Joel Mathis

I bow to no man in my love of the Philadelphia Daily News, but I'm occasionally driven to distraction by one odd habit of the newspaper: Printing letters to the editor that are simply wrong or misleading on the facts—without correction or any indication to readers that the information in the letter is incorrect. Understand, I'm not talking about a difference of opinion here. I'm talking about easily quantifiable distortions, like Michael Kubacki's letter in today's paper: In fact, prior to Citizens United, there were a number of corporations that enjoyed unlimited political-speech rights. Philadelphia Media Network Inc., which owns the Daily News, was one of them. In fact, every corporation that owned a newspaper or a radio or TV station was allowed to say whatever it wished, whenever it wished. Other corporations, however, could not. The major effect of the Citizens United case was simply to level that playing field.   Let us cut through the usual dreary rhe

A new paper from AEI's Kevin Hassett and Aparna Mathur says what you've heard about exploding income inequality in the United States is wrong: It's not really happening, they say, because consumption trends have remained relatively stable—the rich are consuming more, yes, but so are the not as rich.  It's a variation of the old "even poor people have color TVs now!" argument. This is completely misleading. Here is how you know it's misleading. Nowhere in the paper do Hassett and Mathur use the word "debt." And nowhere in the paper do the duo use the word "credit."Nor "bankruptcy." Instead, the two suggest that debt is something kids do and adults pay their way out of: "I ndividuals are generally assumed to be  able to smooth consumption by borrowing in the  low-income years and saving in the high-income  years." Only that's not really true, at least not anymore.  Here's what personal household deb

A reader of the Reading (Ca.) Record Searchlight does not like my take on the immigration debate. He writes: You start by saying Obama did a "righteous thing." By whose definition? Is circumventing congress righteous in your opinion? Are constsnt rewards for illegal immigrants a good thing, knowing their presence puts millions of Americans out of work (including minorities, the poor, the young, and blue collar workers) and costing us well over $100 billion per years a righteous thing? I am assuming you are on the liberal side of things. Liberals seem to operate on emotion. I think that they believe that heart-felt emotion trumps reason, logic, and adhearance to the law. You admit that we, as a nation, have the right to defend its borders and enforce our laws, but you just don't want us to do that for "moral" reasons. Huh? is it moral that the people of our country constantly suffer at the hands of of millions of illegals and a federal government that has an ag

Chinese Data Said to Be Manipulated, Understating Slowdown - NYTimes.com : "Record-setting mountains of excess coal have accumulated at the country’s biggest storage areas because power plants are burning less coal in the face of tumbling electricity demand. But local and provincial government officials have forced plant managers not to report to Beijing the full extent of the slowdown, power sector executives said.  Electricity production and consumption have been considered a telltale sign of a wide variety of economic activity. " One quick, obvious thought: Of course China's economy is slowing down. It's an export-based manufacturing economy--and consumers in the rest of the world are either A) holding onto their cash, B) don't have any cash, or C) are paying down old credit cards. We're not buying as much stuff as we used to . That means China can't sell as much as it used to. China may be stronger than a lot of Western nations, but n a globalized eco

The New York Times reports that even when Mitt Romney lost, he won : "The private equity firm, co-founded and run by Mitt Romney, held a majority stake in more than 40 United States-based companies from its inception in 1984 to early 1999, when Mr. Romney left Bain to lead the Salt Lake City Olympics. Of those companies, at least seven eventually filed for bankruptcy while Bain remained involved, or shortly afterward, according to a review by The New York Times. In some instances, hundreds of employees lost their jobs. In most of those cases, however, records and interviews suggest that Bain and its executives still found a way to make money." The Times adds: " Bain structured deals so that it was difficult for the firm and its executives to ever really lose, even if practically everyone else involved with the company that Bain owned did , including its employees, creditors and even, at times, investors in Bain’s funds." If there's a crisis of capitalism th

Ben and I debate the president's DREAM Act order in this week's column for Scripps . My take: Obama did a righteous thing.  Yes, America has a right to defend its borders. And yes, it has the right to deport people who came and lived in our country illegally.  But it would be morally wrong to deport young people who came to the country as children -- and who, having lived here most of their lives, genuinely understand themselves to be Americans. The sins of the father, after all, should not be visited upon the son.  In a sane political culture, Congress would have passed a law -- the DREAM Act -- codifying such principles. We do not live in a sane political culture: The last attempt to pass the act, in 2010, won a majority of votes in the Senate, but could not clear a filibuster. (The filibuster is evil, but that's a discussion for another time.)  So it's disingenuous of people like Rubio to suggest that the president's act made it "harder to fin

I wrote about it for The Philly Post. A taste : "At times, I wonder if I’m ruining him.  Why? Because writing takes sustained thought. And sustained thought is hard to come by when your kid needs clothes, needs to go outside, needs to go inside, needs something to eat, needs something to drink—”I’m so very hungry and firsty” are words he utters a dozen times a day—needs boo-boos kissed, needs a book read, needs a hug, needs to interrupt me when I’m on the phone, needs, needs, needs, needs everything but to take a goddamned nap once in awhile.  Sometimes I give him my iPad and send him off to watch Thomas The Tank Engine for a couple of hours—just so I can get some work done. Great parenting, right?"

It's been less than a year after Stu Bykofsky creeped out Philadelphia with his wink-wink did-he-or-didn't-he? column about his trip to Thailand and the easy availability of sex with prostitutes there. Today, he's writing—again— about Asian women and sex. To be fair, the topic is at least newsworthy: Philadelphia Housing Authority director Michael Kelly resigned last week and admitted an affair with Audrey Lim, a Singapore native who also got the job of PHA's human resources director under Kelly. Bizarrely, though, Kelly—who comprised one-half of the affair and who was, after all, the person who apparently abused his authority in this case—gets only a passing mention in Byko's column. Instead, Stu weaves a tale in which Lim spins a web with her dragon lady wiles: Her name is Audrey Lim and she is from Singapore. She did the right things to prepare herself for success. She earned a master's degree in occupational therapy, a master's in government adminis

At The Claremont Review of Books , William Voegeli--friend and occasional nemesis--acknowledges popular discontent with capitalism, and intriguingly suggests that can be fixed by making capitalism something people do--as opposed to something that happens to people. Most intriguingly, he suggests giving workers a stake in their companies by tying wages--in part or in whole--to the success of the enterprise. He suggests that labor unions have been the biggest obstacle to such an arrangement: "The greatest monument to the illusion that employees can and should prosper regardless of the economic condition of their employer is the rusting ruin that's the American labor movement. In Which Side Are You On? (1991), labor attorney Thomas Geoghegan lamented that the failure to take the biggest equity position it could in the industries where it represented workers "was the longest-running mistake in the history of labor, the unwitting, almost Gandhi-like renunciation of power.&quo

David French says that liberals are so committed to gay marriage that they'd be in favor even if it demonstrably harmed children of gay marriage: "There could exist definitive social science that homosexual families produce — on average — worse outcomes for their children than heterosexual families, and the fervor of the gay-marriage advocates would be undimmed. After all (and like no-fault divorce), the case for gay marriage has never been about the welfare of children, but instead, the fulfillment of adults.  " At risk of saying, "I know you are but what am I?": Does anybody really think that the mass of social conservatives would drop their opposition to gay marriage even if definitive proof existed that children did better in gay families? I think the mass of opposition to gay marriage is rooted in religious beliefs—people believe it to be morally wrong—and field research probably isn't going to persuade them otherwise. The emphasis on "the welfa

Walter Pincus makes a sensible suggestion : "Given today’s situation, why doesn’t President Obama link his request to restore Clinton-level taxes on the wealthy to the $88.5 billion requested for fiscal 2013 to pay for continuing the war in Afghanistan and counterterrorism efforts worldwide? That Overseas Contingency Operations (OCO) account, the supplemental appropriation created to fund Iraq, Afghanistan and other military actions abroad, is expected to continue as long as the United States has troops in Afghanistan and elsewhere overseas confronting terrorists.  For planning purposes, the Congressional Budget Office sees the OCO account running $44 billion a year through 2022.  What about Obama, Romney or even hawkish members of Congress introducing a special excise tax on telephone calls or even Internet usage or ending some tax loopholes to pay that $44 billion a year. Taxes have been used to pay for America’s past wars going back to the War of 1812 — except for Iraq and Afg

French Bookstores Are Still Prospering - NYTimes.com :  "Since 1981 the “Lang law,” named after its promoter, Jack Lang, the culture minister at the time, has fixed prices for French-language books. Booksellers — even Amazon — may not discount books more than 5 percent below the publisher’s list price, although Amazon fought for and won the right to provide free delivery.  Last year as French publishers watched in horror as e-books ate away at the printed book market in the United States, they successfully lobbied the government to fix prices for e-books too. Now publishers themselves decide the price of e-books; any other discounting is forbidden.  There are also government-financed institutions that offer grants and interest-free loans to would-be bookstore owners." Notice who wins in this scenario: Publishers and booksellers. Readers? Not so much. It's readers who benefit from price competition, after all. Consider this: The list price of " Do Not Ask What Good

Philly cop charged with selling heroin :  "THE IDEA to start selling heroin apparently wasn't dumb enough in the mind of young Philly cop Jonathan Garcia.  The 23-year-old had to go and do it on duty.  In uniform.  Across the street from the district headquarters where he was assigned in Point Breeze." In fairness: There is no John McNesby quote defending the guy.

A New York Times feature on how even professional football players are saying they won't let their kids play, for fear of long-term health problems: "Jay Coakley, a sports sociologist at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, said: “Football is really on the verge of a turning point here. We may see it in 15 years in pretty much the same place as boxing or ultimate fighting.”  In other words, less a lucrative American colossus and more a niche sport beloved for its brutality." On a related note, I (finally!) watched the pilot episode of " Friday Night Lights " last night, after years of hearing worshipful hubub from my friends. I was particularly struck by an early scene in which Taylor Kitsch's character--having shown up to practice half-drunk--is put at the center of a circle of teammates and tackled by each of them, taking turns, while the coach yells at him for his transgression. The coach in the series is supposed to be a good guy. And the

At NRO , Nash Keune asks why the food stamp program is still growing if unemployment is coming down: "In 2000, only 17.3 million people were on food stamps. That number has ballooned to 46.6 million. Of course, it makes sense that participation in a countercyclical program would increase during a recession. But the number of people using food stamps has grown much more than the participation in other similar programs. For example, Medicaid spending increased 27 percent during the recession, while food-stamp spending has jumped 110 percent.  Conversely, as the unemployment rate has come down in the last couple of years, the participation rates have actually jumped. From FY 2009 to FY 2011 the number of people receiving food stamps increased by 11.2 million even while the unemployment rate declined modestly. Even according to the rosy economic predictions of the Congressional Budget Office, the number of people on food stamps is projected to drop back only to 33.7 million by 202

I'm not sure what to make of this assertion from Victor Davis Hanson at NRO : "Suddenly around October the world will become absolutely unsafe. In these dangerous times, Americans must forget their differences, come together, and embrace a bipartisan unity — given that it may be necessary, after all, to hit the Iranian nuclear facilities, since we’ll have learned that the bomb may be a reality by, say, mid-November. Just as we have been reminded that Barack Obama has saved us by his brave decisions to use double agents in Yemen, computer viruses in Iran, Seal Team Six in Pakistan, and philosophically guided Predator assassination hits, so too a strike against Iran may suddenly be of vital national-security interest, though keenly lamented by a Nobel laureate nose-deep in Thomas Aquinas. " Emphasis added. There is a double-standard at work over the last 30 years or so: When Republican presidents go to war, they're righteously defending the country. When Democratic

Census Bureau : "In spring 2007, there were 19.7 million shared households — defined as a household with at least one “additional” adult. An additional adult is a person 18 or older who is not enrolled in school and is neither the householder, the spouse nor the cohabiting partner of the householder. By spring 2010, the number of shared households had increased to 22.0 million while all households increased by only 1.3 percent."

Something I think many rank-and-file conservatives have misunderstood about the left's emphasis on diversity is that it's not just about getting women and minorities at the table for the sake of getting women and minorities at the table—it's often an attempt to tap and develop the talents of people who have traditionally been blocked from fully practicing those talents. Republicans tend to cast diversity efforts almost exclusively in terms of pandering—which may be why, when they get around to trying to promote diversity in their own ranks, they often do it in the worst, most pandering way possible. Which brings us to Sarah Palin. Shortly after she was picked for the GOP vice presidential nomination four years ago, I wrote—in a blog post that appears to be lost to the ages—that if it failed, Republicans would learn learn the wrong lesson from that failure—and see the problem more in Palin's gender than in her obvious deficiencies as a national-level candidate. Vi

I think we're entering the phase where invocations of "religious freedom" are increasingly losing their meaning. The latest example is in Harrisburg , where the Catholic Church is backing a bill to eliminate Department of Public Welfare oversight of church-based day cares and give it to the state's Department of Education—which, incidentally, has no power or infrastructure to actually regulate those day cares: "The committee chairman, Sen. Jeffrey Piccola (R., Dauphin), said the bill was needed because of "continuing encroachment that impacts the religious mission of schools and day-care facilities."  When pressed by other lawmakers, neither Piccola nor a lobbyist for the Pennsylvania Catholic Conference, which supports the measure, could cite an instance where there had been an attempt by state officials to interfere with any religious curriculum." We have enough battles over the appropriate spheres of public and private responsibility that I'

Press release in my inbox just now: Atheist Alliance International (AAI) has launched the 'God Does Not Exist' campaign to draw attention to the case of Alexander Aan, the Indonesian atheist attacked and arrested in January 2012 after posting 'God does not exist' and articles and cartoons about Islam on Facebook. Aan was convicted by an Indonesian court on 14 June 2012, sentenced to two years and six months jail and fined Rp100 million (c.US$10,600).   AAI urges people to exercise their freedom of expression by tweeting messages of support for Aan with the hashtag #goddoesnotexist and posting 'God Does Not Exist' on their Facebook page. Here's more on the case from the New York Daily News . I mention this, because in similar cases in which people have been persecuted or prosecuted for making drawings of Mohammed, lots of folks on the "clash of the civilizations right" have been eager to show solidarity—and, not incidentally, insult Islam— b