POWERLINE COUNTERPOINT

UPDATE: Avedon meant this as a joke.
Avedon Carol shared this on Facebook:

Will we ever get past the "Jewish Bankers" conspiracy theories?

POWERLINE'S DIVIDED LOYALTIES

This screen capture is from the conservative blog Powerline:

THIS IS FUCKED UP

According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, the BLM is going to give back the cattle it had rounded up to Cliven the Clown.   This will only encourage the "sovereign citizens" and conservative wackos.

UPDATE: More about this mess from a Nevadan.

CLIVEN BUNDY IS STILL AN ASSHOLE

I'm glad the Feds decided to back off because the conservative media has been pouring gasoline on the situation and there was a real possibility of deadly violence.  OTOH, Bundy is still a psycho:

Bundy, BLM reach deal to stop cattle roundup

By TOM RAGAN
LAS VEGAS REVIEW-JOURNAL
Posted April 12, 2014 - 9:33am Updated April 12, 2014 - 10:15am

Rancher Cliven Bundy demanded of sheriff Doug Gillespie that all naional park service employees working on the cattle roundup operation be disarmed before 10:45 a.m.

He gave Gillespie one hour to comply, and added for the firearms to be brought to him.

Kevin Drum asks...

(h/t Atrios)

"Who started the Culture Wars, Anyway?" and to be a little pedantic, I'd say they began in the Renaissance and were won by liberals by the end of the Enlightenment because everything after that is merely mopping up the remaining pockets of dust.

CLIVEN BUNDY IS AN ASSHOLE

I heard him today on Hannity's radio show and he is obviously past his prime. Of course, that won't stop hate radio from trying to incite violence (see here and here). I was pleased to hear one caller to Hannity's radio show today state that Bundy should have kept on paying his fees to the BLM and worked within the system to address his issues and a bit surprised that she made it past the call screener. A similar caller reached Clyde Lewis last night and Clyde had to resort to calling him a fascist, a statist, a communist and other hip conservative swear words.

ANOTHER "WAR ON WOMEN" MOMENT

In addition to wack job Cuccinelli, Virgina has other conservative reactionaries:

Virginia Republican Bob Marshall stands by remarks that raise eyebrows

By David Sherfinski
The Washington Times
Thursday, April 10, 2014

Delegate Robert G. Marshall has said that disabled children can be God’s vengeance against women who have had abortions. He has described incest as sometimes voluntary, and he has questioned the sexuality of a Supreme Court justice who has favored marriage equality.

Mr. Marshall is unbowed over his history of controversial rhetoric as he seeks a seat in Congress representing Northern Virginia.

“I don’t care. I mean, if I say something in public, I say it in public,” Mr. Marshall said Thursday.

MORE BULLSHIT FROM WISCONSIN

GOP Gov. Scott Walker is a confirmed liar and it seems the others in the GOP follow his lead.

Mike Ellis drops out of state Senate race

By Patrick Marley and Jason Stein of the Journal Sentinel
Updated: 2:21 p.m.
Madison — State Senate President Mike Ellis dropped out of his re-election race Friday, two days after a secret recording was released revealing him discussing setting up an illegal political action committee to attack his challenger.

Here's Ellis's dishonest response:

"I don't fit in anymore," he said in an interview. "There isn't room for independent thinking and compromise...There's no room on the street anymore for people to walk down the middle of the road."

UPDATE: The infamous James O'Keefe was behind this recording and my guess is that he did it because Ellis isn't sufficiently conservative.

I DON'T KNOW HOW MEDIAITE READERS BREAKDOWN BY POLITICS

So this thread on Fats Limbaugh vs. Stephen Colbert may mean little if Mediaite has primarily liberal readers but it does show that Fats Limbauh isn't fooling most of the people.

IF I WEREN'T FOR THE GASBAGS AND THE RUBES...

(h/t John Aravosis)

this would be the end of the "Benghazi Scandal" -

Chairman Satisfied With Military on Benghazi
WASHINGTON April 10, 2014 (AP)
By DONNA CASSATA Associated Press

The GOP chairman of the House Armed Services Committee said Thursday he is satisfied with how the military responded to the deadly attack on the U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya.

"I think I've pretty well been satisfied that given where the troops were, how quickly the thing all happened and how quickly it dissipated, we probably couldn't have done more than we did," McKeon told reporters at a roundtable discussion.

FATS LIMBAUGH ATTACKS STEPHEN COLBERT ABOUT HIS NEW JOB

Limbaugh apparently believes that a  guy who's been divorced 3 times, went to drug rehab 3 times and has no children is a better representative of "traditional America" than Colbert, who is still in his first marriage & has 3 children.

BEFORE "BEFORE THE STORM" THERE WAS THE NEW DEAL

Many Southern Democrats were upset that FDR treated "Negroes" almost as if they were full-fledged American citizens, as this quote of Sen. Josiah W. Bailey (D-NC):

"The catering by out National Party to the Negro vote...is not only extremely distasteful, but very alarming to m," Bailey wrote [to R. G. Cherry, 3/1/1938] "Southern people know what this means and you would have to be in Washington only about three weeks to realize what it is meaning to our Party in the Northern states. It is bringing it down to the lowest depths of degradation."

SOURCE: Congressional Conservatism and the New Deal: The Growth of the Conservative Coalition in Congress, 1933-1939, P.257.

I COVERED THIS BEFORE

The wingnuts claimed that the New Deal didn't work and that implies that deficit spending is NOT the correct way out of a recession/depression.  They point to the recession of 1937/38 as evidence but neglect to include the budget numbers. My previous response wasn't crystal clear so here's an improved version:

The recession was caused in part by the untimely decrease in Federal deficit spending, not the failure of Keynesian economics.
Data Source

ANOTHER BOOK ON THE IGNORANCE OF ECONOMISTS

Philip Mirowski has written two books that take a critical approach to modern economics (here and here) and one of his main points is that economics has been badly distorted by what Zachary Karabell calls "physics envy":

Why economists should try to measure happiness
Zachary Karabell's new book, The Leading Indicators, shows the problem of relying too heavily on traditional economic measurements
By Sean McElwee | April 4, 2014
THE WEEK

The varied economists who developed national indicators (Fisher, Mitchell, Burns, Kuznets), Karabell explains, suffered from "physics envy." But economics is not physics. Indicators, rather than representing some objective view of reality, are injected with controversial assumptions.

Karabell writes, "The leading indicators are the products of a particular phase of Western history." In this phase, economics was seen as a mechanism, rather than a human endeavor subject to what Keynes called the "animal spirits."

I REALLY DON'T UNDERSTAND CONSERVATIVES

One unnecessary death in Florida will be followed by thousands of others across the states that refused to expand Medicaid but the "family values" crowd doesn't seem to give a damn:

Virginia Is Broken
And low-income Virginians who fall into the Medicaid gap will suffer for it.
By Dahlia Lithwick
SLATE

The government is imploding in large part due to the fact that state Republicans in the House of Delegates have decided to fight tooth and nail—up to and including shutting down the whole government if this is not resolved by July—to avoid expanding Medicaid benefits to cover up to 400,000 lower-income Virginians who fall into the health care coverage gap.

CONSERVATIVES AND THE WOMYNS

They still think they can get away with demeaning women and I'm not just talking about some obscure precinct leader:

Adviser to Texas GOP’s Greg Abbott: No ‘evidence’ that women are ‘significant thinkers’

Neal Boortz Reports, More In Sorrow Than In Glee, That Female Brains Are Simply Inadequate

WSJ EDITORS VS. FATS LIMBAUGH

Limbaugh decried the House GOP's action to improve Obamacare and the WSJ editorial board isn't buying his childish crap:

"In a rational world beating White House industrial policy and allowing more consumer choice would qualify as a modest conservative victory. But some Republicans have convinced themselves that the only tolerable change to ObamaCare is to make it worse," read the piece published Monday evening by the Journal's editorial team, a bastion of pro-business conservative thought.

I WONDER IF I TRIED HARD ENOUGH...

could I find posts like these two every day of the week?

Christian radio host: Nazi ‘race of super gay male soldiers’ is coming to ‘hunt you down’
By David Ferguson
Tuesday, April 8, 2014 11:56 EDT
The Raw Story

NC billboards suggest Jesus wants ‘holy war’ with gays over ‘sexual perversion’
By David Edwards
Tuesday, April 8, 2014 14:52 EDT
The Raw Story

REMEMBER THIS SCENE?

t

These are the CEOs of the major US tobacco companies being sworn in before a congressional committee just before they started to perjure themselves repeatedly.   None of them suffered any penalty for lying so I'm a bit in favor of this suggestion to hold some of the climate deniers to account:

Is misinformation about the climate criminally negligent?
13 March 2014, 6.17am GMT
Lawrence Torcello
THE CONVERSATION

MANDEVILLE GOES MAINSTREAM?

I've made a few posts about his famous work, The Fable of the Bees, and I'm glad to see that he's getting some broader recognition in this Atlantic article: "Greed Is Good: A 300-Year History of a Dangerous Idea".

Just as Machiavelli drew attention to conflict between Christian morality and the proper conduct of the State, Mandeville drew attention to the conflict between Christian morality and the morals of the free market.

I RECALL THAT AMERICANS ARE LOUSY AT GEOGRAPHY

This has been reported before but now we have a disturbing correlation:

On March 28-31, 2014, we asked a national sample of 2,066 Americans (fielded via Survey Sampling International Inc. (SSI), what action they wanted the U.S. to take in Ukraine, but with a twist: In addition to measuring standard demographic characteristics and general foreign policy attitudes, we also asked our survey respondents to locate Ukraine on a map as part of a larger, ongoing project to study foreign policy knowledge. We wanted to see where Americans think Ukraine is and to learn if this knowledge (or lack thereof) is related to their foreign policy views. We found that only one out of six Americans can find Ukraine on a map, and that this lack of knowledge is related to preferences: The farther their guesses were from Ukraine’s actual location, the more they wanted the U.S.  to intervene with military force.

The authors looked at the data a little harder to see if there were any confounding variables:

Even controlling for a series of demographic characteristics and participants’ general foreign policy attitudes, we found that the less accurate our participants were, the more they wanted the U.S. to use force, the greater the threat they saw Russia as posing to U.S. interests, and the more they thought that using force would advance U.S. national security interests; all of these effects are statistically significant at a 95 percent confidence level. Our results are clear, but also somewhat disconcerting: The less people know about where Ukraine is located on a map, the more they want the U.S. to intervene militarily.

IS IT RAND PAUL OR IS IT MIKE MALLOY?

You should be able to tell just from the statement - "Dick Cheney used 9/11 as excuse to invade Iraq for the benefit of Halliburton" - but now you can't.   Rand seems to be just as erratic as his father.

OK, I GET IT NOW

I've wondered where the notion that secular humanism is a religion started and Rick Perlstein has one answer:

Here's some background those befuddled Democrats need to know: One of the most robust and effective conspiracy theories on the right, the notion that "secularism" – or, just as often, "Secular Humanism" – is a religion is meant to be taken entirely literally: right wingers genuinely believe it refers to an actually existing religious practice. How do conservatives know? Because, they say, the Supreme Court said so. It was, as religious historian and Lutheran minister Martin E. Marty has written, "an instance where one can date precisely the birth of a religion: June 19, 1961." That was the day the Court ruled in the case of Torcaso v. Watkins striking down the Maryland Constitution's requirement of "a declaration of belief in the existence of God" to hold "any office of profit or trust in this state" — specifically, in atheist Roy Torcaso's case, the office of notary public. In his decision, Justice Hugo Black, writing for a unanimous court, further asserted that states and the federal government could not favor religions "based on a belief in the existence of God as against those religions founded on different beliefs" – and, in a fateful, ill-considered, and entirely offhand footnote explained: "Among religions in this country which do not teach what would be generally be considered a belief in the existence of God are Buddhism, Taoism, Ethical Culture, Secular Humanism and others."

I was also surprised that Maryland had that religious requirement and enforced it.

ECONOMISTS JUST DON'T GET OUT MUCH

Tyler Cowen writes about unemployment as if he never bothered to get more information than the basic statistics and I find this weakness striking in this paragraph:

Many of these labor market problems were brought on by the financial crisis and the collapse of market demand. But it would be a mistake to place all the blame on the business cycle. Before the crisis, for example, business executives and owners didn’t always know who their worst workers were, or didn’t want to engage in the disruptive act of rooting out and firing them. So long as sales were brisk, it was easier to let matters lie. But when money ran out, many businesses had to make the tough decisions — and the axes fell. The financial crisis thus accelerated what would have been a much slower process.

First. he ignores the prevalence of the "last hired, first hired" rule of thumb and second, without evidence he assumes that executives and owners were pretty much clueless about their employees until the Great Recession spurred them to acquire the relevant knowledge.

Glenn Hubbard makes a lame attempt to blame the lower work force participation rate among young Americans on the increased likelihood that they will get on SSDI and like Cowen, he offers no evidence. He also doesn't realize that the EITC does apply to individuals without famlies.

I AM INDEBTED TO JOHN QUIGGIN

Quiggin posted this to FB and it "expresses my feelings", as the ad surveys ask: