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While I'd normally talk about the primaries in light of this weekend's action, I think the holiday deserves some thought today.

Martin Luther King, like "the Holocaust" or "the Founding Fathers", has become a perfunctory public relations tool. White America has the annoying tendency to bring him up as a form of tokenism, a la "And to show you how I'm down with the colored folk, I will now talk about how great I think MLK was." He's a backdrop for cheesy advertising, motivational speeches, and sidebars in textbooks. We bring him up a lot on our patronizing photo-op Trips into Harlem ("I support Dr. King…..and mandatory minimum sentencing!"). He's lauded for his "peaceful" and dignified approach (unlike that nasty Malcom X, who doesn't make white people feel quite so good about themselves). We remember and talk about, in essence, everything except what he actually stood for. We go as far as to innocuously call the holiday "Human Rights Day" just to completely de-contextualize and water down any potential discussion of the racial elephant in the room.

Let's not talk about how there are now more black men in prison than college – and that the black prison population has risen from 150,000 (in 1980) to 800,000 (today). A 350% increase in 25 years seems reasonable. Like many white Americans, I was raised to believe that there are more black people in the justice system because more black people commit crimes. I guess no one thought it strange that they apparently started committing all of these crimes in 1980. Maybe they had a national meeting and decided to go on a spree. We can't talk about that, because that would entail talking about how the entire "War on Drugs" is little more than a thinly-disguised War on the People We Don't Want In Our Neighborhoods. Of the black men born between 1978 and 1982, 16% are either dead or in prison. Think about that for a second.

Let's not talk about black/white income inequality, or the torrent of race-baiting we see from the media, talk radio, and elected officials, or the white hysteria about "reverse racism" and "racial quotas." Instead let's just warmly applaud a 45-second news story about that likeable man who had some sort of dream, a dream that, whatever it was, apparently worked out OK.

We live in a country in which intelligent people still raise their kids to roll up the windows in "black neighborhoods," to believe that everyone on welfare is black (and they're on it because they're too lazy to work), to think that the ignorant black people are going to unfairly take the law school spots that are rightly Ours, and to think that one can believe all of these things and somehow Not be a Racist. We live in a country where we don't debate racial issues, we debate Free Republic propaganda about how MLK, if alive today, would be rubbing elbows with Trent Lott in the GOP caucus. Can't blame the right wing for trying to claim him, since he and his message have been reduced entirely to Dalai Lama-esque mascot status.

Two days, two violent attacks, 140+ dead Iraqi civilians.

The surge is working! Someone get Petraeus another medal.

Two NPF questions for the gentle readers.

1. So, hypothetically, if I were to print up some ginandtacos swag (maybe t-shirts? coffee mugs?) would anyone be interested or would I just have a big box of them in my garage until I die? Would you be more likely to want something relatively plain or something with a crude, utterly side-splitting joke on it?

2. A strange thing be goin' on these days…ginandtacos' views are way up but the comments aren't. If I'm being boring or talking about un-comment-worthy topics, I would certainly hope that someone would tell me. Honesty is the best policy.

Huzzah!

In his first best-selling book, Downsize This!, Michael Moore made a good (if terribly oversimplified) point by comparing pictures of Flint after GM moved out with Oklahoma City after the bomb went off. Of course, the image of rubble where buildings once stood was essentially the same. Apparently some urban areas in the U.S. feel the same way about big mortgage lenders, raising some interesting questions about responsibility for one's actions and what it means to be a menace to our society.

Cleveland, one of the most beyond-devastated inner cities in the land, is suing 21 large mortgage lenders for intentionally making loans that they knew could not be repaid. On the surface most readers' reaction would be to cry "Bullshit!" a la someone suing McDonald's over hot coffee. But the city has legitimate points. Waves of foreclosures significantly reduce Cleveland's already-pitiful property tax earnings while increasing the drain on city services (police, fire, and maintenance costs increase around abandoned homes). The glut of foreclosed homes in turn depresses the prices of housing in the surrounding areas. For a city already on the edge, these changes can be crippling. Their schools, already among the worst and most underfunded in America, can scarcely afford to lose additional property tax revenue.

Baltimore is also joining in the fun by suing one lender (Wells Fargo) for predatory lending in poor (read: black) neighborhoods. Rates in those areas were nearly double the rates Wells Fargo peddled in other (read: not black) neighborhoods. A racial disparity in interest rates or lending practices would constitute a federal crime, of course. Again, the city's lawsuit notes the dramatic increase in the cost of caring for abandoned neighborhoods.

Unfortunately I think this is just the first step in A) an ugly economic downturn and B) a reckoning for 30 years of attempting to maintain the "American dream" of home ownership in the face of falling real wages and disappearing middle-class jobs. Remember when Carter gave his infamous "We must lower our standard of living" speech and was practically drawn and quartered? Well, 30 years later "we" don't have to do anything – it has been done for us. When real wages don't increase and when good jobs are replaced by Wal-Mart style employment ($7/hr, no benefits, no pension) the only way to keep the dirty common folk from….well, getting pissed….is to create the illusion of wealth through credit. Sure, your wages are shrinking, but here's a couple of credit cards! That'll make up the difference. We know you'll charge more than you can pay back, but it's alright. Just make minimum payments for 30 years. At 20%.

So too goes it with home ownership. This whole "subprime lending" fiasco was perfume attempting to cover the stench of a simple fact: most Americans can no longer expect to be able to afford a home. But in order to create the illusion that they can, it has become necessary to abandon all common sense in lending standards. The only way someone making peanuts is going to get a home is at usurious rates.

People know when their standard of living falls. What they could once afford is no longer attainable. The past decade or two have been nothing but an extended exercise in distraction. John Doe can't afford his lifestyle anymore, but banks (with complicity from the political system) are more than happy to let him charge it. Banks lend money that can't be repaid knowing that they will make even more if people keep chipping away with minimum payments. Unfortunately, as the subprime fiasco is proving on a daily basis, the house of cards collapses when even those minimum payments exceed the capacity of a nation's stagnant or falling wages to pay.

Rather than seeing the headline (courtesy our pals at Feministing) "Huckabee Visits Crisis Pregnancy Center" as a bald attempt at pandering – which it is – it struck me instead as the combination of two things that make me want to punch someone.

Let me state up front that I'm not hostile to the message that "Crisis Pregnancy Centers" (the source of those PREGNANT? NEED HELP? billboards nationwide) pitch. I have no problem with a group distributing information about "abortion alternatives" as they call it. If people want to hear what they have to say, good for them. What bothers me – no, let's say "infuriates the shit out of me" – is the increasingly common false equivalency of politicians treating CPCs and Planned Parenthood as two (equal) sides of the same coin.

Abortions account for about 1% of the medical services provided by Planned Parenthood. Millions of low income people (did you know they treat men too? kids?) depend entirely on PP for healthcare they could not otherwise afford. There are doctors on staff at all time in addition to nurses, med techs, and so on. You know, the kind of stuff you find at a place that provides healthcare services.

What does a "Crisis Pregnancy Center" offer? Bulk-buy drugstore pregnancy tests and "counselors." And the quality of psychological care they provide must indeed be immense. To quote this terrific piece on CPCs that fraudulently advertise themselves as abortion clinics:

Curious, I called Austin Life Care, a prominent local crisis pregnancy center and grilled the unlucky receptionist about the services offered. She said they offered pregnancy tests and counseling. When I asked about the credentials of the counselors, she replied, "Well, we have all different levels of education and some of them are really academic."

In other words, we have a bunch of people from the Jumpin' Jesus Pentecostal Church, some of whom have mail-order degrees in Theology. Huckabee visited the Carolina Pregnancy Center, whose "counseling" program is an evening Bible study group. One of the primary excuses used to funnel money to these groups (they spring up daily and wildly outnumber PP, a testament to the low start-up costs associated with renting a storefront and handing out pee tests from Walgreen's) is that they provide "education." Spend a few minutes browsing the websites of CPCs and you can see what a crock of happy horseshit this is. Among stock gems like "How to tell your boyfriend" and "Telling your parents" is information about the only medical condition (ahem) they appear to care about treating: "Post Abortion Stress Syndrome." Which, unlike postpartum depression or the psychological damage done by bombarding emotionally fragile people with guilt and brimstone, isn't real. They're also not above making up medical information, telling women that abortion will make them sterile and cause cancer. I guess that's the kind of freedom inherent in not having any real medical professionals involved.

Yet more laws and more states seek to legitimize these places as legitimate providers of medical and educational services. Texas forked over $5 million (think of all the pee tests that will buy!), Congress has shelled out $60 million to CPCs in pursuit of Just Say No: The Sex Edition programs, and Congress wants to give them ultrasound machines. I find this last point particularly disgusting. Without the doctors to use them (ultrasounds are a medical procedure, not a "look at baby's toes" service) all that will do is create a shinier veneer of providing medical care where there is none to be found. Why is state money earmarked for organizations whose only "public service" is pimping their ideological message and flat-out wrong educational material?

They must really have a powerful, relevant message if they need to lie so much, misrepresent themselves, and suckle the tax dollar teat to stay afloat.

I usually prefer to space these out a bit but sometimes fate intervenes. In this case, by "fate" I mean Newt Gingrich. When you recover from the shock of the idea that Newt Gingrich could be the source of a logical fallacy, continue.

Non Causa fallacies are straightforward; they involve attributing causality where none exists. As Fallacy Files notes, however, not all such arguments are fallacies. It can be a simple mistake or something that turns out to be incorrect even when based on the best available evidence. A doctor in the 1500s who concluded that too much blood in the body caused illness was not using a Non Causa argument – he was simply making the wrong causal inference because he had limited knowledge and information. A true NC argument ignores or neglects evidence of the real causal relationship while asserting one for which no evidence exists. While the most popular Non Causa is the "correlation = causation" variety, that topic deserves to be covered separately and I'll focus on more straightforward matters here.

Causality is a tricky issue anywhere outside of the hard sciences. In the social sciences or economics, such arguments are inherently inductive and, to some degree, subjective. What really causes poverty? Crime? Unemployment? Voter turnout? Of course we cannot say with certainty. However, we can say with certainty what does not cause those things. The record of a city's football team does not cause poverty. Low voter turnout is not caused by the number of White Castle restaurants in one's area. Crime is not caused by solar flares. So while several things can be argued to cause those phenomena, thousands of other things can be ruled out.

I'm going to let Newt take it away at this point, from his appearance on ABC's This Week pimping his new book of fresh, radical solutions, Real Change.**

Michigan was in a recession when the rest of the country was growing. Other than the states hit by Katrina, Michigan which had been hit by a Democratic governor, Democratic legislature, raised taxes. Yet none of the candidates are willing to be radical enough. Real Change focuses a long section on Detroit. Detroit has gone from a 1,800,000 people in 1950 and highest per capita income in the United States to 950,000 people and it ranks today 62nd in per capita income. And yet nobody want to get up and say…tell the truth. The truth is large bureaucracies are destructive . High taxes are destructive. The system we built discourages any businesses from opening up in Detroit. The schools don't deliver. They uh they do deliver paychecks. They do take care of the union, but they don't deliver for the kids (…) So I think we need dramatically deeper and more fundamental change.

Got that? The decline of the Rust Belt (and the utter devastation of places like Cleveland and Detroit, for whom "decline" is far too prosaic a term) is the fault of electing Democrats, "high taxes" and "bureaucracy." This completely disregards the fact that Detroit has no more "bureaucracy" than any other large urban area, many of which are not declining, and that high-tax states like Illinois, New York, and California are the economic engines of America. And let's also ignore the number of Democrat-electing areas that aren't experiencing these problems. If we put our heads together and really thought about it, might we come up with some better causal explanations?

Maybe. Perhaps we could look at the the fact that Detroit has been hemmoraging high-paying manufacturing jobs for 40 years thanks to free trade agreements. We could note that Michigan's largest employers by far, the Big Three auto manufacturers, have been run into the ground by mismanagement, corner-cutting, and horseshit products. We could point out that the "failing" schools have been defunded to a degree that might make Trent Lott blush. You could question all of these explanations, but do you think they might be a little stronger or explain more of the problem than electing Democrats and having bureaucracy?

The sad thing about Gingrich is he can't even aspire to make a decent illogical causal inference in the form of a correlation = causation fallacy. The conditions he blames are so vague and all-encompassing ("bureaucracy," "high" taxes, and voting for Democrats) that to say they correlate with anything is an incomprehensible stretch. Spike Milligan said that money can't buy friends, but it can buy a higher class of enemy. Sadly, in Newt's case education, money, and experience have bought him neither a clue nor a higher class of bad argument.

**(In case you were wondering, his new, fresh, radical solution is to reduce spending and cut taxes)

Before I talk in significant depth about Mike Huckabee's "FairTax" – the latest branding of the conservative wet dream of a National Sales Tax "replacing" the IRS – let me give you a quick introduction to what kind of shady fuckers we are dealing with. Huckabee claims that the sales tax rate would be 23%, but it's 30 cents on the dollar. How is that 23%? Well, 30 cents is 23% of $1.30, which is the cost of a $1 purchase after the tax is added.

They are calculating the tax rate as a percentage of the cost with the tax included. Because 23% sounds a lot less intimidating than 30%, which is what 30 cents on a dollar is the last time I checked.

I believe that his championing of the "FairTax" says more about who Huckabee is than anything else. And make no mistake, he is a pandering, lousy politician who happens to be right of William F. Buckley on essentially everything. The ask-no-questions, read-the-press-release-into-the-camera media bought heavily into his effort to sell himself as a moderate, but the reality is that he's a Baptist preacher with no foreign policy knowledge and economic ideas that consign most Republicans to the loony fringe.

The idea of "scrapping the IRS" has inherent appeal, and people like Huckabee know it. Never too proud to pander, they beat on the IRS straw man every time they start to slip. The idea of scrapping it in favor of something called the "FairTax" is almost too cynical to measure. Like a person who introduces a statement with "I'm not a racist…" is inevitably about to say something really racist, calling something "FairTax" is the finest possible indication that it is really, really unfair.

The national sales tax is the kind of issue that used to separate the contenders from the fringe in the GOP. You could expect to hear it once every four years from the likes of Phil Gramm, Jack Kemp, or some other Why Is This Guy Running case. That a leading contender like Huckabee is pitching it in 2008 shows you just how far our political discourse has shifted to the right. Why is it not a more mainstream idea? Getting rid of the IRS sounds awesome, right?

Sales tax revenues are both wildly unpredictable and severely regressive. The more money you make, the smaller percentage of it you pay in sales tax. And in any given year, the amount of tax revenue will depend on how much people decide to spend. So the challenge of mainstreaming such a bizarre idea is to make it "fair" to the poor and revenue-neutral compared to the current system.

In the contemporary example, the FairTax gives a "prebate" – a check for a couple of grand per year – to each household to offset the taxes they pay on the first $20,000 of income/spending. Not only does this require the government to front half a trillion in cash each year, but who exactly is going to take care of this? There's no IRS, after all. Well Huckabee proposes that the "United States Fair Tax Federal Revenue Administration and State Tax Authority Reconciliation Service" will handle the bureaucratic side of things. Does that sound like a small, efficient organization? Does keeping track of how much money is being mailed to whom every year sound like a simple job? No, what Mike Huckabee is disingenuously promising is to give the IRS a new name. That's helpful.

Second, the fine print on the FairTax notes that 30% (oops, I mean 23%) is the minimum rate that will be required. The Brookings Institute estimates that a revenue-neutral rate based on 8 years of Bush spending would be 44% whereas the Joint Congressional Committee on Taxation estimates 57%. The group's estimate of 30% (sorry, 23%) assumes massive reductions in federal spending – in the midst of a $200 million per day war. And these estimates are before the "exemptions" that would inevitably follow for things like home mortgages.

Let's play along for a second and pretend that it's revenue-neutral at something like 40%. So we enact the new plan. If it's revenue-neutral and doesn't require appreciably less bureaucracy than the current system, what the hell is the point of making the change? It's simple – people under $30k pay nothing in taxes, those between $30-$100k get a tax hike, and those making six figures get an enormous tax break. Families that spend most of their income (i.e. the poor and middle class) will part with more of their money than before, whereas earners who save/invest a lot will pay not a penny on that income.

Mike Huckabee has gotten a great big pass on this. Can you even imagine what would happen if a Democrat proposed a plan that would raise taxes on incomes between $30k and $100k to forty or fifty percent?

(I'm doing a real post today because yesterday was substandard)

Someone trained in formal logic is going to point out that the use of anecdotal evidence is not a fallacy per se, and that is correct. However, it lends itself so readily to the construction of other fallacies (specifically of the post hoc, unwarranted generalization, or regressive variety) that I feel justified in pointing the spotlights at it.

Anecdotal evidence is simply using an example or anecdote – "I know a person who smoked 2 packs per day and lived to be 90" – to support an argument without acknowledging the extent to which it can be generalized. Often, as in the example I just used, anecdotal evidence is cited to contradict something supported by all available evidence. There's no logically sound way to argue that smoking isn't bad for you, so bring up an (unverifiable) anecdote of someone who beat the overwhelming odds. Like its friends heresay and conjecture, anecdotal evidence strikes at the heart of how good arguments are constructed and supported. If the evidence for an argument is unverifiable, unfalsifiable, or statistically improbable then the argument, regardless of whether or not it has merit, is invalid. I would be equally incorrect to argue "I know someone who smoked and died of lung cancer, so smoking is dangerous." Correct conclusion, but irrelevant to the "evidence" cited.

Talk radio and right-wing columnists are an excellent source of anecdotal evidence (not to mention heresay, conjecture, and sweeping generalizations). Deeply serious and respected NY Times columnist Bill Kristol, please step up and support my claim! (from "President Huckabee?"):

At a Friday night event at New England College in Henniker, (Huckabee) played bass with a local rock band, Mama Kicks. One secular New Hampshire Republican’s reaction: "Gee, he’s not some kind of crazy Christian. He’s an ordinary American."

Anecdotal, and totally unverifiable. How much of the population feels this way? Is it this person or millions of Republicans? To the deeply serious Bill Kristol, one guy's offhand comment is proof of Huckabee's "widespread appeal" to non-Bible thumping Arkansans. Another gem comes from Rush Limbaugh's reaction to the New Hampshire primary, which he blames on his pet theory of "Out of state buses" (i.e., candidates bus in voters from other states to illegally participate in the primary). Rush supports his theory based on callers (heresay) who "saw a lot more people than usual" at their town polling places (anecdotal) and concluded (conjecture) that this is because voters were imported from other states. That's the complete Trifecta of bullshit non-evidence categories in one argument. Thanks Rush!

Anecdotal evidence…isn't. That phrase is a misnomer. I should emphasize that evidence for valid arguments can be anecdotal; this fallacy doesn't mean that your argument is wrong, but rather that your evidence doesn't prove it one way or the other. Maybe hypnosis and miracle dietary supplements can cause weight loss. If that statement is true, it's not because you know someone who tried it and lost 30 pounds.

Here's another happy reminder of how Great the Greatest Story Never Told economy truly is. Creative free-market types that we are, Americans are finding a clever way out of the whole home mortgage crisis: arson. Or, as my ethnic-slur-a-minute high school community called it, "Greek Lightning." I think the classic form of the joke was two Greek guys standing in the kitchen of a gyros stand saying "Remember, no work tomorrow – fire in kitchen tonight."