A perfect time to oppose efforts to protect against voter fraud

What is the extent of voter fraud in the United States?  I sure don't know.  But I find the war between the opposing sides fascinating.

Robyn "Blumñata" Blumner, hard left editorialist for the Tampa Bay Times, enters the fray with "Odd time to purge voter rolls."  Because one wouldn't want to have the purest voter roll just before an important election, right?  Rather, you want to purify the rolls immediately after a big election.  Or at least at some point far enough away from the election so the purge has time to unpurge.

So much for the silly title and on to the silly content.

Our jumping off point is the new Florida effort to purge voter rolls of non-citizens.  Up, up and away:

The process raises uncomfortable comparisons to the Jeb Bush-era error-ridden felon list. That purge list was used to prevent thousands of legitimate voters from casting ballots in the 2000 presidential election — an election decided by 537 votes.

The list prevented thousands of legitimate voters from casting ballots in 2000?   That's news to me.

 Fact check time.

The executive summary of an investigation of the 2000 election by the couU.S. Commission on Civil Rights was apparently not the source of Blumner's claim.  One would think that the direct disenfranchisement of thousands of legitimate voters would serve as exhibit A in such a report, presuming the Commission detected the problem, though an early draft of the report obtained by the Washington Post included the following:

Perhaps the most dramatic undercount in this election was the nonexistent ballots of the countless unknown eligible voters, who were wrongfully purged from the voter registration rolls, turned away from the polls, and by various other means prevented from exercising the franchise. While statistical data, reinforced by credible anecdotal evidence, point to widespread disenfranchisement and denial of voting rights, it is impossible to determine the extent of the disenfranchisement or to provide an adequate remedy to the persons whose voices were silenced in this historic election by a pattern and practice of injustice, ineptitude and inefficiency.

"Countless," so it might have been in the billions.  Though more likely the vague "countless" means they don't have any idea how many.  Several people turned up at the hearings to claim such disenfranchisement.  Assuming their stories are true the number is at least greater than zero.

Hunting in the USCCR data for confirmation of the disenfranchised thousands Blumner alleges turned up nothing.  Agenda journalist Greg Palast named no such number of lost votes.  Lost potential votes, yes--but Blumner uses no such qualifying language.

Don't buy Blumner's number unless it comes with reliable backing.  And good luck ever finding any.

More from Blumñata:

Detzner claims that 180,000 registered Florida voters may not be citizens after their names and other data were "matched" to foreign nationals in an outdated state motorist database. These voters could easily have been naturalized in the years since obtaining or renewing a driver's license or state I.D.

Obviously if the members of the set of 180,000 naturalized at some point then they count as citizens.  However, if they didn't naturalize then they don't count as citizens and it remains true that "180,000 registered voters may not be citizens" until some determination takes place.  Blumner's gratuitously playing up the obvious and admitted lack of certainty regarding the number among the 180,000 who qualify as citizens.

(click image for larger view)

 Blumñata:

Already some of the 2,700 noncitizens on the verified purge list are proving to be citizens. Which leads to the question of whether this is a pure effort to clean up the voter rolls or is there an element of suppressing minority votes?

Fact check.

What is the "verified purge list"?  Supposedly a list from the state that includes only confirmed non-citizens?

Blumner's own paper gives us the answer:

As a result, some citizens could appear to be non-citizens now because the DHSMV computer system doesn't automatically update when someone becomes a citizen, said Chris Cate, a spokesman with the Florida Division of Elections.

"We're not just looking at the matches from highway safety," Cate said. "We're doing a secondary assessment here before we send the names to supervisors of elections. You have to consider that a person's last contact with highway safety can be more than four years ago. Someone could have become a citizen in that time. So you can't presume someone's not an eligible voter."

Is Blumner trying to mislead readers or what?  The state knows that legitimate voters could occur on the list.  That's exactly why they send the list to local election workers. The local workers are charged with trying to verify citizenship.  The best time to do that is in advance of a coming election while allowing enough time to correct as many individual snags as possible.

Blumner:

Monroe County Supervisor of Elections Harry Sawyer, a Republican who is a straight shooter on election matters, says that some of the records Detzner is using are too old to be reliable. Without a confirmation on citizenship one way or another from the voter, Sawyer says, he won't automatically drop anyone off the rolls. But not every local elections supervisor will be this careful.

> Likely de-obfuscation of Blumner's paraphrasing:   Sawyer's stating the obvious again that persons with older driver's licenses are more likely to have achieved citizenship in the interim.   Presenting the same information twice doubles the amount of evidence.  De-obfuscation No. 2:  Sawyer's not acting to remove people from the rolls until he receives confirmation because he's limited from acting because of federal restrictions on his and four other Florida counties.  The information again comes from Blumner's own paper.  And she forgets to mention this?

Blumner:

Florida's noncitizen purge follows those in Colorado and New Mexico. Funny that this is being done by immigrant-heavy swing states with Republican secretaries of state. Both Colorado and New Mexico made a media splash with dire claims that noncitizens were registered and likely voting in large numbers. But a closer look by the nonprofit Brennan Center for Justice found that those states had drawn indefensible conclusions about noncitizen voting and had refused to release evidence that backed up their claims. The allegations of voter fraud, the center suggests, were smoke and mirrors and couldn't be trusted.

Members of the Democratic Party should feel outrage at Blumner's implication that Democrat secretaries of state would resist making it more difficult for non-citizens--who tend to vote Democrat--to vote.

The Brennan Center for Justice evaluation, by the way, has a little hypocrisy problem:

A careful review of the reports and information released (they have not released the complete set of data and methodology used to arrive at their conclusions) shows some serious problems with the methods used based upon the information they did disclose resulting in questionable conclusions.

A definitive finding of "serious problems" depends on a full evaluation of the methodology, at least in a case like this.  None of the supposed problems lacks for a potential solution.  So the evaluation suffers a problem similar to that of which it accuses Colorado and New Mexico.

It should come as no big surprise.  The evaluation was written by Senior Counsel in the Brennan Center's Democracy Program, Keesha Gaskins.  Lawyers too often don't care about the legitimacy of their arguments.  They're often swayed by the desire to convince the audience by any means, including by the use of a host of formal and informal fallacies.  Not that we should dismiss Gaskins' arguments because of that lawyerly tendency.  Each argument stands or falls on its own.

Case in point (Blumner's a former lawyer):

The same can be said for all the dead people voting in South Carolina. That state's attorney general, Republican Alan Wilson, claimed recently that more than 900 votes had been cast by dead people. But after the South Carolina Election Commission looked into the claim, it didn't hold up. There was no evidence that anyone had fraudulently voted in the name of someone dead.

Apparently a confession from the illegal voter is a necessary proof.

Seriously, an investigation of the 207 potential votes by dead people ended up ruling out voter fraud, on reasonable grounds, in all but 10 cases.  In lawyer world that's "no evidence that anyone had fraudulently voted in the name of someone dead."  The investigation did not encompass another 696 suspicious votes from earlier elections.  See what I mean about lawyers?  No evidence isn't the same as no proof.

This is part of a pattern. Republicans actively gin up voter fraud claims to justify turning voting into an obstacle course to dissuade Democratic-leaning constituencies.

Blumner's hilarious.  News reports indicate that the information about potential votes by dead people was uncovered after South Carolina started implementing a voter ID law.  Some pattern.

Blumner shows how consistency isn't always a virtue

Credit this week for Robyn "Blumñata" Blumner of the St. Peterburg Times' editoral page. She demonstrated consistency in condemning President Obama on the issue of presidential power for which she has excoriated President Bush in the past.

But Blumner's column also provides evidence of the unfortunate type of consistency:

These rhetorical criticisms that the candidate leveled at Bush are sad reminders of what we expected of Obama. He was to dismantle the prior occupant's jerry-built rationales for unlimited and unanswerable executive power. But Obama's refusal to follow the strictures of the War Powers Act says that he, too, is willing to manipulate language to ignore inconvenient limits on his power. Bush had John Yoo at the Office of Legal Counsel approving the use of torture by absurdly defining it so narrowly that it no longer included waterboarding.

The unfortunate type of inconsistency occurs when one consistently condemns something like waterboarding without producing a coherent argument.

Blumner called waterboarding torture in part because of deeply flawed essay by Judge Evan Wallach.  Wallach's essay treated substantially different types of techniques under the term "waterboarding" in order to argue it constituted torture.  Wallach's argument wallowed in the fallacy of equivocation throughout.

Suppose somebody buys an equivocation-laced argument such as Wallach's.  What better way to attack the argument on the other side than by claiming that its definitions are too narrow?  That's exactly what Blumner does.

Let's hope Blumner eventually expands her use of the good kind of consistency to avoid the bad kind.

Blumneconomics XIV: the solution to poverty

Though I'm still waiting for Robyn "Blumñata" Blumner to plug another Western European socialist country, we at least have installment XIV in the Blumneconomics series with her "Poverty is not a character flaw" column from last week.

Blumner got the laughter rolling early:

Sen. Bernie Sanders, a liberal, political independent and all-around good egg, has put together a book of excerpts of letters he's received from Vermonters who are struggling through the recession.

Liberal.  Political independent.  All-around good egg.  Socialist.

Blumner may have decided to omit that label because of the regularity with which comments on her columns tag her with "communist" or "socialist."  So here she is lauding the socialist Bernie Sanders in her column.  Perfect.

And Sanders put together a book!:

In short, blunt paragraphs, the writers tell of how they are falling out of the middle class:

"I can't find a job to save my soul that will pay enough to make a difference," says Sue, who is described as "jobless since April" and "facing foreclosure."

Can't find a job that pays enough to make a difference?  The difference between something and nothing is still something, isn't it?  Or maybe Sue's receiving jobless benefits and won't take a job that "will pay enough to make a difference."  It makes a difference to taxpayers, if that's her situation.

Next!:

"I patch together a full-time job making $12/hour and various painting jobs and still can't afford to get myself out of debt, or make necessary repairs on my home," laments a single mom in her late 40s.

Bummer.  I wonder if marriage has crossed her mind a second (third?  I dunno) time?

Next!:

"I am a 35-year-old man living paycheck to paycheck trying to make ends meet while working at a chain retailer. I feel I am being overworked and underpaid," offers a writer from Middlebury who lives with his parents because he can't afford housing.

We have a winner!  How can a person live "paycheck to paycheck trying to make ends meet" while living with their parents?  Even working only 30 hours per week at minimum wage he's got to be taking home about $600 per month.  A person who can't get by on $600 per month while living with their parents probably has issues with budgeting.

That was all for the poverty parade.  But now comes Blumner's economic nonsense for a few paragraphs:

While Republicans in Congress push to unravel more of America's frayed social safety net, they have no plans to help rock-ribbed, hard-working Americans earn a decent living.

Sure they do.  Do what worked in the past.  Harness the free market and let American ingenuity do the rest.  If that won't work then we have no alternative with a proven history of success.  People who fail to understand that are often called "socialists."

Do conservative politicians think, if you're not rich, you're not working hard enough? No one works harder than a roofer in the Florida sun or a tomato picker. But in the GOP's world, it is as if poverty indicates a character flaw. It's an unconscious bias that metastasizes into contempt for people who are struggling economically.

It isn't that poverty is a character flaw.  It's that poor job skills lead to low-paying jobs in a market economy.  And no economy can fool the market indefinitely.  That's why bubbles burst and the business cycle cycles.  A roofer can make pretty good money because it takes a certain degree of skill.  Tomato pickers don't need much skill.  But the market doesn't reward work simply because it is physically difficult.  If I go dig a ditch that nobody wants there's no need to doubt that the work will prove very difficult.  Dirt is pretty heavy, kind of a like thousands of tiny little rocks.  But I don't get a dime if the work is not valuable to a person or persons.

And that's what liberals and socialists always seem to misunderstand about the free market.  There's no escaping it.  You either work with it or fight against it.  Fighting against it carries a terrible economic history.

Blumner's column follows that misstep off into the mire.  She can't understand why Republican free-market policies favor increased freedom for businesses.  She thinks businesses should give (like charity) jobs to people regardless of profit.  In her mind, salaries given for jobs that do not profit the employer serve as the magic bullet that permits people to "earn a decent living."  These useless jobs pump money into the economy, just like unemployment benefits.  And liberals know that paying unemployment benefits is one of the very best ways to stimulate the economy.

But even liberals, if pressed, seem to realize that paying everyone unemployment benefits would not result in a terrific economy.  The missing component?  Wealth creation.  No, printing more money does not create wealth.  It dilutes wealth and creates yet another market condition that will help some and harm others.

Who creates wealth?  Those who direct businesses into ventures that people find valuable.  The Chevy Volt will serve a great test case.  If people (paying customers) value the Volt enough to buy many of them, then the Volt will create wealth.  If the customers don't show then the investors lose money.

There's a good chance the Volt will fail, because it represents the vision of what some people want the market to be while ignoring what the market is in real life.

They never seem to learn.


Correction 7/21/2012:  Fixed dyslexic take ("IVX") on the Roman numeral representation of 14 in the title and text.

Shooting magic blanks

Our favorite St. Petersburg Times commie columnist*, Robyn "Blumñata" Blumner is at it again, celebrating anniversary after anniversary of the perfect marriage between economic cluelessness and leftist ideology.

Perhaps that's redundant.

Anyhow, Blumñata's latest column blasts Republicans for supposedly presenting tort reform as a magic bullet for controlling the increase in health care costs before offering her own solution based on little more than a rhetorical "Abracadabra!"

On Republican magic bullets:

While everyone agrees that spiraling Medicaid costs are a problem that need addressing, Republican politicians would have you believe that tort reform is the magic bullet to cost containment, winning them plaudits and contributions from the medical community.

According to my recollection, Republicans advanced tort reform as a conspicuously missing piece of Democratic Party health care reform proposals.  Blumner apparently thought it unnecessary to provide any example of the type of advocacy with which she charges Republicans.

But at least she comes through with a stellar example when it comes to her own magical thinking:

While defensive medicine — where doctors order tests and procedures as a hedge against malpractice suits — undoubtedly adds unnecessary costs, it is not the main driver. That dishonor goes to one overarching factor: bad jobs — something Republicans don't want to talk about.

Blumner's claim is sheer lunacy, unless by "bad jobs" she literally means jobs that result in making it more likely that workers will require expensive medical care.  The only thing a bad job does is make health care, at whatever price it carries, less affordable.

This is an important distinction progressives like Blumner seem to handle with difficulty.  Suppose we had available a spinal replacement surgery, but it came a cost of $2 trillion per procedure.  In Blumner's world, spinal replacement surgery represents a terrible thing because it's just one more way that health care is unaffordable.  And such prices help necessitate universal coverage where "the rich" share the costs of expensive procedures.  That way, rich folks like Bill Gates can be forced to help underwrite spinal replacement surgery for dozens of people who can't even afford basic health insurance.

Of course, we don't have spinal replacement surgery at any cost--yet.  But the hypothetical procedure illustrates the primary driver of increased medical costs:  medical innovation.

If the only medical care we had was plaster casts, pain killers and 19th century surgical procedures then medical costs would be very low today.  It's not that hard to saw off a leg.  Medical costs increase rapidly because the technology to accomplish more medical treatment is increasing rapidly.  And even when a new advance is relatively inexpensive, such as treatment for erectile dysfunction, overall medical costs increase because people expect such treatments to make up part of their medical care.  That's why even Viagra was covered for a time under Medicare.

The cost (price) of treating erectile dysfunction went down.  The amount of money spent (cost) of treating erectile dysfunction went up.  It's a classic supply-and-demand curve.

And then there's the cost of health insurance as contrasted to the price of health care.  As above, if health insurance covered plaster casts, pain killers and 19th century surgical procedures then health insurance would be extremely affordable--no doubt a small fraction of what it costs today given coverage of everything from cancer treatment to substance abuse treatment.  But government regulators tell insurance companies what they have to cover.  And because so many expensive health procedures exist, the cost of covering the risk of providing those procedures grows right along with it.  The consumer foots the bill where the state mandates increases in the cost of shared risk.

If Blumner has any clue about any of this then her expertise in hiding it for the purpose of her columns cannot be questioned.


* I don't know that Blumner's a communist.  People in the comments section at the Times like to call her that, and I like alliteration ("commie columnist").  She likes organized labor and big government.  She calls herself an atheist.  So if she's not a communist then at least she has a thing or two in common. The description is not intended to identify her as a communist, however.  It is intended as alliterative hyperbole.



Hat tip to JD for pointing out the mess I had made of the third paragraph.  A redundancy has been removed and the phrasing changed slightly to meet my exceedingly high standards of something-or-other.

Extremism apparently now mainstream

Barack Obama rode popular sentiment to his election as president of the United States.  Obama ran on the unpopularity of Republicans and a message of bipartisan change that transformed shortly after election day to a message of partisan change.

Campaign messaging is different today, and Robyn "Blumñata" Blumner of the St. Petersburg Times is here to explain it to us.

Will someone please wake me from this bad dream that is the coming election? No matter how kooky, mean or incoherent Republican candidates get, voters seem willing to support them. Maybe former witchcraft dabbler and perennial deadbeat Christine O'Donnell won't be taking a U.S. Senate seat in Delaware, but there are plenty of other congressional races from Florida to Colorado to Utah in which radical tea party-backed Republicans have a good (or certain) chance of victory. Extremism is the new Republican must-have accessory for fall, and it's working for them.

Think about her thesis seriously for a moment.

Is it possible to forge a successful national political strategy based on an appeal to extremism?

Electoral politics is about forging coalitions.  It cannot succeed at the national level through the appeal to any brand of extremism which a majority strongly opposes.

Blumner's sentiment reminds me of Democratic gubernatorial candidate Alex Sink's impression that nearly half of all Floridians are extremists.  Both ladies need to get out of the office more often.

Extremism with majority appeal is an oxymoron minus very special circumstances (a majority of extremists are extremists, for example).

Blumner's column brought us more of the usual silliness, including a bizarre claim involving Jack Kemp:

Where is the next Jack Kemp, a self-described "bleeding-heart conservative"? He's a Democrat. The Republicans no longer want him.

The majority of conservatives are quite compassionate.  Survey data confirm again and again that conservatives tend to give more generously to charity, for example.  Conservatives just don't want the government in charge of charity.  We see that as a poisonous arrangement.

Blumner on vacation

Robyn "Blumñata" Blumner is on vacation, but still posting columns. I presume that her mode of travel caused more carbon to enter the atmosphere and place the planet in greater peril.

She's still posting columns, but instead of blaming recent violent demonstrations by Muslims on the detention facility at Gitmo, she's writing about how people in Russia and Eastern Europe know English.

Go figure.

Reporting from Kabul, Afghanistan —
Shouts of "Death to America!" rang out in Afghanistan on Saturday as more than 10,000 demonstrators denounced now-suspended plans by an American pastor to burn the Koran.

The protest in the city of Pul-e-Alam, about 35 miles south of Kabul, the Afghan capital, was initially peaceful but boiled over into violence as some demonstrators set shops ablaze and tried to storm the provincial governor's compound.
(Los Angeles Times)

Gitmo is also used as a major recruitment tool and motivation for violent jihadists ("explosive anger"):

“One jihadist posted a picture on the Shumukh al-Islam forum of a beheaded Pastor Jones, with words on the picture reading: ‘Punishment for whoever dares to transgress against the Book of Allah,’” SITE reported (pdf).

One of the jihadists sites called for terrorist attacks, referred to Jones’s plan, which he has since canceled, as “another example of the West insulting Islam and receiving only words of condemnation rather than physical retaliation,” SITE reported.
(Washington Post Blog)

I'm sure when Blumner returns from vacation she will soon renew the call for President Obama to close Gitmo.

Economic slavery

There must be more blindly partisan editorial columnists than Robyn "Blumñata" Blumner.  But I could not name one.  This week Blumner acts as a slave to her idea of Democratic economic policy.

Blumner's latest column tries to inform her readers that liberal policies deserve great credit for rescuing the country, and therefore Democrats should be rewarded with continued political power.

The next election should be a contest over which economic world view — laissez-faire or Keynesian — turned out to be the better one, and on that score the Democrats should win.

Blumner's simplistic analysis overlooks the fact that tax cuts are a type of Keynesian stimulus.  Need proof?  Just look at the stimulus package that Blumner wants to count as a triumph of Democratic economic policy.  Of the $787 billion price tag, $288 billion was in the form of tax cuts.  The Republican Party tends to favor lowering taxes more so than the Democratic Party, and Republicans were on board with the tax cutting portions of the stimulus bill.  The objections occurred because Democrats were counting all manner of run-of-the-mill government spending programs as stimulus.  And of the remaining $499 billion, "almost $200 billion remains unspent."  Depending on the span of time over which the tax cuts were calculated, about half of the stimulus was in the form of tax cuts through the present.

So, Blumner offers us what President Obama likes to call "a false choice."

Back to the Blumnerian rant:

Deregulation got America into this mess — decades of it — the kind of laissez-faire economics enacted by the Chamber of Commerce, former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan and Republican leaders. America barely survived life under their tie-regulators-hands approach to markets. Wall Street sucked up the wealth in this country, hollowing out our productive sectors, while bankers got drunk on risk. It was only after $17 trillion in American household wealth was wiped out in 18 months that Greenspan acknowledged how bankrupt his views were.

Did Blumner forget to mention that much of the $17 trillion only existed because of the same policies she decries?  Oopsie!  Did Blumner likewise forget to mention that government regulation encouraged the housing bubble that set off the banking crisis in the first place?  Double oopsie!   Keep those in mind as Blumner continues:

Blinder and Zandi go on to write that the TARP "has been a substantial success, helping to restore stability to the financial system and to end the free fall in housing and auto markets." And on the $787 billion fiscal stimulus, the authors say that the stimulus alone will add nearly 2.7 million jobs and 2 percent to GDP in 2010.

Meh.  Blumner is accurate in relating the 2.7 million figure, but did a substantial round up to reach the 2 percent figure.  Here's how Blinder and Zandi phrased it:

Nonetheless, the effects of the fiscal stimulus alone appear very substantial, raising 2010 real GDP by about 3.4%, holding the unemployment rate about 1½ percentage points lower, and adding almost 2.7 million jobs to U.S. payrolls.

Blinder and Zandi may be rounding up to reach the 1.5 percentage point figure, and if so then Blumner's estimation is even worse than a 33 percent inflation.  Why not just stick with 1.5?  Maybe that didn't sound good enough?

Again, the Republicans would have acted to stimulate the economy.  But the bill would have relied more on tax cuts and probably would have spent less money--hopefully on things having a greater chance of improving economic performance down the line.  The bill for the stimulus eventually comes due, after all, and that is a legitimate concern of the voting public.

Perhaps Blumner's worst spin comes from her downplaying of the Republican role in TARP, which Blinder and Zandi believe was more beneficial than the stimulus package.  She grudgingly allows that TARP was "passed while George W. Bush was president" though perhaps she wants her readers to think that it passed in spite of the president's veto.  Bush, of course, was the principal force behind TARP, and much of the Republican resistance was due to the lack of accountability of the program.  Blumner is correct on one minor point, in that TARP has received more criticism than it deserves.  The program was effective in averting a severe credit crisis and the loaned monies have been substantially repaid--over half according to Zack's Equities Research.  A bailout via loan is not as bad as a gift bailout unless the borrower defaults.

The big hole in the column is Blumner's failure to acknowledge the drawbacks of a government-managed economy.  Yes, government intervention can soften the landing when times are tough.  But the policy has the effect of slowing the climb and lowering the eventual peaks.  Is it that trade off worth the price, especially if the U.S. follows Greece and Spain toward fiscal oblivion?  Spain, by the way, was one of the Western European socialist nations Blumner would have had us emulate just a few short years ago.

Which reminds me.  If you want to try to predict the next Western European socialist nation Blumner will suggest as the appropriate pattern for the U.S. to copy, take a stab at it in the poll in the sidebar (lower right).

Blumner Explains: How to finance elections!

Another week, another Robyn "Blumñata" Blumner column to dissect.

Last week on "Blumner Explains," she told you what was wrong with the GOP view of the financial crisis. And this week she'll tell you the solution to the huge problem of rich people spending their own money to finance their political campaigns:

(W)e have a hamstrung candidate who has to continuously raise money in small amounts challenged by one who simply digs in his own pocket. Not fair, right? What to do? The answer is public financing.

Dang.  That was easy.  Pretty much like figuring out your name, your favorite color or identifying the fact that your quest is for the Holy Grail.

But why isn't it fair for Rick Scott to dig into his own pocket for campaign finances?  Because he has more money than McCollum?  Barack Obama had a ton more money than John McCain during the last presidential election and I don't recall Blumner whining about it.  Maybe it's fair to have more campaign money than the other guy for reasons other than personal wealth.  But Blumner never really explains that, so I guess we'll have to leave it hanging.

If the issue is fairness, then how many other things should we change about elections?  Rigid controls on campaign promises?  I mean, is it fair to promise things like tax cuts or other popular goodies?  Is it fair to strongly imply (if not promise) that one will not raise taxes on certain folks and then turn around and raise taxes on those folks?

Is it fair to have better name recognition than an opponent?  Or more experience in public office, such as having been elected dogcatcher?  Is it fair being smarter than one's opponent?  Or having better administrative skills?  Or having a better speaking style?

Perhaps what we really need is the Harrison Bergeron Campaign Reform Act of 2010, not some paltry public financing scheme.

Half of Blumner's gripe is aimed at the recent Supreme Court decision that jeopardized some campaign finance laws.  The majority in the 5-4 decision reasoned, in a nutshell, that the government needed a compelling case to limit spending since spending constitutes a type of political speech.

Blumner disagrees:

I don't think the First Amendment is injured under the public financing model. The dissent by Justice John Paul Stevens in Davis explains why. He wrote the millionaire's amendment "quiets no speech at all" and simply assists an opponent "in his attempts to make his voice heard" — an "amplification," Stevens said, that "in no way mutes the voice of the millionaire, who remains able to speak as loud and as long as he likes."

The Davis decision, for what it's worth, was not a public financing model.  The summary of the case makes that clear:

The self-financing candidate remains subject to the normal limitations, but his opponent, the “non-self financing” candidate, may receive individual contributions at treble the normal limit from individuals who have reached the normal limit on aggregate contributions, and may accept coordinated party expenditures without limit.

As for the First Amendment argument, Blumner initially argued that it was not "fair" for Scott to spend more than McCollum.  Fair like this, apparently:

(Davis contended the "Millionaires amendment") unconstitutionally burdens his exercise of his First Amendment right to make unlimited expenditures of his personal funds because making expenditures that create the imbalance has the effect of enabling his opponent to raise more money and to use that money to finance speech that counteracts and thus diminishes the effectiveness of Davis’ own speech.

If Davis wasn't correct, then in what respect would public financing improve the fairness of election in Blumner's eyes?

Blumner's argument rests on an attitude dismissive of the voters' ability to correctly choose their preferred candidate without the help of the omnibenevolent government.


Afters:

I'm glad Rick Scott had a chance to push his candidacy for Florida governor.  I found quite a bit to like about his policy positions.  Plus he physically resembled Max Headroom compared to Bill McCollum's passing resemblance to Howdy Doody.  Advantage Scott on that one.  However, Scott carries a large burden of negatives into the governor's race.  Though I think Scott is more conservative, I'll be voting for Bill McCollum in the belief that he will fare better against his Democratic opponent.

The reason, by the way, for the influx of moneyed candidates is obvious:  Open seats, weak competition and a contentious political atmosphere will collectively make up a strong draw for candidates more blessed with money than either party support or name recognition.

Blumner Explains: Errors of the GOP on the financial crisis!

Robyn "Blumñata" Blumner returned last weekend with yet another senseless screed.

Blumner's column, perhaps once again inspired by a book from a liberal author, attempts to explain why Republicans are wrong to pin the financial crisis on the Community Reinvestment Act along with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

But there's a problem. Blumner's column largely disagrees with the take on the subprime mortgage crisis published by her own paper, the St. Petersburg Times, back on Oct. 12, 2008. See my review and (relatively!) effusive praise of that story here.

A few of the juicier tidbits from Blumner's column:

Fannie and Freddie bought home loans that met certain underwriting standards to free up credit so banks could lend to other borrowers. Many of these loans were packaged into bonds (known as agency mortgage-backed securities) and then sold. But Fannie and Freddie kept much of the risk on its own books by guaranteeing the underlying mortgages against default.

Fannie and Freddie's buying allowed banks to profit from writing the loan and then selling the risk to American taxpayers!  How does Blumner not figure that out even if her nose is buried in an ideologically tilted fairy-tale account of the crisis?  The Washington Post explains:

The agency neglected to examine whether borrowers could make the payments on the loans that Freddie and Fannie classified as affordable. From 2004 to 2006, the two purchased $434 billion in securities backed by subprime loans, creating a market for more such lending. Subprime loans are targeted toward borrowers with poor credit, and they generally carry higher interest rates than conventional loans.

The government made subprime mortgages profitable with its actions.

Another tidbit:

Since about 1995 Wall Street started encroaching on this business, but with a key difference. After Wall Street bought the mortgages, securitized and sold them, it did not guarantee them against default. Wall Street banks had no skin in the game and not surprisingly had less interest in making sure they were buying sound mortgages.

Wall Street still had a good amount of skin the the game, but they were able to peddle off quite a bit to taxpayers (through Fannie and Freddie) as well as to foreign investors.  But the system was enabled and originally forced on the banks by the government.

Blumner again:

Financial expert and author of Bailout Nation Barry Ritholtz puts it another way. He writes that if the CRA caused the crisis, then foreclosures in CRA regions should be the highest in the country, but in fact it's the "sand states" — non-CRA regions such as Southern California, Las Vegas, Arizona and South Florida — that have the worst rates. Ritholtz says the banks making CRA mortgages should be disproportionately failing. But again, Ritholtz notes, that's not what has happened. CRA banks have been relatively healthy. Compared with other factors, Ritholtz says, "the CRA impact is all but irrelevant." 

Ritholtz's logic is faulty, and Blumner shares the criticism for buying it.

1)  The government regulated banks by making the percentage of risky loans a key criterion for things like bank mergers.  The number of "CRA loans" is a red herring.  The risky loans didn't have to be CRA loans.  Banks simply had to use a certain amount of money on such loans to remain in compliance with government standards.

2)  The point above pretty much negates the point Blumner cites from Ritholtz about the prediction of banks with CRA mortgages failing disproportionately.  John Carney at Business Insider goes into greater detail and specifically debunks Ritholtz's objection, using the Countrywide mortgage company as an example.

Carney makes a comprehensive and fair case in "Here's How The Community Reinvestment Act Led To The Housing Bubble's Lax Lending," which contains abundant links to his more detailed arguments.

Megyn Kelly talks to J. Christian Adams (Updated with newer video)

Attorney J. Christian Adams left his job at the DOJ in protest of the decision to drop a case against uniformed New Black Panther Party members who stationed themselves in front of a polling station in Pennsylvania.

Part 1




Part 2.1



Part 2.2




Paging Robyn Blumner, Robyn Blumner the subject of your next editorial column is waiting.


Update:

Kelly updates the story with Adams' allegation that laws requiring states to cull ineligible voters from their rolls are going unenforced for political reasons:



Was this the flip side of the Bush administration's increased emphasis on voter fraud cases? I don't know the details enough to launch into judgment. Until I hear more I'll tend to give the Obama administration the benefit of the doubt.

If this aspect of the situation is reasonably comparable to the aforementioned emphasis on prosecution carried out by the Bush DOJ, then Adams' credibility will suffer. That would surprise me, as Adams has appeared extremely credible so far.

The Predict Robyn Blumner's Next Move poll

Robyn "Blumnata" Blumner, editorial columnist for the St. Petersburg Times, periodically recommends socialist solutions from other nations as models for the United States.  Columns over the past few years, for example, have extolled the wonders of the Spanish economy and, more recently, the model in Germany.  The latter, of course, ignored that nation's recent leaning toward market-based economic reform.

In a blog post dedicated to that most recent Blumner column, I promised a poll to allow reader(s) to predict the next Western European socialist nation she would offer as a model for the U.S.

There's probably something liberal enough to call "socialist" in every Western European nation, as least enough to make Blumner think it would be good for America, so I've listed every nation of Western Europe among the selections.  If a new country forms in Western Europe I'll add it to the list.

The poll will remain open until Jan. 2011 unless Blumner tips her hand before that.  Good luck!

Look for the poll in the sidebar, lower right near the bottom.

Blumneconomics XIII: On second thought, Germany is the Western European socialist nation the U.S. should emulate

Roughly two years ago, Robyn "Blumñata" Blumner was touting Spain as the model for the U.S. economy.

With Spain hot on the heels of Greece on the road toward fiscal ruin, however, Blumner needed a different example with which to inspire the envy of downtrodden American workers.  How about ... Germany?

Since 2003, Germany and its 82 million people have either beaten China in export sales or about tied China for first place. The country is arguably the world's leading industrial power, even as its workers enjoy high wages, six-week vacations and other benefits that an American worker only dreams about.

Yeah, Germany!  There's the ticket!

As usual, Blumner was inspired by a book authored by a liberal/leftist.  This time it was a labor lawyer from Chicago by name of Thomas Geoghegan.  And, once again, the message is that socialism is good.

I haven't read Geohegan's book, so I won't critique that.  But Blumner's cherry-picked statistics and incomplete truth-telling are fair game.
Blumner:

And for those who claim that the cost of European socialism is endemic high unemployment, German unemployment at 7.7 percent is lower than the U.S. rate.

The cherry-picking:  Germany ordinarily trails the United States in terms of unemployment rate during recent history.



The rest of the story:  During the recent recession, Germany has kept its unemployment artificially low by cutting back on the number of hours worked.  Part of Germany's recent success may be attributed to Germany's gravitation toward free market principles in its economic reform movement.

My, that was inconvenient.

Blumner again:

Our lower taxes boost per capita GDP but also mean that we are on our own for collective-type goods like college education, retirement, health care, transportation and child care — things that are efficiently bought with taxes for everyone in European social democracies.

Eh.

I'll be setting up a pool/poll so that readers can vote on which European socialist state Blumner would have us emulate after Germany falters.

St. Petersburg Times subscribes to "divine command" theory for opinion-fact division?

As a footnote to my bash of a Robyn Blumner (St. Petersburg Times) editorial column some days ago, I included a little fact-check item.

Blumner had accused radio personality Neal Boortz of comparing Supreme Court justice appointee Elena Kagan to the cartoon monster "Shrek."

Here's how she did it:

A recent tweet from radio host Neal Boortz asked, "Has anyone seen Mike Myers and your new Supreme in the same room at the same time?" comparing Kagan to Shrek, the cartoon ogre character of which Myers is the voice.

Finding it hard to follow the logic?  Maybe this will help:



(I'm not sure why the video doesn't appear on the main page. It appears if you click "Read more" at the bottom of the post)

If you claim somebody looks like Boris Karloff then you're actually claiming that the person resembles Frankenstein's monster.  Likewise for any example where the actor fails to significantly resemble their character.

Blumner's comment made absolutely no sense, and the comparison was stated as a matter of fact, not as a matter of opinion.  Boortz either did or did not compare Kagan to Shrek.  If opinion entered into it than there is no such thing as a fact divorced from opinion.

Thus began the painful process of holding the Times to account.

Robyn Blumner's defense of women hobbled by her politics

It's time again for a review of an editorial column from Robyn "Blumñata" Blumner.

This week, Blumner rose to the defense of Elena Kagan, President Obama's selection to replace retiring justice John Paul Stevens on the Supreme Court.

Most of Blumner's column is well taken. Kagan's appearance is not relevant to her nomination to the post, and some of the attacks on Kagan have been mean-spirited.

I'll even give Blumnmer extra credit for allowing a fairly obvious hint that conservatives are not alone in criticizing Kagan's looks:

It was inevitable that Elena Kagan's physical appearance would become fodder for critics of her nomination to the Supreme Court. The solicitor general, a woman of remarkable professional achievement, is still, after all, a woman. Even in 2010, 50 years after the stultifying Mad Men era, a woman's looks are part of her resume.

Of course, the most distasteful sentiments are coming from the extreme right.

Such as the extreme right BuzzFeed.

But seriously, Blumner focuses all of her energy in attacking the double standard society places on the appearance of women but whiffs on a huge part of that double standard (and arguably contributes to the double standard):

The corollary to this is the Sarah Palin phenomenon — a woman whose great looks have earned her a place as an opinionmaker, despite demonstrable intellectual limits. (...) Somehow her beauty magically transforms the mash of incoherence she spouts into pearls of wisdom for supporters.

In actuality, Palin's appearance has repeatedly served as a bludgeon used to belittle her accomplishments, and Blumner certainly appears to wield it that way.  If beauty was all there was to it, then Carrie Prejean 2012 stickers ought to be much more common.  Palin is an intelligent woman, if not an intellectual, and her popularity stems from her charisma and her skill in communicating a message.  Her beauty is a bonus.

Women are treated unfairly based on looks.  Attractive women have their accomplishments downgraded because of their looks.  And less attractive women of great accomplishment are downgraded as people because of their looks.  It's a pity that Blumner skipped an opportunity to criticize both sides of the dilemma.



Additional note:

One of Blumner's examples of right-wing neanderthalism, radio talk show host Neal Boortz, may have received a bad rap from Blumner.  Let's review her presentation of what Boortz said:

A recent tweet from radio host Neal Boortz asked, "Has anyone seen Mike Myers and your new Supreme in the same room at the same time?" comparing Kagan to Shrek, the cartoon ogre character of which Myers is the voice.

A number of liberal media outlets are making a similar criticism of Boortz.  But when I saw that Kagan had been compared to Michael Myers already, I decided it was worth looking into the basis for this claim.

Here's a consecutive pair of Boortz tweets (both from May 11):

Note that the Twitter feeds list in reverse chronological order.  The 3:56 a.m. tweet appears to compare Kagan directly with Mike Myers, just as did BuzzFeed.  The 5:13 a.m. tweet is worded as though it is a response to somebody else's comparison of Kagan to Shrek, with Boortz calling the comparison "a wee bit below the belt."

Funny how that part was left out in Blumner's account.

Blumner emerges from glass house, bearing stones for throwing

Ah, I love the vapidity of editorial columns by Robyn Blumner.

Blumner went on the attack against Sarah Palin this week.  I suppose the joy of bashing George W. Bush has faded now that he has been out of office for over a year.

Let's root for those pearls of Blumnerian wisdom:

Since Sarah Palin won't rule out running for the presidency in 2012, her performance recently at the Tea Party convention in Nashville deserves more scrutiny. Voters may have to soon evaluate her as a future leader of our nation and defender of the free world. Which makes her strikingly vapid answers to the softball questions thrown her way all the more frightening.

Newsflash, Ms. Blumner:  Joe Biden is our vice president.  That is the here and now.

Blumner:

Sitting in comfy armchairs she answered questions put to her by the adoring Judson Phillips, founder of Tea Party Nation.

Palin was asked: "We hear about the Obama plan. What's the Palin plan?" Her answer on her national defense plan — the entirety of it — was this: "And when it comes to national security, as I ratchet down the message on national security, it's easy to just kind of sum it up by repeating Ronald Reagan when he talked about the Cold War. And we can apply this now to our war on terrorism, you know. Bottom line, we win, they lose. We do all that we can to win."

Compare that bit of nearly indecipherable triumphalism with the answer President Barack Obama gave at a news conference Tuesday when asked about Iran's decision to further enrich uranium, which is too long to reprint verbatim.

 Apples and oranges comparisons are where it's at, apparently.

Palin was asked a very general question, and so gave a very general answer.  President Obama was at his press conference for a particular reason, with a big part of that the purpose of describing the policy on Iran.  If he had been asked to describe his plan for national defense then it probably would have been very general.  Palin has no reason to develop a detailed foreign policy strategy at present.  The next presidential election isn't for almost three years.  In contrast, Obama has every reason to have a detailed approach to foreign policy as he is currently serving as president.  The comparison of the these two speeches could hardly be less apt.

The rest of Blumner's piece is a similar criticism of another of Palin's answers during the brief Q&A session following her keynote address.  The point, I suppose, is that Obama is much smarter than Palin and speaks better as well.  But even if that is the case, who really cares?  It ultimately comes down to which one has the better policy, and Blumner doesn't delve into that.  Her column counts mostly as a personal attack against Palin, showing yet more evidence that the Palin obsession may be even greater on the left than on the right.

All in all, a boring and unimportant column.

Compare Palin (Q&A at about the 45 minute mark) and Obama for yourself.

Obama, of course, went for months without giving a press conference.  This one offers some evidence that his attempts to improve his teleprompterless speaking are paying off.  He's stuttering less and using fewer "ummm's." But there are still quite a few during his answer on Iran.  Look for it at about the 21 minute mark.

I wonder if Blumner heard about Obama's recent "corpsemen" gaffe?

Legalese disease

Robyn Blumner, St. Petersburg Times editorial columnist ordinaire, shot a few darts at the death penalty in her latest column.

Blumner:

The death penalty costs a lot to implement, a side issue to be sure but in these tough fiscal times, a consideration. Florida, for instance, spends about $51 million a year on its death penalty system or about $24 million for each execution. While another broke state, California, spends an estimated $137 million. The high cost is largely driven by the layers of additional court proceedings intended to make sure that due process has been afforded the accused and a guilty person is being executed.

Cost is actually the best argument against the U.S. version of the death penalty.  I suppose Blumner felt that she would appear lacking in humanitarian principle if she pressed her point in those terms, however.  She is correct in identifying the source of the high cost.

Blumner:

I can hear the cries of "who cares what it costs?" or "let's make it cheaper by cutting out all those extra legal steps." But what should concern capital punishment proponents is that the system, even with these expensive safeguards, gets it wrong. Executing the innocent is a distinct possibility.

It isn't news that our legal system is imperfect.  But if it isn't right to put an innocent to death, then neither is it right to put an innocent in prison for life.  Imperfection is an argument against all legal penalties.

Blumner:

Nine men in 2009 who had been convicted and sentenced to death were exonerated of their crimes and freed. The total now stands at 139 since 1973. According to the Death Penalty Information Center, those nine men served a combined 121 years between the time they were sentenced to death and their exonerations, which means that all that extra due process and all the system's delays that pandering politicians always caterwaul about were necessary to avert a tragedy.

Note that Blumner has constructed an argument over the course of these three paragraphs.  First, states spend a great deal on the death penalty in order to safeguard the results.  Second, despite those safeguards, imperfections in the system persist.  She then offers statistics supposedly in support of her argument.

"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics."
--original authorship uncertain

Recent death sentence exonerations owe much to likewise recent advances in treatment of DNA evidence.  Rather than use those numbers as an argument against the death penalty generally, the advances point toward more reliable outcomes in future cases where the new techniques may be used.  In short, when we scrape a bit below the surface, Blumner's argument undercuts itself.

Back to Blumner:

And then there are the cases where a convict's innocence emerged too late. In a 2006 case concerning the death penalty law in Kansas, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia wrote with his typical crowing arrogance that there has not been "a single case — not one — in which it is clear that a person was executed for a crime he did not commit. If such an event had occurred in recent years, we would not have to hunt for it; the innocent's name would be shouted from the rooftops."

Scalia's misguided confidence is troubling considering the infamous Florida case of Frank Lee Smith whose death warrant was signed in 1989 for a rape and murder. It wasn't until after Smith died of cancer while awaiting execution that a DNA test in 2000 proved his innocence and implicated a convicted rapist and murderer.

Eh.

Are we supposed to believe that if a man sentenced to death dies of cancer while in prison it contradicts Scalia's claim that if a person had been wrongly executed then it would have been widely publicized?

Again, Blumner's argument undercuts itself:  She refers to the Smith case as "infamous"--which we can fairly take to mean widely publicized--and yet it is not the type of case to which Scalia refers.  Blumner's first example only strengthens Scalia's point.

Her second example, the case of a man convicted of murder and executed in Texas, suits her needs far better.  Ironically, however, it was science that convicted the man in that case and science that would have freed him.  Can we credit science without blaming science?

Blumner concludes by making much of a change in the American Law Institute's stance on the death penalty.  Other commentators fail to see much significance in that.

The price argument against the death penalty is fairly strong, but we should always note that most of these arguments against the death penalty (including all of Blumner's) are not arguments against punishing a person by putting them to death per se, but arguments against the system we use to reach that end.

That ought to leave a open window for death penalty reform rather than abolition.

Thou shalt have abortion rights

Robyn Blumner calls herself an atheist. But I think she's religious.

Her religion is reproductive self-determination. But not that heretic branch that claims that women have the right to have as many babies as they wish. She's of the sect that holds the right to an abortion as sacrosanct.

Which brings us to her editorial column in last week's St. Petersburg Times:

In the vote on health care reform offered by the House Democratic leadership, women were given the status of potted plants. It didn't seem to matter that women generally vote Democratic at substantially higher rates than men, their reproductive health care was sacrificed on the altar (and it was an altar) of getting the thing passed.

No wonder she's mad. The altar of a competing religion was getting in the way. Better no health care bill than to see her religion slighted?

On with the sermon:

Rep. Bart Stupak, a Democrat from Michigan and a purported member of the secretive fundamentalist Christian group known as The Family, threatened House Speaker Nancy Pelosi like a spoiled child possessing the playground's only basketball. He promised to let health reform fail, with about 40 members in tow, unless the bill included his amendment that barred abortion coverage from any public option or private health insurance plan purchased with federal subsidies.

I'm sure there are times when Blumner recognizes rights of conscience. But not where her religion is concerned. If the courts recognize the constitutional right of a mother to kill a fetus, then taxpayers need to pay for it whether or not they find it highly objectionable.

From what I can tell, the bit about "The Family" is an unsubstantiated rumor. Stupak lists his religion as Roman Catholic and maintains a membership at a Roman Catholic church in his home state. Classy of Blumner to mention the rumor.

Pelosi didn't have a choice. Even with Stupak's amendment, health care reform squeaked by on a vote of 220 to 215.

The stubborn position of Stupak and his lobbying partner, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, is made even more extreme by the fact that a compromise had been reached to protect the status quo's strict limits on federal funding of abortion. The House bill contained a provision directing health insurers in the new exchanges to segregate federal subsidies from private premiums and use only the private funds to pay for abortion coverage. No public money would be used for abortions except in cases of rape, incest or to save the life of the mother.

What a laughable compromise. Private religious schools should try that one sometime. Let them receive federal money, but keep it segregated from the religious activities of the school.

I'd give Blumner ... 2.5 seconds to blow her top if that arrangement became reality.

Funny how Blumner noticed Stupak's alliance with the USCCB but without letting on that he is a Roman Catholic.

But Stupak and his fellow conservative Democrats wanted more. They wanted to use health reform as an antiabortion tool. Stupak's amendment means insurers in the exchanges are unlikely to offer plans including abortion coverage since most customers will be federally subsidized.

It makes you wonder whom Stupak's team is playing for?

I suppose it is too much to assume that Stupak's well-known Catholicism and the associated probability that he would adopt a pro-life stance was known to Michigan voters. Let's go with the rumor that he is part of the secretive cult known as "The Family."

Passing health reform is the Democrats' top domestic policy priority. In addition to helping save nearly 45,000 people who die every year from a lack of health insurance, Democratic hopes in midterm elections may ride on its successful passage.

Funny stuff! Why is health care reform the Democrats' top domestic policy priority when unemployment is over 10 percent? And why push it when the price tag is so high while the federal deficit is blowing up like a passenger-side airbag after a high-speed collision? Especially when the American people are not behind it? Whether Blumner likes it or not, a majority of Americans oppose providing abortion services under the health care reform bill:

At least on the level of rhetoric, all the politicians and outside groups that have weighed in on health reform seem to agree: taxpayers shouldn't pay to fund abortion. "No federal dollars will be used to fund abortions," said Barack Obama in his speech to Congress on Sept. 8. His Democratic colleagues say they agree with the same principle, as do GOP leaders. That stance mirrors public opinion as well. A 2008 Zogby poll found that 69% of Americans oppose "taxpayer funding of abortion."

It makes no sense except as a long-term strategy to make Americans more dependent on government and thus more likely to vote for the Democrats who dependably vote for more spending on entitlements. Not counting Medicare under the health care reform bill, of course.

Short term, the Democrats will not do well politically to pass health care reform legislation--except with the hard left base. Blumner must be smoking something to think otherwise.

So what else is she thinking these days?

But Stupak and his crew were prepared to trade their own party's electoral prospects and all those lives for a rule that tells low- and middle-income women that they are on their own to pay for a needed abortion. Even in cases where the fetus is deformed and won't survive outside the womb.

As pointed out above, the federal health care reform legislation is unpopular as it is, and it would be even more unpopular if abortion coverage was included. With a reality base like that, Blumner should get Lucy in the Sky to give her enough diamonds to retire from the editing biz.

I'm kind of wondering about this "needed abortion" thing. The reform legislation includes an exception where the life of the mother is at risk. What are the other times an abortion is "needed"? It seems to me that a "needed, elective abortion" is oxymoron territory.

The Catholic bishops also made that calculation. To them, standing in the way of health coverage for an additional 36 million people — which they did aggressively — was worth it. Because now, maybe, some working woman who can't possibly afford another child since she can't even pay for an abortion, will be forced to have an unwanted baby. That was their compassionate, charitable reckoning.

The compassionate thing, evidently, would be to kill the fetus. Beezlenut! Beezlenut! Rah! Rah! Rah! It's not like people adopt babies or anything. And it's not like we'll need workers to pay for the health care of retiring baby boomers.

Whatever the numbers, the reason Stupak and the bishops were so keen to get their regressive amendment through was to make it harder for women to exercise their right to choose.

Probably not. The amendment probably would not make it any harder for a woman to have an abortion than it is at present. If Blumner meant to say that Catholics wanted to keep abortion from becoming an easier choice, that may be accurate. But the rights of conscience should not be discounted without mention.

Blumner ends with a howler:

Every lawmaker with a shred of decency knows that health reform is essential for our nation's future. But reform can't take abortion access with it. Women have to count for something.

The implicit argument: Unless women receive federal funding for elective abortion, women count for nothing.

Is that stupid or what?

As a bonus, we get the implication that a health care reform bill that will either increase the deficit (while being advertised as a deficit cure) or result in much higher taxation--during a recession, no less--is essential to the nation's future.

Dude.

Scientists, politics, and global warming, Pt. 3

The third part in a multi-part review of Robyn Blumner's "Why scientists are seldom Republicans."

When we left off in part 2, we were still in search of the answer to the question posed in the title of Blumner's St. Petersburg Times editorial column.

We saw the implication that Republicans (and the small number of Republican scientists) are simply stupid in part 1.

Part 2 saw Blumner fail to build on that foundation.

On with the search:

Every hope we have to invent our way out of this economic malaise and create enough Information Age jobs to maintain a stable and prosperous middle class sits on the shoulders of people who understand and practice the scientific method. Every hope we have of advancing human understanding of the physical universe and bettering our lives in it, is tied to professionals now represented by only one of our nation's two major political parties — while the other party attempts to obstruct them.

Somebody apparently did away with the 10 percent of scientists who either identify as Republicans or lean Republican. Blumner has also done away with the Obama administration's suppression of a global warming report from the EPA, as mentioned in part 2. Her fantasies about history do not rightly count as evidence, so we will move on.

Global warming is a prime example.

At long last, my title is explained!

Earth is under siege by CO2 emissions to a point that the Pentagon is warning that our national security is at risk if climate change is not arrested. All Americans and politicians should be united for collective action. Yet George Bush spent essentially his entire presidency ignoring and suppressing scientific concerns.

1) The Pentagon is warning of nothing. Rather, a not-for-profit company called CNA Corporation produced a report on the security implications of some of the predicted results of climate change.

Over many months and meetings, we met with some of the world’s leading climate scientists, business leaders, and others studying climate change. We viewed their work through the lens of our military experience as warfighters, planners, and leaders. Our discussions have been lively, informative, and very sobering.

Carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere are greater now than at any time in the past 650,000 years, and average global temperature has continued a steady rise. This rise presents the prospect of significant climate change, and while uncertainty exists and debate continues regarding the science and future extent of projected climate changes, the trends are clear.

CNA corporation, in other words, interviewed scientists and others and did strategic planning based on what they term the consensus opinion. Blumner's column fails to convey an accurate picture.

2) All Americans should be united for collective action, eh? Including action likely to be ineffectual while costing thousands or even millions of Americans their jobs?

3) I'm not going to defend the Bush administration's record on the science of global warming, though I think they may be largely defensible. Bush's acceptance of global warming and initiatives toward emissions cooperation with India and China by themselves reveal that Blumner exaggerated.

That makes for quite a paragraph. I can hardly wait for the next one:

Even today, with the effects of global warming evident, Republicans in Congress are trying to bury the cap-and-trade energy bill, the nation's first attempt (albeit not strong enough) to limit greenhouse gas emissions. Their alternative is to offer nothing.

The effects of global warming are evident? Is she talking about the record high temperatures in Florida or the record cold temperatures in Wyoming and elsewhere? Wouldn't it be just great if both record cold and record highs counted as evidence of global warming?

Their alternative was to offer nothing?

Shortly before the U.S. House of Representatives is poised to vote on a Democratic energy bill for cap & trade, Republicans have introduced a plan on Wednesday that would be an alternative and seeks for the United States to welcome nuclear energy. The GOP 's AEA is setting the goal of almost doubling the United State's nuclear energy infrastructure by constructing one hundred new nuclear plants over the next two decades, which would call for up-to-date construction regulations, tax based incentives and low trade barriers designed for utilities corporations. The AEA is the American Energy Act This bill will also focus on several additional off shore at-home explorations of oil, raises barriers to governments purchases of alternatives such as shale oil and tar rich sands and building a fund for the support of developing of newer energy sources.
(bold emphasis added)

Is Blumner a liar or simply ill-informed?

In any case, we seem no closer to having a reasonable explanation for the dearth of Republican scientists. Maybe we'll find it in part 4.

Lies to make you unhappy

Misery loves company, so it is said.

Which brings us to Robyn Blumner's weekly editorial column. Blumner again makes herself an echo-chamber for unhappy atheist Barbara Ehrenreich. Ehrenreich wrote a book attacking Americans for the affinity they show for positive thinking. Blumner likes the book.

Ehrenreich's bout with breast cancer and the cloying "pink ribbon culture" that surrounds this dreaded disease (she is urged to see her cancer as a "gift") made her explore our cultural obsession with being happy.

The cultural obsession appears to follow a biological drive, from what I can tell. At least in part. But let's allow Blumner to get on a roll before letting the air out of her tires.

The book's point is that realism is being elbowed out of the way by all the life coaches, self-help books and prosperity gospel preachers like Joel Osteen who tell us that a positive outlook will lead to success, riches and the fulfillment of all of life's desires.

It seems to me there's a big difference between simply wanting to be happy and supposing that a positive mental attitude will itself result in prosperity.

These heaping helpings of sunny optimism are subtly diverting us from grappling with serious social and economic issues in ways that can truly bring about change.

I doubt it. Prosperity messages like that preached by Osteen and others have a long history in the United States. Starting back in the 19th century. Most folks ignore them, and most likely many of those attracted to that message are not particularly happy. After all, if you're already happy then why long for more happiness?

The Secret became a runaway bestseller by telling readers that they could have anything they want just by imagining it. The book was obviously unadulterated bunk, but it sold madly as people grasped at any chance to better their lives. One has to wonder if such magical thinking would have been so popular if people felt they had temporal power to change the conditions of their work and prospects.

"The Secret" became a bestseller because Oprah Winfrey endorsed it.

The reason that so many Americans work at jobs that don't pay enough is not that they don't channel enough positive energy into getting a better salary, but that wages have been stagnant for 30 years. And the reason that wages have barely budged is that America's wealthiest households have kept slicing themselves a larger piece of the income pie.

Blumner remains consistently ignorant about economics. First, she provides the reader a false dilemma. Let's say a lack of "positive energy" is not to blame for wage stagnation. But shouldn't we allow for a worker's lack of initiative to play some role in the failure to increase personal wages? And should we ignore major changes to society like the major influx of females into the workforce? Second, she treats income like a finite commodity. It isn't. Wages represent useful work, albeit the system can be fooled for a time. An increase in useful work allows increased wages and increased buying power. More work at the upper end of the spectrum steals nothing from the lower end of the spectrum. Suggesting otherwise is a lie, albeit most often a lie born out of ignorance.

Between 1979 and 2007, the top 1 percent of American households saw their share of all pretax income nearly double while the bottom 80 percent had their share fall by 7 percent. Ehrenreich quotes the New York Times saying, "It's as if every household in the bottom 80 percent is writing a check for $7,000 every year and sending it to the top 1 percent."

Ehrenreich shares Blumner's ignorance of economics. Her conclusion follows if we accept the premise that workers in the lowest 80 percent of incomes have a right to a given share of pretax income. I'd like to see Blumner explain that to a worker in the Times' mail room. Put simply, it makes decent sense if you're a communist. Otherwise, it's just stupid.

Every working stiff in the bottom 80 percent should be outraged and politically motivated to force change. But if everyone is convinced of the convenient nostrum that our own attitude controls how much we are paid, then workers won't band together to demand a larger share of our national prosperity.

Every working stiff, I suppose, should be just as ignorant of economics as is Blumner.

Thankfully, a great number of working Americans recognize that high-income folks have some particular skill or skills that allow them to earn large amounts of money. Where those skills are legal, it isn't particularly appropriate to respond with anger and an attempt to use government to reach into the other guy's wallet. Ms. Blumner's attitude notwithstanding.

This positive thinking message is a kind of opiate that has been particularly effective on the white-collar corporate work force. Ehrenreich documents how corporations hire motivational speakers to convince laid-off workers that their job loss is "an opportunity for self-transformation." Somehow, she says, white-collar workers have accepted positive thinking as a "belief system" that says a person can be "infinitely powerful, if only they could master their own minds."

As with happiness, shouldn't we separate mere positive mental attitude from a prosperity gospel? I think it grand that a company would think enough of its fired employees to hire a motivational counselor on their behalf. Looking for ways to maximize one's value as a worker sure beats plotting ways to pry cash out of the wealthy via the power of government. Unless maybe you're a communist.

On the surface, prosperity gospels and positive thinking companies appear harmless with their treacly "Successories products" of posters and coffee mugs, but they have subversively helped make each of us an island.

Do tell, Ms. Blumner.

They have convinced Americans that each individual has control and power over the conditions of his or her life, when that is largely not the case. Access to decent health care at a reasonable price is not a matter of individual effort.

Again, Blumner offers us a false dichotomy. Americans do have substantial control of the conditions of their lives, and much of this was brought about by the capitalist system that Blumner apparently loathes. Nobody has absolute control of their life. Doe a patient have more control of his life waiting months for a hip replacement in Canada or figuring out how to pay for one now in the United States?

Blumner is correct that access to decent health care at a reasonable price is not a matter of individual effort. Nor should it be. Given that it is not a matter of individual effort, how have the purveyors of positive mental attitude made us islands? Blumner doesn't say. But if she did, she'd be forced to advocate something along the lines of our right to force doctors to work for the wages we set for them. Thus we would negate the individual effort of the doctor via our efforts to force wage controls on him. Anybody else think Blumner's work for the Times is worth about fifty cents a week?

Neither are securing decent wages, pensions, safe working conditions or job security.

Again, those things are substantially under the control of Americans. Workers with fewer skills naturally have less control over them. If the bag boy at Publix can command a six-figure salary and comfortable pension for bagging groceries then you can bet that the price of groceries will be rising sharply. Blumner doesn't get it.

Workers demanded those rights through collective action in the 20th century and we are losing them now by taking an "every man for himself" approach to work.

I cheerfully grant that the labor movement accomplished some good things, including breaking corporations of some self-stifling labor practices. Unfortunately, the labor movement has by now accomplished more bad than good. Blumner doesn't get it.

Bottom line, corporations do not owe jobs to workers. Unless you're a communist.

The ultimate irony is even with the booming positive thinking industry, Americans are not among the happiest people. International surveys put us behind places like Denmark and Switzerland where the social safety net is stronger. It seems that happy thoughts don't alter the reality of American life with all its attendant risks to middle class living standards. Behind the smiley face facade, we are privately worried, and we have reason to be.

1) Number 16, contra Blumner, puts us among the happiest people, all the more based on our high population. The U.S. population is more than twice that of the happiest 15 nations combined. One of them is Puerto Rico (part of the U.S.), and Ireland is two of them (N. Ireland is counted separately).

2) Studies do apparently suggest robust entitlements can help make a people happier. Blumner will shut her eyes, I expect, to the notion of applying the reality principle in such cases. But it's fine with me if the reader wishes to call her a hypocrite.

3) Not long ago, Blumner was urging us to copy the economic model of Spain. Spain's unemployment rate recently topped 17 percent. And despite their univeral health care system, Spanish folk rate below the United States in happiness.

Go figure.

Or if you're Robyn Blumner, just ignore it and prepare another way to mislead people in next week's column.

Scientists, politics, and global warming, Pt. 2

Robyn Blumner, editorial columnist for The St. Petersburg Times, coughed up an editorial a few weeks ago on the political leanings of scientists. Or that's what the column seemed to deal with based on the title. In part 1 of my response, we saw Blumner start with preposterous assertions and follow with a digression into the supposed gullibility of Republicans in thinking that government involvement in health care will lead to government-controlled decisions on the life and death of patients.

By the end of part 1, we had detected no answer to the question of why scientists are seldom Republicans, unless it was the implied answer that scientists aren't stupid enough to be Republicans. Though that would hardly be the rigorous and evidence-based way to address the question.

But let's do our part. On with the examination of Blumner's column:

Since the Sonia Sotomayor nomination we've been hearing about the GOP's Hispanic deficit. Only 26 percent of Latino registered voters now say they identify with or lean toward the Republican Party. But that's a full house compared with scientists. Only 12 percent of scientists in a poll issued last month by the Pew Research Center say they are Republican or lean toward the GOP, while fully 81 percent of scientists say they are Democrats or lean Democratic.

Finally, Blumner produces at least some data we can look at, enabling us to assess some evidence. As for Latino voters, that seems to be nothing but digression. Latinos are largely Roman Catholic (traditionally Democratic based on social justice issues), and many in addition are from a Mexico with a government to the left of our own. It fails to count as a relevant comparison, in other words.

Blumner may have exaggerated the "fully 81 percent" (55 percent identifying as Democrat plus 25 identified as "leaning Democrat" comes to only 80 on my calculator, and even 80.9 is not "fully" 81 percent). But that's a bit of a quibble. What is the reason why the 80 percent or so identify on the liberal side of the ledger? Are they just so much smarter than the other 20 percent?

We shouldn't be surprised that people who are open to evidence-based thinking have abandoned the Republican Party. The GOP has proudly adopted the mantle of the "Terri Schiavo, global warming shwarming" party with the Bush administration helping cement the image by persistently subverting science to serve a religious agenda or corporate greed.

Oh. So maybe many of these scientists were Republicans but switched based on the combination of ethical issues and the global warming dogma? I don't see that in the data, but it seems very fair of Blumner to allow that scientists may have only recently begun to favor the Democrats. Is this supposed to be her rationale for the trend among scientists?

But what worries me is not the shrunken relevancy of the GOP, a party in which 56 percent of its members oppose funding of embryonic stem cell research, 39 percent believe humans have always existed on Earth in their present form, and in which only 30 percent say human activity is warming the planet.

I would think that Blumner would go all a-quiver at shrinking GOP relevancy. But where is she getting those statistics from? Her arse? I can't speak for all Republicans, but the objection is fairly stated in terms of opposing federal funding of embryonic stem cell research. Blumner ought to be able to appreciate the conscience concerns involved after working with the ACLU in her former career as a lawyer.

As for humans as a cause of global warming, I think conservatives are smart to remain suspicious of the global warming dogma. And one wonders how scientists will feel when next year's Pew Research survey asks them if they are aware of Obama administration efforts to suppress scientific findings that run contrary to that dogma.

Again, the underlying argument seems to be that Republicans are simply stupid. But rather than using real evidence, Blumner appears to rely on the appeal to ridicule. That is the weapon of the sleazy lawyer, not the persuasive tool of the person guided by evidence and reason.

Back to what really worries Blumner:

It is that this nation's future depends upon people who don't think that way and the Republican Party is closing the door to them.

That is Blumner's expression of hyper-partisanship. Serious measures aimed at reducing carbon dioxide emissions will cripple the U.S. economy. Let Blumner explain how we end up with a strong United States in the future with a ruined economy. Her fear is not for the United States as we know it, most likely. Blumner probably favors rule by the elites forced on the foolish masses. Your desire for cars and jobs is not conducive to human survival. So the government will run the economy instead of you. For the sake of your survival. Your freedom means little if the human race is otherwise doomed. Something along those lines, though Blumner herself may not even realize where her thinking leads.

It is through historical science that we know that the earth has been through warming and cooling periods in the past. The evidence that a warming period represents an existential threat to the United States is thin at best.

And so far from Blumner, we still only have the implied explanation that few scientists are Republicans because Republicans are stupid.

Look for part 3, coming soon.