Captain Oblivious

Some comedian - and I’m 98% sure it was the great Tony V - said “Happy Holidays” to the crowd.  And one guy, out in the audience off towards stage right… booed.  That’s right, a guy booed “Happy Holidays.”  Swear to god.

Most of the crowd was perplexed.  Even among East Coast, hyper-informed Boston comedy fans, there are not all that many people who live inside the bubble of the Hatfield-McCoy Appalachia that is cable news. In fact, if the reason for the booing was readily apparent to you, be warned - you’re inside that bubble.

Tony handled it beautifully, and used the moment to segue into a great riff about Christmas. I’d be willing to bet that he’d run up against it before.

“It” is the new, virulent anger against the idea of saying “Happy Holidays” - which is to some people as horrifying and awful as some commie trying to sneak a “Season’s Greetings” by you - which is in turn as bad as a hearty, happy “Fuck Jesus!” apparently.  It’s a sign that you hate Christmas and Christianity and the Constitution and the principles that our nation was founded upon.  It’s a sign that you hate America, just like the President of the United States.

I love me some Adam Felber, I really do.

In late November 2009, more than 1,000 e-mails between scientists at the Climate Research Unit of the U.K.’s University of East Anglia were stolen and made public by an as-yet-unnamed hacker. Climate skeptics are claiming that they show scientific misconduct that amounts to the complete fabrication of man-made global warming. We find that to be unfounded:

• The messages, which span 13 years, show a few scientists in a bad light, being rude or dismissive. An investigation is underway, but there’s still plenty of evidence that the earth is getting warmer and that humans are largely responsible.
• Some critics say the e-mails negate the conclusions of a 2007 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, but the IPCC report relied on data from a large number of sources, of which CRU was only one.
• E-mails being cited as "smoking guns" have been misrepresented. For instance, one e-mail that refers to "hiding the decline" isn’t talking about a decline in actual temperatures as measured at weather stations. These have continued to rise, and 2009 may turn out to be the fifth warmest year ever recorded. The "decline" actually refers to a problem with recent data from tree rings.

Shocker. Anti-science climate change deniers are wrong again. Huh. Who knew?

My very, very strong suspicion is that there has never been a time when there weren’t truly crazy people on all sides of the political spectrum doing their truly crazy things. Maybe 1% or so, or even 0.1% — which is a very large number, when you’re talking about a population of, say, 100 million. 

I tend to agree with this. There are some serious nut jobs in the US. The current media slant (not right or left, towards sensationalism) and internet availability combine to give them massive megaphones. Of course, as a Lefty, I think the conservatives wackos are much, much worse than the liberal ones. But I agree that the liberal ones EXIST, and in roughly similar numbers.

The reality of the contemporary United States is that, even as income inequality has exploded, the average tax rate paid by the top 1 percent has fallen by about one-third over the last twenty-five years. Again: it has fallen. The rich have gotten unimaginably richer, and at the same time their tax burden has dropped significantly. And yet conservatives routinely describe this state of affairs as intolerably oppressive to the rich. Since the share of the national income accruing to the rich has grown faster than their average tax rate has shrunk, they have paid an ever-rising share of the federal tax burden. This is the fact that so vexes the right.

Most of the right-wing commentary purporting to prove that the rich bear the overwhelming burden of government relies upon the simple trick of citing only the income tax, which is progressive, while ignoring more regressive levies. A brief overview of the facts lends some perspective to the fears of a new Red Terror. Our government divides its functions between the federal, state, and local levels. State and local governments tend to raise revenue in ways that tax the poor at higher rates than the rich. (It is difficult for a state or a locality to maintain higher rates on the rich, who can easily move to another town or state that offers lower rates.) The federal government raises some of its revenue from progressive sources, such as the income tax, but also healthy chunks from regressive levies, such as the payroll tax.

The sum total of these taxes levies a slightly higher rate on the rich. The bottom 99 percent of taxpayers pay 29.4 percent of their income in local, state, and federal taxes. The top 1 percent pay an average total tax rate of 30.9 percent--slightly higher, but hardly the sort of punishment that ought to prompt thoughts of withdrawing from society to create a secret realm of capitalistic übermenschen. These numbers tend to bounce back and forth, depending upon which party controls the government at any given time. If Obama succeeds in enacting his tax policies, the tax burden on the rich will bump up slightly, just as it bumped down under George W. Bush.

You know, no need to pull a Joe Wilson on them. /snark

Seriously, whenever conservatives propose a flat tax, I always say, "Ok, flat EVERYTHING, set it at 30% and be done with it - I'm with you." But that's not what they want. They only want a flat income tax, and they insist on setting it ridiculously low, which just guarantees that they'll never win the debate because too many of the people who might buy into their theory can do a little bit of elementary math.

News flash: Rich people do NOT pay a higher tax burden, proportionally, than middle class people - at least not in any significant way.

PS I know, the article's making a lot of analytical and historical claims about Ayn Rand. I'm not gonna go there, because frankly Rand has already received far more attention than she deserves.

In the competitive world of Washington protests, crowd size is often a matter of dispute. Organizers usually boast of huge crowds, while police and the news media offer much smaller estimates.

So supporters of Saturday’s “tea party” protests against President Barack Obama were quick to highlight their big turnout. To bolster countless claims on blogs and Facebook, many posted a photograph that showed a gargantuan crowd sprawling from Capitol Hill down the National Mall to the Washington Monument.

But it turns out the photo is more than 10 years old, apparently taken during a 1997 Promise Keepers rally.

Um, what is WRONG with people who try to pull this kind of shit?!? Do they think they won't get caught? Heck, since when is drawing almost 100,000 people to a demonstration something to be ASHAMED of?!? Just tell the f$cking truth, you idiots!

A British film about Charles Darwin has failed to find a US distributor because his theory of evolution is too controversial for American audiences, according to its producer.

There are so many stupid people in our country, and they're so LOUD, that a movie about Charles Darwin can't even be shown here. It's entirely possible that this movie sucks. But I won't be able to tell, because I live in The United States of Ignorance.

Today, you are already aware, is the eighth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. Tomorrow, you may or may not be aware, is the date of Glenn Beck's 9/12 Project, which the Fox News host will be marking with a live-TV event in Washington, and which he announced in March in an effort to

bring us all back to the place we were on September 12, 2001. The day after America was attacked we were not obsessed with Red States, Blue States, or political parties. We were united as Americans...

You can make your own judgments about the platform of Nine Principles and Twelve Values that Beck has tied to the anniversary of a heinous mass murder. But as someone who happened to be in New York City eight years ago today, the implicit premise of the 9-12 Project—that those who aren't on Beck's side must have somehow "forgotten" 9/11 and its aftermath—ticks me off royally and personally.

I was at home in Brooklyn, holding my six-week-old baby on the couch, when I saw the second plane crash into the World Trade Center on TV. I watched the smoking pit of the ruins from the roof of my apartment building as bits of memo paper and ash drifted on the winds to my neighborhood. I was there on 9/11, and 9/12, and 9/13. You'll excuse me if I don't feel warm nostalgia for the lingering smell of burnt airplane fuel, and metal, and bodies.

Nor, of course, does Beck. What he purportedly wants is to bring back our feeling of "unity." I remember that feeling. After 9/11, I remember hardcore liberal New Yorkers rallying behind Rudy Giuliani, saying nice things about President Bush when he spoke at the WTC ruins. I remember thousands of American flags being flown out of apartment and brownstone windows, not as political statements or in the you-better-prove-your-patriotism spirit of flag pins and Freedom Fries, but simply because we felt we Americans were all in this together.

So since March, what has Glenn Beck been doing to re-establish that sense of nonpartisan national brotherhood? Calling President Obama a racist, declaring that the government was bringing fascism upon us, asking his fans to dig up dirt on political figures he doesn't like, and predicting civil-war-like uprisings. Because that's how you bring people together.

Damn straight.

In an August 20th column for the Chicago Tribune, Steve Chapman writes,

Opponents of same-sex marriage reject it on religious and moral grounds but also on practical ones. If we let homosexuals marry, they believe, a parade of horribles will follow -- the weakening of marriage as an institution, children at increased risk of broken homes, the eventual legalization of polygamy and who knows what all.

Well, guess what? We're about to find out if they're right. Unlike most public policy debates, this one is the subject of a gigantic experiment, which should definitively answer whether same-sex marriage will have a broad, destructive social impact.

Massachusetts, Connecticut, Iowa, Vermont, Maine and New Hampshire have all decided to let gays wed.

Actually, the "experiment" has been running in Massachusetts for fully 1/2 decade now. Over three years ago I wrote a story, "Christian Right Wrong on Gay Marriage", summing up the apparent non-impact of the then-2 year "experiment". Now, we have 4 consecutive years of data. According to the most recent data from the National Center For Vital Statistics, Massachusetts retains the national title as the lowest divorce rate state, and the MA divorce rate is about where the US divorce rate was in 1940, prior to the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor that triggered the US entrance into World War Two.

Provisional data from 2008 indicates that the Massachusetts divorce rate has dropped from 2.3 per thousand in 2007 down to about 2.0 per thousand for 2008. What does that mean ? To get a sense of perspective consider that the last time the US national divorce rate was 2.0 per thousand (people) was 1940. You read that correctly. The Massachusetts divorce rate is now at about where the US divorce rate was the year before the United States entered World War Two.

Yeah, you know why? Because they're wrong. They've always been wrong. Letting same sex partners marry has absolutely no negative effect on heterosexual marriages.

Want to see how gay marriage destroys the family? Come to Massachusetts, where we have the lowest divorce rate in the country, as well as all sorts of other excellent family-friendly statistics. Yeah, we liberals sure are amoral heathens, and any decade now we'll succeed in our mission to destroy the American family (/snark)...

There is an overwhelming case that the electronic media went out of their way to cover the noise and ignored the calmer (and from television's point of view "boring") encounters between elected representatives and their constituents.

Let's see. The media get paid to sell papers (grab eyeballs, whatever). Serious, considerate people having an intelligent discussion doesn't sell papers. Lunatics screaming and ranting sells LOTS of papers. So what will the media do, given a variety of possible stories about these town hall health care meetings? They'll pick the most outrageous, of course. As this editorial points out, they did the same thing during the Vietnam, but over-hyping the liberal protests. I can't figure out why this is a surprise. The fact that the media is reporting something does not mean it's accurate. Most likely, it's a small piece of a much larger picture.

It has been suggested that the government could use voter registration to determine a person's political affiliation, prompting fears that GOP voters might be discriminated against for medical treatment in a Democrat-imposed health care rationing system. Does this possibility concern you?

This is from a survey they're running. I think every single word of that question qualifies as either completely bat-shit insane or ... no, I don't need the "or" after all...