Wait…what? Yes, Portland is the last holdout of major cities in the United States when it comes to fluoridating the drinking water supply. It’s a battle that has raged for 57 years in this city. American public water supplies began to be fluoridated 68 years ago, and over time have been fine-tuned to levels high enough to improve dental health while minimizing side effects.

But that hasn’t mattered to Portlanders, who have repeatedly voted against fluoridation of their water. Until recently, the closest the city came to fluoridation was in 1978, when they voted to start it…and then changed their minds in a 1980 vote. Last summer, before a chamber flooded with fluoridation opponents, the city council unanimously voted in favor of adding fluoride to the city’s water supply beginning next March. Those opponents gathered more than twice the number of signatures necessary to bring the issue to a popular vote, which is why I am posting this very article today.

But fluoridation isn’t what this article is really about. Rather, it’s about a number of perceptions, some of which are clearly false. 

As I noted above, Portlanders have long opposed fluoridation. Generally, those opposed to it do so on the grounds that it fluoridation adds “chemicals” to the otherwise clean water supply. The ignorance here is substantial. Everything around us, not to mention our own bodies, is made up of “chemicals”. Some chemicals occur naturally in our environment, and others are entirely man-made. Those that occur naturally aren’t inherently safer than synthetic chemicals, either. After all, hemlock is perfectly natural, and perfectly fatal when ingested.

Some chemicals are fatal in small doses, and there is no known safe dosage for them. Others are essential in small doses, and fatal in large doses. There is literally nothing that is safe at all doses. People die from ingesting too much water…even if it has no fluoride in it.

From a pure reason perspective, then, the questions are whether there is a safe fluoride dose, whether the proposed amount is within those bounds, and whether the benefits outweigh the risks. But that’s not the view of fluoridation opponents.

If we were looking at a region of the country known for its ultraconservatism, the opposition arguments presented to voters would most likely involve a combination of libertarianism and government conspiracy theories. Indeed, the opposition campaign is partially funded by the Kansas Taxpayers Network (which recently merged with Koch-fueled Americans for Prosperity). But that’s not what Portland voters hear. Rather, the campaign focuses on pro-environmental messaging, which includes themes such as “pure water” and “scary chemical industry”. The line of reasoning is similar to that used by immunization opponents.

Portland is extraordinarily liberal. Its congressional district has a Partisan Voting Index of D+22. One of the first public bicycle programs in the country was initiated in Portland. San Francisco may get plenty of press for its liberalism, but Portland ranks right up there. Yet a poll of Portlanders a couple of weeks ago showed about a nine-point gap on the issue of fluoridation, with opponents in the lead.

In other words, it’s not as if conservatives have a monopoly on ideology over reason.

Logarchism’s authors have certainly spilled much digital ink over the degree to which conservatives have consistently chosen ideology over reason. Creationism, climate denial, the insistence that lower tax rates always pay for themselves…the list is pretty lengthy. But it does a disservice to all to ignore cases where extreme liberals do exactly the same.

And, in fact, I would be horrified if those Portlanders opposing fluoridation on the grounds that it’s putting “chemicals” into their “pure water” were driving the Democratic Party. I’m sure that some people believe that they are, but the Congressional Record indicates otherwise. Meanwhile, the very same Congressional Record suggests that far-right equivalent is driving the Republican Party.

We should oppose ideologically-driven politics, regardless of which side of the aisle it comes from. Today, I mourn what appears likely to be an instance of reason losing to left-driven ideology.

Related articles

• You: Fluoridated water? Not all Portlanders will drink to that
• Fluoride, Portland And Science
• Why I’m voting ‘no’ on fluoridating Portland’s water: Guest opinion
• Portland fluoride vote pits liberals vs. liberals
• Physicians voice opposition to fluoride in Portland
• Case for fluoridation is still strong
• False statements about fluoridation in the Portland election campaign

Utah Attorney General John Swallow has some ’splainin’ to do. Source: Jeffrey Allred, Deseret News

Back in February, I told you about the woes of newly-inaugurated Utah Attorney General John Swallow.

At the time, he was accused by convicted swindler Jeremy Johnson. In 2010, Johnson claims he paid Swallow, then the Assistant AG, money to be used to bribe Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. In return, Reid was supposed to get the Federal Trade Commission to lay off Johnson’s former Internet marketing company.

The most incriminating thing for Swallow in this whole farrago of nonsense is his voice on tape appearing to humor Johnson and even collect some money from him, which Swallow says was a campaign donation.

Now, another three months have passed and three more investigations of Swallow are underway.

Jeremy Johnson

The first investigation, now being handled by the Federal Department of Justice, is over the alleged bribery scheme.

A second investigation was launched by Utah Lieutenant Governor Greg Bell, who oversees elections at the state, county and local level. Bell appointed a special prosecutor to investigate three of 12 charges brought by Alliance for a Better Utah, a good-government organization.

In his personal campaign finance disclosure, Swallow failed to disclose an interest in the consultancy P-Solutions. P-Solutions received $23,500 from Richard Rawle, who is now deceased. Rawle, in turn, received payments from Jeremy Johnson for the Reid payoff, said by Johnson to total $250,000.

The alleged election law violations are: 1) not disclosing his interest in P-Solutions; 2) when he removed himself from management of P-Solutions in an amended campaign disclosure he did not disclose his wife’s investment in the company; and 3) he failed to disclose part of the money paid by Rawle.

Marc Sessions Jenson

The third allegation is also under investigation by the Feds and also involves a convicted felon. In this case, the swindler is Marc Sessions Jenson, who tried to create a ski resort near the town of Beaver. According to Jenson, he hosted then-Attorney General Mark Shurtleff and Swallow at separate times at the exclusive Pelican Hill resort. Jenson claims Shurtleff and his wife stayed at the resort with Jenson picking up the tab, and that the Swallows (apparently confused about whether they were supposed to return to Newport Beach or San Juan Capistrano, 24 miles away) also enjoyed Jenson’s hospitality at Pelican Hill.

(At this point, I would attempt to tell a joke about a Beaver, a Pelican and a Swallow who walk into a bar, but I can’t remember the punchline.)

Two county attorneys are also undertaking a fourth investigation of Swallow, also based on the Jenson allegations. Swallow is accused of violating the Public Officers & Employees Ethics Act. The Act prohibits accepting gifts, compensation or employment that might create a conflict of interest.

A fifth investigation, this one by the Utah State Legislature in Swallow’s impeachment hearing, may be in the works. Republican state lawmakers were briefed last week on the impeachment process, according to the Deseret News.

Swallow went to talk radio host Doug Wright to explain himself last week, and began to proclaim his innocence, then the attorney in him began to retract his own comments.

I don’t think it’s in my best interest to start blaming others right now. I wish I could comment further on it and I could. I have the agency to answer those questions, but I think they’re questions better left for another day, and I feel badly that I raised that.

[“Agency” is the word most commonly used by LDS faithful to refer to “free will”.]

Any more trouble would be hard for the Attorney General to Swallow.

Related articles

• Swallow, Shurtleff facing allegations of taking favors from man convicted of fraud
• Utah Attorney Generals accused of soliciting bribes and extortion
• Utah democrats want public hearing on Swallow scandal
• John Swallow denies allegations against him

Is Congress addressing these issues? Not really. The House has spent over 80 hours trying to repeal Obamacare, and has held at least 37 votes to repeal. It’s uncertain why the House leadership — or even any of its junior members — believed the 37th vote would have a better chance of being taken up by the Senate, or being signed by the President, than the first dozen or so did.

But surely that waste of time is an exception. With all the vital issues in the hopper, surely Congress has spent the majority of its time dealing with them, no?

One-third of all House committees are investigating the Obama Administration, as if someone thinks there must be some Bad Thing hidden somewhere. The most popular topics seem to be Benghazi, the IRS, and subpoenas for AP phone records, none of which have turned up anything that has do with the White House. I speculated last week that the inquiry into the Benghazi tragedy was mostly about attacking Hillary Clinton in an effort to affect her chances for a possible 2016 presidential run. What is the purpose of the other distractions from consideration of actual issues?

Part of the problem may be that predictions of economic disaster from President Obama’s policies are not panning out, robbing Republicans of one of their most beloved recent issues. The CBO estimates, for example:

If the current laws that govern federal taxes and spending do not change, the budget deficit will shrink this year to $642 billion, … the smallest shortfall since 2008. Relative to the size of the economy, the deficit this year—at 4.0 percent of gross domestic product (GDP)—will be less than half as large as the shortfall in 2009, which was 10.1 percent of GDP.

A combination of a strengthening and increasingly robust economic recovery, coupled with lower unemployment and higher-than-expected tax revenues, has resulted in a federal deficit that is falling faster than it has at any time since the end of the Second World War. Republican arguments that we must slash federal spending to reduce the deficit would seem to ring increasingly hollow. As the sequester cuts kick in, the effects of reduced federal spending become increasingly unpopular, making this an issue Republicans may not want to run on in the coming election cycles.

Indeed, of the issues listed at the top of this article, Republicans would seem to be on the wrong side of public opinion in many, perhaps most. For example, an estimated 90 percent of the public wants expanded background checks for firearms purchases. Although Obamacare seems to still be relatively unpopular (and, according to a report by the Kaiser Family Foundation, over 40 percent think the law has been repealed), by the beginning of the 2014 campaign season, there may be thirty million more Americans with health insurance. The Dow Jones Industrial Average is at record-high levels. Unemployment continues to fall. About what can Republicans now complain?

There are reasonable issues on which Republicans might be able to make progress. There is a civil war in Syria, and the Middle East always furnishes events that are sufficiently complex that any position can be opposed, or supported, for political purposes here at home. Perhaps there is fertile ground there.

Even with the Republican obsession over Obamacare repeal votes, implementation of the law continues, fueled in part thanks to the refusal of Republican governors to assist in setting up insurance exchanges for their states. This means those exchanges are being set up by the federal government. Perhaps Republicans could make a stink about that, insisting this to be a “federal takeover of health care” — though they’d then have to admit first that their efforts to repeal the law have failed, and second that Republican governors are the cause of this “federal takeover”.

There continues to be a hunger strike at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp. Perhaps Republicans could use this as an issue with which to embarrass the Obama Administration, though this might remind the public that the camp exists because of the actions of the previous Republican president. This might remind Americans of what the last Republican Administration was like. Okay, that’s not such a good idea, either.

So come to think of it, it may be that Republicans want to distract us from actual, you know, issues. Perhaps they’d rather the public obsess over the process of writing talking points for Sunday morning talk shows instead of recalling that nearly two dozen children were brutally murdered in Newtown, Connecticut and yet Republicans refused to allow a gun safety bill to come to a vote in the Senate.

We don’t have to speculate about this. We have it on good authority that this is precisely what Republicans intend. Last week, Michael A. Needham, the Chief Executive Officer of the Heritage Foundation’s lobbying wing, sent a letter to House Speaker John Boehner and Majority Leader Eric Cantor, urging them to concentrate on creating scandals they can attempt to link to President Obama, rather than consider legislation, since the latter “could expose or highlight major schisms within the [Republican] conference”:

I urge you to read the complete letter, which can be found here. It’s short. I’ll wait.

Conservative groups have realized not only that their positions are unpopular with the public, but that they are even unacceptable to many of their own elected members of Congress. Any attempt to actually govern will not only present the Republican party in a bad light, but will cause dissension within their own ranks. Rather than govern, they’ve decided to invent faux scandals to keep the public’s attention away from the things that must be done for the actual good of the country.

After the 2008 election of Barack Obama, Republicans decided to simply oppose anything the new President tried to do, under the theory that he would look weak and ineffective, that he would be unable to make a positive difference in the lives of Americans, and that they could thus prevent him from having a second term. This strategy failed, in part because the President was able to actually govern despite their obstructionism, in part because the lot of Americans has markedly improved, and in part because the public still paid attention to the issues that got President Obama elected in the first place.

Republicans have now shifted from mere opposition to a program of creating distractions. Though America’s condition continues to improve under Democratic policies, perhaps the public won’t notice if all the talk is about fantasy drama.  Though Republican policy positions are increasingly unpopular, maybe the public will forget what they are, if no one reminds them. Though President Obama has shown an uncanny ability to get much of his agenda implemented despite united opposition, perhaps he will be less effective if Congress doesn’t even consider passing any laws.

Republican electoral strategy has become an attempt to prevent governance, and even to distract America from the need to govern. They are attempting to convert CSPAN into a reality show, with no more relevance to the lives of actual Americans, or to the existence of actual reality. On this, they have built their hopes for 2014 and for taking back the White House in 2016.

It is our job, as American citizens, to tell our elected representatives that we want them to do their jobs — the jobs we elected them to do.

Related articles

• Yes, the 37th Obamacare repeal vote matters
• G.O.P. Split Over Whether to Waste Time Investigating Benghazi or Repealing Obamacare : The New Yorker
• CBO: ObamaCare repeal would increase deficit

I

But President Obama did something particularly good last week, and I haven’t yet called attention to it. He signed an executive order mandating that

going forward, newly generated government data shall be made freely available in open, machine-readable formats, while appropriately safeguarding privacy, confidentiality, and security.

This is a big deal, particularly to me. There’s an obvious reason for this, but also a handful of less obvious ones that are worth exploring, too.

Let’s get the obvious one out of the way. As I said in “Supreme Court Watch: FOIA Edition”, a democratically elected government needs freely-available information about our government so that voters are able to make informed decisions. To the extent that this executive order improves availability, it improves our ability as citizens to make informed decisions. For that alone, I applaud the effort.

But the ramifications go much further. As you surely know by now, if you’ve been reading my articles for a while, I’m a stickler for policy that’s based on analysis of data. The more far-reaching the proposed policy change, the more I want data to back it up. This edict will allow me to have access to huge treasure troves of information. Some things I’m really looking forward to knowing:

• What’s the impact of effective income tax rates on different segments of society? Is the impact different for states with income tax but no sales tax (e.g., Oregon) than for states with sales tax but no income tax (e.g., Washington) or states with both (e.g., California)?
• How do effective corporate taxes differ for different industries? Are the petroleum companies really getting a bigger break than other sectors?
• What, if any, relationship is there between federal dollars flowing into a state and its unemployment rate, state tax revenues, and federal tax revenues in subsequent years?
• What’s the difference in impact from a tax cut of a certain number of dollars and increased government spending of the same number of dollars? And, while we’re at it, how about the effects on both sides broken down by income quintile…or wealth quintile, for that matter?

I’m just scratching the surface. Sure, some of the information is available to answer parts of those questions, but they’re limited in scope, which means I don’t have enough data points to be able to whittle the errors down to statistically significant ranges in many cases.

And yet there’s more that this free information does for us. The executive order says, in part:

This requirement will help the Federal government achieve the goal of making troves of previously inaccessible or unmanageable data easily available to entrepreneurs, innovators, researchers, and others who can use those data to generate new products and services, build businesses, and create jobs.

Now, I’ll be the first to admit that we hear a lot of tenuous connections between politicians’ actions and “job creation”. This, however, is a legitimate case. We really don’t have a clue what the long-term implications are, but let me cite a prior example of government-supplied services that exploded into something far more than we would have imagined at the time.

Presidents Reagan and Clinton issued executive orders making GPS information available to the public. Initially, this led to the introduction of some moderately expensive devices that told you latitude, longitude, altitude, and velocity and direction of motion. Those were used mostly as novelty items, but had some use in the surveying industry and for hikers and the like. Over time, we began to see devices with maps loaded on them, and then navigation data. Today, we have smartphones with GPS receivers in them, which route us around based on current traffic conditions obtained by the crowdsourced location and velocity information. Google will even tell you which buses or trains to take to get you to your destination (in a handful of cities, anyway). GPS is used for a ton of location-aware services, like telling you what the cheapest gas is nearby, or where you can go to buy a product you just looked up online. It allows us to know when people we know are nearby, so we can have ad-hoc meetups, even if we’re far from home (say, on a business trip). And this is but a tiny fraction of the businesses that wouldn’t have existed without precision location awareness.

About a year ago, San Francisco embarked on a program similar to that specified by the executive order. Some of the first products to come out of this include:

• Smartphone apps to tell you how many metered parking spaces are available on each block, and how much they cost.
• Web and smartphone apps to tell you where each bus and rail vehicle are in the city. The more sophisticated apps use GPS (!) to figure out the nearest stops, and automatically tell you which lines serve them and about how long you will have to wait for the next arrivals.
• Maps that allow you to look up crime information over time.

And that’s after just a year. Who knows what we’ll see in the City by the Bay in another decade? Seattle did the same thing (using the same data engine) even earlier…no surprise, since the company producing the engine behind these initiatives is Seattle-based (another set of jobs created by open government initiatives). And, yes, Seattle has the transit app, and the crime map. Austin, Chicago, New York…they’re all doing it, too. And states…37 of them. Look at how many of our governments are putting their data online! And what happens when we start to put this up on a federal level?

It’s a future I can’t wait to see.

Related articles

• Obama Signs Open Data Executive Order
• More Data Please! President Obama Signs Open Data Executive Order and Releases Open Data Policy
• Thoughts on the White House Executive Order on Open Data
• Obama orders agencies to ‘open data’ to entrepreneurs, public
• White House Signs Executive Order in Favor of Open, Machine Readable Government Data

If you think this is the Biggest Scandal in American History, then this map is for you.

The Executive Cabins in the Ship of State sprung multiple leaks, and O Captain, My Captain got around to plugging them Wednesday, but not before Widespread Panic broke out.

Representative Darrell Issa (R-Vista, CA) and Attorney General Eric Holder (D-on’t Get All Up in My Grill) exchanged words. Whether or not you think Holder is right that Issa’s snarky questioning of the Attorney General is “too consistent with the way [he] conduct[s him]self as a member of Congress[, and that it] is unacceptable and it is shameful” probably depends on which side of the aisle you call home.

Representative Michele Bachmann (R-Stillwater, MN) kicked off her 2014 campaign, but the 2016 campaign is already underway. Confused? So is she.

Are Republicans going to Widespread Panic also? Can they get Bachmann and Issa to shut up?

Not when 41 percent of Republicans think that Benghazi is the Biggest Scandal in American History. Of course, if you feel that way, you should be able to find it on a map, don’t you think?

Don’t see an article on a particular topic, but want to talk about it somewhere? This is Open Mic. Talk about whatever you want, but stay respectful.

We create a new Open Mic every week to give a clean slate, but feel free to add to this topic at any time.

I have posted an Excel spreadsheet which is an extension of one included in a zip file posted by Herndon, Ash and Pollin (hereafter called HAP). I will use data from that spreadsheet to look at the HAP criticisms of the RR paper.

A good starting point is the now infamous Excel spreadsheet shown to the right.

After noting the coding error by which five rows were excluded, the first question that occurred to me was “where’s the beef?”. The number of countries on which the 90 percent threshold is based is a mere seven (Belgium having been left out by RR). The HAP critique points out that RR is using only 71 data points (110 after Belgium and 14 other excluded data points are added). Since there were relatively few data points, my first inclination was to try to look at that data so see how it was distributed. The following table shows the 71 data points used by RR, the 25 data points for Belgium, and the other 14 excluded data points (marked by ^):

Real GDP Growth for Debt of ≥90 Percent of GDP for 1946–2009

* Columns excluded by RR because of Excel error
^ Data excluded by RR

Note that the 1951 data point for New Zealand is the only data point used by RR for that country. The data points from 1946 to 1949 for New Zealand are excluded. Tab A of the aforementioned spreadsheet shows the following numbers for New Zealand from 1946 to 1955:

Debt/GDP and Real GDP Growth for New Zealand: 1946–1955

^ data excluded by RR

As can be seen, New Zealand had real GDP growth of 14.7 percent the year before and 4.3 percent the year after the –7.6 percent growth in 1951. Hence, had RR used a debt threshold of 85 percent of GDP, the average rate of growth would have been 3.8 percent. On the other hand, if RR had used a debt threshold of 95 percent of GDP, New Zealand would have had no data points. Both of these calculations assume that RR continues to exclude 1946 through 1949. If these are included, the averages become 4.6 and 5.1 percent, respectively. Only by using a threshold of 90 percent of GDP and excluding 1946 through 1949 did RR come up with –7.6 percent. A cursory inspection of the data, as I have done here, would have shown the –7.6 figure to be an unrepresentative outlier, requiring some sort of corrective action.That cursory inspection also turns up the real GDP growth of –10.9 percent for the U.S. in 1946. This was the year after World War II ended so it’s no surprise that real GDP dropped that year. If that year had been excluded, the average real GDP growth for years that the U.S. was above the 90 percent threshold would have been +1.0 percent instead of –2.0 percent.

One might argue that Belgium’s real GDP growth of 15.2 percent in 1947 was also an outlier. Excluding that year, however, merely drops the average real GDP growth for years that Belgium was above the 90 percent threshold from 2.6 percent to 2.0 percent. This is because the effect of an outlier is much greater in a small country sample when the weighting is done per country as was done by RR.

The following table shows the effect on the average real GDP growth for all years above the 90 percent threshold of various corrections and changes in calculation method:

Average Real GDP Growth for Debt ≥90 Percent of GDP for Various Scenarios

* Column excluded by RR due to Excel error

^ Data excluded by RR

The first line shows the slightly negative figure calculated by RR (Reinhart and Rogoff). The next 4 results are in response to various corrections suggested by HAP. The second line shows an improvement of 0.3% when the infamous Excel error is fixed. The biggest improvement of 1.3% occurs in the third line when the missing years of 1946 to 1949 are included for New Zealand. Another improvement of 0.3% occurs when the missing years of 1946 to 1950 are included for Australia and Canada. Finally, another improvement of 0.3% occurs if the data is weighted by country-year instead of by country as suggested by HAP. This gives a real GDP growth of 2.2 percent given by HAP in the Abstract on page 1 of their critique.The final 5 lines show that, even if one insists on weighing the data by country instead of country-year, any reasonable attempt to minimize the effect of outliers will bring the result much closer to HAP’s value of 2.2% than RR’s value of –0.02%. The first of these shows that simply excluding the outlier of New Zealand will cause an improvement of 1.2 percent. The second shows that another improvement of 0.5% occurs if one excludes the outlier of the U.S. in 1946.

A more consistent way of dealing with the small samples of debt right after World War II would be to exclude all countries with no case after 1951. This would raise the real GDP growth to 2.0 percent, nearly as high as the HAP value of 2.2 percent. The same result would occur if the starting year of the data was moved from 1946 up to 1952. The final line shows that, if the study were to simply focus on the “modern era” after 1980, the result would be a nearly-as-high 1.8 percent. As can be seen, any of the fixes beyond merely fixing the Excel error would bring the calculation much closer to HAP’s value of 2.2 percent than RR’s value of –0.02 percent.

What is the lesson to be learned from all of this?

As mentioned here and here, the Reinhart and Rogoff paper was not peer-reviewed. However, the latter article makes the following interesting comment:

So the answer is to only accept peer-reviewed work as economic knowledge, right? Nope. That would be a) too limiting, and b) wouldn’t advance the epistemological cause as much as you think. Peers have their own sets of biases, particularly as gate keepers.

I do think that peer-review does have a role to play, but I can see that it’s not the only answer. Nonetheless, it does seem that we could at least clearly label what is peer-reviewed and what is not. I don’t recall the absence of peer-review having been mentioned once during the public debate of the past three years. Only once the Excel error was found did we hear, “Oh yeah, that paper was never peer-reviewed”.

There is an additional step that I think would help a great deal. For any paper to be taken seriously, the authors should have to give their sources and show their work. In their online appendix, RR stated:

We took great pains to provide the data in as accessible form as possible, including especially meticulous source documentation in the spreadsheets, far more than one sees normally posted with journal papers. So we are simply stunned when bloggers and irresponsible commentators say we have not shared our debt data. Open access to our data has been central to our whole project.

I believe that RR is referring to the links to data that they have posted here. However, it seemed that HAP had to go through a great deal of effort to recreate RR’s numbers. It was only by requesting the original Excel spreadsheet that they were able to start recreating the numbers. Speaking of the spreadsheet, I was unable to find a copy of the spreadsheet anywhere on the web even now. I manually keyed in the numbers that appeared in the one graphic that I saw on the web and added it as tab C in my spreadsheet. I then tried to reproduce the numbers in the spreadsheet using RR’s sources but was unable to find all of the data. Fortunately, HAP posted the zip file with their spreadsheet and I was able to replicate the numbers with that.

Why don’t economists just post their original spreadsheets? There may be many reasons. Some may be willing to put up with peer-review when required but not want every pointy-headed number-cruncher with too much time on their hands to be going through their work. I suspect that those number-crunchers would catch a number of errors or questionable methodology that peer-review would not catch. In addition, some economists might feel that publishing their spreadsheets would reveal trade secrets and/or help other economists to compete in their area of study. Hence, I think that it’s largely up to those who consume the studies to demand that the work be released. Of course, economists would still be free to release studies without peer-review and showing precisely how they arrived at their conclusions. But if those studies were simply ignored or treated as interesting ideas until they can be verified, I suspect that many of those economists would be willing to “show their work”.

Related articles

• Researchers Finally Replicated Reinhart-Rogoff, and There Are Serious Problems
• GOP’s go-to economics study debunked
• Statistic cited to defend austerity partially based on Excel error
• Europe should thank Silvio Berlusconi
• Meet the 28-year-old Student Who Exposed Two Harvard Professors Whose Shoddy Research Drove Global Austerity

Just in case you missed them.

Tuesday, Angelina Jolie, who possesses perhaps the most famous mammary glands on the planet, announced in a New York Times Op-Ed that her breasts have been prophylactically removed because a gene test for BRCA1 came back positive. It’s a well-written, passionate and thoroughly researched article which I strongly recommend you read.

We don’t generally do celebrity news here at Logarchism, but we do discuss the politics and economics of health care. Jolie’s story illustrates some of the challenges facing health care as we move into the Age of Obamacare.

Jolie’s announcement comes as the Supreme Court has heard arguments, and is currently deliberating and preparing a written opinion, in the Association for Molecular Pathology v. Myriad Genetics, Inc. case. I summarized the relevant facts in an earlier article.

Jolie is no stranger to controversy, and she (or her publicist) delves into the deep end of medical ethics and public policy with this bold statement:

Breast cancer alone kills some 458,000 people each year, according to the World Health Organization, mainly in low– and middle-income countries. It has got to be a priority to ensure that more women can access gene testing and lifesaving preventive treatment, whatever their means and background, wherever they live. The cost of testing for BRCA1 and BRCA2, at more than $3,000 in the United States, remains an obstacle for many women.

If the Supreme Court decides in favor of Myriad, we can expect this situation to continue. With her gene status, Jolie says her chances of developing breast cancer were 87 percent before the double mastectomy but have now declined to five percent post-surgery. This not only represents a huge cost savings to Jolie’s insuror, but also to the nation as a whole.

In the United States alone, with one in eight women receiving a breast cancer diagnosis and subsequent treatment, we spend an estimated $14 billion on breast cancer treatment, or a cost in the tens of thousands for each patient with a diagnosis. Anything we can do to screen for at-risk women and take action before a diagnosis of cancer is made will reduce that cost significantly, and more importantly, save lives and promote a healther populace.

I’ve explained before that evidence-based medicine shows that with current technology, routine mammograms for women 40 to 50 years old are not cost-effective, nor do they significantly reduce the risk of breast cancer in this population. (Jolie claims to be 37.) When one does the math, in fact, many, many more mastectomies are performed because of false-positive tests in this population than lives are saved by early diagnosis.

The exception is women who carry the BRCA1 gene, as Jolie does. She is also at high risk for ovarian cancer, and according to her article, will be considering a prophylactic oophorectomy (removal of the ovaries) at some future date. That decision is more complicated, though, because removing her precancerous breast tissue has reduced her ovarian cancer risk, and there are significant complications associated with early oophorectomy and the associated loss of female hormones made by the ovaries. Hormone replacement therapy, particularly in a woman at risk of breast cancer, is a tricky proposition. The multiple intersecting risk factors for Jolie make deciding on next steps a much more fraught choice, and not nearly as clear-cut as the decision for a prophylactic mastectomy.

Just based on the numbers, then, a $3,000 test to identify women at risk is a good bet for identifying at-risk women and thereby lowering our health care costs. Anything we can do to chip away at that $14 billion number would be welcome.

There are 40 million women in the US aged 30 to 49. If we tested every single one of them for the BRCA1 gene, the one-time retail cost would be $120 billion, with a continuing cost of $6 billion per year or so for the women turning 30. Jolie has a strong family history, with a mother who died at 56. Assuming about ten percent of the population has such a history (recall that one in eight women receive a diagnosis during their lifetimes, so this seems a safe, if conservative, assumption), then we’ve only balanced $12 billion in widespread testing vs. $14 billion spent on the disease, and we wouldn’t come close to reducing all diagnoses.

Another way would be to nationalize or semi-nationalize the test and regulate its cost. Myriad, like any business, wants to recoup the expense of finding the gene and developing the test, and would also like to make a tidy profit. Some of the profits can be used to fund the creation of new tests. Absent those profit motives — both invidious and noble — there is no technical reason the BRCA1 test cost couldn’t be reduced to the $200 or so it costs to determine paternity.

I’ve written about the similar decision we need to make as a nation regarding Synagis^®, a $9,000 annual treatment that actually reduces the risk of respiratory synctial virus (RSV) infection in toddlers who were formerly premature babies. Even at that cost for 500,000 babies per year in the US, it’s still cheaper than hospitalization which will almost certainly occur every winter until the child turns 7.

Should we allow companies like AstraZeneca (manufacturers of Synagis®) or Myriad Genetics to soak the taxpayer for treatments that are needed to reduce health care costs through effective screening programs? Where is the balance needed between corporate profits (which may or may not drive innovation) and public health? Obamacare has multiple stumbling blocks, but this is one of the largest.

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As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1.

Over time, numerous corollaries have arisen. The gist of all of them is that the hyperbolic nature of these sorts of discussions inevitably leads to the “ultimate” hyperbolic comparison, which in sociopolitical circles means Nazism.

There are two negative outcomes that arise from this form of hyperbole. The first, obvious one is that it increases the perceived severity of the item being compared to Nazism. That’s the one almost universally intended by the person bringing swastikas into the discussion. The other, more subtle, is that it decreases the perceived severity of Nazism. Each hyperbolic comparison chips away at the enormity of Hitler’s actions in the 1930s and 1940s.

Shortly before the 2010 elections, Jon Stewart said at the Rally to Restore Sanity,

If we amplify everything, we hear nothing. Not being able to distinguish between real racists and Tea Partiers or real bigots and Juan Williams and Rick Sanchez is an insult, not only to those people but to the racists themselves who have put in the exhausting effort it takes to hate.

This is the problem we’ve had, and continue to have, with these Nazi references.

But that’s not the issue I have today. Well, it is, but not exactly. Instead, it’s Godwin’s Cousin’s Law. Or a cousin to Godwin’s Law, anyway: all political scandals, no matter how small, will inevitably be compared to Watergate. 

Like the Godwin arguments, the person attaching the “gate” suffix intends to increase the perceived severity of the activity in question. And, like the Godwin arguments, each one chips away at the enormity of President Nixon’s actions in the 1970s.

Lest I give the wrong impression, I don’t intend here to compare Watergate to Nazism. What happened in Germany in the 1930s and 1940s might be considered Watergate to the Watergate power. The comparison here is strictly that both are used as the extreme form of whatever the speaker finds distasteful.

It’s been a while since Watergate, so perhaps it’s worth examining what the scandal was all about in the first place. Like Nazism, the reason Watergate is so important is not for any single act, but rather for the collection of acts, all of which collectively served to undermine society. In the case of Watergate, they served to undermine democracy in particular.

It began with Nixon’s intent to rid the field of credible challengers, in order to gain a landslide reelection and claim a mandate. In order to accomplish this, he (or, rather, his reelection campaign staff) wanted to collect negative intelligence on potential Democratic candidates. They opted to do this by using the government’s capabilities to spy on various facets of the Democratic Party. Remember what I mentioned on Saturday? Here’s a great example of how universal wiretapping can be used to undermine our democracy.

Yes, it does undermine our democracy. The incumbent party has the power to find dirt on the competition that the challenger could not find on the incumbent party. This hurts voters’ ability to make intelligent decisions at the polling places, and significantly impacts the outcomes of the elections.

Using government to uncover the dirt was bad enough. But in those days Nixon was limited by the technology of the time. Wiretaps were harder to accomplish, and most information was stored on paper. Almost nothing existed in a digital form. So a handful of operatives were sent into the office of the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters in the Watergate Office Complex in Washington, DC, to take photos of documents on site and install bugs. Three times they went in there. It was during the third break-in that they got caught.

And the people who got caught happened to have E. Howard Hunt’s name in their (paper) address books. Hunt was a CIA operative who in 1970 went to work in the White House to stop classified (and politically damaging) information from being leaked to the press. The danger, then, was that the arrestees would be connected to the Nixon White House, and thus Nixon himself.

Which brings us to the second instance in the Watergate scandal where democracy was undermined. In order to prevent the FBI investigation from connecting the break-in to Nixon, the President ordered the CIA to block the FBI’s investigation into the break-in. Another case of using the government’s power to undermine our democracy. This wasn’t merely a bunch of people choosing not to incriminate themselves (something protected by the Constitution). It was actively using the government to keep things from ever reaching the point where anyone had to remain silent.

Things got worse for the President. Word got out that one of the arrestees was a Republican Party security aide. Further investigation uncovered money from Nixon’s reelection campaign in the bank accounts of the five arrestees, much of it ostensibly to cover campaign expenses. Since the investigation was unable to find any instance where money that went to the reelection campaign was not actually used for reelection expenses, and all transactions appeared to be on the up-and-up, this strongly suggested that the burglars were employed by the reelection campaign, though not necessarily conducting the break-in on Nixon’s orders.

It wasn’t until the Senate formed a committee to investigate the Watergate break-ins that we run into the third activity that undermined our democracy. Attorney General Richard Kleindienst was replaced by Elliott Richardson, who appointed Archibald Cox as special counsel for the Watergate investigation. During the Senate hearings, White House assistant Alexander Butterfield disclosed that Nixon had a recording system in the Oval Office that stored every in-person and telephone conversation held there. Cox subpoenaed the tapes for the investigation. Nixon refused to produce them, claiming “executive privilege”. Executive privilege, insofar as national security and ability to have frank conversations in private regarding daily matters, is perfectly legitimate. It was formally endorsed by the Supreme Court as well during the Watergate hearings. But using it to hide evidence of illegal activity is not legitimate. It undermines our democracy by preventing illegal activity from being uncovered and justice being served.

And then we come to the fourth major issue that undermined our democracy. Nixon ordered Cox to drop the subpoena. When Cox refused, Nixon ordered Attorney General Richardson to fire the special prosecutor. When Richardson refused, Nixon fired him. And his deputy. And searched for someone in the Justice Department willing to fire Cox. He found a friend in Robert Bork, who fired Cox and appointed Leon Jaworski to replace him.

How did this undermine our democracy? Because there was a clear conflict of interest here. Just as Nixon intended to find a Democratic candidate he could defeat in November, 1972, he intended to find a special prosecutor he could defeat in late 1973. In other words, he intended to prevent our democracy from working as it should, with power distributed widely enough that nobody is able to amass enough power to hold onto it without informed consent.

We were fortunate that irrefutable evidence was uncovered that Nixon had been involved in the coverup from the start, and he would have been both impeached and convicted based on that evidence. But we should not lose sight of the real issues here. Nixon repeatedly undermined our democracy, not by engaging in a mere “coverup”. Rather, it was the methods he used that were direct assaults on our democracy. It is for this reason that I get particularly upset when people use evidence of a “coverup” as reason to compare le scandale du jour to Watergate. The coverup is not the issue.

Not being able to distinguish between real threats to our democracy and relatively minor embarrassing political scandals is an insult, not only to those involved in the relatively minor scandals but to Nixon himself, who put in the exhausting effort it took to undermine our democracy.

It’s time we close the gate on the “gate” suffix, just as it’s time we stop comparing whatever we don’t like to Nazis.

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Nawaz Sharif: every legitimate vote counts.

It was the worst of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of foolishness, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the epoch of incredulity…

One is dead. The other has been resurrected from political death.

Saturday’s Pakistani elections for the National Assembly resulted in a resounding win for former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, leader of the Muslim League (PML-N). Former cricket star Imran Khan’s party, Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI), appears to be in opposition. The Pakistan People’s Party (PPP), founded and run by the Bhutto family, got walloped.

This al Jazeera infographic explains the Pakistani election process. The May 11 elections were for the National Assembly, leaving the PPP in charge of the Presidency.

If Sharif can form a government, and the army can be persuaded not to overthrow the democratic process, then it will be the first legal transition of power in the 66-year history of the country.

Pakistan’s four regions. Yellow is Sharif’s Punjab; tan is Bhutto’s Sindh.

Nawaz Sharif was born in 1949 in Lahore, in the Punjab region of Pakistan. His rich and prominent family, who owned iron foundaries, pushed him into politics so they could more nearly perfect the art of kleptocracy. He became an acolyte of General Zia ul Haq, serving the military ruler as both finance minister and chief minister of Punjab (1985–1990).

Sharif was elected Prime Minister in 1990, soundly defeating archrival Benazir Bhutto in National Assembly elections. He was deposed under a cloud of Bhutto-generated corruption allegations in 1993 and Bhutto herself took over. He won elections to the National Assembly again in 1997, this time with a two-thirds supermajority. Again serving as Prime Minister, in 1998 he became immensely popular for bringing Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program to fruition (a program that was ironically begun by his archrival Bhutto’s father).

In 1999, the army again seized power allowing Pervez Musharraf to take the reins (or the reigns) of a broken and corrupt state. Sharif was tried in a military tribunal and convicted of hijacking and terrorism. Musharraf apparently looked the other way as Sharif slipped into exile under the protection of the Saudis in 2000.

In 2007, Sharif was allowed to return. His party was beaten in the 2008 National Assembly elections after the assassination of his opponent, Benazir Bhutto, set off a wave of sympathy voting for her PPP. In this year’s National Assembly elections, Sharif has declared victory, but the size of his parliamentary majority (if any) and his ability to hold on to power is decidely uncertain.

Benazir Bhutto (1953–2007). Source: nilacharal.com

Sharif’s election may set into motion a chain of events that will dispatch the equally corrupt Bhutto-Zardari family from power.

Zulfikar Ali Bhutto took Nusrat Ispahnie as his second wife. Together, they had four children. Benazir was the eldest. Murtaza Bhutto was born in 1954, a second daughter Sanam in 1957, and the youngest son Shahnawaz in 1958.

Bhutto pere founded the PPP. As PPP leader, he began Pakistan’s successful nuclear weapons program, served as Pakistan’s 4th President (1971–73) and 9th Prime Minister from 1973–77. In the 1977 elections, amid widespread allegations of vote rigging, the PPP overwhelmingly won reelection as the majority party in the National Assembly, which elects the Prime Minister.

Zulfikar Ali Bhutto died under detention in 1977 when his daughter was 24. As Wikipedia inelegantly puts it, “Democracy again returned which was resumed from 1972 to 1977 under Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, until he was varnished [sic] by General Zia-ul-Haq.”

(What a horrible way to die. Shades of Goldfinger, but with clear paint instead of gold. More credible accounts say he was killed by hanging.)

After their father’s death, Murtaza and Shahnawaz fled to then-Communist Afghanistan where they formed al-Zulfiqar to avenge their father’s death.

Shahnawaz Bhutto was the youngest of the second generation of Bhuttos and was less involved politically, but was the first to die, in Nice, France on July 18, 1985. His Pashtun wife, Rehana, was Afghan royalty. She was suspected of murder by both the French authorities and the Bhutto family, who accused her of poisoning him. The Zia-controlled Pakistani media said he died of drug and alcohol abuse.

Murtaza Bhutto was assassinated on September 20, 1996.

Benazir Bhutto was assassinated by parties unknown on December 27, 2007.

Upon her death, attention turned briefly to Sanam, who demurred. Sanam apparently enjoyed her lifestyle (emphasis on life), a luxe London existence paid for by allegedly ill-gotten gains. Her alleged co-conspirator? None other than her brother-in-law Asif Ali Zardari, Benazir Bhutto’s widower.

Asif Ali Zardari (left) and Bilawal Bhutto Zardari (right): new PPP leaders who just happen to be related.

Asif Ali Zardari was swept into the President’s office through a popular wave of PPP support in 2008 elections — the same election in which a returned Sharif was soundly defeated.

Their son Bilawal Bhutto Zardari is head of the PPP.

Asif Ali Zardari is currently serving as Pakistan’s 11th President. The President can dissolve the National Assembly, which the new Prime Minister will presumably be keen to remove by enacting Constitutional reforms requiring a two-thirds vote of the National Assembly. It is currently unclear whether the elections resulted in the necessary supermajority.

Benazir Bhutto’s murder has never been solved, but the head of the Federal Investigation Agency and his chief prosecutor, Chaudhry Zulfiqar Ali, said on April 30 that he had “solid evidence” that General Pervez Musharraf is complicit in her death. Musharraf is the former military ruler of Pakistan who deposed and exiled Sharif 13 years ago.

On May 3, Ali was driving to his next deposition when a motorcyclist pulled up to one side and a taxi on the other. He was shot 13 times. Ali was also prosecuting the Lashkar-e-Taiba, a terrorist group made up of the country’s élite, kleptocrats in training. The Lashkar-e-Taiba were behind the 2008 Mumbai attacks.

Ali’s family say he had received death threats from both Musharraf and the Lashkar-e-Taiba (assuming they are different).

The Bhutto family, kleptocrats and politicians from the southeastern region of Sindh, are the sworn enemies of the Sharif family, kleptocrats and Iron Men (literally) from the eastern region of Punjab, who forged a “Dynasty” of their own. Pervez Musharraf is the third point in this Shakespearean political triangle and seems to hate them both about equally.

Khan, the runner-up in Saturday’s election, is a fierce opponent of the use of drones by the United States. Whether he will be able to leverage his political power in the next government remains to be seen. No one can tell what the future holds, where Sharif’s allegiance will lie, or who will emerge on top once the dust settles from this latest messy transition of power in Pakistan.

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Karl Rove, still in the game

The 2016 presidential campaign has definitely started. No candidates have announced themselves, but the most likely players are clearly evident. For the Democrats, most speculation has centered around two veteran politicians: former Senator and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and Vice President Joe Biden. On the Republican side stands a bevy of brash young Turks, each trying to out-do the others for the most possible camera time. You can tell which side is already running scared, and which opposing candidate is most feared. Fox “News” and Karl Rove (desperate to remain a player after backing so many losers in 2012) have already created a campaign-style attack ad.

The attacks on Secretary Clinton consist of innuendo and speculation fueled by hearings in the House Oversight Committee chaired by Representative Darrell Issa (R-Vista, CA). Those hearings were in regard to a different attack — the September, 2012, assault on the American diplomatic post in Benghazi, Libya, an action which resulted in the deaths of Christopher Stevens (then America’s ambassador to Libya) and three other staffers. Republicans have already taken multiple bites off this apple, including non-inhaling former Governor Mitt Romney’s clumsy and ineffective macho blustering that began while the event was still under way; then a sensationalist first set of Congressional hearings in January; and then the scuttling of Susan Rice’s nomination for the post of Secretary of State. In no case was any wrongdoing revealed, only Republican frustration at the Obama Administration’s insufficiently prurient use of the word “terrorism.”

Was anything substantial dredged up in the most recent fishing expedition? Not according Karl Rove. Or Darrell Issa.

The best Rove can present is the empty innuendo, “Was [Ms. Clinton] part of a coverup?” (Translation: There’s no evidence of it, and we’re not sayin’ she was, we’re just askin’.) More to the point, not even Rove’s fevered imagination can furnish any suggestions for what was covered up, though he does ask us to consider why Ms. Clinton initially suggested that the Benghazi attack grew out of a protest over “a video”. (Note that we are no longer reminded of any details concerning that video, which news reports linked to simultaneous protests in Cairo, and which sparked a familiar round of Republican outrage at Muslims, for daring to be so upset about it.) The ad doesn’t tell us what was covered up, nor explain the very clear reasons why everyone thought at the time that the video was involved. The ad invites us to simply imagine something scary, since there isn’t any actual, you know, evidence of anything scary.

One could perhaps be justified in criticizing the U.S. Secretary of State for not knowing what was going on, though even Mitt Romney also thought at the time that the anti-Muslim video was the cause of the violence in Benghazi. Romney’s criticism of President Obama was that he was supposedly “sympathizing with anti-American interests in the Muslim world,” since the President had acknowledged how offensive Muslims might find the content of that video. To wit, he said to reporters:

I think it’s a terrible course for America to stand in apology for our values, that instead when our grounds are being attacked and being breached, that the first response of the United States must be outrage at the breach of the sovereignty of our nation. An apology for America’s values is never the right course.

But all that’s old news. One could reasonably expect the then-current Secretary of State to be better informed than a mere vulture capitalist who happened to be running for President. So perhaps what is being “covered up” is some kind of incompetence in the State Department? But no, Republicans seem to be going the other way, insisting that President Obama and the State Department did know precisely what was going on, and intentionally lied about it. Why would they lie? The reason seems to be eluding Republicans.

The best they came up with early on was the idea that the Obama Administration had been claiming “terrorism” to have been “defeated” (even though no one ever made this claim). Therefore, an acknowledgement that “terrorists” had killed the American ambassador would have somehow endangered President Obama’s reelection. And yet, certainly by the time of the second Presidential debate, America clearly knew the Benghazi attack had been an act of terrorism (leading to the most crushingly understated response ever delivered during a nationally televised debate: “Please proceed, Governor”).  America knew, and yet Barack Obama was reelected with coattails that increased Democratic seats in both Houses, and even flipped several state legislatures.

The idea that a “coverup” of “terrorist involvement” was needed to insure Obama’s reelection doesn’t seem credible, since there was no such coverup and it apparently wasn’t needed. What, then, was “covered up”? There must be something hidden somewhere.

Another theory is that various requests had been made to increase the security in Benghazi, even on the night of the attack, and the requests were denied. There do seem to have been such requests, and additional guards were not moved in. Deputy Chief of Mission in the U.S. Embassy in Libya, Gregory Hicks, testified before Issa’s committee last week that requests for an additional Special Forces unit were made. However, even Hicks acknowledged that had an additional unit been dispatched, it would have made no difference to the result. Ambassador Stevens and the three others would still be dead. There seems to be no particular reason to be “covering up” these requests — and indeed, Secretary Clinton answered extensive questions about them back in January. Again, knowledge about the things supposedly being “covered up,” knowledge which Rove’s ad so dramatically demands, has been available for months.

Besides, this is hardly something Republicans want to talk too much about, since they withheld hundreds of millions of dollars for embassy security in 2011. If we look too closely at why the Benghazi diplomatic post wasn’t properly protected, the answer to that rests more than a year before the attack last September, and it doesn’t lie in the State Department.

Rather than admit that perhaps nothing is being covered up, Republicans held another Star Chamber–type inquiry last week, desperate to find something — anything — to hang on Secretary Clinton and/or President Obama. What they found was typical bureaucratic interdepartmental politics, and a clumsy system for creating and updating official “talking points” to present on Sunday-morning talk shows.

Much has been made about the editing and reëditing of a particular memo — eleven edits were made! While some of the edits were indeed major (and were apparently made as part of political calculations and cover-your-ass interdepartmental turf battles), some of them consisted of the alteration of a single phrase, or a single word, to make the statement more accurate (for instance, changing “Consulate” to “diplomatic post”). The final result is a no-nonsense straight-to-the-point piece with no excess verbiage, and no obfuscatory fluff, nor any historical discussion. Just a focus on the current immediate event and the efforts to understand it. You can examine the evolution of the memo, and see its every change, here.

One would expect several departments and many hands to be involved in the assembly and confirmation of a statement about such an important and sensitive event, particularly one where the details were still not well understood. To be honest, I’m surprised there were only eleven edited versions. I rewrite particularly important passages of my own work more times than that, before submitting it to an editor, and I need the approval of only me.

The Obama Administration covered up the fact that they edit memos? Seriously? This is such an actual non-story that Issa himself admitted last week’s hearings taught him nothing new.

Just as it has begun to seem as if there is no coverup here, we have Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) to the rescue. He opened his idea in January, when Secretary Clinton testified before the Senate. The Obama administration, he claimed, is covering up a vast conspiracy of arms smuggling out of Benghazi to jihadi rebels in Syria. This delightful fantasy presents President Obama not only as covering up something awful, but as being in secret league with Muslim extremists.

The evidence supporting Senator Paul’s theory is less than compelling, and consists entirely of Senator Paul’s claims that it is true. In March, Senator Paul provided some details:

I have a feeling that it had something to do with the CIA annex. You know, a week before the ambassador was killed in Libya, a ship left Libya and docked in Turkey and it [presumably the CIA, not Turkey or the ship] actually interviewed the captain of that ship who said there were arms on board and that he actually witnessed the rebels taking the arms and disputing over who got what. That there were grenade launchers; that there were significant arms being transferred…

Now that doesn’t say the CIA was involved, but that begs the question (what) was the CIA annex there.

It “begs the question” perhaps, but doesn’t answer that question anywhere but in Senator Paul’s fantasies. Fortunately, additional bizarre details are being added by other imaginations. Retired Admiral James Lyons suggested on Fox’s Lou Dobbs Tonight:

I speculate that Ambassador Stevens was supposed to be kidnapped, held hostage, in exchange for the release of the Blind Sheikh that we’re currently holding in prison. That’s the only thing that makes sense to me.

This theory “makes sense”? That President Obama is orchestrating a vast Manchurian conspiracy that pays no regard to human life (let alone American sovereignty) for the sake of assisting Islamic extremists — and is bringing Hillary Clinton along with his dastardly schemes and the coverup thereof?

We’re back to Mitt Romney’s initial clumsy reaction on the night of September 11, 2012, as the attack in Benghazi was happening, that Barack Obama is covertly providing assistance to anti-American Muslim terrorists. The Republican Inquisition here is nothing more or less than an extension of the birther conspiracies, the Obama-as-secret-Muslim rumors. the attacks on the President as being a frightening “Other,” coupled with attempts to link a coverup of that “otherness” to the possible 2016 Democratic Presidential candidate whom Republicans most fear. Former Secretary Clinton was hip-deep in protecting the vile Islamic plots of our Manchurian President.

As Republicans’ fear of another eight years of a Democratic president becomes more desperate, as repeated inquires about Benghazi repeatedly come up with nothing, the dark coverup theories must grow ever more absurd and rococo to explain why there continues to be no evidence of anything being covered up. One must wonder how long this process can continue before the enormous weight of nonsense collapses under the strain of credulity stretched beyond tissue-paper-thin.

There are still nearly three years to go before the first of the 2016 presidential primaries. The anti-Hillary forces may wind up peaking far too early.

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