Elections? What Elections?

There was an article in the New York Times yesterday headlined, “Republican Leaders Map a Strategy to Derail Donald Trump.”  It describes the various methods which “Republican leaders” are employing against Trump to “deny him the presidential nomination.”

Now, I am certainly no fan of that idiotic blowhard, but what part of democracy do these “Republican leaders” not get? What role do they believe it is that voters are supposed to play in a primary election?

Not that the Democrats are any better, really. The party has a nationwide database of voters and contributors, but that database is available only to incumbents. Members of the party who are running in a primary election against an incumbent Democratic office holder are denied access to these databases.

So Democratic voters think they are voting in a fair election, but they are not. They are voting in an election stacked in favor of the incumbent.

“You have a democracy,”  he said, “if you can keep it.”

Who Is The Major Power?

We have been in Afghanistan for fifteen years now, and we cannot really define why we are there with any believability, nor can we say when we are leaving. The Russians, on the other hand, after being in Syria for the purpose of restoring the Syrian government to a winning position in their civil war, have accomplished that goal in a matter of about six months and are sending their forces back home.

So which nation is a “major power” here? The one that was warning the other about the “quagmire” into which it was going to find itself, or the one which was and still is in a quagmire of its own?

Some would say that the Russian objective was “more limited,” which actually is a good part of my point; Russia had an objective, met that objective and is going home. If we have an objective in Afghanistan, it certainly has never been spelled out in any fashion that makes sense to any thinking, rational person.

Nor has any logical objective been set forth for our presence in Syria, because the effort to “degrade and destroy” the Islamic State while helping Al Queda destroy Syria makes no sense whatever, especially given that we were carefully not attacking the Islamic State’s income-producing oil transportation system. Russia wiped it out in its entirety in about two weeks while we were castigating Russia for attacking Al Queda and accusing them of not attacking the Islamic State.

Maybe the problem is that the miracle F-35 has not yet arrived at the battle front yet.

Democracy?

It is sort of amazing to me the degree to which the governing establishment has become openly, downright brazenly, undemocratic. It proves the saying the “power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

The Democratic Party has 715 “superdelegates” who are free to cast their votes for the nominee of their choice at the convention; who are not answerable to the voters in any way. Granted, they usually vote for the candidate who has the greater popular vote, and they are a smallish minority of the 1200 or so votes needed for nomination, but why do they exist at all? Why does the party establishment feel the need to have a not insignificant number of votes controlled by the establishment, and able possibly to thwart the will of the voters?

Further, why has the party establishment chosen to make public that the overwhelming majority of those superdelegates have already chosen in favor of the establishment candidate and against the challenger, if not to create a discouraging atmosphere with which to reduce participation of voters who might otherwise champion the challenger?

The Republican Party establishment is even more energetic in its effort to thwart the will of its voters. It may well be that stopping Donald Trump would be a worthy cause, but that is not what democracy is about. He is receiving by far the greatest majority of votes, and the party establishment is openly seeking ways to deny him the nomination no matter what choice the voters make at the polls. They have even gone so far as to openly discuss rigging the nomination process (they call it “brokering”) at the convention to deny the choice of the voters if that choice turns out to be Donald Trump.

Someone once said that we had a democracy if we could keep it, and clearly we have not kept it, because the governing establishment no longer even pretends that the votes of the governed class really count. They no longer pretend that public opinion matters, and no longer bother to make the lies that they tell us believable.

Well, Now We Know

The San Diego Chargers not only resigned Antonio Gates, they did a two-year deal for $12 million. So now we know that General Manager Tom Telesco either doesn't have a clue, doesn't watch the games, or both. Gates' pass route running can best be described as, "clump, clump, clump..." I think he runs about 8.7 in the 40. The only time he caught passes last year was when the opponent forgot to cover him at all, because a defensive lineman with a bad knee can cover him.

What El Nino? Where?

Media which is hyperventilating about El Nino and about “El Nino-driven storms”  has pretty much reached the point of being completely detached from reality. So far this rainy season has not even been of normally wet parameters, and what they should be writing about is the degree to which El Nino has turned out to be a non-event.

California snowpack is at 83% of its normal depth. Overall the state has received 89% of normal rainfall, with 83% for San Diego. Reservoirs statewide which were at 64% of capacity are at 69% now. None of that paints a picture of any sort of cataclysmic deluge, especially since those normals include four years of severe drought.

The last “El Nino storm” which came through San Diego dropped .6” of rain in a two day period. In most years we would not even call that a storm. We would call it “some rain” and it would be reported in the weather segment of the news, not on page one above the fold.

The media runs around and finds one tree that has fallen down, or one stream that has left its banks, and then runs that film clip over and over, giving the impression that the entire state is underwater and/or buried in fallen trees, but these events happen every rainy season in this part of the country, even during drought years. Hell, I’ve seen Eucalyptus trees drop major limbs on a sunny, totally windless day.

Severe storms in the lower Midwest are being connected to El Nino, but I think that is an unwarranted assumption. There are more tornadoes than usual, but they are occurring on fewer days, meaning that there are more occurring in each storm system. That indicates that the systems are more intense, which is almost certainly due to the greater energy content of the atmosphere in general due to climate change. It’s doubtful that El Nino has anything to do with it.

I think the media is writing based on its expectations and its desire for excitement rather than based on any sort of commitment to an informed public.

Of Course He Did

Jimmie Carter resigned from the Southern Baptist Convention this year, a religious body of which he has been a member for all of his adult life; on the order of seven decades.

Why did he do that? Because the organization passed a resolution declaring that women are inferior to men and cannot hold a leadership role in the church. That means women cannot be a pastor or chaplain in a military or a deacon in a church. Jimmie Carter and his wife could not hold that position and left their life-long church.

The man is a giant. He is the standard to which members of the Democratic Party should be held.

Pro-what?

Democratic candidates were asked, “Is there a time when you think abortion should be illegal?” The answers were as typical and as revealing of the candidates as anything I’ve heard yet. Sanders replied, “No, I am very strongly pro choice.” Clinton answered, “I have been on record in favor of a late pregnancy regulation with exceptions for the life and health of the mother.”

The answers were as typical and as revealing of the candidates as anything I’ve heard yet. Sanders keeps it simple, direct and unequivocal. Clinton’s “on the record” is interesting, since someone who is habitually honest doesn’t gratuitously preface a statement with an offer of proof and, while wanting to be in line with the Democratic "pro-choice" position, her “life and health of the mother” thing is a favorite phrase of the “pro-life” crowd.

Since late term abortion is virtually never done for any reason other than “the life and health of the mother,” she favors prohibiting the procedure except when the reason for doing it is the one for which the process is almost always done. Her statement is, in fact, the sort of empty triangulation for which the Clintons are infamous. It gives her credit for being “pro-choice,” while at the same time giving her a foot in the “pro-life” camp.

Hillary Clinton has no guiding principles which direct her statements. She is guided in her rhetoric only by the number of votes she thinks she can promote.

Um, No.

There are many reasons to dislike the concept of Hillary Clinton in the White House, but to claim that it is a breach of the 22nd amendment is not one of them. Please, let's keep some small shred of sanity.

And You Expected Logic?

Sen. Bernie Sanders “could come out a winner in most of the weekend's presidential primary contests” according to a memo sent out by the Clinton campaign headquarters. Meanwhile, CNBC tells us that Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton “each look to strengthen their front-runner status” in those weekend primary races.

Meanwhile, Democrats say that the low turnout in their primaries is due to Republican voter registration laws. That is kind of amusing, since they have been saying all along that those laws are racist, targeted at preventing black voters from voting, and are now saying that Hillary is winning because black voters are turning out in great numbers and are voting for her in droves, while it is the white voters who are producing disappointing numbers.

My wife says that it is illogical to expect logic in political discussions, but then she is a Democrat.

More About Two Parties

My wife commented that the Republican Party establishment is overriding the voters to oust Trump because otherwise they will lose the general election. Assuming that to be true, which I’m not sure it is, that still is oligarchy rather than democracy.

Republican voters have long had a set of overriding principles. I don’t happen to agree with those principles, but I rather admire their willingness to lose elections when needed to send a message to their elected representatives that they expect them to abide by those principles. “Do what we elected you to do or we will throw you out of office.”

Democrats not so much. For one thing, if you put five Democrats in a room you will get six or seven sets of overriding principles. In any case, if a Democrat is elected to office and acts like a Republican, the Democratic voters might complain but will reelect him rather than risk losing an election. “Vote for anybody so long as they have a D after their name.”

The Democrats have been playing a “divide and survive” game for years, dividing their voters into many factions, making it much less likely that they will get thrown out for their demonstrated inability to govern.

No two legislators run on the same issue, or set of issues, so voters are fragmented into small splinter groups rather than being united behind one unifying set of ideals. As a result, their voters don’t know what they want their legislators to do, and are therefor not disappointed when they don’t do it. They just know, because this is the one unifying theme of Democratic legislators, that they do not want Republicans to win.

Now the Republican establishment is moving to the Democratic model, splintering the voters by throwing a plethora of candidates at them and campaigning on the horror of a Hillary Clinton presidency, and when the voters seem to be doing their usual thing of unifying behind one candidate the establishment frantically tries to unseat the people’s chosen candidate. In a democracy, if the people want to choose a losing candidate the party would be obliged to allow them to do so, whereas in an oligarchy we have the open admission that the establishment does not want the common voters to be in charge.

And nominating a losing candidate might very well be a perfectly logical choice for voters wanting to send a message to its party leadership that they have taken the party where the voters do not want it to be and willing to surrender control of the executive for four years in order to send that message.

“What we are doing is not working and we need to stop doing it. Even if the new thing is wrong, at least it’s different, and we are not merely repeating the same stupidity,” is a valid message. Democratic leadership is rejecting that message somewhat more subtly than are Republicans, but both parties are vigorously rejecting it.

A Tale of Two Parties

The GOP establishment is frantically trying to thwart the choice of its voters by finding some way to “stop Trump” and nominate someone who is more acceptable to the establishment, but who would demonstrably be less acceptable to the voters because… Well, because whoever the establishment might choose, the voters have not been voting for him. This is not rocket science, really.

And not only are Republicans voting for the candidate that the GOP establishment does not want, they are doing so in record numbers. Turnout is unprecedented in every Republican primary so far.

Meanwhile, on the Democratic side, the establishment is firmly behind a candidate who is winning by somewhat less of a margin than they would have you believe, and who is thought to be “dishonest and untrustworthy” by 53% of those who voted in Democratic primary elections so far. Apparently a significant number of Democratic voters are willing to vote for someone who is “dishonest and untrustworthy,”  which I think does not speak well for party principles, but that’s a different issue.

The “superdelegates,” who do not answer to voters and which have no equivalent in the Republican Party, are almost 100% pledged to this establishment candidate. The Democratic National Committee scheduled the debates for the convenience of the establishment candidate, and the establishment is actively trashing both the person and the policies of the rebel candidate.

Meanwhile, turnout in Democratic primary elections is something close to a disaster, down anywhere from 35% to as much as 50% in every primary election to date from the last contested primary in 2008.

The media is trumpeting about how the establishment candidate currently has a lead that is larger by percentage than the lead Obama enjoyed at any time in the 2008 campaign, but that may be caused by the fact that most of the voters cannot stand the establishment candidate and have been convinced by the media and the establishment that the rebel candidate cannot win, and are staying home in disgust.

What the parties have in common is that neither of them is paying the slightest bit of attention to the voters and are, in fact, openly rejecting what the voters are saying to them. How this will play out remains to be seen, but this nation’s transformation to oligarchy is now complete.

Good for Minnesota

My senior niece lives in Minnesota and sometimes got a little weary of me ribbing her about Michele Bachmann, claiming that that district is an anomaly in the state. Minnesota is not, she says, populated by idiots, but is filled with very pleasant and intelligent people.

I have been pretty sure she was telling the truth given that she lives there and given that state’s two Senators, both of whom are not only sane but show signs of being extremely intelligent, and yesterday’s primary election provides further confirmation of her assertion.

Bernie Sanders not only won the state, he won it by a rather large margin, and not only did Trump fail to win, he came in third. Too bad about their winters. I guess between idiots and beaches and what Minnesota has… And yes, I speak from experience. I spent nine winters in Wisconsin and Minnesota is, if anything, worse.

Minnesota was, however, pretty much the only bright spot in yesterday’s mess. The media is overstating the case when they claim that Bernie is toast, and I think Hillary is exercising her proclivity for arrogance by writing him off and beginning her campaign against Trump. But let’s face it, we are more likely than not going to be faced with a choice between Hillary and Donald in the fall, which is much like being offered a dinner choice between horse shit and vomit.

On Minimum Wage

I have no objection to raising the minimum wage. There is no real proven downside to it, but I see no upside which is of sufficient significance to make it a major plank in the Democratic Party platform. The party’s emphasis on raising the minimum wage makes the Democratic Party the party of low expectations.

If Democrats were “fighting for working men and women” as they claim to be doing, but most certainly are not, they would be talking about bringing the $30/hr jobs and the $45/hr jobs back from overseas. They would be talking about restoring the power of the working class by reinvigorating labor unions and collective bargaining. They, including Bernie Sanders, are not even touching on those subjects.

Those $30/hr and $45/hr jobs began being lost to offshoring during a Democratic Clinton administration, resulting in no small part from a NAFTA treaty promoted vigorously by Hillary Clinton as well as her husband. Remember Ross Perot and his “giant sucking sound” claim? He was laughed at but he was precisely right.

Defenders of the policy of permanently making America a minimum wage economy claim that “those jobs are never coming back”  or that “those jobs cannot be brought back,”  but they have no cogent arguments as to why that is so. Those jobs can be brought back, but it would be hard, and this country apparently no longer does hard things.

In fact, the Democratic Party embraces the continuance of the offshoring of our economy with its support of “free trade”  as defined by the current extension of NAFTA to the Pacific Ocean nations; a pact known as the TPP.

Obama promised in his campaign that he would support labor unions, including a noteworthy statement that whenever there was a picket line, “I will be there at your side.”  It would not be unreasonable to assume he was speaking figuratively rather than literally, but he remained completely disengaged as the Wisconsin governor disbanded the unions in that state, offering not even token verbal support for the working class.

If Democrats were “fighting for working men and women” as they claim to be doing, they would be talking about ways to restore collective bargining so that employees would no longer be powerless when dealing with employers. They would be finding ways to eliminate the "right to work laws" which are passed by legislatures at the behest of business campaign contributors and not by voters.

One has to remember that when we “vote for the lesser evil” we are still voting for evil. The status of the working class is not going to change in this country until we throw evil out, both greater and lesser, and make it clear that we are demanding something better.

No Crystal Ball Needed

In addition to mind reading, I also flunked fortune telling in high school and so that is another thing which I generally eschew in discussion and writing. Still, one can see trends without needing the use of a crystal ball.

Democrats are concerned about low turnouts in the primary elections and, for the most part, are unsure what to do about it. Consensus seems to be they need a higher profile by the likes of Bill Clinton on the campaign trail, and that the candidates perhaps need to yell a little louder or something.

It doesn’t occur to them that while Hillary Clinton is viewed by 53% of Democratic voters as “not honest or trustworthy,”  everyone in the Democratic establishment is telling voters that if they nominate Bernie Sanders they will lose the White House to the Republicans. I can think of no better strategy for keeping voters away from the polls in droves.

Meanwhile, Republicans are trying to find a way to get rid of Donald Trump because he is winning. Do I need to explain the insanity of that?

This election is going to be a) disgusting and b) weird.

Logic Does Not Prevail

Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper Jr. said in a Senate hearing on Feb 11th that, “there are now more Sunni violent extremist groups, members and safe havens than at any time in history.”

This after thirteen years of a military adventure in Afghanistan which Obama has repeatedly described as being for the purpose of “denying them space in which to plan their attacks.”  This after seven years of Obama’s plan for raining down death and terror in at least seven countries using Hellfire missiles fired from unmanned drones at “suspected terrorists.”

If what you are doing is not working…

Peak Stupid

Every time I think that I have seen the ultimate example of the stupidity of which the American people are capable, I find that there are new heights yet to be scaled. The latest is a poll showing that people like the Sanders plan of “Medicare for all,”  but not if it is accompanied by a tax of 2% on gross income.

Just stop a moment and think about the Sanders plan. We presently pay a tax for Medicare; 1.45% which we pay for our entire working careers and which covers us, statistically, only for the last twenty years of our lives. Sanders is offering to extend that to our entire lifetimes, that is by more sixty years, four times the coverage, for only 2% more, an amount which is barely more than double. That is a howling bargain.

Not to mention that the Sanders plan replaces private health insurance. Would you rather pay 6% or more of your income to a private insurance company than pay 2% to the government, merely because the latter is called a “tax”  for God’s sake?

Besides the “peak stupid” of that, I must comment on the endless appetite of the public for government benefits while being totally unwilling to pay for any of them. That is in part stupidity, an ignorant hatred of the word “tax,”  but it is in part due to elements of selfishness and greed in our national culture which are profoundly disturbing to me.

Can GOP Stop Trump?

Interesting question. The answer is a lot less interesting than is the question itself. As in, if Trump is the choice of people who are voting for him, why would the Republican Party want to "stop" him? Curious.

Big Money Bites It

The Los Angeles developer who spent $10.5 million on a campaign to pass “Measure A,” which calls for building a mega-mall on the shore of a lagoon in Carlsbad, actually lost yesterday. A small, underfunded group with $100,000 to spend won the day by a narrow margin.

Sadly, $75,000 of funding for what turned out to be the winning side came from a competitor of the LA developer, owner of a nearby mall which would have been in competition with the new mall, so the “save the lagoon” group was not entirely the noble cause that it presented itself to be.

Still, Los Angeles big money did not win the day. Sons of bitches didn’t get our football team (at least not yet), and they didn’t get our lagoon, either.

Most of the $10.5 million was spent on television ads that talked about “saving 176 acres of open space,” about being “good for us local businessmen,” and about “reducing traffic” and “shorter red light wait times.” Because every small business wants a shopping mall nearby competing with him, and we all know that no shopping mall ever creates traffic.

While swanning about “saving 176 acres of open space,” no mention is made about the 49 acres of open space being destroyed by the mall. As a matter of fact, none of the ads mention anything about a shopping mall at all. Most people outside of Carlsbad did not even know that Measure A had anything to do with a shopping mall. “Shopping mall? What shopping mall? I thought it was about open space.”

I am somewhat cheered. For once, big money and dishonesty did not prevail.

Rendering Incoherent

I believe Obama is sitting in the White House thinking, "What can I do next to really piss of the Republicans?" Nominating a Supreme Court justice is too obvious, and he wants to dangle that one in front of them for a while anyway. Then the proverbial light bulb appears over his head. "I know,"  he declaims, "I'll go to Cuba."

Incoherent Campaign

Hillary Clinton now trails Bernie Sanders by 47% to 44% in a national poll. Before reading too much into that, it should be noted that it is a Fox News poll and that, like the general election, popular vote doesn’t really matter. A candidate has to garner delegates, and Hillary still has a significant advantage in that metric, if for no other reason than the superdelegates who do not care what voters think and are unanimously pledged to Hillary.

Still, it does show that her campaign message of “I am the reason you can’t have nice things” is not going over very well against the Sanders message of “vote for me if you want nice things.”

Hillary’s message, an effort to counter the Sanders liberalism and loudly applauded by Paul Krugman, is that candidates for office should not make promises on which they cannot deliver. I don’t know where she got that idea, since candidates of all political parties have been doing it for more than two centuries. In fact, she is doing it quite a bit of it herself in this campaign, but I won’t get into that.

Her argument is that Democrats shouldn’t try to do good things because the Republicans will stop them. She uses as an example how Republicans blocked Obama, and then claims she is “running for a third Obama term” and doesn’t seem to think that is just a little bit incoherent.

Which leads me to believe that if she occupies the White House we will have another president saying things like, “We are denying them space in which to plan their attacks.”

Feline Logic

Whenever my wife needs to leave early, jury duty today for instance, she tries to be as quiet as possible, but her efforts are in vain. As soon as the damned cat has finished breakfast she considers it her bounden duty to use her feline wiles to get my lazy ass out of the bed.

Her breath usually smells like dead fish at that point, so the experience is not as much fun as it might be.

Why she needs me out of my bed is unclear, because the minute I am up she curls up in her bed and goes to sleep.

And On Google

A headline reading, "Near-Earth Asteroids are Spectacularly Destroyed Before Reaching the Sun."

They go on to say that the actual mechanism causing asteroids to disrupt is still unknown because the destruction itself has never been seen, and so they don't know, in fact, whether they are "spectacularly" destroyed or whether the destruction is utterly mundane and would bore the viewer to tears.

That is not, however, going to stop them from writing a colorful headline. It's called "clickbait."

No, I Did Not Read It

On Salon.com I find a featured headline which reads, Beyond "Hookers For Hillary", with a subhead reading, "Nevada's Bunny Ranch workers are drawing attention to the varied, complex and often-ignored politics of sex workers." Oddly perhaps, I am not particularly interested in the "politics of sex workers." God help us all.

On Election Coverage

I don't discuss the election much because I have been around too long. It is a well known cycle, endlessly repeating itself. The electorate realizes the party in power is incapable of governing, so it votes the other party into power, only to rediscover that it also is incapable of governing. Rinse and repeat.

By definition, a political party is incapable of governing because governance and maintaining itself in power are incompatible goals. Political parties are not concerned with governance. Their goal is to keep themselves in power, and inevitably that goal becomes so transparent as to be self defeating.

Another Initiative

The television is flooded with advertisements supporting “Measure A” in Carlsbad, coming up in a February 23rd special election in that San Diego suburb. Since I don’t live in Carlsbad I haven’t been paying much attention, but my initial reaction was to oppose the idea simply because somebody, known only in the ads as “Citizens for Agua Hedionda,” is spending so much money to support it. “Follow the money” and all that.

Turns out it is a plan to construct a huge mega-mall on the south shore of Agua Hedionda lagoon. It was approved by the City Council before being blocked by a citizen’s initiative. The City Council is still lobbying furiously in favor of the mega-mall, which makes me think they are still trying to earn their bribes campaign contributions.

One of the ads includes the City Fire Department, complete with firefighters in uniform and a fire engine in the background, supporting the measure because it will reduce traffic and reduce wait times for the arrival of fire fighters when you call for them, in that it “requires the developer to provide $10 million for infrastructure.”

Anyone who believes that a $500 million mega-mall is going to reduce traffic probably also believes that $10 million is a lot of money when it comes to building roads. That amount will build an entrance to the mega-mall, but that’s about all it will do. It certainly isn’t going to add a lane for the entire length of Pacific Coast Highway, and if you think $10 million in road construction is going to make the Fire Department get to your house faster, I have a bridge I’d like to sell you.

On closer review, the city’s brochure doesn’t mention the fire department at all; it only talks about red light wait times for regular drivers. Maybe that’s what the firefighters are actually talking about with their “wait times,” in which case what does the fire department have to do with anything and why are they making the ad?

Another ad has a weathered looking lady standing before a field of wild flowers that stretches to the horizon. She tells us breathlessly that “Measure A will protect 176 acres of open space,” and waxes poetic about the wonderfulness of the coastal wildlife.

She wants you to think that field behind her is what she’s talking about, but an acre isn’t anywhere near that big. A football field is three acres. Besides, if the measure fails and the mall isn’t built the existing open space of 225 acres will remain 225 acres of open space. So the measure doesn’t “protect 176 acres of open space” so much as it destroys 49 acres of open space.

But that’s how the “initiative process” works in California. The side with the money says nothing about building a mega-mall, telling the public we are building roads, reducing traffic and preserving 176 acres of open space. The side that has no money is unable to get the message out that the plan is about a mega-mall, increased traffic and destroying 49 acres of existing open space. And, of course, the money usually wins.

This Is Promising

Chase Elliott, son of Bill Elliott, won the pole at Daytona today. Not the first time a rookie has done so, but he is the youngest driver ever to have done it.

Matt Kenseth is the other driver with a guaranteed starting spot (2nd). All others will race for starting position in a pair of qualifying races on Thursday.

What Recovery?

Journalists and politicians are still touting new unemployment claims as evidence that our economy is still strong despite the declining stock market, evidence signaled by the bond market, and that the rest of the world is clearly going into recession. We are not going into recession because our economy has “decoupled” from the world economy and workers are, presumably, not being laid off in droves. Today’s political candidates are hoping that theory holds up through the elections.

Unemployment is a “lagging indicator” moreover, meaning that the numbers are affected after the fact rather than beforehand, and economists know that. So to be using the unemployment numbers as a predictor of the economy is ignorance, stupidity or outright dishonesty.

In any case, our economy in terms of the working class is not strong and never even came close to any kind of “strong recovery” from the 2008 recession.

Ian Welsh, who is Canadian and is therefor guilty of a certain degree of honesty seldom found in this nation, presents a graphic depiction of the working class “recovery” in this country. It is striking and has great impact because he presents only the facts that are needed to paint a complete picture, using three graphs.

First he shows the graph of the official percentage of the workforce unemployed as calculated by the government’s Bureau of Lies and Scams, whereby if you are disgusted with the job market and are no longer looking for a job you are not unemployed, even though you do not have a job and are living with your parents and eating their food. Most journalists and politicians pull this graph out and wave it around, pointing to how the line plunges from a high of 10% down to its current 5% and claiming that it proves how wonderfully the economy has improved.

This graph is rather dramatically countered with another graph showing the percentage of the work force which is currently employed. Politicians and journalists never show or refer to this one because it drops from a high of 65% prior to 2008 down to below 59% in 2009, and it never significantly goes back up. There are fewer ways to cook these numbers, because whether you are looking for work or not, you are not participating in the work force if you do not have a job.

Notice, too, how the line did not start to drop noticeably until some time after the recession started, further evidence that unemployment cannot be used as a predictor of economic conditions.

One commentor promptly claimed that the reduced participation in the workforce was caused by illegal immigration which is, of course, utter nonsense. The work force is counted using Social Security numbers, and illegal immigrants don’t have Social Security numbers. The growth in the work force is caused by eighteen-year-olds, who are not in the work force, turning nineteen and becoming part of the work force.

His last graph provides the change in income for various wage groups between 2006 and 2014, which completes the picture that leads to the title of this piece.

Freelancing Backfires

I was making jambalaya yesterday and discovered I was out of creole seasoning. So I just made my own, grabbing bottles from the spice rack and throwing shit in the pot at random. It turned out awesome, better than it does when I use my usual Zatarain's, but now I have no idea whatever what I put in it. I don't mean how much of what, I mean what the hell it was that I put in. Next time take notes, fool. Oh well, back to Zatarain's.

Why?

If you are a man and you vote for a man because he is a man, you are an asshole. But, according to Madeleine Albright and Gloria Steinem, if you are a woman and you don't vote for a woman because she is a woman, "there is a special place in hell reserved for you."  If voting for a man due to gender is sexist, why isn't voting for a woman due to gender sexist?

Hyping the Threat

When we launch a satellite into orbit we are “launching a satellite” using a rocket. When North Korea does so it is “testing a missile that could reach the United States” and, of course, it’s not a rocket it’s a missile. Even more alarming is that the satellite which the “missile” put into orbit was “about the size of a nuclear bomb” and it crossed over the Super Bowl.

Never mind that the game had been over for more than an hour, so it didn’t “cross over the Super Bowl,”  it crossed over an empty stadium. And we won’t go into how many things our satellites cross over, but it can be summed up as pretty much everything on the planet.

I love the bit about the satellite’s size. Nuclear bombs are top secret, so only a few people know how big they are, and none of them work for CBS News. I’d say it’s a safe bet that nuclear bombs come in a fairly wide variety of sizes, so claiming that the North Korean satellite is “about the size of a nuclear bomb” is hyperbole pretty much on the face of it.

I think this means we probably have to nuke North Korea.

Post Game

That was a good game if you like defense, which I do, but Phil Sims can near as dammit ruin a Super Bowl. Most of the time he has no idea what is going on and merely babbles from the vacuum which exists inside his head. Ginn catches a 32-yard pass and Simms tells us, "Of course Ward was all over it."  Ward was three steps away from it, which is why Ginn caught it.

I was disappointed in Cam Newton at several levels. He choked from the first quarter on. In the third quarter he backed away rather than making any attempt to recover his own fumble. And his lack of class after the game gave Auburn a bad name. Too bad. I won't enjoy watching him as much next year. If he'd merely had a bad game, sure, but to lose his professionalism during and after the game like that, to display the "I'm a classy Mr. Showboat, but only when I win,"  is just trashy.

People, including his own coach, are making excuses for him. "He's young and needs to grow into the role." Balderdash. This was his fourth year in the NFL and his fourth year as a starting quarterback for his team.

Pregame Ruminations

A few sports writers are picking the Broncos, but the Panthers are the overwhelming favorite. I can’t even really say which team I want to win, being a long time Broncos fan, and having been a fan of Cam Newton since he played for Auburn. The second half of that is quite a statement coming from someone for whom the opposite of “stop” is spelled with an “x.”  John Elway is is still with the Broncos and is my favorite player ever.

(For those not from the south, LSU, Geaux Tigers)

I would like to see Ronnie Hillman have a good day. He’s a little guy from San Diego State who was not supposed to make it in the NFL. I’d also like to see Ron Rivera have a good day. He is one of the finest gentlemen ever to grace the coaching ranks. Opposing teams, but...

As to eats: ribs and wings on the grill, and roasted potatoes. Not baby backs, but meaty ribs from a full grown pig, precooked yesterday and marinated overnight. I'm not really a big fan of wings, but my wife expressed a hankering and clipped a recipe from a magazine, and I want to encourage her suggestions so I went for it. Also precooked yesterday and marinated overnight for grilling today. Potatoes are those miniature golden ones, roasted until they are just slightly crunchy outside and nice and mealy inside.

Politics of Incrementalism

I am astonished, although perhaps I shouldn’t be, by the success of Hillary’s campaign against Bernie based on his ideas being “impractical” and that he could never get them through Congress. Like she could get anything through a Republican Congress, which hates her probably even worse than they do Obama.

But more than that, she is selling voters on the fear of losing. “We probably could not get it done, and trying to do it and failing would be a fate worse than death, so we must not, must not even try to do it.”  Never, she is telling us, attempt to do anything unless you are certain you can bring it off. Bernie keeps pointing out that you cannot get something done if you don’t even try to do it, but very few in the party leadership are listening.

What kind of political party buys into Hillary’s message? Who buys into a message that relative ineffectiveness is better than a risk of failure?

Nancy Pelosi does. As House Leader she would not permit a bill to come to the floor unless she knew in advance that she had the votes to pass it. She was never willing to come to the voters and say, “Well, we tried, but we were outvoted. Elect more of us and we will win next time.”  Instead, she didn’t even try.

Republicans voted something like twenty times to overturn Obamacare. It was a silly idea, in my opinion, but they were willing to lose a vote as often as necessary to keep trying to do something that they believe in. I respect that a whole lot more than I respect Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi and their silly and cowardly politics of incrementalism.

Posted without comment

Paul Krugman is a Tool

Paul Krugman in the title of todays blog post says that his "head stagnates," which is true enough, but probably not in the way he meant when he wrote it. His head, mind, has been stagnating for some years.

In his post yesterday he manages to come up with a rationale that Clinton's "victory" in Iowa was not actually the virtual tie that statistics showed it to be, but was an overwhelming victory of massive importance.

Talk about being a tool of the establishment...

Salon Does It Again

With an article titled, "7 places to find porn that’s actually worth watching."  I question the premise that any porn is actually worth watching, and I certainly did not go to any of the sites they listed. Just reading the descriptions of the sites that they considered to be "worth watching," gave me a bad case of the heebie jeebies. I'm not going to go into it here, but you can read for yourself what Salon considers to be "good porn."  Yikes.

Langiappe

No football this weekend. Well, there's the Pro Bowl, but who watches that? Stock car racing doesn't start until the week after the Super Bowl, which is itself still a week away. But I recorded some curling last night and, since that sport is not widely reported, I do not know the outcome. I can watch that.

It's women's curling, which is fine. Curling is the one sport in which there is absolutely zero difference in watching the men's and women's versions. I think a women's team could compete against a men's team on a perfectly equal footing. There probably should be some sort of profound social commentary to be made about that, but I can't think of any off the top of my head.

Anyway, I do enjoy watching curling, so I'm good to go.

The Whole Story

It is amazing to me the number of pundits and politicians, Paul Krugman and Hillary Clinton among them, who are critical of universal health care based on the bogus argument that “it will massively increase taxes.”  Bernie Sanders has no problem with that, planning to add 2.2% to my personal income tax, a move which makes him my hero. Based on the advocacy of “voting in my own best interest,”  which I don’t do, that would get him my vote.

(As an aside, I vote in behalf of the best interest of the nation as a whole, not for the benefit of myself personally or of my own state.)

If Bernie passed universal health care, added 2.2% to my personal income tax, and relieved me of paying out the 13.2% of my income that I paid last year in health insurance premiums, copays and deductibles, I would be delighted with that. His opponents always mention the taxes, but they never point out that the taxpayer no longer has to pay for insurance.

In a similar vein, it was reported briefly in the news that signups in the “healthcare.gov” insurance plans has dropped this year by about one third over last year. The issue was dropped immediately by news organizations and has not been picked up for discussion by one single commentator or pundit. It’s a pretty massive drop in enrollment, and one has to wonder how come the media is not asking why it is happening.

I don’t know, of course, but one reason that occurs to me is that many people found out that having health insurance is not worth much when the copays and deductibles are so high, and the networks are so limited, that you cannot afford to use it.

Flip Flop

A person can change position as he is presented with new information or as situations change. I have no problem with that. I would, in fact, have a problem with a person who refused to change position in the face of an evolving environment. But the Democratic Party has changed its fundamental campaign principle from “hope and change”  to “maintain the status quo,” and has done it entirely for the purpose of maintaining its grip on the power of the White House.

I would expect Hillary Clinton to use pretty much anything she can to be critical of Bernie Sanders. I do not say that critically of Clinton; she is running against him in an election. She cannot oppose his plan for universal health care on its merits, Democrats have been advocating that for decades, but she has to find some manner in which to be critical of his espousal of it, and so she decides that his promise is too radical and can never succeed. She claims that we need to maintain the present plan and just tinker with some improvements to it.

So far, I have no problem with the ethics of this, although I would certainly be inclined to back the candidate who has more courage and not the cowardly candidate who says that my nation is incapable of adopting significant change. Canada was able to convert from the same system we presently use for health care to the universal plan that Sanders proposes, and I’m no fan of anyone who claims Canada can do that which America cannot.

My issue is with the Democratic Party, who backs the Clinton approach. “This is a nation of incremental change,” is the mantra of the party leadership, after eight years of marching in lockstep with a president who was the “hope and change” presidential candidate. Either the nation changed pretty dramatically in the past eight years, which would debunk their “nation of incremental change” theory, or the Democratic Party did.

They are, however, trying to change and not change at the same time, to be both revolutionary and status quo, because they are campaigning for the first female president and suggesting that we should vote for her both because she is a woman and because she won’t change things very much.

So other than changing history by her gender she’s not going to do much, and voting for her purely to feminize the White House would not be the least bit sexist. Voting for someone else, and thereby avoiding feminizing the White House, would make you a chauvinist misogynistic pig.

Bad Weather Driving

I was driving down the I-8 freeway a couple days ago on a clear, sunshiny day and threw a glass of water out of my car window. Four cars behind me crashed.

No, it is NOT Brady vs. Manning

At no time will Tom Brady ever "face off against"  Payton Manning on the football field today. Football doesn't work that way. It is Payton Manning vs. the New England defense and Tom Brady vs. the Denver defense.

Okay, actually it's the New England offense vs. the Denver defense, and the Denver offense vs. the New England defense. Whatever.

Payton Manning is a dead quarterback who doesn't know he died of old age two years ago. Only a few people, me being one of them, are able to admit that the man is at least two years past his prime. Still, a dead Payton Manning is better than at least thirteen other NFL starting quarterbacks who are still alive, so...  Not to mention that if you can get to Tom Brady with your front four you can beat him. If you have to blitz him, Tom Brady will kill you because the blitz will have left the secondary weakened, but Denver can get to him with their front four.

Denver by a score of 24-17.

I want Cam Newton the Panthers to beat Arizona, but the game is close and hard to call. I would like Cam Newton to score about ten touchdowns, because I love the looks on the faces of the little kids he gives the footballs to.

I'll go with the Panthers, 38-31.

Snowpocalypse?

At the center of the storm, Washington DC, the forecast is for 12"-24" of snow, and the media is treating this as something close to the end of the world. Grocery stores are empty, schools closed in advance, people are being warned that they could die... The subway is shut down. The subway. Isn't that underground?

I don't get it. I lived in Milwaukee WI for six years, and we had 24" snowfalls several times every year. We had "dipstick heaters" in our cars. If you don't know what that is, I'm very happy for you.

Sometimes 24" or more fell overnight while we were sleeping, and that did not even provide a valid excuse for being late to work the next morning. It certainly didn't result in news anchors coming to town and screaming about the end of the world.

What is this country turning into?

Media Mediocrity

The San Diego Union Tribune is owned by the Los Angeles Times, and so an LA Times writer's comumn appears in the Union Tribune saying that the Chargers should stay in San Diego, not based on San Diego wanting to keep them, but on the basis that when they were in Los Angeles they failed. Of course that was 54 years ago, and at that time all AFL teams were failing, the AFL itself was failing, but let's not let historical perspective get in the way of trying to make a point.

He debunks Dean Spanos' claim that 25% of the Chargers fan base comes from the LA area by saying that "I've never met one."  I rather doubt that Spanos claim myself, but I'm not satisfied that one sportswriter's claim to have met every existing football fan in Los Angeles County is adequate proof that Spanos is lying.

One of the narratives is that today’s Chargers could take the town from the Rams if they win more games. But that didn’t work back then. While the Rams were 4-7-1, the Chargers and starting quarterback Jack Kemp were 10-4 and advanced to the AFL’s first championship game against the Houston Oilers.

Right, did you pick up on the "first championship game" bit? He is equating an established team in the NFL, with several division titles and a world class quarterback, to a first year team in a first year league, with players whose names were not known and whose whole existance was largely laughed at. Microsoft didn't exactly set the world on fire its first year, either. Hewlett Packard certainly didn't. Would he want to keep those entities out of his town today?

Pandering to the Establishment

Paul Krugman panders to the status quo today, engaging in his usual method of misquoting the people who he doesn’t like and applying his implications masquerading as facts out of context. The accuses Bernie Sanders of dishonestly proposing a health care plan that is “mostly smoke and mirrors.”

He says that the plan will “impose large middle-class taxes,”  and that it “relies on the assumption of huge cost savings,”  and, “it involves a huge magic asterisk.”

As to the taxes, Sanders proposes a progressive addition to the income tax, with heavier hits on the rich, so there is nothing “middle class” about it. Further, that tax replaces insurance premiums, deductibles, copays, and costs which insurance companies presently do not pay for various reasons. So if I pay $6000 more in taxes and am relieved of the $13,000 that I paid in medical expenses last year, I’d say that’s a pretty good deal.

The savings do not consist of one or two undefined “huge savings,”  they are outlined in the plan and are entirely realistic; money spent by the insurance industry marketing and managing its plans and generating profits, for instance, and the cost to doctors and hospitals for billing. The plan would also seek deep discounts from the drug industry, which Obamacare doesn’t even attempt.

The main thrust of the Sanders plan is universal coverage, to which Krugman devotes no attention. His entire piece is devoted to debunking exaggerated claims as to cost savings; claims which Sanders has never made. He says that to “get costs down to, say, Canadian levels, we’d need to do what they do: say no to patients, telling them that they can’t always have the treatment they want.”

First, Sanders never claimed we could “get costs down to Canadian levels,”  and what’s more, in order to do so we would no more have to deny health care than Canada does. We would simply have to begin paying reasonable salaries to doctors who perform complex surgeries, say $200,000 per year instead of $20 million. We would have to pay $8 per pill for cancer treatment instead of $750 per pill. Etcetera.

The title of his piece today spells out where this nation has gone. We have gone from Jack Kennedy taking us to the moon with, “We do these things not because they are easy but because they are hard,”  to Krugman surrendering to the death of universal health care with “health reform is hard.”

Sanders says that we can provide health care to everyone in this nation and spells out how we can afford to do it. Sanders is right. Krugman, Clinton, Obama and the rest of the moneyed establishment point out that providing universal health care should not be attempted because it would be hard to do and “too disruptive.”
They are wrong.

USA Network: Colony

I love science fiction and post-apolyptic stuff, so the long buildup for this show hooked me big time. Watched it last night and am fairly unimpressed by the slow start. Previews at the end give me some hope, but only a little.
I still have Mad Max:Fury Road and The Martian on tap, so...

Fine Lines

From a comment made in an online discussion:

"17 cargo ships pollute as much as all the vehicles in the world. Necessary trade is … well … necessary, but trade for the purpose of wage arbitrage is evil, not only for moral harm of slavery, but for the enormous environmental harm it does."

A simple truth all too seldom told.

Kudos

The Iranians detained some Americans who strayed into their waters. It was entirely appropriate for them to do so, provided that they treated those sailors with respect and proper care. It appears they did so, and the sailors were promptly returned to American jurisdiction through diplomatic means. This is what happens when a powerful nation acts like an adult and actually talks directly with another nation which it considers to be an "enemy."

This relationship with Iran and the opening of Cuba are, in my opinion, the only two things which Obama can properly claim as true successes of his time in office. John Kerry deserves high praise, more so than Obama actually, for the Iranian agreement.

One can only hope that the next administration will continue and build on these initiatives, but the rhetoric from both sides gives little hope that such will be the case.

I Know I'm Being Petty, But...

Salon.Com, with its pretense to importance in the political journalism field, has an article headlined, "The search for the perfect dildo: Size really does matter."

I no longer do anything more than browse the headlines of that website, and now I'm wondering why I continue to do even that.

ROLL TIDE

Molly spends a lot of time on my lap, but not last night. I think she was hiding in the closet. All I know is that early in the second quarter she made a high speed exit from the living room. My wife stayed in the back bedroom but not, so far as I know, in the closet.

Alabama’s defense was not nearly as bad as I was accusing them of being; at high volume apparently, and using some of my Navy language. Deshaun Watson is really good, but when you are rushing a dropback passer who can run like that you need to shut off the fucking running lanes. How do you repeatedly have two pass rushers put their hands on him 13-15 yards behind the line of scrimmage and then have him run for a first down?

Nick Saban apparently agreed with me, at times anyway. First time I’ve ever seen him throw his headphones. Sort of an exercise in futility, it turned out, since they were tethered to him, but he made his point. When the defense came off the field they headed to the sideline as far away from him as they could get.

I was pretty hot at Saban when he left LSU, but the man is a quintessential gentleman and one of the best leaders in the coaching business. Nick Saban is, actually, what leadership is all about.

When invited by the idiotic reporter to say that special teams had won the game he declined. “Special teams had an impact,”  he replied, ”but we made some impact plays on offense and the defense made some important stops. This was a total team effort.”

When invited to compare this national title to the ones which preceded it, he declined that too. “Tonight is about this team and this championship. I could not be more proud of these guys.”  One gets an idea why his players put forth the effort for him that they do.

And then the man even smiled. I wasn’t sure he could.

Ditch The Myth

The myth persists that the financial wizards of Wall Street were unaware of the danger of the financial instruments they were buying and selling, were too stupid to see the bubble of 2007 and were unable to predict the crash of 2008. This is a fallacy. They knew exactly what they were doing. They knew precisely the damage it would cause to the working class. They didn't care.

They also knew precisely how the government would react, if for no other reason that that they control the government. They knew that, while millions would suffer severe loss of wealth, they themselves would walk away from the wreckage with their wealth not only intact but enhanced. That was their plan, and they pulled it off.

They are doing it again, with a stock market overvalued by a factor of at least six times, much of the overvalue caused by stock buybacks.

On Payton Manning

Only people over sixty will get this, but I happened to see a couple of guys on ESPN discussing Payton Manning and his fourth-quarter entrance into the final game of the season. "He's like Charlton Heston in El Cid,"  one of them said, "where they prop him on a horse with a spear to hold him upright and drape a cloak over him and nobody knows he's dead, and they win the battle just from seeing him."

Silly Cheerleading

A Reuters news item describes the US economy as being “on solid ground” due to an employment “surge”
in December employment, not thinking that much of that surge might have been part time and/or temporary holiday jobs, and specifically discarding “a troubling international backdrop.”  Other news items have used the same report to describe the economy as “on the right track” and “encouraging.”

First of all, the report did not actually portray the “robust employment data” that Reuters claims it did. The 292,000 job increase was from the “Establishment Survey,”  which reports jobs filled. Since many of those may be (are) part time jobs and the people filling them are people who were already working at other part time jobs, the impression of newly employed people is inflated. Additionally, if an employer creates a temporary job lasting one week, that is simply reported as a “new job created.”  If the employer does that two or three times, it is reported as two or three jobs created.

The “Household Survey” reports only 192,000 newly employed persons, and it does that only by means of a “seasonal adjustment”  to the numbers. Without that adjustment, that is by using the numbers as actually counted, the employment market actually lost 93,000
jobs in December.

Which numbers are accurate? Well, I don’t know, and that really is my point.

And to conclude from this reporting that employment is going in the right direction and start waving pompoms is particularly absurd. There were 3.5 million jobs added in 2014 and only 2.95 added in 2015 which, being a decrease of 15%, is most certainly not the right direction in a job market that is still well below full employment. Even worse is that manufacturing, which added 500,000 jobs in 2014, added only 30,000 in 2015. That’s a decrease of 94% - absolutely not “on the right track.”

They even mention that salaries are flat, not really even keeping up with inflation, and simply toss that aside with the impression of, “Oh well, we’ll deal with that later.”

And the “international backdrop,” which they so blithely ignore, is a good bit more than “troubling.” Notice what’s happening in China right now? The Chinese economy is essentially crashing, the Japanese economy is doing that slow motion thing like two planets colliding in a sci-fi film, and most of Europe is clearly heading into recession if it isn’t already in one.

Reuters is apparently in the economic camp that believes that America has “decoupled” from the world economy and will be unaffected by economic conditions outside our borders. I’m sure the ostrich felt that way, too, until a lion came up and bit it in the ass.

Genius

Lovie Smith, after leading Tampa Bay to a 6-10 season in his second year rebuilding the Buccaneers as head coach, 3-3 in the division, got fired this week.

The Chargers on the other hand, after suffering a 4-12 season, 0-6 in the division, and its third year of missing the playoffs under head coach Mike McCoy, not only will allow him to complete his contract through 2016, but gave him an extension which will keep him on board through the 2017 season. Awesome.

Weather Today

Who says San Diego doesn't have weather? We have weather; we just don't have it very often.

And sometimes we overdo it a bit. There are no fewer than six hazard notices at the moment, including flash flood warning, high surf warning, flash flood watch, wind advisory, severe thunderstorm warning and beach hazard advisories. The latter has to do with unusually high tides driving surf across costal roads and highways.

My wife, cat and I live on high ground, so...

Update, 3:10pm: And they just added a tornado warning for the area where my wife is currently at work, extending south to less than a mile from where the cat and I are at home. Less and less I like this El Nino.

Executive Action

I am not all “up in arms” about Obama stealing my guns for several reasons, chief among them being that his executive orders amount to the classic “sounding brass; filled with sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

Actually, it is a “tale told by an idiot” which is full of sound and fury, and sounding brass is properly compared to tinkling cymbals, but I like the mixed metaphor better. Otherwise I would either have to call Obama an idiot or compare gun control to tinkling cymbals, and neither one really works for me.

He has not “closed the loophole” allowing purchase of guns at trade shows and online without background checks, because no such loophole exists. Dealers at trade shows are required to do background checks, and online dealers are required to ship firearms to a licensed dealer to have a background check performed before delivery to the purchaser. Perhaps better enforcement is needed, but the laws are in place, so Obama’s executive order is essentially window dressing.

He does attempt to put a halt to those at trade shows who claim to be “hobbyists” and therefor exempt from regulation, but only to the extent of pointing out that doing so is already illegal. Enforcement is not going to be any easier in the future than it is now, so I’m not sure what this part of his proclamation actually accomplishes.

In any case, not one mass shooting to date has been performed with a gun bought online or at a gun show without a background check, so Obama is not even locking the barn door after the horse has been stolen, he is locking the door of a barn which has never contained any horses.

He is not adding 200 new agents to the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco Firearms and Explosives, he is asking Congress to fund that addition. Congress isn’t going to do that, so write that off as mere rhetoric.

The rest of it is a lot of fluff about background checks but, again, not one shooting has been a issue with a firearm purchased as a result of a background check failing to discover information. Where persons who could not legally buy a gun had them in their possession, the gun was either stolen or was purchased for them by another person who was legally able to buy the firearm. How are background checks going to stop that?

I’m not opposed to background checks, not in the least bit. But I don’t think that they, or any amount of puffery and window dressing from the White House, is going to solve the problem.

What I do have a problem with is the whole Obama meme of, “If Congress won’t do it, I will.”  There is simply nothing in the constitution which authorizes that. The statement itself is an abuse of power, as are any executive orders which arise from it.

Krugman Opens My Year

Paul Krugman ends the old year by engaging in his usual habit of misinterpreting data, saying in a blog post that, “it’s now a fact as opposed to a mere projection that Obama significantly raised taxes at the top.”  Actually the president can’t set tax rates, and so to whatever extent tax rates were raised, they were raised by Congress.

Further, the chart presented by Dr. Krugman shows that they were raised by a Republican-controlled Congress, a feat which the Democratic-controlled Congress never even attempted when they had a Democratic president. The chart shows that taxes on the rich rose slightly in Obama’s first term when Congress was led by Democrats, and then moved right back down until they were at the same low level in 2012 that they were at in 2007, before Obama was in office.

That’s because Obama could negotiate nothing more than a two-year self-limiting tax increase with a Democratic Congress, and it was not until Republicans controlled the House that a significant, permanent tax increase made it through. That’s hardly the picture painted by Dr. Krugman’s piece.

One could also quibble with Krugman’s claim that an increase from 19% to 25% is “significant.”  It strikes me as rather trivial, given that the top rate in 1960 was 90%.

I know, I know, “the Republican minority blocked legislation” and all that, but when a majority cannot execute its agenda, it does not deserve to continue governing as a majority.

Parsing and Overcomplicating

A few articles are hinting that Payton Manning "did not really deny" using HGH in his statements, hinting that he sort of talked around the issue and refused to talk about what prescriptions his wife may or may not have been using. What does he need to say beyond, "I did not ever use HGH or any other banned substance," which is what he said?

The discussion of why the Patriots elected to kick off at the beginning of overtime is including that one of the options is to "defer." Defer to what? One overtime period completes the game. At the beginning of the game a team can defer its choice to the second half; a choice which I think is idiotic. Why give your opponent the opportunity to score first? In a championship game, with multiple overtimes possible, a team can defer until the third overtime, but that would be even more stupid than deferring at the beginning of the game; a second half is assured, while a third overtime is not only not assured, it is highly unlikely.

Some also say that the Patriots meant to make a choice as to which end to defend, but let's not be obtuse here. The other team would then choose to receive, so that would be tantamount to electing to kick off. In any case, there was no wind so choosing an end zone was irrelevant. Belichek decided to kick the ball, and only understanding how his mind works will make it possible to know why he did that, which means it will remain forever unknowable.

Brass Balls

Scripps Hospital has recently billed me some $72,000 for a ten-day stay in their hospital, which was paid in its entirety by insurance, but still... (Reaching the "maximum out-of-pocket"  limit is a mixed blessing.) Now they send me a solicitation, referencing the wonderfulness of my care at the hospital, and asking for a charitable donation. Um, I think not.

Interesting Game

They call it the "Holy War,"  Utah vs. BYU, and Utah won it by a score of 35 to 28. Drilling down into the details, however paints a somewhat bizarre picture.

Utah scored all of its 35 points in the first 9:39 of the game, racking up 65 yards of offense to BYU's 39 yards, largely due to no fewer than five turnovers committed by BYU. If you notice that five turnovers at seven points each might produce a score of 35-0, you are very perceptive.

In the final 50:21 of the game Utah racked up 39 yards of total offense and scored zero points, while BYU accumulated 347 yards of offense and scored 28 points.

All in all, it was perhaps the silliest exhibition by two teams that I have ever seen on a football field. Scoring 35 points with 65 yards of offense is nonsensical, as is racking up 39 yards in more than 50 minutes.

Who was this young man?

When the gunfire began Thursday night Zaevion Dobson stepped in front of three girls, instinct apparently guiding him to protect them with his own life. There is something very powerful about that story; something that has caused it to stick pleasantly in my mind.

Whenever we have one of these mass shootings the media goes nuts to “personify” the shooter. His picture, his name, and minute details about his background are in the news for days as the media tries to explain what led him to do it.

On the third day after his death we know almost nothing about Zaevion Dobson, and today’s media does not mention him. We know that he was a football player and one person says he was “a mentor to his peers,”  but that is about all. We know nothing about his family or spiritual environment.

Something rather powerful fostered such a sense of selflessness and good in this outstanding young man, and I would like to hear about what it may have been. Why do we dwell so much on evil and are so quick to move past goodness?

Interesting Conversation

There is a YouTube video of Bernie Sanders in conversation with a black guy called Killer Mike in an Atlanta barber shop, which I watched over the past couple of days. I very much enjoyed the conversation, and several things struck me as interesting, beyond the points which both men were trying to make.

The first was that when Killer Mike was speaking Sanders was not merely waiting impatiently for him to finish, but was actively listening to him with eye contact and with gestures of agreement as Mike made specific points. What politician does that? Well, Sanders says he’s not a politician, and maybe he’s not. That would be a good thing.

Another was that during the entire lengthy conversation, not one time did Sanders divert his response to a topic other than the point which Mike had raised. Again, politicians have policies which are points of vulnerability and which they prefer to avoid, either because their solution is unpopular or because they have no solution to offer, and so when those issues arise they segue their answers off to another topic. Sanders stayed with the issue until his interlocutor was ready to move on. He gave the appearance of a man who is very comfortable with his positions.

About one minute into Part 2, Sanders talks about the course of his political career, saying that unlike most career politicians, “I didn’t get into politics to figure out how I could become President or a Senator.”  I think there is truth in that. He comes across as a man of very little personal ambition; more concerned with what he can do than who or what he can be.

I actually think Obama started out as such a person but was seduced by the power of the office. In hindsight, it seems to me the seduction began well before he ran for president. Anyway…

Sanders is, perhaps, a little bit of a wishful thinker. At one point Mike is talking about seeing a current mindset of selfishness and greed in the nation’s culture; of today’s voter basing decisions on what they want personally rather than what is in the nation’s best interest. Sanders replies that he sees that in the wealthy and financial sectors, but that he does not believe that it extends to the working middle class Americans. One has, I think, only to look at who the voters are electing and reelecting to see the flaw in Sanders’ thinking.

I have problems with some of Sanders’ foreign policies, but I am beginning to like him more and more on the domestic front and as a leader. And, aside from the insight into Sanders, I liked Killer Mike quite a lot.

Historic Agreement

I have joined a weight loss club. There are one hundred of us in the club, and we are going to lose a total of 2500 pounds by some indefinite date in the future. We are not committing to how much weight any individual is going to lose, but obviously not any single one of us can lose the total, so even the less obese are going to have to pitch in and lose a pound or two.

We are not committing to any specific actions that we will undertake towards losing that weight, such as eating less food, removing donuts from our diets or engaging in some form of exercise. That would be hard, and we don’t do hard things. We are convinced that we can lose all of that weight by the sheer force of our good intentions.

To show how serious we are about this, we are announcing the intention to create a $100,000 fund to pay the health care costs of our members who suffer from the the ill effects of being overweight. We are not actually creating the fund, that would mean parting with real money which is also hard, we are merely announcing that we have good intentions to do so.

I can’t wait to see how this turns out. Pun intended.

Well, That Was Rude

The Denver Broncos came to San Diego and basically played football for one offensive series. They took the opening kickoff, effortlessly drove the length of the field for a touchdown, and then effectively hung up their cleats and dallied with us for the rest of the game. They decided that San Diego could not score more than three points and that that one touchdown was all they needed for a win. They were right.

They did accept a gift in the form of an interception from Philip Rivers, which their defense ran back for another touchdown, but that was not necessary to their winning effort. Philip Rivers completed 51% of his passes and wound up with a quarterback rating of 57.1 for the day.

The Chargers offense, at this point, has not scored a touchdown in more than 2½ games.

How To Make My Day

I was reading an article about fast food work that reminded me of a lunch stop I made a couple months ago. It was a Carl's Junior, which I seldom go to, so I am unfamiliar with the menu. A young African-American person, about eighteen, greeted me when I approached the counter and I asked her what was good for a light lunch. She met my eyes and smiled as she made a suggestion, and again as she gave me a numbered card, thanked me pleasantly for my order, and told me my food would be brought to my table.

It was the same person who brought out my order and, again, there was a meeting of the eyes and a smile as she told me to enjoy my lunch. I told her that she could make a good career in customer service because she is very good at it, and thanked her for the good service. Got a really big smile in return.

The burger wasn't all that good, but it was a nice lunch.

Social Justice in the Military

So, all of the armed forces have been ordered to open all roles without exception, including all combat roles, to women. No mention was made of submarines, which are currently only open to female officers. Putting women in the crews of submarines, if this is included in the order, will be a very interesting exercise indeed.

I have been supportive of the process of more fully integrating women into the full mission of the armed forces to the greatest possible degree, and have been critical of the Neanderthals in the military who have resisted it. I have seen no credible arguments, for instance, why a woman cannot perform on a completely equal footing with a man as the pilot of a jet fighter in combat, and therefor no reason why women should be denied that role.

That process, however, needs to be guided by the best interests of the service and not be dictated by some misguided crusade for social justice. The military’s mission is to maintain the most effective fighting force possible in defense of the United States. Period. Anything which weakens that mission is, to quote the fear mongers in Washington, “a threat to national security.”

The Pentagon asked the military to study the effectiveness of combat units which included women, and so the Marine Corps ran a study lasting more than a year in which it compared the performance of units consisting of men and women (mixed units) and ones comprised of all men. The mixed units did not perform at the same level as the male units by any measure. They were slower on long marches, accuracy with all types of firearms in simulated combat was lower, injury rate was higher…

The pentagon criticized the study and rejected the conclusions because they were “based on collective performance instead of assessments of each individual.”  The illogic in that statement rather staggers the imagination, and reveals why this nation and its armed forces are weakened by having a Secretary of Defense who has never served in the military. He thinks the military is about individual achievement and social justice. There is no grasp of the basic concept that the success of the mission is fundamentally dependent the "collective performance" of the force.

Yes, occasionally a hero charges a machine gun and is awarded a medal, but if he never reached the battlefield because his unit was too slow on the road march it would never have occurred, and so the individual achievement is entirely subordinate to the collective performance.

What the civilian in the Secretary’s position doesn’t get is that if, by making sure that “women will now be able to contribute to our mission,”  the collective performance is weakened, then the contribution of those women is negative, regardless of what they do individually. By serving the interests of women, he has gone against the best interest of the armed forces he leads.

This is part one of three, so stay tuned.

Seriously Fubar

There is something seriously wrong about the fact that Hillary Clinton is an overwhelming, even prohibitive, favorite in the Democratic primary, and yet in polls for the general election she trails by significant margins to every single one of the moronic Republican candidates. Do the Democrats seriously want to lose the White House?

And So It Begins

There are no words to express, at least in polite company, my feelings about sending troops into a combat role in Syria/Iraq. Especially after promising the public and the military specifically for more than a year that he would not do so.

So it’s only 200 men? Yes, and that is the precise number of Green Berets who were first sent into a combat role in Vietnam. That’s how it begins.

It seems obvious to me that every Islamic group in the area will make it their first priority to assure that one of those raids walks into an ambush and, no matter how good they are, there is no way that will not eventually happen. When it does…

Not to mention that we are back to "kicking in doors in the middle of the night." Needless to say, they will not always be the right doors, and we will make even more enemies in the process. Have we forgotten how much hatred we created doing that in Iraq & Afghanistan? Or do we just not care?

All because the posturing narcissistic jackass in the White House cannot stand to be upstaged by Russia's Vladimir Putin.

Head Scratcher

We watched a recorded episode of "The Good Wife" last night, with a plot regarding Diane Lockhart's passionate, and somewhat over-the-top, defense of a right wing group's to publish secret recordings they had made in a Planned Parenthood clinic. Actually it was recorded in a donut shop and they didn't use the name, but let's not be coy, here.

I have a little trouble seeing how publishing a recording not of one's own words, but of someone else's words, recorded without their permission, recorded illegally, and which they do not want published, constitutes "free speech."

Headlines

The headline reads, "Mass Shooting at Planned Parenthood." Three people were killed. Not to diminish the tragedy of those lives and the loss to their families, but is three people a "mass shooting" now?

Reasonable Positions

The following is from a discussion between the French and Russion presidents regarding the future of Syria.

Mr Hollande reiterated his position that Mr Assad “cannot play a role in the future of this country” but Mr Putin rebuffed him, repeating his standard phrase that only the Syrian people could determine the future of their country.

Imagine. The collossal effontery of that man Putin to suggest that the people of a nation should determine the future of their own country. Maybe even elect their own leader.

Silly Question Gets Silly Answer

I sometimes wonder is Dear Abbey isn’t a couple of sandwiches short of a picnic when it comes to choosing the letters she decides to publish. For instance the person who says that gun control isn’t going to stop mass shootings because she has been fighting depression for twenty years and has never felt like shooting anyone. She claims that everyone says the shooter “was depressed” and that what is needed to stop the shootings is better mental health treatment.

Abbey does mention that is it severe psychosis that leads to these shootings, not depression, and mentions that the families of the shooters have found it impossible to get the persons in question into treatment. What she fails to point out that the failure is, more often that not, refusal of treatment by the person who is ill and not actually a social failure at all; that treatment was abatable but refused. In some cases the person was in treatment but it wasn't helping.

She also fails to point out that when someone goes all batshit crazy and decides to shoot up a school or theater, he is going to have a really hard time doing it if he is unable to get his hands on a firearm. Not advocating firearms control, you understand, just applying a little logic.

Ugly, Ugly, Ugly

The LSU Tigers not only lost their third game in a row, they got humiliated for the third week in a row. In all three games they scored fewer than 20 points and in all three games their defense surrendered 30 or more points.

Rumors are that Les Miles is toast, and that he may pop up nicely browned and buttered even before the end of the season.

Racing is a Contact Sport

We now have clarification from no lesser person than Brian France who, as bizarre as it may seem, actually owns the sport of stock car racing. Imagine one person owning football; no, not the NFL, football. All local race tracks must be licensed by NASCAR, which Brian France owns. Imagine, again, that high schools and colleges could not play football unless they were licensed by the NFL. Anyway...

It is permissible to wreck another car in order to gain a spot toward winning the race. It is even encouraged because, according to Mr. France, racing fans love it. It is not permissible to wreck a competitor because he has wrecked you in the past and you are pissed off at him.
So now we know.

Krugman Again

I can’t stand to read Paul Krugman every day, especially when I’m still recovering from pneumonia, so while he wrote a post entitled “Terrorists and Aliens” on Tuesday,
I didn’t catch it until today. Fortunately I wasn’t drinking coffee, or I would have had to buy a new keyboard.

First he says that Keynesian economics doesn’t work. After decades of claiming that government deficit spending will pull a depressed economy out of recession, a foundation of Keynesian thinking, he says that, “The Great Depression wasn’t ended by the intellectual victory of Keynesian economics…”  He goes on to refer to a worsening in the Great Depression in 1937, “when FDR tried to balance the budget too soon and send the U.S. economy into a severe recession.”

In other words, all of that spending is great as long as you keep doing it, but as soon as you stop spending you are right back where you started.

Now that is, perhaps, arguable because his position is that the New Deal would have worked if FDR had continued it longer. He claims that he has mathematical formulas which prove that to be a fact, and I claim that what he has are tea leaves and that it is pure speculation.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m a big fan of the New Deal and I think we should do it again. It would be far better than just pretending that unemployed people don’t exist by changing the definition of unemployed. I just don’t think it would actually change the economy.

Then he says that what ended the Depression was World War Two, “which led to deficit spending on a scale that was politically impossible before.”

He has made that statement before, and it always makes me want to travel to Princeton and hit this idiot between the eyes with a two by four. This moron has his head buried so far up his ivory tower that he doesn’t even know what an economy is.

Every dollar of that deficit spending, and a large portion of the non-deficit spending, was on instruments of death and destruction; tanks, bombers, warships, bombs, artillery, small arms… In the real economy, the one where people live, you could not buy a car of any description. That didn’t matter, because if you had a car you couldn’t buy gasoline or tires for it. You couldn’t buy sugar, meat, chocolate, or cigarettes without a ration coupon. You could not buy luxury goods of any description.

Sure, unemployment was essentially nonexistent because ten million men overseas in harm’s way were fully employed, and a man buried in a muddy field in France or some Pacific island was not counted as unemployed, he was counted as dead.

It was not the war that led to this nation’s prosperity, it was the postwar years, when America became the world’s largest producer and exporter of everything, including oil. We had no competition, because we had bombed and shelled the entire rest of the industrialized world into rubble, barely leaving one stone on top of another. We supplied the world’s need for goods of virtually every type for several decades and became enormously prosperous in the process. And we had essentially no deficit spending in those decades.

Krugman proceeds, in his little babbling brook of nonsense, to speculate whether or not the terrorist attack in France will cause the French government to spend enough money to help the economy. He compounds his idiocy. Spending on war did nothing for our economy in WW2, and it will not help France now. Spending for militarism is like beating your head against a brick wall. It’s only helpful when you stop.

Pots and Kettles

President Obama, in excoriating Republicans over wanting to refuse admittance to Syrian refugees, accused them of being "afraid of some widows and children," which, although not exactly a knee slapper, I thought was pretty good. I was impressed he was able to deliver the line with a perfectly straight face.

Actually, I think they would be afraid of my cat, who is so fierce that the vetinary technicians laugh when she hisses at them. Anyway...

Republicans were of, course, outraged, saying that it was terrible for him to be making "that kind of personal attack on his opponents." Of course it is. That's far worse than accusing them of being Muslims.

Seriously?

I thought this nations's immigration position was broken about as badly as it was possible to break anything. But to deny entrance to Syrians based on the attack by ISIS (which is not really specific to Syria) on Paris, is miles beyond more stupid than anything I ever thought that anyone could ever come up with. There apparently is some cosmic vacuum cleaner sucking the brains out of the people of this nation. We will soon all be in diapers.

It's About Hypocrisy

About Sunday’s post; to say the Ghadaffi was a monster misses my point entirely. That post was about hypocrisy.

A people willing to kill innocent people in foreign lands, for any reason whatever, should not be surprised or feel victimized when survivors of those killings come back and kill them in turn. "I'm willing to kill you and your family, but don't you dare turn your gun on me."  That is unjust and unjustifiable thinking. You are starting a war, thinking that you can somehow remain uninvolved.

War may be justified. I’m not going to get into that. But to think that you can start, or enter, a war and that somehow only the other side will suffer casualties while you remain uninjured is insane or incredibly hubristic. In either case sympathy for casualties suffered in a war thought to be safe because it is fought far from home is not in my wheelhouse.

Russia lost 224 of its people when an Islamic bomb brought down one of its airliners. Where were the statements of “We’re all Russians now” after that happened? How many buildings were lit up red, white and blue? How many “thoughts and prayers” were issued for the families and friends of the victims?

Why is it that 129 French victims of Islamic terrorism are so much more valuable and more tragic than 224 Russian victims of Islamic terrorism? My sympathy for the French is hardly enhanced by them being part of the world’s nonresponse to the Russian loss.

In France

I will probably be excoriated for this, but I have a question. How many innocents did the French kill in their leadership role of bombing Libya to get rid of Ghadaffi? I don’t know, but it was certainly a great many more that the 129 dead in Paris. How many innocents have died in Libya as a result of it having become a failed state due to France’s intervention? Again, probably a number 100 times greater than the number of French dead.

Do not sow that which you are unwilling to reap.

Yet Another Assassination

In a CNN article headlined “U.S. airstrike in Libya kills ISIS leader” today we are told that, “The U.S. military on Friday killed the senior ISIS leader in Libya” in an airstrike. The article does not admit that no one has seen a body, and provides a lot of wishful thinking and pure fantasy about how "Nabil's death will degrade ISIS's ability to recruit new members in Libya, establish bases in the country, and plan external attacks on the US."

We're back to the war in Afghanistan being about "denying them space in which to plan their attacks;" logic which, of course, would actually involve bombimg Hamburg in Germany where 9/11 was actually planned.

By my count we have now killed 347% of the terrorist leadership, which accounts for the absence of any recent terrorist activity. Oh, wait. And it was in Libya, so add another Muslim country in which we are bombing not just with drones but with manned aircraft.

For those of you who study history, the last war we won was World War Two. We accomplished this feat by ignoring the ground troops and focusing on killing the generals behind the lines and by tracking down Hitler and assassinating him. Actually, I believe I may have that wrong. Hitler killed himself, and almost all of the generals were alive at the end of the last war from which we emerged with victory.

For some reason, Americans take great comfort in the announcements of these assassinations, notwithstanding that the government is simultaneously prating about the dangers of terrorism and the need to be afraid of it. I suggest that it’s odd, because either the assassination program is working and reducing the threat, or the threat is increasing and our spreading of death and destruction around the world is actually counterproductive.

We cannot blame Obama for the “global war on terror,” but it is absolutely he who, using his own perception of “executive authority,” turned this nation into the most horrific assassin in history.

Oh Really?

I'm not even going to tell you what this article is about.
Go look at it for yourself. I actually read only the headline, but would say it is unsurprising to the point of stating the obvious. Janet Novak is in New York.

The Sky Is Falling

Janet Novak, of Forbes, tells us today that Social Security is not only failing but is also probably a fraud. Her ire and anxiety is fueled by Congress cutting off a rather bizarre loophole which she says, "could cost some baby boomer couples tens of thousands of dollars."

The headline: "After Budget Deal's Surprise Cuts, Can Boomers Really Count On Social Security?" Please.

At issue is a loophole whereby one spouse can file for retirement benefits, immediately suspend those benefits and allow them grow until they maximize while they draw spousal benefits instead. It is a rather bizarre loophole and, notwithstanding that my wife is making use of it, I have always regarded it as absurd and have never figured out why it was there in the first place. Ms. Novak says that it will "cost tens of thousands of dollare," but I would say that it prevents people from committing a form of legalized fraud.

Ms. Novak also thoroughly discredits herself by saying that the Social Trust Fund is "arguably an accounting fiction."  Where do supposedly intelligent people keep coming up with the idiotic notion that, since the Social Security Administration has invested trust fund money government bonds that the "government has spent the money and it no longer exists?"  She also says that the trust fund, "will give the Social Security Administration legal authority to pay full benefits until then, even if they’re not covered by current taxes."  Well, yes, that is precisely what a trust fund is designed to do; it is the entire purpose of a trust fund.

The purpose of the article, clearly, is not to inform; it is to sow fear, uncertainty and doubt.

I'm Back

Blogging went from slow to a dead stop due to a trip to the hospital for my third bout of pnuemonia in just slightly over two years. It was 18 months between the first and second bouts, and I managed only ten months before this one. Each one has been worse than the one before and this one has been, and still is, brutal. I am home now, but will be on antibiotics for at least two months and am having to use supplemental oxygen to keep my oxygen level up to 92%. It drops to 80% without oxygen, and sometimes lower.

I have a machine in the living room which rumbles, gurgles, thumps and bumps, and a hose which is long enough to reach pretty much the whole house. The cat doesn't like it very much, my wife likes it less, and I like it least of all, but...

I have not missed any of the San Diego Chargers games, but sort of wish I had. 2-7 is not an attractive record, and it doesn't help when the team and coaches say nothing more than, "We just have to stop making mistakes."
I think, actually, that you need to play better football in every aspect of the game. When you do that, a few mistakes don't matter.

I have been keeping a list of ideas on which to write and will post them as my stamina permits. Stay tuned.