Bill Posey is an anti-science loon

If you're in the market for a Republican to sneer at, U.S. Rep Bill Posey of Florida should be first on your list.

I'm always eager to call out members of "my side," and unfortunately, I didn't see this CSPAN clip from 2012 until just now, but it's still valid. In a congregational hearing with CDC representatives, Posey plays the tired gambit of trying to imply that vaccines cause autism, but then cowardly retreats and claims he is not against vaccines.

Where I come from, we call those kind of people "liars." Watch him for yourself:


Here's a recap. He made a naked argument of authority stating that his predecessor is a doctor who believes vaccines cause autism, then claimed Africa never had autism until they received vaccines, then rudely belittled and interrupted the CDC representatives again and again while he accused them of wasting his time for not answering questions in his leading format..

Posey is exactly what the right doesn't need right now, an obnoxious, dishonest, anti-science fool.
Read more...

Take Mitch McConnell with you

Please oh please let Mike Huckabee's follow through on the threat he made on a radio station Tuesday, where he criticized the GOP for not fighting hard enough against gay marriage, and potentially giving up on the issue.

If the the Republicans want to lose guys like me and a whole bunch of still God-fearing, Bible-believing people, go ahead and just abdicate on this issue and while you're at it, go ahead and say abortion doesn't matter either. At that point, you lose me. I'll become an independent. I'll start finding people that have guts to stand.

Does he mean it? If so, not only would the Republicans lose a major social conservative leader, but he could potentially siphon off a large portion of similar party members. Imagine that, we could potentially have Republican leaders who focus on economic issues and don't get bogged down holding back science and human rights.

Who knows, some of them might even try to cut spending, instead of merely cutting taxes. 

Read more...

A quick lesson on political realities

The major political ideologies in America are often presented as stark opposites that hold opposite views on most issues and only overlap in superficial, no-brainer ways.

That's extremely short-sighted and wrong, and the Boko Haram abductions in Nigeria illustrate just how wrong that view is. These are Islamic fundamentalists who violently kidnapped 100 schoolgirls as part of an ongoing campaign to end the formal education of women. They don't want women to go to school, and they are willing to kill to make that happen.

I'm sure you could find a couple lunatics in America that will believe any crazy view, but for all intents and purposes, no one in America agrees with this view. The same can be said for all kinds of older opinions that our society has burned away over the course of civilization. Think of slavery, genocide, formal stratification of society into castes and torture as a form amusement.

Those ideas were accepted as the norm for a long time, and as the savage actions of Boko Haram are showing us now, there are plenty of people in other parts of the world who still reject ideas that we consider beyond debate.
Read more...

Categorical hypocrisy is not actual hypocrisy

I draw a lot from the Robbers Cave Experiment when I write about political attitudes, where people see their political opponents as a monolithic group while seeing their own side as diverse and nuanced.

Far too often this takes the form of labeling a large loosely-associated group of people hypocrites because of two views that are both supposedly common within that group. These accusations of "categorical hypocrisy" include:

Feminists who supposedly don't care about women in poor nations,

Guns owners who don't see gay marriage as a personal right,

Pro-lifers who support the death penalty

Pro-choicers who oppose the death penalty

Critics of Obama's economic policies who tolerated Bush's big spending

Opponents of Bush's war mongering who give Obama a pass

In all of these cases, the problem stems from the assumption that everyone in the group holds the same position. Individuals can be hypocrites and hold two opposing view, but it doesn't make sense to take that example of hypocrisy and apply it to all other members of loosely-defined groups like "feminist," "gun owner" or "Democrat." Feminists who oppose female genital mutilation are easy to find, and gun-owning libertarians who support gay marriage are crawling out of the woodwork these days.

While it can be tempting to label groups or ones political opponents as contradicting themselves, its usually a cheap stunt that can reveals a low level of discourse. Categorical thinking is a crude way to form a world view and categorical hypocrisy is not really hypocrisy.
Read more...

The White House and the economy

I've long held the belief that what party holds the presidency has little impact on the economy. Perhaps I'd hold this view less if the economy didn't do better on average when the Democrats are in the White House, but that's the nature of bias.

Still, there are plenty of people who claim that the economic policies of Democrats must be superior because of GDP performance during their terms as president. Here's what the GDP growth numbers look like from an analysis by Alan Blinder and Mark Watson of Princeton:

Notice that the numbers leave out FDR, who took office during the Great Depression, and start during Harry Truman's second term. However, if one starts with Nixon in 1969 the averages look a lot more even, although the Democrats still win the contest.

What Blinder and Watson set out to do was respond to that claim that a Democrat in the White House is the reason the economy got better.

The superiority of economic performance under Democrats rather than Republicans is nearly ubiquitous; it holds almost regardless of how you define success. By many measures, the performance gap is startlingly large--so large, in fact, that it strains credulity, given how little influence over the economy most economists (or the Constitution, for that matter) assign to the President of the United States.

My usual response has been that the president is a small factor and the party distribution in Congress also plays a role, such as the Republican led Congress during Clinton's time in office. But they found that on average, the party in Congress is not the deciding factor either. It's also not the conditions the president inherited when he came into office. Instead, it's a bit of luck:

Democrats would no doubt like to attribute the large D-R growth gap to better macroeconomic policies, but the data do not support such a claim….It seems we must look instead to several variables that are mostly “good luck.” Specifically, Democratic presidents have experienced, on average, better oil shocks than Republicans, a better legacy of (utilization-adjusted) productivity shocks, and more optimistic consumer expectations.

Please keep in mind that Blinder has been a high-profile economist for Democrats and the conclusion is not a love letter to those connections. Bravo to him.

It looks like we all need a reality check on our political positions now and then, myself included. Luck is a very unsatisfying answer, as I strongly believe that institutions matter and one would expect the policies we choose would play a larger role in growth.

Perhaps in a way they do. Are the macroeconomic policies of Republicans and Democrats really that different? We think of them as opposites, but both parties agree on a lot of issues. Our current president has an economic team filled with people who believe in markets; heavily regulated markets, but markets none the less. The GOP gets votes by saying it will shrink the size of the federal government, a promise it always breaks. Tax rates are a point of disagreement, but President Obama isn't seriously considering bringing a single bracket above the Clinton rate.

In a historic perspective, the policy differences are small and from a quarter that already has a limited impact on the economy. From the small sample size of the modern presidents, luck is a perfectly rational explanation.
Read more...

Douthat on the myth of the radical right

New York Times columnist Ross Douthat proposes the greatest explanation to why small-government conservatives are painted with the "extremist" label so recklessly by the left:

This divide, I think, explains a lot of the mutual incomprehension surrounding size-of-government debates. To liberals and many moderates, it often seems like the right gets what it wants in these arguments and then just gets more extreme, demanding cuts atop cuts, concessions atop concessions, deregulation upon deregulation, tax cuts upon tax cuts. But to many conservatives, the right has never come remotely close to getting what it actually wants, whether in the Reagan era or the Gingrich years or now the age of the Tea Party — because what it wants is an actually smaller government, as opposed to one that just grows somewhat more slowly than liberals and the left would like. And this goal only ends up getting labeled as “extreme” in our debates, conservatives lament, because the right has never succeeded in dislodging certain basic assumptions about government established by F.D.R. and L.B.J. — under which a slower rate of spending growth is a “draconian cut,” an era of “small government” is one which in which the state grows immensely in absolute terms but holds steady as a share of G.D.P., and a rich society can never get rich enough to need less welfare spending per capita than it did when it was considerably poorer.

There is more here.
Read more...

Survivor's journal from the Great Shutdown of 2013

Remember folks, it's the political party you don't like that is holding the nation hostage when neither of them will budge.

Bill Clinton exemplified the hypocrisy of this viewpoint perfectly:

Former President Clinton steadfastly defended President Obama and Senate Democrats Sunday morning on their position in the debt-ceiling fight and criticized House Republicans for not being interested in real budget negotiations. 

"This is the House Republicans and tea party saying, 'We don't want to negotiate with Democrats,' " Clinton told This Week's George Stephanopoulos."They're mad because they don't want to negotiate."

Clinton defended Obama's position while calling the House Republican position "almost spiteful." "If I were the president, I wouldn't negotiate over these draconian cuts that are gonna take food off the table of low-income working people, while they leave all the agricultural subsidies in for high-income farmers and everything else," Clinton said. "I think it's chilling. It seems almost spiteful."

Clinton is simultaneously saying he wouldn't negotiate in this situation and shame on the GOP for not negotiating. What complete rubbish.

Republicans are using their power to defund Obamacare. They know full well that doing so would mean president Obama would choose to shut down the government rather than let them smother his health care act.

But in response we have both sides saying it's the other guys fault: Obama and the Democrats are to blame for his decision to shut it down or the Republicans are to blame for putting the president in that situation.

This is what gridlock looks like, and I'm sick of people saying it means Congress is "broken." This is how checks and balances are supposed to work, and neither party is required to back down when they lack overwhelming votes.

Despite all the fear mongering we're hearing today, the government shutdown of 2013 will be a brief inconsequential footnote in history.
Read more...

Politicization of Martin Luther King Jr.

I heard a few of the speakers at yesterday's 50th anniversary of MLK's I Have a Dream speech on NPR while I was driving. It turns out women weren't allowed to speak at the original event, something the NPR reporter brushed off as a quaint, acceptable custom of that time.

Another group that wasn't allowed to speak at the 2013 group appeared to be Republicans, but I was flat-out wrong. Here's what I read today on a Wall Street Journal blog:

Former NAACP Chairman Julian Bond told MSNBC Wednesday that event organizers invited “a long list of Republicans to come,” but each declined. A spokesman for Speaker John Boehner acknowledged that Mr. Boehner was invited to speak but instead had marked the anniversary by speaking at a July event commemorating the march in the Rotunda of the Capitol, with other top lawmakers including Senate Majority Leader Sen. Harry Reid (D., Nev.).

Both President Bushes were unable to go because of recent health problems.

There were plenty of Democratic politicians at the event on the Mall yesterday, including presidents Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. Predictably, they spent as much time as they could sneaking in shout-outs to every left-wing issue they could, including income inequality, the minimum wage, so-called assault weapon bans, calls to raise taxes, environmental policy and stand your ground laws.

No one should have been surprised, of course. I was disappointed, but certainly not surprised.


Read more...

Principals over personal interest

Jonathan Chait penned a great piece on what he calls a moral failing of U.S. Sen. Rob Portman, R-OH, for the reason he switched sides on gay marriage.

Clearly, Chait isn't upset that Portman now supports gay marriage. He's critical that Portman was unable to emphasize with gays until his own son came out as gay.

Here's the money quote at the end:

That Portman turns out to have a gay son is convenient for the gay-rights cause. But why should any of us come away from his conversion trusting that Portman is thinking on any issue about what’s good for all of us, rather than what’s good for himself and the people he knows?

Well said. I'm glad Portman came around, but I wish he had done so from an unbiased perspective.
Read more...

Mitch tries to Switch

I didn't write anything before about Rep. Sen. Rand Paul's excellent Fillibuster last week because I had nothing to add that hasn't been written 1,000 times elsewhere.

What has also been written elsewhere, but I don't think enough, is the lame 11th hour attempt fellow Republican senator from Kentucky Mitch McConnell made to get on the bandwagon. This includes joining in on the filibuster after it had national attention and was nearly done and trying to frame it as a a partnership between himself and Paul.

For example, the above image is introduced on McConnell's official Facebook page with the line "Add your name to join Mitch & Rand's fight against Obama's drone policies" followed by a link to a useless online petition that declares one Stands with Mitch & Rand.

At least in his fundraising emails on the issue McConnell's staff had the decency to put Rand Paul's name first.

If it interests you, I spent the better part of an hour listening to the filibuster in one window and watching a Super Ghost 'n Ghouls legit speed run in another. It turns out there is time to defeat the penultimate boss with the bracelet if you get closer, and you can get Democrats to turn on the president if you keep at it long enough.

Read more...

Sugar tariffs are sour, not sweet

Every once in a while someone makes an argument so bad that it just draws more attention to how wrong they are.

This week's fool is U.S. Rep. Tom Rooney, R-Florida. A protectionist, Rooney penned a recent Gee-Willikers-I-Don't-Like-Government-Intervention-But-This-Is-Different piece for the Daily Caller called A Conservative Case for Sugar Tarrifs.

His basic argument is that limiting sugar imports protects American jobs, and it's good for consumers because if we let our sugar producers compete under a free market, they would go out of business and the foriegn nations would start a sugar cabal and charge more.

This fooled absolutely no one, as our tariffs already make Americans pay twice as much for sugar as the rest of the world. Why wait for foreigners to impose higher prices later when we can have them now?

I wonder if Rooney's protectionist policies have anything to do with the $14,000 U.S. Sugar gave to his campaign, or the $75,000 from "Crop Production and Basic Processing" or all the sugar cane production in his district?

Of course they do. Rooney is a stooge for the sugar lobby, and a rather unskilled one at that. He had the nerve to write that the tariff program "operates without a federal budget outlay, which means it doesn't cost taxpayers a dime."

Reality check. This program costs Americans between $2.4 million and $3.5 million every year.
Read more...

Playing the party game

Dave Berri over at the Freakonomics blog has a great post about approval of political actions as a form of party tribalism.

The national debt seems to always trouble the party that isn’t in the White House. When Bush was President (pick your Bush), Democrats were very troubled by the rising national debt. Republicans, though, were relatively quiet. Now that Obama is President, Republicans are extremely worried about the national debt. However, Democrats don’t seem as alarmed.

Berri illustrates this further with an anecdote about how Democrat and Republican voters, as groups, reversed their positions when asked if the president is responsible for high gas prices, when the party in the White House switched.

President Barack Obama himself is guilty of this slight. As a Senator, he was quick to blame President George W. Bush for high gas prices, but now that he's in the oval office, he believes oil prices are determined by the global market

This is unfortunately, part of the human experience and we're all guilty of doing this. Our brains are very good telling us that what we want to believe is the truth, and are skilled at making excuses when a few pesky facts get in the way.
Read more...

Why I support Edwina Rogers

Edwina Rogers, a former Republican strategist has been named the Executive Director (and chief lobbyist) of the Secular Coalition of America. You can guess what happened next in the left-wing atheist blogosphere. Yeah, these clickable links say exactly what you expect.

To be fair, some people did say they will give her a chance. Rogers also submitted to two interviews with prominent secular bloggers, and the information from them is important.

The frustrating part is vocal members of the secular community expect Rogers to grovel before them and publicly beg forgiveness for aiding and abetting the Republican party. This is an unrealistic demand to ask someone who will be marching over to Capital Hill and knocking on red doors.

Rogers didn't handle the Greta Christina interview perfectly. She said she doesn't believe the majority of elected Republican officials support social conservative positions like opposing gay marriage, and thinks the jury is still out on that one. I'm a registered Republican too, and I don't buy that for a second.

She and Christina talked past each other for most of the interview. Christina wanted her to pay penance for being involved with the Republican party and Rogers wanted to show that she joined the party for economic reasons. American parties are so weak that members are not required to pass a strict litmus test, and Rogers wanted to emphasize that there are plenty of people who believe in the things secular people value who are also Republicans, so it's wrong to assume membership is an endorsement of everything the party stands for.

I think a lot of the misunderstanding here is that Rogers is going to be the head of a lobbyist group, not a spiritual leader for atheists and agnostics. With that in mind, her GOP credentials are an asset, as she will get in more doors than the usual Democratic gang who speak about secular values.

The unstated major premise here is that the Republicans have been bad on secular issues, so the Democrats must be good on them. I completely agree the Republicans have been an obstacle for secular values, but does that tell us anything about the state of the Democratic party?

Remember the election of 2008, when the Democrats took over Washington and quickly legalized gay marriage on the federal level? No, of course not. They won't even do that now. The black church plays a crucial role in Democratic politics. An embarrassing 38 percent of registered Democrats are creationists. That's not as bad as the Republican rate of 60 percent, but it's not something to stick on the fridge. Republicans gets low ratings from the SCA's own voting appraisal, but the Democrats didn't ace it.

Was Rogers predecessor, Sean Faircloth, ever asked to explain himself for his involvement with the Democratic party?

There's a lot of tribalism on display here, and Rogers should be seen as someone who can prove that the secular community isn't a generic liberal advocacy group. Surprisingly, I've been unable to find any mention of Edwina on the feminist Skepchick.org blog, which is surprising as its been beating the drum to get more women in the secular and skeptical communities.

Lobbying is not perfect at changing minds, but effective or not, that's what the SCA is for. Unfortunatly, GOP officials often have leaders of the Christian right whispering in their ears. Someone needs to whisper some reason in the other ear, and Rogers is someone who can pull that off.
Read more...