The Wrongologist – Page 220 – Geopolitics, Power and Political Economy

Is Snowden the First, or Last of His Kind?

Wrongo and Ms. Oh So Right saw “CitizenFour” a few days after the Oscars. It is interesting that the Academy recognized both “American Sniper” and “CitizenFour.” The former bagged one Oscar, for Best Sound Editing, while the latter won for Best Feature Length Documentary. One made big bucks, the other is already on HBO. Both celebrate heroes, one a tool of the Global War on Terror, the other a whistleblower computer geek who saw that the War on Terror was compromising our Constitution.

Laura Poitras accepted her Oscar, but Edward Snowden couldn’t, because of that little “treason” thing.

As Kunstler says: (brackets by the Wrongologist)

He [Snowden] appeared to know exactly what he was doing, and with quiet, unshakable moral commitment. And then he disappeared down the gullet of America’s modern times nemesis, Russia, where he continues to taunt with his very existence, the NSA gameboys, lizard-lawyers and puppet-masters who cordially invite him back home to face, ho-ho, our vaunted justice system. Of course any six-year-old understands that they would love to jam Snowden down some federal supermax memory hole as an example to any other waffling NSA code-jockey having second thoughts about reading your grandpa’s phone records.

Snowden is a much more interesting hero than the sniper, Chris Kyle. The documentary follows Snowden, who was hiding in plain sight in Hong Kong in the spring of 2013, after he stole over 220,000 files belonging to the National Security Agency. Glen Greenwald, Barton Gellman, and Laura Poitras later began revealing to the public the extent to which the American government was spying on everyone’s electronic life while ignoring that pesky US Constitution, and setting the USA on a track towards becoming a police state.

Listening to Ed talk, you’re pleasantly surprised. He gets the concepts, he articulates them beautifully.

Towards the end of the movie, one of the characters (Greenwald?) makes an amazing statement. He says:

What we used to call liberty and freedom we now call privacy. And now people are saying privacy is dead.

Is that what we’re all fighting for? Liberty? Is that a concept that unites the left and the right in America?

You’d expect people to be up in arms about “CitizenFour” but the truth is they just don’t care. That’s our government’s job. If we don’t let the agencies run wild, ISIS will attack Kansas. So we suspend your rights for a while. That’s right, the head fake of fighting “terrorism” has caused us to let our First Amendment freedoms go down the drain, and if someone like Snowden blows the whistle, they are a traitor, or a pariah.

Snowden sparked a debate about how to preserve privacy in the information age—and whether such a thing is even possible. If Snowden hadn’t come forward, the steady encroachment of the surveillance state would have continued, and most people might never have known about the government’s efforts.

There’s something hollow in the soul of America today. Right and wrong used to matter. But now, the government works to keep the average person off balance via subterfuge and fear. And very few of us grasp the facts, even when they’re staring us in the face.

So, we’re dependent on lone wolves to help us see. Snowden says he’s only the first, that the government may get him, but others will follow in his wake. Really?

Once upon a time, “CitizenFour” would have incited a national debate. Now it’s just grist for the mill, Snowden’s character has already been assassinated by the main stream media, and his Oscar-winning movie will come and go.

All of the political debating about immigration, DHS funding, taxes, and ISIS are the sideshow. The main event is how they’ve got our number and we’re already living in 1984. And you believed it couldn’t happen here.

The truth is it already has. We need more Snowdens. People who will say, as Snowden did:

There are things worth dying for.

Today’s Reason for Rejecting Conservative Republicanism

Yesterday, we highlighted an effort by a county Republican Party organization to establish Christianity as the state religion of Idaho. Turns out, that idea was smack in the mainstream of Republican ideas: A national poll of Republican primary voters conducted by Public Policy Polling finds that 57% percent of these voters support establishing Christianity as the national religion, while 30% oppose making Christianity the nation’s religion. Well, this means that 57% of Republicans hate America plain and simple. They want to turn our nation into something out of the Dark Ages.

A number of red states have passed statutes forbidding the implementation of Islam-based sharia law in their states, but Republicans apparently have no misgivings about turning the US into a Christian theocracy. The poll’s cross-tabs reveal that support for making Christianity the official religion is strongest among supporters of Mike Huckabee (94%), Rick Perry (83%), and Ben Carson (78%).

Now the poll was small, only sampling 316 Republican primary voters. Sample sizes of 300-600 are the norm for national telephone pollsters. While 316 is on the low end of that, PPP says that its margin of error is ± 5.5%, so some will say that it can’t scale up. However, PPP has been very accurate in the past.

The same poll also found that 66% do not believe in global warming, and a plurality (49%), do not believe in evolution. So, not only do they wish to establish a national religion, but it appears that their version of Christianity is one that is at odds with the scientific consensus in climatology and biology.

These data were buried deep (starting on page 14 of 47) in a report about how Scott Walker leads in the national eye test competition among Repubs.

Here’s a repeat of yesterday’s reminder: The First Amendment to the US Constitution provides that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion”. There’s a reason that our Founding Fathers wanted to establish a strict separation of Church and State, and the poll results bear out that wisdom. If things were left up to today’s Republican primary voters, we’d already be a theocracy, perhaps as self-righteous and intolerant as Iran or Saudi Arabia.

The ignorance of our Constitution displayed by the poll results speaks to a voting populace that simply doesn’t care about tolerance, multicultural diversity, and most certainly, not about religious freedom.

America ought to be better than this. Instead, a significant portion of the electorate would be perfectly happy to turn this into a Christian theocracy…a recipe for tyranny by these good, God-fearing Christian patriots.

Our Founding Fathers lived at the end of a 300-year period where Europe had been racked by wars of religion, fought between adherents of various “Christian” sects, and they were only a little over a hundred years removed from the English civil wars of the mid-1600’s which were strongly influenced by religion. The colonies themselves mirrored Europe’s religious division, Anglicans in Virginia, Puritans in New England, Quakers in Pennsylvania, Catholics in Maryland, and many German religious refugees in New York and Pennsylvania. They had darned good reasons to not want any religion to be given preeminence.

And today, we see religious violence in Asia (Burma, India, and China) and in the Middle East. Why would we want to revisit that here, in a nation that knows better?

From fear of Jihadi John, to fear of immunizations, to denial of climate change, it doesn’t seem that Conservative American Christians are comfortable with the idea of critical thinking; it seems to require too much of them. How would atheists, or non-Christians of all stripes survive under the US Christian state? Luckily, that would take a Constitutional Amendment, which could prove very difficult to enact.

How did Conservatives, noted in the not-so-distant past for a fierce commitment to logic, become such prisoners of their various religions?

Monday Wake Up Call – March 2, 2015

The lands surrounding the Mansion of Wrong remain deeply snow-covered, and we picked up another 6” of snow last night. Where is Spring? In other weather-related news, February 2015 was officially the coldest February on record here in the Nutmeg State. So, let’s turn to Pete Seeger for a lovely Wake Up song about snow, with a gentle political message buried inside. Here is “Snow, Snow”:

Sample Lyrics:
Snow, snow, falling down;
Covering up my dirty old town.

Covers the garbage dump, covers the holes,
Covers the rich homes, and the poor souls,
Covers the station, covers the tracks,
Covers the footsteps of those who’ll not be back.

In news of the stupid, a branch of the Republican Party in Idaho voted to take up a measure to declare the state is Christian. The Idea was to bolster what supporters called the Judeo-Christian underpinnings of the US. The proposal was that Idaho be “formally and specifically declared a Christian state,” guided by a Judeo-Christian faith as reflected in the US Declaration of Independence. Jeff Tyler, a member of the committee and backer of the draft resolution, said:

We’re a Christian community in a Christian state and the Republican Party is a Christian Party.

It’s possible that the county Republicans had never heard of the Establishment Clause of the US Constitution, which says…”Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion”…Oh, and that applies to the states as well.

Well, when the news got out of Kootenai County, the county’s Republican Central Committee decided to shelve the measure, Now, Republicans will tell you it was just a small splinter group, and the resolution was going nowhere, so the US Constitution was never in danger from Republican religious extremists. Perhaps the more realistic way to look at it is that the Constitution is safe for the moment, until another, larger Republican extremist group comes along.

Here are your Monday hot links:

A study of frozen ice cores from the Tibetan Himalayas shows that international agreements on phasing out the use of toxic organic pollutants are working. It’s cheaper to take an ice core sample than it is to place air quality sensors everywhere and monitor them.

In the US, just three out of ten workers produce and deliver all of the goods we consume. Everything we extract, grow, design, build, make, engineer, and transport – down to brewing a cup of coffee in a restaurant kitchen – is done by roughly 30% of the country’s workforce. Another 30% of us spend our time planning what to make, deciding where to install the things we have made, performing personal services, talking to each other, and keeping track of what is being done, so that we can figure out what needs to be done next. The rest are kids, elderly and out of work. Which 30% are you in?

Last week, the Muslim World League, a Saudi-backed alliance of Islamic NGOs, held a three-day conference in Mecca on “Islam and Counterterrorism.” The conference’s organizers cast their mission as developing a coordinated campaign to promote a moderate, peaceful vision of Islam that disavows the violence and apostasy that ISIS thrives on. They also think only Muslims can solve the ISIS problem.

You Tube makes no money. The Wall Street Journal reports that while YouTube accounted for about 6% of Google’s overall sales last year ($4 billion), it didn’t contribute to earnings. After paying for content, and the equipment to deliver speedy videos, YouTube’s bottom line is “roughly break-even”. You Tube has 1 billion users per month. By comparison, Facebook generated more than $12 billion in revenue, and nearly $3 billion in profit, from its 1.3 billion users per year.

An abandoned Walmart is America’s largest 1-floor library. This is an old story, but worth checking out if you missed it. The architect firm of Meyer, Scherer & Rockcastle transformed an abandoned Walmart in McAllen, Texas, into a 124,500-square-foot public library, the largest single-floor public library in the United States:

Sunday Cartoon Blogging – March 1, 2015

“We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them” – Albert Einstein

Israel PM Bibi Netanyahu is addressing Congress on March 3rd about his problems with a potential Iranian nuclear deal. He is looking to turn Republicans in Congress against any deal, an effort designed to undercut President Obama’s negotiations. Bibi has big problems with Mr. Obama, but he has apparently already found a soul mate in Saudi Arabia.

According to the Times of Israel, it is looking as if two former enemies have developed a behind-the-scenes alliance against Iran. Saudi Arabia has agreed to let Israeli warplanes overfly Saudi territory while attacking Iranian nuclear sites. From their report:

Saudi Arabia is prepared to let Israeli fighter jets use its airspace if it proves necessary to attack Iran’s nuclear program, an Israeli TV station reported Tuesday, highlighting growing ties in the shadow of Tehran’s nuclear drive.

This works for Israel since using Saudi airspace provides Israeli planes a direct route for reaching Iran. It means they won’t have to fly around the Persian Gulf, which would take more time and fuel. The Times says that Israel and Saudi Arabia also share intelligence on Iran’s nuclear program at a very detailed level. The alliance works for the Saudis, who are also concerned about a possible agreement coming out of the Geneva. Netanyahu has warned repeatedly that the Iran must not be allowed to acquire nuclear weapons, although Iranian officials insist the nuclear program is purely for civilian use.

The Times of Israel reporting suggests that Netanyahu may have laid the groundwork for his own plan to attack the Iranian nuclear sites, if the international negotiations are successful.

Bibi rocks the House:

Bibi is ALWAYS non-partisan when in DC:

GOP gets adjustment, extends DHS funding for a week:

Republicans didn’t realize the immigration order was already off the table:

Jeb Bush says he’s not in the family business:

RIP Mr. Spock:

Friday Music Break – February 27, 2015

With all the talk about Scott Walker’s Republican presidential bid, maybe there should be some equal time for the governor of Minnesota, Wisconsin’s neighbor to the west, Mark Dayton, who is a Democrat. HuffPo reports:

When he took office in January, 2011…Dayton inherited a $6.2 billion budget deficit and a 7 % unemployment rate from his predecessor, Tim Pawlenty, the soon-forgotten Republican candidate for the presidency who called himself Minnesota’s first true fiscally-conservative governor in modern history.

During his first four years in office, Gov. Dayton raised the state income tax from 7.85 to 9.85% on individuals earning over $150,000, and on couples earning over $250,000, raising $2.1 billion/year. He’s also agreed to raise Minnesota’s minimum wage to $9.50 an hour by 2018, and passed a state law guaranteeing equal pay for women.

According to trickle-down economic theory, Minnesota must be losing businesses and jobs, right? Wrong. In the real world, the opposite happened. Between 2011 and 2015, Gov. Dayton added 172,000 new jobs to Minnesota’s economy, or 165,800 more jobs in Dayton’s first term than Pawlenty added in both of his terms.

• Minnesota’s top income tax rate is the 4th-highest in the country, but it has the 5th-lowest unemployment rate in the country at 3.6%.
• By late 2013, Minnesota’s private sector job growth exceeded pre-recession levels, and the state’s economy was the 5th fastest-growing in the United States.

Despite Republican complaints about Dayton’s supposedly anti-business agenda, Forbes ranks Minnesota the 9th-best state for business, while Scott Walker’s Wisconsin comes in at #32 on the same list.

And while Walker was busy blocking people from voting, Dayton actually created an online voter registration system, making it easier than ever for people to register to vote.

Oh, and Dayton is a billionaire. He’s an heir to the Target fortune, and a member of 1% who isn’t a prisoner of the billionaire dialectic.

There you have it, proof that trickle-down economics is bunk. Minnesota proves it.

On to your Music Break:
Whitehorse is a Canadian folk rock duo. Luke Doucet and Melissa McClelland were married in 2006, but both were established and successful singer-songwriters prior to marriage and subsequently. They started to perform together in 2011. She also works with Sarah McLachlan, providing backing vocals at McLachlan’s live shows. Here are two songs from their just released “No Bridge Unburned” album. First up, “Downtown”:

Sample Lyric:
I’m electrified by the city light
I get off where I need to
And with who I like
I’m a diplomat
I’m a subway rat
I like the unfamiliar
I’m not scared by that

Next, “Sweet Disaster”:

Sample Lyric:
Galileo was bluffing
It’s just a mess out here
There’s no compass to guide us
Through the flashes of violence and fear

See you on Sunday.

Did Chicago Police Run a “Black Site”?

“At any given moment there is a sort of all-prevailing orthodoxy, a general tacit agreement not to discuss some large and uncomfortable fact”. − George Orwell

The Guardian is reporting that the Chicago police have used a “Black Site” for years:

The Chicago police department operates an off-the-books interrogation compound, rendering Americans unable to be found by family or attorneys while locked inside what lawyers say is the domestic equivalent of a CIA black site. The facility, a nondescript warehouse on Chicago’s west side known as Homan Square, has long been the scene of secretive work by special police units.
Interviews with local attorneys and one protester who spent the better part of a day shackled in Homan Square describe operations that deny access to basic constitutional rights…

Spencer Ackerman of The Guardian reported that alleged activities there included the following:

• Detainees were kept out of the official police booking system
• Persons in custody were often shackled for long periods of time
• Attorneys were denied access to their clients
• There were frequent beatings, causing head injuries

If this is happening in Chicago, then could other cities also be operating illegal detention sites?

A series of US Supreme Court cases over the past 100 years have codified the rights of suspects under our system, but they may not have protected many suspects in Chicago. The Atlantic interviewed Tracy Siska, executive director of the Chicago Justice Project and a criminologist who wrote a story for The Guardian on military interrogation tactics in the city. Siska spoke about the Homan Square abuses of Constitutional rights: (emphasis by the Wrongologist)

What used to happen at Homan Square is that prior to a year ago, if you get arrested and you get brought down anywhere in any district, you would not pop up in the city computer as being arrested until they processed the police report, which could take anywhere from an hour to 15 hours.
If they “arrested” you, then they have to report it. But if they don’t “arrest you,” nefarious things could happen and they could interrogate you without a lawyer. And they would move you around from district to district. So [for example] if the family shows up or the lawyer shows up and they say you aren’t here but you are, they’ve denied you access. But if they say you’re at [district] 17, then move you to 15, and then 12, they can question you without counsel. At Homan Square they don’t process paperwork about your arrest. You’re just gone. No one knows.
At some point they have to do the paperwork and prosecute you. After they get your confession, you wind up back in the paperwork.

One implication of Siska’s interview is that the Constitution-shredding actions of the Chicago PD ended in 2014. Again, according to Siska: (emphasis and brackets by the Wrongologist)

About a year ago, [the rule changed]…After arriving at a CPD facility, [officers] have 20 minutes to one hour to put you into the system, and you appear on the system city-wide. Any officer anywhere in the city can find where you are. And anywhere they move you to, every time you move, [officers] have 20 minutes to one hour to put you in so you show up on a computer. Each time you move, your right to phone calls and Miranda rights starts all over again.

Belated exposure of the possible Constitutional abuses at Homan Square proves once again − as if we need more proof − how deeply the police forces in the US have been corrupted by the military-industrial complex and by our political enablers. It shows the extent that policing has become more like an occupation army (as it has been perceived in minority communities for a very, very long time).

There is no evidence that any loss of Constitutional rights, no matter how appalling, will wake up a solid majority of people in this country anytime soon. Like the Orwell quote says, we have agreed not to discuss some very important things, like Constitutional rights in our cities.

Not just that. We had a $4 trillion war based on lies that we didn’t discuss. We had a $1 trillion dollar financial meltdown. Not discussed. We learned that the NSA “collects it all.” Ho-hum.

“Mistakes happen”, and we just move on, talking about “50 Shades of Gray”. Americans have made their screwed-up priorities quite clear. They’ve given up on reality and have decided to go with fantasy.

Monday Wake Up Call – February 23, 2015

Welcome to Monday. The Wrongologist and Ms. Oh So Right are heading back to the Northeast.

Today, the world needs to wake up to the threat posed by outsourcing military operations to private armies whose allegiance is only to the highest bidder. The American Conservative warns in an article by Kelley Vlahos, called “A Blackwater World Order”, that the Pentagon’s dependence on contractors has created a new era of warfare in which several newly founded private military companies are meeting the demand of an exploding global market for armed conflict.

The article describes the book, The Modern Mercenary: Private Armies and What they Mean for World Order, by Sean McFate, a former Army paratrooper who later worked for outsourcer and defense contractor DynCorp, in Africa. In the book, McFate says that warfare is shifting from global dominance by nation-states to a “polycentric” military environment in which states now compete with transnational corporations, regional and ethnic interests, and terror organizations in the chess game of international power. McFate argues that new access to professional private arms has ended the traditional monopoly on force by the large states, and has brought about the dawn of a new era of armed conflict.

Are we sure these groups won’t go rogue? Who can control the mercenaries? What if a truly wealthy oligarch fields his own mercenary army to seize control of a country? It wouldn’t be for the first time.

Lots of questions, but very few answers.

Here is your Wake Up tune of the day. The National’s “Fake Empire”, from their 2008 album “Boxer”.

A fun fact about “Fake Empire” is that it was used in a 2012 Romney political video made by the group, Ohio University Students for Romney. Apparently, nobody told them that the same song was used by Obama in a 2008 ad. The National asked the Romney people to take it down, saying:

Our music was used without our permission in this ad. The song you’re using was written about the same backward, con game policies Romney is proposing.

Judge for yourself. Here is “Fake Empire”:

Sample Lyrics:
Turn the light out say goodnight, no thinking for a little while
Let’s not try to figure out everything at once
It’s hard to keep track of you falling through the sky
We’re half-awake in a fake empire
We’re half-awake in a fake empire

Monday’s hot links:

Chinese city says air pollution is due to bacon: Dazhou, a city located in the northeastern corner of Sichuan province, has suffered from especially “severe air pollution” since earlier this month, and officials say the main cause is the smoking of bacon by local residents. China consumes half of the world’s pork every year. Insert your own joke here.

MIT has a list of breakthrough technologies for 2015. Invest at your own risk.

New data for 2013 reveals that states with weak gun violence prevention laws and higher rates of gun ownership have the highest overall gun death rates in the nation. Here is a handy table from the report:

You can see where your state ranks here.

Now, get up, get dressed, and get going.

Sunday Cartoon Blogging – February 22, 2015

“There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs”− John Rogers

On Friday, we wrote about the Randian/Republican ideologues who want to keep myth alive in our discourse about economics. Today, we note that the Oklahoma Tea Party wants to change AP History courses in the state because maybe, they teach too much of the bad parts, like that messy land grab from Native Americans and all that civil war violence in the west. The bill would require schools to instruct students in a list of “foundational documents,” including some good things, such as the Federalist Papers, along with some questionable items like the Ten Commandments, two sermons, and three speeches by Ronald Reagan. In addition, they want included:

Founding documents of the United States that contributed to the foundation or maintenance of the representative form of limited government, the free market economic system and American exceptionalism

Limited government, the free market system and American Exceptionalism? Nope, no political agenda there.

The bill designates a total of 58 documents that “shall form the base level of academic content for all United States History courses offered in the schools in the state.” Many of the texts are not controversial and are undoubtedly covered in AP US History courses around America. Things like the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence and Gettysburg address. The bill was approved by the Education committee on an 11-4 vote.

It’s all great stuff if you want to raise a state full of conservative think-tank weenies.

But we must go further. TPM reported that Fox host Lisa “Kennedy” Montgomery suggested getting rid of the nation’s public schools altogether on Thursday’s “Outnumbered.” She was talking about that Oklahoma bill:

There really shouldn’t be public schools, should there?…I mean we should really go to a system where parents of every stripe have a choice, have a say in the kind of education their kids get because, when we have centralized, bureaucratic education doctrines and dogmas like this, that’s exactly what happens.

Sure. Bring back the 16th century, because in the 17th century, the first public school in America was founded (1635). So public education must have been holding us back ever since. Oh, and a glance at Ms. Montgomery’s Wikipedia page shows that she is a product of public education, from Lakeridge High School in Oswego, OR and from UCLA, it was public schools all the way. Hard to judge if that is a good thing, though. She seems to have graduated from both.

The news this week included snow, the dog show, the stay of the immigration executive order, Jebbie talking foreign policy, Biden acting frisky with the new Secretary of Defense’s wife, and A-Rod’s apology.

The Northeast has its own bad torture movie:

After the Beagle won at the Westminster Dog show, there were consequences:

Jeb Bush spoke about foreign policy. Mostly, he tried to flick away his bad angel:

Activist judge changes immigration policy, and the GOP is for it:

Biden misunderstood exactly WHO was being too frisky this week:

A-Rod found pie on his menu in NY:

The Republican Revolution is De-evolution

De-evolution, or backward evolution, is a term in biology that describes the fact that a species can change from a more complex form into a more primitive form over time. So noted. Now on to the commentary below:

America used to have smart, effective Republicans, but alas, not recently, and not in the lifetimes of younger voters. In line with this de-evolution of Republicans, consider Paul Krugman’s take down of what he labels the Charlatan Caucus, a group of supply-side voodoo economists that Scott Walker had to court this week: (brackets by the Wrongologist)

On Wednesday…[Walker] did what, these days, any ambitious Republican must, and pledged allegiance to charlatans and cranks.

Krugman reminded us that the phrase, “charlatans and cranks” was originally coined by Republican economist Gregory Mankiew, who served as George W. Bush’s chief economic adviser. Krugman is speaking about Gov. Scott Walker’s appearance at a New York dinner featuring supply-siders’ Arthur Laffer (of the Laffer curve), CNBC’s Larry Kudlow, and Stephen Moore, chief economist of the Heritage Foundation. More from Krugman: (emphasis by the Wrongologist)

Bowing obeisance before the high priests of bunk – like questioning climate change, evolution, and the current president’s American bona fides – has become a “right” of passage for Republican presidential contenders. Clearly, to be a Republican contender, you have to court the powerful charlatan caucus.

In Krugman’s view, with these economists, reality always takes a holiday. Ideology takes precedence. He cites:

• Mr. Moore published a 2004 book titled “Bullish on Bush,” asserting that the Bush agenda was creating a permanently stronger economy.
• Mr. Kudlow sneered at the “bubbleheads” who asserted that inflated home prices were due for a crash.
• Mr. Laffer wrote in the WSJ in 2009, “Get ready for inflation and higher interest rates”. What followed were the lowest inflation in two generations and the lowest interest rates in history.
• Mr. Moore publishes articles with lots of bad numbers. According to Krugman, Moore’s numbers are consistently wrong; they’re for the wrong years, or just plain not what the original sources say. And not surprisingly, his errors always make the case he wants.

But the supply-side ~~economists~~ charlatans continue to have a big influence on Republican politicians. The NYT also reports that the University of North Carolina’s Republican-appointed Board of Governors is closing several academic centers on its campuses dedicated to studying poverty, climate, and social change. That couldn’t also be about ideology, could it? More from The Times:

It’s clearly not about cost-saving; it’s about political philosophy and the right-wing takeover of North Carolina state government…said Chris Fitzsimon, director of NC Policy Watch, a liberal group…And this is one of the biggest remaining pieces that they’re trying to exert their control over.

OK, 29 of the 32 university board members were appointed by the Republican Legislature since 2010, but that doesn’t make the decision about politics?

It’s similar to Scott Walker’s Wisconsin, where our friend of education is cutting the University of Wisconsin’s budget by $300 million. Mr. Walker saw Mr. Laffer’s curve, and bought it. It hasn’t worked out so well for him, since he now has to refinance a $108 million debt payment, increasing the state’s borrowing costs by $19 million over the next two years. The re-fi is a result of Walker’s $600 million tax cut in 2014, which will ultimately lead to a $648 million deficit over the next two years. But, in the big Republican wet dream, he will be president by then, and blame his successor for Wisconsin’s fiscal debacle.

And there is Gov. Sam Brownback (R-KS), whose aggressive tax cuts were heartily cheered on by Republican economists, but which have driven his state into a deep fiscal crisis. North Carolina’s Republican Gov. Pat McCrory has also tasted the charlatan Kool-Aid, but isn’t quite there yet, although he’s working on it.

Back to Krugman. He concludes:

So what does it say about the current state of the GOP that discussion of economic policy is now monopolized by people who have been wrong about everything, have learned nothing from the experience, and can’t even get their numbers straight?

Current-day Republicans seem to have abandoned the idea that there is an objective reality. What are you going to believe, Right-Wing doctrine, or your lying eyes? These days, Right Wing doctrine wins.

In America, there has been a steady drumbeat by conservatives against education. Conservatives really believe in education…but only if it’s the privatized, de-evolved kind.

You can’t have a bunch of people looking too closely at facts, because as is well-known, reality has a liberal bias.

Road Trip Vol. II

Finally, trees with green leaves, green grass and temps in the 50’s. There was snow cover along I-95 for 630 miles south from the mansion of Wrong in Connecticut. After that, we passed through 50+ miles of ice-covered trees. In that part of America, there seemed to be few snow plows, so gas station and supermarket parking lots were ice-covered. Many schools and stores were closed.

I-95 was dry from Baltimore to Savannah, due to Socialist snow plows clearing and salting the roads. Apparently, the Obama tyranny will never end.

Have you noticed that Congress looks more and more like their owners?

Boehner is convinced that America will blame the Democrats when funding for the Department of Homeland Security expires. The reality may be the opposite:

Today’s Links:

What ISIS wants. A must read from The Atlantic.

Netanyahu wrecked a two-state solution with Palestinians in 2011. Found this at Sic Semper Tyrannis, a go-to blog on military strategy in the Middle East

Hillary Clinton and Elizabeth Warren have “cordial” meeting. Does cordial mean, “civil, but can’t stand each other?” Were they smiling, or grinding their teeth?