Those crazy right-wingers cannot be convinced they are wrong merely by facts

Lane Wallace reports on a study by a group of researchers from Northwestern University, UNC Chapel HIll, SUNY Buffalo and Millsaps College into the problem of Motivated Reasoning. How often have we liberals complained that the right-wing knows the outcome they want and tailor the collection of facts and analysis to achieve the outcome desired before they started? This seems to be the explanation.

How is it that people can cling to an opinion or view of a person, event, issue of the world, despite being presented with clear or mounting data that contradicts that position? The easy answer, of course, is simply that people are irrational. But a closer look at some of the particular ways and reasons we're irrational offers some interesting food for thought.

In a recently published study, a group of researchers from Northwestern University, UNC Chapel HIll, SUNY Buffalo and Millsaps College found that people often employ an approach the researchers called "motivated reasoning" when sorting through new information or arguments, especially on controversial issues. Motivated reasoning is, as UCLA public policy professor Mark Kleiman put it, the equivalent of policy-driven data, instead of data-driven policy.

In other words, if people start with a particular opinion or view on a subject, any counter-evidence can create "cognitive dissonance"--discomfort caused by the presence of two irreconcilable ideas in the mind at once. One way of resolving the dissonance would be to change or alter the originally held opinion. But the researchers found that many people instead choose to change the conflicting evidence--selectively seeking out information or arguments that support their position while arguing around or ignoring any opposing evidence, even if that means using questionable or contorted logic.

That's not a news flash to anyone who's paid attention to any recent national debate--although the researchers pointed out that this finding, itself, runs counter to the idea that the reason people continue to hold positions counter to all evidence is because of misinformation or lack of access to the correct data. Even when presented with compelling, factual data from sources they trusted, many of the subjects still found ways to dismiss it. But the most interesting (or disturbing) aspect of the Northwestern study was the finding that providing additional counter-evidence, facts, or arguments actually intensified this reaction. Additional countering data, it seems, increases the cognitive dissonance, and therefore the need for subjects to alleviate that discomfort by retreating into more rigidly selective hearing and entrenched positions.

Needless to say, these findings do not bode well for anyone with hopes of changing anyone else's mind with facts or rational discussion, especially on "hot button" issues. But why do we cling so fiercely to positions when they don't even involve us directly? Why do we care who got to the North Pole first? Or whether a particular bill has provision X versus provision Y in it? Why don't we care more about simply finding out the truth--especially in cases where one "right" answer actually exists?

Part of the reason, according to Kleiman, is "the brute fact that people identify their opinions with themselves; to admit having been wrong is to have lost the argument, and (as Vince Lombardi said), every time you lose, you die a little." And, he adds, "there is no more destructive force in human affairs--not greed, not hatred--than the desire to have been right."

So, what do we do about that? If overcoming "the desire to have been right" is half as challenging as overcoming hate or greed, the outlook doesn't seem promising. But Kleiman, who specializes in crime control policy and alternative solutions to very sticky problems (his latest book is "When Brute Force Fails: How to Have Less Crime and Less Punishment"), thinks all is not lost. He points to the philosopher Karl Popper, who, he says, believed fiercely in the discipline and teaching of critical thinking, because "it allows us to offer up our opinions as a sacrifice, so that they die in our stead."

A liberal education, Kleiman says, "ought, above all, to be an education in non-attachment to one's current opinions. I would define a true intellectual as one who cares terribly about being right, and not at all about having been right." Easy to say, very hard to achieve. For all sorts of reasons. But it's worth thinking about. Even if it came at the cost of sacrificing or altering our most dearly-held opinions ... the truth might set us free.

Mark Kleiman describes what a liberal education should do to counter the logical problems caused by motivated reasoning. How do we deal with evangelical religious and ideological political institutions that exist to teach their students to practice motivated reasoning? Because that's exactly what Regent University, Liberty University, the Discovery Institute, the Heritage Institute, the American Enterprise Institute, the CATO Institute and other cults all do.

Have Glenn Beck and Michelle Bachman gotten a census worker murdered?

The death of Bill Sparkman in Eastern Kentucky has been national news for a week or so, but the authorities have been quite sparing on the details. But now the CBS and the Associated Press have published some of the details that the authorities were holding back.

A man who said he was among those who found the body told tells the Associated Press that Sparkman was naked, bound at the hands and feet with duct tape and gagged - details that have not yet been confirmed by authorities.

Jerry Weaver of Ohio told the Associated Press he was visiting a cemetery in rural Kentucky with family members on Sept. 12 when he, his wife and daughter saw the body.

"The only thing he had on was a pair of socks," Weaver said. "And they had duct-taped his hands, his wrists. He had duct tape over his eyes, and they gagged him with a red rag or something.

"He was murdered," Weaver said. "There's no doubt."

Weaver said the body was about 50 yards from a 2003 Chevrolet S-10 pickup truck.

Two people briefed on the investigation said various details of Weaver's account matched the details of the crime scene, though both people said they were not informed who found the body. The two spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the case.

Authorities have said a preliminary cause of death was asphyxiation, pending a full medical examination. According to a Kentucky State Police statement, the body was hanging from a tree with a rope around the neck, yet it was in contact with the ground.

"And they even had duct tape around his neck," Weaver said. "And they had like his identification tag on his neck. They had it duct-taped to the side of his neck, on the right side, almost on his right shoulder."

Both of the people briefed on the investigation confirmed that Sparkman's Census Bureau ID was found taped to his head and shoulder area. Weaver said he couldn't tell if the tag was a Census ID because he didn't get close enough to read it. He could see writing on Sparkman's chest, but could not read that it said "fed."

With both hands and feet duct tapped this was clearly murder. The fact that the body was naked and the federal ID was duct taped to the body is a clear statement of why. Is there an alternative explanation?

Although anti-government sentiment was one possibility in the death, some in law enforcement also cited the prevalence of drug activity in the area - including meth labs and marijuana fields - although they had no reason to believe there was a link to Sparkman's death.

Why would drug dealers display the body they way these killers did? Especially with the census taker ID taped to the naked body? That just attracts police. Having Sparkman simply disappear would have been much more reasonable for drug dealers protecting their operation. This was designed to attract the media.

Then consider this.

A retired state trooper who worked with Sparkman at Johnson Elementary School, some 30 miles from where the body was found, said he warned Sparkman that some people in the rural area are hostile.

"I said, 'Bill you be careful when you go over to eastern Kentucky to do your census work. Some of the people over there may not understand that you're just collecting statistics,'" friend Gilbert Acciardo told CBS News.

Both Glenn Beck and Michelle Bachman have been encouraging people to refuse to cooperate with the Census because it is "an intrusive government program" by an authoritarian federal government. Of course, I doubt that either has told anyone directly on the record to kill census takers the way Glenn Beck told his viewer to kill Dr. Tillman because he provided late term (legal) abortions. But there are crazies out there just looking for excuses and targets to kill. Those two certainly have been stoking the fires under the crazies.

There is no difference between what Bachman and Beck have been saying and yelling "Fire!" in a crowded theater. They did not target him specifically but they got Bill Sparkman killed.

MA governor appoints Paul Kirk as interim Senator; GOP throws tantrum in media

The Massachusetts legislature passed a bill authorizing the governor to appoint an interim Senator to fill the seat which became vacant when Sen. Ted Kennedy died. The election to fill the seat permanently will still occur in the Spring of 2010. The GOP immediately brought suit saying that since the legislature did not declare that the interim appointment was an emergency appointment with a two-thirds vote, then the MA governor was required to wait 90 days to make the appointment.

State Court Judge Tom Connolly disagreed and threw out the GOP lawsuit as being without basis. This was Judge Connolly's argument:

Lawmakers passed a law this week giving Patrick the power to appoint an interim replacement for the late Senator Edward M. Kennedy until a special election can be held Jan. 19. Laws usually take 90 days to go into effect, but Patrick signed an emergency letter which made it effective immediately.

In a court filing, Assistant Attorney General Peter Sacks countered that the Supreme Judicial Court in a 1975 ruling had made it clear that a governor does not need legislative approval to invoke an emergency. He also said that the judiciary does not have the constitutional authority to directly block a governor's executive appointment.

On Thursday, Secretary of State William F. Galvin, a Democrat, said the emergency letter is "very clearly available to the governor under the Constitution. I don't know how you suggest this is something novel. It's not."

Former Republican governor Mitt Romney used the emergency provision 14 times, Galvin added, including to increase the boating speed limit in Charlton and to change the office of town moderator in Milton.
[...]
"the Party [The GOP] does not cite any case law in support of its argument."

So the precedent is that the Governor has the power to declare the law an emergency on his own and previous governors have frequently used that power. There is no case law that establishes that the governor does NOT have the power to make the immediate appointment. If there were then the GOP would have cited it in their lawsuit.

It looks to me as though the GOP was bringing a frivolous lawsuit hoping to get it heard by a lawless conservative judge who does what he wants instead of what the law requires. Now that Judge Connolly has done what the law and precedent required, the GOP is going to complain loudly in the media for a while. They were just playing for more time to kill health care reform.

What's wrong with America? Ask Jon Taplin.

Reagan and the neoconservatives managed to convince their followers that the only thing the government knew how to do well was fight wars. All the rest--building the Interstate Highway System, running Social Security and Medicare--the government must be incompetent. But it is the financing of the National Security State that prevents us from providing a world class universal health care and K-College education system. Nothing else. And until the Democrats are willing to provide a counter-narrative to Glenn Beck's vision of what's wrong with America--one aimed at the working class and not Wall Street--the social contagion of the interregnum's morbid symptoms will continue to spread.

This is the conclusion that Jon Taplin has come to. It's very interesting how he gets there.

I had identified the problem of the culture clash myself, but I had not put the rest of it all together they way he has. His book should be very interesting.

Joe Wilson was sandbagged by the Republicans per SNL

This has to be the most rational explanation. Surely Joe Wilson is not some crazy cracker from South Carolina or anything.

CNN calls FOX news Liars

Here is the tape.

What went wrong with macro economics and financial economics

I have previously written about Paul Krugman's article in the NY Magazine about how the economics profession got a real black eye out of the current Recession-and-almost-Depression. Here's some more writings on the same subject:

• What went wrong with economics Jul 16th 2009 from the Economist.


• Why I didn't go medieval on Krugman, and other book newsSept 10, 2009 in Time.com


• Hoisted from the archives – my old post on Freshwater and Saltwater macroeconomic theorySept 16th, 2009 posted in the TPM reader blogs by John Hempton.

They all tell pretty much the same story. Financial economists and Macro economists essentially overlooked the warnings that the economy was coming off its rails.

The articles are all quite good, and each takes a mildly different look at the issues so reading them all helps in understanding what has been happening to us. My earlier blog can be found at The US economy is surprisingly dysfunctional. . It contains links to other writings, as do many of the articles in the list above.

One important point to remember, though. Even though the economists got some important points wrong, the politicians have been consistently much worse and should not be trusted.

Anti-government teabaggers complain about lack of government public transportation

This is funny. The protesters want the government services and they want them to work right. They just refuse to plan for or pay for it.

Protesters who attended Saturday’s Tea Party rally in Washington found a new reason to be upset: Apparently they are unhappy with the level of service provided by the subway system.

Rep. Kevin Brady called for a government investigation into whether the government-run subway system adequately prepared for this weekend’s rally to protest government spending and government services.

Seriously.

The Texas Republican on Wednesday released a letter he sent to Washington’s Metro system complaining that the taxpayer-funded subway system was unable to properly transport protesters to the rally to protest government spending and expansion.

“These individuals came all the way from Southeast Texas to protest the excessive spending and growing government intrusion by the 111th Congress and the new Obama administration,” Brady wrote. “These participants, whose tax dollars were used to create and maintain this public transit system, were frustrated and disappointed that our nation’s capital did not make a great effort to simply provide a basic level of transit for them.”

A spokesman for Brady says that “there weren’t enough cars and there weren’t enough trains.”

Steve Benen points out

Apparently, Brady heard complaints from some of his constituents who traveled to D.C. to protest "big government." They were disappointed to discover, however, that the government had done more to satisfy their public-transportation expectations, and now want other government officials to address the problem.

In some instances, Brady said constituents relied on private enterprise -- taxi cabs -- rather than the (ahem) public option. The conservative lawmaker described this as a bad thing. Local officials, Brady said, should have made "a great effort to simply provide a basic level of transit" to the public.

Read that sentence again and replace "transit" with "health care coverage."

Is it any wonder that the Bush administration, which was administered to suit the demands of conservatives like these teabaggers, failed utterly to function even adequately? It's irrationalism in action.

Sen. Baucus sets new record for political incompetence

Sen. Baucus is presenting his committee's health care bill proposal today. He has negotiated for months, delaying the entire health care process to the point that Republicans think they can kill what last summer seemed inevitable to pass, and what has Sen. Baucus achieved?

He has failed to get a single Republican to support it and lost one Democrat. And the most moderate Republican in the Senate, on whom Baucus was setting great store, rejected the resulting proposal primarily because the funding was too conservative and was unlikely to be successful!

It is truly amazing that such a long term experienced Senator, one who is intelligent and well-thought of, should fail to understand that what he was trying to do was politically impossible and that the Republican Party was playing him. Baucus has simply been insulated in the 100 rich man's club (the US Senate) for much too long to understand the political reality of the health cared debate.

I hope the damage Baucus has caused and permitted can be repaired. That's more likely than repairing Baucus' reputation as an effective politician who works for the good of the American public.

The people behind the teabaggers have appeared!

Here are the wealthy supporting the teabag demonstrators.



Here's some more of the same:



And more:

Thinking about thinking - not just for human beings now

The ability of humans to think about what they are thinking about (Metacognition)has long been considered by many as a uniquely human behavior. Maybe not. Maybe it's just easier to test for in humans because humans can talk about what they are thinking about, while similar tests in animals require observing the animal behavior and inferring what they are thinking about. This from Live Science at Yahoo News:

Some animals are more thoughtful than others, according to a comparative psychologist who says evidence is mounting that dolphins, macaque monkeys and other animals share our ability to reflect upon, monitor or regulate their states of mind.

J. David Smith of the University at Buffalo notes that humans are capable of metacognition, or thinking about thinking. "Humans can feel uncertainty. They know when they do not know or remember, and they respond well to uncertainty by deferring response and seeking information," Smith writes in the September issue of the journal Trends in Cognitive Sciences.

And accumulating research, he says, suggests metacognition is not unique to humans.

"The idea is that some minds have a cognitive executive that can look in on the human's or the animal's thoughts and problem-solving and look at how its going and see if there are ways to guide it or if behavior needs to pause while more information is obtained," Smith told LiveScience.

So what, you say?

Metacognition is a critical part of what it means to be conscious. If we can understand metacognition, then we are further down the road to understanding what consciousness is.

Ted Kennedy on the Bush/Cheney lies that led us to invade Iraq

Teddy Kennedy's memoir has come out today, and talking Points Memo has just published what Kennedy wrote about the way the Bush/Cheney administration lied America into invading Iraq for American domestic political purposes. America has lost all the lives and treasure, and Iraq has been devastated to advance the political fortunes of the American conservatives.

Here is Kennedy on the lack of justification for the war:

My views on war drew upon the teachings of Saint Augustine and Saint Thomas Aquinas. A distillation of their philosophies has yielded six principles that guide the determination of a "just" war, and these principles were my guiding arguments:

• A war must have a just cause, confronting a danger that is beyond question;
• It must be declared by a legitimate authority acting on behalf of the people;
• It must be driven by the right intention, not ulterior, self-interested motives;
• It must be a last resort;
• It must be proportional, so that the harm inflicted does not outweigh the good achieved; and
• It must have a reasonable chance of success.

There was no just cause for the invasion of Iraq, I declared time and again. Iraq posed no threat that justified immediate, preemptive war, and there was no convincing pattern of relationships between Saddam and Al Qaeda. The "legitimate authority," the Congress, indeed approved authorization for the use of force in Iraq in October 2002, but it acted in haste and under pressure from the White House, which intentionally politicized the vote by scheduling it before midterm elections. By contrast, in 1991, the administration of the first President Bush timed the vote on the use of military force against Iraq to occur after midterm elections, in order to de-politicize the decision.

As for "motives," those stated by the Bush administration itself were unacceptable on their face. "The Bush administration says we must take preemptive action against Iraq," I pointed out from the Senate floor in October 2002. "But what the administration is really calling for is preventive war, which flies in the face of international rules of acceptable behavior." I was far blunter less than two years later, when the loss of life among our young troops and the devastation to Iraqi society had grown grotesque. The war, I charged on the Senate floor in July 2004, was "a fraud, cooked up in Texas" to advance the president's political standing.

Besides being a fraud, the War in Iraq caused the Bush/Cheney administration to take the resources away from Afghanistan where they were actually needed. The result is that America did nothing to improve Afghanistan at a time when the population was a lot more prepared to accept what we had to offer. Because of the Bush/Cheney blindness and self-centered conservative, the Taliban has been reconstructed and now threatens the nuclear-capable Pakistan and al Qaeda is becoming a new and more dangerous entity world wide.

In every way the Bush/Cheney administration failed to provide for American security and failed to adequately protect the American people.

The top movie pie fight

Is there any movie pie fight better than this one? If so, I don't remember seeing it.

What's wrong with South Carolina?

South Carolina has a real history as the home of resistance to the federal government. Currently it houses Governor Mark Sanford and House Representative Joe Wilson. Politico has this interesting article.

Just under nine months into the president's term, the state has emerged as a beachhead for the president's most aggressive conservative critics, a secure launching point for some of the harshest attacks on the administration’s policy initiatives.

[...]

The state has a long history of stridency in national politics, having produced legendary opposition figures from Vice President John C. Calhoun, who helped pave the way for the Civil War, to the late Sen. Strom Thurmond, who filibustered historic civil rights legislation. By comparison, DeMint, Sanford and Wilson are a tame bunch.

"South Carolina is a state that's always loved having characters for politicians," said Bruce Haynes, a political consultant who served as an aide to Campbell. "There's been no shortage of South Carolina politicians over the past 50 years who have said some interesting and outrageous things. And they tend to be reelected by large margins."

Is it something in the water?

This is hilarious.

How far wrong can Newt Gingrich be? Newt Gingrich Accidentally Names Porn Exec 'Entrepreneur Of The Year'.

An excellent example of Gingrich's normal inability to get things right.

Here's why we elected Obama.

Consider this speech by Obama..

The US economy is surprisingly dysfunctional.

Several reasons why America is in an economic crisis.

First, is an excellent article by Anna Burger in Huffington post that describes how the US Chamber of Commerce has orchestrated the uncompetitive structure of large corporations and the way top executives control their corporations even when the shareholders object. Here's a sample

To find the "whodunnit" of our current economic crisis, look no further than the corporate boardroom.

Far from serving as checks-and-balances, today's corporate directors are under thumbs of the CEOs who selected them. With unquestioned power and ever increasing arrogance, CEOs can take unnecessary risks, hide details of bad investments, and pay out excessive bonuses to themselves and top executives regardless of their job performance.

That's how subprime mortgages and credit default swaps were hatched. That's how Bank of America's Ken Lewis kept details of Merrill Lynch's poor health and plans of multi-billion dollar bonuses from shareholders. That's how the initial nine banks that got TARP money could pay out $32.6 billion in bonuses last year despite getting a $175 billion dollar bailout from taxpayers.

Then, also in the Huffington Post is an article by Ryan Grim that shows how the Economics profession is dominated by the Federal Reserve.

The Fed belongs to the banks, and all three work in close coordination to make sure that everyone is speaking on the same sheet of music as they propagandize about the economy.

Then there is Paul Krugman's article in the Sunday New York Times describing just how badly the Economics profession got its recommendations in the run up to the 2008 collapse of the American (and then the world) banking system which nearly threw the world into Great Depression II. (I blogged about Krugman's article last Saturday.)

Then there is the fiction that the economy is somehow self-sufficient and self-regulating. It's not. Power structures determine where and how economic transactions occur, but since power cannot be measured in dollars it gets forgotten when we talk about economics. There was a reason why the discipline used to be called Political-economics before Economics itself became a branch of statistics.

Consider how big business organizations are structured. America's economy is largely controlled by large businesses and those businesses act largely at the behest of wealthy conservative oligarchs. Here is how it works.

Big businesses are controlled by the self-defensive conservative wealthy elite whose main purpose is to protect their social position and the wealth that assures they keep that position. The businesses themselves are controlled by the Iron Law of Oligarchy. To a large extent all the resources are controlled by the top managers, and those top managers determine what their employees do professionally.

Robert Michels explained the iron law of oligarchy. The control and wealth of the corporate organizations are centralized in a few individuals at the very top. The recent extreme pay checks to CEO's is the way the conservative wealthy have manipulated the owners and top managers of large business organizations, especially the centralized media corporations.The media are important, because objections to the way the overall system is organized has to be communicated to the masses if it is going to be changed for the benefit of the rest of us. With control of the big media the oligarchs are able to get out the propaganda that justifies the existing system that works to their benefit and objections to that system are not spread widely.

If there were social justice, the CEO's would only be paid what they are worth - which is not the multimillion dollar pay checks they have increasingly been getting, especially over the last three decades. Those paychecks are designed to align the desires and actions of the top managers of the MSM with the wealthy conservative oligarchs.

This is just a sample of the dysfunctional structure of the American economy, and the super-wealthy like it this way. Since they control the TV networks, the large newspaper chains and the most influential elements of the rest of the media, the rest of us don't hear much about just how dysfunctional the economy and society really is.

Just a few ideas for your consideration.

The health care bill is saveable according to Jonathon Cohn.

The very knowledgeable Jonathon Cohn has hope for the health care bill.

...the greatest risk with reconciliation is that the process produces a weak bill, an incomplete one, or, in the very worst case, a counter-productive one--not that it fails to produce any bill at all. The Democratic Party isn’t necessarily the bravest. (If it was, it’d have passed reform already.) But it’s also not the dumbest. Failing to pass a bill when they have the numbers would be politically suicidal, just like it was in the 1990s. Having committed themselves to passing legislation, they now must follow through. They knew that before August. Knock on wood, they still know it today.

This is an alternative to the possibility of passing a "bipartisan" bill the gets approval by Maine's Sen. Olympia Snowe, still the preferred route by The White House and Sen. Harry Reid.

But Jonathon points out that either case passed a bill. Neither is a sure thing, but the net evaluation he presents is that we get health care reform that can be improved in the future as its flaws become more apparent.

That's good news for America.

Abdul Khan describes how he started the Pakistani nuclear program

This is a report by an interview on Pakistani TV conducted with Dr. Abdul Khan who is the father of the Pakistani nuclear program.

It was started because of the Indian nuclear weapons test and because Pakistan was especially concerned about their security after East Pakistan revolted in 1971 and became Bangladesh. It was sped up because Pakistan was supporting the military activities of the Americans in Afghanistan at the time of the Soviet takeover.Khan also discusses the relationship between Pakistan and both North Korea and Iran. He would not discuss nuclear technology transfer to either of those countries, however.

The existence of Pakistan's nuclear weapons program is a major reason why the American military is currently in Afghanistan.

Dr. Khan's interview is quite illuminating. It's only about 10 pages.

McChrystal's plan for Afghanistan is now available to the public

If you want to read General McChrystal's plan, here it is in pdf format. It is dated August 10 and signed by both U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan Karl Eikenberry and by commander of U.S. forces Afghanistan Gen. Stanley McChrystal. It is a combined Civil-Military plan.

Want to bet that the Bush administration under Cheney and Rumsfeld would never had presented a plan that covered both the military AND the Civilian aspects of the war?

Politico has a discussion of the plan here.

I'll read it and discuss it later.

The best argument yet that we should support the public option.

It has long been clear that private and for profit health insurers cannot and will not provide quality reliable health insurance for everyone. The best and lowest cost solution is the single payer government financed system actual delivery of health care in the hands of a mixture of private and public institutions.

That's been off the table because the Obama administration compromised before even starting the health care debate. Jeff Neffinger explains why that was the wrong strategy.

This is the best rational for single payer I have seen yet.

What if America got the equivalent of the Mass health plan?

Here is a description of what has happened since Massachusetts has implemented their universal health care plan. It's a mixed bag, mostly better and nothing really bad.

Nobody could have predicted .... Macroeconomics in the ashes of the Recession of 2008

The Macroeconomics profession had essentially concluded by the end of the century that they knew enough so that another Great Depression was now impossible. Not that if it started economists and policymakers could head it off, but that it was impossible for it to even start. That conclusion was based on the assumption that the price valuations set my markets were perfect, given the available information at the time along with a great deal of very complex mathematical models and a lot of high-level statistics.

The assumptions that financial markets provide perfect prices and that people are perfectly rational were the same assumptions made by the Classical Economists before the Great Depression. It became the new assumption when Keynesian explanations of Depressions being caused by a lack of adequate demand were rejected in a flurry of new mathematical models and a flash of computer monitors. Unfortunately the models were essentially based on what Krugman calls ketchup economics.

Ketchup economics means the "...because a two-quart bottle of ketchup costs twice as much as a one-quart bottle, finance theorists declare that the price of ketchup must be right." It ignores the underlying factors that establish the true value. So if you compare home prices at a given point of time and the price of two comparable homes is roughly the same, then the price is right. There is no consideration of whether the income of the homeowners can support the mortgage required to meet that price. Those fancy mathematical models threw out answers that just don't match up with reality in the long run.

Financial markets, unfortunately, are well known to be based on short term considerations and to not consider long term factors.

The economic and financial experiences world wide of the last two years has left economies world wide in much worse shape than previously and also it has left the profession of Macroeconomics strongly questioning where they went wrong. Bankers are beginning to speak publicly about the need to put human beings back into the lending decisions and not depend on the mathematical models.

Paul Krugman has presented a fascinating overview of the questions the Macroeconomic profession are now grappling with The generally accepted new assumption goes back to Keynes' conclusion that recessions, even the depression, are caused by lack of adequate demand. But the beauty of the neo-classical models holds a powerful attraction. The recognition of what went wrong is not yet there.

Go read Krugman's article. It is lengthy, but written in language a layman with some understanding of Macroeconomics can handle.

OK. I want to quote Krugman on why the government has to be spending so much right now.

During a normal recession, the Fed responds by buying Treasury bills — short-term government debt — from banks. This drives interest rates on government debt down; investors seeking a higher rate of return move into other assets, driving other interest rates down as well; and normally these lower interest rates eventually lead to an economic bounceback. The Fed dealt with the recession that began in 1990 by driving short-term interest rates from 9 percent down to 3 percent. It dealt with the recession that began in 2001 by driving rates from 6.5 percent to 1 percent. And it tried to deal with the current recession by driving rates down from 5.25 percent to zero.

But zero, it turned out, isn’t low enough to end this recession. And the Fed can’t push rates below zero, since at near-zero rates investors simply hoard cash rather than lending it out. So by late 2008, with interest rates basically at what macroeconomists call the “zero lower bound” even as the recession continued to deepen, conventional monetary policy had lost all traction.

Now what? This is the second time America has been up against the zero lower bound, the previous occasion being the Great Depression. And it was precisely the observation that there’s a lower bound to interest rates that led Keynes to advocate higher government spending: when monetary policy is ineffective and the private sector can’t be persuaded to spend more, the public sector must take its place in supporting the economy. Fiscal stimulus is the Keynesian answer to the kind of depression-type economic situation we’re currently in.

This observation was at the core of Krugman's book "Depression Economics." It also explains why attempting to balance the federal budget anytime soon is likely to cause a second economic downturn.

At the end of his article Krugman lays out where he thinks the profession has to go next, with his reasons for thinking so. anyone interested in macroeconomics or in investing needs to read this article carefully.

Al Franken gives a real good explanation of why and how to change the medical system

Al Franken meets with tea party people and talks turkey with them.



This is the best short explanation I have seen and better that most of what I have read.

Have the GOP leadership gone stark raving mad?

Chairman of the Republican Party of Florida Jim Greer has responded to President Obama's proposal to broadcast a live address on education to schools that choose to air it with a hysterical tirade that makes it sound like Greer is horribly frightened.This is a surprise since as Eric Kleefeld notes, Greer is "seen as one of the more sensible, mainstream Republicans, as he is a long-time ally of moderate Gov. Charlie Crist." What's happened to make mainstream GOP leaders react like scalded cats to the most innocuous actions from President Barack Obama?

Thomas B. Edsal points out that the GOP seems to have two groups looking towards the future. They are 'Ideologues who are inciting the base with wild rhetoric and banking on a "great American awakening" that will sweep conservatives back into power. On the other: Strategists, who see the party's growing intolerance as a prescription for minority status.'

Jim Greer should be aware of this split. It looks like he thinks the votes will be with the ideologues, so he is playing his cards to be one of them.

Greer's hysterical statement proves once again that Republicans, especially the leadership, are all about personal self-interest rather that working for the long term good of the organizations they belong to - in this case the Republican Party.

Bartiromo demonstrates how conservatives fail to contribute to the healthcare discussion

CNBC anchor Maria Bartiromo demonstrates the combination of partisanship and ignorance that ideological conservatives have brought to the discussion of the American health care system.



Here's how Steve Benen describes her ignorance:

She thinks a public option would undermine quality care, but she doesn't know why. She thinks Medicare somehow offers sub-standard care, but she doesn't know why. She thinks 44 year olds who like Medicare should sign up for it, unaware of eligibility restrictions. She thinks Weiner should choose to opt into Medicare, while simultaneously arguing argument against giving American consumers the choice of a public option.

This is not thought. It is pure reflexive obstructionism.

The absence of an organized American health care system fails a sizable percentage of the American public by not letting them get the health care they need. It has damaged the American economy and made it less competitive in international trade. And it has done all of this while costing a great deal more per person than does the next most expensive national health care system in the industrialized world. And what do the American ideological conservatives offer to improve the American health care system?

A combination of "head in the sand" refusal to even address the problems of the overall system and reflexive obstructionism trying to prevent others from working on the problem. That's what. Nothing else. The conservative ideology is even more bankrupt than is the American health care system.

The Democrats need a single healthcare reform narrative now

What we learned in August is something we've long known but keep forgetting: The most important difference between America's Democratic left and Republican right is that the left has ideas and the right has discipline. Obama and progressive supporters of health care were outmaneuvered in August -- not because the right had any better idea for solving the health care mess but because the rights' attack on the Democrats' idea was far more disciplined than was the Democrats' ability to sell it.

[...]

Whatever discipline Obama had mustered during the campaign somehow disappeared. This is just the latest chapter of a long saga. Over the last twenty years, as progressives have gushed new ideas, the right has became ever more organized and mobilized in resistance -- capable of executing increasingly consistent and focused attacks, moving in ever more perfect lockstep, imposing an exact discipline often extending even to the phrases and words used repeatedly by Hate Radio, Fox News, and the oped pages of The Wall Street Journal ("death tax," "weapons of mass destruction," "government takeover of health care.") I saw it in 1993 and 1994 as the Clinton healthcare plan -- as creatively and wildly convuluted as any policy proposal before or since -- was defeated both by a Democratic majority in congress incapable of coming together around any single bill and a Republican right dedicated to Clinton's destruction. Newt Gingrich's subsequent "contract with America" recaptured Congress for the Republicans not because it contained a single new idea but because Republicans unflinchingly rallied around it while Democrats flailed.

You want to know why the left has ideas and the right has discipline? Because people who like ideas and dislike authority tend to identify with the Democratic left, while people who feel threatened by new ideas and more comfortable in a disciplined and ordered world tend to identify with the Republican right.

Robert Reich explains what we should learn from the experience of August. Go read the rest.

Don't trust CBO scoring of bills

The trouble with CBO scoring of bills is that they apply conventional economic wisdom and then usually miss major shifts in the economy that throw their projections into a cocked hat. Dean Baker explains.

Universal health care first; then a health care system that works

First America needs guaranteed universal health care. That's the big flaw in the current lack-of-system. But once that is taken care of, health care has to be provided more effectively and at lower cost to the nation.

The second part cannot be done until there is a universal health care system in place. Without universal health care and some organization overseeing the complete system there are too many places to fail. The biggest failures today are simply shunted into the pool of uninsured and ignored.

After the current battle is won, then the next set of problems has to be dealt with. Dr. Dean Ornish describes some of his experiences trying to change the health care delivery system based on good science.

Universal health care is only today's biggest battle in health care delivery. Making it more effective and cost-effective will continue to require a lot of work.

Kennedy's health care plan

Not all of the proposed health care plans are arcane and unintelligible. There is the Kennedy Plan out there.

The GOP may be screwing themselves

Digby points out that the Republicans have taken a real stonewall position in any and every possible health care bill. Even a proposal that would require everyone to buy insurance (a universal mandate) and be a real bonus for the health insurance companies is off the table.

The three groups involved in the healthcare debate are the progressive Democrats (the largest group but not a majority) the republicans (the minority party and shrinking as their positions get crazier and less popular) and the centrist Democrats (Digby calls them the "sell-outs") who hold the deciding role in the mess. The Republicans could get the crappy pro-business bill with the help of the centrist Democrats and the Democrats would have to get that bill if it is all the centrist Blue Dogs would go for. But the Republicans refuse to give the Blue Dogs any support for that pro-insurance bill. The Democrats from conservative districts and states are targeted no matter what they do. Those center-right districts and states are the Republican Party's only possible route back to majority party status.

Digby suggests that this will be the margin that forced the Democratic Party to pass a real health care reform bill that actually does address America's health care problems, but it'll only happen if the Republicans continue to stonewall the centrist Democrats. Here's Digby's description of the situation:

The sell-outs are almost begging the Republicans to help them pass the terrible, insurance company giveaway bill they want so badly --- and the Republicans just won't cooperate. They are making the Democrats go this alone, which is the last thing they want to do because they [The sell-outs] have to face their own voters after passing something that won't work --- and now they know the Republicans will kill them no matter what they do. They have nowhere to hide.

An intriguing scenario. The Republicans could weaken the Democrats by getting them to pass the insurance company's bill, but they put a higher priority on winning back the more conservative districts and states they have lost to the Democrats, especially in the last two elections. There are two factors which I think account for most of that. First, I'd guess that the Republicans who are left in Congress all represent strongly gerrymandered Congressional districts or come from states dominated by social conservatives, so that if they want to keep their elected positions, they have to toe the radical right-wing line. If they don't, then Limbaugh and the other right-wing talk-radio hosts will gang up on them along with Grover Norquist's Americans for Tax Reform will come down on them with both feet. So the Republicans in office do not dare to provide any room for the "blue dog" centrist Democrats.

The other factor is that most of the conservatives in office today are the true-believers who seriously believe that America is a right-wing nation, and they have just had a string of bad elections recently. If that's true, then the conservative states and districts are ripe to be retaken by the Republicans. All they have to do is overcome the liberal brainwashing of the electorate which has resulted in so many voters blaming Republican policies and the Bush administration for the current Recession (and near-Depression.) along with countering the Democratic actions with organizations like ACORN to steal elections. Those who thoroughly buy into the right-wing culture and world view really can't accept that America isn't truly a center-right nation at heart.

If Digby's scenario is accurate at all, that would be the reason why. As I said - an intriguing scenario.

The fingerprints on the Republican "death panel" fear tactic

The Republicans are in an all-out battle to prevent the Democrats from passing health care reform, and since they have no rational reasons for opposing it, they are spreading as much fear as the media will bear. The most recent is the line that the health care reform includes what they call "death panels." Talking Points Memo traces the development of that meme in the media.

Notice that it starts with a lie told by the whacked out loon Betsy McCaughey. Then it is picked up by House Minority Leader John Boehner. Then Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-NC) presented the meme on the House floor. Then Sarah Palin posted the idea on her Facebook page and spread the label "death panel." Then Newt Gingrich appeared on ABC's "This Week" and pushed the meme even further.

Next Senator Johnny Isakson reversed his previous position on end of life counselling and put out a statement distancing himself from it. Sen. Grassley (R-IA) worked to spread teh fear when he told a Republican town hall crowd, "You have every right to fear....a government-run plan to decide when to pull the plug on Grandma." This was the same day RNC Chairman Michael Steele told Neil Cavuto that panels were going to be imposed to make life-and-death decisions. Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) added to the story with more of the "pull the plug on grandma" rhetoric to a local Oklahoma TV station.

Of course, nothing the Republicans lie about is complete unless Rush Limbaugh bloviates about it. He has been all over the "death panels" fear-mongering. Rep. Broun (R-GA) who is also an MD sent a letter to the American Conservative Union making the statement which he cannot support: "When mama falls and breaks her hip, she'll just lie in her bed in pain until she dies with pneumonia because her needed surgery is not cost efficient."

John McCain must have been concerned that he was being left out, because he rather belatedly echoed the by now full-throated Republican fear-mongering lie. So did the NRO writer Jonah Goldberg.

Several common things run through this. First, this is fact-free fear-mongering spread throught the mass media. Second, the Republican Party is pushing it. They completely avoid talking about the problems Americans have with the failed health care system, and they offer no solutions. This is pure obstructionism.

Steve Benen explains what happens next.

The right's "death panel" attack was thoroughly and completely debunked. It didn't matter -- lots of Americans believed the lie anyway. It has, however, started to lose some of its salience, which means it's time for the new health care reform lie.

Presidential power in the future depends on successful use of power in the past

Power begats power. Weakness begats weakness. That's politics.

Anyone who thinks that someone is powerful just because they occupy the office of President needs to rethink the proposition. M. J. Rosenberg provides a current example.

Here's what's wrong with the American media

Once upon a time the TV networks provided a public service. They also were highly profitable. What happened to them? The Reagan Revolution and deregulation happened to them. Here is an analysis by TexasTom at Daily Kos:

until the eighties, only one of the major TV networks was a publicly traded corporation. CBS and ABC were both privately held, and (especially in the case of CBS) were owned and managed by people who had a sense of the public obligation associated with their networks. Today, all the networks are part of large, publicly traded corporations who see their news departments as another profit center...and that's about it. For Time-Warner, CNN isn't about making a fair profit by serving it's audience...it's just about the profit, period. The same thing can be said at the other networks. Over on the newspaper side, it seems that the few newspapers that didn't become part of large publicly traded groups are the ones that seem to be weathering the current recession -- probably because they aren't having to cut staff just to meet debt service payments.

The evidence that we're seeing in recent years is that news media as publicly traded corporations doesn't seem to be a winning bet.

The second point, of course, is deregulation. In the sixties, an activist FCC actually refused to allow the sale of the ABC network to a multinational conglomerate (ITT) on the basis that such an ownership change would not serve the public interest. Note that the argument that ABC was unprofitable and needed the infusion of cash from the conglomerate did not sway the FCC. The FCC also imposed limits on the amount of advertising that stations could run (that's why infomercials didn't appear on TV until the eighties), requirements for some "public service" programming, ownership restrictions, and much, much more. Note that the broadcasting business was extremely profitable (especially for major and medium market television stations) during this era of heavy regulation.

Starting in the eighties, the era of deregulation began. Throughout the eighties and nineties, rules were eliminated and ownership limits were relaxed. We're all familiar with the results -- the almost total demise of actual news reporting by any radio stations (even so-called "news" stations are really mostly opinion and talk anymore), and the steady concentration of ownership. The latter means that while we have the illusion of more choice, the reality is that we have less choice because all those different channels are controlled by the same companies.

Strangely enough, all that deregulation has resulted in a less profitable broadcasting business. Once again, the conservative mantra of deregulation seems to be wrong...

One reason why that deregulation has been such a disaster for the broadcast industry is the rise of cable and satellite TV. Back in the seventies, much of the left saw the then new cable TV industry as being the salvation of television. No more would the "lowest common denominator" rule the dial. Unfortunately, those folks never saw the rise of E!, VH1, Bravo, A&E, and the multitude of other channels that are essentially devoted to mind-numbing trash. How did they end up being so wrong about cable?

Unfortunately, the rise of cable coincided with the era of deregulation. The result is that the cable industry was never adequately regulated, and the result was a level of ownership concentration that makes the broadcast business look diffused by comparison. Big companies bulked up by buying a whole bunch of cable networks and forcing cable systems (and, later, satellite services) to carry all of them on the lowest tier. Viewers were forced to buy on an "all or nothing" basis, which prevents those viewers from being able to easily vote against channels that they see as worthless by cancelling their payments for those particular channels. It's all structured to maximize corporate profits, of course -- and it does so very effectively. Public service of any sort is not even a consideration.

The centralization of radio media has led to lack of local control

It has been clear that diversity of programming has suffered greatly since the a few companies have bought up so many local stations and placed them into chains with lock-step national programming. Here is what Amanda Terkel at Think Progress has written about the situation:

Approximately 91 percent of weekday talk radio programming is conservative, and just nine percent is progressive. However, “43 percent of regular talk radio listeners identify as conservative, while 23 percent identify as liberal and 30 percent as moderate.” Much of this imbalance was created in the wave of consolidation after the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which “removed the national limit on the number of radio stations that one could own.”

Central control of the media is inherently anti-democratic. The conservatives are desperate to keep it that way.

Republicans - the Party of "Just Say No!"

The Republican Party is and will remain
the Party of "Just Say No!"

For all the economic and international problems the Republicans have created, you'd think they would be embarrassed and try to fix the two wars and the near approach to Great Depression II which has left us still in the worst recession since Great Depression I. But no, they don't want to solve problems for the American people. This is what they want. Rep. Shimpkus says it and emphasizes what he says so that we cannot misunderstand him.



Source
YouTube

---

As an example of the Republican "Just Say No!" principle, here is Sen. Baucus on The GOP leadership view about health care reform:

"he also admitted that the GOP leadership is putting “intense political pressure” on his committee colleagues Olympia Snowe, Chuck Grassley, and Mike Enzi to defeat any health care bill:

“The Republican leadership in the Senate and in the House is doing its utmost to kill this bill,” he said. “They are putting intense political pressure on Chuck Grassley, Olympia Snow and Mike Enzi, to bow out, because they want to kill it. So I’ve got a challenge ahead of me to work out all this on policy as we go through these meetings.

“The other thing is the politics of it: ‘People, this is the right thing to do for America. I know you’re under intense political pressure, but do the right thing. I know it’s easy for me to say right now, because I’m getting beat up by both sides, but not nearly as much as you are by the Republican hierarchy.’ ”

Yesterday, in an interview with FOX News, Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ) underscored the GOP’s reticence to support health reform. He told Neil Cavuto that he doesn’t think “a single Republican” will vote for health care legislation that looks like the bills in the House or Senate HELP committee."

Johnny Cash - I've been everywhere

Another good Johnny Cash song.

I've Been Everywhere
sung by Johnny Cash.

Source
YouTube

Johnny Cash - the Wanderer

This is one Hell of a fine song.

The Wander
Sung by Johnny Cash.

Source
YouTube

The right-wing lies that are dominating health care have a well-trodden path

Steve Benen has written an excellent post on the path that right-wing lies take from idiots like Betsy McCaughey to the mainstream news. The steps are

1. Get a crazy to publish a lie
2. Limbaugh and talk radio pick up the lie and broadcast it to the base.
3. Drudge picks the lie up.
4. FOX News and the Wall Street Journal Editorial Board picks up the story.
5. The rest of the media reports on the controversy.

So what does this tell us?

• First, the right lies a lot, especially when trying to scare people about health care.
  
• Second, when Democrats ignore ridiculous far-right claims [and present good ideas], good ideas become law.
  
• And third, in time, the hysterical find new things to get excited about, so there's no point in caving to conservative demands every time they throw a fit.

One real problem is that politics are inherently conservative. That's conservative in the sense that the politicians of today look back to model on the successful politicians of the past. the Obama team is looking back at what the Clinton team did that succeeded and at what failed. Efforts to try new things almost invariably cause a politician to lose the election.

The result is that although the lesson on how not to deal with the Republicans is very clear now, there is no corresponding lesson in how to win the next issue, and the risk of winging it and losing are very high.

It's that strategy for winning that needs to be found now.

Health care battle between cost and universal care for Dems

The health care battle in Washington has three major players. They are

1. the Progressive Democrats who want universal national health care,
2. the Republicans who desperately want to regain power, and see their route back to power being through defeat of the Democratic Health Care initiative as it was in 1993-94, and
3. the conservative Democrats (known as the Blue Dogs) who are concerned about the cost of a health care plan and about local business and financial interests that are critical to their reelection prospects individually.

The story of the Progressive Democrats and the whacked out desperate Republicans has been rather well described. But we don't see much on the motivations of the Blue Dogs.

Here's an excellent addition to the overall discussion - it's a good article on Kent Conrad from the Huffington Post. It'll provide a better understanding of the third major issue group in this great 2009 political battle.

Obama needs something for his troops to rally around

I voted for Barack Obama because he seemed to have the good of the nation on his mind, together with the skills and knowledge necessary to actually get something done. My biggest single issue for America is health care availability for every American. So here is Obama on the subject of getting health care passed over Republican obstructionism.



Is Obama even listening to the question? Or is he just throwing out a series of words to fill the time until the next question?

I am certain that George W. Bush was in a bubble. He had no knowledge of anything that his advisers did not tell him, and he was under the thumb of some of them. Neither Bush nor his advisers saw the Presidency as an office that belonged to the people of America. Instead is was their property and they had the right to exploit it. I didn't think that was the case for Obama.

But now I don't know. Obama walked into a real mess, one in many ways the making of George W. bush's supporters, advisers and handlers. But Obama brought his own supporters, advisers and handlers, and Obama entered his own bubble. That's the nature of the Presidency.

The American government exists in order to do what Americans need done, so that they can live out their lives in a stable society that allows them to provide for their own needs and those of their families. For a century now, the medical care that a great many Americans have needed simply has not been available to those who need it when they need it. The private market was important in helping the growth of a medical industry, but the massive gaps in coverage and the numerous ways health care can be used to exploit large numbers of people have also grown. The problems now are socially destabilizing. Every other modern nation has resolved this set of problems by having some form of government regulated health care system. Now that the only institution that can improve the situation is the federal government.

Piecemeal modifications have failed to keep up. A full revision of the system is long overdue. Without that revision, the American government has failed and the failure grows larger each day.

A failed government will be replaced. There are many ways to slow down that replacement, but it is inevitable. If Obama cannot get the powers who exploit the current failed health care system under control, then the American people will replace him and the Democratic Party with someone who promises to succeed.

I thought that Obama was aware of that when I voted for him. As I watch him blather his way through a non-answer answer above, I have really begun to wonder. Obama's spokesman, Gibbs, said the other day that if getting health care passed means Obama will be a one-term President, then Obama is ready to accept that. What he better realize is that if he doesn't get health care passed, he is going to be a one-term President, And he won't get much else done after Health Care fails. To get it passed, Obama better get a single clear plan out there and gain the support of the American people pretty damned soon. The enemies of rational health care system are already mobilized and in place because they know what they have to lose.

Obama needs to get something out there like a battle flag that the troops on his side can rally around. He's built up a lot of expectations and they are coming to a head. He sure failed to put up a battle flag or rallying cry in the answer above.

I don't think that the American people are going to be patient much longer. Failure to rationalize the health care system means that the American government has failed, and a failed government will be replaced with one that promises better results.

Lewis Black - Damned Good Comedy from 2007

Lewis Black is an excellent comedian and does topical political humor. Try a few here.

Lewis Black - the Old Testament


Lewis Black - Queers


Lewis Black - Hunting


Lewis Black - Bad Language


There is more of this. Go here and check down the right side.

What are Republicans worth, anyway? America doesn't need them.

In a Wednesday New York Times report, White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel is quoted as saying the GOP "has made a strategic decision that defeating President Obama's health care proposal is more important for their political goals than solving the health insurance problems that Americans face every day." And earlier today, Gibbs said "only a handful" of Republicans are interested in anything resembling true health care reform.
[From TPMDC]

America needs a program of health care that provides it as a human right to every American. Does America really need the conservative Republican parasites who are blocking health care legislation so that they can suck money out of sick people and leave others without health care or in bankruptcy?

Here's why Gen. David McKiernan was sacked as Afghanistan commander

Gen. David McKiernan was fired as American commander in Afghanistan and replaced by Gen. Stanley McChrystal. This is the first U.S. commander fired during war time since Harry Truman fired Douglas MacArthur in the Korean War. It was so far out of the ordinary way of treating American Generals during combat that eyebrows rose all over the place. What the Hell happened? Rajiv Chandrasekaran of the Washington Post now explains.

In mid-March, as a White House assessment of the war in Afghanistan was nearing completion, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, met in a secure Pentagon room for their fortnightly video conference with Gen. David D. McKiernan, the top U.S. commander in Kabul.

There was no formal agenda. McKiernan, a silver-haired former armor officer, began with a brief battlefield update. Then Gates and Mullen began asking about reconstruction and counternarcotics operations. To Mullen, they were straightforward, relevant queries, but he thought McKiernan fumbled them.

Gates and Mullen had been having doubts about McKiernan since the beginning of the year. They regarded him as too languid, too old-school and too removed from Washington. He lacked the charisma and political savvy that Gen. David H. Petraeus brought to the Iraq war.

McKiernan's answers that day were the tipping point for Mullen. Soon after, he discussed the matter with Gates, who had come to the same conclusion.

Mullen traveled to Kabul in April to confront McKiernan. The chairman hoped the commander would opt to save face and retire, but he refused. Not only had he not disobeyed orders, he believed he was doing what Gates and Mullen wanted.

You're going to have to fire me, he told Mullen.

Two weeks later, Gates did. It was the first sacking of a wartime theater commander since President Harry S. Truman dismissed Gen. Douglas MacArthur in 1951 for opposing his Korean War policy.

The humiliating removal of a four-star general for being too conventional reveals the ferocious intensity Gates and Mullen share over a growing war that will soon enter its ninth year. It also demonstrates their zeal to respond to President Obama's demand for rapid success in a place where foreign armies have failed for centuries.

McKiernan is an old school American general. You don't get more hard corps old line American than being an Armor Commander. Armor, Artillery and to a lesser extent, tactical air (close air support), are the epitome of conventional war.

What's so old line about being an Armor General? That's a logistics war, big army against big army. The commander who can bring the greatest numbers against the weak point of the enemy normally wins. And what are "the greatest numbers?"

The numbers that matter in conventional war are rounds of ammunition and tons of ordnance. A conventional commander coordinates the firepower of more weapons on the battlefield to greater effect than does the commander of the enemy forces. The ultimate weapon in conventional war is a nuclear weapon. The most important resources for the winning commander come from either the largest economy or the greatest population. The commander's most important skills are coordinating the use of these resources - logistics.

How do you defeat the army that posses an essentially unlimited number of rounds of ammunition and ordinance to drop on you? The Chinese tried overwhelming numbers of troops, which works as long as the opponent isn't losing so badly they resort to nuclear weapons and you have enough troops. Since many of the Chinese troops used in Korea were previously Kuo Ming Tang troops and as such politically unreliable, they were expendable and available. But human wave attacks were not the best solution. A few years after Korea, the Algerians adapted Leninist guerrilla techniques and applied what is now called asymmetric warfare against the French. You don't offer the dominating power an army for a target. The new strategy was effective. Algeria is no longer French dominated even though the French had both the police forces and the conventional army with the conventional power. The asymmetric warfare technique migrated to South Vietnam and defeated the U.S. military also.

Asymmetric warfare was a logical solution when the occupation following American conventional invasion of Iraq was so badly screwed up by the American conservatives from the Heritage Foundation and the Bush administration who sent them there. The attempt to impress a foreign political ideology will always fail with it does not match the existing culture the ideologues attempt to impress it on. Such an effort creates a perfect ground for asymmetric warfare. So how does it work?

Instead a conventional army, you place highly skilled and very political cadres into the population and convince the population that the conventional forces and police of the government are their enemy. That is done in several ways. First, make promises that, given power, the cadre will focus on and provide for the needs of the population. Whatever can be done to back these promises up makes them more credible, so the cadres have humanitarian needs organizations - with political brands. This is easier when the government has no similar humanitarian efforts.

Second, conduct guerrilla operations against the enemy military and police that cause them to attack the population as the source of those operations. The extreme version of this is terrorist operations in which the attackers are prepared to and plan to die in the attacks. The most effective of these cause a massive counter reaction by conventional forces against the general population. Such efforts also create martyrs who have died to benefit the population. It really helps the insurgents when the government is inherently corrupt, since the population will always recognize this and act to reject it. How do you think the Iraqi population reacted to the corruption of Blackwater and Halliburton? Was there any doubt that these organizations represented the Bush administration? Since the conservative American philosophy of individualism with no regulation encourages such corruption, the Conservative philosophy creates its own enemies.

Afghanistan is a political war. Where is the effective conventional warfare counter for these asymmetric techniques? Conventional warfare has only one solution - destroy every last member of the cadre of insurgents, and if they keep being recreated from the population (as they will be), conduct genocide on the population. This has been the Soviet reaction in Chechnya. It hasn't worked very well there, and with the most modern forms of journalism, works even less well. The media has become a major theater in such wars now. That's because the battleground is the minds of the population involved.

LtC. John A. Nagl in his superb book Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam describes the traditional U.S. military conventional war culture beautifully. It is a culture that permeates both the military forces and, more important, the American political culture. You can tell that Gen. Petraeus and Gen. Chrystal are violating it because they are accused of being "political generals." The American culture of war fighting looks down on "political generals", but that is the essence of fighting an asymmetric war successfully.

In the American political culture, Americans fight wars against other armies. When America is at peace, the military is subordinate to the political leaders, but when America is at war, the military leaders determine how the war will be fought. That includes the political effects, because modern wars are total wars in which both the military and the civilians are combatants. Let's not forget that both WW I and WW II were won in large part because the American economy was nationalized and directed by the government planners. That's the definition of total war. In total war, there is no essential difference between the civilian sector and the military sector. America fights modern wars in which scientific logic based on observable facts dominates the actions taken by both armies and civilians. West Point was created in 1803 and run by the Army Corps of Engineers to create an officer corps dominated by scientific thinking rather than the traditional thinking of European armies. West Point succeeded. It has been a major element in creating modern America.

By the way, buy a copy of colonel Nagl's book. Most intelligent and promotable U.S. officers already have.

As a company grade officer during the Vietnam War, I read Mao's writings on how to fight a war. They were inherently political. They started with a dedicated political cadre and worked up to a conventional army, but only as each stage succeeded. The stages were inherently political, not military. As one who firmly believed in logistics and the idea that the biggest battalions win, I was hard to convince. But I was thinking on the wrong battlefield. The conventional war battlefield is just that - armies, trenches and ordnance. The modern battlefield is men's minds. Thomas Kuhn would describe this as a paradigm shift. George Lakoff would describe it as "reframing the issue." Both are correct. But who would have thought that shifting the paradigm or reframing the issue would determine who might win a war? But it does.

And Gen. David McKiernan was not able to make the shift or reframe the issue. That became obvious to Secretary Robert M. Gates and Adm. Mike Mullen. Afghanistan is simply not a war suitable for an armor general who sees war as a challenge for an engineer or logistician. It is a war for a politician. The fact that he was unsuited to win that war was demonstrated by his refusal to accept a face-saving way out of his command.

I don't blame McKiernan. I don't trust political generals, either. I was a logistician. That's my generation. McKiernan was one of our very best. But then, so was General Westmoreland in Vietnam. Let's not forget that we didn't win that one, either.

The cable news networks viewers have interesting demographics

Daily Kos Commissioned and reported the results of a nationwide poll of who watches the three major cable news networks, MSNBC, CNN and FOX. The results tell us a lot about modern America. Here is their analysis:

Cable news networks have a level of influence that far exceeds their audience, since their actual audience is actually quite small. Most people simple don't watch cable news networks, but the ones that do are generally influentials.

Republicans watch Fox News and nothing else, Democrats split between MSNBC and CNN, and Independents watch nothing. MSNBC, in particular, depends on Democrats for the vast majority of its audience. One would think they'd realize this and get rid of Joe Scarborough to boost its morning ratings.

The South, unlike the rest of the country, appears to have their TV dials stuck on "FOX NEWS". Except for the youth, that is. 82 percent of 18-29-year-old respondents never watched FNC.

We then asked, "When it comes to accuracy and trustworthiness as a source of news would you say that [Media Org] is extremely reliable, reliable, unreliable, or extremely unreliable?"

Combining "extremely reliable" and "reliable", and "unreliable" and "extremely unreliable", Fox News clocked in at 35-41. Republicans (and the South) obviously think they're the word of god, while Democrats think it's shit.

CNN came in at 44-34. For Republicans, it was 20-61. They actually believe all that crap about the "Communist News Network". CNN garnered good numbers from Democrats (56-20) and Independents (48-30). Again, the South (28-53) was at odds with the rest of the country, which generally gave the network high marks for accuracy and trustworthiness.

As for MSNBC, Democrats gave it the highest marks (37-7), followed by Independents (24-16). Republicans, of course, think the network is crap -- 6-31. MSNBC was easily the least-recognized network of the bunch, with 60 percent of respondents unable to give an opinion. That "not sure" number was only 22 percent for CNN, and 24 percent for FNC.

The fact that the audiences are small but consist of influentials suggests that watching cable news is something done by the more well-to-do upper class groups of people. The fact that the audiences are small confirms that the mass news media on cable TV has broken down into niche markets. So this is a report on an upper class (probably upper middle) consisting of influentials and it's also a report on which media outlets cater to the different categories in that class.

The fact that the South is FOX territory tends to confirm my own belief that the conflict between what are politically labelled conservatives and liberals is actually a culture clash between rural traditionalists and urban modernists. These two cultures are socialized differently and in fact even think differently.

It's clear from the political clashes between them that the two groups consider very different issues to be of greatest priority for America, and the way each group treats government is an outgrowth of those different ways of thinking and different priorities. I find it no surprise, for example, that the rural traditionalists are also exclusionists - thus the immigration issue, and the modernists support diversity.

Traditionalists are not fact based. They think in terms of what the traditional authorities tell them is true. They will not be swayed by facts, no matter how obvious. I'd suspect that FOX News has made themselves into one of those authorities, along with Church leaders and high level political authorities like the President. This latter is probably why putting a liberal Democrat 0r worse, an African American, into the position of President is considered the equivalent to lese majeste or worse. That's why electing Clinton over George H. W. Bush, a member of an old-line upper class family, was so emotionally upsetting to so many conservatives. Clinton's enemies had to redeem the Presidency from his presence.

No, I can't prove this, but it fits. It explains a pattern of facts that I have not seen otherwise adequately explained.

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Addendum 9/30/2009
I stated above that traditionalists are not fact based, but that I cannot prove it. A group of researchers, however, describe what they call Motivated Reasoning which is exactly what I was talking about.

Traditionalists have an emotional need to be "right" and so they reject facts that show they are not. Motivated Reasoning describes how they go about rejecting those facts they find uncomfortable. But where do they get the mistaken ideas they consider "right?" FOX News and the other Murdoch propaganda outlets as well as such right-wing propaganda organizations as Regent University, Liberty University, the Discovery Institute, the Heritage Institute, the American Enterprise Institute, the CATO Institute and others.

DoJ defends Defense of Marriage Act while also declaring the law should be repealed

This is a legal brief only a lawyer could love. Think Progress presents the story.

The Obama administration has been seeking to dismiss a suit brought by a gay couple in California challenging the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA). In June, the Obama Justice Department’s brief defending DOMA infuriated LGBT activists because it referenced incest and child rape when talking about marriage equality. Today, however, the Justice Department has filed a new brief making clear it believes DOMA is “discriminatory” and should be repealed. The White House even put out a statement from Obama on the matter:

Today, the Department of Justice has filed a response to a legal challenge to the Defense of Marriage Act, as it traditionally does when acts of Congress are challenged. This brief makes clear, however, that my Administration believes that the Act is discriminatory and should be repealed by Congress. I have long held that DOMA prevents LGBT couples from being granted equal rights and benefits. While we work with Congress to repeal DOMA, my Administration will continue to examine and implement measures that will help extend rights and benefits to LGBT couples under existing law.

So the Department of Justice is doing its job as directed by law. It is presenting a legal defense of the law when the law is challenged in court. But at the same time, they are telling the court that they feel the law itself is wrong and discriminatory and should be repealed by Congress.

Sometimes the Rule of Law works its way out in strange ways.

Two Congressional GOP leaders admit lying to defeat health care

The Congressional Republicans, who themselves offer no solution to the many problems Americans have with no health care coverage, have inadequate coverage, or think they have coverage only to find it suddenly withdrawn when they make a claim, have now admitted they were lying earlier when they described alleged problems in the current health care proposals. The first of these Republicans is GOP Rep. Roy Blunt of Missouri.

Rep. Blunt, the head of the House GOP Health Care Solutions Group, was caught lying by his local newspaper.

Blunt claimed to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch that he wouldn’t be able to get his hip replaced in countries with socialized medicine, prompting the paper to respond aggressively in an editorial:

Rep. Roy Blunt, R-Springfield, knows a thing or two about health care. But some of what he knows just isn’t true.

“I’m 59,” Mr. Blunt said last week during a meeting with Post-Dispatch reporters and editors. “In either Canada or Great Britain, if I broke my hip, I couldn’t get it replaced.”

We fact-checked that. At least 63 percent of hip replacements performed in Canada last year and two-thirds of those done in England were on patients age 65 or older. More than 1,200 in Canada were done on people older than 85.

In a subsequent conversation with the paper, Blunt claimed: “I’m glad you pointed that out to me. I won’t use that example any more.”

The second GOP leader who has admitted lying to defeat health care reform is Sen. Charles Grassley, R - Iowa). Last week Sen. Grassley told an audience of his constituents that "The government would pull the plug on 'Gramdma.'"Here is Plumline's report on his lie.

This passed unnoticed, but it’s a big deal: Over the weekend, and very quietly, Senator Chuck Grassley completely retracted his widely-reported claim last week that people have “every reason to fear” that the House health care proposal would create a “government program that determines if you’re going to pull the plug on grandma.”

The retraction was buried deep in this Washington Post article on Grassley’s role, with a spokesperson admitting Grassley doesn’t really believe what he said about “grandma”:

Grassley says he opposes that counseling as written in the House version of the bill, but a spokesman said the senator does not think the House provision would in fact give the government such authority in deciding when and how people die. The House bill allows patients to decide for themselves if they would like such counseling.

Let’s be clear: By clarifying that Grassley doesn’t think the House bill would “give the government such authority in deciding when and how people die,” his spokesperson completely repudiated his widely discussed claim. This goes much farther than Grassley did in a statement released Friday clarifying he’d never used the words “death panel” and was merely worried about “unintended consequences.”

So, either Grassley made his claim about “grandma” to a crowd in his home state last week and didn’t believe it; or he changed his mind since then.

This demonstrates the position of the Republican Party very clearly. They have no interest is working to resolve problems that the American people have with the availability or effectiveness of health care. They have no policy or proposals to fix the many flaws in the current lack-of-system. They work for the health insurance industry that is gouging the American public for their own profits, and the Republicans work to gain personal power in the government at the expense of the American people. This isn't just some rogue Senator or Congressman. This is lies told by the Republican leadership to spread fear of the proposed changes in the health care system. That fear will kill people if it succeeds.

The Republican leadership has no hesitation to repeatedly tell lies to advance their self-centered cause, and no shame when caught at it.