Why bother with truth when you can blame hippies?

Robert Samuelson continues his disinformation campaign on energy policy. Samuelson repeats his past misunderstanding of the carbon tax vs. carbon trading issue. He accuses environmentalists of placing a hidden tax, even though there is more to the issue and he has already been beaten up for this false accusation before. While carbon trading and a carbon tax may have similar outcomes, carbon trading uses markets to set the price of carbon while a carbon tax sets an arbitrary price for it. There are some good economic arguments for using the tax instead of the market, but Samuelson doesn’t under them. It’s easier for him to concoct an environmentalist conspiracy than understand issue.

Play the McCain game or get the blame

David Broder blames Obama for the increase in discord in the campaign.  McCain has run one ad claiming that Obama ditched wounded troops (a lie) and another comparing his opponent to an heiress-turned-homemade-pornstar-turned-reality-tv-star.  Even though Obama hasn’t resorted to such attacks ads, Broder thinks he’s the one to blame.  Broder writes that McCain offered to have a series of 10 joint townhall meetings this summer and argues that, had Obama tagged along with McCain, their together-time would have improved their relationship and negated the need for counseling and attack ads.  Obama legitimately turned down McCain’s offer because he had just been through dozens of debates during the democratic primary leaving both candidate and audiences with debate fatigue, but Broder doesn’t seem to care if Obama had a good reason.  Apparently, we can’t expect McCain to play well with others unless he gets quality bonding time.

I wonder when McCain will announce playdates with Ahmadinejad as a central plank in his foreign policy.

Above the fray without the facts

A WaPo editorial tried to stay above partisanship by faulting both presidential candidates for bringing up race in the campaign.  They charge that Obama brought up the idea of his face on the dollar.  The problem with the claim, as Mark Thoma of Economist’s View shows, is that McCain ran adds with Obama’s face on the dollar before Obama brought up the issue.  I suspect the WaPo editors couldn’t find any real fault with Obama’s behavior, but wanted to appear above the fray so they found an easy criticism and didn’t find the need to fact check it.

GOP ideology vs. net neutrality

FCC commisionar Robert M. McDowell, a former teleco lobbyist appointed by Bush, attacked net neutrality in his Monday Post Op-Ed.  McDowell took to the Post to make his argument since it seems that a majority of the other FCC commissionars are going to find that Comcast violated the law and broke net neutrality and needs to be punished.

Most ISPs are monopolistic and fail to compete in both service or price, simply taking in as much money as they can while only doing just enough to pretend they’re making an effort to deliver a service.   McDowell defends this system, saying we have the strongest “internet economy” in the world–even though well-regulated internet in Europe and Asia is faster and cheaper. McDowell even defends Comcast, one of the worst offenders. Comcast jacks up prices and its customer service been ranked the worst of any company or agency in several surveys.  As a virtual monopoly in many areas, Comcast needs to do little to compete.  Comcast has made over three visits to my house, missing several other appointments, in the past few weeks and the internet still does not work properly.  They charge me for services I never requested and pipe me through byzantine phone trees so that I can’t complain.  Most people would see such a monopoly and call for reform; McDowell wants to give it more power.  While Comcast controls price and service reliability, it doesn’t yet have control over the service content. McDowell wants to get rid of net neutrality so that Comcast controls this last aspect of internet access.  With content controls, Comcast can not only hose its customers with monthly fees, it can nickel-and-dime them with usage fees.  McDowell think say this is a good idea because he’s in the cable industry’s well-lined pockets or he may have a ideological, and clearly foolish, opposition to regulation.

McDowell’s piece is filled campfire ghost stories warning of dangerous government regulation.  He alludes back to congestion problems in 1987 when the present internet was its infancy stage as ARPANET and NSFNET.  McDowell says these problems were solved without the intervention of government politicians and bureaucrats.  This is true, however, it’s only part of the story.  ARPANET and NSFNET with both government projects.  Government research helped build these important building blocks for the internet.  The internet is a testament to the good work that government can do to coordinate and fund important research breakthroughs.  Government is only a problem for the internet when it becomes involved through its worst aspects, lobbyists turned politicized bureaucrats.

Can’t let neoconservatism go… five years on

Charles Krauthammer refuses to let neoconservatism die.  Neoconservatism provided the philosophical underpinnings for the Iraq war.  The neocons thought they could reshape the international landscape through military action designed to spread their ideology, an idea closely related to Trotskyism, a communist school of thought that many of the neocons adhered to in their early days.   The neocons envisioned American troops marching through the Mideast delivering international capitalism and crony democracy in exchange for roses from the welcoming natives.  This vision became a farce, but Krauthammer refuses to it let go.  In Maliki votes for Obama, Krauthammer has to abandon the latest conservative talking point, that Obama’s Iraq plan isn’t supported by those on the ground, since the President of Iraq, with a fair amount of “on the ground” experience, endorsed Obama’s plan.  Instead of repeating this discredited line, Krauthammer has to reinvent the rationale for the war… once more.  First, we had to get the weapons of mass destruction..  until we found none.  Next, we had to liberate the population from an inhumane regime… until we became one.  Then we had to fight to stop the insurgents who destabalized the country, but Maliki thinks Obama’s plan will address this best, so Krauthammer needs a new rationale for the war: Now, he claims, be must fight for a foothold in the Mideast to combat Iran.

If Iran were such a problem, we should have attacked them first. If we considered Iran the major Mideast threat, we should not have crippled their greatest enemy.  Krauthammer overlooks these details.  He just falls back on the neocon arguments of 2003: a Mideast country might have WMD, and we need to spread our values to the Mideast by force.  Krauthammer decides to rehash the same “noble lie” used to bring us to war in 2003 and combine it with the same defunct ideology that convinced the elites that we needed war.  Bad ideas do not improve with age; they remain as rotten as ever.

When there’s no else left, claim Democrats don’t support the troops

Bob Novak nimbly turns his hood-mounted crosshairs from pedestrians to Democrats in his latest Op-Ed.  He lays in to Democrats for not giving more support for proposed legislation to help improve voting access for troops.  As Novak, mentions Maryland Democrat Steny Hoyer had planned to co-sponsor the bill, but backed-off since provisions related to expat voting where dropped from the legislation.  The bill has also received scant support from the GOP, especially the White House.  But that (like pedestrians on his windshield doesn’t stop Novak.  He tries to lay the blame on Democrats, even though Republicans have had eight years to deal with voting issues and are still hardly lifting a finger on this legislation.  Moreover, it’s hard to claim the GOP supports the troops when they opposed the new GI bill and Sen. Webb’s legislation guaranteeing a reasonable amount of leave between deployments. Not to mention supporting the troops by ensuring a just cause for war before sending them into harms way.

Into the memory hole

One of the Post’s “liberal” columnists buys into the McCain campaign line that Obama’s refusal of public financing represents a lack of moral character (McCain’s Core Advantage). Both the McCain and Obama camps have run this issue into the ground with spin, but one point that doesn’t seem to get much attention is that McCain did the exact same thing a few months ago.  Similar to Obama’s withdraw, McCain opted for public financing in the Republican primary and then withdrew once he realized it was more lucrative to raise private funds.  Unlike Obama, McCain was bound to public financing by a legal agreement, not just a pledge.  McCain took out a bank loan and listed public financing as collateral.  Under FEC rules, a candidate is legally bound to public financing if he takes out such a loan.  McCain petitioned for an exemption from public financing, but the FEC is not capable of giving an exemption because its board does not have enough members (another story). Meanwhile, McCain has acted as if he had an exemption and has spent beyond the spending limits set by public financing.  Whatever Obama’s faults for breaking a pledge, at least he’s within the law.

Even if Cohen intended his column as a warning to Obama, he should have mentioned something about McCain’s similar withdraw from public financing and the surrounding legal predicament. It’s hard to tell whether Cohen forgot about the issue, didn’t think it was important (despite mentioning other, less relevant McCain flip-flops), or had some other reason for omitting this.

Fiscal snake oil salesman

Novak attempts to point the spot light on an economics reform package pitched by Paul Ryan (R-Wisconsin) in “Fiscal Medicine Man.” Based on Novak’s description, Ryan’s policies aren’t anything new to the GOP, despite Novak characterizing them as breath of fresh air to the stagnant atmosphere of Republican policy. Novak describes Ryan’s town hall meetings where the congressmen uses standard Republican fear mongering that the government will grow to practically European size proportions if we don’t do anything.

Ryan’s snake oil solution to the problem is a series of policies centered on tax reform. Of course, we’ve seen the same plan pitched by both Reagan and Bush: Cut revenue to shrink government. In both cases, we’ve ended up larger government and larger national debt. Reagan and Bush proved cutting revenue does nothing to stimy government growth; each president oversaw massive governmental growth and swelling debt that weakened the nation’s economy. Only fiscal restraint can decrease the size of government, but that’s too hard an answer for a snake oil salesman to pitch. Instead he travels from town to town, telling the people that his complex formula of opt-out social security and opt-in flat tax will both provide tax relief and protect the economy. In reality, a flat tax will only benefit the wealthiest, and the opt-in part of the plan is just smoke and mirrors designed to hide yet another tax cut for those who are getting by at the expense of a growing debt that hurts those that are already hurting. Like other snake oil, Ryan’s plan sounds too good to be true, because it is.

More Prisoners, More Strawmen

With conservatives losing on almost all issues, from foreign policy to the environment, George Will turns to the mainstay of “law and order” conservatism in his Sunday Outlook WaPo Op-Ed, “More Prisoners, Less Crime.” Conservatives aren’t left with much ammo these days, so Will uses the old conservative trick of painting liberals as the allies of vicious criminals. Will is responding to those who point out that we have the highest incarceration rate in the world, higher than third world countries and despotic regimes. Will sets up a strawman, arguing that liberals think that this is the result of racism. He then proceeds to argue otherwise. He cites a Manhattan Institute article that claims “the reason more blacks are disproportionately in prison, and for longer terms, is not racism but racial differences in patterns of criminal offenses.” Will seems satisfied with this answer and ignores the obvious question that entails: Why are there racial differences in crime patterns? Why does Will think minorities are predetermined to commit crimes and what can we do about it? Will doesn’t seem to care. His article only offers the “lockem’ up” strategy of policing. He claims high incarceration has caused a drop in crime, so we should incarcerate more.

Taking our cue from Will’s opening words, “Listening to political talk requires a third ear that hears what is not said,” we should look at what will did not discuss in his piece. Will completely glosses over the main incarceration issue: Why do we have the world’s highest incarceration rate? High incarceration not necessary for a low crime rate. Despite having the world’s highest incarceration rate, the US is one of the most crime-ridden developed nations. Other countries manage to have both extremely low crime rates and low incarceration rates. Will, and conservatives generally, don’t want to discuss this. Their only solution for crime is a heavier fist, and they challenge any distent on the issue by branding the opposition as criminal sympathizers.

In addition to the strawmen and omitted arguments, Will’s op-ed suffers from general poor quality. The Op-Ed centers on cut and paste excerpts from an article (which opens “The race industry and its elite enablers take it as self-evident that high black incarceration rates result from discrimination.”[credit]) written by Heather Mac Donald for the right-wing Manhattan Institute’s City Journal. Mac Donald’s article is a mash up of other research, so Will’s Op-Ed is based on nothing but third hand information passed through at least two arch-conservative filters.

Will’s other major source are quotes from James Q. Wilson, a university professor best known for a government textbook that has been criticized for doubting global warming and misrepresenting supreme court cases on school prayer. Will finishes his Op-Ed piece by quoting Wilson, “And, Wilson dryly adds, the report does not explore “whether society gets as much from universities as it does from prisons.” Will goes on to add “A good question, but not one apt to be studied in academia. “

Will, the quintessential elitist, never fails to slam what he deems to be the elite. Will, a former professor with degrees from Oxford and Princeton, likes to pretend he’s above the academic elite (which would only make him super-elite, but he fails to note this). Both Will and Wilson are qualified to undertake a research project comparing the benefits of universities to prisons, but they would rather make snide remarks than actually do work to support a point. Will, as usual, goes for the easy points scored with anti-intellectualism, which is astonishing given that he is the son of a philosophy professor and has had his own very intellectual career. Anyone familiar with Will’s work knows that this intellectual’s anti-intellectualism is really only anti-intellectual honesty; Will makes his career writing Op-Ed’s based on strawmen and fudged facts, and holds disdain for the intellectuals who produce worthwhile research.

A Modest reply to "Vulgarian at the Gate"

Former Bush speech writer Michael Gerson criticizes Minnesota Senate candidate and SNL alum Al Franken in today’s Vulgarian at the Gate. Gerson’s column repeats one of the latest conservative talking points: Franken’s comic career has had vulgar moments. The WaPo should have the stature to find columnists who write thoughtful, informative op-ed pieces; instead it lends its print to Gerson who might as well be reposting a months old Newsmax piece on a second-rate blog.

The op-ed is pretty much limited to Franken’s Playboy “Porn-O-Rama,” an article Franken wrote in 2000. A comedian’s eight year old Playboy article hardly seems like a significant issue. If Gerson really wants to weed vulgarity out of society, he should target his former employer: the White House that planned out the torture techniques used at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. No matter how twisted Franken’s Playboy article may be, at least he hasn’t used S&M as a feature of public policy.

Gerson criticizes the Franken campaign’s response that the article was satire by comparing Franken to supposedly pure and gentlemanly Erasmus, Jonathan Swift, and George Orwell. Apparently Gerson couldn’t think of any satirists born within the past hundred years who didn’t write at least one lewd piece. Even Orwell’s writing wasn’t entirely G-rated. Gerson should take a closer look at Orwell’s works which had their sexual moments–albeit in stodgy British fashion–comparing a woman’s breasts to knots on trees. And Swift achieved infamy for his “Modest Proposal” that the Irish would not be hungry if they ate their own children. Instead of comparing Franken to Swift, Gerson should compare himself to the foolish readers that didn’t know how to handle satire and took Swift’s proposal seriously.