In which I take a look at a candidate who's gone from an afterthought to this week's cause célèbre.

Why in the hell is anyone taking Herman Cain seriously?

I suppose I ask that question as a subset of the question "why is anyone taking any of the Republican Presidential candidates seriously?"

This guy's website is a riot, unless you take him seriously. At that point it becomes downright frightening.

His "999 Plan" -- and by the way I can guarantee you that if he were a Democrat, the religious right would immediately note that it's really a "666 Plan" turned upside down to fool you...who knows, they're probably saying that about Mr. Cain as well...seriously...Cain, the Bible's first murderer...the "999">"666"...c'mon, it could only be more obvious if he had horns on his head and carried a pitchfork -- oh yeah, but back to the plan.

Anyway, his "999 Plan" combines the regressive elements of a flat tax on income with the even more regressive 9% national sales tax. Proponents of the 9% sales tax suggest that it will encourage saving and thrift, but they apparently don't understand that Joe Jones who earns $22,000 a year and Chauncey Witherspoon who earns $250,000 a year both have to fill their cars with gas and eat food to stay alive and that both of them will pay the same new 9% on those everyday expenses (no details on the website as to whether food is taxable under his plan...currently some states tax food and some don't). Additionally, does Cain intend to put his 9% national sales tax on top of the existing state (and in some cases municipal) sales taxes?

For example, California has the highest state sales tax at 7.25% (before you California haters start hating, understand that with municipal taxes added in, some regions of Alabama, Arizona, and Illinois actually have higher sales taxes than California's maximum local + state sales taxes). So let's imagine that state sales taxes remain in place (after all, sales tax is currently a significant chunk of state revenue in states that have sales taxes) and Mr. Cain manages to pass his 9% national sales tax. That gives us a whopping 16.25% tax on most items purchased in California. In some parts of Illinois, your sales tax would be 20% once local, state, and federal sales taxes were applied.

His corporate policies are even friendlier, with corporations being allowed to avoid most of the taxation by hiding income as "investment" and as an added kicker, dividends paid to shareholders are exempted from the corporate tax. The interesting thing would be to see how Mr. Cain would treat dividends on the shareholder's end...currently they're taxed in most cases around the same rate as capital gains, and Mr. Cain would eliminate capital gains. Would he treat dividends as capital gains, or would they be lumped into general income? If he treats them as capital gains, then he could pull off the amazing feat of taking these items from the conservative talking point of "double-taxation" to the la la land of tax-free income.

Aside from the general regressiveness of his policies toward individuals, and the friendliness of them toward corporations, his website is full of meaningless platitudes, which I suppose many politicians' websites are. This little gem, however, is a real keeper:

A dollar must always be a dollar just as an hour is always 60 minutes.

Last I checked, a dollar always was a dollar. It's the exchange rate that varies. Is he proposing to eliminate inflation? To set exchange rates? I'm not sure what the hell he means.

Which of course brings me back to my initial question: why the hell is anyone taking this joker seriously?

The not so great era of online media.

I've taken to almost completely ignoring comments left on newspaper articles, youtube videos, etc. They're beyond useless. The concept is great: open up the articles for immediate and unlimited commentary. Unlike the traditional letters to the editor (which still exist of course), these comments can appear seconds after the article has been posted (and by seconds, I mean, quite literally, that many comments appear to be made without any sort of knowledge of the originating article), and you don't have to worry about column space. Additionally, in keeping with the fine internet age, we can all comment without attaching any of our real names (yes, I know, my entire blog is based on that premise...but at least I put some thought into my posts).

Essentially, these comment spaces have become nothing more than arenas for confrontation between two blandly predictable opposing camps. Very little thought is required to anticipate the content of the comments section -- far from liberating, they are in fact constricting. No one takes any sort of time to read an argument, so very few people take time to write one. Instead it's invective, sound bites garnered from talk radio, and rehashed political party talking points. Additionally, for all the complaining the right wing does about the Washington Post, and the threats that "they'll never read that rag again" or "no one reads the Post anymore" or some such bullshit, the right wing loons are clearly reading the Post.

It's my belief that right wing loons (for instance, the Freepers -- and I follow long-standing policy of not providing links to racist or fascist organizations) actually see it as their mission to patrol message boards of prominent media outlets and swamp the comment pages with their own irrational arguments and position statements. It could very well be that the left does the same, but I haven't seen it (unless the conversation has been pushed so far right that you have to define "left" with the idea that the government has the right to exist).

However, the Post isn't the best place to see this insanity at work, because it's too mainstream (not used in the bogeyman sense that critics on right and left seem to deploy it, but rather in the "general audience" sense). The best place to look for this phenomenon is on the comment pages of specialty media outlets, like The Chronicle of Higher Education. The Chronicle (which can be nefariously abbreviated to "CHE," showing off, I'm sure, its true socialist leanings) is a leader in its field, but its field is very small. You don't see back issues sitting around the dentist's office, like you might see Car and Driver or Sports Illustrated or Ladies Home Journal. The Chronicle is aimed at highly educated people (and administrators) who work at or with institutions of higher education, and its content therefore concerns such earthshaking issues as graduation rates at community colleges, bad writing and bad thinking, and a police raid on a student newspaper. Now these are important issues and they do touch at times on larger cultural hot buttons, but so also does the latest research in physics deal with important issues that have ramifications for our larger culture -- yet the pages of the Journal of Applied Physics do not overflow with fools arguing that Obama/Hitler/Stalin has threatened to eat all the children of white gun-toting patriots (OK, first I exaggerate, and second, the Journal of Applied Physics, like most scholarly journals, doesn't have a comments section).

Getting back to my point, I'm convinced that Freepers or some organization much like the Freepers trolls the CHE boards spouting off nonsense. I'm not suggesting that there's a policy decision anywhere saying, "let's assign five people to watch over Board X"; I simply think that a few members probably see it as their mission in life to bring their level of ignorance to the higher education community.

As an example, I cite "adamreed," on a comment left on Mark Bauerlein's "Brainstorm" column (for those who don't know Mark Bauerlein, he's a right-leaning professor at Emory with whom I don't agree much if at all, but who at least employs rational argumentation):

24. adamreed - April 16, 2010 at 02:57 pm

Oh delicious irony: A man who directs the re-distribution of property taken from its creators as taxes, by the most uncivil of means, extortion at gunpoint, lectures his victims about "civility." Who needs The Onion when we have propaganda?

"adamreed" is commenting on the current NEH "civility tour" that Bauerlein objects to. To sum up Bauerlein's argument, the lead objection (which we should also read, if we were Freudians, as the "manifest content") is that the civility tour oversteps NEH's jurisdiction and mission, while the real objection is that NEH Chair Leach is "politicizing" the NEH in ways Bauerlein doesn't like (interesting conclusion, given the Lynne Cheney years of hyper-politicization). But back to "adamreed," who apparently objects to taxation and believes he's being extorted at gunpoint to pay his taxes. He obviously has either not read Thoreau or simply didn't understand him.

Whether you agree with Bauerlein or not about Leach's civility tour (and it seems Bauerlein most likely objects more to the content of Leach's speeches and not the tour itself, despite his initial argument), it's clearly not something "adamreed" even knows how to engage with. So instead of offering a useful commentary either in keeping with the column itself or the 23 comments that precede his, he offers his soundbite libertarian objection to taxes and the canard that Obama is a socialist (again exposing his ignorance of either Obama's policies or the definition of socialism...I'm not sure which).

There are other gems in the comment section for this particular Bauerlein column, but this post is already too long as it is. The bottom line (and believe it or not the "adamreed" comment was downright coherent as opposed to others I've read on that site) is that tools like "adamreed" certainly aren't reading the Chronicle because they are involved in higher education; they're actually pretty much incapable of maintaining a straight line of reasoning or supporting their sound bite arguments. So what the hell is "adamreed" doing reading this somewhat esoteric weekly, and more importantly, what motivates someone to insert themselves into arguments that they have no ability to follow? It'd be just as silly for me to jump on the JAMA website and opine on the latest medical research.

Leaving on a jetplane...

What do you think the thought process was behind the NYC flyby?

How do you think that went?

"Um, we want to take some pictures with a passenger jet and some tall buildings, real real close."

"Hey, how about New York City?"

"Oh, yeah, but, um, what about 9/11 ... some of those tall buildings are gone."

"Yeah, but they have plenty more."

"Should we send an alert or something?"

"Nah, who's going to notice...you can't really see the sky from most of the streets."

Caldera should be out on his ass.

Going off the rails on a crazy train...

Sarah Palin rallies are interesting things. For starters, they're more Sarah Palin rallies than they are John McCain or even McCain-Palin rallies. Check out this write-up from a Scranton-area paper after Palin's appearance in Joe Biden's hometown:

One anti-abortion Palin supporter at the event shoved two graphic photos of aborted fetuses in front of a Times-Shamrock reporter.“This is why I’m voting for her. They stand against this,” said West Wyoming resident Maryann Yorina. “They stand for babies. They stand for God.”

Others said Palin represents a fresh start for the country because she’s not from Washington. Meg and Peter Siegel, vacationing in Pennsylvania from Vienna, Va., said they feel like they know Palin.“She gives an accurate representation of middle America,” Siegel said.

Note that these three rally participants seem to think Palin is the driving force of the ticket, with the first actually stating she's voting "for Palin," apparently under the mistaken impression that the vice-president bullies the President around (understandable I suppose after 8 years of Cheney). I also find it humorous that the couple vacationing from Vienna, VA, a few stops from DC on the Orange Line, are pleased Governor Palin isn't from Washington (although McCain's quarter-century tenure there doesn't seem to faze them). I disagree with them about whether her over-the-top mimicry of aw-shucks lunch counter locals is an "accurate representation of middle America." Outside of redneck stereotypes (see Hee-Haw, Dukes of Hazzard, and Beverly Hillbillies), I've never seen a speech so full of gosh-darnits, you betchas, and the like...and that includes Bobby Bowden post-game interviews.

Beyond that, you get the sense that she is drawing -- and intends to draw -- only the hard-core true believers. At this point in the campaign, she and McCain have to hope the die hard Republican base shows up, because if the Black Helicopter, Obama-as-Muslim, International Jewish Banking Conspiracy, registered Democrats-as-traitors wack-jobs don't come out, McCain-Palin will simply be trounced and what's worse is that the Senate and House races will be lost.

So she needs to energize the fanatics who haven't managed to develop critical thinking skills or are so hard-line that they are the 27% who still approve of Bush's job handling...

Update: I took this video from the Daily Kos website...it's a great look at Palin's core supporters and what happens when you waste your mind.

Maybe Zeppo, but definitely not Karl...

If you want to see something that's either sad or funny, depending, you should google "obama marxist." It's pretty revealing. I'd been reading comments on various mainstream press articles about how Obama was some sort of liberal or even worse radical Marxist, and I kept thinking to myself that I didn't know a single Democrat in the House or Senate who could come close to being a Marxist. In fact, my main criticism of Obama is that he is simply more of the same neo-liberal pro-corporate fluff served up by the Democrats for decades.

Yet there seems to be a widespread belief among conservatives that Barack Obama is a Marxist. I would show examples, but I don't link to right-wing blogs as a general rule. Just do the google search, you'll see them. The fact that most of these sites also make a point of emphasizing Obama's middle name (I don't even know John McCain's middle name...) shows their hands a bit too clearly, though...and illogically of course, because there aren't too many Muslim states that are Marxist. In fact, one of the first things that generally happens to Marxists in a Muslim state is that they get thrown into prison. So I'm not sure of the connection.

Then I saw in a funny piece Dana Milbank did at the McCain/Palin rally at Lehigh University a few of the McCain/Palin supporters wearing these identical shirts that took Obama's campaign symbol (you know, that blue circle above the red and white stripes...the thing that looks an awful lot like Bank of America's corporate logo) and in the circle they had a hammer and sickle. Now where the hell does all this "Obama-as-Communist" thinking come from (I've yet to see a similar McCain logo redo with a swastika in place of the star, but maybe that's coming)? It certainly can't come from an examination of his policies or voting record in the Senate.

Unless of course you count the recent bailout bill that both he and McCain supported, since it strongly suggests that the U.S. Government will at least partially nationalize several financial institutions...but that plan was presented by the Republican administration and can hardly be said to belong to Comrade Obama.

The tax plan that Obama has been touting is hardly a new thing...it's simply a continuation of the progressive tax system that's been in effect in the United States for basically the entire 20th century and in weakened form in the 21st.

Where are Obama's plans to seize the means of production? I have yet to see his plans to nationalize private property...maybe he's being coy.

If Obama is the poster-boy of Marxism, then we Marxists are in serious trouble.

This is not a pipe.

I always knew Ron Paul was a crackpot, the sort of guy who dreams of those utopian days of free-market capitalism that haven't existed since...well, since ever, but especially since we decided that sweatshops and child labor and completely expendable workers' lives were no longer in fashion, but he confirmed it with a commentary on cnn.com. According to Paul, our current fiscal crisis is a problem of too much government regulation as opposed to too little, basically proving that he's been out to lunch for much of the last thirty years.

Paul is correct in arguing that the proposed Paulson bailout rewards idiotic behavior, but his opposition to it stems from entirely incorrect assumptions that the so-called free market isn't free enough. Here's a little sampling of Representative Paul's theory:

The solution to the problem is to end government meddling in the market. Government intervention leads to distortions in the market, and government reacts to each distortion by enacting new laws and regulations, which create their own distortions, and so on ad infinitum.
It is time this process is put to an end. But the government cannot just sit back idly and let the bust occur.
It must actively roll back stifling laws and regulations that allowed the boom to form in the first place.
The government must divorce itself of the albatross of Fannie and Freddie, balance and drastically decrease the size of the federal budget, and reduce onerous regulations on banks and credit unions that lead to structural rigidity in the financial sector.
Until the big-government apologists realize the error of their ways, and until vocal
free-market advocates act in a manner which buttresses their rhetoric, I am afraid we are headed for a rough ride.

Umm, it was the lack of "stifling laws and regulations" that allowed the false boom to form, not the presence of them. Throughout the 1980's and 1990's, the government removed many of the regulations that prevented financial institutions from overextending themselves and exposing themselves to massive speculative debt. "Vocal free-market advocates" have had their way ever since Reagan rode into town, and the chickens are coming home to roost. These "distortions" in the market that Paul tries to lay at the feet of government were created and sustained through the prevalent free market practice of speculation; a quick primer on the history of capitalist economics could show you that the cycle of boom and bust -- a cycle not absent but decidedly much more extreme during the heady days of unregulated markets -- has been leveled and controlled through regulation.

Over in the corner, Ron Paul's been watching the deregulation gang kicking the supports out and as the roof collapses he's shouting that the few remaining beams are the cause of the collapse.

Olympic letdown.

I just turned on the Olympics and I know I must have the wrong channel. They're showing people jumping up and down on trampolines like they're in a backyard in West Virginia. WTF? Have the Olympics sunk this low? Or has this new non-sport replaced the old non-sports of rhythmic gymnastics and synchronized swimming?

Research and Teaching. A rebirth of wonder.

I'm reading through Foucault's lectures at the College de France. The volume I'm reading is Society Must Be Defended, from 1976. The volume is essentially a semester's worth of Foucault's lectures, so it really lends itself to reading group use, if let's say your reading group were to meet once a week.

Foucault gets the ball rolling with an interesting comparison of research and teaching:

"I would like us to be a bit clearer about what is going on here, in these lectures. You know that the institution where you are, and where I am, is not exactly a teaching institution...we are paid to do research. And I believe that, ultimately, the activity of teaching would be meaningless unless we gave it, or at least lent it, this meaning, or at least the meaning I suggest: Given that we are paid to do research, what is there to monitor the research we are doing? How can we keep informed people who might be interested in it, or who might have some reason for taking this research as a starting point? How can we keep them informed on a fairly regular basis about the work we are doing, except by teaching, or in other words by making a public statement? So I do not regard our Wednesday meetings as a teaching activity, but rather as public reports on the work I am, in other respects, left to get on with more or less as I see fit."

In the academic world, teaching and research have an uneasy relationship. Officially, of course, we have distinctions between "Research I" institutions and down the line to liberal arts colleges, and the common way to talk about schools is whether they're research or teaching focused (and to tailor our job letters toward each school's emphasis). However, no matter where you are, you're generally expected to do at least a little of both teaching and research.

Foucault's position is interesting in part because he at first seems to equate teaching with "making a public statement," but then immediately pulls that back in the next sentence by admitting he doesn't consider the lectures "a teaching activity, but rather public reports" on his research. This contradiction can in part be explained by the fact that Foucault is really providing something as straightforward as a report on his current research interests, but that since his research is so remarkably original even that report provides insight and guidance to the audience.

Part of the usefulness of the lectures is simply the connections he makes, tracing the development and divergences of concepts like "nation," "state," "race," "class," and "society," especially as they relate to the workings of power.

I can't say it's the easiest reading I've ever done, but I've got to re-dedicate myself to the academic life and I'm thinking these bite-size lectures are a good way to begin.

The time of revelation is at hand.

Well, I suppose the charade is over. It had to end one time or another. So today I am revealing to the world that I am, indeed, I am, Eliot Spitzer.

A post mainly to reassure my legions of readers that I haven't been run over by a truck. Yet.

Just when you thought I might have given blogging up to go join another cult, I'm back with a question for the ages:

How do you explain the music career of Lenny Kravitz?

Discuss.

p.s. I realize too that I've been tapped to participate in some meme...I promise to work on that.