Rudy Giuliani, cheating on YOUR taxes

Part of the DailyKos name-that-scandal contest.

When it's ripe

Poll: Bullshit Is Most Important Issue For 2008 Voters

After all, bullshit is important to me.

(Hat tip Philosoraptor.)

NYTimes off the reservation

The New York Times treads right up to the line and, though it doesn't quite say openly that Rudy Giuliani is a compulsive liar, cheat, and bullshitter, nowadays, that's close enough for plaudits.

Here's the clearest of many illustrations:

In a recent radio advertisement by the campaign about his health care proposal, Mr. Giuliani repeated another false statement that he had been using on the campaign trail.

Frank Luntz's take on the Republican attitude toward bullshit is also instructive:

“When he talks about New York, people see it,” Mr. Luntz said of Mr. Giuliani, “and they feel it, and if a number isn’t quite right, or is off by a small amount, nobody will care, because it rings true to them.”

Whether something's true or not doesn't matter. Only fooling the people with their feelings matters.

There's also some compulsive reportorial "balance". Both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama get dinged. (I bet John Edwards wishes he were in the story, too, even to get corrected!)

Obama exaggerated the degree of increase in the public debt. He said "doubled". The Times should have served its readers better by noting the facts: From Jan. 20, 2001 to today, the national debt has increased from $5.7 trillion to $9.1 trillion, an increase of a mere 60%.

No time at the moment to check Hillary's NIH statement.

Update: Hard to be sure what Hillary said or meant to say without context, but it is true that NIH funding has increased in every area under Duhbya.

Ten bucks on the Washington Spectator

OK, I have plenty to read, and I usually toss all the offers right into the recycle bin. But the Washington Spectator started its offer letter this way:

I won't mince words. Our government is run by criminals and liars, the opposition party lacks a backbone, and the corporate-controlled media gave up reporting most real news a long time ago.

Tic-tac-toe!

So, I'm going to have a first hand look. Sadly, I can't help Molly Ivins, but at least I can send a check in the direction of Lou Dubose.

Middle school

Mike Huckabee wants to be a political Jackie Gleason, "Boom, Hillary, to Mars." Personally, I'd prefer to have grown-ups in charge, after eight years of the Bushist faux grown-ups. But Huckabee correctly assesses the maturity of the core Republican voters, many of whom never graduated emotionally from middle school.

And, of course, CNN calls Huckabee's juvenile taunt "witty". Not just a quip, but witty! I can't believe how debased our national conversation is.

Perfect illustration

Hillary is toying with asking Colin Powell to help restore America's reputation. Huh? He had his chance, and he completely blew it. This is the perfect illustration why I don't like Hillary. For cryin' out loud, can we please have a goddamn change!

Boltin' from Bolten

Tattered remnants of Josh Bolten's Labor Day deadline to follow the rest of the Norway rats (Rove, Gonzo, ...). The AP lives Memento every day but doesn't take notes. Or maybe it doesn't read them. Whatever.

Al Hubbard worked on Social Security, SCHIP, global warming, and a proposal I had not previously heard about to tax health insurance benefits. Yeah, that's good for the middle and working classes. Good riddance!

One popular idea

On the Republican platform.

Republicans love tax cuts. They especially love cuts that help what Duhbya lovingly called his base when he appeared in black tie before a very wealthy donor group in 2000.

It's ironic that only when Duhbya is joking are his words true. It's inexplicable that the Democrats have not played that clip over and over again. Someday I'll hunt it up and link to it. But I digress.

Of course, the GOP loves tax cuts. Who doesn't? Even liberals like me would prefer to pay less - fairly, of course - if only all other things would remain equal. Opposition to taxes is the policy position where the Republicans are best aligned with Americans at large.

The Republicans love tax cuts so much that they live in a universe where two plus two may not equal four. Their rhetoric frequently changes the plain meaning of numbers, not just words. In their lexicon, a vote not to raise taxes is a tax cut. On the other hand, a Democrat's vote not to cut taxes is a tax increase. Then, the GOPers count these instances up, including all the procedural votes as if they were distinct proposals. Ordinary people would call this sleight of tongue lying, but the press plays along.

I can't wait for the Republicans to take this one step further. I don't see why they would scruple against saying that a tax that continues in force from a previous year is not a tax increase this year. After all, they seem to think that the only legitimate tax rate is vanishingly above 0%. I once played poker with a seemingly good guy who proposed in all seriousness that even a flat tax was unfair to the rich - that each person should be assessed the same dollar amount regardless of income, much less wealth. Of course, he worked in the rarefied world of private finance, where the only poor people he ever saw were beggars on the streets of Boston.

I suppose the government should live off nothing like an air fern. Well, except for the military-industrial complex - they can't be expected to survive without public funding.

The Republicans are not satisfied to distribute their tax cuts evenly. That's not what they're about. They want to change the tax burden of the wealthy, and you just can't do that if all you're rebating to them is $300. Those greedheads need five figures at least to notice.

What the GOP has found, however, is that your average middle class American can be bought off for $300. Normal people do notice a couple of days wages.

Best of all, this chicken feed is hardly noticeable to the Treasury, which is under dramatically more duress from the self-entitled wealthy.

It's shocking that the American middle class acquiesces to this bad bargain. Even capuchin monkeys show outrage at unfair treatment - if one gets a grape, they all want grapes, not some lesser treat. Yet we Homo sapiens accept a few crumbs from the floor around our betters' table!

The press does notice this, especially conscientious stalwarts like Paul Krugman. It's hard to imagine that anyone who is paying attention could miss the brute, incontrovertible fact that the Bushist tax cuts tilted overwhelmingly to the rich - and overwhelmingly again to the very rich. But that's just the problem: Americans are not paying attention. If they were, they'd be in the streets with pitchforks.

In any case, the press doesn't let a few numbers interfere with the tax cut narrative of something for everyone. Reporters never call bullshit on their captiously deceitful source of Republican spin. They seem to think that spin is valuable to them and that the spinners wouldn't bless them with it if they were to evaluate it as semi-numerate adults. Or maybe it's those exclusive cocktail parties again that the reporters are just dying to be invited to, like uncool teenagers who want the jocks and cheerleaders to like them. As if!

If the Republicans really wanted to help everyone, they wouldn't have started with the inheritance tax. Grover Norquist labelled it the death tax, and the Democrats didn't respond by calling it the Paris Hilton tax or the billionaire playboy tax. Allowing the tax-free passage of estates worth more than $3 million to heirs who didn't earn them and making that a pseudo-populist issue is a dramatic accomplishment of wool-pulling. Oh, those poor, poor trust fund babies, how they have suffered!

Sincere broad-based tax cutting would start with FICA and Medicare, the slightly regressive, mostly flat payroll taxes that fund Social Security and health care. Instead, Republicans tell us that all those trillions we've paid since Social Security taxes were responsibly raised in 1983 to anticipate the demographic bulge of the baby boomers went to fund the rest of the government and we won't pay them back. That stance is the only rationale for claiming that SSA is in financial trouble.

Sincere broad-based tax cutting would have long since relieved the middle class from inflating into the sights of the alternative minimum tax. But the Republicans haven't done that, have they? They prefer that middle class taxpayers feel the bite of a tax intended to make sure the wealthy pay fairly, in hope that they'll stay in the bad bargain that delivers those tiny crumbs.

Disinformation from GOP, Inc.

More on the Republican platform.

In the face of the unpopularity of the Republican platform, the disinformation was easy. First, they worked the refs assiduously for a long time. If the media continued to report facts and call bullshit on the bullshitters, there was no hope.

But advertising provided the perfect model of field-tested deceit that was credible to mass audiences. It had worked beautifully with cigarettes for years. Clearly, for a manageable price - since corporations used it every day - it could convince Americans to believe many things that were not true.

Advertising was also a way to exert power over the media. After all, corporations were already paying news outlets for the eyeballs of their readers. Why weren't the newspapers, radio stations, and TV networks grateful to the very people who were paying the bills? Instead, the journalists would actually bite the hand that fed them. That had to stop. But how?

The answer was to appeal to the vanity, laziness, and greed of the reporters and editors. If flattery, convenience, and sales worked with products on essentially all Americans, why wouldn't it work on underpaid hacks?

Appealing to laziness was the easiest. Corporations had been writing press releases forever, but that hadn't done the trick.

Small papers might edit PR's pearls lightly and print them verbatim - the desired result - but hoity-toity outfits like the New York Times would still make Mobil actually pay for its advertorials on the op-ed page. Their flacks just didn't have enough letters following their names, or failing that, at least some impressive title. Manager of public relations just couldn't hold a candle to senior fellow.

What the conservatives needed to thrust their propaganda was to dress it up as serious intellect, an alternate academy. In the 1970s, they increased funding of the American Enterprise Institute by a factor of eight. In 1973, they started the Heritage Foundation. In 1979, they started the Claremont Institute and the Pacific Research Institute. In 1982, they started the Manhattan Institute (motto: "Turning intellect into influence"). John Stossel is a trustee, but he never thrusts the propaganda, right? More important, they turned their sights to the nefariously independent judiciary by starting the Federalist Society, expropriating the good name of historic liberals for their reactionary cause.

From all these hifalutin' drunk tanks, uh, think tanks, the conservatives generated a huge volume of thinly sourced "research" that was very useful when planting stories in the willfully naive press. Like their creationist friends, they started with their ideologically correct conclusions and searched for fig leaf rationales to fortify them, not even bothering to justify them. It's enough to fog the subject with doubt so that people can believe what their prejudices tell them.

Besides, a white paper is sooo much more appealing than a press release.

Since the conservatives have ready access to piles of cash (Olin, Hertz, Scaife, to name a few), they found several ways to reward helpful journalists, so that they could buy houses on Martha's Vineyard despite toiling in a thoroughly middle class profession. First, of course, was the creation of parallel, ideological media such as Fox News and the Washington Times. This provided good conduits for cash to right-thinking (and I do mean right) journalists. Just look how often Anne Kornblut shows up on Fox in a red suit. Then, there's the rubber chicken circuit, which pays thousands to business-friendly reporters. Hello, Cokie and Stephen Roberts. Then of course, there are also the appearance fees for laughing along with Rush Limbaugh, Michael Savage, Sean Hannity, Bill O'Reilly, and hundreds of other wingnut gasbags on talk radio.

The conservatives are businessmen, of course, so they want value for their money. Accordingly, they exploited their foundations to start the gravy train rolling for young conservatives who otherwise would wind up drinking three-martini lunches near Wall St. Ramesh Ponnuru Dinesh D'Souza, for example, couldn't reason his way out of Hanover, but he has spent the last twenty years suckling at the teat of rightwing private foundations. Whew, at least he's not taking public money for his sinecures. (Corrected, with apologies to Ponnuru and thanks to Ben in comments.)

Ironically, the wingers have proven willing to buy and pulp hundreds of thousands of unreadable books in order to subsidize their greatest thinkers and writers. Maybe it's not so ironic. Their core constituencies are not great readers of anything other than the Wall Street Journal or the King James Bible. It is ironic that a subsidy method pioneered by Jim Wright would be acquired and used by Newt Gingrich, the very man who used its scandal to bring down Wright's Speakership, especially given its existing popularity in the Conservative Book Club and Regnery Press.

I suspect that conservatives also provide direct payments to favored journalists, but I don't have any evidence for this. If it's true, it's also easy to hide.

With all this money and ease floating around, maybe flattery is not really necessary. And, clearly, conservatives have not flattered journalists as a group. What they have done instead is to coopt journalists into the ruling class in Washington. The price has been low - a few shrimp here, a few canapes there. Invitations to the cool parties, once punished by their peer group, become the currency of influence. That's why Tim Russert is "tough" in the useless way of always reinforcing the conventional narrative.

Then, there were the end of the Fairness Doctrine and the erosion of ownership limits. What a bonus! The moneyed interests could now employ economies of scale to commoditize conservative messages, as they own more and more of the media.

The GOP board of directors probably didn't have the vision to set the steps from the beginning and then execute a fixed plan. That probably would not have worked in any case. Flexibility is essential in any campaign, and they read situations and media well and improvised well.

Update: Someone has been ego-surfing. No harm in that. How'd you think I found the link, anyway? I knew there had to be a reason this post got comments! The NRO denizens were probably starving for some place to comment.

Update (2/12/2012):  I had left out the word not in the sentence about the King James bible and the Wall Street Journal.

Republican platform

Finally getting back to how we got where we are today.

What Republicans want to do to America is not popular. Why have they had so much success implementing their platform?

First, what is their platform? I divide it into two parts, what the party elders really want and what issues they use to win votes. Naturally, there are issues that cross the line and play in both parts. There is even a small amount of heterodoxy in the Republican Party since it is a coalition between economic and social conservatives.

Still, the economic conservatives dominate the party's power. They toss the religious conservatives a bone now and then (and sometimes the fundie foot soldiers do notice that they are being taken for a ride), but the wealthy interests always come first.

So, the real platform:

• Low taxes for the wealthy
• Power concentrated in the hands of a few
• The end of unions
• Return to economic organization closer to feudalism than to laissez-faire
  
• The end of science-based and meritocratic regulation
• Foreign policy based on the economic interests of their real constituency
  
• Oh, and even lower taxes for the wealthy

Of course, these are all fundamentally elite economic issues with concentrated power and wealth as the end goals.

This sort of platform is, needless to say, difficult to sell to well-informed voters in a democracy. The Republicans have responded over the past 40 years with a mixture of:

• Disinformation
• Distraction
• Wedge issues

Coming when I get around to it: Details on the Republican tactical mixture.

Nice little business ya got there

Shame if anyt'ing happened to it. Powerful software companies threatening small businesses. Obviously, they're not doing it for deterrent effect. They're maximizing revenue. Would it be impolite to call it an extortion racket?

The asymmetry of power is what concerns me. This is what happens when campaign funding-raising is done from corporate interests, who then get to write the laws in a way that helps them.

SMOC SLAPPs

While I agree with most of SMOC's work, know and respect a member of its board, and don't find it hard to believe that both officials and private citizens may have crossed the line into bigotry, suing people who are exercising their Constitutional rights is bad and actionable when a corporation does it, and it's bad and should be actionable when a public agency does it.

I'll be interested to learn the specific allegations. If they are about speech, this lawsuit is worse than misguided; it's an abuse.

Count the votes

Imagine, a close election followed by a hand recount in order to get the result right, not just a fast result.

Self-satisfaction

Everyone who comments on the news is self-important, not excluding someone like me who doesn't even have much of an audience.

What's annoying about Katharine Seelye is her complete self-satisfaction. She's just thrilled she's writing about convention blogging nine months early. She's so smug to think that bloggers and useless MSMers like her will be interviewing each other in 2008. Most likely, she'll be interviewing bloggers, not the other way around. Not that I'm important enough to be there, but why would any of us want to hear the conventional wisdom from her?

And of course Seelye, typically, gives Republicans equal credit for something they're hardly even doing. You watch, their bloggers will all be from the MSM, trying to be cool and failing abjectly.

Bite your tongue

It's hard to understand how a teacher in the Sudan could be so obtuse as to not know that everything associated with the Prophet Muhammad is subject to primitive taboos and hypersensitivity. Here in the U.S., with only small direct exposure to Islam, I nonetheless refrain from nicknaming co-workers named Muhammad, in case 'Mo' would be offensive.

The power of names is a curious subject, not limited to Islam. Why else would an entire Commandment be wasted on taking the Lord's name in vain? Nonbelievers like me could suggest many other topics that seem to us more important or at least slip it into the prohibition of graven idols, but Yahweh put both of them into the top ten separately. Oops, there I go, putting vowels into the Tetragrammaton, which of course I shouldn't be using at all.

I have also heard Christians from evangelical Protestants to mainstream Catholic priests utter the name Jesus in self-conscious tones of piety. Jesus Christ, what's up with that? I also remember my own youthful and failed attempts to strip these petty blasphemies from my speech.

J.K. Rowling wrote the latest naming taboo for He-who-must-not-be-named. I always cheered Harry's casual use of Voldemort, even when his elders were uncomfortable.

Still, the Sudanese response is wildly disproportionate, typical of sharia advocates throughout the Islamic world. No doubt there's a thread of misogyny in it. Let's lash another uncovered Western slut! Yay! Honestly, the irresistibility of female skin and hair to fundamentalist Muslims is something they confess every time they put their chattel women in another shapeless bag.

Can Islamic societies ever be truly pluralistic? Not without the liberation of Muslim women. If they're married to a man named Muhammad, they've got to be able to yell his name in less than pious tones.

Update: Another thought - this is a great object lesson for the 7-year-old students in the severe limits that sharia places on democracy. Religious law can be such a potent tool for tyrants.

Case of missing perspective

OK, I'm a New England Patriots fan. Yes, I think they could go undefeated and win the Super Bowl. But I have no desire to replace Yankees fans from the 1990s. So, I'm obliged to slam the idiots who wrote the first and the last of these letters.

Both call this objection to running up the score "politically correct". Seriously. It's elementary good sportsmanship not to run up the score. These are the kind of people who can see the offenses of their opponents but not of their team. It would not surprise me to find out that they also believe torture's fine so long as we're the people doing it but is outrageous from anyone else.

Good sportmanship is PC. OK, we liberals who get blamed for PC will take this one.

Beyond vanitas

No idea why I'm blessed with free copies of the Harvard fanzine, 02138. However, as a compulsive reader, I crack it open to see what my most self-involved classmates and fellow alumni most desire in flattery.

The November/December issue (not online yet but presumably destined to show up here) does have a significant story in it, "A Million Little Writers", by Jacob Hale Russell. It explains why there have been so many recent plagiarism scandals at the self-appointed capitol of American intellec-, uh, power elitism (and I say that with the greatest affection).

The long-time practice in the natural sciences has been for grad students to do the experiments but for their professor the principle investigator to be primary author on all publications. I've seen this up close from a responsible scientist who was significantly involved in steering research and in editing resulting papers. I've also known many grad students who resented a system built on expropriation of their work.

The article makes it clear how widely this practice has spread to the social sciences and humanities. Charles Ogletree's accidental theft of verbatim paragraphs from a Yale professor (how embarrassing!) happened because of the mistake of an assistant. Ogletree acted as manager of the team that wrote "his" book but put his own name alone on the title page, having consciously taken ownership of someone else's words, thinking they were written by a research assistant.

It's hard to see how putting your name on someone else's words is not plagiarism just because you hired that person for starvation wages. Yet that seems to be how the academy treats it.

Ogletree, by the way, is by no means the only Harvardian to succumb to this temptation. The story also names Alan Dershowitz, Doris Kearns Goodwin, and Roland Fryer.

In business, this is nothing new. Vice presidents who share credit are as rare as CEOs who share their multimillion dollar bonuses. After all, sharing is regarded as weaknesses among executives and would-be CEOs.

Not that individual artists haven't tried this before. When I read The Executioner's Song, what, 30 years ago, it seemed to me a poorly constructed pastiche of the work of research assistants. It hadn't even been effectively edited, which would have helped immensely to improve a book that had about half as much to say as it actually put into print. And of course, there's the "atelier phenomenon" of Renaissance artists, as Dean of Arts and Sciences Harry Lewis is quoted describing the story's subject.

Shorter Mark Halperin

"I've totally screwed up my readers since 1990, but listen up: A pox on both parties' houses, and here's my 'deeper question'."

Sunday comics blogging - more torture

After you've followed the link on the image to Salon, stick around and read Glenn Greenwald here and here on Joe Klein, Time, and the thorough irresponsibility of the Beltway pundits.

Glasnostalgia

Remember those heady days when Russia was a fledgling democracy trying to build institutions of democratic succession? Well, the new tsar has put an end to that Western nonsense.

As for who lost Russia back to authoritarianism, there's plenty of blame to go around. Most of it belongs with Russians, of course, but a couple of U.S. Presidents failed to engage strongly, and there's then-Harvard economist Jeffrey Sachs, whose plan to reform the post-Soviet economy was an abject failure.

Of course, I'll always remember Duhbya's insight-free assessment of Vladimir Putin's (non-existent) soul. Not that Bill Clinton did much better.