Brad DeLong's Egregious Moderation

Christina Romer on the Radio

Christina Romer on the stimulus | WBUR and NPR - On Point with Tom Ashbrook: CHRISTINA ROMER: $787 billion of stimulus... has been passed. We’re... focusing on spending that money as quickly and as efficiently and as transparently as we can. We think that’s absolutely the right strategy. That’s certainly going to be the money that can get out the door the quickest and we are already doing that, so I think it makes sense to concentrate on that....

[T]he way I described what happened back in December and January and February was we got a tremendous amount of new information... everybody was [changing] their forecasts very quickly....[T]he important thing... is to concentrate on where we are now, and where we are now is with a lot of fiscal stimulus there already approved... we always knew it would take some time... to actually get the money there and employing people... it is ramping up substantially over the next couple of quarters....

[W]e absolutely have to think about the deficit looking down the road.... [T]he president has said that we need to... have a plan in place for getting it down.... [T]his is why healthcare reform is so important... the number one thing that’s going to blow a hole in the deficit as we go forward 20, 30 years is government spending on healthcare....

[P]ople have forgotten... what the economy... was like in December and January. We were truly an economy in freefall.... We’ve started to see some of those leading indicators... turn around.... [W]hat I’m going to be looking at is: Are we on the right path? And certainly we do have to give the stimulus the time to have an effect....

[T]oday we just got some information that initial claims for unemployment insurance have dropped a lot.... there’s a fair amount of noise in our indicators. I’m going to be looking at all of the indicators...

One of Andrew Sullivan's Correspondents on Sarah Palin

The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan: Like you, I am amazed how this country came so close to the cliff. That a group of people knowing full well that this woman is totally unqualified to have handled the position of Vice President, let alone president, were willing to sacrifice this country for power is simply mind boggling.

From the day Palin stepped on the stage to the night of her convention speech to the Gibson and Couric  interviews, just by listening to her string words together that made little or no sense, I realized that something was amiss.

I worked in a newsroom in Pensacola at the time. Some in there thought that by a stroke of genius McCain had saved his campaign. Many others sided with me and thought the woman was going to flame out. But for me the fact that McCain chose this woman ran deeper than most. I came to this country as an immigrant because of war in my country. I had just become a citizen and was going to be voting for the very first time in my life. I had admired the American system of governing. The mere change of power without a single gunshot being fired is something that I am in awe of, even today.

And this country that has been touted as the greatest on the earth was being played like a two bit banjo by a select few, who could careless about the grit that this country was built on and made of. That sent chills down by body. I saw through the deceit, lies, hypocrisy, all of it by people, who should have known better, but chose to forgo their principles. I watched Peggy Noonan talk out of both sides of her mouth about this woman. And when she was caught with a hot mike, tried to make the best out of her hypocrisy.

I watch journalists shy away from asking the questions – tough questions – that they probably would have had no qualms asking women the likes of Hillary Clinton, if the shoe was on the other foot. Even today, you have reporters like Andrea Mitchell and others from major networks flocking down to Arkansas to continue to give this woman legitimacy. They still are not asking the right questions. Mitchell, when Palin complained about the fact that the frivolous ethics investigations were pushing her out, did not have a follow-up question. She too, had gone down there for the photo-op, to my mind.

You are so right. It is not about this woman (as far as I am concerned) anymore. It is about the people  -- John McCain, people in the GOP and our erstwhile media that came together and nearly destroyed this country. I share your desire to continue to push on this story until these people are fully exposed for what they wrought upon us.

Economist: Russian-American relations: In search of détente, once again

Russian-American relations: In search of détente, once again | The Economist: The real breaking-point in Russia’s relationship with America came after 2003. America’s invasion of Iraq, and the Kremlin’s attack on Yukos against the background of a rising oil price, coincided to change Russia’s direction and subsequently its relationship with the West.

With his fondness for conspiracy theories, Mr Putin decided America’s goal was to weaken Russia at any cost. He blamed “outside forces” for a tragic school siege in Beslan, and also saw an American hand behind the Orange revolution in Ukraine in 2004. That looked to him like a dress rehearsal for a revolution in Russia. Meanwhile he saw the war in Iraq, Russia’s long-time client state, as an intolerable encroachment on national interests, if not a declaration of war. Mr Putin compared the West to a “strict uncle in a pith helmet” telling other people how to live. But Mr Bush, preoccupied with Iraq, paid little attention.

“Ten American presidents from Truman to Clinton [made] Russia one of their top strategic issues,” says Strobe Talbott, Mr Clinton’s top Russian adviser. “George W. Bush, if you had asked him what his ten to 15 top issues were—Russia would not be one of them until August 2008 [when Russia invaded Georgia].”

When Mr Putin warned America and its allies against taking Georgia and Ukraine into NATO, the West saw this as posturing. In the end, it achieved the worst of both worlds. It pledged eventual membership to Georgia and Ukraine without offering them a way to achieve it, and it infuriated Russia without promising to defend Georgia. “We have combined strong rhetoric with policies of appeasement,” says Joseph Wood, a senior adviser to Dick Cheney, America’s former vice-president.

In August 2008, Mr Bush and Mr Putin talked in Beijing about the worsening situation in the Caucasus. When Mr Putin realised that Mr Bush wouldn’t or couldn’t rein in Mikheil Saakashvili, Georgia’s president, he decided to whack him himself. In invading Georgia, Mr Putin felt he was merely mirroring NATO’s actions against the Serbs and America’s war in Iraq. But Russia also saw the war in Georgia as a proxy conflict with America and NATO. For a moment, the two countries were close to touching the electrified wire.

Cold-war mentalities

Mr Obama is going to Moscow at a dangerous time. The risk of another war in Georgia is far from over, and the economic crisis has not made Russia any friendlier to the West. By way of a welcome for Mr Obama, Russia has staged the biggest military exercise in the north Caucasus since the end of the cold war. It concludes on the day he arrives in Moscow.

The new American administration, which has mobilised some of the best experts on Russia, has few illusions about the nature of the Kremlin regime: institutionally weak, nationalistic, corrupt and dangerous both to its neighbours and to its own people. But they are also aware that lecturing the Kremlin about its behaviour at home or abroad is useless. “We don’t have the ability or even will to use coercive power to change Russia’s behaviour,” says a senior administration official.

Instead Mr Obama will be talking about America’s national interests, in the hope that some of them may overlap with Russia’s. The irony is that while Mr Obama and Mr Medvedev have pledged “to move beyond cold-war mentalities and chart a fresh start”, the central (and safest) topic of talks is nuclear-arms control, just as it was in the 1980s. The two are aiming to bring their deployed arsenals down below the 1,700-2,000 by 2012 agreed in the 2002 Moscow treaty. An opinion poll this week shows that more than half of all Russians do not support the reductions. “Russia is encircled by American military bases, airports and naval units,” cried Vyacheslav Nikonov, a hawkish commentator.

Yet the fact is that, in many ways, Russia needs a new treaty more than America. It cannot afford to start another arms race. “It is back to the future: in the dark days of the cold war, the only piece of real business that the United States and the Soviet Union could do together was not blowing up the world. It may not be the only game in town, but it is the only one that looks pretty clear win-win,” says Mr Talbott.

By engaging with Russia on nuclear questions and giving it the status it craves, of a quasi-superpower, America hopes to get traction on other issues, such as Iran and non-proliferation. And if Russia has enough at stake in its relationship with America, it may even decide that the cost of fighting another war in Georgia or destabilising the Crimea is simply too high.

Moscow has registered the change of language. Sergei Prikhodko, the Kremlin’s chief foreign-policy adviser, says the style has not become softer, but “we get the feeling that they don’t just listen to us, they hear us as well.” He says Moscow is also receptive to America’s demand to limit any possible leaking of nuclear technologies and material out of Russia. And both Mr Prikhodko and his American counterparts say Russia has been more co-operative on Iran than it appears. “They are certainly not doing certain negative things that they could have been doing there,” a senior administration official says.

Much of Mr Obama’s policy rests on the assumption that Russia still wants to sit at the same table as America and be integrated into world structures. But this may no longer be the case. Russia does not consider the West as a model of governance or the rule of law, but as a provider of services, including financial ones, for the ruling elite. As Dmitri Trenin, head of the Carnegie Moscow Centre, has argued, Russia has left the West and is trying to build up its influence in the former Soviet space. Mr Putin’s decision to pull out of the World Trade Organisation entry negotiations, saying that Russia is prepared to go in only as part of a customs union with Belarus and Kazakhstan, illustrates that point. It came despite Mr Obama’s and Mr Medvedev’s pledge to jump-start Russia’s entry.

But the most difficult issue will remain the fate of Georgia and Ukraine. Russia may not be trying to recreate an empire—it has neither the energy, human resources or ideology for that—but it is trying to prevent the West from entering its sphere of influence. Mr Trenin says that what Russia wants is a buffer zone, with no American military bases or NATO presence. The first targets in Georgia last August were military installations built to NATO standards.

Russia wants a monopoly on the use of force in the former Soviet Union. It also wants to ensure that no conflict can be resolved without its involvement. In advocating a multipolar world, Russia sees itself as one of the poles, dominating its region.

Looking the same way, unusually

Mr Obama’s team will stress that America has no intention of giving up on Ukraine and Georgia. But it will not fight for Georgia militarily or force the issue of NATO membership, not least because neither country is ready. The danger, says Mr Illarionov, is that Russia may interpret any wavering as a signal that America has abandoned Georgia and Ukraine, which might then lead to another military clash.

As one of his advisers puts it, Mr Obama is not a sentimental guy. He will give the Russia relationship his best shot. But if his investment does not yield returns, there is a good chance that Russia will simply drop to the end of his long list of priorities. “We know this is a very serious window of opportunity and nobody should be in any doubt that we want to use it,” says Mr Prikhodko. “But we also have to get answers to the questions we have accumulated over the years. We can ‘reset’ the computer—but what are we going to do with the memories?”

Epicurean Dealmaker: Bankslaughter

Felix Salmon » Blog Archive » Bankslaughter | Blogs |: edbury — You are right: like all salesmen, we tried to sell our products and services. As I believe I have mentioned elsewhere, bankers drank the Kool Aid like everyone else, and most of them thought they were selling great products.

However, I stick by my assertion that we did not create the huge global demand for riskless returns that is at the root of our current predicament. Investment bankers did not force anyone to buy toxic securities or execute stupid M&A deals. They did not have fiduciary duties to the shareholders and stakeholders of the pension funds, hedge funds, and corporations who did do those deals: the management of those entities did. And, as fiduciaries, these are the people with whom the buck stops. These are the people who have to say, “Wait a minute, gravity hasn’t been repealed; return cannot be earned without risk. No thank you, Mr. Investment Banker. Piss off.” Many–way too many–did not. Piggy, piggy, piggy.

There are indeed clear statutory guidelines for what constitutes fraud. That, or any other crime, should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. Hang ‘em high, I say.

But at the same time, I would like to remind everyone of two little words of wisdom, whether you are considering buying an ice cream cone, a condo in Miami, or a Series F Double Rotating CDO-squared: Caveat Emptor.

In my book, at least, a consenting adult should not have the gall to scream rape after they find out their partner was lousy in bed. Outing him or her on Facebook or Twitter, on the other hand, may be just fine.

Hilzoy vs. Megan McArdle on Medical Care

The Washington Monthly: Megan McArdle responds to my last post:

Surely the point of worry is that many millions of people will be forced into the public system, because its existence will encourage their employers to dump their health care plans. Since private systems have so far found it virtually impossible to deny many treatments for long, this will mean that millions of budget constrained people will find themselves with less available treatment than before. (...)

This is not a crazy worry. What America is best at is delivering a lot of complicated care in extremis, and "quality of life" treatments. What European countries are best at is delivering a lot of ordinary care for the sorts of things that afflict people from 0-50, which is why most of the Europhile journalists writing about Europe genuinely have very good experiences to report. I'd rather be here to have a hip replacement, but I might rather be in the Netherlands to have a baby. Doing something moderately ordinary here is a hassle. Doing something extraordinary there is often not possible for the overwhelming majority of citizens, though that depends on what, and in what system.

The main point I wanted to make in my last post was this: if by 'rationing' you mean making it impossible for people to get certain kinds of care, even if they're willing to pay for it themselves or buy supplemental insurance, then no one is proposing rationing. If, on the other hand, you mean 'making people have to buy it themselves or pay for supplemental insurance', then you have to count our current system as rationing care in such a way that 47 million people, plus all those who discover that their health insurance doesn't actually cover the care they need, are 'deprived' of care.

What you don't get to do is act as though the fate that would befall a 99 year old who needs a pacemaker (in the imaginary world in which no one has Medicare) is a horrible new scourge that Obama's plan would introduce into the world. Or, in short: you don't get to ignore the existence of the uninsured. (Or the underinsured, or those whose private plans deny them care.)

With that in mind, consider this sentence from McArdle's piece:

I'd rather be here to have a hip replacement, but I might rather be in the Netherlands to have a baby.

A question for Megan: would you really rather be here for a hip replacement, given that you'd have about a one in six chance of being uninsured? If you say 'yes', does your answer rely on the fact that most people who need hip replacements are covered by Medicare? Would you also say 'yes' for some treatment that people your age are more likely to need?

If not, you're relying on the assumption that the people you're imagining actually have health insurance. In this context, that's not a valid assumption.

---

UPDATE: Kevin Drum questions Megan's assumption that we do, in fact, do better at managing serious diseases:

If by "extraordinary" Megan means the most extreme 0.001% of procedures, then maybe she's right. Maybe. But nothing I've read about Western European healthcare systems makes me believe that there's any substantial difference between the way they treat severe illnesses and the way we do it. And no systematic difference in success rates for such treatment either. Nor should this come as a surprise, since most extreme medicine is practiced on older patients, who are covered by a public plan both here and in Europe.

He's right. But even if we pretend, for the sake of argument, that there is such a difference, we'd still need to bear in mind the possibility of being uninsured here when asking: where would I rather be if I needed medical care?

Matthew Yglesias: Quite Contrary

Matthew Yglesias: Quite Contrary: Andrew Gelman asks:

This brings me to a research question: is contrarian-ness on the increase, or have pundits been doing this sort of thing forever? All someone needs to do is come up with a good measure for it and go through the right database and find out the answer. I really feel like the op-eds have become more contrarian in recent decades. Probably this is impossible to measure, but if anyone has a good idea, go for it!

My strong sense is that contrarianness reached its apogee in the 1990s when a general sense took over that politics was basically silly and that punditry should be seen as basically akin to the college debate circuit wherein the idea is to construct the most clever possible argument rather than to actually hit on the truth. When this general spirit of the times merged with the elite press’ inexplicable loathing of Al Gore you started getting really bizarre arguments being made with a straight face. People would say that one good thing about George W. Bush was that he was dimwitted, which made him understand leadership. Or that a big problem with Gore was that he was interested in public policy.

This attitude brought us thousands of Americans killed in a terrorist attack, thousands more killed in a senseless war, and eventually the collapse of the world economy. But that in turn has at least to a small extent reminded people that it actually does matter what happens and who’s right.

Todd Gitlin on Sarah Palin: "Your Department of Law"

"Your Department of Law" | TPMCafe: Kate Snow of ABC News scores the Big Get with Sarah Palin, and elicits this amazing quotation:

as for whether another pursuit of national office...would result in the same political blood sport, Palin said there is a difference between the White House and what she has experienced in Alaska. If she were in the White House, she said, the "department of law" would protect her from baseless ethical allegations.

"I think on a national level, your department of law there in the White House would look at some of the things that we've been charged with and automatically throw them out," she said.

Snow's droll, too-true follow-up line:

There is no "Department of Law" at the White House.

What there is is a legal counsel. He or she counsels but does not "throw" anything "out."

Ten years ago, it was de rigueur for news organizations to go to every Democrat under the sun and press them on their views of Bill Clinton's carrying on with Monica Lewinsky. May we expect the same full-court press on every Republican, to see how they feel about having campaigned, not so long ago, to put this woman one 73-year-old heartbeat away from the Oval Office?

Shall we hear more from Bill Kristol, he who granted his imprimatur to the Governor way back when she was peaceably ensconced in Juneau?

Or Ross Douthat, who on Monday informed his NYT readers that "Sarah Palin represents the democratic ideal -- that anyone can grow up to be a great success story without graduating from Columbia and Harvard." And that: "Sarah Palin is beloved by millions because her rise suggested, however temporarily, that the old American aphorism about how anyone can grow up to be president might actually be true."

Greg Marx at CJR refutes Douthat's faux populism. Sarah Palin is beloved by the Republican base, period. There's no evidence that anyone else loves her (besides Tina Fey and comedy-lovers everywhere).

Truth is, anyone can be a great success story on the op-ed page of the NYT even if he's been to Harvard.

Attaturlk: Our Press Corps Is a Joke (Jake Tapper/ABC Edition)

Rising Hegemon: Jake Tapper - Full Grown Tool(?) (like we need to ask):

It took three people to write that too.

Glenn Greenwald: Dan Froomkin hired by The Huffington Post

Dan Froomkin hired by The Huffington Post - Glenn Greenwald - Salon.com: In yet another sign of how online media outlets are strengthening as their older establishment predecessors are struggling to survive, The Huffington Post has hired Dan Froomkin to be its Washington Bureau Chief and regular columnist/blogger.  Froomkin will oversee a staff of four five reporters and an Assistant Editor, guide The Huffington Post's Washington reporting, and write at least two posts per week to be featured on its main page and Politics page.  I learned last night of the hiring and spoke to both Arianna Huffington and Froomkin this morning.

Under still-unclear circumstances, which executives refuse to discuss even with their own Ombudsman, Froomkin was fired by The Washington Post a little more than two weeks ago after writing an online column for almost six years that was one of that newspaper's most popular.  Almost immediately upon the reporting of Froomkin's firing, screenwriter Nora Ephron, an Editor-at-Large for The Huffington Post, emailed Huffington with a one-line note:  "I hope we're hiring him."  Within hours, Huffington called Froomkin, met with him in Washington last week, and a deal was finalized this week.  That was just one of numerous overtures Froomkin received from various media outlets interested in hiring him (Salon was one such outlet expressing preliminary interest, but both Froomkin and Salon believed that much of what I do here already overlaps with much of the work he does).

Though the precise reasons for Froomkin's firing by The Post remain unclear, there's no question that his penchant for aggressively criticizing establishment media behavior escalated tensions.  In recent months, The Post spiked columns of his that contained pointed media critiques.  In the wake of his firing, Post defenders misleadingly focused on (and then rebutted) the obvious strawman argument that Froomkin was fired for being "liberal."  But that, in fact, was something virtually nobody claimed.  Instead, it was Froomkin's practice of exposing the corrupt practices of establishment journalists (both by his words and deeds) that made him such a unique presence at The Post.  Pioneering press critic Bob Somerby put it this way:

Dan Froomkin criticizes the press corps. In the press corps, if you’re a liberal, that just isn’t done. . . . If there’s one thing you’ll never see [E.J.] Dionne or [Eugene] Robinson do, it’s criticize their cohort—the coven, the clan. . .  But in the mainstream press corps, liberals don’t discuss the mainstream press.  That’s the price of getting those (very good) jobs. It’s also the price of holding them.

Indeed, nothing eliminates the possibility of establishment journalist jobs more quickly or decisively than criticizing the establishment media as being too sycophantic to political power, manipulated by the Right, and, in general, slothfully devoted to doing nothing other than uncritically repeating what "both sides" say (by stark contrast, the tired right-wing grievance about The Liberal Media is not just permitted but welcomed; Bill Kristol spent years depicting The New York Times as an anti-American, Terrorist-loving beacon of left-wing bias, only to be hired by them as a full-time columnist, while right-wing polemicists who voice similarly trite claims about the media -- Charles Krauthammer, Jonah Goldberg, Bill Bennett -- are routinely heard in the very venues they attack).  As Brad DeLong documented in a thorough retrospective on Froomkin's firing, the first attempt at The Post to remove Froomkin from his status as "reporter" was driven by right-wing complaints that the content of his column was inappropriate for a reporter.

Huffington says that it is Froomkin's views on the media that, for her, is his primary appeal.  The key to vibrant, successful journalism, she said, is "getting away from the notion that truth is found by splitting the difference between the two sides, that there is always truth to both sides."  Huffington argues that establishment journalism is failing due to "the idea that good journalism is about presenting both sides without a voice -- without any passion."  The outlets that continue to adhere to that "obsolete" model "are paying a price."  Froomkin -- who has written extensively about how passion-free, "both-sides-are-equally-valid" journalism is the primary affliction of the profession -- echoes that view:  "The key challenge is to present an alternative to the 'splitting the difference' culture that has infested traditional media."  

While this pairing is, in some ways, a natural one (even the Post Ombudsman suggested that "Web sites like The Huffington Post or Politico would seem a perfect fit"), there are also potential sources of tension.  As a practitioner of what he calls "accountability journalism" -- "explaining how Washington works; pulling no punches" -- Froomkin has been a vehement critic of the Obama administration for the last several months, while The Huffington Post frequently trumpeted (some might say "cheerleading") the Obama campaign and even his presidency (though it has become mildly more critical of Obama in recent months; its screaming, red headline today: "White House May Cave on Public Option").  Will Froomkin's harsh criticisms of Obama alienate an Obama-loving HuffPost readership?  

And given the central importance of Arianna Huffington's personal relationships with key media figures and those in power, will Froomkin's unrestrained criticisms of many of those same people undermine a key aspect of The Huffington Post's business and promotional strategies?  Both Huffington and Froomkin insist that he will have full editorial freedom, though that commitment is often more easily embraced in theory than in practice. 

For all the self-serving talk about how political journalism is dying, it is striking how new and online media outlets continue to thrive.  Yesterday, Josh Marshall's TalkingPointsMemo -- which began as a one-person blog --  announced a major investment from Netscape founder Marc Andreesen that is allowing it to double its reporting staff.  And now today, a columnist fired by an old, struggling establishment outlet claiming "business reasons" as a motive is not only almost immediately hired by a new media entity, but was inundated with expressions of interest and even other offers from an electic mix of reporting outlets. Clearly, journalism itself is not dying.  What is dying -- and rightfully so -- is the staid, establishment-serving, passion-free, access-desperate, mindless stenographic model to which establishment journalism rigidly adheres.  As The Post's Ombudsman reported from personal experience, Froomkin's firing left "an army of angry followers" and "an outcry from a loyal audience."  People are obviously hungry for the type of real journalism Froomkin practices.  The Huffington Post immediately capitalized on the Post's short-sighted and myopic decision to fire one of their most (and one of their very few) vibrant, passionate and innovative journalists.  In this episode lies many insights about the real reasons establishment journalism is struggling severely.   UPDATE:  Media Matters' Jamison Foser uses pictures to convey "what The Washington Post is up to these days."  With leadership like Fred Hiatt and the nepotism-benefitting Graham family, it's really no wonder that -- with a couple of individual exceptions -- it's become such a sad spectacle.  Nora Ephron said this morning:  "I used to read Dan Froomkin religiously -- I thought he was one of the best things at the Washington Post. I was bewildered when he was fired."  At least it freed up money to produce embarrassing vaudville videos from Dana Milbank and Chris Cillizza.  When they're not selling access to lobbyists and printing John Bolton Op-Eds urging some new war on the latest Enemy, that is what "the Post is up to these days."

Reihan Salam: Sarah Palin and the Appeal of Quitting

Sarah Palin and the Appeal of Quitting | Politics | The American Scene: Sarah Palin’s makes perfect sense to me. Though I wouldn’t exactly be surprised if she turned blue, sprouted several additional arms, and decided to become America’s chief advocate of a forceful Hindutva politics, I tend to think she really wants to leave politics behind and perhaps became the evangelical Oprah. One wonders if she’d do well as a radio talk-show host, a difficult and demanding job but one that requires her ease and natural charm.

The Purdum piece suggests that she moved very quickly through the ranks, and that she has a highly aggressive style — hence the “Barracuda” nickname. Think about how totally knackered you’d be after a decade of climbing over the dead bodies of all those who dared stand in your way. Having seen her political ambitions go terribly awry, with a collapsing approval rating and a long string of serious missteps — embarrassing reversals, an insidery-style that’s become a liability — who wouldn’t want to pull the plug and press reset?

My thinking about quitting is related closely to my thinking about sunk cost and the value of good bankruptcy laws, a favorite theme of Megan McArdle. No one wants to be a quitter. But sometimes you should quit! For example, you’re watching a terrible movie. Say you’re watching Tadpole, a movie so horrible that it makes me want to claw out not only my eyes but the eyes of the creators of the movie itself, just to teach them a lesson. Do you endure the whole thing? I did, and I’ve regretted it ever since.

Sarah Palin had a sense of how this movie was going to an end. Was this unfair to the people who put her in office? Actually, I’m pretty sure a lot of them are relieved. She’s presumably developed broader interests. Her thin-skinnedness doesn’t lend itself well to intense national scrutiny, particularly since she comes from a small-town political culture where cutting corners happens all the time. It turns out that she was, for purposes of personal happiness and fulfillment, in the wrong line of work.

I sincerely think she’d make an excellent television personality. I found her statement affecting. But yes, I can’t imagine she’d be a great president or senator, and those were the logical next steps in this career trajectory.

She could “hunker down” and “get down to business” for the balance of her term — but she’s lost interest! That happens! And to soldier on can be pretty unendurable.

We’re talking about human beings, man.

David Frum: The Carrier Goes But Not the Virus

undefined: Sarah Palin said today that her decision to resign as governor had been in the works “for a while” and “after much consideration.” In that case, you might wonder why she had not bothered to write out a speech in advance.

Instead, the Alaska governor delivered a rambling, angry, and self-pitying statement that praised people who do not give up – and then gave up.

Gov. Palin does not seem to intend to end her political career. She quoted Douglas MacArthur, she talked about working for change outside government. She may yet try a run for the presidency in 2012.

But if her political career is not quite ended, it now seems headed nowhere positive. Sarah Palin’s approval ratings as governor of Alaska have plunged from over 80% to 55% over a little more than 18 months. Her departure at this time will raise unerasable suspicions that she anticipated still deeper declines. Perhaps some scandal was hovering over the horizon. Perhaps she wished to clear her work schedule to cash in on the lecture and television circuit. Or perhaps she simply wished to be elsewhere when the bills arrived for her reckless management of her state’s finances.

Whatever the motive for the departure, the fact of the departure will exact a terrible cost. Should she run for president, she will face the same question again and again: “What happens if the presidency turns out harder than you expect? Will you quit that job too?” If Margaret Thatcher was the Iron Lady, Palin is the Plaster Lady: Under pressure she has cracked and broken.

Many Republicans will be relieved by Palin’s decision. As a candidate for vice president in 2008, Sarah Palin suffered what may be the fastest and steepest plunge in voter approval in the history of polling.

In the single month of September 2008, her net approval rating (positives minus negatives) dropped by a stunning 20 points. Women especially disliked her: By mid-October 60% of women under 50 expressed a negative view of her. Negative views about Palin contaminated the whole McCain candidacy: By mid-October, 41% of voters viewed Sen. McCain as a man of “poor judgment” as opposed to only 29% who said so about Barack Obama.

And yet – bitter irony – Palin’s self-immolation today may yet do the Republican party more harm than good. Had Palin sought and won the Republican nomination in 2012, she would almost certainly have proceeded to a Goldwater-style debacle – and dragged Republican senators, governors and representatives down with her. That would have been a miserable result. And yet it also would have been a clarifying one. Republicans would have got Palin and Palinism out of their systems in a sharp and painful lesson that would have opened the way to the kind of reconstruction that has occurred in, say, the United Kingdom.

Now the steady and diligent Mitt Romney now emerges as the far and away Republican front-runner. Romney used to be exactly the kind of presidential candidate the GOP needed: accomplished, intelligent, knowledgeable. But a Republican party that has not learned why Palin was a problem has pressed Romney into turning himself into a Palin replica. If Romney loses in 2012, the same pressures will be applied to his successor. Spared the misery of massive defeat, Republicans will also be denied the lessons of defeat – and the hope of a rapid recovery.

Sarah Palin’s supporters are a large and important constituency within the Republican party and the conservative movement, a constituency indispensable to conservative success. But they are not a constituency sufficient for conservative success. There are just not enough of them. The Republican party has to reach further and grow bigger. The one positive effect of a serious Palin presidential candidacy would have been to teach that lesson to the whole Republican party. Friday’s abrupt dereliction of duty has deprived the GOP of even that benefit. Her resignation enables her supporters to continue living under an illusion – to the terrible and enduring cost of their party and their country.

Hilzoy on Sarah Palin: There's Something About This I Just Don't Understand ...

Obsidian Wings: There's Something About This I Just Don't Understand ...: anderson Cooper interviewed Sarah Palin's spokesperson tonight. He asked what Sarah Palin would be doing next. Here's her answer:

STAPLETON: OH, everything under the sun that you can possibly think of. And what she has said and what she did say in her speech was, just alone, getting out there and working with candidates and for candidates to get the right people in office who have those same ideas and ideals, and energy independence and who will work for stronger national security and more support for..."

I see. Sarah Palin resigned as Governor so that she could help people who share her "ideas and ideals" get elected to political office. Maybe if she works really hard at it, she could even get one of them elected governor.

Oh, wait ...

David Frum on Sarah Palin

undefined: nother day, another leak from the wreckage of the McCain campaign. First Todd Purdum publishes a harsh piece in Vanity Fair on the Palin nomination, filled with harsh quotations from anonymous senior campaign sources. Politico follows with an even more revealing exchange of charges and counter-charges. Now at NRO, Mark Hemingway reproduces a series of leaked internal emails. The issue in all cases: Who was revealing to the world these damaging insider descriptions of Gov. Palin?

I'm as fascinated as the next person by the insider details. But let's pause for a sobriety check. The 2008 campaign is over. The 2012 campaign has begun. Gov. Palin is a leading candidate for the Republican nomination. As much as everybody enjoys code-breaking the mystery of who blabbed, isn't the more urgent and important question: Is it true?

Palin evokes a devoted response from a large following. In the mysterious soup of motives that sustains her supporters, enthusiasm for effective governance does not seem a very major ingredient. But you'd think they would at least care whether she could campaign competently. Purdum argues intensely that she cannot--that a Palin candidacy would be the greatest self-inflicted disaster since George McGovern or Barry Goldwater. Here are some of the highlights from Todd Purdum's Vanity Fair piece: 

ITEM: The top McCain aides who had tried hard to work with Palin--Steve Schmidt, the chief strategist; Nicolle Wallace, the communications ace; and Tucker Eskew, her traveling counselor--were barely on speaking terms with her, and news organizations were reporting that anonymous McCain aides saw Palin as a “diva” and a “whack job.”

ITEM: At one point, trying out a debating point that she believed showed she could empathize with uninsured Americans, Palin told McCain aides that she and Todd in the early years of their marriage had been unable to afford health insurance of any kind, and had gone without it until he got his union card and went to work for British Petroleum on the North Slope of Alaska. Checking with Todd Palin himself revealed that, no, they had had catastrophic coverage all along. She insisted that catastrophic insurance didn’t really count and need not be revealed. This sort of slipperiness--about both what the truth was and whether the truth even mattered--persisted on questions great and small.

ITEM: By all accounts, Palin was either unwilling, or simply unable, to prepare. In the run-up to the Couric interview, Palin had become preoccupied with a far more parochial concern: answering a humdrum written questionnaire from her hometown newspaper, the Frontiersman.

ITEM: In every job, she surrounded herself with an insular coterie of trusted friends, took disagreements personally, discarded people who were no longer useful, and swiftly dealt vengeance on enemies, real or perceived.

ITEM: More than once in my travels in Alaska, people brought up, without prompting, the question of Palin’s extravagant self-regard. Several told me, independently of one another, that they had consulted the definition of “narcissistic personality disorder” in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders--“a pervasive pattern of grandiosity (in fantasy or behavior), need for admiration, and lack of empathy”—and thought it fit her perfectly.

ITEM: A year ago, 80 percent of Alaskans viewed Palin very favorably or somewhat favorably; by this spring, just 55 percent had a positive opinion.

The McCain campaign is over. The duty of confidentiality has expired. The next campaign has begun. If conservatives are to avoid catastrophe, they need to hear from those inside what exactly happened. If true, the leaks constitute an urgent warning and public service. I believe they are true. For sure they confirm what I have heard during the campaign and after. Instead of complaining about these leaks, conservatives should heed them - and fast.

John Quiggin: Against (micro)economic imperialism

Against (micro)economic imperialism: We’ve had various versions of the case for and against the use of (micro)economic rational actor models in the social sciences lately, so I thought I would weigh in with my version of the case against. It has three main elements

First, most rational actor models assume that “rationality” can be represented as “maximization of self-interest”. This assumption is either false or vacuous. Those committed to egoistic rationality tend, when challenged, to oscillate between falsehood and vacuity, in much the manner of the function sin (1/x) as x approaches zero.

A very good example arises with voting. In this 1987 paper pointing out the empirical weakness of rational actor models, I observed out that, while egoistic rationalists will not vote (or rather will vote only in very small numbers), quite a limited amount of altruism suffices to making voting rational. Andrew Gelman made the same point more recently.

Second, the fact that egoistic rationality assumptions work well in a lot of microeconomic applications proves little or nothing about their viability in other contexts; these include macroeconomics as well as sociology, political science and other targets of microeconomic imperialism. Abstractions that work well in one context don’t work well in another. In particular, deviations from given assumptions that roughly cancel out locally may nonetheless be significant in the aggregate. I conjecture that something like this underlies the notion of emergent phenomena, beloved of critics of reductionism in general.

Finally, game theory is much more problematic than is commonly realised. To derive a Nash equilibrium, it is necessary to define the strategy space. In real games this is not a problem. In social, economic and political operations, however, it requires that the participants have shared understandings of the problem, accessible to the modeller. In practice this is hardly ever true, and game theoretic analyses typically proceed with an essentially arbitrary assignment of strategies to players.

Cenk Uygur: Conservative Media vs. Progressive Media

Cenk Uygur: Conservative Media vs. Progressive Media: The NY Post is run by Rupert Murdoch to further his conservative agenda. It loses $50 million a year. The Washington Times is run by Rev. Sun Myung Moon to further his conservative agenda. By some estimates Rev. Moon has sunk $2 to $3 billion into it and it has never been profitable. The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review is run by Richard Mellon Scaife to further his conservative agenda. It loses $20 to $30 million a year.

The Weekly Standard used to be owned by Murdoch to further his conservative agenda but is now owned by Philip Anschutz to further his conservative agenda. Either way, it loses $5 million a year.

Do you know how many people read The Weekly Standard? They have a circulation of 80,000. To put it bluntly, that's pathetic. That means almost no one reads it. Its main purpose is not to turn a profit but to spread Republican propaganda in the guise of news. Conservative billionaires use these publications to give legitimacy to their political opinions, but don't actually expect to make any money for them. They're an investment, in propaganda. But without their wealthy benefactors, these publications would immediately go bankrupt and cease to exist.

On the other hand, progressive media has now built a self-sustaining business model on the web that makes money because people actually read the websites or watch the shows. I can't speak for other progressive outlets (Huffington Post for one seems to have a very healthy valuation). But I can speak for us. The Young Turks is a progressive web show that is popular and profitable all on its own. The Young Turks now has numbers that make conservative outlets look like a joke by comparison.

In fact, today the show crossed the 100 million views barrier on YouTube. The Young Turks now has 100,106,994 views on our You Tube channel alone. This doesn't count views on our own website and the dozens of other outlets we're on, including Sirius XM Radio. Last month we had 7,289,549 views on our YouTube channel. Now think about The Weekly Standard's sad, little 80,000 number (and how many of those people actually read the magazine?). And these clowns lose $5 million a year to run that operation. Spending over $5 million a year to reach 80,000 people? That amuses me.

Let me give you one last stat. The Young Turks is now averaging over 350,000 views a day on You Tube. That is more than four times The Weekly Standard's circulation. And we get that in just one day! And we do all of this at just a fraction of what they spend. How can they possibly compete with us in the long term?

The bottom line is that most of these conservative media outlets don't stand a chance. Sure, some will have staying power in representing a certain percentage of the population. Those are the ones that focus on opinions. But no one is taking their "news" operations seriously. On the other hand, a progressive colossus is rising on the web and the conservatives are powerless to stop it. That is not a future that bodes well for the Republican Party or the conservative movement in this country. We're coming for them. They're standing in front of a steamroller and they don't even know it.

Ed Kilgore: Todd Purdham on Sarah Palin

Democratic Strategist: At virtually any given moment, the news-cycle-driven chattering classes of politics have in the background of their computer screens or the pockets of their briefcases a Big Thumbsucking Magazine Article on a political topic that they read during periods of calm. The Big Article du jour is Todd Purdum's massive profile of Sarah Palin in Vanity Fair.

Most of the buzz about the piece deals with a variety of off-the-record snarks about Palin from McCain campaign staff. Indeed, conservative columnist Bill Kristol and McCain campaign manager Steve Schmidt have engaged in a public exchange of insults over alleged leaks to Purdham.

Personally, I thought Purdham's best insight was about the exceptionally exotic nature of Palin's home state of Alaska, which he thinks the McCain campaign never understood:

The first thing McCain could have learned about Palin is what it means that she is from Alaska. More than 30 years ago, John McPhee wrote, “Alaska is a foreign country significantly populated with Americans. Its languages extend to English. Its nature is its own. Nothing seems so unexpected as the boxes marked ‘U.S. Mail.’” That description still fits. The state capital, Juneau, is 600 miles from the principal city, Anchorage, and is reachable only by air or sea. Alaskan politicians list the length of their residency in the state (if they were not born there) at the top of their biographies, and are careful to specify whether they like hunting, fishing, or both. There is little sense of government as an enduring institution: when the annual 90-day legislative session is over, the legislators pack up their offices, files, and computers, and take everything home. Alaska’s largest newspaper, the Anchorage Daily News, maintains no full-time bureau in Juneau to cover the statehouse. As in any resource-rich developing country with weak institutions and woeful oversight, corruption and official misconduct go easily unchecked. Scrutiny is not welcome, and Alaskans of every age and station, of every race and political stripe, unself-consciously refer to every other place on earth with a single word: Outside.

But what bothered me most about the profile was that with so many words to work with, and for all his focus on why McCain was a fool to put her on the ticket, Purdham never gets around to examining in any detail why the Conservative Base loves her so. That's a strange omission, particularly since the whole piece begins with Palin's speech earlier this year at an Indiana Right-to-Life event--significantly, her first public appearance outside Alaska in 2009.

In all the hype and buzz about Palin when she first joined the ticket, and all the silly talk about her potential appeal to Hillary Clinton supporters, the ecstatic reaction to her choice on the Cultural Right didn't get much attention. She wasn't an "unknown" or a "fresh face" to those folks. They knew her not only as a truly hard-line anti-abortionist, but as a politician who had uniquely "walked the walk" by carrying a pregnancy to term despite knowing the child would have a severe disability. And all the personality traits she later exhibited--the folksiness, the abrasive partisanship, the hostility towards the "media" and "elites," the resentment of the establishment Republicans who tried to "manage" her, and the constant complaints of persecution--almost perfectly embodied the world-view, and the hopes and fears, of the grassroots Cultural Right. (This was particularly and understandably true of women, who have always played an outsized role in grassroots conservative activism.) Sarah Palin was the projection of these activists onto the national political scene, and exhibited the defiant pride and ill-disguised vulnerability that they would have felt in the same place.

This base of support for Palin--maybe not that large, but very passionate, and very powerful in places like the Iowa Republican Caucuses--isn't going to abandon her just because the Serious People in the GOP laugh her off in favor of blow-dried flip-flopping pols like Mitt Romney or blandly "electable" figures like Tim Pawlenty. To her supporters, mockery is like nectar. And that's why Sarah Palin isn't going to go away as a national political figure unless it is by her own choice, or that of the people of her own state.

Matthew Yglesias: The Bishops and the Baptists Reveal Their Real Goal: Slut-Shaming

Matthew Yglesias » Bishops, Baptists Organizing Against Contraception: It’s precisely because of stances like this that it’s very hard to take the “abortion is murder” crowd seriously when they say abortion is murder. Their revealed behavior indicates that they don’t actually find abortion especially problematic, but just place it on a spectrum containing a general aversion to women controlling their own sexuality:

But more conservative religious groups working with the White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships say they would be forced to oppose such a plan—even though they support the abortion reduction part—because they oppose federal dollars for contraception and comprehensive sex education. This camp, which includes such formidable organizations as the U.S. Council of Catholic Bishops and the Southern Baptist Convention, is pressuring the White House to decouple the two parts of the plan into separate bills. One bill would focus entirely on preventing unwanted pregnancy, while the other would focus on supporting pregnant women.

Atrios sees this as a reason to mock those who advocate seeking “common ground” with abortion proponents. I think we’re arguably seeing here the real fruits of seeking common ground in good faith—their real views are smoked out.

Economist: Conservative strategery, or why the Republicans are surplus

Conservative strategery | Free exchange | Economist.com: THE New York Times is reporting that Republicans have decided to let Ben Bernanke have it as the decision over whether to reappointment him as Fed chair looms. Their specific line of attack? He's a tool of big government and of the Democratic administration:

Unhappy about the huge bank bailouts that the Fed arranged with the Treasury Department during the Bush administration, many Republicans are even more displeased that Mr. Bernanke is now working hand-in-glove with the Obama administration.

This is nonsensical on multiple levels. The Federal Reserve's biggest recent errors, I believe it is widely agreed, have been errors of inaction—standing by while a dangerous bubble inflated, in the first case, and allowing Lehman Brothers to go under in the second. There have been some errors of overaction, but these have been abetted by Republican officials as often as Democratic ones. Moreover, the Federal Reserve under Mr Bernanke has been the principle edifice standing between the global economy and outright depression.

And as Mark Thoma notes, were president Obama to let Mr Bernanke go, he would almost certainly replace the current chair with someone more inclined to intervene in the economy and more inclined to assist Mr Obama whenever possible—a Janet Yellen, for instance, or possibly even Larry Summers. Mr Bernanke is absolutely the most amenable candidate they're likely to get.

So why the fuss? Mr Thoma suggests that they're not actually hoping to derail the reappointment. Rather, they're simply trying to make a point—that the Fed has lost it independence and gained too much authority throughout the course of this crisis. It's not an argument without merits, but there is an irony to the stance. The Fed's role has increased so significantly in this crisis in no small part because it is able to act without the approval of the Congress. The intransigence of the legislature on critical financial and economic issues, due largely (though not entirely) to knee-jerk GOP obstructionism, pushed both the Bush and Obama administrations to do as much as possible via the executive and the Federal Reserve. It was that or nothing, and nothing was not acceptable.

In nearly every way, Republicans have no one to blame for this situation but themselves.

Economist: The deficit as political football

The deficit as political football | Free exchange | Economist.com: THERE is no question that there are serious budget issues facing the American government. As the Congressional Budget Office noted last week, without major reforms government spending will ultimately grow to eat the economy due to nothing more than demographic change and rising health costs.

But it's important to note that this is a long-run budget problem. The wars, tax cuts, and economic interventions of the past decade will increase the size of the debt significantly, but there is no sign that these increases have shaken market faith in America's ability to service its debt. What will ultimately shake that faith are clear signals that the American government is unable to adequately address its growing structural budget issues. That may become an issue, but there's no particular reason that it must become an issue this year or next. As Brad DeLong says:

It is, I think, much too early to be worrying about closing America's structural deficit through any policies other than trying to set health care cost-containment in motion. Recession-fighting should be the agenda for 2009-2010. Structural balance should be the agenda for 2011-2012.

But Mr DeLong links to Ed Luce, who sees the political shadow cast by large deficits....

I actually don't buy the story Mr Luce presents; Americans may say they care about deficits, but it's not the kind of caring that will resonate at polls like actual economic conditions. A slumping economy is by far the bigger threat to Democratic prospects in 2010 and 2012 than budget issues.

But that doesn't mean that deficits aren't dangerous politically. A more plausible scenario is that grandstanding moderates of both parties will use budget issues to extract concessions on key pieces of legislation—including health care, or another round of stimulus—which may ultimately undermine recovery or deny the administration key legislative wins. The Congress is a peculiar institution, one which may derail stimulative measures in the short term, and structural budget reforms in the longer term.

Hilzoy and Daniel Larison on Nationalism

The Washington Monthly: More Puzzlement: Daniel Larison says a(nother) wise thing (h/t):

Americanists believe that any statement from the President that fails to build up and anoint Mousavi as the preferred candidate is discouraging to Mousavi and his supporters, because they apparently cannot grasp that being our preferred candidate is to be tainted with suspicion of disloyalty to the nation. It is strange how nationalists often have the least awareness of the importance of the nationalism of another people. Many of the same silly people who couldn't say enough about Hamas' so-called "endorsement" of Obama as somehow indicative of his Israel policy views, as well as those who could not shut up about his warm reception in Europe, do not see how an American endorsement of a candidate in another country's election might be viewed with similiar and perhaps even greater distaste by the people in that country.

Indeed. And a lot of those same people thought that Iraqis would adore us because we had overthrown Saddam Hussein, apparently without thinking: however much they hated him, it's deeply humiliating to have someone else overthrow your dictator and occupy your* country. And so, in all likelihood, however happy Iraqis might be at first, we should expect that not to last: inevitably, soldiers in an alien country make mistakes and kill or detain the wrong people, call in airstrikes on people who are doing nothing wrong, etc.; and when that happens, our welcome, however warm initially, will very quickly turn to resentment.

National pride is a powerful thing, and a completely comprehensible one. Why the very people who will brook no criticism of their own country, even when it's fully justified, should fail to understand this is a mystery.

Booman: When Dana Milbank Lost His Reason for Being

Booman Tribune ~ A Progressive Community: It's Really Dana Milbank Who is a D-ck: There was a brief period of time, probably in 2004, when I thought Dana Milbank was doing a decent job of showing a sane level of skepticism about the Bush administration's pronouncements and behavior. He wasn't striking for his wit or his moral outrage. He just stood out as someone who was occasionally willing to call bullshit in a town where that seemed never to happen. His schtick appeared to be irreverence of a kind slightly more substantive than that provided by Lady Dowd. But something changed. If I had to guess, what changed is that Milbank started getting invites to be on the cable news. And that made him somebody. He joined the Big Boys like Howard Fineman and Ron Brownstein. His opinion was supposed to move the national discourse. He became a connoisseur of the cocktail frankfurter. And then...he began to suck.

He lost his outsiderish up-and-coming edge. His condescension stopped reaching up and started hammering down. Instead of telling us that our betters are full of crap, he told us that his lessers were unworthy. And, at some point he reached a stage of inness where he felt comfortable enough to wallow in his sense of accomplishment and to develop a sense of entitlement. He worked hard to get where he is and, dammit, who is some blogger from the Huffington Post to get an invitation to ask the president a question? That blogger is Nico Pitney who has been covering the Iranian elections with indefatigable energy. Milbank's sense of vanity was on full display today when he appeared on Howard Kurtz's Reliable Sources with Nico, and whined about a mere aggregator of news getting called on in a presidential press conference. When the segment was over, Milbank turned to Pitney and told him, "You are such a dick."

It's hard to say exactly why Milbank decided to insult Pitney to his face, but it's a good bet that his feelings were hurt when Nico pointed out that Milbank once asked candidate Obama numerous questions about how he looked in a swimsuit. I think it should go without saying that a journalist's opportunities to ask a presidential contender questions are limited, and Milbank blew one of the few chances he will ever get. The truth is, only someone whose bowels are bloated with cocktail weenies would ever waste such a golden chance to probe the mind of a presidential candidate by asking about his pectoral muscles.