Saalon Muyo

See? McCain isn’t that old. It’s clear Anna Nicole Smith, at least, is capable of, um, arousing him. And I suppose in Smith he has someone who actually makes Sarah Palin look smart in comparison.

Not.

If [the media] convince enough voters that that is negative campaigning, for me to call Barack Obama out on his associations,” Palin told host Chris Plante, “then I don’t know what the future of our country would be in terms of First Amendment rights and our ability to ask questions without fear of attacks by the mainstream media.”

Ben Smith at Politico nicely stripped away the fallacies in this quote, though I wish he hadn’t prefaced it by claiming a risk of pedanticalness. Frankly, I’m sick of the slightly more complicated nature of fact giving those who speak it a bad name as out of touch, elitist of intellectual.

Coming from a Mayor who floated the idea of banning books from the public library, cries of First Amendment violations sound particularly idiotic, but her lack of understanding (or purposeful misinterpretation) of one of the cornerstones of our governmental system just throws the whole thing into Wacky Land.

Let me make this clear for you, Governor. The First Amendment is not there to protect your feelings. It does not exist so people will be nice to you, or even to force people to tell the truth (a fact I am sure you will be pleased to learn). It exists to protect speech from the suppression of government bodies. Specifically, it exists so that ideologue Mayors with poor knowledge of our nation’s laws can’t do something like pulling books about homosexuality out of public libraries.

There are laws to protect people from lies and distortions in the media, but they are not part of the First Amendment. If what you are alleging is libel, slander or defamation of character, then press those charges. I know defamation might be a big word for you, but that’s what we hire lawyers for, right?

But allow me to warn you of something, since your ambition is your most defining trait. Your ability to remain unchallenged on the things you say slips when you seek widespread public status. If you’d like to become the new face of the GOP - and I urge you to, for the good of the country - I’d suggest getting used to people writing things about you that you don’t like.

I’d also suggest actually picking up a copy of the Constitution and putting it under your pillow. Learning by osmosis has no scientific basis, but when has that stopped you from believing something?

So there’s this town in Japan called Obama.  Seriously.  And Barack has given them the once in a lifetime chance to piggy back hometown publicity with U.S. politics. What to do?  Sing!

I’m honestly not making this up.

Via Politico.

“Oh, you think that’s funny?!” the large bearded man said. His face was turning red. “Yeah, that’s real funny…” he said.

And then he kicked the back of my leg, buckling my right knee and sending me sprawling onto the ground.

- Joe Killian,  “How I Became Joe Sixpack”

It’s beginning to feel like every report of a McCain/Palin rally comes with its own unique section of violent outrage.  This started about a month ago, when an African American sound man was told to “Sit down, boy!” in the same rally a reporter heard a man shout “Kill him!” as Gov. Palin asked the crowd who Barack Obama really was.  Since then, I’ve heard a number of tepid arguments defending the McCain campaign from being associated with these situations.  He can’t control who goes to his rallies.  Idiots come to rallies of all kinds.  Obama is trying to make all McCain supporters out to be racist lunatics.

I have certainly seen these people at other types of rallies and gathering, and I doubt even the majority of McCain supporters would condone kicking a reporter in the back of the leg simply for looking up at pro-Obama protesters.  One or two stories of this nature wouldn’t concern me.  A couple of people in campaign shirts that use them as license to insult and attack would not be a surprise.

It’s the quantity of them that scares me.

N&R political reporter Mark Binker and I were on different sides of the crowd - but we both got the same reaction from Palin fans as we craned our necks to see what the disturbance was.

“That’s not the story, the story’s up there on the stage!” someone yelled at Binker.

“Ain’t nothing to look at and don’t you write about it!” I was told.

- Joe Killian,  “How I Became Joe Sixpack”

It’s also that they appeared as soon as the McCain/Palin strategy became one of attack, and specifically took up the question “Who is the real Barack Obama?”  When this stump speech first appeared, it was met with protests.  Many on the left thought it was racist.  Of course, since no one said “darkie” and no McCain staff members tap danced in black face, this was brushed off.

But are these complaints really invalid?  Let’s work backwards.

Following the reveal of the new stump speech, stories of hateful language, violent acts and threatening comments began to bubble to the surface.  Senator McCain being asked by a woman about Obama being an Arab.  A lady at a rally suggesting Obama may be a terrorist because “He’s got the bloodlines.”  A man with a monkey doll with a piece of paper wrapped onto its head, who he referred to as “L’il Hussein.”  These people were not created by the McCain campaign, but something convinced them that friends would be present at one of his or Sarah Palin’s rallies.  They even felt so at home that they had no problem saying these things into a camera, even after these videos started to show up on YouTube.

To me, this is evidence of some change in Senator McCain’s campaign strategy.  But what about the “Who is Barack Obama?” line would call out to the racist and angry in our nation?

Let’s look at the argument itself.  In it, former weatherman Bill Ayers is brought up, as is Obama’s community work he did while on a board Ayers was also a part of.  In this speech, Sarah Palin would wonder if Barack Obama really sees America the way her followers do if he’s willing to pal around with terrorists.

That sounds hyperbolic, certainly, but racist?  Not if our criteria for racist language is ends at “He’s got the bloodlines.”  Throughout this election, viral e-mails have been going out about Obama’s middle name, using it to suggest he was educated at a fundamentalist Islamic Madrasah or that he was secretly a Muslim.  The guy with the Obama monkey was certainly the target audience of those e-mails.  Now, in the middle of stump speeches, you start saying that Obama is friends with terrorists.

What do most people think of, right now, when you use the word “terrorist” to describe them?  Someone of any race, creed or culture who happens to use terror as a weapon?  Or this?

What I mean is this:  If you say to someone - who already thinks a man who is a U.S. citizen and is running for president and is the son of a Caucasian woman and a Kenyan man is secretly an Arab fundamentalist Muslim - that Obama “pals around with terrorists,” what do you think is popping into their head?  Obama with a white 60’s radical on the board of a community organization?  Or this?

To deny that these stump speeches lacked a racial component works only if you read racism only as white people hating black people.  While I certainly think the people who have been kicking and shouting at reporters are racist in this way as well, they are not only afraid of dark brown people.  They’re afraid of light brown people as well.  Once you subscribe to the idea that someone of a different color than you is inherently more dangerous, you’re probably not going to restrict that to one color.  An insinuation that Obama is dangerous because he associates with terrorists (read: Arab Muslims) is going to play with people who also think he’s dangerous because he’s a watermelon and fried chicken eating Negro.

To be fair, it might be more accurate to say that Palin and McCain have been playing to their bases’ xenophobia, even though I think that’s largely the same thing as racism.  They are saying to be scared of Obama because he’s different than you.  Because he travels on exotic and foreign vacations (to Hawaii) and because he wants to talk to (Arab and Latino) leaders before bombing them.  When they ask if we know the real Obama, they want people to wonder if he’s even American at all.

And frankly, the only people batshit enough to think that a man running for the U.S. presidency is secretly not an American citizen who has connections to Islamist terrorism are the ones who were prejudiced against him for some other reason.  Say, the color of his skin and his decidedly unWASPy name.

Do I believe that John McCain wanted a bunch of Obama monkey-waving cretins to come to his rallies and kick reporters?  No, I do not.  (In all honesty, the jury’s still out on Palin with me, but I’ll let that lie).  But I do believe that he was hoping to raise doubts about Obama as a risky choice.

And I blame him for not realizing that using incendiary language in an election that was already bound to bring out the racist fringe of our nation would not be heard as a siren’s song to them.  In Senator McCain’s desperation to win the U.S. Presidency, he has given a seal of approval - however inadvertently - to those whose primary motivation is hatred.  The people coming to he and Palin’s rallies spewing hatred and anger have come because they believe they’ve been invited.

There’s no closing the box, at this point.  But I’d like any John McCain supporters to consider this question.  Isn’t shouting at a reporter to stop covering a story and then assaulting him when he does not listen a lesser form of terrorism? And before you say that Ayers set a bomb and that’s a lot worse, let’s not forget that the last time a culture of racial hatred got scared of the specter of racial equality, it led to a couple of things that anyone would label as terrorism.  Maybe even Sarah Palin.

Hahahahahahahahahahahahahhahahahah!

Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahah!

…wait, this was satire, right?

People are wondering if Sarah Palin was knocking places like California and Massachusetts as being anti-American when she said this:

Palin also made a point of mentioning that she loved to visit the “pro-America” areas of the country, of which North Carolina is one.

She wasn’t. She was obviously talking about how nice it was being away from her anti-American home state of Alaska, where her friends in the Alaskan Independence Party feel a hatred of our government so hot that the fires of hell are glaciers in comparison.

So chill out, everyone.

Want to keep your candidate of choice in the game?  Polls are hard to game from the outside, but by God, I bet you could bamboozle Intrade!

An internal investigation by the popular online market Intrade has revealed that an investor has been attempting to artificially boost the prediction that Sen. John McCain will become president.

Over the past several weeks, the investor has pushed hundreds of thousands of dollars into one of Intrade’s predictive markets for the presidential election, the company said, resulting in great financial losses through a strategy that belies any financial motive.

Was the perceived benefit that Intrade granted the McCain campaign (which couldn’t have been large, as Ben Smith at politico notes) worth the money this cost?  You probably could have bought the number of votes this would have swung McCains way at a better rate than you got on Intrade.

Really, really weird.

A lucid point about the Joe the Plumber taxation thing is made by John Seery at HuffPo:

Joe versus Sam. You could line up economists spouting elegant theories for each side, but the basic arguments can probably be reduced to Joe’s and Sam’s respective positions on very gut levels. Joe’s never made $250,000, but he feels that if he ever reaches that threshold, he shouldn’t be “penalized” for his success. He seems to believe that cutting taxes for wealthy individuals somehow serves his current financial interests and his aspirations for the future. Sam’s already lived those trickle-down and dream-up Republican talking points but now rejects them with hard-won conviction.

I’m not going to say there aren’t business owners over the $250k range that wouldn’t disagree with this, but I think it’s anecdotal evidence of what I talked about yesterday.  The real recipients of the high-income taxation message are middle class voters who are encouraged to project their fantasies of wealth into Obama’s tax plan. It simplifies a complicated issue of the effects of taxation into meaninglessness.

There are cases where appropriate spending of fair taxation helps everyone, just as there are cases where inappropriately high taxation can hurt an economy, just as there are cases where an imbalance in tax proportions unfairly benefits a minority of Americans.

Sam’s point stands, though.  If your consumers can’t afford to buy from you, a difference in 4% taxation isn’t what’s going to cause you to lay off workers.  We could cut your taxes to nothing and you’d still go out of business.

The greatest trick the conservative movement ever pulled was convincing the population of America they were all the on the verge of massive wealth.  All of them.  This has been the thrust of every supply-side economic movement we’ve been forced to endure, and is at the core of modern conservative policy.

Sure, they say a lot of other things about why cutting taxes on the wealthy will be good for us.  It promotes job growth because “small businesses” have more to spend.  People who have lots of money who end up with even more money will spend or invest it in such a way that it will work its way down to the poor folk.  Taxes are an evil dreamed up by the Liberal anti-God at the dawn of time to combat balanced fiscal policy and punish the successful.

That’s not why people get on board.  You can tell, because people who are voting Republican have a tendency to say things like “They’re going to raise my taxes!”  My taxes.  Not, “They’re going to raise the taxes of my employer, kicking off a chain reaction that will result in my firing.”  No.  The taxes are going up on you.

How could this be?  Look at the current election, where Senator Obama says “Only people making over $250,000 a year will see an increase.”  That’s pretty clear language, and still I see people who aren’t even making $100k claiming that Obama will raise their taxes.  In fact, Senator McCain is saying that as well.  He’s not talking to the 5% of the population Senator Obama is proposing raising that taxes of; he’s saying your taxes.

So what gives?  How does this message manage to stick every time it comes up?

I think it’s pretty simple.  All of America is convinced they’re on the verge of making tons of money.  Just around the corner is that great investment or big job.  That $250,000 is about five times the median family income in the U.S. is irrelevant.  We’re all about to make 500% more, and as soon as that happens, Democrats want to punish you! The idea of you in the future with $250k+ becomes you now and you vote as if that’s the case, even if the only reason you had the shot at that money were the fruits of the taxes you pay, like your public education.  It’s absurd, but it works.  And now, finally, the Republican party has found their economic mascot.

Joe the Plumber.

Here’s the back story.  Joe Wurzelbacher showed up at an Obama rally in Ohio and said, basically, “I’d like to buy the plumbing business I work for, and then I might make more than $250,000, and I don’t understand why you want to tax me extra for that.”  Obama suggested it would be better for everyone, including him, if they “spread the wealth around” a bit.  Of course, the McCain campaign jumped all over that insinuation of class warfare and proceeded to bring it up in the debate last night some 20 times.

Now, keep in mind that Joe doesn’t make anywhere near $250k right now.  He’s talking about the theory of him making this money in the future, and how in theory this would be unfair to him.

Wurzelbacher this morning told ABC News’ Diane Sawyer that he was talking about, in Diane’s words, the prospect, the hope that someday he would make $250,000.

“Well, exactly,” he said. “Exactly. I mean not that I don’t want to be taxed. You have to be taxed. But to — just because you work a little harder to have a little bit more money taken from you, I mean, that’s scary. You know as opposed to other people. I worked hard for it. Why should I be taxed more than other people?”

Sorry to break it to you,  but you’re not likely to make $250k any time soon.  Chances are, you won’t ever make that much money, unless inflation changes what that number means.  You haven’t worked hard for it, yet, and even if you get that amount of money there’s no guarantee you’ll have worked harder than other people for it.  I make almost twice what one of my friends makes and I assure you he works way, way harder than I do.  He carries cabinets.  I type on a computer.  He wins.

Let’s put aside the fact that Joe is registered Republican who voted in the primary, so this whole insinuation of him being some independent voice for the blue collar crowd everywhere is bull.  Let’s also ignore that he’s not even licensed as a plumber, so calling him Joe the Plumber is especially moronic.  And, while we’re at it, we’ll try not to read too far into the fact that he hasn’t been paying his existing taxes.  Not that this isn’t all important to deflating the idiot-bubble the McCain campaign is trying to inflate for themselves out of this situation, it’s just not relevant for what I’m saying.

Joe the Plumber is the conservative myth made flesh.  “Don’t raise any taxes, ever, even on a tiny percentage of the population who can afford higher taxes because the day may come when I’m rich too and I won’t like it much!”  That’s how it goes, and that’s who Joe represents.  The person who votes against their own self interest because their greed is so ingrained in them that they can’t tolerate the idea of being less rich than they could be.  In all probability, they will never smell that tax bracket, yet their argument against it existing is that…well, maybe, someday, right?

In any case, the argument is fallacious.  Our tax code as it’s existed for some time is progressive, meaning that the more you make, the higher percentage of taxes you pay.  This is done for a simple reason: people who make less can part with a lower percentage of their income safely.  The more you make, though, the greater amount of your money is going into luxuries, and thus you can afford to lose some for the greater good.  If your reaction to this is “Socialism!!!!” maybe you should listen to everyone’s favorite capitalist, Adam Smith:

The necessaries of life occasion the great expense of the poor. They find it difficult to get food, and the greater part of their little revenue is spent in getting it. The luxuries and vanities of life occasion the principal expense of the rich, and a magnificent house embellishes and sets off to the best advantage all the other luxuries and vanities which they possess. A tax upon house-rents, therefore, would in general fall heaviest upon the rich; and in this sort of inequality there would not, perhaps, be anything very unreasonable. It is not very unreasonable that the rich should contribute to the public expense, not only in proportion to their revenue, but something more than in that proportion.

Get that?  Progressive taxation ain’t so bad.  And that’s why we do it.  Unless you make no money, someone who is making less than you is getting charged a smaller tax percentage.  Every raise you get endangers you, for you are bound to be punished by our socialist tax system.  What Senator Obama is proposing is restoring the percentage at the top of the tax bracket to where it was before Bush’s first term tax cuts, which will be expiring in 2011 anyway.  People making $250,000 are already paying a slightly higher percentage of tax.  The framework is in place.  Obama is suggesting adjusting the proportional differences, not creating them.

Joe the Plumber represents one of the sickest parts of the American dream.  The idea that if you achieve that dream it’s solely because of the superiority of your work ethic and intellect, and any progressive taxation is simply punishment for your success.  When arguing this, though, we forget that without publicly funded schools, police departments, road crews, transit systems and unemployment benefits, the likelihood of your success was far lower.  People like me and Joe the Plumber have a shot at success because the taxes we pay fund the programs that prepared us.  Paying higher taxes at a higher income isn’t punishment, it’s paying the system that got you there back.

Most people at the bottom of the tax bracket work way harder than those at the top.  You talk to a mother who can’t afford day care and works two jobs if she thinks my success in sitting at a desk typing was a result of me being a harder worker than her.  You live with the stress of wondering if you can feed your child and get it needed medical care without crushing your already strained budget then tell me how much you’re being punished by losing an extra 4% of your $250k income.

Say it ain’t so, Joe!

If you’re like me, you’ve been watching the stock market bounce around like a yo-yo for the past couple of weeks and hoping it gives you some kind of indicator as to how the financial crisis is shaping up.  And, if you’re like me, you’ve been unable to glean even a tiny bit of information from its gyrations.  As I learned today, the stock market is the wrong thing to watch.  It’s just reacting to something else: the frozen credit markets.

So how do we watch those?  Well, the wonderfully informative people at NPR’s Planet Money podcast point us to the right place.  The core of the crisis is that people don’t want to lend to each other.  This is the same thing that happened prior to the Great Depression, and our lack of response to that credit freeze may be what turned a financial downturn into a global depression.  When the solvency of institutions that are supposed to be stable, like banks, comes into question it makes people timid with their investments.  In fact, it even makes banks afraid to lend to each other, and that’s when things get really ugly.

So there are two things to watch.

The first is the rate on 3 Month Treasury Bonds.  These are considered very safe investments, so when people panic, the put their money here.  And the more money the put into them, the less of a return they pay.  What does that mean?

As the market panics, the 3 Month Treasury rate goes down.  As it calms, it goes back up.  Right now the rate is .11%  Last month it was at 1.58%. Not so good.

The second thing to look at is something called the TED Spread.  The TED Spread is basically the difference between the rate on one of those 3 Month Treasury Bonds and the rate banks are actually charging each other to borrow money.  The lower the TED Spread, the more confident banks are in each other. Why?  Because if you think someone is safe, you’ll charge them close to the same interest you’re getting out of the really safe government treasury bonds.  If not, you’ll charge them a lot more, because those T-Bills are way less of a risk.  A good explanation of this can be found here.

So historically the TED Spread has been at around .5%.  It went up to 1% for most of this year, which you can see on the chart at Bloomberg.com which I linked to above.  Then things got bad.  Now the TED is hovering around 4.5%, and is not yet going down. That means that even though we’ve dumped some money at the problem, banks still see each other as risky investments and are reluctant to give them money.

As the stock market flies all over the place, keep your eyes on Treasury bonds and on the TED Spread to see if the real cause of this crisis - frozen credit - is getting better.

So far it isn’t.