The Jesters Playing King or The Iowa Republican Debate

"This is Bret Baier, and I enjoy listening to bullshit."

Thursday night I had the horrible misfortune of watching Fox News for the first time in a while. What made it particularly painful was instead of hearing one idiot prattle about debt reduction or the heinous crime of abortion, I had to hear a whole stage full of them. For those of you skipped out but want your daily fill of idiocy, gather around.

I should start off by saying I came in a bit late during the debate. The first event I witnessed is something I will call the Paul-Santorum rally on Iran. This was one of Ron Paul's rare moments of reason, where he argued that the best policy to deal with Iran is free trade and a dropping of the long standing sanctions. Naturally, he took a lot of flak for suggesting such an idea. Even most members of America's Left would take issue with it. (Personally, I am almost certain he is right; Iran has the region's most modernized and pro-America populace aside of Israel, and allowing US companies to spread their products to Iran would greatly de-legitimize the regime's ability to blame America and the West for its own economic failings). Rick Santorum (and probably 95% of the Fox viewership) could not comprehend what the congressman was arguing and instantly went on a crazy tirade that claimed Iran has killed more US serviceman in Iraq and Afghanistan than Iraqis and Afghans (even though Iran actually offered to aid in the capture of Taliban who were escaping Afghanistan in 2001 and has been at war with both the Baathist regime of Iraq and the Taliban). Paul countered on how the US had caused the hostilities with Iran originally in 1953 with the reinstatement of the Shah and the 1979 revolution was only a reaction to that, but was quickly decried by Santorum as apologizing for US policy which only protects liberty and freedom. Yes, because putting one of the most despotic dynasties in Persian history after creating the region's first truly free and independent republic is the standard for defending liberty. Oh did I mention that this was done twice? However, I digress. Cain and Bachmann fortunately came to Santorum's aid, because attacking Iran when talking about foreign policy is such a risky move in US politics. The whole thing reeked of 2004 when the Bush administration tried to brainwash the country into thinking the world was safer without Saddam Hussein and those who would question that fact are apologists for the terrorists.

So what came next? Oh yes, questions on social policy. This is such a joke it almost isn't worth talking about. But let's go through the basic review. Mitt Romney talked about the necessity of a national marriage amendment, because marriage should be consistently defined in the nation in order to prevent issues in divorce law, tax benefits, and children rights. All of which is a hilarious argument, because every state acknowledges heterosexual marriage so the only effect of such an amendment would be to permanently disenfranchise gay couples. Good job, Mitt, use the argument that actually is the primary justification to your opposition in order to promote your side. While we are on the subject of homosexuality, Santorum was quick to condemn Iran's oppression of gays regarding foreign policy, but I did not see him running to their defense during the social policy round.

Bachmann got a positively bizarre question regarding whether or not she would “submit” to the will of her husband. The context, which only barely matters, was that her submission to the will of her husband, as is ordained in the Bible, was why she entered tax law in the first place. Her response was actually not terrible, but the fact that this question was even allowed to be asked shows the insanity of the Right. That question was sexism disguised under the guise of religion and has no place whatsoever in our political forum, but then again I am neither a Republican nor a Christian so what do I know about right or wrong?

Oh and then came abortion. Abortion is always something fun to talk about, especially if you are Jon Huntsman. Then you can give your cute little anecdotes of a Supreme Court case where a rapist could not be put to death but the child could be. Well that's one way of putting it. Here's another that I just made up on the spot, “The man accused of being a rapist could not have the death penalty invoked against him, but the victim has the right to choose to abort the embryo conceived from the rape.” But I'll let you decide which wins over pro-life supporters. Huntsman condemned the courts for allowing what he called two crimes against the unborn child. You know, I wouldn't mind pro-lifers if they all didn't happen to be the exact same people who constantly invoke the “welfare queen” story when asked about their stance on Medicaid, food stamps, and federally funded school lunch programs. Even Ron Paul, the paladin of libertarians, said doctors who perform “illegal” abortions should have civil or maybe even criminal suits filed against them. You got to love the fact that a man whose whole premise is that government has expanded its mandate too far, is just fine with extending its jurisdiction into a woman's vagina.

And finally came the economy. Let's listen to the brilliance of the vanguards of the Jobs Creators ©. Good old Job Creator © Mitt was questioned as how he would go about making jobs, to which he replied that in order to make jobs one needs to have had a job. Yes, because serving on the faculty of one of the most esteemed universities in the nation is the same as being unemployed. Even the crowd booed at this comment, probably because the best that the “presidential” heavyweight could do is make non-witty quips about the president. He should leave such bad comedy to Leno.

Fortunately Job Creator © Jon Huntsman had Real Solutions ^TM. Yes, Huntsman has a serious history of job creation and wants to make America the great country it was... by encouraging manufacturing. And does he have a plan to bring back slave lab- I mean manufacturing, back to the US; he wants to end the oppressive tyranny of the EPA. You heard it here first folks, the Environmental Protection Agency is why all of the US companies moved manufacturing to LDCs. The fact we have a minimum wage and a maximum work week of 40 hours has absolutely nothing to do with it. Nor does the fact that corporations exploit tax loopholes by moving operations out of the control to pay literally no taxes. Instead it is the fact that companies cannot blow sulfur into our air and pour heavy metals into our rivers. I am not saying safety concerns do not contribute to increased costs for the bottom line, but it is not even comparable to the fact that laborers in Cambodia and Pakistan get paid $1 a day for 60 hour work weeks, as opposed to the $8/hr plus health benefits, vacation time and what not for 40 hour work weeks the equivalent American would make. Nor am I saying it is a bad thing we mandate having such a higher standard of living; we should instead encourage other nations to not be subjugated to such hellish work. Could it be that Huntsman has ulterior motives for wanting the EPA to be disbanded? Well he only worked for a chemical engineering firm, so fortunately that is not an issue.

Now some of you may be wondering, “Oh Arugula Eater, what about the spending crisis and debt ceiling idiocy that had been going on for the past month? Did none of the candidates spout bullshit about how we should not have raised the debt ceiling?” Of course they did, silly! That's what this paragraph is about! Naturally Bachmann was quick to call the Most Holy Bargain a terrible mistake and pointed to the S&P downgrade as proof. Yes the very credit downgrade which identified the Republican inability to compromise on revenue sources and taxation as one of its reasons, is the justification the congresswoman uses to show her extremism and hostage taking of the US debt as valid. You really cannot make this shit up. Furthermore, she claimed in the process President Obama got a $2.4 Trillion blank check. I really want to know if she is reading the same bill as me, because when I read it the president only got a chance to make a mockery out of the progressive values which inspired the Left to vote for him. Job Creator© Herman Cain proudly touted his anti-debt ceiling stance. Fighting words for a man whose only constituency is people who enjoy crappy pizza.

But let's not forget Prospector Paul and his mad gold rush. Indeed, the congressman took great pride in the fact that he helped lead the new generation of Andrew Jackson worshipers and restated his opposition to the growing national debt. He claimed that the proper steps would be for the Fed to have simply destroyed over $1T in the bond markets to put off the ceiling vote. Yes, because raising the interest rates is exactly what you want to do in a recession where there is low demand. Fortunately, Jon Huntsman rode in with some distant cousin of logic and attacked the other candidates for their lack of pragmatism and vowing to never let the United States to default. All very valid, until he then praised Speaker Boehner for his bravery. Of course all of this was undone by the end of the debate, when Huntsman identified the national debt as the biggest threat to America, once again demonstrating the fact that these people are fixated with Hooverism.

Once the debate was all said and done, nothing had really changed. America's economy still in the gutter. The partisanship in Congress is worse than the Bush era, even though now there is a president who wishes to end it to the point that he uses his own party as the sacrificial lamb. And the Republican candidates are all brim full of shit. Based on the foxnews.com audience ratings, Michelle Bachmann and Herman Cain appeared to have won the debate, keeping us on track for the Mayan apocalypse. I for one welcome the Bachmann/Cain 2012 ticket. Then Obama would only have to campaign on “I can look at the camera straight,” to win.

It's like she is looking at you but she isn't at the same time.

Oh right, I almost forgot Tim Pawlenty was also at the debate. He said things. I usually went to the bathroom or got something to drink during that. Don't worry, I am sure it wasn't as hilariously crazy as the things other people said, but I am sure that he was just as stupid as the rest of them.

   

My Father Would Also Be Disappointed

So, I evidently guessed wrong on the jobs report, but to be fair the report was only slightly above stagnation. In fact it hardly changed the course of the markets on Friday.  There was a minor blip, but until the ECB's announcement regarding buying Italian bonds, it appeared as if we were going to stay downhill for the day.  Thankfully, the European crisis might be starting to get resolved so at least the market won't need to worry about what is happening on the other side of the pond.

Of course, really what does that matter when:

Image Credit: Personal Friend

Yes, Standard and Poors, after messing up their initial calculations by $2 Trillion, has decided to downgrade the United States from its long standing AAA to AA+.  Indeed, that glorious bargain once again has turned out to be a dud.  I could spend a post on mentioning how S&P is full of shit, but there are others who have that covered.  So instead let's focus on what this means. It means higher interest rates all across the board which basically undoes everything Bernanke and the Fed attempted with QE1 and QE2. And since we (and by we I mean both parties in Congress, the President, and the media) decided that fiscal recovery was not important, loose monetary policy was all we had left. (Let's just pretend we weren't in a liquidity trap for a second)  So now we have nothing.  The only solace we can take in this is the fact it was announced afterhours on a Friday, so perhaps the market will calm down by Monday.

Dow Jones From Aug 4 to Aug 5, Net Loss of 451.83 pts, 3.8%

Then again when was the last time Wall Street was known for being calm?

Down Came the Rain and Washed the Market Out

Dow Jones fell 512.76 points.  Really there isn't much else to say. Oh except that I hear that the ECB is a bucketload of idiots. Idiots.

Oh and I forgot that every other market also followed suit.  Nasdaq, FTSE, S&P, even Nikkei caught up once it opened there. Thank god we at least have gold. Wait, oh shit.

So yeah, apparently Wall Street doesn't care much about Washington bipartisanship and instead looks at monetary policy and growth rates. Good thing we have a jobs report coming out tomorrow and fortunately we saved the Job Creators from Job Killing Taxes with our Very Serious Deal.  I mean imagine if there was no growth in the last month or two; that would be embarrassing, and we might even lose another 500 points.   

Ann Coulter's Egypt or How Republicans Deliberately Misrepresent Reality

I apparently missed this last week, but Ann Coulter takes it upon herself to present herself as either an idiot or a liar on Real Time with Bill Maher and successful does both. Check the clip here.

Most notably is Coulter's attempt to make it appear as though the Egyptian revolution happened through US military action and regime change.

Here is some of the dialogue (around 2:50):

COULTER: What do you think about Libya and Egypt, as long as I have you here?
MAHER: What about them?
COULTER: Are in favor with us intervening in these two countries that didn't hit us on 9/11 solely for purposes of regime change?
MAHER: First of all I didn't think we were intervening in Egypt? Are we?
COULTER: We did.
MAHER: What we do? What we do in Egypt?
OTHERS: No we didn't.
HAYES: Intervene or military? There's a difference.
FOREMAN: I mean we talked about it.
COULTER: Yeah.
MAHER: We talked about it. We can talk.
HAYES: Well we talked we didn't send any troops or anything.
COULTER: Well ok we are flying bombs or something.
[Shock by Hayes and all other correspondents say no]
COULTER: We were threatening to [sic] why Mubarak left.
MAHER: No, no we never threatened. No, no.
COULTER: No I think we did.

Notice how her story keeps changing as reality keeps proving her false. Later in the clip (8:00):

COULTER: Well he called for Mubarak to leave.
HAYES: That's not the same as bombing!
COULTER: It's threatening to bomb!
HAYES: That's completely different things!
COULTER: Is Mubarak gone? Did [Obama] take action for regime change?
[...]
COULTER: Manifestly it was being backed up by the threat to bomb.

Watch how the reality (Secretary of State Clinton and President Obama asking for the leave of Mubarak and the end of violence in Egypt) was translated to a disturbing fantasy (full scale military intervention in Egypt equal to Libya). The fact is that the Right has no qualms of spreading such myths and at times even appears to actually believe them. Our only hope is for people like Bill Maher and Christopher Hayes to nip these lies in the bud, lest they blossom to full newscycles, like say the Austerity-Economic Growth fallacy.

[HBO via Medialite]

The Biases of an Arugula Eater or Why Not To So Indiscriminately Cut Spending

While I usually focus on international political issues, this recent newscycle and national joke of a discussion has me particularly worried. Not a day passes when I open my Google Reader and then do not wish to throw my laptop out the window, because of some pundit who argues that national debt is somehow the cause of our unemployment problem.

Now why in particular does this offend me so much, besides its laughable premise? (I will show you how dumb this is in a second) Because the implications of an aggressive contractionary fiscal policy has clear negative effects on my personal life. This is a bias that I find only fair my readers should know. I am a college student from a middle class family. The repealing the Bush era tax cuts for the exceptionally wealthy has no negative effects for me, so I have no qualms with such a decision in budget balancing. However I, along with many others at my juncture in life, have much to lose by a hack and slash approach to budget reduction.

Right now I am working as a research assistant in a medical lab. My mentor got the money to hire me through a National Science Foundation grant. The grant to start our next major project is currently under review by the National Institutes of Health. I can afford my college education only through financial aid and relying on federal subsidized student loans, because Congress already removed the Pell Grants that used to help me. I can only afford graduate education through scholarships financed by the NIH and NSF. So yes, my future is entirely at the mercy of the hands of the Boehner/Cantor/Ryan House.

And there are millions upon millions of others who need vital government services in order to survive. Medicaid had 62 million enrollees in 2008 according to the Congressional Budget Office (you know, that infamous liberal nonpartisan accounting agency put under Nixon). That number has only increased with the continuing Great Recession. Similarly, there are 45 million in Medicare and the baby boomers are just beginning to retire. I am not suggesting that we should not reform these agencies. We should, eventually and not through gutting the entirety of the Great Society.

The worst part of this debate is that it is being played at the basest of human emotions. From Ryan's voucher for Medicare proposal, to Cantor's we must defend the rich's right to tax cuts, and Coburn's vitriol for the sciences, we are engaging in a nonsensical dialogue with a blatant disregard towards history. To take the cake is the fact that both sides, the President and the GOP House, have agreed that this discussion should be framed that National Debt ruins confidence. The academics sit in shock at the inanity and FDR and Keynes roll in their graves as Hoover slowly rises from the grave.

From our esteemed President on October 22, 1928,

"The Democratic administration cooperated with the Republican Party to demobilize many of her activities and the Republican Party from the beginning of its period of power resolutely turned its face away from these ideas and these war practices, back to our fundamental conception of the state and the rights and responsibilities of the individual. Thereby it restored confidence and hope in the American people, it freed and stimulated enterprise, it restored the Government to its position as an umpire instead of a player in the economic game. For these reasons the American people have gone forward in progress while the rest of the world is halting and some countries have even gone backwards. If anyone will study the causes which retarded recuperation of Europe, he will find much of it due to the stifling of private initiative on one hand, and overloading of the Government with business on the other."

Almost exactly a year later on Black Thursday the world saw the greatest economic catastrophe in history. And the sacred confidence of industry and enterprise was not restored by the government trying to keep the international house in fiscal order. It was not until 4 years later with a new administration that our nation would recover.

And so my friends who are still here, let me reward you with a picture of what the aftermath of the New Deal was:

(Click to Enlarge)

I feel almost dirty presenting this as evidence in the confidence fairy (credit to Krugman) discussion. Because, it shows two relatively independent variables in economics vary independently. The orange is percent unemployment from 1950-1999. The blue is the national debt in 2011 dollars using the Consumer Price Index to account for inflation. As for Tea Partiers, please note your Messiah Reagan was the first to break $3 trillion... and $4 trillion.... and $5 trillion. In fact from 1950-1980 we hardly changed our debt and by the end our unemployment skyrocketed. Once Reagan finally started heavy spending, unemployment began to drop. Just in time for his 1984 re-election. Seeing Keynesian Economics worked out from 1982-84, he continued it till the end of his term and unemployment almost dropped down to 5%.

Sadly, this kind of analysis and reasoning has no place in our discussion. Since I can't speak the doublespeak that our politicians use I fear this graph means nothing to the 24/7 media monstrosities. But for those of you who can read graphs and understand numbers, let this be something to think about. I'll let you decide what the urgency of debt reduction is in our economy.

Note: Here is a link to the Excel sheet that has all this data. The CPI data comes from the Bureau of Labor Statistics CPI Calculator, the National Debt data comes from the Treasury, and the Unemployment Data is from the Misery Index which aggregates data from the Bureau of Labor.

Spinach Isn't Bad Either

As a child I never understood people's abject hatred towards spinach. It was a lovely green vegetable filled with a plethora of health properties and a distinctive taste. This most likely stemmed from my Iranian upbringing; spinach is oddly enough a staple of Persian cuisine where it in a combination stew of meat, herbs, and legumes as a common meal. Fast forward a decade and a half and imagine my happy surprise when I learned of a certain eatery named Subway offering it upon their sandwiches. I was delighted. And that brings us to earlier today, as I sat at work, eating a tuna sub with spinach amongst other things on it.

It was then, after much debate and deliberation, that I came to the conclusion that this blog should not die. Let's back up for a second. This blog effectively died upon my entrance into college after being born for mere months. And as every terrible father should, I was ashamed about it. I also realized that I did wish to continue writing. For a short period of time, I wrote for a tech blog but to call what I did as publishing “articles” or even “posts” is a horrible lie. Instead the editor had me write 150 word blurbs on the specs of every mediocre notebook and netbook that had a press release. Writing on other matters was discouraged, because apparently discussing the Great Firewall of China does not earn as much ad money as listing permutations in processor speeds of the new 13” and 15” MSI Wind laptops.

So what is a bored college student to do? I suppose go on Facebook and stalk his friends or look up funny pictures on Reddit and 9Gag. I resist falling so low, so instead I wondered about starting a new writing venture. I looked at Wordpress and Tumblr, both enticing options, but in the end I felt dirty making what would actually have been the fourth blog I have helped author. (Don't bother looking for the first, it has long been banished to the deep recesses of Blogger's abyss) Also, after the Red Rebellion of 2010 (I find it ironic that the Tea Partiers are the same color as those Bolsheviks that they constantly fear), I realized that the world needs an Arugula Eater more than ever. And after speaking to my compatriots in cyberspace, I have decided to take up the mantle once again.

Fear not my fellow brethren of the Interwebs. I shall descend into the Chasm of Crazy and enter their Fortress of Silliness. Trolls in the form of the press, pundit, and politician should best fact check their statements, because such foolish foolishness shall not be tolerated by me. I am the one, the only, the true Arugula Eater. And I have returned.