The Republican's Palin Problem

CNN's Gloria Borger reports that the Palin fatigue is setting in. The ex-Beauty Queen and half-term governor of Alaska appears to have overstayed her welcome. It's a good article.

Washington (CNN) -- OK, you've got Palin fatigue. Not to worry. So does much of the country: The latest CNN poll shows that 56 percent of Americans view her unfavorably.

More damaging, though, is this: Sarah Palin's unfavorable rating among women has gone up 10 points. And 59 percent of those all-important independent voters don't like her -- and that's up a stunning 14 points in just a few months.

You might argue it's because of the debate surrounding the Tucson shootings -- specifically, Palin's tone-deaf response to the unfair charges that she was somehow responsible for a deranged shooter's state of mind. And that could well be part of it. But there's more: She's completely overstayed her welcome.

We've watched her morph from the hockey mom into a multi-media extravaganza that knocks on our door every day to sell something, without any invitation.

[...]

Her staunch supporters are still there, to be sure, but Republicans are getting antsy, even nervous. In GOP circles, she's beginning to be seen as toxic in any presidential race. The whispers (which have always been there among the establishment) are starting to become public.

[...]

GOP presidential contenders may be trying to wait and see if she runs. (Why alienate her followers for no reason?) Or, they would love to see someone take her on -- like a Mike Huckabee, for instance -- with the understanding that the candidacy could become sacrificial. So who is going to sign up for that?

Not many. The hope for some Republicans is that Palin will literally tweet her way out of our hearts. The books, the reality TV, the family psycho-dramas, the never-ending internet "thought bubbles" could just be enough to drive even those who like her over the edge. And, sure, we in the press are part of this uber-coverage, behaving as if every 140-character thought is worth some conversation. It isn't. As Erick Erickson, the editor of the conservative RedState.com and a CNN contributor, told me, it's not really about what Palin has achieved. "By 2012," he says, "people are going to be so tired of her they're going to want to avoid eye contact. It's not fair, but it's reality."

I think Gloria Borger has nailed it. Palin is past her "Use by" date. It's really about time.

A recent example of Palin aversion among conservative was the announcement Friday, 4 February, that she would be the keynote speaker for the Patriots & Warriors Gala on May 2 in Glendale, CO which was to be put on by the Sharon K Pacheco Foundation. Saturday the entire event was canceled. ^** The organizers blamed an "onslaught of negative feedback." Law enforcement in Colorado has no reports of the alleged "threats" that were cited as the reason for canceling the event or the Sarah Palin appearance.

I suspect that the Tea Partiers as a group will shortly approach the same kind of expiration date as their repeated failures in Congress become clear to the public.

What is driving the Middle Eastern social unrest? It looks like food prices.

What has caused the Egyptians to revolt against Mubarak at this time? Paul Krugman lays the blame on bad weather.

While several factors have contributed to soaring food prices, what really stands out is the extent to which severe weather events have disrupted agricultural production. And these severe weather events are exactly the kind of thing we’d expect to see as rising concentrations of greenhouse gases change our climate — which means that the current food price surge may be just the beginning.

Now, to some extent soaring food prices are part of a general commodity boom: the prices of many raw materials, running the gamut from aluminum to zinc, have been rising rapidly since early 2009, mainly thanks to rapid industrial growth in emerging markets.

But the link between industrial growth and demand is a lot clearer for, say, copper than it is for food. Except in very poor countries, rising incomes don’t have much effect on how much people eat.

It’s true that growth in emerging nations like China leads to rising meat consumption, and hence rising demand for animal feed. It’s also true that agricultural raw materials, especially cotton, compete for land and other resources with food crops — as does the subsidized production of ethanol, which consumes a lot of corn. So both economic growth and bad energy policy have played some role in the food price surge.

Still, food prices lagged behind the prices of other commodities until last summer. Then the weather struck.

In his blog, Krugman expands on this idea.

First of all, I don’t have any particular faith that markets necessarily get things right. Some readers may remember that I was almost all alone back in 2000-2001, declaring that the California energy crisis reflected market manipulation, not fundamental shortages; and I took a lot of heat back in 2005 for warning that we had a huge housing bubble.

So this isn’t about a priori belief in markets; it’s about whether we see the “signature” of a speculation-driven price surge.

Many people on the “speculators did it” side like to point to financial data, especially large purchases of futures by various players. But food is a physical commodity, and plays in the financial markets can only move the price to the extent that they affect physical flows and stocks.

Here’s my exotic model of the market for a physical commodity: [Go to his blog to see the simple supply demand graph.]

OK, how can speculation affect this picture? The answer is, it has to work through accumulation of inventories — physical inventories. If high futures prices induce increased storage, this reduces the quantity available to consumers, and it can raise the price. And you can, in fact, argue that something like this has been happening for cotton and copper, where there are apparently large and growing inventories.

But for food, it’s just not happening: stocks are low and falling.

[...]

So if and when I see signs that speculation is really driving up prices, I’ll say so. But the signature just isn’t there right now.

This looks like good data-driven analysis to me. Until I see evidence to the contrary this works.

Is privatization really better than government providing benefits?

Ed Wallace is an expert on history of the automotive industry, has his own radio show and writes a regular weekly article on the automotive industry. Hus articles are also published in Business Week, but I get them in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. Much of what he writes is history. One of the things Ed has come across is how Chicago sold off 36,000 of the city's parking meters to Morgan Stanley Bank for 75 years for a mere $1.2 billion dollars in a one-time payment.

Morgan Stanley eventually took majority ownership of the city's parking meters for 75 years, in exchange for a one-time payment to Chicago of just under $1.2 billion. According to Chicago Sun Times political columnist Carol Marin, almost immediately the cost of using a parking meter inside the Loop jumped to 28 quarters ($7) for a two-hour period.

In the meantime, most cases of privatizing public services are blatant theft of public tax money.

But quickly increasing the cost of parking wasn't the only pain inflicted by the new owners. Many parking meters couldn't handle that much loose change in one day, and once full the meters would accept no more change; anyone who parked by one was doing so illegally. Yes, the number of parking tickets jumped so much they had to stop writing them while new meters that would accept credit cards were installed. Even more interesting is that LAZ Parking - also owned by Morgan Stanley - was responsible for collecting the coins out of the meters and issuing the parking tickets.

The meters were set to demand payment 24 hours a day and seven days a week, ending the free parking that enticed many families to downtown Chicago on Sundays.

Chicago's Inspector General analyzed the deal only after it was done; and on June 1, 2009, his report on the sale said officially that Chicago had gotten the short end of the stick. The report faulted William Blair's calculations of the 36,000 parking meters' present and future value: they were worth not a mere $1.2 billion, but more in the neighborhood of $2 billion. Seems Blair wrote the entire report from the investors' perspective, not from that of the real owners, the people of Chicago. The Inspector General concluded that the entire deal was "dubious."

It should be noted that Daley's friend Blair wasn't the only one who profited by suggesting and promoting this deal. The Mayor's former spokeswoman, Avis LaVelle, emerged from it with a new job - spokeswoman for Morgan Stanley's parking meter entity.

Is this more efficient than government? Or is it a secret deal by politicians to make the politicians and Morgan Stanley rich? I know which one I believe. But Ed also points out another case.

ABC News did a story about Florida's privatizing its food stamp operations to J.P Morgan - which in turn contracted a call center in India to process the claims. Imagine that. Florida gives taxpayers' money to J.P. Morgan, which to make a greater profit uses that money to hire people in India, putting Floridians out of a job. Then out-of-work Floridians have to call India to get approved for food stamps.

OK. Frequently private business does provide products and services to customers at a lower cost than government can. But it depends on who the customers are!

A private business has the privilege of selecting what market it will serve. They ignore all other people. Government does not have that privilege! Government is responsible for everyone who is within its jurisdiction. Private enterprise businesses lower their costs by limiting who they have to provide products and services to.

Anyone who does not fall into their market is ignored or abandoned. Government, on the other hand, deals with the people private enterprise drops. Consider New Orleans and Katrina. No private insurance company covered Katrina damage. Government had to step in and deal with the damage that private enterprise could not handle. So government has expenses that private businesses simply will not pay. Hurricanes, Tornadoes, war, crime, accidents - government is going to send people in to deal with those things when private business does not because it cannot.

As Ed Wallace says, "'privatization' is code for 'profitization' and the public gets none of the profits." Private business is not more efficient than government. It just serves different (and profitable) markets while leaving the unprofitable business that has to be done to government.

America could learn a lot from the French health care system

Even when (or if) the Affordable Healthcare Act is implemented, it will not solve all of America's problems of providing health care to the population in an affordable way. But Bloomberg Businessweek writes approvingly of the French health care financing system.

In Sicko, [Michael] Moore lumps France in with the socialized systems of Britain, Canada, and Cuba. In fact, the French system is similar enough to the U.S. model that reforms based on France's experience might work in America. The French can choose their doctors and see any specialist they want. Doctors in France, many of whom are self- employed, are free to prescribe any care they deem medically necessary. "The French approach suggests it is possible to solve the problem of financing universal coverage...[without] reorganizing the entire system," says Victor G. Rodwin, professor of health policy and management at New York University.

France also demonstrates that you can deliver stellar results with this mix of public and private financing. In a recent World Health Organization health-care ranking, France came in first, while the U.S. scored 37th, slightly better than Cuba and one notch above Slovenia. France's infant death rate is 3.9 per 1,000 live births, compared with 7 in the U.S., and average life expectancy is 79.4 years, two years more than in the U.S. The country has far more hospital beds and doctors per capita than America, and far lower rates of death from diabetes and heart disease. The difference in deaths from respiratory disease, an often preventable form of mortality, is particularly striking: 31.2 per 100,000 people in France, vs. 61.5 per 100,000 in the U.S.

That's not to say the French have solved all health-care riddles. Like every other nation, France is wrestling with runaway health-care inflation. That has led to some hefty tax hikes, and France is now considering U.S.-style health-maintenance organization tactics to rein in costs. Still, some 65% of French citizens express satisfaction with their system, compared with 40% of U.S. residents. And France spends just 10.7% of its gross domestic product on health care, while the U.S. lays out 16%, more than any other nation.

To grasp how the French system works, think about Medicare for the elderly in the U.S., then expand that to encompass the entire population. French medicine is based on a widely held value that the healthy should pay for care of the sick. Everyone has access to the same basic coverage through national insurance funds, to which every employer and employee contributes. The government picks up the tab for the unemployed who cannot gain coverage through a family member.

This is, of course, a report from a business publication rather than a political publication. Most of what we political wonks on-line look at are political publications and they focus on the he-said - he-said of party politics. The business publications have a focus on the bottom line, so they can sometimes report that one side or the other in an argument is right and the other is wrong. Providing health care to the population and to the workforce may be one of those situations. Read the rest of this report for a very interesting view on health care.

One more point - will the five conservative Catholics on Supreme Court vote to declare the mandatory buy-in required by the Affordable healthcare Act (ACA) is unconstitutional if the business community objects? Especially the health care companies who expect to get an additional 45 to 50 million paying customers under the ACA?

The Political Power of Narrative Trumps that of Fact

I've been looking at the social power of narratives for a while, and you seen to get the idea over quite well. Here is a Scientific American Mind article which supports the power of storytelling: The Secrets of Storytelling: Why we Love a Good Yarn.

Politically a good narrative trumps a lot of powerful facts because that is the way the human mind works. That's true even when the story being told is blatantly fiction.

Since one of the major focuses of a liberal education is to overcome the desire for a good story when the facts demonstrate that it is false, we liberals are trained to downgrade the importance of narrative. But the major religions are all transmitted through narratives. So is the American conservative movement - certainly it has been since Reagan started telling the Welfare Queen story.

Another example is Ayn Rand's book "The Fountainhead" which is the narrative soul of Libertarianism in America today. Fact? Not a bit, but any facts that are presented to demonstrate its falsity literally bounce off of the narrative power of that book. Try arguing with a committed libertarian and you will see that there is no rationality in their position.

Tribalism is passed on through narrative, not through any form of science or reliable truth. For a modern example of such tribalism Michael Wolraich points out (in his TPM Cafe essay How a Story Seduced the Right Wing) that the conservative movement is a tribal group held together through a series of narratives.

When I started trying to understand the nature of narrative I was referred to an essay "Notes on the Origins and Life of Narrative" in Reynolds Price's excellent book "A Palpable God." It is the best discussion of narrative I have ever found. The rest of the book is Price's translations of various books of the Old Testament which he presented as outstanding example of narratives. The desert religions are based on the tribalism carried in those stories. I found the same narrative power in an excellent book called "The Teachings of Buddha" by Paul Carus. Again the stories were told and refined by storytellers (because of their narrative power) for centuries before ever being written down.

These days many of the best narratives in America are crafted by advertisers and PR people. The conservatives have adopted narratives as ways of communicating and attracting others to join their tribe. Rush Limbaugh crafts narratives and tries them out on his audience, then modifies them to improve the power to get people to do what he wants.

It's going to be difficult for liberals to fight the political battle based on mere facts and science. The human mind prefers narratives to determine how to behave - or to vote.

[I haven't read it yet, but Michale Wolraich recently published a book on this subject entitled Blowing Smoke: Why the Right Keeps Serving Up Whack-Job Fantasies about the Plot to Euthanize Grandma, Outlaw Christmas, and Turn Junior into a Raging Homosexual.]

Wealth, Power and Revolutions: What is happening in North Africa?

Jon Taplin posted a very interesting essay at TPMCAFE about the causes of the revolutions we are watching in the Arabic Middle East right now. It set me to thinking about the interaction of globalization and political power. What I took away from his essay is the following:

Cheap money allows those with wealth to purchase wealth-producing assets and take control of them. So it benefits those with wealth and the banks which manage their money.

Commodities increase in value at a more rapid pace than do sources of intellectual wealth, since the sources of intellectual wealth are uncertain while commodity prices are the inverse of the cost of the cheap money.

So wealth itself becomes the primary source of wealth. The productive economy declines in both value (as measured in money) and in social importance (as measured in political power.)

To state that wealth itself becomes the primary source of wealth and to suggest that political power shifts towards that wealth and away from real economic production is to describe how the economy has been financialized.

The thing I have rarely seen discussed is the "power effect" of money. Possession of money gives an individual the power to influence the decision of those who want the money, and in the financial economy in which we all depend on others for the basic factors of living, this gives those with large accumulations of money great power over lots of people. The Koch brothers are a prime example of this. But there are no reliable and consistent accounting measures of power as there are of money, so economists tend to dismiss power and power effects. The interesting thing, though, is if you go into an organization and conduct a survey of who has power and who does not, the results are quite clear. Everyone knows who has power. But there are no power statements to put in power point alongside financial statements when higher managers make decisions. Those with power can easily dismiss the power aspects of their decisions.

I have attributed the violence in the Middle East largely to the effects of globalization. Globalization is the process of replacing traditional economies with money economies. It is possible to audit and manage the economic changes in a money economy, but because there is no valid and reliable measure of power through society, the power effects of such changes are neither widely recognized nor are they managed. In fact, Libertarianism is the justification presented by the powerful for refusing to manage the social power effects of financializing society.

A revolution is what happens when power moves away from large numbers of people who depend on having the power they need to live their lives with dignity and some predictability.

we must not crucify our economies upon a cross of ...rubber??

OK. That's what Paul Krugman said. And he makes good sense.

An increase in interest rates right now would strangle the developed economies. Inflation is a problem in China and a few other developing countries, and those countries are the ones that need to cut back their economies, not the developed nations. The only inflation at the moment is in a few commodity items, and that is directly the result of the rapid expansion of the economies in underdeveloped nations.

Once again a group of bankers are proving that bankers are idiots.

America's right wing oligarchs confer

The wealthy American oligarchs who are making war on the American middle class and working class are conducting in a coordination meeting to plan out how to use the Citizen's United decision to flood the American political scene with well-funded right wing candidates. The meeting is being conducted by billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch.

Here are a few of the attendees according to Think Progress:

• Richard DeVos, billionaire cofounder of Amway
  
• Diane Hendricks, billionaire widow of Ken Hendricks who founded Abc Supply which has become the largest U.S. wholesaler of roofing, siding, windows and gutter supplies.
  
• Herman Cain, founder of Godfather's Pizza
  
• Ken Langone , an investment banker and founder of Home Depot
  
  
• Ronald Erickson, CEO of Holiday Companies, a Minnesota based petroleum retail and wholesale convenience business with operations in twelve states across the Upper Midwest and Alaska
  

Think Progress also links to this listing of attendees at the Koch Brothers conference in 2010.

Remember, these are the people that Wall Street banks exist to cater to. These people and the Wall Street banks between them have been directly responsible for outsourcing most of American middle class jobs in the last half century. They have also centralized the banks and set them up to be free of usury laws so that the banks can gouge the middle class. This same group with their Wall Street Bankers is also primarily responsible for the policies that created what Ben Bernanke has called the greatest financial disaster ever. We know this disaster today as the Great Recession.

It is my opinion that American troops remain in the middle east today because the wars there support the excessively bloated Pentagon budget which pumps up the investment returns these individuals get. They and the oil companies had a similar reason to urge George Bush to invade Iraq. (There were other reasons, but these were at or near the top of the list.)

Now they are gathering together to determine how the Citizen's United decision by the Supreme Court will permit them to secretly leverage the use of their money in American politics to make themselves even richer at the expense of the Middle and working classes.

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Addendum 5:06 PM
While the above addresses the effect that money and great wealth is having on American politics, Kevin Drum last Friday blogged on how much effect FOX News was having on elections. In summary, FOX seems to be having only a slight effect on actual votes, but it has had a massive effect on setting the American political agenda.

Notice that Glenn Beck from FOX is attending the Koch brothers convention, too. He and FOX as a whole are a major elements in the Oligarch's propaganda army.

The American conservatives depend on a fantasy of Europe to frighten American voters

Paul Krugman responded to the very misleading official Republican response to the State of the Union by Representative Paul Ryan. Ryan's image of Europe is pure fantasy. Ireland and Britain have had their recent financial crises precisely because they followed the prescription being peddled by Ryan and the American conservatives!

..in 2006-2007 Ireland was running a budget surplus, and had one of the lowest debt levels in the advanced world.

So what went wrong? The answer is: out-of-control banks; Irish banks ran wild during the good years, creating a huge property bubble. When the bubble burst, revenue collapsed, causing the deficit to surge, while public debt exploded because the government ended up taking over bank debts. And harsh spending cuts, while they have led to huge job losses, have failed to restore confidence.

The lesson of the Irish debacle, then, is very nearly the opposite of what Mr. Ryan would have us believe. It doesn’t say “cut spending now, or bad things will happen”; it says that balanced budgets won’t protect you from crisis if you don’t effectively regulate your banks — a point made in the newly released report of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, which concludes that “30 years of deregulation and reliance on self-regulation” helped create our own catastrophe. Have I mentioned that Republicans are doing everything they can to undermine financial reform?

What about Britain? Well, contrary to what Mr. Ryan seemed to imply, Britain has not, in fact, suffered a debt crisis. True, David Cameron, who became prime minister last May, has made a sharp turn toward fiscal austerity. But that was a choice, not a response to market pressure.

And underlying that choice was the new British government’s adherence to the same theory offered by Republicans to justify their demand for immediate spending cuts here — the claim that slashing government spending in the face of a depressed economy will actually help growth rather than hurt it.

So how’s that theory looking? Not good. The British economy, which seemed to be recovering earlier in 2010, turned down again in the fourth quarter. Yes, weather was a factor, and, no, you shouldn’t read too much into one quarter’s numbers. But there’s certainly no sign of the surging private-sector confidence that was supposed to offset the direct effects of eliminating half-a-million government jobs. And, as a result, there’s no comfort in the British experience for Republican claims that the United States needs spending cuts in the face of mass unemployment.

Essentially Ryan's speech demonstrated that he does not know the economic status of Europe and he clearly does not understand macroeconomics.

Who coulda known??

When Edward P. Mangano ran for county executive of Long Island's Nassau County as a libertarian tax-cutting Tea Partier, he promised that if he were elected he would cut taxes, cut spending and that the county would become a Tea Party Paradise. Everyone could "keep their own money and be richer!"

It was predictable. Everyone wants to cut taxes and cut spending - they just don't want the services they depend on cut along with it. Don't listen to those with experience, and especially ignore the guys who actually look at those pesky numbers and make decisions like accountants! They are pretending they are better than the voters and are lying to them, right?

The incumbent Mangano ran against knew that the county voters would not cut the services. They were unwilling to part with them. He ran against Mangano by telling the truth. The voters bought the lies of the Tea Party scammer and rejected the experience incumbent. Where was the media? Oh, wait. The media, especially FOX and the right wing radio gasbags were pushing the scam!

It's been a little over a year. The inevitable has happened. Nassau County is in a financial crisis that it cannot deal with, so the state has taken over Nassau County's finances.

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The Tea Partiers are now trying the same scam on the government of the United States. That's what all the shouting in the House of Representatives is all about now that John Boehner and the conservative Republicans have taken over. And what are they shouting?

Cut taxes, cut spending and that the nation will become a Tea Party libertarian Paradise.

Tell me. When the nation buys the Tea party Libertarian scam and then collapses, who takes over? The United Nations? The World Bank? Forget it. The inevitable collapse of the United States finances if the scam is put into practice cannot be nearly as easily dealt with as the collapse of Nassau County finances will be.

[H/T to Steve Benen at Political Animal.]

It's hard to take the Republicans in Congress seriously

President Obama was in full professor-mode last night, and the Republicans were simply angry destructive children playing at being adults and trying to get people to pay attention to them. No one showed that more than Eric Cantor who was the serious child playing dress up and trying to act adult but having no comprehension of what was actually happening around him. As if that were not enough childishness for one night, Cantor was followed by the Congressional Republican court jester, Michelle Bachmann. CNN decide the crazy children were so cute that they had to display her like a doting grandparent who shows off his grandchild acting silly and gushes "Oh, how sweet."

The best response from the grownups that I have seen this morning comes from Steven Pearlstein at the Washington Post. This is how he characterizes the best the Republicans had to offer last night:

Republicans, it turns out, have no public investment strategy, just as they have no health-care strategy and no agreed-upon blueprint for reducing federal spending. What they have are poll-tested talking points, economic delusions and an overwhelming partisan instinct to say "no" to anything Barack Obama proposes. In their response to the president's State of the Union message, they remind us once again that they are not serious about economic policy and not ready to govern.

In framing his retooled economic and political strategy, the president emphasized using public money to leverage private investment and innovation, once a popular Republican theme.

In the short term, administration officials expect the bigger boost to the economy is likely to come not from jobs directly funded but from additional private investments spurred by increased confidence and a renewed sense of national purpose - "our Sputnik moment," as Obama called it.

The Republicans owned the Federal Government from 2001 until their idiocy got so clear that Democrats were brought back in the Run Congress in 2006 and Obama was brought in to replace the failed George Bush in 2008.

Face it. What did the Republicans do for America? Two unnecessary wars, the destruction of the financial underpinning of the federal government after Clinton had set it on the way to fiscal surpluses, the destruction of the great city of New Orleans through mismanagement of the rescue and rebuild process after Katrina hit it and the greatest economic disaster since 1929 which was completely avoidable if the adults had been in charge in Washington and on Wall Street.

With the two wars still bleeding American taxpayers and killing American troops and the unemployment at close to 10% (a number that is carefully held down by conservative definitions) all the Republicans can offer as rebuttal to Obama's State of the Union speech last night was the sedate unrealistic ignorance expressed by Eric Cantor and the loud primal scream of frustration that Michelle Bachmann awkwardly displayed.

Why are the Republicans acting so idiotic in public when America is suffering so from the first decade of Republican mismanagement during the Bush administration? People with money (e.g. The Koch brothers, Howard Ahmanson, Jr. and Houston's Bob Perry. Then there is the Wall Street money, the insurance lobby money, the Military Industrial Complex money protecting its contracts, and many more.) are stirring up the American crazies and the Republican politicians need those crazies if they are to continue to hold their elected offices. Without those well-financed special interest groups, America could have a marginally sane opposition party. as it is we get Mitch McConnell, John Boehner, Eric Cantor and Michelle Bachmann.

So last night as the serious adults tried to work out how America will deal with the most challenging period it has undergone since the Great Depression and WW II, the Republican Party responded by offering the rantings of self-centered ignorant children playing dress-up and keeping the adults from doing serious work.

The Republicans are not ready to govern, and they are doing everything they can do to stop the Democrats from governing, just as America needs its best minds working to determine how to deal with the disasters Republican government have left us with. Last night put it all on display.

Oh, and the media did not show that it has a serious purpose, either, as it catered to the crazy children running the Republican Party and released an advance copy of the SOTU speech early.

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Addendum 1:25 PM
This, from Steve Benen comparing Michelle Bachmann's idiocy to the speech by the more polished Eric Cantor, is interesting. They spouted the same nonsense.

But here's the funny part: substantively, Bachmann's nonsense was roughly identical to the foolishness repeated by Paul Ryan in the official Republican SOTU response. Note Media Matters' fact-check of Ryan's speech and then check Media Matters' fact-check of Bachmann's speech. The similarities are striking -- with a few exceptions, they had the exact same message.

So who is handing them their talking points? This message is obviously centrally controlled.

Really. Who is it that controls this idiocy? I have hinted at a few of the culprits above. With the Citizen's United decision from the corporate-owned U.S. Supreme Court, though, tracking that information down soon enough to make a difference politically is going to be almost impossible.

They're off! Who will the Republicans nominate for 2012?

I'm wondering about the Republican nomination. Will the crazies cancel each other out while the sane Republicans nominate Romney?

I mean, Palin (won't run), Bachman (dies in the first states), Giuliani (won't actually run), Gingrich (sells books, won't run), Huckabee might get 20%. Who else is Fox "news" grooming in its candidate stable?

I know almost nothing about Thune, and Pawlenty is remarkably forgettable. But neither seems to be ready for the money primary against Romney. Other than them there are no apparently credible "surprise" candidates currently in the wings warming up to undertake an Obama-style outsiders campaign by someone new.

I left Rick Perry off the list but I think Rick Perry may have been serious when he said he was not going to run and his efforts to deal with the currently $27 billion (and counting) Texas shortfall of revenues vs expenses will clobber any chance he might have had. That deficit is roughly a quarter of total anticipated revenues in a low-tax low-service state that spends on almost nothing now except health care and education. Texas is going to look like Arizona on a much larger scale. Perry has no more chance to run for President than does Arizona's Gov. Brewer.

Who does Romney have to run against to get the more sane voters in the Republican primaries? The crazies are going to cancel each other out and leave the field to Romney by default. That makes the nomination Romney's the same way 2008 belonged to McCain. That's a problem of its own, of course.

The problem McCain had was that the social conservatives detested him and he couldn't get a majority at first. It was only when everyone else was proven unable to get the nomination that they settled on McCain. But the social conservatives still detested him, so he was forced to go with one of theirs - Palin. He also had to abandon all his carefully established sensible persona to cater to the Dominionists who want a Biblical-based government over the Constitution. It didn't get McCain elected (nothing could have done that right after Bush) but Palin on the ticket kept the social conservatives from sitting at home and not voting. The choice of Palin and the shift of political positions to appease the radical Christianists avoided a Goldwater-style blow out.

I see the same social conservative - movement conservative split doing much the same thing this year and next, with the Tea Partiers acting as the wild card. The social conservatives don't like Romney any more than they did McCain. But the party is going to reluctantly go with Romney and try to patch up with the social conservatives.

With money behind him, I think that still means Romney and a social conservative to be named later as their ticket. No one is going to love it, but they can unify the Republicans after the nomination through their hatred for Democrats and especially for Obama.

The hatred will be above ground mostly lies and hatred for liberals, and below ground it will be another round of Racism. Anti-immigration will fit about half-way in the middle of that, with anger at any immigrant mixed with race hatred for Mexicans.

That's my best guess right now. Of course, in fall of 2007 I was expecting Guiliani to be the Republican nominee. This time, though, I don't expect Romney to self-destruct the way "G" did.

One last thing - This is going to be the Citizen's United Presidential race in 2012. It's going to be massive amounts of corporate money and wealthy family money, combined with the radical right organizing power of FOX News against the grass-roots organization and fund-raising power of Obama. Since the Citizens United money will be mostly secret (no one will know who is paying for the ads) the lies from the right are going to swamp the airwaves. It will all be seasoned with more shootings like that of Gabby Giffords in Tucson. (See link below.)

This is a prediction for the next 21 months, and we all know that predictions run into reality and become unrecognizable. It'll be interesting to see how close this one turns out to being true.

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Addendum: 01/24/2011 at 11:56:37 PM CT
I predicted these shootings above, but I really expected them to take longer to happen. Apparently they are already in progress. Police fear 'war on cops' At least 11 shot in 24 hours; death toll apace with 2010 uptick . This is from MSNBC This evening.

The only questions are (1)whether the shootings will be more frequent and (2) whether the quite inadequate media will bother to report them or aggregate the reports to show what is happening.

What happened in Tucson Saturday?

The tragic shooting at the Safeway in Tucson is now widely known. Now the background is just beginning to make it into the news. Today the news begins to present a description of Jared Loughner who was and is a very disturbed individual. But any description of Loughner should also be considered in the context of America's political climate.

CNN today describes Jared Loughner's behavior leading up to the shooting in an article entitled "Loughner's dad feared he was 'out of control,' neighbor says."

Tucson, Arizona (CNN) -- The father of Arizona massacre suspect Jared Lee Loughner had a front-yard argument with his son the morning of the killings and had told a neighbor the 22-year-old was "out of control," according to neighbors and investigators.

The shaven-headed youth had quit a community college in October after being suspended and had been warned not to come back without a mental health evaluation. Postings attributed to Loughner on websites including MySpace and YouTube show "classic signs of psychosis," one expert told CNN.

Loughner had complained for years about U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords -- the apparent target of Saturday's bloodbath, according to a law enforcement official.

[...]

The morning of the shooting, he had argued with his father, Randy Loughner, in the front yard of their Tucson home, Richard Kastigar, the head of the Pima County Sheriff's Department's investigations bureau, told CNN's "John King USA." The younger Loughner was in the front yard with a bag, possibly a backpack, when his father asked him what he was doing with it, Kastigar said.

"Jared mumbled something back to his dad, and his dad said he didn't understand what was said. It was unintelligible," Kastigar said. "And then Jared left. The father followed. The father got in his vehicle and tried to locate his son and followed the direction that he went and he could not locate his son."

Randy Loughner thought his son "went into the desert some place," Kastigar said. But by Saturday afternoon, he and his wife returned home to find police waiting for them, neighbor Stephen Woods said.

"His hand went on his head. He seemed very upset. His wife was crying. I assume that's when they told him," Woods said. Randy Loughner "was just holding his head, saying, 'No. No.' "

[...]

Searches of their home after the killings turned up a 2007 letter from Giffords, thanking Jared Loughner for attending a 2007 event similar to Saturday's. An envelop in the same strongbox was scrawled with phrases like "die bitch" and "assassination plans have been made," Kastigar said.

A law enforcement official who spoke on condition of anonymity told CNN Loughner asked Giffords a question at the 2007 event and was unhappy with her response.

"He never let it go," the source said. "It kept festering."

Online, Loughner ranted about poor grammar, illiteracy and "mind control" and argued that space shuttle missions were faked and that people could make their own currency.

"In conclusion, reading the second United States constitution I can't trust the current government because of the ratifications: the government is implying mind control and brainwash on the people by controlling grammar," he wrote in one piece posted to YouTube. "No! I won't pay debt with a currency that's not backed by gold and silver! No! I won't trust in God!"

Alan Lipman, director of the Center of the Study of Violence at Georgetown University, said the postings show "classic signs of psychosis."

"People were looking for whether he was on the left or the right. He was neither," Lipman told CNN. "He was incoherent. Those were signs, classic signs you'd see in a psychiatric unit of formal thought disorder."

And forensic psychologist Kathy Seifert called the postings "absolutely psychotic." Loughner should have been evaluated for schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, autism or other mental illnesses, she said.

The article continues to discuss Loughner's behavior in school and the reason why he was barred from Pima County College. It is clear that he was getting mentally worse over recent years.

In a separate article CNN states Alleged Loughner postings paint disturbing picture. This describes Loughners writings online.

(CNN) -- NASA has never flown a manned space shuttle mission.

There was no Mars rover.

People can make their own currency.

From February 2009 through September 2010, someone using the name "Erad3" made these and a series of other assertions -- unusual at best, disturbed at worst -- on the website abovetopsecret.com.

Erad3, according to site co-owner Mark Allin, was almost certainly Jared Lee Loughner, the 22-year-old man accused of killing six people and injuring 14 others last weekend, including U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, D-Arizona.

The site, Allin said, focuses on "alternative news" and information "not covered by the mainstream media." Allin noted that all 130 messages from Erad3 were posted from Loughner's hometown of Tucson, and many of them bear a striking resemblance to postings made by Loughner on the popular social media site YouTube.

Investigators are examining the postings on Allin's site, according to a law enforcement source.

The messages from Erad3 -- riddled with grammatical errors -- often became the object of ridicule, scorn or sympathy from other contributors.

"The ranting about proof, (your) inability to make a coherent sentence gives you away red handed," one person wrote. "It won't be long (until) you have been banned once again!"

"You sound absolutely bonkers," added another.

"I think you're frankly schizophrenic," said a third. "That's not an amateur opinion and not intended as an uninformed or insulting. ... You clearly make no sense and are unable to communicate. I really do care. Seek help before you hurt yourself or others or start taking your medications again, please."

Erad3 replied with a series of unrelated arguments before concluding with a brief expression of thanks for the writer's concern.

None of Erad3's postings mentions Giffords or a desire for violence, unlike language used in documents found in Loughner's residence. They do, however, appear to reflect a strong urge to break free of any constraints -- real or imagined -- imposed by government officials.

So it is quite clear that Jared Loughner was known to be a very disturbed individual. What happens when a person this disturbed in surrounded by images of violence and threats? Consider the language that has been spread through the media recently. Congressman John Dingell lists just a very few statements that have been widely publicized:

Rep. John Dingell (D-MI), by contrast, ran through a litany of now-infamous statements by high-profile politicians, leaving blank the names of people and issues under threat.

"Let me read some statements that I have seen to be pretty awful," he said on Wednesday.

Here they are in order:

* Quoting Sharron Angle: "People are looking towards the second amendment remedies and saying my goodness, what can we do to turn our country around."

* Angle again: "The first thing we need to do is take out blank." The exact quote: "The first thing we need to do is take Harry Reid out."

* Quoting Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN): "I want people in blank armed and dangerous on this issue [of the energy tax] because we need to fight back."

* Quoting Glenn Beck: "I want to kill blank with a shovel." The exact quote: "I want to kill Charlie Rangel with a shovel."

* Beck again: "Every night I get down on my knees and pray blank will burst into flames." The exact quote: "Every night I get down on my knees and pray Dennis Kucinich will burst into flames."

* Quoting Texas GOP candidate Stephen Broden: ''Our nation was founded on violence. I don't think that we should ever remove anything from the table as it relates to our liberties and our freedoms.'­­­­­' The exact quote: ''Our nation was founded on violence. The option is on the table. I don't think that we should ever remove anything from the table as it relates to our liberties and our freedoms.'­­­­­'

* Quoting Sarah Palin: "Don't retreat, reload."

* Quoting would-be Alan West chief of staff Joyce Kaufman: "If ballots don't work, bullets will."

So take a very disturbed individual whose father states was out of control and place him in a state with the most lenient gun laws in the nation.

On November 30, Jared Lee Loughner went to a Sportman's Warehouse in Tuscon, Ariz., and purchased a Glock 19 semiautomatic weapon, after passing an instant background check.

He allegedly used that weapon in the January 8 shooting rampage that killed at least six people and wounded Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ) and 13 others in Tuscon.

Arizona's gun laws, among the most lenient in the country, allowed Loughner to conceal and carry his firearm without a permit, explains Washington Post reporter James Grimaldi. Grimaldi, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter, wrote a piece on Sunday about Arizona's gun laws.

"Essentially, there is very little obstacle to purchasing a weapon in the state of Arizona," Grimaldi tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross. "There are laws that require you, federally, to be at least 21 years old to purchase a handgun. But basically state law permits anyone 21 and older to own a firearm and also, to carry it concealed in the state. That's different than many other states, many of which have stricter gun laws."

In January 2010, Gov. Jan Brewer signed a bill which repealed an Arizona state law that required gun owners to have permits to carry concealed weapons. Arizona's previous governor Janet Napolitano, now the Homeland Security secretary, had vetoed previous attempts from the gun lobby to scrap the permit requirement.

Arizona also allows gun owners to carry their weapons almost everywhere in the state, including government buildings and inside the state Capitol. Exceptions exist for private businesses and doctor's offices.

"There's a proposal [in Arizona] that would allow teachers and students to carry [weapons] into classrooms and that was meant to be a hedge against what happened at Virginia Tech," says Grimaldi. "It's permitted in a bar [to carry a weapon] in Arizona if the person who has the weapon is not imbibing in alcohol. It's also permitted on school grounds currently if the person is picking up or dropping off a child as long as the weapon is unloaded and the gun owner remains in the vehicle."

It cannot be determined at this time why Jared Loughner focused on killing Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords. The politicians who spread violent rhetoric through the media did not cause him to conduct teh shooting, but they certainly gave him permission to shoot his enemy. The gun freedom in Arizona did not cause the shooting, but every social system that might have prevented the shooting was removed, most recently when the Arizona Governor signed a bill which repealed an Arizona state law that required gun owners to have permits to carry concealed weapons.

The NRA suggests that if everyone carried weapons shooting events like the one in Tucson would not happen, but an individual who carried a legal weapon was in the Safeway when Congresswoman Giffords was shot. He is reported to have come out to the parking lot where he saw a man holding a gun and nearly shot him. The man hold the gun was the Colonel who had taken it from Jared Loughner. The actual shooting had taken less than 15 seconds so that others with weapons could not have stopped it, and as the near shooting of one of the innocent victims showed the danger of death by innocents is quite high.

The one other thing that is obvious is that it was clear for a long time before the shooting that Jared Loughner needed psychiatric care and did not get it. Such care is not normally available and the laws across the nation do not encourage the courts to force a troubled person to get medical care for psychiatric problems.

What happened in Tucson was not just the actions of a single mad man. It was that, of course, but American society also set it up so that the inevitable crazy individuals are encouraged to commit murder, are given all the tools needed to do it and all of the preventive measures such as care for the mentally ill are being removed. Arizona is the leading low-tax low-service state which will always be ripe for this kind of event.

Media clams both sides equally guilty of excesses

Ross Douhat of The New York Times states it clearly. "if overheated rhetoric and martial imagery really led inexorably to murder, then both parties would belong in the dock." But he's wrong. It's not both sides equally. No one is threatening right-wing leaders with violence or "second amendment remedies" as the Republican nominee for Nevada Senate did.

It's the right-wingers in America who are threatening violence, and that is exactly what they did when they sent individuals carrying firearms to Democratic political rallies. Firearms are a symbol that violence is being threatened. They use the rhetoric that guns are for defense, but that's only true for people working for the government. Anyone else who carries a gun does so because he he afraid, angry at someone else, or insane. He displays it to threaten violence and to intimidate those he is threatening.

Why do I exempt people with the government? Because the first function of a government is always to maintain social stability and the government must maintain a monopoly on the legitimate right to use violence to maintain social stability.

Notice that social stability was NOT maintained in the parking lot of Safeway. There were people there with legal concealed weapons, but the shooting started and was over in less than 15 seconds. Untrained carriers of so-called defensive firearms got to show up in time to see the blood and bodies on the ground. The violence was ended by unarmed civilians before the gun-carriers even realized there was a problem.

The only reason anyone other than a licensed peace officer carries a firearm in a crowd is as a symbolic threat to perform violence ("I'm a bad-ass! Fear me!" or "Better cater to my whims! "I'm armed!" or "You can't threaten me! I'm armed and dangerous!") or in preparation of a terrorist action. The weapon is always a symbol of violence and intimidation.

It is the right-wing that does the threatening of violence because they are the ones most likely to practice it on their political opponents. There is no equivalence on the left.

Right-wing hate-mongers and the unstable individuals they direct and encourge to act

Steve Benen wrote about the shooting of Democratic Congresswoman Gabby Gifford in Tuscon, AZ:

it seems there are two main, big-picture observations that are being bandied about. The first is that this is an excellent time for political pugilists to appreciate the power of language, and come away from this tragedy exercising better judgment. There's a level of toxicity in our discourse just isn't healthy, and it tears at the societal fabric that holds the country together.

The second is that Loughner, by all accounts, is clinically ill, and what might set off an armed mad man is necessarily unpredictable. To this extent, the political/rhetorical environment isn't to blame for yesterday's events; the sickness of a disturbed young man is.

I'm inclined to think the two points aren't mutually exclusive.

It's true. The two points aren't mutually exclusive. An unstable person with a tendency to act out his fantasies is more likely to do so when he is given permission by others to act.

There are indications that Laughner is such an unstable individual. Laughner was rejected by the Army as unsuited to join, and the community college he had been attending has expelled him until he could demonstrate that he was not so mentally deranged that he would not be a danger to other students there. As news about him is reported it's pretty clear that he does not have the ability to predictably control his actions. So he has already been recognized as an unstable individual. What does the current political climate in America do to individuals like Laughner?

There are unstable individuals out there who are more likely to go shooting someone, but what has happened is that the right-wing hate-meisters are setting a climate that gives these individuals targets to hate and they also set a climate that further gives them permission to go after those targets. Glen Beck, Rush Limbaugh and their ilk name the targets. Sharron Angle - the Republican nominee for Senate - publicly told him to consider "Second Amendment remedies." The only thing missing in the connection is a direct statement to the crazy individual "Now. Go shoot so-and-so."

Sara Robinson wrote an article that listed the similar incidents between January and June of 2009. Chip Bertle summarizes
the dynamic.

Hannah Arendt described the process of demagoguery leading to violence as it occurs in totalitarian regimes ranging from Hitler to Stalin. The demagogue frames the target, but leaves off a direct call for violence. But the message is clear. Unstable people often act first. Political ideologues, however, can be mobilized as the process continues to act as a group.

This really is how organized terrorism begins.

I consider it very likely that soon right-wing politicians and pundits are going to start traveling with open armed guards "because the climate is so dangerous to public figures." (Another market for Blackwater/XE?) That will be another major step towards creating a violent political climate.

---

One other thing to consider. The right wing repeats the idea "Guns don't kill. People kill."

Yeah? Watch movies and monitor the tone of the movie when the scene with someone pulling out a gun and cleaning, loading or just checking it. The music gets more ominous as does the entire tone of the movie. Other weapons have similar responses, but a gun has a much stronger one normally. A gun is a symbol of preparing for violence.

So if the climate around you is threatening, it is traditional in America to reach for a gun. Then if something startles you or threatens you, what happens next? Someone gets shot at or even killed.

Guns may not kill, but they make it a lot more likely that someone will get badly hurt or killed.

Right-wing lack of self-awareness version 9575+

This really is funny. The right-wing bible magazine National Review has actually published:

a piece from a money launderer (Ralph Reed) defending a money launderer (Tom DeLay) against money-laundering charges.

Apparently conservatives have not yet come to grips with the fact that money laundering with the intent to conceal the source of money can be a crime.

Look at this definition of money laundering from the International Economics Glossary:

The conversion of large amounts of money the source of which one wants to hide (e.g., from drug trafficking) into a form that appears to be legitimate. The process often involves multiple international transactions across currencies and financial institutions in order to obscure the source.

Here is a more detailed description of money laundering:

Money laundering is usually described as having three sequential elements - placement, layering and integration - as defined in a report by the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (2002,7):

The first stage in the process is placement. The placement stage involves the physical movement of currency or other funds derived from illegal activities to a place or into a form that is less suspicious to law enforcement authorities and more convenient to the criminal. The proceeds are introduced into traditional or nontraditional financial institutions or into the retail economy. The second stage is layering. The layering stage involves the separation of proceeds from their illegal source by using multiple complex financial transactions (e.g., wire transfers, monetary instruments) to obscure the audit trail and hide the proceeds. The third stage in the money laundering process is integration. During the integration stage, illegal proceeds are converted into apparently legitimate business earnings through normal financial or commercial operations.

Not all money-laundering transactions involve all three distinct phases, and some may indeed involve more (van Duyne2003).

Essentially, though, money laundering is a process of moving funds from a source to a destination in which such funds are not legal. The laundering process is a set of transactions conducted with the intent to conceal the original source and nature of the funds from those who ultimately receive those funds.

That fact that using funds that are illegal at the destination is a crime seems to have escaped the notice of the editors of the National Review.

{h/t to Steve Benen at Political Animal]

Wonder where the right-wing gets it's misinformation about the financial impact of repealing the Affordable Health Care Act? Try Tom Coburn.

Conservatives are claiming they can repeal the Affordable Care Act without increasing the budget deficit in the future. Many of them seem to believe this, or at least think they have support for this lie. Red State has published a propaganda piece which has come from Senator Tom Coburn. It will get rather wide distribution among the right wingers. It is, however, little more than word salad that makes no real sense.

Here is what Oklahoma Senator Tom Coburn has posted as an explanation for why the repeal of the PPACA (Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act) would lower the federal deficit:

Beyond the headlines, it’s important to look at what CBO actually said…..

1. Repeal Reduces Health Insurance Costs for Americans. "In particular, if H.R. 2 was enacted, premiums for health insurance in the individual market would be somewhat lower than under current law…”
2. Repeal Reduces Federal Spending on Health Care. “Last March, CBO estimated that enacting PPACA and the relevant provisions of the Reconciliation Act would increase the “federal budgetary commitment to health care” by about $400 billion over the 2010–2019 period; CBO uses that term to describe the sum of net federal outlays for health programs and tax preferences for health care.7 In contrast, CBO estimated that enacting that legislation would reduce the federal budgetary commitment to health care during the decade after 2019.”
3. CBO Reviewed the Repeal Bill, But a Detailed Analysis is Still Forthcoming. “The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has reviewed H.R. 2, the Repealing the Job-Killing Health Care Law Act, as introduced on January 5, 2011. That bill would repeal the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA, Public Law 111-148) and the provisions of the Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act of 2010 (P.L. 111-152) that are related to health care….. CBO has not yet developed a detailed estimate of the budgetary impact of repealing that legislation, although it is working with the staff of the Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT) to complete such an estimate in the near future. Because Congressional deliberations on H.R. 2 could begin very soon, CBO is providing in this letter a less-detailed preliminary analysis of that legislation.”
4. The Promised Deficit Reduction From the Overhaul Has Changed Slightly. “The projected increase in deficits will not be exactly the same as the reduction in deficits that was originally estimated to result from the enacted legislation….[because] the economic outlook is now somewhat different…. Some of the funding provided by the legislation enacted last March has been obligated or spent… Subsequent legislation has already modified the laws enacted last March.”
5. Now Repeal “Costs” $145 Billion. “CBO expects that enacting H.R. 2 would probably increase federal budget deficits over the 2012–2019 period by a total of roughly $145 billion..”
6. But CBO Was Forced To Score the Initial Bill –Full of Smoke and Mirrors – as it Was Written. “As with all of CBO’s cost estimates, those estimates reflect an assumption that the provisions of current law would otherwise remain unchanged throughout the projection period and that the legislation being considered would be enacted and implemented in its current form. CBO’s responsibility to the Congress is to estimate the effects of proposals as written and not to forecast future legislation.”
7. CBO Admits Actual Costs of the Overhaul Could Be Much Higher. “Projections of the bill’s budgetary impact are quite uncertain…..However, CBO’s staff, in consultation with outside experts, has devoted a great deal of care and effort to the analysis of health care legislation in the past few years, and the agency strives to develop estimates that are in the middle of the distribution of possible outcomes. As a result, CBO believes that its estimates of the net budgetary effects of health care legislation have a roughly equal chance of turning out to be too high or too low.”
8. So, if the Current Law Were Changed Significantly (As Many Experts Anticipate), Repealing the Overhaul Could Reduce the Deficit.
   
   “The budgetary impact of repealing PPACA and the provisions of the Reconciliation Act related to health care could be quite different if key provisions of that original legislation would have subsequently been changed or not fully implemented….. Current law now includes a number of policies that might be difficult to sustain over a long period of time. For example, PPACA and the Reconciliation Act reduced payments to many Medicare providers relative to what the government would have paid under prior law. On the basis of those cuts in payment rates and the existing “sustainable growth rate” mechanism that governs Medicare’s payments to physicians, CBO projects that Medicare spending (per beneficiary, adjusted for overall inflation) will increase significantly more slowly during the next two decades than it has increased during the past two decades. If those provisions would have subsequently been modified or implemented incompletely, then the budgetary effects of repealing PPACA and the relevant provisions of the Reconciliation Act could be quite different—but CBO cannot forecast future changes in law or assume such changes in its estimates.”

[Note: I have changed the quote above to add numbers instead of dots. This permits me to analyze the document paragraph by paragraph below. ]

---

Here is my analysis of the word salad above.

Item 1. above states that the insurance companies will lower the price of health policies in the individual market if PPACA is repealed. No source is provided for this, but I am quite certain that Senator Coburn has a written promise from the insurance companies that they will lower prices. Yeah. Right.

Item 2. above is truly strange. Sen Coburn compares the CBO anticipated total federal outlays for health care during the period from 2010 - 2019 to the net federal outlays and tax preferences for an unknown period. Beyond being nonsense, this is at best an apples to oranges comparison. There is no "contrast" in the numbers for the third sentence to compare to. Besides, the third sentence is about the period after 2019. This three sentence paragraph is complete gibberish.

Item 3. above complains that the CBO detailed analysis on the proposed H.R. 2 repeal of the Affordable Care Act was not complete and final prior to the Republican House even considering the bill. Well, Duh! There has not been any proposed H.R. 2 before today. There is no telling what will happen to it in Congress. This paragraph is another space filler with no information in it. It is meaningless word salad.

Item 4. above states that the conditions under which the CBO estimate of the costs of the AHCA they presented in March may be slightly different today because some conditions have changed since then. In other words, today is not exactly the same as last March was. There is, of course, no indication that the changes since they are in fact significant. Again, this is a filler paragraph designed to look like something was actually being said. It is more meaningless word salad.

Items 5 and 6 above need to be considered together. First item 5. points out that where ever the Coburn people got their numbers the cost of repeal would be $145 billion between 2012 and 2019. This number is the center of the entire document Coburn is trying to wish away. According to TPM this number itself is sharply low-balled from the current $230 billion over the same period of time.

Today, CBO forecast that the 10-year cost of repealing health care reform is actually $230 billion. That's nearly $100 billion higher than one might have expected, given that just under a year ago, the same budget analysts concluded that the Affordable Care Act would reduce the deficit by $143 billion in the first decade.

Item 6 above tries to justify the quotation marks that Coburn put around the "Costs" before he stated $140 billion. The excuse? The CBO estimate from last March was based only on the way the bill that was passed as of the time of the estimate, March 2010. Therefore it was purely smoke and mirrors. It does not estimate changes that Congress might make to the bill. Yep. Word salad again.

Item 7 above pulls out the statement that any honest analyst making a prediction of future costs is going to have to make. "Projections of the bill's budgetary impact are quite uncertain ....." but they developed a best case scenario, a worst case scenario and a most likely scenario and this was the most likely. Gee. Yogi Berri is alleged to have said It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future. So somehow this crap published by Tom Coburn is supposed to be as reliable as the best estimates of the CBO? Just like everything above except paragraph 5 which presents a sharply low-balled cost figure, this paragraph is more crap word filler with no real meaning.

Item 8 above suggests that if the Affordable Care Act were repealed significantly and then repealed, repealing the overhaul might reduce the deficit. So if unspecified changes are made in the law and then it is repealed, there might be reductions in the deficit.

Yeah, right, and if I buy a lottery ticket tonight and it happens to win next Saturday, then I just might possibly become a wealthy man. This paragraph is yet more crap word filler - but less likely than my suddenly coming into lottery wealth.

Essentially Senator Coburn has explained why the ACA can be repealed without increasing the deficit by placing a low-balled CBO estimate of how much CBO said months ago it would cost to repeal the act between seven paragraphs of gibberish and irrelevancies to try to hide the low-balled figure. It's not even good propaganda. But RedState published it.

The Pakistani ISI it part of the South Asia problem

The recent problem in which the American CIA station chief in Islamabad was "outed" and forced to leave the country, probably by members of the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence, is just part of the South Asia problem. The arrest and convictions of David Coleman Headley, an American who participated in the Mumbai terror attack, has provided a great deal more information about the relationship between the Pakistani ISI and the terror group Lashkar-e-Taiba.

Pakistan's powerful intelligence service has been accused for years of playing a "double game:" acting as a front-line U.S. ally in the fight against terror while supporting selected terrorist groups which serve Pakistani interests.

Now, for the first time, there is a detailed inside account of how that game is played. The U.S. investigation of the 2008 Mumbai attacks [1] has built a strong case that officers in Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI) collaborated with the Lashkar-e-Taiba terrorist group in the plot that killed 166 people, six of them Americans. U.S. and Indian investigators say their understanding of the ISI-Lashkar alliance is drawn from the confessions of David Coleman Headley, an American convicted of participating in the Mumbai plot, as well as documents, phone records and electronic eavesdropping.

Officials from both countries say they are persuaded that ISI officers recruited and trained Headley in spying techniques and gave him money and instructions to scout targets in Mumbai and elsewhere. Headley has told investigators that a Pakistani Navy frogman helped plan the maritime attack on Mumbai, according to a 119-page report recounting his interrogation this year by Indian authorities. The report, which was obtained by ProPublica, quotes Headley as saying his Pakistani intelligence handler took part in a discussion about a subsequent Lashkar plot to attack a Danish newspaper -- information that Pakistan did not share with Danish authorities.

In essence, U.S. and Indian officials say, Headley was more than a terrorist: He served as a Pakistani spy.

During the period that ISI officers allegedly helped Lashkar plan to kill Americans and Jews in Mumbai, the intelligence service was working closely with the CIA and U.S. military in counter-terrorism efforts and Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari was pledging his support for the U.S. campaign against militants in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Pakistani officials deny any link to Lashkar and point out that hundreds of ISI officers have died in clashes with militants. They accuse India of politically motivated distortion in the report on Headley's interrogation.

"It is a stereotype, a Pakistan-specific version of an Indian interrogation," said a Pakistani official who requested anonymity because of the sensitive topic. "The Indian version is totally distorted and fabricated as there was no involvement of the ISI whatsoever. Nor did any serving official interact with Headley or any of the perpetrators."

But U.S. investigators see much of Headley's account as credible, U.S. officials said. The investigators believe his main handler, a man identified only as Major Iqbal, was a serving member of ISI and one of several Pakistani intelligence officers who had contact with Headley, according to U.S. officials.

The Obama administration has expressed frustration with Pakistan's failure to bring to justice the suspected masterminds of Mumbai and to rein in Lashkar, the ISI's longtime proxy army against India. Recent intelligence shows Lashkar remains intent on striking the West, according to a U.S. official who requested anonymity.

While the civilian government of Pakistan denies that the ISI was involved in the attack on Mumbai, their denial has to be recognized as necessary because if they failed to deny the ISI involvement then they would be admitting that the Pakistan government is so weak that it cannot prevent rogue elements of the ISI from attacking Pakistan's neighboring countries. Admission of that weakness could easily attract internal opponents to try to replace them. The same dynamic applies to the public complaints the government makes about the American drone strikes against the Taliban in North Wiziristan even though elements of the government are said to be providing targeting information to the Americans in order to guide the drone attacks.

My previous articles on Pakistan are

• CIA Chief in Islamabad reportedly exposed by Pakistani ISI
• US reported to be considering expanding operations inside Pakistan

Want to lose weight? Cut carbohydrates sharply

Two years ago I lost 45 pounds within four months by cutting out almost all carbohydrates and keeping a daily record of everything I ate along with the calories. Essentially it was the Atkins Diet combined with careful record-keeping. It worked.

No sugar, no bread made with processed flour, no white potatoes, no rice, no alcohol. There was almost nothing in a 7-11 store that I could eat. The only thing McDonald's sells that I could eat was a quarter-pounder hamburger Pattie. No bread. The important point, though, it that it worked. Especially important, I was not hungry for more food. Staying under 1000 calories per day was no problem.

But I was told it was dangerous. I had to have carbohydrates many people told me. So I started adding carbohydrates back in. And I became irrationally hungry, binging frequently. I put 25 pounds back on.

Well, today the Los Angeles Times reports studies that confirms my experience.

All carbohydrates (a category including sugars) convert to sugar in the blood, and the more refined the carbs are, the quicker the conversion goes. When you eat a glazed doughnut or a serving of mashed potatoes, it turns into blood sugar very quickly. To manage the blood sugar, the pancreas produces insulin, which moves sugar into cells, where it's stored as fuel in the form of glycogen.

If you have a perfectly healthy metabolism, the system works beautifully, says Dr. Stephen Phinney, a nutritional biochemist and an emeritus professor of UC Davis who has studied carbohydrates for 30 years. "However, over time, as our bodies get tired of processing high loads of carbs, which evolution didn't prepare us for … how the body responds to insulin can change," he says.

When cells become more resistant to those insulin instructions, the pancreas needs to make more insulin to push the same amount of glucose into cells. As people become insulin resistant, carbs become a bigger challenge for the body. When the pancreas gets exhausted and can't produce enough insulin to keep up with the glucose in the blood, diabetes develops.

The first sign of insulin resistance is a condition called metabolic syndrome — a red flag that diabetes, and possibly heart disease, is just around the corner. People are said to have the syndrome when they have three or more of the following: high blood triglycerides (more than 150 mg); high blood pressure (over 135/85); central obesity (a waist circumference in men of more than 40 inches and in women, more than 35 inches); low HDL cholesterol (under 40 in men, under 50 in women); or elevated fasting glucose.

About one-fourth of adults has three or more of these symptoms.

"Put these people on a low-carb diet and they'll not only lose weight, which always helps these conditions, but their blood levels will improve," Phinney says. In a 12-week study published in 2008, Phinney and his colleagues put 40 overweight or obese men and women with metabolic syndrome on a 1,500-calorie diet. Half went on a low-fat, high-carb diet. The others went on a low-carb, high-fat diet. The low-fat group consumed 12 grams of saturated fat a day out of a total of 40 grams of fat, while the low-carb group ate 36 grams of saturated fat a day — three times more — out of a total of 100 grams of fat.

Despite all the extra saturated fat the low-carb group was getting, at the end of the 12 weeks, levels of triglycerides (which are risk factors for heart disease) had dropped by 50% in this group. Levels of good HDL cholesterol increased by 15%.

In the low-fat, high-carb group, triglycerides dropped only 20% and there was no change in HDL.

The take-home message from this study and others like it is that — contrary to what many expect — dietary fat intake is not directly related to blood fat. Rather, the amount of carbohydrates in the diet appears to be a potent contributor.

"The good news," adds Willett, "is that based on what we know, almost everyone can avoid Type 2 diabetes. Avoiding unhealthy carbohydrates is an important part of that solution." For those who are newly diagnosed, he adds, a low-carb diet can take the load off the pancreas before it gets too damaged and improve the condition — reducing or averting the need for insulin or other diabetes meds.

Americans can also blame high-carb diets for why the population has gotten fatter over the last 30 years, says Phinney, who is co-author of "The New Atkins for a New You" (Simon & Schuster, 2010).

"Carbohydrates are a metabolic bully," Phinney says. "They cut in front of fat as a fuel source and insist on being burned first. What isn't burned gets stored as fat, and doesn't come out of storage as long as carbs are available. And in the average American diet, they always are."

Here's how Phinney explains it: When you cut carbs, your body first uses available glycogen as fuel. When that's gone, the body turns to fat and the pancreas gets a break. Blood sugar stabilizes, insulin levels drop, fat burns. That's why the diet works for diabetics and for weight loss.

When the body switches to burning fat instead of glycogen, it goes into a process called nutritional ketosis. If a person eats 50 or fewer grams of carbs, his body will go there, Phinney says. (Nutritional ketosis isn't to be confused with ketoacidosis, a dangerous condition that can occur in diabetics.)

Beyond the fat-burning effects of ketosis, people lose weight on low-carb diets because fat and protein increase satisfaction and reduce appetite. On the flip side, simple carbs cause an insulin surge, which triggers a blood sugar drop, which makes you hungry again.

"At my obesity clinic, my default diet for treating obesity, Type 2 diabetes and metabolic syndrome is a low-carb diet," says Dr. Eric Westman, director of the Lifestyle Medicine Clinic at Duke University Medical Center, and co-author of the new Atkins book. "If you take carbohydrates away, all these things get better."

Though the movement to cap carbs is growing, not all nutritional scientists have fully embraced it. Dr. Ronald Krauss, senior scientist at Children's Hospital Oakland Research Institute and founder and past chair of the American Heart Assn.'s Council on Nutrition, Physical Activity and Metabolism, says that while he fundamentally agrees with those advocating fewer dietary carbs, he doesn't like to demonize one food group.

That said, he adds, those who eat too many calories tend to overconsume carbohydrates, particularly refined carbohydrates and sugars. "It can be extremely valuable to limit carbohydrate intake and substitute protein and fat. I am glad to see so many people in the medical community getting on board. But in general I don't recommend extreme dietary measures for promoting health."

Joanne Slavin, professor of nutrition at the University of Minnesota and a member of the advisory committee for the 2010 Dietary Guidelines for Americans, is less inclined to support the movement. The committee, she says, "looked at carbohydrates and health outcomes and did not find a relationship between carbohydrate intake and increased disease risk."

Most Americans need to reduce calories and increase activity, Slavin adds. Cutting down on carbs as a calorie source is a good strategy, "but making a hit list of carbohydrate-containing foods is shortsighted and doomed to fail, similar to the low-fat rules that started in the 1980s."

As nutrition scientists try to find the ideal for the future, others look to history and evolution for answers. One way to put our diet in perspective is to imagine the face of a clock with 24 hours on it. Each hour represents 100,000 years that humans have been on the Earth.

On this clock, the advent of agriculture and refined grains would have appeared at about 11:54 p.m. (23 hours and 54 minutes into the day). Before that, humans were hunters and gatherers, eating animals and plants off the land. Agriculture allowed for the mass production of crops such as wheat and corn, and refineries transformed whole grains into refined flour and created processed sugar.

Some, like Phinney, would argue that we haven't evolved to adapt to a diet of refined foods and mass agriculture — and that maybe we shouldn't try.

health@latimes.com

This describes my experience exactly. Look at the two items I have highlighted in green. The first one shows how the weight loss eliminates metabolic syndrome. It worked for me. I both lost weight and improved my cholesterol and lipids.

The second item in green explains the effects so many people successful in phase one of the Atkins diet described to me. In phase one they lost weight. A lot of it. When they started putting carbohydrates and sugar back into their diet, the weight came back. The second item in green explains my hunger binges. Sugar or carbohydrates kicked my blood sugar up rapidly and then it dropped rapidly a short time later making me hungry.

Remember, hunger is something you feel because your brain receives messages about blood sugar from your blood. It has nothing directly to do with your stomach or how much you have eaten.

One more thing I should report, though. I really was NOT hungry on the diet. Restricting my diet to below 800 calories per day led to even more rapid weight loss. But when my vision changed sharply requiring new glasses, then changed back a few weeks later, my ophthalmologist explained that changes in the blood sugar can effect the lens in your eyes. So don't try the diet without the advice of good medical experts who are familiar with the Atkins Diet. MOST medical professionals are unaware of what this diet is doing, and they won't tell you that.

My weight and triglycerides have gone up. I am going back on the diet. But I now have a good reason to totally stop bread, sugars and so on. If you have found your weight slowly going up as you get older, this is why.

Carbohydrates. Get rid of them. Keep a daily record of the foods you eat along with the calorie count each day. Also weigh yourself daily. If your weight starts going back up, check back to what you ate over the previous three weeks and you will see why if you kept honest records.

Here are the results of the deficit hawks' proposals

When Social Security retirement is stolen to pay for the tax cuts for the rich and for their interminable wars (wars always benefit the wealthy but are fought by the not-so-wealthy) the end result is going to be poor houses. Glenn Beck specifically proposes them.

What will get us there? The bankers and wealthy big business owners are gambling on stock market and bond market speculations. When they lose, they will again demand that the tax payers bail them out because their services are all that will be keeping the economy out of the next Great Depression. The result? Look at Ireland. This is Digby's blog. Here are the pictures of unrest from Ireland.

I really don't want to see that happen here, but the only thing stopping it is the fact that the U.S. dollar was and remains the world currency and will remain so as long as the federal government does not default on its treasury bonds - at least not to foreign banks. Defaulting to the Social Security trust funds is fine. What is being proposed right now is an internal default. Lower Social Security benefits so that the government does not have to pay back the Social Security trust funds the money they have borrowed in order to fight two unnecessary wars and to pay the outlandish tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans. .

By lowering Social Security benefits, the federal government will then only be faced with raising taxes enough to pay back the Chinese, Japanese and Middle Eastern Oil Magnates who own the rest of the bonds. All the government has to do is keep on over-taxing the workers for Social Security and the wealthy and the bankers will do quite well. The only people who will be hurt are future retirees.

The working class is being taxed so that their tax money can make the wealthy better off. That's what the talk of cutting Social Security benefits to lower the deficit is about. But Social Security has never run a deficit, nor will it. .The deficit has come from wars and unnecessary tax cuts on the already under-taxed wealthy Americans.