The Progressive Mind, 140 Characters At A Time

By Derek Hunter

Sunday, February 02, 2014

That the media of old is dead comes as a surprise to no one. All pretense of objectivity is gone. When a media orgy breaks out over a progressive activist blogger with no journalistic background leaving the once-credible Washington Post to start a “news organization” that seeks resumes of like-minded progressives who “share our passion for fixing the news,” we can say without reservation that the media shark has been jumped.

Oddly enough, I agree with the idea of “fixing the news,” though I suspect I disagree with progressives on how to do that. I’d re-impose standards and require objectivity. How they would fix it was on display this week in all its hateful, racist glory.

On Wednesday, the official Twitter account for MSNBC decided it was lagging in the office pool for throwing out the most ridiculous, unsubstantiated charges of racism for the month of January and tried to catch up. It tweeted, “Maybe the rightwing will hate it, but everyone else will go awww: the adorable new #Cheerios ad w/ biracial family.” It provided a link to the Super Bowl ad for Cheerios (I won’t link to it here because I haven’t seen Cheerios comment on, let alone condemn, it).

It would be disgusting enough to read that coming from a person, but a supposed news organization? It’s just one of a long list of reasons NBC News is now the least trusted name in news, coming in at 6 percent, according to the progressive polling firm Public Policy Polling. For reference, a dirty drifter at the end of a local bar claiming to know the names of the shooters on the grassy knoll pulls in 7 percent.

To say the least, NBC News has lost its credibility thanks to its being the same news organization as MSNBC.

Three hours after the tweet was sent, it was deleted, and a so-called apology was issued, both from the MSNBC account and the account of Richard Wolffe, MSNBC.com’s executive editor. “The Cheerios tweet from @msnbc was dumb, offensive and we've taken it down,” Wolffe wrote. “That's not who we are at msnbc.” First, the attack wasn’t on Cheerios. Second, what he didn’t say was that it was racist and a lie, most likely because…well, we all know “who they are” at MSNBC.

And, as an interesting aside, even Time magazine came to the defense of conservatives by applying that first pillar in the progressive’s religion – science. It wrote, “Not only aren’t there stats to back up MSNBC’s assertion, but the stats that do exist suggest, if anything, there may be a slight bias in favor of same-race households on the other side of the aisle, among Democrats.”

The next day, Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus banned all RNC employees from appearing on MSBNC until its president, Phil Griffin, apologized. He did…sort of.

Griffin wrote, “The tweet last night was outrageous and unacceptable. We immediately (as in three hours later) acknowledged it was offensive and wrong, apologized and deleted it. We have dismissed the person responsible for the tweet. I personally apologize to Mr. Priebus and to everyone offended. At MSNBC, we believe in passionate, strong debate about the issues, and we invite voices from all sides to participate. That will never change.”

Let’s take that frog of a statement to biology class for a minute.

So, Griffin is sorry people are offended, not that the statement was made. And who was the person responsible? Is “dismissed” the same as fired? Why not name the person who humiliated the company? Actually, NBC News has some history here. It still hasn’t named the person who dishonestly edited the 911 call of George Zimmerman to make him sound like he, rather than the 911 operator, brought up race. And who are these “voices from all sides” Griffin is talking about?

The closest thing to dissent on MSNBC is Joe Scarborough, who is somewhat conservative on some issues. To his credit, he at least stands up to the cheerleaders from time to time and criticizes his network occasionally. But the only other person who cashes an MSNBC check with regularity and calls themselves a Republican is Abby Huntsman. Huntsman, daughter of failed presidential candidate Jon Huntsman, is Megan McCain without the deep-rooted understanding and commitment to conservative principles.

Beyond that, who?

Mr. Griffin, I realize a dissenting voice is someone who knows the name of the doorman at your Manhattan cocktail parties, but one and a half people occasionally disagreeing with a bunch of nodding bobblehead hosts and guests does not equal “voices from all sides.”

MSNBC’s “talent” is as challenging to progressive orthodoxy as a two-piece Lego set is for a MENSA member. Bigotry and racism isn’t what they do so much as who they are. They all agree on everything – even on the shows hosted by supposed journalists from the NBC News mother ship.

Journalism is dead at NBC News, and aside from random accidents and pockets here and there, it’s not coming back anytime soon. As some scramble to “fix the news,” a tiny portion of the public will live in a constant state of misinformation, lies and ignorance for the foreseeable future thanks to the failure of the plucked peacock network and other likeminded, self-appointed arbiters of morality and truth in the “fourth estate.”

I, for one, long for the day the mainstream media returns to some degree of honesty and objectivity, and the portion of Americans interested in learning what their government is doing to them will find that information presented in an unspun way. But, with NBC News as the tip of the spear, the fourth estate has become a fifth column; an appendage of the state. The network occasionally will be shamed into a moment of humility but will quickly recoil to its natural state faster than a hand touching a hot stove. Hatred is not an emotion progressives reserve for those who disagree with them. It’s who they are.

MSNBC exists on the reputation of NBC News and the anger of people who’ve been told they’ve been wronged. There will never be a shortage of the latter, but the former is wearing thinner by the day. The self-help seminar for those with rage issues runs 24 hours a day, taking breaks only on weekends for prison documentaries. But it’s usually a laughable hatred restricted to the small number of people who spend their lives raging at “The Man” after discovering too late in life that their degree in 1940 bisexual polar bear studies isn’t all that marketable in a tight economy.

The reality of the failures of progressive policies is smacking the American public across the face in poll after poll. As the numbers continue to drop, the lashing out from MSNBC will only grow worse – on the air and 140 characters at a time – as November draws nearer. That whoever sent that tweet was “dismissed” for expressing views the network’s hosts and contributors share more crudely every day for millions of dollars per year hardly seems, to borrow a favorite word of theirs, “fair.”

But life isn’t fair. If it were, they people responsible for that tweet would be sent to a place where they could say anything they want, in the most crude terms imaginable, but no one would ever hear them. They’d be given a show on MSNBC.

When the Left Goes Wrong in the Inequality Debate

By John C. Goodman

Saturday, February 01, 2014

If I were to reduce to a bumper sticker the way the left thinks about the world these days, it would read:

Inequality happens

If I were to reduce to a bumper sticker the way the right thinks about the same subject, it would read:

Inequality happens for a reason

This is not a small distinction. For President Obama, inequality is the public policy issue du jour. And like lemmings, left wing editorial writers and bloggers can think of nothing else to write about. But here is something that may surprise you. The most interesting analyses of the problem are on the right, not the left. For the most part, all the left does is deplore. They seem to have no interest in understanding why we have a problem. (I have a theory on that below.)

By contrast, both Charles Murray and Tyler Cowen argue that problematic change is occurring: the middle is disappearing and people are gravitating into the upper and lower strata of society. For Murray the reason is behavioral. For Cowen, it is technological.

It isn't that left-of-center scholars are ignoring these things. Work is being done by economists at the Brookings Institution, for example. But you are more likely to learn of this work in a David Brooks column than in one by Paul Krugman, Nicolas Kristof or Robert Frank — three other New York Times columnists who write about inequality frequently.

Let's start with Murray, who says we are experiencing an ever widening cultural divide. As summarized in a previous post:

Upper-middle class professional types may pretend that they are cultural relativists, accepting of whatever lifestyle their fellow human beings happen to choose. In reality, they live by old fashioned puritan values, however. They get married and stay married. They work hard and work long hours.

Not so for the blue collar, never-got-beyond-high-school class, however. A shocking number aren't even working at all. Many are not getting married in the first place. Of those that get married, the divorce and separation rates are soaring.

What about happiness and well-being? About 65% of the upper middle class professional types say they are in happy marriages. That number has been dropping steadily for the past 40 years for the working class types; and today it stands at 25%!

And Murray's study leaves out blacks, Hispanics and other minorities — just so you don't think the fundamental problem is racial or ethnic. His study focuses only on the white community.

Tyler Cowen has a completely different approach. Are your skills a complement to the computer or a substitute for it? If the former, he predicts that life for you is likely to be cheery. If the latter, life is likely to be dreary. "This is the wave that will lift you or that will dump you," he says. As I wrote in a forthcoming review in the NABE journal:

Cowen finds examples everywhere of intelligent machines substituting for human labor. Robot arms are doing the work of doctors in the operating room. Computers spend more time flying our planes than the pilots do. Smart software is being used to spot phony reviews on the Internet, to detect liars at online dating sites and to profile passengers in airports. Computers are creating music, playing chess and drawing pictures of human faces.

The growth of "mechanized intelligence" is likely to continue for two reasons: (1) Moore's law and (2) the fact that it is an area of life that is basically unregulated.

So what can be done about any of this? Virtually no one has a compelling solution. And there may be no solution.

The only new idea the left seems to have is universal preschool. (They don't know how to reform any existing programs, so why not throw money after one more?) But the more common tactic (e.g., Paul Krugman) is to use inequality as an excuse for enacting the traditional liberal agenda — deficit spending, minimum wage increase, more unemployment compensation. If you think any of that is going to solve the fundamental problem, I know a bridge in Brooklyn that is for sale.

For the scholars, behavioral remedies are paramount. From the Cato Institute and the National Center for Policy Analysis comes the observation that if you do these four things, it's almost impossible to remain poor:

1.Finish high school,

2.Get a job,

3.Get married, and

4.Don't have children until you get married.

Those who do these things have only a 2 percent probability of remaining in poverty and a 75 percent probability of joining the middle class.

From Elizabeth Sawhill at the Brookings Institution comesa similar observation:

…[A] significant number of kids stay on track through the early years, but then fall off the rails as teenagers. Sawhill set a pretty low bar for having a successful adolescence: graduate from high school with a 2.5 G.P.A., don't get convicted of a crime, don't get pregnant. Yet only 57 percent of American 19-year-olds get over that bar. Only one-third of children in the bottom fifth of family income do so.

One suspects that for Paul Krugman and others on the left this counts as "blaming the victims." In any event, I have never seen a Krugman column discussing how the solution to inequality is for those at the bottom of the income ladder to change their behavior. Instead, we find the ever-present hint that those at the top are somehow to blame.

Background: for know-nothings on the left there has always been the belief that the reason there is poverty is because there is wealth. That the high income earned by some is the cause of the low income earned by others. I've never seen Krugman say that. He's too good of an economist to go that far.

But his columns give aid and comfort to people who harbor those beliefs. A Krugman column the other day entitled "The Undeserving Rich" had not one word to say about how a single billionaire had undeserved income. It made not a single connection between one person's wealth and another person's poverty. But it would be easy for an uncareful reader (especially a non-economist) to finish the column with the impression that there is a connection.

If your goal is class warfare — to inflame the passions of those who have less by making them angry at those who have more — writing about the behavioral causes of poverty does not advance your cause.

Are You Smarter Than a Communist?

By John Ransom

Friday, January 31, 2014

Well it’s official.

We’ve known that I'm smarter than a communist, but now comes confirmation that I’m smarter than government economists—which still is a rather hollow accolade.

GDP figures for 2013 came out and despite a doubtful surge that came in the last half of the year GDP still managed to squeak under 2%, just as I predicted at the beginning of the year.

“For 2013 as a whole,” says ABCNews, “the economy grew a tepid 1.9 percent, weaker than the 2.8 percent increase in 2012, the Commerce Department said Thursday. Growth was held back last year by higher taxes and federal spending cuts.”

And Obamacare.

And Dodd-Frank.

And the War on Energy, the EPA, the IRS, the Fed and the general problems that Democrats have with adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing conspired to keep growth slow. You'd have to be a communist not to admit of these facts.

But, if you like your abacus, you can keep your abacus.

“For some reason, today pundits are appalled by the loss of Fed credibility…. Perhaps instead of that,” writes ZeroHedge, our favorite finance crime fighter, “the sophisticated financial community should focus on the core of the problem: the Fed's chronic inability to look even more than a couple of years into the future without being dead wrong about what transpires, even in the absence of a great financial crisis (which the Fed never could predict in the first place of course).”

In graph below ZH details the various revisions to GDP for 2013 that the Fed has made as it got closer and closer to its target date.

What’s most appalling about it is that even in June and September of this year, the Fed was still forecasting high even as the economy needed 4.1% and 3.2% annual growth rates in quarter three and four respectively just to come in under 2% for the year.

 

But don’t worry say economists. This year should be much, much better.

“This year, economists think the economy will get a lift from continued gains in hiring,” writes ABCNews. “Further steady job growth would give more households money to spend and help lift consumer spending, which accounts for about 70 percent of economic activity.”

Yeah, steady job growth?

The jobs numbers are at best mixed, as are a whole host of other data on the economy going into 2014.

How one sees the economy depends on whether one is a glass half-full kind a guy or a glass half empty kind a guy.

Personally I’m more like a Washington is half full of it kind of guy, and always the wrong half.

Job gains have always been the key to economic growth, and there’s not a lot of good news on that front. While it’s true that unemployment claims of been trending down the last several years, 2013 has been sideways. And a late surge of volatility in the index could point to a reversal of the trend since about September 2013.

US Initial Claims for Unemployment Insurance Chart

As seen in the chart above claims volatility has picked up substantially since September. Much of that volatility is due to unemployment claims not being processed in a timely manner in certain large states. But if you apply just a little technical analysis since September to the chart, there's no doubt that there's been at least a temporary reversal. Claims are not trending downward, they’re trending upward.

And even the mainstream media has recently acknowledged that much of the improvement in the unemployment rate is coming via a shrinking workforce, not a growing number of jobs.

That’s akin to breaking a 12-inch ruler in half, and then claiming that one half of the ruler is still equal to one foot.

David Williams of WilliamsEdge and PageTrader.com, a sponsor for Ransom Notes Radio and a specialist at forecasting market direction, has told me that 2014 will mark an important market top.

By the time of the midterm elections in 2014 the market should be reversing course, or at least sideways, in my estimation. Williams believes that this could mark the beginning of a multi-year bear market.

That’s a good news and bad news scenario.

The bad news obviously is that nobody likes the stock market to go down when all of us in one manner another are vested in stock markets returns for our retirement plan.

The good news however could be that 2014 might be the year where Main Street and Wall Street start to work in tandem to affect change.

Because as usual Washington, DC has it wrong: Wall Street and Main Street will always have more in common than anyone has with Washington, DC. We don’t need Washington protecting Main Street from Wall Street.

We just need Washington to stop being the uninvited third wheel to the economic machine driven by Wall Street and Main Street.

Remember: I’m not a government economist. Or a communist.

I’m just smarter than either.

But then so are you.

Build the Keystone Pipeline, Already!

By Paul Driessen

Saturday, February 01, 2014

President Obama has repeatedly said he wants to turn the economy around, put America back to work, produce more energy, improve public safety, and open new markets to goods stamped “Made in the USA.” In his State of the Union address he said, if it becomes necessary because of congressional inaction, “I will act on my own to slash bureaucracy and streamline the permitting process for key projects, so we can get more construction workers on the job as fast as possible.”

Unfortunately, like Arafat, he never misses an opportunity to miss an opportunity to do all these things.

Most Americans are no longer fooled by empty hope and change hype. In December only 74,000 jobs were created (many of them low-paying part-time seasonal positions), while 374,000 more people gave up looking for work. Not surprisingly, recent polls have found that three-quarters of Americans say the country still appears to be in a recession, two-thirds don’t trust the President to make the right decisions for the country, and barely 30% say the nation is “heading in the right direction.”

The President needs to use his pen and phone to free our energy, economy and entrepreneurial instincts. But ANWR, OCS, HF, KXL and other solutions were AWOL from the SOTU. They were sacrificed on the CO2 and CMGW altar, by the POTUS, EPA, DOI and DOE, in obeisance to the EDF, NRDC, other environmentalist pressure groups, and assorted unelected, unaccountable, unconstitutional autocrats.

Our nation is blessed with vast energy, metallic, mineral, forest and other resources, waiting to be tapped. But they are locked up in favor of crony-capitalist, eco-unfriendly, land-hungry, subsidy-dependent, nigh-useless pseudo-alternatives that are dearly beloved by utopian environmentalists – and by politicians hungry for campaign contributions from businesses that they repay with billions in other people’s money, taken from taxpayers at the point of an IRS gun to prop up renewable energy schemes.

Our hydrocarbon wealth especially offers amazing benefits: improved human safety, health, welfare and living standards, in a more stable world, with new sources of jobs, wealth and income equality. Not tapping these resources is contrary to Obama’s promises and America’s interests. It is immoral.

Of all the opportunities arrayed before him, the 1,179-mile Alberta to Texas Keystone XL pipeline (KXL) is the most “shovel ready.” Indeed, it awaits merely a presidential phone call or signature, to slash bureaucratic red tape, streamline the permitting process, and create construction and manufacturing jobs. Some 40,000 jobs in fact – more than twice as many as created nationwide last December.

As I have pointed out before, there are compelling reasons why the President should end this interminable six-years-and-counting dilatory KXL review process – right now.

Jobs. KXL would create an estimated 20,000 construction jobs; another 10,000 in factories that make the steel, pipelines, valves, cement and equipment needed to build the pipeline; thousands more in hotel, restaurant and other support industries; and still more jobs in the Canadian, North Dakota and other oil fields whose output would be transported by the pipeline to refineries and petrochemical plants where still more workers would be employed. With Mr. Obama and his EPA waging war on communities and states that mine and use coal, these jobs are even more important to blue-collar Americans in flyover country.

Revenue. States along the pipeline route would receive $5 billion in new property tax revenues, and still more in workers’ income tax payments. Federal coffers would also realize hefty gains.

Safety. Right now most of the oil from Canada’s oil sands and North Dakota’s Bakken shale deposits move by railroad and truck fuel tanks, often through populated areas. Truck and rail accidents have forced towns to evacuate and even killed 53 people in Lac-Megantic, Quebec. Corporate executives and federal regulators are working to improve tanker designs and reroute traffic. But despite occasional accidents, pipelines have a much better safety record. KXL would be built with state-of-the-art pipe, valves and other components, to the latest design, manufacturing, construction and inspection specifications. It has been configured to avoid population centers, sensitive wildlife areas and the Ogallala Aquifer.

Resource conservation and energy needs. Building Keystone will help ensure that vast petroleum resources can be efficiently utilized to meet consumer needs. In conjunction with other pipelines, it will greatly reduce the need to flare (burn and waste) natural gas that is a byproduct of oil production in Bakken shale country. The pipelines will also help get propane and natural gas to places that need these fuels. Recent pipeline problems, plus unusually high demands for propane to convert corn to ethanol, created soaring prices and shortages amid one of the nastiest North American cold spells in decades.

KXL will also enable state and private lands to continue contributing to America’s hydrocarbon renaissance. That is especially important in the face of congressional and Obama Administration refusals to open more federal onshore and offshore oil and gas prospects in Alaska and the Lower 48 States.

US-Canadian relations. The endless dithering over KXL has frayed relations between Canada and the United States. It has compelled the Canadians to take decisive steps toward building new pipelines from the Alberta oil sands fields to Superior, Wisconsin … and to Canada’s west coast, for shipment to Asia’s growing economies. Further delays will not reduce oil sands development – only the oil’s destination.

Climate change. In his SOTU speech, President Obama informed us that “climate change is a fact.” Well, duh. It’s been a fact since Earth was formed. The only pertinent issues are these: Are humans causing imminent, unprecedented climate change disasters? And can we prevent those alleged disasters, by drastically curtailing hydrocarbon use, slashing living standards and switching to renewables?

There is no evidence to support either proposition. Moreover, oil sands production would add a minuscule 0.06% to US greenhouse gas emissions, a tiny fraction of that amount to global carbon dioxide emissions, and an undetectable 0.00001 degrees C per year to useless computer-model scenarios for global warming.

A January 24 letter spearheaded by Senator John Hoeven (R-ND) and signed by all 45 Republican Senators notes many of these points and requests that President Obama permit KXL pipeline construction “as soon as possible.” Several Democrats told Hoeven privately that they support his effort and Keystone, but are nervous about challenging the President or Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid publicly.

On January 31, the State Department reaffirmed its March 2013 conclusion that KXL is unlikely to noticeably increase demand for Canadian oil sands or global emissions of carbon dioxide. Now that the President has been reelected, he clearly has “greater flexibility” and doesn’t need to kowtow to his radical green base. By cutting off another year-long study of whether Keystone is “in the national interest,” picking up his pen and phone, and approving the pipeline, he could even satisfy his union base.

Democrats are urging unemployed workers to lobby Republicans for extended benefits. They should instead lobby Democrats and the President to do what’s right for America: create the jobs they promised, by approving Keystone – along with drilling, fracking, mining, and reduced taxes and regulations.

America is waiting. Will there finally be real hope and change? Or just more hype and empty rhetoric?