Benghazi: The Movie. The Hearings. The Witch Hunt.

So the Republican leading the ongoing, interminable hearings in the Republican House of Representatives has released his movie poster for the hearings. Can an i Tunes release be far behind?

The big star most recently was a State Department official, Gregory Hicks, who was demoted afterwards. Knowing a little something about bureaucratic vindictiveness, it is not hard to believe Hilary Clinton might just stick it to anyone who was not Hilary Clinton who had the temerity to speak to the press.

And so, we have begun to discover, what?  Did Mr. Obama launch the attack on Benghazi to cover up the secret files housed there which proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that he was born on Mars? Did Hilary Clinton launch the attack because she was having an affair with Ambassador Stevens and he was about to pull a Monica Lewinsky?  Did Hilary and Mr. Obama arrange for the hit on Ambassador Stevens because he was actually their love child and they could not afford for that news to get out? 

Or, did Hilary Clinton send the ambassador to a poorly defended outpost and then try to cover up the report she had been negligent in protecting her own staff by demoting Mr. Hicks and by ordering her underlings to report this was a spontaneous, thus unpredictable act of violence?  And if this is so, should Ms. Clinton be scratched as a potential Presidential candidate because, obviously, she is not great at responding to the totemic 2 AM phone call?

Or, did Mr. Issa have a love child with Ms. Clinton, i.e. Mr. Hicks, and Mr. Issa is very indignant Ms. Clinton laid the heavy wood on Mr. Hicks and demoted him?

The plot lines are legion.  This soap opera could go on as long as "As The World Turns."
Stay tuned. Brought to you by the RNC, The Rush Limbaugh Show and the Watch-out-for-those-black-helicopters .com blog.

Mark Sanford: He Is Risen

There are no second acts in American lives.
                            --F. Scott Fitzgerald


One might argue Mark Sanford's election to his old House of Representatives seat is not a second act but just a continuation of the first.

One might argue this is simply the second act of "House of Cards."

Mad Dog would argue, Mr. Sanford's election is no surprise. The surprise would have been if he had been defeated.

What were his offenses? 
1. He cheated on his wife. No disqualification there: JFK, Clinton,Henry Hyde,  you name him.
2. He lied about cheating on his wife, about where he was when he was not on the Appalachian trial. Clinton lied about Monica Lewinsky.
3. He flew down to Argentina and to various assignations on  government money.
Now, that might matter, but the man is all about saving the government money, and about not being Nancy Pelosi or Barack Obama, so we can forgive him that youthful indiscretion.

The misperception of the Bible thumping voter is that he or she could never forgive a man who violates his sacred marriage vows, said before God, on the wedding alter. But the South Carolina voter is not the New England Puritan. The South Carolina voter knows he's a sinner. He's embraced a culture and a history of slavery. He's happy to sell tobacco to Asians.  He can forgive a lot. 

What he cannot forgive is being Barack Obama, being judged by sanctimonious Northerners and a federal government which wants to take his money, or tell him what he is doing is immoral, injurious or wrong.  

As that great South Carolina Representative to the Congress of the United States, Francis Underwood, once said, "What you have to understand about my people is that they are a noble people. Humility is their form of pride. It is their strength; it is their weakness. And if you can humble yourself before them they will do anything you ask. "

Niall Ferguson, John Maynard Keynes and the Homosexual Hypothesis

Niall Ferguson: Wishful Historian

"During a question-and-answer session after a prepared speech at the Altegris Strategic Investment conference in Carlsbad, Calif. on Thursday, Ferguson was asked to comment about Keynes, an influential 20th century British economist who advocated government spending as a way to make up for lagging demand in a down economy.
Ferguson suggested that Keynes philosophy was shaped by his homosexuality. Keynes, therefore, had no children so he wasn't as invested in future generations as others might be, Ferguson said."
--from the Internet

If history is just one long argument, then we might judge the history offered by any author as a wish list of the way he thought the world ought to have happened.

This is no where more apparent than in the pronouncements, writings and expostulations of Niall Ferguson, Oxford PhD, professor of history at Harvard and gadfly about the nation, who created a dust up recently attacking not just the economic theories of John Maynard Keynes, who had the temerity to suggest that when free market, capitalistic economies were tanking, the government might do some good by rescuing the capitalists from their own folly by pumping money into the economy. Ferguson, a disciple of Margaret Thatcher and other right wing ideologs, thought this heresy unconscionable and offered a psychobabble historical explanation for Keynes's theory--saying that anyone who wanted government to ride to the rescue in the short term, could not possibly care a whit for the long term consequences, which would ultimately be doom and gloom, and anyone who had no concern about the long term must not have children, because, of course, only people with children could possibly care about the long term. 

And since Keynes was homosexual, and had no children, he could not possibly care about the future.

Whew! Got that?

Of course, Keynes may well have been a homosexual, but he was also married, had a wife and his wife lost a child in a miscarriage, so we might further conclude, having lost his own individual genetic contribution to posterity, Keynes had no further use for the future.

Ferguson really does  not like Keynes: Feruguson suggests elsewhere the main reason Keynes was dismayed by World War One is it swept away all the young men Keynes liked to pick up for sexual adventures, and sent them off to the trenches, where they died in heaps, and so Keynes had a personal stake in the war.

One wonders how Ferguson and historians like him get that sort of insight. Do they prowl through diary entries?  "No young men on Picadilly Street today. All off at the war. Damn this war! No gay escapades this week! Damn this war!"
Or, perhaps, Ferguson interviewed old friends and acquaintances of Keynes:  "He was all in a snit about the war, don't you know? Took the cream of the crop. Meant he had to go home to his proper wife. Didn't like that one bit."

Or, perhaps Ferguson simply had a graduate assistant plow through biographies of Keynes.

The fact is, Ferguson has been adviser to John McCain's campaign, and the professor is a member of the Hoover Institute--ah, now there's a fine, upstanding trickle down hero, Herbert Hoover--and wherever you see a gathering of right wingers drawn together, you are apt to find Mr. Fergusson writing history for them.  

Stella Tremblay has been drinking from the same cup as Professor Ferguson, as every right wing whacko must.  The gospel according to...Ms. Tremblay, Mr. Ferguson, and every telling of the way things happened somehow bolsters the view of the current world held by the right wing.  Even today, former Senator Jim Demint (R-SC),  who now heads the Heritage Foundation, brings forth a "study" which shows exactly what the conservative Heritage Foundation suspected all along:  That immigrants cost the nation more than they contribute. Those derned immigrants, showing up at emergency rooms, getting hospitalized, getting welfare, a real drag on the federal treasury and on the economy. We told you so! And now we have a study to prove it! And it's all true. We know it's true because we did the study our own selves!

Actually, you have to give the right wing some credit for breadth of personality. They range all the way from Lindsey Graham who says really absurd things while sounding like an idiot, to Niall Ferguson, who says really absurd things and sounds oh so British and intelligent. 

So Ferguson says history shows us government spending leads to long term financial collapse. It's been 80 years since The Great Depression which was ended by government spending. 

Paul Krugman:  Substance Over Style

"Krugman argued that Ferguson's view is "resurrecting 75-year old fallacies" and full of "basic errors". He also stated that Ferguson is a "poseur" who "hasn't bothered to understand the basics, relying on snide comments and surface cleverness to convey the impression of wisdom. It's all style, no comprehension of substance."
--Wikipedia article on Ferguson



But in the end, it's the substance not the style, as Mr. Krugman reminds us. Lunacy riding about in an aristocratic hat and cloak is still lunacy.

The old ditty, the first casualty of war is the truth.
Same can be said of the right wing historian.

Stella Tremblay: New Hampshire's Very Own

 Thank God we have at least ONE state representative from the state of New Hampshire who is willing to stand up for justice in defense of truth, and to face the powerful NWO sellouts who will pillory and vilify her without mercy, until she is driven from office, Mark my words, her removal is already being planned. Soon, Zionist dollars will flow prodigiously in an attempt to to create a ruse to push her from office with a recall election, or failing that, they will insure her defeat with unlimited funding to back a suitably compliant opponent in the next election. Tremblay, first elected in 2010, was born in Italy .Maybe that's why she's willing to speak her mind and do the job she was elected to do. Thinking Americans, who realize the grave danger we now face, need to rally to the support of any state or federal politician who is willing to speak the truth and stop this treasonous sedition in its tracks....] By Jim Haddadin jhaddadin@fosters.com



Where is Gail Collins when the Granite State needs her?
Or The Onion? Or Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert?

Really, does any state, even South Carolina, have anyone to match the Republican Representative from  Auburn, New Hampshire?

Ms. Tremblay recently made a name for herself on national websites by claiming the Boston bombing was actually a federal government black ops plot, that one of the victims, shown in a wheel chair holding what was left of his left leg (the fragment of his tibia clearly visible), did not look to be in pain, which was, Mad Dog can only guess, meant to suggest his injury was bogus, despite the photographic evidence, and that those victims who wound up in various Boston hospitals were all part of some grand government plot, a grand fiction, like the moon landing and President Obama's Hawaiian birth.

The website, "Granite State Progress," lists Ms. Tremblay's votes in the legislature and there are no surprises here:  Votes to require the University of New Hampshire to investigate every student who might be an immigrant to be sure they are not illegal, votes to endorse the Arizona immigration law--with its racial profiling--votes to de-fund Planned Parenthood, votes to de-fund any hospital which is in any way connected to abortions, which would cost New Hampshire billions in federal matching funds.

She is the genuine Tea Party, frothing Free Stater, on-what-planet-do-these-people spend-the-majority-of-their-time article. 

And she's all ours. Actually, if Mr. Haddadin is correct, she was born in Italy, but she is as American as apple pie and Olive Garden.

Mad Dog has been moved to pick up that splendid volume by Richard Hoftstader, The Paranoid Style in American Politics, which demonstrates, if nothing else, that Ms. Tremblay is nothing new, only freshly amusing. 

She is also a prodigious historian, who has rendered opinions about Frederick Douglass and his opinion of the allusion to slavery in the U.S. Constitution, and opinions about Woodrow Wilson, who, she says, believed with Hitler in the destiny of the Aryan race to rule the world. Actually, if you read Howard Zinn, you might find something to this portrait of Wilson the racist.  It is curious how often the Tremblay sort of mind alludes to history.  It is as if by talking about a version of history which is different from what we all learned in high school she can make claim to an insight the rest of us lack, an insight which should inform our understanding of where we are now.  So, if we know that Frederick Douglass actually believed slavery, then we can believe what the government and the media are now telling us about the Boston bombings is untrue.

Ms. Tremblay informs us, in somber and pregnant tones, that we really need an independent inquiry into the so-called Boston bombing, because we cannot believe what we've been told thus far, and it really was, presumably, all staged on a back lot in Los Angeles, and nobody was actually blown up, and all those hospitals and doctors are just actors or part of a vast conspiracy.

Can you imagine what her living room must look like? Can you imagine what Auburn, New Hampshire must be like?  Mad Dog may have to drive out there and spook around.  It's probably crawling with federal agents on their cell phones to the black helicopters circling overhead. 

Can you imagine how much fun it would be to simply follow her around with a microphone?  Why hasn't anyone done this?  

Where is Michael Moore, when you need him?

Richard Hofstader, Columbia University

 

Economics 101

Paul Krugman, Who Knows of What He Speaks

Don't know much about economics, other than what I read in the New York Times, the New Yorker and what I see on "The News Hour."

Economics is not like biology--it is not an experimental science. Oh, we do economic experiments all the time, but we cannot hold enough variables constant to call it a science. It is not clear that, for all the numbers economists throw around, you really need to understand those numbers to understand the basic economic forces and concepts.

It must mean something  that Mad Dog can now watch a discussion of economic policy and Mad Dog can finish the sentence of each participant. It must mean we are hearing the same arguments over and over again.

Last night, on the "News Hour" they had some stooge from the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, DC, and a man from some Boston institute discussing our economy. The Boston guy says, "When you have a recession, an economic slow down, that's when you do not want the government to stop spending. The national economy is not like a family budget. Sometimes deficit spending is a good thing. It's an investment in the future. You get people working, repairing the infrastructure,  paying taxes, spending and then you can back off, pay down the deficit and restore balance. But if the European experience shows anything, it is that cutting government spending at the beginning or in the middle of a recession just makes things worse." 

To which the American Enterprise Institute guy replies: "Deficits are bad. When you allow the deficit to grow to over 45% of GNP you simply run out of money to spend. This Kenseyian argument, that we should spend our way out of a recession, is a recipe for disaster." 

This very same argument has been going back and forth since at least the years when Andrew Mellon was the Secretary of the Treasury arguing that a Depression purges the system of bad blood, bad, lazy people and is just what the doctor ordered for a country which needs discipline. He was Herbert Hoover's secretary. Hoover said all along there is nothing government can or should do in hard times. Hoover lost that argument to FDR and the Republicans lost the White House for the next 4 elections.

Republicans ever since have argued the only way Roosevelt got America out of the Depression was to get into a world war and unemployment went from 20% to close to 0% in a year.  And, of course the implication of that was--war is bad, so anything associated with it must be bad.

The fact is, what that wartime government spending  demonstrated is economically, the effect of government hiring vast numbers of people was capable of pulling us out of the Great Depression and that good economy persisted for decades after the war, with deficits going down when people were working and paying taxes.  May have been we put a lot of undeserving people who were wicked and mean to their children back to work, and we rewarded an undisciplined American population, but it sure was good for the economy, and government spending did not result in disaster but relief and prosperity.

So why, Mad Dog asks, are we still debating this issue?

Do we really still need to debate whether or not the heart pumps blood to the brain?

Do we need to discuss whether or not metal airplanes can fly or whether or not metal ships will sink?

Do we really need to listen to David Stockman, people from conservative "think" tanks proffer these antediluvian ideas on national TV, radio and newspapers?

When will we get tired of listening to idiots?

Hal Rogers: When Sunlight Is the Best Disinfectant

Hal Rogers, Chairman of the House Appropriations Committee

Sometimes Jon Stewart is simply indispensable.
Tonight was one of those classic examples. 
First, Stewart runs a montage of Fox News bimbos saying the Sequester turned out to be a big nothing--proving we can cut government spending drastically and nobody notices because government does nothing important. There's an air head blond saying, "It turns out to be a 'No-questor," and grinning, very pleased with herself.

Then Stewart shows the irate reaction of the chairman of the House Appropriations committee, a Republican named Hal Rogers, who is grilling the head of the FAA about the furlough of air traffic controllers which has inconvenienced Congressmen trying to fly home to their districts. "Why didn't you tell us this would happen?" the Congressman demands.  

So Stewart rolls a montage of Obama official after official warning of this very outcome, of news people warning about air traffic control trouble if the sequester is allowed to go forth.  Then he plays the Congressman intoning how outrageous this is, nobody told him!  Stewart observes he must be one of those people who complains nobody told him the gun would go off if he pulled that trigger.

Then Stewart shows Susan Collins speaking on the Senate floor, all giddy that Congress was able to pass a law which returned all the air traffic controllers to work. "See how we can work together. We can cross party lines to get things done!"

To which Stewart replies, "Oh, we should be so happy we have a Congress which having created a problem for the many, has been able to solve one small part of that problem for the few, namely themselves, when the problem affects them."

He then sends correspondents out to soup kitchens, cancer treatment centers which have had to close their door because of the sequester. 

So there we have it--Congress as the ultimate example of the old adage: The worse thing for a bad product is good advertising.

 

Peggy Orenstein: When a Disease Becomes a Cause

Peggy Orenstein has written the article Mad Dog would like to have written, but thought it was too politically incorrect.

For readers of Mad Dog Democrat, the idea anything is too politically incorrect for Mad Dog may come as a surprise, but this topic is so incendiary and requires such tact, Mad Dog knew it was simply beyond his talents.

The problem here is: Is anyone rooting for breast cancer? Does anyone not wish to see an end to breast cancer? So any time you question or undermine the efforts of a group which is trying to end breast cancer deaths, you have to tread lightly, something Mad Dog has not mastered.

Ms. Orenstein writes an article which embraces the complexities and the successes and the lack of successes in a very adroit way.

The problems with the Susan Komen organization and others like it is they are focused on raising awareness of breast cancer, on the psychological impact, on making breast cancer socially acceptable to talk about, to acknowledge you've had, but at some point we all really have to accept, okay, mission accomplished when it comes to marketing and name recognition and attitude change: What we really need now is some good, effective science and technology.

Breast cancer, as she points out is not even one disease. There are different types of breast cancer (estrogen receptor positive, estrogen receptor negative, Herc positive, triple negative--the list expands as molecular genetics identifies new types.) There is even a pre-breast cancer which may or may not ever develop into breast cancer, DCIS.

As Ms. Orenstein points out, delicately, women almost never die of breast cancer which is confined to the breast; what they die from is metastatic breast cancer, i.e. breast cancer which escapes the breasts and implants in liver, brain, bone, lung and elswhere, seedlings in the wind, taking root, becoming the ultimate invasive species. 

The big problem is this process may occur before there are enough breast cancer cells to see on mammography, so even if you remove the breast cancer you find by imaging, by mammogram, ultrasound, MRI, you may still be dealing with a mortal illness--you just won't know it for some years.

When Mad Dog was an intern at Memorial Sloan Kettering, he admitted dozens of patients every week who told the same story: "They told me they got it in time. It was so small. I was cured."  But here they were, 10 or 15 years later with breast cancer growing in vertebrae, femurs, ribs, lungs, liver, brain and all stops in between. Dying of a disease the doctors thought they had cured.

It was this realization, that microscopic, invisible tumor cells escape early and may be growing in distant sites which moved the researchers in Milan, Italy to try chemotherapy to flow in the blood and kill the invisible metastases at the time of the original breast surgery and that study was done in the early 1970's. American doctors came later to accept this concept and now protocols include chemotherapy to get those sleeper cells.  

But chemotherapy does not kill every cell in every patient and patients are still dying from widely metastatic disease despite all the protocols, years later.

And mammography may not have made much of a dent in this process. 
But when various scientific groups, recognizing the futility of screening mammography for various groups of patients--e.g. women less than 40--have recommended mammography start later and not be used annually all hell breaks lose because breast cancer organizations--who have a stake, financially, professionally and emotionally--oppose these recommendations, not because the science is flawed but because they have other motivations.

Consider this example, which Orenstein quotes:  Suppose you have 100 women who have a mammograms at age 67, are found to have breast cancer and treated but they all die 3 years later at age 70.  The 5 year survival in that group is 0%. Suppose now, you have 100 64 year old women who have a mammograms and gets treated but the treatment doesn't work and they all die 6 years later at age 70 The 5 year survival for these women  is 100%. Looks like a great victory for mammography: You've improved 5 year survival by 100%!  But what have you really done? You've made the women in the first group aware they have cancer three years earlier and they've had to live with that knowledge but they have not lived a day longer for it.

The fact is, funding for research is competitive: If the National Institutes of Health funds breast cancer at $100 billion dollars there is not going to be $100 billion for melanoma. And with diseases acquiring advocacy groups, AIDS, prostate CA, testicular CA, decisions may rise or fall based on who has the best paid lobbyists in Washington, rather than who has the best scientific arguments in Bethesda (where the NIH is.)

And what happens to testicular CA if it's major poster boy falls from grace for doping while he was winning the Tour de France?

Is this any way to run a railroad?

Ms. Orenstein has written a very important public policy, public health article. It is one every citizen ought to read, in the quiet of his or her own home, preferably after a Valium or a good glass of wine.