Haggard floats back up

It's like a train wreck: you can't look away.

Since the guy fell from grace and his church took a huge hit, he just hasn't gone under; people with megalomania rarely do.

Update: Dixie County Lawsuit media coverage

A few months ago I mentioned that I was going to contact some people with the ACLU and the local Dixie County papers to try to get an update on the status of the case.  I didn't hear anything back, and now I found out from Prof. Friedman's excellent blog that proponents of church-state separation have won a primary challenge:  we have legal standing to sue.  The ACLU found a non-resident of the county who was nonetheless given legal standing because of the nature of this anonymous person's business with the county in buying land there.  Here is the LexisNexis link to ACLU of Florida Inc. v. Dixie County Florida, 2008 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 61177 (ND FL, Aug. 8, 2008)

I have updated the list of media related to the whole Dixie County debacle as it has unfolded.

Regarding LTE (letters to the editor) "con" means the person writing is againstthe 10C monument & "pro" means they approve of it:

1. Gainesville Sun -- 11/28/06
2. Dixie County Advocate -- 11/30/06
3. Alligator -- 11/30/06
4. Alligator -- 12/1/06 (editorial)
5. FFRF Press Release -- 12/1/06
6. Gainesville Sun -- 12/02/06
7. 3 Letters to the Editor at the Sun -- pro, pro, con (12/2/06)
8. Dixie County Advocate -- 12/7/06
9. 2 More Letters to the Editor at the Sun -- pro (12/12/06), con (12/17/06)
10. St. Petersburg Times -- 1/3/07
11. St. Petersburg Times (LTE) -- con, 1/13/07 (4th letter down; response to 1/3/07 article)
12. Gainesville Sun -- 2/7/07
13. ACLU News Release -- 2/7/07
    
14. Reuters (Miami) -- 2/7/07
15. Gainesville Sun -- 2/8/07
16. St. Petersburg Times -- 2/8/07
17. Alligator (LTE): -- con, 2/9/07, (see text here)
18. Dixie County Advocate -- 2/15/07
19. Orlando Sentinel -- 2/17/07
20. Gainesville Sun (LTE) -- pro, 2/17/07
21. Dixie County Advocate (LTE) -- con, 2/24/07
22. Liberty Counsel -- 3/8/07
23. CNS News -- 3/12/07
24. Florida Humanists Association -- 4/9/07, (also here and here)
25. atheism.about.com -- 4/27/07, Austin Cline
26. Dixie County Advocate -- 9/27/07, Issue 40, Page 18
27. Dixie County Advocate blog -- 6/11/08, linked to my YouTube video

other media (blogs):

1. KipEsquire -- 11/28/06
2. Florida Progressive Coalition -- 4/4/07
3. John Pieret -- 4/15/07
4. Prof. Friedman -- 8/14/08

rev 11/22/08

Conservatism at any cost

Shortly after the economy's tailspin began, I wrote two items on the misplacing of blame on the poor and/or Democrats and/or Fannie & Freddie for the credit crisis. One of the things I addressed in the last item I wrote was the market share of subprime lending was 84% privately-held. Today, Krugman links to an article with a neat graph showing the market share of mortgages through 2003, and the NYT published a great article on Phil Gramm, whose actions seriously undermined regulation of the financial markets and helped precipitate this crisis. Excerpts below the fold:

On Capitol Hill, Mr. Gramm became the most effective proponent of deregulation in a generation, by dint of his expertise (a Ph.D in economics), free-market ideology, perch on the Senate banking committee and force of personality (a writer in Texas once called him “a snapping turtle”). And in one remarkable stretch from 1999 to 2001, he pushed laws and promoted policies that he says unshackled businesses from needless restraints but his critics charge significantly contributed to the financial crisis that has rattled the nation.

He led the effort to block measures curtailing deceptive or predatory lending, which was just beginning to result in a jump in home foreclosures that would undermine the financial markets. He advanced legislation that fractured oversight of Wall Street while knocking down Depression-era barriers that restricted the rise and reach of financial conglomerates.

And he pushed through a provision that ensured virtually no regulation of the complex financial instruments known as derivatives, including credit swaps, contracts that would encourage risky investment practices at Wall Street’s most venerable institutions and spread the risks, like a virus, around the world.
...
“Phil Gramm was the great spokesman and leader of the view that market forces should drive the economy without regulation,” said James D. Cox, a corporate law scholar at Duke University. “The movement he helped to lead contributed mightily to our problems.”

In two recent interviews, Mr. Gramm described the current turmoil as “an incredible trauma,” but said he was proud of his record.

He blamed others for the crisis: Democrats who dropped barriers to borrowing in order to promote homeownership; what he once termed “predatory borrowers” who took out mortgages they could not afford; banks that took on too much risk; and large financial institutions that did not set aside enough capital to cover their bad bets.

But looser regulation played virtually no role, he argued, saying that is simply an emerging myth.

“There is this idea afloat that if you had more regulation you would have fewer mistakes,” he said. “I don’t see any evidence in our history or anybody else’s to substantiate it.” He added, “The markets have worked better than you might have thought.”
...
From 1999 to 2001, Congress first considered steps to curb predatory loans — those that typically had high fees, significant prepayment penalties and ballooning monthly payments and were often issued to low-income borrowers. Foreclosures on such loans were on the rise, setting off a wave of personal bankruptcies.

But Mr. Gramm did everything he could to block the measures. In 2000, he refused to have his banking committee consider the proposals, an intervention hailed by the National Association of Mortgage Brokers as a “huge, huge step for us.”
...
In late 1999, Mr. Gramm played a central role in what would be the most significant financial services legislation since the Depression. The Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, as the measure was called, removed barriers between commercial and investment banks that had been instituted to reduce the risk of economic catastrophes. Long sought by the industry, the law would let commercial banks, securities firms and insurers become financial supermarkets offering an array of services.
...
In November 1999, senior Clinton administration officials, including Treasury Secretary Lawrence H. Summers, joined by the Federal Reserve chairman, Alan Greenspan, and Arthur Levitt Jr., the head of the Securities and Exchange Commission, issued a report that instead recommended legislation exempting many kinds of derivatives from federal oversight.

Mr. Gramm helped lead the charge in Congress. Demanding even more freedom from regulators than the financial industry had sought, he persuaded colleagues and negotiated with senior administration officials, pushing so hard that he nearly scuttled the deal. “When I get in the red zone, I like to score,” Mr. Gramm told reporters at the time.

Finally, he had extracted enough. In December 2000, the Commodity Futures Modernization Act was passed as part of a larger bill by unanimous consent after Mr. Gramm dominated the Senate debate.

“This legislation is important to every American investor,” he said at the time. “It will keep our markets modern, efficient and innovative, and it guarantees that the United States will maintain its global dominance of financial markets.”

But some critics worried that the lack of oversight would allow abuses that could threaten the economy.
...
“He was the architect, advocate and the most knowledgeable person in Congress on these topics,” Mr. Donovan said. “To me, Phil Gramm is the single most important reason for the current financial crisis.”

Mr. Gramm, ever the economics professor, disputes his critics’ analysis of the causes of the upheaval. He asserts that swaps, by enabling companies to insure themselves against defaults, have diminished, not increased, the effects of the declining housing markets.

“This is part of this myth of deregulation,” he said in the interview. “By and large, credit-default swaps have distributed the risks. They didn’t create it. The only reason people have focused on them is that some politicians don’t know a credit-default swap from a turnip.”

But many experts disagree, including some of Mr. Gramm’s former allies in Congress. They say the lack of oversight left the system vulnerable.

“The virtually unregulated over-the-counter market in credit-default swaps has played a significant role in the credit crisis, including the now $167 billion taxpayer rescue of A.I.G.,” Christopher Cox, the chairman of the S.E.C. and a former congressman, said Friday.

Mr. Gramm says that, given what has happened, there are modest regulatory changes he would favor, including requiring issuers of credit-default swaps to demonstrate that they have enough capital to back up their pledges. But his belief that government should intervene only minimally in markets is unshaken.

“They are saying there was 15 years of massive deregulation and that’s what caused the problem,” Mr. Gramm said of his critics. “I just don’t see any evidence of it.”

So far as I am able to tell, Gramm was not joking in any of his quotations.

An end to this occupation after a war of choice

Assuming the new agreement passes the Iraqi parliament, the war in Iraq now has a definite end in sight:

The draft approved Sunday requires coalition forces to withdraw from Iraqi cities and towns by the summer of 2009 and from the country by the end of 2011. An earlier version had language giving some flexibility to that deadline, with both sides discussing timetables and timelines for withdrawal, but the Iraqis managed to have the deadline set in stone, a significant negotiating victory. The United States has around 150,000 troops in Iraq.

It's still hard to believe how duped we were by the lies told by Bushco. And it's also hard to believe that so many still don't realize it.

The waning Southern strategy

The NYT had a great front-page item today following up on what I wrote a few days ago about the (sad) role of Applachia in the election.

Along the Atlantic Coast, parts of the “suburban South,” notably Virginia and North Carolina, made history last week in breaking from their Confederate past and supporting Mr. Obama. Those states have experienced an influx of better educated and more prosperous voters in recent years, pointing them in a different political direction than states farther west, like Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana and Mississippi, and Appalachian sections of Kentucky and Tennessee.

Southern counties that voted more heavily Republican this year than in 2004 tended to be poorer, less educated and whiter, a statistical analysis by The New York Times shows. Mr. Obama won in only 44 counties in the Appalachian belt, a stretch of 410 counties that runs from New York to Mississippi. Many of those counties, rural and isolated, have been less exposed to the diversity, educational achievement and economic progress experienced by more prosperous areas.

They accompanied the analysis with a great graphic too:

Basically I would just say that I hope the party continues its slide into irrelevance and ignorance. Let the GOP be the party of the uneducated religious zealot, the bigoted redneck and the gun-crazed nutjob. According to Beliefnet, 52% of the anti-intellectual elements of the party (namely Evangelicals) apparently believed that Obama was a Muslim. Yet they still believe the media is ridiculously liberal, despite the media's inability to inform them of the basic fact of the President-elect's religion. Sad.

Anti-intellectualism and conservatism

Analyzing the fall of the GOP in the past two elections has induced a cottage industry, so I may as well join in. After reading a neat piece on the anti-intellectual base of the GOP, I see dark days ahead for the party, and I'm not alone. David Brooks thinks that the GOP is heading for major reforms:

Moreover, the Reformers say, conservatives need to pay attention to the way the country has changed. Conservatives have to appeal more to Hispanics, independents and younger voters. They cannot continue to insult the sensibilities of the educated class and the entire East and West Coasts.

The WSJ published a really insightful piece along the same lines:

It's a sad tale that began in the '80s, when leading conservatives frustrated with the left-leaning press and university establishment began to speak of an "adversary culture of intellectuals." ... The die was cast. Over the next 25 years there grew up a new generation of conservative writers who cultivated none of their elders' intellectual virtues -- indeed, who saw themselves as counter-intellectuals. Most are well-educated and many have attended Ivy League universities; in fact, one of the masterminds of the Palin nomination was once a Harvard professor. But their function within the conservative movement is no longer to educate and ennoble a populist political tendency, it is to defend that tendency against the supposedly monolithic and uniformly hostile educated classes. They mock the advice of Nobel Prize-winning economists and praise the financial acumen of plumbers and builders. They ridicule ambassadors and diplomats while promoting jingoistic journalists who have never lived abroad and speak no foreign languages. And with the rise of shock radio and television, they have found a large, popular audience that eagerly absorbs their contempt for intellectual elites. They hoped to shape that audience, but the truth is that their audience has now shaped them. [...]

Writing recently in the New York Times, David Brooks noted correctly (if belatedly) that conservatives' "disdain for liberal intellectuals" had slipped into "disdain for the educated class as a whole," and worried that the Republican Party was alienating educated voters. I couldn't care less about the future of the Republican Party, but I do care about the quality of political thinking and judgment in the country as a whole. There was a time when conservative intellectuals raised the level of American public debate and helped to keep it sober. Those days are gone. As for political judgment, the promotion of Sarah Palin as a possible world leader speaks for itself. The Republican Party and the political right will survive, but the conservative intellectual tradition is already dead.

And the WaPo says:

Tuesday's Republican debacle was, as the social scientists say, "over-determined." It had many causes. Was it brought on by congressional corruption, Bush administration incompetence, intellectual exhaustion or John McCain's failings as a candidate? All of the above -- and then some.

They go on to dissect three of those four causes, but not intellectual exhaustion.

I mentioned the other day a study that contradicted one of the favorite myths of the GOP and the Religious Right: that going to college will lead you to either Socialism or hell. My question is -- do you go to college to get told what to think, or shown how to think by asking questions and looking at all the angles? It's church where you're told what you must believe and are started from a very early age with songs and verse-memorization to try to mold you in the direction of religion. The Red Scare converges well with the Religious Right, in my humble opinion, because they are reminded of what the Soviets and Chinese did to churches: they shut them down.

The fact is, conservatives have been dissing intellectuals for decades, and I don't know if it's because academia is thoroughly leftist or because the true power base of conservatism is the Religious Right. I'm convinced that there is a link between religiosity and conservatism that extends beyond the trite, "if you love Jesus, vote Republican." I think it is part of the nature of religiosity to tend towards anti-intellectualism: why study philosophy if the Bible has all the answers?

Religious conservatives are, in my humble opinion, to blame for the death of the conservative intellectual force. These people are devoted to a farcical worldview that does not reconcile easily with assault weapons or laissez-faire capitalism to begin with, so they twist and contort social issues in order to ascend within the GOP and use demagoguery in place of reason. Some people may think that this period will result in a "purging" of these godbots from the Republican Party, but I am willing to put down money that they will only make the GOP even further right, at least in the near term. And then, hopefully, a true multi-party system may emerge in the US, which I think will bring more health to our political system.

It seems that it's an intrinsic part of conservatism (by definition) to preserve the social order and resist progress. It seems that it's an intrinsic part of liberalism (by definition) to question and challenge the status quo and the institutions of power and push for social reforms. If your philosophy is innately resistant to change, then as the world slowly changes around you, your philosophy becomes irrelevant. This is what's happened with religion to a large degree: the thriving churches are thoroughly modern and provide huge social outlets and social supports for members. The danger of liberalism is change for change's sake, if the net result does not better prosper or secure our nation. Liberals can believe too much in government spending to solve all ills and not enough in the power of free markets.

I would love to see a smart, lean and mean progressive coalition that enacted real reforms, cut the budget in all the right places, and increased it where it counts. And I think the only way to get there is to depend upon evidence and study in knowing what to do and how to do it, rather than relying upon party dogma.

Kristof talks about intellectualism in his column Sunday:

An intellectual is a person interested in ideas and comfortable with complexity. Intellectuals read the classics, even when no one is looking, because they appreciate the lessons of Sophocles and Shakespeare that the world abounds in uncertainties and contradictions, and — President Bush, lend me your ears — that leaders self-destruct when they become too rigid and too intoxicated with the fumes of moral clarity.

I really think that Americans were so sick of our Idiot-in-Chief that listening to Barack refuse to oversimplify answers and pontificate was actually refreshing. We understood that it was time for a leader who was goddamned razor-sharp and willing to consider arguments from all perspectives. Republicans had some ideas for this election, but their ideas lacked the force of power that Democrats' did, precisely because Republicans have a sort of dogma that resists challenge.

The gods are smiling on me

They must be:

My healthy baby is getting cuter and chubbier every day.

My candidate won the election. Change is coming.


My Gators won the SEC East. They should be ranked #3 today, and will likely be in the BCS Championship Game when they beat Alabama in the SEC Conference Championship. (Certainly so if Texas Tech loses to Oklahoma in two weeks.)

Appalachia

This morning I saw Krugman's cut on Zell Miller and wanted to find the source of his map (funny how some blogs are horrible about linking to important source material). I found it shortly thereafter at the NYT. (And this interactive one.)

What the map shows is what I feared months ago after the primaries: that the Appalachian region would solidly vote against Obama. Amazingly, only 22% of the counties of the entire USA voted more Republican this election than the last one. Guess where they are heavily concentrated?

Tazewell County is my home! The poorest, least educated, most religious parts of the country, of course! And it went 2:1 for McCain.

Charles Blow has more depth on the same topic.

Michael Crichton dies at 66

Although I recently knocked him for his loony tripe about global warming, I grew up reading Crichton before most people knew who he was, and it is a sad day for fans of his writing.

A myth destroyed

The idea that liberal professors indoctrinate students is a favorite canard of the anti-intellectual right that I've commented on before. It's mainly the fear of the Religious Right that college = atheism, despite contradictory evidence. New research pulls the rug out from under this claim.

So much for that rumor

When even the WingNutDaily affirmed the authenticity of Obama's birth certificate, other conspiracy-theory-minded nuts should've moved on (or back) to the Muslim Manchurian idea.

Now it's a little difficult to support this one.

State declares Obama birth certificate genuine

1 day ago

HONOLULU (AP) — State officials say there's no doubt Barack Obama was born in Hawaii.

Health Department Director Dr. Chiyome Fukino said Friday she and the registrar of vital statistics, Alvin Onaka, have personally verified that the health department holds Obama's original birth certificate.

Fukino says that no state official, including Republican Gov. Linda Lingle, ever instructed that Obama's certificate be handled differently.

She says state law bars release of a certified birth certificate to anyone who does not have a tangible interest.

Some Obama critics claim he was not born in the US.

Earlier Friday, a southwest Ohio magistrate rejected a challenge to Obama's citizenship. Judges in Seattle and Philadelphia recently dismissed similar suits.

Another smear bites the dust.

Democrats v. Republicans on the economy

Title sounds familiar for a reason (9/19).

I just wanted to catalog a few useful links that I have found to be integral to arguing with conservatives about economics.

update: 12/18

Although federal income taxes are progressive (get larger as income gets higher), all taxes do not, and as a share of one's income, the overall amount of taxes paid is fairly flat across all incomes. It literally comes down to a few points difference in total tax burden for people in the 2nd-5th quintiles of income.

Ezra Klein on the changes over time in overall tax burden (graph 1 source, graph 2 source)
Chart showing overall tax burden (CSM)
State and local tax burdens (NSN)
Washington Monthly on overall tax burden
NYT graph on overall tax burden (NYT article)
NYT graph on tax code changes and beneficiaries (NYT article)

11/1

Income inequality under Dems v. GOP (Bartels)
Income inequality under Dems v. GOP (chart, Krugman)
Income inequality under Dems v. GOP (Rolling Stone, Krugman)
Explanation of the causes of the financial crisis (Stiglitz)
The $3T War (Stiglitz)
Overall economic comparison of Dems v. GOP (Slate)
Overall economic comparison of Dems v. GOP (NYT, Alan Blinder)
How the GOP went from a $5.6T surplus to a $3.8T deficit (CBO)