Author Archives: Jeff Q

About Jeff Q

I live in New Orleans. I have a Bachelors in Computer Science and a Masters in English Literature. My interests include ancient history, religion, mythology, philosophy, and fantasy/sci-fi. My Twitter handle is @Bahumuth.

GAO: Two Out of Three Corporations Don’t Pay Taxes

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“Two out of every three United States corporations paid no federal income taxes from 1998 through 2005, according to a report released Tuesday by the Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress.”

“Using their own words in documents subpoenaed by the Subcommittee, the report discloses how financial firms deliberately took advantage of their clients and investors, how credit rating agencies assigned AAA ratings to high risk securities, and how regulators sat on their hands instead of reining in the unsafe and unsound practices all around them.”

http://levin.senate.gov/newsroom/release.cfm?id=332491

Unions and Libertarianism

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One of the central issues of right-wing politics is the strange dynamic between Conservatism and Libertarianism. Back when I was a Libertarian, I was always surprised by how the two party system monopolized all the polls. Today it seems all too easy to get caught up in the overly politicized Liberal/Conservative media circus but when I was growing up news was freaking boring and there simply weren’t a lot of polarizing political pundits on television. Rush Limbaugh was still on, and he even had a television show back when I was in high school, but it was on really late and his audience was packed full of nothing but cowboys and assorted yahoos, none below the age of 50.

Some time around 2004, I noticed that the name Libertarian had become more and more associated with the right wing, with so-called Libertarians hating on Democrats more than Republicans, rather than taking the netural socially liberal, fiscally conservtive stance that I had come to associate it with. Back when I was in high school, I agreed with a lot of radical Libertarian ideas like going back to the gold standard, but it seemed to me that by the turn of the century, Libertarianism was becoming more of a safe harbor for pro-Business refugees escaping the teetering Republican brand name as the growing unpopularity of the Bush Administration reached historic proportions. The newfound popularity of Libertarianism around 2004 started to make me feel cheated, like one of those underground music lovers who hates the newfound popularity of a band once they “sold out” (I’ve seen others have similar feeling when anime suddenly became popular).

Now it seems there is a whole swarth of assorted Libertarians and Tea Party Patriots who have decided the real problem with the economy are those greedy teachers sucking money away with their collective bargaining rights. But it seems like once some Libertarian group like the Tea Party gets too popular it’s taken over by Social Conservatives.

So one of the ways I distinguish true Libertarians from Corporate Socialists is their stance on unions. On general principle, Libertarians support the rights of free association and should allow collective bargaining. Reason’s Libertarian blog, Hit and Run, talks about “How to Make Unions More Powerful the Libertarian Way.” Corporate Socialists, like the Cato Institute, instead says that “Collective bargaining is a misguided labor policy because it violates civil liberties and gives unions excessive power to block needed reforms.”

So when the issue with public unions came up in Wisconsin, I started asking some people, “Aren’t unions part of the ‘invisible hand’?”

One answer I got was: “Not for public service unions!!!!! Don’t you know your history? They were not even allowed to organize ubtil the 1960s. FDR said that if allowed that they would destroy America and that was in the 1930s!!!!”

Obviously, whenever someone says, “Don’t you know your history?”, it’s pretty much a gurantee that they are about to say something that they just heard in the last week or so.

My reply was: “Oh, yeah, I support the Democrats instead of the Republicans on the Wisconsin unions so therefore I don’t know history. And I bet you didn’t know Reagan supported unions and was the only president who was also a union leader. Oh! Must mean you don’t know history!”

The answer I got was: “Well then I guess you know that Reagon crushed the Flight Controlers’ Union”

At this point I decided to do a little more research. This was my extended reply:

So FDR said public sector unions would “destroy America.” I’m guessing you got that from Beck since he used the same wording: that FDR said “collective bargaining would destroy us.” Haven’t you figured out by now that Glenn Beck’s history is complete bullshit?

FDR said “Organizations of Government employees have a logical place in Government affairs” and “The desire of Government employees for fair and adequate pay … is basically no different from that of employees in private industry. Organization on their part to present their views on such matters is both natural and logical, but meticulous attention should be paid to the special relationships and obligations of public servants to the public itself and to the Government.”

He also signed the National Industrial Recovery Act Of 1933 and the Tennessee Valley Authority Act Recognized Collective Bargaining Rights, both of which guaranteed collective bargaining rights for unions and the National Labor Relations Act Of 1935 Prohibited Employers From Barring Workers From Bargaining Collectively. In his 1940 Labor Day speech, he touted the “splendid new agreement” between labor and the federal government:

“Never once in these years, in this the biggest consolidated construction job ever undertaken directly by the national Government, has there been a substantial interruption to the continuance of your labors. This Dam, all the dams built in this short space of years, stand as a monument to the productive partnership between management and labor, between citizens of all kinds working together in the public weal. Collective bargaining and efficiency have proceeded hand in hand. It is noteworthy that the splendid new agreement between organized labor and the Tennessee Valley Authority begins with the words “The public interest in an undertaking such as the TVA always being paramount …”

What FDR was against was public workers striking. This is also the same reason Reagan broke up the Air Traffic Controllers strike: because it was against the law to strike.

Is this really the battle you sent the Republicans — sorry, I mean the “Tea Party Coalition of Republicans and Democrats” — back to fight? To break apart teacher unions? Is that what this epiphany of outrage was all about? Not to cap banker salaries, not to reform the banks or the financial laws, but to break apart unions in Wisconsin? I thought you supported a minimum wage. That goes against free association to artifically bring wages up. Union breaking goes against free association to artifically bring wages down.

The good news is Fox is seriously considering dumping Beck now that he has lost a third of his viewership, so maybe I won’t have to deal with factchecking his fantasy world conservatives like to call “history.” If they do that, Fox will have to rely far more on falsified polls, like the one where they reversed the percentages in order to claim 61% of Americans supported ending collective bargaining, not 61% are for keeping collective bargaining.

When I asked for a reply, he suddenlly became too busy.

Another talking point I’ve heard from multiple right-wingers is that unions have gotten too powerful in recent history. The truth, however, is the opposite: union membership is at a historic low. Labor Unions are down to 12% in the United States while Sweden and Denmark had union membership at 95% in 1990!

From the New York Times:

For the first time in American history, a majority of union members are government workers rather than private-sector employees, the Bureau of Labor Statistics announced on Friday.

In its annual report on union membership, the bureau undercut the longstanding notion that union members are overwhelmingly blue-collar factory workers. It found that membership fell so fast in the private sector in 2009 that the 7.9 million unionized public-sector workers easily outnumbered those in the private sector, where labor’s ranks shrank to 7.4 million, from 8.2 million in 2008.

From Wikipedia:

American union membership in the private sector has in recent years fallen under 9% — levels not seen since 1932.American unions remain an important political factor, both through mobilization of their own memberships and through coalitions with like-minded activist organizations around issues such as immigrant rights, trade policy, health care, and living wagecampaigns. Unions allege that employer-incited opposition has contributed to this decline in membership.

….

Union membership had been steadily declining in the US since 1983. In 2007, the labor department reported the first increase in union memberships in 25 years and the largest increase since 1979. Most of the recent gains in union membership have been in the service sector while the number of unionized employees in the manufacturing sector has declined. Most of the gains in the service sector have come in West Coast states like California where union membership is now at 16.7% compared with a national average of about 12.1%.[7]
Union density (the percentage of workers belonging to unions) has been declining since the late 1940s, however. Almost 36% of American workers were represented by unions in 1945.Historically, the rapid growth of public employee unions since the 1960s has served to mask an even more dramatic decline in private-sector union membership.
At the apex of union density in the 1940s, only about 9.8% of public employees were represented by unions, while 33.9% of private, non-agricultural workers had such representation. In this decade, those proportions have essentially reversed, with 36% of public workers being represented by unions while private sector union density had plummeted to around 7%. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics most recent survey indicates that union membership in the US has risen to 12.4% of all workers, from 12.1% in 2007. For a short period, private sector union membership rebounded, increasing from 7.5% in 2007 to 7.6% in 2008. [8] However, that trend has since reversed. In 2009, the union density for private sector stood at 7.2%.

…

Possible causes of drop in union density:

Public approval of unions climbed between 1981 and 1988, with 61% of Americans approving of unions in 1988. The rate of public confidence in the United States during this same time differed little from the analogous rate in other industrialized nations.

More recently, as unions have become increasingly concerned with the impacts of market integration on their well-being, scholars have begun to assess whether popular concerns about a global “race to the bottom” are reflected in cross-country comparisons of union strength. These scholars use foreign direct investment (FDI) and the size of a country’s international trade as a percentage of its GDP to assess a country’s relative degree of market integration. These researchers typically find that globalizationdoes affect union density, but is dependent on other factors, such as unions’ access to the workplace and the centralization of bargaining.[17] Sano and Williamson argue that globalization’s impact is conditional upon a country’s labor history.[18] In the United States in particular, which has traditionally had relatively low levels of union density, globalization did not appear to significantly affect union density.

Studies focusing more narrowly on the U.S. labor movement corroborate the comparative findings about the importance of structural factors, but tend to emphasize the effects of changing labor markets due to globalization to a greater extent. Bronfenbrenner notes that changes in the economy, such as increased global competition, capital flight, and the transitions from a manufacturing to a service economy and to a greater reliance on transitory and contingent workers, accounts for only a third of the decline in union density.[19] She claims that the federal government in the 1980s was largely responsible for giving employers the perception that they could engage in aggressive strategies to repress the formation of unions. Richard Freeman also points to the role of repressive employer strategies in reducing unionization, and highlights the way in which a state ideology of anti-unionism tacitly accepted these strategies [13] Goldfield notes that the overall effects of globalization on unionization in the particular case of the United States may be understated in econometric studies on the subject.[20] He writes that the threat of production shifts reduces unions’ bargaining power even if it does not eliminate them, and also claims that most of the effects of globalization on labor’s strength are indirect. They are most present in change towards a neoliberal political context that has promoted the deregulation and privatization of some industries and accepted increased employer flexibility in labor markets.

No Take Backs

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Non-Sequitur

The funny thing about climate denialism is that they basically break Karl Popper’s verification of science through falsifiability. No experiment, no matter how promising it may seem beforehand, can ever prove that the climate is actually warming. Paul Krugman writes:

So the joke begins like this: An economist, a lawyer and a professor of marketing walk into a room. What’s the punch line? They were three of the five “expert witnesses” Republicans called for last week’s Congressional hearing on climate science.

But the joke actually ended up being on the Republicans, when one of the two actual scientists they invited to testify went off script.

Prof. Richard Muller of Berkeley, a physicist who has gotten into the climate skeptic game, has been leading the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project, an effort partially financed by none other than the Koch foundation. And climate deniers — who claim that researchers at NASA and other groups analyzing climate trends have massaged and distorted the data — had been hoping that the Berkeley project would conclude that global warming is a myth.

Instead, however, Professor Muller reported that his group’s preliminary results find a global warming trend “very similar to that reported by the prior groups.”

….

But back to Professor Muller. His climate-skeptic credentials are pretty strong: he has denounced both Al Gore and my colleague Tom Friedman as “exaggerators,” and he has participated in a number of attacks on climate research, including the witch hunt over innocuous e-mails from British climate researchers. Not surprisingly, then, climate deniers had high hopes that his new project would support their case.

You can guess what happened when those hopes were dashed.

Just a few weeks ago Anthony Watts, who runs a prominent climate denialist Web site, praised the Berkeley project and piously declared himself “prepared to accept whatever result they produce, even if it proves my premise wrong.” But never mind: once he knew that Professor Muller was going to present those preliminary results, Mr. Watts dismissed the hearing as “post normal science political theater.” And one of the regular contributors on his site dismissed Professor Muller as “a man driven by a very serious agenda.”

Of course, it’s actually the climate deniers who have the agenda, and nobody who’s been following this discussion believed for a moment that they would accept a result confirming global warming. But it’s worth stepping back for a moment and thinking not just about the science here, but about the morality.

For years now, large numbers of prominent scientists have been warning, with increasing urgency, that if we continue with business as usual, the results will be very bad, perhaps catastrophic. They could be wrong. But if you’re going to assert that they are in fact wrong, you have a moral responsibility to approach the topic with high seriousness and an open mind. After all, if the scientists are right, you’ll be doing a great deal of damage.

But what we had, instead of high seriousness, was a farce: a supposedly crucial hearing stacked with people who had no business being there and instant ostracism for a climate skeptic who was actually willing to change his mind in the face of evidence. As I said, no surprise: as Upton Sinclair pointed out long ago, it’s difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.

But it’s terrifying to realize that this kind of cynical careerism — for that’s what it is — has probably ensured that we won’t do anything about climate change until catastrophe is already upon us.

So on second thought, I was wrong when I said that the joke was on the G.O.P.; actually, the joke is on the human race.?

Climatologist Ken Caldeira, who helped fund the study but did not particpate in it wrote:

I have seen a copy of the Berkeley group’s draft paper, which of course would be expected to be revised before submission.

Their preliminary results sit right within the results of NOAA, NASA, and HadCRU, confirming that prior analyses were correct in every way that matters. Their results confirm the reality of global warming and support in all essential respects the historical temperature analyses of the NOAA, NASA, and HadCRU.

Their analysis supports the view that there is no fire behind the smokescreen put up by climate science deniers.

This isn’t the only take-back from Republicans. Recently, Paul Ryan released a 10-year budget plan that will be cutting the top marginal rate to 25%, lower than it has been at any time in the past 80 years. The Heritage Foudnation then released a projection that tried to claim that the plan would bring the civilian unemployment rate under 3%, something that hasn’t been done since briefly during the Korean War. When economists caught wind of the ludicrous claim, they scrubbed the entire statistic.

According to Ryan’s own plan, it would not balance the budget until the 2060’s and presumes the Supply Side assumption that cutting taxes means higher revenue, arguing that large tax cuts will increase revenue by almost $600 billion over 10 years, while the CBO says the spending cuts would lead to bigger deficits and more debt than current law. One conservative estimate is that it would add $62 trillion to the debt before 2063.

Krugman writes:

“According to the budget office, which analyzed the plan using assumptions dictated by House Republicans, the proposal calls for spending on items other than Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid — but including defense — to fall from 12 percent of G.D.P. last year to 6 percent of G.D.P. in 2022, and just 3.5 percent of G.D.P. in the long run.

That last number is less than we currently spend on defense alone; it’s not much bigger than federal spending when Calvin Coolidge was president, and the United States, among other things, had only a tiny military establishment. How could such a drastic shrinking of government take place without crippling essential public functions? The plan doesn’t say.”

And then there’s the much-ballyhooed proposal to abolish Medicare and replace it with vouchers that can be used to buy private health insurance.

The point here is that privatizing Medicare does nothing, in itself, to limit health-care costs. In fact, it almost surely raises them by adding a layer of middlemen. Yet the House plan assumes that we can cut health-care spending as a percentage of G.D.P. despite an aging population and rising health care costs.

The only way that can happen is if those vouchers are worth much less than the cost of health insurance. In fact, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that by 2030 the value of a voucher would cover only a third of the cost of a private insurance policy equivalent to Medicare as we know it. So the plan would deprive many and probably most seniors of adequate health care.

Remember when Republicans were screaming at Obama not to touch their Medicare? Well, jokes on you. The plan to replace Medicare fee-for-service with vouchers is one we have already tried with Medicare Advantage and it was a fiscal disaster.

According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, out of the $4 trillion in spending cuts Ryan proposes over the next decade, two-thirds cut programs that mainly serve low-income Americans. depriving some 34 million non-elderly Americans of health insurance.

The CBO found that in addition to acknowledging that seniors, disabled and elderly people would be hit with much higher out-of-pocket health care costs, in the 10-year budget window, public debt will actually be higher than it would be if the GOP just did nothing.

Ezra Klein writes:

Just over a year ago, I wrote a column praising Rep. Paul Ryan’s Roadmap. I called its ambition “welcome, and all too rare.” I said its dismissal of the status quo was “a point in its favor.” When the inevitable backlash came, I defended Ryan against accusations that he was a fraud, and that technical mistakes in his tax projections should be taken as evidence of dishonesty. I also, for the record, like Ryan personally, and appreciate his policy-oriented approach to politics. So I believe I have some credibility when I say that the budget Ryan released last week is not courageous or serious or significant. It’s a joke, and a bad one.

Ryan’s numbers are so fantastic that Alice Rivlin, who originally had her name on this proposal, now opposes it.

The Affordable Care Act, in contrast, actually includes reforms and new processes for future reforms that would help Medicare save money rather than shift it. Ezra Klein writes:

The Affordable Care Act’s central hope is that Medicare can lead the health-care system to pay for value, cut down on overtreatment, and cut out treatments that simply don’t work. The law develops Accountable Care Organizations, in which Medicare pays one provider to coordinate all of your care successfully, rather than paying many doctors and providers to add to your care no matter the cost or outcome, as is the current practice. It also begins experimenting with bundled payments, in which Medicare pays one lump-sum for all care related to the successful treatment of a condition rather than paying for every piece of care separately. To help these reforms succeed, and to help all doctors make more cost-effective treatment decisions, the law accelerates research on which drugs and treatments are most effective, and creates and funds the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute to disseminate the data.

If those initiatives work, they head over to the Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB), which can implement cost-controlling reforms across Medicare without congressional approval — an effort to make continuous reform the default for Medicare, even if Congress is gridlocked or focused on other matters. And if they don’t work, then it’s up to the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation, a funded body that will be continually testing payment and practice reforms, to keep searching and experimenting, and when it hits on successful ideas, handing them to the IPAB to implement throughout the system.

The law also goes after bad and wasted care: It cuts payments to hospitals with high rates of re-admission, as that tends to signal care isn’t being delivered well, or isn’t being follow up on effectively. It cuts payments to hospitals for care related to infections caught in the hospitals. It develops new plans to help Medicare base its purchasing decisions on value, and new programs to help Medicaid move patients with chronic illnesses into systems that rely on the sort of maintenance-based care that’s been shown to successfully lower costs and improve outcomes.

I could go on, but instead, I’ll just link to the Kaiser Family Foundation’s excellent primer (pdf) on everything the law does. The bottom line is this: The Affordable Care Act is actually doing the hard work of reforming the health-care system that’s needed to make cost control possible. Ryan’s budget just makes seniors pay more for their Medicare and choose their own plans — worthy ideas, you can argue, but ideas that have been tried many times before, and that have never cut costs in the way Ryan’s budget suggests they will.

That’s why, when the Congressional Budget Office looked at Ryan’s plan, they said it would make Medicare more expensive for seniors, not less. The reason the deficit goes down is because seniors are paying 70 percent of the cost of their insurance out-of-pocket rather than 30 percent. But that’s not sustainable: We’ve just taken the government’s medical-costs problem and pushed it onto families.

No one who knows health-care policy will tell you that the Affordable Care Act does everything we need to do in exactly the way we need it done. That’s why Resichauer gave it a five, not a 10. But it does a lot of what we need to do and it sets up systems to help us continue doing what’s needed in the future.

Ryan’s proposal, by contrast, does almost none of what we need to do. It appeals to people who have an ideological take on health-care reform and believe we can make Medicare cheaper by handing it over to private insurers and telling seniors to act like consumers. It’s a plan that suggests health-care costs are about insurance, as opposed to about health care. There’s precious little evidence of that, and when added to the fact that Ryan’s targets are so low that even his allies can’t defend them, the reality is that his savings are largely an illusion.

Republicans have also been constantly taking back the amount they want to cut. First it was $31 billion, then $32, then $38, now it’s $39, all of which are really peanuts in the long run for the debt but critical for today’s services. It’s like cutting off your pinky finger to lose weight.

The last time Clinton and Gingrich’s showdown caused a government shut down, the Republicans took most of the heat and Newt went from House Speaker to Senate outcast. Yet a NBC/WDJ poll shows Democrats and Independents would rather compromise on the budget while Republicans would rather the government shut down.

The relationship between Republicans and Democrats often reminds me of a marriage between a redneck gun nut and his wife, where they both work and no raises their child, while most of the money goes to buying the guy’s gas-guzzling camouflage truck complete with wind-dragging American flags attached to it, his impressive gun collection, and the hospital bills for fights the guy gets in with foreigners. The wife typically wants to spend money on their home’s infrastructure and education for their children, and hates it when her husband goes off gambling, but the guy thinking he will become a billionaire one day, gambles all the money away. But the redneck blames his economic problems on his wife wasting money on school, the house, or to charity, because it’s always the dregs of society below him that are the real problem, not anything in the way he lives his life (“How dare she say I’m addicted to oil!”).

When the redneck and his wife are held up to gun point by the gambler’s kingpin, he tries to convince his wife not to hand over what they have because there really aren’t any bullets in the gun. The wife of course doesn’t believe him and tells him she knows exactly what caliber bullet that’s being pointed at them and so forces them to hand over what they have. The husband then tries to convince her that since the caliber bullet was actually larger than what she said it was, she didn’t know what she was talking about. When the cops come, the redneck refuses to identify his cohorts and tries to blame it on the fact that the cops are anti-gambling, but he tries to maintain that none of this was his fault because he didn’t want to hand over the money in the first place.

The Founding Fathers on Religion

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Jefferson on Christianity

Mike Hukabee was on The Daily Show yesterday and they started talking about David Barton, an evangelical Christian minister and political activist that Hackabee called “the greatest historian in America.” Barton is one of those historians who believes the Founding Fathers based the core principals of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights not on the values on the Enlightenment, but on the Bible. Of course, it’s the opposite that’s true. Starting with Emperor Constantine in the 300s A.D., virtually every country in Europe since the Fall of Rome has tried to base their nation’s values on Christianity while America was the first to base it’s values on the concepts of individual freedom.

Below are some quotes from Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, James Madison, Benjamin Franklin, and John Adams, proving they were all (with the partial exception of Washington) Deists and Unitarians. The same is true for John Quincy Adams, Thomas Paine, Ethan Allen, and Abraham Lincoln. Many, like George Washington, were also Freemasons, liberal religious thinkers who are/were discredited by most Catholics and Protestants. Jefferson in particular was very hostile to organized religion and believed it always corrupted a free society. He also wrote the Jefferson Bible in which he combined the sayings of Jesus from the four gospels and cut out all the miracles and references to Jesus’ divinity.

Thomas Jefferson Quotes:

“Christianity neither is, nor ever was a part of the common law.” -Thomas Jefferson, letter to Dr. Thomas Cooper, February 10, 1814

“In every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot, abetting his abuses in return for protection to his own.” -Thomas Jefferson, letter to Horatio G. Spafford, March 17, 1814

“They [the clergy] believe that any portion of power confided to me, will be exerted in opposition to their schemes. And they believe rightly; for I have sworn upon the altar of God, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man. But this is all they have to fear from me: & enough too in their opinion, & this is the cause of their printing lying pamphlets against me. . .” -Thomas Jefferson

“History, I believe, furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government. This marks the lowest grade of ignorance of which their civil as well as religious leaders will always avail themselves for their own purposes.” -Thomas Jefferson to Alexander von Humboldt, Dec. 6, 1813

“Man once surrendering his reason, has no remaining guard against absurdities the most monstrous, and like a ship without rudder, is the sport of every wind.” – Thomas Jefferson to James Smith, 1822.

“Millions of innocent men, women and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined and imprisoned; yet we have not advanced one inch towards uniformity.” -Thomas Jefferson, Notes on Virginia, 1782

“Question with boldness even the existence of a god; because if there be one he must approve of the homage of reason more than that of blindfolded fear.” -Thomas Jefferson, letter to Peter Carr, August 10, 1787

“Among the sayings and discourses imputed to him [Jesus] by his biographers, I find many passages of fine imagination, correct morality, and of the most lovely benevolence; and others again of so much ignorance, so much absurdity, so much untruth, charlatanism, and imposture, as to pronounce it impossible that such contradictions should have proceeded from the same being.” -Thomas Jefferson, letter to William Short, April 13, 1820

“To talk of immaterial existences is to talk of nothings. To say that the human soul, angels, god, are immaterial, is to say they are nothings, or that there is no god, no angels, no soul. I cannot reason otherwise: but I believe I am supported in my creed of materialism by Locke, Tracy, and Stewart. At what age of the Christian church this heresy of immaterialism, this masked atheism, crept in, I do not know. But heresy it certainly is.” -Thomas Jefferson, letter to John Adams, Aug. 15, 1820

“The whole history of these books [the Gospels] is so defective and doubtful that it seems vain to attempt minute enquiry into it: and such tricks have been played with their text, and with the texts of other books relating to them, that we have a right, from that cause, to entertain much doubt what parts of them are genuine. In the New Testament there is internal evidence that parts of it have proceeded from an extraordinary man; and that other parts are of the fabric of very inferior minds. It is as easy to separate those parts, as to pick out diamonds from dunghills.” -Thomas Jefferson in a letter to John Adams, January 24, 1814

“I concur with you strictly in your opinion of the comparative merits of atheism and demonism, and really see nothing but the latter in the being worshipped by many who think themselves Christians.” -Thomas Jefferson , letter to Richard Price, Jan. 8, 1789

Quotes on George Washington:

Washington, out of the Big Four (along with Jefferson, Madison, and Franklin), is the most religious of all: half-Anglican, half-Deist. While he was President, Washington attended Christ Church (an Anglican/Episcopalian congregation) in Philadelphia. Although he was an Anglican and an Episcopalian, Washington reportedly did not take communion and was not considered an official “communicant” (full-fledged adult church member).

“Dr. Rush tells me that he had it from Asa Green that when the clergy addressed Genl. Washington on his departure from the govmt, it was observed in their consultation that he had never on any occasion said a word to the public which showed a belief in the Xn religion and they thot they should so pen their address as to force him at length to declare publicly whether he was a Christian or not. They did so. However he observed the old fox was too cunning for them. He answered every article of their address particularly except that, which he passed over without notice. Rush observes he never did say a word on the subject in any of his public papers except in his valedictory letter to the Governors of the states when he resigned his commission in the army, wherein he speaks of the benign influence of the Christian religion. I know that Gouverneur Morris, who pretended to be in his secrets & believed himself to be so, has often told me that Genl. Washington believed no more of that system than he himself did.” – Thomas Jefferson, journal entry for February 1, 1800, a few weeks after Washington’s death.

James Madison Quotes:

“An alliance or coalition between Government and religion cannot be too carefully guarded against……Every new and successful example therefore of a PERFECT SEPARATION between ecclesiastical and civil matters is of importance……..religion and government will exist in greater purity, without (rather) than with the aid of government.” – James Madison in a letter to Livingston, 1822, from Leonard W. Levy- The Establishment Clause, Religion and the First Amendment, p. 124

“And I have no doubt that every new example will succeed, as every past one has done, in showing that religion and Government will both exist in greater purity, the less they are mixed together.” -James Madison

“What influence, in fact, have ecclesiastical establishments had on society? In some instances they have been seen to erect a spiritual tyranny on the ruins of the civil authority; on many instances they have been seen upholding the thrones of political tyranny; in no instance have they been the guardians of the liberties of the people. Rulers who wish to subvert the public liberty may have found an established clergy convenient auxiliaries. A just government, instituted to secure and perpetuate it, needs them not.” – James Madison, “A Memorial and Remonstrance”, 1785

“Religion flourishes in greater purity, without than with the aid of Government.” -James Madison

“Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprise, every expanded prospect. ” -James Madison

Quotes on James Madison:

“Offered for the Legislature, and it was objected to [Madison], by his opponents, that he was better suited to the pulpit than to the legislative hall. His religious feeling, however, seems to have been short-lived. His political associations were those of infidel principles, of whom there were many in his day, if they did not actually change his creed, yet subjected him to a general suspicion of it.” -William Meade, Episcopal Bishop of Virginia, based on the account of Reverend Alexander Balmaine, husband of one of Madison’s favorite cousins and the Episcopal priest who officiated at his marriage to Dolly Paine Todd.

“I was never at Mr. Madison’s but once, and then our conversation took such a turn–though not designed on my part–as to call forth some expressions and arguments which left the impression on my mind that his creed was not strictly regulated by the Bible.” -Bishop Meade

“He talked of religious sects and parties and was curious to know how the cause of liberal Christianity stood with us, and if the Athanasian [Nicene] creed was well received by our Episcopalians. He pretty distinctly intimated to me his own regard for the Unitarian doctrines. ” -Irving Brant, biographer, based on a Bostonian’s account of an 1815 dinner table conversation with Madison

Benjamin Franklin Quotes:

“You desire to know something of my religion. It is the first time I have been questioned upon it. But I cannot take your curiosity amiss, and shall endeavor in a few words to gratify it. Here is my creed. I believe in one God, the creator of the universe. That he governs by his providence. That he ought to be worshipped. That the most acceptable service we render to him is doing good to his other children. That the soul of man is immortal, and will be treated with justice in another life respecting its conduct in this. These I take to be the fundamental points in all sound religion, and I regard them as you do in whatever sect I meet with them.

“As to Jesus of Nazareth, my opinion of whom you particularly desire, I think his system of morals and his religion, as he left them to us, the best the world ever saw or is likely to see; but I apprehend it has received various corrupting changes, and I have, with most of the present dissenters in England, some doubts as to his divinity; though it is a question I do not dogmatize upon, having never studied it, and think it needless to busy myself with it now, when I expect soon an opportunity of knowing the truth with less trouble. I see no harm, however, in its being believed, if that belief has the good consequences, as probably it has, of making his doctrines more respected and more observed; especially as I do not perceive that the Supreme takes it amiss, by distinguishing the unbelievers in his government of the world with any peculiar marks of his displeasure.” -Benjamin Franklin to Ezra Stiles, March 9, 1790

“My parents had given me betimes religions impressions, and I received from my infancy a pious education in the principles of Calvinism. But scarcely was I arrived at fifteen years of age, when, after having doubted in turn of different tenets, according as I found them combated in the different books that I read, I began to doubt of Revelation itself” -Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography, p. 66

“The time which I devoted to these exercises, and to reading, was the evening after my day’s labor was finished, the morning before it began, and Sundays when I could escape divine service. While I lived with my father, he had insisted on my punctual attendance on public worship, and I still indeed considered it as a duty, but a duty which I thought I had no time to practice” -Benjamin Franklin, p. 16

“Charmed to a degree of enthusiasm with this mode of disputing, I adopted it, and renouncing blunt contradictions, and direct and positive argument, I assumed the character of a humble questioner. The perusal of Shaftesbury and Collins had made me a skeptic; and, being previously so as to many doctrines of Christianity, I found Socrates’ method to be both the safest for myself, as well as the most embarrassing to those against whom I applied it. It soon afforded me singular pleasure; I incessantly practiced it; and became very adroit in obtaining, even from persons of superior understanding, concessions of which they did not foresee the consequence” -Benjamin Franklin, p. 17

“I began to be regarded, by pious souls, with horror, either as an apostate or an Atheist” -Benjamin Franklin, p. 22

Quote on Benjamin Franklin:

“In Boston, in 1721, when the pulpit had marshaled Quakers and witches to the gallows, one newspaper, the New England Courant, the fourth American periodical, was established as an organ of independent opinion, by James Franklin. Its temporary success was advanced by Benjamin, his brother and apprentice, a boy of fifteen, who wrote pieces for its humble columns.

“The little sheet satirized hypocrisy and spoke of religious knaves as of all knaves the worst. This was described as tending ‘to abuse the ministers of religion in a manner which was intolerable.’ ‘I can well remember,’ writes Increase Mather, then more than four score years of age, ‘when the civil government would have taken an effectual course to suppress such a cursed libel.’ “The ministers persevered, and, in January, 1723, a committee of inquiry was raised by the legislature. Benjamin Franklin, being examined, escaped with an admonition; James, the publisher, refusing to discover the author of the offense, was kept in jail for a month; his paper was censured as reflecting injuriously on the reverend ministers of the gospel; and, by a vote of the House and Council, he was forbidden to print it, ‘except it be first supervised.'” -Goodrich’s Reader (Fifth, pp. 273, 274)

John Adams Quotes:

“The question before the human race is, whether the God of nature shall govern the world by his own laws, or whether priests and kings shall rule it by fictitious miracles?” -John Adams, letter to Thomas Jefferson, June 20, 1815

“The United States of America have exhibited, perhaps, the first example of governments erected on the simple principles of nature; and if men are now sufficiently enlightened to disabuse themselves of artifice, imposture, hypocrisy, and superstition, they will consider this event as an era in their history. Although the detail of the formation of the American governments is at present little known or regarded either in Europe or in America, it may hereafter become an object of curiosity. It will never be pretended that any persons employed in that service had interviews with the gods, or were in any degree under the influence of Heaven, more than those at work upon ships or houses, or laboring in merchandise or agriculture; it will forever be acknowledged that these governments were contrived merely by the use of reason and the senses.” -John Adams, “A Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America” (1787-88)

“Thirteen governments [of the original states] thus founded on the natural authority of the people alone, without a pretence of miracle or mystery, and which are destined to spread over the northern part of that whole quarter of the globe, are a great point gained in favor of the rights of mankind.” -John Adams, “A Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America” (1787-88)

“We should begin by setting conscience free. When all men of all religions … shall enjoy equal liberty, property, and an equal chance for honors and power … we may expect that improvements will be made in the human character and the state of society.” -John Adams, letter to Dr. Price, April 8, 1785

“As I understand the Christian religion, it was, and is, a revelation. But how has it happened that millions of fables, tales, legends, have been blended with both Jewish and Christian revelation that have made them the most bloody religion that ever existed?” -John Adams, letter to FA Van der Kamp, December 27, 1816

“The frightful engines of ecclesiastical councils, of diabolical malice, and Calvinistical good-nature never failed to terrify me exceedingly whenever I thought of preaching.” -John Adams, letter to his brother-in-law, Richard Cranch, October 18, 1756, explaining why he rejected the ministry

“I shall have liberty to think for myself without molesting others or being molested myself.” -John Adams, letter to his brother-in-law, Richard Cranch, August 29, 1756, explaining how his independent opinions would create much difficulty in the ministry,

“When philosophic reason is clear and certain by intuition or necessary induction, no subsequent revelation supported by prophecies or miracles can supersede it.” -John Adams, from Rufus K Noyes

“Indeed, Mr. Jefferson, what could be invented to debase the ancient Christianism which Greeks, Romans, Hebrews and Christian factions, above all the Catholics, have not fraudulently imposed upon the public? Miracles after miracles have rolled down in torrents.” -John Adams, letter to Thomas Jefferson, December 3, 1813

“Cabalistic Christianity, which is Catholic Christianity, and which has prevailed for 1,500 years, has received a mortal wound, of which the monster must finally die. Yet so strong is his constitution, that he may endure for centuries before he expires.” -John Adams, letter to Thomas Jefferson, July 16, 1814

“I do not like the reappearance of the Jesuits…. Shall we not have regular swarms of them here, in as many disguises as only a king of the gipsies can assume, dressed as printers, publishers, writers and schoolmasters? If ever there was a body of men who merited damnation on earth and in Hell, it is this society of Loyola’s. Nevertheless, we are compelled by our system of religious toleration to offer them an asylum.” -John Adams, letter to Thomas Jefferson, May 5, 1816

“Let the human mind loose. It must be loose. It will be loose. Superstition and dogmatism cannot confine it.” -John Adams, letter to his son, John Quincy Adams, November 13, 1816

“Can a free government possibly exist with the Roman Catholic religion?” -John Adams, letter to Thomas Jefferson, May 19, 1821

“I almost shudder at the thought of alluding to the most fatal example of the abuses of grief which the history of mankind has preserved — the Cross. Consider what calamities that engine of grief has produced!” -John Adams, letter to Thomas Jefferson

“The priesthood have, in all ancient nations, nearly monopolized learning…. And, even since the Reformation, when or where has existed a Protestant or dissenting sect who would tolerate A FREE INQUIRY? The blackest billingsgate, the most ungentlemanly insolence, the most yahooish brutality is patiently endured, countenanced, propagated, and applauded. But touch a solemn truth in collision with a dogma of a sect, though capable of the clearest proof, and you will soon find you have disturbed a nest, and the hornets will swarm about your legs and hands, and fly into your face and eyes.” -John Adams, letter to John Taylor, 1814

“The Church of Rome has made it an article of faith that no man can be saved out of their church, and all other religious sects approach this dreadful opinion in proportion to their ignorance, and the influence of ignorant or wicked priests.” -John Adams, Diary and Autobiography

“What havoc has been made of books through every century of the Christian era? Where are fifty gospels condemned as spurious by the bull of Pope Gelasius? Where are forty wagon-loads of Hebrew manuscripts burned in France, by order of another pope, because of suspected heresy? Remember the Index Expurgato-rius, the Inquisition, the stake, the axe, the halter, and the guillotine; and, oh! horrible, the rack! This is as bad, if not worse, than a slow fire. Nor should the Lion’s Mouth be forgotten. Have you considered that system of holy lies and pious frauds that has raged and triumphed for 1,500 years.” -John Adams, letter to John Taylor, 1814

“God is an essence that we know nothing of. Until this awful blasphemy [of the Incarnation of Christ] is got rid of, there never will be any liberal science in the world.” -John Adams

Campaign Reruns

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One of the things I hate about reading politics is that I have to deal with reruns:

HANNITY: Donald Trump has said where is the birth certificate? You said it is not an issue for you. You have no doubt whatsoever. … Why don’t they just produce the stupid thing and move on?

PAWLENTY: […] But on the other hand for me, the news reports from CNN and others have said they’ve seen the birth certificate.

HANNITY: Never trust CNN. … You don’t have a problem with people saying can we see it? Can you find it?

PAWLENTY: No, but it has been reported. You know, CNN, I watched it myself. CNN reported they saw the birth certificate. You got to either believe that they didn’t and they’re lying or there is something else going on.

HANNITY: It’s just something weird that they won’t release it and just get it over with. It seems to me because I don’t doubt it. I’m just — now it is getting strange that they don’t say here.

Three years later and Republicans are STILL bitching about Obama’s fucking birth certificate.

Of course, Obama DID produce the certificate but Fox News pundits realized if they just ignored it then their sheep will never find out about it. The Republican governor of Hawaii put out a news release that she has seen it, and when that was ignored, she backed a law to stop the millions of idiots who keep asking for it. Factcheck.org took pictures of it and posted it to the website, and if that’s too hard to find a Google image search will bring it up.

It’s no wonder Democrats have been working on the “zombie lie” theme. Republicans just close their ears and pretend they don’t hear anything that contradicts them. Like “Climategate” proves global warming didn’t exist despite the fact that the sixth investigation — not including all the unofficial investigations done by fact-checkers and news agencies — this one led by Jim “Environmentalists are Nazis” Inhofe, has cleared the scientists of East Anglia.

Like the “Obama is a Socialist” lie. I’ve had to listen to this rerun for so long, I’m starting to hope they start calling him a Communist just to change things up.

Fox News executive Bill Sammon, the same guy who wrote notes telling the Fox “news” anchors to “refrain from asserting that the planet has warmed (or cooled) in any given period without IMMEDIATELY pointing out that such theories are based upon data that critics have called into question” and to always refer to Obama’s health care plan as “government-run health insurance” (despite the fact that it’s insurance-based) because that phrasing polls badly, has been caught yet again, this time admitting that all that stuff about Obama being a socialist was just a lie:

“At that time, I have to admit, that I went on TV on Fox News and publicly engaged in what I guess was some rather mischievous speculation about whether Barack Obama really advocated socialism, a premise that privately I found rather far-fetched.”

As Media Matters points out, he archestrated this theme on a lot of different “news” shows. Of course, now Sammon is trying to say that Obama eventually proved to be a socialist after all. So it wasn’t a lie, but pre-truth!

As Bryan from YouAreDumb.net says: “Everyone knows what Fox is. Fox knows. Other news organizations know. The viewers know. But Fox is allowed to deny it, and it’s considered partisan and unfair for anyone to actually say it. Yet Sammon was admitting it two years ago, when he thought he was among friends and wasn’t going to get caught. And now, his only defense is that everyone sure was talking about Obama being a socialist after we kept saying he was a socialist, even though we knew he wasn’t a socialist.”

So, after finally being told that there actually IS a birth certificate, Trump went on O’Reilly’s show and said, “Bill, I grew up with Wall Street geniuses. What they do in terms of fraud, and how they change documents.”

Yeah, remember that next time a Right-winger starts going off about how the president and everyone they work with needs to have business experience. I guess in Trump’s screwed up mind, we NEED frauds who lie and cheat in order to run the country.

So this is the point where out hagiography of business has gotten us: Trump bragging about how he and his fellow “geniuses” make money through fraud. No union leader would need to be told that that is an incredibly stupid thing to say, but I guess people are now so biased for business that you don’t even need to pretend that there isn’t a lot of systemic corruption inherent in the corporate system. Trump probably thinks everyone is just jealous that they aren’t the ones commiting fraud.