The Birthers, the Deathers and the Tea-baggers.

The Birthers, the Deathers and the Tea-baggers. What do all three of these groups have in common?

They all invoke Godwin's Law in record speed.

This isn't just some fringe element associating themselves with these people invoking Godwin's Law so quickly. Think Progress has an article from the How To Take America Back right wing conference with speakers such as Rep. Tom Price, Michele Bachmann and Gov. Mike Huckabee.

Let me give you a rundown on what Godwin's Law is exactly, then you will see just how ridiculous these conservatives have become by embracing a faux pas bloggers almost unanimously make fun of.

According to Wikipedia, Godwin's Law is:

"is a humorous observation made by Mike Godwin in 1990 which has become an Internet adage. It states: "As a UsenetNazis or Hitler approaches 1." discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazi's or Hitler approaches one."

The problem is this, rather than waiting, (just for simplicity, I'll refer to The Birthers, Deathers and Tea-baggers as BDT) BDT'ers have decided to go full throttle Godwin on Obama and his administration right off the bat. As Godwin's Wiki entry states, Reductio ad Hitlerum refers to:

"The fallacy most often assumes the form of "Hitler (or the Nazis) supported X, therefore X must be evil/undesirable/bad. For example: "Hitler was a vegetarian, so vegetarianism is wrong." The tactic is often used to derail arguments, as such a comparison tends to distract and to result in angry and less reasoned responses."

The comparisons of Obama actions to Nazi action has turned into Reductio ad Hitlerum on steroids. Case in point. The previous Think Progress link I pointed to above, spoke of Kitty Werthmann, during her workshop, "How to recognize living under Nazis and communism, mentioned "They had Joseph Goebbels; we have Mark Lloyd, the diversity czar." This isn't the most obsurd claim. The BDT's have also pointed out similarities of his "indoctrination" of school children recently when he gave school children a speech on the opening day of school. The paranoia grew into a frenzy, even causing some parents pull their kids out of school that day.

Conservatives have managed to take one of the jokes of the internet and turn it into one of the driving forces to energize their base. I'm not sure exactly what that says about the conservative base.

I bet Mike Godwin never thought he'd be yelling Godwins Law every time he turned on the T.V. when a story about President Obama came up.

Jesus Camp Bush Worship - Talk About Throwing Bricks in a Glass House

It seems Fox News has decided to further the smear campaign against this president and coordinate with Drudge Report to push the story of school children singing a song about President Obama during Black History Month this past winter. Odd how this is brand new information to Fox since this tape has been out for some time now.

Here's what Fox News didn't tell you and is much more disturbing.

I'm sure everyone remember the Jesus Camp movie that came out some time ago where children were put into some sort of summer camp to train how to worship Jesus. Well, worshiping of Jesus wasn't the only thing going on.

Here is an excerpt from Jesus Camp that I'm sure most of you will find pretty disturbing.



This isn't the only example of Bush worship.

The Huffington Post recently linked to a story about how school children greeting Bush with a song in response to none other than his response to Katrina.

Anyways, before the propaganda machine Fox News decides to push a story to distract their viewership from the gains being achieved by President Obama at not only the U.N. meeting, but also at the G20 summit, they should probably do a little bit of research. Of course, those viewing Fox News will never know about these Bush worship videos because they aren't even a real news organization and never show both sides of a story.

Cash for Clunkers and the Hypocrisy of Conservatives

Cash for Clunkers succeeded beyond anyone's imagination. In under a week, much of the $1 billion in the original CAR Allowance Rebate System (C.A.R.S) was used up.

This program benefits the buyers with a new fuel efficient vehicle at a discount. It benefits the dealerships by moving inventory. As inventories clear, factories will begin turning out more cars. The factories will require parts from parts manufacturers. At each step, workers will benefit and generate stimulus through pay to kick start this ailing economy.

According to a Bloomberg article the additional 2 billion approved today by the Senate, could increase GDP by .5 percentage points.

To find out if you qualify you can go to cars.gov .

You would think conservatives would be ecstatic when Americans are given some of those hard earned tax dollars back to go out and make purchases right? Wrong.

At every step of the way, conservatives have railed against this plan claiming we can't afford it. Of course, tax right offs to companies to do every day business is O.K. but when its American families that need a tax cut, its Socialism.

There is another program in the U.S. that is very similar to this program and you never hear a peep about it. That would be the Federal tax credits for energy efficient clients and home improvement upgrades.

When was the last time you heard Senators coming out against these tax credits? Are the right wing talking heads shouting out against this?

Never and no.

Why? Because when the tax credits came about, a Republican was in the White House. A bit hypocritical, don't you think? But now, since a Democrat is in charge and conservatives have a short memory span, this has now become generational theft.

America vs. Health Insurance Companies

Back on July 28th, I made note of the extraordinary misinformation being disseminated out there regarding the health care debate. I also brought to light that Rachel Maddow pointed out the night before The LewinGroup, funded by UnitedHealthCare (large insurance group) via a subsidiary Ingenix, as noted by The Washington Post back on July 23, has been quoted over and over as a source of statistics to try and crush health care reform. I had argued at the 538.com forum that "This is a fight between Americans and the insurance companies. Ask your congressmen on which side they stand."

Yesterday afternoon, I argued again "I think framing this as a battle of Americans and their future against insurance companies protecting their interests is the way to go personally.

Make people aware insurance companies are against lowering costs on their own. Then tie only those Republicans out there obstructing constructive debate using fear tactics and misinformation to the insurance companies."

Well, it looks like this might be the way Democrats have chosen to go and conservatives have taken note. Just today, a spokesperson for the Heritage Foundation, the far right wing (think tank? oxymoron) made the claim on Sean Hannity's radio show he doesn't think this line of attack will work. I'm not sure when the last time the Heritage Foundation was right about anything so I'm not fretting it.

This weekend the White House will be meeting with Congressional Dems to coordinate messaging a bit more. Lets see if they stay with the American's vs. Insurace companies route or chose a new one.

Could big job gains be just around the corner?

Nate Silver, in his post Healthcare Timeout is Fine posted a number of 250,000 job losses for this month that might be announced August 7th as one of the reasons not to fret about not getting health care reform out of both the Senate and House committee's by August recess.

Well for anyone that has been paying attention, that seems like an awfully low number. I had my doubts too until I did a bit of checking and low and behold, things may not be as bad as they seem.

In fact, we may be soon see the end of the job losses as soon as September with a projected job gain of 100k non-farm payroll jobs.

Below is a chart with values obtained from Bureau of Labor Statistics loaded into a scatter chart and trending the data five months out. As you can see, the trend for July crosses at the 250,000 job loss mark and if you continue to follow the trend line to November, there is a projected 600,000 non-farm payroll jobs gained.


Lets hope this comes out to be true. With job creation possibly just around the corner, both public trust and confidence in this Administration to successfully overhaul our ailing health care system and our deteriorating environment are sure to gain traction.

(updated)

I've updated the graph with updated information from The Bureau of Labor Statistics. This included revised numbers for May and June.



Surprisingly enough, the July number was just about right. With the adjusted values, August looks to cross the Y axis value at somewhere around 80k non-farm payroll job losses.

This is nothing to celebrate. Each job loss out there means one more person having to come home and break the news to their family. It could mean another person losing health insurance coverage. Or another, having to go into foreclosure because they can no longer afford the payments.

For the situation to really turn around, consumer confidence is going to have to keep up the upward trend it had maintained until May as consumer spending is the major driving force behind economic growth. We will see near the end of this month what impact the good job news has.

Until then...

(update 9/10/09)

I thought I'd continue to update this. I'm including a new chart with both last months and the previous months numbers adjusted from 443,000 to 463,000 in June and 247,000 to 276,000 in July. Augusts numbers came out above the trend at 216,000, much higher than the projected 80,000.

It would be safe to say to not expect an exact linear regression of job loss reductions.

Obama and Health Care, Conservative Pundit Trolls and Henry Louis Gates Jr.

Has everyone been paying attention to the health care debate today following Obama's presser last night? What's that? You aren't hearing anything about it? Oh, all you hear is about Obama's statement regarding the police arresting a man in his own home.

The trolls have managed to derail the entire discussion that should be taking place.

Everyone familiar with blogging, most certainly has dealt with a troll or two. Trolls, according to Wikipidia is "someone who posts controversial, inflammatory, irrelevant or off-topic messages in an online community, such as an online discussion forum, chat room or collaborative content community with the primary intent of provoking other users into an emotional or disciplinary response or to generally disrupt normal on-topic discussion."

But, since people are misrepresenting what President Obama was saying, lets make this clear as day.

When Obama stated he did not know all the facts, it was in response to the what does this mean for race relations question. He stated he doesn't have all the facts to determine if it was a racial profiling incident.

Here is the question and statement for you viewing pleasure.

Reporter: "... What does that incident say to you and what does it say about race relations in America?"

Obama: "...I don’t know – not having been there and not seeing all the facts – what role race played in that"

He didn't say he didn't know the facts to have an opinion on the situation.

Furthermore, when he went on to speak of the history of racial profiling, he prefaced it with "what I think we know separate and apart from this incident is that there is a long history in this country of African-Americans and Latinos being stopped by law enforcement disproportionately, and that's just a fact."

Do you conservatives have some sort of selective listening device that ignores ends of sentences or other words or phrases that just don't fit into your argument?

Sure seems like it.

Second, if Republicans really want to rally behind this one, be my guest. The all white party railing against a President that stated it was stupid to arrest someone in their own home is a reverse Sister Soulja moment for them.

But I understand, it'll give the racists a reason to make a stink and hide behind the shield of nobility of defending a policeman.

So, now that we got that behind us, lets get back to discussing why it's politically corrupt for politicians to be setting medicare reimbursement rates in their local districts and how we should put the power into the hands of the suggestions coming down from the Medpac board of professional doctors and physicians, which I remind you, was a Republican idea, as noted by the President last night. There is where the real saving will come.

For more info on Medpac, please look HERE,

Republicans Catch-22

Democrats are fortunate to be on the side of history and also being on the side of where ideas progress. Republicans on the other hand, well, aren't, to put it bluntly.

Another thing going for Democrats is the electorate is slowly but surely in support gay marriage and pro-choice. Republicans, still use these two issues to get their base fired up and the fringe of the base chooses to throw these issues in the electorates face come election time. More so the issue of abortion than gay marriage.

Here is where the Republicans are in a losing battle.

The electorate doesn't want to hear it any longer....but don't tell them that.

It doesn't take much to bait the fringe and even main stream Republicans into debating these issues. Most recently, you had John McCain discussing abortion and using air quotes when speaking of the women's health.

Bad idea John, bad idea.

Until Republicans learn to tame the base to not make these issues front and center and turn off moderates and other on the fencers, the further they will continue to go into the abyss of irrelevancy.