Brad DeLong's Egregious Moderation

Leszek Kolakowski: My Absolutely Correct Views on Everything

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E.P. Thompson: An Open Letter to Leszek Kolakowski

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Matthew Yglesias and Mark Thoma on Franklin Foer and the New Republic Still Dodging Core Issues

Matthew Yglesias: Washington Post Still Dodging Core Issues in George Will Scandal: Meanwhile, The New Republic thinks liberals are too hard on the MSM and that we should be defending it from right-wing jackals rather than piling on to its corpse. Mark Thoma replies:

When the press does its job well, it deserves defenders, and when it does a lousy job, it deserves being taken to task. The complaint seems to be that the criticism is without foundation, and there’s some of that, but the fundamental problem is not, in my view, the people doing the criticizing, it’s the media companies themselves. The argument also seems to treat “media” as something other than Fox News. I agree that the term journalism conjures up another image, as it should, but presently Fox News isn’t clearly separate from other media outlets, far from it, and the commingling of all of these sources of information in the minds of the public is part of the problem. If journalists in the mainstream media want respect, they need to differentiate themselves from the “partisan outlets,” including calling foul loudly and in no uncertain terms when Fox or whomever crosses the line, and they also need to do a better job themselves of establishing and maintaining their credibility through solid reporting.

There’s been a lot of discussion recently of the narrow question of the declining economic feasibility of the newspaper business model. But there’s a broader crisis of legitimacy in the broader news media. And I think The New Republic is looking at this in precisely the wrong way. Decades ago, the press began to come under systematic attack from a conservative movement that wanted to transform it from something that’s primarily a vehicle for truth-telling into something that’s primarily a vehicle for transmitting right-wing propaganda. Media organizations could have chosen to stand firm against that. And those institutions and—more common—individual journalists who’ve done that of course deserve support. But most organizations chose to respond to the attacks by bending to the will of the right.

So George Will will lie to you about climate change, and when this is pointed out The Washington Post will throw its institutional weight behind a defense of lying and an attack on people being rude to Will. This kind of behavior doesn’t earn you a respite from the right’s attacks, but it does make it impossible for a progressive to, in good conscience, defend your organization.

Matthew Yglesias and Ryan Avent: Washington Post Still Dodging Core Issues in George Will Scandal

Matthew Yglesias: Washington Post Still Dodging Core Issues in George Will Scandal: The latest from Washington Post ombudsman Andy Alexander is really pathetic. I’ll quote Ryan Avent’s recap:

George Will wrote a column suggesting that there was a broad scientific consensus in the 1970s regarding the threat of global cooling. This is simply not true. Moreover, this untruth is readily verifiable. And George Will attempted to sow doubts about global warming by citing a bogus analysis of research findings, from an organization that has publicly said that the analysis was bogus and that their research in fact says just the opposite of what George Will argued. And then of course there is the fact that there is a broad scientific consensus regarding the threat of global warming, supported by overwhelming evidence.

The Post continues to not even address the majority of these concerns. Instead, in the eyes of the Post the only issue here is that there’s a disagreement between Will and some other people about how to characterize research findings from the Arctic Climate Research Center. The Post thinks that the opportunity should have been taken to foster more constructive debate about this. But why would there be a “debate” about how to interpret scientific findings undertaken between, on the one hand, the scientists who did the research and on the other hand a political pundit who’s misrepresenting it? Then the Post simply has nothing to say about the fact that Will’s column falsely claimed—and not for the first time!—that there was a scientific consensus in the 1970s about a global cooling phenomenon. This myth, though widespread, is false. And though false, it’s widespread, because prominent media organizations like The Washington Post see misleading people about climate change as a valuable service that they’ll pay people money to do...

United States v. Hayes: Summary

United States v. Hayes - ScotusWiki: [T]he United States... asserted that... Section 921(a)(33)(A), plainly read, requires only the element of force. Any alternate reading runs contrary to Congress’s intent of prohibiting domestic violence misdemeanants from possessing guns. When Congress enacted the statute, the government explained, it knew that the federal government and more than half of the states did not have domestic violence misdemeanor statutes with a domestic relationship element, and that DV offenses were normally prosecuted under laws without that element. Thus, according to the government, a reading that requires both elements would have rendered the statute inapplicable to most states when passed. The United States also argued that certiorari was warranted to resolve the sharp split between the Fourth Circuit... and the contrary holdings of nine other circuits...

Matthew Yglesias: Huckabee Making Strong Bid to Lose “Likeable Conservative” Credentials

Matthew Yglesias: Huckabee Making Strong Bid to Lose “Likeable Conservative” Credentials: I met Mike Huckabee once, briefly, and he was extremely charming. He offered up more of what I’d seen in the best of Mike Huckabee on television—a charismatic, friendly guy who laced his conservatism with real Christian values like generosity and humility. And then there’s this guy:

“The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics may be dead,” said Huckabee, “but a Union of American Socialist Republics is being born.” Democrats, according to Huckabee, were packing 40 years of pet projects like “health care rationing” into spending bills. “Lenin and Stalin would love this stuff.”

Steve Benen says “I suspect that if a prominent Democratic office holder, in 2005, delivered a speech referring to George W. Bush’s agenda as “fascism,” comparing his administration to totalitarian regimes, and casually throwing in a reference to Hitler, that Democrat would have a very difficult time being taken seriously by the political establishment moving forward.” Indeed, recall that when Dick Durbin compared American mistreatment of detainees to maltreatment of prisons in the Gulag, we was pressured into offering a groveling apology. In Durbin’s case, though, one could see the point of the comparison.

Why Huckabee thinks that federally funded research into determining which medical treatments are effective is similar to being a totalitarian mass-murderer is a bit beyond me. But it’s par for the course in the uglier corners of conservatism, they’re just not corners Huckabee’s been known for dwelling in.

Greg Anrig: Correcting Marc Ambinder on the Budget

TPMCafe | Talking Points Memo | Correcting Ambinder on the Budget: Marc Ambinder just wrote a short post raising alarms about how Social Security is going to cause the national debt to explode over 10 years, even though the numbers he's looking at show no such thing. He writes that "the budget projects the national debt will increase nearly two-fold over 10 years, from $8.3 trillion in 2009 to $15.3 trillion in 2019." But as a share of gdp, that increase is only from 58.7 percent to 67.2 percent. And all of that increase occurs between 2009 and 2011, when the share of the debt held by the public will be 67.3 percent. That increase is mainly attributable to the added spending connected to the stimulus package and the reduced taxes collected during the downturn. Social Security taxes will continue to exceed Social Security benefits throughout most of the period. So don't blame SS.

Hans-Joachim Voth: Syllabus: Financial Crises, Bubbles, and Crashes

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Andrew Sullivan on Newsweek and Yuval Levin

The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan: How do you write a column about the stimulus package while barely mentioning the only reason it existed at all: the sharpest depression since the 1930s? Yuval Levin managed it. How do you write it without mentioning well over $300 billion in tax cuts from a Democratic president (far more than anything the Republican actually proposed last fall)? Levin managed that too. He also managed to argue that the two parties represent deep, stable and coherent views about human nature, and the relationship of the citizen to the state. The Republicans, one infers, represent fiscal responsibility, the freedom of the individual vis-a-vis the government, the resilience of human nature, and prudent strength in foreign policy.

Hmmm. Which party added over $32 trillion to future unfunded liabilities, turned a surplus into a trillion dollar deficit, and endorsed indefinite nation-building at a simply staggering cost in two of the most intractably divided non-countries in the world? Which party asserted "near-dictatorial" powers for the executive, the priority of the will of the leader over the rule of law, and a mantra, in the words of the most "conservative" vice-president in memory, that "deficits don't matter." Which party described prohibitions against torture "quaint" and presided over the most reckless, and irresponsible period in American finance since the 1920s? Ah, yes, I remember ... Levin's party. And Levin's president. And Levin's vice-president.

Quite a racket, that partisanship, don't you think?

Matthew Yglesias: David Gregory Is Remarkably Clueless

Matthew Yglesias: You, Me, and David Gregory: I think everyone understands the human phenomenon whereby we mistaken deem our own personal experiences to be more typical than they are. People who attended selective colleges tend to talk as if they don’t realize that the majority of the minority of Americans who go to college at all go to unselective institutions. People who earn a lot of money overestimate the number of people who earn that much money. And poor people tend to underestimate how rich the really rich people are. It’s easy to see how this happens and totally forgivable.

But part of what being a journalist is about—especially a journalist who covers public affairs in the United States—is to operate on the basis of actual factual information about the country. Thus, it’s been striking to watch press coverage of the Santelli mishigos and see how many wealthy media celebrities believe that the experience of a wealthy commodities trader is typical of the country. This was on egregious display yesterday during the Sunday shows, and it wasn’t the end of it. At one point, for example, David Gregory was making some point about the stock market and said something about how “it isn’t just the fat cats, it’s you and me” as if he, David Gregory, is a typical workaday American.

In reality, the median household income in the United States was $50,233 in 2007. That’s non-trivially less than I earn. And though I like to think that my blog is pretty neat, I’m pretty sure that being the host of Meet The Press puts Gregory well above me in the media totem pole. Meanwhile, Gregory’s wife Beth Wilkinson served for two and a half years as executive vice president, general counsel and corporate secretary of Fannie May until she resigned in September 2008 following the federal takeover. After this setback she became a partner at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP, a firm where first-year associates earn more than triple the national household median income.

And good for them. I think Gregory’s takeover of Meet the Press has been change for the better and some of my best friends work for high-paying law firms, and Wilkinson had a substantial career in public service before getting her payday. But the fact of the matter is that these are the fat cats—they host major network television shows, they’re partners at prestigious law firms, and their experience of the economy is quite a bit different than that of a typical American.