The Fallacy of False Equivalence

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I was reading a convoluted article in The Nation entitled ‘The Proud Liar Mitt Romney Claimed Today‘ when I came across the phrase ‘the time-honored MSM tactic of false equivalence.’

I never did figure out author Eric Alterman’s reference to ‘MSM.’ Clearly not Methylsulfonylmethane, probably not Manhattan School of Music, even more clearly not Men Who Have Sex With Men. Ironically, Alterman is profiled as ‘a Distinguished Professor of English, Brooklyn College, City University of New York, and Professor of Journalism at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism.”

But I did think I knew what the Fallacy of False Equivalence means. Or should mean … I looked it up too, of course. I fancy myself a student of rhetoric. I once even wrote a series of articles on rhetoric and persuasive writing. I found no really solid definition.

I think the fallacy of false equivalence is a modern composite re-invention of several older classical fallacies. It also seems to be endemic to political journalism. In my day we were trained to just call these non sequiturs (Latin, “doesn’t follow”).

The general structure of the false equivalence fallacy (and its variants) would have a structure similar to the following:

Deadly nightshade is a member of the potato family. Paprika and chili peppers are members of the same family. We must regard paprika and chili peppers as poisonous.

Or, one of the more family-friendly examples found in a blog by a gentleman named Wally who wrote a 2005 post called Generalized definition of ‘false equivalence’

I didn’t pay you back once when you lent me a dollar, you stole a dollar from my wallet, therefore we’re even.”

What statement actually got The Nation contributor Eric Alterman’s goat?

The most recent punditocracy kerfuffle involves Mitt Romney’s first paid presidential television advertisement. Ironically titled keep talking about the economy, we’re going to lose.” Deliberately left out of the ad were the preceding words: “Senator McCain’s campaign actually said, and I quote…”

I bring this topic up because we’re going to see a lot more real-life examples. For more information (and some examples that use cuss words) see the article The fallacy of false equivalence by Furry Brown Dog. He does an interesting analysis of the Bush v. Kerry campaign misuse of the Swift Boat furor, about which I happen to agree with the author: Bush’s stance boiled down to the claim Kerry’s Department of Defense documentation lied, whereas Bush’s anecdotal version was the contextually more accurate if you happened to be serious about voting Republican.

No, it’s not just Republicans. We need to watch election statements more critically, rather than blindly applauding anything which makes our side look better, no matter how egregious the misrepresentation. Non sequitur arguments are so embedded in the political culture that the discerning reader should have no trouble spotting them in either camp. But, as Guardian writer Michael Tomasky posts in his blog Can you play False Equivalency!?:

And no, people, I’m not saying liberals never do anything bad. I am saying (read slowly now): this. is. a. constant. habit. of. conservatives. in. a. way. it. is. not. quite. with. liberals.

BAD JOKE

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The joke below has lain dormant on my Humor page for well over a decade now. No one knows who wrote it. No one remembers who sent it. There’ve always been several things wrong with it.

1) It’s too close to the truth.
2) There are too many variants of the joke, all kludged together by others trying to get more mileage out of a self-evident fact.
3) These days it seems more appropriate than ever.

Boat Race

The Americans and the Japanese decided to engage in a boat race. Both Teams
practiced hard and long to reach their peak performance levels. On the big
day they felt ready. The Japanese won by a mile.

The American team was discouraged by the loss. Morale sagged. Corporate
management decided that the reason for the crushing defeat had to be found,
so a consulting firm was hired to investigate the problem and recommend
corrective action.

The consultant’s finding: The Japanese team had eight people rowing and one
person steering; the American team had one person rowing and eight people
steering.

After a year of study and millions spent analyzing the problem, the
consultant firm concluded that too many people were steering and not enough
were rowing on the American team.

So as race day neared again the following year, the American team’s
Management structure was completely reorganized. The new structure: four
steering managers, three area steering managers, and a new performance
review system for the person rowing the boat to provide work incentive.

The next year, the Japanese won by TWO miles!!!

Humiliated, the American corporation laid off the rower for poor performance
and gave the managers a bonus for discovering the problem.

Three Off-Focus News Items

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It’s not that we’d like to see these news headlines go away entirely. We’d just like to see them addressed appropriately.

PERRY: Rick Perry’s brain-freeze debate debacle even went viral on YouTube. In truth everybody has “senior moments” like forgetting a word we know we should know, or walking into a room and forgetting why we went there. Fortunately most of us don’t have an opportunity to forget one of our three pet political platforms in front of millions of TV viewers. Even Perry’s admission that “he stepped in it” is symptomatic of the problem here. I’m not a Perry fan and never will be, but Perry inarticulateness isn’t the reason.  If the GOP didn’t like the self-mortification of promoting embarrassing public speakers, it wouldn’t have backed Bush Jr. for two full terms. But if you want confirmation of how common this sort of brain freeze is, check out the interesting New York Times article on Rick Perry’s Brain Freeze.

CAIN: Charges of sexual harassment look bad for Herman Cain, but it’s far from clear whether Cain, his accusers or both sides have the credibility gap. I’ll wait until the facts are aired and sorted out. On a recent road trip I heard most of an LA talk show on this topic. All callers had already arm-chaired the scandal without benefit of the facts, which are still not known, and their “opinions” seemed to depend on whether or not they liked Cain. I don’t like Cain either, but whatever happened to due process and an impartial hearing?

PATERNO: Sacked Penn State coach Joe Paterno, 84, was accused of failing to act on molestation testimony against a formerly respected and long-serving coaching assistant, Jerry Sandusky. University President Graham Spanier was also just fired. Penn State students rioted against the loss of their coach, and presumably out of loyalty to their team. This misplaced at-any-cost “loyalty” is exactly what compounded the scandal in 2002 when college officials suppressed it. I think most of us would prefer to see a serious national inquiry into prevention of institutional child abuse and subsequent cover-up. As for Paterno and Spanier, it happened on their watch and they sandbagged it. The sackings were appropriate. Treating trusted college officials as the victims instead of the kids they betrayed is what’s offensively inappropriate.

‘Occupy Wall Street’ Protests

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BBC News

Looking at the mock US flag displayed by protesters on Wall Street (click thumbnail for BBC graphic), we can see a field of thirty corporate logos in place of the familiar fifty stars. Most of us could come up with a list of fifty “bad” companies, couldn’t we? I can identify most of the thirty: Nike, Coca Cola, AT&T, Wal-Mart, Lilly, GM, Citi, Apple, Google, Fox, Verizon, Warner Brothers, Exxon, Visa, McDonalds, Disney, Pepsi, Ford, NBC, Intel, Master Card, GE, and Microsoft.

In my own humble microcosm of Americana, I don’t find many of the companies I’d personally fancy seeing there. We can all recall consumer protests against Nike, Wal-Mart, Exxon, and McDonalds. But, “do no evil” Google? Apple? These choices leave me baffled. In some political circles there must still be plenty of antipathy for any large US corporation: sized-based discrimination is sometimes still politically correct.

On one score I do sympathize with these protestors’ frustrations. Wall Street screwed the entire country in the events leading up to the global crash of 2008. But it’s never as simple as that, is it? The collapse having been orchestrated with the full oversight and blessing of the SEC, Fed, Moody’s, S&P and most of the Bush Administration, targeting “Wall Street” isn’t precisely accurate. It was the “too big to fail” bankers themselves that provided the mighty engine for a catastrophic recession that went viral across the globe. What the hell were they thinking? Citi certainly deserves its place on the infamy list, but I feel the sterling reputations of Bank of America, Wells Fargo and many others were tarnished by omission.

As I wrote a friend the other day,

In Europe, countries like Greece ruined the banks, but in the US, the banks ruined the country!

In a somewhat personal aside, my best buddy’s dad was a VP in the “old” BofA (think green visor accountant types), and he is probably rolling over in his grave. None of us should be too surprised at the irresponsible greed of the usual Wall Street perps, but what the banks did was criminally insane.

Obama Says Texas Wildfires Linked to Climate Change

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PolitiFact analyzed President Obama’s September 26 comment at a fundraising event, in which he said, “I mean, has anybody been watching the debates lately? You’ve got a governor whose state is on fire denying climate change.”

If you’re not familiar with PolitiFact, you can check out political claims at PolitiFact.com the same way and for the same reason we check out viral online rumors at Snopes.com. If you have an interest in the subject matter you should read the full PolitiFact article. It’s a good read and not that dense.

I found PolitiFact did a good job on their in-depth analysis of the President’s remark, which some White House aides dismissed as a tongue in cheek wise crack. After all, Perry is on record of being a climate-change denier, even as his state was ravaged by some of the worst fires on record – 3.8 million acres, to be exact.

PolitiFact rated the Obama statement “Half-True.” Cutting to the chase, scientists do not think it is good science to attribute a single event to a long-range phenomenon:

However, climate-change experts have also long urged caution in assuming that particular weather events are caused or influenced by climate change.

Consider a June 2011 paper published by the Pew Center on Global Climate Change, an independent research organization. In the paper — titled “Extreme Weather and Climate Change Understanding the Link, Managing the Risk” — co-authors Daniel G. Huber and Jay Gulledge write that “when we ask whether climate change ‘caused’ a particular event, we pose a fundamentally unanswerable question.” In fact, they say it is “nonsense” to debate a direct climatological link between a single event and the long-term rise in the global average surface temperature.

The reason, Huber and Gulledge write, is the distinction between “climate” — a long-term pattern that averages many weather events over the years — and a particular weather event.

So we cannot say that any one specific forest fire, wildfire or hurricane is directly caused by climate change. What we CAN do is observe the long-range pattern of those events, and compare that to regional historical data. We can even say that increasing average temperatures may be expected to increase the incidence and severity of the events.

What no one can prove is that any one specific Texas fire was caused by global warming. Anyone can claim that it could have occurred anyway.

What they cannot say is that a long-range increasing trend in such events cannot be related to climate change. As long-range temperatures rise, average humidity goes down, long-range rainfall decreases, and any firefighter or forest ranger can guarantee us there will be more fires. Do the math.

Fine, but is there any evidence this incendiary uptrend is already occurring? The Pew study cited by PolitiFact addresses a fact of life already well known to residents of Texas, California, Arizona and New Mexico, for example:

“There is a well-documented link between the earlier start of spring, higher summer temperatures, and drier conditions during summer and fall — that is, climate change — and a dramatic increase in wildfire activity in the western U.S. since the late 1980s,” he said. “These observations reveal an increase in fire risk due to climate change.”

So climate-change deniers aren’t off the hook. Are there are other phenomenon which ARE directly related to climate change? Yes. Rising sea levels, for example, are already the cumulative global result of many individual events as snowpack, glaciers and icecaps melt in the mountains, on the fjords, and at Earth’s poles.

The Globally Disenfranchised Vote

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Arab Spring. US corporations who buy elections. Hanging chads and disproportionately disenfranchised minorities throwing presidential elections. The packing of the US Supreme Court. The congressional budget meltdown. Unsubstantiable personal attacks on TV driven by political parties and leaders gone completely out of control. Campaign charges you can’t believe even in those rare cases you’d like to. Nations of sheep who are manipulated and stampeded into predefined niches at the polling place. In our new Information Age, a deficit of trustworthy information and news resources.

According to many young, representing the arriving new generations, the whole election process has become so corrupt it can no longer be trusted to represent the people.

Here’s current New York Times reporting on the phenomenon, “As Scorn for Vote Grows, Protests Surge Around Globe” by Nicholas Kulish (September 27, 2011):

But from South Asia to the heartland of Europe and now even to Wall Street, these protesters share something else: wariness, even contempt, toward traditional politicians and the democratic political process they preside over.

They are taking to the streets, in part, because they have little faith in the ballot box.

‘Our parents are grateful because they’re voting,’ said Marta Solanas, 27, referring to older Spaniards’ decades spent under the Franco dictatorship. ‘We’re the first generation to say that voting is worthless.’

Economics have been one driving force, with growing income inequality, high unemployment and recession-driven cuts in social spending breeding widespread malaise. Alienation runs especially deep in Europe, with boycotts and strikes that, in London and Athens, erupted into violence.

But even in India and Israel, where growth remains robust, protesters say they so distrust their country’s political class and its pandering to established interest groups that they feel only an assault on the system itself can bring about real change. “

Democracy is always a flawed, messy, disorganized process, but if we don’t clean up the processes designed to serve it, we’ll end up with something infinitely worse.

Taking a Second Look at Social Security

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Recently Cousin Ron Lamont re-posted a Facebook “Like” quote by someone alleging that as early as 1967, liberal economists were calling Social Security a “Ponzi scheme.” This irritated me enough that I removed it with the “hide this post” tool. I’m still considering whether Facebook, a family-friendly safe space, is even the proper forum for hard-core political commentary and opinion.

So to be honest, It’s fair to say I started it all when I re-posted my personal website article “Social Security Not a Ponzi Scheme” on Facebook. Even though PolitiFact [1] rates Perry’s 2011 “Ponzi” statement as “False,” I’d have to rate the 1967 “Ponzi” allegation, far from being a “Pants On Fire” item, as “Half True.”

My cousin’s post was a fair turnaround. Now then, what’s the story about Social Security?

In 1967 Newsweek reportedly ran a column by noted liberal economist Paul Samuelson (of college Economics textbook fame). Samuelson in fact did compare Social Security to a Ponzi scheme [2]. This source cites numerous other early references to the same opinion, including the Wall Street Journal. The source notes that Samuelson was “actually drawing on the Ponzi analogy to defend Social Security”, a back-handed way for an academic to illustrate a point if ever I heard one. There’s a long history of groups that tried to pin Social Security to the mat before. You should read the PolitiFact assessment [1] of the whole issue.

In my first article I showed that Social Security is NOT a Ponzi scheme by definition, but an account that is actually but not physically held in each contributor’s name. Despite all the rhetoric about what Congress is doing or has done with those funds, the account is still due and payable according to the terms of the social contract. The obvious cause for concern is: how long will the Social Security trust fund remain solvent and be able to pay out on its obligations?

Over the years a major defense of Social Security has been that it is deemed “actuarially sound,” meaning that a statistical analysis of FICA and Employer Contributions, charting pay-in and pay-out amounts against actuarial table life expectancies shows that Social Security is paying its own way, or is at least solvent. Well, it probably would be solvent if its funds were securely invested at going interest rates like any other form of pension fund.

I recently read a cynical charge somewhere that when FDR and the New Deal Congress inaugurated Social Security in 1935, the actuarial life expectancy of the current generation of retirees was about three years. I couldn’t verify that. Social Security Online [3] presents a quite different accounting: “men attaining 65 in 1990 can expect to live for 15.3 years compared to 12.7 years for men attaining 65 back in 1940.” 1940 was the first year Americans could collect Social Security.

One study I can and did do is an analysis of my own SSI account. I started drawing on it at age 65 in 2009. Raw data includes all of my contributions from 1960 to 2009 (49 years), matching Employer contributions in like amounts, and even a withholding rate adjustment recalculation for a five-year period where I was mostly self-employed. Given the taxable income data posted to everyone’s annual SSA statements, and the withholding rate for each year [4], it is a simple matter to calculate annual withholding amounts without trying to locate 49 years of W2′s or Form 1040′s. My 49-year figures came within $186 of the government-reported withholdings. And I know exactly what my SSI income is.

I assumed those funds must be adjusted or amortized for the value of interest they should earn in any interest-bearing account, making no assumption about what the Congress and Treasury may actually be doing with our money. I chose a 5% APR. Some may object that the government doesn’t credit interest accruals to our account. I am calculating the value of the account, not just the portion allocated to us.

But what is the difference between the principal and principle plus accruals? My own contribution’s cash flow plus assumed accrual worked out to 148.47% of principal. (That’s so low because the early years contributed the least). I calculated what the future value [6] of each year’s total adjusted contribution would be by year 2009. Adding the sum of those payments plus interest equaled just under 12% of my lifetime earnings.

Obviously I won’t be publishing personal financial data out of privacy concerns, but you could run the same calculations on your own account using the source links I’ve provided in “References” below. If you do not yet have a retirement year and estimated SSI monthly income, use your SSA annual statements to make some assumptions. You need to know the effect of different retirement ages on SSI income anyway.

My own work experience may not be entirely representative. I probably worked somewhat longer than the average of all wage-earners. On the one hand, my wages include three years in the military, part-time income in college, and five years of exquisitely marginal self-employment income. On the other, I finally “capped out” on SSI contributions in my last years in the workforce. The difference is what those early years might have contributed to personal savings growth had my income curve been more even. That makes a big difference to my old age, but doesn’t materially affect the amount of my monthly social security payment.

We noted how low my wages were in those early years (even if adjusted for inflation, which we should not do here). My experience would be different from someone who went straight from college into a lifelong professional career. Those earners would “cap out” early, and the Social Security Administration fund would probably never “go into the red” for individuals least likely to depend on it. Conversely, my contributions would be proportionally greater than those of someone who, for example, left the workplace to raise a family, or on account of illness or disability. All I can conclude is that it sounds reasonable that a substantial proportion of the workforce probably survives to receive social security payments well in excess of that ever put into the fund. Perhaps people who complain that is not fair forget that’s the security benefit of a social security insurance plan. Private insurance plans of all types depend on the very same mathematical certainty of pooling of risk.

The reason we can’t add an inflation factor to our calculations is off-topic but worth examining. Savings and other interest-bearing accounts don’t take inflation into account either. There, a dollar is only a dollar whether deposited in 1960 or 2009. I ran the “Inflation Calculator” [5] on my yearly payments anyway, even though I could not fairly use them for my bottom-line calculations. It’s instructive to note that the same $36.13 worth of groceries in 1962 (my FICA contribution for that year) would cost $256.66 in 2009 dollars. Younger readers would not remember the late 1970′s, when so many of us consumed with plastic credit cards bearing an 18.99% APR, since we could more cheaply repay later with devalued dollars. It isn’t just the stodgy classic University of Chicago economic conservatives who call inflation the “hidden tax.” It is. Today we call it “Quantitative Easement.”

In my early years I argued that I would probably live to regret paying into the Social Security fund (as if I had a choice). My spreadsheet proves me wrong. Actuarially speaking, in my case, I should expect to get out of it almost exactly the value of what I put into it. The spreadsheet calculations revealed that my own account will hit “break-even” when I turn age 80.25, and my statistical life expectancy right now in 2011 is age 82.77 years.

Unfortunately, even considering my low-earning early years, the purchasing power of my Social Security “nest egg” would have been worth 91% more (almost double the real purchasing power) if we did not live in an inflation-addicted economy. Our “hidden tax” benefits the government in the short run, because it repays debt with cheaper dollars just like we did with the plastic 1970 credit cards. As you can see, in the long run inflation hurts all of us, including our government.

Unsurprisingly, conservatives and upper-income wage earners will argue that Social Security is inefficient and of limited value. Liberals, seniors and lower-income workers will argue that the vast majority of Americans need a safety net. Despite all the rhetoric on both sides, I’d like to know what is going to be done to save a program that has worked for generations of American retirees so far.

If Congress can’t or won’t fix the program we have now, it would be foolhardy to put our faith and trust in a poor substitute that takes the “insurance” out of Social Security insurance, or, even worse, in some scheme that’ll be shunted off to the same private sector that brought us toxic assets, job offshoring and an imperiled middle class. That’s just my opinion, but whether the polls prove that to be in the 51% majority or 49% minority, it can’t and won’t be ignored.

©Alex Forbes 2011

References

[1] PolitiFact, “Shacking up: Social Security & Ponzi schemes“
[2] Liberally Conservative, “Perry Wasn’t the First“
[3] Life Expectancy for Social Security, SSA
[4] Social Security Administration Trust Fund Data
[5] Bureau of Labor Statistics CPI Inflation Calculator
[6] Future Value: I couldn’t get the built-in Excel function to work properly in my spreadsheet. Just use the formula FV = PV ( 1 + i )^ t (see NetMBA Future Value) which, in the Excel cell, would look like this: =D5*1.05^G5 if cell D5 contains the principal and G5 contains the number of periods. 1.05 is the assumed interest factor compounded annually.

Social Security Not a Ponzi Scheme

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Many Americans were surprised to hear any frontrunner candidate for President, even Texas Gov. Rick Perry, say recently in the GOP candidate debates that Social Security is a Ponzi scheme. As quoted by the Washington Post on August 29, [1] Perry claimed:

It is a Ponzi scheme for these young people. The idea that they’re working and paying into Social Security today, that the current program is going to be there for them, is a lie,” Perry said. “It is a monstrous lie on this generation, and we can’t do that to them.”

It’s a lie only if and when Congress reneges on a solemn US government promise and obligation. Seniors who have paid into the Social Security fund all their working lives should be outraged. The young and those who are only beginning working careers might well find cause for alarm in those words. I believe we can set the record straight here while still bypassing 95% of the partisan rhetoric. The status of Social Security as a “Ponzi scheme” begins and ends with the intent of Congress.

Merriam-Webster defines ‘Ponzi scheme’ as:

an investment swindle in which some early investors are paid off with money put up by later ones in order to encourage more and bigger risks.

For more information on Ponzi scheme, see Wikipedia [2]. It is true that the money you’re depositing into your SSI account goes into the Social Security Trust Fund. It’s true that the money credited to “your account” goes not into the purchasing of equities to build a nest egg for your own eventual retirement, but to pay off obligations to the current generation of retirees. Just like most private pension funds, Social Security obligations pose a long and growing debt “tail” of outgo which is micro-managed by Congress in periodic fits of oversight.

According to OMB, the Office of Management and Budget as quoted in Wikipedia [3]:

These [Trust Fund] balances are available to finance future benefit payments and other Trust Fund expenditures – but only in a bookkeeping sense…. They do not consist of real economic assets that can be drawn down in the future to fund benefits. Instead, they are claims on the Treasury that, when redeemed, will have to be financed by raising taxes, borrowing from the public, or reducing benefits or other expenditures. The existence of large Trust Fund balances, therefore, does not, by itself, have any impact on the Government’s ability to pay benefits. (from FY 2000 Budget, Analytical Perspectives, p. 337)

The Wiki article quoted Dr. Alan Greenspan as saying: “The crucial question: Are they ultimate claims on real resources? And the answer is yes.”

The devil’s in the details. All the worrisome arguments about how those dollar bill notes paid to you out of the fund come from the current cycle of depositors, and are not “your” dollar bills, could equally well be applied to any checking or savings bank account you own. This out-of-context argument makes no sense. The thing to remember is that it’s YOUR account, and the source of the physical greenbacks is an irrelevant distraction. The obligation to make good on your account is indeed YOUR asset, and morally it should certainly not be subject to the discretion of Congress, any more than your bank can legally decide whether your savings withdrawals coincide with the bank’s current priorities.

It’s a well know fact that the Baby Boomers are putting a heavy strain on the Social Security system. We’ve known that was coming for half a century. As we face a looming cash flow problem with Social Security, I think Congress and not individual Americans deserve full blame and responsibility for that.

Personally, I was trained in classical laissez-faire economics, and I’m very conversant with all the theoretical arguments why Social Security was a mistake in the first place. They’re just another political case of “that may work in practice, but it won’t hold up in theory.”  In my twenties I resented Social Security bitterly. After a lifetime paying into the fund, and a lifetime observing corporate practice in the American workplace where I worked for over forty years, I saw I’d be a fool to trust any “privatized” solution. Neither am I amused when I hear my account dismissively called an “entitlement.”

Reasonable people will conclude that Social Security is NOT a Ponzi scheme because, among other things, it is NOT a get-rich investment scheme and, for better or for worse, the “real resources” backing the fund are United States Treasury bonds. One could, if one wished, even argue that Perry was really calling into question the full faith and credit of the United States government. After all, it was his party that shook world confidence in our national will to pay our just debts and obligations in the first place.

© Alex Forbes 2011

Further Reading

[1] Washington Post, “Perry’s Ponzi scheme rhetoric” by Jonathan Bernstein
[2] Wikipedia, Ponzi scheme
[3] Wikipedia, Social Security Trust Fund

The Tea Party on Hurricane Irene

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And finally, the party that has a political take on everything. Where is the Tea Party in the wake of Hurricane Irene?

Well, in the St. Petersburg Times article “Michele Bachmann rally draws over 1,000 in Sarasota, but some prefer Rick Perry” we’re hearing from a couple of their candidates:

“I spoke to Rick Perry Thursday night,” said Wes Maddox, a GOP activist in Tampa who went to Texas A&M with Perry, who is expected to make his first Florida stop Sept. 13 in Tampa Bay. “He said, ‘You tell them (in Florida) help is on the way.’ That’s what the governor’s message is – help is on the way.”

And according to the same source, Michele Bachmann said:

“I don’t know how much God has to do to get the attention of the politicians. We’ve had an earthquake; we’ve had a hurricane. He said, ‘Are you going to start listening to me here?’ Listen to the American people because the American people are roaring right now. They know government is on a morbid obesity diet and we’ve got to rein in the spending.”

How fatuous. Does Bachmann really think God has joined her Tea Party to intervene in partisan politics? If so, doesn’t that make her Tea Party The Party of God? How ironic she’d paint their god as an obsessive-compulsive klepto.

Millions of Americans who have paid into the Social Security fund their entire working lifetimes were angered to hear this new breed of political opportunist call Social Security benefits “entitlements.” That was just a warning shot across our bow.

Where is the consistency in a Tea Party that mocks the working class, our once and former middle class, with taunts of “entitlement?” Millions of unemployed and displaced were ruined by the ongoing global financial hurricane, itself spawned by corporate carpetbaggers masquerading as “free enterprisers.” Newly poor Americans may soon find themselves in the ranks of the chronically unemployable and dispossessed. They will be dependent wards of the welfare state that those carpetbaggers, who helped create the very conditions that fuel the poverty/welfare cycle, detest. Those Americans might be surprised to hear themselves called welfare cheats and social parasites.

Who is next? When do we get to hear Tea Party rants about “entitlements” for the victims of Irene, Katrina, mine disasters, victims of wacko shootings, and other “nanny state parasites?”

Give me your poor, your tired, your huddled masses yearning to breath free … if “help is on the way,” as Perry, who as governor of Texas lacks jurisdiction over the Eastern Seaboard, was said to promise: let the Almighty sweep the carpetbaggers out to sea like cockroaches in a storm drain. In the long run, marginalizing our fellow citizens with outsourcing, corporate mismanagement and rampant corruption, toxic assets and Bernie Madoff style investment schemes, all the while painting us as bloodsucking socialist parasites, just won’t cut it. Heed the roar of reality. “Arab Spring” won’t begin to cover the revolt.

Science Denial and the Texas Board of Education

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In another century and simpler time (1999) I wrote my signature article about the Kansas Board of Education (KBOE)  — dissecting our massive modern schism between science and biblical literalism. We didn’t even have the term “science denial” in those comparatively innocent days.

Darwin’s world of science clashes once again with the recidivist views of those who would turn the pages of the world body of knowledge back to the Roman Catholic Inquisition of 1615.  That nearly executed Galileo for  heliocentric blasphemy.

How have we fared since? We deplore all sorts of agenda-driven rhetoric when the source is the Taliban extremism of Mideastern Islamic fatwas.  We somehow condone it as just another opinion if it comes from Christian fundamentalism and Holy Roller biblical literalism.

American regional sectarianism is celebrated with equal parts amusement and proof of our rich cultural tradition of diversity and tolerance, but no one so far has seriously suggested the private religious beliefs of one or more of those regional cults should drive national government policy.

Nor has anyone yet seriously challenged Thomas Jefferson who wrote, “I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should ‘make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,’ thus building a wall of separation between Church & State” [Wikipedia]

Libertarians preach that “this kind of [science-oriented] government interference is intolerable”, yet their evangelical supporters have brought interference in education and dumbing-down of our children to a whole new level.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously  quipped “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.” He’s currently enjoying a well-deserved revival.

As commentators in science, media and education note with alarm, we find GOP frontrunner candidates Rick Perry and Michelle Bachmann on record as questioning both global warming and evolution itself. Evangelical Texas governor and presidential candidate Rick Perry told a school child on national TV that evolution was a theory that has “got some gaps.” So as to avoid conveying the false impression that Texas encourages the same science education that propelled America into the post-Sputnik Age of the 1950′s, he claims schoolchildren there are taught both “theories” as if both have equal credibility. There’s grave danger that science denial will actually storm through the doors of the White House in 2012.

The respected conservative Dr. Charles Krauthammer (a political commentator and Harvard-trained physician presumably well grounded in science) stated yesterday on Inside Washington that Global Warming has to be looked at seriously, but is still a theory. Qualifying that, he explained that man-made CO2 injection into the atmosphere is geologically unprecedented, but Earth has self-healing counter-mechanisms such as carbon sequestration (all true enough) … so we should look at the phenomenon more carefully before investing trillions in greener energy resources.

“I’m perturbed when I hear Republicans talk about Evolution as a theory like Keynesian economics,” Krauthammer says. Scientists say “it’s so” of global warming and Krauthammer says “it probably is,” but he questions the scientific models predicting the scope and intensity of potential disaster.

That may work in practice, but it won’t hold up in theory.

To the anti-science Republican Party that invented the “if it walks like a duck” theory of fact validation, it would seem the “it’s just a theory” dismissal of global warming would be more plausible if the polar cap were icing over, the Northwest Passage refroze, polar bears were thriving on an ice floe paradise, ocean levels were dropping, air quality was as good as Mauna Kea’s globally, and Phoenix was hitting summertime highs of 86.

In a bizarrely dangerous reversal of separation of church and state, science education is now politicized to a degree that wouldn’t have been tolerated a decade ago or two. Covering this epidemic was this morning’s PBS “Need to Know,” which presented a short section on the herculean effort of the Texas Board of Education (SBOE) to rewrite history and science in the Texas classroom.


Episode #168H Duration: 56:46 STEREO
TEXAS TEXTBOOKS – Despite Governor Perry’s statement that Texas schools teach evolution and creationism, Texas recently voted not to add creationism or intelligent design to its science texts. But the actions of the state’s school board continue to be closely watched by the nation. NTK caught up with the Board last May, as it was considering changes to be made in its social studies curriculum – changes that critics said inserted politics and religious beliefs into textbooks. Shot in Austin, Mt Pleasant and Bryan Texas. Interviews include Don McLeroy (SBOE), Thomas Raitliff (SBOE), and Kathy Miller (TX Freedom Network).

For anyone who has followed science denial for the last decade, there is little new in the theory of revisionism here, but the level of micro-management has escalated in the choice of religiously “correct” science and history and even in the choice of English textbook words used to describe those studies.

For example, SBOE members objected to the frequent textbook use of the word “propaganda” to describe U.S. Government efforts to rally public support for the World War I and II war efforts. To them, “propaganda” only connotes the sort of lies the bad guys promoted in wartime Germany, Japan and the Soviet Union, or anything President Obama says. The SBOE voted to substitute a neutral word like “public information” in Texas history books.

PROPAGANDA: Official government communications to the public that are designed to influence opinion. The information may be true or false, but it is always carefully selected for its political effect. — Dictionary.com

“Propaganda” is also used to educate about the need for rationing, conservation, job creation and other vital public concerns. It is a legitimate dictionary word with a rich historical backdrop. In point of fact, a government information campaign to “Buy War Bonds” is propaganda whether we approve or not.   As for the negative connotation of the word, maybe it hits too close to home. That is exactly what the SBOE is doing, and it must be stopped.