(UPDATE: Check out the comments section for more examples of racism, homophobia, and generally insanity. What a conference! (and remember, Cuccinelli spoke there yesterday) – promoted by lowkell)

As you watch this video and read about what happened, just keep in mind that CPAC (and the GOP more broadly) is overwhelmingly white. Why is that? Perhaps because their policies are horrible, and also because the party is filled with the type of people who used to infest the old Dixiecrats (Strom Thurmond, George Wallace, Jesse Helms, etc.), but thank god left the Democratic Party. Of course, they’re now in the Republican Party, thanks in part to many years of Lee Atwater’s (and Richard Nixon’s, Ronald Reagan’s, Karl Rove’s, etc.) “Southern Strategy,” and from the looks of it, they really really REALLY do not like being called out for their utter lack of racial inclusiveness.

Finally, I’d just note that this John Birch Society freak show, aka the CPAC conference, is considered not just totally mainstream in today’s GOP, but highly desirable. Note that raging homophobe/science denier/fanatic Ken Cuccinelli just spoke there yesterday. Also note that leading 2016 GOP presidential possibilities – like Bob McDonnell, Marco Rubio, Rand Paul, etc. – have been clamoring to speak there (or have been seriously bummed that they were snubbed, as in the case of T-Bob). This really says it all about today’s Republican Party.

P.S. Great snarky comment at Daily Kos: “Ladies and gentlement, don’t panic, but…there is a black man in the building.  Repeat: A black man in the building!”

P.P.S. Serious question: is there ANY equivalent of CPAC on the progressive and/or Democratic side? I’ve asked several people, and nobody can think of anything even close. Yet the corporate/idiot media keeps insisting on some sort of equivalency. Amazing.

You can skip most of this, but definitely watch starting around 6:25 of this video, as Paul Begala kicks some serious conservative butt (on whether the debt and deficits matter).

Begala: Let me quote a conservative hero, Dick Cheney, who said Ronald Reagan taught us deficits don’t matter. As he was about everything, Dick Cheney was wrong. He was wrong then, and he’s wrong now. Of course deficits matter. But any one of you who supported the Bush tax cuts, the Bush war in Iraq, or the Bush prescription drug entitlement plan, has no business talking about debt; just sit down and shut up, let the grownups handle it. (booing) You’re welcome. I helped Bill Clinton balance the budget and build a surplus.

Why? Because we had good economic times. In good economic times, you pay down the deficit – as Clinton did, but Reagan did not and Bush did not – and in bad times you do have to stimulate in the near term, as thank god President Obama is doing. But any of you who caused this debt and deficit – no no, you forgot the rule, you have to hush up if you supported creating the deficit – it’s like listening to lectures on hygiene from Typhoid Mary. So just let us grownups handle it; we Democrats will balance the budget once again.

Hahahaha, OWNED! 🙂

P.S. Also check out 13 minutes in for Begala’s utter deconstruction of the faux Republican hysteria over Benghazi. As Begala points out, “when our embassies and consulates in 11 places were attacked by terrorists in the Bush administration, none of you said boo – in Uzbekistan, in Karachi, in Saudi Arabia, in Syria, in Yemen, in Athens – all around the world we were under attack under the Bush administration, and Republicans voted against spending the money to harden those facilities and make them safe; so friends if you’re upset about what happened in Benghazi and I am, I suggest my Republican friends that look in the mirror.”

Chap Petersen with Justin Fairfax (03/05/2013). Please watch, forward, share, like, tweet and join us at Congressman Connolly's St. Patrick's Day celebration this Sunday.

19th Annual St. Patrick's Day Fete
http://www.gerryconnolly.com/fete

Just when you thought Ken Kookinelli couldn’t get any creepier or more bizarre, he says s*** like this.

How about [appealing] to women?

I’m a person who appeals to women with a variety of issues that they just happen to care more about that I also happen to care about. I’ve worked to improve mental health and worked to help the mentally ill for over a decade and a half, including when I was in the legislature. Women’s issues aren’t just abortion. Women’s issues are everything women care about. And I have an awful lot of issues that I appeal to women on, just as a natural course.

So, let’s get this straight: the first thing Cuckoo’s mind goes to when he’s asked about how Republicans, including himself, might better appeal politically to women is “mental health” and “help[ing] the mentally ill.” Not jobs, the economy, health care, education, or a million other things, but focusing on the “mentally ill.” I’ve run this quote by a bunch of people, without telling them whose quote it was, and they all reacted with varying degrees of “WTF” and “that’s creepy” and “I didn’t know mental health was specifically a women’s issue.” But for Crazy Cuccinelli? Who knows how that guy’s mind works; I actually don’t want to know…

P.S. Of course, this is the same guy who doesn’t “believe” in science, thinks the government is using Social Security numbers to “track” him, has flirted with “birtherism,” etc, etc. So what else would we expect?

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[This is the 14th installment in the “Swinging for the Fences” series. A compendium of the preceding entries, complete with links, is found below the present installment.  This is the second round on how the market economy generates a force that, if uncorrected, drives a society to develop in ways determined by the system rather than chosen by the people who in that society.]

My book, The Illusion of Choice, is about  how the market economy is only partially a means for human choice to determine the course of things.  The system itself has its own inherent dynamic which, if not corrected by means of collective decisions made through government, will take a society in a direction chosen by the system, and not the people.  The market steers in certain directions because it sees and is responsive to some areas of value while it is blind to others.

There are several aspects of this.  One of these is what economists call “externalities.”  These are impacts of market transactions on people or systems that are not party to those transactions.

Here’s a passage from the book which examines this problem.  It begins with the problem of ice on the roads in winter, and what solutions people choose for dealing with the problem.  The market gives out information through its pricing.  The market ideologues treat “market prices” as embodying great wisdom.  But the blind spots corrode that wisdom significantly.

Quoting:

“Rock salt is quite effective in keeping both private driveways and public highways from icing up… The runoff of the salt, he explained, causes damage to underground cables, car bodies, bridges, and groundwater. The cost of these damages is twenty to forty times the price of the salt to the person or organization buying and using it… There is an alternative product to rock salt that produces no such damage from runoff. It is called CMA, and it costs a good deal more than the salt. It costs less, however, than the damages the salt inflicts. Yet, as Morris writes [in a Washington Post article], ‘No highway department, homeowner or business would purchase large quantities of CMA today even if it were widely available, because the individual doesn’t care about cost, only price.’

Rock salt is an example, but (I continue):

“How is rock salt different from a million other things we use and countless things we do except, perhaps, in degree? The cost of rock salt is many times higher than its price. But are not the costs of most things we consume in our economy higher than their prices? Everything that in production or use involves the consumption of carbon-based fuels is contributing to the greenhouse effect, which, according to present scientific consensus, threatens disruption of the global climate and possible world-wide famine within a human lifetime.”

The market ideologues, like Milton Friedman, know about the problem of externalities. But they don’t seem to recognize how significant are the implications of this problem for their overall rationale for putting our destiny into the hands of the market.

Those of the Milton Friedman school just don’t seem to realize that these externalities are so pervasive that, like so much rock salt sprinkled liberally across the landscape, they rust out the iron-clad logic of the market ideology. As a result, many of their ideological assumptions become questionable.

    (1) If important costs and benefits are disregarded in market transactions, how meaningful are the values that the market assigns to the goods exchanged, and what happens to the market’s claim of efficiency?

    (2) If nontransactors must suffer damages to which they have not consented, what happens to the claim that the market metes out justice? And, finally,

    (3) if each of us is the unwilling victim of countless transactions in which we have no say, how well does the market protect the liberty of any of us to choose our destiny?

In the context of “Swinging for the Fences,” and our exploration of systemic forces that must be controlled or overcome if we are able to create a future we would desire, the bottom line is this:  we use an economic system that, unless we correct for its defects, will drag us into a future in which those values that get attended to in transactions between buyers and sellers get magnified in importance, and those values that fall outside the concerns of the immediate parties to the transaction will be neglected.  

This leads to a society whose mix of wealth and poverty is warped and unbalanced, and suboptimal for human fulfillment.

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The Series Is Introduced with These Entries:

Swinging for the Fences: Please Join Me in this Bold New Effort  

Swinging for the Fences: The Fable of the Magnet

The Spirit Behind “Swinging for the Fences” is the Same Spirit that’s Expressed in My Campaign Speech that Went Viral Through this Video

The First Round on the “Magnets Consisted of These:

An Unwelcome Driver of Social Evolution: The Parable of the Tribes  

Swinging for the Fences: How the Market Economy Shapes Our Destiny  

Swinging for the Fences: Polarization as a Form of Cultural Breakdown  

Swinging for the Fences: The Transmission of Culture Through Time

Then There Were a Few Improvizational Offerings;

A Sick and Broken Spirit

Swinging for the Fences: Hunting for Very Big Game

Problems in the Religion Are Symptoms of Something Deeper

Second Round on the Four “Magnets”:

Swinging for the Fences: The Parable of the Tribes–Step One A Breakthrough Unprecedented in the History of Life

Swinging for the Fences: The Parable of the Tribes– Step Two: The Circumstances from the Human Breakthrough Make the Struggle for Power Inevitable

Swinging for the Fences: The Parable of the Tribes–Step Three: Selection for the Ways of Power

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Andy Schmookler, an award-winning author, political commentator, radio talk-show host, and teacher, was the Democratic nominee for Congress from Virginia’s 6th District.  He is the author of various books including Fool’s Gold: The Fate of Values in a World of Goods.