March 30^th

Henry‘s detritus will take a short hiatus while he gets new karabiners, sharpens his ice-ax and replaces some worn climbing ropes. More detritus will follow; that’s inevitable. Stay tuned!

 

March 28^th

Ted Cruz, as most everyone now knows, announced his candidacy for President at Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia. As most everyone also knows this educational institution required the attendance of its entire student body at Cruz’s coming out party; as a result some eleven thousand students showed up. If a student chose not to attend this event the reprimand cost would be a ten dollar fine. The administration claims that they want to expose their students to a variety of viewpoints and they do that through convocations. But then why did they disband the student’s Democratic Club in 2009?

According to PolitiFact there are many other ways to incur reprimands.  Participation in an unauthorized demonstration can produce twelve reprimands. (I wonder if there are any authorized demonstrations.) “Participation in a séance, witchcraft or other demonic activity carries a five-hundred dollar fine and possible expulsion.”  One can’t help but wonder if any cases of witchcraft have been reported.

This isn’t simply a case of fundamentalist paranoia worthy to be laughed at. Perpetuating the notion that witchcraft exists encourages unrestricted violence by some immigrant populations in this country and many others abroad who believe they are at the mercy of witches; the result is that they murder the suspected witch. In Kinshasa Nigeria there are more than 25 thousand abandoned children, abandoned because they cried for no discernable reason. Their parents were convinced by religious fanatics that their child was possessed of the devil and so had to be rejected. That an American institute of higher education would have a regulation implying the existence of witchcraft is beyond belief! Yet Cruz chooses this venue to announce his candidacy for President!

How do we describe the student body? Requirements for graduation include a generous dose of religion courses. Of the 120 credits required to graduate nineteen credits must be in religious studies. This is very close to the credits required for a minor in most colleges and is far more credits than the college requires in science. All-in-all I think Liberty University is a very appropriate place for Cruz to make his pitch to be the Republican standard bearer. They are a good fit for each other!

March 27^th

Our conservative de jour is Phil Kerpen. His message today is a call to repeal the inheritance tax but like the good conservative he is he calls it the “Death Tax.”

He tells us that 61 percent of the public support this tax’s repeal.  I’m surprised that it’s only 61 percent; how many would support the repeal of the gasoline tax, their state’s sales tax or whatever tax you might name? The estate tax will affect just .12 percent of all estates in this country; that’s about eight-tenths of one percent and that’s not very many. One reason is that the exemption is now well over 5 million dollars for an individual and close to 11 million dollars for a married couple.  A spouse can pass his estate to his wife or husband free of any estate tax. Then when the wife or husband dies there is an 11 million dollar exemption. That estate has to be more than 11 million dollars before any federal estate tax is owed. Of course this is for the federal estate tax, the states can have their say and right now some ten states have their own estate tax with exemptions much lower that the federal exemptions. Mr. Kerpen doesn’t touch that one, state’s rights you know.

He is also dead wrong about the federal estate tax. He claims, “We now have a tax on the books that takes up to 40 percent of everything a person leaves to his or her children as a punishment for success, for achieving the American dream.” That is, to put it inelegantly, “Horse Hockey.” As I pointed out above, not until the estate is worth nearly 11 million dollars is any estate tax owed. Kerpen must believe that there is no estate tax exemption or if he knows better he is quite simply lying.

He then cites a study that claims this tax is responsible for “the destruction of 1.1 trillion dollars of capital.” Apparently Kerpen believes that if you make the lie sufficiently outrageous people will believe it. The 1.1 trillion dollar figure he cites comes from “The Family Business Coalition.” They do not explain whether the “destruction” of these billions of dollars is the result of burning them in the streets, dumping them in the ocean or if this “destruction” is carried out in some more truly spectacular way!

Perhaps Kerpen himself deserves a closer look: A quick online search tells us that he has been very active in right wing organizations and now runs his very own as president of “American Commitment.” This group is organized as a 501 c 4 supposedly dedicated to social welfare. Hah! Really?  Openrecords.org has tried to check them out with little success because the money between this group and some others simply flies back and forth. As a 501 c 4 they cannot advocate for a candidate but they use wording that clearly shows which candidates they favor.

Mr. Kerpen is also an author: his book is titled “Democracy Denied: How Obama Is Ignoring You and Bypassing Congress to Radically Transform America—and How to Stop Him.” This effort is available used on Amazon for one penny, perhaps because the original purchasers do not seem to want it in their libraries; even so I’d bet it’s still worth the purchase price.

March 26^th

Today George Will instructs us all in economics, at least in his version of economics. Does anyone believe that this will be “fair and balanced?” Neither do I.

Will quotes at length from, “Popular Economics: What the Rolling Stones, Downton Abbey and LeBron James Can Teach You about Economics.” This book was written by an editor of Forbes magazine, John Tamny. That may suggest to you the direction the book takes. Unfortunately it will be very hard for you to read this splendid book for yourself because it hasn’t been released to the public yet. The available date is about the middle of next month; meanwhile advanced copies have been made available to those expected to comment favorably on the book’s content. George Will has complied; he quotes many passages and agrees with all of them.

We find that “Most of the persons on the original list of the 400 richest Americans in 1982 were off the list in 2013.” I hope that doesn’t mean that a high percentage of former Forbes folks are now on food stamps. At this writing the poorest of the current Forbes 400 is worth 1.79 thousand million dollars.  If in another twenty years it takes 3 thousand million dollars to make the list I’ll bet the current list’s bottom feeders will still not need direct government assistance!

We learn about John D. Rockefeller who, surely out of the goodness of his heart, lowered the price of Kerosene to six cents a gallon in spite of the fact that he already had a monopoly. He may have gotten that monopoly by lowering the price to drive potential competitors out of the market. Rockefeller had plenty of other income sources which would have enabled him to do exactly that; in fact he was notorious for slicing prices to drive competitors out of his markets.

An interesting factoid presented without question, or citation, is this Tamny assertion, “When the wealth gap widens the lifestyle gap shrinks.” Will swallows this nonsense? What a fantastic statement; presumably folks at the bottom of the economic ladder find their circumstances much improved now that the top 1% are making  multimillion dollar salaries. Mr. Suh who now plays football for the Miami Dolphins recently signed a 60 million dollar guaranteed contract. (The total contract was for well over 100 million dollars.) Isn’t that wonderful for everybody? I wonder if Will or this editor of Forbes has, within the last ten years, ever had coffee with anyone on food stamps, you know say a full time Walmart employee.

Will should know that our Gini index (a measure of income inequality) is now at .41 compared with Sweden’s .24; that’s simply embarrassing and more embarrassing is Will’s apparent commitment to push it still higher. He seems unacquainted with, or purposefully ignoring, Gunnar Myrdal an architect of Sweden’s third way. The Stockholm School which Myrdal helped to found sought a middle way between Communism and Capitalism. The result was a Nobel Prize for Myrdal and the current economic situation in Sweden. The Swedes do not have to rely on improving the wealth of some so that many others can get larger crumbs from their table.

March 25^th

Cal Thomas comes forth today with some whoppers. “The President …behaves like an enemy of Israel when he attempts to impose a Palestinian state on Israel…” but then there is the fact that Netanyahu himself has suggested a “two state solution.” The problem with his solution is that it comes with conditions that the Palestinians could never accept and it’s clear that Netanyahu knows that. Even so, just before the election he flatly denied the possibility of a two state solution before he later modified that assertion.

“Israel embraces western values …free elections and religious tolerance… a free press and equal rights for women…” says Thomas. That will be news to the Israeli women who were stoned for praying at the Wailing Wall while the police looked on and did nothing. At least the police didn’t force them to leave the wall as they have done over and over again in the past. Israel is a semi theocratic state dominated by orthodox Jews. As for “pluralism” why would Netanyahu claim, as a scare tactic, that Arabs were “being bused in to vote?” I guess he was catering to the “real” Israeli’s fear of Israeli Arabs most of whom are Muslim; why else would he say that if he had nothing to gain by saying it? (The episode reminds me of the voter ID laws popping up in red states here that once simply intimidated black applicants trying to vote. Now with a stacked SCOTUS these states have a way to limit voting rights legally.)

Thomas goes on to claim that a Palestinian state would be a launching pad for an attack on Israel, that it would be suicide for Israel to return to the 1967 borders which he claims President Obama is pushing Israel to do. Where exactly does the President push Israel to return to the 1967 borders except for the international expectation that conquered territory should not benefit the conqueror? Most European nations take the same view of the Israeli situation that our government has, yet Cal Thomas criticizes only President Obama. Again it is clear that this country is the only friend Israel has; its only supporter and Netanyahu has chosen to risk throwing that away. Now Thomas tells us this is President Obama’s fault.

Netanyahu, when he spoke to Congress, claimed he wanted to give them his message. No, he wanted to humiliate the President. He could have communicated with Congress in a letter but that would not have been sufficiently incendiary for him, not nearly colorful enough for Netanyahu the demagogue. He craved the standing ovations he knew he would get from a Congress hostile to the President and he got what he wanted, perhaps more that he wanted.

Finally Thomas references Old Testament passages in Deuteronomy and Zachariah describing the horrible fate that awaits those who support Israel’s enemies. If we take those warnings seriously Cal I guess Israel doesn’t really need us anymore.

 

March 24^th

Today Mona Charen’s column is all about race. She begins by attempting to establish her bona fides on the topic; as a child she grew up in a black neighborhood and had black friends and neighbors. She even had a black “much adored second grade teacher” so clearly there couldn’t be a racist bone in her body. She then tells us how she was chased and beaten up in this same neighborhood when she was nine years old. Of course she was; if she had been a lone black kid in a poor white neighborhood or even a strange white kid in a white neighborhood the same thing would have happened.

Mona claims that when we are asked to engage in a conversation about race what is wanted is a confession of sin by white people and, despite vastly diminishing levels of racism the old stain continues to poison the lives of minorities. This, she tells us, is a fiction. Really, tell that to the parents of a demented black kid who waved a screwdriver at a white cop in Madison and was shot dead five seconds later.

Then she claims that she is extra polite and considerate toward black people in an attempt to make up for our racist past. She maintains that the entire quota of social programs including trillions of dollars and even the election of “Barack Hussein Obama testifies to how badly America yearns to prove its racial bona fides.” Absurdities will multiply when they go unchallenged. Tell us Mona what is your reference is for these trillions of dollars in social programs designed to compensate blacks for past discrimination? I thought our social programs were race neutral and not specifically aimed at African Americans. If I was wrong then which programs were designed specifically to help African Americans and make up for our past sins?

Then we have the bizarre notion that whites elected President Obama from a sense of guilt. That remark comes close to being delusional. Obama lost the white vote by 20 percentage points, a statistic Charen could have obtained in 30 seconds on the internet. Never mind if Charen was concerned about truth she would never had said “trillions” were being spent on social programs to compensate blacks for racial injustices.

Finally Mona gets to what she sees as the nub of the issue, the kernel that proves no amount of help can improve the black community; it’s because of absent fathers. She claims that family structure is a far better predictor of poverty than is race, but the correlation between family structure and poverty is exactly the same as the correlation between poverty and family structure. Any high school student can tell you that the correlation between “A” and “B” is exactly the same as the correlation between “B” and “A.” Mona is in well over her head.

She speaks glowingly of Pat Moynihan and claims that we haven’t had an honest conversation about race since; nor does she provide one here.

March 23^rd

Ted Cruz has announced his candidacy for President. He did that today from a stage at Liberty University; this is the school founded and previously administered by the fundamentalist minister Jerry Falwell. Now his son, Jerry Falwell Jr. is continuing in his father’s tradition. The Reverend Falwell Jr. fervently believes that the earth is less than 10 thousand years old and that dinosaurs and humans occupied the earth at the same time. While evolution is taught there so is creationism which is pushed as the superior choice.

Senator Cruz was at least assured of an audience; all Liberty University students were required to attend the speech announcing his candidacy. The requirement to attend was not seen by all students as a requirement to support Cruz; some students showed up in crimson t-shirts with their choice, Rand Paul, emblazoned on the front and these sat well within camera range. (I know of one college requiring attendance at convocations which found students unfurling newspapers just as the speaker began holding forth. Students can be difficult to push around!) The Senator at one point asked that all members of his audience use their cell phones to send their email addresses to his campaign headquarters; this would make it easier for them to receive invitations to contribute to his campaign.

The students were particularly enthusiastic when he claimed that when elected he would immediately repeal “Obama Care.” I doubt that any of these undergraduates knew that repealing this legislation would immediately remove them from their parent’s health insurance. Adolescents are quite susceptible to most forms of demagoguery and while Cruz’s high-pitched voice is not well suited to that task, otherwise he has all the rhetorical skills of Huey Long, even if they have totally different messages.

There is little doubt that if the “Old Confederacy” still existed, Cruz would have a splendid chance at the nomination for its presidency and he would probably win it. Unfortunately for Cruz the majority of Americans, even the majority of Republicans, are not much impressed by his efforts. A poll today shows Cruz’ candidacy with just three percent of the Republican vote tied there with Huckabee against Jeb Bush’s 13 percent. In fact no poll by anyone shows Cruz anywhere but in the very low single digits.

I’m sure the Democrats would love to see the Tea Party Kid surge forward and get the nomination. That is unlikely to happen but we can all hope for the best in this best of all possible worlds.