U.S. Senator Jim Inhofe tosses a snowball

YouTube link.

The travesty is detailed at ABC News:

Sen. Jim Inhofe, a devoted climate change denier, tossed a snowball at someone on the Senate floor today as he tried to debunk climate change. 

“In case we had forgotten because we keep hearing that 2014 has been the warmest year on record, I ask the chair: You know what this is? It's a snowball and that just from outside here so it's very, very cold out. Very unseasonal,” he said. 

“So, Mr. President, catch this,” Inhofe, R-Okla., said on the Senate floor, tossing the snowball to someone off-screen as he tried to suppress a smile. 

“We hear the perpetual headline that 2014 has been the warmest year on record but now the script has flipped and I think it's important since we hear it over and over and over,” Inhofe, 80, said. “As we can see with the snowball out there, this is today. This is reality.” 

That degree of ignorance in a person who helps make the laws for this country is virtually incomprehensible to me.  I can't even comment without resorting to offensive expletives.

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Eisenhower's 91% income tax rate

It wasn't that long ago:

[T]he most successful Republican of the 20th century up to that time, Dwight D. Eisenhower, had been quite happy with a top income tax rate on millionaires of 91 percent. As he wrote to his brother Edgar Eisenhower in a personal letter on November 8, 1954:

[T]o attain any success it is quite clear that the Federal government cannot avoid or escape responsibilities which the mass of the people firmly believe should be undertaken by it. The political processes of our country are such that if a rule of reason is not applied in this effort, we will lose everything–even to a possible and drastic change in the Constitution. This is what I mean by my constant insistence upon ‘moderation’ in government. Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things. Among them are H. L. Hunt [you possibly know his background], a few other Texas oil millionaires, and an occasional politician or business man from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid.

That was a marginal tax rate, of course, but still worth noting.

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5 minutes

Yesterday was the nonpartisan primary voting day in my town.  Because of the arctic cold, my wife and I drove rather than walk the mile-and-a-half to our local community center.  I took note of the time when we arrived:

12:42 - park car

• walk into Community Center
• give my name to ladies at the table, receive a number
• take the number to the lady at the next table, receive ballot
• enter booth, mark ballot
• inset ballot into Marksense optical scanner, wait for beep
• take "I voted" sticker, walk out of polling place

12:47 - back in car

Five minutes to complete my civic duty.  Can't complain about that.  There are many arguments for revising/updating/computerizing the voting system in this country - all of which are well beyond the scope of this post -  but shortening the time required to vote is not in my view a pressing need (even granting that this was just a primary).

If I could make one change, it would be to make the November presidential election a national holiday, so that more people could vote.  To placate the business owners who want employees in the workplace, I would compensate by deleting the February President'sDayLet'sGoShopping holiday and tell people to honor their presidents by voting instead.

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"We built this" - redux

During the last presidential campaign, a recurring theme was that of independence from government support, a claim made proudly to counteract Obama's perceived "socialist" tendencies. 

This past week, one of the rebuttals to Obama's State of the Union address was given by Joni Ernst (R-Iowa), who proudly described how she wore plastic bread bags over her shoes as a mark of her family's humble roots and ability to live within their means.  What she conveniently left out was her family's acceptance of federal farm subsidies:

The truth about her family’s farm roots and living within one’s means, however, is more complex. Relatives of Ernst (née: Culver), based in Red Oak, Iowa (population: 5,568) have received over $460,000 in farm subsidies between 1995 and 2009. Ernst’s father, Richard Culver, was given $14,705 in conservation payments and $23,690 in commodity subsidies by the federal government–with all but twelve dollars allocated for corn support. Richard’s brother, Dallas Culver, benefited from $367,141 in federal agricultural aid, with over $250,000 geared toward corn subsidies.

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Europeans think Americans have "gone crazy"

Excerpts from a thought-provoking TomDispatch essay by Ann Jones reposted at Salon:

Americans who live abroad... often face hard questions about our country from people we live among. Europeans, Asians, and Africans ask us to explain everything that baffles them about the increasingly odd and troubling conduct of the United States.  Polite people, normally reluctant to risk offending a guest, complain that America’s trigger-happiness, cutthroat free-marketeering, and “exceptionality” have gone on for too long to be considered just an adolescent phase...

Then recently, I traveled back to the “homeland.”  It struck me there that most Americans have no idea just how strange we now seem to much of the world...

At the absolute top of the list: “Why would anyone oppose national health care?” European and other industrialized countries have had some form of national health care since the 1930s or 1940s, Germany since 1880.  Some versions, as in France and Great Britain, have devolved into two-tier public and private systems.  Yet even the privileged who pay for a faster track would not begrudge their fellow citizens government-funded comprehensive health care...

In Norway, where I live, all citizens also have an equal right to education (state subsidized preschool from age one, and free schools from age six through specialty training or university education and beyond), unemployment benefits, job-placement and paid retraining services, paid parental leave, old age pensions, and more.  These benefits are not merely an emergency “safety net”; that is, charitable payments grudgingly bestowed upon the needy.  They are universal: equally available to all citizens as human rights...

In all the Nordic countries, there is broad general agreement across the political spectrum that only when people’s basic needs are met — when they can cease to worry about their jobs, their incomes, their housing, their transportation, their health care, their kids’ education, and their aging parents — only then can they be free to do as they like...

Other things I’ve had to answer for include:

• Why can’t you Americans stop interfering with women’s health care?
• Why can’t you understand science?
• How can you still be so blind to the reality of climate change?
• How can you speak of the rule of law when your presidents break international laws to make war whenever they want?
• How can you hand over the power to blow up the planet to one lone, ordinary man?
• How can you throw away the Geneva Conventions and your principles to advocate torture?
• Why do you Americans like guns so much?  Why do you kill each other at such a rate?

They’ve watched the United States unravel its flimsy safety net, fail to replace its decaying infrastructure, disempower most of its organized labor, diminish its schools, bring its national legislature to a standstill, and create the greatest degree of economic and social inequality in almost a century. They understand why Americans, who have ever less personal security and next to no social welfare system, are becoming more anxious and fearful...

What baffles so many of them, though, is how ordinary Americans in startling numbers have been persuaded to dislike “big government” and yet support its new representatives, bought and paid for by the rich.

There's more at the link.

Posted for my expat cousin Karl in Barcelona, who undoubtedly has to answer the same questions.

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Democracy as a vehicle for tyranny

That democracy can be a vehicle for tyranny was well understood by earlier generations of liberal thinkers. From Benjamin Constant, Alexis de Tocqueville, and John Stuart Mill through to Isaiah Berlin, it was recognized that democracy does not necessarily protect individual freedoms. The greatest danger for these liberals was not that the historical movement toward democracy would be reversed, but rather the potential ascendancy of an illiberal type of democracy — a development they saw prefigured in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s theory of the general will. Legal and constitutional protections have little force when majorities are indifferent or hostile to liberal values. Because democratic regimes can claim a source of legitimacy that other forms of government lack, liberty might be more threatened in the future than in the past. Most human beings, most of the time, care about other things more than they care about being free. Many will vote readily for an illiberal government if it promises security against violence or hardship, protects a way of life to which they are attached, and denies freedom to people they hate.

Today these ideas belong in the category of forbidden thoughts. When democracy proves to be oppressive, liberals insist it is because democracy is not working properly — if there were genuine popular participation, majorities would not oppress minorities. Arguing with this view is pointless, since it rests on an article of faith: the conviction that freedom is the natural human condition, which tyranny suppresses. But the mere absence of tyranny may allow no more than anarchy; freedom requires a functioning state, with a competent bureaucracy and a legal system that is not excessively corrupt, together with a political culture that allows these institutions to work independently of lawmakers.

In the absence of these conditions, human rights — which are, fundamentally, legal fictions that are created and enforced by well-organized states — are meaningless. Such conditions do not exist in most of the world today and will not exist in many countries for the foreseeable future, if ever. Where they do exist, they are easily compromised. Far from being the natural condition of humankind, freedom is inherently fragile and will always be exceptional.

Liberals in all countries find this prospect intolerable...

An excerpt from the thought-provoking essay Under Western Eyes, by John Gray.

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Black members of Congress

Found at The Washington Post.

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Relevant demographics of the mid-term elections

Two graphs from a Washington Post article.  The first shows the age of people who voted in the last ten mid-term elections:

The second shows that this trend of an older populace will continue for our lifetimes:

A major question is what percent of each cohort will vote in future elections?  And how will the priorities and biases of age cohorts be different (or not) in future elections?

Addendum:  From The Dish, a graph showing that voter turnout in this most recent midterm election was the lowest in thirty years.

Those who didn't vote this week are invited not to comment on this post.

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America functions as an oligarchy, not as a democracy

Who really matters in our democracy — the general public, or wealthy elites? That's the topic of a new study by political scientists Martin Gilens of Princeton and Benjamin Page of Northwestern. The study's been getting lots of attention, because the authors conclude, basically, that the US is a corrupt oligarchy where ordinary voters barely matter...

The Vox link discusses these conclusions in some detail.  This graph shows the probability of a policy being adopted by the U.S. vs the percentage of the general population that agrees with the policy:

And this one shows the approval probability vs the preferences of the economic elite and special interest groups:

The study is here.  This from their Abstract:

Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence. The results provide substantial support for theories of Economic-Elite Domination and for theories of Biased Pluralism, but not for theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy or Majoritarian Pluralism.

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Two more weeks of this...

The "caller ID" no longer works on my office phone, so yesterday when I answered it, I heard "Hi !! This is [politician].  I know everybody hates robocalls, but..." [click]

I have grown not to just despise the politicians, but to hate the process.

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Large American cities ranked liberal to conservative

My current location, Madison, Wisconsin, at a population of 240,000 is not big enough to make this list (250K lower limit), but would presumably rank down there by Minneapolis and Seattle.

Data apparently based on city policies, not on population surveys, from this study, via BoingBoing.

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Jon Stewart's tirade re "boobs on the ground"

The Daily Show
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Jon Stewart's wit is often acerbic, but for this piece he seems truly angry ("F*ck you and your false patriotism").

The Washington Post has a backstory about the woman combat pilot. The original "boobs on the ground" comment is here (and here is the related Reddit comment thread).

Via Mikeb30200.

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Analysis and discussion of "millennials"

From an article in the New York Times:

Suddenly, as you may have noticed, millennials are everywhere. Not that this group of people born after 1980 and before 2000 — a giant cohort now estimated to number at least 80 million Americans, more than the baby boom generation — was ever invisible. What’s changed is their status. Coddled and helicoptered, catered to by 24-hour TV cable networks, fussed over by marketers and college recruiters, dissected by psychologists, demographers and trend-spotters, the millennial generation has come fully into its own. The word “millennial,” whether as noun or adjective, has monopolized the nonstop cultural conversation, invariably freighted with zeitgeisty import...

What Pew found was not an entitled generation but a complex and introspective one — with a far higher proportion of nonwhites than its predecessors as well as a greater number of people raised by a single parent.

The Pew study is here.  And this is interesting:

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Millenials are abandoning political parties

From the Pew Research Center:

The Millennial generation is forging a distinctive path into adulthood. Now ranging in age from 18 to 33, they are relatively unattached to organized politics and religion... Pew Research Center surveys show that half of Millennials (50%) now describe themselves as political independents and about three-in-ten (29%) say they are not affiliated with any religion. These are at or near the highest levels of political and religious disaffiliation recorded for any generation in the quarter-century that the Pew Research Center has been polling on these topics.

At the same time, however, Millennials stand out for voting heavily Democratic and for liberal views on many political and social issues...

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