Peeing on the Trees

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Media Matters says MSNBC actually hosted Pam Geller to explain why a mosque should not be built near the Ground Zero site. To me, this is a bit like bringing on Tom Delay to discuss ethics in government. Although, come to think of it, I believe that’s been done, too.

I understand the mosque is to be built at 45 Park Place, which is a couple of blocks away from the Ground Zero site. Just for fun, I pinpointed that location on Google Maps to show its physical proximity to Ground Zero:

Site of Mosque

Proximity of Proposed Mosque to Ground Zero

Don’t be confused by the World Trade Center subway station. That’s just the name of a subway station. The actual Ground Zero site is below Vesey Street; click here for an expanded view.

The way people had been going on about this, I thought the mosque was going to be built next to Ground Zero, but it isn’t. The mosque will be only 13 stories high, which in lower Manhattan ain’t nothin’. Given the other structures in that neighborhood, I can’t imagine the mosque would be visible from Ground Zero (except looking down on it from a high-rise, if they ever build one there). And I doubt Ground Zero would be visible from the mosque, unless they bulldoze all the buildings in between.

So, what’s the big bleeping deal? Geller said,

GELLER: We know in Islamic history that they build triumphal mosques on the cherished sites of sacred lands of conquered lands. So how is building a mosque, looking down at the cemetery of ground zero where they’re still finding remains outreach?

Unless they’re planning to build a 110-story mosque, it won’t be “looking down” on Ground Zero. However, it appears it might be looking down on the Amish Market. Somebody should alert the Amish.

Apparently there was some kind of hearing on the building of the mosque recently, and from the video it’s obvious hardly anyone showed up for it. I’ve seen some headlines that suggest there is some groundswell of opposition to building the mosque in Manhattan, but I don’t think most Manhattanites are that worked up about it.

To their credit, NBC and CBS have refused to air a hateful Muslilm-bashing ad in opposition to the mosque. But that doesn’t make up for MSNBC actually giving a platform to Crazy Toxic Hate Geller.

Righties are trying to tie anyone associated with the mosque to jihad, but of course to righties everyone remotely associated with Islam is a jihadist. The mosque is a project of the Cordoba Initiative, which appears to be an organization of moderate and peaceful Muslims who oppose sectarian violence. (So if we can’t be tolerant to Muslims who want peace and harmony, which Muslims can we be tolerant to? Why, none, of course. That’s the point, to hate all Muslims because they are Muslims.)

And then there’s the Florida birther-preacher named Bill Keller who wants to build a “9/11 Christian Center” as an alternative (?) to the mosque. As if there aren’t a number of large churches already there, including the famous St. Paul’s Chapel. St. Paul’s, where George Washington went to pray after his first inauguration as President, really is adjacent to the Ground Zero site but, remarkably, sustained only minor damage that day. For weeks after it was used as a “rest” station for Ground Zero workers. Parishioners kept the church open 24/7 and provided food, first aid, and places to rest for the workers.

There’s your “9/11 Christian Center.” What Bill Keller wants to do isn’t “Christian,” it’s just territorial marking. He wants to come here and pee on our trees, so to speak. Keller, stay home.

Lies or Illiteracies about Tax Cuts

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Just read Ezra Klein. I’m too disgusted to add much, except to say that I doubt even Sen. Mitch McConnell is stupid enough to believe “There’s no evidence whatsoever that the Bush tax cuts actually diminished revenue,” and that the tax cuts succeeded in increasing revenue. If he’s bright enough to tie his own shoes and eat with a fork, he ought to know the Bush tax cuts drained the budget. I say he’s just plain lying.

Dearborn Four Follow-Up

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The four proselytizers who were arrested for handing out copies of the Gospel outside the Arab International Festival were arraigned a couple of days ago on disturbing the peace charges and will have to appear at more hearings. I wrote earlier that unless more stuff went on that no one is talking about, I didn’t think what they were doing justified an arrest.

So this is what Steve Pardo of The Detroit News wrote about the arraignment:

Negeen Mayel, 18, of California; Nabeel Qureshi, 29, of Virginia; Paul Rezkalla, 18 of New York, and David Wood, 34, also of New York, face fines of up to $500 each and up to 93 days in jail. Dearborn authorities said the four “chose to escalate their behavior, which appeared well-orchestrated and deliberate” as they handed out religious literature and talking with people at the festival. The woman and three men are members or founders of a group called “Acts 17 Apologetics.” …

…City officials said police received a complaint of the members of Acts 17 Apologetics “harassing and intimidating patrons of the festival and that a large crowd was gathering.”

The behavior of these individuals drew and incited a large crowd to a point where they were in violation of city ordinances, including breach of peace and failure to obey the lawful order of a police officer, according to the city’s public relations department.

Festival rules require religious groups to distribute information at paid booths or outside the event.

The proselytizers released a YouTube video that appeared to show hardly anyone was nearby when police arrested them. The group also is complaining that the police confiscated their video cameras and haven’t returned them.

Just for fun I checked out the Acts 17 website, which is very attractive. The organization exists to convert Muslims to Christianity. From there I found some YouTube video from the same festival in 2009 in which the Acts 17 people clearly were proselytizing inside the festival area, not outside of it.

The video I linked to (if you don’t have the stomach to watch it) shows an Acts 17 guy behaving like a five-alarm asshole, aggressively (in a verbal way) challenging the religion of Islam right in the middle of this festival and then whining about how unfair it was that the security people at the festival made them stop filming and go away. Personally, I say the fair attenders showed enormous restraint by not breaking the video camera over the jerk’s head.

I think it’s important to recognize that aggressive, in-your-face proselytizing is an act of hate and hostility. The message behind it is “I hate you, and I’m going to keep hating you until you become like me.” It’s beyond obnoxious, but the proselytizers are incapable of seeing themselves as others see them.

I just hope for their sake they don’t spin off an organization to convert Buddhists. We may be non-violent, but we also invented kung fu.

Tax Cuts Are Sacred

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As exemplified in the comments threads of the last couple of posts, rightie economic “theory” rests on a number of bedrock beliefs that have nothing to do with the real world, but which righties believe to the foundations of their souls. These beliefs cannot be questioned These include —

  • Government is to the economy what a tick is to a dog. Money paid in taxes is lost forever to the national economy.
  • Government jobs are not real jobs. Wages paid to government employees are not real wages. When government employees use their wages to buy stuff, it doesn’t count as a stimulus for business to make more stuff. Only stuff bought with wages from a private sector job can do that.
  • Free markets are forces of nature that self-regulate and grow the economy as long as they aren’t regulated.
  • Private enterprise does everything more efficiently than government bureaucracies.

And now we have one more,

  • Tax cuts to the rich are sacred.

The immortal words of Senator Jon Kyl:

“[Y]ou should never raise taxes in order to cut taxes,” Jon Kyl said on Fox News Sunday. “Surely Congress has the authority, and it would be right to — if we decide we want to cut taxes to spur the economy, not to have to raise taxes in order to offset those costs. You do need to offset the cost of increased spending, and that’s what Republicans object to. But you should never have to offset cost of a deliberate decision to reduce tax rates on Americans.“

This was said yesterday on Fox News Sunday. According to Steve Benen, Kyle was responding to a question from Chris Wallace.

Wallace, to his credit, raised a good point — the “Republican growth agenda” is predicated on keeping “the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy.” Wallace said this would cost $678 billion over 10 years, and asked Kyl how the GOP would pay for them. Kyl dodged the question, and talked about how great those tax cuts were.

So, Wallace asked again how the cuts would be paid for. Kyl responded, “You should never raise taxes in order to cut taxes. [etc.]

The Bush tax cuts are the single biggest cause of the current budget deficit. It is an even bigger cause than the Iraq War, and far bigger than all the “entitlement” programs put together when you consider there was a budget surplus before Bush was elected.

Given their recent whining about the deficit, they must have one more rule:

  • Budget deficits caused by tax cuts don’t count. Budget deficits caused by wars don’t count most of the time. However, domestic spending by government causes a different kind of deficit that does count.

As Ezra Klein says, “This sort of comment is how you tell people who care about the deficit apart from people who are interested in exploiting fears of the deficit to shrink the size of government.”

If you can think of any more wingnut economic rules, please add them.

Random Acts of Journalism

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Digby found a television news guy actually checking facts —

For those of you who can’t play the video, here’s the transcript.

Libby Spencer at The Impolitic cites another recent example of a journalist checking facts, and speculates we are at the beginning of a trend. That’s way premature, I say. But the biggest reason I started blogging was the way right-wing goons could get on television and tell any lies they wanted, and the so-called moderators would sit there silently and not even raise an eyebrow. So it’s always good to see these little glimmers of factuality break through the fog..

Trickle Up Misery

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Whatever happened to the theory that the “subprime” mortgage crisis came about because Barack Obama-trained ACORN thugs pressured banks into lending money to undeserving brown people? Well, it seems the misery has trickled up.

It’s a pattern you can find over and over again in U.S. (and other) history. A problem with the economy hits the poor first, and the poor are blamed for it, but if nothing is done eventually it hits the not-poor, and then it becomes a problem. Most history books will tell you the Great Depression began after the stock market crash of 1929, but the fact is that parts of the U.S. — the poorer parts — had been in an economic hole for a couple of years by then. The Depression didn’t become official until the misery finally hit the upper classes.

In light of our recent arguments in the “Heartless, Clueless” post with Popgun, who refuses to see that allowing the economy to go down the toilet might eventually affect him, I thought this was interesting. I don’t rejoice in their misfortune, but I do wish some people would pay attention to reality instead of keeping their heads wrapped in a gauze of myth and ideology.

Why Is There an Economy?

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From Paul Krugman’s blog:

There’s now a lot of talk about the fact that U.S. corporations are sitting on a lot of cash, but not spending it. I don’t find that particularly puzzling: with huge excess capacity, why invest in building even more capacity. But almost everyone seems to agree that if we could somehow get businesses to spend some of that cash, it would create jobs.

Which then raises the question: how can you believe that, and not also believe that if the U.S. government were to borrow some of the cash corporations aren’t spending, and spend it on, say, public works, this would also create jobs? (Brad DeLong has tried to make this argument repeatedly).

I didn’t know that U.S. corporations were sitting on a lot of cash, but this sort of ties in to something Yves Smith and Rob Parenteau wrote for the New York Times a couple of days ago, “Are Profits Hurting Capitalism?” In a nutshell, Smith and Parentau argue that over the past decade and a half corporations have been saving more and investing less in their own businesses. Smith and Parenteau continue,

The reason for all this saving in the United States is that public companies have become obsessed with quarterly earnings. To show short-term profits, they avoid investing in future growth. To develop new products, buy new equipment or expand geographically, an enterprise has to spend money — on marketing research, product design, prototype development, legal expenses associated with patents, lining up contractors and so on.

Rather than incur such expenses, companies increasingly prefer to pay their executives exorbitant bonuses, or issue special dividends to shareholders, or engage in purely financial speculation. But this means they also short-circuit a major driver of economic growth.

Krugman says that the corporations need an incentive to stop sitting on all that idle cash. Krugman discusses the famous exchange between President Lincoln and General McClellan, in which Lincoln asked McClellan if he could borrow his army, since McClellan wasn’t using it. Krugman continues,

We don’t literally have to borrow from the corporations; they’re parking their funds in the money market, and the feds would borrow from that market. But the end result would be to put some of that idle cash to work — and, ultimately, to give the corporations a reason to start investing, too, so that the deficit spending would crowd investment in, not out.

To which Brad DeLong adds,

After all, simply rename the United States government something like: “United States Joint-Stock Corporation” and then if it borrows and spends, or even spends more rapidly, employment goes up. The argument for the ineffectiveness of fiscal policy in all of its forms requires a rigid (or, at least, a completely interest-inelastic) velocity of money and money multiplier. And that means that increases in private desires to spend also have no effect save to raise interest rates–the full Say’s Law.

I had never heard of Say’s Law, so I looked it up. Apparently there are a lot of different “Say’s Laws,” including one that seems to support supply-side economics, but I don’t think that’s what Brad DeLong is talking about here. From what I glean from Wikipedia, Says (18th-19th century economist and businessman) said that what really drives an economy is the exchange of commodities, and that money is just a facilitator. That works for me.

I have long thought that we lose sight of what an economic system is for, which is to enable people to trade with each other for goods and services they need and want without having to do face-to-face negotiation for every little thing. So raw materials and finished goods all move to where they need to be without, say, the shoemaker having to barter directly with the tanner, and what if the tanner already has enough shoes?

Further, as I understand it, Say’s Law says the process of producing and exchanging goods and services will drive an increase in real income to purchase goods and services. That’s the part that gets picked up by supply-siders, but the flaw in supply-side theory is that just cutting taxes on businesses doesn’t necessarily translate into investment into more production of goods and services. As we see from the real world, it’s just as likely to create a class of hyper-rich corporate executives who sit on their money.

I think what Brad DeLong is pointing to here is that a desire for goods and services by itself will not grow an economy. It also suggests that when an economy becomes more about acquiring and hoarding money rather than producing goods and services, it will stagnate.

I thought this was all particularly interesting given the discussion that followed the last post. The righties who joined in continue to believe the private sector can save itself. In theory, I suppose it could. But the private sector is sitting on its hands, and there is no “market based” incentive in sight that might persuade it to do otherwise.

Heartless, Clueless, Confused, and Calculating

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The Senate went on recess without extending unemployment benefits, and now Republicans are arguing that this is Democrats’ fault.

How so? GOP senators say they would have voted for the unemployment extension if the money were taken out of the budget, in particular from “unused” stimulus funds, to avoid running up more debt. Odd how deficits don’t matter when there’s a Republican in the White House, but that’s the argument.

Sen. Debbie Stabenow, Democrat of Michigan, explained (emphasis added),

Republicans want to pay for it [unemployment extension] from taking money away from the recovery dollars. Those are dollars being used to create jobs in construction and manufacturing incentives and alternative energy. To take money from job creation to fund unemployment benefits makes no sense.

Essentially, what the GOP favors is a kind of economic cannibalism. Think of the economy as a starving person, and the Republicans are saying they’ll feed this person, but only with some of his own cooked body parts.

Republicans keep talking about “unused” stimulus funds, as if there’s a pile of money somewhere that no one knows what to do with. But my understanding is that it’s all allocated already, even if not all of the projects to which the money is allocated have gone into effect. From an editorial in the Boston Globe:

Senator Brown has said he would vote for extended unemployment assistance if money for it came from unused stimulus funds. But yesterday’s jobs report proved that the economy needs both aid for the unemployed and the ongoing boost that stimulus projects provide as they come on line. Just this week, Massachusetts received $45.4 million in stimulus money to expand broadband access in the western part of the state where some towns have virtually no high-speed Internet service. Overall, the 2009 stimulus package includes $7.2 billion to upgrade the nation’s data networks — and, at the same time, create 5,000 construction jobs.

Clearly, not all stimulus projects were shovel-ready when Congress passed the bill last year, but that is just as well, since the economy still needs the turbo-injection of an initiative like broadband expansion.

And, of course, unemployment benefits also stimulate the economy.

In his column today, Paul Krugman asks how the Senate could possibly have turned its back on the unemployed. “The answer is that we’re facing a coalition of the heartless, the clueless and the confused,” he writes.

The “heartless” are Republicans who blocked the extension as a political ploy. They somehow think blocking the benefit extension will give them an advantage in the midterm elections.

The “clueless” are people like Sharron Angle, the Republican candidate for senator from Nevada, who says people would get off their lazy butts and get jobs once their benefits are cut off. Given that Nevada has, I believe, the highest unemployment rate of all the states, I hope Nevada voters think hard about where this woman’s head might be.

The “confused” are those who think the deficit is more dangerous to the economy than the lack of money in circulation. Krugman writes,

Helping the unemployed, by putting money in the pockets of people who badly need it, helps support consumer spending. That’s why the Congressional Budget Office rates aid to the unemployed as a highly cost-effective form of economic stimulus. And unlike, say, large infrastructure projects, aid to the unemployed creates jobs quickly — while allowing that aid to lapse, which is what is happening right now, is a recipe for even weaker job growth, not in the distant future but over the next few months.

But won’t extending unemployment benefits worsen the budget deficit? Yes, slightly — but as I and others have been arguing at length, penny-pinching in the midst of a severely depressed economy is no way to deal with our long-run budget problems. And penny-pinching at the expense of the unemployed is cruel as well as misguided.

But, Krugman adds,

So, is there any chance that these arguments will get through? Not, I fear, to Republicans: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something,” said Upton Sinclair, “when his salary” — or, in this case, his hope of retaking Congress — “depends upon his not understanding it.”

Exactly, and I’d say many Republican lawmakers are not so much confused as calculating. They want the economy to be as bad as it can get in November. They want to keep the value of labor low; that’s been one of their goals for generations now. An opportunity to strangle the economy and drive workers into greater and greater desperation must seem too good to pass up.

Happy Independence Day

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july4whitebackground

This is also Mahablog’s 8th birthday.

From the “none are so blind as those who will not see” department — Kathleen Parker wrote one of her usually inane Washington Post columns the other day in which she called Barack Obama “the first female president.” Apparently in Parker’s World a “real man” must be a swaggering, angry, shoot ’em all and let God sort ’em out type, not cool and cerebral. By Parker’s reasoning probably Thomas Jefferson was the first female president, and Abraham Lincoln would have been right up there also, but let’s go on.

Some of Parker’s comments offended African-American readers, who wrote to tell her that

One, a black man cannot show anger in public lest he be considered an Angry Black Man.

Two, to suggest that a black man has any feminine characteristics, even when framed as an “evolutionary achievement,” is to emasculate and reduce him to a figure from Jim Crow days.

That first one, about not showing anger, is a point I’m sure I’ve written about before. I wrote in July 2008 —

If there is one thing Obama has been very cautious about, it’s bringing race into the campaign. As I’ve written before, he goes out of his way not to be the “black candidate.” He and his surrogates have brought up race occasionally, when they had to, but they drop it quickly.

Obama has also worked very hard not to display anger throughout his campaign; the cool demeanor may or may not be the “real” Obama, but he is incredibly disciplined about keeping his cool. And that’s because he understands that there are whites who can like a nice black man, but who will run screaming from an angry black man, even if the black man has plenty to be angry about.

I think anyone with his eyes open, watching race relations in America, ought to have noticed this. But then there’s Kathleen Parker, who wrote in a column today —

Do I think people are too sensitive? Yes. Do I think I may have overstepped the line? No. It’s a column, not a dissertation. And my thesis, bouncing off the notion that Bill Clinton was the first black president, is serious only insofar as you really think Clinton is black.

But I also recognize that my life experience is different from that of most African Americans. And that experience allows me both the luxury of seeing people without the lens of race, but also (sometimes) to fail to imagine how people of other backgrounds might interpret my words.

“Without the lens of race” my ass. Being utterly oblivious to the realities of racism is not being “without the lens of race.” It means she’s left the lens cap on.

Apparently someone actually had to explain to her that black men are held to a different standard in the anger department than white men. But then Parker says she can’t be prejudiced to Barack Obama, because she and the president are 8th cousins once removed. Seriously.

But then she goes back to saying that “many people” want their president to be an “action figure in the hyper-masculine mode.” Again, no Jeffersons or Lincolns. Really, the idea that presidents are supposed to channel the nation’s emotions seems to be relatively new. Calvin Coolidge (still beloved by wingnuts) was famously unemotional. I don’t remember Eisenhower or Kennedy appearing enraged in public, although I was very young then and maybe I missed it. Reagan, on the other hand, was the Great Emoter.

I blame television; government is becoming just another reality show.

Conservatives and Guns

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This is a follow up to The Irony of McDonald v. Chicago. One cannot post anything about firearms here on the Intertubes without some Second Amendment Uber Alles activist showing up to explain that eliminating firearm restrictions reduces gun violence. Well, take a look at this chart:

Crime Statistics > Firearms Death Rate per 100,000 (most recent) by state

The data is from 2002, so most recent trends may differ. I believe these are deaths of all types, including accidents and suicides. Just note that the top 20 states in gun fatalities (I’m not counting the District of Columbia, which is an anomaly in several different ways) are all solid red. The bottom 10 states are all blue or purple.

Differences in the amount of firearm violence from one place to another can have many causes beside differences in the law. One of the low-violence states, New Hampshire, has very lenient firearm purchase and possession laws, although I believe most of the other low-violence states lean more in the direction of restrictions. The high-violence states tend to be more rural than urban, but so are some of the low-violence states. I’m not seeing a clear correlation between poverty levels and gun violence at the state level, although you might see that at a city level. I assume that Alaska — the most trigger-happy state in the nation — is not being overrun by illegal immigrants from Mexico. So the only conclusion one can draw from this data, I believe, is that there is a strong tendency for more conservative states to have a higher rate of firearm fatalities. Make of that what you will.

Note to firearm “libertarians”: Be polite, argue from facts with links, and address only what is discussed in this post, or your comments will be deleted. See comment policy.

Update: From the Stuff That Ought to Be Obvious Department — this is from a UPI story from 2008 —

States with high rates of gun ownership have the highest firearm death rates, an analysis by a U.S. non-profit group found. …

…The five states with the highest per capita gun death rates — Louisiana, Alaska, Montana, Tennessee and Alabama — had a per capita gun death rate far exceeding the national per capita gun death rate of 10.32 per 100,000.

Louisiana had the highest rate of gun death, 19.04 per 100,000 and has household gun ownership of 45.6 percent. Alaska had a gun death rate 17.49 per 100,000 and household gun ownership of 60.6 percent. Montana had a gun death rate of 17.22 per 100,000 and 61.4 percent gun ownership.

Conversely, states with the lowest levels of gun ownership had the lowest levels of gun death rates.

Hawaii has a household gun ownership of 9.7 percent and a gun death rate of 2.20 per 100,000. Massachusetts has 12.8 percent rate of gun ownership and a gun death rate of 3.48 per 100,000. Rhode Island has a household gun ownership of 13.3 percent and a gun death rate of 3.63 per 100,000, the researchers said.