But Americans are supposed to enjoy particular constitutional rights from their home country, yet Obama is ordering the killing of suspected terrorists who are also American citizens. Obama (and Eric Holder, Leon Panetta and other high level members of the administration) claim there is a through investigation and review, it's just that none of us ordinary citizens can know about it (but how can have due process if no one can see it?).

This is the issue Jack Kelly takes on today, and in several ways, he gets it right. Americans are being killed abroad, and although we don't know for sure, we have no evidence any kind of judge is involved. Maybe that doesn't even matter, as far as I know judges do not have the power to order the killing of people so much as to examine the legal process involved for (ultimately) constitutionality. We don't know there is not a secret court, but then Americans are really not supposed to be in favor of secret courts, and anyway the administration has not offered us even that degree of reassurance.

I can tell this is a complicated issue for Kelly, however, as he indulges himself in his customary level of over-reach. He has an issue where at least a few liberal journalists agree the President is absolutely wrong, yet he pushes out in several directions and undermines his own credibility. For example, he mentions Anwar Al-Awlaki as the "poster boy for the new policy". But a paragraph later Kelly says "Few doubt Mr. Awlaki posed "an imminent threat of violent attack."", it is just that Kelly does not want the "President alone" to decide to execute this man. Kelly seems to me to insinuate that if a more proper person, such as a military man, decided to kill Al-Awlaki, it would be fine with him. Kelly then mentions due process and the Fifth Amendment in opposition to this program.

Now, I would have liked to see Osama bin Laden extended due process protection, I think a trial in New York City with tremendous amounts of evidence and testimony would have been pretty cathartic for the country. Admittedly, if we had put bin Laden on trial and subsequently executed him, then American citizens would have wanted to withdraw from Afghanistan immediately after (perhaps putting the President in an uncomfortable position with powerful US interests). Meanwhile, I imagine Pakistan might well have objected basedo n bin Laden being taken from Pakistan, and possibly other countries like Iran and Syria, but I suspect most countries would have celebrated the US sense that justice deserves due process (no, I'm serious). But we didn't get that chance, a helpless, unarmed bin Laden was executed in cold blood.

Did Jack Kelly raise the due process issue when he wrote about the killing of bin Laden. No, he quoted a film critic on how clumsy Obama's speech to the country was, and repeated a rumor that the President had held the SEALs for 16 hours. Evidently, Jack Kelly only cares about warrants, judicial review and due process when it suits him.

Kelly actually mentions the very issue of FISA warrants later in this column, although he only frames it in terms of wiretapping foreign terrorists, conveniently forgetting to mention any US end component of George W Bush's wiretapping program. And Kelly describes Obama and Eric Holder as "stunning" hypocrites, not seeing that his own mis-statement (to put it charitably) of the issue and his own dismissal of due process then compared to his calls for it now is pretty spectacularly hypocritical.

Kelly finishes his column with claim that is almost true, but as such shows a pretty stunning lack of research on his part. He complains that "liberal" journalists blasted Bush when he was in office, but are silent on Obama. One journalist who could only be described as liberal has complained loudly about both Presidents. Kelly's conservative, Tea Party type blinders make him prone to wild hyperbole that entirely undermine his message, and turn what should be an important indictment of President Obama into mere partisan whining.

Kucinich in retrospect

Glenn Greenwald has an interesting examination of Dennis Kucinich. I personally have always thought of Kucinich as no better than a killjoy, opposed to all those fun things like wars and bellicose behavior (yeah, I know, pretty immature of me), and perhaps a bit nutty. Greenwald raises interesting questions (at the very least for me) about Kucinich and particularly how his own party views him. Apparently I wasn't alone in thinking that someone who is consistently against war is kind of nutty.

Greenwald's basic point is that Kucinich has been surprising;y consistent, about things we all should support. I mean, what has going to war in the Middle East gotten us? I have to admit I was in favor on the war in Afghanistan, since I naively believed we were trying to capture or kill Osama Bin Laden. But I thought it blatantly obvious that Iraq had nothing to do with terrorism or weapons of mass destruction (I did believe the UN weapons inspectors over President Bush, and by the way, look who turned out to be right). Kucinich opposed them all, and it seems pretty obvious we would have been better off if we had not go to war so many times (or even once). Apparently Kucinich was not very successful in getting legislation passed, I guess because anti-war and helping poor people is not very popular.

But shouldn't it be?

Kelly's dog whistle column

Jack Kelly always uses coded language to whip up conservatives while still alarming independents. Today's column on energy prices is a bit more straightforward - gas prices are up, it is Obama's fault, and by the way, Obama is throwing away tax dollars on "renewable" energy that is more expensive anyway. Kelly is throwing a nod to "crony capitalism" with that last, which actually takes up most of his column.

But Kelly does start with the line that gas prices are up and it is Obama's fault. Interestingly, a video has shown up on the internet (I saw it on Facebook) from 2008 when Bush was in office and gas prices shot up to over $4.00 per gallon. The video shows Fox News' defense of Bush; that a President (any President) can't do much to affect gas prices. I see no reason to think the numbers cited on the video are any less true today, despite what Republican candidates are saying now. Yet, apparently Republicans/conservatives are willing to throw Bill O'Reilly and Fox News under the bus when their history becomes inconvenient.

Past that, I would make a couple of points. In Kelly's first paragraph he quotes Stephen Chu, who apparently in 2008 suggested US gas prices should actually be at European levels. Once again this is Republican/conservative slamming of Europe. Granted, Europe has a unique problem in adopting the Euro as the currency for so many countries, and they are finding that not being able to let a currency float downward during a recession makes improving exports and lowering imports really difficult. But on other fronts, Europe is far ahead of the US in terms of government services, including health care systems with lower costs per patient and to their GNP's while also having better aggregate health outcomes. International surveys consistently say that Europeans are among the happiest peoples on earth, far happier than Americans (and this was true during the Bush administration as well as now).

Yes, Europeans have higher gas prices largely as a result of higher taxes. But they are not unhappy in general, they have adapted to these higher prices. They get (and actually take) longer vacations than we do, but they frequently (mostly?) take them by really fast train. Europeans often live in apartment building groups, and tram stops and grocery and other shopping venues locate within walking distance of these groups. Europeans often travel by bicycle to work or walk to shop, helping making them healthier than us. Obviously a model like that won't work for farmers, but apparently 82% of us live in cities or suburbs, so there are a lot of us who have already chosen to live near urban centers. We just need to go back to a notion that it is cool to live in a Manhattan style metropolis (as opposed to the "Leave It To Beaver" car-focused suburb, although as I recall the kids in that show rode bikes all the time).

Europeans are far ahead of us in terms of wind and solar as well. Again, despite Republican/conservative attempts to paint Europe as a hellish landscape with a dystopian dictatorship, the Europeans themselves feel pretty good about their lives. Maybe part of that is a satisfaction that they are doing the most they can to ameliorate climate change.

Kelly grudging notes wind is pretty competitive but then talks about bat and bird kills and wind not working in extreme heat and cold. But Kelly is hardly convincing as an environmentalist (he slams "green" energy in his next paragraph), and the extreme weather in Texas and England he mentions could well be caused by the very climate change non-fossil fuel energy sources are supposed to address. This article provides a reasonable discussion of the issue.

Kelly trots out the tired canard about how green energy firms support the President and his administration's green energy policies in turn help them. Are we surprised green energy firms might have been started by liberals who might also be inclined to support Obama on general principle? Do I need to talk about Republican connections to oil, gas and coal companies (the Koch brothers, for example). Kelly' quoting of a retired Shell executive and the American Petroleum Institute kinda of prove the point.

But I do want to finish with a somewhat larger point. We know that fossil fuels are inherently limited. For the planet to keep supporting any human life, much less the roughly seven billion people we have now, we need to switch to renewable energy sources. I don't expect we will be totally or even mostly off petroleum-powered cars in my lifetime, or off coal powered electricity. But I think we need to make a credible start. Honestly, I can't imagine what fantasy future Jack Kelly sees. But it worries me that the Post-Gazette allows him to peddle it as truth to those who still read newspapers week after week.

Ruth Ann Dailey weighs in, and we are the poorer for it ...

I have to note that I was entirely silent (last week) on the passing of Andrew Breitbart. I will not conceal that he was very far from my favorite person, but I would not wish a premature death like his on anyone, especially a family man. I would have been perfectly happy if, on the advice of his doctor to avoid unnecessary stress, Breitbart had turned to reporting on Hollywood.

Ruth Ann Dailey gave us her opinion on the Sharon Fluke/Rush Limbaugh debacle today. Dayvoe at 2 Political Junkies addresses a subtle shot Ms Dailey makes against the Obama administration. That shot is in this paragraph (my emphasis):

"As Mr. Limbaugh himself had pointed out, that's exactly what the White House wanted. It can't defend its economic record -- the recession and jobless numbers now belong solely to Mr. Obama -- so it needed to shift the campaign focus to social values."

Dayvoe does a good job of showing, once again since Republicans have been bringing this up since June of '09, that Obama inherited the bad economy, that the National Bureau of Economic Research stated that recession ended in June of '09, and that the numbers have mostly been getting better since then (with some back sliding here and there). I will make one point that Ruth Ann Dailey or any Republican could (but never would) make: the economy would be doing better if the stimulus had been bigger. Now, the blame that needs to be shared, including by Olympia Snowe, Arlen Specter and Susan Collins, the three Republicans who broke ranks but demanded cuts in the stimulus in exchange for their votes. Still, to be sure the Obama administration could have (and should have) proposed a bigger stimulus.

But what I really wanted to address is Ruth Ann's attack on Sharon Fluke. She starts her column with this:

"As necessary and welcome as Rush Limbaugh's apology to Sandra Fluke is, there's a bigger victim of his ill-chosen remarks still waiting for the situation to be set right -- if it can be."

So while she goes on to complain that the so-called attack on religious liberty that Republicans/conservatives entirely created (not exactly her words), Ms Dailey seems to imply that Mr Limbaugh needed to apologize for what he said about Ms Fluke.

But wait, Ms Dailey clarifies her position later:

"The unremarkable episode quickly passed from the political scene but was revived when Mr. Limbaugh called her a "slut" and challenged her to tape the sex that taxpayers would now be subsidizing. That's how he cast himself in the role of scary, woman-hating monster -- without any help from the Left.

Why take that route when tongue-in-cheek barbs could have been launched from many angles? He could have conducted a fundraising drive for Ms. Fluke -- to prove that liberty-loving conservatives can always be counted on to meet human need through private charity! "Coins for Condoms," "Pennies for Pills," "Freebies for Fluke" -- silly slogans sure to paint the Left's insistence that free birth control is a fundamental right, trumping the free exercise of religion, as the ridiculous assertion it is."

What is clear from the second paragraph is that it's not the attack Ms Dailey disapproves of, only Limbaugh's chosen method. Ms Dailey doesn't want to call Ms Fluke a slut or prostitute, but "tongue-in-cheek barbs could have been launched from many angles". Notice Ms Dailey only specifies one example of what she has in mind - a fund raising drive for Ms Fluke. No mention of what other "barbs" would be acceptable or otherwise to her (calling Ms Fluke an idiot? saying that if a woman has health issues that are addressed by the pill, well, God meant for that woman to have those health issues (unless she is rich, in which case she is favored by God and can get the pill if she wants)).

Actually, notice how Ms Dailey's suggestion, raising money from "liberty-loving conservatives" carries a faint echo of Mitt Romney's "bet you ten thousand dollars" elitism. Plus the idea of only raising money for Sharon Fluke shows an entire ignorance of the real issue. I mean, yes, a scholarship student at Georgetown might well be poor enough that paying for the pill would be a hardship. But that student could possibly find a way to get a loan since after all, they will soon graduate from Georgetown law. They will very likely be part of the top 5% of the population money wise, possibly the top 1%. Meanwhile, there are food service workers and housekeepers at Georgetown, or Duquesne University or at Catholic hospitals who do not have that luxury, whose lives will be made genuinely worse if Republicans get their way. Where's the fundraising campaign for them, Ms Dailey?

And while Ms Dailey is answering questions, perhaps she could tell us which liberties, whether economic or religious, are under threat of being lost if President Obama wins re-election. Tell us what "Obamacare"'s (the ACA for those of you with a shred of respect) real threat to liberty is. Don't just complain that the real issues aren't being talked about, actually talk about them. But be fair, include in your discussion a comparison of European, Canadian, Japanese and Australian/New Zealand healthcare to ours before and after the ACA passed (and is implemented). Talk about the cost to the GNP of uninsured workers, the bankruptcies and preventable premature death. Give us an answer to this question, if "Obamacare" is repealed, will companies that do not offer health insurance to their workers compensate the rest of us who have to pay in higher hospital bills and health insurance premiums for their workers who go to the hospital and can't pay, declare bankruptcy is they do survive or die prematurely subsequently. Why should we have to pay because Republicans/conservatives want so badly to win an election that they create a false issue to pull religious extremists to their side and sabotage healthcare for all?

Kelly channels (Ron) Paul, opposes (Paul) Krugman

So today Jack Kelly again turns to economics, telling us that inflation is much higher than the government tells us it is, and is set to explode. In so doing, Kelly is simultaneously channeling Ron Paul (he who said "We are all Austrians now") and dissing Paul Krugman. The Ron Paul thing is a bit surprising, I had the impression Kelly preferred his outlandish theories to have a cynical realpolitik element to them, i.e. Santorum is electable because he is a real conservative, Ron Paul is not because he is bat shit crazy.

(just a brief self=serving tangent) Mind you, just because I am a fan of Krugman, and just because Kelly somewhat limited the craziest of his economic assertions today, I am still convinced Jack Kelly does not know I am alive, much less see that I criticize him for mangling economics. Krugman is apparently a favorite target of conservatives, and of course vice versa.

Kelly starts his column firmly grounded in reality; the price of gas(oline) is going up. But quickly he veers into crazy land, strongly implying we should be comparing the price of oil to gold, not dollars (although you have to use dollars to compare, but then how is the free floating dollar really capturing the value of gold ... my head is starting to hurt). (long sentence alert) Kelly then veers between complaining about Obama's restrictions on oil production (even though oil/gas production is the highest it has ever been, but although Obama takes credit that is probably just result of market forces trumping NIMBY-ism), then giving us a history of our leaving the gold standard and a (n incomplete) description of how inflation works. Kelly uses a libertarian "dog whistle" phrase - ""fiat" currency", which ends up referencing the Austrian school of economics without his actually having to actually say he is using their theories. I think that is a favorite tactic of a particular type of conservative conspiracy theorist who wants to sound both superiorly informed/educated and very in tune with the reality of our economy.

Another bit of a confession, inflation effects and their relationship to/with interest rates can (and do) confuse the ... er, (ahem) heck/excrement out of me. But, with that caveat, when Kelly talks about inflation in terms of the government spending past revenues (the deficit/debt) and also low interest rates (held there somewhat by the Fed; Kelly suggests controlled by the Fed) and "quantitative" easing, he insinuates that Obama/Bernanke want to create inflation and then conceal it from us.

But low interest rates, government spending and increases to the money supply should also cause the economy to take off (according to standard economic theory; see the Reagan economy after stagflation broke), and I don't think anyone would say our current economy is exploding. Which should be where anyone can see Kelly's arguments falling apart. I mean, I guess he is saying we are in a sort of stealth stagflation (to the extent he has thought out what he is saying), that there is both high unemployment and high inflation. But what people forget is that for high inflation to work, a fair number of worker's wages have to increasing with the price increases or the economy just collapses. I remember learning in 1980 that American wages are "sticky downward", that is, once they go up, they won't go back down. Inflation was bad for low wage earners and especially those on fixed pensions (without Cost Of Living Adjustments) and Social Security back before it had automatic COLA's and had to be adjusted by vote of Congress. But particularly union workers (and of course the wealthy) did OK, because they renegotiated their wages upward fairly frequently.

Setting aside what Kelly is theorizing and returning to his column, Kelly tells us the Fed currently says the risk of inflation is low, and the Fed/BLS says right now inflation is low. But the American Institute for Economic Research has a different method of evaluating inflation (using a different "basket" of goods, if you will) and finds that by their measure inflation is actually 8 percent and will increase to as high as 15 percent next year (and overwhelm the Fed'a ability to control it).

Paul Krugman addresses these suggestions about stealth inflation often in his blog krugman.blogs.nytimes.com (and yes, I am too lazy to find specific posts to that effect since my own post had gone too long already and will go even longer). He even addresses this specific notion that the government is hiding inflation.

Meanwhile, who is the American Institute for Economic Research? Well, apparently they are a think tank created out of MIT after the Great Depression. In a small amount of Google research, they were mostly described as centrist, to the extent anyone noticed them at all. But they are self-described as libertarian. Which makes we wonder, since Ron Paul, the libertarian (and I believe other libertarians), are enamored with Ludwig Von Mises and the whole Austrian School of economics and since that school of economics is obsessed with inflation and the gold standard, it seems possible that the AIER is viewing the world through Austrian school colored glasses. Which (for me) makes their conclusions somewhat suspect. Yeah, that is pretty thin, and maybe Jack Kelly cherry picked quotes from them, but that is where I am with them.

By the way, I am pretty sure that Paul Krugman has mentioned that Ron Paul makes similar predictions that inflation is going to go hyper in six months or so (and has made that six month prediction for years). I have heard Ron Paul use the term "fiat" currency and of course Ron Paul wants to abolish the Fed and return to the gold standard. I have no idea if Kelly is suggesting support for the full Ron Paul platform, or just using Paul-like ideas to try to skewer Obama.

However, I will concede that with rising gas (gasoline and natural gas) prices, it seems like it should be possible to slant inflation as higher than the official Fed position. High gasoline prices were a component of stagflation, although to some extent it was also driven by sucessful wage demands pushed by (then more powerful and larger) unions which extended into the rest of the economy. Kelly ends with his column with a quote from Joseph Svetlic in the ultra conservative American Thinker ""So now we have inflation coupled with low economic growth," he said. "Welcome back, Carter."". There may be some truth to that, but Paul Krugman would disagree with (Kelly's noting of) Svetlic's contention that "Obama-Bernanke policies are precisely the opposite of the Reagan-Volcker policies". There are some differences, but once staglation was broken, Reagan and Congress spent like sailors, while Volker let interest fall much lower than they had been.

Which happens to lead us (well, me) to point out where Kelly is misinterpreting history and economics. He says "President Ronald Reagan and Federal Reserve Board Chairman Paul Volcker ended stagflation by cutting taxes and regulations to stimulate growth in the private sector, slowing the rate of growth of federal spending and tightening monetary policy." Only the tightening of monetary policy was the part that worked. I am not terribly convinced that Reagan cut taxes that early, that he actually even slowed the rate of growth of federal spending (which is Kelly not totally lying in trying to say Reagan cut spending, but still lying in not acknowledging the Reagan explosion in defense spending) or that Reagan even cut that many regulations (maybe some OSHA or drilling in parks regulations, not much more) much less that that doing any of that so positively affected growth. I am fairly convinced Reagan had nothing to do with the Fed raising the prime rate to 21.5%, a policy that is largely considered to have ended the inflation part of stagflation, or even with Volker's loosening the reins by dropping interest rates after having raised them so high.

A bit earlier in the column Kelly quotes the director for education and research at the AIER ""An enormous wall of money has built up in the banking system. If it finds its way into the general economy at pre-recession rates, the United States is in for quite a ride."". Frankly, considering we are in the deepest recession since the Great Depression, seems to me we should hope we should be so lucky as to see explosive growth.

Which maybe should be the question to end my post with; why doesn't Jack Kelly want to see explosive growth when the official unemployment rate has been so high for so long, and there are so many uncounted discouraged workers? Is he so afraid of the economy recovering while Obama is President that he has to raise the specter of the inflation bogeyman?

And of course, why does the Post Gazette continue to allow Jack Kelly to write a column?

Science or politics?

Today, in talking about Jack Kelly's column, I was going to make a long comparison between economics and Climate Change as fields of science. (economics being complicated and worthy of debate, Climate Change considered settled by those actually in the field), but I think you are smart enough to already understand the topic (and just dissecting Kelly's column takes long enough, sorry). Jack Kelly is counting on you to just accept what he says, and not do any research of your own

Kelly writes today a column titled “The great ‘warmist’ caper”, about the Heartland Institute document controversy, and essentially all his assertions are at least questionable, not to say outright lies. First, what motivated this column is that an anonymous source emailed a document on a strategy to Climate science, supposedly from the Heartland Institute, to Peter Gleick. Gleick decided to try to verify the document by posing as a Heartland board member, and request documents from the last board meeting. Gleick then forwarded those Heartland board documents to climate concerned blogs/websites. Heartland was infuriated and Gleick came forward after a few days and admitted what he had done and apologized. And pretty much everyone agrees the original document was a fake, by the way.

A quick aside, Kelly mentions that the (fake) document "included plans for "dissuading (K-12 teachers) from teaching science."" While as I said many agree the document mailed to Gleick is a fake, there must be other mentions of plans concerning K-12 education. The AP investigated and found the "expert" who is designing a curriculum for schools suggesting "teaching both sides of the science, more science, not less." The AP then quotes Harry Lambright, a Syracuse University public policy professor who specializes in environment, science and technology issues "Scientifically there is no controversy. Politically, there is a controversy because there are political interest groups making it a controversy,".

People concerned with Climate Change and policy understandably talked about the Heartland documents, but Gleick initially acted alone (I don’t think the anonymous source of the fake counts). The sub-title of Kelly’s column is “Global warming activists get caught conniving”. To connive is defined as both “Secretly allow (something considered immoral, illegal, or harmful) to occur” and “Conspire to do something considered immoral, illegal, or harmful”. Gleick was not exposed, he came forward on his own, and he acted alone. Where’s the conniving?

Kelly starts his column talking about how the people who believe Climate Change is real see the Heartland Institute documents as the “Climategate” of the deniers. This is a false premise in a couple of respects. First, people who study the issue and believe climate change is real were not persuaded by the claims the deniers made. Some people whose political views are shaped by 30 second TV news reports may well have been confused by the claims of the deniers about Climategate, but experts agreed Climategate proved nothing about science, only that scientists are casual in emails they think are private (like all of us). Second, no one who thinks Climate Change is real thinks that the Heartland documents would have any impact on the science concerning the Climate. One could say that the Heartland Institute has nothing to do with science, it is entirely about politics, specifically the politics of misinformation and confusion.

Kelly doubles down by quoting Michael Mann, the person behind the now infamous “hockey stick” graph. Mann says essentially that the documents confirm Heartland is funded by oil interests and right wing billionaires. Kelly proceeds to attack Mann’s character and how good a scientist he is. Kelly asserts the National Academy of Science states little confidence in Mann’s data and even less (than little!) in Mann’s conclusions that the 1990’s were the warmest decade for a thousand years.. Well, the actual report actually finds Dr. Mann’s conclusions “plausible” and states the “conclusion has subsequently been supported by an array of evidence that includes the additional large-scale surface temperature reconstructions and documentation of the spatial coherence of recent warming described above (Cook et al. 2004, Moberg et al. 2005b, Rutherford et al. 2005, D’Arrigo et al. 2006, Osborn and Briffa 2006, Wahl and Ammann in press) and also the pronounced changes in a variety of local proxy indicators described in previous chapters (e.g., Thompson et al. in press).”. Judge for yourself.

Kelly also quotes an email from Phil Jones of East Anglia exposed in the Climategate scandal that mentions Mann. Once again, investigative panels found nothing in the Climategate emails that changed the scientific consensus on Climate Change.

Kelly turns to the Heartland scandal and Peter Gleick. Kelly quotes Andrew Revkin, who is very critical of Gleick. The interesting thing is how seriously those who support the scientific view of Climate Change take ethical charges. Read all of Revkin’s column, including the end where Revkin says “It’s enormously creditable that Peter Gleick has owned up to his terrible error in judgment.”. Revikin also points out “The only people I see out there in the climate fight who – as far as I can tell — never admit to an error are people with agendas from which they can never stray. They’re perfect.”. He could about be talking about Jack Kelly.

Kelly then mentions an LA Times editorial about Heartland that suggests that deniers engage in a "big" lie, and uses a quote from "Mein Kampf" to describe it. This is of course red meat for deniers like Kelly and other deniers. Kelly states ""The impacts of global warming are already patently obvious," the paper's editorial board said. But if this were true, warmists wouldn't need to fabricate evidence."

Kelly then turns to Fritz Vahrenholt as his proof of fabricated evidence. He says Vahrenholt is "to Germany what James Hansen of NASA, the original global warming alarmist, is to the United States.". In fact, Vanrenholt is a chemist who works for energy companies, who admits he is not not expert in climate science. He is one of those people with agendas, from whom he can not stray no matter what reality is.

It is not exactly clear to me what Kelly wants from us. I guess in true cognitively dissonant fashion he wants Congress to dismantle the EPA, cancel any restrictions on drilling for oil and give away all mineral and drilling rights on public lands to energy corporations. The National Academy of Science sees Climate Change as settled facts, apparently Kelly sees climate change denial as settled facts. Whose opinion do you want to accept, especially in the light of Kelly's repeated distortion of facts and other people's statements?

Actually, the real question is why the Post-Gazette puts up with Jack Kelly.

When will we talk about real isses?

Jack Kelly started out pretty good today, but then he utterly fails to actually talk about real issues and falls back on Republican stereotypes. His topic today is apparently "crony capitalism", although he doesn't talk much about government aid to "crony" corporations.

Kelly does start by complaining that Obama's new chief of staff, Jack Lew, is a millionaire like former chief's of staff Bill Daley and Rahm Emmanuel are. That's actually not a bad point (see Inside Job). All three do have significant connections to banking as well as to the Clinton administration (and Emmanuel had significant Congressional experience). The banking experience leads to reasonable questions about how aggressively they would pursue the Wall Street banks who could reasonably said to be largely (and criminally) responsible for the current financial crisis.

But also let's step back here for a moment. Was there Republican outrage when Dick Cheney was chosen to be George W Bush's Vice President? Was there any Republican comment on Halliburton getting so many government contracts, and contributing to the awful bungling of the occupation and reconstruction of Iraq, and the resulting incredible waste and fraud? And let's be clear, it's no excuse for Republicans to now say that Bush was wrong to do these things. It doesn't give Americans any sort of confidence in Republican's decision making ability if they wait five to eight years to say "hey, wait, that's not a good idea". If Republicans/conservatives want to say they are better than Democrats/liberals, then I think it is fair to expect them at least own up to and apologize for past performance (as Colbert likes to say "George W Bush, great President or greatest President?").

Certainly Kelly has no trouble dredging up the pre-Obama past if it supports his narrative. I should actually say the invented pre-Obama past, implying (clumsily) that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were the biggest cause in the financial meltdown (without actually saying that): "Fannie and the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corp. (Freddie Mac) bought bad loans from firms such as Countrywide Financial -- where "fraud was systemic" -- then resold the toxic mortgages to Wall Street."

Freddie and Fannie did get involved in the trade of subprime loans, although late in the game. Freddie and Fannie were government agencies that were pushed out into the private sector, with originally a mandate to help make low income home ownership possible, a goal they performed admirably for years. But they were also supposed to make profits, and my sense is that at some point (no earlier than 2005, possibly later) Fannie and Freddie looked around, saw record profits already being made by private financial institutions, and decided to get in. They had enormous market share of repurchased mortgages as opposed to originated (essentially all the clean low income mortgages, huge numbers of little mortgages), so they end up having significant impact.

But even the duplicitous Jack Kelly admits fraud was systematic at Countrywide (and implies at other financial firms like Countrywide). Now admittedly when the House was controlled by the Democrats, it did not hold Pecora style hearings, but guess what, when the Republicans took the House, no hearings then either. Again, can the Republicans still claim to be better than the Democrats?

Kelly goes on to assert that since the war on poverty started in 1964 "$16 trillion has been spent on means-tested welfare programs ... more than double the $6.4 trillion (in inflation adjusted dollars) America spent on all its shooting wars combined.". I looked for a couple of hours and found that the 16 trillion figure originated with the Heritage Foundation, but everywhere I saw taht, I never saw a footnote to indicate where the numbers came from or how they break down. It seems these numbers must include not only food stamps (now SNAP) and Medicaid, but also Social Security and Medicare. Remember that those two programs have their own dedicated taxes (that can be adjusted), but it strikes me that Jack Kelly is saying that Social Security and Medicare should be shut down tomorrow, all because there are still Americans who live below the poverty line. Do we really think that if we throw mom and dad under the bus, the poor will magically disappear?

If you know anything about economics, you know that programs that aid the poor reduce that aid as the poor get raises at their jobs. They do this at different income levels, and at different rates for different programs (such as SNAP, housing assistance and the EIC), with the result that a raise at work can leave a poor person worse off. There are real world disincentives to work harder. We need to understand even as these programs reduce as income rises, the EIC in particular is a bell curve that starts low at the lowest level of income. So for some, you need to have a job to get the benefit (the earned income credit) and if you move from a five thousand dollar a year job to a fifteen thousand dollar a year job you get more EIC. In fact, if you are a single mom and you income goes up to twenty two grand, your children will help reduce your tax by thousand for each kid. Now you may also be losing part of your food stamps and if you had got on subsidized housing your rent is likely at least going up (I honestly don't know when or if you get kicked out).

My point being that welfare does deserve a good hard look, but an honest look. None of Ronald Reagan's "welfare queen" or Jack Kelly's other comment "They also deliver less than promised. Medicaid patients are more likely than the uninsured to die in hospitals, researchers at the University of Virginia found." Is that because the uninsured don't go to the hospital if they are seriously ill because they fear the cost, where Medicaid patients are more willing to chance it? Could it be that hospitals send the uninsured home from the ER, while Medicaid patients are admitted? Prove me wrong.

There's things that could be said about the negative income tax research of the 1970's (essentially using the EIC to replace all aid to the poor by increasing it and allowing the poor to optimize their consumption of housing, food and other life essentials and making the reduction in their aid a clear one). There's more to say, such as keeping education credits as a necessary infrastructure investment, but changing higher education status to something like a regulated utility to limit their taking advantage of that government benefit, but ... That is for another time, if this country actually gets serious about real reform that benefits everyone (including making the rich richer by making the whole country richer). This post is about Jack Kelly's column.

Yeah, this a long post in response to Kelly's column (I am reminded of a running joke in the movie "Clue" - someone says "to make a long story short", someone else says "too late"). but I like to try to respond to each point if I can, or at least the major ones.

Kelly suggests that the war on poverty is an actual war we can win, much like the "Global War on Terror" (copyright pending) was declared by George W Bush. Both wars ended up only addressing the symptoms of the problem, meaning they would never solve the root causes (for poverty, education and good jobs would do that).

Kelly goes on to launch on oblique attack on elementary and higher education "To Democrats, teacher unions matter more than children trapped in failing schools. The federal student loan program has saddled thousands of young people with debts they can't repay, but has been a bonanza for colleges and universities." I already suggested a fix for higher education (why doesn't Jack, past his suggestion to vote Democrats out of office and put college out of reach for millions of poor Americans, a suggestion he has made in the past?). Kelly's attack on teacher's unions is a typical Republican attack on teachers - reasonably paid unionized public school teachers working in poor inner cities with students who know the score are less effective than poorly paid non-union teachers at private schools teaching privileged students. Well duh. But would busting unions in public education and perhaps only have private schools in cities actually help inner city students, or only line the pockets of the wealthy? Oh, I think I just answered my question.

Kelly finishes with "Times are tough for most Americans. But Wall Street is making record profits. Members of Congress are getting richer. Crony capitalists reap billions in taxpayer subsidies."

What's Kelly saying? We know he wants the White House to be Republican and both houses of Congress to be Republican, does he think they should all be paid less as a reward? Does he think that conservatives can distinguish between crony capitalists (i.e. solar power companies) that do not deserve aid (because the market does not support them) and worthy companies (like oil and coal companies) that do deserve aid (because the market does support them)? Or does Kelly in fact advocate income redistribution?

Nah.

But Kelly's parting words are actually not the worst. "If you want to know what's really going on, follow the money" Absolutely, look at Obama's Wall Street affiliated advisers. But also investigate the Kochs and Scaife.

The gap between Republican and Democratic myths, and maybe the truth ...

As I have been saying, Glenn Greenwald has made a full time job of criticizing President Obama and his supporters. Targeting American citizens (not to mention non-citizen human beings) for execution without due process or any sort, the use of drones not only to hunt terrorists, but to attack funerals (in the attempt to kill more terrorists, although inevitably civilians are killed), the Obama justice department's war on whistle blowers and more, Greenwald is furious that Obama is, if not ordering these things done himself, then is not stopping them. That Obama is supposed to be a liberal and/or progressive is worse, and worse still that the left in America is giving Obama a pass on all of the above and more.

And yet, Republican's say nothing about these things. I mean, yes, there was some talk about whether Obama should have gone to Congress when he wanted to deploy troops in Libya per the War Powers Act, yet conservatives made themselves look silly alternately complaining and cheering Obama in that particular situation.

The more usual Republican view is neatly characterized by the first paragraph of Ruth Ann Dailey's PG column on Monday: "Conservatives and their libertarian kin have long contended that Barack Obama's vision for America is fundamentally different from the founders' ideal. With his policy on free birth control -- and even in his shell game of a reversal -- he has proven them right."

So (at least according to Greenwald) Obama has gone at least as far as George W Bush did in attacking civil liberties and due process, and (many of) Obama's advisers and appointed officials are straight from Wall Street. Yet the Republican's claim is that Obama is a European style socialist (Muslim), the most liberal since ... ever.

Mind you, my view of Obama does not mean I will not support any of the current crop of Republicans. Romney, Gingrich, Santorum, Paul? None of them have any clue, and as far as I can see none have much potential. I believe Obama still has the potential to do better, to reverse himself on the current policy of assassination and using drones to attack civilians. I am fairly sure that a President Romney or President Gingrich would not.

Having said all that, I will only spend a little more space on the rest of Ms Dailey's column. She concentrates on how she believes the first amendment gives religions as almost unlimited right to declare actions (or not doing certain things) as central to their faith, and therefore things the government can not compel them to do (or not to do).

The fact that Catholics rarely if ever involve themselves in anti war demonstrations leads me to suspect there is (at least) some hypocrisy here. Further, we should really look at the contraception issue as it is in the real world. After all, if the Catholics succeed in being able to avoid paying for contraceptives for employees of their institutions (or presumably also patients of their hospitals), what will that mean in practical terms. Well, all the condoms in the grocery and drug stores will not disappear. what will happen is that middle income and especially poor women will lose access to an effective form of birth control that they can control, and yet if covered by ones health insurance can be relatively cheap. Essentially one has to say the Catholics are (once again) oppressing mostly poor women.

Of course, at least the Catholics have the excuse that the Church has always been this way. The Republicans trying to make points with conservative voters and Catholics are essentially willing to sacrifice poor women to curry favor particularly with wealthy donors. How should we look at that?

War?

What are the odds that we will go to war with Iran soon? Myself, I put them at no better than 3 in 10, although those odds could change quickly if Iran decides to do something we see as provocative.

Why am I even talking about this? It's not like it's September 12th, 2001. But apparently the media is talking about the possibility, according to Glenn Greenwald.

Greenwald has spent (mostly) his last few columns talking about things associated with Iran. Apparently there is a group "Mojahedin-e Khalq (MEK)" that is opposed to the current regime in Iran and has been giving money to US politicians such as Rudy Giuliani and Howard Dean. Only hitch, the State department has designated them as a terrorist organization. Apparently this is a complicated situation (with echos of Achmed Chalabi?) that makes the US politicians involved look like dupes.

But Greenwald wonders if we all are. Forget having learned lessons from Vietnam, have we forgotten we were lied to about Iraq? I guess it's OK, it's the Obama administration.

The bigger worry for me is what Israel might do. I haven't been paying a whole lot of attention to Israel recently, but I wonder if the the current conservative government might need a distraction from the hash they are making of their relations with the Palestinians. The current assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists (which Greenwald has mentioned) seem like something that either this MEK group or the Israelis might do, as opposed to our doing that. I say that not because we wouldn't, but rather because Israel and/or this MEK know the area and are likely more competent than we are.

Could Israel end up dragging us into a war with Iran? Iran has some missiles, which I am about 95% sure can not reach us, or even much of Europe. But I'll bet they could reach Israel easy. If Israel bombs what they think is an Iranian nuclear development site, the Iranians could retaliate (possibly with chemical weapons). That, or Israel's nuclear retaliation, could drag us in.

Frets are for guitars ...

A friend of mine once loaned me a book, a piece of fiction about how the United States had degenerated, was threatened by craven, cowardly politicians and its only hope were these wise, somber, deliberate ... militia guys (you know, the guys who plav soldier dress up and run around the woods with guns). Reading the dialogue, I remember where the Vice President was scheming to … I don’t even remember what, but the only people who kept their head in the crisis were the militia guys.

I wonder if that is what Jack Kelly’s world is like (at least this week). After all, apparently in his world, one of the big topics (if not the biggest topic) of conversation on “college campuses” and among “liberal elites” are Paul Ehrlich’s neato theories/predictions about population (which, as Kelly pointed out, really flopped after 1968). Also, apparently Kelly thinks that economists haven’t learned anything since Malthus.

Kelly points out that where Malthus thought population would explode (geometrically) while food production only increases modestly (arithmetically), actually food production abilities have more than kept up with our population growth. Well, I guess anyway, although it still seems like there are still a bunch of starving people around and about, while many, if not most, of us 300 million some “exceptional” Americans are getting fatter. Of course, the reasons people are starving have to do with complicated geopolitical realities that, if you think long and hard about it, don’t make much sense. Our being fat is about our having way too much disposable income (many of us anyway) and price supports for food

But I digress somewhat. This is another one of those columns where I agree part way with Kelly; Malthus and Ehrlich clearly were wrong about population growth causing starvation. But past that Kelly and I disagree. I have a lot of trouble believing Ehrlch is much of a topic on for anyone, let alone college faculty, students or any liberals (whether elite or not), nor is there any indication of that in a Google search on his name.

Kelly tells us that actually world population is about to decline. Maybe so. I remember a class reading in a labor (dismal science) economics class, suggesting that large families are a rational choice in countries with less industrialization and particularly a smaller government structure; large families (where only some children survive) are a de facto retirement program. As governments get better at collecting revenue and offering safety net programs, as countries industrialize (so people are likely to leave their parents homes for better paying jobs elsewhere) and as infant and child mortality rates drop with improvement in national and international health systems, parents stop having as many children as they did in the past.

So there is a (rational) economic analysis/prediction that suggests Kelly is correct about the predictions I assume he is repeating. But the pesky thing is that as I understand it, the world’s population is still increasing.

Of course, there is a racist (or xenophobic) tinge to Kelly’s column when he starts to identify where birth rates are falling. And a little conservative dig with this passage “This means that in advanced countries, there won't be enough people working to pay for the pensions and health care of the elderly.”

The title of the column is “Fretting Liberals”. I might well fit that description, but Kelly does not particularly capture my concerns related to world population at all. I am much more worried about fossil fuel use in the US and around the world. I think that managing our fossil fuel use in the United States (as the world’s biggest per capita user) is actually a national security issue, something that would make our nation stronger (by preserving what assets we have, reducing pollution in the US and contributing to the reduction of climate change). Managing fossil fuel use around the world has implications for how world economic development proceeds, and the totality of how the world addresses climate change. There needs to be an international discussion about whether Europe and America want to deny the developing world the standard of living we enjoy now, or whether the developing countries might benefit more from personal and large scale sustainable technologies. How we all use fossil fuels should also take into consideration the needs of future generations. Yes, there is technical progress, but Jack Kelly has made it clear that he does not support government having a role in any kind of technological innovation. Jack Kelly seems delighted that oil companies are among the biggest in the country, and I guess he would be delighted with the auto companies if the auto companies were to break the unions that infest their companies.

The US is heavily invested in oil fueled vehicles, but whether Kelly likes it or not, oil is an inherently finite resource. If we simply say future generations will take care of the problem, I think we abrogate our responsibility to show we understand reality as science understands it. We lose our chance to manage a transition from using something that will grow scarce (and expensive) before it runs out to finding sustainable fuels (like solar, wind, tidal and water forces) that should last for as long as there is a planet and a sun.

Kelly fights economics, does economics win?

So this week Jack Kelly turns to economics. He presents a damning comparison (that he implies actually Democrats are making) between Obama and Ronald Reagan. He then presents instances of how Republican governors are beating Democratic governors during the Great Recession. I will address these as best I can.

But in someways maybe the most interesting thing is how Kelly starts his column. He begins with the beginning of the Dickens classic "A Tale of Two Cities": ""It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness""and""It was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair."".

Kelly suggests that Democrats and Republicans embody these traits:

"To get the economy moving again, increase spending, bail out failing businesses, invest taxpayer money in "green" technologies and redistribute wealth, Democrats think.

Reduce government spending and debt, lower tax rates, slash government red tape, Republicans think.

What is Light to Democrats is Darkness to Republicans, and vice versa. Both approaches have been tried. They've produced very different results."

Does this count as insightful? In my opinion, it does, to some extent. But it is the equivalent of Mitt Romney's assertion that income inequality should only be discussed in "quiet rooms" (in other words, only whispered about, not the subject of protest signs and Occupy camps). Yes, Republicans are using a different sort of economics than Democrats do. Ron Paul states he looks forward to the day when we will all say "We are all Austrians now", referring to the Austrian school of economics. I don't know that Romeny and Gingrich particularly embrace Friedrich Hayek, but certainly neither man publicly rebuked Congress when they held the debt ceiling hostage. As Kelly says (whether there is a theory that supports it or not) Republicans believe in cutting spending and red tape and taxes. The assumption is that growth will result as the free market is unfettered, and that even though tax rates are reduced, the revenue will explode. Of course, that would require incredible growth.

I have to admit that the our corporate tax rate of 38% is among the highest in the world, although I think we have all heard about the GE's, Exxon's and other huge companies that pay no corporate taxes. On the personal income tax front, our tax rates are the lowest they have been in 50 years. Personally I can't see personal spending increasing that much if rates go even lower, but perhaps that's just me. On the regulation ("red tape") front, there is major disagreement on how much and how effective it is. Lower regulations scare me (in much the same way Republicans claim "the climate of uncertainty" for new regulations, since there are not that many actual new regulations, scares them); I like to have water I can drink, air I can breath and a job where my safety is at least a minor concern.

But Republicans would disagree or dispute all of what I just wrote. We apparently no longer have a common language with which to discuss economics. All I can say is that in 1979 when I was first studying economics, Paul Samuelson's introductory economics textbook that so many students studied firmly stated that (deficit) government spending is the best cure for a recession, as it was for the Great Depression. I guess Republicans say he was wrong, as we all were, about economics and particularly the Great Depression.

Which is maybe why Kelly chose to compare the current recovery with the end of Stagflation during Reagan's administration: "This recession was very bad, Democrats note. The only one comparable was in 1981-82.". Really? What about comparing to the Great Depression?

And does Kelly mean Democrats are saying the only recession comparable to our current one is '81-'82? He doesn't actually say that, he just implies by mentioning Democrats in the previous sentence. But why bother actually telling us the truth, when playing word games is so much more satisfying.

Kelly pushes us in the direction he wants us to go; Obama versus Saint Ronald (Reagan). I remember maybe six months ago that Obama was losing (in polls about who would you vote for) to a "generic" Republican presidential candidate. I believe now Obama is beating Romney slightly, Gingrich much more, these days in those polls. What better "generic" Republican to run now against Obama than Saint Ronald (Reagan)? All the better that Reagan is conveniently dead, so he can't talk about how he worked with an opposition Congress to achieve what he did. And apparently we will ignore Reagan's deficit spending.

Also apparently we will ignore Paul Volker, the chair of the Fed appointed by Jimmy Carter and re-appointed by Ronald Reagan, the guy Kelly doesn't mention once. Volker raised the Fed Funds rate to 20% in 1981 which I believe acted like chemotherapy - it killed inflation slightly faster than it killed the overall economy. After inflation had dropped sufficiently, Volker's Fed dropped the Fed Funds rate and the economy came roaring back. I suspect some of the growth post-stagflation and post-recession was the Reagan deficit spending, somewhat vindicating the ideas of Keynes. But that's not the myth, so Republicans/Kelly ignore the actual history and broadcast the myth.

By the way, this 2008 interview with Nobel laureate in economics Joseph Stiglitz gives us an interesting perspective on the economy. But Stiglitz must an ivory tower academic liberal who doesn't understand the real world, I guess, since he calls for more regulation, and a change in our view of regulation.

Kelly goes on to tell us that states with Republican Governors are doing better than state with Democratic Governors. Perhaps, okay. Then Kelly gives us this "Democrats control the state house and the legislature in three of the four states where unemployment rose." First of all, in our system of government, generally speaking a "state house" is either the entire legislature or part of a legislature, along with a state senate. But no matter, Kelly's factual sloppiness only peripherally informs his intellectual rigor. In this case, apparently Kelly wants to engage in those things he sometimes accuses the "liberal" media of, cherry picking facts.

For example, in response to the positive (downward) trend of unemployment, Kelly brings up discouraged workers who are not counted in unemployment. Certainly as the recession has dragged on, that number has become more important, so the accusation becomes that Obama has not done enough for the unemployed. But Obama himself does not make policy per se, Congress votes laws and budgets. Which brings us back to Reagan and his opposition Congress. Reagan's rhetoric included "In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.". Yet Reagan and Tip O'Neill and Congress worked together to pass bills (for better or worse). In the last three years, Republican Senators have continued to filibuster to stop almost all legislation, and since January 2011 the House has simply ignored the President and gone in bizarre directions.

And how were George W Bush's job growth numbers in his first term? Pretty anemic (lower than Obama's so far, according to Wikipedia). His second terms was actually negative. But then Republicans have long since thrown dubya under the bus.

I mean, yes, Truman famously said "the buck stops here", but we are not a monarchy (yet); the President has to work with a Congress and then there are the actions (and ability) of the Fed affecting things. But conservatives like Kelly (and Limbaugh and Fox News in total) don't care about reality, they want to spin and cherry pick any news to benefit their side, regardless of the effect on Americans in general.

Some stuff

So apparently the ground hog saw his shadow this morning. Six more weeks of winter. These days I think that means six more weeks of mid forties and rain.

Welcome to global warming. Actually, we are not suppose to conflate climate and weather; climate change is the world being a couple degrees warmer, weather is us at 45 degrees and Europe in a deep freeze. Which actually could be related to climate ...

By the way, I hope that "ground hog" refers to a critter close to the ground, not a chopped up pig.

Toyota has finally figured out the formula to making hybrids stupidly enormously popular; shrink it and price it under 20 grand. Actually, Honda has already done that with the second generation Insight, but the Insight gets mild hybrid Honda mileage (41 mpg combined according to the EPA). The small Prius is supposed to get Prius mileage (50 mpg combined per the EPA).

You just won't be able to buy it. Argh.