Last outpost of crazy headlines: Boehner's bartender

"John Boehner’s bartender planned to poison him at Ohio country club"

That's only part of the wackiness. Let's see--according to this news story, the bartender turned himself in, perhaps because he was trying to get his bartending job back! 

He also claimed to be Jesus Christ and Boehner is the devil. Is this a case of someone taking a statement from a conservative source ("Boehner is the devil" or some such) literally instead of figuratively?

Well, probably not. I recognize this as manic behavior from someone who's gone off their meds, and I mean this literally, not as an internet insult. I've seen it often and in different forms, and once even called the applicable counseling service three days before the person ended up in a psych unit. Bipolar disorder is a common mental health issue among us wacky humans. I bet everyone knows someone with it. But I digress... 

Still, I wish everyone would desist from calling others 'the devil.' Some people can't process those statements appropriately, and we don't really need the vitriol. Give it a rest... and please drink and talk responsibly!

Image: onekit.enr-corp.com

Lies on campus... or rape on campus?

I have little idea what is really happening on college campuses. Is there an epidemic of rape? I don't know. A journalist and the editors of Rolling Stone, who should know this better than me, published an account of a gang rape on campus that turned out to have a lot of holes. The complaining female student used a pseudonym for herself and everyone else involved.

One problem - Shoddy journalism

However, unlike many fabricated news stories, this one isn't a total lie thrown together from pieces of others' stories with generous exaggerations. People treating this story as only an example of bad journalism are missing an important point.

Yes, there was incredibly shoddy journalism with zero verification of the story. This story could easily have been totally false--a complete fabrication on the part of the woman/student telling it. We all know that this sometimes happens: Tawana Brawley wasn't raped by police officers and an assistant DA, and Susan Smith's children weren't murdered by a black man who carjacked them.

Another problem - Sexual assault at frats

In this case, elements of the story do appear to be true. The three friends have come forward and told a different story on the record. The victim called them in the early morning, was clearly traumatized, and told about a much-anticipated date turning into coerced oral sex by five frat members. That's not a gang rape by seven men, but it's not nothing either.

Yet even this part of the story may not be true. The actual name of the 'date' seems to been have fabricated by the accuser. Text messages were exchanged, but none of the three friends ever met the 'date' and it turns out that no student of that name ever attended the university. The accuser seems to have lied to her friends years ago, and kept on lying--to rape crisis counselors, to survivors' groups, and to a gullible journalist. (Just an observation, but gullibility isn't a good trait for a journalist.)

More problems - Student destructiveness and irresponsibility

Nonetheless, is there a major problem on campuses? I live in a college town, and my experience is that, yes, there are big problems on campus. There is a drinking and partying culture that sometimes runs rampant and ends up in riot, injury, and ridiculous amounts of property destruction. Maybe the riot part is getting better (or maybe it's just reported with less outrage). It's not hard to imagine that rape is a problem too, especially in light of the rapes of a minor in Steubenville, as just one example.

How should we deal with these issues? That's a very difficult question. We have a concentration of people who are of legal age, so they can't be treated as minors. However, they aren't generally very mature.

My background in psychology says that when you want to change behavior, you have to manipulate the contingencies. You have to understand what will motivate people to change in the direction you want them to go. But this doesn't always work, as any addictions counselor, police officer, teacher, or parent will tell you.

To understand how complex this can be, read this fascinating article about fraternities (by Caitlin Flanagan, the same author that inspired this post). Fraternities want to be places where college men have a lot of fun. That has motivated them to figure out legal and financial ways to avoid the legal and financial liability associated with that fun (which is often fueled by alcohol, drugs, and poor judgment). How are you going to change their motivation so that avoiding responsibility is no longer their goal?

That is why I doubt that new rules at the University of Virginia will be enough to change the situation where a story of a gang rape or coerced oral sex in a fraternity was all too believable.

Image: galleryhip.com

Update 3/15/15. Two important stories involving fraternities this week. First is the video of frat members from the University of Oklahoma chanting an anti-black racist song during a chartered bus trip. Second is very sexual, racist, and arrogant email from last year that includes the valedictory "Fuck consent." It reminds me of the slogan "No means yes, yes means anal." That slogan caused the closure of a couple of fraternities. Gang-rape isn't too hard to imagine at a frat, is it?

Update 3/17/15. Another frat behaving badly.

GOPers hate their House leaders

It's no surprise that John Boehner held on to his position as Speaker of the House, despite all the conservative media that seem to hate him. The conservative media and their zipperhead followers seemed to think Boehner was about to be overthrown. They unfortunately overlooked the reality that most of the country and the GOP isn't as right-wing as they are, and they are in fact a rather small minority.

However, in one way the Tea Party types are correct. No one seems to like John Boehner. Who is standing up and lauding him for his clarity of vision or great leadership?  In contrast, Nancy Pelosi is frequently praised by her caucus. This is a strange difference... so I must investigate, or at least cogitate and speculate.

Looking at this historically, it seems that the GOP wasn't enthralled with their last Speaker either. Denny Hastert wasn't a fiery Speaker either that many in the GOP seem to long for. The last Speaker who had some of that fire was Newt Gingrich. But unfortunately, Newt was also rather too blustery and egotistical, so he resigned when his leadership proved counterproductive.

So it seems that the GOP has been fated in the past two decades to never have a satisfying leader in the House. If they managed to elect another popular firebrand, he would probably cause too many headaches as Newt did. Most GOP representatives seem to know this, so they've elected more moderate leaders for their last two speakers.

These leaders might be taking on the Speaker's office as a favor to the party. They know they won't be popular, and that the conservative media will revile them, but someone has to sacrifice and take one for the team. That's what I think Boehner is doing. He has taken on a nearly impossible job, and will get no thanks for it. Maybe there are some perks that he really likes, such as tossing rebels off committees or perhaps assigning them tiny basement offices.

I'm afraid I can imagine all too well that it's satisfying to 1) keep your caucus from exploding, and 2) mete out petty punishments to the poorly behaved children in the caucus. Yikes! I might have the personality to be a GOP Speaker of the House. Quick, shoot me!

Image: dancingczars.wordpress.com

Extras. Bernstein series on Boehner here and here and here.

Will we see a battle for the GOP's soul?

Is the GOP the party of the white working class traditionalists, or a modern business-friendly party? Is it for crony capitalism where everyone gets a piece, or for small government?

This has been a big question ever since Reagan pretended that he was for small government, but never followed through. So many Republicans since then have winked and lied to the electorate about being for small guvmint, and the lie has taken root with conservative talk radio and the non-elites who think they are now the heart of the GOP.

First contender - Louie Gohmert

Maybe we will see the answer to this question in the next few years. Some of the Tea Party types are again hopeful that they can overthrow the business/establishment GOP leaders, as Louie Gohmert challenges John Boehner for leadership in the House.

To most people, Louie Gohmert is the embarrassing fool who talks about the dangers of letting gays (with their strength-sapping sex-same massage techniques) in the military. He probably denies evolution, and doesn't think that we should have freedom of religion for non-Judeochristians. I don't know that Gohmert espouses these religious views, but it would be all of the same piece if he did.

However, to some people, Louie Gohmert "is a good conservative- he’s been on Hannity a number of times." Wow, to some people, Louie Gohmert isn't a laughingstock! Who would have thunk it?

Nonetheless, it's highly unlikely that Gohmert will prevail as he tries to win the speakership. The true conservatives will probably be thwarted by the establishment yet again.

Weightier contender - Jeb Bush

The bigger contest will be for the 2016 GOP presidential nomination. Jeb Bush looks like he's going to run, and he isn't going to pretend to be more conservative than he is. He's sitting out an anti-immigrant conference (or at least that's the spin from the liberal MSM).

If Jeb Bush can blatantly run as a moderately conservative Republican and win the nomination, that will say a lot about the GOP. It will be a repudiation of the trope of 'true conservatism,' meaning the conservatism that desires to roll back almost everything since the 1960's. It would be a boon to rationality for this kind of conservatism to be defeated because this conservatism is chock-full of contradictions. They can't decide whether they are for or against Medicare, for or against Social Security. Many lie to themselves about how the government actually spends our tax dollars. They imagine that they are taxed heavily and benefit lightly while deadbeats make out like bandits. They refuse to see how they (or Granny) are actually the huge beneficiaries of taxation.

It would be great if Jeb Bush would run as a conservative who looks at the budget and tells the truth about it. It's good whenever any politician in any party does that. I don't know that Jeb Bush will do this, and I'm not counting on it, but maybe he'll get closer to this than any other GOP politician. And it could be that his wing of the party, including business people who regularly look at balance sheets, will be ready to hear that kind of message.

I keenly hope for this, but not because I believe in Jeb Bush or because I'm tired of the Dems. I hope for a heavyweight in either party who will run a campaign based on hard numbers instead of inflated hopes and vaguely sketched proposals. What would Americans do if someone confronted them with the truth? That would be a telling experience!

Image: rackjite.com

Extra. Another bozo running against Boehner: Ted Yoho.

Update 1/7/15. I have to chuckle about how the conservative media caters to (or lies to) their audience. These guys don't have the numbers, but their media outlets never tell them that hard truth. Here's just one example:

"I am tired of all this big talk from all these people who keep losing. And losing. And losing. They talk this big game, but they still haven’t defunded Obamacare. They still haven’t gutted the Environmental Protection Agency or shut down the Education Department. Call me a bad loser, but it is well past time for these people to shut up all their talk and start winning." 

Even in his rant against big talk, the author still doesn't acknowledge that the policies don't have the support at the ballot box.

An unsettled argument about the Great Depression

What if the US owed its former marvelously robust middle class to anti-competitive regulations from Franklin Roosevelt? Would that make the heads of conservatives and libertarians explode? Well, folks, especially those from the aforementioned groups, that is a very strong possibility.

Lots of politically-minded people have reasons to try to tear down FDR's legacy. (I suppose a similar number have political reasons to bolster it. I'm not neutral, but, as always, I tend to bow to evidence.) A gem fell in the laps of anti-FDR folks in the form of a study from two UCLA economists claiming that some FDR policies slowed recovery from the Great Depression by seven years. Specifically:

"So he came up with a recovery package that would be unimaginable today, allowing businesses in every industry to collude without the threat of antitrust prosecution and workers to demand salaries about 25 percent above where they ought to have been, given market forces. The economy was poised for a beautiful recovery, but that recovery was stalled by these misguided policies."

Suppose you don't focus on the second half of that paragraph (the stalling of a 'beautiful recovery'), but instead focus on the policies that allowed businesses to collude as long as they paid their workers more.

Wow! This sounds like paying factory workers well. They can then afford to buy homes, let their children stay in school, enjoy occasional vacations, and generally live a decent life due to their decent wages. This also sounds like the American dream.

So there are all sorts of conservatives and libertarians beating up on FDR, but perhaps he was responsible for the well-paid, productive US factory workers who were the backbone of the halycon 1950's. When conservatives and libertarians say that we can have a much better, more productive economy, aren't they subliminally asking us to imagine the 50's? I think so. I don't think they're asking us to envision the periods when steel companies crushed strikes or when meatpacking companies cared little about the deaths of their workers.

What if the greatest period in US history is the product of the paternalist and socialist tendencies of FDR, and not the due to the vitality of American industries and the work ethic of their employees?

Well, if we're honest, no one thinks we can go back to the 1950's. We were the only industrialized country that hadn't been devastated by war, so we didn't have the international competition that we have today. We also have tapped out some of the resources we had back then, which is another reason we can't go back.

We can't go back to times that conservatives and libertarians consider 'better.' However, we can't use the same policies that FDR used either. Would we accept public works jobs that paid the present-day equivalent of $1 a day (as the WPA paid) and housed workers in dormitories? I can't imagine that we would. No, solutions to today's economic and employment problems aren't going to be found among New Dealers, or Austrian/libertarians, or nostalgic tea partyers, or staunch supply-siders.

. . . but maybe we'll try them all before we realize that.

WPA sewing project

Image: livingnewdeal.org

Extra. More revisionist history about the Depression that isn't quite accurate. A fascinating discussion of the monetary policy before and after the crash of 1929.

Update 2/20/17. Possibly some more evidence of this. From a fascinating article about how modern capitalism is about to face a huge pushback, here are two graphs showing how workers are losing their share of the economic pie while the rich are taking it:

Image: macrobusiness.com.au

This isn't supposed to be a zero-sum situation. Supposedly, we can all get richer together, so it doesn't matter if the ultra rich become ultra richer. But maybe we're experiencing that it does matter.

Update 10/25/17. Some extra information. A graph showing income gain (or loss) over 6 decades. Yes, increases in income used to be shared more evenly across the spectrum than it is now. This article credits the Wagner Act of 1935 concerning collective bargaining for the increase in workers' wages.

Update on voter fraud

Prior to the November 2014 election, I collected several articles on voter fraud, a topic I've discussed before. The usual spiel on voter fraud is 1) it's committed by the Democrats regularly (and is the only reason they win, according to some), 2) let's laugh at the zany claims made by those zany conservative hicks.

I don't want to do a piece that falls into either of these categories, but what's left? How about a sober evaluation of the claims? Here's what I found:

Local investigation in Florida of non-citizens voting. This seems like a level-headed initial investigation into real (not imagined) fraudulent voting by non-citizens. However, it leaves unanswered how these non-citizens ended up on the voter roles. Were they registered by default or by honest error when they obtained or renewed a driver's license? Were they registered in a voter drive by unscrupulous operators? Is the mistake and/or fraud different in many of the cases? We don't have those answers, and the non-citizens aren't shining much light on how this happened. The reporters aren't doing a good job either because they cite 100 possible cases, but not how wide an area they came from? Is it just one county, all of Florida, or what? Perhaps this isn't so much a real investigation as a bait for a particular segment of the audience.

Non-citizens voting in Virginia. This is skirmish in the voter fraud war. The Electoral Board did some research using juror records, and found approx. 300 possible non-citizens who were on the voter roles. They forwarded the information to the local prosecutor, but got no response.

Here are some others:

• Iowa cases, 200 not 3.5K.
• Non-citizens voting far fewer than the margin of victory in Ohio.
• No non-citizens voting in Boulder. Another similar case of GOPers trying to root out voter fraud. The local DA's response: "We don't need state officials sending us on wild goose chases for political reasons."
• Isolated fraud incident in Colorado.

Do these cases change anything? No. The typical charges of 'massive voter fraud' originate with conservative talk radio demagogues, and these guys don't care about truth, evidence, or investigations. So we'll continue to hear these claims of voter fraud, and they'll be unchanged by the reality of minimal numbers. The only reason I bother to note this information is in preparation to refute the argument. Not that I'll convince any true believers, but sometimes I just want to get some truth out there.

Voter fraud! (assumed)

Image: norcalblogs.com

Update 3/4/17. Here's a report from Ohio on one type of voter fraud--non-citizen voting. In 2017, that would be a staggering 82 of them. I guess the million of non-citizens voting for Clinton came from other states.

Brilliant or crazy: Was Moynihan a neocon?

I have to repeat the headline: is it a brilliant insight or insanity to list Daniel Patrick Moynihan as a neocon?

You may be wondering where this crazy notion came from. Honestly, I never would have thought of it myself, so of course it came from some reading on the web. Specifically, it came from this article:

"A historian of American intellectual thought would probably conclude that once there were actually serious neoconservative thinkers like Daniel Bell, Nathan Glaser, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and Irving Kristol who published original and ground-breaking works on social and economic policy, some of which have become classics in the field. But when it comes to the field of international relations, neoconservatism has failed to produce any great thinkers, and will instead be remembered for its many pundits and operators, or policy entrepreneurs..."

The article is a reflection or complaint about neoconservative foreign policy, and is worth reading. But what really lit my fuse was the reference to Moynihan as a neocon. Is it possible that he actually was a neocon?

I have a few memories of Moynihan, who was senator from New York (my home state) from 1977 to 2001. He seemed to have a clearer insight into problems than other politicians, and he wasn't afraid to depart from the party line. In that vein, he raised concerns about welfare and its effect in breaking down black families. He was decades ahead of others with that insight (though it doesn't tell the whole story of family breakdown).

I know I can't rely on my memory to answer the question of whether Moynihan was a neocon, so I went to my constant friend Google. It brought me to another fascinating article about Moynihan's long history in politics. The article contains a hint that perhaps Moynihan was a neocon:

"He had predicted the collapse of the Soviet Union as early as 1979 (all those years spent studying ethnic conflicts and failed economic development projects were not in vain). As the Berlin Wall came down, he began to rethink the world in the most sweeping terms. He decided that that moment was a once-in-a-generation opportunity to establish global rule of law. Needless to say, that project didn’t come to anything. But his letters on the subject still make for fascinating reading."

Luckily, he couldn't have been full neocon because he voted against authorization of the first Gulf War. Perhaps he could be classified as a social neocon since he voted for outlawing partial-birth abortions (more properly called dilation and extraction abortions). But his voting record is quite mixed--against welfare reform (strangely), against the Defense of Marriage Act--so he doesn't seem like a social conservative either.

The upshot is that it seems a stretch to define Moynihan as a neocon. Phew, that's a relief!

Image: urbanland.uli.org