Morans at Sea

Posted on by

I’m struggling to not enjoy this too much —

A leap of faith that sent an Arizona family bound for the South Pacific in a sailboat has returned them in an airplane after a harrowing ordeal at sea that saw them adrift and nearly out of food in one of the remotest stretches of ocean on the planet.

Hannah Gastonguay, 26, and her husband, Sean, 30, were fed up with abortion, homosexuality, taxes and the “state-controlled church” and so “decided to take a leap of faith and see where God led us,” she told The Associated Press in a telephone interview. With them were Sean’s father and the couple’s two daughters, one 3 years old and the other an infant.

A few weeks into their ultimately 91 days at sea, the Gastonguays encountered “squall after squall after squall” that damaged their boat. Originally on a heading for the archipelago nation of Kiribati near the international dateline, they changed course to the Marquesas Islands, but were unable to reach them either.

Along the way, they apparently suffered damage to their mast and, unable to set a foresail, made little westward progress.

They were down to “some juice and some honey” and whatever fish they could catch when a passing Canadian cargo ship tried to help out with supplies. But when it came alongside, it did even more damage to the tiny sailboat.

Eventually they were picked up by a Venezuelan fishing boat, which transferred them to a Japanese cargo ship, which dropped them off in Chile, where they apparently still were when the news story was written. Wait; the State Department of the evil and satanic U.S. government arranged for them to fly home to the states. I assume this was paid for by the oppressive taxes the family didn’t want to pay.

Apparently they had no experience sailing and navigating in open ocean, and they did this damnfool thing with a baby and a toddler on board, and they were heading off to an island chain that is sinking because of global warming and whose government is telling citizens to give it up and move somewhere else. Brilliant.

I loved this part —

Gastonguay told the AP that she never thought the family was going to die: “We believed God would see us through.”

If we’re lucky, maybe they will stay in go back to Chile.

The Difference Between Baggers and Libertarians

Posted on by

Stuff to read, in case I don’t have time to post any more this weekend. This should keep you busy.

Kim Messick, The Tea Party’s paranoid aesthetic. For Mahablog readers this will be old ground, but Messick does a good job explaining how Richard Hofstadter predicted the Tea Party way back when. Also old ground, baggers perceive people with different views as a personal, existential threat, which is why they are paranoid. Also, too,

The Tea Party’s paranoid aesthetic conveys this narcissistic view of itself and its role in our politics and history. If its fusion of form and content is compelling to its audience — and it obviously is — this is because it offers one of the most intense pleasures any narrative strategy can: the pleasure of luxuriating in our own importance and significance, qualities only confirmed by the fact that history itself has resolved on our total defeat. This is the message paranoid narcissism ceaselessly delivers to its devotees. “The Others are irreligious, unproductive, licentious, treacherous. You are the rock on which this nation was built and you are the foundation on which it will rise again. You. It’s all about you.”

See also Michael Lind, once again skewering libertarianism in Conservatives once ridiculed Ayn Rand.

When she died in 1982, Alissa Rosenbaum — the original name of the Russian-born novelist — was the leader of a marginal cult, the Objectivists, who had long been cast out of the mainstream American right. But the rise of Tea Party conservatism, fueled by white racial panic and zero-sum distributional conflicts in the Great Recession, has turned this minor, once-forgotten figure into an icon for a new generation of nerds who imagine themselves Nietzschean Ubermenschen oppressed by the totalitarian tyranny of the post office and the Social Security administration.

So baggers are paranoid narcissists and libertarians are narcissists with a mixed martyrdom/superiority complex. Got it.

C u n d gulag pointed this one out in comments — Sorry, It’s Not A ‘Law Of Capitalism’ That You Pay Your Employees As Little As Possible by Henry Blodget. Don’t miss it. See also Sean McElwee, Republicans have no clue how businesses work.

(Righties believe they are inherently knowledgeable about business, even if they’ve never run one, just as they are inherently knowledgeable about war and the military, even if their entire military experience consists of watching John Wayne movies. It’s just who they are. Libtards will never understand.)

Another must read — Death Panels and the Apparatchik Mindset, by Paul Krugman.

Aaron Carroll reads the Wall Street Journal, which is outraged, outraged, at the prospect that Oregon’s Medicaid system might seek to limit spending on treatments with low effectiveness and/or patients who aren’t going to live much longer in any case. Death panels!

Carroll points us to the actual staff recommendation, which is far milder than the WSJ blast would have you believe. But as Carroll points out, the larger point is the absurdity of the Journal’s position. On one side, it’s fanatically opposed to Medicaid expansion — that is, it’s eager to make sure that millions have no health coverage at all. On the other side, it claims to be outraged at the notion of setting priorities in spending on those who do manage to qualify for Medicaid. It’s OK for people to die for lack of coverage; it’s an utter horror if taxpayers decline to pay for marginal care.

Yeah, funny how that works.

La crème de l’idiotie

Posted on by

When one considers Rand Paul is among the more viable candidates the Republicans might offer in 2016 … well, let’s just say the GOP has come a long way since the days of Dwight Eisenhower and Thomas Dewey. And that long way is mostly downhill and into a big tar pit of stupid.

Here’s a bit of a recent Rand Paul interview:

You’re a big reader of Austrian economists such as Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises, who don’t believe in stimulus and say the economy can return to health only through austerity.
You can stimulate prosperity by leaving more money in the hands of those who earn it. If you want to stimulate the economy in Louisville, leave more money in Louisville and send less to Washington. My plan has a 17 percent flat tax with very few deductions, and it would leave $600 billion in the economy. But it would work better than a government stimulus because of the Milton Friedman proposition that nobody spends somebody else’s money as wisely as they spend their own. I think you’d have a boom like you’ve never seen in this country.

Who would your ideal Fed chairman be?
Hayek would be good, but he’s deceased.

Nondead Fed chairman.
Friedman would probably be pretty good, too, and he’s not an Austrian, but he would be better than what we have.

Dead, too.
Yeah. Let’s just go with dead, because then you probably really wouldn’t have much of a functioning Federal Reserve.

This is not someone I’d trust with sharp objects, never mind the country.

In this same interview, Paul said,

…what I would say is extreme is a trillion-dollar deficit every year. I mean, that’s an extremely bad situation.

But Paul Krugman says the deficit is now at about $600 billion and falling fast. He also said,

I think it’s pretty clear that Paul actually has no idea that the deficit is falling; it’s quite possible that neither does Cantor. The whole incident reminds me of 2011, when supposedly well-informed candidates like Tim Pawlenty went on about soaring government employment during a time of unprecedented cuts in the public payroll. Once you’re inside the closed conservative information loop, you know lots of things that aren’t so.

Yes, and I suspect a President Rand Paul would make George W. Bush look like a genius. Dubya was, I suspect, sort of willfully stupid; he seems to have believed thinking was a job for the help. But I doubt Rand Paul had a choice in the matter. See also Jonathan Chait, “Rand Paul Not So Good With Numbers.”

Framing the Issue

Posted on by

The President’s press conference today was mostly about security issues, but it also included this:

…Now, I think the really interesting question is why it is that my friends in the other party have made the idea of preventing these people from getting health care their holy grail. Their number-one priority. The one unifying principle in the Republican Party at the moment is making sure that 30 million people don’t have health care; and presumably, repealing all those benefits I just mentioned — kids staying on their parents’ plan, seniors getting discounts on their prescription drugs, I guess a return to lifetime limits on insurance, people with pre-existing conditions continuing to be blocked from being able to get health insurance.

That’s hard to understand as a — an agenda that is going to strengthen our middle class. At least they used to say, well, we’re going to replace it with something better. There’s not even a pretense now that they’re going to replace it with something better.

Q: (Off mic) —

PRESIDENT OBAMA: The — the — the notion is simply that those 30 million people, or the 150 million who are benefiting from the other aspects of affordable care, will be better off without it. That’s their assertion, not backed by fact, not backed by any evidence.

It’s just become an ideological fixation.

Well, I’ll tell you what — they’re wrong about that. There is no doubt that in implementing the Affordable Care Act — a program of this significance — there are going to be some glitches. No doubt about it. There are going to be things where we say, you know what? We should have thought of that earlier, or this would work a little bit better or this needs an adjustment. That was true of Social Security. That was true of Medicare. That was true of the children’s health insurance program. That was true of the prescription drug program part D that was rolled out by a Republican president and supported by Republicans who are still in the House of Representatives.

That’s true, by the way, of a car company rolling out a new car. It’s true of Apple rolling out the new iPad. So, you know, you will be able to, whenever you want, during the course of the next six months and probably the next year, find occasions where you say, aha, you know what? That could have been done a little bit better, or that thing — they’re kind of making an administrative change. That’s not how it was originally thought this thing was going to work.

Yes, exactly, because our goal is to actually deliver high- quality, affordable health care for people and to reform the system so costs start going down and people start getting a better bang for the buck. And I make no apologies for that.

And let me just make one last point about this. The idea that you would shut down the government unless you prevent 30 million people from getting health care is a bad idea. What you should be thinking about is, how can we advance and improve ways for middle class families to have some security so that if they work hard they can get ahead and their kids can get ahead.

Nice framing of the issue, I’d say.

Eyes of the Beholder

Posted on by

This headline made me laugh — “Why isn’t Rick Santorum the GOP 2016 frontrunner?”

Because he’s a dork, perhaps? Just guessing. But then I saw Brian Beutler call Santorum Conservatives’ Great White Hope — emphasis on the “white” — and I’m thinking, even if you agree with his crazy-ass ideas, he’s a dork. He’s the embodiment of dorkiness. American voters would elect a German shepherd before they’d elect a dork.

Now, I agree with Hunter that Frothy can be amusing as hell. Recently he said that abortion rights advocates cause boys to be uncomfortable showering in a gym. Which was a pretty awesome thing to say, in its way. Hunter reacts —

I … I don’t understand. I’m not sure I want to, mind you, but I’m just trying to parse out how this situation came up and why Rick Santorum was thinking about it. So the premise is that abortion rights advocates are wandering into YMCA showers and lecturing people? Did someone have this experience, where they were randomly accosted in the “mixed company” of a YMCA gym shower by a group of radical abortion rights advocates, and it made them sad and they said, “I know what I must do now. I must go tell Rick Santorum about this.” It’s no seven-foot-tall doctor, but roving public shower lectures on abortion rights certainly sounds like it could be the next big thing.

Seriously, you could do six months’ worth of comedy riffs on this. Still, Santorum is not just a dork, but a creepy dork. And when his Day of Judgment comes he’ll find the Pearly Gates blocked by Saint Margaret Sanger. And then he’ll be reborn as the poor and unwed mother of six disabled children. Mark my words.

But Don’t Call Them Racists …

Posted on by

Obama Protesters Sing ‘Bye Bye Black Sheep,’ Rail Against ‘Half-White Muslim’ In Arizona. Seriously, these are the same people who take great umbrage if you accuse them of racism, aren’t they?

… a prevailing theme among many in the protest appeared to be issues of race. Some even suggested that Obama himself was to blame for racial tensions.

“We have gone back so many years,” Judy Burris told the Republic, arguing Obama had taken the nation back to pre-Civil Rights era levels of racism. “He’s divided all the races. I hate him for that.”

Stupidity alone can’t account for this. The amount of social-psychological pathology these people are buried under is just staggering.

This Is Not What Freedom Looks Like

Posted on by

Via Charles Pierce — A small town Pennsylvania police chief made a video threatening “libtards” that went viral. The video got him a 30-day suspension from his job, but many people in the community wanted him gone permanently.

However, Kessler became a hero to gun rights activists. At a public hearing a week ago, gun guys from several states showed up in force to support the sheriff. Things got a bit hairy.

Many in the gun-toting crowd, which seemed to out-number the considerable media and the sparse towns folk, seemed to agree. Some bearing arms said they were there to protect Kessler, who has claimed to have received multiple death threats in wake of the Internet firestorm. Some said they were providing “security” for the meeting.

When it came time to open the small borough building for the public meeting, these armed men blocked the doors and prevented people from going inside. The mayor hand-selected members of the media who were granted access. Gilberton residents were admitted first.

It’s a pro-gun crowd that goes on about United Nations code No. 7277, which Zangaro said declares international law intended to restrict and register weapons.

Signs in the flag-waving crowd read, “Impeach Obama, Mark Kessler for President” and “Legalize the Constitution.”

No police were present at the meeting.

And while Kessler enjoyed his share of support from those who hail his Second Amendment leadership and vigorous video defense, the chief had detractors among some residents brave enough to speak out.

“He was way across the line,” said Wade Greg Necker, who lives just outside the 700-resident borough. “He’s a nut. I do not feel safe with him around at all.”

“He should have been fired,” added life-long Gilberton resident Pete Kostingo, addressing the borough council. “He used the position, and he abused the position.

Another citizen, speaking at the meeting, called for the county district attorney to investigate Kessler and his actions.

Another, Gregory Grove, said his wife lives in fear of the chief. “She’s afraid of him,” he told council. “Kessler is a detriment to this borough.”

Michael Morrill, with Keystone Progress, delivered a petition bearing 20,000 signatures calling for Kessler’s firing….

But Morrill said the group purposefully declined to mobilize its own set of protesters, fearing an altercation with the gun-carrying crowd. As it was, Morrill was shouted down, including by someone with a bullhorn.

This is not what freedom looks like. Charles Pierce wrote,

The Republican party, a number of timid Democrats, and the conservative “movement” have played footsie with dangerous woodland characters for far too long. This stuff can be used, but it cannot be fully controlled. This is not political debate. This is empowered, enabled paranoia, with firearms. This is not an exercise in democracy. This is a little touch of Munich, 1923 come to the forested exurbs. This stuff can be used, but it cannot be fully controlled, and something very bad is going to happen.

And Pierce is not the sort to evoke Godwin’s Law lightly. Anyway, it was at this hearing that Kessler got his 30-day suspension, and later he complained he’d been the victim of a “kangaroo court.”

But dude — sounds like the kangaroos were on your side. And they were armed.

The most recent wrinkle is that residents of the community have started a “We the People” White House petition to send National Guard to protect them from Kessler and his “fans.” I believe it would be more correct to petition the governor of Pennsylvania, who commands the Guard within his state. But the governor is a Republican, so he won’t respond.

Also, a solicitor for the town wants Kessler to account for all the weapons his department has bought and sold over the years. Apparently the rifles he fired in his videos belonged to the town, not to him. Officials may suspect Kessler has been using department firearms as his own personal arsenal. Kessler responded through his lawyer that if the town fires him, he will sue.

Media Madness

Posted on by

I don’t know why Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post, and I don’t much care. In theory, I suppose, WaPo could suck worse than it already does, but there’s more room for improvement than not.

Somebody’s going to buy the New York Times eventually. It must be running on fumes. But let us go on to other amusing things in the news today.

Per Steve Benen, the ever-amusing PolitiFact finds truth in a lie, somehow. In an interview, Eric Cantor spoke of the “growing” federal deficit, but the federal deficit is shrinking. So PolitiFact says =-

Cantor said that the federal deficit is “growing.” Annual federal deficits are not growing right now, and they are not projected to grow through 2015, a point at which the deficit will have shrunk by three-quarters since 2009. By this standard, Cantor is wrong. However, unless policies are changed, deficits are projected to grow again in 2016 and beyond, according to the CBO. On balance, we rate his claim Half True.

All together now — oh, good grief …

Elsewhere, Ted Cruz reveals that he is confused by this newfangled Internets thing.

The first paragraph of this Kevin Williamson NRO piece is hysterically funny, in a completely unintentional way. It begins, “Conservatives have for years attempted to put our finger upon precisely why Barack Obama strikes us as queer in precisely the way he does.” And then it goes on and on about how there’s something about the President that makes them uncomfortable. (Too blah, perhaps?)

I’ve decided that one of the feature pathologies of that complex of twitchiness that makes wingnuts what they are is a complete inability to perceive projections as projections. There are individual lefties with the same problem of course, but I think most of us over the age of 30 or so can appreciate that the way we perceive a thing has at least as much to do with us as with the thing. But righties are nearly always completely unconscious about this. This has a lot to do with why they think the rest of the world should adjust to gratify their predilections rather than the other way around.

Resistant to Reality

Posted on by

Following up the last post, today’s Krugman column is Republicans Against Reality.

What’s happening now is that the G.O.P. is trying to convert Mr. Ryan’s big talk into actual legislation — and is finding, unsurprisingly, that it can’t be done. Yet Republicans aren’t willing to face up to that reality. Instead, they’re just running away.

When it comes to fiscal policy, then, Republicans have fallen victim to their own con game. And I would argue that something similar explains how the party lost its way, not just on fiscal policy, but on everything.

Think of it this way: For a long time the Republican establishment got its way by playing a con game with the party’s base. Voters would be mobilized as soldiers in an ideological crusade, fired up by warnings that liberals were going to turn the country over to gay married terrorists, not to mention taking your hard-earned dollars and giving them to Those People. Then, once the election was over, the establishment would get on with its real priorities — deregulation and lower taxes on the wealthy.

At this point, however, the establishment has lost control. Meanwhile, base voters actually believe the stories they were told — for example, that the government is spending vast sums on things that are a complete waste or at any rate don’t do anything for people like them. (Don’t let the government get its hands on Medicare!) And the party establishment can’t get the base to accept fiscal or political reality without, in effect, admitting to those base voters that they were lied to.

The result is what we see now in the House: a party that, as I said, seems unable to participate in even the most basic processes of governing.

(See also Krugman’s correction to what he wrote in the column about the food stamp program.)

I think also what’s happening is that elections are being won by people too stupid or deluded to see the lies as lies. They are true believers, in other words. They don’t understand they’re supposed to be just pretending.

See also Stan Collender.

Also, too, see House GOP plans anti-Washington push in August. House Republicans have left Washington and are telling the home folks how awful Washington is. However, as Stan Collender (link above) says, right now it’s not so bad. The House is in recess, after all.

The Devil in the Details

Posted on by

This week House Republicans choked on Paul Ryan’s budget plan. Yes, the plan Republicans and baggers have long praised as a work of genius and exquisite wonkiness suddenly didn’t look so hot. That’s because they finally had to deal with the details.

Krugman:

The big if hard-to-report story in DC last week was the ongoing collapse in governance, as Republicans proved themselves unable to reconcile their ideological commitment to drastically lower government spending with the reality that they and their constituents actually benefit from said spending. They’re willing to impose savage cuts on the poor — but even that gets them nothing like the spending cuts they claim they’ll make. Yet rather than acknowledge this reality, they’re basically sticking their heads in the sand.

Times Editorial Board:

A $44 billion measure based on the tooth-and-claw Ryan blueprint approved by the same House just three months ago had to be yanked from the floor when not enough Republicans showed up to vote yes. An embarrassed leadership was forced to concede that the size of the proposal’s cuts to transportation, housing and urban development had become intolerable even to the fiscal zealots among the rank and file, who no longer had the stomach to walk the austerity talk.

Part of the problem, as I understand it, is that the famous policy wonky Ryan Budget that House Republicans have passed at least twice that I can remember was actually long on promise but short on detail. It was more wishful than wonky, to be honest. And when it finally came time for the congress critters to get specific about exactly what programs had to be cut, and how much, they choked. They realized that the cuts would hurt actual flesh-and-blood voting constituents, plus their political careers, and not just the generic welfare queens and other fabled archetypes of parasitism rattling around in their heads. The Times continues,

… the House’s skittishness at the decidedly unpopular costs of some of the party’s budget strictures presented a revealing tableau of both hypocrisy and weakness: Republicans could not pass their own cramped vision of the future.

The Ryan Budget never added up, or subtracted down, or whatever, the way Ryan claimed it would. Ezra Klein explained back in March 2012,

CBO hasn’t looked at whether Ryan’s budget will achieve the results Ryan says it will. Rather, it looked at what will happen assuming Ryan’s budget achieves the results that Ryan says it will.

On the third page, CBO writes, “Chairman Ryan and his staff specified rules by which revenues and spending would evolve.” They then detail what those rules were:

Ryan tells CBO to assume his tax plan will raise revenues to 19 percent of GDP and then hold them there. He tells them to assume his Medicare plan will hold cost growth in Medicare to GDP+0.5 percentage points. He tells them to assume that spending on Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program won’t grow any faster than inflation. He tells them to assume that all federal spending aside from Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security will fall from 12.5 percent of GDP in 2011 to 3.75 percent of GDP in 2050.

He tells them to assume that if we all wish real, real hard, the budget will balance.

Back to Krugman:

There’s a long history here — Republicans have been for lower spending in the abstract, but unable to find things they actually want to cut, for a long time. But the more immediate source of their present difficulties is the Ryan budget. Remember how that budget was initially greeted with cheers and adulation? But the CBO wasn’t fooled; in fact, its report came as close as I’ve ever seen to being openly sarcastic, especially with regard to the kinds of spending that now have Congress paralyzed:

The path for all other federal spending excluding interest—that is, for discretionary spending and mandatory spending apart from that for Social Security and the major mandatory health care programs—was specified by Chairman Ryan’s staff. The remaining part of mandatory spending includes such programs as federal civilian and military retirement, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, unemployment compensation, Supplemental Security Income, the refundable portion of the earned income and child tax credits, and most veterans’ programs. Discretionary spending includes both defense spending and nondefense spending—in roughly equal amounts currently. That combination of other mandatory and discretionary spending was specified to decline from 12 percent of GDP in 2010 to about 6 percent in 2021 and then move in line with the GDP price deflator beginning in 2022, which would generate a further decline relative to GDP. No proposals were specified that would generate that path.

By budget office standards, that last sentence is uproarious.

A lot of right-wing governing ideas are like this. As long as they’re just talk bouncing around the echo chamber, being preached by fanatical gasbags long of wind but short of facts, the troglodytes can think themselves brilliant and congratulate themselves on their great ideas. But when dragged into the cold light of day and put to work actually doing something, the ideas are revealed to be the broken, twisted, ill-conceived things that they are.