South Carolina has a state fossil

South Carolina finally has an official state fossil: the Columbian mammoth (that's also the state fossil of Washington). The decision was not without some melodrama.

As I mentioned below, eight year old Olivia McConnell was perusing lists of state symbols and noticed that her state was one of the last states without a state fossil. She did some research and discovered that South Carolina has a special tie to American paleontology through a discovery of some mammoth teeth that were the first in the New World to be authoritatively identified as elephantine in nature. The identification was made by an African slave whose name was unfortunately not recorded. Armed with this background research, Olivia wrote to her state representatives who promptly wrote a bill and submitted it to each house. The bill was short and clear. After the usual whereas's it read:

Article 9, Chapter 1, Title 1 of the 1976 Code is amended by adding: "Section 1-1-712A. The Columbian Mammoth is designated as the official State Fossil of South Carolina."

It sailed through the House with a 94-3 vote, went on the Senate, and came screeching to a halt. Sen. Kevin Bryant, a creationist, decided the bill needed some religion and amended it with three verses from Genesis describing the creation of the animals. This was judged to be an insertion of a new topic into the bill which, for procedural reasons stopped its progress. At this point, the national press took notice, and not in a way that made South Carolina look good. 

If the story had simply been about religion, Bryant and his supporters would have gotten their Southern stubborn on and said "screw you" to Yankees, the liberal media, and all of the others that they imagine to be persecuting them. The South Carolina legislature has had no problem unconstitutionally inserting religion into their education standards. What made this time different was that the story was almost universally framed as "humorless old men frustrate well-meaning little girl's dream." Defying public opinion in the name of God and the South wasn't going to work this time. Bryant whined to The Daily Beast that he didn't mean to block Olivia's bill, he "just felt like it'd be a good thing to acknowledge the creator of the fossils."

The simple thing to do would have been for Bryant to remove his amendment and pass the bill before the PR disaster could go on any longer. It didn't work out that way. Bryant removed his amendment, but Sen. Mike Fair, another creationist, put a hold on the bill so Bryant could reword his injection of religion in a way that wouldn't be deemed a new topic. Bryant did this and the Senate leadership accepted his new language. The bill was set to come up for a vote on Wednesday, when Senate Majority Leader Harvey Peeler blocked it. Peeler thinks the state has more than enough state symbols and considers naming any more to be a waste of time. To demonstrate how strongly he felt about this, he chose the most embarrassing time possible to waste three hours of the Senate's time arguing over it. Finally, the leadership allowed his to insert a second clause into the bill declaring a moratorium on any new symbols. The leadership chose not to view this as a new topic even though it is. The final vote was unanimous.

The final Senate bill is hardly perfect. Peeler got his moratorium. Bryant got his religion. The final wording is awkward and redundant:

The Columbian Mammoth, which was created on the Sixth Day with the other beasts of the field, is designated as the official State Fossil of South Carolina and must be officially referred to as the 'Columbian Mammoth', which was created on the Sixth Day with the other beasts of the field.

The one improvement, from my perspective, is that they finally got the species right. The original bill said "Wooly (sic) Mammoth" in  the title and "Columbian Mammoth" in the actual bill. The final version has this corrected to Columbian in both places. The press is still having trouble with that. The New York Times coverage refers to it as the "Columbia woolly mammoth." USA Today correctly refers to it as the Columbian mammoth, but then messes up by calling it a sub-species of the woolly mammoth.

South Carolina has a state fossil and Olivia McConnell has had an education in civics. I hope this encourages her to stay out of politics and to go into science. Or, if she is inspired to go into politics, that it be so the people of South Carolina have someone representing them who knows how to do their homework and who will cut through the crap.

It's Treason Appreciation Month

A whole year has passed and it's already Confederate Heritage and History Month. Every year, it begins, appropriately enough, on April Fools Day. So far, the governors of Alabama and Mississippi have issued official proclamations calling on the (white) citizens of their states to honor the august achievements of those four years of waging war against the United States. Well, history is history. I'll have a few things to say myself.

I vote for number three

Republican Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin issued a statement today explaining why the state's strict new voter ID law is no problem.

There are more photo ID’s currently issued than there are registered voters in Wisconsin.

As I see it, this statement can be interpreted several ways:

1. Walker thinks everyone in Wisconsin already has an ID.
   
2. Walker thinks people who don't vote also don't drive.
   
3. Walker thinks sixteen year olds can vote.
   
4. Walker is dumb as a post and believes all of the above.
   
5. Walker believes we're dumb as posts and will believe one of the above.
   
6. Walker is play a dog whistle game with the paranoid right and wants them to think Democrats have been stockpiling multiple IDs to commit massive voter fraud.

Why would a conservative be against that?

The often confused Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) thinks President Obama's jobs plan is a secret plot to keep gays from getting married, or something like that.

This may be, uh-uh, something nice he’s throwing out for uh gay folks that are living together so he can tell them actually you’re better off not getting married, uh because there’s a marriage penalty here.

Or maybe it's an attack on straight marriage.

If you’re the head of a single household, you have an exemptions at $225,000. If you're all other cases $200,000. So it really penalizes married individuals ... But if you want to get divorced it is good news for you

No, it's definitely about the gays.

Now, of course, the founders, uh they all understood marriage to be between a man and a woman and um that's the way the history of the country's been.

Or, whatever.

This president, according to the power to, as the old saying goes, the power to tax, the power to destroy, takes a shot at uh conven-- traditional, conventional marriage.

Since Gohmert has so much trouble keeping even one thought clear in his head, I suppose it would be futile to point out that it is congress--specifically, his branch of congress--that has the power to tax (and destroy) and not the president.

We had to destroy California in order to save it

I think if the day ever comes when no one wants to carve a new state out of California, that will be the day that we can give everything away and climb up on a hill to await the apocalypse. The end will surely have arrived.

The latest entry in the sweepstakes is Riverside County Supervisor Jeff Stone. Last year he failed to get elected to the State House. This year he says he never wanted to be part of their stupid state house anyway. He's going to form his own state and it's going to be super awesome.

Stone, a Republican, just unveiled a proposal to have Riverside and 12 other counties split from California and create the new State of South California.

The county news release doesn’t indicate whether Stone’s floated the idea with the other counties, or if his own colleagues would even support such a drastic move.

But county release did say the new state would be run by a part-time legislature in order to provide more "local control." The new state’s legislators would be get a $600 monthly stipend but no other benefits.

Naturally, South California will be a red state.

Besides Riverside County, the new state would include the counties of Imperial, San Diego, Orange, San Bernardino, Kings, Kern, Fresno, Tulare, Inyo, Madera, Mariposa and Mono.

Should Riverside County supervisors back Stone’s plan, county staff will organize a meeting with the other counties’ supervisors and city councils to sort out the myriad of details.

That includes whether to end term limits, how to defend the new state borders and how to tax residents, according to the county news release.

The first step in defending the borders will be to sieze the armories and demand the northerners evacuate Fort Sumter.

"Are there huge challenges? Absolutely," Stone said in the news release.

"But the destruction of California has to stop and we won’t know what we can accomplish unless we sit down and consider the possibilities."

The destruction of California can only be stopped by destroying California.

A little historical perspective, please

A little historical perspective, please

One of the talking points that conservatives have been using in order to deny credit to Obama for killing bin Ladin is to say that some if not all of the credit belongs to Bush and, therefore, Obama is a jerk for not recognizing that fact. They give different reasons as to why Bush deserves the most credit. The Fox morning crew has been among the most energetic in pushing this interpretation but no one has push the envelope as far as Condoleezza Rice did on their show last week.

BRIAN KILMEADE: The president in his speech — did a great job on his speech Sunday night — talked about coming together like we did on 9/11, he wants to see it happen again. Do you think a nice gesture would be to invite President Bush out on Thursday when he comes down to Ground Zero to greet the families?*

RICE: Well, obviously, I'll leave that to the two of them and to the administration. But President Bush had at Ground Zero probably the most important moment maybe in American history. It was when this wounded nation watched their commander-in-chief** stand on that rubble and say that they will hear us, we are going to avenge this.

This woman has a PhD in history, although, in her defense, I should point out that it is not in American History. If she had studied American history, she might have been familiar with some other important moments, such as:

• The British surrender at Yorktown
  
• Pearl Harbor
  
• The signing of the Declaration of Independence
  
• FDR's "fear itself" speech
  
• Palmer raids and the first Red Scare
  
• The Confederates firing on Ft. Sumter
  
• The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927
  
• The Louisiana Purchase
  
• The ratification of the Constitution
  
• General Butler exposing the coup plot against FDR
  
• VJ Day
  
• The Haymarket massacre
  
• Passage of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments
  
• The stock market crash of 1929
  
• The Cuban Missile Crisis
  
• Texans winning their independence at the Battle of San Jacinto
  
• The Big Blow Up of 1910
  
• Women getting the vote
  
• Marbury vs. Madison
  
• HUAC hearings and the second Red Scare
  
• Lee's surrender at Appomattox
  
• Teddy Roosevelt accidentally becoming president
  
• The Trail of Tears
  
• Nineteen guys flying airplanes into buildings a few days before Bush's speech

Bush gave a nice speech at Ground Zero, but the speech itself was not some kind of world historical moment. I'm not going to spend any time beating up on Bush or hunting for reasons to hate the speech. Rice's crush on her former boss is well known--if a little off putting (I mean, eewww)--so her ridiculous hyperbole is not surprising. What I do find a little surprising is how many times I have heard variations of that idea from other people.

On the day 9/11, even before the second tower had fallen, one of my co-workers said "thank God Bush is president and not Gore." Because of the moment, I didn't what the hell she was talking about. Just last week in a Facebook thread of an old friend, someone commented, "Imagine if it would have been al gore (sic) dealing with 9/11. That would have been a real nightmare." What do these people think Al Gore would have done? Surrendered and turned the entire country over to bin Laden. They seem to believe that any Democrat would have said, "aww, he just needs a hug and we should give him a great big apology for making him feel bad."

That's complete and utter crap. Al Gore would have done exactly what Bush did. Or McCain would have done. Or Bradley. Or Hillary. Or you or I or any president in the history of the republic or anyone who isn't brain damaged. He would have gone on every news channel and made a speech saying the American people will rise above this, we will track the people responsible to the ends of the earth, heads would have rolled at the CIA, and we would have invaded Afghanistan to get at bin Laden and punish those who protected him.

Here are some things that might not have happened. Gore probably would not have sat frozen, reading "My Pet Goat" for eight minutes after hearing about the planes hitting the World Trade Center. He probably would have issued his first statement from Air Force One rather than leaving the American people without reassurance while he flew around for nine hours and spent another ninety minutes at the White House. He certainly would not have called off the search at Tora Bora. He would not have spent hundreds of billions of dollars and thousands of lives waging a war in a country that had nothing to do with 9/11.

He probably would not have tolerated wholesale violations of international and domestic laws such as creating a bogus category of "enemy combatants" to avoid the Geneva Conventions, using torture, or gutting habeus corpus. I know he wouldn't have completely respected all of our rights the way I would have liked. There still would have been a slide toward a surveillance state with wire tapping and eavesdropping. The same conservatives, who spent the Bush years justifying the erosion of rights would have cried "tyranny" and raised holy hell.

Actually, those last few points would have been moot, because I know for a fact that the Republicans would have tried to impeach Gore for allowing 9/11 to happen. There would have been none of the coming together in good faith that the Democrats offered throughout 2002. But this brings us to a final point, under Gore, there might not have been a 9/11 because he might have actually have read the August 8 security briefing. Remember, he was VP when Clinton tried to get bin Laden in 1998. Terrorism was a front-burner issue for him, whereas Bush only cared about tax cuts for the rich before 9/11.

Rice's comical overstatement is not limited to the "thank God it wasn't Gore crowd." As last week developed, the "Obama deserves little if any of the credit" message was taken up all across the spectrum of conservative politics.

• Sarah Palin refused to even mention Obama's name several times when doling out credit: "We thank President Bush for having made the right calls to set up this victory."
  
• Former Bush Chief of Staff Andy Card: "[Bush] made sure everything was in place so that President Obama could have an opportunity to get Osama bin Laden."
  
• House Majority Whip Eric Cantor: "I commend President Obama who has followed the vigilance of President Bush in bringing Bin Laden to justice."
  
• Washington Times editor Brett Decker: "Bin Laden's death is more Mr. Bush's victory than Mr. Obama's..."
  Fox News personality Sean Hannity: "There was no way this would have happened, but for the policies Of George W. Bush."
  
• Fox Business host Eric Bolling on Twitter: "Andrea Mitchell just said 'this is a game changer for Barack Obama'..WHAT?? Thank GWB for this not BHO!"
  
• Former Bush adviser Karl Rove: "I think the tools that President Bush put into place –- GITMO, rendition, enhanced interrogation, the vast effort to collect and collate this information — obviously served his successor quite well."
  
• Torture guru John Yoo: "Without the tough decisions taken by President Bush and his national security team, the United States could not have found and killed bin Laden."
  
• Media critic Brent Bozell" "It's because of those [torture] techniques that George Bush was crucified over that Osama bin Ladin is dead today. Hip, hip, hooray to George Bush. ... It's high time that [the mainstream media] started apologizing to him."
  
• Former Senator and Republican Presidential candidate Rick Santorum: "9/11 families and everybody else in America should be furious at this president that he’s walking abound taking credit for, you know, getting Osama bin Laden. He didn’t get Osama bin Laden!"
  
• National Review blogger Jim Geraghty (under a picture of GW Bush): "VINDICATION: When the loudest critic of your policies achieves his greatest success because of them."

Many of the "the real credit goes to Bush" crowd are making a self-serving effort to justify their own indefensible support of torture and all of them are engaged in a petty and partisan driven refusal to give Obama credit for anything. They rather pathetically grope for any excuse to find fault with any action Obama (and by extension any Democrat) takes. If Obama did it, there must be something wrong with it. All they ask is a little time to figure out what that fault is. Such pettiness has always existed in American politics, but, in recent years, pettiness has become almost an article of faith on the right.

* Just for the record, he did invite Bush and Bush declined. Not that that will stop conservatives from attacking Obama over the non-existent slight.

** I've said this before, and Rice should know this, the President is commander-in-chief of the military, not of the civilian population. The President is our employee, making us his commanders-in-chief. One of the founding principles of this country was civilian control of the military and we should all strongly resist any effort to militarize our society or to bring civilians under control of the military. Again, the President does not command us; we command him. If he leads us, it is because he has convinced us that he has earned that privilege. One good speech by Bush did not make us his subjects.

Really Rand, is that the line you want to take?

Rand Paul, questions whether Donald Trump is Republican enough to head their ticket. This would be the same Rand Paul whose father has changed party affiliations twice and who once ran as a Libertarian against the Republican nominee for president and who is competing with Trump to be the Republican nominee next year.

"I’ve come to New Hampshire today because I’m very concerned," Mr. Paul said. "I want to see the original long-form certificate of Donald Trump’s Republican registration."

[...]

"I’m going to believe it when I see his embossed seal to his Republican registration," said Mr. Paul, a rising figure in the Republican Party who is visiting New Hampshire this week during the Congressional recess. He spoke with a smile, but his words marked one of the first times that a leading Republican has challenged Mr. Trump’s ties to the party.

Jeff Zeleny, the author of the NYT article, completely missed the irony.

History was not his best subject

Rep. Tom Graves of Georgia was elected to Congress last year with support from local Tea Party groups, the Club for Growth, and disgraced former House Speaker Newt Gingrich. Like most Tea Partiers, Graves is a bit history challenged. Yesterday, while being interviewed by Contessa Brewer, he said this:

BREWER: They've had the lowest tax rates under the Bush-era tax cuts in years. How come we haven't seen massive job growth?

GRAVES: Well, what we've seen is massive job loss that began in about 2008, and I believe that was under Barack Obama.

BREWER: One. 2001.

GRAVES: No, not two — the job losses began in late two thousand and —

BREWER: Yes, sir. The numbers support what I'm saying.

Graves believes Obama was president in 2008. Most people with properly functioning memories or an elementary school knowledge of history or civics will know that George W. Bush was president in 2008. However, he is correct in saying there were massive job losses that year. As to when the job losses began, they're actually both right--in their ways. Bush presided over two recessions, one at each end of his presidency. Bush began his presidency with massive job losses and ended his presidency with even more massive job losses. In between, the Bush "recovery" didn't produce enough jobs to keep up with growth in the population. Let's look at some numbers.

Just so our conservative friends don't cry foul, let me lay out a few conservative assumptions. I'll crunch my numbers according to their rules. First, only private sector jobs count. Government jobs are not real jobs. Those pay checks brought home by soldiers, sailors, teachers, politicians, and civil servants aren't real pay checks. And government employees can't lose their jobs, because they never had "real" jobs to start with. Second, presidents are responsible for every jot and tittle of the economy from the day they take office. If Obama can't blame Bush for the recession at the beginning of his presidency, Bush can't blame Clinton for the recession at the beginning of his presidency. That's only fair. Because presidential terms begin in Late January, I'll give January 2001 to Clinton and January 2009 to Bush.

After Bush became president, the private sector lost jobs for sixteen straight months (Feb. '01 to May '02), a total of 2.82 million jobs, one of which was mine. Over the next fourteen months (June '02 to July '03), only three months showed private sector job gains and the rest showed losses, a net loss of another 583 thousand. That's a total of 3.403 million jobs lost in his first two and a half years in office. Following that catastrophic beginning, the private sector gained jobs for forty-eight consecutive months, had one bad month (Aug. '07), and five more good months, for a total of 7.379 million new jobs. The economy lost jobs for the remaining twelve months of the Bush presidency (4.629 million)--once again, my job was among them--finishing up his presidency 653 thousand in the red.

At some point in June '05, the economy had replaced the 3.403 million private sector jobs lost during Bush's first two and a half years. However, by then 5.537 new workers had entered the labor force. Some of those people got jobs that don't count with the government, but most of them were hoping, but unable, to enter the private sector. During the rest of the Bush recovery, the private sector put on 3.976 new jobs. During that time, the labor force grew by another 4.822 million. During the last year of the Bush presidency, while the economy hemorrhaged 4.629 million private sector jobs, the labor force grew by 561 thousand. The final count is that the Bush years lost over a half million private sector jobs, while the labor force grew by over ten million.

That sounds like massive job losses to me. These losses and failure to keep up with population growth happened while the Bush tax cuts were being made and were in effect. It's Republican and conservative dogma that putting more wealth into the hands of the already wealthy--in the form of tax cuts--will result in them investing in ways that will benefit all Americans. The rich will create jobs and the benefits of making them richer will trickle down onto all of us.

Since Rep. Graves wanted to talk about job losses under Obama, let's talk about them. The single worst month for private sector job losses (841 thousand) was January 2009, the last month that Bush was in charge. As soon as Obama took over, the losses slowed. There were still huge losses, but they got smaller and smaller until March 2010 when the private sector created more jobs than it shed. One million eight-hundred thousand new jobs have been created since then. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the labor force actually decreased during Obama's first two years in office, by 180 thousand. Almost nine million private sector jobs were lost during 2008-09.

Total employment is far below what it was when Clinton turned his record budget surplus over to Bush. The labor pool has increased by almost ten million in that time. Even with big tax cuts and loopholes for the rich and for large corporations, the private sector hasn't been able to absorb all of these people who are able and want to work. The public sector had absorbed some of those people, but Republican majorities in state houses and the House of Representatives are trying to lay off as many of those people as possible. Of course, according to the conservative assumptions I laid out above, none of those people had "real" jobs to start with and the the it's Obama's fault they aren't bringing home paychecks any more. Those same conservatives tell us that the only reason those millions aren't bringing home pay checks is that they're all lazy, drug-addicted hobos. But that's a topic for another post.

Sources for figures:
Private sector job creation and losses.
Total civilian labor force.

Rand Paul fails history

While making the "we're slipping into tyrrany" claims so beloved of tea partiers, Rand Paul offered this bit of historical wisdom:

In 1923, when they destroyed the currency, they elected Hitler. And so they elected somebody who vilified one group of people, but he promised them, "I will give you security if you give me your liberty," and they voted him in.

Anyone with even a passing knowledge of the history of the interwar years knows that Hitler was elected chancellor in 1933, not 1923. The Thousand Year Reich lasted twelve years, not twenty-two.

The famous Weimar hyperinflation began in mid 1922, accelerated at the beginning of 1923, and lasted all year. In November of that year, the government introduced a new currency, the Rentenmark, at a value pegged to the pre-war price of gold. Initially, Reichsmarks could be exchanged for Rentenmarks at a rate of one billon to one. Even though the Rentenmark held stable, the conversion took some months to complete during which the Reichsmark continued to loose value. The hyperinflation was over by late 1924, over eight years before Hitler was appointed chancellor.

What was Hitler doing during this time? Hitler was a relative unknown during most of 1923. Though rapidly expanding, both in numbers and new chapters around the country, the Nazi Party was still a fairly small, mostly bavarian affair. In November, Hitler led an attempted coup against the government--usually called the Beerhall Putsch. It was a pathetic failure. Hitler was arrested, tried for treason and thrown in jail. The Nazi Party was temporarily banned.

In 1932, Hitler ran for President and was trounced by Paul von Hindenburg. When he came to power the following year, it was not because the German people voted for him personally; it was because they gave his party enough seats in parliament that Hindenburg allowed him to form a government--and only after the other parties had failed to form a stable coalition. During the elections of 1932, Hitler and the Nazis made many campaign promises; a vague law and order plank being only one part of their platform. The rest of Hilter's rise to dictatorship was achieved through deals with Pres. Hindenburg and with the other parliamentary parties, and not by a vote of the general electorate.

I'll leave it to someone else to examine Paul's conspiratorial hints that there was some sinster "they" who destroyed the German currency.

Dibs on his car

Another pastor is scaring his flock by predicting the Rapture. This one isn't wasting time; he says it's clear in Revelations that it will be at sunset tonight or maybe tomorrow, depending on your time zone. I was taught that the Rapture would come "like a thief in the night" and that no one could know the "day or hour, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father." Apparently my church was reading a different Bible.

Why Sarah Palin will never be president

Mark Halperin was on teevee this morning giving reasons why Sarah Palin will never be president. His three are:

1. One is that Republican elites behind her back think she’d be horrible for the party.
   
2. Two is, she’s not appealing to anybody but a narrow slice of American life and she’s heading more and more in that direction based on her rhetoric.
   
3. And finally and I think it’s best for the country. She has no ideas. She stands for nothing specific.

I'd like to add three more to that list:

1. She's dumber than a sack of rocks.
   
2. Sacks of rocks: they're smarter than Sarah Palin.
   
3. If Sarah Palin and a sack of rocks were on Final Jeapoardy together, the sack of rocks would win.

I'm sure you have some of your own to add to the list.

It couldn't have happened to a more deserving guy

James O'Keefe, the wannabe investigative film maker whose cartoonish pimp sting at an ACORN office made him a conservative hero last fall, has been arrested in New Orleans and charged with intent to commit a felony.

O'Keefe's ACORN sting led to a feeding frenzy of conservative attacks on the urban advocacy group. His notoriety from that stunt led to him being invited to speak before the Pelican Institute for Public Policy, a libertarian group in New Orleans. Promotional materials for the Thursday event hailed him as "a pioneer in the use of new media to drive these kinds of important stories. He will discuss the role of new media and show examples of effective investigative reporting." Monday, O'Keefe and three of his new friends were arrested trying to plant a bug in conservative Democratic Senator Mary Landrieu's office. No doubt this was one of his "examples of effective investigative reporting."

O'Keefe and his co-conspirators entered the Hale Boggs Federal Building wearing green vests, tool belts, and hardhats and told the staffer in Landrieu's office that they were there to fix the phones--a classic gambit used in television and spy movies since long before any of the foursome were born. The unnamed staffer noticed O'Keefe filming the others as they messed around with the phones. After a few minutes, they asked to be shown the main telephone box for the building. Before they could access the box, a General Services Administration employee asked to see their phone company ID. They told the GSA employee, that they had all left their IDs in the car--a gambit familiar to every underage college student who has ever tried to bluff his way into a bar and one that never, ever works. Federal Marshals arrested them a few minutes later.

One of O'Keefe's co-defendants is Robert Flanagan the son of William Flanagan, the acting US. Attorney for the Western District of Louisiana. Flanagan's lawyer says his client works for the Pelican Institute. That makes it sound to me like O'Keefe met the other three after his talk and they decided to some documentary film making on the spot. In other words, the whole caper was planned on the spur of the moment, ineptly carried out, and, ultimately, unsuccessful. It could have come right out of the G. Gordon Libby playbook.

Logic, not his strong suit

Last May, culture warrior and failed presidential candidate Gary Bauer was upset about the proposed hate crimes legislation. The standard argument against the bill at the time was that adding gender, gender identity, and sexual orientation to existing hate crimes laws would somehow lead to the criminalization of Christianity. That argument was as dishonest as it was vile. They argued that extending the penalties for violent crimes based on the gender, gender identity, and sexual orientation would also criminalize hateful speech. This was a lie. Not only was hate speech not included in the bill, it would have been immediately struck down as unconstitutional if it had been included. They further argued that hateful speech directed at women and gays was such an integral part of Christianity that outlawing such speech would amount to de facto criminalization of Christianity. This was both a libel against the Christianity practiced by most Americans and a very disturbing look into the psyche of Bauer's confederates. Bauer managed to take even that argument one step further by claiming the new law would make hate thought illegal, a claim that added silly to dishonest and vile as a proper descriptor for their arguments.

Today, it seems, Bauer is very upset about hate crimes.

Throughout much of the world today, where Christianity is in decline attacks on Jews are on the rise. In post-Christian Europe, Jews are often victims of a deeply entrenched anti-Semitism.

[...]

It is true that the citizens of the U.S. are more pious than those of many European countries, where the decline of faith has been much reported. Still, in the U.S., legal attacks on Christmas have become as much of the tradition as the holiday itself, and church attendance among American youths has reached all time lows.

[...]

America’s secular momentum coincides with an increase in persecution of American Jews. The Federal Bureau of Investigation recently released 2008 hate crimes statistics showing that 65.7 percent of religion-motivated hate crimes were anti-Jewish. There were 1,013 cases of hate crimes motivated by anti-Semitism last year, the most since 2001.

His solution is for more people to become Christians because we all know that that's never bad for the Jews.

It is particularly laughable that, in his column against the hate crimes bill, Bauer used the phrase "Correlation does not imply causation." Both columns are filled with logical flaws, distortions of fact, and self-pity, but, for now, let's just stick with his correlation of increased secularization and increased anti-Semitism. Bauer draws his statistics from the period 2001-2008. Let's look at some other trends during that period that are just as likely as secularization to be a cause of rising anti-Semitism.

The last eight years saw:

• The presidency of George W. Bush
  
• The rise of reality shows
  
• iPod
  
• A dramatic decrease in Joe Lieberman's political ethics
  
• Paris Hilton
  
• The Iraq War
  
• Texting
  
• A dramatic increase in economic insecurity
  
• Endless fear mongering by certain pundits and politicians
  
• A dramatic increase in the amount of crabgrass in my lawn
  
• The Harry Potter movies
  
• Jon Stewart becoming the most trusted newsman in America
  
• Too many Americans surrendering their Constitutional rights for the illusion of safety
  
• Paris Hilton
  
• Glen Beck on my teevee

My votes go for fear mongering and economic insecurity, but I wouldn't rule out the crabgrass. That stuff is evil. Feel free to make your own nominations in the comments.

Does even he know what his point is?

Rep. Thaddeus McCotter, a Republican from the suburbs of Detroit, is an opponent green jobs, any attempt to reduce carbon dioxide production, and, in general, a climate change denier. I can't say he's registered very prominently on my radar; I had a vague idea who he is, but thought of him as not much more than a supporting cast member to the star nincompoop, James Inhofe. However, today he got my attention with this piece of world class incoherence.

Remember, the people who talk about the melting of the glaciers and others -- imagine if you were in a peninsula around 1000 BC or so or earlier, and your name was Tor and you were out hunting mastodon and you didn't notice that the glaciers were melting and leaving the devastating flooding in its wake that became the Great Lakes in the state of Michigan. So, what I think that what we have to do is go back in history and look at this and realize that the Earth has been here a long time. To take selective periods of time and say that somehow this proves that there's a man made global warming occurring is absolutely wrong.

McCotter delivered this in a very matter of fact tone as if he was explaining something obvious. He seems to think he has a point of some sort. There is so much wrong in this short exposition that it needs to be taken apart phrase by grammatically incorrect phrase.

...imagine if you were in a peninsula around 1000 BC or so or earlier, and your name was Tor and you were out hunting mastodon...

Why should we be taking lessons on anything from someone who is this monumentally ignorant of geology and history? He seems to think that 1000 BC is a really, really long time ago and the world was populated by cartoon cavemen at that time. By 1000 BC, the ice age had been over and the mastodons extinct for 8000 years. Egyptian civilization was over 2000 years old, Sumer and Babylon had risen and fallen as had the Minoan and Mycenaean civilizations. Oh, and Paleo-Indians were not named Tor, unless McCotter thinks America was first settled by Vikings 2000 years before Vikings existed.

...and you didn't notice that the glaciers were melting and leaving the devastating flooding in its wake that became the Great Lakes in the state of Michigan.

What is he getting at here? If you were a caveman who didn't notice devastating flooding going on around you then... what? That flooding would later make some nice lakes and the state McCotter represents, which means what? Tor didn't notice dramatic climate change going on around him so we shouldn't either? Climate change leads to Michigan so it's a good thing? If you were a caveman who didn't notice devastating flooding going on around you, then your line went extinct with the mastodons; take that, you liberals? Really, he thinks he has a point, but can anyone tell me what it is?

To take selective periods of time and say that somehow this proves that there's a man made global warming occurring is absolutely wrong.

Why shouldn't we be looking at the period in which we have been pumping unprecedented amounts of carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere--gasses that have been absolutely proven to cause an increase in the surface temperature of the Earth via a mechanism known as the greenhouse effect?

McCotter is clearly someone who suffers from delusions of adequacy. He seems to believe that being able to string a bunch of words together into a Plainesque sentence substitute is the same as making a devastating argument. It's not, though, I have to admit, it does have a certain entertainment value.

Unclear on the concept

Lindsey Graham on Fox News yesterday:

There will be no climate change bill with my vote unless you have offshore oil drilling. I won't vote for any climate change bill that doesn't allow a dramatic increase in nuclear power. I'm not going to vote for any climate change bill that doesn't allow us to use our coal deposits.

Got that? No climate change bill unless it allows us to burn more oil and coal.

Tenther nonsense

When Michele Bachmann made her conspiracy theory comments about the census, I thought she would be laughed off the stage. Every census, some nuts on the farthest fringes make that claim that the Census Bureau can't do anything except count people, but only conspiracy nuts and libertarians take them seriously. Bachmann is a bona fide conspiracy nut so no one of any responsibility should have taken her claims seriously. However, not only have so called grownups paid attention to her, they have now built on her arguments to claim healthcare reform is unconstitutional.

Their argument is that the Tenth Amendment prohibits the federal government from doing anything except for the very few things specifically mentioned in the body of the Constitution. The Tenth Amendment reads, in it's entirety:

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

That's it. "Powers" is a very vague word. They choose to define it as meaning only those very specific tasks and responsibilities mentioned in the body. If the Constitution doesn't specifically mention healthcare, then the Federal government can't do anything about it.

For the census, here's what the Constitution says in Article I, Section 2, the section on the elction of members of Congress.

Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers ...[this part, about slaves counting as three fifths of a person, was deleted by the Fourteenth Amendment]. The actual Enumeration shall be made within three Years after the first Meeting of the Congress of the United States, and within every subsequent Term of ten Years, in such Manner as they shall by Law direct.

They read this to mean the Census can only ask questions about how many people live at a given location. They can't ask their names. They can't write down the address. They can only count. The part about "in such Manner as [Congress] shall by Law direct" must mean something like whether the census counters have to count on their fingers or use paper.

The writers put Congress first in the Constitution--Article one. They must have thought Congress was pretty important, but the tenther line of argument doesn't leave the Congress much to do. They get to pass a budget, declare war, run the Post Office, determine whether census counters count on their fingers or use paper, and not much else.

Over the years, the same argument has been raised whenever the government is doing something that conservatives don't like or that provokes some kind of populist paranoia. In the thirties, conservatives and Republicans pulled out the Tenth Amendment argument to fight the New Deal and declaired that Roosevelt had ended constitutional rule and become a lawless tyrant. Southern politicians pulled out the Tenth Amendment argument during desegregation and declaired that Eisenhower had ended constitutional rule and become a lawless tyrant. When Medicare was being debated in the sixties, Ronald Reagan recorded a speech declairing that Johnson had ended constitutional rule and become a lawless tyrant. You get the idea.

These things sound ridiculous to most of us, but many Republicans are still fighting those battles. Newt Gingrich would like to repeal most of the social legislation of the sixties. Other Republicans are still trying to repeal the reforms and initiatives that Roosevelt used to end the Depression. When the sane among us try to laugh at the tenther argument by pointing out that, by their logic, Social Security, Medicare, veterans' hospitals, and the interstate highway system are unconstitutional, a frightning number of office-holding Republicans will look us in the eye and soberly answer that that, yes, they do think those things are unconstitutional.

Asking them about big government programs doesn't really expose the complete irresponsibility of the tenther argument. There are lots of things that the federal government is involved in, in one way or another, that are not specifically mentioned in the body of the Constitution. Among them:

• Murder
  
• Kidnapping
  
• Predicting the weather
  
• Texas secceeding
  
• Terrorism
  
• The Air Force
  
• Child pornography
  
• Preventing flooding on the Mississippi
  
• Helping people after flooding on the Mississippi
  
• The definition of marriage
  
• Public schools
  
• Illegal immigration
  
• Fighting forest fires
  
• The war on drugs
  
• Air traffic control
  
• People putting poison in our food
  
• Abortion

I think everyone can find something on that list that they think the government should not be involved with, but only the most over the edge libertarians would say they shouldn't be involved anything on that list. Somehow, mainstream Republicans have decided they need to pander to that fringe of the fringe.

One power that is specifically delegated to the government is to "fix the Standard of Weights and Measures." This means that while the government cannot do anything to fight child pornography, it can standardize shoe sizes. That's the original intent of the framers of the Constitution. That's how it should be.

What would you add?

Rob Simmons of Connecticut is the latest Republican to try and reinvent himself as a far right demagogue. When Simmons was a member of the House, he was rated as one of the least conservative Republicans there. Now, he wants to challenge Chris Dodd for his Senate seat and has decide the way to get his party's nomination is by pandering to the nutty fringe of the conservative movement. He has been repudiating some of his previous voted in the house and has this to say to the teabaggers:

This state and this country needs people like you. [...] I’ve made it a habit over the years to carry my Constitution in my pocket as a reminder of what this country and what this country’s government is all about. But more recently because of the participation of many of you, I’ve added something to my Constitution. I’ve added a tea bag.

This, of course, brings up the question of what you want to add to your constitution. In the past, this question has almost always involved an amendment. However, Simmons has opened up a whole new line of speculation. If you could add one food item to the constitution, what would it be. I'm torn between beef jerky and aged cheddar cheese.

Unclear on the concept

At the ultra-conservative Values Voter Summit tonight, Bill O'Reilly is scheduled to be awarded the Family research Council's "Media Courage Award." That session will be closed to the media.

Irony has no meaning

Teabaggers complaining about the quality of public transit on their way to protest government spending. It's not the Onion, it's the Wall Street Journal.

Rep. Kevin Brady (R-TX) asked for an explanation of why the government-run subway system didn’t, in his view, adequately prepare for this past weekend’s rally to protest government spending and government services. ... "These individuals came all the way from Southeast Texas to protest the excessive spending and growing government intrusion by the 111th Congress and the new Obama administration," Brady wrote. "These participants, whose tax dollars were used to create and maintain this public transit system, were frustrated and disappointed that our nation’s capital did not make a great effort to simply provide a basic level of transit for them." "People couldn’t get on, missed start of march. I will demand answers from Metro," he wrote on Twitter.

Worst of all, somee people had to resort to private enterprise to get to their anti-government rally.

Brady says in his letter to Metro that overcrowding forced an 80-year-old woman and elderly veterans in wheelchairs to pay for cabs. He concludes that it “appears that Metro added no additional capacity to its regular weekend schedule.”

This a classic case of "when I use the government, it's providing neccessary services; when you use the government, it's wasteful spending by the nanny state." You know that these teabaggers would -- to a person -- vote against a mass transit levy in their home towns.

Update: Yep. Brady's as big of a weinie as we suspected:

Brady voted against Federal funding for the very same Metro he’s blaming for offering the tea partiers substandard service.

[...]

But earlier this year, Brady voted against the stimulus package. It provided millions upon millions of dollars for all manner of improvements to … the D.C. Metro.

A useful graphic

Soon after the inauguration, Republicans thought they had a winner in calling the current economic mess "the Obama Recession." A year ago you'd have to be as deluded as Glenn Beck to believe such revisionist nonsense, but Obama seems to have brought out the inner Glenn Beck in millions of people, turning our national political discourse into a freakshow of conspiracy nuts on parade. In most areas, it's almost impossible to penetrate their alternate reality bubble, but it is possible to make some quick rebuttals of the "Obama Recession" lie. Here's one.


Steve Benen made the original chart and I only added the arrow and lower labels. The chart shows job losses over the last ten months. Admittedly, the fact that there have been hundreds of thousands of losses every month for the last year is pretty depressing, but there has been a very clear and easy to understand change in the momentum. Things are crappy and continuing to get crappier, but it's easy to see that things could stop getting crappier pretty soon and even start getting less crappy in the foreseeable future. So, print this out on a notecard (do they still make notecards?) and keep it on hand so that the next time your right-wing neighbor or brother-in-law starts ranting about how Obama is destroying the economy and the stimulus has been a failure, you can whip this out and smack them around with a real fact.

Remember, facts are our friends.