filed under: trust, but verify

OK, so you don't want to go crazy on every little issue with worrying about who is saying what about whom and for what reasons.  Who has the time to check everything?  Right?  Still it is important to do just a little research because if you accept everything at face value then who knows what you are being fed?

Here is a quick example.

I read a little piece by Steve Kornacki in Salon that laid out plans for how Obama can defeat the Republicans (link).  Nothing earth-shattering in that.  And probably likely to happen, I think.  When it comes down to it, I just don't know that anyone running on the Republican side has enough appeal to win the middle and still hold on to the angry fire on the right.  It will be close, and it will depend on whether the economy stays down.  But I wouldn't bet the farm on Obama being a one-termer just yet.

Anyway...  Kornacki claims the House is standing in the way of Obama's jobs bill precisely to hold the economy down and increase their chances "even when there is wide agreement among economists that his proposals would add jobs and spur growth."  I might even agree on that.  At a minimum, the Republicans (and Democrats, too) seem unwilling to compromise, finding that sticking to their guns on "principles" is more likely to benefit them than a bad economy is likely to hurt them.  But the "wide agreement" thing caught my eye.  Really?

I clicked on the link to see what Kornacki took for "wide agreement" and the article listed only one economist, Moody's Mark Zandi.  Also, the article was from September 9, just shortly after Obama had given his speech before Congress -- before the policies had even been spelled out.  So how could there have been wide agreement by one single person before anyone even knew what was in the thing? Besides, Moody missed the housing and mortgage crisis and so anything they say at the moment is suspect to me.

So I googled Mark Zandi.  It just took ten seconds.  You can probably do it in five. I'm more easily distracted than you. 

Anyway, in the first several articles, I saw that Zandi had predicted in 2007 that the economy wouldn't grow much weaker, just before it went on its historical devastation tour.  Then in 2010, he predicted that the economy would be "off and running" by early 2011.  I don't know how it is in your neighborhood, but that hasn't happened happened in mine.

So the "wide agreement" that Kornacki cites is by one guy who has been wrong on some of the major job movements of the past several years, and that guy made his prediction before the bill was even produced.

So, do you see why it's important to ask the question every once in a while?  It only takes a second.

filed under: a picture is worth a thousand words

Slate recently published a little piece (link) about a Thomas Hoepker 9-11 picture that Frank Rich commented on... saying the "young people" in the photo weren't "necessarily callous."  The photo reads, when viewed one way, as a sign of the times.  New Yorkers sitting around under the sun, taking in the destruction in the background with almost a ho-hum where-shall-we-go-for-dinner attitude.  Except that Slate also found some of the people in the photo and allowed them to tell their story.  (link)

As it turns out, the people in the photo were talking about the events of the day in the way that you might have been, in the way that I was.  One of the subjects asks viewers to consider how a snapshot at a funeral can make mourners look as if they are attending a party.  The point, of course, is well taken.  How many times do we let those who wish to shape our opinions simply report the news to us without asking questions about how they are manipulating their stories?  See, for example, how CNN reporter Susan Roesgen chooses to present stories on the demonization of Bush and Obama (link).  One caricature is a "lookalike," the other is disrespectful.

With our current palavering pundit class, it is important always to ask what is behind the messages being produced.  Who is behind the information?  And don't simply take the image, or the interpretation of the image, at face value or without question.  Learn to see between the lines, even in your own thinking.  The next time you read something about global warming that is being espoused by some scientist or other, simply google that scientist's name. See what else he's been up to. Or listen to the way Rush Limbaugh dismisses those who call him with reasoned arguments against his opinions.  Or ask yourself why, if Mr. Obama has suddenly found the power to act on the economy without the Congress's involvement, he didn't find a way to do so before we headed into election season.

Learn to ask, that is, what is behind the picture.  In the thousand words that any picture represents, there are almost always two or three, or six or fifteen, different sides to the story.

filed under: don't go wobbly on me now, george

In the run up to the First Gulf War, Margaret Thatcher famously stiffened George Bush's spine by telling him not to go "wobbly" when he had a moment of indecision.  In a recent column in Slate, Beverly Gage wonders whether the OWS movement will have the stick-to-it-iveness to ride out the protests now that cold weather has come on (link).  She is heartened to find that, one cold storm in, the movement seems resolved to continue.  She then goes on to review the labor movement and draw lessons for OWS.

Like Gage, I hope the movement continues.  There is talk of a national forum in Philadelphia next year, a kind of second constitutional convention.  I hope it goes forward, and finds ways to meet on common ground with the Tea Party movement.  I believe there is plenty of room to begin such a conversation (link).  However, I hope the movement, while keeping its legs, also refrains from going Wobblie.  That is, I hope the movement does not become coopted into the Big Labor movement, as Gage seems to suggest between the lines.  If it does, it will become merely part of the Democrat party machinery, as the Tea Party has come dangerously close in recent days to becoming for the Republicans -- a kind of add-on that adds salt to the wound but does nothing to cure the disease.

Why do I say this?  Didn't labor help us avert the kind of nationalist crises that Europe underwent during the Great Depression?  Well, yes.  It did. But has the labor movement come to be coopted by partisan politics?  Well, of course.  And worse, labor has, through those same partisan connections, rigged the system in ways that are perhaps less lucrative but no less wrong than the injustices that OWS is protesting (link) (link).  And now, some union bosses are calling for OWS to become more "militant" (link) -- occupying bridges, banks, etc.  (One small question, by the way... in this quote, Mr. Gerard says that since the right wing nut jobs took over the House nothing has been accomplished.  I won't argue with that per se.  But he also says it has been a year and a half or two years since that happened.  Does he own a calendar?  By my count from mid-January to today is just about ten months.  Did Ed Schultz even ask about this or did he just hum in agreement, because they both know that they are "correct on the issues"?)

OWS should strive to keep itself free of those who want to march in its parades only in order to line their pockets and fund their re-elections and take credit for their anger.  Chris Hedges has the right idea  (link).  If the Tea Party and OWS allow themselves be sucked up into the parties that have been the driving forces (along with corporations) behind the problems they protest, they will ultimately show themselves no better than those hypocritical partisan players that weeble when they wobble... and we don't want that.  It's time to knock the bastards down.

filed under: move on

I have written several posts recently discussing Herman Cain's bid for the presidency.  His case interests me because it is one of those cases that come along once in a while in American politics that muddy the usual partisan waters.  Think Terry Schiavo or Monica Lewinsky.  Folks are trying to find a way to line up so that their glaring hypocrisies do not show and they can still get the outcome they desire.  In the case of Schiavo, liberals who argued that women have an unassailable right to decide what to do with their own bodies suddenly found themselves having to find a way to justify allowing a husband to pull the plug on his vegetative wife's life support so that they could get at the real nut, which was opposing the nuts who believe in the sanctity of life.  In the case of Lewinsky, it came down to conservatives who had spent the better part of a decade arguing that sexual harassment was a trumped up political wedge issue suddenly trying to use that wedge to bring down the Clinton Administration.  For better or worse, the liberals won both of those arguments.

Which brings us to Mr. Cain.  I will say here that I do not support Cain for President -- not because he is, as has been claimed by the pundit class class recently, an Uncle Tom, but because he seems to me to be the crazy uncle in the corner.  He simply doesn't make much sense.  He is incoherent.  And I don't think he is what we need right now.

That said, I am unwilling to live in a society where there is one set of rules for one class of people and another for everyone else.  So I would take a moment here to ask a very simple question:  Even if Mr. Cain was involved in a suit for sexual harassment in which his organization paid out, as has been reported, a $35,000 settlement to a woman who claimed he made her uncomfortable with his advances... so what?

Didn't Bill Clinton put the nail in this coffin once and for all?  Didn't the fact that he paid out $800,000 to Paula Jones in a settlement over the very same issue without ever for one moment, according to the left, losing his credibility and legitimacy as President, set a hard and fast rule that settling on a sexual harassment claim is not a preclusion to serving as President?

If you want to oppose Cain, oppose him, as I do, on policy grounds.  But sexual harassment?  Move on, America.  One is tempted to say... Move on dot org.

(See also here: link)

filed under: a distinction without a difference

I don't have to explain myself because what I say is self-evident. If you can't explain yourself, it means that you are stupid.

At 0.26 Toure says that sometimes having to explain himself and prove his point regarding racism is too much of a burden -- and, anyway, his point is self-evident. Then at 3:57 he argues that Herman Cain cannot explain his policies because he suffers from an anti-intellectualism that the right embraces.

Double standard much?