Jon Stewart vs Marc Thiessen

Jon Stewart eviscerates torture promoter Marc Thiessen:

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Exclusive - Marc Thiessen Extended Interview Pt. 1
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It's pathetic that Jon Stewart is the only person who will actually conduct this interview the way a journalist should. At the end of this clip, Thiessen is angry that Stewart has challenged him. His complaint is that Stewart, unlike most of the mainstream "journalists", actually call him out when he lies or omits important facts.


Thiessen tries to defend, among other things, the despicable ad run by Liz Cheney which accuses lawyers who volunteered their time to make sure that innocent detainees were afforded their constitutional rights of being Al Qaeda sympathizers. Thiessen compares them to mob lawyers or drug cartel lawyers, a comparison so grossly dishonest that it fits right in with the whole "Keep America Safe" viewpoint perfectly.


Here's the difference: when you refer to "mob lawyers" or "drug lawyers", you are making an assumption about these lawyers, and that assumption is that they are dishonest, that they will do anything to get their clients off, that they are in bed with their clients, and that they are in fact just criminals who haven't been caught yet. To the extent that they are honest lawyers trying to defend their clients within the context of the law, we would not refer to them as "mob lawyers" or "drug lawyers". 


The GITMO attorneys were defending people that were, in most cases, innocent. They volunteered their time, they did not profit from it, and they have no other connection to their clients. These attorneys did this because they believed in the American ideals of justice and innocence until proven guilty and the United States Constitution. For defending these American ideals, Liz Cheney accuses them of being terrorist sympathizers and Marc Theissen goes on nation television and compares them to criminals posing as lawyers.


And it should be pointed out that the innocence or guilt of their clients is not relevant. You are not supposed to know if someone is guilty before you begin the process of determining whether they are guilty or not. This is why you have lawyers and trials and constitutional safeguards. Thiessen incredibly claims that we should consider lawyers who defend accused pedophiles of being pedophiles themselves. Notice the two massive errors he makes in this one claim:


1. Lawyers who defend people accused of crimes are guilty of those crimes themselves.
and
2. People who are accused of crimes are automatically guilty.


It's  both incredible and frightening that someone with such a warped and disgusting view of the most basic concepts of the American legal system and the Constitution could have ever set foot in the White House, much less write speeches for the most powerful man on earth. 


And it's equally frightening that the only person who is willing to call him out on it is a comedian.

If This System Is Right, Then I Want To Be Wrong

It would be difficult to find a single incident that better encapsulates everything wrong with our war on drugs and the police state it has spawned than the death of a man who was Tasered after he tried to avoid being arrested for marijuana possession by swallowing the drugs. He died shortly afterwards.




The local sheriff, Frank McKeithen, predictably tried to blame it on the victim, saying "This subject chose to ingest this and put this in his mouth, and because of that, you know, he's dead."

That's not why he's dead. He's dead because three cops, who apparently can't figure out how to subdue one man without resorting to deadly force, decided to shoot him full of 50,000 volts of electricity while he had something in his airway.

Think about the big picture. A man is carrying a misdemeanor quantity of an absolutely harmless drug. He is stopped by police. He is unarmed. Somehow, three cops let the situation get so far our of control that the end up Tasering the man to death. Sweet land of liberty!

Ten minutes before, this guy was a zero risk to society. And now he's dead. And Sheriff McKeithen thinks the system worked just fine.

Not A Good Sign

I should say I'm shocked and horrified, but I suppose I'm really just kind of numb at this point:

WASHINGTON — With Democratic Congressional leaders and the White House struggling on Wednesday to finalize the details of major health care legislation, House Democrats were desperately trying to prevent another of President Obama’s top legislative priorities – an ambitious overhaul of student loan programs – from becoming a casualty of the health care battle.

...

Some Democrats said that such a move would stall the student loan changes at a minimum for several months, and perhaps kill the overhaul altogether.

Mr. Obama’s plan would end a program in which the government pays private, for-profit student lending companies to make risk-free loans using taxpayer money. Instead, the proposed overhaul would broaden the government’s existing direct-lending program, saving billions of dollars that the president had proposed using to expand Pell grant scholarships for low-income students.

The current program is literally a huge, multi-billion dollar giveaway to banks at the expense of taxpayers and broke college students. Gail Collins explained it best several months ago:

Let us stop here and recall how the current loan system works:

1) Federal government provides private banks with capital.

2) Federal government pays private banks a subsidy to lend that capital to students.

3) Federal government guarantees said loans so the banks don’t have any risk.

And now, the proposed reform:

1) The federal government makes the loans.

Wow. You really do wonder why nobody came up with this idea before.

I wrote more about it here. The current system is such a ludicrous, egregious handover of taxpayer money to banks that it is simply impossible to defend. And yet the reform of this system will probably fail because enough Democrats will join every single Republican in voting against it.

If this can't be reformed, how can we every expect to do anything to slow the rising cost of health care or reduce the military or keep the banks from finishing off the US economy.

Some days, I just see no future for this country.

Sadly, the Hurt Locker Is What Passes For A Great War Film

I finally watched "The Hurt Locker" the other night, and I was, to put it mildly, underwhelmed. As an action/suspense movie, it was ok. But the fact that it was an action/suspense movie is what really bothered me.

It's been seven years since our government lied to us, and then launched a war against a small, helpless foreign country which had done nothing to us. This war resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians and thousands of American troops. It has cost nearly $1 trillion dollars. It has destroyed what little moral standing America had left in the world.

These facts are not in dispute. It is, quite frankly, one of the biggest foreign policy fuck-ups of all time. And Hollywood can't even bring itself to make a mainstream movie that so much as alludes to these facts.

Critics are falling all over each other trying to congratulate this film for being apolitical. But they ignore the fact that it is simply impossible to make an apolitical film about a subject as political as Iraq. By refusing to address the illegitimacy of war, or the impact on the Iraqi people, they are making a political statement-namely, that these issues are not important. And they are very important. 

Robert Scheer makes another point:

What a shame that the one movie about the Iraq war that has a chance of being viewed by a large worldwide audience should be so disappointing. According to press reports, members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences finally found a movie about the Iraq war they liked because it is “apolitical.” Actually, “The Hurt Locker” is just the opposite; it’s an endorsement of the politically chauvinistic view that the world is a stage upon which Americans get to deal with their demons no matter the consequence for others. 

It is imperial hubris turned into an art form in which the Iraqi people appear as numbed bystanders when they are not deranged extras. It is a perverse tribute to the film’s accuracy in portraying the insanity of the U.S. invasion—while ignoring its root causes—that the Iraqis are at no point treated as though they are important.

And that's just it. Iraqi's, to many Americans, are not really even humans. We obsess over American casualty counts, but could give a rat's ass about how many Iraqi's have died as a result of our invasion. And the "Hurt Locker" is a perfect example of this. Towards the end of the movie, an innocent Iraqi, who has been booby trapped, pleads for the hero to save him. He is a good man, a family man. Everyone is in agreement on this point. But when he is blown up anyway, all of our concern is directed towards the hero, and how his failure will negatively affect him. The film can't even spare a few seconds of footage for the Iraqi man's family, because in our world, having your Iraqi father blown into little pieces just isn't as important as the the ego of an American soldier.


But this dehumanization is necessary if we are to continue to bomb, murder and torture people who get in the way of our dreams of global domination. It was the same with Hitler and the Jews.  Dehumanization is something that "civilized" people must do before they murder other people. Because "civilized" people would never do what we did to the Iraqi's if the Iraqi's were human beings.


I hope that a truly great film will be made about Iraq one day. I hope that it has no speaking parts for any American soldiers. I that hope it centers on what it would be like to live through through the nightmare of the last seven years. A film like that could transform hearts and minds. 


But this is not that film.

Now This Would Be Change You Can Believe In

This is how health care reform should have been approached from the beginning. It would have made the Republicans take a position on Medicare immediately, and it could have have begun helping people immediately.

How can Republicans justify denying Medicare to the rest of the country? Why should a healthy, well-off 68 year-old get Medicare, while a poor 30-year-old with lupus gets a death sentence?

Instead of a confusing, bloated, insurance company giveaway like the bill which the Senate has passed, why not just propose The Medicare For All Act? Medicare is hugely popular, and the voters would love it.

I realize that this is a rhetorical question. We don't really live in a democracy anymore, at least not in any meaningful way. And so what the voters want is pretty much irrelevant. But what is relevant is what the insurance companies want, and Medicare For All would be the end for these parasites.

Please, Please...

...Please, please please let this happen:

CALLER: If the health care bill passes, where would you go for health care yourself? And the second part of that is, what would happen to the doctors, do they have to participate in the federal program, or could they opt out of it? [...]

LIMBAUGH: My guess in even in Canada and even in the UK, doctors have opted out. And once they’ve opted, they can’t see anybody Medicare, Medicaid, or what will become the exchanges. They have to have a clientele of private patients that will pay them a retainer and it’ll be a very small practice. I don’t know if that’s been outlawed in the Senate bill. I don’t know. I’ll just tell you this, if this passes and it’s five years from now and all that stuff gets implemented — I am leaving the country. I’ll go to Costa Rica.

So Democrats could finally, after all these years, accomplish one their most cherished goals and, by doing so, run Rush Limbaugh out of the country. Naturally, they'll screw this up.

Also, I think it's funny that Rush wants to go to Costa Rica. Costa Rica's health care system, of course, is not only ranked higher than the ours by the World Health Organization, but is a perfect example of socialized medicine with universal coverage.

But hey-let's not tell him that.

A Matter Of Time

USA Today has a front page article about the growing consensus for a need to reform marijuana articles. And when USA Today, the most mainstream of publications, has a story about pot reform, you know it's becoming acceptable. Interestingly, the story is now the most popular piece on all of USAToday.com. This probably shouldn't surprise anyone; remember the online Q&A Obama had last May in which the top query was whether we should legalize marijuana. (Obama belittled the question insultingly- he apparently thinks a war on drug users which costs $40 billion per year and imprisons millions of Americans is trivial.)

LOS ANGELES — James Gray once saw himself as a drug warrior, a former federal prosecutor and county judge who sent people to prison for dealing pot and other drug offenses. Gradually, though, he became convinced that the ban on marijuana was making it more accessible to young people, not less.

"I ask kids all the time, and they'll tell you it is easier to get marijuana than a six-pack of beer because that is controlled by the government," he said, noting that drug dealers don't ask for IDs or honor minimum age requirements.

So Gray — who spent two decades as a superior court judge inOrange County, Calif., and once ran for Congress as aRepublican— switched sides in the war on drugs, becoming an advocate for legalizing marijuana.

"Let's face reality," he says. "Taxing and regulating marijuana will make it less available to children than it is today."

There is literally no rational reason for continuing the criminalization of a harmless plant like marijuana. And even right-wing Republican drug warriors are beginning to see the light. Even if you really believe that marijuana is harmful, as Gray still apparently does, you have to recognize that the current approach only works if you believe that the goal is to imprison more Americans.

The Obama administration still opposes smoking marijuana for its medicinal benefit, says Tom McLellan, deputy director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy. He says more research is needed to deliver the medically useful ingredients in a non-smokable form.

The Obama administration still opposes smoking marijuana, period, for its political benefit. As usual, it is petrified of leading on this issue. President Obama is an intelligent man. He cannot possibly believe that we should be imprisoning people for non-violent marijuana crimes. And yet he refuses to lead because he is afraid of the repercussions.

But perhaps that's for the best. If he had an honest talk about marijuana, every single Republican in the country would put aside their personal beliefs and unite in a massive condemnation of that drug-using, witch-doctor, crack-baby president (who just so happens to be black) and accuse him of trying to corrupt their innocent, young, white daughters with the horrifyingly dangerous marijuana drug. And then every Democrat in the country would fall all over themselves in an effort to appear even tougher on pot  (because the Democrats are a bunch of wimps without the courage of their mostly correct convictions) and the marijuana reform movement would be set back 25 years.

And I don't think I'm exaggerating the Republican response one bit.

Chinese Bubbles

I guess you have to keep dancing until the music stops, right?

SHANGHAI — The spacious duplex comes with crocodile-skin bedposts, hand-carved bronze doors inlaid with Swarovski crystals — and a $45 million price tag.

Signs of exuberance are everywhere. An investor in Shanghai recently bought 54 apartments in a single day; a villa sold for $30 million last year; and in December a consortium of developers paid more than $3.5 billion for a huge tract of land in Guangzhou, one of the highest prices paid for any property, anywhere. In the city of Tianjin, in north China, developers have created a $3 billion “floating city,” a series of islands built on a natural reservoir, featuring villas, shopping malls, a water amusement park and what they say will be the world’s largest indoor ski resort.

Floating islands and indoor ski resorts? Sounds a lot more like irrational exuberance than the normal kind.

Those who buy an apartment here tend to be extremely wealthy, like Liu Yiqian, an eccentric Shanghai entrepreneur whom Forbes magazine says is worth about $540 million.

Mr. Liu, 47, got his start driving a taxicab in Shanghai but eventually made a fortune investing in the stock market. In an interview this week, he acknowledged owning hundreds of apartments in Shanghai (he said he could not remember exactly how many), including a 6,000-square-foot apartment in Tomson Riviera, which he bought in 2008 for about $11.5 million.

“I invest in properties,” Mr. Liu said, noting that he also collects art, antiques and jade. “I think in Shanghai in five to seven years the real estate prices will be even higher.”

Of course, everyone who invests in a bubble has to say that, even if they don't believe it.

Despite the fear of a bubble here, Mr. Tong said his prices were just right, particularly because of so much hidden wealth in China. The publicly listed company is controlled by his family.

“I have a friend,” he said. “She makes maternity clothes. Her company has 20 percent of the world’s market share, and they’re not even a listed company.”

And when the renminbi finally does appreciate, as it will, she's not going to have 20% of the world's market anymore.

But a sales agent at Tomson Riviera says this is the future financial capital of the world, not the dying one.

“Look at this bronze door,” said Wang Yaodong. “That costs $50,000! Look at these Gaggenau appliances. They were made in Germany.” The glasses were imported from Belgium, the Jacuzzi from Italy. And don’t worry about losing your key, he said, “This lock can read the palm of your hand.”

Oh, boy.

Banks Take Themselves Hostage

Yves Smith comments on the further weakening of banking regulation:

The notion that makes this guaranteed-to-continue-to-be-weak oversight OK is that the big banks will be permitted to fail. While that may be credible for some of the really big banks (Fifth Third, for instance, is large but not systemically important) any large capital markets player is an integral part of crucial debt market operations. Those large firms in turn are deeply enmeshed via counterparty relationships, most notably repos and credit default swaps. How, pray tell, do you shut down a trading firm in an orderly fashion? You can’t freeze positions, which is what you need to do in an unwind, and not create pain and inconvenience for the counterparties. Are we going to have a firm in default (presumably with emergency credit lines) continue trading? I haven’t heard a credible solution to this rather major conundrum from the officialdom.

There isn't a credible solution, and every time you hear a politician claim that the new regulations will allow for an orderly winding down of any of these institutions you should remember that. Unilateral regulations can never work in the age of globalization; it is essential that the G20 work together to come up with some method of dealing with cross-border resolution issues-as Simon Johnson has pointed out repeatedly, this just isn't going to happen anytime soon. And since it isn't, we need to break these big banks up, because if we don't we will have to bail them out in a couple years when they fail again, and it will only be worse next time.

Also, notice the perverse incentives created by this government guarantee. Fifth Third is not systemically important enough to get saved, therefore it probably won't. What does this tell the CEO of Fifth Third? If it's me, I'm going to get out there and try to make myself systemically important. I'm going to make my bank dangerous so that it won't be allowed to fail. I am essentially going to strap a bomb to my chest and walk around Wall Street daring taxpayers to let me fail.

These are not good incentives.

Oh Danny Boy, The Pipes, The Pipes Are Calling...For A Military Takeover Of A Democratically Elected Government

Daniel Pipes, spends his life dreaming up new excuses to kill men, women and children indiscriminately by constantly promoting war, has found some more violence he can get down with.

The arrest and indictment of top military figures in Turkey last week precipitated potentially the most severe crisis since Atatürk founded the republic in 1923. The weeks ahead will probably indicate whether the country continues its slide toward Islamism or reverts to its traditional secularism. The denouement has major implications for Muslims everywhere.

It certainly does. Those who hate Muslims, and don't believe that they should be allowed to run governments, will be enraged, and probably call for some killings. People like Daniel Pipes.

Turkey's military has long been both the state's most trusted institution and the guarantor of Atatürk's legacy, especially his laicism. Devotion to the founder is not some dry abstraction but a very real and central part of a Turkish officer's life; as journalist Mehmet Ali Birand has documented, cadet-officers hardly go an hour without hearing Atatürk's name invoked.

I don't know about you, but this military sounds sort of like a cult. It reminds me of the North Korean military is devote to Kim Jong Il. But this doesn't seem to faze Pipes.

On four occasions between 1960 and 1997, the military intervened to repair a political process gone awry. On the last of these occasions, it forced the Islamist government of Necmettin Erbakan out of power. 

So now I really don't like this military. I don't know how Pipes feels, but I don't like the idea of any country's army moving in and deposing a democratically elected government. It's undemocratic, you see.

Chastened by this experience, some of Erbakan's staff re-organized themselves as the more cautious Justice and Development Party (AKP). In Turkey's decisive election of 2002, they surged ahead of discredited and fragmented centrist parties with a plurality of 34 percent of the popular vote.

Parliamentary rules then transformed that plurality into a 66 percent supermajority of assembly seats and a rare case of single-party rule. Not only did the AKP skillfully take advantage of its opportunity to lay the foundations of an Islamic order but no other party or leader emerged to challenge it. As a result, the AKP increased its portion of the vote in the 2007 elections to a resounding 47 percent, with control over 62 percent of parliamentary seats.

That's a pretty impressive vote total in a country with multiple parties. It kind of sounds like they were the people's choice.

Repeated AKP electoral successes encouraged it to drop its earlier caution and to hasten moving the country toward its dream of an Islamic Republic of Turkey. 

Turkey is 98% Muslim. We probably shouldn't be too surprised if they choose to live in an Islamic Republic.

The party placed partisans in the presidency and the judiciary while seizing increased control of the educational, business, media, and other leading institutions. It even challenged the secularists' hold over what Turks call the "deep state" – the non-elected institutions of the intelligence agencies, security services, and the judiciary. 

This, of course, is exactly what any political party with widespread public support would do. Remember how the Republicans tried to get McCain elected? Remember how they nominated right-wing justices to the Supreme Court and the federal courts? How about when they installed a Republican Education Secretary, let the banks buy the the Treasury Department, entered into a full-spin zone with Fox News, and basically took over the country for most of the last decade. I didn't like it, but I wasn't about to call up General Patraeus and have him develop battle plans for the Capitol.

Only the military, ultimate arbiter of the country's direction, remained beyond AKP control.

Why is the military the ultimate arbiter of the country's direction? Is this something to strive for? Military dictatorships? It sounds like it is, in Daniel Pipes' world.

Several factors then prompted the AKP to confront the military: European Union accession demands for civilian control over the military...

Those crazy Europeans. They have this strange aversion to out-of-control armed forces. Maybe they remember this, or this, or this.

a 2008 court case that came close to shutting down the AKP; and the growing assertiveness of its Islamist ally, the Fethullah Gülen Movement. An erosion in AKP popularity (from 47 percent in 2007 to 29 percent now) added a sense of urgency to this confrontation, for it points to the end of one-party AKP rule in the next elections.

Well, that sounds like the Turkish people are working this out in a non-violent, democratic fashion. Good for them.

The AKP devised an elaborate conspiracy theory in 2007, dubbed Ergenekon, to arrest about two hundred AKP critics,including military officers, under accusation of plotting to overthrow the elected government. The military responded passively, so the AKP raised the stakes on Jan. 22 by concocting a second conspiracy theory, this one termed Balyoz ("Sledgehammer") and exclusively directed against the military.

Why would these conspiracy theories appeal to people? Why might they even be true? Could it be because the Turkish military has overthrown the civilian government four times since 1960?

The military denied any illegal activities and the chief of general staff, İlker Başbuğ, warned that "Our patience has a limit." Nonetheless, the government proceeded, starting on Feb. 22, to arrest 67 active and retired military officers, including former heads of the air force and navy. So far, 35 officers have been indicted.

Ok, well I guess they'll have trials. They'll probably be given lawyers, since this is Turkey and not the United States, and then they'll have a verdict and so forth. Why is this any of our business?

Thus has the AKP thrown down the gauntlet, leaving the military leadership basically with two unattractive options: (1) continue selectively to acquiesce to the AKP and hope that fair elections by 2011 will terminate and reverse this process; or (2) stage a coup d'état, risking voter backlash and increased Islamist electoral strength.

So they could respect the democratically elected government, or they could go in with guns and take over the country. As a man who believes in exporting democracy, even at the point of a bayonet if necessary, one would think that Pipes would want the Turkish military to butt out.

Turkey's Islamic importance suggests that the outcome of this crisis has consequences for Muslims everywhere. AKP domination of the military means Islamists control the umma's most powerful secular institution, proving that, for the moment, they are unstoppable. But if the military retains its independence, Atatürk's vision will remain alive in Turkey and offer Muslims worldwide an alternative to the Islamist juggernaut.

Given that Pipes has already said that there are only two options, it's pretty clear he's calling for the coup. 


I guess democracy is great, but what's even better is making sure that Muslims don't get to run governments. And if people and democracies need to die to fulfill Pipes' racist and fear-driven vision, too bad.

Why We Will Pursue The Wrong Strategy With Iran

Roger Cohen, in an excellent piece on how to approach Iran, says this about sanctions:

I’m told that’s how Obama, who remains intellectually committed to the idea of an Iran breakthrough, views them: a necessity in the light of Congressional and Israeli pressure, but not a likely means to get sanctions-inured Iran to change course.

Now sanction for Iran are worse than useless. They serve mainly to enrich the political leadership which can get around them and profit by selling things ordinary citizens can't get. It's a perfect way to further alienate the Iranian people. This is widely known. But we're going to get them anyway. Why? Because Israel and their allies in Congress (who put Israeli interests before American) want it. 


When it comes to foreign policy in the Middle East, Congress no longer serves the American voter. It serves Israel.


Stratfor has a very interesting suggestion on how to deal with Iran. I'll excerpt a little, but you should really read the whole thing. (Stratfor is a leading global intelligence consulting company.)

Iraq, not nuclear weapons, is the fundamental issue between Iran and the United States. Iran wants to see a U.S. withdrawal from Iraq so Iran can assume its place as the dominant military power in the Persian Gulf. The United States wants to withdraw from Iraq because it faces challenges in Afghanistan — where it will also need Iranian cooperation — and elsewhere. Committing forces to Iraq for an extended period of time while fighting in Afghanistan leaves the United States exposed globally. Events involving China or Russia — such as the 2008 war in Georgia — would see the United States without a counter. The alternative would be a withdrawal from Afghanistan or a massive increase in U.S. armed forces. The former is not going to happen any time soon, and the latter is an economic impossibility...

It is said that Ahmadinejad is crazy. It was also said that Mao and Stalin were crazy, in both cases with much justification. Ahmadinejad has said many strange things and issued numerous threats. But when Roosevelt ignored what Stalin said and Nixon ignored what Mao said, they each discovered that Stalin’s and Mao’s actions were far more rational and predictable than their rhetoric. Similarly, what the Iranians say and what they do are quite different.

When it comes to foreign policy in the Middle East, Congress no longer serves the American voter. It serves Israel.

Rapprochement with Iran, and an acceptance of that nation's desired position of relative power in the Middle East could have great benefits for Iran and the United States. But it will never happen, at least not anytime soon, because Israel doesn't want it. And Israel, ultimately, decides what American policy will be-not Americans.

Why NYC Is Randomly Arresting People To Meet Quotas

NYC local ABC affiliate has this story:

When Officer Adil Polanco dreamed of becoming a cop, it was out of a desire to help people not, he says, to harass them.

"I'm not going to keep arresting innocent people, I'm not going to keep searching people for no reason, I'm not going to keep writing people for no reason, I'm tired of this," said Adil Polanco, an NYPD Officer.

Officer Polanco says One Police Plaza's obsession with keeping crime stats down has gotten out of control. He claims Precinct Commanders relentlessly pressure cops on the street to make more arrests, and give out more summonses, all to show headquarters they have a tight grip on their neighborhoods.

"Our primary job is not to help anybody, our primary job is not to assist anybody, our primary job is to get those numbers and come back with them?" said Officer Polanco.

Polanco goes on to describe how the NYC police department's quotas result in officers routinely arresting people on trumped charges, explaining that they are often arrested for "engaging in tumultuous and violent conduct that caused public alarm, given a summons for unlawful assembly and locked up overnight."

Engaging in tumultuous conduct, of course, is a catch-all charge that officers use when they want to arrest you. It's similar to our old friend "disturbing the peace," which last made headlines after being used on Harvard Professor Louis Gates, Jr. It's also the charge which is sometimes known as "contempt of cop."

And think of how outrageous arrest quotas are. It is a policy that literally promises to arrest a given number of people for crimes, regardless of whether crimes are actually committed! This cannot be constitutional, and yet it exists, right here in the United States.

What's apparently happening is NYC is that the Bloomberg administration is pressuring the police department to keep up the arrests, because their rich, white voting base likes to be reassured that all the colored people are being kept in check. And the other tool they use to do this is the NYC "stop and frisk" policy. As Bob Herbert wrote in the local NY rag:

From 2004 through 2009, in a policy that has gotten completely out of control, New York City police officers stopped people on the street and checked them out nearly three million times, frisking and otherwise humiliating many of them.

Upward of 90 percent of the people stopped are completely innocent of any wrongdoing. And yet the New York Police Department is compounding this intolerable indignity by compiling an enormous and permanent computerized database of these encounters between innocent New Yorkers and the police.

Not only are most of the people innocent, but a vast majority are either black or Hispanic. There is no defense for this policy. It’s a gruesome, racist practice that should offend all New Yorkers, and it should cease.

It is hard to describe how wrong all of this is. The NYC Police Department is literally forcing its officers to arrest people for no reason. These people are having their civil rights grossly violated (can you imagine being arrested off the street for no reason being thrown in jail for the night?), are being saddled with an arrest record, and are then often simply let out the back door with no reason given for their arrest or for the lack of charges. It's a heinous crime against innocent people which harms them, makes them afraid and resentful of our "criminal" justice system and cops, wastes money, and makes the people of NYC less secure, not more. And it is representative of a pattern of police behavior all over this country.

It should hardly be surprising. We live in a country where those in power believe that security is more important than freedom-especially when they aren't the ones whose freedom is in jeopardy. Consider the policies that this country has adopted over the last few decades: an unconscionable war on its own citizens who use drugs, the use of incarceration for non-violent crimes (especially drug crimes), arrest quotas, stop and frisk, three-strikes, and so on. We are far and away the world leader in imprisoning people, both in absolute numbers and on a per capita basis. Over 2.3 million Americans were in prison in 2008. 

These numbers are staggering. We imprison people at rates that countries like Iran and China (who we deride for their lack of freedom) can only dream about. 

But these policies affect primarily black, brown or poor people. If you steal a pair of sneakers, you're going to jail. But if you steal a trillion dollars from the taxpayers, you'll probably just get flown to Washington and treated to lunch and a casual Q&A with Congress. 

Look, I realize that there has always been a different system of justice for the elite. It's been that way throughout history, and in every country. The promise of America was that there would be liberty and justice for all, not just for the few who could afford lawyers. But this promise has never been fulfilled, and it is now slipping further and further from our grasp. 

We should certainly stop lecturing the world on freedom. But more importantly, we should do something to change this. Vote for politicians that have a record of supporting civil rights. Vote for people that support ending the drug war. Vote against extra funding for police and prisons. Vote for people that oppose the use of Tasers. If these people aren't running, then go find one and encourage them to run for office. If you can't find someone suitable, do it yourself.

But if you don't want to live in the police state that this country is rapidly becoming, do something.

Bankrolling Gamblers

From WSJ:

The biggest banks in the U.S. and Europe set aside almost 10% more money for compensation and benefits in 2009 than a year earlier, according to an analysis of their full-year results.

Global banking giants, including Morgan Stanley, Citigroup Inc. and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. paid out $275.54 billion in compensation and benefits in 2009, a year in which they faced intense scrutiny from regulators, governments, shareholders and the public over their pay practices in the wake of the financial crisis. In 2008, these banks set aside about $251.16 billion for compensation and benefits.

Just a reminder-these bankers are all making money gambling with taxpayer dollars. You won't get a cut when they win, but when they inevitably lose, you'll be the one paying off the bet.

I hope you're ok with that.

Useful Idiots or Dangerous Fools?

The NYT has a profile of the first Tea Party activist, and it's quite illuminating:

SEATTLE — Keli Carender has a pierced nose, performs improv on weekends and lives here in a neighborhood with more Mexican grocers than coffeehouses. You might mistake her for the kind of young person whose vote powered President Obama to the White House. You probably would not think of her as a Tea Party type. 

Apparently, having a pierced nose is now some sort of liberal marker. Also, living in a neighborhood that doesn't have coffeehouses makes it likely you are not a liberal. I have to admit, I'm a little confused. If you're going to use stereotypes, then you should at least know what the prevailing stereotypes are.

But leaders of the Tea Party movement credit her with being the first. 

A year ago, frustrated that every time she called her senators to urge them to vote against the $787 billion stimulus bill their mailboxes were full, and tired of wearing out the ear of her Obama-voting fiancé, Ms. Carender decided to hold a protest against what she called the “porkulus.” 

And here is the first sign of ignorance. Making up names for policies, positions, or people that just sound bad is a hallmark of, well, kindergarten reasoning. It's also a hallmark of conservative (ignorant) politics, because it's a way of showing disapproval for something which you do not understand well enough to oppose on factual grounds. "Porkulus", of course, was coined by Rush Limbaugh.

If someone asks you to explain your opposition to the stimulus bill, and you don't know anything about Keynesian economics, or what an output gap is, you can just say "porkulus" over and over again. And your uncurious and similarly ignorant friends will laugh and think to themselves "Wow! She's so clever! 'Pork' and 'Stimulus' put together make a funny sounding word! I don't really know what a stimulus is, but I think in politics pork is bad, so this must be bad! Plus, she has a pierced nose, so she's cool and edgy!" And as childish as that sounds, it works.

Debating the pros and cons of policy decisions is hard work, you see. It much easier to just call health care reform "Obamacare" then to actually discuss a piece of legislation that you know nothing about, other than the fact that it will set up "Death Panels."

The Times notes that many Tea Party activists are new to politics, and have never voted before. Are these people in any way qualified to say anything intelligent about what is going on in the world around them? At the risk of sounding like a condescending liberal, these people don't even know enough to realize they don't know anything.

The daughter of Democrats who became disaffected in the Clinton years, Ms. Carender, 30, began paying attention to politics during the 2008 campaign, but none of the candidates appealed to her. She had studied math at Western Washington University before earning a teaching certificate at Oxford — she teaches basic math to adult learners — and began reading more on economics, particularly the writings of Thomas Sowell, the libertarian economist, and National Review. 

Here is a perfect example. She became interested in politics less than two years ago. Her introduction to political economy came by way of Thomas Sowell, a libertarian economist whose free-market theories have been thoroughly discredited by real world experiences, and National Review. Has she ever read anything else? Has she ever bothered to understand the arguments made by either Sowell or NR? The answer is no, because it is simply not possible to understand and/or judge the validity of an economic theory less than two years after making the startling discovery that we live in a participatory democracy.

Reading about the stimulus, she said, “it didn’t make any sense to me to be spending all this money when we don’t have it.

She should have just stopped at "It didn't make any sense to me." Because the second half of that statement demonstrates a thorough lack of even basic familiarity with the concepts involved.

“It seems more logical to me that we create an atmosphere where private industry can start to grow again and create jobs,” she said. 

"And even though I know nothing about this issue, I'm going to take this talking point that 'seems' logical and start a national movement that advocates against a policy that I don't even begin to understand."

Ms. Carender is less certain when it comes to explaining, for instance, how to cut the deficit without cutting Medicaid and Medicare. 

“Well,” she said, thinking for a long time and then sighing. “Let’s see. Some days I’m very Randian. I feel like there shouldn’t be any of those programs, that it should all be charitable organizations. Sometimes I think, well, maybe it really should be just state, and there should be no federal part in it at all. I bounce around in my solutions to the problem.” 

So one day she thinks we should live in an anarcho-capitalist state where the strong devour the weak, and the next she thinks government should handle all health care - just not the federal government. The incoherence is breathtaking.

Here she is on Sarah Palin. "She will have to campaign on Tea Party ideas if she wants Tea Party support. And if she were elected, she’d have to govern on those principles or be fired.”

What principles? One moment she's daring government to tax her to pay for someone else's health care, the next she's worried about cutting Medicare.

Look, I'm not trying to pick on Carender, who I'm sure is a very nice woman. But the last thing we need here are more useful idiots. This is what I'd like to tell her: I know that the spotlight is great, and I realize that you want to do something, but please go away for a while and learn something about the issues you say you care about.

I realize that all Tea Party people don't think alike. But if there's one thing that stands out when thye are interviewed is their complete ignorance of the way the world around them works.

This doesn't mean they're evil, of course. But people like this are profoundly uncurious, and are more interested in having some sort of narrative to hang their hats on. And the reason that they gravitate towards right-wing or libertarian economics and politics is because the the hallmark of those theories is simplicity. And simplicity appeals to people who just want a narrative right now, and don't have the time, patience, ability, and/or desire to actually try to find out the truth.

It wil be interesting to see whether people like Carender are curious enough about the contradictions in their positions to explore them further. Will their anger at bank bailouts push them to discover the truth about class warfare? Will this in turn lead them to question their free-market ideology? Will a curiosity about Medicare inefficiency lead them to learn more about how health care markets work, both here and in other countries? Will their anger at "porkulus" lead them to gain a rudimentary understanding of Keynesian economics?

I think for the most part the answer is no. People who haven't taken the time to learn anything about these issues until now are probably just not naturally curious, and will probably always be susceptible to simplistic, but wrong ideas. They will be the useful idiots that the Republican party needs.

Our best and only hope may well be to introduce doubt at every opportunity.

The United States Of Surveillance

Wired.com has a story about the biggest threat to the open internet, and a threat to democracy in general:

When he was head of the country’s national intelligence, he scared President Bush with visions of e-doom, prompting the president to sign a comprehensive secret order that unleashed tens of billions of dollars into the military’s black budget so they could start making firewalls and building malware into military equipment.

And now McConnell is back in civilian life as a vice president at the secretive defense contracting giant Booz Allen Hamilton. He’s out in front of Congress and the media, peddling the same Cybaremaggedon! gloom.

And now he says we need to re-engineer the internet.

"We need to develop an early-warning system to monitor cyberspace, identify intrusions and locate the source of attacks with a trail of evidence that can support diplomatic, military and legal options — and we must be able to do this in milliseconds. More specifically, we need to re-engineer the Internet to make attribution, geo-location, intelligence analysis and impact assessment — who did it, from where, why and what was the result — more manageable. The technologies are already available from public and private sources and can be further developed if we have the will to build them into our systems and to work with our allies and trading partners so they will do the same."

Re-read that sentence. He’s talking about changing the internet to make everything anyone does on the net traceable and geo-located so the National Security Agency can pinpoint users and their computers for retaliation if the U.S. government doesn’t like what’s written in an e-mail, what search terms were used, what movies were downloaded. Or the tech could be useful if a computer got hijacked without your knowledge and used as part of a botnet.

The importance of the internet to democracy in this country cannot be overstated. It is virtually the only place where people can get decent information on what their government is actually doing. The mainstream media has for some time now served the corporate and government elite, and the main thing that is keeping them from putting the finishing touches on an alternate reality is the internet, which keeps them from having a stranglehold on the free flow of information.

It is no accident that the Chinese government, which brooks no political dissent, has a zero-tolerance policy when it comes to internet freedom. In fact, if one were to design a totalitarian state from scratch, there would be no question that the internet as we know it would have to be banned completely. 

In the United States, of course, such drastic measures would be met with fierce resistance. And so if there was an effort to restrict internet freedom, it would have to be done gradually. What McConnell is proposing is one of the first steps.

We can debate whether this is some secret conspiracy by the ruling elite to consolidate control of political speech,  or just another way to keep the "Defense" department cash flowing, or a benign but misguided attempt to "secure" the nation at the expense of our basic freedoms. (I tend to avoid unproven conspiracy theories.) But for the purposes of deciding on a course of action, the distinction is largely academic. We absolutely must fight this.

I expect progressives and libertarians to fight this. But I'm really curious to see if this becomes an issue for Tea Party types, who say that they are opposed to big government and to government intrusion. I can't think of a more appropriate issue for them to take up.

Now is the time to put an end to this. Once the government is given these powers, it will be impossible to take them back. We are faced today with a choice: We can continue along the path towards an Orwellian media state, in which the government controls what the people think by controlling the information they receive and in which the government knows nearly everything you do, or we can accept that we will never live in a perfectly secure world, and at least fight for our freedom to think and act.

Update

Let's hope everyone is ok down in Utah:

FARR WEST -- Hazmat crews were called to the IRS building in Farr West Monday.
The crews arrived sometime after 11 a.m. at 1973 N. Rulon White Blvd.
Two people were removed from the building on stretchers.
Details are few right now. Phone calls to the IRS are being directed to the FBI, which has not yet released any information.

Hopefully this isn't related to the terror attack on the IRS in Austin.

Deficit Fear-Mongering Is Just Class Warfare

It seems like all you ever hear about these days is the deficit or our massive national debt. But here's a question:

Can the United States ever be forced to default on its debt? 

The answer to this would seem to be important, since there are a lot of people out there who believe that the United States is heading towards bankruptcy, and that we could one day be forced to default on our debt. 

Representative Barney Frank recently posed this question to Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke:

Frank: Do you think there is any realistic prospect of America’s defaulting on its debt in the near future?

Bernanke: Not unless Congress decides not to pay….

So how is this possible? We know that nations can and do default on their debt, as Argentina notably did in 2001. Why couldn't the same thing happen to the US?

The reason is that, unlike Argentina in 2001 and Greece today, the debt that the United States owes is in a currency which it can simply print more of. The United States is borrowing dollars. In fact, the United States can print as many dollars as it wants to, and this ability is literally limited by the supply of paper in this country. 

Greece, on the other hand, owes a lot of debt in Euros. It does not have the ability to print euros, and so if it runs out of them, its only other options are to create its own currency, or to default. And while it can create its own currency, there are two big issues with that option. The first problem it would have to withdraw from the European Union, and the second problem is that that it would have to use its new currency to buy euros so it could pay back its euro debt. And its new currency wouldn't be worth very much. 

The United States does not face this problem. All of its debt is in dollars, and it can simply print as many of them as it wants. 

This may seem unbelievable. It's rather hard to believe that the US can just make its debt go away tomorrow by printing new dollars. But it can.

Why doesn't it? Because printing $12 trillion new dollars would make the dollars that we already have worth far less. In other words, it would lead to massive inflation. 

And here is where we should realize that the debt is simply a political issue, and in fact concern over debt is nothing more than disguised class warfare.

There are currently 20 million unemployed people in the United States today. This means that 20 million people are sitting around doing nothing, when they could be doing something productive like working on badly needed infrastructure projects. Roads, bridges, broadband access, public water systems, etc -the list goes on. We could print more money and pay these people to work, and the country as a whole would be better off for it. So why don't we do that?

Again, the fear is that printing more money would make the money we already have worth less. But this effect is a class-based effect. Simply put, if you have no money, you aren't worried about inflation, because you have nothing to lose. And if you have no job, you'd far rather have inflation and a government job building bridges than no inflation and no job.

If you have $58 billion like Bill Gates, 10% inflation (far above anything we've seen since 1979-1981) means that after one year, your money will be worth $5.8 billion less in today's terms.

On the other hand, inflation means that nominal wages will rise, while fixed payments like mortgages will not. So if you have a mortgage and a job, you'll get paid more money for work, but you won't have to pay more for your mortgage. It's kind of like getting a raise. 

But, if you own a lot of bonds (your average American does not), inflation is terrible, as the interest rate on these bonds can suddenly become far less than the rate of inflation, which means that bondholders will lose money.

So the point is that government spending is not intrinsically good or bad. In fact, whether the level of government deficit spending is good or bad depends on two things:

• What it's being spent on, and 
• Who you are.

What It's Being Spent On

Deficit spending on useless projects is a bad idea for everyone. Building bridges to nowhere does not add much to the overall wealth of the United States, and deficit spending should add exactly that. (It might be better than paying people to do nothing, but that depends on whether people would be more productive on their own, or whether the work experience and dignity afforded by being employed is adds more value than say, staying at home and blogging.) Other things that add no real wealth are:

• Bailouts of the massive banking industry, a large portion of which adds no value, but which can properly be viewed as parasitic.
• Large portions of our "defense" budget, which serve no purpose other than to enrich defense contractors and which encourage us to invade other countries so as to justify the expediture.
• The War on Drugs, which is a horribly destructive waste of money.
• Medicare/Medicaid waste and fraud, and all government waste and fraud in general. (I am certainly not advocating an end to Medicare/Medicaid, just pointing out that waste in that sector is unproductive and adds no value. There are other considerations.)

The list goes on. 

However, deficit spending on other things is good. 

• Necessary national defense.
• Necessary health care.
• Necessary infrastructure (roads, bridges, rail, etc)
• Useful Government research programs.
• Necessary environmental protections.
• Financial regulation.
• Air Traffic Control.

Etc...

These things add real value. You may think that the private sector can do some of them better, and in some cases you may be right. But when the private sector is not putting those 20 million people to work, that question is moot. 

Who You Are:

Whether or not the spending adds value isn't the only question. There is always a cost, and that cost is inflation. Inflation affects people in different ways. 

If you're Bill Gates, it might not be that important to you that the government creates jobs building bridges. And the possibility that you will lose 10% of your net worth is probably very important.

On the other hand, if you're a restaurant owner whose business has been cut in half because your customers are all out of work, and you have a fixed 10-year lease, then the benefits of full employment are probably pretty big, and the cost of inflation isn't that big of a deal, since while you'll be paying more for food, you'll also have more customers and the value of your lease payment is going down by 10%.

Or, if you're unemployed and broke, the cost of inflation is negligible to you and the benefits of employment are immense.

Now, I'd like to pause to recognize that it's not just as simple as rich vs poor. Pension funds get hurt in inflationary periods, and rich people benefit from improved infrastructure. But the dynamic here is basically rich versus poor. Full employment/high inflation is bad for corporate profits, bondholders, and the rich, and good for your average American working stiff. (It's also good for the long-term debt outlook, because unless we get people back to work, the massive drop in people paying income taxes is going to explode the deficit anyway.)

But here's the thing: you never hear any of this in the media. You hear this constant fear-mongering about our out-of-control debt that has no basis in reality. You hear about how government should be forced to balance its budget just like American families do, which is ludicrous, as there is no semblance of a similarity between a sovereign government with a fiat currency and your family (most notably, because your family cannot print more money when it needs to.)

And the sad thing is that millions of Americans, who don't really understand monetary policy, are being talked into voting against their best interests and in favor of the interests of the elite. And it is the elite who are convincing them to do this.

We have 20 million people out of work in America today. These people will suffer permanent career damage. They are losing their homes. They are losing their health insurance. They need jobs. Inflation in the United States last year was negative .034%. I realize that Lloyd Blankfein and the rest of the bankers will scream bloody murder if we print some more money to put the unemployed to work doing something useful, but they've had their way with this country for long enough.

It's time we get America back to work.

Hear, Hear

I'm really on a roll here with this mulitmedia blitz. Here's Senator Dick Durbin pointing out that the only real idea that Republicans have for health care reform is at best useless, and at worst enormously unjust:





Malpractice reform has one thing going for it-you get to bash lawyers. And if there is one thing that uneducated, knee-jerk right wingers hate more than Congress, it's lawyers. They can't tell you why, really. It's just been drilled into their heads over and over again. So naturally they believe that all lawyers are out to destroy the economy by filing billion dollar lawsuits every time someone burns themselves on a McDonald's product.

What these people forget is that in a purely free-market environment (which I realize is a fictional concept, not unlike unicorns, leprechauns and free birthday ponies for all), lawsuits are how you get the compensation you deserve. It is a terribly inefficient and inequitable system in which a small percentage of the total number of injured people get most of the money, while most of the injured get none. But this is a by-product of free-market philosophy.

I would gladly trade the malpractice litigation system we now have for an out-of-court, no fault system like the one in France- if I could have a single payer health care system. But as long as I am forced to buy insurance on the open market, I want my right to sue when I don't get what I paid for.

Racist Proponent Of Genocide Calls For Ethnic Cleansing Of Gaza

This man is quite literally claiming that the way to end terror by radical Islam is by denying Muslims the ability to reproduce.

Who is this genocidal lunatic, this philosophical heir to Nazi eugenic ideology?

He's none other than Martin Kramer, a visiting scholar employed by Harvard University.

Marc Theissen Justifies 9-11

Marc Thiessen continues his dishonest and disgusting attempts to legitimize the use of torture. First, he simply decides to re-define torture

“There’s a standard of torture in civil law,” he said, “which is severe mental pain and suffering. I also have a common-sense definition, which is, ‘If you’re willing to try it, it’s not torture.’ ”

Thousands of American soldiers have been willing to undergo waterboarding as part of their resistance training, Mr. Thiessen notes; therefore, it stands to reason that it is not torture.

This is total bullshit. The fact that somewhere there is someone who is willing to undergo waterboarding has absolutely no bearing on whether on not waterboarding is torture. There are people who are willing to endure all sorts of things for all sorts of reasons, and that does not give us the right to inflict anything on anyone. People have shown a willingness to douse themselves in gasoline and light themselves on fire as a means of protest; does this mean that that would be acceptable treatment as well? 

Second, he invokes Catholic teaching to defend what he calls “coercive interrogation.”

The catechism states, “the defense of the common good requires that an unjust aggressor be rendered unable to do harm,” and Catholic tradition accepts that this might involve killing. And, Mr. Thiessen writes: “If this principle applies to taking human life, it must certainly apply to coercive interrogation as well. A captured terrorist is an unjust aggressor who retains the power to kill many thousands by withholding information about planned attacks.”

A captured terrorist most certainly is not an unjust aggressor. He is in custody, and can do no more harm. Theissen is not just claiming that you can kill someone who is trying to kill you. He is saying that you can do anything you want if you feel like your life is being threatened. You can kill the person who is threatening you. You can kill someone who might know something about someone who is threatening you. You can torture someone if you feel threatened. In other words, as long as you feel as though you are threatened, there is literally nothing you cannot do.

Worried that you might be struck and killed by a drunk driver? According to Thiessen, you can just pre-emptively kill all drunk drivers. Or all drunks, or even all drivers. 

Worried that some Muslim might know something about a terrorist attack? Just torture him to death. Maybe you'll find something out, maybe you won't. But it's your right!

Are you a Muslim that's worried that the United States is planning to invade another Muslim country? I guess you're justified in flying passenger jets into skyscrapers. See how that works?

Basically, Theissen is arguing that governments or individuals can justify ANY behavior, no matter how evil, by claiming that they felt as though they were in danger. And make no mistake about it, he is not arguing that we can only do this to people who are guilty of committing terrorist acts. He is arguing that the guilt of the person is irrelevant; all that is needed is some belief, however misguided, that one's life is in danger.

This is face of the Neo-Con movement. It is a movement that is doing everything it can to destroy a century's worth of advancement in human rights and international law. Its justification is self-defense, but its ultimate goal is absolute power, and the domination of the world. It uses fear to consolidate its power; in this sense, it is no different from, and in fact acts in concert with, Al Qaeda. 

Morally, its goals are repugnant. Strategically, they are stupendously foolish. But they are moving ahead anyway, and Marc Theissen is doing anything he can to further the cause.

Paul Ryan: Government Spends Too Much! Also, Stop Government From Killing Wasteful Spending!

Investors.com is still waiting for rebuttals to points made by GOP Rep. Paul Ryan at Thursday's health care summit. They have a list of points, some of which I would concede. I don't support this bill, and there are obviously problems with it. I would just like to point out that Ryan has no solutions other than to get rid of Medicare altogether. But one of his points just illustrates Ryan's basic dishonesty:

"Millions of seniors who have chosen Medicare Advantage (Medicare through a private insurer) will lose the coverage that they now enjoy."

I'll let Ezra Klein explain the Medicare Advantage ripoff.

Philip Rucker takes a good, hard look at the scam that is Medicare Advantage. Essentially, it works like this: Congress allowed private HMOs to compete for Medicare patients under the rationale that they could offer better service at lower cost than the government. They couldn't. So Republicans in Congress began boosting their payments, to the point that Medicare Advantage gets paid 114 percent what Medicare gets paid to care for a patient. That leads to some fun perks, like free gym memberships and complimentary aspirin and band-aids, which in turn leads seniors to defend the program because they like their perks. But it also means a lot of unnecessary expense for taxpayers.

And it's important to remember that those free perks do not account for the whole of Medicare Advantage's overpayments. Rather, economists have estimated that for every extra dollar we pay the program, 14 percent is passed on to seniors and 86 percent goes to profits or other costs. In other words, we're getting only 14 cents of obvious value for every dollar of overpayment.

So Ryan is complaining that the bill will kill off this scam, which is basically just welfare for his rich buddies in the corporate world. Ryan pretends to be in favor of free-market, private sector solutions, but what he's really in favor of is just giving taxpayer dollars to rich, private sector corporations. And then, of course, trying to scare the "millions of seniors who now get Medicare Advantage" into turing against health care reform, even though he knows they won't lose health care, but will simply be required to use regular Medicare instead of the tax-payer ripoff known as Medicare Advantage.

It was irresponsible and dishonest for him to not say that. But political dishonesty and irresponsibility works, because now a bunch of people are going to waste their correcting him, when they could be fighting for single payer.