Reading List for 10-28-15

The Fake News Food Chain, in which real journalists aren’t able to recognize that the politicians they’re interviewing are parroting garbage factoids from Fox‘s land of make-believe.

After Company Raises Minimum Salary To $70,000, Revenue And Profits Double, in which we discover that Gravity Payments benefits from basic economic principles.  You can read a related article from a while back here.

Brownback satisfaction rating at 18%; Democrats targeting Senate seats, in which 61% of Kansans think the Governor's signature tax policies have either been a "failure" or a "tremendous failure."

Billionaire Hobby Lobby owners probed in looting of artifacts for Bible museum, in which the Customs Department finds suspicious packages en route to OKC.

Can taxing the rich reduce inequality? You bet it can!   in which we learn something we learned 50+ years ago.

GOP candidates stumble badly on fake historical quotes, in which a lot of candidates go all David Barton in their campaign speeches. 

"The official response here in Oklahoma is based on pedestrian self-interest about how important the energy sector is here on an economic level and just basic ignorance. It’s important to note that the state has a low college graduate rate and has cut education funding the most of any state in the nation in the last several years. This is the state that has produced the world’s most infamous global warming denier, U.S Sen. Jim Inhofe, and is home to The Oklahoman, one of the most conservative major metropolitan newspapers in the country. The newspaper supports Inhofe and ridicules anyone concerned about this issue.
"Oklahoma will go down in history as a world cesspool of ignorance and corporate greed as the planet is slowly but surely destroyed. Hyperbole? I see nothing here certainly and not much in the world that’s happening that makes me feel such a statement is over the top."  Dr. Kurt Hochenauer

The Hillary of Foxworld

In Foxworld, all of the above is true,

the findings of seven investigative committees to the contrary notwithstanding.

http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2014/11/republicans-finally-admit-there-no-benghazi-scandal

Labeling By Policy

The New York Times published an article explaining what Bernie Sanders means when he says he's a Democratic Socialist.  The article is a good read, but the Facebook group Moderates for Bernie introduced the article with an excellent summary: 

WHAT IS BERNIE SANDERS?
Bernie Sanders is primarily a social democrat, calls himself a democratic socialist, and is called by others a socialist running as a Democrat. No wonder so many people are confused! Unfortunately, these very similar names represent very different political ideologies.
So let’s try to clear things up a bit.
...

SOCIALISM is a broad economic system involving collective ownership of the means of production. Although there are many different types of socialism, it is most closely associated with the USSR. And USSR labeling is its own mess: it called itself socialist, was called by others communist, and was actually state-capitalist.
 DEMOCRATIC SOCIALISM is a type of socialism that combines the economic collective ownership of the means of production with the political rule by the people (via direct democracy or republic, like we have).
 SOCIAL DEMOCRACY is a type of democracy with a large social safety net and other government-sponsored social programs. Such social programs include any government program that uses private resources (collected via taxes) for the public good. So any politician that wants the government to continue building roads and maintaining fire departments is a social democrat.
 Bernie Sanders and the Europeans you hear him talking about are primarily social democrats. They may want more/bigger social programs than other politicians, but everybody wants approximately the same system of government. One real difference is that Sanders & co also have a tiny bit of democratic socialism sprinkled in; e.g. a single-payer healthcare system socializes health *insurance* (NOT healthcare itself). But for the most part, Sanders and the Europeans want to maintain privately owned businesses.
 Of course, labels – especially political labels – change meaning over time. So even with full understanding of the current definitions, it makes sense to focus on specific policies, rather than labels.

Reading List 10-11-15

When a photo of your stillborn baby appears in a viral antiabortion video, in which a stolen photo becomes a prop in a political debate.

The staggering cost of day care when you make only the minimum wage, in which we find that a babysitter in Washington costs more than some people's yearly income.

The Attack on Voting Rights, in which Alabama, et al, continues to restrict access to the polls.

Somehow his colleagues have not managed to convince Ted Cruz that the negotiating strategy of "we will blow up the country unless you change the laws in ways we like" is a losing strategy in a country in which it is considered a bad thing to give in to blackmail...
The curious thing is that there are Senators Cruz and Lee--and fifty Republicans in the House--who think that their constituents care so little about the well-being of the country that they applaud threats of “we will damage the country unless you change the laws in ways we like”…--Brad DeLong

They saw inflation where it did not exist and, when the official data did not bear out their predictions, invoked conspiracy theories. They denied that monetary or fiscal policy could support job growth, while still working to direct federal spending to their own districts. They advocated discredited monetary systems, like the gold standard. --Ben Bernanke

Every month, about the same number of Americans are killed with guns as the number of Americans killed in the Sept. 11 attacks, Waldman reasoned, but the Republican response to those deaths was, and remains, wildly different. For elected Republicans, the gun death toll, versus that of a terrorist attack, is “simply not meaningful enough to justify any action to not even restrict, but merely to inconvenience Americans’ ability to own as many guns as they want and to get them as easily as they want,” wrote Waldman.  --Rachel Brody

What you need to understand about political commentary these days — including the de facto commentary that poses as news analysis, or even reporting — is that most of the people doing it have both a professional and an emotional stake in portraying the two parties as symmetric, equally good or bad on policy issues and general behavior. To stray from this pose of even-handedness is to be labeled a partisan — and to admit that the parties aren’t the same, after all, would mean admitting that you’ve been wrong about the most basic features of the situation for years. --Paul Krugman

People who really worry about government debt don’t propose huge tax cuts for the rich, only partly offset by savage cuts in aid to the poor and middle class, and base all claims of debt reduction on unspecified savings to be announced on some future occasion. ... --Paul Krugman