CommentaramaPolitics: June 2013

Saturday, June 29, 2013

Muppet Crime Open Thread

Sesame Street has a new Muppet. This Muppet is called “Alex” and Alex has a problem. Alex’s father is doin’ a dime up at Muppica for going Hannibal Lector on a school bus full of Muppets after getting high on a little Kermit dust. And poor Alex doesn’t know how to handle this. :(

In all seriousness, Sesame Street is introducing the first Muppet with a father in prison, and quite a few people are upset. Sesame Street claims that 1 in 28 kids has a parent who is in jail and they want to offer those kids some support (I suspect the number is closer to 1 in 172). Some people are bothered by the idea of introducing the concept of jail to Muppet-land, because they think it will ruin childhood. I don’t buy that. Kids know what jail is because they see it on other cartoons, on other television shows, and their parents threaten them with it - "This will go on your permanent record and you'll end up in jail when you grow up!" And it’s not like they’re glamorizing it by having Alex be happy about it... this is not Muppetfellas.

Others are upset that they are being one-sided and aren’t telling the kids why Alex’s dad is in the joint. I don’t have a problem with that either. The point here is to sympathize with the kids whose parents are in jail, not to justify the sentence imposed on the father. Indeed, all that really does is make the child accountable for the sins of the father, which is kind of crappy.

On the other hand, I doubt this will help much of anything, as Sesame Street seems to hope. For one thing, it’s not like the show is telling anyone anything they don’t already know: gee, a child with a missing parent is a sad child--

uh...

Wait a minute! Doesn’t that conflict with the idea that single parent families are cool? Isn't this going to cause an entire generation of kids to grow up believing that it’s depressing and difficult not to have a father? Snort. Once again, it looks like politically correct liberals are contradicting their own messages by adding new, poorly thought out messages to prior poorly thought out messages and thereby creating a big old steaming pile of conflict. Liberals really are their own worst enemies, aren’t they?

In any event, the real story here is that, apparently, Muppets can be dangerous criminals. Bring a Muppet into your home at your own risk!

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Friday, June 28, 2013

Our Wrongs and Our Rights

Well, we've had fun times this week, what with DOMA being struck down and other silliness. Not being a deep and learned scholar of constitutional law like our dear President, I doubt I could say anything as to the legal details of the case or its rights and wrongs. I would, however, like to address this whole notion of gay marriage as a "right."

The lure of accepting gay marriage as an inevitability and even perhaps a positive good is something many conservatives, especially young conservatives, have snapped up, and while I for one refuse to go gently into that good night (or whatever the phrase is), I do, on some level, understand its appeal. Nobody likes to be mean, or to be perceived as mean; and the libertarian ethos that is part and parcel of American conservatism would have a hard time in any climate opposing calls for the freedom to marry. Consider the stance of groups like "Young Conservatives for the Freedom to Marry," which argues that endorsing gay marriage "is in line with our core belief in limited government and individual freedom," not some "partisan issue." Well, I can forgive them that (though not their rejection of opposition as not "a conservative or an American value"). But their rhetoric strikes me all the same as extremely muddle-headed, to say the least, and as indicative of our modern obsession with rights.

Although it seems most glaring today in connection with gay marriage, this is hardly a new obsession. The history of the modern West could almost be summarized as people conceiving of rights and then being determined to get them, no matter how noble or absurd. Consider, for example, the UN's "Universal Declaration of Human Rights," which includes in its list not only the right to marry, the right to equal pay, and the right to free education, but also the right of copyright, the right to an international order, the right to develop one's personality (whatever that means), and the right to "rest and leisure." Well. But are these claims merely laughable, or actually wrong?

Conservatism has always been suspicious of such broad declarations of personal right. And rightly so: Too often, people mean by "right" something nice that they think everyone should be able to have. That is hardly its true meaning, though--rights have never existed in a vacuum, but are always dependent on circumstances and the obligations that go with them. As Russell Kirk put it, more presciently than he knew, in The Conservative Mind: "If a man has a right to marry, some woman [or in this case, some man] must have the duty of marrying him; if a man has a right to rest, some other person must have the duty of supporting him." Rights and obligations: You can rarely have the former without the latter, and in the real world, obligations often take precedence altogether. This is why I never understood the furor over DADT being cast as a matter of one's right to serve in the military. No one has a right to serve in the armed forces; if such a right existed, anyone not drafted could call themselves "oppressed." Military service is, in the final analysis, an obligation which the military authorities include or exclude a man from as they see fit.

Though the two are hardly identical, something similar could be said about the "right to marry," whether it concerns gays or straights. No individual or board has oversight of marriages, it is true. But just as it would be foolish for me to say my rights are being violated if I don't get drafted, what should I say if I'm unlucky in love and can't find a spouse? Who's violating my rights then? The ladies who shot me down? The government for failing to provide me with a wife? Does any of this make sense?

Now maybe you'll say that I'm interpreting this too narrowly. "Right to marry" doesn't mean the right to be provided with a spouse, it means being able to get married if you and another person want to do so. Fair enough (though you really can't call it a "right" in that case). But at no time in history have we permitted the fulfillment of such desires at face value. Incestuous marriages are not allowed; neither are polygamy or group marriages (yet). Feel free to compare those behaviors to homosexuality or not; the point is that restraints on who can get married are and always have been universally accepted, regardless of the banned people's feelings or whether they "love each other."

Concepts like freedom, liberty, and fighting for one's rights are part and parcel of American conservatism, and should not be denied. But in order to do that, we must not confuse libertarianism with libertinism, nor our desires, sexual or otherwise, with actual rights. At its heart, conservatism understands that liberty exists alongside an often-fragile social fabric; where an institution as important to that fabric's continuation as marriage is concerned, accepting a concept like "homosexual marriage" can only come after careful deliberation and weighing of the costs and benefits (if any), and certainly not because it's demanded as a right.

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Thursday, June 27, 2013

Film Friday: Presumed Innocent (1990)

Presumed Innocent is the best legal thriller ever filmed. It’s gripping, it’s tense. It’s incredibly realistic. It’s populated with real characters with real motivations. It’s unpredictable. It’s thoroughly enjoyable. Needless to say, I recommend it.

Click Here To Read Article/Comments at CommentaramaFilms

New York State of Mind and more stuff...

Bikes, bikes, everywhere bikes. No, that photo is not of NYC, but Amsterdam. But it's only a matter of time before we look like this too. So, this last Memorial Day, our fearless leader Mayor Bloomberg rolled out his latest harebrained...er...great idea to make us better humans.

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Wednesday, June 26, 2013

Hollywood Will Implode!!! Or Not

A week or so ago, George Lucas and Steven Spielberg both predicted that the film industry would “implode.” That drew a lot of attention, but honestly, I think they are mistaken.

Click Here To Read Article/Comments at CommentaramaFilms

Is Affirmative Action In College Admissions Dead?

Prepare your brains. . . we’re going to talk about law. Specifically, we’re going to talk about the Supreme Court “punting” on the issue of affirmative action in the Fischer v. University of Texas case. That’s how everyone is describing it, but they are wrong. The Court’s decision very likely has killed affirmative action in education.

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Tuesday, June 25, 2013

News Nuggets

Let’s do a couple of quick-hit news items you may have missed... nuggets, as it were... golden chicken parts.

● Obamacar-nage: We’ve been saying all along that Obamacare will kill jobs. Now there’s some interesting proof in the form of a poll. The poll was commissioned by a law firm and it was conducted by Gallup. They surveyed 603 small business owners and found this:

● 41% said they have frozen hiring to avoid Obamacare.
● 19% said they have laid off employees to avoid Obamacare.
● 48% think Obamacare will hurt their bottom lines. Only 9% think Obamacare will be good for their business.
● 55% think Obamacare will lead to higher costs. Only 5% think it will lead to lower costs.
● 52% think Obamacare will lead to a reduction in the quality of healthcare. Only 13% expect an improvement.

This is rather interesting, especially the first two points. If half of small businesses have either frozen hiring or laid people off, that’s a horrible sign for any sort of economic improvement. Small business accounts for two-thirds of all new jobs over the past couple decades. Interestingly, this has some “experts” shocked as they figured small business would happily take a bullet to solve Obama’s problem... ha ha. Others are still stupidly holding out hope that “education” can change minds. Propaganda is fun, but it doesn’t work when people can see the bottom line.

● Obamacare Lies: Last week, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services boasted that insurance premiums fell nearly $4 billion last year, which they called "savings" and which they attributed to the Obamacare requirement that insurers spend at least 80% of their revenue on providing medical services. Well, not quite.

Someone asked the industry lobbyist, America's Health Insurance Plan, about this and the response was that they had no idea where the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid got their data because the industry didn't give it to them. Moreover, they noted that most insurers were already well above the 80/20 requirement, so the requirement isn't likely to have done anything in any event. In the end, they weren't sure why premiums would have gone down. I can tell you why though. When Obama first announced his plans to destroy our medical system, there were 43 million uninsured. Now there are 49 million. That means somewhere around six million people lost their insurance since Obama deigned to bless us with "universal coverage." Call me crazy, but I'm thinking those six million people no longer paying health insurance premiums is probably what caused the overall amount paid in premiums to drop by $4 billion.

● Economists Are Liberals? A lot of people seem to think that economists are conservatives. I’m not sure why people think this, but it’s not true. According to a 2008 survey of the American Economic Association:

● 49% of members were registered Democrats and only 17% were registered Republicans.
● 60% supported Obama.

In a 2003 study of 1,000 economists, only 8% supported free-market principles.

● China Breaking: I’ve said several times that China has serious problems and will probably never overtake the US economically. Their demographics are against them, as their population is aging ultra-fast, and China's population will start shrinking dramatically soon. Similarly, their costs of doing business have been rising so fast that they are no longer competitive. They’ve lost manual labor work to Bangladesh and apparently it now makes more sense to open most new factories in the US rather than China. Making things worse, China appears to have slipped into recession and their growth is well below the level people have generally assumed they need to maintain social stability. Indeed, there is also a question of whether they ever actually had the growth they claimed. Everyone knows official statistics in China are fantasy, so people have been estimating growth based on electricity consumption figures. Now it turns out that China knew this and has been faking that data as well. Some people think China is only growing at 4% compared to the 9% they have been claiming.

Historically speaking, when you look at the other Asian tigers, each of whom burned out, China is following the same pattern – fast growth as they move people from the peasantry into the working class, followed by stagnation once they run out of peasants and as wages rise. If China's growth is in single digits, then they're pretty far along that curve. To put it simply, history tells us that China has peaked.

Now their last gasp appears to be a plan to move more people to the cities. Right now 1/2 of the population lives in cities. They want to increase this to 2/3. To do that, they are moving the equivalent of the entire population of the US into cities they are only now building. The plan is to get them all relocated by 2030. This sounds like a disaster in the making as it sounds unlikely there will be jobs for these people in those cities. Be thankful that for all of our problems, we are nothing like China.

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Monday, June 24, 2013

Immigration Bill Update -- 25% Reduction?

By now you’ve probably heard about the Congressional Budget Office’s scoring of the Rubio bill. Let’s discuss that because it clears up the cost issue and it simultaneously raises a concern... this 25% estimate, though that’s not nearly as bad as you have heard.

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Saturday, June 22, 2013

Outraged! And Open Threaded

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Friday, June 21, 2013

Film Friday: Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within (2001)

Sometimes a box office bomb is actually a gem. Indeed, even great films can get lost when the marketing goes wrong or when the general public just doesn’t get it the first time through. More often, however, a bomb is just a bomb. Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within was a bomb.

Click Here To Read Article/Comments at CommentaramaFilms

Trickle, Trickle, Trickle....

"Trickle-down economics." "Voodoo economics." "Reaganomics." Ooh, I'm getting a chill down my spine. I am referring, of course, to the poorly understood and very maligned idea that is "supply-side economics," with a title much newer than the idea itself. What is it, and why do liberals say it doesn't work? Let's discuss.

What we call supply-side only got its name in the '70s, thanks to some of Nixon's economic people, and frankly, that alone should be reason to look for a new title. But it has a long pedigree, going back to Adam Smith and other greats of the time. It's not so much a philosophy of the size of government as a question of how to get the most bang for your (literal) buck where state revenue is concerned. And it is a simple idea, really: Very low taxes may not bring in a sufficient amount of revenue, but high taxes strangle the productive capacity of taxpayers, causing them to earn less income, therefore they pay fewer taxes, therefore the government gets less revenue as well. The trick is to find an optimum tax rate at which citizens earn the most income and pay the most taxes. In twentieth-century circumstances, that generally means tax cuts, especially on the most productive members of society--the rich.

There have been lots of criticisms of this idea, some of them rather sophisticated and pointed, admittedly. All too often, though, especially when voiced by partisan leftists, such critique devolves into "tax cuts for the rich," "Republicans looking out for their fellow fat cats," etc. And also, liberals have claimed that these policies don't work, that they only benefit the wealthy and end up causing economic slumps down the road.

What actually happens when these "unfair" tax cuts go into effect? Let's look at one of the more famous extended examples of this working, those terrible "Roaring Twenties" of the Coolidge presidency.

After a nasty recession in the early '20s, Harding and then Coolidge pushed through, over intense opposition from progressives in Congress, a drastic tax cut. Top rates went down to 25 percent, lower than they have been at any point since. What happened? Well, if you're even passably familiar with 20th-century America, you probably know there wasn't a sudden economic collapse, a bankrupt government, a disintegration of law and order, etc. U.S. GDP grew by 59 percent between 1921 and 1929, and even more importantly, during this same period, annual tax revenue over the same period grew from about $300 billion per year to $700 billion per year.

But the other feature of these 1920s tax cuts is especially worth dwelling on. So top earners, i.e. the rich, saw the greatest reduction in tax rates. That means the rich bore less of the total tax burden under Republicans Harding and Coolidge, right? Well, actually, no. Statistics show that when the first of the 1920s' Revenue Acts was passed, those making over $100,000 paid about one-third of all taxes per year. By decade's end, after all the tax cuts had taken effect, said group paid two-thirds of the total burden. Conversely, while those making over $100,000 saw their average income increase by a healthy 15 percent, those earning between $10,000 and $100,000 saw a whopping 84 percent growth in income. In other words, the farther down the economic ladder one was, the better deal one got from these "tax cuts for the rich." It might be noted further that minorities weren't excluded from this good fortune; black Americans saw a rapid improvement in their standard of living over the decade, until by 1930 their unemployment rate was slightly below that of whites.

Since I mentioned "Reaganomics" as one of the derogatory terms used by critics of supply-side policies, it bears mentioning how things went when similar policies were tried in the '80s. Reagan began his administration with across-the-board tax cuts, provoking the inevitable caterwauling from liberals; once more, the government did not fall apart, but saw a doubling in annual income tax revenue over the course of the '80s. Moreover, the top 1 percent's share of the tax burden rose by 40 percent, despite having their income tax rates lowered from 70 to 28 percent, while the bottom 60 percent saw a 20 percent drop in its share. As in the '20s, there was remarkable growth among the lower and middle classes, with particular expansion among middle-class and small business-owning African-Americans.

That these periods of prosperity were followed by economic downturns in the '30s and early '90s should be taken into account, of course. But by the same token, we cannot and should not ignore the very real economic improvements up and down the ladder that took place after the implementation of supply-side policies. They made a positive difference in America.

But if liberal mockers of supply-side really want a target to unload on, I can give them one just as good as Reagan. Namely, a President who cut the tax rate for top earners from 91 to 70 percent, proportionally a far greater cut than, say, G.W. Bush undertook; a man who argued high taxes caused low revenue and defended tax cuts on capital gains as a means of "obtaining capital and thereby the strength and potential for growth in the economy." His name was John F. Kennedy.

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Thursday, June 20, 2013

Caption This: Putin Us Off

Well, it's not been a particularly good week for President Obama and it has nothing to do with the ever-growing list of domestic scandals. As you know, Our Dear Leader has been in Northern Ireland lecturing world leaders at the G8 Conference about stuff. Then on to Germany to lecture the Germans about more stuff. The crowd at the Brandenburg Gate, where he gave his latest grand speech was downsized from a Hope-N-Change crowd that was 200,000 strong in 2008 to around about 4,800 invited guests. Sadly, his usual big finish was spoiled by the sun. Yes, the sun got in his eyes and he couldn't read his teleprompter, so the crowd wasn't awed by the wonder of his soaring rhetoric. But, it is reported that he covered nicely. Feeling that he was losing the crowd, he decided it would be a good time to disrobe and that was met with thunderous hoots and applause of an appreciative crowd. [Note to speech-givers: When sensing you might be losing the crowd, take off an article of clothing]

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Wednesday, June 19, 2013

Guest Review: Side Effects (2013)

A Film Review by Tennessee Jed
Since his arrival in 1989 with Sex, Lies, and Videotape, celebrated director Steven Soderbergh has been nothing if not prolific in his output. Critics argue with some justification that his work is best described as uneven or inconsistent. Though hardly an expert on his career, as a fan of independent, low budget films, I owe him at least a debt of appreciation for his notable contributions in that regard. To be sure, this director has made many complete stinkers, but he’s also made several films I have truly enjoyed. Side Effects, fortunately, falls into that latter category.

Click Here To Read Article/Comments at CommentaramaFilms

Consumerism and GM Foods

One area where conservatives have had a real blindspot is recognizing misbehavior by corporations. All an oil company has to do is scream “commies tryin’ to steal our jobs!” and any number of conservative pundits will jump to defend them. That does seem to be changing though. Let’s talk about this in the context of the “Monsanto Protection Act” (MPA) and Genetically Modified (GM) crops.

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Tuesday, June 18, 2013

Gallup, Rubio and the Talk Radio Base

Bev will probably kill me for talking about 2016, so don’t tell her I said this. ;-) I said last week that despite the howling on talk radio that Rubio was finished, Rubio will be the man to beat in 2016. Now there’s some proof to back that up in the form of a Gallup poll. This poll also tells us something interesting about the party’s base.

Gallup quizzed the public about five Republican contenders. What they found suggests that the Republican base is very much in tune with its leaders and not with talk radio. Consider these numbers on how Republicans responded:

Notice that despite the near universal hatred poured out at Rubio from talk radio and conservative blogs, Rubio has a 58% approval and only an 11% disapproval.... and that’s among Republicans, not the public at large. That’s significant. That means that despite months of an intense anti-Rubio campaign by the supposed leaders of the base, the Republican base approves of Rubio in overwhelming numbers – by a 6 to 1 margin. Even more significantly, only one in ten disapproves of Rubio. That’s an amazing repudiation of the talk radio message, and that suggests several things.

First, that suggests broad acceptance (if not endorsement) of immigration reform by the Republican base, otherwise Rubio’s disapprovals would be higher. This is consistent with the large and growing number of conservatives who support the initiative and the polls which show surprisingly high support for the measure. This further suggests that Rubio won’t be hurt by pursuing immigration reform, or else his disapprovals already would be higher.

Secondly, it suggests that the talk radio base is not the supermajority within the Republican base they like to think they are... not even close. Consider this: Rubio has been blasted for months with near 100% vehement opposition from the talk radio base. Thus, it is reasonable to assume that some high proportion of the talk radio base disapproves of Rubio. Yet, he only polls 11% disapproval. That means that only 11% of the Republican base is following the talk radio line. Similarly, look at Christie. Christie is viewed favorably (52% - 25%) by the Republican base despite being attacked daily for several years now as a RINO traitor by talk radio. Thus, only 25% of the Republican base toes the talk radio line on Christie.

Think about what this says about the size of the base. Talk radio has blasted Christie so long, so harshly and so universally that it is likely that everyone in the talk radio base disapproves of him as well as a good number of conservatives who don’t align with the talk radio base. That means not only that it’s logical to see his 25% disapproval as the upper cap on the potential size of the talk radio base, but it also means that 25% likely overstates the size of the talk radio base. Looking at these numbers suggests to me that the talk radio base is somewhere between 11% and 25% and I would place them at around 16% (Rubio disapproval times 1.5 or Christie disapproval times 2/3). Again, that is not consistent with the picture painted by talk radio of a silent conservative majority oppressed by a small RINO leadership. Why does this matter? Well, I think it explains why the Republican leadership seems to be willing to decouple themselves from the talk radio base. I see hints of this everywhere, everything from a change in the agenda to a change in the rhetoric to the pushing aside of bomb throwers like Michelle Bachmann. And I don’t think the Republicans would be doing this if these numbers were reversed.

Other thoughts on this data:

● This data suggests that Paul Ryan (69% - 12%) would be the leader if he chooses to run, but I actually doubt he will. I like Ryan a lot, but he just never looked comfortable in 2012. I think he will happily stay in the House and run the budgets.

● This data suggests that Christie is stronger than I would have guessed last year, though I wonder how far his appeal really runs? I suspect a lot of his support is at the level of “Oh, I like him in New Jersey, but not nationally.” In either event though, he must be considered a serious contender. Ultimately, I interpret his approval rating as a sign that the base is being much more practical than they been have in the past. This seems to be a statement that they will accept people who aren’t ideologues if they can win in places Republicans don’t win and they can bring some conservatism to the table in those areas.

● Rand Paul’s support (56% - 13%) is interesting too. Paul embraces issues that sit uneasily with the Republican base. His foreign policy and defense policy make the neocons angry, the religious right is suspicious of his claims to social conservatism, and his attempts to appeal to minorities and youths through civil liberties issues are upsetting to many conservatives. Yet, six in ten approve and only one in ten disapprove. That suggests that the Republican base is much more open to new ideas than you hear.

● Finally, the data suggest that Ted Cruz may have a problem. He has hooked his star to the talk radio base and they have rewarded him with an intense amount of coverage and praise. He is the anti-Rubio. Yet, all of this has resulted in only 40% approval and 52% indifference. Those aren’t great numbers when the guy you’ve cited as your mortal enemy is 20% higher than you. Even worse, if the “not Rubio” agenda hasn’t worked so far, there is little reason to think it will work any better in the coming two years, and Cruz doesn’t really offer more than that. If he wants to win, he’ll need an agenda, not just opposition to the new Republican agenda.

I guess we’ll see.

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Monday, June 17, 2013

Obamacare Update No. 437

It’s time for another Obamacare update. This thing truly is a gift to bloggers. Today’s theme in the slow motion train wreck of Obamacare is “That’s not fair!”

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Saturday, June 15, 2013

Human Evolution Open Thread

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Friday, June 14, 2013

Film Friday: Cop Land (1997)

Imagine a film staring Sylvester Stallone, Harvey Keitel, Robert De Niro, Ray Liotta, Robert Patrick and a dozen more people you’ll recognize. Now imagine if the thing is really well written. Yet, few people know about it. That’s Cop Land, and this is truly an excellent film.

Click Here To Read Article/Comments at CommentaramaFilms

Hero, Traitor, or Blah?

So there was a pretty big story in the news this week. It involved government surveillance, questions about civil liberties, and cloak-and-dagger work. And unfortunately, there was a hipster at the center of it.

Last week, word came of a massive information leak from the NSA, thanks to one of its employees, Mr. Edward Snowden, who had accumulated a bunch of data, sent it all to a reporter, and then made his escape to Hong Kong. The information has to do with the NSA's means of gathering data, which include the collection of personal emails, phone records, etc., all with the click of a mouse by government employees. So, naturally, this was going to get tied into the broader "Scandal-gate" (tm) and become controversial, which Snowden helped along by saying in interviews from his new port of call that he could have downloaded the data and personal correspondence of literally anyone who was a U.S. citizen (and probably lots of people who weren't).

As inevitably happens, there's been a lot of back-and-forth about how damaging to national security the intel leak is, whether Snowden did the right thing, what his motives are, etc. Lots of people think he's a hero (so much so that he's beginning to have a weird cult following), others that he's betrayed America or at best is just an opportunist and media whore. So it's worth diving into to sort out what's going on.

Specifically, what Snowden leaked was the details of a surveillance program known as PRISM, which to my profound disappointment doesn't actually stand for anything. Simply a codename for a vast operation involving spying on both foreign and domestic individuals and corporations, not to mention other governments and military forces. Partly, the operation accomplished this by mining tons of personal data from such sites as Facebook, Yahoo, Google, etc., raising fears that the heads of these companies were deliberately colluding with the government in eavesdropping on their users. (The CEOs dispelled these fears right away by issuing denials unusually similar to each other.) Anyway, Snowden, who had been working for one of the firms handling all this data collection, gathered a bunch of documents related to it, then sent them off to a reporter before high-tailing it out of here.

The reaction of the politically powerful, in both parties, has been rather predictable. Given that the damage is occurring to a Democratic administration, it's no surprise to see people like Dianne Feinstein accusing Snowden of treason. Among Republicans, too, leaders from Boehner on down have denounced the leaker as a traitor, with even Ron Paul fighting shy of calling the man an American hero (although I bet he really wanted to).

The guy's claim, all along, has been that he was morally repulsed by the extent of NSA spying activity and felt it was his duty to let the American people know about it. In his own words, he's neither a hero nor a criminal, just a guy who saw something that needed to be done. Well, that's noble (in an annoying do-gooder sort of way). And Snowden's online history shows a long record of hostility to Big Brother, so it's certainly plausible. Do note, however, that he was only working for the NSA for a few months, which for many people has raised the question of whether this was a huge play from the beginning. Either way, for him to sit down with the Chinese press and talk about the NSA's surveillance of leading members of the People's Republic doesn't suggest a natural-born patriot. As one blogger put it (I paraphrase), "It's one thing to talk to the American people about the American government's snooping. It's another thing entirely to talk to the Chinese people about the American government's snooping." And the fact that Snowden's openly discussed fleeing to Russia and putting himself under Vladimir Putin's protection suggests that he may be, at best, a monumentally stupid man.

Snowden seems like a rather unsavory character the more we learn about him (I'm assuming bragging about having sex in a playground can still qualify one for the definition of "unsavory character"). But does it matter? Even talking to China about the NSA's snooping on them, something the Chinese undoubtedly knew about already (although maybe not in all its details), probably isn't specific enough to qualify for a charge of "treason."

Plus, there doesn't seem to be any mass reaction to the leak one way or the other. A recent poll showed 56% of Americans saying they had no issue in principle with extensive government surveillance; another survey had it at 49% of people being mostly okay with it. So it's a split decision, which may or may not be encouraging to the DC pols. Certainly it won't provide mass support for a witch-hunt, if that's what they're after. Probably, there will be a lot of harrumphing about the guy and then he'll be forgotten, especially if his image becomes more and more tarnished and he winds up as Putin's puppet (like everyone else in the Kremlin).

Frankly, I think the big take-away here, once more, is the extent to which the Obama White House closely resembles its predecessor. After coming into office four years ago with promises of respecting "the rule of law" and ending abuses of power a la Patriot Act, The One is trying to plug leaks and clamp down on his underlings' lips just like any other executive. So much for being transformative.

As for Snowden....meh. Like I said, he's a hipster, and kind of a weirdo. I say we waterboard him if we get him back, just because.

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Thursday, June 13, 2013

Commentarama-Social Summer...

Politics, schmolitics! How many more scandalous revelations will hit before Labor Day? Ah, we've got all summer to talk about that. So let's take a break from all the revelatory fun and talk summertime fun!

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Wednesday, June 12, 2013

Star Wars VII by JJ Abrams

“I think that the thing is so big and so massive to so many people that the key to moving forward is honoring but not revering what went before.”

– JJ Abrams about Star Wars

Click Here To Read Article/Comments at CommentaramaFilms

The Recovery That Wasn’t

There is something wrong with the stock market. The housing market too. I see no evidence that the economy is picking up. To the contrary, all the numbers are horrible. Yet, the stock market and the housing market seem to disagree. Why? Well, there are reasons.

● The Stock Market: Ug. The stock market. The stock market is my nemesis in rational times, but forget times like this. Since 2009, the stock market has been on one long, uninterrupted ride straight up. We’re up 117% from the lows of 2009 with no signs of stopping. Does that make sense? Well, consider this:

● Unemployment grew from 6% to 10% during that period and still remains around 7.5%. Is that good news?

● Corporate profits are weak. 80% of S&P 500 companies have issued negative guidance on corporate earnings growth, and 56% missed their revenue targets. As the market increased 5% in the first two months of this quarter, earnings actually dropped 3.4%. Should stocks really go up?

● Economic growth in the US has been anemic.

● The US government is paralyzed by debt and infighting.

● There have been repeated near-collapses of the Eurozone, which still has virtually no growth and no jobs.

● China’s economy has slowed to a crawl and is well below the level where the Chinese government fears a revolution.

So if things are this bad, then what justifies this long, steady rise? One thing: the Fed. The Fed is pumping money into the market each month. Right now it’s buying $85 billion in bonds each month to prop up the world’s biggest companies. Even a hint that the Fed might cut the heroin is enough to make the market lose 2% until someone at the Fed says, “Just kidding!”

In fact, we’ve reached a point where market watchers say that the worst thing that could happen to the market would be good economic news because it would mean the Fed might end its buying. Think about how sick that is that our stock market, which supposedly represents the value of American companies, wants bad news to maintain its drug habit. This is basically subsidy behavior. Buyer and sellers and profits no longer matter... government money matters.

● Jobs: And what has that government money gotten us? No jobs, that’s for sure. May’s jobs report showed that 175,000 jobs were added as compared to 149,000 in April. Sounds good, right? After all, it is higher than in April. Well, no. For one thing, this number of jobs is the average for the last 12 months. So this isn’t exactly a break out... it’s just more of the same. Moreover, 26,000 of those were temp jobs, meaning they aren’t real. Some number will also be summer jobs, which will end in August. So we’re looking at something less than 149,000 real jobs were created. Unfortunately, the economy needs to create around 180,000 jobs a month just to keep up with population growth. So all we did last month was increase the number of unemployed people.

Moreover, while the official unemployment rate fell to 7.6% the real number remains double that. And this is after five years of the Fed pumping 2-3 trillion dollars “into the economy.” So why didn’t this stimulus work? Well, the problem is that they didn’t put it “into the economy.” They gave it to rich banks, who sat on it. And as I point out in my book, just giving money to someone does nothing to make working more profitable nor does it make the cost of labor cheaper. In other words, it will never spur hiring.

● Housing: So what about housing? Strangely, over the past couple years, the housing market has started rising again. This makes little sense unless the economy is doing better and people have more confidence, right? Well, no, because it turns out that “people” aren’t buying the houses. According to a company that tracks mortgage financing, “first-time home buyers” are buying only 16% of homes at the moment. That is a surprisingly low number. So who is buying the rest? Well, it turns out that 69% of purchases are being made by “investors,” and these aren’t people who flip homes.

According to Fitch, “The housing price growth is being propelled by institutional money.” Companies like Blackstone are buying homes. (There are other companies too.) In the past couple years, Blackstone has spent nearly $4 billion to buy 24,000 homes with plans to rent them out. And they’re doing it in pockets, which is why the housing market has taken off in some cities but not others. For example, according to Bloomberg, Blackstone bought 1,400 properties in Atlanta in 2012 for a total value of $100 million. The result was that home prices increased 12.4% in Atlanta compared to 10% nationally.

But who cares, right? A buyer is a buyer, right? Well, no. For one thing, these companies are jacking up the price of homes in markets where the natural economy can’t support the price. That always happens when you get an influx of outside money. Basically, you get a price spike that is unrelated to the natural market value of a thing which distorts the market and makes it harder for the locals to buy homes. Moreover, when the outside money stops, the prices will crash. In fact, warned Fitch: “The question is how much the change in prices really reflects the market demand, rather than one-off market shifts that may not be around in a couple of years.”

Do I ultimately care that investors are doing this? No. But what bothers me about all of this, is that our economy is off-kilter because it no longer seems to be focused on helping average people. To the contrary, our government has decided that “the economy” means “Big Business” and it has set out to take care of them on the theory that this will make everyone’s lives better. This is called “socialism” and it doesn’t work any better when it’s done using a handful of big companies as agents than it does when it’s done directly by bureaucrats. We genuinely need to rethink our economy and open it up to the free market. The government needs to stop trying to prop up big companies and their stocks, it needs to stop giving tax breaks to investors to buy homes rather than home owners, and it needs to focus on eliminating the barriers to the creation of jobs. America is a country of people and their government should recognize that... it is time to think about the people and not the balance sheets of the incorporated. We are the United States of America, not America, Inc.

Free the free market!

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