Third in a multi-part series
August – September 2013: A really bad month for Thucky
I wonder if August – September 2013 was an especially eventful time in Thucky’s life. Some ambitious investigative type might want to look into that possibility. I say that because it’s when Thucky’s commenting gets out of control, not just on BfAZ, but, as I learned later, over at Seeing Red AZ as well, where he was posting as Socrates1289.
There’s somewhat of an oddity that occurs in August 2013. To my knowledge, there was only one time when Thucky seemingly had someone post a comment for him. It occurred in August 2013. Our posts move down the page quickly, so we rarely receive comments more than a day or two after a post goes up. In this case, we received a comment from Thucky in response to a post related to the common core standards. Then, four days later, when the post was old and cold, we received another comment, from an IP address at the Department of Education that Thucky had used. Although the comment was not from Thucky, all appearances are that it was made at his direction.
Frankly, I don’t have a clue what was going on here. But whatever was going on, Thucky was one angry dude by the time September rolled around. I noticed it in the comments to my posts, but it came screaming through in his comments to other posts.
There’s this comment in early September, from the Department of Education, to a BlueMeanie post on food insecurity in America:
Food insecurity? You have to be kidding me. The number one problem of the poor is now obesity, severe obesity, extreme obesity. The next generation will not live as long because of the severity of this obesity.
Talk about showing your inner moron. It’s been common knowledge for years that obesity and food insecurity are linked, but Thucky’s clearly of the view that obesity disproves food insecurity. Note the condescending certainty of his tone. I encountered this several times in reading the Thuckmeister’s comments, which caused me to trot out the old Will Rogers quote about Hoover: “It’s not what he doesn’t know that worries me. It’s what he knows for sure that just ain’t so.”
I didn’t know it at the time, but that was just a few days after this now infamous comment at Seeing Red AZ (which is similar to what he said here at BfAZ):
When Darwin wrote his treatise on evolution, it was titled ” Survival of the Favored Races.” There were two parts to his work, one was to give a foundation to evolution, the other was to explain the dramatic differences between species. As he explained it in his 1859 work, as a species evolves it begins to develop different races. When one of those races develops a superior advantage, it wipes out the genetically inferior race. It was Darwin, not Hitler who named the Germans the master race. It was Darwin who expressed approval of eliminating both Jews and Africans. Hitler worked to eliminate the Jews. Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood was given the job of eliminating African Americans. Hitler fed 6 million Jews into the ovens. Sanger has fed 16 million African Americans into the abortion mills.
On September 8, 2013 Thucky really goes off the rails, in five separate, some lengthy, comments to a Craig McDermott post, The 2014 Republican Dream Team is assembling…, between 4:30 and 7:00 in the morning.
First, he lashes out at Craig, calling him an idiot, a Neanderthal, and “truly vile.”
Next, he manages to combine the “some of my best friends are Hispanic” line and a claim of reverse racism into one comment:
As for Huppenthal hating public education and hispanics, that’s not going to wash. Huppenthal grew up in south Tucson, all of his friends were Hispanics. He was the only Caucasian in his social group. Jimmy Ortega, Manny Gonzales, Luis Rodriguez, Charlie Praciado, Marcelino Lucero. Just because he won’t support the “we hate Whitey” curriculum of extreme Chicano activists doesn’t mean he can’t do well among Hispanics.
That comment ultimately was a major clue in figuring out who Thucky was, but we were still months away at this point.
Then, he unleashes this Orwellian doozy, explaining how Horne is a stand-up guy and Rotellini is “absolutely corrupt.”:
They also noticed that Hornes independent campaign was his own money. Rottellinis independent campaign was funded by taxpayer dollars laundered through the prosecutors association. What Horne did may have been illegal but it was honest. What Rottellini did was legal but it was absolutely corrupt.
Of all the entities in this conflict, only Horne wasn’t screwing us.
Then, another explosion of raw narcissism, as he speaks of himself glowingly in the third person:
Returning to Huppenthal. When McDermott says that Huppenthal is utterly unqualified for public office what does he mean by that? Huppenthal prime sponsored and successfully passed more more legislation than any other legislator in Arizona history. Huppenthal passed more legislation that was passed by majorities of both parties than any other legislator in Arizona’s history. Huppenthal passed more legislation that was signed into law by Governor Napolitano than any other legislator.
Also, it was quality. Huppenthals probation management legislation is a national model. Since it was passed felonies by probationers have declined by 1700 per year. Over 3,000 fewer probationers kicked back to prison annually. All time record successful completion of probation by Arizona. That’s just one of his bills.
He concludes in a fifth comment with an explanation of how Randy Pullen would win the State Treasurer election.
While this was going on, the Thuckster was spouting one absurdity after another in his comments to my inequality related posts, which inspired me to write Thucky: A Case Study in Conservative Intellectual Dishonesty, I’ve pasted the entire post with comments in below, but this is where I get irked by his idiocy and dishonesty. The post basically calls him out for his faux concern for the poor. Then, in a comment, Thucky tries to say that reduced inequality would harm the poor. Here was my response:
I think I can diagnose your condition. You’re an idiot savant. You can read papers written by economists with lots of equations containing letters from the Greek alphabet, but you can’t (or won’t) reason your way out of a paper bag.
Consider what you said: “Reducing income inequality makes the poor worse off, not better.”
If that were correct, than the following also would be correct: Increasing income inequality makes the poor better off.
But that can’t be correct. If the top 1% were taking in 90% of the total income, would it help the poor if the share of the 1% increased to 95%? Of course not, unless the effect of doing so would be to more than double the size of the pie over what it would have grown to in the absence of such an increase.
So, the analysis here is tougher than spouting out talking points. Talking points are easy. You memorize them, you wait for something remotely relevant to be said, and you spout them out. Reasoning is tougher. Show some reasoning skills, Thucky. Don’t just rely on the rantings of some economist you worship. Use your own brain for a change.
Ironically, about a week after he started wearing out his welcome with me, he completely wore it out at Seeing Red AZ. Posing as Socrates1289, Thucky goes on a narcissistic binge at Seeing Red AZ, which culminates in him losing his commenting privileges there:
Socrates:
You have tried dominating this section with over a dozen comments. Although some have been posted, don’t expect to see any others. Your wild accusations, name calling and warning to others that this is an untruthful site, will not fly here. This conservative, fact-based site obviously is not the place for you.It is frenzied candidate John Huppenthal, meeting strong opposition to his bonding with Arne Duncan and Obama’s educare, who is untruthful. He deviously wants to change the name “Common Core” to “Arizona College and Career Ready Standards” hoping no one will notice. We all have and will not forget. Huppenthal is rightly sweating his upcoming election and has taken refuge in deceit.
All of the above took place in a one month period, running from mid-August to mid-September. It was, as I said, a really bad month for Thucky.
…
Thucky: A Case Study In Conservative Intellectual Dishonesty
The Thuckmeister is wearing out his welcome here, at least as far as I’m concerned.
Among other things, he’s engaged in what seems to me is rank intellectual dishonesty.
But since Thucky’s dishonesty is sort of a case study in conservative intellectual dishonesty, let’s explore.
Some time back, when ole Thucky first started railing about the evils of our social safety net, he made statements very clearly designed to conjure up images in the reader’s mind of lazy welfare recipients sitting on their couches drinking beer and watching their flat screen TVs. And if the lazy person the reader imagined sitting there in front of the flat screen was black, well, all the better.
But when I began posting about the conservative war on the poor, Thucky morphed into a “compassionate” conservative, overcome with emotion over the damage welfare does to its recipients whom he cares so much about. On my last post, he commented about the harm that welfare does to children in their pre-school years. He’d even counted the number of words they were not hearing before entering school.
If you took his recent comments at face value, you’d think the Thuckmeister’s desire to shred the safety net is driven by his concern for poor children.
Actually, he’s just a corporate shill and the concern he purports to have for poor children reeks of intellectual dishonesty.
Let’s go back to Thuck’s disdain for welfare beneficiaries’ ownership of televisions. How do you reconcile that with his concern for the children. If welfare children really are not hearing the right number of words they should from their parents, wouldn’t we want them to at least have the chance to see TV shows like Blues Clues and Sesame Street?
If he’s so deeply concerned about the children, why does Thucky oppose programs to ensure they get the proper nutrition? After all, the brain of a malnourished child never fully develops, thereby robbing the child of his potential. Would someone concerned about the number of words a pre-school kid hears be willing to risk having that kid lose brain function?
Thucky has commented several times on the effective tax rate of safety net beneficiaries on the first dollars they earn from work. He’s actually correct about this, but there are two ways to fix the problem: Reduce or eliminate benefits, even to those in need or, in the alternative, phase the benefits out more gradually for those who find employment. If you cared about the children, you’d prefer the second of those approaches, as it would leave benefits in place for the children who really need them, while still solving the problem of the effective tax rate. But Thucky would prefer to slash benefits.
If the Thuckmeister really is concerned about the children, why doesn’t he share my concerns about inequality? If the dollars currently flowing to the top were flowing to wage earners instead, aggregate demand would increase, causing an increase in the demand for workers, thus creating jobs for some of those welfare recipients.
If he truly were overcome with concern for welfare children, why have we not seen comments from Thucky pushing for infrastructure spending? That would create jobs, again putting some of those welfare recipients for whom he purports to have so much compassion back to work.
If his overriding concern is welfare children, why hasn’t Thucky commented on the need to increase funding for pre-school programs? Surely it would be better for those welfare kids to be in pre-school than sitting at home not hearing any words and having “negative interactions with adults” (his words, not mine).
Truth is, Thucky’s dishonesty is not exceptional. He’s just a textbook case of how conservative ideology doesn’t square with the concerns conservatives would like you to believe motivate that ideology. And if you keep track of what they say, their remarks become littered with contradiction. You don’t need an advanced degree to figure this out. You don’t even need to be smart. You just need to pay attention.
Thucydides | September 13, 2013 at 5:00 pm | | Edit
We certainly aren’t experiencing a movement to equality of outcomes that our President promised us. Inequality is absolutely at its worst. That inequality is now especially devastating because outcomes for the poor are going downhill.
The correlation between wealth for the rich and wealth for the poor is cross sectional by country. Let me assure you that the poor in the US are much better off than the poor in an other country. Our poor are very asset wealthy and consumption wealthy as compared even to typical people in most other countries. But they are not emotionally well off. They are very unhappy, they don’t lead emotionally healthy lives. People with jobs experience much greater happiness, emotional growth and cognitive growth.
No correlation is absolute. What is going on in our economy is very complex. Owners of small businesses are not creating jobs. They just got hit with a large tax rate increase and a big regulatory hit. The lost jobs would have really helped the poor. Those jobs would have also have really helped the small business owner earn a lot of money. Didn’t happen. The positive correlation was lost.
Meanwhile, large corporations are brutally squeezing the efficiency out of every single process and making much larger profits. Substituting inexpensive capital for labor at every possible point. All of the 1% are making large untaxed gains through untaxed stock gains. Their gain is, temporarily, at the expense of the poor. They are being subsidized by the actions of the federal reserve at keeping the cost of capital artificially low. This will not go on for much longer, the end is near. We have enough money in the sitting idle to fuel an economy of 50 Trillion dollars. Soon, within the next two years, people will stampede out of money the same way they stampeded out of housing when housing became glutted. Overnite, money will become worth half as much.
This is still avoidable if the president flips the economy and moves to a set of policies that will get us growing at 4% or greater. Definitely possible. The growth path would affirm the value of the money. The federal reserve could back off and allow this huge pool of cash to fuel capital expansion. Interest rates would rise causing labor to become inexpensive relative to capital and also keeping money from stampeding.
Nirvana.
Bob Lord | September 11, 2013 at 9:27 pm | | Edit
I think I can diagnose your condition. You’re an idiot savant. You can read papers written by economists with lots of equations containing letters from the Greek alphabet, but you can’t (or won’t) reason your way out of a paper bag.
Consider what you said: “Reducing income inequality makes the poor worse off, not better.”
If that were correct, than the following also would be correct: Increasing income inequality makes the poor better off.
But that can’t be correct. If the top 1% were taking in 90% of the total income, would it help the poor if the share of the 1% increased to 95%? Of course not, unless the effect of doing so would be to more than double the size of the pie over what it would have grown to in the absence of such an increase.
So, the analysis here is tougher than spouting out talking points. Talking points are easy. You memorize them, you wait for something remotely relevant to be said, and you spout them out. Reasoning is tougher. Show some reasoning skills, Thucky. Don’t just rely on the rantings of some economist you worship. Use your own brain for a change.
Thucydides | September 11, 2013 at 5:09 pm | | Edit
Reducing income inequality makes the poor worse off, not better. The outcomes for the poor are very positively correlated with outcomes for the rich. Your entire arguments surround a sharing of the pie concept. Very flawed. The size of the pie exploded after the Reagan tax rate reductions on small businesses. The supply side effect was disputed until the year 2000. Now, no one disputes it, not even Goolsbee, Obams’s economic warrior – read his latest research. He grants the effect of the Reagan tax cuts.
He further subtley acknowledges its later large effect of encouraging second income earners to be more productive, retirees to return to the work force and human capital to become more productive.
Jealousy is an important part of this analysis. You are only worse off by the creation of rich people if you are the jealous type. If you suffer from extreme jealousy, the very existence of the rich does damage to you. Most people have at least a modest amount of jealousy, it is a very tribal emotion. Reasearch in the workplace shows workers actively seek a state of compensation dissatisfaction. They start by comparing thei4r salaries with the coworkers and keep working up to professional baseball players and billionaires if they have to.
Caring about the poor may be really caring about yourself.
The current environment is just nuking the poor, increasing the pool of the poor at an astonishing rate.
Bob Lord | September 11, 2013 at 1:08 pm | | Edit
Spot on, Jana. The notion that those confronting inequality are motivated by jealousy is moronic. I seriously doubt Joe Stiglitz or Robert Reich is wanting in any way financially, but they’re the folks leading the charge. I guess my question would be “at what point is it no longer petty jealousy to question the share of the top 1%?” If the top 1% garnered 90% of our wealth and the bottom 98% had only 1%, thus making a top one percenter 9,000 times as well off as a bottom 99 percenter, would someone in the second 1%, who would be pretty well off, still be considered “jealous” if he spoke up for the 98%?
Jana | September 11, 2013 at 12:13 pm | | Edit
People who are concerned about income inequality are just jealous? Talk about rank intellectual dishonesty. If Thucky was intellectually honest he wouldn’t paint the entire portion of the populace that thinks income inequality is a problem as bunch of petty coveting ninnies. Not everyone who is concerned about wealth inequality is of the opinion that he or she is on the losing side of the equation. Your jealousy rationale goes poooof!
Bob Lord | September 11, 2013 at 7:16 am | | Edit
Reduce taxes on small businesses? That’s a talking point with no basis in reality. The overwhelming majority of small businesses are Subchapter S corporations or LLCs. They don’t pay tax. And the income they pass through to their owners is about the only form of income not subject to the 3.8% medicare tax on income over $250,000. And one of the worst loopholes in the tax code is the ability of S corporation owners to avoid massive amounts of employment tax.
Thucydides | September 10, 2013 at 10:47 pm | | Edit
I am not concerned about inequality because I am not a jealous person. I have not a jealous bone in my body. I am very concerned about the plight of the disadvantaged. Spent half the day today with the most disadvanted residents of the state.
Unlike you, I want small businesses to earns gobs more money so they pay gobs more taxes and hire gobs more young people. The 1 percent are getting more than ever before because the are friends of the president, they aren’t paying a Penney more in taxes. The also aren’t hiring.
We should have a tax on unrealized capital gains and reduce taxes on small businesses. I would love to see Warren Buffet write a check to the federal government for 30 billion.