A friend sent this to me. I don’t know if it’s legitimate, but I agree with the sentiment.
At least we now know what happens when Washington runs out of cash — they just create more of it out of thin air.
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My leftist friend Paul still insists that FOX News is biased to the right (which they are), but it’s just a conservative myth that most other national news organizations are biased to the left. Take a look at these Newsweek covers:
Bias? What bias? We don’t see any bias. In his excellent book “Bias,” Bernie Goldberg (who worked at CBS for many years) explained that the liberals who dominate the nation’s newsrooms don’t believe they’re biased for one simple reason: they see the liberal viewpoint as the obviously correct viewpoint, and so in their minds, they’re just reporting the truth. With that in mind, here’s how Andrew Sullivan of Newsweek explained the Obama cover: Appearing on MSNBC’s “Hardball,” Sullivan defended his story, saying he was simply telling the truth about Obama, whom he described as a “sensible, pragmatic centrist.” Bias? What bias? We don’t see any bias. On to the next round …
Round 11(a) – Paul Tom Like most FOX viewers you believe the Mainstream Liberal Media Myth. Let’s just review, however, the history of mainstream media since the end of World War II. When William Randolph Hearst was still alive. Controlling something like 30 papers around the country. Hearst was ‘not’ a liberal in his later years. He famously fell out with FDR in 1935. Yet Hearst newspapers remained a force long after Willie’s death in 1951. TIME was co-founded by Henry Luce in the 1920′s. Who became its longtime publisher until the 1960′s. Luce also founded LIFE and FORTUNE (plus Sports Illustrated). Making him highly influential in shaping America’s news throughout the early post-war years. Luce was not a liberal. Nor was his more famous wife, Claire Booth Luce. The latter was, in fact, a Republican Congresswoman (who didn’t like FDR at all). Luce retired from TIME in ’64 to champion Barry Goldwater. DeWitt Wallace, founder of READER’S DIGEST, was certainly not a liberal. Yet his magazine was Number 1 in circulation, all through the post-war era. Shaped to fit on toilet tanks, it provided Nixon with a voice. He was a frequent contributor during his wilderness years. And Wallace was so generous to Nixon’s ’68 campaign that Robert McCormick, aka, ‘Colonel McCormick’, ran the CHICAGO TRIBUNE as a Republican paper for much of the 20th Century. And even after his death in ’55, The Tribune remained Republican-leaning up to the Reagan era. As the dominant daily in what was American’s 2nd biggest city. The LOS ANGELES TIMES was founded as a Republican paper. And it remained conservative into the post-war years. Servicing a city that zoomed from 4th to 2nd between the 40′s and the 80′s. Walter Annenburg owned THE PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER from the 40′s through the 60′s. Servicing what historically was America’s 3rd, then 4th, largest city. Annenburg became a major Nixon backer. Getting an ambassadorship to England. Annenburg latter became best of friends with Ronald and Nancy Reagan. Annenburg, by the way, founded TV GUIDE which he owned until the 80′s. A magazine that was Number 1, in newsstand sales, for most of the post-war era. Impacting our choices on what we chose to watch. Annenburg also had an impact on teenage girls by founding SEVENTEEN. THE WALL STREET JOURNAL has been the nations’ top financial daily for more than a 100 years. And for most of our lives it was respectably conservative. A paper even liberals quoted when it served their needs. But since Murdoch took control, The Journal’s reputation has been sullied by connection to the London scandals. U S NEWS AND WORLD REPORT was America’s 3rd biggest newsweekly during the post-war era. With a very conservative readership. For years every issue contained “A New Soviet Threat”. USA TODAY, launched by Gannet in the 1980′s, is one of our few national papers. With a reputation mainly for light and fluffy news. Not a paper liberals quote when discussing politics. Finally one should note that hometown papers all over the country tend to be conservative. Especially in Metro Areas of cities with less than a million people. And until the internet took over, most Americans got their news from local papers. With regards to broadcasting, RCA owned NBC from the 20′s to the 80′s. And NBC was the first television network. Whose newscasts were top rated during the Huntley-Brinkley years. While the TODAY show dominated morning news until the 1980′s. Yet one should note that RCA was a major defense contractor. Until it was swallowed by Interestingly, the NBC news desk actually bore the logo of GULF OIL for several years in the late ’60′s, early ’70′s. It disappeared in ’73 when gasoline spiked to 50 cents! CBS was controlled by William Paley from the 20′s to the 80′s. A man who frequently clashed with Edward R Morrow, foe of Joeseph McCarthy. In fact, the George Clooney movie “Good Night and Good Luck” highlighted those clashes. Paley feared that Morrow’s liberalism would cost the network sponsorships. And Morrow left CBS a very bitter man. During the Cronkite era, ’62 to ’81, CBS NEWS offended conservatives. In particular their coverage of Viet Nam and Watergate. But ‘was’ Viet Nam a war America could have won? Was Watergate not the scandal it seemed? In any event, Walter Cronkite ranked as “The Most Trusted Man In America” in numerous public opinion polls. ABC was the last network to have a serious newscast. During the 70′s their news desk frequently changed butts. It wasn’t until GOOD MORNING AMERICA broke out in the ’80′s that their nightly news got a boost and became competitive. Though even under Jennings it was known for lighter stories. Not unlike the morning news. During the ’80′s, columnist GEORGE WILL became a regular on ABC’s THIS WEEK (where he remains today). Will, you might remember, was a best-selling author of Victorian values. Success that was due in part to ABC. Which also used him frequently on Ted Kopple’s NIGHTLINE. Where HENRY KISSINGER made numerous appearances. WILLIAM KRISTOL is another conservative ABC has often featured. And ABC RADIO was the home of PAUL HARVEY NEWS AND COMMENT for more than 50 years! Harvey, who was unabashedly square, had a peak audience of 24 million listeners. Few, if any, considered Paul a liberal. WILLIAM F BUCKLEY, publisher of THE NATIONAL REVIEW was a fixture of PBS’s FIRING LINE from the ’70′s through the ’90′s. Becoming the foremost conservative of his time. As a syndicated columnist, Buckley was a PBS also carried WALL STREET WEEK IN REVIEW every Friday night from the 70′s through the 90′s. And FREE TO CHOOSE, in 1979, was hosted by Milton Friedman himself. A multi-part series based on his best-selling book. THE McLAUGHLIN GROUP has been a staple of PBS for more than 20 years. Providing a weekly showcase for old Nixon colleagues, JOHN McLAUGHLIN and PAT BUCHANAN. They are frequently joined by MORT ZUCKERMAN, N Y DAILY NEWS publisher. That paper, by the way, has always been conservative. And was, for many years, bigger than the N Y Times in terms of newsstand sales. Therefore your contention that conservatives had no voice in the mainstream media until FOX NEWS came along is a denial of media history. It reflects a paranoia akin to Scientology. A mindset Fox News caters to! And nothings more pathetic than a bunch of nerdy White guys claiming they’ve been oppressed by liberals. And yes, there’s going to be a few sour apples. Like John Stossel, for instance. Journalists who feel appreciated only at FOX NEWS. But one should note that every field has disgruntled ex-employees. Why would broadcast journalism be any different? The problem is conservatives are frequently pushing ideas that seem mean and, or, stupid. Like Abstinence Only Education, denial of Evolution, restrictions on woman’s rights, open-carry gun laws, schemes to gut environmental laws, schemes to privatize the government, schemes to restrict minority voting rights, etc, etc, etc. None of these And Tom since you’re such a wonk you’ll get back to me. With the age of Rupert Murdoch when he bought his US citizenship. Murdoch ain’t American. Nor is he British. Murdoch’s from the swamps! As you shall see from THE N Y TIMES article I’ll be sending with this. Paul
Round 11(a) – Tom Greetings, Paul – Like most FOX viewers you believe the Mainstream Liberal Media Myth. It’s not just FOX viewers. I saw a poll once in which 90% of conservatives said they believe the national media leans left. Interestingly, 20% of self-identified liberals in the same poll said the national media leans left. Nice to know some liberals still have good powers of perception. As I pointed out before, even Walter Cronkite’s former boss said in an interview that the national media is dominated by liberals. As for your examples of newspapers that were originally founded and run by Republicans, so what? That has zero bearing on the political leanings of today’s journalists. Most of the Hollywood studios were founded by political conservatives as well, but if you’re going to deny that Hollywood today is dominated by liberals, I would suggest you seek professional help. (TV Guide and Reader’s Digest, seriously? You’re offering those up as examples of news media? They’re fluff.) Finally one should note that hometown papers all over the country tend to be conservative. Especially in Metro Areas of cities with less than a million people. And until the internet took over, most Americans got their news from local papers. Hometown papers aren’t the national media. It’s the national media that leans left. Our hometown paper leans left, even though Tennessee is a conservative state. We were treated to a series of rah-rah articles about the “stimulus” package, which I wrote about here http://www.tomnaughton.com/?p=400 and when the 2010 elections came around, the editorial board at the Nashville paper got together and — being totally unbiased and objective, of course — endorsed the Democrat candidate in all nine of the state’s districts. Tennessee voters were so impressed with the totally unbiased and objective endorsements, they elected Republicans in seven of the nine districts. During the Cronkite era, ’62 to ’81, CBS NEWS offended conservatives. In particular their coverage of Viet Nam and Watergate. But ‘was’ Viet Nam a war America could have won? Was Watergate not the scandal it seemed? In any event, Walter Cronkite ranked as “The Most Trusted Man In America” in numerous public opinion polls. And his newscast was top rated all throughout the 70′s. Suggesting its appeal went beyond a liberal base. As for the most trusted man in America, some quotes from the horse’s mouth: “Everybody knows that there’s a liberal, that there’s a heavy liberal persuasion among correspondents…..Anybody who has to live with the people, who covers police stations, covers county courts, brought up that way, has to have a degree of humanity that people who do not have that exposure don’t have, and some people interpret that to be liberal.” — Cronkite at the March 21, 1996 Radio & TV Correspondents Dinner. “I know liberalism isn’t dead in this country. It simply has, temporarily we hope, lost its voice….We know that unilateral action in Grenada and Tripoli was wrong. We know that ‘Star Wars’ means uncontrollable escalation of the arms race. We know that the real threat to democracy is the half of the nation in poverty. We know that no one should tell a woman she has to bear an unwanted child….Gawd Almighty, we’ve got to shout these truths in which we believe from the housetops. Like that scene in the movie ‘Network,’ we’ve got to throw open our windows and shout these truths to the streets and the heavens. And I bet we’ll find more windows are thrown open to join the chorus than we’d ever dreamed possible.” — Cronkite at a People for the American Way banquet. His successor, Dan Rather, once gave a speech at a Democratic fund-raiser and had to have it explained to him by the CBS brass that it wasn’t a good idea — ya see, Dan, it’s kinda hard to deny those “bias” accusations when you’re out there raising money for Democrats. That’s the same Dan Rather who put forged documents on the air in a botched attempt to embarrass George W. Bush, even though one of the document experts called in by CBS warned Rather the documents appeared to be forged. Bias? What bias? We don’t see any bias … During the ’80′s, columnist GEORGE WILL became a regular on ABC’s THIS WEEK (where he remains today). Will, you might remember, was a best-selling author of Victorian values. Success that was due in part to ABC. Which also used him frequently on Ted Kopple’s NIGHTLINE. Where HENRY KISSINGER made numerous appearances. WILLIAM KRISTOL is another conservative ABC has often featured. And ABC RADIO was the home of PAUL HARVEY NEWS AND COMMENT for more than 50 years! Harvey, who was unabashedly square, had a peak audience of 24 million listeners. Few, if any, considered Paul a liberal. WILLIAM F BUCKLEY, publisher of THE NATIONAL REVIEW was a fixture of PBS’s FIRING LINE from the ’70′s through the ’90′s. Becoming the foremost conservative of his time. As a syndicated columnist, Buckley was a superstar. PBS also carried WALL STREET WEEK IN REVIEW every Friday night from the 70′s through the 90′s. And FREE TO CHOOSE, in 1979, was hosted by Milton Friedman himself. A multi-part series based on his best-selling book. THE McLAUGHLIN GROUP has been a staple of PBS for more than 20 years. Providing a weekly showcase for old Nixon colleagues, JOHN McLAUGHLIN and PAT BUCHANAN. They are frequently joined by MORT ZUCKERMAN, NY DAILY NEWS publisher. That paper, by the way, has always been conservative. And was, for many years, bigger than the N Y Times in terms of newsstand sales. Therefore your contention that conservatives had no voice in the mainstream media until FOX NEWS came along is a denial of media history. It reflects a paranoia akin to Scientology. A mindset Fox News caters to! And nothings more pathetic than a bunch of nerdy White guys claiming they’ve been oppressed by liberals. Are you seriously suggesting that because a few conservatives appeared on the networks once per week (usually on Sundays), that disproves the Brian Williams comment that the left-leaning media created the market for Rush Limbaugh and FOX news? Limbaugh has a daily three-hour show. FOX is a 24/7 news station. Before they came along, there were liberals on the air every day, but no conservatives. And yes, there’s going to be a few sour apples. Like John Stossel, for instance. Journalists who feel appreciated only at FOX NEWS. But one should note that every field has disgruntled ex-employees. Why would broadcast journalism be any different? Stossel felt very appreciated at ABC until he started covering stories from a libertarian point of view. Then his stories were spiked and Paul Jennings stopped talking to him. That’s the point. The problem is conservatives are frequently pushing ideas that seem mean and, or, stupid. Like Abstinence Only Education, denial of Evolution, restrictions on woman’s rights, open-carry gun laws, schemes to gut environmental laws, schemes to privatize the government, schemes to restrict minority voting rights, etc, etc, etc. Please cite the FOX newscasters who deny evolution and want to restrict minority voting rights. None of these ideas sound positive when analyzed by responsible journalists. Only within the vacuum of FOX NEWS can these ideas make any sense. Thank you for proving my point. That’s exactly the attitude Bernard Goldberg described as being rampant among national journalists in his book “Bias” … well, of course all the reasonable people are liberals! Of course the liberal viewpoints are the correct and responsible viewpoints – and we know this is true because we’re all liberals, and we all tell each other so. You’ve made several snide remarks about FOX news in our exchanges, indicating that you believe they report with a right-wing bias. I believe CNN, CBS, ABC and NBC report with a left-wing bias — which you insist isn’t true, even though 90% of the political contributions made by their journalists have gone to Democrats, even though Walter Cronkite himself admits there’s a “heavy liberal persuasion” among correspondents, and even though according to internal media surveys, liberals outnumber conservatives in national newsrooms by better than 10 to 1. So here’s the question: why is your ability to correctly perceive bias so much more advanced than mine? Is it something you eat? Tom
Round 11(b) – Paul Tom: I made a point of not mentioning Dan Rather because I could never stand him myself. What’s more, I told you in previous emails that I don’t think news can be explored with commercial breaks. That goes for all the commercial networks. In fact, all those pharmaceutical ads have driven up Medicare costs. Convincing people they need the purple pill! And it seems that cable news networks have even more commercials yet. I don’t bother with MSNBC just for that very reason. For every conservative like you who thinks the big 3 networks have a liberal bias, you can bet there’s a liberal who feels they are beholden to corporate interests. Because they are! With regards to my recap on post-war media history, I feel I made significant points. READERS DIGEST wasn’t frivolous. Most of its articles were first published in other well-known magazines. And TV GUIDE was the most widely read magazine about the media itself. Furthermore, I’m not really sure when you think this liberal media era began. The 70′s? 80s? 90′s? When?? Get specific. Realize too that big league journalists tend to be educated, well-traveled residents of world-class cities. You cannot expect them to share the views of Baptists in the South or farmers on the plains. You cannot expect educated women to support legislation requiring rape victims to carry resulting pregnancies. Nor can you expect them to support legislation banning contraceptives. Or abstinence only education. With regards to restrictions on voting rights, since the Tea Party came to power, in several state legislatures, there have been flurry of laws requiring voters to present state I D’s. With the calculation that X number of poor people cannot choke up the cash to get copies of their birth certificates. What’s more, about 15 states have passed laws this year making it far more difficult for students to vote in college towns. They will have to either go home on Election Day, or cast absentee ballots. Again, it’s a cynical calculation that X number of students won’t bother going to the trouble. Did you read that article I sent about News Corp in London? If you think those scandals are not a reflection on the Murdoch empire, I question your intelligence. According to testimony at the House of Commons, News Of The World sanctioned thousands of phone hackings during the last 10 years. I also read that Murdoch visited James Cameron at 10 Downing Street something like 15 times during Cameron’s first year in office. Entering from the back door every time he went. Can you imagine how Americans would feel if some foreign media magnet paid that many visits to the White House? So yeah, I regard FOX NEWS with absolute suspicion. Why should Murdoch be a lord at large to the English speaking world?? Meddling in the politics of not one but ‘three’ major democracies (including Australia). Again, if you don’t get my concern with that, I question your intelligence. Paul
Round 11(b) – Tom Greetings, Paul – I made a point of not mentioning Dan Rather because I could never stand him myself. With good reason. What’s more, I told you in previous emails that I don’t think news can be explored with commercial breaks. That goes for all the commercial networks. In fact, all those pharmaceutical ads have driven up Medicare costs. Convincing people they need the purple pill! And it seems that cable news networks have even more commercials yet. I don’t bother with MSNBC just for that very reason. I agree, but I don’t think our over-consumption of drugs has anything to do with a liberal/conservative debate. For every conservative like you who thinks the big 3 networks have a liberal bias, you can bet there’s a liberal who feels they are beholden to corporate interests. Because they are! You still are laboring under the belief that “corporate” means “Republican.” It doesn’t, not by any stretch. Plenty of large, powerful corporations love big government, because big government helps make them rich. With regards to my recap on post-war media history, I feel I made significant points. READERS DIGEST wasn’t frivolous. I don’t know anyone who turns to Reader’s Digest for political opinions. (I don’t know people who read Reader’s Digest, as far as that goes.) Most of its articles were first published in other well-known magazines. And TV GUIDE was the most widely read magazine about the media itself. TV Guide is about TV. I’m talking about the national news media leaning left on political issues. Furthermore, I’m not really sure when you think this liberal media era began. The 70′s? 80s? 90′s? When?? Get specific. After Watergate, the attitude among journalists and aspiring journalists took a sharp turn towards advocacy journalism. My mom, in fact, wrote a paper on the topic while pursuing her master’s. She interviewed Mike Royko for her paper. The new generation of journalists saw their mission less as one of reporting facts and more of a need to be agents for change. In surveys of journalism students, “I want to change society for the better” (or some similar sentiment) is now the most popular reason given for choosing journalism as a career. “Change the world!” types tend to be liberals. Realize too that big league journalists tend to be educated, well-traveled residents of world-class cities. So we’re back to the “all the smart people are liberals” nonsense. You may not have noticed this yet, Paul, but I’m pretty well-educated and well-read. So is my brother, my best friend (a partner at the biggest law firm in Tennessee), the programmers I work with at BMI, etc. — all libertarians or conservatives. Journalists don’t become liberals because of their superior educations. They become journalists because the field attracts a disproportionate share of liberals — as Walter Cronkite’s former boss said himself. (He said the same about the entertainment field, by the way.) When I was in journalism classes, 90% of my fellow students were liberals … and that was long before any of them became well-educated, world-travelin’ residents of world-class cities. You cannot expect them to share the views of Baptists in the South or farmers on the plains. I see you still believe conservatives are all religious hicks who drive pickup trucks. Perhaps you should travel outside Hollywood someday so your perception of conservatives will be informed by something more realistic than Hollywood stereotypes. You cannot expect educated women to support legislation requiring rape victims to carry resulting pregnancies. Nor can you expect them to support legislation banning contraceptives. Or abstinence only education. I don’t expect educated people of either gender or of any political persuasion to support legislation banning contraception or forcing rape victims to give birth. As for sex education, I expect the schools to teach the biology of reproduction. I don’t want them to teach my kids how to have sex without becoming pregnant, and I sure as hell don’t want them giving my daughters birth control. (I say this despite not being a Baptist or a farmer.) Those aren’t decisions the schools have any right to make for my child. That’s my job as a parent. With regards to restrictions on voting rights, since the Tea Party came to power, in several state legislatures, there have been flurry of laws requiring voters to present state ID’s. With the calculation that X number of poor people cannot choke up the cash to get copies of their birth certificates. What’s more, about 15 states have passed laws this year making it far more difficult for students to vote in college towns. They will have to either go home on Election Day, or cast absentee ballots. Again, it’s a cynical calculation that X number of students won’t bother going to the trouble. I want voters to show IDs. I realize that’s an outrage to Democrats, who would lose some of their ability to win elections by encouraging illegal immigrants and dead people to vote early and often, but considering that I can’t rent a DVD, write a check, open a bank account, buy a beer, or visit a doctor without showing ID, I don’t think it’s too much to demand that people picking the next president prove they are who they say they are. In fact, I want more than just a requirement to show an ID. I want anyone who applies to vote in elections to pass the same tests proving they understand the basics of U.S. government that we demand foreigners pass before they become citizens and vote. People who can’t identify the two houses of Congress have no business voting. Did you read that article I sent about News Corp in London? If you think those scandals are not a reflection on the Murdoch empire, I question your intelligence. According to testimony at the House of Commons, News Of The World sanctioned thousands of phone hackings during the last 10 years. I also read that Murdoch visited James Cameronat 10 Downing Street something like 15 times during Cameron’s first year in office. Entering from the back door every time he went. Can you imagine how Americans would feel if some foreign media magnet paid that many visits to the White House? So yeah, I regard FOX NEWS with absolute suspicion. Why should Murdoch be a lord at large to the English speaking world?? Meddling in the politics of not one but ‘three’ major democracies (including Australia). Again, if you don’t get my concern with that, I question your intelligence. Yes, I’m aware of the crappy behavior of Mr. Murdoch’s employees at News of the World. But unless and until employees of FOX news in the U.S. engage in similar behavior, I don’t see what it has to do with FOX news. Bad behavior by journalists is, unfortunately, not all that uncommon. To recall a few examples in the U.S.: 1. Maureen Dowd (NY Times), caught stitching together separate quotes from George W. Bush into single quotes to produce controversial statements he never actually made. 2. Stephen Glass (New Republic), caught making up entire stories. 3. Janet Cooke (Washington Post), caught making up entire stories. 4. Dan Rather (CBS), used forged documents on the air in a botched attempt to take down George W. Bush 5. Jayson Blair (NY Times), caught making up entire stories. 6. Michael Gallagher (Cincinnati Enquirer), caught fabricating sources for a story and (apparently) hacking into a corporation’s voice-mail system. 7. Michael Gartner (NBC), resigned when it was revealed that NBC staged an explosion of a GM truck for a news story on the supposed dangers of the trucks. 8. Adnan Hajj (Rueters), caught doctoring photographs while covering the Israeli action against Lebanon. 9. Jack Kelley (USA Today), caught fabricating stories. 10. Christopher Newton (API), fired for fabricating stories. 11. Patricia Smith (Boston Globe), resigned after admitting her columns described people and events that were fabricated. I could go on, but you get the idea. Bad behavior by journalists is hardly limited to Murdoch-owned media. Best, Greetings, Peter —
I made a point of not mentioning Dan Rather because I could never stand him myself.
With good reason.
What’s more, I told you in previous emails that I don’t think news can be explored with commercial breaks. That goes for all the commercial networks. In fact, all those pharmaceutical ads have driven up Medicare costs. Convincing people they need the purple pill! And it seems that cable news networks have even more commercials yet. I don’t bother with MSNBC just for that very reason.
I agree, but I don’t think our over-consumption of drugs has anything to do with a liberal/conservative debate.
For every conservative like you who thinks the big 3 networks have a liberal bias, you can bet there’s a liberal who feels they are beholden to corporate interests. Because they are!
You still are laboring under the belief that “corporate” means “Republican.” It doesn’t, not by any stretch. Plenty of powerful corporations love big government, because big government helps to make them rich.
With regards to my recap on post-war media history, I feel I made significant points. READERS DIGEST wasn’t frivolous.
I don’t know anyone who turns to Reader’s Digest for political opinions. (I don’t know people who read Reader’s Digest, as far as that goes.)
Most of its articles were first published in other well-known magazines. And TV GUIDE was the most widely read magazine about the media itself. TV Guide is about TV. I’m talking about the national news media leaning left on political issues.
Furthermore, I’m not really sure when you think this liberal media era began. The 70′s? 80s? 90′s? When?? Get specific.
After Watergate, the attitude among journalists and aspiring journalists took a sharp turn towards advocacy journalism. My mom, in fact, wrote a paper on the topic while pursuing her master’s. She interviewed Mike Royko for her paper. The new generation of journalists saw their mission less as one of reporting facts and more of a desire to be agents for change. In surveys of journalism students, “I want to change society for the better” (or something like that) is now the popular reason given for choosing journalism as a career. “Change the world!” types tend to be liberals.
Realize too that big league journalists tend to be educated, well-traveled residents of world-class cities.
So we’re back to the “all the smart people are liberals” nonsense. You may not have noticed this yet, Peter, but I’m pretty well-educated and well-read. So is my brother, my best friend (a partner at the biggest law firm in Tennessee), the programmers I work with at BMI, etc. — all libertarians or conservatives. Journalists don’t become liberals because of their superior educations. They become journalists because the field attracts a disproportionate share of liberals — as Walter Cronkite’s former boss said himself. (He said the same about the entertainment field, by the way.) When I was journalism classes, 90% of my fellow students were liberals … and that was long before any of them because well-educated, world-travelin’ residents of world-class cities.
You cannot expect them to share the views of Baptists in the South or farmers on the plains .
I see you still believe conservatives are all religious hicks who drive pickup trucks. Perhaps you should travel outside Hollywood someday so your perception of what conservatives are like will be informed by something more realistic than the Hollywood stereotypes.
You cannot expect educated women to support legislation requiring rape victims to carry resulting pregnancies. Nor can you expect them to support legislation banning contraceptives. Or abstinence only education.
I don’t expect educated people of either gender or of any political persuasion to support legistlation banning contraception or forcing rape victims to give birth. As for sex education, I expect the schools to teach the biology of reproduction. I don’t want them to teach my kids how to have sex without becoming pregnant, and I sure as hell don’t want them giving my daughters birth control. (I say this despite not being a Baptist or a farmer.) Those aren’t decisions the schools have any right to make for my child. That’s my job as a parent.
With regards to restrictions on voting rights, since the Tea Party came to power, in several state legislatures, there have been flurry of laws requiring voters to present state ID’s. With the calculation that X number of poor people cannot choke up the cash to get copies of their birth certificates. What’s more, about 15 states have passed laws this year making it far more difficult for students to vote in college towns. They will have to either go home on Election Day, or cast absentee
I want voters to show IDs. I realize that’s an outrage to Democrats, who would lose some of their ability to win elections by having illegal immigrants and dead people vote early and often, but considering that I can’t rent a DVD, write a check, open a bank account, buy beer, or visit a doctor without showing ID, I don’t think it’s too much to demand that people picking the next president prove they are who they say they are. In fact, I want more than just a requirement to show an ID. I want anyone who applies to vote in elections to pass the same tests proving they understand the basics of U.S. government that we demand foreigners pass before they become citizens and vote. People who can’t identify the two houses of Congress have no business voting.
Did you read that article I sent about News Corp in London? If you think those scandals are not a reflection on the Murdoch empire, I question your intelligence. According to testimony at the House of Commons, News Of The World sanctioned thousands of phone hackings during the last 10 years. I also read that Murdoch visited James Cameronat 10 Downing Street something like 15 times during Cameron’s first year in office. Entering from the back door every time he went. Can you imagine how Americans would feel if some foreign media magnet paid that many visits to the White House? So yeah, I regard FOX NEWS with absolute suspicion. Why should Murdoch be a lord at large to the English speaking world?? Meddling in the politics of not one but ‘three’ major democracies (including Australia). Again, if you don’t get my concern with that, I question your intelligence. Yes, I’m aware of the crappy behavior of Mr. Murdoch’s employees at News of the World. But unless and until employees of FOX news in the U.S. engage in similar behavior, I don’t see what it has to do with FOX news. Bad behavior by journalists is, unfortunately, not all that uncommon. To recall a few examples in the U.S.:
1. Maureen Dowd (NY Times), caught stitching together separate quotes from George W. Bush into single quotes to produce controversial statements he never actually made.
2. Stephen Glass (New Republic), caught making up entire stories.
3. Janet Cooke (Washington Post), caught making up entire stories.
4. Dan Rather (CBS), used forged documents on the air in a botched attempt to take down George W. Bush
5. Jayson Blair (NY Times), caught making up entire stories.
6. Michael Gallagher (Cincinnati Enquirer), caught fabricating sources for a story and (apparently) hacking into a corporation’s voice-mail system.
7. Michael Gartner (NBC), resigned when it was revealed that NBC staged an explosion of a GM truck for a news story on the supposed dangers of the trucks.
8. Adnan Hajj (Rueters), caught doctoring photographs while covering the Isreali action against Lebanon.
9. Jack Kelley (USA Today), caught fabricating stories.
10. Christopher Newtonw (API), fired for fabricating stories.
11. Patricia Smith (Boston Globe), resigned after admitting her columns described people and events that were fabricated.
I could go on, but you get the idea. Bad behavior by journalists is hardly limited to Murdoch-owned media.
Best,
Tom
If Paul keeps at it, I’ll never have to come up with another idea for a post. He’s been quiet over the holidays, but I suspect I’ll hear from him soon enough. In the meantime, here’s another round.
Round 10(a) – Paul Tom: I did some searches on Climategate to see what I’d been ‘sleeping through’. First I found this BBC piece that seems to vindicate the scientists in question. Then I found a WASHINGTON POST story (from that same week last month) commenting on the same study reported by the BBC. ** Earth is warming, study concludes ** A study by an independent scientific project, set up in the wake of the Climategat email affair, concludes the Earth really is warming. http://www.bbc.co.uk/go/em/fr/-/news/science-environment-15373071 Paul
Round 10(a) – Tom Paul – You either desperately want to believe humans are warming the planet, or you’re more gullible than I thought. So a bunch of scientists at Berkeley (who also no doubt desperately want the theory to be true, since their livelihoods probably depend on it) attempted damage control by rushing in, producing their own analysis, and saying ,”No problem folks. Doesn’t matter how irresponsible and clearly dishonest the ClimateGate folks were. We also found that the earth is warming. Keep those grants coming.” Their new “proof” doesn’t change several pertinent facts: 1. The ClimateGate scientists were freakin’ liars. As I said in my Science for Smart People speech, that’s the unfortunate conclusion you have to reach once you start looking into some scientific fields. The freakin’ liars are way more common than we’d like to think. I don’t have the articles handy, but other freakin’ liars in climate science have also been busted recently. 2. The ClimateGate scientists and others worked to suppress papers that didn’t support their theories. This has in fact happened many times, in many organizations. Somewhere in my files I even have a stinging letter of resignation from a scientist who’d finally had enough of being told what results he was expected to produce. 3. Thousands of real, honest-to-god climate scientists signed the statement I sent you earlier because they have examined the data and don’t agree with the supposed consensus. And as Robert Carter — a real climate scientist — points out in his book, there is no consensus. Lots of papers have been written (though not often published) detailing data that goes against the theory. In real science, a hypothesis is not considered supported unless the data confirms it consistently and repeatedly. Real scientists, in fact, are supposed to start with the “null hypothesis” — i.e., they’re supposed to assume their hypothesis is false and try to prove it false. If they can’t prove it false, then they’re onto something. That’s certainly not the case with the AGW theory. In fact, I agree with Michael Crichton, who once believed the theory himself, then began researching it for a book he was writing. He later concluded (and gave a terrific speech on the topic) that AGW is just a new, modern religion. We have saints, sinners, orthodoxy, persecution of those who don’t espouse the orthodoxy, a bite-from-the-apple event that caused the fall from grace (the invention of the combustion engine) and the threat of a fiery hell if we don’t stop sinning. Most importantly, he concluded, we have high priests who, like Catholic bishops, are able to simply ignore or dismiss scientific evidence that their religious beliefs aren’t true. You know … kinda like religious conservatives who simply dismiss evidence that the earth isn’t a mere 6,000 years old. 4. Even if your pals at Berkeley had gone out and performed a totally unbiased, thorough review of the data, even if they actually had the capability of measuring all the temperatures all over the world and comparing those temperatures to equally accurate measurements from the same places under the same environmental conditions throughout time (measurements that don’t actually exist, by the way) and then — with no attempts to massage the data — they concluded that the earth has gotten warmer, here’s what you could reasonably state based on their conclusions: The earth has gotten warmer. That’s it. It doesn’t tell us diddly about WHY the earth has gotten warmer and therefore isn’t proof that humans have anything to do with it. Tom
Round 10(b) – Paul Tom: A poll has discovered that viewers of FOX NEWS are less informed than people who watch ‘no’ news. Though in all fairness, the survey found that MSNBC (which I don’t watch) isn’t that great either. http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-pn-fox-news-poll-20111121,0,3985 Paul
Round 10(b) – Tom Hey, Paul – Since my research for Fat Head and my ongoing research for my blog have turned me into a bit of a science nerd, I’ve gotten into the habit of tracking down studies after seeing them reported in the media — the reason being that there’s a LOT of biased and manipulated crap out there passing for science, and most media reporters are either too scientifically illiterate to recognize when a study is crap, or they’re too lazy to actually look into the data, choosing to simply repeat what the researchers wrote in their conclusions. (Dr. John Ionnidis, a Harvard MD and math genius, has spent years analyzing health and medical studies after the fact. He found that 80% of the conclusions reached in observational studies and 25% of the conclusions reached in clinical studies have turned out to be wrong … often because the researchers designed the study to produce the results they desired, or even played statistical games with the results. As Dr. Mike Eades put it, “If you torture the data long enough, it will tell you what you want to hear.”) Took awhile, but I found the full paper for the study you referenced. They conducted a small-sample phone survey, solely among New Jersey residents. They only asked a few questions. Already, this wouldn’t qualify as a legitimate study by any real scientific standard. The researchers claim their overall margin of error is 3.5% but note that the margin of error for each group and each question is much higher, due to the small sample size. Once the margin of error for a result exceeds 5%, the result falls into the category of “statistically insignificant” — in plain English, “Likely due to chance and therefore not scientifically valid.” If I flip a coin four times and it comes up heads three times, I cannot declare that 75% of coin flips results in heads, because my sample size is too small. So by the usual rules of science and statistics, their claim that people who watch FOX news are less informed than people who watch no news is completely invalid. (Not that the scientific illiterates at the Huffington Post, etc., will either notice or care.) I also noticed that while CNN was included in their questionnaire, results for CNN viewers somehow vanished in their analysis comparing people who watch TV news to people who don’t — not that the analysis would be valid, since their margin of error was way over 5%, but I find it suspicious that CNN mysteriously disappeared from the tabulations. Tom
Round 10(c) – Paul Hey Tom! Yeah, I admit the New Jersey study should be taken with a grain of salt. Though personally I believe FOX NEWS has had an extraordinarily divisive impact on this country. And the fact that Murdoch is not really an American pisses me off to the max! Nor is he really British. Yet he has had an outsize impact on British politics as well. Though not in any positive way. Earlier this year I read about a study calculating the impact of FOX NEWS and (right wing) talk radio. The study was comparing American politics today with politics of the Vietnam era. And though the Vietnam era was very turbulent, there was actually more agreement then on what the basic facts were. Because everyone then was getting their news from the same sources. The big 3 TV newscasts, major newspapers, TIME, LIFE, NEWSWEEK and even READERS DIGEST. But thanks to FOX and Rush Limbaugh, Americans today cannot even agree on basic facts. For instance, you asked if I was sleeping all through Climategate. Well I hate to tell you, Tom, but Climategate was actually a made-for-FOX NEWS story. Outside the right-wing media, it didn’t get much play. And that myth of ‘mainstream liberal media’ is totally outdated. As I’ve said before, the big 3 network newscasts are largely dependent on pharmaceutical commercials. In fact, there are so many commercials in those newscasts, that one is only getting about 8 minutes of hard news. Which is often devoted to just a single (disaster) story. In fact, I think the only worthwhile TV newscasts are PBS, BBC and Al Jeezera, all of which have no commercials. NPR is also an excellent source because of no commercials. Only with no commercials can you really go in-depth. My other main sources are THE NY TIMES AND WASHINGTON POST, as you’ve probably guessed. One suspects the best writers gravitate to their newsrooms. With regards to your contention that studies can be manipulated, I totally agree! In fact, I believe that think tanks do that on a regular basis. Which is basically their mission. Paul
Round 10(c) – Tom Paul – Yeah, I admit the New Jersey study should be taken with a grain of salt. Though personally I believe FOX NEWS has had an extraordinarily divisive impact on this country… Earlier this year I read about a study calculating the impact of FOX NEWS and (right wing) talk radio. The study was comparing American politics today with politics of the Vietnam era. And though the Vietnam era was very turbulent, there was actually more agreement then on what the basic facts were. Because everyone then was getting their news from the same sources. The big 3 TV newscasts, major newspapers, TIME, LIFE, NEWSWEEK and even READERS DIGEST. Yes, I’m aware liberals miss the days when all the news came from three left-leaning networks and the left-leaning national newspapers. Ahhh, the good ol’ days when people were only given the slanted news we wanted them to see… I’m always amused by liberals practically pissing themselves over the existence of FOX news. To understand what it felt like to be a libertarian or conservative back in those good ol’ days you miss so much, imagine only having three news networks, and they all report from a right-wing perspective, just like FOX news. (And yes, I admit that FOX reports from a right-wing perspective. They’re not “fair and balanced,” but they do provide the balance that was missing previously.) But thanks to FOX and Rush Limbaugh, Americans today cannot even agree on basic facts. For instance, you asked if I was sleeping all through Climategate. Well I hate to tell you, Tom, but Climategate was actually a made-for-FOX NEWS story. Outside the right-wing media, it didn’t get much play. Of course it didn’t get much play outside of right-wing media! The left-wing media wasn’t about to shout from the hilltops that the people producing the data that’s fed so much global-warming hysteria were a bunch of freakin’ liars who fudged their own data and tried to suppress dissent. That’s exactly why we need right-wing media to cover the stories the left-wing media would prefer to sweep under the rug. And that myth of ‘mainstream liberal media’ is totally outdated. As I’ve said before, the big 3 network newscasts are largely dependent on pharmaceutical commercials. In fact, there are so many commercials in those newscasts, that one is only getting about 8 minutes of hard news. Which is often devoted to just a single (disaster) story. And the fact that their advertisers are drug-makers proves they’re not biased to the left how, exactly? Advertisers don’t care if the newscasters lean left or right (which is why their ads also appear on FOX) … they only care how many eyeballs are watching their ads. Walter Cronkite’s former boss admitted the national news media is biased to the left. ABC’s ombudsman admitted the national news media is biased left. Jonathan Alter of Newsweek admitted the national news media is biased left. Bernard Goldberg (formerly of CBS news) wrote an entire book describing how the national media biases the news left. NBC’s Brian Williams, in fact, once said that if the national news media weren’t so biased to the left, there never would have been a Rush Limbaugh or a FOX news. You stated above that ClimateGate — a scientific scandal reflecting on a major issue of the day — didn’t get much play outside of right-wing media. How do you square that statement with your contention that the mainstream media isn’t biased? That’s a perfect example of bias. That scandal should have been front-page news in the New York Times. The mainstream media didn’t report on that story because they don’t want people doubting the man-made global warming theory … same reason the news story about temperatures declining and ice increasing in the eastern Antarctic never saw the light of day in most American media. That also should have been front-page news. In fact, I think the only worthwhile TV newscasts are PBS, BBC and Al Jeezera, all of which have no commercials. NPR is also an excellent source because of no commercials. Only with no commercials can you really go in-depth. My other main sources are THE NY TIMES AND WASHINGTON POST, as you’ve probably guessed. One suspects the best writers gravitate to their newsrooms. So someone who leans left prefers left-leaning media. Not sure what that’s supposed to prove. You suspect the “best” writers gravitate the big left-wing newspapers? I suspect the best left-leaning writers gravitate there. A right-leaning reporter would find his work unwelcome, as Stossel did at ABC. With regards to your contention that studies can be manipulated, I totally agree! In fact, I believe that think tanks do that on a regular basis. Which is basically their mission. A point I make over and over in my Science For Smart People speech. Learn how to read the studies and ask the critical questions – no matter what the issue. Tom Here we go again … Round Nine – Paul Tom: With regards to Global Warming, you say my cousin’s opinion doesn’t matter. But he is a physicist who spends most of his time with physicists. So I’m likely to believe that he and his associates have looked into the math ‘you’ presume to offer. And while my own mathematical training is somewhat limited, I have to think that 4 billion extra people, in a span of 80 years, is going to have an impact. But if you want another opinion, the link below connects to an excellent article by NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC entitled “The Carbon Bath”. http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/big-idea/05/carbon-bath Said article features simple graphics that explain the science of global warming by describing the world as a carbon bathtub. NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC, by the way, has presented global warming updates in almost every issue for several years at this point. And don’t come back and tell me that National Geographic is part of Al Gore’s conspiracy! One should note that Republicans and Libertarians have been waging a war on science with regards to global warming. Why? Because to admit the problem exists would be a call to action. Requiring more regulations and increased costs for industry. Actions that would be unspeakable to conservatives. One should also note Republicans have been waging war on science with regards to Evolution. abortion and sex education (or lack of). In all these campaigns the right wing media has falsely claimed mainstream science is on their side. On another issue, the link below is to a NY TIMES concerning TARP funds repaid. The article clearly states that figures vary wildly with regards to how much has actually been repaid. Nevertheless it appears that substantial sums have been repaid. And allow me to note something you may have overlooked. Alan Greenspan, who enabled the housing bubble with years of low interest rates, is actually a Libertarian. Look it up! In fact Greenspan and Robert Rubin were champions of derivatives. What’s more, they overrode calls within the Clinton administration for a regulated exchange for the trading of derivatives. A story that was compellingly presented on PBS’s FRONTLINE in a 2009 segment entitled “The Warning”. Paul
Round Nine – Tom Paul – With regards to Global Warming, you say my cousin’s opinion doesn’t matter. But he is a physicist who spends most of his time with physicists. So I’m likely to believe that he and his associates have looked into the math ‘you’ presume to offer. And while my own mathematical training is somewhat limited, I have to think that 4 billion extra people, in a span of 80 years, is going to have an impact. Four billion extra people will absolutely, positively have an effect on the earth’s resources. But to conclude that because we’re burning more fossil fuels as a result of the population explosion, this somehow proves fossil fuel use is warming the earth is a tautological argument with no scientific validity. But if you want another opinion, the link below connects to an excellent article by NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC entitled “The Carbon Bath”. Said article features simple graphics that explain the science of global warming by describing the world as a carbon bathtub. NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC, by the way, has presented global warming updates in almost every issue for several years at this point. And don’t come back and tell me that National Geographic is part of Al Gore’s conspiracy! I read the article, which simply restates the theories promoted by the global-warming hysterics without providing anything resembling proof. The article assumes that rising CO2 leads to higher global temperatures, then describes how long it will take to clear the CO2. There’s no proof of that initial assumption — that’s a theory, not a scientific fact. I noticed they conveniently stated that CO2 concentration hasn’t been this high in 800 million years. True. But it was far higher at other times in the planet’s history, and during some of those periods the planet was far colder than today. One should note that Republicans and Libertarians have been waging a war on science with regards to global warming. No, libertarians aren’t waging a war on science. We’re waging a war on hysteria that isn’t based on anything resembling scientific certainty. The people who are screwing up science are the irresponsible grant-whores who manipulate data to support their theories — did you sleep through the whole ClimateGate episode? To refresh your memory: 1) The emails suggest the authors co-operated covertly to ensure that only papers favorable to CO2-forced AGW were published, and that editors and journals publishing contrary papers were punished. They also attempted to “discipline” scientists and journalists who published skeptical information. (Gee, maybe that has something to do with why 90% of the zoologists agree with your cousin — the papers disputing AGW aren’t published. In real science, opposing views are encouraged.) 2) The emails suggest that the authors manipulated and “massaged” the data to strengthen the case in favor of unprecedented CO2-forced AGW, and to suppress their own data if it called AGW into question. 3) The emails suggest that the authors co-operated to prevent data from being made available to other researchers through either data archiving requests or through the Freedom of Information Acts of both the U.S. and the UK. 4) Comments left in computer-modeling programs by programmers stated that the programmers were frustrated at how difficult it was to force the models to produce the conclusions the researchers desired. Real scientists don’t tell programmers what results they want ahead of time, and real scientists don’t try to prevent other scientists from reviewing their data. Attacking these bozos isn’t attacking science — it’s attacking bad science. Why? Because to admit the problem exists would be a call to action. Requiring more regulations and increased costs for industry. Actions that would be unspeakable to conservatives. To “admit” the problem exists would be to accept a theory for which there is no proof, in a branch of science in which the honest scientists admit they’ve barely begun to identify all the variables involved. I’d suggest you turn that question around: why are leftists so eager to insist we act on a theory that hasn’t been proved? The answer, of course, is that the supposed cures involve imposing new taxes without having to call them taxes. We have governments subsidizing researchers who conclude that we have a serious problem on our hands — and the answer is to impose taxes that would provide those governments with more revenue. Do you see a conflict of interest there? I see a perfect analogy to scientists who were funded by the USDA concluding the key to health is to consume more of the grains the USDA subsidizes. But let’s suppose we take those “unspeakable actions” you support. If we adopted every draconian provision in the Kyoto treaty, it would reduce carbon emissions by about 1/30th of what’s necessary to prevent global warming (assuming you believe the theory that humans cause global warming). So we would tank economies all over the world in order to solve … nothing. You’re already convinced that no one can afford medical care, no one can afford to save for retirement, and yet you support making absolutely everything people buy significantly more expensive (energy is an input cost for nearly all goods and services), even though 1) those extra costs wouldn’t even begin to solve a supposed problem that 2) hasn’t been proved to be a problem in the first place. Is this another situation where you believe the government can wave its magic wand and cancel the economic effects? One should also note Republicans have been waging war on science with regards to Evolution. abortion and sex education (or lack of). In all these campaigns the right wing media has falsely claimed mainstream science is on their side. The small fraction of Republicans who try to dispute evolution are, like the “scientists” involved in ClimateGate, not interested in real science and should be ignored. As for attacking the “science” of abortion and sex education, what the hell are you talking about? What does science have to do with abortion and sex education? On another issue, the link below is to a NY TIMES concerning TARP funds repaid. The article clearly states that figures vary wildly with regards to how much has actually been repaid. Nevertheless it appears that substantial sums have been repaid. The figures vary wildly, but you’re offering this up as proof of something? Of course the figures vary wildly, because the government officials compiling them are self-serving hacks. Regardless, I don’t care if all the TARP money is eventually repaid. The federal government has no business bailing out private corporations. And allow me to note something you may have overlooked. Alan Greenspan, who enabled the housing bubble with years of low interest rates, is actually a Libertarian. Look it up! In fact Greenspan and Robert Rubin were champions of derivatives. Wow, Alan Greespan was a libertarian?! Thanks for informing me … I guess that proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that libertarianism caused the housing boom and meltdown … For Pete’s sake … It doesn’t matter what he calls himself, Paul. He abandoned libertarian principles years ago, doing exactly what libertarian economists from Hayek on down warned against. Hayek wrote thick books on the dangers of allowing a central bank to manipulate interest rates and create new money out of thin air. He warned that those actions would always lead to a bubble followed by a bust. Libertarian economists were highly critical of Greenpan’s tenure at the Fed, precisely because he abandoned the principles he’d once espoused. If a self-proclaimed Buddhist goes on a killing spree, that doesn’t mean the tenets of Buddhism are wrong. It means the killer wasn’t much of a Buddhist. Bill Maher used to call himself a libertarian too, even though he hasn’t taken a libertarian position on economic issues in years. (Which really pisses me off, by the way. I tell people I’m a libertarian, and once in awhile someone will reply, “Oh, like Bill Maher!” Grrrr….) What’s more, they overrode calls within the Clinton administration for a regulated exchange for the trading of derivatives. A story that was compellingly presented on PBS’s FRONTLINE in a 2009 segment entitled “The Warning”. I’m going to shock you here … you may want to sit down for this. Are you seated? Okay: Given the circumstances under which they were created, I wouldn’t have a problem with the issue and trading of those types of derivatives being regulated. Free market principles work in free markets, not in markets where the federal government has skewed all the normal market factors out of proportion. Greenspan’s attempts to manipulate the housing market (along with Fannie, Freddie and Congress) created an unnatural situation that never should have existed, with more and more loans being written for less and less qualified buyers. This never would have happened without Fed and government involvement. Those bad loans were turned into bad bonds which became bad derivatives. So given that the government enabled and encouraged so much crappy debt to be created, I would support someone else in government stepping in to prevent the government-created bad debt from being sold to unsuspecting investors. But the situation never should have existed in the first place. The bond market was where the crappy loans eventually did their damage. Take away the derivatives, and the implosion merely would have happened somewhere else. Once the bad loans were written, we were going to have a financial failure somewhere. If Fannie and Freddie had kept the loans, all the damage would have shown up there. They sliced and diced the loans and sold them to Wall Street, so the damage showed up on Wall Street. No amount of financial regulation would have prevented the trillions in bad loans from going bad once they were written — and they wouldn’t have been written without the Fed, Fannie, Freddie and Congress @#$%ing everything up. Again, go back 25 years, before our government geniuses created all those asinine incentives, and banks didn’t write loans like those. Take a look at Barney Frank insisting Fannie and Freddie were sound and the government should be doing more to “encourage home ownership” — i.e., backing more loans that were doomed to go bad: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cMnSp4qEXNM&feature=player_embedded#! Tom My leftist Hollywood buddy Paul seems more interested in changing the subject than in answering the many questions I’ve asked him during our debate — I plan to remedy that later. Meanwhile, the debate rages on:
Round Eight (a) – Paul Tom: You said the government is worthless at promoting new technologies. Better look at this. Paul
Round Eight (a) -Tom Paul – Cool weapon. Actually what I said is that viable technologies don’t need government “encouragement” because viable technologies attract investors. We of course have to make an exception for military technology, because only the federal government has a military and is therefore the sole market. Even so, being empowered to spend other people’s money has led to some bad decisions. Powerful congressmen have foisted weapons systems on the military that the military brass didn’t ask for and said specifically they didn’t need. Tom
Round Eight (b) – Paul Hey Tom: I’ll be getting back to you on other points, but here’s an article I saved in anticipation that someone with your sentiments would note all the freakish winters we seem to be having. In fact, the paragraph below (culled from page 2 of the story, seems to be speaking to you. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/25/science/earth/25cold.html?_r=2&emc=eta1 “Bloggers who specialize in raising doubts about climate science have gleefully pointed to the recent winters in the United States and Europe as evidence that climatologists must be mistaken about a warming trend. These commentators have not been as eager to write about the strange warmth in parts of the Arctic, a region that scientists have long predicted will warm more rapidly than the planet as a whole”. Paul
Round Eight (b) – Tom Hey, Paul – Indeed, what all these unusual weather patterns (none of them predicted by the computer models employed by global-warming hysterics) tell us is that we haven’t identified more than a small fraction of the variables that drive climate, as I stated before. In fact, it finally occurred to some climate scientists to take those computer models, plug in the data from 100 years ago, and instruct the computer models to predict the next 100 years. The models failed miserably. And yet the global warming hysterics pretend they can tell us what the temperatures will be 50 years from now based on computer models that clearly aren’t capable of making accurate predictions. This has put the global-warming hysterics in the embarrassing position of relying on ad-hoc theories to explain why their earlier theories didn’t match reality. True scientists have a word for ad-hoc theories: bull$#@%. True scientists are willing to say “We don’t know” when they don’t know. I was pleased to see the New York Times apparently spoke to some real scientists: At least two prominent climate scientists have offered theories suggesting that it is. But others are doubtful, saying the recent events are unexceptional, or that more evidence over a longer period would be needed to establish a link. But Dr. Overland acknowledges that his idea is tentative and needs further research. Many other climate scientists are not convinced, saying that a two-year span, however unusual, is not much on which to base a new theory. “We haven’t got sufficient insight to make definitive claims,” said Kevin Trenberth, head of climate analysis at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo. Here’s where the New York Times exposes its bias: While mainstream researchers are sure that greenhouse gases released by humans are warming the Earth, they acknowledge being on shakier ground in trying to predict the regional effects of that change. That’s utter bull. Mainstream scientists aren’t sure that humans are warming the earth. Many of them may believe that wholeheartedly (and will continue to receive research grants as long as they believe that wholeheartedly), but they aren’t sure, because they don’t have anything close to sufficient data or sufficient knowledge of the variables involved. Here’s a news story which (shock!) the New York Times didn’t choose to run: http://www.news.com.au/antarctic-ice-is-growing-not-melting-away/story-0-1225700043191 Antarctic ice is growing, not melting away ICE is expanding in much of Antarctica, contrary to the widespread public belief that global warming is melting the continental ice cap. The results of ice-core drilling and sea ice monitoring indicate there is no large-scale melting of ice over most of Antarctica, although experts are concerned at ice losses on the continent’s western coast. Antarctica has 90 per cent of the Earth’s ice and 80 per cent of its fresh water, The Australian reports. Extensive melting of Antarctic ice sheets would be required to raise sea levels substantially, and ice is melting in parts of west Antarctica. The destabilisation of the Wilkins ice shelf generated international headlines this month. However, the picture is very different in east Antarctica, which includes the territory claimed by Australia. East Antarctica is four times the size of west Antarctica and parts of it are cooling. The Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research report prepared for last week’s meeting of Antarctic Treaty nations in Washington noted the South Pole had shown “significant cooling in recent decades”. Cooling temperatures and expanding ice in east Antarctica does not fit the man-made global warming theory and was not predicted by any of the computer models employed by the global-warming hysterics. Bottom line: nobody knows enough about what drives climate to make accurate predictions or to say with anything resembling scientific certainty what caused the slight warming of the late 20th century and whether it will continue, reverse, or stay the same. Tom
Round Eight (c) – Tom Paul– The timing of this is too perfect: I stated in my last email that leftists are some of the most intolerant people on the planet. This morning I just happened to watch an episode of John Stossel’s show I’d recorded. The subject was free speech and censorship. Stossel described how when he was a liberal reporter at ABC, he was popular around the network and had no trouble getting his stories aired. Then he had a libertarian conversion and began reporting from that perspective. He was shunned at the network. Paul Jennings, once a friend, stopped talking to him. Many of his finished stories were spiked by ABC editors and never aired. So he finished out his contract and left. One of his guests on the censorship episode was Juan Williams, the liberal commentator who was fired from NPR after saying in an interview that if he sees Muslims on board when he’s flying, he feels a bit uneasy. (In the same interview, he went on to say we can’t let that emotional reaction dictate our policies.) Williams told Stossel that when he was growing up, he associated intolerance with Archie Bunker types, but (wait for it …) ” … as I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to realize it’s the left in this country that is truly intolerant.” And he’s man enough to admit it. Tom
Round Eight (d) – Paul Tom – Excuse me, Tom. My cousin Chris is a mainstream scientist. You can look him up. Fermi National Lab, Batavia Illinois. And visiting professor, University of Chicago. Chris, a physicist, MIT and Cal Tech trained. is a recognized expert on Black Holes in space. In that capacity he lectures all throughout Europe and India. And he is totally connected to the mainstream science community. Chris told me that about 90% of mainstream scientists believe Global Warming is, at least, partially influenced by the burning of fossil fuels. Though Chris personally thinks Solar Flares are having some effect as well. Interestingly, Paul Krugman, the Nobel prize winning columnist and Princeton Economics professor, also claims that 90% of mainstream scientists believe the fossil fuel/warming theory. I, however, heard that first from Chris. But don’t look at science. Look at Demographics. The world recently surpassed the 7 billion mark. Up from 3 billion in 1930. Which means an increase of 4 billion in 80 years. Then factor in the rise of China, India and Brazil in just the last 30 years. The number of power plants and motorized vehicles they have added to world totals. Then factor in the number jet airliners and cargo ships they have added to world totals. It doesn’t take a physicist like my cousin Chris. To tell you that 4 billion people in 80 years is going to have effects. An imagination is all you need! To picture how much crap is in the atmosphere. With regards to John Stossel, I used to watch him on ABC. But then he started doing pieces I thought would be more appropriate for FOX. Which you apparently watch. FOX, controlled by the same family that owned London’s NEWS OF THE WORLD. A scandal The House of Commons is still investigating. In fact, James Murdoch was there again this week. Denying that he lied in his first appearance. Paul
Round Eight (d) – Tom Paul – Excuse me, Tom. My Chris cousin is a mainstream scientist. You can look him up. Fermi National Lab, Batavia Illinois. And visiting professor, University of Chicago. Chris, a physicist, MIT and Cal Tech trained. is a recognized expert on Black Holes in space. In that capacity he lectures all throughout Europe and India. And he is totally connected to the mainstream science community. How does expertise in black holes qualify him to determine whether or not humans are warming the planet? Chris told me that about 90% of mainstream scientists believe Global Warming is, at least, partially influenced by the burning of fossil fuels. Yet another weak appeal to authority. Once again, truth isn’t determined by how many people agree or don’t agree with it. At one time, 90% of doctors believed cholesterol causes heart disease. That theory has since been discredited. I’ve seen the 90% figure before, and also seen that it includes scientists in fields such as biology and zoology — i.e., scientists who have no more qualifications to make pronouncements on the causes of climate change than a plumber. The New York Times article stated (though it’s obviously bull$#@%) that mainstream scientists are sure humans are causing global warming. No, they’re not sure. Many mainstream scientists may believe that, but they can’t possibly be sure because they can’t possibly identify all the variables involved. If they had enough data and enough knowledge to be sure, then the following statement wouldn’t have been released: “There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gasses is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate.” That statement was signed by 31,000 scientists, including 9,000 with doctorate degrees in atmospheric science, climatology, Earth science, or environmental science. You don’t get that kind of disagreement when scientists are “sure” about a topic. Though Chris personally thinks Solar Flares are having some effect as well. Some? Probably most, based on historical data. Interestingly, Paul Krugman, the Nobel prize winning columnist and Princeton Economics professor, also claims that 90% of mainstream scientists believe the fossil fuel/warming theory. I, however, heard that first from Chris. Who the @#$% cares what an economics professor says about global warming? That’s an even weaker appeal to authority than quoting your cousin. But don’t look at science. Look at Demographics. The world recently surpassed the 7 billion mark. Up from 3 billion in 1930. Which means an increase of 4 billion in 80 years. Then factor in the rise of China, India and Brazil in just the last 30 years. The number of power plants and motorized vehicles they have added to world totals. Then factor in the number jet airliners and cargo ships they have added to world totals. That’s a tautological argument. You’re claiming that of course fossil fuels cause global warming because so many more people are burning fossil fuels now. By that logic, I could argue that wearing shoes causes global warming … after all, billions more people are wearing shoes now than in previous eras. If fossil fuels are causing global warming, then you’ll have to explain why we’ve had alternating scares about global cooling and global warming in the past 100 years. Around the turn of the (last) century, newspapers were full of warnings about a coming ice age. Then, after 30 years of warning, the newspapers were full of warnings about the planet heating up — 1934, the year my dad was born, is still the hottest year on record in modern times. This continued until the 1940s, when the planet began another cooling cycle that lasted for 30 years, even as industrialization was causing an accelerated release of CO2 When I was high school, we were told the earth was headed into another ice age. Newsweek even published a scary article about the coming ice age in 1975 and suggested (this just cracks me up) that we may have to use bombs to blow up the polar ice caps to prevent it. It doesn’t take a physicist like my cousin Chris. To tell you that 4 billion people in 80 years is going to have effects. An imagination is all you need! To picture how much crap is in the atmosphere. How much CO2 do you think we’ve put in the atmosphere? The concentration of atmospheric CO2 has been multiple times higher at various points in the planet’s history. During some of those periods, the planet was warmer. During others, it was cooler. When Al Gore scared people with his dumbass documentary by showing how the rises in CO2 and temperature are correlated, what he didn’t show (by cleverly separating the two trendlines on two panes several feet apart) is that if you put his trendlines on the same page, they clearly show that the temperature rose first, then was followed by a rise in CO2. Here’s the graph:
This makes perfect sense. When you heat water, it releases CO2. A warming planet means warming oceans, which means atmospheric CO2 will rise as the oceans release CO2. As for how much “crap” humans put in the atmosphere, do you actually know what proportion of CO2 humans produce? Here are the figures: 1) Carbon dioxide makes up 0.039% of the atmosphere — i.e., just under four tenths of one percent. 2) Humans produce 5% of the carbon dioxide that winds up in the atmosphere. The rest occurs naturally — no surprise, since CO2 is perfectly natural and has been around since the dawn of time. 3) Carbon dioxide is estimated to exert 2.3% of the total greenhouse effect. So let’s have some fun with math … 0.039% x 5% = 0.00195%. Or, expressed a decimal, it’s 0.0000195. Human-produced CO2 is now slightly less than two one-thousandths of one percent of the atmosphere. 2.3% x 5% = 0.115%, which means humans in theory could be producing just over one-tenth of one percent of the total greenhouse effect. Expressed as a decimal without the percentage, it’s 0.00115. But that assumes that the relationship between carbon dioxide and temperature is linear, with no offsetting counter-reactions in the atmosphere. Climate scientists don’t know nearly enough about all the variables involved in the climate to say what the effects and counter-effects will be. Any scientist who claims he can accurately predict what will happen to the climate if humans contribute 6% of all atmospheric CO2 instead of 5% is full of $#@%– or angling for his next grant. With regards to John Stossel, I used to watch him on ABC. But then he started doing pieces I thought would be more appropriate for FOX. Which you apparently watch. FOX, controlled by the same family that owned London’s NEWS OF THE WORLD. A scandal The House of Commons is still investigating. In fact, James Murdoch was there again this week. Denying that he lied in his first appearance. What does the Murdoch family’s scandals have to do with the relevance of Stossel’s program? Once again, you’re resorting to ad-hominem attacks instead of debating the actual issues. By the way, with all those millions of tons of human-produced crap fouling up the atmosphere and heating up the planet, how do you explain the fact the eastern Antarctic has gotten cooler and the ice there is getting thicker? Tom
My Hollywood buddy Paul is relentless. Here’s another round in our on-going email debate:
Round Seven – Paul Tom – Regarding that smallpox vaccine, I think all government contracts should be open to competitive bids. What’s more, it surprises me Republicans haven’t jumped on this. And if the shelf life of this vaccine is only 36 months, it strikes me as ridiculous. But does that mean the government should never fund vaccines? No, I wouldn’t conclude that. If indeed a real epidemic threatens, only the Federal Government has the funding to manufacture nationally sufficient stockpiles. I mean, it’s not like we can depend on private sources to create a vaccine for 300 million people. Nor can we expect lower-income people to pay $35 per dose to vaccinate themselves at their local Walgreens. Only the Federal Government can implement a national effort free of charge to everyone. With schools and local governments encouraging participation. Which will, in fact, be necessary when the next pandemic strikes. And pandemics aren’t the time for testing Libertarian principles. Milton Friedman would back me here. With regards to Medicare, let’s roll back to the summer of ’09. At that point the Tea Party was rearing its stupid face. Or the faces of older, angry Whites opposing health reform. With signs that actually read “Hands Off My Medicare”. Stupid as they are, those seniors certainly know that Medicare is essential to their survival. A point, apparently lost on you. No one has the cash these days to fund their own retirements. And no one would ever inherit anything from their parents if Medicare didn’t exist. Our parents would all go bankrupt by age 80, at the latest. Don’t you get that, Tom? Or has your family been so lucky you really have no clue? And if we privatize Medicare, as Paul Ryan recommends, characters like Ron Perlman will be vying for the contracts, or charging into the markets. Politically-connected guys who get exclusive bids. The privatization of Medicare would be their mother lode! Therefore I prefer good old civil servants. Administrators with no allegiance to any corporation. And safe from getting fired when new Presidents take office. Or when Congress suddenly shifts. Finally Tom, I must note, the word ‘Libertarian’ forces me to use the spelling option almost every time. This should be a red flag to anyone in your movement. Here in Hollywood we know: hard to spell titles never sell. Paul
Round Seven – Tom Greetings, Paul – Regarding that smallpox vaccine, I think all government contracts should be open to competitive bids. What’s more, it surprises me Republicans haven’t jumped on this. And if the shelf life of this vaccine is only 36 months, it strikes me as ridiculous. It’s nice that you believe in responsible purchases by government, but surely you know that wasn’t my point. I said in an earlier email that if the government takes over the healthcare system, decisions will be based on political connections, not what’s good for us. This article I linked is a perfect example of what happens when self-interested government officials are empowered to spend huge sums of money on healthcare — is that too Pollyanna of me? But does that mean the government should never fund vaccines? No, I wouldn’t conclude that. If indeed a real epidemic threatens, only the Federal Government has the funding to manufacture nationally sufficient stockpiles. Excuse me… have to chuckle a bit… did you just try to tell me that if there’s ever a drug that EVERYONE needs, the greedy pharmaceutical companies won’t be capable of manufacturing it?!! An instant market of hundreds of millions of people, and the pharmaceutical companies wouldn’t be satisfied with earning a couple of bucks per dose? That’s laughable. We have enough Tylenol for everyone, don’t we? When the cold and flu season comes around, I don’t hear about a shortage of DayQuil. I mean, it ‘s not like we can depend on private sources to create a vaccine for 300 million people. You do depend on private sources to create vaccines. The government doesn’t manufacture them; it buys them. We have fewer domestic manufacturers of vaccines now because the Clinton administration imposed “voluntary” price controls but refused to place any limits on liability. Since all vaccines produce negative reactions in at least a small fraction of the population, most domestic drug-makers quit making vaccines rather than put themselves in a situation where they’d be forced to accept small profits while facing unlimited liability. That’s why we had a shortage of flu vaccine a few years ago, when our government was scrambling to find enough foreign-produced vaccine. As I said in an earlier email, if you want a product readily available, you’d better hope to hell someone’s making a profit. Nor can we expect lower-income people to pay $35 per dose to vaccinate themselves at their local Walgreens. Only the Federal Government can implement a national effort free of charge to everyone. With schools and local governments encouraging participation. Which will, in fact, be necessary when the next pandemic strikes. I disagree that people can’t find a way to spend $35 to save their own lives, but again, that’s not the point. Our government just wasted nearly a half-billion dollars on a drug that apparently isn’t even necessary, just to say thanks to a big contributor. That’s what happens when you’re empowered to spend other people’s money. When you say “free of charge to everyone,” are you suggesting the government doesn’t have to tax citizens to pay for the drugs, or do you mean “free of charge to people who don’t pay taxes and feel entitled to live off the earnings of others”? And pandemics aren’t the time for testing Libertarian principles. Milton Friedman would back me here. I agree. Libertarian principles should be tested long before a pandemic strikes. Because when the pandemic does strike, we’ll learn the hard way how incompetent our government is, as the residents of New Orleans discovered after Hurricane Katrina. With regards to Medicare, let’s roll back to the summer of ’09. At that point the Tea Party was rearing its stupid face. Or the faces of older, angry Whites opposing health reform. With signs that actually read “Hands Off My Medicare”. I didn’t see those, if they existed, those people don’t represent the majority of the Tea Party members. Stupid as they are, those seniors certainly know that Medicare is essential to their survival. A point, apparently lost on you. That explains why no one lived to a ripe old age before Medicare came along. No one has the cash these days to fund their own retirements. That would be news to the millions of Americans with 401Ks. And no one would ever inherit anything from their parents if Medicare didn’t exist. That explains why no one ever inherited anything from their parents before Medicare came along. Our parents would all go bankrupt by age 80, at the latest. I see you still believe Medicare somehow magically causes the cost of treatment to vanish. Same apparently goes for government-funded retirements, only in reverse – the money just appears, like magic. I covered this in a previous email, but I’ll go ahead and re-state the blindingly obvious: Medicare simply transfers the cost of treatment to the taxpayers. So if the cost of medical treatments will bankrupt all of our parents by age 80 without Medicare, then the taxes required to fund those same medical treatments through Medicare will likewise bankrupt our parents, along with everyone else. Transferring a cost doesn’t reduce it. If no one can afford to save for retirement, then the government can’t possibly fund everyone’s retirement either, because people who can’t afford to save for retirement likewise can’t afford the taxes required to fund everyone else’s retirement. (Of course, saving for retirement would be a hell of a lot easier if our average wage-earner’s total tax burden hadn’t gone up 20% since the 1950s.) You seem to believe government has the power to repeal the laws of mathematics. It doesn’t. And here’s what the mathematics say: Most of the Medicare costs seniors rack up are incurred in the last two years of their lives — in other words, they result from ridiculously expensive treatments for people who are going to die soon anyway. So there is an alternative to going bankrupt: we accept that life is a fatal condition, as an old person without Medicare probably would. If I were 80 years old, had a half-million dollars saved, and some doctor wanted me to plough through my savings to live a couple more years, I’d tell him to piss off. I’d rather check out and leave the half-million to my kids. (If I were 55, that would be different — I’d still have a lot of life and earning power ahead of me.) But when it’s “free” medical care courtesy of the taxpayers, of course I’ll spend whatever it takes to live two more years. Again, that’s what happens when self-interested people get to spend someone else’s money. Here’s what else the mathematics say: when you incur a bit more debt each year, the debt grows exponentially and eventually the interest on the debt exceeds your income, unless your income somehow grows exponentially. Many consumers have learned this the hard way, and nations aren’t immune from the math. The United States is officially 14 trillion dollars in debt, which is outrageous, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Depending on whose figures you use, Medicare alone has somewhere between $50 trillion and $80 trillion in unfunded forward liability. If we use the lower figure, that’s more than $300,000 for every working adult. We will never pay that bill. It isn’t possible. At some point in the next 10 or 15 years (if we’re lucky), the interest on the debt will exceed tax revenues, no matter how high we raise taxes. When that day comes, all these government goodies will stop. Not just Medicare — everything. It’s a mathematical certainty, not a right-wing theory. So when I hear leftists whining for more government handouts, I hear children who, upon learning that their parents are in hock up to their ears, have been funding the entire household on credit-card cash advances and have tapped the last credit card, immediately demand a raise in their allowance and help with the college tuition. They just know, by gosh, that somehow, some way, Mom and Dad can continue the spending and even increase it. There is no free wealth. We cannot continue spending wealth that wasn’t produced. We’ve bled the country dry and have already taken out credit cards in our kids’ names and run those up to the limits. You can cry a river over all the old people who can’t afford to rack up hundreds of thousand of dollars in medical treatments during their last year or two on earth, but that doesn’t change the mathematical fact that the government can’t possibly afford those costs either – and attempting to do so will only hasten the day when the government either defaults on its debts, hyperinflates the currency, or implements an austerity program that will make Greece’s austerity program look like a picnic. Any of the above will likely cause an economic crash that exceeds the levels of the Great Depression. Don’t you get that, Tom? I get the math. You don’t. You still believe the government can create wealth and goodies out of nothing, like Santa Claus. Or has your family been so lucky you really have no clue? Yes, my dad did quite well financially — all because of luck. First, there were the family connections. His grandfather was a coal miner who emigrated to the U.S. alone at age 13. His father was an alcoholic railroad worker who raised my dad and his brother in a small house on the blue-collar side of town. They shared a bedroom with one bed until my uncle left for college. This is, of course, the kind of family that feeds directly into the old-boy network. Dad was lucky enough to develop a childhood stuttering problem that left him insecure and painfully shy, and later lucky enough to begin working at age 15 and continue working as he put himself through college — with a few bucks here and there from his mother, who had saved money by stealing from the old man’s wallet whenever he passed out drunk. One of Dad’s lucky jobs was hauling railroad ties on his back. My mom remembers him being so covered in creosote, he looked like a black guy. After he left college and became a salesman for IBM and later NCR — always afraid he’d start stuttering during a sales call — Dad was lucky enough to save like a madman. Vacations consisted of driving to visit relatives or friends. Weekend entertainment was playing cards with friends. Thanks to this luck, he bought his own business at age 36, thus risking everything he’d saved, with a wife and three kids to support. After several years of having the good fortune to work his ass off building the business, he started doing quite well — but continued saving like a madman. He never bought an expensive car, never joined the nearby country club despite his love for golf. Thanks to this bit of luck, he survived the early ’80s recession by paying himself a dollar a year for three years, funding the business from his savings while refusing to lay off anyone on his staff. Despite this luck, he at one point went through a period of deep depression because he believed he’d soon have to close down his business .. thanks in part to the geniuses in the Illinois legislature raising payroll taxes in the middle of a recession, costing him an extra $40,000 in a year during which he was already losing money and running the business with his savings. He studied for a real estate license just in case. As he neared 60 years of age, confident his business wouldn’t sink in some future recession, he finally started treating himself and my mom to more of the good things in life… vacations overseas, expensive golf clubs, a nicer house, etc. He had a pretty good decade, then succumbed to Alzheimer’s. So yes, Paul, by the leftist definition, he was a really lucky guy. A “winner of life’s lottery,” I believe is the preferred term among leftist politicians. My mom is now paying $5,000 per month to keep him in a nice nursing home for Alzheimer’s patients. If she ends up in a similar home someday, if all the money my lucky dad earned throughout his lifetime is gone by the time they’re both gone, that’s fine with me. I would never dream of asking other people to pay for their care so I can inherit his money. And if we privatize Medicare, as Paul Ryan recommends, characters like Ron Perlman will be vying for the contracts, or charging into the markets. Politically-connected guys who get exclusive bids. The privatization of Medicare would be their mother lode! Well, let’s see how that would work. I’m the CEO of a private — and therefore profit-motivated — business. Along comes Ron Perlman, offering to sell me a drug nobody is sure anyone needs, for the low, low price of $433 million. How do you think that would play out? What would be the self-interested decision? Therefore I prefer good old civil servants. Administrators with no allegiance to any corporation. Riiiiight. Give a man a job in government, and he immediately ceases acting from his own self-interest and starts caring only about what’s good for society. That’s why in the states that are going broke, you see all those selfless civil servants offering to give up part of the their ridiculously generous pensions so the pension liability doesn’t bankrupt the state. Did you miss that part in the article where the government employees stepped in and made sure good ol’ Ron Perlman got his $433 million for a drug we don’t need? Are you still under the delusion that government employees who get to spend other people’s money don’t operate in their own interest? But it’s libertarians who have a Pollyanna problem… And safe from getting fired when new Presidents take office. Or when Congress suddenly shifts. That’s actually one of the biggest problems with civil servants. It’s nearly impossible fire the ones who are stupid or incompetent unless they show up at work firing a gun or tell a female co-worker she looks hot in that dress. Finally Tom, I must note, the word ‘Libertarian’ forces me to use the spelling option almost every time. This should be a red flag to anyone in your movement. Here in Hollywood we know: hard to spell titles never sell. No, that’s not the biggest problem libertarians have. A fellow comedian, of all people, explained the problem to me: “Libertarians are the most intelligent, well-informed, rational people I’ve met,” he said. (He didn’t say “wonkish,” but that could be what he meant.) “And that’s your problem. I find your arguments very convincing and very logical. But most voters aren’t logical. They’re emotional. And until you can learn to play hardball against the team that tells the voters that shrinking the size of the government is going to kill babies and old people, you’re going to lose.” He was right. So the government will continue to grow and take on debt, and someday in our lifetimes it’ll go totally bust. Then everyone will lose. Tom
Nov
30
2011
 
Debate With A Leftist Pal, Part SixPosted by Tom Naughton in Economics, Politics, Random MusingsThis is part six of on-going email debate between me and one of my leftists pals from Hollywood.
Round Six — Paul Tom: With regards to Roosevelt, you confirmed my point; measuring FDR against the man who never was. Roosevelt and Churchill shared aristocratic backgrounds . And their politics were not as different as you imply. As a member of Parliament in the early 1900′s, Churchill supported unemployment insurance! And the regulation of sweatshops and mines . Churchill was, in fact, quite close to Prime Minister Lloyd George . A Welshman of modest origins who championed working people. And though he was a disaster for working Americans, you voted for Bush Jr . Confirming my suspicions that Libertarians vote Republican . They are, essentially, a wing of the party . So when Libertarians disown Republicans it is essentially disingenuous . The Tea Party disowned Bush mainly because of TARP . But the bailout was actually cheap . Most of that money has been paid back; a largely under-reported story . Less than 50 billion is outstanding . Which is pocket change compared to a meltdown of the markets. They would have melted because Citibank was teetering . Another under-reported story . And yes, Citibank, ‘was’ too big to fail . It’s collapse, on top of AIG and Lehman Brothers, would’ve triggered a crash like ’29 . I just think that TARP should have come with the restoration of Glass-Steagel . And it seems absurd that banks are fighting Dodd-Frank which was largely watered-down from it’s initial form . Nevertheless I believe that bailout showed the necessity of a central bank . And your historic analogy, concerning the Fed’s creation, is actually a little off . J P Morgan functioned as our central bank before the Fed was born. In fact, the Fed was actually created to get that function away from Morgan . And interestingly Morgan died shortly afterwards. Regarding the Crash of ’29, you describe it as a correction . One that warranted no response from government . This view overlooks the extent of phony paper issued then as common stocks . Like the phenomenon of ‘holding companies’ . Which were exactly that . Companies marketed as stocks whose only business was holding stocks. And strangely layers of holding companies would clump like stupid geese . Swallowing and defecating one continuous line of string . So when the crash finally came, all those holding companies went down in a line. But the ’20′s were, on paper, at least, a Libertarian paradise: unfettered capitalism and small federal government . No SEC or FDIC . Agencies whose missions would later seem quite obvious . But whose missions Libertarians continue to dispute. Though if you’re measuring FDR against the man who never was, you can dispute Global Warming while your state is literally burning (from epic drought conditions) as Rick Perry did . Here’s what I don’t get . When it comes to government, Libertarians are puritanically cynical . Imagining levels of rot warranting wholesale purges . Yet when it comes to private enterprise, Libertarians see the best in folks . Like anyone in a suit and tie is probably a good family man . And one can just assume they’re principled and honest. Isn’t that a paradox? This paranoid Pollyanna mix? But again, if you’re measuring FDR against the man who never was, nothing has to make any sense. Every day financial pages report malfeasances . Like Inside-trading scandals, wire fraud indictments, juiced-up stocks, currency manipulations, toxic spills, faulty product deaths, etc, etc, etc. And if you don’t see these stories, you’re not tracking finance . You’re probably watching FOX or listening to Limbaugh. Inherent in capitalism is a history of buccaneering . Going back to Francis Drake . And New England privateers . A certain degree of piracy has always been attendant . A reflection perhaps on mankind more than economics. So again it seems peculiar that Libertarians have this Pollyanna streak with regards to business . What’s more, in this age of multi-nationals, so many businessmen live beyond our borders . Hatching schemes we might view as common piracy. Here I feel compelled to note that Libertarians are ideologues not unlike Soviet style Communists . Subscribing to philosophies everyone must buy*. Which leads to puritanical purges . Like we’ve seen with the Tea Party . But Tom your arguments would impress The Cato Institute . Where you should have a fellowship . Think of the prestige! If you need a reference call on me . I will tell the Koch Brothers that Tom Naughton is politically reliable! Paul
Round Six — Tom Hey, Paul – With regards to Roosevelt, you confirmed my point; measuring FDR against the man who never was. No, I measure FDR by the bone-headed policies he instituted. Roosevelt and Churchill shared aristocratic backgrounds. So did Bush and Gore. And their politics were not as different as you imply. As a member of Parliament in the early 1900′s, Churchill supported unemployment insurance! And the regulation of sweatshops and mines. Churchill was, in fact, quite close to Prime Minister Lloyd George. A Welshman of modest origins who championed working people. This is a minor detour away from the larger issues, but Churchill was, you recall, the leader of the Conservative party . In the 1945 election, when the voters ousted him in spite of his inspiring leadership during the war, the Labour party campaigned on promises to create full employment, a tax-funded universal National Health Service, and a cradle-to-grave welfare state. Churchill was against this creep towards socialism, as evidenced by one of his many famous quotes: “The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.” And though he was a disaster for working Americans, you voted for Bush Jr . Confirming my suspicions that Libertarians vote Republican. They are, essentially, a wing of the party. So when Libertarians disown Republicans it is essentially disingenuous. Most libertarians I know have concluded that we stand a better chance of taking over the Republican party than launching a successful third party, since our system is skewed in favor of a two-party system — same strategy employed by the “progressives,” who took over the party that was essentially the racist party of the Old South for many generations. Given a choice between a Republican who agrees with libertarians on perhaps 50 percent of the economic issues and a Democrat who believes the key to prosperity is to raise taxes and expand the welfare state, I’ll vote for the least objectionable choice every time. By the way, how is the Great Savior Obama’s economic program working out for the working American so far? I seem to recall something about unemployment being high, in spite of the trillions in “stimulus” spending. The Tea Party disowned Bush mainly because of TARP. But the bailout was actually cheap. Most of that money has been paid back; a largely under-reported story. Less than 50 billion is outstanding. Which is pocket change compared to a meltdown of the markets. The story is “under-reported” because it isn’t true. The “it’s almost all paid back!” story is Obama administration P.R. nonsense. Let’s take just one example: GM. Officially, they’ve paid back $4.7 billion of a $6.7 billion loan. But that doesn’t count the other $40+ billion GM sucked up from the taxpayers in the form of GM stock purchased by the government. The Obama administration also put $13 billion of bailout money in an escrow account, and GM largely “paid back” the $4.7 billion by tapping that account. In other words, they “paid back” the government loan with government money. You can read up on the full shenanigans here: http://reason.com/archives/2010/04/27/gms-phony-bailout-payback Even if GM somehow manages to pay back the full amount, the government has no business taking taxpayer money and “investing” on our behalf in a failing business. (Next thing you know, they’ll give a half billion or so to a solar-energy company that will go bankrupt a year later.) They would have melted because Citibank was teetering. Another under-reported story. And yes, Citibank, ‘was’ too big to fail. It’s collapse, on top of AIG and Lehman Brothers, would’ve triggered a crash like ’29. No company is too big to fail. The system meltdown threatened by the banks and the Fed was an excuse to save a lot of politically powerful and wealthy bankers and investors from taking the financial bath they had coming to them. Instead, the Fed bought up a bunch of worthless mortgages (with money created out of thin air and backed by taxpayer IOUs), transferring the losses from the investors who willingly engaged in the risks to ordinary citizens who didn’t. This also only postponed the day of reckoning, when the artificial expansion of the economy produced by magic Fed money will collapse. [NOTE to readers: I recently finished reading "The Big Short," an excellent book by Michael Lewis (author of "Moneyball") on the Wall Street meltdown. He agrees that letting AIG and the big banks fail without any federal intervention would have caused a financial meltdown. But he contends that the solution should have been a carefully managed bankruptcy and transfer of assets of each company, not a slew of bailouts. Back to the debate ...] Nevertheless I believe that bailout showed the necessity of a central bank. And your historic analogy, concerning the Fed’s creation, is actually a little off. J P Morgan functioned as our central bank before the Fed was born. Pardon me while I laugh my ass off for a few minutes before responding … … Okay, that’s enough. Paul, the housing bubble and inevitable meltdown was CAUSED by the existence of a central bank. Take away the central bank, and people can only borrow capital others have saved. The Federal Reserve enabled and encouraged the borrowing frenzy to occur by creating new magic money out of thin air so the banks could continue lending and lending, even after they’d exhausted the pool of qualified borrowers. The only reason we “need” central banks to provide bailouts when economic bubbles finally burst is that central banks cause the bubbles to occur in the first place. Without a central bank, a borrowing frenzy can’t happen. If you have an explanation for how a borrowing frenzy can go on without a central bank, please share it. In fact, the Fed was actually created to get that function away from Morgan. You believe that story, eh? And I guess if you read that Rockefeller was publicly opposed to the creation of the Fed, you’d also believe he was actually against it? Rockefeller and other rich bankers publicly opposed the Federal Reserve as a ploy to convince the public that the Fed must be bad news for rich bankers, even as they were working behind the scenes to make sure the Fed was created. The ploy worked. Years later, it became public knowledge who was at the secret meeting on Jekyll Island during which the Fed was concocted. One of them (can’t remember which) fessed up in a magazine article 30 years later. Regarding the Crash of ’29, you describe it as a correction. One that warranted no response from government. This view overlooks the extent of phony paper issued then as common stocks. Like the phenomenon of ‘holding companies’. Which were exactly that. Companies marketed as stocks whose only business was holding stocks. And strangely layers of holding companies would clump like stupid geese . Swallowing and defecating one continuous line of string. So when the crash finally came, all those holding companies went down in a line. Which proves the crash of ’29 wasn’t a correction how, exactly? Sounds like a rather dramatic example of a correction to me. Stupid behavior was punished. That’s what corrections do — if the morons in government don’t start bailing out the morons in the market. But the ’20′s were, on paper, at least, a Libertarian paradise: unfettered capitalism and small federal government. No SEC or FDIC. Agencies whose missions would later seem quite obvious. But whose missions Libertarians continue to dispute. It’s not unfettered capitalism when the Federal Reserve is creating new magic money out of thin air to allow a borrowing frenzy to continue. In real capitalism, you can’t borrow capital that doesn’t exist. As Paul Schiff aptly described our latest borrowing frenzy and subsequent bust: Yes, the bankers and investors acted like a bunch of drunk teenagers. But the Federal Reserve provided the endless supply of alcohol and encouraged them to drink it. Though if you’re measuring FDR against the man who never was, you can dispute Global Warming while your state is literally burning (from epic drought conditions) as Rick Perry did. Not sure I see the connection there, but I don’t dispute that the earth warms and cools in cycles. I definitely dispute that we can say with anything remotely resembling scientific certainty that humans have zip to do with it. But if you want to cite a drought as proof of man-made global warming (because droughts never happened before the late 20th century, right?), then I’ll share a few headlines and leads from news stories of the past few years with you: Rare October snow brings winter landscape to NY. This winter has been one of the toughest in decades, with temperatures today reaching as low as -38C in large areas of the Midwest. Germany marked record low temperatures for the third day in a row on Thursday Charlottes Pass at 13 degrees below average set a new Australian record for cold today at -13 degress celcius. This sets a new cold record for April for anywhere in Australia If it seemed cold to you in Green Bay on Saturday, it was. The high temperature for the day, reached at 9:50 a.m., was 52. That set a record for the lowest high temperature for June 6, according to the National Weather Service office in Ashwaubenon. Northern Arizona residents were digging out Tuesday from a storm that left record snowfall in Flagstaff, knocked out power to tens of thousands, shut down two major interstates and kept children out of school. Snow fell as the House of Commons debated Global Warming yesterday — the first October fall in the metropolis since 1922. By the way, it’s 27 degrees in Tennessee this morning — 13 degrees below the historical average. Newsflash: the weather changes. Always has, always will. Here’s what I don’t get. When it comes to government, Libertarians are puritanically cynical. Imagining levels of rot warranting wholesale purges. Yet when it comes to private enterprise, Libertarians see the best in folks. Like anyone in a suit and tie is probably a good family man. And one can just assume they’re principled and honest. Isn’t that a paradox? This paranoid Pollyanna mix? I’m sitting here trying to figure out if you’re just yanking my chain, or if you’re actually that ignorant of what libertarians believe. Going all the way back to Adam Smith’s free-market treatise “The Wealth of Nations,” libertarians have contended that humans act in their own best interest, period. It’s because of this self-interest (or greed, if you prefer) that Smith warned against allowing government officials to have control over the economy — he knew full well that eventually the smart greedy merchants would get together with the smart greedy government officials and rig the game so they could all get rich together at everyone else’s expense. Smith also pointed out that when businesses can’t get rich by leveraging the coercive powers of government (that is, when free markets exist) they are forced to compete with each other, which leads to higher efficiency, lower prices, and better products. As I stated in an earlier reply, when I created a trademark docketing system that was far less expensive than what was already on the market, it wasn’t because I have warm fuzzy feelings towards trademark attorneys. I created that system because I’m self-interested — I wanted their money — and yet the trademark attorneys benefited. The reason New Yorkers can buy beef in the local grocery store isn’t that ranchers in Texas love New Yorkers and want to take care of them. The beef arrives in New York because the Texas ranchers are greedy. When government stays the @#$% out of the way, the only way a business can get a consumer’s money is to offer a product the consumer wants at a price the consumer can afford. Good intentions have nothing to do with it, as any libertarian economist would happily tell you. That’s why you’ll never see a libertarian marching in the streets and whining like a five-year-old after figuring out that corporations care more about profits (egads!) than people. We don’t expect corporations to care about people. We’re adults. The reason we’re cynical about government is that government gives coercive powers to self-interested people (which is bad enough) and then gives those self-interested people the ability to spend other people’s money (which makes matters worse). In free-market exchanges, there is no coercion. You can’t make me buy your product or invest in your company . You can only try to persuade me. But morons in government can take my money and invest it in GM or Solyndra, without any worries about bad investments costing them a dime personally. That’s the difference. If anyone is suffering from a Pollyanna complex, it’s today’s “progressives,” who (against all evidence) believe that when people take a job in government, they immediately cease acting out of their own self-interest and start making decisions based on what’s good for the rest of us. If the heads of Fannie and Freddie are paid bonuses based on the size of their total mortgage portfolios, a libertarian would fully expect them to boost their own pay by lowering their mortgage standards and buying increasingly risky mortgages from the banks, allowing and encouraging the self-interested bankers to keep writing those mortgages — which is what happened. When the housing meltdown occurred, we didn’t whine about how greedy and irresponsible the bankers were. We pointed out how Fannie, Freddie, Congress, the Fed, etc., created a perverse set of incentives that practically guaranteed the self-interested bankers would do exactly what they did. By contrast, in 1985 — before those asinine incentives were created — my best friend was turned down for a mortgage even though he was an attorney employed at a large firm and had a 10% down payment. The bank wouldn’t write a mortgage for anyone who didn’t have a 20% down payment. Why? Because they were greedy, and without Fannie and Freddie taking all the risky mortgages off their hands, the self-interested decision was to minimize risk. But again, if you’re measuring FDR against the man who never was, nothing has to make any sense. No, I judge FDR by the bone-headed policies he instituted. But now that I think about it, I’ll happily measure him against Harding. During the steep recession of 1921 — which was worse than the first year of the Great Depression, with manufacturing declining by something like 40% and stocks declining rapidly — Harding ignored the advice of Herbert Hoover, who wanted to engage in corporate bailouts and massive spending to prop up the economy. (Yes, Hoover — your “laissez faire” guy.) Harding said the market needed to be allowed to clear itself of the malinvestments, and it did. The recession was over a year later. Too bad Hoover didn’t learn the lesson. Every day financial pages report malfeasances. Like Inside-trading scandals, wire fraud indictments, juiced-up stocks, currency manipulations, toxic spills, faulty product deaths, etc, etc, etc. And if you don’t see these stories, you’re not tracking finance. You’re probably watching FOX or listening to Limbaugh. Again, I’m not sure if you’re yanking my chain or simply ignorant of what libertarians believe. In case it’s the latter, I’ll fill you in: Libertarians believe in voluntary exchanges between free adults. If a company defrauds you, it isn’t voluntary — you weren’t given what you agreed to. If a company poisons my land or water, I didn’t volunteer for that. If a product kills or maims me, I didn’t volunteer for that, and the company that produced it should be held liable. You seem to believe libertarianism means corporations are never punished for anything. That’s simply not true. Libertarianism means 1) if I want to make a voluntary exchange with someone else and we agree to the terms, you don’t get to step in and stop us simply because you don’t believe our deal is good for you, and 2) you don’t get to force me to make exchanges I don’t want to make. In other words, we all get to act like free adults living in a supposedly free country. Inherent in capitalism is a history of buccaneering. Going back to Francis Drake. And New England privateers. A certain degree of piracy has always been attendant. A reflection perhaps on mankind more than economics. I seem to recall incidents of buccaneering and plundering long before capitalism ever came along. Yes, of course, it’s a reflection on mankind. To repeat, libertarians believe people are self-interested — including those who work in government. So again it seems peculiar that Libertarians have this Pollyanna streak with regards to business. See above. You are criticizing an attitude libertarians don’t hold. What’s more, in this age of multi-nationals, so many businessmen live beyond our borders. Hatching schemes we might view as common piracy. If they’re hatching a scheme to sell me products I’ll willingly buy, it’s not piracy. If they’re bribing government officials to get deals they shouldn’t have, then the problem is the self-interested government officials being empowered to rig the game, which makes them worth bribing. Here I feel compelled to note that Libertarians are ideologues not unlike Soviet style Communists. Subscribing to philosophies everyone must buy* . Which leads to puritanical purges. Like we’ve seen with the Tea Party. Hmmm .. I must’ve missed a few newscasts. When the Tea Party members start dragging people away to gulags? What I’ve seen are people exercising their right to protest against the actions of their government. But as far as subscribing to philosophies everyone must buy, have you paid any attention to what’s happened on college campuses? Nitwit leftists routinely stealing all the copies of the campus conservative newspaper? Students charged with “hate speech” for putting up posters advertising a speech by the (black conservative) author of “It’s Okay to Leave the Plantation”? A history student in California given an F and told by his professor to undergo therapy because he wrote a paper supporting the war in Iraq? Students attempting to physically attack Ann Coulter when she gave a speech on campus? Another of her speeches canceled because of student riots? Give me a break … leftists are some of the most intolerant people on the planet. (Wish I could remember who did this … someone parked a car with Kerry For President bumper stickers on it in an ultra-conservative voting district. Nothing happened to it. He also parked a car with Bush-Cheney bumper stickers on it in an ultra-liberal voting district. Tires slashed, key scratches, window broken. When leftists preach tolerance, what they mean is that they tolerate white liberals, black liberals, Asian liberals, Catholic liberals, Jewish liberals, atheist liberals, straight liberals, gay liberals, and transgender liberals. If you’re not a liberal, they’ll start — strangely, I might add — comparing you to the people who ran the Soviet purges.) But Tom your arguments would impress The Cato Institute. Where you should have a fellowship. Think of the prestige! You could use your wonkish talents to crank out wonkish papers. That other Libertarians will think are simply brilliant. I appreciate the sarcastic compliment, but they wouldn’t be impressed by me. They already know what I know, plus a lot more. I’m still trying to put my finger on your definition of “wonkish,” however. Near as I can tell, it’s something like “studies subjects before developing opinions on them and cites facts with references in debates instead of spouting opinions.” Tom My friend Paul in Hollywood is relentless. Here’s round five of our debate. (Links to previous rounds: one, two, three, four.)
Round Five A — Paul Tom: I’ll get back to you later with a full rebuttal. But today I showed your argument to my neighbor Caitlyn, one the hippest chicks in Hollywood. Caitlyn, 27, went to N Y U and works as a Production Assistant. The type who wears expensive stone-washed denims. Anyway, I showed her what you wrote and she just giggled dismissively saying, “Oh my god, he’s so anal..!” Not that you’re an ‘asshole’. She meant ‘anal retentive’. But Caitlyn said it so dismissively I felt embarrassed for you. Tom, I swear, if you’d been here, her dismissive giggle would’ve melted you like cheese. One of those cheapie slices Kraft makes in the wrappers you can’t get off. That’s how you would’ve melted Tom! There’s nothing worse than having some hip 20-something laugh at you like that. I’m just passing this on, so you know, Tom, how you’re perceived by others. And yeah, I’ll get to work. Composing what will surely be a bitch-slap of a comeback. Paul
Round Five A — Tom Hey, Paul – I realize 27-year-old NYU grads who work as production assistants in Hollywood and pay too much for jeans are renowned for their deep knowledge of economics, but nonetheless you don’t have to feel embarrassed for me. Being the target of a dismissive giggle (which I presume was a substitute for actually having an intelligent reply) from a totally happenin’ and cool economic illiterate not only wouldn’t bother me, I’d consider it a badge of honor. Same goes for how I’m perceived by any other totally cool and hip Hollywood economic illiterates … I really don’t care. Ask Rob what he thinks of my political and economic beliefs. He’s one of the few people I met there whose opinions I actually respect. Or find a really cool and hip production assistant in Hollywood who’s actually read a single book on economics (I’ve read a couple dozen), then get an opinion. Interesting article in our local paper this weekend. Our county in Tennessee has had a major influx of transplants from other parts of the country in the past few years. The number one area from which people relocated was Los Angeles. Like me, those other transplants probably realized they didn’t want their kids growing up around all those really hip people in Hollywood. Prepare that bitch-slappin’ comeback … Tom [NOTE: The 'Rob' I mentioned is another actor I knew in Hollywood who refused to play the starving-actor role. He started a painting and home-repair business and now employs other people in addition to himself. Although I knew him for 10 years, it was only in the last year (while he was painting my office) that I learned he's an economic libertarian/conservative. As Kelsey Grammer once said, being a conservative in Hollywood is a bit like being a gay man in the 1950s: you eventually find each other, but if you know what's good for you, you're careful about it.]
Round Five B — Tom again Hey, Paul – This example of our fine government regulators just arrived in my inbox this morning: http://farmtoconsumer.org/quail-hollow-farm-dinner.htm And of course, we just had more great examples of government investing our money for us: If you can explain how taking my tax money and giving it to incompetent companies that soon go bankrupt “stimulates” the economy, I’m all ears. Tom
Round Five C — Paul Tom – Your tax money? That first story doesn’t concern you, Tom. Unless you pay taxes in Southern Nevada. Because it clearly involves a ‘local’ inspector. It sounds like this farm dinner was marketed as a commercial enterprise which brought a response from the local agency charged with inspecting restaurants. Should these inspectors not be curious? Should restaurants ‘not’ be inspected? Should people be allowed to turn their homes into restaurants while evading restaurant standards? And should we, as readers, assume the farm wife telling this story is really sympathetic? She is quite possibly some fool. Who was, indeed, intending to serve an unsanitary meal. You weren’t there, Tom, you don’t know. It may have been a meal neither one of us would touch. Regarding Beacon Energy, I read THE WASHINGTON POST every day. But this story is somewhat flawed in that it keeps mentioning Solandra. Which actually has no relationship to Beacon. Nor were they involved in similar technologies. Solandra was manufacturing solar panels. While Beacon’s business seems to be a ‘flywheel’ that eliminates power surges. And it seems their technology is viable but not substantial enough to build a company around. So are we as readers supposed to think the Department of Energy should make no effort whatsoever to encourage green technologies? Like we should just allow the wholesale fraking of America’s interior? While opening our coastlines to unrestricted drilling? I mean, if we poison all our aquifers and ruin all our fishing grounds, that might cost a whole lot more that what we’ve lost on Solandra. Just for the record, we’re dropping about $1.5 billion per week in Afghanistan. And I don’t hear Rush Limbaugh or anyone at FOX railing about that waste. Nor has any Republican candidate come close to addressing it. Have you heard about the pipeline proposed to extend from Canada to Texas? To bring oil to the Gulf from shale tar pits in Alberta. Although no formal approval has been granted, a Canadian company is already sending out letters to farmers in Nebraska. Demanding use of their land (for the pipeline) under threat of eminent domain! This same pipeline, by the way, would be skirting Yellowstone Park. An area where an Exxon pipeline ruptured earlier this year. Do we really want this new pipeline? I’m not hearing much discussion. It seems the ‘liberal media’ is out to lunch on this. Paul
Round Five C — Tom Greetings, Paul – Your tax money? That first story doesn’t concern you, Tom. Unless you pay taxes in Southern Nevada. Because it clearly involves a ‘local’ inspector. If you read my email again, you’ll see it’s clear I was talking about the Department of Energy’s latest boondoggles. That is definitely my tax money being flushed down the toilet. It sounds like this farm dinner was marketed as a commercial enterprise which brought a response from the local agency charged with inspecting restaurants. Should these inspectors not be curious? Should restaurants ‘not’ be inspected? Should people be allowed to turn their homes into restaurants while evading restaurant standards? I’m pretty sure you can guess the libertarian reply to that. If a local farmer wants to serve dinner and charge for it and I want to attend that dinner, it’s not the government’s job to step in and prevent two adults in a supposedly free country from making a voluntary exchange. Local governments are doing the same thing all over the country to prevent willing consumers from buying raw milk (which is far better for your health than pasteurized milk) from local farmers. What possible business does a government have preventing me from buying raw milk from a farmer willing to sell it to me? She is quite possibly some fool. Who was, indeed, intending to serve an unsanitary meal. How do you know it was unsanitary? You weren’t there, Tom, you don’t know. It may have been a meal neither one of us would touch. And if neither of us would touch it, that’s our choice. If others are willing to eat the meal and take whatever risks are involved, that should be their choice. It’s not up to you, or me, or some local government goofs to make that decision for them. So are we as readers supposed to think the Department of Energy should make no effort whatsoever to encourage green technologies? As a reader, that’s exactly what I think. Viable technologies don’t need “encouragement” by the government. If they’re viable, they’ll attract investors risking their own money, not mine. And it’s pretty clear the government is (surprise) incompetent at picking the viable companies. It’s money down the toilet. Even if the Department of Energy could pick winning companies, it’s still not the government’s proper function, and it creates the potential for a huge conflict of interest. I develop a technology without government “encouragement,” someone else develops an inferior technology in which the government has invested millions of dollars … guess which technology the government will choose? The government shouldn’t be investing in private corporations, period. Like we should just allow the wholesale fraking of America’s interior? While opening our coastlines to unrestricted drilling? I mean, if we poison all our aquifers and ruin all our fishing grounds, that might cost a whole lot more that what we’ve lost on Solandra. The one has nothing to do with the other. Prohibiting government from investing in failed solar technology doesn’t mean supporting fraking the interior — which, by the way, mostly occurs with government permission. Just for the record, we’re dropping about $1.5 billion per week in Afghanistan. And I don’t hear Rush Limbaugh or anyone at FOX railing about that waste. Nor has any Republican candidate come close to addressing it. Surely you’re not suggesting one waste of taxpayer dollars justifies another. And the last time I checked, Ron Paul was still a Republican candidate. Obama has been the commander-in-chief for more than three years now. If Afghanistan is strictly a Republican operation, why are we still there? Have you heard about the pipeline proposed to extend from Canada to Texas? To bring oil to the Gulf from shale tar pits in Alberta. Although no formal approval has been granted, a Canadian company is already sending out letters to farmers in Nebraska. Demanding use of their land (for the pipeline) under threat of eminent domain! You’re preaching to a libertarian about government misuse of eminent domain?! Did you happen to notice which Supreme Court justices were against the Kelo decision, in a local government used eminent domain to force people out of their homes so the local government could earn more tax revenue by turning the land over to developers? This same pipeline, by the way, would be skirting Yellowstone Park. An area where an Exxon pipeline ruptured earlier this year. Do we really want this new pipeline? I’m not hearing much discussion. It seems the ‘liberal media’ is out to lunch on this. I don’t want a pipeline anywhere near Yellowstone. That place is a major eruption waiting to happen. Tom
[NOTE: In case you don't remember, in Kelo v. City of New London, the Supreme Court ruled (for the first time) that a city could use eminent domain to force the sale of private property to another private owner -- in this case, a developer who promised the new development would provide jobs and more than a million dollars in tax revenue. Here's how the justices voted: For: John Paul Stevens, Anthony Kennedy, David Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer. Against: Sandra Day O'Connor, William Rehnquist, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas -- the most conservative members of the court at the time. To quote the dissent by Clarence Thomas: "This deferential shift in phraseology enables the Court to hold, against all common sense, that a costly urban-renewal project whose stated purpose is a vague promise of new jobs and increased tax revenue, but which is also suspiciously agreeable to the Pfizer Corporation, is for a 'public use.' Allowing the government to take property solely for public purposes is bad enough, but extending the concept of public purpose to encompass any economically beneficial goal guarantees that these losses will fall disproportionately on poor communities." But Paul still believes it's the liberals who stand up for the little guy. Now for the punchline: The developer was unable to obtain financing and abandoned the redevelopment project, leaving the land as an empty lot, which was eventually turned into a dump by the city. A neighborhood with homes before, a city dump afterwards ... your government at work!] In my debate with my leftist pal Paul, I stated that if the federal government government takes over the healthcare system, I believe health policy will be based on political influence, not what’s best for our health. This article from the Los Angeles Times is a perfect example of what I was talking about: Over the last year, the Obama administration has aggressively pushed a $433-million plan to buy an experimental smallpox drug, despite uncertainty over whether it is needed or will work. Senior officials have taken unusual steps to secure the contract for New York-based Siga Technologies Inc., whose controlling shareholder is billionaire Ronald O. Perelman, one of the world’s richest men and a longtime Democratic Party donor. When Siga complained that contracting specialists at the Department of Health and Human Services were resisting the company’s financial demands, senior officials replaced the government’s lead negotiator for the deal, interviews and documents show. When Siga was in danger of losing its grip on the contract a year ago, the officials blocked other firms from competing. But of course, when the whole system is run by the government, it’ll be a model of efficiency and the cost of healthcare will go down. Riiiiiight.
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