Cartooning at Drinking Liberally!

Thursday will be an extra special Drinking Liberally featuring Ken Avidor and some of his cartoon/illustrator buddies. Ken promises to bring along his sketch book and pen.

As most of you know, Ken has done several graphics for the Cucking Stool over the past couple of years. He skewers Michele Bachmann with some regularity and writes for Dump Michele Bachmann. Recently, Ken’s work in sketching for Law and Politics at the Republican National Convention won him a Society of Professional Journalists award.

One of Ken’s recent projects was to do the cover of the first issue of False Witness, Bill Prendergast’s graphic retelling of the Michele Bachmann story:

False Witness was noted recently in Talking Points Memo. And the dialogue is genuine Michele Bachmann, too!

We’ll have some copies of the comic available for you to buy, boys and girls, and Ken will autograph the cover if you like. It would make a great gift, especially for the right winger in your life.

We meet six to nine or so at the 331 Club in Northeast Minneapolis.

Technorati Tags: Drinking Liberally,331 Club,Ken Avidor,Michele Bachmann,False Witness

Dewey defeats Truman!

Spot’s back on the ‘net but is a little behind on his reading. Here’s a news tidbit to hold you over.

Technorati Tags: Harry Truman,Thomas Dewey,1948 presidential election

About that principled stand

Nevermind.

Nearly a month after President Barack Obama picked her for the Supreme Court, Republican senators say Sonia Sotomayor isn’t serving as the political lightning rod some in their party had hoped she would be.

“She doesn’t have the punch out there in terms of fundraising
and recruiting, I think — at least so far,” said Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.), who most likely will be elected as the No. 4 Republican in Senate leadership this week.

We can't raise money off of tortured readings of her opinions, it's not working well for our recruiting efforts, so I guess we'll allow her to move forward with her nomination -- for now. Bigotry just ain't what it used to be, I tell ya.

Somebody better make sure the Admiral gets the memo before his head explodes at further contemplation of the nominee's "seething hatred this women has for the white race."

Horrible computer problems

Spot's computer has been involved in a grisly accident. Posting now from a remote location without the blog editor or practical means for inserting photos of video. Thoughts and even prayers are appreciated; it may be a while.

Drinking Liberally tomorrow night (Thursday)

Unallotment will be the topic tomorrow night.

Six to nine or so at the 331 Club in northeast Minneapolis.

Graphic by Tild.

Technorati Tags: Drinking Liberally,331 Club,Tim Pawlenty,unallotment,Sweeney Todd

Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer on single payer health care

When he ran for the DFL nomination for the U.S. Senate seat now held by . . . well, who holds that seat now, grasshopper?

Nobody, Spotty.

Ah, that’s right, grasshopper!

Anyway, Jack showed up at Drinking Liberally one cold winter night and gave a terrific presentation on universal health care –- and a single payer system to pay for it –- in about ten minutes. It’s worth repeating, so here it is:

Jack talks about healthcare

Technorati Tags: Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer,universal health care coverage,single payer health care,Drinking Liberally,331 Club

Railing against gangster government

Michele Bachmann, standing on the floor of the House:

"The Federal Government has set up a new cartel and private businesses now have to go begging with their hand out to their local--hopefully well politically connected [sic]--Congressman or their Senator so they can buy a peace offering for that local business," said Bachmann. "Is that the kind of country we are going to have in the future?" she asks.

"We need to call this for what this is," Bachmann added. "We need to call this for what this is. Call it out. The American people need to get outraged and figure out that it could be them next."

What was she talking about and what did she call it, Spotty?

She was talking about the intervention of congressional members to speak on behalf of car dealerships slated for closure by GM; she called it “gangster government.”

Why are those pictures of Jack Abramoff and Tom De Lay up there in the corner, Spot?

Oh, they just seemed ironic, grasshopper. Or maybe iconic. Take your pick.

Our beloved Captain Fishsticks — Craig Westover — takes up the cudgel, too, although it is unclear whether he is speaking as a Pioneer Press editorialist, a contributor to the Minnesota Free Market Institute, or as an alternate to the Republican State Central Committee (which he apparently is):

Bachmann is right. What is happening in this country is not capitalism. It is not free market economics. It is not "necessary" to save either capitalism or free markets. "Gangster government" is the blatant exploitation of fear, uncertainty and doubt spawned by an economic crisis created by decades of government meddling in the economy. It is "the law perverted" as Frederick Bastiat wrote in " The Law. " It is the destruction of the fundamental principles upon which this country was founded -- the primacy of individual sovereignty, the sanctity of private property and the rule of law.

Yes, the Captain says we are entirely forgetting our national motto: E Pluribus Pluribus! And the Captain is certainly right about the “sanctity of private property”; we have almost entirely forgotten the line in the Sermon on the Mount: Blessed are the acquisitive, for they shall inherit the earth, or all the valuable parts thereof, anyway.

You see, the Captain believes that free market and capitalism are the ultimate goals of society. Get for yourself, and the devil take the hindmost. It’s the simple hunter gatherer mentality: you get to eat what you kill and you don’t share with anybody. I caught this grub, and I’m going to eat it!

Fishsticks and Andrew Mellon would have gotten on quite well, Spot thinks:

Mellon became unpopular with the onset of the Great Depression. Many economists today (such as Milton Friedman and Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, to give two prominent examples) partially attribute the collapse of the American banking industry to the popularity among Federal Reserve leadership of Mellon's infamous "liquidationist" thesis: weeding out "weak" banks was seen as a harsh but necessary prerequisite to the recovery of the banking system. This "weeding out" was accomplished through refusing to lend cash to banks (taking loans and other investments as collateral), and by refusing to put more cash in circulation. He advocated spending cuts to keep the Federal budget balanced, and opposed measures for relief of public suffering. In 1929-31, he spent much of the time overseas, negotiating for repayment of European war debts from World War I. In February 1932, Mellon left the Treasury Department and accepted the post of U.S. Ambassador to the United Kingdom. He served for one year and then retired to private life.

Even Herbert Hoover thought Andrew Mellon was a nutjob, got rid of him at Treasury, and sent him to England where he couldn’t do so much harm. Mellon thought that a liquidation of the entire freakin’ economy was just what we needed in the Depression, a view undoubtedly embraced by Fishsticks, too.

The Captain and Michele raise some issues about bankruptcy reorganization and the enforcement of contracts, too, but they will have to wait for another time.

Technorati Tags: Michele Bachmann,Craig Westover,Captain Fishsticks,Andrew Mellon,Herbert Hoover,Depression,Jack Abramoff,Tom De Lay,bank liquidation

Katie does a two-fer

Reaching deep into the well of anti-Muslim venom, not to mention the well of recycling, Katie manages to combine two of her favorite subjects: the warron terra with Peter Hegseth and video games in her opinion piece, For veterans, Guantanamo was no game, in the Strib on Sunday. She displays once again the rich talent that inspired the Cucking Stool to establish a new award in her name: the “Katie.” (Katie cannot win a “Katie” of course, because she IS the Katie.)

Katie has mentioned Peter Hegseth, that nice young man from Forest Lake, and his heroics in the warron terra, several times. But she never gives poor Peter his due, including: Executive Director of the pro-war Iraq Vets for Freedom, a fish in the conservative think tank called the Manhattan Institute, a “Witherspoon Fellow” for the Family Research Council (think James Dobson and Tony Perkins), and banker at Bear, Stearns.

Peter has written about Guantanamo; he apparently spent some time there; here’s what he said for the Family Research Council:

There is abuse at Gitmo, as our Witherspoon Fellowship Alumnus, 1/LT Pete Hegseth, has said: it's the detainees abusing their guards. They are the ones who throw bodily waste on the guards and hit their own Korans!

The U.S. Congress begs to differ:

A US bipartisan Senate report released late last year found Rumsfeld and other top administration officials responsible for abuse of Guantanamo detainees in US custody.

Katie’s on your case if you play video games, too.

So, what could be better than Katie’s warrior friend doing battle with a video game? The game in question was written by a Scottish company, and it features innocent (according to the game) detainees at Guantanamo fighting to free themselves.

Katie:

"Rendition: Guantanamo" is clearly unsavory. But it's still just a video game. Why get so worked up?

"The game is one small corner in a larger battle to shape perception of American conduct in the war on terror generally, and at Guantanamo Bay specifically," says Hegseth. "It's an attempt to rewrite history, to create the perception that the war is misguided and that in fighting it, America has lost its values, lost its way."

Pete seems a little defensive, don’t you think, boys and girls? You know, Pete, it may take a revisionist historian to know one; if so, Spot supposes you’re just the guy to complain about the video.

For Americans, of course, our perceptions were shaped before the Iraq invasion began by guys like Vice President and Minister of Disinformation Dick Cheney. (Don’t even bother to write, Dave.)

Come to think of it, we never heard from Katie or Peter when this game was published:

The goal of Muslim Massacre, which can be downloaded for free on the internet, is to "ensure that no Muslim man or woman is left alive", according to the game's creator.

Players control an "American Hero" armed with a machine gun and rocket launcher who is parachuted into the Middle East.

By slaughtering all the Arabs that appear on screen – some dressed as terrorists, some apparently civilians - players progress to later levels where they take on Osama bin Laden, Mohammed and finally Allah.

The game's creator, a freelance programmer known as Sigvatr, described the game as "fun and funny" and some players have interpreted the game as a critical commentary - albeit a crude one - of US foreign policy.

Or this fun weekend activity came to light. Or this one.

Or did Spot just miss it?

Technorati Tags: Peter Hegseth,Katherine Kersten,Manhatten Institute,Family Research Council,Muslims,Guantanamo,video games,Rendition: Guantanamo,Muslim Massacre

Planning ahead for special Drinking Liberally sessions

June 25, 2009

Ken Avidor is the headliner for this session of DL. He has promised to bring his [wicked] pen and do some caricatures of some people, especially the bloggers or other activists, in attendance.

Many of you have seen and enjoyed Ken’s work at Dump Michele Bachmann, Law & Politics, and this very blog to name just a few places. He recently won an achievement award from the Society of Professional Journalists for his graphic coverage of the Republican National Convention that ran in Law & Politics.

Come and see DL’s denizens through Ken’s eyes. We’ll also put some of Ken’s work for the evening up here.

July 23 or July 30, 2009

The date is not yet final, but on one or the other we’ll hold the first Drinking Liberally poetry slam. The form of the poem is entirely up to you; it doesn’t even have to be overtly political.

We are working on celebrity contestants and judges, too.

If writing and performing a poem is a little outside your comfort zone, but you’ve always thought you’d like to try it, DL and the 331 Club would be friendly confines to give it a shot.

Technorati Tags: Ken Avidor,Drinking Liberally,331 Club,poetry slam,caricatures

Buying a judge you can’t even use

Scott Horton tells the tale very well; he always does. Shorter version:

West Virginia coal executive spends three million dollars to elect a judge to the West Virginia Supreme Court. An appeal comes before the court on a $50 million judgment against the same coal company. The judge casts the deciding vote to overturn the award.

The United States Supreme Court, in a 5 – 4 decision, said, not so fast; the judge should not have ruled in a case involving so large a benefactor.

Spot will leave you to imagine who the five were and who the four were.

Give up?

The dissenters were, naturally, what Horton calls the “Roberts quartet.” Here’s what Horton says about the reasoning of the dissenters:

But there may be a deeper rationale behind the opinion of the Roberts quartet. Whereas movement conservatives once complained bitterly about judicial elections dominated around the country by the trial bar, their complaints have gone silent over the last decade, as the Republican Party and its allied business interests have come to dominate the elected bench in most of these states. New York University’s Brennan Center estimates that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce has poured $50 million into state judicial races over the last six years. The trial lawyers have also raised substantial sums, but they now lag far behind the organized fundraising efforts of G.O.P.-loyal groups. The result has been a fairly dramatic shift in control over the elected state bench, in states like Alabama, Mississippi, Texas, and West Virginia, where movement conservative Republicans who think and look much like the Roberts quartet have taken charge. One beneficiary of the shift was Brent Benjamin, a Republican insurance defense lawyer elected to the West Virginia court with massive funding from business interests.

Brent Benjamin, by the way, is the judge we’re talking about.

Because of recent decisions by the United States Supreme Court and the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals in cases involving Minnesota, judicial candidates in Minnesota may now seek and obtain party endorsements, and they may also discuss their view of issues that may come before the courts. There have been a few judicial candidates who have received local Republican endorsements, but none has so far been successful in getting elected.

One might expect the decision in the case, Caperton v. Massey, would discourage groups like MCCL or the Minnesota Family Council from sinking big bucks into judicial races in the hopes of hiring a homer. Let’s hope so.

Incidentally, there is presently no per-contributor dollar limit on contributions to judicial campaigns in Minnesota, although the candidates aren’t supposed to know who made them.

Technorati Tags: judicial elections,West Virginia Supreme Court,Brent Benjamin,Minnesota judicial candidates

Now who else does this remind us of?

"The responsible white separatist community condemns this. It makes us look bad."

Drinking Liberally tomorrow night

Thursday night – the 11th – we’ll have our regular Drinking Liberally meeting: an evening of agreeable company and refreshment, probably outside under he awning. Six to nine or so at the 331 Club in northeast Minneapolis.

And just a reminder: the first (annual?) Drinking Liberally Poetry Slam is coming up; it will probably be either the 23rd or the 30th of July. Start or keep working on that poem.

Technorati Tags: Drinking Liberally,331 Club

Boy, talk about your metaphors!

Thanks again to the Wege, a regular reader of Haaretz.

Here’s the set up: an Israeli colonist in the West Bank, living in a settlement colony sets fire to some nearby Palestinian land and then sits back to watch, grinning in satisfaction. The scene is caught on Israeli television.

Haaretz reports that the following was also captured on video:

The haters of Obama, the haters of Arabs, [the article was mostly about the Israeli hatred shown for Obama during his Middle East visit] and the outpost gunslingers should bear in mind what happened at the end of that Channel Two report on the Gilad Farm activists: not long after they started the fire on their neighbors’ field, smoke and flame were licking at the walls and windows of their own houses.

The Haaretz article also mention our old friend Rabbi Manis Friedman from St. Paul and the charming video interviews that Max Blumenthal shot in Jerusalem on the eve of Obama’s visit to Cairo.

And these are all apparently Charlie Krauthammer’s kind of people. The stench of moral sickness hangs so heavily over this crowd that it makes you gag.

Technorati Tags: Palestine,Israeli colonies,Haaretz,Obama,West Bank,arson

Hunted!

Scott Horton has some of the details of Donnie in the Dock:

The senior United Nations expert on the integrity of legal processes states that beginning next year, Donald Rumsfeld will have difficulties traveling outside of the United States because of his connection to war crimes. The official, Leandro Despouy, drew his conclusions based largely on a review of the recently released report of the Senate Armed Services Committee, which directly connected the mistreatment of prisoners to policy decisions taken by Rumsfeld. Despouy is a well-known Argentine human rights lawyer and diplomat who has served as the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Independence of Judges and Lawyers since 2003.

Spot is delighted to say that he predicted this in October of 2007, and explained why, in a post entitled Bitten in le ass!

Do you remember, boys and girls, when George Bush bought a ranch in Paraguay? Spot always figured that he might turn it into a resort for his buddies who can't travel anywhere else!

Technorati Tags: Donald Rumsfeld,war crimes,universal jurisdiction,Leandro Despouy,mistreatment of detainees,Convention Against Torture

Returning to the scene of the grime II

A recent conversation in a doctor’s office:

Well, Mr. Horner, the results of your colonoscopy are negative.

Aw, dammit! Another wasted medical test!

Here’s our patient Tom in the opinion piece that won him a Katie (tm):

Virtually every person who has studied America's health system agrees that at least 30 percent of health spending is unnecessary and unproductive. More tests, more procedures and more doctor visits don't mean better outcomes.

A breathtaking statistic, Tom. Speaking of colonoscopies, that figure must have come from the same place that Rush Limbaugh gets most of his statistics! Who are these students of health care, Tom? Inquiring minds want to know.

If we quit giving flu shots, only a small percentage of people would die, or even be hospitalized. Does that mean we should quit administering them? Tom would say, “Yes, of course!”

Every time a medical test comes back negative, Horner and his buddies probably think it’s a waste, defensive medicine. But then, Tom has probably never heard of differential diagnosis, the systematic identification of unknowns used by doctors to determine cause.

In his own careful assessment of the health care patient, Horner says:

Providing access to the 45 million Americans who are without insurance -- and that's a competitive necessity, not just a moral imperative -- will require more efficient use of the resources already being spent. Some of the efficiency will come from changes in how we purchase our care, some of it will be driven by changes in how health providers are reimbursed and some will come from the technology adopted to make everything from access to recordkeeping more streamlined.

None of this will mean beans if we continue to off load a quarter to a third of our health-care spending on the insurance industry. Horner may be right about the percentage of waste, but he’s looking in entirely the wrong place.

The 45 million people without health insurance are a rather unlikely place to look for overuse, too.

For evidence that our problem is not in overuse of care but in the insurance system, one needs only to look at the recent OECD report issued on several measures of well being in the 30 member countries:

Infant Deaths: 28 out of 30 (Mexico, Turkey). [!]

Life Expectancy: 24 out of 30 (Mexico, Turkey, Hungary, Poland, Czech & Slovak Republics). [!]

Health Expenditures: 1 out of 30. [!]

Poverty Rates: 28 out of 30 (Mexico, Turkey).

Child Poverty: 27 out of 30 (Mexico, Turkey, Poland).

Income Inequality: 27 out of 30 (Mexico, Turkey, Portugal).

Obesity: 30 out of 30.

Incarceration: 30 out of 30.

Work Hours (ranked in ascending order): 30 out of 30.

Height (women): 25 out of 30 (Mexico, Turkey, Korea, Portugal, Japan).

Height (men): 24 out of 30 (Italy, Spain, Mexico, Portugal, Korea, Japan).

The countries in parentheses are the ones that the US bested in each category. We’re getting comparatively shorter, by the way, another marker of relative health, or rather declining health. It’s beyond the scope of this relatively short post, but studies do pretty consistently show that in several measures of outcomes, our system does not fare well compared to most other industrialized countries.

So, instead of blaming the providers, Spot says blame the politicians and the business people who are the ones responsible for the mess, including the (cough, cough) bright lights who invented managed care.

Technorati Tags: managed care,OECD,healh care,Tom Horner

Returning to the scene of the grime

Yesterday, Tom Horner won the first-ever Katie (tm) award for his stunning opinion piece in Sunday’s StarTribune. It was a trilogy of foolishness, dedicated to tax policy, health care, and education. First, I’ll discuss the section that won Horner the Katie (tm): tax policy. Here’s part of what he said:

Minnesota needs a tax system that encourages businesses to innovate and create jobs. That means some business taxes should be reduced or even eliminated. But doing that leaves a revenue hole. The solution is to increase consumption taxes. And that's where too many Republicans draw the line -- because of politics. Republicans should provide leadership that acknowledges that tax reform will increase some taxes in order to reduce those that stifle economic growth and innovation.

At the outset, Spot notes that more reliance on consumption taxes would make the tax system in Minnesota even more regressive. Horner suggests that Republican politicians should just Do The Right Thing and provide leadership to make the income distribution in the state even more unequal.

Here’s some language from a press release about the 2009 tax incidence study (based on 2006 data) from the Minnesota Department of Revenue that Charlie quoted at Across the Great Divide:

According to the report, Minnesota’s tax system in 2006 was somewhat regressive, with lower- and middle-income households paying a higher percentage of overall taxes in relation to income than upper-income households. As in previous studies, Minnesota’s highly progressive income tax [highly progressive is in the eye of the beholder; here the beholder is Pawlenty’s Department of Revenue – Spot] somewhat countered the regressive effects of property and consumption taxes.

Raising the sales tax would just make that regressively worse. If you’d like to read a little more about why progressive taxation is more fair, here are a couple of resources that will be of interest.

Henry Ford understood that his workers had to make enough money to buy a car, or the whole system wasn’t going to work. (More on this and an essay from techno shortly.)

Horner says we have to get rid of business taxes because they “stifle growth and innovation.” Anything a business has to pay for stifles growth. Perhaps Tom thinks that a business should just be permitted to steal its raw materials? Using slave labor would also undoubtedly save millions of dollars. And environmental regulation? Think about how much money utilities could save if they could just belch that darn coal ash into the air for all of us to breathe? Or chemical companies were permitted to dump waste into rivers. What’s a river catching fire or two among friends?

The examples are not just silly. They are all examples of a business enterprise shifting the cost of its operation on to the public or to other individuals. An elimination of business taxes would be no different.

Even Tom Horner might admit in a private moment that businesses are consumers of, and beneficiaries of, government services. On a local level, fire and law enforcement, utilities, streets and roads: almost everything a municipal or county government does. It’s true on a state level, too. Law enforcement, maintenance of a court system, roads, protection of property in the event of natural disasters or civil unrest when the Guard is called out, and the list goes on.

But Spot, doesn’t business just include the taxes paid in the price charged?

Yes, grasshopper, it does. But when a business has to include the social costs of its operation in its price — taxes or pollution abatement or whatever — the price more accurately reflects what a good or service really costs to produce. If a polluter causes or exacerbates asthma, the public pays for part of the polluter’s cost of production. Likewise, if a business benefits from government services provided, but doesn’t pay for them, the public has to.

We can argue about the amount of taxes that should be allocated to business — and we do; it’s called the political process — but Horner’s argument is just for pikers, scrubs, and freeloaders.

Technorati Tags: Tom Horner,Katie (tm) award,tax poliy,equal marginal sacrificice principle of taxation,progressive taxation,freeloaders,social costs

Palestine’s Holocaust

A thump of the tail to the Wege for a link to this op-ed piece in Haaretz:

For 42 years we have been occupying, oppressing and stealing lands that are not ours. To be free in our land do we need to become thieving Cossacks, uprooters of trees, burners of fields and harassers of women, the elderly and the very young? "We have this land, we have it," goes the song, but what should have been said is "We have the power, we have it, we have the money, we have it, and we are allowed, we are," to starve an entire population, imprison it and annihilate it using air strikes, cluster bombs and white phosphorous. Because we are the lords of the land and God has chosen us to rule. For the shame of it.

From the same piece:

Time has passed and many heirs to Kahane have arisen - not only among a greedy and savage multitude but also among "the public's chosen representatives" in the Knesset and government. The latter are busy preparing blatantly racist laws and sending armed police to thwart Palestinian-initiated international cultural events because the regime believes the Arabs of the Land of Israel, the native Palestinians, are not worthy of being called human beings. According to the writers of these laws, the Arabs are certainly not entitled to human rights, not to mention a cultural and intellectual life, and never mind property, land and a home, because thousands of years ago God promised this land to Abraham and his seed.

Most regrettably and disgracefully, everything that Lord Rothschild [in a letter stating why he did not support the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine] predicted is coming to pass in our time. In our blackest dreams and in the hardest times since the struggle to establish the state, we never imagined that those who call themselves disciples of Ze'ev Jabotinsky would impose terror and fear here using deranged racist legislation. We never imagined that they would use the destruction of the court system to try to prevent any possibility of achieving social justice and a humane attitude. This is something essential in every democratic society toward every man, woman and child, irrespective of origin, race, religion and sex.

I have raised the issue of genocide in the Israeli treatment of Palestinians before, and has taken some heat for it. But take what the author of the opinion above, Shulamit Alini, says about the actions of the Israeli government, and then compare it with the two elements of genocide as contemplated by the man who invented the term, Raphael Lemkin:

“Genocide has two phases: one, destruction of the national pattern of the oppressed group; the other, the imposition of the national pattern of the oppressor. This imposition, in turn, may be made upon the oppressed population which is allowed to remain, or upon the territory alone, after removal of the population and colonization of the area by the oppressor’s own nationals.”

Technorati Tags: Israel,Palestine,Holocaust,genocide

Tom Horner wins a Katie (tm)!

What’s a Katie (tm), Spot?

I’ll explain it in a moment, grasshopper, but first let’s see what Tom did to earn the award. Horner gets a big spread in the opinion section of the Star Tribune today (Sunday) to permit him roam around and think about Life Without Pawlenty. He talks about three issues that he thinks Republicans can win on. The first one he discusses is tax policy:

Minnesota has a tax system created for an economy based in manufacturing and dependent on a young population of families in their years of high consumption. Holding onto this tax system is like General Motors hanging onto tail fins. [Spot’s italics]

Okay, Tom, what do you recommend? In the very next paragraph, Horner says:

Minnesota needs a tax system that encourages businesses to innovate and create jobs. That means some business taxes should be reduced or even eliminated. But doing that leaves a revenue hole. The solution is to increase consumption taxes. And that's where too many Republicans draw the line -- because of politics. Republicans should provide leadership that acknowledges that tax reform will increase some taxes in order to reduce those that stifle economic growth and innovation. [again, Spot’s italics]

Brilliant, Tom. Take a tax base that is diminishing and rely more heavily on it.

Tom Horner must be dismissed as any kind of serious public policy commentator — if for no other reason, and there are some — because he can’t be logically consistent two paragraphs in a row.

Who does this remind you of, grasshopper?

Of course! Katie! Now we get it!

That’s right, grasshopper. The Katie (tm) is a new award given to someone who writes a piece of internally-inconsistent intellectual hackery that Katie — Katherine Kersten — would be proud to have written.

I’ll have more to say about about Horner’s take on taxes, health care, and education later.

Technorati Tags: Tom Horner,Katherine Kersten,Katie (tm),tax policy,consumption taxes

I’ll take number three for five hundred, Spotty

These were links shown on the Star Tribune homepage on Saturday night. Guess which piece Katherine Kersten authored:

That really wasn’t very hard, was it? Here’s Katie’s lede:

We're increasingly uncomfortable with religion these days.

As a society, we tolerate pastors, priests, rabbis and other religious folks, so long as they confine their message to a vanilla "God is love" theme and bless babies, brides and caskets.

But when religious leaders speak out on the issues of the day -- especially using morally tinged language -- the elite gatekeepers of public opinion in the media, government and academia warn shrilly that a new Dark Age is upon us.

And Katie knows all about shrill, doesn’t she? Anyway, Katie tells us that Judeo-Christian principles are the reason why we’re good:

We Americans take the moral principles of equality and compassion for granted. Yet these ideas are deeply counterintuitive. We've largely forgotten that their source is the once-revolutionary Judeo-Christian belief in a loving God, who created human beings in his image and decreed charity to be the first of virtues.

Never mind that other religions — take Buddhism, or, gasp, Islam — teach moral principles of equality and compassion, too.

Fundamentally, so to speak, Katie’s problem is that religious leaders get pushback when they act like the Holy Bully, not when they’re being compassionate or egalitarian. Kersten rails against the “New Atheists” for condemning religion, but they don’t do so on the grounds that religion is too compassionate or egalitarian. It is the lack of these qualities that the New Atheists find so off-putting, as do many people who aren’t in the atheist camp.

In fact, Spot will put the compassion and egalitarianism of Richard Dawkins or PZ Myers up against Katie, the Holy Bully, Michele Bachmann, Pat Robertson, the late Jerry Falwell, John Hagee, Jimmy Swaggert, Bill Donohue, Mark Buesgens and Mary Kiffmeyer COMBINED and win in a walk.

When “media, government and academia” take moral instruction from some of the religious clowns who are fellow travelers of Katherine Kersten, you will know that the theocracy has arrived. And then, democracy, in the words of the Munchkin coroner, will be absolutely completely dead. (At least that’s what Spot thinks he said.)

Ethical systems — and not just ones based on traditional religion — are all rooted in empathy. Empathy is a word in the news a lot lately, and it’s not the conservatives who are champions of it. Recent brain research tells us about parts of our brains called mirror neurons. These mirror neurons are what allow us to feel what other people feel: to walk in their shoes or to “empathize” with them.

It may be that religion is as much an effort by humans to explain this brain phenomenon as it is a source of it. Religion is the first ethical system that most of us experience, so we all assume that’s where “goodness” comes from, but it ain’t necessarily so.

Religion can be, and obviously is for a lot of people, an empathy reinforcement mechanism. It can also be a source of authoritarianism and narcissism. When that happens, religion has nothing to do with the compassion and egalitarianism that Katie speaks so glowingly of.

Technorati Tags: Katherine Kersten,religion,empathy,mirror neurons,Richard Dawkins,PZ Myers,ethical systems

Charlie Krauthammer is pro-lebensraum

Here’s Charlie in an op-ed piece entitled The Settlements Myth:

President Obama repeatedly insists that American foreign policy be conducted with modesty and humility. Above all, there will be no more "dictating" to other countries. We should "forge partnerships as opposed to simply dictating solutions," he told the G-20 summit. In Middle East negotiations, he told al-Arabiya, America will henceforth "start by listening, because all too often the United States starts by dictating."

An admirable sentiment. It applies to everyone -- Iran, Russia, Cuba, Syria, even Venezuela. Except Israel. Israel is ordered to freeze all settlement activity. As Secretary of State Hillary Clinton imperiously explained the diktat: "a stop to settlements -- not some settlements, not outposts, not natural-growth exceptions."

What's the issue? No "natural growth" means strangling to death the thriving towns close to the 1949 armistice line, many of them suburbs of Jerusalem, that every negotiation over the past decade has envisioned Israel retaining. It means no increase in population. Which means no babies. Or if you have babies, no housing for them -- not even within the existing town boundaries. Which means for every child born, someone has to move out. No community can survive like that. The obvious objective is to undermine and destroy these towns -- even before negotiations.

The colonies in the Occupied Territories are illegal. Read more here. Or here. Charlie’s “natural growth” is just lebensraum:

The term Lebensraum was coined by the German geographer, Friedrich Ratzel (1844-1904). During the last two decades of the 19th century, Ratzel developed a theory according to which the development of all species, including humans, is primarily determined by their adaptation to geographic circumstances.

Above all, Ratzel considered species migration as the crucial factor in social adaptation and cultural change. Species that successfully adapted to one location, he thought, would spread naturally to others. Indeed, he went on to argue that, in order to remain healthy, species must continually expand the amount of space they occupy, for migration is a natural feature of all species, an expression of their need for living space.

This process also applied to humans, who operate collectively in the form of 'peoples' (Völker), with one Völk effectively conquering another. However, according to Ratzel, such expansion could be successful only if the conquering nation 'colonised' the new territory, and by 'colonisation' he meant the establishment of peasant farms by the new occupiers.

Making room for the cute little Israeli baby comes at the expense of living and breathing room for probably several Palestinian ones. It takes especial chutzpah to make Krauthammer’s argument when it’s the Palestinian babies’ land in the first place.

Krauthammer also wails that there has been no “negotiation” over this. The Israelis have been foot dragging about this for years in an attempt to run out the clock and hope that the “facts on the ground” will make the establishment of a Palestinian state impossible. They may have already succeeded. Once more we go to the Bob Simon video:

Watch CBS Videos Online

Listen to the former Mayor of Jerusalem and the West Bank Mayor, especially.

If there’s any myth at work here, it’s Charlie’s mythmaking about justification for colonies in the first place.

If there is no peace in Palestine, there won’t be in the Middle East, and the United States will not know peace, either.

Technorati Tags: Charles Krauthammer,Palestine,Israel,illegal colonies in the West Bank,settlements