Bob Lord

The BlueMeanie wrote what would seem to be a timely post, Sockpuppet John Huppenthal also trolled Wikipedia, in which he reminded us that in 2006 ole Thuckenthal was busted for whitewashing his Wikipedia page. Obviously similar behavior to what we’ve noticed here.

But it seems BlueMeanie let Huppenthal off too easy. You see, there was an exchange of comments that occurred between an “anonymous” commenter and the proprietor of the blog, who went by the name Geo. The comment exchange made for reading as good as the post, which was quite good, by the way.

Yes, we can’t know for sure who the commenter was, but the M.O. was vintage Huppenthal, including the sock puppetry. But it’s not the sock puppetry that makes the comment noteworthy. It’s the obsessive compulsive nature of the commenter. You see, this comment was posted on a two-year old post that appeared on a blog that had gone defunct. Who on this planet is obsessive enough to go to such lengths to defend John Huppenthal? Before jumping to answer that, remember the title of my post from earlier this week: Does Anyone Actually Like John Huppenthal?

Here are the first few sentences of the proprietor’s response to the “anonymous” comment:

Dear “Anonymous”,

You have got to be kidding me. On a thread that is over two years old, posted on a blog that has been defunct for over a year, you drive by to make your comment and open a controversy that I’m sure most people had forgotten about long ago? Wow.

The entire exchange follows after the jump.

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Okay, for the few of you who have not figured this out yet, by all indication our friend Thucky is John Huppenthal, the Superintendent of Public Instruction, which is the fifth highest elected office in the state.

This may be a first. I don’t know of any other elected official who has led a double life as a serial blog troll besides John Huppenthal. Chalk that up to Arizona having the market cornered on political craziness, I guess.

I’ll be making many observations about this in the months to come, as may my colleagues here at BfAZ. How often is it that you get this close a look at what really is going on inside the head of an elected official? It’s kind of fascinating.

So, it’s not surprising that ole Thuckenthal would not find much love here. In The Political Brain, Drew Westen makes the case that if 30% of the electorate does not affirmatively dislike you, the election is not going to happen for you. And, if you’re John Huppenthal, ours is the group who you’d expect not to like you.

But here’s the amazing thing: They don’t like him any better on the other side of the aisle. You see, he posts on the conservative sites as well. At one site, Seeing Red AZ, he has used the handle Socrates1289 (he’s gone by Socrates a few times here as well). So, last September, he was up to his usual dishonesty, speaking of Huppenthal in the third person, and the site proprietor eviscerated him, with full-throated support from the other commenters:

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Progress in the battle for economic justice will require action on two fronts: Bringing up the bottom and bringing down the top.

And in bringing down the top, knocking down CEO pay is a must win battle, for two reasons. First, it lies at the heart of where the system is broken, and must be fixed. Second, the ripple effect of outsized CEO pay is a huge factor in the bloated income share of the top one percent.

A recent Dean Baker piece,  CEO pay and performance link? For Coke, zero, illustrates this well. Baker, regarding the ripple effect:

But pay for top managers in corporate America also has a spillover effect in other sectors. As a result of the exorbitant pay going to CEOs, top management at universities, hospitals and even charities can count on pay packages that run into the high six figures and even seven figures. Their top assistants have their pay scaled accordingly. In other words, excessive CEO pay is a big part of the story of growing inequality that we’ve seen over the last three decades.

Consider the math. When CEO pay is 200 to 300 times worker pay, instead of the 20 to 30 times worker pay range that prevailed in the pre-Reagan era, it pulls the pay of other top executives with it. 

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Another mid-book review, combined with commentary from Truthdig.

I’m a little past the halfway point of The Battle for Justice in Palestine, by Ali Abunimah.

Although I spend most of my reading time on inequality and taxation, I’m frequently drawn to the Israel-Palestine debate. I’ve read a fair amount, but my knowledge base on subject is only modest at best. So there are a lot of gaps in my understanding.

Abunimah is helping to fill some of those. Most importantly, although I’ve read articles by Palestinian scholars, this is the first Palestinian-authored book I’ve read. My thought before I started was that it would be helpful to understand the Palestinian perspective emotionally. The book actually adds very little in that regard, at least so far. And, really, several of the Jewish-authored books I’ve read did a good job of capturing this aspect of the situation.

Ironically, I’m finding that Abunimah’s focus is inequality and economic justice. He rejects the notion of Palestinian statehood for statehood’s sake and argues instead that the resolution must be one that gives Palestinians a chance to break free of economic domination by Israel.

Interestingly (and, to me, effectively), Abunimah seems to consciously refrain from using emotions to persuade. Instead, using historical analogies, primarily from South Africa and Northern Ireland, he employs a sober, logical analysis to make his points.

That is not to say Abunimah argues in the abstract. He brings facts to bear, but to support a  logical argument, not an emotional one. For example, in discussing Israel’s invasion of Gaza in 2009, Abunimah’s takeaway point is not about the 1400 hundred or so Palestinians killed in the invasion, but on the evidence of advance planning by Israel to use the attack to achieve an economic objective. Specifically, Israel used the occasion to wipe out the chicken farming industry in Gaza. There was no military need to bomb the crap out of Gaza’s chicken farms, but there sure was an economic one. Now, post-invasion, most of the chicken and eggs on Gaza supermarket shelves are made in Israel. Israeli chicken farmers benefitted handsomely from the attack on Gaza, to the detriment of Gazans, whose food insecurity and malnutrition worsened.

Unfortunately, while Abunimah is speaking and thinking logically, Israel (and many of its American supporters) is not. William Pfaff touches on this in his Truthdig column, Obama Could Spare Israel Terrible Outcome:

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