Mutually Contradictory Positions

There are several policies on the right which are mutually contradictory as relates to abortion and population.

We often hear the complaint that poor people breeding excessively is a problem.  Putting aside the canard that they are doing so in order to increase their welfare receipts (because in most cases, that's just not the case), let's look at right wing policies and how they create exactly that problem.

Policy #1:  Abstinence Only Sex Education.

Teach children to say "no".  This is not reasonable, there are basic biological urges that most people cannot fully control.  We do it when we have to, such as by not wantonly having sex in the middle of a dinner party, or with whoever is around regardless of their consent, but it is not reasonable to expect people to be entirely abstinent.  This is a large part of why so many politicians have sex scandals, being human they are simply unable to resist their urges 24 hours a day, 7 days a week without break.  It is also probably a large part of the priesthood problems in the Catholic church.  Asking these normal, healthy men to subjugate that core part of themselves for life leads to issues.

So, we raise a generation that doesn't know what contraception is or how to use it.

Policy #2:  No Subsidized Contraception

Now, again because it's "not moral", let's not aid anyone in getting their contraception.  No, that's just aiding sluts who want something for free.  Which means now you have people who have probably not got a full grasp of what contraception is or how to use it properly to protect themselves now also having to decide whether they can AFFORD it.  Some won't be able to.  This will not prevent them from having sex (see #1), just prevent them from avoiding pregnancy.

Policy #3:  Anti Abortion

So now, we have people getting pregnant because they never learned how to have a normal sexual life safely, or could not afford their contraception, but now that's a LIFE, from the moment of conception (never mind that the Bible defines human life as beginning with the first breath, which happens after birth), and we dare not take it.  So this couple who conceived a child through carelessness or (more likely) through a lack of knowledge that you've engendered and a lack of access to affordable contraception that you've prevented, and you will not allow them to terminate the pregnancy.

Policy #4:  Complain

And finally, complain that these poor people, the ones most hit by policies #1 and #2 and exacerbated by #3, are breeding so much, and require government assistance to feed these children.

Really, this series of policies is kind of like having a policy of gathering seeds of invasive plant species, having another policy of strewing them around your property, having a third property of watering and fertilizing them, and then complaining because invasive plant species are taking over your yard.

Health Care Reform and Religions Exemptions

[This was written in response to someone who posted the letter from the Hobby Lobby CEO as to why they were filing suit against the Health Care Reform law, since it "forced" them to pay for abortions.]

I hope you'll do more research into this issue.  The attached text is so full of half-truths, false implications and lies as to be nothing more than a partisan political spin.

Understand that the health care law that this is about is not perfect, but it's a step in the right direction of solving a major problem, and by the way you are benefiting from it right now by still being on your parents' health insurance and being able to REMAIN on it until you are 26, unless you get married.

At another time, if you like, I can go through a long list of what is wrong with our health care system.  It'd chill your blood, realizing the amount of suffering people can go through in order to increase the profits of insurance companies, and the extent to which one moderately bad disease can completely financially ruin someone today, and the number of people who do not have access to basic necessary health care.  There are a lot of different ways this could be solved, and honestly, the current system is NOT my favorite... it's just a step in the right direction.  AND, by the way, it's put together almost entirely of a set of proposals put forth by Republican/conservative lawmakers, who then turned around and called it a "liberal take over of health care, rammed down our throats by the President", when in fact if he'd REALLY given us anything like what the liberals wanted, we'd be in far better shape now.

So, there are several things at issue here.  We could talk about the hypocrisy of a man who is worth 4.5 BILLION DOLLARS, and whose family will never have to want for anything for generations, complaining about having to provide basic health care to people who have not had his good fortune and are struggling to get by.  Or we could talk about his use of false conservative talking points like calling businesses and rich people "job creators", when in fact they don't CREATE jobs, they merely make use of resources in order to capitalize on a market, if the market isn't there, they don't magically create jobs just because they have more money, they just … have more money.  They only hire more people if in the process of doing so, it stands to make them even MORE money.  We could point out the insanity of the position that saving money for rich people and corporations will create more jobs when a quarter or two ago, even adjusted for inflation, American corporations had their best year, profit-wise, EVER, and yet the jobs aren't there, meaning if they've got more money than ever but still aren't hiring, it's pretty clear that simply having money doesn't spawn some kind of altruistic job creation, and maybe putting a little more money into the hands of the people who BUY the products will do more to create jobs (by creating more demand) than putting more money into the bank account of a man who, with 4.5 billion dollars, really will never spend what he HAS, never mind needing more.

But let's focus on the central thrust of the piece, that Religious people should be allowed to dictate how "their" money is spent, even after it is spent on other people.

Religion is supposed to tell you how to live YOUR life, not allow you to tell other people how to live THEIRS.  If your religion tells you you should not wear yellow on days  containing a T, that's fantastic.  You should not wear yellow on days containing a T, and if your religion is correct and you DO wear yellow on such days, you'll face penalties in your ultimate reward.  What it does NOT do is give you the right to start insisting that no one ELSE wear yellow on T days, and I think you'll agree if I told you my religion said that wearing blue on Halloween was verboten, and therefore you could not wear that wonderful halloween costume you made in 2011 (and which is currently in your profile picture), you'd be a little miffed that your choice of costume, that you put so much effort into, couldn't be worn.

Now, the argument is that basic health care policies which are now required to be carried for employees might pay for something that violates his religion.  And I'm sorry for that, but let's point out that if we start making these exemptions, then the law is worthless.  There are fairly mainstream religions out there that don't believe in blood transfusions.  So should they be allowed to remove from their policies any coverage for blood transfusions?

The Christian Scientists (I think, I might have the wrong group) don't believe in ANY extreme medical intervention, believing that prayer is the only way to resolve medical issues, or that if prayer doesn't do it, then the disease and subsequent death were "God's will".  So… should Christian Scientist owned businesses be allowed to provide "health insurance" policies with exceptions so that they cover nothing at all?  If my company is owned by a person of this persuasion, and my child gets appendicitis and vitally needs an appendectomy so as not to die, should I be forced to bankrupt myself in order to provide it, because my employer was able to absent himself from the rules everyone else has to follow regarding basic health care coverage?

And given our current legal system, if you start allowing this exemption, how long until people start "religions" who disagree with basic health care in order to legally exempt themselves from having to provide health insurance, thus cutting off a significant portion of our society from access to basic health care, which is the heart of the problem we need to solve?

And from how many other laws, then, should we allow people to exempt themselves for religious reasons?  If your religion does not believe that taxes are moral, should you be able to not pay taxes?  If your religion says that employers should have no responsibility for the safety of their employees, should you be exempt from workplace safety laws?

What if the next step is for employers to say "I want to be able to pay this salary to my employees with a prohibition on its use for cigarettes or alcohol or gambling or … whatever.  I don't support those things, so I don't want my money going to them".  Once I earn the money, it's not up to my employer how I choose to spend it, it is no longer their money, and that's the case here, it's not that the employer's money is being spent on abortions, it's that the employer is paying benefits to their employees, who then have a range of options that *THEY* have the right to decide which to use and which not to.  Because let's say they manage to exempt themselves from things they find objectionable in the health care law.  Can they then say "Hey, we want to legally prohibit our employees from even GETTING an abortion, because they'd pay for it with salary money We gave them, and that means OUR money went to pay for an abortion?"  And again, if that's allowed, then do the Christian Scientists get to refuse to allow you to pay for your child's appendectomy even out-of-pocket, because you earned the money from THEM that would go to pay for it?

I don't have a problem with anyone following the tenets of their religion *FOR THEMSELVES*.  I have a little more problem with it for their children (there are several high profile cases of children dying because their parents decided that an easily treatable disease was really better treated through prayer.  To me, this is child abuse, and is tragic).  But I have a HUGE problem with members of one religion imposing their beliefs on people of other religions, and members of religions should have the same problem, because if you have the power to do it to someone else, then someone else might have the power to do it to you, and do you really want to suddenly live under Sharia (Muslim) law if Muslims manage to take power in your state, just so you have the right to impose Christian law on others?

This ISN'T a war on Christianity.  This is about a huge problem in this country, health care, and people's basic access to it.  It's not about "free health care" as some crazy people will tell you, it's about making sure that if you get sick, if you draw the short stick and are the unlucky one, health wise, that doesn't ALSO mean you're the unlucky one financially, or made all the MORE unlucky because you can't afford a basic treatment that would extend your life, save your limb or otherwise make your life better.

This is a long, nuanced issue, and I've taken up far more of your time than you probably want, so as I say, I'll hold off on more details of our fiasco of a health care system unless you want me to go through it.

Just please understand that it is not an attack on anyone's religion, it is an attempt to solve a real problem in this country.

More On Job Creation

So, according to the news today, last quarter (2012Q3), American corporations had their highest profits, even adjusted for inflation, ever.

So can we finally put to bed the claim that trickle down economics works, or that by giving tax breaks and otherwise putting more money into the pockets of the rich and the corporate "creates jobs"?

If this claim were true, we should right now have a record number of jobs, along with the record profits.  We should be SWIMMING in jobs.  There should be so many jobs, everyone in the country that needs to be (adults of working age) should be able to have one, with more waiting to be filled.

Instead, we're sitting here in a poor economy, with rich and corporations telling us that the way to resolve the problem is to slant things so they can make MORE money, dangling the stick of more jobs in front of us.  Oh, poor us, if you only let us have a little bit MORE, we'll solve all of your problems.

I've said it many times, jobs are not created by wealthy and corporations.  Jobs are created by market demand.  If a company makes widgets, and there is a daily demand for 500 widgets, the most that company is ever going to try to make is 500 widgets per day, and that assumes they're the only manufacturer of widgets.  It doesn't matter if that company makes a tiny profit or a huge one on those 500 widgets, they're not going to hire more people and create more widgets if they can't sell them.

On the other hand, if the daily demand is for 1500 widgets and they're currently making only 500, THEN they will hire more people ("create more jobs") in order to capitalize on that untapped market.

Stimulus can not and should not be spent on the rich.  This is not a matter of fairness or anything else, it is simply a matter of effectiveness.  If you want to spur the economy, you need to get money flowing.  Putting it into the hands of people who will spend it does that.  Putting more of it into the hands of people who already have a surplus just means more will go into their savings accounts, and will do almost nothing to spur the economy.

Now, we can discuss the ways in which to put more money into the hands of the poor.  I, personally, like the idea of infrastructure spending.  Not pork barrel stuff like bridges to nowhere, but real, needed repairs to our bridges and roads and other aging infrastructure.  Stuff that according to Republicans "we can't afford right now", but which would stimulate the economy by putting more money into the hands of people who are currently unemployed but would then NOT be, which would increase revenues (again by the Republicans' own argument, and common wisdom, that a strong economy creates more revenue for the government).

But the fact is that cutting taxes on the rich from their historically-low levels right now to even LOWER levels will do NOTHING to stimulate the economy, only make some rich people even richer... and give the selfish Tea Party that much more ammo in their panties-in-a-wad concerns that we simply can't afford the basic social safety net that we've all enjoyed.

Get money and jobs to the poor and (to a lesser extent) middle class, and you'll stimulate the economy.  Get it to the rich, you'll just further increase the already huge gap between the "haves" and the "have nots".

More Greedy M.F.-ers

Read this.  Just read it.  Go on, I'll wait.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is someone double dipping, being greedy and playing politics all at the same time.

How is this double dipping?  He's planning to charge his customers a 5% surcharge on the price of their meals to cover the "increased costs of ObamaCare".  I'd love to see a breakdown of his revenues and expenses, I'd be willing to bet 5% is WAY more than the increased costs imposed by ObamaCare.  Just look at the recent kerfuffle with Papa John's saying it's going to cost just under 15 cents per pizza to cover the additional costs, and unless Papa John's is charging just $3 per pie (which I highly doubt), that's FAR less than 5%.  Turns out it's less than 1%, and already according to the math people have done represents about twice the increase Papa John's actually needs to cover the additional costs.

So, Mr. Metz is now going to increase his profit margins significantly, using some small part of that increase to cover increased costs of ObamaCare and pocketing the rest.

And then... he plans to sit his employees down and tell them that he's cutting their hours back to under 30, also because of ObamaCare additional costs.  This means that for a significant number of his employees, he will no longer be paying ANY health benefits.  Which represents not merely an offset of the existing costs of ObamaCare, but an actual savings to him over and above that offsetting...

Which means the question "how is this greedy" is also answered.  He stands to save money by shafting his employees, and then shafting his customers by charging them a surcharge for an increased level of costs he's not actually incurring.  This is simple marketing, he's BLAMING ObamaCare, but that's blaming a relatively small increase in his costs to justify much larger savings and higher prices.

How is this playing politics?  Because he's hoping to blame the whole thing on ObamaCare.  *HE* is a greedy little pig, taking the opportunity to rake in additional profits on the backs of his employees AND his customers and foisting all of the blame off on ObamaCare, hoping not merely to defer the blame off of himself for his increased profits, but to actually make ObamaCare unpopular with his employees (who will see their having been shafted in hours and benefits as the result of that program) and his customers (who will see their increased cost as directly the result of that program).

It's also playing politics to do it the way his is doing it.  At least Papa John's said they could do it by just raising the cost of the pizza.  I don't know how often you go out to eat, but lately restaurants have been upping their prices a lot.  There have been some food shortages, there has been a higher transportation cost for the food due to higher gas prices, there have been lots of reasons, but the end result is that most places I go out to eat cost 10-15% more than they did even just a year or two ago.  Another 1% increase wouldn't even be noticed, but instead of just increasing prices as a cost of doing business, like with every other increase, THIS one he decides to put a face on.

Does he charge a "fuel surcharge" for the increased cost of getting his supplies?  Or a "food shortage" surcharge for the increased price of food due to poor harvests of one crop or another?  No, that's just the cost of doing business, you do not get an itemized bill for the cost of your meal.

So, to sum up, this is a man finding two different ways to well more than offset his additional costs, either one of which would likely stand to make him HIGHER profits, now implementing BOTH and thus double dipping, increasing his profits by screwing over both his employees and his customers, and trying to make them all hate ObamaCare for that screwing, rather than the actual greedy pig, which is he himself.

Greed

I'm wondering how many greedy owners of companies are planning on cutting costs and increasing their bottom line by lowering worker hours to below 30 (thus making them ineligible for benefits), having layoffs, etc, and blaming it all on Obama and ObamaCare.

There are a number of reasons I suspect this.

First off, there is the fact that a number of places have already done this, or had layoffs, immediately following the election.  I know of several people who lost jobs after the election, and I think the timing is unlikely to be coincidental (although if I'm being honest, I have to allow for the possibility that the timing might be due to having held off to avoid affecting the election, rather than after due to the results of it, although I doubt that).

But really, anyone who has had layoffs now due to the election results is lying, because literally nothing has changed, nor will until January 20th.  After that date, you could make the argument that things "would be different" if a different person had been sworn in.  But until that date, there's not a thing that's different today than it would have been if last week's election had elected Gov. Romney.

Even making the argument that "under Romney, we'd be expecting ObamaCare to be rolled back, and now we know it won't be" doesn't really materially change things TODAY.

Second, in specific looking at Papa John's, the claim is that in order to meet the costs of ObamaCare, the price of a pizza would have to go up by about 15 cents.  Really?  You're not willing to pass that along to customers?  I've watched the prices at my local restaurants climbing steadily over the last few years due to increased food costs and various other factors, an increase of 15 cents on a pizza really isn't going to even show up on my radar...  But somehow that's untenable and requires cutting people's hours and their benefits?

Finally, again Papa John's.  According to an article I read recently, the math doesn't add up.  Papa John's CEO has claimed that ObamaCare would increase their corporate costs by about $5 million, which according to that web site would represent an average increase on the cost of a pizza of about 5-6 cents.  If true, this also represents a mindset of "maximizing the blame on an external force" in order to justify cost cutting measures designed less because of those external costs and more to maximize profits.

Increased Welfare and Food Stamps

It's amazing to me how few in this country seem to be able to connect dots, they've gotten so good at separating things and ignoring cause and effect.

I can't count the number of times people have pointed to the increase in number of people on some sort of government support under Obama's first term as "proof" of the culture of dependency and of wanting more things from the government.

Now let's consider the facts.  The fact is that our economy completely collapsed, was in the process of free fall when Obama was first elected.

The fact is that this was largely due to Republican-led deregulation of the banking industry, Republican-led wars on two fronts (at least one of which was completely frivolous and unnecessary), Republican-led tax cuts which they assured us would pay for themselves via trickle down and the Laffer curve, both of which have been thoroughly debunked.

In that process, a lot of good people lost jobs.  I had a lot of friends in that group.  People who wanted to earn a living, but no longer could.  Low skill jobs would not hire them because they were "overqualified", on the risk that the moment they finished training they'd leave for something that better suited their qualifications.  But the higher skilled jobs simply weren't there.

And so, in order to survive, a lot of these people went on unemployment, welfare, food stamps, whatever they could in order to not lose everything, in order to survive.

This is not an indictment of the welfare society, this is a celebration of it.  In much the same way that pulling the ripcord after falling out of a plane isn't a condemnation of parachutes, but a celebration of that parachute doing exactly what we needed it to do:  Provide a measure of safety between you, gravity and the ground.

Why are there more people on food stamps and other government assistance?  Because our economy collapsed.  It is not that most of these people wanted to be lazy, or looked down at the meager safety net and said "Y'know what?  I think a hardscrabble existence on the government teat sounds better than this comfortable life I have now earning my own living."  It's that the tightrope wire upon which they were walking was suddenly severed, and the choice was between landing on the safety net, or not having it and crashing to pain, severe injury, an possible death.

Let us stop complaining about the increase in public assistance and celebrate that the safety net performed exactly as designed and saved a lot of people from fates not of their own making.

Fiscal "Cliff"

So, here we are, supposedly headed for a "fiscal cliff" and yet my impression is that few people really understand what that means.

The thing is, this is yet another case of the right successfully branding something relatively benign with which they disagree in a way that makes it seem horrible and terrifying.  "Death tax" and  "Socialist Health Care" are two other recent examples.

But here's the thing...  our "fiscal cliff" is really more of a bump in the road.  It consists of two major categories:

1) Some tax increases due to the expiration of some "sunsetting" tax cuts and the implementation of some new taxes.

2) The automatic slashing of the budget for a number of programs due to the failure of the "Super Committee" to come to an agreement on deficit reduction.

The second of these is stupid, and is why I have opposed "balanced budget amendments" and the like in the past.  If you can do something, do it.  If you can't do something, don't think you're accomplishing anything by passing a rule that says you have to, even if it imposes stiff penalties if you fail.  Because what ends up happening is what's going to happen here:  you'll pay the penalties.

The second one is by far the more onerous problem for the United States, being that it would impose something like the austerity measures which have been such a stunning failure in much of Europe.  At a time when the cruise ship of the economy is slowly beginning to respond to the turning of the rudder, now is absolutely not the time to throw the anchor overboard.

But the key to it is that this was a law.  As with so many other laws, it could be fairly simply repealed by the Congress if they so chose.  And this is a poison pill of Congress' making, the talk of the "cliff" being designed to influence the President, holding hostage the American public and our economy in order to force capitulation by the President.

But guess what:  this President isn't running again.  He doesn't need to try to stay popular.  He needs to do what's right for the country.  And cutting spending drastically at this time is not in anyone's best interests.

And by the way, what could the President do to avoid this "fiscal cliff"?  The only thing he could do would be to agree to not raise tax rates which are already almost criminally low in our country, and to agree to many of the same tax cuts which will go into effect if the "sequestration" spending cuts go into effect.  So really, where is the benefit to capitulating, if we're going to get those highly damaging spending cuts one way or the other, and at least without capitulating, we also get a bit more tax revenue coming in.

To the first point, the only part of the cliff that's bad is the increases of taxes on the lower and middle class, the people who will actually spend the money they'll lose.  The rich, who will mostly just inflate their bank balances if tax cuts are extended, will do nothing with that money to stimulate the economy, and as we've gone over before, there is zero chance that the rich will go out and create jobs with more money, unless there is a greater market for their product.

It's simple economics:  If someone wants to buy your product at a price point where you can make money on that product, you'll find a way to increase capacity in order to manufacture that product.  If no one wants to buy your product, you aren't going to increase capacity just because you have a few extra dollars, you're just going to pay higher dividends and increase the corporate bottom line.  Wealthy people and corporations do not create jobs.  Demand for products and services creates jobs.  Wealthy people and corporations merely capitalize on that demand.

We need some increased taxes.  Our current extreme deficit problem is a direct result of our tax rates being cut below the level that they really ought to be while failing to recognize that going to war has always required some financial sacrifice on the part of the population.

So, to sum up, let's go over the cliff.  This is a case of terrorism, a case of kidnapping.  You can't negotiate.  It may seem like the right thing to do, if we just negotiate we can prevent this horrible damage.  But what you do if you capitulate to any demands is set up a situation where, while avoiding ONE crisis, you demonstrate to the perpetrators that the way to get you to behave the way they want you to is to threaten more terrorist acts.

If kidnapping never resulted in ransom being paid, the number of kidnappings for money would go down, because what would be the point if the act NEVER paid off.  If kidnappings routinely resulted in huge payoffs and rarely resulted in prosecutions, the number of fiscally-related kidnappings would go up.

The President just won.  The Democrats increased their numbers in the Senate and reduced the majority of the Republicans in the House.  By all measures, this election was a win for the Democrats.  It is the Republicans who should be making concessions and reaching across the aisle.  If they don't, let them drive us over the cliff.  Let them shut down the government.

The result will not be nearly as negative for the President or the Democrats as capitulation would be, and the results for the country as a whole will be far better than giving into more failed economic theories which really only serve to line the pockets of the already lucky at the expense of the unlucky.

And that shouldn't be how a compassionate country behaves.

How Elections Are Stolen

These are some of my thoughts as to the nature of stolen elections, at the national level, in today's society.

Anyone who has paid attention to the news over the last four years has watched the GOP systematically demonize ACORN and various other left-leaning organizations for supposedly submitting fraudulent voter applications. I have discussed before the reasons why this is a bogus charge and why the fraud was not committed BY ACORN, but AGAINST them. Regardless, voter fraud of that type is an extremely inefficient way to attempt to alter the results of a national election in today's society.

The way elections are stolen in today's world is not by stuffing ballot boxes or by having people commit voter fraud. With the sheer volumes of voters in any of the states that matter, you'd have to do an amazing amount of tweaking, the conspiracy would have to be enormous. It would come out.

The way elections are (or could be) stolen is through insecure voting systems. Read up on it, there are numerous stories about the ways in which voting machines and central tabulating machines of various voting systems out there can be quickly and easily hacked, untraceably altered, etc.

There was a situation with voting machines 8 years ago in which someone determined that one particular voting machine would report itself as "clean and empty" if the SUM of all votes cast equaled 0, so if you wanted to adjust the results, you start the machine out with, say, 1000 votes for one candidate and -1000 for the other. The sum is 0, the machine reports itself clean and reset, and you've just effected a 2000 vote swing from one candidate to the other.  Do this with all of the memory cards for every machine in every district that leans towards the opponent of "your guy" prior to voting day, and you end up with an election that reports itself to have started out clean, but tilts your state towards your guy.

Or take the multiple reports of "man in the middle" setups, such as that in Ohio in 2004 where it is documented that votes passed at one point through a Republican controlled server between the voting machines and the final tally.

Or the fact that one voting machine company stored the votes unencrypted on the tabulating machines, making it extremely easy for someone to go in and manually switch votes untraceably.

Or the fact that in Ohio this year, some of the regional tabulating machines sent their results to the central tabulation unit in an unencrypted text file to the central location to be certified.

Or the highly illegal last minute "patch" of one of the Ohio voting machine systems at the last minute this year, which clearly was not used to change the outcome (because those in control of the change were Republicans and the result went to the Democratic candidate). This is not to allege that they did, or even intended to, alter the results of the election, but that if unverified, un-certified code can be installed on voting machines and central tabulators days before an election with little transparency or oversight, clearly it'd be easy in another instance for that code to be intended to alter the results reported by the machines.

THAT is how an election would be stolen, if one was, in today's society. It wouldn't be by "literally dragging" unconscious people into a polling place, nor by a few fraudulent voter registrations and someone voting a few extra times.

More War on Facts

Really REALLY wish we could get to the point where we THINK about what we say before we say it.  As I mentioned earlier, one person I know asserted that she witnessed Democratic workers "literally dragging vegetative people into the polling places".  One of my friends helpfully found some statistics and determined that the number of people in a persistent vegetative state in this country is somewhere around 25,000, and in this election unless they're all in the same state, and drag every last one of them in to vote for a candidate, it would not have made any difference in the outcome.

Now the answer to that is, of course, "But this is just one example of what Democrats will do to steal elections", but really, I think I've already pretty effectively pointed out that if this were happening on any kind of regular basis, we'd be hearing reports of it through official channels, not merely on right wing blogs.

Another argument was from noted intellectual light-weight Victoria Jackson, who asserts (rather without proof) that there are whole bags of military members' votes which were "delivered too late to be counted" and "would have changed the election".  I wrote a long response to this (below), but one of my friends pointed out even more cogently, ballots are counted if they're delivered late, they're only not counted if you VOTE late.  If your ballots are postmarked or otherwise provably sent by the deadline, they will be counted, and if that changes the results of the election, then that change will be made official.

My response, however, relates to the "think before you speak" aspect of this, again even assuming that what she says about the votes is true.

* * *


Wow, Victoria Jackson is one crazy conspiracy theorist. Her latest assertion is that there was this large group of overseas military ballots which arrived a day late, and which would have changed the election.

Let's take this one piece at a time. First, even if these ballots exist, none of the supposed reports on them has an accurate count of how they voted, these articles just ASSUME that every active military person voted for Romney.

But more importantly, as of last year (the most recent for which I can quickly find numbers), there were 1.5 million active military members. Total, not just overseas, this includes large numbers of people serving here on American soil, who were perfectly capable of casting their ballots in the normal way. But for the moment, let's stipulate the almost certainly false assumption that A) every single one of them intended to vote, B) every single one of those votes was in some mysterious shipment that arrived a day late to be counted, and C) every single one of those votes was a vote for Gov. Romney. (And by the way, on assumption C, I already know this is false, I know several active military members who report having voted to reelect President Obama. But I digress.)

As of right now, Obama's lead in the popular vote is 2.8 million votes. So even assuming all of the "insanely in VJ's favor" assumptions are made, the lead for Obama would still be 1.3 million votes.

Now, there are certain flaws with my argument. FIrst, not all ballots have been counted yet, Florida is still not certified, there are still absentee ballots and provisional ballots and the like being counted across the nation. So that 2.8 million vote lead may change.

Second, of course we don't elect on the popular vote, we elect on the electoral college, and it's certainly possible that you can find a way to surgically apply those 1.5 million military votes to key states in such a way as to change the results of those states, and thus, the election.

But even for a moment assuming (again, almost certainly fallaciously) that all of the un-counted ballots fell in exactly the states they'd need to in order to flip electoral college votes around and provide a win for Romney... didn't we just get done watching Donald Trump talk about what a travesty of justice it was that Obama won when (at the time he was posting, with only very preliminary numbers in) Romney was leading in the popular vote?

Not to say that it would be improper to win that way, it's the way our system works, but let's be honest here: There's a long set of assumptions which have to all break in the most favorable way possible, for Victoria Jackson's conspiracy theory du jour to have any merit at all.

If you're going to buy into a conspiracy theory to try to claim that your side didn't lose the election, at least come up with one that fits the facts and for which there's some reasonable evidence. A conspiracy theory that takes one small unfortunate fact (if it is even true) and then relies heavily on extremely favorable assumptions in order to come to your pet conclusion doesn't mean you got screwed, it means you don't understand critical thought.

Go away, Victoria Jackson. Join Donald Trump in the land of "people who can't feed themselves without drooling flecks of angry spittle on their shirt front" and leave the people who understand actual evidence to deal with important things like elections.

GOP Debate Tactic Du Jour

[This was in response to someone who claimed to have witnessed Democratic volunteers "literally dragging people in vegetative states in the election booth", a day or two after someone else told me about something "an Obama supporter" had told him "yesterday".]

Yeah, that's a new tactic I've noticed from a number of right leaning people: take a (probably apocryphal) story that's flying around on the internets, and report (or significantly imply) that they themselves witnessed it.

Funny how this is so wide spread that so many people witnessed it happening, and yet there's zero substantiation for it anywhere.

I have one right leaning friend who fairly often takes to telling me what "I had an Obama supporter telling me, just this morning". Amazing how often he speaks to Obama supporters who happen to have just told him the exact thing Fox News reports Obama supporters believe, when not a single Obama supporter I know (and I know quite a lot of them) believes anything like that.

But of course, if you report that you've seen it, A) it's harder for us to disprove what you say, and B) you get to indignantly ask "Are you calling me a liar?" if we question what you're saying.

Well, I say, if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck... You really don't get to be indignant when you get called a liar if you actually ARE lying... and when you associate yourself with a group so willing to lie in exactly that fashion, I'm sorry if you're the ONE who actually DID witness what you say you witnessed, but as a group populated with many boys-who-cry-wolf, you'll have to excuse me if I have a hard time being willing to put a whole lot of effort into substantiating what seems like yet another in the series.

Plus, let's be honest, it's not like this wouldn't be easy to spot. Think about what this would entail. You're sitting at your polling place, and you watch someone literally carrying or wheeling in an unconscious or semi-conscious person to the polling place. You watch (in contrast to the laws in my state at least, don't know about yours) as someone OTHER than the person voting declares their identity, and then fills out a ballot for them... and not one person challenges that or reports it to the authorities... and yet so many people are willing to run out and report it to the (far less critical or likely to fact-check) right wing web sites?

C'mon.

American Exceptionalism

Someone please explain to me what is meant by "American exceptionalism" and why it matters so much to so many that we TALK about it?

To me, we either ARE exceptional or we AREN'T. If we ARE, that's great, and we don't need to talk about it. If we AREN'T, no amount of telling ourselves we are is going to change that.

So why get upset when one politician or another fails to use the term? We should always be working to be the best we can be. To me, even if we ARE exceptional, labeling ourselves as such just sows the seeds of resting on our laurels and perhaps losing the very thing we prize, because we've now told ourselves we have it and stop striving for it.

It's a buzz word. It means nothing. And when someone tells me "This is part of what group doesn't like about politician , because he doesn't talk about American exceptionalism", this tells me that group has their priorities completely wrong.

***

(In response to Gordon Goldberg, who said "What's actually sad is that those who use the term most seem to think it has something to do with American *superiority* -- but it doesn't. It has to do simply with the idea that America, being the first of the "new countries", is exceptional (as in "different") from the "old" countries of Europe.")

Gordon: That's a great point. I have much less of a problem with it if we want to use it in that context, but precisely because in that context we're NOT claiming to be BETTER.

If people wanted to talk about American Uniqueness (which is true, there are few countries in the world which are EXACTLY like any other, and so each has its own uniqueness), I'd be OK.

But you're right, implicit in the term "exceptionalism" (and what I always assumed it meant based on the context) seems to be the unstated term "excellence" as in not that America is exceptional (different) but that it is exceptionally excellent.

I really don't want to get into an argument over whether this is the best country in the world, because it's a hot button topic and if you discuss it honestly, you get a lot of blowback from people who insist you "hate America".

I just think that I'm not a big fan of going around telling people how good I am. If I'm a truly good person, most people will see that. If I'm not, telling people I am won't make it so.

Why I Vote How I Vote

Why I vote the way I vote:

Because my gay friends are people, deserve rights, and did not CHOOSE to be gay.

Because my female friends own their bodies and really shouldn't be forced to let someone ELSE choose for them whether to carry a symbiote or terminate a parasite, or whether a rape was "legitimate" or not.

Because we have a fiscal problem in this country, and the solution isn't going to be solved by some magical "trickle down", letting people who already have more than they can possibly need take even more, when almost none of that will go into creating jobs or stimulating the economy as long as there continues to be no market for goods and services, because the people who would BUY those services don't have enough to buy them.

Because I don't believe in rewarding people who work against the interests of their employers for their own self interest and then point to the failure of the OTHER SIDE to get things done as a reason to now elect one of theirs.

Because I have a human heart and not a dollar sign beating in my chest.

(And by the way, even if they DID choose to be gay, they'd STILL deserve rights and would still be people.)

The GOP War On Facts

I read a great blog post I read earlier today, someone pointing out that much of the Republican party seems to have gone away from "how do I work the facts into my world view" to "if the facts contradict my world view, I must find a reason to dismiss them."

It is evident in the common GOP response to climate change (it's a liberal conspiracy), to polling data they don't like (it's biased, here is what the unskewed* numbers show), and in a number of other areas.

I think you really do yourself and everyone else a disservice if whenever your philosophy or belief structure disagrees with observable reality, your first instinct is to find a way to discredit observable reality. And I don't mean in terms of verifying results, I mean in terms of saying "Well, this disagrees with what I believe, so it must be wrong." and then finding ways to justify that.

It's why I could have supported Jon Huntsman, but so few other GOP candidates: Until they stop with this "evolution isn't real, climate change isn't real" mantra, I don't trust them. If you're not willing to take the facts as they come and then fit your world view to them, then how can I trust you'll do a good job in other areas, if something comes up that contradicts your world view?

(Like, for instance, the increasing evidence that "trickle down" economics simply does not work.)

This is, by the way, a problem I have with some religious people as well. If you're religious, but are willing to make the effort to modify your beliefs to fit with observable reality, that's fantastic, and I know a lot of people who do this. "A day to a being like God might be eons, so the 7 days in the Bible isn't necessarily 7 literal 24-hour days" or "Who is to say that God doesn't have a hand in directing the path of evolution, perhaps that's the way He works".

But when you start coming up with what seem to outside observers to be insane examples of pretzel logic in order to discredit observed reality where it disagrees with your beliefs ("Fossils were created by Satan to tempt us not to believe", "Evolution can't possible exist, even though we've seen species adapt and change in labs", "The Earth is only 6000 years old, and no amount of scientific evidence will change my mind on that", "The sun goes around the Earth, and I'll throw Galileo in jail for daring to suggest otherwise.", etc), that's... your business, actually, as long as it's your own opinion.

But when you want to start making real policy decisions affecting me and the rest of the world, that's the point it becomes a problem. Like the times in history when, to "make the math easier", laws have been passed setting the value of Pi at 3. You can believe it's 3. You can want it to be 3. But if you insist that I use 3 in my calculations, you don't make things better, you just make it so that every one of my calculations relating to circles or spheres will be off by some amount.

* A reference to "Unskewed Polls", a site run by a conservative who, claiming all of the polls showing Obama in the lead were tainted with bias, put up a set of polls he claimed had been "unskewed" and giving Governor Romney a landslide win... even though in the end those "biased" polls turned out to be extremely accurately predictive, while the "unskewed" poll numbers were just the wishful thinking of a deluded mind.

On Loving America

The thing is, I think most people "love America". But... an analogy.

We all love our children. We want the best for them. But if I live in an area with predominantly holistic doctors, and my child gets leukemia, and all of the information I'm presented with by the supposed experts tells me that the best thing for my child is to give them vitamins, acupuncture, chiropractic adjustments and some homeopathic treatments, I'm bound to believe it, even though unbeknownst to me, science has not shown any of those things to have any effect at all on leukemia.

Meanwhile, your child also gets it, and you live near M.D. Anderson or Sloan-Kettering, the recognized best experts on treatment of cancer in the nation, and so you get the up-to-the-minute state-of-the-art treatment advice for your child's treatment.

We both love our children, that's not at issue. Neither of us is trying to harm that child. But one of us is just WRONG. One of us got bad information from supposed experts we mistakenly put our trust in, and with the very best of intentions, consigns his child to an almost certain death, while the other obtains treatment and very likely gives his child a long and healthy life, after a short unpleasant round of treatment.

And that's what's wrong with Fox News, to me. They are the homeopathic "doctors" telling people to ignore the science because it's all "bought and paid for by the drug companies" and instead to follow this "natural" regimen, which is good for exactly nothing. But people eat it up and become convinced that black is white, up is down, and the best solution for your headache is to run head-first into a brick wall.

Why I "Hate" Fox News

Someone asked my why I hate Fox News so much.

This was my answer:

I "hate" Fox so much because they are a propaganda arm that leads great chunks of our society to be ignorant of basic facts and to believe fervently blatant falsehoods. Because they claim to be news, and their watchers believe that, even as multiple studies (the most recent done this year at Fairleigh Dickinson College) show that Fox News viewers can answer fewer domestic and foreign facts than even non TV watchers, far less than Daily Show viewers, and embarrassingly less than the top of the scale, NPR/PBS listeners/viewers.

I think they are victimizing whole swaths of our society, telling them things that aren't true, convincing them to vote in contrast to their own self interest, and helping to create such a wide-spread culture of misinformation that it even infects non-viewers, like contact high or second hand smoke, pernicious in the damage it does even to non-or-casual users. And because that misinformation is SO widespread, followers hear the same stuff repeated back from others and believe they have independent corroboration, when in fact they're just hearing the bounce back from another wall of the propaganda echo chamber.

I "hate" them because they serve the rich and selfish over everyone else, and because the victims of their actions (such as yourself) are so misinformed, and SO indoctrinated, they won't even CONSIDER any evidence that flies in the face of doctrine. It's almost like a cult brain-washing.

I "hate" them for what they have done to you, XXXXX, an otherwise great guy of whom I am very fond.

A return to blogging

I've had a good couple of days on FB, and posted a few things that really should be blog posts. Tonight, I'm going to post a batch of them, and if I get motivated, this weekend I'll flesh some of them out a bit.