Jack Kelly wants to help Obama get re-elected

Or so it would seem in today's column.

Well, actually, not really.

By the way, I've noticed that almost if not every week, the Obama administration/campaign is described by Kelly as desperate.

The theme this week is a Kelly implication that Joe Biden is such a liability to Obama that he should be dumped. No wait, Kelly says, that would smack of too much desperation. And there is so much for Obama to be desperate about, great Republican victories in the recall primary (although I thought primaries were separate races?) and the fact that in the West Virginia Primary 40% of the vote went to a convict currently incarcerated in Texas. Kelly uses the term "Slow Joe" for Joe Biden, a not so subtle suggestion that Biden is retarded. Definitely another dog whistle column.

I do have admit that with the weak economy Obama is vulnerable. I don't expect that a lot of people are reading Glenn Greenwald, so not a lot of people are seeing the liberal criticism of Obama. Greenwald had a good piece about Obama's relationship with the banks (which actually referenced a Newsweek piece on that subject, an indication maybe more people will see it). There are several reasons to be annoyed with Obama, things that liberals are saying quite different from the conservatives complain about (not enough tax breaks for the rich).

Still, I think that the merits and detriments of both sides need to be considered. Frankly at this point Romney and the Republicans have literally no merits, nothing for the economy or foreign policy. While Obama does have his faults to be sure, so too the Republicans have them, I believe at least slightly more. Perhaps when re-elected Obama can be talked out of the drone program, the assassination program, the bank coddling ... maybe Obama will let loose on one or more of those, once the first (actually) black President is re-elected (actually because of course Bill Clinton claimed to be the first black President). By contrast, I suspect Romney will not revert to moderate (like he was in Massachusetts), and I think the Republicans will maintain all the policies of Obama's that we don't like now. Nor do I think it will be possible to convince Romney to change those programs (much like Bush did pretty much whatever he wanted).

Columns like this "Slow Joe" are just a distraction, and I still wonder whether the PG really wants to be associated with the wild sorts of accusations backed by shaky facts that Jack Kelly keeps making.

Kelly on Earth Day

As I mentioned recently that instead of reining Jack Kelly in (fact checking or limiting his shilling for the Tea Party), the PG has expanded Jack Kelly's column's. On Tuesday Jack Kelly suggested that Earth Day was ignored this year because people realize Climate Change is a hoax. Now, I have to agree that Earth Day was not a big event this year. Would it surprise you to know I disagree about why that was the case?

Kelly starts with by slamming the turnout for an Earth Day rally at the DC mall. I have no idea where he got his information, since the five hits I found in Google search I made never mentioned a number for turnout. In fact, only two of the five were about the DC rally, and the Washington Post talked about the rain that day instead of the turnout. Fairly clever of Kelly to talk about something difficult to verify.

Kelly mentions "Gallup's annual environment poll" where he claims that concern about Climate Change has declined since 2000, and that of seven issues (not defined), "global warming" ranked lowest. I couldn't find that particular poll, but I did find other Gallup polls that indicate a slim majority believe climate is real and something to be concerned about, and has since 2000. Kelly does go on to suggest that in a difficult economy and with a violent occupation still going on in Afghanistan, "People who worry where their next meal is coming from tend not to worry much about polar bears or the rainforest" Not that Climate Change is concerned solely with polar bears or the rainforest, but being snide is much more fun than being accurate. Kelly's next sentence - "But it's due mostly to the collapse of hysteria about anthropogenic (man-made) global warming." sets the tone for the rest of the column.

As part of that tone, Kelly also takes a cheap shot at a favorite conservative target - "As recently as 2006, former Vice President Al Gore could claim that as a result of melting polar and glacial ice, sea levels could rise as much as 23 feet in a century, and draw a respectable audience. That's inconceivable now." I can't be certain but I guess Kelly is referring to Al Gore's Climate Reality event last September. As before, I made a Google search and found some conservative claims that there wasn't much of an audience, but little in the way of impartial analysis of the audience.

So I have spent a lot of time on the first six or so paragraphs of this Kelly column, with several more to go. But I think I can deal with them more succinctly. Kelly next quotes several "climate scientists" who (I suppose) reveal the truth about global warming (so to speak). He first mentions a James Lovelock, "perhaps the most prominent scientist among the alarmists". Lovelock apparently said "We were supposed to be halfway toward a frying world now" and that would be interesting if a) anyone had actually said that by 2012 we would be halfway to a "frying world" (whatever that means) and b) I could recall ever having heard of James Lovelock before. Apparently he was a visionary in the 1970's, back when everyone was talking about Climate Change(?). Oh wait, the seventies was overpopulation, which of course has not panned out (even though we are almost seven billion now, but fortunately the populaiton rate is declining).

Kelly goes on to mention "climate scientists" Richard Lindzen, John Christy,Roy Spencer and Gordon Fulks. They are identified by several sources as climate change deniers, yet Jack Kelly identifies them as climate scientists, essentially intentionally misleading his readers.

Now, as far as I know, Kelly is not far off when he says that "In March, the CRU said a study it has completed for Britain's Met(eorological) Office indicates global temperatures have risen just 0.75 degrees Celsius (1.35 degrees Fahrenheit) since 1900.". What I will say is that really smart people, all the National Academies of Science, NOAA, NASA, the American Meteorological Society, the UK's Climate Research Unit, etc, all say that the level of warming we have experienced and will continue to experience (even if we stop burning fossil fuels now) are significant. To accept what Jack Kelly says, you have to agree that the National Academy of Science, NASA, NOAA, the American Meteorological Society and the rest are captive to a vast liberal conspiracy, that their so-called science are nothing more than lies.

Is that what the PG wants to tell its readers?

The column Jack Kelly should write/have written

Today I saw a column about how certain significant parts of the media (really the most well known parts - the Washington Post, The Atlantic, The New York Times. Time, NBC) are slavishly trumpeting the achievements of the Obama administration, and in return are granted extensive access - to Osama bin Laden's private documents, to the White House Situation Room and to comments from high officials. My first thought was this is the sort of thing Jack Kelly wants to say exists, yet it was not a product of the PG and/or Jack Kelly. This column came from Salon and Glenn Greenwald . I suppose I should have known it could not be Jack Kelly since the column was rather scrupulously fair. The column noted that much the same thing (part of the press corp being slavishly positive and thus being granted exclusive access) occurred during the Bush administration. I would suggest that some time during Bush's second term increasing parts of the press corps started to attack the Bush administration, but certainly it seemed the press was incredibly faithful in reporting exactly what the administration wanted them to say in the run up to the war in Iraq.

The lesson Greenwald takes from this similarity of affairs (I assume one might well find such a situation in all administrations going back 40 years or more) is that the motivation of these reporters is specifically not political. The reporters are not interested in supporting Obama because he is a Democrat per se, they are intoxicated by the proximity to the power of the office. I will say I remember Bob Woodward (surely the very icon of liberal journalism) wrote some rather positive books about George Bush during the Bush administration, books made at least better by some pretty exclusive access.

Still, the point of Greenwald's column should not be understated. The Obama administration have taken drone attacks to a new level, both in Afghanistan and Pakistan. There is a war on whistle blowers and on legal (at the state level) medical marijuana that has exceeded not only what the Bush administration did, but to some extent all previous administrations. There is the assassination of Anwar Al-Awlaki and his son, both American citizens, without the benefit of trial or any sort of due process. There is even the failure of the administration to examine the activities of the Bush administration.

I suppose it is good news that the Obama administration has not come up with some "unitary executive" theory of government, although it is bad enough that the administration is saying these assassinations of American citizens are being reviewed and decided on by a secret group of advisers. Even though Kelly (stupidly) thinks that a liberal media is in bed with the Obama administration, his actual point that the press is not doing its job; it is not challenging the administration on many substantive issues. Unfortunately Kelly can almost always only just repeat the (Tea) Party line, so he is no help on this front either.

Too bad the PG hasn't syndicated Glenn Greenwald.

Facts or Dog Whistle?

Let's look with an open mind at the President. I will say that Obama could have done more with the economy if a Republican blocked Senate and (now) Republican controlled House had helped him out. In areas where Obama does have control (and I am not talking about this silly "Fast and Furious" thing) Glenn Greenwald claims Obama is behaving immorally and frequently illegally (you can read the variety yourself at Greenwald's columns). Yet the majority of Republican attacks on Obama do not use anything Greenwald says. Jack Kelly did write "Obama can kill you", but even then Kelly contradicted his own past statements and claimed no liberals were covering this issue (thus losing credibility with anyone who has read Greenwald).

I didn't write a post last week, in part because I noticed Jack Kelly is writing more than I thought, and I started to think I should go back and write about these mid week efforts. I might still do that (I guess it started in the last month).

Even though I missed last week, looking back at last week's column "Obama the loser: His arrogance, ignorance and laziness have led to failed policies" and this week's column "Romney might win big: He's talking issues while Democrats attack", there is a certain irony in Kelly first attacking (and also insulting) Obama, then turning around and claiming that Democrats are the ones making personal attacks.

So Kelly claims that while Democrats are only attacking Romney, Romney is raising real issues. Yet Kelly fails to mention any specific policy issues, and at best raises a sort of non-policy issue of competency. Competency is a complicated issue (how does one look at Massachusetts, and "Romneycare"?), but let's face it, Kelly's column is essentially a series of dog whistles, not specifics. Right off the bat, he mentions Hillary Rosen and Obama eating (being fed) dog as a child in quick succession. (By the way, do you think there is a difference between an adult deciding to place his dog on the roof of his car for a multi-hour highway trip and a child living with a stepfather and his mom after his biological dad abandoned them?).

To his credit, Kelly does note that others say that a second term election is a referendum on the current President's performance, yet refuses to connect the dots and admit that said referendum essentially means attacks on (not issue discussions with) the President. Although maybe he tacitly admits that, since he gives us personal attacks on Obama before and after the referendum remark, and also last week.

Why doesn't Jack Kelly give us any issues that Romney is (supposedly) talking about? Maybe because the policies Romney advocates are things like the Ryan budget, eliminating the department of Housing and Urban Development and the state and local tax deduction for itemization. Romney says he doesn't worry about the very poor because they have a safety net, yet he promises wealthy donors to gut that safety net (partly through eliminating HUD) when he (Romney) thinks the general public can't hear.

In any event, Jack Kelly's attacks on Democrats and Obama certainly seem like dog whistle type attacks, and (perhaps you'll agree) distortions of reality. For example, Kelly says "this time Democrats are emphasizing abortion and gay rights". Well, whatever you think of how the Affordable Care Act controversy concerning paying for contraception played out, everyone should agree it was about contraception, not abortion. And as fas as I know, it has been Rick Santorum talking about gay rights, not Democrats (except perhaps in response to Santorum) and certainly not Obama.

As I mentioned at the topic of this post, there are reasons to attack Obama. But unfortunately in our current system there end up only two candidates to choose from, so we have to choose from that tiny pool. Between the two, I think there is a possibility that Obama could be persuaded to change his ways. I think that people like Jack Kelly push Mitt Romnney so far to the right that he will sign into law the gutting of government aid to the poor. (Which of course raises the question of why the PG allows Jack Kelly to continue to write columns, let alone expanding his platform)

Romney has a "Bitterly Clinging" moment

Everybody must know by now that Mitt and Ann Romney spoke to wealthy donors in Palm Beach. You'd think after Barack Obama's experience in the last campaign (in 2008), candidates would never stray from their public script (maybe if there was only one other person in the room).

Romney promises the wealthy additional tax cuts (nothing we haven't heard before), and apparently says they will be paid for with some cuts in deductions and cutting some cabinet level departments. He suggests that education could be reduced until its only activity was to bust teacher's unions, and HUD might not be around too much longer.

But I found the suggestion of which deductions he would end most interesting. I mean, ending the mortgage deduction for second homes might have hurt some of the donors at the event. Which means I should give points to Romeny for at least doing that. However, Romney immediately loses points when someone for suggesting ending the deductionS (for itemizing purposes) of State and Local taxes. I mean, sure, Florida has no state income taxes (only real estate taxes, which Romney did not suggest ending) so no better places to announce that. But ending that deduction would hurt middle class itemizers, especially those who have more modest houses. The Republicans accuse Obama of initiating class warfare, and then Romney pulls this.

But Mitt's real "bitterly clinging" moment is when he and Ann talk about what a gift Hilary Rosen's charge that Ann Romney had never worked a day in her life is. Hmm, the Romney's care so much about women that they will exploit any comment made about Romney (Ann or Mitt) (comment not even made by Obama, but stuck to Obama by the Romney's).

Two things about this. First Romney made a comment a while back that a poor single mom should have to work to get welfare. So much for how much like real work for pay raising children is. Of course, considering how Bill Clinton ended long term welfare, the earned income credit is one of the few ways single (working) women can get any government assistance. Still, Romeny is falling easily into a contradiction. Not a good way to attract independents and undecideds.

Second, I have to say, glancing at the Romney biography on Wikipedia, the Romeny's had kids at an awfully early age. They started in undergrad, and had at least one more before Mitt finished grad school. A heck of an example for the moralizing Republicans clearly want to do. Much like Romney has taken to calling Obama a Harvard educated snob, funny considering Romney has twice as many Harvard graduate degrees as Obama.

As I said, a "bitterly clinging" moment.

Kelly weighs in on Zimmerman

Strangely, although I was able to buy a Post-Gazette Sunday "Early Edition" at 8:30am yesterday morning, Jack Kelly's column has not made it to the PG web edition at of 9:50am on Sunday morning. So no link yet (maybe later).

Today Jack Kelly declares his man love for Rick Santorum, and describes the steamy weekend they had in ... what, your print edition doesn't have that column? Well, show me a link ...

Naw, today Jack Kelly veers away from racist economics and returns to racist sociology, talking about how the media, in talking about George Zimmerman, engaged in a "Rush to Judgment" (see, this is where there would be a link, since "Rush to Judgment" is the title of Kelly's column).

This is something of a complicated topic. It would be impossible to deny that there has been a lot of attention paid to this topic, one crime out of hundreds of thousands. Yet, what my girlfriend pointed out to me when I mentioned Kelly's line of thought here, is that without all that media attention, Zimmerman would not have been arrested. Probably that is the result Kelly would have wanted. On a recent Bill Maher, a conservative (woman, I forget who) was complaining that Zimmerman was/is being convicted by liberals without having a day in court, to which Van Jones (who was also on) plaintively said "That's what we want, Zimmerman in court".

Of course, that's not all Kelly said. One issue he raised was a surveillance tape from the police station when Zimmerman was brought in for questioning on the day Martin was shot. I saw a brief version on the Maher show, and first of all, you certainly see Zimmerman from the front. One of Zimmerman's claims is that Martin punched him in the nose. Well, there was no sign of blood on Zimmerman from the front. Even if the paramedic's cleaned him up, it seems likely his shirt would have shown some blood, yet there was none I could see. Perhaps the paramedics or cops gave Zimmerman a clean shirt ... but why would the cops or paramedics have a spare shirt? How far do we have to stretch the bounds of credibility?

Now, Kelly claims there is a longer version that shows injuries to that back of Zimmerman's head, supporting his claim that Trayvon Martin had been slamming Zimmerman's head to the ground (perhaps sidewalk pavement). Now, once again, my girlfriend has been paying a lot of attention to this issue, and just recently has had the time to search on the internet. She says she saw a longer version of the police tape, and she disagrees with what Kelly says. Given that Zimmerman claimed a nose injury for which no evidence was shown on the tape, and the explanation for why there is no sign is tortured and far fetched, it calls Kelly's statement into doubt.

On another point Kelly raises, there is, first, the fact that Zimmerman called 911 so often that the police had him call some other number to report "crimes", to keep him from clogging the 911 line. So he called the number on the fateful day, and talked to an operator. Kelly details how there is the actual version of the call, that somehow shows Zimmerman is not being racist, compared to an edited soundbite that was replayed by the media countless times. I disagree, I think the longer version shows the same racism as the shorter version, it actually adds American stereotypes about black crime. For example, Zimmerman asserts (at the time) Martin "looks like he is up to no good, or on drugs or something. It's raining and he is just walking around, looking around".

And by the way, let's not forget what Kelly doesn't mention, that Zimmerman tells the police operator that he is following Martin, to which the operator replies "we don't need you to do that". Zimmerman did anyway, carrying a gun, which, especially in light of what then transpired, I think provides ample evidence to support a charge (if not conviction) of reckless endangerment.

There is also apparently a (and pardon the word, I am quoting) "coon" remark, which I don't know much about. I could easily find out, but I haven't been motivated to do so. So apparently this remark is on tape (perhaps Zimmerman was still talking to the police operator). Kelly claims what is actually said is "It is (expletive(fucking?)) cold". Was Zimmerman focused on Trayvon Martin or on the weather?

Kelly also mentions an incident where a black Sanford homeless man is killed by the son of a cop, and that Zimmerman is "foremost" aomng those calling for justice. Citation? No no, we are just supposed to accept Kelly's word for it.

But the final straw(s) for me are how Kelly ends his column. As an example of a rush to judgment, Kelly brings up the Duke lacrosse case, and then brings up Dan Rather's story about letters to get Dubya Bush into the Texas Air National Guard as example of what should happen to reporters who quote facts they (Kelly would say) they know are untrue. Kelly never mentions what should happen to columnists who selectively present facts, who quote what are deliberate lies.

But what is most important to me is that Kelly refuses to discuss the Martin/Zimmerman case on its own merits, and instead raises these two Republican dog whistle issues. When Democrats/liberals say that the current bad economy was caused by events that occurred on George W Bush's watch, Republicans/conservatives ask when it will become Obama's economy and for Democrats/liberals to stop bringing up ancient history. Yet Duke Lacrosse was apparently from 2006 and the Rather thing from 2004.

Democrats are not models of consistency and Obama, as President has done things which should be grave crimes. Yet Republicans/conservatives, in a depressing race to the bottom, and as exemplified in part by Jack Kelly's various columns, continue to show how they would (as they did from 2000 to 2008, and particularly from January 2003 to December 2006) make things so much worse. Jack Kelly shows with his dissembling about the Martin/Zimmerman issue/case what sort of commitment to the truth he has.

Why does the PG allow him to present the distorted and deceptive conservative perspective?

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.