In Case You Actually Like David Brooks

This is essentially retweeting Atrios, but he's sort of retweeting Greg Mitchell, so we're even.

Mitchell reminds us of what a chicken hawk David Brooks was on the eve of the Iraq War. There are cheerleaders and then there are people who get hard listening to George W. Bush.

You read. You decide.

It Was Never About Social Security

Atrios points to a CEPR blog post with an aim of whacking Abby Huntsman -- daughter of former Utah governor Jon Huntsman -- over bad reporting on Social Security.

The LA Times got into it, too, with a scathing article about Huntsman's performance on the show she shares with several millennials, MSNBC's The Cycle. Abby ranted on about how horrible Social Security is for her age cohort.

She thinks Social Security is going bankrupt, leaving her and her generation with nothing. "This is infuriating," she said, bouncing up and down in her chair like a petulant toddler, "because none of our elected officials seem to care enough to do anything about it." 

Unfortunately, almost everything she said about Social Security in the name of making it "sustainable" for her generation was wrong.

Dead wrong. 

 Read the article to find out more. To the CEPR post:

There are two big problems with the basics of Huntsman's story. First, most of the gain in life expectancy that she points to in the segment is the result of reduced infant mortality, not people living longer. For example, the Social Security trustees report shows life expectancy at birth increased by more than 15 years from 1940 to 2012, however life expectancy at age 65 has increased by just 6.5 years. It's great to see lower infant mortality rates, but this doesn't affect the finances of Social Security, it is the increase in life expectancy at age 65 that matters.

However the  bigger problem with Huntsman's diatribe is that this increase in life expectancy was expected at the time the program was created. As a result, a number of increases in the tax rate were put into place in the next five decades. The initial tax rate was just 2.0 percent of wages on both the worker and the employer. Since 1990 it has been 6.2 percent of wages for both employer and employee. (The taxable wage base was also increased substantially.) These increases were put in place to deal with the costs associated with a rise in the ratio of retirees to workers. The age for receiving full benefits has also been increased from 65 to 66 at present, and will rise to 67 for people reaching age 62 after 2022. It is flat-out wrong to claim either that the increase in life expectancy caught anyone by surprise or that no changes were made to deal with longer life expectancies.

The gist of Abby Huntsman's rant was that the millennials are going to take it in the shorts because of grandma and grandpa, when in fact if millennials get the expected wage rises over their careers, they should be fine with yet another simple 0.5 percent FICA tax increase easily paid for by their rising standards of living, which will pay for SS well into the next century.

Abby Huntsman press photo, courtesy MSNBC.
Not sure what they're promoting here,
but it might not be brains, or honesty.

It turns out the only problem might be that those wage rises won't happen because of growing income inequality. So, who are the bad guys, grandma and grandpa or fatcat CEOs and hedge-fund managers?

The bottom line is that it isn't now and never was about Social Security. It was and continues to be about tax cuts for the rich and hating on the poor. And poor, poor Abby Huntsman, like many who go down the "Social Security is killing us" road, ends up looking pretty stupid or, worse, conniving (sounds better than evil). And being hot won't help her unless she was on Fox instead of MSNBC.

Dear Abby,

Stop.

Your friend,

The Rational World

A Rare Case of Political Correctness on the Left

Ezra Klein

Accusing the left of demanding political correctness has been a bogus claim for years. No one has a more constricted pattern of political correctness than the far right. Witness the right's fanatical obedience to the NRA. If you're a conservative who's in favor of gun control, it's the same thing as saying "term-limit me now, friends."

So seeing a case of political correctness on the left is actually a rare event, but I think I've found one that deserves some comment.

I've been a fan of Ezra Klein since I discovered his blogging back in, I don't know, the Jurassic Period of political blogging. Sometimes lately I've had quibbles with his views -- which means I think he's swerved rightward, on entitlements for example, when he shouldn't have -- but ordinarily he's done admirable work.

Since he got too big for his britches -- or so the Washington Post must have thought -- he's been at work preparing his own media site at Vox.com. And just the other day, he announced the hiring of Brandon Ambrosino, a young, openly gay writer I'd never heard of. Ambrosino would be joining the crew at Vox.com.

All hell broke loose. Ambrosino had apparently written several pieces that some found offensive, among them Media Matters, a website I've admired for years because of their tireless work against the misinformation meisters on the right. Attacking someone of the left is rare, but Media Matters made an exception with Ambrosino.

Brandon Ambrosino

Of Ambrosino's pieces, I found his reminiscences of Liberty University one piece that he should have skipped -- saying "but Jerry Falwell was nice to me" hardly cleans up that man's hateful reputation -- and his other pieces make it clear that he's not interested in claiming any space as a leftist writer. However, his piece on Duck Dynasty's Phil Robertson -- also roundly condemned -- made some sense to me.

Ambrosino held that we're generally jumping up and down in praise of our new Pope Francis, because he seems to be, if not gay-friendly, then at least not ready to burn them at the stake as previous popes have been. "Who am I to judge?" asks humble Francis.

But we jump up and down condemning Louisiana yokel Phil Robertson for being a yokel, someone "born that way." Ambrosino's point was that Robertson and our new Pope held precisely the same views on homosexuality, only Phil embellished his views with the hillbilly tongue. So Phil's a bigot and Pope Francis is our New Hero?

I get it, Brandon. You're sort of right. Wish you weren't, but...

Another Ambrosino piece, this time on why he doesn't do gay-pride parades, is in a similar vein. His point is that he wants to engage people on the right as equals, not as queer but as someone who's gay but also believes in God and holds many of the same family values that the right claims exclusive rights to. Again, I get it. You're sort of right. When gays march in their buttless chaps, they're saying "we're queer, we're here." What Ambrosino wants to say is "I'm queer, I'm your next door neighbor, want to come over for some coffee and meet my kids?"

(I often wonder as I drive by San Francisco's gay-friendly Castro District, given the great strides forward gays have made, whether they even need their own neighborhood anymore. You're welcome in mine!)

Ezra Klein has already made some mea culpas, saying he didn't hire Ambrosino to be Vox.com's LGBT writer-in-residence but for his general writing skills and outlook. Time will tell how this all works out.

I suggest we all do a half-chill on this guy. By the way, whatever controversy erupted around Brandon Ambrosino, he's probably fine with it. I hadn't the faintest idea who he was until this brouhaha, a situation no doubt many people were in just a few days ago. Now we're all clicking on links to his articles.

Well played, Brandon. Good luck. It's a jungle out there in the blogosphere.

I'm Sorry, but nobody's home...

zzzzzzzzz...

Listen Up, John McCain, Lindsey Graham, et al: Americans Don't Want to Go to War Anymore

"They're onto us on the war-mongering shit, Lindsey. We might have
to come up with another form of bluster. I know it's a lot of work,
but what the hell else are we gonna do?"

My only hope is that somehow the Very Serious People come to terms with the fact that after 10-plus years of war, Americans are sick of it. It would be even better if the VSP admit that we've been a total, colossal failure at it.

I don't know what kind of world of denial Condoleezza Rice lives in, but Te-Nehisi Coates does:

Condoleezza Rice was an important member of an administration that launched a war on false pretense and willingly embraced torture. This was done in the name of the American people. It takes a particular historical blindness to claim that such actions should have no effect on all our crowing over "democracy and human rights."

I've got a suspicion that Rice is as responsible as any in the Bush administration for trashing our reputation. Vietnam didn't help, but the world had forgotten. The Bushies drove the point home all over again.

That doesn't keep the likes of David Brooks from pretending that it's so bad we don't lead anymore, ignoring the fact that we just might not be the leader the world is looking for right now:

It’s frankly naïve to believe that the world’s problems can be conquered through conflict-free cooperation and that the menaces to civilization, whether in the form of Putin or Iran, can be simply not faced. It’s the utopian belief that politics and conflict are optional.

One set of numbers in the data leaps out. For decades Americans have been asked if they believe most people can be trusted. Forty percent of baby boomers believe most people can be trusted. But only 19 percent of millennials believe that. This is a thoroughly globalized and linked generation with unprecedentedly low levels of social trust.

We live in a country in which many people act as if history is leaderless. Events emerge spontaneously from the ground up. Such a society is very hard to lead and summon. It can be governed only by someone who arouses intense moral loyalty, and even that may be fleeting.

I feel the need to apologize for quoting Brooks here, mostly because I don't know what the hell he's saying. I'm not sure that Brooks even knows. But Conor Friedersdorf does:

This point is being made with increasing insistence by the American public because they perceive, correctly, that there is a cadre of Washington, D.C. insiders—bureaucrats, military contractors, think-tank fellows, editors like Bill Kristol, writers like Max Boot—so oblivious to America's limits that they can't even see the last military intervention that they successfully advocated as a mistake, even though, in that case, the catastrophic results have already played out. 

Brooks is a much more subtle thinker and insightful writer than any of these people. On matters of foreign policy and what he would call "national greatness," he is still unduly influenced by them, despite the fact that, more than any other actors in American life, they've destroyed the trust in leadership that Brooks himself values. Leaders that blunder into wars and subsequently lose them, at great cost in lives and treasure, forfeit their ability to lead. Their ideas lose esteem.

How could it be otherwise?

You've got that right.

"In the struggle to get the world to hate our bullshit, America has prevailed."

Thankfully, Paul Ryan Clarifies His Stance on the Poor

In the inner cities, they're born lazy! Why didn't I think of that?

Oh, yeah, that's right, I'm not a born racist! Sez Paul:

Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) on Wednesday lamented that the culture in inner cities contributes to poverty in America.

“We have got this tailspin of culture, in our inner cities in particular, of men not working and just generations of men not even thinking about working or learning the value and the culture of work, and so there is a real culture problem here that has to be dealt with," he said on Bill Bennett's "Morning In America," as recorded by Think Progress.

In discussing inner city culture, Ryan referenced Charles Murray, a social scientist who has claimed that, "One reason that we still have poverty in the United States is that a lot of poor people are born lazy."

From now on, when I want to clarify my feelings about the poor, I, too, will reference Charles Murray.

Riddle Me This: Why Is the 2nd Amendment Immutable When the 4th Is Already Gone?

The 4th Amendment: Like Schödinger's cat, it's both alive and dead depending on
a random event, like the NSA deciding, or not, whether the right to privacy exists.

Yes, in today's chief thought experiment, we have a right to privacy depending on something random, like James Clapper deciding how much truthiness we're entitled to.

)

President Barack "Yes we can spy on you" Obama continued the thought experiment by essentially saying that James Clapper should have lied better, or something:

“I think that Jim Clapper himself would acknowledge, and has acknowledged, that he should have been more careful about how he responded,” Obama told CNN in an interview that aired Friday. “His concern was that he had a classified program that he couldn’t talk about, and he was in an open hearing in which he was asked, he was prompted to disclose a program, and so he felt he was caught between a rock and a hard place.”

As far as the 4th Amendment is concerned, then, we see that the president believes it's between a rock and a hard place, in a sort of existential limbo, where truth is very much a Schrödinger's cat, in an unresolved quantum state, such that it's either alive or dead and the reality of its state is unobservable.

Okay then, just so we know.

I'd say it's time to try the thought experiment on the 2nd Amendment, but Wayne Lapierre has already done so:

Wayne Lapierre, and a hell of a lot of Americans, just took out their guns and blew away Schrödinger's cat. They just redefined its fucking quantum state, motherfucker.

See, that wasn't complicated.

A last thought, though: Why do 2nd Amendment advocates react that way for the 2nd Amendment and not the 4th?

Oh, I forgot. They're not worried. They're the good guys. Somewhere between the good guys and the bad guys, Schrödinger's cat lives! Or not. And that's a hell of a state to be in. (Florida?)