Hoystory

Jul

21st Century Alchemy

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Categories: Democrats and Economics

As I was running an errand earlier today, I was listening to a local talk show host interview my congresswoman, Lois Capps. It was the typical softball interview you expect from a small-town talk show host. But there was one statement made by Capps that I’d heard peddled before, but I couldn’t believe anyone other than Nancy Pelosi would utter it.

Capps said that unemployment insurance is “one of the most stimulative things you can do” and that for every dollar paid out in unemployment insurance $1.63 in economic activity occurs.

The basis of this claim appears to come from Mark Zandi, the chief economist at Moody’s. Zandi apparently gets this number by putting the $1 in a model and $1.63 comes out the other end. It’s magic! (I got this weird shiver when I thought about what would happen if you crossed Zandi’s model with the anthropogenic global warming models, but that’s a different story.)

On the other end of the spectrum you’ve got economist Robert J. Barro who believes the multiplier for the economic effects of unemployment insurance is not 1.63, but 0.80. (Actually, Barro thinks the multiplier is no higher than 0.80.)

But let’s set all of the economists and their models aside for a second and use what I like to call “common sense.” (Which is increasingly uncommon.)

The government gives $1 to an unemployed worker. He spends it and the “trickle-down” effect of that is $1.63 in the economy.

What is the effect of $1 I earn myself and spend on the economy? Is it less than $1.63?

It obviously can’t be. If the economic multiplier of my earned $1 is less than $1.63, then the government should just take all my money [don’t give them any ideas – ed.] and then give it back to me as a transfer payment and voila, it’s now 163% more economically effective than it was before.

Of course, there’s also the reductio ad absurdum argument – the economy would really boom if everyone lost their job and went on unemployment.

And let’s not even get into how a dollar taxed from me (or borrowed from the Chinese) somehow passes through all those levels of bureaucracy and comes out the other end worth more.

The right, wrong, or necessity of extending unemployment benefits to two years is beside the point here. As someone who’s actually cashed an unemployment check in the past year, I think that there’s certainly a place for a safety net of some kind. The issue here is whether unemployment insurance is a positive multiplier on the economy.

It isn’t. The fact that anyone thinks it is befuddles me. And I wouldn’t trust Mark Zandi with one red cent.

Jul

Shirley Sherrod to sue

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Categories: Democrats, Media and Racism

Shirley Sherrod, who was reflexively fired by the USDA a week or so back has announced she intends to sue Andrew Breitbart.

No lawyer with half a brain – or working on a contingency basis – will take the case.

Why?

Well, a week later Chris Matthews figures it out.

The Newsbusters transcript:

CHRIS MATTHEWS: Well, there you go. "I opened my eyes. I realized it wasn’t about black and white. It was, but it was about other things, about poverty." So, Joan, that part, that part in there about redemptive revelation was actually in the initial tape.

JOAN WALSH, SALON: Chris, that little snippet was. But it ends with, "I took him to one of his own." What she goes on to say is one of his own didn’t help him. He came back to her. She wound up helping him. She saved his farm. And then she goes on to tell this story, which is a story that I’ve told and to some extent Governor Dean has told it, too, about the way black and white people in the south were pitted against each other and they were always taught to fight one another when they really had more in common. She goes on to say repeatedly it’s about poverty. It’s about haves versus have-nots.

MATTHEWS: Yeah, but why do you think if this was a complete slime job, why do you think Breitbart kept that in there, Governor? Why did he keep in that part – let me let the Governor in here. Why did he put the redemptive part in here at all?

Dean’s response is typical and repetitive of what happened when he appeared on “Fox News Sunday.” He doesn’t know the facts, he doesn’t know what he’s talking about and he’s not a responsible or credible individual.

Jul

Deepak Chopra’s charlatanism

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Categories: Idiots

When your main claim to fame is meaningless platitudes, you’re going to get caught occasionally.

Jul

Rewriting history

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Categories: Media and Politics

A couple of things jumped out at me recently as I’ve been reading some of how the purportedly mainstream media is covering the Journo-List and Tea Party “Racism” issues.

First, the Journo-List, from Politico’s Roger Simon:

Recently, however, the conservative website The Daily Caller, run by Tucker Carlson, got hold of many Journolist e-mails and printed the most provocative, which to some gave every appearance of a left-wing conspiracy to slant news coverage in favor of Barack Obama. Journolist posts by Washington Post blogger Dave Weigel, who was helping cover the conservative movement, that were critical of conservative icons, including Matt Drudge, prompted Weigel to resign.

What were the “critical” comments? A wish that Drudge would set himself on fire and that Rush Limbaugh’s heart would fail. Are those really high-minded, critical comments? They certainly aren’t substantive criticism. If they had been substantive, then Weigel would still be writing for the Post. Conservatives criticize each other all the time, and that’s never been a firing offense.

I hate to accuse Simon of trying to smooth over inconvenient facts [no, you don't -- ed.], but would Simon have referred to former Sen. George Allen’s “macaca” moment as a merely a criticism of overzealous campaign workers? Describing Weigel’s hateful personal attacks as mere “criticism” is dishonest. Simon knows better.

Second, and perhaps more destructive is this non-correction correction from The New York Times:

The Political Times column last Sunday, about a generational divide over racial attitudes, erroneously linked one example of a racially charged statement to the Tea Party movement. While Tea Party supporters have been connected to a number of such statements, there is no evidence that epithets reportedly directed in March at Representative John Lewis, Democrat of Georgia, outside the Capitol, came from Tea Party members.

This is a vicious sleight of hand. There’s no evidence that racial epithets were yelled at Rep. John Lewis outside the Capitol by anyone. The Times falsely levels a smear at the Tea Party in the story, and then changes it to a smear by insinuation in the “correction.”

Journalism. Wound. Self-inflicted.

Jul

Invoking the mercy rule

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Categories: Politics

Don’t bring a knife to a gun fight.

Don’t engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed man.

If you’re Chris Matthews, don’t try to better Rep. Paul Ryan – you’ll lose.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Click over to Newsbusters for the transcript.

Jul

Absolute moral authority

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Categories: Media and Racism

Heard anything about Cindy Sheehan lately? Wonder why?

The last person to have “absolute moral authority” (AMA) granted to her by the mainstream media, Sheehan is no longer a useful tool now that the target of her ire would be a Democratic president.

Sunday, on CNN’s “Reliable Sources,” Salon.com (does anyone actually read that site?) editor-in-chief Joan Walsh bestowed AMA on Shirley Sherrod, the speaker at an NAACP event who was fired by the Obama administration over the fear that she might become a regular staple of the Fox News Channel.

Walsh (who is now claiming she didn’t say what she really did say) said that Sherrod can say whatever she likes because her father was murdered by a white man who was never charged in the Jim Crow South.

JOAN WALSH, EDITOR-IN-CHIEF, SALON.COM: The woman’s father was murdered by a white farmer, and there were witnesses. And the white justice system never found the murderer guilty. She’s entitled to talk about race any way she wants to. That’s not giving her a pass. Yes, any way she wants to. A bad experience in your background? I’m talking about murder. Murder, Matt. And the fact of the matter is, the woman turned out to be the antithesis of Andrew Breitbart, who told a story of racial reconciliation and healing and forgiving white people, and going on to help white people and going on to — the issue in this country — is class as much as race. I’m not giving her a pass. But I think the idea that she shouldn’t be able to say Fox or Breitbart is racist preposterous. She gets to say that because it’s true, and because from her vantage point it’s especially true.

Walsh is less of a journalist than even Breitbart purports to be – and Breitbart doesn’t purport to do journalism. Beware if Walsh ever decides that Spencer “who cares – call them racists” Ackerman should have AMA because he was picked last to play soccer on the playground as a child.

For the record: Having listened to Sherrod’s entire speech, I still think she’s a class warrior and a based on the charges she’s since hurled at Andrew Breitbart – specifically her outlandish claim that he wants blacks to be slaves again – that Breitbart’s original charge turned out to be more accurate than the original, truncated video would lead one to believe. During the original video, Sherrod also claimed that the right opposes Obama because he’s black – a typical, but dishonest and unwarranted portrayal of the race card. The right opposes Obama’s policies because of his policies, not because of his skin color.

Jul

The Climategate debate

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Categories: Environment and Media

Britain’s Guardian newspaper held a debate a couple weeks back over the Climategate scandal. The panel featured Steve McIntyre, proprietor of ClimateAudit.org and debunker of the infamous hockey stick graph. You can find a brief summary of the debate here.

The audio of the entire debate is here at the Guardian site and certainly worth listening to.

I got a chance to listen to the audio as I was doing some other stuff and it was largely predictable. However, there was one point late in the debate when one of the global warming alarmists made the shocking claim – and I’m paraphrasing here – that the reason why Venus is hotter than the Earth and Mars is cooler is the relative amount of CO2 in their atmospheres.

Seriously.

He told the crowd that Venus has too much CO2 and is very hot. Mars has practically none and is freezing cold. The Earth has just about the right amount.

The inconvenient fact that these three planets are varying distances from a HUGE BALL OF BURNING GAS CALLED THE SUN never entered into his analysis.

And he never addressed the fact that, despite the utter lack of any humans to cause global warming on Mars, that that planet has been getting hotter with virtually no CO2 in its atmosphere.

But we need to destroy the global economy – especially damaging to the world’s poor – immediately to stop the Earth from warming. And these people wonder why they’re losing the debate with the public.

Jul

Howard Kurtz: Spectacularly dishonest

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Categories: Economics and Immigration

As a follow up on the post immediately below this one, Washington Post media writer Howard Kurtz takes on the Journo-list scandal and includes this line:

But there is no getting around the fact that some of these messages, culled from the members-only discussion group Journolist, are embarrassing. They show liberal commentators appearing to cooperate in an effort to hammer out the shrewdest talking points against the Republicans — including, in one case, a suggestion for accusing random conservatives of being racist.

According to the Media Matters standard, Howard Kurtz is spectacularly dishonest.

Or, Jamison Foser is still a blithering idiot.

On a related note: Spencer “Steaming Pile of Excrement” Ackerman, as quoted in several Journo-list e-mails, seems to have some fetish for thrusting his foes through plate glass windows.

I really do hope that Ackerman is 6’5”, 235 lbs. and built like a NFL linebacker. Otherwise he’s little more than an Internet cliché and a guy whose mouth (or computer keyboard) writes checks his body can’t cash.

Jul

The biggest moron in the world

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Categories: Democrats, Idiots, Media and Racism

I must confess that I haven’t spent enough time writing about the Journo-list and the downfall of Washington Post “conservative” blogger Dave Weigel and today’s Daily Caller article on an effort by members of the Journo-list in 2008 to brand conservatives interested in the controversy over President Obama’s former pastor Rev. Jeremiah Wright as racists.

But amid all of that, I did want to point out that the biggest moron in the world is Media Matters’ Jamison Foser.

Foser has been hit with a stupid stick so many times his brains have apparently fallen out, been squished underfoot and put back in in some jumbled mess.

There are a wide variety rocks that are smarter than Foser.

From the Daily Caller article, quoting Spencer Ackerman, a vile leftist of the Washington Independent (who should, but won’t, be hounded out of journalism and politics for suggesting evil, baseless slanders of his political foes):

I do not endorse a Popular Front, nor do I think you need to. It’s not necessary to jump to Wright-qua-Wright’s defense. What is necessary is to raise the cost on the right of going after the left. In other words, find a rightwinger’s [sic] and smash it through a plate-glass window. Take a snapshot of the bleeding mess and send it out in a Christmas card to let the right know that it needs to live in a state of constant fear. Obviously I mean this rhetorically.

And I think this threads the needle. If the right forces us all to either defend Wright or tear him down, no matter what we choose, we lose the game they’ve put upon us. Instead, take one of them — Fred Barnes, Karl Rove, who cares — and call them racists. Ask: why do they have such a deep-seated problem with a black politician who unites the country? What lurks behind those problems? This makes *them* sputter with rage, which in turn leads to overreaction and self-destruction.

Mary Katharine Ham highlights this quote and writes:

What better to paper over the cynicism and contradictions of the Democrats’ candidate than some good, old-fashioned, crude shouts of "racist"? To their credit, several JournoList contributors suggested Ackerman’s line of attack was not wise precisely because it contradicted so clearly Obama’s message of healing. It was more of a strategic disagreement than a disagreement on the merits of the racism charge, but it’s something…

…

Liberals do it because it works. In a standard that works rather conveniently for liberals, and has been embraced by much of the media during the post-Obama Tea Party era, white conservatives and their allies are considered racists for merely being white conservatives. No video evidence is necessary to condemn, and no number of repuditations [sic] is sufficient to clear conservatives of this taint.

It’s at this point the drooling moron Foser comes in and alleges dishonesty on Ham’s part.

Ham, in other words, portrays Ackerman as having argued for baseless allegations of racism against conservatives he knows aren’t racist. But in order to do so, she had to omit a key part of the Daily Caller article, which acknowledged: “Ackerman did allow there were some Republicans who weren’t racists. ‘We’ll know who doesn’t deserve this treatment — Ross Douthat, for instance — but the others need to get it.’”

So, according to the Daily Caller article Ham cites, Ackerman explicitly said that conservatives who don’t deserve to be called racists shouldn’t be called racists. But Ham omitted that fact from her post, and instead portrayed Ackerman as having advocated the “cynical political ploy” of baselessly accusing non-racists of racism.

Again: Spectacularly dishonest. [emphasis in original]

The “key part” of the Daily Caller article isn’t exculpatory, and if Foser had 1/1,000th of a brain he’d understand that. Ackerman’s acknowledgement that “some Republicans aren’t racists” is a sop to reasonableness and reality. Ackerman’s willingness to give a clean bill of health to Ross Douthat is like me pointing out that New York Times columnist Nick Kristof occasionally writes some good articles.

No serious individual (which of course exempts the entire Media Matters organization) believes that Fred Barnes or Karl Rove are racists. Ackerman suggested that Journo-listers slander Rove, Barnes and other Obama opponents as racists willy-nilly – hence the addendum of “who cares” to the list of potential victims. The resort to “who cares” isn’t a high-minded call to identifying racists and calling them out – it’s a call for using a scatter gun of slurs.

Ninety-eight percent of Media Matters’ output is garbage, but usually it’s tenuously connected to some sort of reflection of the real world. Foser’s analysis would be funny it weren’t so lame and if the charge of “racism” still didn’t carry such a stigma in today’s society.

Jul

What gerrymandering wrought

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Categories: Democrats and Idiots

The worst thing about gerrymandering is that you get districts created that are weighted in such an incredibly partisan fashion that blithering idiots can be re-elected time and time again.

This week’s evidence, Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, who by the way has a degree in political science from Yale.