Archive
Andrew Sullivan Defends his Palin-Trig Not-So-Conspiracy Theory
While on break, my favorite veteran blogger, Andrew Sullivan, let MSNBC’s Dave Weigel guest-blog for him. Weigel took the opportunity to criticize Sully for his questioning the legitimacy of the Trig pregnancy.
Andrew Sullivan comes backs and defends himself.
I am, after all, not claiming something for which there can be no proof. I am not claiming something after contrary proof has been provided (as in Obama’s birth certificate). I am merely asking to clear up a question for which there must be a mountain of readily available medical records, and which Palin could have released almost two years ago – and still refuses, even when asked in a friendly attempt to kill off the rumors once and for all. In this refusal to provide information, Palin’s key allies are in what now passes for the press. And you wonder why we knew nothing about John Edwards or Eliot Spitzer or Stanley McChrystal or … well, WMDs in Iraq or torture, until it was all over and done with.
Go, Sully, go! I am pro the transparency of even the private lives of politicians. When you make the decision to be a public figure, you have to accept the responsibility of that transparency. To have the audacity to make a claim like having contractions during a speech and then flying on a plane back to Alaska (2:18) and then refuse to answer basic questions… that is not what I want in my people in office.
Fact Checking The National Inflation Association And its Hyperinflation Fear-Mongering.
This is a response to this youtube video with over a half million hits, posted by the mysterious The National Inflation Association:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eb1n1X0Oqdw
First off, it’s always good to ask who is funding the organization and the video production. From their website http://inflation.us/ (Ooh, dot us. Flashy domain name. Very patriotic.) I can’t say for sure.
But here’s a good guess:
“One of our missions at the National Inflation Association is to discover and profile companies that we believe will prosper in an inflationary environment. Typically we will bring to you producing, profitable, Gold and Silver companies with strong balance sheets. We believe these stocks have a chance of becoming some of the best performers of the next decade.” Most of their 22 companies on their stocks page are gold or silver companies.
Now I’m not going to bash Gold and Silver as a means to hedge long-term financial risk, because I’m not an economist. But here’s an article that does: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/alan-schram/is-gold-a-good-inflation_b_443927.html “Gold does not generate cash flow (indeed it has a carrying cost for storage, insurance etc.) and does not have any intrinsic value, and therefore it is of dubious value as a long term investment.” The same thing that gives gold its value, faith, is the same thing that gives money its value. Makes sense to me.
Onward to the youtube video.
Commentary:
I’m not going to fact check all the numbers, but a lot of the statistics in the video seem to be reasonable. The video also cites some legitimate facts about the financial crisis and legitimate concerns about the US’s ability to pay for impending SS and Medicare. But there are a lot of interpretations of these statistics and facts that are misleading, fear-mongering, and just plain wrong.
9:45 “The average American might have to eat less and stop air conditioning and heating their home just to afford gas for their car.”
I like the word ‘might’. And aren’t we obese and energy-hungry anyway? Doesn’t a third to a half of our food go into the garbage and not into our mouths and out our ass? Maybe we shouldn’t have killed the electric car, before the lithium ion battery took off.
10:40 Peter “Dr. Doom” Schiff calls Social Security a Ponzi scheme.
While there are parallels between the concepts, it’s not fundamentally true, because technological advancements have exponentially increased economic output over the last century. According to Michael Mandel of Business Week: “The U.S. population has more than tripled since the early 1900s, while the U.S. economic output has gone up by more than 20 times… Assuming that technological progress continues over the next 70 years, and output productivity growth continues over the next 70 years, the finances of Social Security are relatively easy to fix. A fairly minor cut in benefits, combined with a relatively small increase in taxes, will bring the system back into balance again. (the latest Social Security report projects a 75-year deficit of $4.3 trillion. That sounds like a lot of money, but over 75 years it’s roughly $60 billion a year…not chicken feed, but not overwhelming).“
13:18 “The only way our economy can truly recover [from the crisis caused by trillion dollar deficit] is for the government to dramatically slash spending across the board and eliminate unnecessary departments like the Department of Energy… and the Department of Education.”
The video tries to link the rise in private tuition costs to the rise in Dept of Ed. Spending. I don’t get it. It also fails to mention that the Dept. of Ed only has 5,000 employees and that most of the increase in spending was because of Bush’s No Child Left Behind. And Dept of Energy? Um, isn’t the one that deals with our nuclear waste?
15:42 They try to bash breastfeeding protection laws. Fail.
16:55 They claim a Republican administration would have supported the health care bill. Um, no? From what I remember, the health care bill had to go through extensive Senate reconciliation after the Dems lost their supermajority with Massachusetts.
24:15 “We conservatively believe the real rate of inflation to be 3-4% higher than what is indicated by the CPI.” Thanks for giving us the formula for how you calculated that.
25:34 Suggestion for fed funds rate to increase to 5.31% Again, no math evidence.
25:05: FIRST GOLD PITCH HERE
I skimmed through the next 10 minutes. It was Gold Gold Gold Gold Gold.
37:45 Selective statistics about debt. You can see the full debt story in chart form here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_debt_by_U.S._presidential_terms
Post-WWII our deficit was briefly over 100% relative to GDP. In the last 30 years, it went up with Reagan and HW Bush and lowered with Clinton. Obama inherited an 83.4% rate from Bush and it is currently rising.
42:10 The video suggests we “go back to our roots” to fix our economy. I love 12 hour work days, child labor, sub-minimum wage, and sweatshops.
The rest of the movie was more OMG DEFICIT and Gold Gold Gold Gold Gold.
50:15 I love how the movie links inflation to the “destruction of family values.” Inflation will soon make a $20 bill worth more as an implement to snort coke out of a hookers ass than its value!
50:38 Somehow the government is “transferring money to Wall Street through inflation.” Really? I thought it was the deregulation (by the ironically Democratic senate) in the late 90s and early 2000s causing Wall Street to systematically restructure itself into unsustainable pyramid schemes.
The entire movie seems to forget a basic Econ lesson: Businesses don’t look at national debt and think, “Let’s raise prices!” Growing economies and demand make prices go up. A recession—like what’s happening now—makes selling stuff harder, so prices go down. That’s why inflation is down.
The deficit needs to take a backseat right now to the higher goal of economic growth. And it’s noteworthy that we borrow from China because they have relatively low lending rates. Really, what’s China going to do; invade us if we default? The US and China are economically co-dependent, which is not a great place to be, but safe for the moment. Right now the Obama administration is attempting to do what it needs to do, focusing on unemployment and GDP growth. Whether it’s succeeding or not is another post for another day.
[edit]: I wrote a Follow Up Post in response to some of the comments on this page. Less Sarcasm. More go suck it, Austrian school of economics: https://scandalousmuffin.wordpress.com/2011/05/25/nia-article-comment-reax/
Quick Commentary on Kagan
I haven’t been following it too closely, (who really watches hearings from beginning to end) but there are a couple things I’d like to comment on about Elena Kagan.
- A bit dated, but softball photo. Really media? Really?
- Yoinked from wiki (cited Campus Progress): “As dean, Kagan supported a lawsuit intended to overturn the Solomon Amendment so military recruiters might be banned from the grounds of schools like Harvard. When a federal appeals court ruled the Pentagon could not withhold funds, she banned the military from Harvard’s campus once again. The case was challenged in the Supreme Court, which ruled the military could indeed require schools to allow recruiters if they wanted to receive federal money. Kagan, though she allowed the military back, simultaneously urged students to demonstrate against Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.“ Whoo! Kagan’s got balls. I support.
- Denying prisoners of war habeas corpus? Not cool. But she might have a point that they AREN’T protected by current law. She might secretly support reform to make laws, though. She is a lib and we all know.
I do think she’s a pretty solid pick for the new SCOTUS Justice. I think her obfuscating from answers about her personal views is a strength in terms of the position. But it’s still not satisfying my curiosity. 😛
CATO attempts to explain why intellectuals hate capitalism
http://www.cato.org/pubs/policy_report/cpr-20n1-1.html
Interesting. Basically what he’s saying is that intellectuals–those who rocked the Critical Reading portion of the SATs but not necessarily Math–are arrogant fucks who believe that they deserve income proportional to their intellectual value. At a young age they are conditioned by their school enviornment to accept a certain standard of psychosocial norms that do not mimic the rewards system of the real world.
From a skeptic of both extremes of anarchocapitalism and a centrally planned economy, I have to say that the author’s argument is extremely intellectually specious.
Yes, we are arrogant fucks. But I’ve also always found a certain kind of arrogance in using the pronoun “we” in formal writing, as if the author assumes that the reader agrees.
I think the writer forgot that intellectuals have a tendency to hate capitalism because it’s a cannibalistic system which has a tendency to bring out the gaping orifices in personal moral values.
Let’s watch the monkey dance:
Gah, I can’t take the stupid! Obama and Socialism. *headdesk*
Good morning. It’s 11:38 AM. I fell asleep at 7 AM. I am tired and cranky and would like to raise a hefty middle finger to the Drudge Report, which has been increasingly pissing me off since its posting about the crazy, attention-seeking chick with the backwards B carved into her face.
It is no surprise that a week before the election is the appropriate time for the Marxism rhetoric. Because tying Obama to the name of a man who died long before industrial capitalism was effectively replaced by finance capitalism is now the most effective way to propagate fear, since calling him a Muslim obviously wasn’t working.
All reasonable onlookers of Drudge’s latest headline — 2001 OBAMA: TRAGEDY THAT 'REDISTRIBUTION OF WEALTH' NOT PURSUED BY SUPREME COURT — say, wtf, Matt Drudge, what is this bullshit.
My favorite gay, libertarian blogger says, “He was making a case against using courts to implement broad social goals – which is, last time I checked, the conservative position.”
Yes, Obama is a socialist. Because progressive taxation is totally the slippery slope to replacing private means of production. Yay labour theory of value! Boo marginal utility! Most people have no idea what I’m talking about because most people can neither define nor spell proletariat.
God forbid we become a “socialist country much like Sweden,” the country with world’s highest democracy index, which ranks higher than the United States in per capita GDP, literacy rates, life expectancy, and oh– happiness.
Fuck you, Matt Drudge. Fuck you.
McCain, please. This is my maverick.
I wish I had come across this article earlier. It still makes me proud to remember whom I supported in the primaries and whom I would have voted for had he not withdrawn by the time the primaries hit my state.
Some people will ask of this Congress, what were we thinking? Why did we give $700 billion bailout to Wall Street without fixing what caused the problem in the first place? Why did we rig the free markets for security fraudsters? Why didn’t we explore alternatives to let Wall Street solve its own problems? Why didn’t we have money save millions of homeowners, create millions of jobs, and a green economy? Why didn’t we stop the speculators? Why wasn’t there accountability? Why didn’t we take time to make an intelligent decision?
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