The Newsroom: Counterpoints and Retrospective (7/28/13)

Watching this episode, I noticed that I wrote down a lot less than usually do. There are a few points to address but not nearly as much as last time. That being said, time to get down to it.

1. The GOP primary candidates are an absolute disgrace for not standing by Captain Stephen Hill when his video was booed by members of the audience during the debate. Had Romney intervened, he would have won the election then and there.

I watched all of the GOP primary debates during the 2012 campaign season and I vividly remember two instances where the audience's reaction made me cringe visibly. That was the first one. I will readily admit that the GOP candidates are cowards because none of them could, politically speaking, defend Captain Hill in the face of such boorish behavior.

But all politicians are like that. They can't afford to go against the people who elect them otherwise they get voted out of office. When then-candidate Obama talked about revising NAFTA to help blue collar workers in front of blue collar crowds while having his aides privately reassure backers that he had no such intentions of doing so, that was also an example of political cowardice. But the Newsroom didn't show that.

Well, it couldn't have, chronologically speaking. But considering that the subject was on Don't Ask, Don't Tell and the President's recent actions to repeal it, the show could have questioned the President's own stance on the subject before and after he became President. He was against it while he was scrapping for votes in the blue collar districts of Ohio, Pennsylvania, and South Carolina. But he gets to "evolve" on the issue and the Republican candidates don't get the same implicit benefit of the doubt?

That's slanted coverage. It's too partisan to accuse one party of political cowardice and not mention the other. Both parties are equally opportunistic and cowardly, subject to the whims and fancies of their largely uneducated constituency. For McAvoy to be a Republican and excoriate his own party and spare the Democrats represents a very curious type of political allegiance.

2. Let's throw more fancy terminology and credentialism at the audience to advance the plausibility of Operation Genoa.

I get the fact that The Newsroom has to sell Operation Genoa as something plausible, but the story just falls apart when you apply an actual plausibility check against the story. The Marine who met with Mackenzie and Dantana said they were going door to door looking for their captured fellow Marines and the helicopters started spraying white phosphorus and Sarin everywhere? Even if the extraction team is wearing MOPP suits, there's no way they can count on the hostages wearing the same. If you were going to gas an area you were trying to go door to door through to find and extract people, you'd be extracting corpses.

There is no tactical rationale for using Sarin and white phosphorus to suppress the indigenous population, even if they couldn't get an AC-130 to loiter on the other side of the border. From what most journalists have gathered, the likely course of action for an extraction team in trouble is to get themselves into a Black Hawk Down situation (indiscriminately slaughtering civilians and militia alike). Carpeting an area with nerve gas just makes no sense.

3. Boycott Lockheed because they make the Hellfire missiles that Predator drones use.

If you have such disdain for the drone program, wouldn't it make more sense to use your limited airtime to excoriate the Federal government and the Obama Administration rather than to direct your fire at the defense contractors who are just filling an order requested by the government?

To paraphrase an argument from Thank You For Smoking, if some drunk driver kills himself in a car collision, do you go banging on the door of General Motors questioning their role in the incident?

4. The campaign bus is nothing but free media for the candidate. When are we going to be able to ask the hard hitting questions?

All those questions that Jim Harper, fearless journalist, asked were the same questions that political reporters and journalists asked candidates and aides during the campaign season. Perhaps he should get over the fact that beat reporters attached to the campaign bus are complete nonentities.

5. Shout "tequila!" after you take a shot of tequila.

You had me at "tequila!"

Real Time With Bill Maher: Counterpoints and Retrospective (7/26/13)

Tonight we had a great show with good panelists. Although the mid-show guest slowed it down a little, tonight was one of the better episodes. A lot of things were discussed, so it's time to get right to it:

Sarah Slamen: Conservative Republicans in Texas don't seem to be very pro-life when it comes to their stance on the death penalty. They're waging a war on women and only care about babies when they're in the womb. If they cared about kids growing up, there wouldn't be over 13,000 kids under state foster care.

Slamen recycled one well worn liberal/progressive trope regarding abortion rights and capital punishment. But it's one of those lines that can only be used to pump up your base. Obviously there is a huge difference between a baby in a uterus, which has done nothing of its own free will, and a convicted felon who did something so heinous that a prosecutor has seen fit to punish with execution. She knew she was speaking in front of a friendly crowd, which is why she got away with it. But you can't conflate the two issues together.

The point about kids growing up in foster care is much murkier. I'm not sure how she crafted that argument. Is she suggesting that most wards of the state are the children of pro-life Texas conservatives who abandoned them? Or the fact that 13,000 kids in foster care is a travesty in and of itself? I'm not sure. If it's the former, it's completely spurious. If it's the latter, it's just a confusing argument with no real rebuttal because there's no real argument, just confidently delivered word diarrhea.

My overall impression of Slamen is that she is trying her hardest to enjoy her 15 minutes of fame. Obviously when you testify in front of a government body, you are supposed to do so in a composed, courteous way. Her outburst was undignified and can only appeal to people who already agree with her point of view. She was just making a scene.

Bill Maher 1: It baffles me how inconsistent talking heads are when it comes to publicly shaming politicians who like to cheat on their spouses.

Amen.

Eliot Spitzer: The Republicans don't know what they're talking about when it comes to the stimulus bill. Obama brought us out of the recession with the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

This couldn't be further from the truth. The vast majority of stimulus money was spent in the latter half of 2009 and 2010. The market bottomed in March and then began a rapid recovery as firms were propped up by TARP (a stabilization program begun under the Bush Administration and then Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson) and, more importantly, by the extraordinary actions of the Federal Reserve, which pumped trillions of dollars of easy money into the banks at the time.

While it is impossible to know how important the stimulus was to the economic recovery, one thing we do know is that the economic recovery we've experience has been the slowest in American economic history. A lot of this has to do with forces outside of the Federal government's control. Things like globalization, the profligate spending of the average American, and municipal governments who couldn't care less about providing fundamental public goods at a reasonable cost conspired decades before and when the latest boom/bust cycle happened, it finally revealed the fundamental flaws in the American balance sheet.

Politicians and the pundits who support them need to stop kidding themselves when they state that the US government bailed us out of some new Great Depression. All they did was ameliorate the effects at great financial cost that must be borne by future generations.

Reza Aslan 1: The laws of this country are geared towards keeping the rich rich and keeping the poor poor. Only accredited investors benefit from the Federal statutory and regulatory codes when it comes to finance.

While it is true that accredited investors have more choices when it comes to investing (only accredited investors can invest in hedge funds, for example), those extra choices carry a lot more risk. It is extraordinarily easy to become rich the boring way: investing in stocks. Given the fact that most Americans have shown zero propensity to save and invest their wage income, assets are trading at a structural deficit. Those who do show the patience and discipline to set aside a portion of their wages to invest will reap the rewards.

The fact of the matter is that the vast majority of the American public has no interest in investing. That's why the recovery has really been a recovery of the rich. Because the rich are the only people with any real wealth to recover.

Jim Wallis: Words about the Bible, Jesus, and immigration.

Maher always treats his religious guests with a generous heaping of condescension, but Wallis' halting, slow speech does not translate well to a rather fast paced debate panel. Even though it annoys me when Maher expects a direct answer from the first answer and cuts people off when they try to answer in a roundabout (and sometimes evasive) manner, at this point it needs to be expected. Be direct, concise, and don't take 20 words to say something that could have been said with 5.

Bill Maher 2: I tell my religious friends this all the time: if there's even one turd in the pool, do you jump in?

Life is messy and nothing is perfect. It is unrealistic to expect religion to be any different. Reza Aslan made a very good point when he said that the Bible isn't about the words within it, it's about the people interpreting it. It really is a mirror reflecting the values and beliefs of the person who reads it at the time. Maher reads it to find contradictory/embarrassing stuff to throw at religious people's faces. Conservatives read it to find support for their beliefs, as do many liberals. Abolitionists read it and so did slave owners.

People, naturally are going to gravitate towards the data that supports their predefined belief system. It is only when their personal experiences disabuse them of their preconceived notions repeatedly and in a substantive way do they have a change of heart. Even self described literalists, as Aslan stated, aren't actually literalists.

Reza Aslan 2: I've been in this country a long time. Had to pretend to be Mexican because being an Iranian in the 80s was even worse, if you can believe it. And I was an illegal immigrant for 10 years. From my personal experience, I can tell you that the reason why immigration is so prohibitive in this country is because of racism.

Racism isn't the right word for this. It's actually xenophobia. Jim Wallis actually had a point when he was talking about immigration. It's about fear of the foreigner. Humans have a natural tribal tendency. There's a reason why international trade deficits can be used to demagogue an issue but nobody worries about the trade between California and Nevada.

My own personal experience is that people are distrusting of people who are not similar to them. People are always going to be suspicious of people who are different from them. The most obvious difference is in physical appearance (skin color). But when we get to know people a bit more, we slowly learn that we are not so much different from one another. I've had many friends and colleagues say to me, after they've known me for a while, that I'm more American than they are. The implicit statement was that before, they saw me as some perpetual foreigner because I'm ethnically Chinese.

When it comes to immigration, many people are close minded about it because they have an idea in their head that immigrants are foreigners. And you know what? We're not too crazy about foreigners. I'd rather be in contact with Americans. When communities and people have more exposure with immigrants, they usually turn around but only towards those specific immigrants. Sure, Jay Sun is an example of an immigrant coming to America who rapidly Americanizes and becomes a successful person, but not all immigrants are like him. When people who are against immigration reform think about the immigrants who want to come in, they immediately default to some unlikable stereotype, probably of a dirty, smelly, uneducated Mexican male who wants to commit crime.

That stereotype is something rooted in racial prejudice, but that doesn't mean that the person who believes in that stereotype can't view a Mexican in a positive light. They'll simply say "oh, that guy's the exception that proves the rule." This is why so many Americans can have strong racial prejudice and still say with absolute conviction that they're not racists/bigots. Because they can judge individuals after they get to know them, but the group that those individuals happen to be classified under don't get the benefit of the doubt.

It's not racism. It's tribalism.

The Resource Curse, Scaled Down

A week ago, two separate articles featured the Long Island College Hospital. One appeared in the Wall Street Journal. The other in The New York Times. Both described the imminent closing of the hospital due to financial problems. The latter article described a full time medical staff that costs 3 million per week, enough to service a hospital with a capacity of 375 patients. At the time, there were only 18 patients.

The former article described a charitable gift to the hospital from a deceased couple. In the 1990s, the hospital received a 135 million dollar endowment from the Othmer family, the investment proceeds (the principal sum was meant to be untouched) were meant to help fund the hospital's operations in perpetuity. Now, the vast majority of that endowment is gone. Much of it was used to settle medical malpractice suits and to finance renovations of the hospital.

It amazes me that such a generous gift could have been squandered in such a short amount of time. It costs a lot of money to run a hospital. But a charitable gift, meant to be held in a trust with its principal sum untouched, should not have been squandered like that. Court ruling after court ruling effectively stated that, were the Othmers alive today, they would have wanted (or at the very least, consented) the hospital to liquidate portions of their trust.

The fact that the hospital has a full time staff and no patients to treat also amazes me. Union rules prevented the hospital from furloughing unneeded staff and, in any case, the hospital administration had to have been incompetent if it needed to dip into a charitable trust to pay for settling/litigating medical malpractice suits. This is simply the resource curse scaled down.

Any organization that happens upon a windfall that they didn't earn is likely to squander that windfall. It's the reason why great fortunes are so often lost by the succeeding generations. They take the money for granted. They count on that money being there to support them. And they keep spending it, and spending it, until, suddenly, it doesn't exist anymore.

And that's what happened at Long Island College Hospital. Any competent administrator should have realized that, while 135 million dollars seems like a lot of money, for a hospital trust, it can't contribute any more than 11 million dollars in a good year without dipping into the principal amount. 11 million dollars is not a lot of money when you consider how much money it takes to support a hospital. And that's in a good year. The average year would be around 7-8 million dollars.

That's enough to support a couple dozen extra nurses and doctors per year. But you can't count on that money to do much more than that. And once you start dipping into the principal, then you're in even worse shape because suddenly a couple dozen extra nurses and doctors turns into only a dozen. Or half a dozen. Or none, once you've spent all the principal amount.

The end result is that a great fortune, one that was meant to explicitly provide for a community, is used to hasten the community's downfall. The vast majority of people have a hard time readjusting to a lower baseline of spending, which is why so many of them dip into their savings/principal investments to begin with. It's better to keep living like nothing's wrong at the expense of the future. Because who knows? Maybe somebody else in the future will come along and bail you out. The sad reality is that it never works out that way.

The Minimum Wages of Destruction

Two weeks ago, the DC City Council passed the Large Retailer Accountability Act, a bill that would raise the minimum wage for employees at big box retailers like Wal-Mart to 12.50 USD an hour. Since this proposed law would only apply to stores with retail space of at least 75k sq ft whose parent companies have gross revenues of over 1 billion per year, it is a bill designed to keep 3 proposed Wal-Mart stores out of DC, which would create about 1800 permanent jobs.

And that's a real shame. Right now, DC proper really only has two types of residents: upper middle class white yuppies and poor, uneducated inner city blacks. The latter group live in an environment of crushing poverty, a dearth of jobs (of any kind), and rampant crime and drug use. They need low end jobs provided by stores like Wal-Mart in order to gain work experience and make money.

According to the BLS, DC currently has an unemployment rate of 8.3%. But black unemployment levels in DC are around 20%. This staggering disparity is even more pronounced when you realize that blacks make up half the city. Whites in DC have an unemployment rate of under 4%.

The action taken by the city council represents the trifecta of bad government in the US: rent seeking by entrenched special interests, ignorance or indifference to sound economic principle, and the political goodwill of useful idiots needed to back such harmful laws.

The fact that Wal-Mart must pay 4 dollars above the DC minimum wage simply because it's Wal-Mart and not some small convenience store is sheer lunacy. And the only reason why only Wal-Mart has to comply is because those smaller mom and pop shops pay many of their employees at minimum wage. This law is designed to keep Wal-Mart out of DC in the most naked way possible.

Raising the minimum wage for large retailers disproportionately hurts poor blacks because it drastically increases the barriers to job entry for the least skilled/marketable members of society. Given the fact that employment has become so important to a person's career, high minimum wages do nothing but perpetuate an underclass of people who have no economic prospects whatsoever.

All this is made possible by a coalition of upper middle class progressives (who hate Wal-Mart and love Whole Foods) and politically connected blacks who couldn't care less about Wal-Mart and would rather build political capital than do things that would actually help the people they're supposed to serve. Even a minimum wage job at Wal-Mart is a good thing because it helps a person with no work experience (who could only be hired at minimum wage by a neutral employer) gain work experience.

Work experience is paramount to building a career. Every day you're working is another day that you're building your personal social capital and signalling to employers that you're employable. But if you can't get your foot in the door, you remain an unemployable bum in the eyes of prospective employers. For a person with no work experience, very few skills, and low marketability (which unfortunately describes the vast majority of young black kids living in DC), you need an employer to take a chance on you. And the higher you set the minimum wage, the more expensive it is for a business to take that chance.

My very first job was working at a movie theater for 5.50 an hour (at the time, 35 cents above minimum wage). I hated the job. I hated my bosses. But I kept working at it because I wanted spending money. The time I was there, I learned about how wage employees get paid and how they keep track of employee hours. I also learned that I had to suck up to both the customers and the bosses in order to be considered a good worker. And I learned that anybody could do my job, so even if I quit, they would just hire somebody else to take my place.

Learning and adjusting to be a cog in the system is something very, very important. And it's something that nobody teaches you in school. You learn it when you start working. But if nobody ever gives you a job, it's something you never learn and the hiring manager will easily dismiss you as a "bad culture fit".

Nobody dreams of working at Wal-Mart. And working at Wal-Mart at minimum wage is something that very few people want to do. But for some people, it's their only option. And that option is better than doing nothing.

The Newsroom: Counterpoints and Retrospective (7/21/13)

My oh my, we've got quite a chock full episode of Things That Need To Be Addressed. It was also quite entertaining as well. But let's get right to it. I feel like this is gonna be a long blog post.

1. Chasing down a lead on sarin gas is worth doing, despite the fact that it's completely implausible.

Supposedly the story within the story is based on Operation Tailwind. But Tailwind had much more "this might actually be plausible" flavor to it seeing as it was based in Vietnam 28 years ago at the time. And it was allegedly a punitive mission, not a extraction mission. Using Sarin during an extraction makes absolutely no sense because you'd wind up gassing the very people you were trying to extract in the first place.

The US military has a very good term for that kind of thing: danger close. If their servicemen couldn't be extracted because of heavy enemy resistance, it's likely because the enemy is keeping them pinned. If that happens, that means they're close by. With a dispersal agent like Sarin, any drop would probably be within 600 meters of the people we were trying to extract. Combine that with the fact that Predator drones aren't currently equipped with warheads that can deliver Sarin and that manned fixed-wing aircraft are unable to operate within Pakistani airspace, and there is literally zero possibility for this being plausible from an operational standpoint. Conventional drone strikes would have provided effective close air support, anyways.

From a political standpoint, any military operation involving explicitly banned chemicals would be political suicide for any Administration. Any tactical advantage that could be gained from its use would be immediately outweighed by the political and strategic consequences. Use of white phosphorus in Iraq already created a mini-scandal and its use isn't banned by international protocols on the rules of war. Sarin, which was used to notorious effect in the Iran-Iraq war and, most recently, in Syria (in which the President declared that such use would represent a red line that would carry dire consequences) would have been impossible for any Administration to consider.

The Newsroom is doing itself a huge disfavor by introducing this storyline into the mix. It's utterly implausible.

2. Troy Davis should be granted clemency on account of the fact that the appeals process was arguably mishandled and that 7 out of 9 witnesses that had testified against him later recanted their story.

I hate to use Will McAvoy's own argument against the case against Troy Davis' execution, but everything he said was true. Witnesses make lousy witnesses and could easily recant in the years after which the issue becomes a cause celebre. And arguing that the lawyers handling the appeals weren't good enough also makes sets dangerous precedent for future cases to be overturned on appeal simply because the issue of "good enough" is too subjective.

In the absence of incontrovertible evidence that could be used to exonerate Davis or a clear blunder in the handling of his appeals process, the original ruling must stand. The lengthy time it takes to take a case through due process when capital punishment is sought can easily distort our perception of how things happened as they happened. When the jury heard the evidence brought against Davis, they agreed, unanimously, that it was strong enough to warrant a conviction. Any relitigation of the issue would immediately be tainted by the fact that the case had become an extreme controversy after the fact.

3. Will McAvoy: I'm not allowed to get into advocacy.

When he explained his position to Don, this just immediately jumped out to me. Of course McAvoy is allowed to get into advocacy. And he's already done so. It would have been more prudent for him to state his original case, which is that the jury already decided, the trial is too far removed to relitigate, and that it would be both petty and useless to advocate on one case of capital punishment, even if it is somewhat of a big controversy.

Given the fact that McAvoy has already gone on air to say that he will make no attempt to hide his opinions from the audience, later seeing him say that he's not allowed to get into advocacy is a bit of a stretch.

4. The killing of al-Awlaki is a surprise to McAvoy and represents an egregious abuse of executive power.

This can't have been a surprise to any experienced news hand. The fact of the matter is that al-Awlaki had been marked for death for over a year before it actually happened. I know this because I read it in the Wall Street Journal's editorial pages a year before al-Awlaki was terminated via Predator strike. al-Awlaki cannot be granted the rights of due process a civilian enjoys in US jurisdiction if he is an enemy combatant.

His status as a senior operative within al-Qaeda made him an enemy combatant. The government of Yemen (I know, not the most revered of authorities) has already declared him outlaw and subject to death. The fact of the matter is, at the time of his sanctioned killing, he was an enemy combatant and therefore not entitled to normal procedures of due process as befitting an American civilian. The legal precedent had already been established in a case (Ex Parte Quirin) with similar circumstances.

All of this is readily available information. What is not readily known are the confidential courts and legal memorandums that authorized his killing. But any chase down that rabbit hole ultimately leads to a compromised ability for the executive to safeguard national security. For this type of incident, there simply isn't any smoke that suggests the government was acting irrationally, imprudently, or illegally. "Just trust us" is the implicit argument of Justice and Defense. In this case, I'm inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt.

5. Sloan Sabbath: Investors should look to Nigeria for the next oil supply boom.

The funny thing about The Newsroom is that although their journalists have a preternatural ability to sense how major events will turn out before they actually turn out, they can't get the details right when it comes to economics.

Nigeria's oil production has been stagnant since 2010 due to extreme corruption in the state owned petroleum industry. Meanwhile, the extraordinary increases in oil and gas production in the US, thanks to hydraulic fracturing (fracking), has lead Federal and international energy agencies to predict that the US will overtake Saudi Arabia as the top petroleum producer by 2020.

Widespread fracking had begun in earnest in the mid aughts and singlehandedly revived the flagging US petroleum and gas industries, which began their slow decline in the 70s, after conventional sources peaked. This had all been common knowledge in late 2011. If The Newsroom wants to credibly portray Sabbath as some economic genius, the least they could have done was have her stay on the economic knowledge curve at the time instead of just giving her a throwaway line that only sounds smart to the uninitiated.

6. Will McAvoy: I'm sick of this charade I have to put on for my Democratic/liberal newsroom colleagues.

What really pissed me off about Sorkin is how he discredited McAvoy's legitimate arguments against Troy Davis and al-Awlaki by having him express remorse to a complete stranger (the police officer) about those arguments he used. It's "winning" an argument by not actually winning the argument. The fact is those arguments are legitimate and they weren't addressed in a substantive manner. It was what McAvoy needed to do to let the audience know that he's still the secret liberal/progressive Sorkin wants him to be and it was the easiest way to "win" the internal debate within the show.

7. Rival news chick: Perry's gonna bomb out as soon as he opens his mouth.

Of course, The Newsroom gets the benefit of hindsight. And gives their prognostication to some random news chick that's so obviously going to be a love interest of Jim. So of course they have to make her look smart. At the time, the smart money (Intrade) still had Romney as the (slight) favorite to win the nomination. But nobody predicted that Perry would have flamed out in such spectacular fashion as he did (oops, gets me every time!). I remember the news coverage of Perry at the time of his nomination, and he was treated as the insta-frontrunner and the serious, credible alternative to Romney in a way that Huntsman never was.

8. Lisa: We're only living together because we can't afford to live apart. The rent is too damn high.

I know this is the line they used to give Maggie a reason to still be living with Lisa (to set up their eventual reconciliation), but come on. During this time, NYC rents had been in the midst of a renascence and Lisa could have easily found a roommate to replace Maggie.

9. Sloan Sabbath: I have 450k Twitter followers.

Gimme a break. Given Sloan's area of expertise and the fact that her real life counterpart, Maria Bartiromo, only has 85k, they should have picked a slightly more realistic number. I'd give her 150k at the most.

I know, ridiculously stupid nitpick. But that's why you read this blog.

Real Time With Bill Maher: Counterpoints (7/19/13)

I don't think I've said this before, but we didn't get a very good show tonight. Lots of cross talk. The panel was bad. The interview sucked. Really the only bright spot was Dan Savage's spirited semi-monologues. That being said, we had a show, it had some talking points, I gotta provide some counterpoints. So let's get to it.

John Hargrove: It's hard for sensible people to take me seriously because I'm a huge hypocrite and I don't even realize it.

I really wish Maher had explicitly called Hargrove out on his hypocritical self righteousness, but it was not to be. If you've been at SeaWorld for a decade and you only decided to resign now, after having been disillusioned for years (his own words), why didn't you resign sooner? And how can you possibly make a complete 180 without even telling the audience why you had such an about face on the issue?

Maher implicitly called him out when he said something to the effect of "what right do humans have an emotional relationship with and be entertained by killer whales?" Hargrove immediately jumped in after that, agreeing with Maher. And I can't take him seriously because he kept talking about his relationship (again, his words) with those Killer Whales. Being a trainer at SeaWorld obviously means he was complicit in entertaining other people by exploiting/leveraging his "relationship" with the whales. And yet he never really confesses his own sins. The sins belong completely to the corporation, who is an easily demonized target.

Grover Norquist: Let's talk, in an inarticulate fashion, about charter schools in Louisiana and the DC voucher program when the conversation is actually about racial bias in our legal system.

I really like low taxes. Every two weeks, the government gets a very sizable cut of my earnings and I'm furious about it. That being said, Norquist is a terrible spokesperson for small government and lower taxes. His attempt to reroute the conversation from George Zimmerman and the legal system to education was ill handled, distasteful, and intellectually dishonest. He can't think on his feet very quickly either. There's a lot of pauses and halts in his speech, as if he's trying to analyze precisely the right thing to say.

Rula Jebreal 1: I'm going to talk in a very self righteous manner, be a complete scold, and do it all through a very thick and very annoying accent.

I remember her from a previous panel, and she was terrible. And she did the same thing this panel. I'm honestly flummoxed as to why Maher keeps booking her. I've come to the conclusion is that it's because she's insanely attractive, because she has no other redeeming qualities whatsoever.

In a show that is supposed to be about intellectual discourse of American politics, she is somewhere close to the bottom of the totem pole. If you can't speak English fluently, you shouldn't be a panelist on a political show. It's really that simple.

Normally that wouldn't bother me so much, but that combined with the way she carries herself. She is incredibly arrogant, judgmental, and has absolute conviction in the drivel that she's saying. And the audience plays along with it because she's on their team and she can memorize enough talking points to hand out red meat to the base. She has absolutely nothing substantive to say.

Connie Mack: "I don't know that I have the same experience" growing up as a black guy.

Are you kidding me? Rich white guy doesn't have the same experience growing up as a black person? The fact that a retired politician has to mince words like that when we're talking about race between the most privileged racial group and the most disadvantaged racial group in the US absolutely astounds me.

This is something that Maher gets so frustrated by and it frustrates me to no end too. White people need to realize that being black in the US absolutely sucks. Hell, being anything nonwhite sucks compared to being white when it comes to how other people perceive you. Being white is to be a blank slate. Nobody will assume anything bad/weird about you if you're white. That changes for any other ethnic and racial group.

Bill Maher: With the Zimmerman ruling and Stand Your Ground and the other trial statistics I brought up, it seems like the legal system is telling white people that it's okay to shoot black people.

There is no racial component to Stand Your Ground. This ruling is a combination of the triumph of reasonable doubt, and the fact that there are still plenty of white people who have negative opinions of black people. The jury acquitted Zimmerman. And juries have acquitted white people who shot black people and then used the Stand Your Ground defense to exonerate themselves. Laws and regulations are enforced by fallible human beings. There's nothing wrong with the law. It's the people that are wrong.

In my view, Zimmerman should have been convicted of some type of manslaughter. It is unconscionable to be armed and approach somebody who is unarmed, get into a fight, and then shoot the other person. Zimmerman's life may have been in danger when he got into the fight, but he should have never approached Martin in the first place.

Had it been a black guy stalking a white person who was unarmed, confronted him, got into a fight, and eventually shot the white guy dead, he would have been found guilty of manslaughter. This is an edge case where race clearly played an issue.

Rula Jebreal 2: Explain why 90% of the prison population is comprised of minorities and why black people are disproportionately targeted in the Stop and Frisk program in New York. The legal system is disproportionately biased against black people.

This might be hard to hear, but it's probably because blacks and other minorities commit a disproportionate number of crimes.

I agree with Democrats, Maher, and Jebreal that you are definitely treated differently (and mostly in a negative way) if you're black. And when you get judged by 12 (or 6, depending on the jurisdiction), you're less likely to get the benefit of the doubt if you're black. There is definitely a case to be made that, on the margin, black people get a raw deal.

But can we get real for a second? The system is weighted against their favor, but it's not weighted 4x against black people. Gun homicides like the Zimmerman controversy are not the norm. The majority of gun homicides is black on black or minority against minority, and most of those homicides are drug and gang related. But when it comes to overall homicide, blacks were arrested for 49.7% of such instances in 2011. That is something you absolutely can't ignore.

The only area where the legal system (rather, the people within the legal system) are heavily biased against minorities (blacks in particular) is drug crime and sentencing upon conviction. If you legalized the possession and distribution of marijuana and cocaine, you'd eliminate the majority of racial disparity.

Rula Jebreal 3: Corporations shouldn't be threatening to pull advertisements from Rolling Stone. Free speech is a fundamental right.

I know it seems like I'm picking on Jebreal, but she honestly is an airhead and deserves it. Hey, Rula, Rolling Stone can have free speech and free press, but it can't have the right for companies to pay money to advertise in their product.

Observation: Grover Norquist has a thoroughly unlikable persona.

A Quick Thought on Detroit's Bankruptcy

A few hours ago, Detroit filed for Chapter 9 bankruptcy in Federal court. It needs to restructure an 18 billion dollar debt. It is the largest municipal bankruptcy in American history.

The cause is pretty easy to see. After decades of mismanagement by the city's officials, Detroit shrunk from a city of 1.8 million in 1950 to a city of just 700,000. Rising crime, corruption, and profligate misuse of taxpayer dollars all contributed to the decline and fall of one of the greatest American cities. Right now, the city spends half of all its tax revenue just servicing its pension and health obligations of retired municipal workers.

Although it is the currently the largest municipal bankruptcy ever, it will soon be eclipsed by other cities and counties. The tax exemption on municipal bonds created a gigantic pool of easy credit that states and municipalities gorged. They used those funds to build wasteful capital projects to appeal to politicians' vanity and guarantee exorbitant retiree benefits for government workers. Spending rapidly outpaced revenue and now many local governments find themselves drowning in red ink.

This is going to be a closely watched bellwether for the 4 trillion dollar municipal bond market. Depending on how secured creditors get treated by the bankruptcy court judges, this could have a cascading effect on interest rates for other municipal bonds. If that happens, state and local governments will experience higher debt loads and interest payments.

The recession took the biggest toll on state and local payrolls. Detroit could easily be a harbinger of even further cuts in state and local government.