The rent is too damn high

I have an idea.  Let all debates about taxes begin with these facts:

But in fact, most Americans in 2010 paid far less in total taxes — federal, state and local — than they would have paid 30 years ago. According to an analysis by The New York Times, the combination of all income taxes, sales taxes and property taxes took a smaller share of their income than it took from households with the same inflation-adjusted income in 1980.

 Households earning more than $200,000 benefited from the largest percentage declines in total taxation as a share of income. Middle-income households benefited, too. More than 85 percent of households with earnings above $25,000 paid less in total taxes than comparable households in 1980.

Lower-income households, however, saved little or nothing. Many pay no federal income taxes, but they do pay a range of other levies, like federal payroll taxes, state sales taxes and local property taxes. Only about half of taxpaying households with incomes below $25,000 paid less in 2010.

Or this cartoon (via Daily Kos):

So, a return to slightly higher rates won't even be close to Eisenhower-era socialism.

Arsenic and old lace

Rick Warren, MEGACHURCH Christian minister, has a lot of gay friends.  You can tell this by the respect for them oozing from his well-considered words.  In an interview with Piers Morgan of CNN, he had the following to say about the naturalness of homsexuality.

WARREN: Here’s what we know about life. I have all kinds of natural feelings in my life and it doesn’t necessarily mean that I should act on every feeling. Sometimes I get angry and I feel like punching a guy in the nose. It doesn’t mean I act on it. Sometimes I feel attracted to women who are not my wife. I don’t act on it. Just because I have a feeling doesn’t make it right. Not everything natural is good for me. Arsenic is natural.

The iron manners among you will want to say that he is merely claiming that just because something is natural does not make it right.  And indeed in the very abstract such a point is a reasonable one. 

But this is actually not an abstract point.  Because the issue on the table nowadays is that Homosexuality is a natural form social interaction among humans and many other animals.  The evidence is that people and other animals lead purpose-driven, fulfilling lives as homosexuals.

Warren rejects that, however.  For him, homosexual behavior–i.e., sex–is morally wrong (because, he states elsewhere, the Bible says so).

So indeed, homosexual behavior is natural (though he says earlier in the interview that the jury is still out on this–he studies these things apparently), but it's natural like arsenic, the poison that will kill you, is natural.  Or worse, it's natural like his urges to violent reprisal. 

She loves me not

The standard critical thinking examples of fallacies, many argue, just don't ever occur in real life.  No one, for instance, would ever allege that the stock market is tanking on account of someone's appearance on a TV show.  Right?  Wrong.  Take the following interchange between Rep. Raul Grijalva (D-AZ) and CNBC's Michelle Caruso-Cabrera  (Via TPM).

“Representative? You know what, as we’re talking the market is selling off once again,” she told Grijalva. “Every time members of Congress come on, and I’ve got to tell you sir, I think you’re contributing to the fears that we’re going off the fiscal cliff because it doesn’t sound like there’s any compromise in what you’re saying. Do you care that markets are selling off dramatically when it looks like you guys can’t come to a deal?” 

What makes this hilarious is the implication that the stock market, with all of its wonderful complexity, was glued to CNBC, and CNBC's narrative of compromise, such that its hopes sank like a teenage boy at a high school dance when that compromise didn't appear to be imminent.

Sadly, the person who made this comment has a job as a journalist in the financial industry.  One might believe that knowledge, with all of its requirements of believing correctly and evidence and such, might be paramount.

Regrettably, no.

How to tell when you’re a complete hack

Here's New York Magazine's Jonathan Chait on conservative cheerleader John Podhoretz:

The first few weeks after a losing presidential election are an awkward period for the most devoted ideological polemicist. Months of optimistic spin about your candidate must be cast aside for an entirely different sort of spin — where before the candidate was a budding juggernaut boldly carrying the party banner onward to victory, now we can see in hindsight that he was a hapless loser unable to articulate our side’s clearly winning vision. Transitioning from one line to another can often take months of careful tip-toeing. Commentary editor John Podhoretz offers up a magisterial postelection essay, “The Way Forward,” that instead simply takes the full plunge all at once.

Read the whole essay.  Very entertaining.  Here's the punchline:

The preelection Podhoretz was perfectly willing to credit any potential Obama victory, however unlikely, to his policy agenda:

if he loses on Nov. 6, he will lose for the same reason he would have won — because of his very real, very substantial, and very consequential achievements.

The postelection Podhoretz asserts that Obama’s win was “an astonishing technical accomplishment but in no way whatsoever a substantive one.” In no way whatsoever. Onward to victory in 2016, comrades!

It's an accountability free profession.

 

Monandry

My apologies to those who want something more challenging, but here's a classic slippery slope from the Vatican:

VATICAN CITY — The Vatican is digging in after gay marriage initiatives scored big wins this week in the U.S. and Europe, vowing to never stop insisting that marriage can only be between a man and a woman.

In a front-page article in Saturday's Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano, the Holy See sought to frame itself as the lone voice of courage in opposing initiatives to give same-sex couples legal recognition. In a separate Vatican Radio editorial, the pope's spokesman asked sarcastically why gay marriage proponents don't now push for legal recognition for polygamous couples as well.

I apologize for the lack of a direct quote and link, but the Osservatore Romano site does not have the article and when you search for the term "gay" nothing appears.  Curious.  Anyway, perhaps the Pope's spokesperson will remember that the slope leading to polygamy and polyandry hasn't already been traversed in the opposite direction.  Those things already exist, in other words, and it was straight marriage that led to them.

Gay marriage, being the opposite of straight marriage, will lead therefore ipso fatso apodictically to the opposite of the slope leading to polyandry and polygamy: monandry or monogamy.  That's the way logic works.

Antichrist

One would hope in vain that the reelection of Barack Obama would put to rest the foolishness of many of his opponents.  Here is a megachurch pastor from Texas:

"I want you to hear me tonight, I am not saying that President Obama is the Antichrist, I am not saying that at all. One reason I know he's not the Antichrist is the Antichrist is going to have much higher poll numbers when he comes," said Jeffress.

"President Obama is not the Antichrist. But what I am saying is this: the course he is choosing to lead our nation is paving the way for the future reign of the Antichrist."

One question: Can we do anything to stop the Antichrist at this point?  Should we try to stop him coming?

The confidence man

Nate Silver, nerdy statistician at 538.com, correctly predicated the outcome of the recent election (with the exception, by the way, of one Senate race in North Dakota).  Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan, "numbers" guys by their own descriptions, did not.  An article at CBS.com (my first time there too!) had this to say:

Romney and his campaign had gone into the evening confident they had a good path to victory, for emotional and intellectual reasons. The huge and enthusiastic crowds in swing state after swing state in recent weeks – not only for Romney but also for Paul Ryan – bolstered what they believed intellectually: that Obama would not get the kind of turnout he had in 2008.

They thought intensity and enthusiasm were on their side this time – poll after poll showed Republicans were more motivated to vote than Democrats – and that would translate into votes for Romney. 

As a result, they believed the public/media polls were skewed – they thought those polls oversampled Democrats and didn't reflect Republican enthusiasm. They based their own internal polls on turnout levels more favorable to Romney. That was a grave miscalculation, as they would see on election night.

Those assumptions drove their campaign strategy: their internal polling showed them leading in key states, so they decided to make a play for a broad victory: go to places like Pennsylvania while also playing it safe in the last two weeks.

What is interesting about this account is that the Romney campaign found a way to convince itself of the power of confidence, motivation, and enthusiasm over simple numbers.  But that is why we have numbers, because those things are meaningless

Here was Romney's approach to the economy (from, by the way, the same tape where he made the "47 percent" comment):

If it looks like I'm going to win, the markets will be happy. If it looks like the president's going to win, the markets should not be terribly happy. It depends of course which markets you're talking about, which types of commodities and so forth, but my own view is that if we win on November 6th, there will be a great deal of optimism about the future of this country. We'll see capital come back and we'll see — without actually doing anything — we'll actually get a boost in the economy.

I'm glad he did not win, for his losing has been so instructive.

Schadenfreude

The election is finally over, save the crying.  Speaking of which, please join me for a little bit of schadenfreude at the expense of Charles Krauthammer, Fox News contributor and columnist.  A little context, the other night, as the internet went all abuzz with an imminent Obama victory, many turned to Fox News to watch the slow motion realization that their alternative reality was just that, alternative.  I happened to catch an embittered Charles Krauthammer utter the following:

If he manages to win the popular vote, it will be very small, if there’s any. And even in the electoral, I think it will be a very small majority. Particularly if Virginia and Florida will go to Romney. So this is not a mandate in the number, or in the way that he campaigned. He did not campaign on any ideas. Anything large. Anything important. He didn’t address entitlements of tackle anything like that. 

Via Salon (via DailyKos), here's Krauthammer in 2004:

I think it was a huge issue that the president was weak in his first term. He had less of the power and strength and capital, as he speaks of, than he does today. And now that he’s been elected with a large majority, or a significant majority, and with a mandate, I think part of that mandate is to get the right judges, by his likes.

What where the election results in 2004 versus 2012?  Following directly from above. 

Bush won with 286 electoral votes to John Kerry’s 252, and with a 2.4 percent margin in the popular vote. Obama currently has 303 electoral votes to Romney’s 206, and he’s likely to add to that the 29 votes from Florida, which hasn’t been called yet, for a grand total of 332. It’s to early to tell on the popular vote, but it will be between 2 and 3 percent.

I don't know what "mandate" means, by the way.  But if Bush had a mandate in 2000 (as some said–I'll find the quotes later), and a real mandate in 2004, then Obama has a mandate now. 
 
Like I say, I'm glad the election is over, but I'm enjoying the crying.