I guess the mosque issue is important; I guess a better way to put that would be, I guess the mosque stirs up emotions but really isn’t that important. The controversy seemingly can be solved with just a single sentence:

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.”

Unfortunately, it’s not –that- simple; I mean the 2nd and 4th Amendments are pretty straight forward and are often used in arguments, but people ignore them. We can express our views and religion in many ways that is almost endless, but the question is what is appropriate? I asked Glenn Greenwald on twitter if his stance for freedom of speech and expression extends to other amendments. I did so by asking a simple question such as “do we have the right to cull gun ownership in areas where crime has occurred? (after all what’s the difference between culling one Amendment over another?)” and “would it be ok to build a gun store across the street from columbine?” Unfortunately he never addressed those questions, but instead asked me a question of “is it ok to stop a church from being built across the street from an abortion clinic or near Oklahoma City’s bombing site (the last one doesn’t make any sense)?” I wanted and should have replied, “no, but you or your cohorts probably would.” Instead I insisted that was unrelated to my argument, and I was merely pointing out his double standard…for which he asked me the question again. At that point I gave up on trying to convince someone who is more bullheaded than myself. The 1st Amendment argument helps to create a pedestal for defenders, but I’m not so sure that’s the argument that people have been using against it; some are making a stink because Glenn Beck wants to hold a rally near where MLK did a speech and on 8/28 because it’s on “hallowed ground”…how is this any different? It’s not, as Greta Van Susteren of all people points out.

Remember…the Muslims in NYC have a First Amendment right to build a mosque but most Americans don’t want it…and you have to ask the wisdom of the Muslims to push the issue. Just because you have the right to do something does not mean you should. My view? No mosque at ground zero and Glenn should move his event.

It does not help heal the country on so many fronts if we poke a stick in eyes.

The issue I have with the mosque doesn’t really involve the mosque, but people who support the mosque having double standards. Most people protesting the mosque aren’t arguing on the validity of the 1^st Amendment, in that no one (excluding Newt Gingrich) has suggested the government censor or not allow them to build there. The thing is, this happens all the time under the guise of social agendas. Land is confiscated, cities have zoning laws. Since we are arguing on the basis of location, I believe all avenues should be opened; because after all this is about property rights and freedom of religion. Yet, the simple fact is that you could never have an ammunition store across the street from a high school, you could never have a strip club across the street from a church; remember the “ground zero cross,” Trump’s American Flag? Those were just small examples, that just so happened to land on the front page. We (as a society) selectively censor people’s speech and property rights, and it’s not until we agree with someone’s position that we defend their rights; we call this censorship “societal norms.” But that’s not how the Constitution works, the simple fact is that the people supporting the mosque (in most instances) are just as hypocritical about 1^st Amendment rights as people like Newt Gingrich.

Unfortunately, this angle will never be explored, because both sides are so caught up in their own world view that they both deny their own hypocrisy. To me the people have every right to build the mosque, but that doesn’t mean it’s a good idea. Just like I should have the right to build an ammo store across the street from Columbine, but that’s not a good idea. I think the whole idea boils down to what you think is considerate, if where you draw the lines of society norms.

In other news, Greg Gutfeld from Fox News Red Eye, says he’s going to build a gay bar beside the mosque (which really isn’t so much a mosque as a community center for Muslims.) I support his endeavor, because he has the right to do so, it’s not a good idea because it will likely offend people…but I think that is the moral question that Gutfeld is trying to raise…and one that almost everyone has ignored. In a world, and a political world that lives on political correctness, it’s interesting to see the sides reversed.

Quick Update:

The argument of “hallowed ground” I guess doesn’t apply if you’re defending the “hallowed ground?” Newt? Anyone? An anti-mosque rally on 9/11 ? Really?

According to the Washington Post, the answer to that question is a resounding “yes.”

The intent of the memorial is to publicly honor the courage of those who died in the line of duty, but it also conceals a deeper story about government in the post-9/11 era: Eight of the 22 were not CIA officers at all. They were private contractors.

To ensure that the country’s most sensitive duties are carried out only by people loyal above all to the nation’s interest, federal rules say contractors may not perform what are called “inherently government functions.” But they do, all the time and in every intelligence and counterterrorism agency, according to a two-year investigation by The Washington Post.

What started as a temporary fix in response to the terrorist attacks has turned into a dependency that calls into question whether the federal workforce includes too many people obligated to shareholders rather than the public interest — and whether the government is still in control of its most sensitive activities. In interviews last week, both Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and CIA Director Leon Panetta said they agreed with such concerns.

Check out their charts, they show the expansive nature of the National Security structure. Somewhat related, I was recently watching a documentary on the growth of the intelligence community before this was published; internet traffic is being monitored from secret rooms in some of the nation’s top telecoms.

Liberal outlet the Daily Kos  today announced that it was filing a law suit against Research 2000.

I have just published a report by three statistics wizards showing, quite convincingly, that the weekly Research 2000 State of the Nation poll we ran the past year and a half was likely bunk.

Since the moment Mark Grebner, Michael Weissman, and Jonathan Weissman approached me, I took their concerns seriously and cooperated fully with their investigation. I also offered to run the results on Daily Kos provided that they 1) fully documented each claim in detail, 2) got that documentation peer reviewed by disinterested third parties, and 3) gave Research 2000 an opportunity to respond. By the end of last week, they had accomplished the first two items on that list. I held publication of the report until today, because I didn’t want to partake in a cliche Friday Bad News Dump. This is serious business, and I wasn’t going to bury it over a weekend.

We contracted with Research 2000 to conduct polling and to provide us with the results of their surveys. Based on the report of the statisticians, it’s clear that we did not get what we paid for. We were defrauded by Research 2000, and while we don’t know if some or all of the data was fabricated or manipulated beyond recognition, we know we can’t trust it. Meanwhile, Research 2000 has refused to offer any explanation. Early in this process, I asked for and they offered to provide us with their raw data for independent analysis — which could potentially exculpate them. That was two weeks ago, and despite repeated promises to provide us that data, Research 2000 ultimately refused to do so. At one point, they claimed they couldn’t deliver them because their computers were down and they had to work out of a Kinkos office. Research 2000 was delivered a copy of the report early Monday morning, and though they quickly responded and promised a full response, once again the authors of the report heard nothing more.

It was apparent from most poll results that something was amiss, but what you likely won’t hear from all media outlets is that the infamous poll showing that the “right wing” was full of “wing nuts” also goes by the way side. If you’ll note, the poll which is quite often cited by liberals was conducted by Research 2000. Read more…

Ashton has been getting some bad press as of late because of his mocking of “drill baby drill,” when he said:

“If you could go back to the Republican national convention and look the guys in the eyes that were saying, ‘DRILL DRILL DRILL’, at the Republican national convention, those guys, there you go, that’s what we got, like, we did it, we drilled drilled drilled.” …

“But at the end of the day the truth is, is like, we got to think about the world we live in, I mean we have to be conscious. This is like not a right, it’s a privilege to be on this land and using its resources and we have to be smart about it.”

You wouldn’t have thought I’d take this angle, but we should really leave Ashton alone about this. Sure, he drove a 14,500 lb. Navistar CXT that gets 7 MPG; but I ask you this, how else is Ashton supposed to haul around his huge ego? Did you ever think of that? Do you think he can just jump in a Ford Fiesta and get around town? I think not, and maybe you should be more understanding. So, anyhow he’s hauling big cargo, and that requires a huge truck that gets 7 mpg.

I won’t stop there, I have yet another reason why he’s a good environmentalist, he’s using a used model. Think about it people, he could be out chasing tail of young 20 somethings but instead he has settled for the 48 year old Demi Moore, who was previously married to Bruce Willis. So really he’s actually doing more for the environment than any of us, maybe you should look at yourself before you cast a stone. Ashton is a great person, so great of a person that his memorial of Britney Murphy included 1 tweet using bad grammar and text speak…which in this day and age is the most you can of someone as busy as Ashton.

It’s a popular game now, seeing how much bad press you can give BP in a given day; and as I sit and let Keith Olbermann’s program run in the background I’m reminded of one thing: Keith Olbermann is a pompous moron…and the campaign against BP is much worse than BP’s campaign. While that may be two things, it really doesn’t matter since numbers don’t mean anything to the anti-BP crowd. Sure BP messed up (as did the government) and and now there is a huge pool of bumbling crude floating around in the ocean (a pool of oil which is nothing compared to what the U.S. consumes on a daily basis.) However, people have allowed themselves to become so full of crap regarding BP that it makes BP look clean. Here me out. Apparently BP running advertisements takes their attention away from cleaning up the oil spill…since I guess the PR team should be out there with a mop and bucket. I guess with this logic, Apple’s spending on their advertising campaign takes quality away from their product and NBC advertising their news takes away from the quality of their news. We should all know this is total horsecrap, yet just the other day the media began doubling down; I read a story where a media outlet has claimed that BP buying keyword advertisements on search engines is “clogging the flow of information.” Apparently BP is now a magical entity that erases all search terms under the actual advertisement and blocks out the sun as well.

Not only are people making absolutely no sense in how BP spends it’s PR money, which has nothing to do with its ability in cleaning up oil, but now everyone is an expert on oil. That’s right, Keith Olbermann, Rachel Maddow and Jim Bob who lives on Main St all know more than the engineers who have been doing this their entire life. All I hear in the media currently is “why isn’t BP doing this,” of course this question is asked by a talking head who clearly doesn’t know what the hell he’s talking about. Roger Ebert said BP was downplaying something that may only end in them nuking the oil well, he no doubt got this information from some pseudo-scientist who was on The Today Show or something. Which brings me to a larger point, being an “expert” on TV doesn’t make you an “expert” it means you’ve been on TV before and the network pulled you from their Rolodex of scientists who have done well on their networks before. Watching Maddow tell me about the evils of oil, while riding around in the wetland on a gasoline powered boat…just doesn’t make much sense. If Keith Olbermann and his guests are experts on oil, or politics for that matter, then Dick Morris is a genius and knows the meaning of life and the universe (not that Olbermann is the only one doing it, even Fox is doing it…and I thought they were “pro-corporation”).

On a side note: Olbermann has declared BP to be “BS” which is very clever since I call MSNBC, BSNBC.

Truth be told, Paul Krugman is wrong.

Krugman posted a new article (it’s more of a random thought) on his blog which he calls “Why Libertarianism Doesn’t Work, Part N”

He offers an argument which I have heard from many liberal minds, and he falls into the same trap of disproving himself by trying to prove his views correction, let’s dissect:

Krugman says:

Thinking about BP and the Gulf: in this old interview, Milton Friedman says that there’s no need for product safety regulation, because corporations know that if they do harm they’ll be sued.

Interviewer: So tort law takes care of a lot of this ..

Friedman: Absolutely, absolutely.

Meanwhile, in the real world:

In the wake of last month’s catastrophic Gulf Coast oil spill, Sen. Lisa Murkowski blocked a bill that would have raised the maximum liability for oil companies after a spill from a paltry $75 million to $10 billion. The Republican lawmaker said the bill, introduced by Sen. Robert Menendez (D-NJ), would have unfairly hurt smaller oil companies by raising the costs of oil production. The legislation is “not where we need to be right now” she said.

And don’t say that we just need better politicians. If libertarianism requires incorruptible politicians to work, it’s not serious.

Ah, but Paul, you missed an important part of your argument. That $75 Million existed before the oil spill, thus when doing a cost/benefit analysis of safety measures, BP undoubtedly put the $75 Million into an equation and weighed the (relatively low) risk of such a large oil spill. So the company said something such as: “well, we could spend a few million on these safety measures on all of our rigs…but the government has us covered if we exceed $75 Million, so really it’s not even worth the money since our risk is already limited.” It’s kind of like “too big to fail,” when your risk is limited by a third party, you take more risk . It happens in insurance all the time; for example, you already hit your deductible, so you go ahead and start spending money almost without limit. Or you have a low deductible and take more risks, we’ve all seen episodes where people with no insurance are extremely careful. The bottom line is when you know you aren’t going to see the costs you’re going to take more risks, the same can be applied to health insurance…which is one of the reason why “insurance” itself is the problem with high costs.

Anyhow, by making this statement on how “corruption” has led to the price ceiling, he misses starts to diminish his own argument. Isn’t such a price ceiling against libertarianism? (Yes) Likewise, isn’t the lack of a fast clean up not an unintended consequence of these rather “progressive” measures? The idea of libertarianism is to limit the power of government, and if the government has limited power then its corruption (which is inevitable) has a limited impact. The oil spill was a private sector failure, but it was led by a government failure.

Just when I thought I could go a day without reading the dumbest article in my life (it’s a daily occurrence) I ran across this Time Magazine op-ed by Joe Klein:

The anti-Obama forces, it seems clear, are rooted in classic American know-nothing populism–nativist, isolationist, paranoid. Today’s Exhibit A is from the Drudge Report, in which the newly designed $100 bill is slagged for, as the headline has it, “looking European.” Drudge links to this report from Bloomberg, which describes the reasons for the new look:

The new look, aimed at thwarting counterfeiters, has several new security features, including a “3-D Security Ribbon” and an image of a bell on the front of the note that, when tilted, changes in color from copper to green. The reverse side of the bill includes a new vignette of Independence Hall in Philadelphia.

But…reasons? Rationality? Greater security against counterfeiters? Feh! It looks like a freakin’ Euro, which means it must be a precursor of socialism. That Obama is one sneaky crypto-muslim.

How did Joe Klein come to this grand conclusion? Because the Drudge Report used “Looking European” as a headline, as in the new $100 Bill looks like the the Euro. So…was there an article that accompanied the Drudge headline that spelled out how it was a conspiracy? No, because it was simply a link to a Bloomberg article. Here is a picture of the new $100 bill next to the Euro.

Do they look anything alike? No, but I guess Drudge was talking about the hologram…however, there is a dollar redesign project (I don’t think they are involved with the treasury) that has produced some mock-ups of U.S. dollars that do bear striking resemblances to the Euro.

I actually like the last design, though I’d like to see some changes that make it more of  “throw back” to our older currencies, because quite frankly the dollar’s design beauty has faded with this last design. You can see the entire design mock-up of each bill similar to the last image here.

From the NY Post:

Keith Olbermann is running wild again at MSNBC. Network higher-ups put the kibosh on Donny Deutsch‘s weeklong stint hosting a 3 p.m. show called “America the Angry” after Olbermann “went ballistic and threw a fit” when he was featured in a segment on Tuesday, sources said. “After Olbermann saw the clip, he started freaking out and called Phil [MSNBC head Phil Griffin] to say he wasn’t going to do his show unless Deutsch was taken out,” says an insider. “MSNBC knows he’s nuts, but they kowtow to him.” In the segment, radio talk host Hugh Hewitt referred to Olbermann as one of the “biggest hatemongers on television,” to which Deutsch diplomatically responded, “I’m not taking the side of either one.” A source said, “Donny is pissed. He can’t believe this happened. He didn’t even say anything.”

This may sound out of character to some, but to anyone who has watched his show without having to wipe their drool from their chin knows it’s probably true. I recently had a short lived back and forth with Olbermann, in which I said nothing derogatory.

Look at this short lived conversation, I must have been super mean!

@PacesetEclectic: Black Tea Party Protesters vs. @KeithOlbermann – http://bit.ly/a6ecuu
@KeithOlbermann: Yep. 6 black people out of 25k proves no racism
Me: One black MSNBC correspondent proves network diversity”
@KeithOlbermann: 23
Me: The ones you actually put -in front- of a camera at MSNBC, that’s not 23, that would put you at ~18% black. Clearly not true

Because I’m a fact checker, I looked up MSNBC’s staff myself, and found he was fiddling with the numbers, so I divided his number by the number provided by Wikipedia. I found that most of those people were NBC staff, such as Al Roker.

I thought it was a fair observation, yet this is what it got me.

Man, he really showed me!

So it is pretty clear that not all “Tea Party” members are of the highest caliber in their Constitutional readings, some dare I say have probably never read it. However, can you write off an entire movement based on a select few? I’m not so sure, but it appears that many of the political “left” are more than willing to throw a movement into a category of racist, homophobic, “birthers,” “truthers;” and meanwhile they also complain about themselves being thrown into a category of “Marxist,” “socialists,” etc.

As an example, I have recently gotten engaged in a political argument with a rather liberal (political science) professor at MTSU and after a reasonable amount of good debate it eventually degraded into marginalizing. Who was marginalizing? Well, in my opinion it was him, but I surely soon followed suit by calling him an “ideologue.” There of course was a good reason in my mind to call him such a term, because he had made some outrageous claims such as most “libertarians” are motivated by race and thus racist…and that economists (especially from the Austrian point of view, in his opinion) were nothing more than racists with an economic understanding. What struck me as odd though, is that soon after I had been degraded I became accuse of calling him a socialist and a Marxist…which I never actually did. In fact I admitted to the various social concerns of his liberal point of view, but also I countered in some instances with what George Stigler referred to as “Regulatory capture,” among other things. Eventually I gave up on arguing my logic, and have only had jabs thrown out me during class sessions, such as libertarians being the backing of fascism in America (he used the example of Timothy McVeigh.)

More to the point, this isn’t just something that happens on a personal level with each side of the political spectrum; there becomes a point of political dialogue in which each side starts to sound just as stupid if not more stupid than what they are criticizing. Take Joan Wals who appeared on Hardball with Chris Matthews, who said, “The climate right now is that Republicans use everything they can to undermine and de-legitimize this President. And it’s actually un-American. It’s traitorous in my opinion. Do you want to give aid and comfort to our enemies? Continue to treat this President like he wasn’t elected and he doesn’t know what he’s doing!”

Or perhaps take Keith Olbermann who during the election to fill Ted Kennedy’s senate seat said:

“In short, in Scott Brown we have an irresponsible, homophobic, racist, reactionary, ex-nude model, teabagging supporter of violence against woman and against politicians with whom he disagrees. In any other time in our history, this man would have been laughed off the stage as an unqualified and a disaster in the making by the most conservative of conservatives. Instead, the commonwealth of Massachusetts is close to sending this bad joke to the Senate of the United States.”

Then there is always Ed Shultz:

So I beg to differ with Mr. O’Reilly. He may have a bigger audience but I know I have the truth. It is about race. I do not think that the President of the United States deserved to have an Adolf Hitler mustache put on his face. Because I know if I was in a group of people who were holding signs like that, I would have the courage to go over and say “I think you should take that down because that’s not who we are.”

There was a point where…there was a point, but it has suddenly become lost in some sort of magnetic effect in which pushes your views so far opposite of your opponent that it eventually is exactly the same. I think this is exactly what people like Gandhi, Jesus, and MLK were trying to tell us, it’s not necessarily that non-violence is “always” the answer (though certainly preferred); but that the more we retaliate to our enemy using their tactics the less we become what we once stood for. The right wing is certainly not innocent of this, saying Obama is Hitler-eque is immature and and saying the left did the same thing is no excuse! It’s the same excuse which both sides have used, even while in the White House: “They did it, so why can’t we?”

There can be a civil discourse, and you don’t have to degrade your opponent to push across your point. This type of behavior is exactly why people hate politics and Washington in general, but no one has the balls to stand up and say that both sides are acting like children. There is a district difference between making fun of someone, and degrading and marginalizing them. In some cases it maybe called for, but more specifically if you have evidence. For example if someone is a holocaust denier, they have a pretty high probability of being an anti-Semite…but if you’re against “free riders,” that’s not exactly a correlation. The left rails against profiling, but are doing it…the right hated Bush bashing, but now they are doing it to Obama. It’s not that one side has a point and the other doesn’t, it’s that both sides have become so politically charged that they have become the same thing…stupid.

Of course the Becker-Posner blog is a wealth of economic information from two experts, this week they take on entitlement spending’s looming crisis point. I also attached a chart which illustrates the certain peril we face as people are feeling rather “entitled” to their entitlements, which they largely have not paid for.

Gary Becker (excerpt) [full blog here]:

The entitlement fiscal burden from projected spending increases on retirement benefits and health care during the next couple of decades is scary for Western Europe, Japan, The United States, and other rich nations. I will concentrate on the US, but the picture is often as bad or worse in these other nations.

In 2010, spending on social security retirement benefits amounted to about 4.3% of American GDP, while Medicare and Medicaid added another 5 ½ %. This gives a total federal spending on health and retirement benefits of about 10% of GDP, which is 40% of overall federal government spending of 25% of GDP. Without incorporating the effects on spending of the new health care bill, and with no further changes in retirement ages and other aspects of social security benefits, the combined spending on these entitlements is expected to rise in twenty years to about 15% of projected GDP. The expected increase in spending on health of the elderly is the biggest component of this increase, although social security payments will also rise significantly.

State and city obligations to retirees are often forgotten in calculating the burden of government commitments to retirement and health benefits, but these too are sizable for many localities. A recent report in the New York Times indicated that a new analysis of California’s pension liabilities found a hidden shortfall of more than half a trillion dollars. This is several times as large as the state pension obligations that had been reported, and over six times the size of California’s outstanding bonds. Calculations for Illinois and some other states, and also for some cities, also indicate large future pension obligations.

That the retirement obligations of state and local governments are sizable is not surprising since they have early retirement ages for police, firemen, and other government employees. These governments also usually use earnings in the last year or two prior to retirement to determine the level of retirement benefits. Hence government employees nearing retirement have strong incentives to push for higher pay and overtime work since higher earnings then have a multiplier effect on the size of retirement benefits.

Richard Posner (excerpt) [full blog here]:

Although I do not place any weight on long-term economic forecasts, there is no doubt that we face a growing burden of federal and state entitlement spending—“entitlement” signifying that expenditure levels are automatically financed, rather than having to be reauthorized every year as defense expenditures (and indeed all nonentitlement government expenditures) are. Government entitlement spending is concentrated on pensions and elder health care. Both forms of spending increase as a function of the growing percentage of elderly people in the population, and healthcare spending grows additionally because of increases in cost caused by new technologies plus the normal upward-sloping supply curve, implying that increases in demand for health care (because of the increasing number of elderly) cause a rise in average and therefore total costs.

Becker rightly adds to entitlement costs the cost of servicing government debt, since lenders to government have an entitlement to the repayment of their money with interest at the rate specified in the loan. Costs of debt service can easily grow at a compound rate, because the more the government borrows, the higher the interest rate it is likely to have to pay; instead of borrowing $1 billion at 5 percent interest, for a total annual interest expense of $50 million, it might have to pay 7 percent interest to borrow $2 billion, for a total annual interest expense of $140 million—which is more than twice the interest expense on a loan that is twice as large. Because of the United States’ huge public debt (the part of federal government debt that the government is contractually committed to repay), interest rates on the public debt are likely to rise, creating the compounding effect that I just illustrated.

A chart I got from Free Market Mojo that illustrates how grave the problem really is, as U.S. citizens are unwilling to be weened from what they feel entitled to.