Daniel Moynihan's seminal essay "Defining Deviancy Down," took direct aim at the likes of Juan Williams and Ceci Connelly, who, in exchange for money and media exposure, lend legitimacy the charlatans and reprobrates of Fox News, an outfit devoted to relentless repetition of The Big Lie. On a recent All-Star Panel, used to commence a 48-hour propaganda cycle, Connelly and Williams were used as foils for WALLACE: I remember it well.

KRISTOL: ... may have been -- may have been warmer than the current - - the world may have been warmer then than it is now. That's why Greenland was called Greenland. You know, it was green in the southern part of Greenland. You could actually grow things there.
That's a huge concession. Their whole premise has been we are in an unprecedented moment of global warming. They're now having to retreat even from that.
I think the whole -- we're now going to have a complicated scientific debate for the next 20, 30, 40 years and take some incremental steps to adjust a few things. The whole global warming hysteria is over.

Kristol lied, and Wallace backed up Kristol's lie. In the BBC interview -- which by the way, took place 24 hours before Kristol's comments, not "a couple of days" prior -- scientist Phil Jones said the opposite of what Kristol claimed and what Wallace remembered so well. Jones said that the fragmentary evidence of rising temperatures during the Medieval Warm Period was insufficient for an inference that the temperature rise was global. More specifically, the recorded data was basically limited to the Northern Hemisphere. He said:

We know from the instrumental temperature record that the two hemispheres do not always follow one another. We cannot, therefore, make the assumption that temperatures in the global average will be similar to those in the northern hemisphere.

In order to reverse the meaning Jones' remarks, writers for Kristol and Wallace deleted a major qualifier:

Of course, if the MWP was shown to be global in extent and as warm or warmer than today (based on an equivalent coverage over the NH and SH) then obviously the late-20th century warmth would not be unprecedented. On the other hand, if the MWP was global, but was less warm that today, then current warmth would be unprecedented.

Given the absence of evidence to back up either possibility, it's a somewhat meaningless aside. But Jones was very clear that neither scenario, nor any other prior periods of solar and/or volcanic forcing, would be relevant to the rise in global temperatures during the past 60 years. Jones categorically rejected the notion that the current rise in temperatures was not man-made. That "huge concession" was a pure invention by Wallace and Kristol, who used it as a retort to the fact-based remarks of Connolly and Williams.

Connolly, as a concession to downward deviancy, spoke to the dumber-than-a-fifth-grader crowd, who don't understand that planet earth is much bigger than United States, and that seasonal winter storms do not refute decades of climate data:

CONNOLLY: Well, a couple things. I think you're getting at a very important point, which is that there's a real difference between talking about climate and talking about weather. And when we're talking about climate, it's decades and centuries, not one miserable week. And it's difficult for the human mind to deal with counterintuitive notions. And anybody who was out there this week, as we all were, shoveling and breaking up snow dams in our -- ice dams in our gutters -- it's hard to imagine, but it is correct that '09 was the second warmest year since anybody has been keeping track of these things.

It's a hard notion to get your head around, but I think that is true. And even, you know, any number of respected Republicans and the vast majority of scientists say, "Look, the important point here is that human behavior -- namely, pollution and the reliance on polluting vehicles and factories -- is exacerbating the natural phenomenon."

And that's really what the discussion has to move to, how you can begin to sort of lessen that exacerbation.

WALLACE: But, Liz, on the other hand, there's an awful lot of the, quote, "science" that keeps being challenged. We had those e- mail reports that were leaked out of East Anglia that seemed to indicate that some of the climate change advocates were suppressing opposition.

Now we have this 2007 report by the U.N.'s International Panel on Climate Change. One thing that I was studying up for this -- this segment -- that there was a claim that the Himalayan glaciers would disappear by 2035 -- wasn't an academic study. It was one expert who says he was misquoted. Hasn't a lot of the science turned out to be somewhat sketchy?

The most important evidence was suppressed by Wallace, who kept touting the phony "climate-gate" story, which had been thoroughly discredited by the AP's fact checking, and by Connolly, who declined to challenge his deception. Nor did she challenge his other conceit, which suggested that flaws and discrepancies about the rate of change within a mountain of solid data, do not invalidate the overall mountain of data. The designated flunky knew her place.

And then the uber-liar piggybacked off of Wallace's fraudulent premise:

LIZ CHENEY: And I think the real problem, real-term, for us is that the Obama administration continues to insist that that science is true. And attempts to put policy in place, cap and trade and others that will have a damaging impact in the academy, that will really impose new taxes, new regulations, on the businesses that we need to be growing to create jobs based on what now looks to be very questionable science.

Flunky number two, Juan Williams, was set up to be slapped down by Kristol's lying:

WILLIAMS: But to make this into a political argument that, "Gee, you know what? Global warming isn't happening. Oh, this is evidence. Those crazy liberals have been making this stuff up all along." You know what? Most scientists say this is ridiculous. Of course global warming is taking place. And it's not a matter of we have to go back to years A.D., Bill. You know what? We are warmer now than we have been over the last few centuries and we have to look at changes in human behavior that produce more carbon gases that go into the atmosphere.

There's no question we have more factories...

KRISTOL: We've been warming since 1400. Have we been driving cars around since 1400?

WILLIAMS: No, we are warming now.

KRISTOL: Have we had factories since 1400?

WILLIAMS: In other words, in this...
(CROSSTALK)
KRISTOL: Timing in the last 40 or 50 years, which surely is all you're talking about...

WILLIAMS: That's what I'm talking about.

KRISTOL: ... is tiny. It's -- when you do the recalculations with real science, it's very gradual and very small. And A and B -- you know what used to measure -- "Oh, oil -- we've got to get off oil."

Oil has done an unbelievable amount of good for human beings.

WILLIAMS: Sure.
(CROSSTALK)
KRISTOL: ... you know, and helping hundreds of millions more Chinese and Indians escape poverty over the next 10 years is a lot more politically and morally defensible a policy than totally trying to turn our economy on its head for the sake of dubious scientific propositions...

WILLIAMS: Wait a minute. What's the...

KRISTOL: ... to make environmentalists feel good.

WILLIAMS: OK, so what's dubious about the idea that we should become more energy independent, not reliant on oil?

Those are the ground rules. It doesn't matter what honest people, like Phil Jones, may say. The liars will always edit their words to change the meaning and smear the innocent. And on Fox News the liars always have the last word.

The very next day, Brett Baier amplified Kristol's mendacity:

The scientist behind the so-called "climate-gate" e-mail scandal now admits there has been no statistically significant global warming since 1995.

Jones said something very different:

BBC: Do you agree that from 1995 to the present there has been no statistically-significant global warming?

Jones: Yes, but only just. I also calculated the trend for the period 1995 to 2009. This trend (0.12C per decade) is positive, but not significant at the 95% significance level. The positive trend is quite close to the significance level. Achieving statistical significance in scientific terms is much more likely for longer periods, and much less likely for shorter periods.

In other words, Jones is a scientist who requires a broad-based data sampling, in contrast to those lying crackpots on Fox, who select small data samples, such as winter snowstorms, for snarky insinuations. Baier went on:

Professor Phil Jones also tells the BBC that scientists are unsure whether the Medieval Warm Period was actually warmer than current temperatures. Some skeptics say that is the first time a senior scientist working with the U.N. report on climate change has admitted the possibility that the time between 800 and 1300 A.D. could have actually been warmer than present temperatures. That would be a blow to global warming believers.

In order to give the false impression that Jones' scientific work on climate change cannot withstand scrutiny, Baier impugns the speaker and twists the speaker's message. Jones neither "admitted" nor said he was "unsure" about anything. He said we don't have the data, so we can draw no inferences about what happened during the Middle Ages. And once again, Baier deceitfully edits the facts to convey a false message. And for the umpteenth time, Baier suppressed the information that discredits his fraudulent "climate-gate" story.

Baier was that evening's warm-up act for headliner Sean Hannity, who panders to the dumber-than-a-fifth-grader crowd:

All right, this winter continues to bring Al Gore bad news. Now first global warming was completely undermined by ClimateGate, now Donald Trump attacking his most prized possession in a speech over the weekend. The real estate mogul argues that, "With the coldest winter ever recorded, with snow setting record levels up and down the coast, the Nobel Committee should take the Nobel Prize back from Al Gore." For that, according to the "New York Post," he got a standing ovation. Hey, Al, sorry. Donald, good job.

Or perhaps Hannity's Monday evening warm up act was that drug addict who says he's in recovery but emulates the techniques Joseph Goebbels. Glenn Beck spewed out one of those delusional rants that seem so antithetical to sobriety:

Even as the global warming hoax continues to be exposed and debunked -- and again, more on that coming up in a second -- the president is trying to hammer draconian measures through, using executive orders. And now the EPA is pushing their way through. He'll get what he wants. Farmers in California continue to struggle with no water as the state focuses instead on the beloved delta smelt.

The EPA continues to crackdown on manufacturing, which would further cripple the U.S. economy but save the cave-dwelling Piute trout or whatever it is they're trying to save at this point. If this issue were really truly about science, wouldn't we stop right now? The global warming thing, isn't there enough right now? I mean, assuming that you've found any of the articles on TV or on, you know, the Internet or any of the magazines on the newsstands or your newspapers about global warming -- wouldn't, wouldn't you say there is enough to say, "Hey, wait, wait. We should -- we should look at what the scientists are saying?"

This isn't about science. It never has been. It's about control -- all of it. Health care is not about health. It's about control.

The next day, Neil Cavuto picked up where Baier and Hannity left off:

CAVUTO: All right, well, the president pushing green jobs, as we have been saying, even as a top climate scientist is raising some big doubts about it -- Phil Jones now admitting that there has been no statistically significant global warming in the last 15 years. Now, it's the reason why three big companies, ConocoPhillips, B.P., and Caterpillar, are pulling out of a major climate partnership and why Donald Trump is urging something else be pulled, Al Gore's Nobel Prize.

He joins us now on the phone for this exclusive chat. First off, on these companies pulling out of this, maybe they're catching on to something you had warned about. What do you make of this?

TRUMP: Well, I don't blame them. They probably see the e-mail that was sent a couple of months ago by one of the leaders of global warming, the initiative, and almost saying -- I guess they're saying it's a con.

And they see things like that. They see the fact that, in Washington, where I'm building a big development, nobody can move, because we have 48 inches of snow, and the snow is not melting because it's so cold. And, in New York, we have had the coldest winter on record.

And all over Europe -- by the way, I have friends in Europe -- they're are freezing. It's so cold. It's never been colder.

(LAUGHTER)

CAVUTO: Well, you know, but, Donald, I have talked to a lot of the environmentalists and global warmists, whatever you call them, who have been saying, well, this is global warming. This is what happens.

TRUMP: Well, the problem we have is that the world has also got to play the game. And we're scrubbing our coal, and we're doing all sorts of things that are making our products much more expensive and non- competitive.

And places like China, do you think they scrub coal? Well, I doubt it. Japan, India -- do you really believe that India is out there scrubbing their coal to make it nice and clean? I don't think so, Neil. So, we...

CAVUTO: So, you think we're stuck with the burden of doing all of...

(CROSSTALK)

TRUMP: Well, we do it, but they don't do it. They talk a good game. And they talk like, oh, well, we will do it.

I watched as one of the big representatives from China was talking about global warming, and I know that, underneath, he's laughing, because I know a lot of people, a lot of entrepreneurs and businesspeople from China, they laugh at our stupidity as a country.

Actually, our stupidity is not so funny. But Kristol, Wallace, Baier, Hannity, Beck and Cavuto are coming up with new and inventive lies to make us more and more stupid every day.

More on Glenn Beck

Season after season I go to the fashion shows and look for new trends in beauty. Much to my frustration, the models' hair never changes. To keep attention on the clothes, the hair is almost always pulled straight back in a bun, a twist or a chignon. If there is any statement to be made, it is usually done with dramatic makeup. The face paint is usually translated to a prettier, more wearable version for the woman on the street.

This year one of my (and many others') fashion heroes, Marc Jacobs, broke the mold. The women wore their hair long, soft and full. The makeup palette was almost nude with just a pinch of color. Lips were soft with a hint of orange and coral, a combination we haven't seen in years. The overall effect was girls' born with a natural splendor who need very little effort to look beautiful. The soft look is easy to achieve and the makeup colors could be adjusted easily to enhance any complexion. The look is pretty, wearable and suitable for all occasions.

The hair was gorgeous. Barely coiffed, it looked like hair that had a great cut and beautiful, natural textures. I must give credit to Marc's favorite hairdresser, Guido Palau. He can make the most ordinary hair extraordinary. You know of course that not every model has beautiful, full hair. This may be every woman's dream, but in fact, for most women, especially those with fine hair, it's an illusion that has to be created.

There are two types of fine hair. The first is when you have plenty of hair but each strand is baby fine. The second and most difficult hair to deal with is sparse and fine hair. This kind often looks like see-through hair or hair that sticks to the head moments after the blow dry. This is apparent when the tips of the ears stick out, or hair looks scraggly and absolutely refuses to hold a blow dry or set. Here are some easy tips to make your fine hair look its best.

* The finer and more sparse your hair, the more essential it is to have the right haircut. The best cut for almost all fine hair is the bob. There are many variations of the bob, from layered to the most traditional one-length Vidal Sassoon signature cut. You must find the one that suits your face shape. I would rather see hair look a little thin than cut painfully short. If your hair is extremely thin, try having the ends cut to look a little irregular. This will allow you a little extra length and add dimension and style.

The big bang cut is perfect for woman with fine and sparse hair. With this haircut, the bangs start almost at the crown of the head. This gives thinning hair the illusion of fullness and is extremely chic. The pixie is a very good haircut for thinning hair. You can wear it combed or messy and it always look great. But you must have a good face shape for this cut. Warning! It will accent a sagging jaw line or a drooping chin.

* This is the perfect time to talk about hair extensions. They can be the best solution to add volume to fine hair. Applying hair extensions is a highly developed skill. The hairdresser must be aware of the size or thickness of the extension and the number applied. Nothing looks more horrible or artificial than hair that looks too thick and wig-like. Less is always more unless your goal is to look like Lady Ga-Ga. Hairdressers will often splice the extension in two to create a more natural look. Placement is key. The attachment to the hair must never be visible. The colors of the extensions are also important to a natural look. Usually lighter tones are picked. As hair grows, the ends do become a pinch lighter. Pick up the ends of your hair and compare the color to your roots. You will instantly see the difference. The color at the ends of your hair will provide the palette you should pick for your extensions.

* Styling fine air is crucial. Volume starts at the roots. This is the foundation for all full hair. If you are good at wielding a blow dryer, make sure to lift the hair directly off the scalp. Use a spray of light root lift on each section. If you are not handy with a blow dryer, use old fashioned rollers. These may be the best-kept secret in the business. You can find them backstage of every fashion show and photo shoot. Every stylist I know has rollers in her beauty kit. Rollers are not only for your mom; they're for you, too. Make sure you place the rollers squarely on their base. This will guarantee optimum lift and fullness. They are usually applied after the hair has been blown dry. Using rollers not only gives extra body but prevents over-drying and damaging hair. Once the rollers are in place, it is the perfect time to apply your makeup.

* Volumizing products can work miracles or be a complete disaster. You must experiment and find the right product for your specific hair. I find that sprays and mousses work best. Creams often weigh the hair down unless they are very dry. Gels and silicones will exaggerate your thinning hair and must be avoided at all cost.

* Color can make hair look and feel thicker. Adding color actually roughs up the hair, giving it texture and creating the illusion of volume. I have many clients who come to me not because their roots are showing, but rather because their hair has started to look flat on their heads. Avoid either excessively dark or light colors. They will make your scalp more obvious. This is a definite beauty faux pas.

* People with naturally thick hair are lucky. Their hair almost always looks good and their styling lasts much longer. Fine hair does require more work. It requires frequent shampoos and needs to be restyled more often to look its best. But don't despair! There are many beautiful women with less-than-perfect hair. They just know how to make it look its best. Just remember that Victoria Beckham, Charlize Theron, Cameron Diaz and Paris Hilton all have fine hair. They also have some of the best looking hair in Hollywood.

A POLL IS NOT A VOTE:

So many of the political pundits on talk radio, television and in the newspapers claim to know what "We, the People" want. They claim to have polled a sufficient number of folks from every persuasion, denomination, and walk of life and to know within statistical margins of error what it is the people desire.
Listening to the pundits to learn what it is that you and your fellow countrymen and women supposedly want is deeply frustrating. It makes actual participation in politics seem redundant. It may even, perversely, discourage the only form of direct participation our federal system provides: voting for one's representatives in the House and Senate, however infrequent and fraught with undue influence by corporate wealth that process may be.

Why bother with the ballot box when the polls are stocked with armies of surrogates purporting to speak for all the citizens and then scientifically sifted and collated to yield decisive numbers? Why not use daily tracking polls to take the ever-changing pulse of the public? Would it not be quicker and easier to have the percentages pop up on the TV screen like popcorn from the microwave?

So, you ask, what is the difference between views solicited by pollsters and pundits and views determined by people actually going to the ballot box or signing a petition? I may be really old fashioned here, but I believe a poll will never take the place of a vote. When you vote, you declare your views with your feet. You declare your loyalty to a person, cause, or action. And you stand with a larger group of like-minded individuals that, when the votes are counted, are bound to the outcome that your shared opinions have generated. And those opinions can then turn into political actions that meaningfully reflect the will of the people and can potentially redound to the good of the larger community of citizens.

Voting, unlike most forms of speech, is usually anonymous in order to protect voters from pressure either by government or by particular candidates or by their peers. But even when people vote behind a curtain, their actions connect them with others and with eventual political outcomes, whether they are voting for or against candidates for federal, state, or local legislative positions or, as is possible - and, some think, all too frequent - in some state and local governmental systems, for or against specific referendum or initiative proposals that purport to state policy choices in some usually binary form.

A poll, on the other hand, is anonymous in the worst possible sense. Opinions - whether about candidates or about policy proposals - that are bundled by polls are like disembodied mortgages that are repackaged and resold as high income instruments. The vacuity of those instruments can be seen only when the bubble bursts in the high, thin atmosphere of virtual reality. At best, polls are ephemeral political creatures. No deeds are generated by these virtual opinions and no loyalty attaches to their consequences. When a citizen's opinion is not actually counted in a way that tethers it to a political action that demands loyalty to the larger community, the substance of our political reality reveals our nakedness. Put otherwise, when an expression of view is disconnected from any real consequence other than that of offering fodder for talking heads to deploy in the manipulation of public opinion, that expression represents neither genuine speech nor actual participation in governance but something altogether phony and hollow.
Alexander Hamilton once commented on what constituted American freedom: Our freedom, he reasoned, lay in the capacity to govern ourselves. "The broad principle of civil freedom is to be understood as a determination to rest all our political experiments on the capacity of mankind for self-government". His idea that the state ought to exist for men [and women]--that justice, protection, and the common good ought to be the aim of government--these were the sentiments and opinions of our revolutionary forebears. But when we participate in our democratic process not by casting binding votes but by offering ourselves up to the altar of statistical sampling, we will find our freedom to govern ourselves overtaken by avatars not of our own choosing.

What brought this issue into stark relief for me was listening to the nightly television health care debate. Every time pundits, legislators, or newscasters talk about the issues--components of the various bills either in the House or the Senate - a new set of polls is trotted out to vindicate whatever sliver of the issue was being debated. "Experts" debate whether "We, the People" do or don't "want a public option," or "want to finance health care reform with a tax on Cadillac health plans," as though the systemic change that all honest and informed observers recognize as essential could possibly be reduced to a sequence of binary choices. Not even something as relatively simple as the redesign of the unfortunately fallible Toyota could be accomplished by polling potential users of the vehicle about each of the available options. How much truer is that of something as irreducibly interconnected and complex as the redesign of 17% of the nation's economy? So I am not advocating a substitution of representative democracy with the plebiscitary variety or an attempt to redesign the federal government into an approximation of those state governments where a sequence of statewide referenda renders governance a virtual impossibility. I do not claim to know exactly which choices of federal policy are sufficiently fundamental and sufficiently binary in character to lend themselves to resolution through direct electoral participation by the voters. Nor do I claim to have solved the considerable constitutional problem of how Congress could permissibly delegate to the people themselves the power to make choices that the Constitution's Framers clearly expected Congress to make.
But our nation has engaged in major constitutional innovations before. The alphabet soup of agencies, from the SEC, the FCC and the FDA to the FRB and the NLRB, were not dreamed of in the Framers' philosophy. Nor was the idea of a Military Base Closing Commission or a binding Bipartisan Debt Reduction Commission. The fact that our largely 18th century Constitution has proven flexible enough to accommodate these novel ways of tying the otherwise dysfunctional national legislature's hands to the outcomes of processes very different from those of the supposedly representative democracy embodied in the House and in the (distinctly unrepresentative) Senate should not escape our attention. Why not, then, explore ways of tying the hands of Congress to the outcomes of direct referendum processes for resolving the most fundamental policy choices presented by, for example, the health care debate? Assuming that we do not want to go the difficult and risky route of a constitutional amendment - or, riskier still, of a full-fledged Constitutional Convention - why not consider framework legislation that would permit an otherwise deadlocked or bought-and-paid-for Congress to turn certain basic choices back to the people themselves?

Again, I may be very old fashioned and naïve, but if a pundit or legislator is going to speak for me, I want my actual opinion to be registered somehow, somewhere at the voting booth. For example, I would love to register my opinion on having a public option for this new health care legislation. I would love to go to the voting booth and register that opinion - not as the experimental subject in a supposedly scientific poll but as a direct participant in this not always so-representative democracy. I would love to have my vote counted and then see the results of my and millions of other votes counted all over the land - and counted in a way that actually counted. After all the votes are tallied, if my opinion is not in the majority, I would live with that. My own opinion does not always have to win, but I do want our laws to reflect the desires of all American citizens who choose to exercise their right, duty, and honor in the voting process.

My opinion, registered first at the voting booth and then through my elected representative, must reflect the substance of the legislation that we as self governing Americans covenant and combine to live by and obey. Alexander Hamilton and so many of the other Founding Fathers, did not mince words. They saw clearly the dangers that await a democracy where the oligarchy of the few controls opinions, skips the ballot box, and renders the representatives of the people deaf and mute. When our Congress is made dysfunctional by the tyranny of the few, all the nightmare scenarios of the Founders begin to return, and their subject is not tyranny but anarchy. It was the anarchy inherent in the economic disequilibrium of the French Revolution that scared Americans. It was the anarchy inherent in the allocation of votes among the states that led to the infamous 3/5ths compromise. And it was the anarchy inherent in the corruption of judges that led to the creation of separate branches of government. And though we may not want to admit it, anarchy will return through our stymied electoral process and corrupt our freedom for self government.

America can be a country where self government is not just a poll in a virtual reality of whirling opinions but where a vote counts and is counted, where our civil freedom is determined by our capacity for self government and our self government reflects the love, generosity, and respect of our fellow countrymen.

I had dinner the other night with a Democratic pollster who told me Democrats are heading toward next fall's mid-term elections with a serious enthusiasm gap: The Republican base is fired up. The Democratic base is packing up.

The Democratic base is lethargic because congressional Democrats continue to compromise on everything the base cares about. For a year now it's been nothing but compromises, watered-down ideas, weakened provisions, wider loopholes, softened regulations. Health care went from what the Democratic base wanted -- single payer -- to a public option, to no public option, to a bunch of ideas that the president tried to explain last week, and it now hangs by a string as Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid try to round up conservative Democrats and a 51-vote reconciliation package in the Senate.

The jobs bill went from what the base wanted -- a second stimulus -- to $165 billion of extended unemployment benefits and aid to states and locales, then to $15 billion of tax breaks for businesses that make new hires. Financial regulation went from tough new capital requirements, sharp constraints on derivative trading, a consumer protection agency, and a resurrection of the Glass-Steagall Act -- all popular with the Dem base -- to some limits on derivatives and a consumer-protection agency inside the Treasury Department and a rearrangement of oversight boxes, and it's now looking like even less.

The environment went from the base's desire for a carbon tax to a cap-and-trade carbon auction then to a cap-and-trade with all sorts of exemptions and offsets for the biggest polluters, and now Senate Democrats are talking about trying to do it industry-by-industry.

These waffles and wiggle rooms have drained the Democratic base of all passion. "Why should I care?" are words I hear over and over again from stalwart Democrats who worked their hearts out in the last election.

The Republican base, meanwhile, is on a rampage. It's more and more energized by its mad-as-hell populists. Tea partiers, libertarians, Birchers, birthers, and Dick Armey astro-turfers are channeling the economic anxieties of millions of Americans against "big government."

Technically, the Democrats have the majority in Congress and could still make major reforms. But conservative, "blue-dog" Democrats won't go along. They say the public has grown wary of government. But they must know the public has grown even more wary of big business and Wall Street, on which effective government is the only constraint.

Anyone with an ounce of sanity understands government is the only effective countervailing force against the forces that got us into this mess: Against Goldman Sachs and the rest of the big banks that plunged the economy into crisis, got our bailout money, and are now back at their old games, dispensing huge bonuses to themselves. Against WellPoint and the rest of the giant health insurers who are at this moment robbing us of the care we need by raising their rates by double digits. Against giant corporations that are showing big profits by continuing to lay off millions of Americans and cutting the wages of millions of more, by shifting jobs abroad and substituting software. Against big oil and big utilities that are raising prices and rates, and continue to ravage the atmosphere.

If there was ever a time to connect the dots and make the case for government as the singular means of protecting the public from these forces it is now. Yet the White House and the congressional Democrats' ongoing refusal to blame big business and Wall Street has created the biggest irony in modern political history. A growing portion of the public, fed by the right, blames our problems on "big government."

Much of the reason for the Democrats' astonishing reluctance to place blame where it belongs rests with big business's and Wall Street's generous flows of campaign donations to Democrats, coupled with their implicit promise of high-paying jobs once Democratic officials retire from government. This is the rot at the center of the system. And unless or until it's remedied, it will be difficult for the President to achieve any "change you can believe in."

To his credit, Obama himself has not scaled back his health care ambitions all that much, and he appears, intermittently, to want to push conservative blue-dog Democrats to join him on a bigger jobs bill, tougher financial reform, and a more effective approach to global warming. (His overtures to Republicans seem ever more transparently designed to give blue-dog Democrats cover to vote with him.)

But our president is not comfortable wielding blame. He will not give the public the larger narrative of private-sector greed, its nefarious effect on the American public at this dangerous juncture, and the private sector's corruption of the democratic process. He has so far eschewed any major plan to get corporate and Wall Street money out of politics. He can be indignant -- as when he lashed out at the "fat cats" on Wall Street -- but his indignation is fleeting, and it is no match for the faux indignation of the right that blames government for all that ails us.

Cross-posted from RobertReich.org.

More on Barack Obama

Recently, I posted two interviews with discredited researcher Paul Cameron conducted by Midweek Politics Radio.

The response to these posts have been, in my view, successful. Many people who weren't aware of Paul Cameron became educated on his lies about the gay community.

But then there was a segment who asked why was I giving Cameron attention. They claimed that any focus on Cameron validated him. They were under the impression that if Cameron was ignored, he would go away.

Unfortunately, this mindset also includes other lies told about the gay community by religious right groups. There seems to be this idea that when so-called traditional values groups tell outright fibs about gay lives, the way we have express our love, or our moral outlook, these claims should either be laughed at or ignored.

But what some in our community fail to understand is that the lies told about the gay community aren't going away and ignoring them doesn't diminish their power. These lies have the power to hurt the gay community if unaddressed.

A perfect example is a recent incident during a Minnesota legislative hearing on marriage equality:

Barb Davis White, a Tea Party activist and Republican candidate for Minnesota's 5th Congressional District, prompted shocked gasps from the packed hearing room when she said, "Rosa Parks did not move to the front of the bus to support sodomy." Her testimony involved accusations that the movement for marriage equality is hijacking the civil rights movement.

"There is no difference between a black person and a white person other than their skin color when there's a tremendous difference between a man and a woman," said White, who was the GOP's endorsed candidate against Rep. Keith Ellison in 2008. "Allowing a black woman and a white man to marry does not change the definition of marriage. However, allowing two men or two women to marry would fundamentally change that definition."

White also garnered some laughs from the audience when she said, "Studies also show that the average homosexual has hundreds of sexual partners in his lifetime... and I repeat hundreds."

"I'm here today to tell you that homosexuality and lesbian behavior is unhealthy," claiming that gays and lesbians have higher rates of STDs than anyone else in the world, including "gay bowel disease," an ailment that does not exist and is often used by religious right figures to paint gay men as diseased.

The sad thing is not the fact that White actually believes this nonsense but her claims, in one form or another, are on a myriad of religious right web pages or have been repeated by their spokespeople as fact.

And the gay community and its leadership as a whole have yet to specifically address these lies with the expediency they deserve.

We as a community tend to forget that many people aren't as knowledgeable about us as they should be. Therefore they are susceptible to any group claiming to stand for "morality" or any speaker claiming to speak for "values, even if their definitions of "morality" and "values" involve unfairly painting the gay community as drooling sex-crazed miscreants from a movie co-directed by George Romero and David Cronenberg.

The question that needs to be asked is not whether gays are deserving of equality but why these so-called moral groups and spokespeople feel the need to deny us that equality through lies.

Gays aren't the ones creating phony medical terms designed to connotate the worst images about sexual intercourse,

Gays aren't the ones manipulating the numbers of sexual partners,

and gays aren't the ones who have created a body of junk science based on the ravings of a man who couldn't be believed even if a vial of truth serum was pumped into his veins, i.e. Paul Cameron.

The culprits of these offenses are the so-called Christian groups such as the American Family Association, the Family Research Council, and the Concerned Women for America. The only reason why they have gotten away with it is because the gay community hasn't demanded that they explain their distortions.

And I can't help but to wonder if we are ever going to.

I have a racist in-law. But then again, who doesn't?

I don't see a lot of this guy, because my wife only begrudgingly let him back into her life after a decade of exile. She has not exactly done cartwheels over the decision, but we're stuck with him now.

Clearly, this man is not particularly close to his relative, my wife, or else he would have noticed that she disgraced the master race by marrying a Latino. My guess is that he thinks I just spend a lot of time in the tanning booth.

It's important to note that my in-law is not overt about his bigotry. He either isn't as virulent as, say, 1950s Strom Thurmond, or more likely, he doesn't have the cojones to be upfront about it.

Of course, this brings up the uncomfortable truth that we now have degrees of racism. In the old days, a person was either a hate-filled redneck with a noose in one hand, or he was a progressive, love-thy-neighbor type who was incapable of seeing race, much less discriminating against someone.

But a more nuanced view has come into play in recent years. This viewpoint holds that everyone has some level of unconscious prejudice. At its lowest level, it may be the white woman who grips her purse a little tighter when a black man passes her on the street. From there, we ratchet up the intensity until we reach Klan level.

My in-law is somewhere between those poles. His dancing around the issue makes his prejudice less obnoxious in person and, on occasion, even unintentionally hilarious.

Recently, he sent us a forwarded email that slammed Obama's immigration-reform plan. Perhaps I should have pointed out to him that there is no Obama immigration-reform plan, per se, but that would have prevented me from savoring the deeply astute political viewpoints that the email expressed.

• There was a lot about English being under attack.
• There was something about immigrants breeding out of control.
• There were a few lines about Mexicans stealing our jobs.

Yes, I learned a lot from my quick glance at the missive. Most interestingly, the email detoured into how Anglo Saxon culture was the only basis for American values. The email gave white people credit for ending slavery in America (neglecting the obvious fact that white people were responsible for slavery in the first place). I must admit that this was an interpretation of history that I had never considered.

The forward ended, rather ominously, with the declaration that white people can, at any point, take back everything they have generously given the rest of America.

I wasn't sure what response my in-law wanted. Like I said, I barely know the guy.

Is it more proper to call him on his bullshit? Or would that just be a waste of time that does nothing but jack up everyone's blood pressure? Is it standing up for oneself and La Raza to go on the counteroffensive? Or is it more dignified to dismiss idiocy with the split-second contempt that it deserves? Like many things in life, dealing with racists offers valid arguments for contradictory courses of action.

In the end, I just deleted the man's rant and made a mental note to do the same whenever he sends us another email.

He's since forwarded numerous other manifestos, but I've deleted them automatically, declining the opportunity to learn how Obama is a socialist who wasn't even born in this country and wants to give all my money to gay, flag-burning immigrants.

That can wait until my next face-to-face discussion with my in-law, whenever that is. I'm sure he'll start the conversation with "I'm not racist, but..."

Yes, good times are coming.

More on Family

This time President Obama, in his obsessive reaching across the political aisle, may have gone a stretch too far. For the Republican he picked to co-chair the so-called deficit reduction commission, former Sen. Alan Simpson, has been a harsh critic of Social Security and Medicare. And he sought to destroy their most powerful defenders, especially AARP.

That was 15 years ago, but as recently as 2005, Simpson, a conservative from Wyoming who left the Senate in 1997, supported attempts by President George Bush to privatize Social Security by turning part of the pension and insurance program into millions of individual investment accounts, which by now would have lost 20 percent of their value. Bush's plan failed, largely because of the opposition of AARP and other advocates that Simpson sought to discredit..

Even now, Simpson, who should know better, conflates or deliberately confuses Social Security's long term fiscal problems, which are minor, with its supposed contribution to the federal deficit, which is almost nil.

In an interview with the NewsHour after his appointment, Simpson said of Social Security, "You have two choices...you either raise the payroll tax or decrease the benefits or start 'affluence testing. The rest of it is B.S. And if the people are really ingesting B.S. all day long, their grandchildren will be picking grit with the chickens. This country is gonna go to the bow-wows unless we deal with entitlements, Social Security and Medicare."

His colorful language aside, what does one problem have to do with another? The Social Security trustees and the Congressional Budget Office have said the nearly $3 trillion trust fund will last for at least another 30 years. Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan said the projected shortfall after that is easily fixed for decades with a small raise (two percent split between employer and employee) in payroll taxes. Obama also minimizes Social Security's fiscal problem and suggests simply raising or removing the current $106,000 ceiling on salaries subject to the tax. Will his pledge to maintain Social Security as a pension program clash with Simpson?

But here's my point: Social Security long term fiscal problem has nothing, absolutely nothing, to do with Social Security's role in the deficit. For, as I have emphasized in my column for years, Social Security costs the budget not one cent-aside from the one percent it spends on its thousands of employees and field offices. Indeed, Social Security helps finance the deficit by loaning the treasury money, for which it earns interest (about $700 million a year.) If what's owed to Social Security must be cut as part of deficit reduction, will that help Social Security?

Nevertheless, Simpson's statements help perpetuate the myth among right-wingers that Social Security contributes to the deficit. Here is former Texas Rep. Dick Armey, chief organizer of the Tea Baggers and a longtime enemy of Medicare and Social Security: "If you're not courageous enough to look at mandatory spending the two biggest components being Medicare and Social Security, then don't tell me you're serious about fighting the deficit."

Simpson's record in the Senate raises questions about his appointment: Did the president have any notion of his background of hostility towards the twin pillars of American social insurance? Has Simpson left his right-wing politics far enough behind? Can he be an honest broker when, say, advocates for Social Security and Medicare come before his panel? Here's why I ask.

In December 1994, when the Republicans were on the verge of taking over the House, the right-wing Capital Research Center, one of several relatively new think-tanks funded by prominent and wealthy conservatives, launched assaults on the Clinton administration and two major organizations that supported Clinton's failed efforts to pass health care reform and resisted Republican efforts to cut Medicare funds. The organizations were AARP and the labor-backed National Council of Senior Citizens (NCSC), which had played a major role in the 1965 passage of Medicare-over Republican objections. They were vulnerable because they held small federal contracts to train workers and also lobbied, which they were permitted to do.

According to consumer and medical affairs writer Trudy Lieberman, in her book, "Slanting the Story," the conservative campaign took off when it was joined by Simpson, a rich rancher who was chairman of the Senate Finance subcommittee on Social Security and Family Policy. A rather goofy dilettante, he was about to announce his retirement and had nothing to lose so he took on his antagonists, especially AARP, which had criticized him and lobbied against Republican efforts to slash Medicare funds and privatize Social Security.

According to Lieberman, "Simpson liked to tell stories about how he had to pay out of his pocket for his own parents' care and believed everyone should do the same." Simpson's father, Milward Simpson had been Wyoming's governor and a U.S. senator.

Using what Capital Research had found, Simpson wrote an op-ed column in the
conservative Washington Times in February 1995, attacking AARP's director, Horace Deets for criticizing the Republicans and charged AARP was illegally using members funds and the federal grants for lobbying. Simpson also resented AARP's opposition to the pending Balanced Budget Agreement. AARP had run afoul of the IRS for mixing its royalty revenues with its nonprofit business and was forced to pay a fine and separate its profit and nonprofit ventures.

But with the help of the press and the network of conservative groups, Simpson's assaults-and his hearings-put AARP and the NCSC on the defensive. The latter folded and reorganized as today's Alliance of Retired Americans. AARP's Deets retired and was replaced by a Republican, Public Relations Executive William Novelli, who had become friendly with House Speaker Newt Gingrich. Novelli, in 2003, stunned congressional Democrats when he threw AARP's support behind George Bush's private Part D drug program, which also provided huge subsidies for private Medicare Advantage plans.

Those plans, then called Medicare Plus Choice, became the first wedge in the privatization of Medicare in 1997. Under pressure from Republicans to slash Medicare funds, AARP was toothless, and Clinton agreed to allow private companies to sell insurance under Medicare. That was part of the 1997 Balanced Budget Agreement, which slashed more deeply than ever into Medicare and Medicaid funds and severely restricted the use of Medicaid for long term care.

The Balanced Budget Agreement, which did produce a one-year balanced budget, was shepherded through the Congress by Clinton's Chief of Staff, Erskine Bowles, now president of the University of North Carolina and the other co-chair of the Deficit Reduction Commission.

Write saulfriedman@comcast.net .Friedman also writes for www.timegoesby.net .

Warren Buffett's eagerly anticipated annual letter to shareholders was released this morning. Here are the highlights:

Book value increased 19.8% last year, gaining $21.8 billion in net worth, and is at $84,487 per share. In the last 45 years, Berkshire never had a five-year period during which its book value didn't outperform the S&P 500.

The company had net income of $8.06 billion, or $5,193 per share in 2009, which is about $155 million a week. It has $156.6 billion in cash and securities, or approximately $100,000/share.

The letter included a primer on Berkshire's approach to business, for the benefit of the 60,000 new shareholders due to the acquisition of Burlington Northern Santa Fe (BNSF). It contained details on Berkhire's four separate business segments:

1. Insurance, which had a float of $62 billion at the end of the year, and earned an underwriting profit of over $1.5 billion in 2009.

2. Regulated utility business, which earned Berkshire over $1 billion for the year. In the future, the newly acquired BNSF railroad business is going to be a part of this segment. Berkshire is committed to providing the country with reliable electricity and railroad systems, despite the capital intensive nature of this business and its heavy demand for continuing capital expenditures.

3. Manufacturing, Service and Retailing, with over $60 billion in revenue and net income of $1.1 billion for the year. The diverse businesses Berkshire owns in this segment distribute groceries, sell chocolate, furniture, jewelry, paint, shoes, cutting tools, ice cream and more. Most of these operations suffered from the recession, but Buffett singles out NetJets, which sells fractional ownership of jets, as particularly problematic. NetJets has been losing money and without Berkshire guaranteeing its debt, would be out of business. Buffett assigned Dave Sokol as its new CEO, with the task of turning NetJets around.

4. Financial Products: Berkshire owns Clayton Homes, a manufactured home builder, an industry that has been in shambles partly because mortgage rates kept low by the government do not apply to low cost manufactured homes. Berkshire also has furniture and trailer leasing operations that have been hit hard by the economic downturn. All in all, this business segment earned $781million pre-tax last year.

Another part of Berkshire are its investments: Berkshire has common stock investments worth $59 billion, with a cost basis of $34.6 billion. In the cases of Conoco Phillips, Kraft, Sanofi Aventis and US Bancorp, the market value of its holdings is below Berkshire's cost.

In addition Berkshire owns $26 billion of non traded stocks, in companies like GE, Goldman Sachs and others. These holdings pay Berkshire $2.1 billion in annual dividends and interest.

The much maligned derivatives contracts Berkshire holds has shown unrealized gains of $3.5 billion in 2009.

Regarding the BNSF acquisition, Buffett says outright that he and Charlie Munger believe the Berkshire shares they used to buy BNSF were worth more than their market value (second paragraph, page 17).

This is a rare statement. I can only remember one other time that Buffett, in his 45 years at the helm, has said Berkshire shares were undervalued, and that was in 2000, in what turned out to be a major bottom for the stock.

More on Warren Buffett

On February 25, Guatemala's Constitutional Court ordered the removal of Education Minister Bienvenido Argueta for failing to provide the court with complete information regarding the beneficiaries of President Álvaro Colóm's flagship social program, Mi Familia Progresa. This latest development in a months-old political drama augurs poorly for Guatemala's fragile education system and President Colóm's claims to be supporting transparency measures in this notoriously corrupt nation.

Mi Familia Progresa (MFP) is Guatemala's conditional cash transfer (CCT) program, which provides cash payments to poor mothers, conditional upon them sending their children to school and for health check-ups. CCT programs have become increasingly popular in Latin America, as they have shown demonstrably positive results on school enrollment and child health.

President Colóm has hailed MFP as the cornerstone of his anti-poverty platform in Guatemala, but critics have argued that Colóm has used the program to reward voters who supported him in the 2007 elections. Colóm's critics also worry that the president has been transferring funds from other ministries to the program to use it as a campaign tool for his wife, Sandra Torres de Colóm, the coordinator and face of the Council of Social Cohesion that oversees MFP.

In recent months, congresswoman Nineth Montenegro has been leading efforts to force the Colóm government to divulge the names of program beneficiaries along with their identification numbers. Montenegro, former human rights activist and leader of Encuentro por Guatemala (the party that nominated Rigoberta Menchú as its presidential candidate in the 2007 elections), wants the information to determine the validity of accusations that the Colóm government was using this program for partisan ends. She won a court order demanding that the Ministry of Education provide a full list of program beneficiaries' names and ID numbers. The Ministry of Education proceeded to provide only the names, denying that it needed to provide further information.

Montenegro then went back to the Constitutional Court, which responded by issuing the order for Argueta's dismissal.

At the time of writing, the Colóm government had not responded to the Court's actions. But, whatever comes next, certain consequences of the ruling are already clear.

First, Argueta's dismissal will thrust an already-weak Guatemalan education system into further disarray. Since classes began in late January, the country's principal teacher's union has gone on strike repeatedly--closing schools, occupying Ministry offices and blocking roads. The teachers first took action in late 2009 and early 2010 to support the government's call for increased taxes to augment the nation's education budget. More recently, though, the union took to the streets after breaking off negotiations with Minister Argueta over salary increases.

As if that were not enough, the Ministry has also failed at many schools to distribute food and school supplies for students on-time. These delays, at least in part, reflect the broader fiscal crisis facing Colóm's government given its inability to get Congress to pass tax reform.

Now, assuming the government accepts the Court's order, Guatemala will have its third education minister in six months. Bringing in a new education chief will undoubtedly lead to further delays in putting out the union-related and logistical fires already dogging the ministry. Unfortunately, putting out these fires will also postpone the long-term task of improving the quality of Guatemalan education. Education experts all agree that, though education coverage has improved dramatically since the 1996 Peace Accords, the quality of education remains woefully low and nowhere near a level necessary for Guatemala to transform itself from being one of the poorest countries in the Americas.

The Court's action will also have further repercussions for Colóm's government. Colóm has recently tried to fashion himself as a leader in the struggle for greater transparency in Guatemala, criticizing widespread impunity and corruption and arresting former President Alfonso Portillo on corruption charges. In fact, hours before the Court ordered Argueta's dismissal, Colóm ousted his Minister of Agriculture, Mario Aldana, for irregularities in bids to supply a government program with fertilizer.

But Thursday's ruling against Argueta will undermine Colóm's pro-transparency stance. If Colóm were serious about his position, he would have ordered Argueta to abide by the Court's ruling. It is hard to believe that Argueta would have resisted if Colóm had insisted that he comply. As it stands, the ruling against Argueta gives the impression that Colóm's government is either incompetent or hiding something. And "stupid" or "corrupt" are not typically the adjectives between which a government would like to choose.

But perhaps the most distressing consequence of the MFP controversy will be the potential discrediting of government programs designed to address Guatemala's rampant poverty and inequality. CCT programs have a strong international track record of improving educational and health outcomes in Latin America. But, in Guatemala, this model has been tainted by accusations of malfeasance that the government has done nothing to dispel. Now, opponents of Colóm (the first Guatemalan president elected on a left-of-center platform since 1954) will feel emboldened in their criticisms against government spending to alleviate poverty and address its underlying causes. Already, the Guatemalan Right has held up much-needed tax reform, basing its opposition on arguments that taxes should not increase until taxpayers can trust that their tax dollars will be used effectively and transparently. This argument is, in large part, a spurious recasting of the anti-tax position that the Guatemalan Right has maintained since 1996, but Thursday's court ruling will likely bolster the anti-tax lobby's position.

Finally, looking forward to Guatemala's next elections, the potential ramifications of the current crisis are even more worrying. It's no secret that the man to beat in the upcoming elections will be retired General Otto Pérez Molina, who barely lost to Colóm in 2007. The election of Pérez Molina, who played a critical role in the genocide of rural indigenous Guatemalans in the 1980s, would signal a major step backward for a country that has only begun its fight against impunity.

With all these issues in mind, it is clear that Argueta's dismissal could have a major impact on the remainder of President Colóm's term. It will now be up to Colóm to show leadership by respecting the Court's decision and appointing a new Minister who will provide the required information on MFP. If Colóm is serious about supporting greater transparency in Guatemala, his government must share its complete files and shed light on MFP. Continued secrecy will only prolong this scandal, and, in the process, further weaken the education system, undermine transparency initiatives, and strengthen Colóm's right-wing opposition.

(Copied with permission from www.americasquarterly.org.)

More on Transparency

Private equity firm Thomas H. Lee Partners will buy CKE for $928 million and assume $309 million in net debt. Shares rise on news of the deal, which is expected to close in the second quarter.

CKE Restaurants Inc., parent of fast food restaurant chains Carl's Jr. and Hardee's, said Friday that it would be bought by a private equity firm for $619 million.