Daniel Ellsberg on Obama and FISA

Daniel Ellsburg on Barack Obama and FISA:

I think when people go to the polls in November, and especially in light of the fact that even Barack Obama (whom I certainly support – it’s essential, necessary that he be elected), with his support of this FISA Amendment Act, has indicated very clearly that it is not his intention to roll back this usurpation of presidential powers. He’s accepting the powers that Bush and the Congress are going to bequeath him. So I think the people will be choosing between two… not presidents in the sense of the constitution … but two kings, two people with dictatorial powers.

Conservative Assumptions

According to Richard Viguerie,, Chairman of ConservativeHQ.com, the actual Bush deficit for the coming fiscal year is not the $482 billion announced by the White House, but rather $789 billion. The former number does not include $227 billion that will be borrowed from the Social Security Trust Fund (taken from the middle and working classes), and $80 billion to fund the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Estimated expenditures are over $3 trillion, counting the wars, so that we are borrowing about $.26 cents for every dollar we spend at the federal level.

Viguerie is against this sort of spending. We probably don’t agree on where spending should be cut, but it is refreshing to hear from him, to know that there are some fiscal conservatives living and breathing out there. As with everything else he touches, Bush has made a joke of an honorable philosophy.

dubya – the movie

more about "dubya", posted with vodpod

I hope Oliver Stone was high as a kite when he made this movie, just like he was when he did Natural Born Killers (and like ‘W’ was for most of his youth). That’s when he’s at his best.

My Own Private Lieberman

It looks like Obama has found his own Joe Lieberman – potential running mate Tim Kaine. Surprise! He’s more right than left.

Greedy Lenders, Unsophisticated Borrowers

I learned the following from an IRS official who is active in volunteer tax assistance programs in our county:

…we are trying to concentrate our efforts on getting the earned income credit taxpayers to stop taking those refund anticipation loans. Out of the 4700 EIC filed returns in Gallatin County in 2004, over 3600 of them had refund anticipation loans! Not good in my opinion.

Refund anticipation loans are, along with payday loans, about as bad a deal as can be had. Interest rates run from 40% to as high as 700%. From a lender’s standpoint, they are gold – a guaranteed source of repayment, and an unsophisticated client in financial need.

I suppose you could say that people are their own worst enemy – that’s true. Most people haven’t a clue how interest is calculated. It isn’t normally taught in school. But the lending industry has to answer for its own behavior without regard to the sophistication of its clientèle. Regulation is in order, not because I think everything need be regulated, but rather because it would do some actual good. We could either ban the loans entirely, or regulate the rate of interest that can be charged. That would be a moral thing to do in am amoral “Gotcha!” marketplace.

IRS is doing its part – when people file electronically and use bank debits instead of paper checks, refunds are very quick. They are trying to get money to people as fast as possible to keep the refund anticipation people out of the picture. But one problem is that many low-income people don’t have bank accounts. Paper checks take a few weeks longer.

My oh my how we take advantage of one another. This is but one more way. The housing crisis was in large part brought about because of Shylock’s preying on uninformed and unsophisticated consumers. Payday loans may be outrageously expensive, but refund anticipation loans are as bad, if not worse.

It Happens

I hope liberals don’t make too much of the fact that Jim D. Adkisson, the lunatic that gunned down eight people in a Unitarian church in Knoxville, did so because of the group’s liberal views. What happened was random. That could as easily have been a black church or a white fundamentalist one. There are crazies out there, they can strike anywhere, any time, for any reason.

This time they hit a liberal church. Next time it will be something else – something I can’t even imagine. That’s because it is crazy, and crazy is, by definition, random. These are victims of random violence, but let’s not make a cause of it. It can happen to any one of us at any time, and there is no rational explanation.

Paying Barry Zito’s Salary

Years ago in another life (and another body) I used to play slow-pitch softball. My wife would come to most all the games, and she and the other wives would have the greatest of times though they could not tell you who won or lost the game. But the point is that the men got to do their thing, which was to drink beer after the game, and the women theirs, which was yak with other women. What could be better?

Well, here’s a story about a study that says that cities that have major league baseball teams, on average, have a 28% lower divorce rate than cities that don’t have major league teams, but would like to. As schooled as I am in stats, I can guarantee that that means direct cause and effect, and here’s why: If a husband and wife go to a game, since it is such a slow game, they can have conversation. If two couples go to a game, the women can yak, and the men can cheer for the team and drink beer. Everyone is happy, ergo longer-lasting marriages.

Earlier this year we went to a game at AT&T Park in San Francisco. We were wandering around the stadium before the game, and I determined that I would have a beer for this afternoon affair. I went to the booth, asked for an Anchor Steam, handed the man a $20, and got $10.25 in change.

$9.75 for a beer. Needless to say, there were no seconds. Surely someone somewhere, perhaps Freakonomics, can explain such a high price for a beer. I can think of only one good reason: The San Francisco Giants do not want rowdy fans, and at the same time want to make a lot of money on beer. Therefore they drew a graph and hit on the optimum price that would yield the highest profit from beer sales while putting a damper on rowdies.

AT&T, by the way, is a beautiful facility, and does the city proud. But those prices could well break up a marriage.

The Autism Test (Michael Savage Scored High)

Take the autism test – 50 questions, it goes very quickly. Find out if there is a basic and simple explanation for all those quirks you have.

You tell me your score, I’ll tell you mine.

The Tired Old Sewing Circle

There’s a plethora or conservative blogs here in Montana now, quite a change from a few years back when we had two intellectual extremes, Dave Budge and Eric Coobs, and a few in between. These days, with Big Sky Cairn, The Hammond Report (Coobs’ replacement), Missoulapolis, the Hardliner, Rabid Sanity and a host of others, the Dextra is brimming with activity. And that’s a good thing – a few of us lefties love to make the rounds and stir things up.

A Pew Research Center study reports the following:

Judged by their answers to three news knowledge questions, the most informed audiences belong to the political magazines, Rush Limbaugh’s radio show, the O’Reilly Factor, news magazines, and online news sources. Close behind are the regular audiences for NPR and the Daily Show.

Audiences with the highest educational achievement, by far, are the literary magazines and online news outlets. Readers of news magazines, political magazines and business magazines, listeners of Rush Limbaugh and NPR, and viewers of the Daily Show, and C-SPAN also are much more likely than the average person to have a college degree.

That makes sense – I’ve been encountering more and more smart conservatives, and debates are getting harder all the time. Just a couple of observations, however:

For one, conservatives usually know their own minds very well, but little of the other side. They are much more likely to draw caricatures of liberals and progressives, and attack those strawmen. The most ardent practitioner of this habit is Dave Rye (followed closely by Wiley Cody – read this for a classic example), who is perpetually framing his argument with the preface “Here’s what liberals think”. Dave is now a talk show host down in Billings, and not a blogger, and to fill air time, I am told, he allows liberals on. That’s unusual – his predecessor, Dave Berg, engaged in the Limbaugh method – he would allow opponents a narrow window up against the break or simply hang up on them. Truth is, with Berg and Limbaugh and all the other right wing yakkers, that they don’t want opposition viewpoints. Talk radio is a propaganda exercise, and balance is an anathema to propaganda.

The result is conservatives talking to other conservatives, backslapping, pontificating and validating one another without interferences from other viewpoints. I noticed this phenomenon in the blogs, and called it the “right wing circle jerk“, since I have no sense of propriety.

This is what I see in our new (and old) right wing bloggers. Craig Sprout was initially invited to be a writer at Montana Netroots, and very shortly after that announced he would not partake. Wiley Cody has some fancy explanation for why he never leaves that site. Dave Budge told me a few months back that he was not coming to this web site again. The right wing proprietors don’t get out much, and it’s a shame. The very best that we can do for one another is debate. It’s a complicated world, and odds are that everyone is partly right and partly wrong. (In the real world “free” markets have positive impacts, as do government-run social programs.) We create false dichotomies, we demonize. And the only outcome is polarization.

But in my experience it is mostly the righties who insulate themselves. Jay Stevens makes the rounds, as do I, as do Wulfgar and Lamnidae, Shane Mason and Colby Natale. We’re constantly stirring it up over there, but there’s nothing coming the other way. I am led to conclude that the conservative bloggers are not confident enough in their own ideas and abilities to withstand the heat of a fiery debate. They retreat to their circle, talk amongst themselves, talk about us, and only engage us unwillingly when we come visit them.

That’s a shame. The Montana blogs are rich now with smart and educated participants full of energy and ideas. We should be having more fun than we are. Pity the poor conservative who doesn’t know enough of his own mind to take it on a shopping trip.

White Guy Problems

I once had a cartoon over my desk titled “White Guy Problems”, and the picture was of a guy spilling his latte on his suede jacket while driving. I guess I have to look no further than the Wall Street Journal for other white guy problems:

Problem: You packed a bottle of wine for the picnic, but forgot the corkscrew.

Solution: It’s an unthinkable predicament among some instructors at the Sommelier Society of America in New York, but they came up with two options. The first involves driving the cork into the bottle. “Use a narrow, cylindrical thing — a tube of [lip balm] … or the handle of a wooden spoon — and gently, slowly push it down into the bottle,” says Anne Woods, the organization’s assistant to the chairman. “Then you have to be creative when you pour it,” because when you tip the bottle to pour, the cork will block the flow of wine. So you’ll need something long and skinny — the spoon handle again or a skewer — to hold the cork back as you pour. The second method: If you happen to have a screw — preferably one with large threads like the kind used in woodwork — it could work like a corkscrew with the help of a screwdriver, Ms. Woods says. Once you’ve screwed the hardware into the cork, use pliers to slowly wriggle the cork out of the neck. The Sommelier Society instructors admit this is the more difficult of the two methods.

My problem is more basic – what to do in a motel room when you don’t have a beer opener. We had this problem once, and I went down the the lounge to ask for an opener. The bartender had only one – a lethal looking combination knife/corkscrew/opener, and she begged me to return it when we left, and I promised I would. The day we left I put it in my jacket pocket to drop off downstairs, and then promptly forgot. When we arrived at the airport and had to put all our belongings in the basket for the screener, there I was with a nasty looking knife/corkscrew. It was confiscated. I’m sure now I’m on a watch list, this country being paranoid and all.