Tag Archives: Politics

nature.com: Conservatives Into Liberals?

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In “Magic trick transforms conservatives into liberals,” Brian Owens in Nature magazine reviews a diabolical Swedish study that suggests many of us aren’t as politically hidebound as our friends in the opposite political party are so apt to charge. The study showed survey respondents could be tricked into changing conservative positions into liberal ones, and vice-versa.

On the other hand, what I also get out of this is, if we can be that manipulable,  many of us might not always have the foggiest why we hold the political beliefs we do, despite what we may think.

 

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Happy Fiscal Cliff New Year

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Happy New Year. It’s a bit early to pat ourselves on the back for the midnight Senate compromise bill. We have yet to reckon with the real hurdle, Boehner’s House.

The American people are deeply divided along party lines on fiscal priorities. No president is going to “negotiate” these differences away. Like the market collapse after the 2008 meltdown, no one knows how seriously the world economy would have been impacted if the US had simply defaulted to the recession option.  It is arrogant to say that Obama “caved,” because it’s arrogant to elevate the “winning” mantra over fiscal responsibility.

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Piers Morgan Deportation Petition

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As most of you’d have read by now, there’s a small movement promoting a petition at whitehouse.gov to punish CNN commentator Piers Morgan for his caustic comments against the NRA’s Wayne LaPierre in wake of the awful Sandy Hook tragedy. They’re petitioning to deport Morgan, a British citizen, despite the fact that in the United States we have not only a Second Amendment, but the First. I posted my somewhat tongue in cheek quip below to the Huffington Post:

How about deporting Wayne LaPierre to the Congo where he could lead his child soldiers in the glorious revolution against brains?”

But I was bested by another reader:

Has not the Congo suffered enough?”

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The Economy and The Dam

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CATASTROPHE: To the right of the steep Interstate 5 grade that takes us out of the Los Angeles basin and over the Sierra Pelona Mountains of northwestern Los Angeles County, toward Gorman Pass, looms a massive concrete and earthen dam high above the freeway. When traffic slows up the grade, I often get the creeps pondering the fact we are all sitting ducks here. If this dam forming Castaic Lake were ever to burst, there is no place to turn around and flee, no place to go, and we and everything around and below us would all be swept away by a wall of water nearly 200 feet high. Of course the communities below would be wiped out.

They would build a new dam, and they would wait for it to fill up.

But as it turns out, this already happened before.

In 1928, one year before the 1929 Great Depression, the old St. Francis Dam failed catastrophically, killing 600 people in the flood.

When an economy breaks completely as it did in 2008, there are only a few things the government can do to stimulate demand, promote hiring, and get businesses going again. It is a slow process. And most of those things are against the political philosophy of half of the country, anyway. Like that new dam filling with water, there is just so much engineers and hydrologists can do to increase the flow of the water that fills the dam. You can dredge the feeder creek.  You can try to remove obstacles to smooth water flow. There’s no magic wand to boost the flow of water that gradually refills the dam. Most of it is up to processes that occur naturally. An economy works the same way.

But you can bet the folks in the wealthy homes high above the dam were anxious to see their Lake Castaic Reservoir refilled. “Make the river flow faster!” they’d have shouted. “Make it rain!” And they’d vote for the magician who promises he can wave his magic wand and make all that unpleasantness go away.

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Why Undecided Youth Should Vote Democratic in 2012

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Maybe you’re thinking neither political party has a handle on the economy. Maybe you’re mad at Team Obama because he couldn’t reach out across a bipartisan aisle like he thought he could. Maybe you’re thinking you won’t even vote in the 2012 election.

Well, the GOP’s “social conservative” plank should be the deal breaker for you.

If you’re from a poor or middle income family, or you’re an ethnic or cultural minority, or a woman, or gay, you’re a target. If your civil rights are eroded or actually taken away by legislative fiat, you lose full civil equality. You lose your standing as a fully equal citizen to debate and argue the national issues, including both the economy, and your own right to have a fully enfranchised say in it.

No matter who you are, or what your background and upbringing was, maybe you just think it’s time we work together to put the “all” back in “all men are created equal.”

“Social conservatism” is, among other things, a cancerous code word for anti-gay, anti-women, anti-minority, anti-Islam and even anti-Semite.

Most Republicans don’t fit that description, and many are as nice as any other folks you’d hope to meet. Right now, though, if you vote Republican, you’re stuck with the “social conservatism” baggage a cult minority has imposed on the much bigger GOP.

As Chris Rock said, “If you vote against Obama because he can’t get anything done, it’s kind of like saying ‘This guy can’t cure cancer. I’m gonna vote for cancer.”

You can register for any political party you want, but vote for Obama so we can get on with the business of fixing our country.

_____

If you liked this message, please feel free to email it to your friends, or post it to Facebook or other social media. Alex Forbes Sept 2012.

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Milton Friedman Then and Now

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Here’s a comment I posted to Huffington Post, commemorating the 100th anniversary of the birth of economist Milton Friedman …

The Chicago School of Economics was always conservative. More than any other economist, Milton Friedman made it synonymous with ultraconservative. Friedman was a brilliant advocate of free-market economics, but he was no ideologue. With elimination of controls, laissez-faire thinkers like Friedman (and Greenspan) envisioned increased competition, a healthy business and social environment, more jobs, a higher standard of living, and lower prices. That was the theory.

What we got was “too big to fail” mega-mergers, corrupt business practice, decreased competition, layoffs and mortgage defaults, a thrust-fault slippage of the standard of living, higher prices, and the biggest global economic catastrophe since 1929. As a consolation prize, we got Citizens United to remind us what a monumental achievement this was.

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Quote of the Day

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“If you’re not sure about wanting to support Mitt Romney, whether you’re liberal or very conservative, you ought to be excited, because he’s been on your side at one time or another.”

– Rep Louis Gohmert, R-TX

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Who’s To Blame?

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Mini-ed (from my recent Huffington Post comment):

The collapse was a two-decade bipartisan collaborative effort in partnership with private enterprise. The root of the collapse of the economy and average family wealth also goes, causally but perhaps coincidentally, back to 1992, the year to which family net worth was reset. That was also the year the real estate bubble really started to take off. We all said, “this can’t last.” Remember?

On paper, homeowners were worth more. Republicans and Democrats alike clapped and cheered. Relaxed and ultimately crazy lending requirements fueled a genuine American Tulip Mania. The whole economy became dependent on future growth for today’s prosperity. ARM’s, derivative speculation and toxic assets were the icing on the cake.

The $1.3 trillion war debt would certainly have helped our recovery effort. Once again, a divided America supported that effort on both sides of the aisle.

It’s time to stop the finger-pointing, roll up our shirtsleeves, and work together to fix this thing. That may require political compromise, something we used to be good at. The only thing that’s stopping us is ourselves.

 

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Top GOP Pollster to GOP: Reverse On Gay Issues

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Excerpt from the remarkable article (with embedded documentation) by Andrew Sullivan at The Daily Beast:

Below is a remarkable document. It’s a memo circulated by Jan van Lohuizen, a highly respected Republican pollster, (he polled for George W. Bush in 2004), to various leading Republican operatives, candidates and insiders. It’s on the fast-shifting poll data on marriage equality and gay rights in general, and how that should affect Republican policy and language. And the pollster’s conclusion is clear: if the GOP keeps up its current rhetoric and positions on gays and lesbians, it is in danger of marginalizing itself to irrelevance or worse.

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Michael D. Higgins Video

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Must-see. Michael D. Higgins is the President of Ireland. His comments on the United States political climate, respect for President Obama, and criticism of Tea Party dialectic is better than anything I ever heard in the United States. Invigorating, humorous at times, and devastatingly to the point. Embedded YouTube video.

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Anonymous Paid Political Advertising

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Bill Moyers did a wonderful job of illuminating “Who Pays for Political Ads?” Following this conversation on Huffington Post, I found that I had some observations of my own.

I saw reader comments that we have NO right to know who sponsors anonymous paid political advertising — the PINK SLIME of the advertising industry. The laws of slander still apply to us, but they don’t apply to the anonymous wealthy who corrupt the electoral process.

So it is argued that we who don’t like anonymous paid political ads are free to ignore them, and people who DO like them are free to waive their right to due diligence on the source and veracity of the content. It’s argued there certainly is a protected “right” to anonymously buy the spread of smear and slander. Who can spell PROPAGANDA?

When we think about it, propaganda can be used to manipulate opinion by either side of an issue, but a civilian population has at least a theoretical means of independently verifying or debunking it. It’s quite rational and legitimate to consider the credibility of the source in evaluating things we are told. Anonymous paid political ads take this off the table, because we no longer have a way to determine the source of the information, let alone the methods used to gather or manufacture it.

Anonymity may be vital to the success of a totalitarian state, for both perpetrators and victims, but anonymous and unverifiable political defamation is subversive of a democracy. Stand up to the perpetrators!

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Schrödinger’s Cat, 2012

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The New York Times had an amusing op-ed piece “A Quantum Theory of Mitt Romney,” by David Javerbaum. Mitt Romney is compared under several different tenets of Quantum Physics, in which Romney can simultaneously be both a moderate and a conservative, or, in the Feynman diagram, in which a Romney and anti-Romney collide and annihilate each other.

I was quite surprised the author didn’t also nail down the famously skeptical Schrödinger’s Cat thought experiment, in which we are asked to ponder a celebrated cat that might indeed be either dead or alive, depending on the outcome of a random event.

Wikipedia notes that “Schrödinger did not wish to promote the idea of dead-and-alive cats as a serious possibility,” but, more than 75 years later, the evidence is now tangible, dragged in not by the cat, but by politicians.

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