Grasping Reality with Both Hands: The Semi-Daily Journal Economist Brad DeLong

I Don't Think Jeffrey Goldberg Gets This "Weblogging" Thing... (May 09, 2008) - Hezbollah and its Apologists

So I was told I really should read Jeffrey Goldberg--that he is really good, and has a new weblog at the Atlantic. And so I surf on over. And I find that he writes:

Hezbollah and its Apologists: Hezbollah has been doing a bang-up job this week undermining Lebanon's future on behalf of its sponsors, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps and Syrian intelligence. It is simultaneously doing effective work undermining its apologists in the West. We've heard the arguments over and over again: Hezbollah is social service agency; Hezbollah wants to join the Lebanese political process; Hezbollah is not in fact dominated by murderous Jew-haters. And so on...

And my first reaction is: "We have? Over and over again? I haven't! Who is he talking about here?

But there are no names in Goldberg's first paragraph. No names in the rest of the post either--just a reference to "many of Hezbollah's friends" and to "those on the left... who wanted to whitewash Hezbollah's violent, anti-democratic program," and a pointer to Michael Young.

So we surf on over to Michael Young at Reason.

First paragraph: no names of Hezbollah apologists, just a reference to intellectual "collateral damage... in academic departments, newsrooms, think tanks, and cafes far and wide...alleged "experts"...

Second paragraph: no names of Hezbollah apologists...

Third paragraph: no names of Hezbollah apologists, just a reference to "an embarrassing number of writers and academics"...

Fourth paragraph: no names of Hezbollah apologists, just a reference to "writers and scholars, particularly Westerners, who lay claim to Hezbollah sources... edited with minimal rigor"...

Fifth paragraph: no names of Hezbollah apologists, just a reference to how the Party of God "though it is religious, autocratic, and armed to the teeth, often elicits approval from secular, liberal Westerners"...

Sixth paragraph: no names of Hezbollah apologists, just a reference to the "primary emotion... prompting secular liberals to applaud armed Islamic groups... hostility toward the United States, toward Israel... toward what is seen as Western-dominated, capitalist-driven globalization"...

Seventh paragraph: no names of Hezbollah apologists, just a quote from Fred Halliday warning of "dangers in the accommodation between Islamists and the left"...

Eighth paragraph: A name! Norman Finkelstein! And Norman Finkelstein again in paragraphs nine and ten!

Eleventh paragraph: A name! Noam Chomsky! And Finkelstein in paragraph twelve! And Finkelstein and Chomsky in paragraph thirteen!

And that's it. Fifteen paragraphs--three from Young and two from Goldberg--to denounce the Noam-Norm axis. Yes, the denizens of "academic departments, newsrooms, think tanks, and cafes far and wide, the "alleged 'experts'," the "embarrassing number of writers and academics," the "writers and scholars, particularly Westerners," the "secular, liberal Westerners," the "secular liberals," the "left" all turn out--though their names is truly Legion--to be two whacko guys, Noam Chomsky and Norm Finkelstein, each of whom breaks out in oaths and curses when miscalled a "liberal."

Now don't get me wrong. There's nothing I love more on the internet than to hear the horns of Elfland summoning me to join the Queen of Air and Darkness and the rest of the Unseelie Court on their wild nighttime hunt through the skies in pursuit of the those twin beasts of the apocalypse Noam Chomsky and Norm Finkelstein, especially Noam Chomsky (see here and here and here and here). But neither Goldberg nor Young have any quotes from Chomsky at all! And Young's quotes from Finkelstein make him look (falsely) reasonable--quoting him as stating that Palestinians have a right to wage war on Israelis occupying their country, that Lebanese have a right to wage war on Israelis invading their country.

This weblogging has to be carried out with style: with actual quotations (ideally weblinks) from real targets and with a much higher information density than two barreled fish in fifteen paragraphs. At the least put some facts about Chomsky in apposition--Chomsky, who classified Holocaust denier Faurisson as an "apolitical liberal of some sort"; Chomsky, who compared Pol Pot favorably to Charles de Gaulle; Chomsky, who claimed that Milosevic's massacres of Bosnian Muslims were the key struggle of our time against global imperalism because the U.S. had selected the Muslims of Bosnia to be its Balkan clients."

On the internet, if you are to be successful, you need to recognize that you are not S.I. Hayakawa with control over the megaphone. So:

• You need to name, quote from, and link to your targets--real targets, important targets, not ineffectual and marginalized loons (unless you are just in it for entertainment value)--or else people will point out that you did not do so, and you will appear and will be either ignorant, lazy, mendacious, or off-base.
• You need to get to the point quickly: there is lots to read on the internet, and people who chase pointers through fifteen paragraphs only to come across nothing but a weak-tea denunciation of the Noam-Norm axis will be snarky.
• You need to bring information to the table that your readers lack--at least one of these three: new information you have, information others have not been aware of that you can point to, analyses that have not occurred to your readers.

Whether Goldberg will eventually acquire the... sprezzatura, I guess... to make a success of the internet is unclear. But I'm not optimistic about a weblog that seems not to reach beyond "cooking with Elijah Muhammed" and denunciations of the Noam-Norm axis. Surely the Atlantic can find someone better suited to the medium?

Why Oh Why Can't We Have a Better Press Corps? (Joe Klein Edition)

A conversation in Brewed Awakening this morning:

Thrasymakhos: Why are you chewing your tie?

Glaukon: I made the mistake of reading Joe Klein this morning...

Sokrates: How can listening to what somebody has to say ever be a mistake?

Glaukon: You'll see. The structure of Klein's argument was roughly as follows: (1) Hillary Rodham Clinton has been demagoguing the gas tax holiday; (2) I know it's a bad and stupid idea; (3) but my small unevolved journalist lizard-brain was excited and enthusiastic; (4) but she lost; (5) so I will kick her when she is down; (6) and I feel somewhat guilty; (7) and I will be a more substance- and less spin-minded journalist in the future...

Sokrates: But this is a story of self-development--of someone acquiring knowledge through experience. Why should that make you chew your tie?

Thrasymakhos: No, Sokrates, you are wrong. This is a story of someone pretending to acquire knowledge through experience--it is a false repentance narrative, a la Elmer Gantry. But did you expect any better?

Glaukon: I was not finished. Then there is: (8) John McCain is an honorable man; (9) if Barack Obama "wants to maintain his reputation for honor, he'll have representatives from his campaign sit down with McCain's people to work out a sane, equitable campaign-financing mechanism for the general election — and a robust series of debates." The fact that the initial gas tax holiday demagoguer was John McCain is not mentioned--Joe Klein hides it from his readers. If he meant his pledge to do better, the fact that the gas tax holidy was McCain's idea first would have made it into the column...

Sokrates: Your logic is irrefutable, Glaukon.

Thrasymakhos: You are correct, Glaukon. If I were as ill-mannered as Duncan Black, I would award Joe Klein yet another "wanker of the day" prize.

Sokrates: I do wish you wouldn't chew on your tie, however. It sends the wrong message...

Thrasymakhos: This is Berkeley. Why are you even wearing a tie?

---

Here is Klein:

http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,1738330,00.html: Clinton stood on the back of a vintage pickup truck in Gastonia, N.C., and let fly in the most impressive fashion — a woman transformed from Eleanor Roosevelt into Huey Long in two short months. Spotting a big yellow placard that said GAS TAX HOLIDAY IS BLATANT PANDERING — a sign she would have ignored in her earlier, less feisty incarnations — she went after the young Obamish sign-holders: Why wasn't the Federal Reserve accused of pandering when it bailed out the Bear Stearns investment bank to the tune of $30 billion? Why shouldn't the oil companies pay the federal gasoline tax this summer instead of the people who "hold their breath" every time they pull up to the gas pump? "I know that some people don't have to worry when they go to the supermarket," she said, staring accusingly at the placard bearers, but "there are people who count their pennies as they walk down the aisle," trying to figure out what they can afford. "Don't they deserve a break every once in a while? They haven't done anything wrong ... The oil companies have had it their way for too long," she said. "I'm tired of being a patsy."

Wow.... I was of two minds. My high-minded policy brain was, of course, appalled. The gas-tax holiday was a scam.... Her sell was, well, shameless pandering.

On the other hand, my cynical low-information political brain was saying, You go, girl. This was fun to watch. "This is a serious election," Clinton said in Gastonia, "but I believe you still should have some fun." She seemed energized by her irresponsibility, sprung from her lifelong, eat-your-peas policy straitjacket.... It seemed like smart politics too... the kind of thing I have seen "work" throughout my nearly 40-year career as a journalist... you could fool most of the people most of the time....

[Yet] Clinton's paste-on populism changed absolutely nothing. The demographic blocs that had determined the shape of this remarkable campaign remained stolidly in place.... Clinton's slim margin of victory in Indiana was provided, appropriately enough, by Republicans.... Rush Limbaugh... had counseled his ditto heads to bring "chaos" to the Democratic electoral process by voting for their favorite whipping girl....

Clinton was spiky and histrionic in her simultaneous duel with George Stephanopoulos. She made alpha-dog power moves.... It wasn't until I read the transcript that I realized that Clinton's bravado had masked a brazenly empty performance. Stephanopoulos nailed her time after time.... In retrospect, it was easy to see that Clinton was desperate, willing to say almost anything to get over. At the time, she just seemed strong, certainly stronger than Obama on Meet the Press ... at least she did to me and many members of my chattering tribe. And our knee-jerk reactions — our prejudice toward performance values over policy — could infect the campaign to come between Obama and John McCain, just as it has the primaries....

The shameless populism that seemed a possible game changer to media observers, micro-ideas like the gas-tax holiday, the willingness to go negative....

In his victory speech after the smashing North Carolina results came in, Obama went directly after both McCain and the media. "[McCain's] plan to win in November appears to come from the very same playbook that his side has used time after time in election after election," Obama said. "Yes, we know what's coming. I'm not naive. We've already seen it, the same names and labels they always pin on everyone who doesn't agree with all their ideas, the same efforts to distract us from the issues that affect our lives, by pouncing on every gaffe and association and fake controversy, in the hopes that the media will play along."

That may have been unfair to McCain, since the Senator from Arizona won the Republican nomination in much the same way Obama has triumphed — as an outsider, an occasional reformer, a pariah to blowhards like Limbaugh. But it's also true that McCain has a choice to make: in the past month, he has wobbled between the high and low roads, at one point calling Obama the Hamas candidate for President after a member of that group "endorsed" the Senator from Illinois. If McCain wants to maintain his reputation as a politician more honorable than most, he's going to have to stop the sleaze. And if Obama wants to maintain his reputation for honor, he'll have representatives from his campaign sit down with McCain's people to work out a sane, equitable campaign-financing mechanism for the general election — and a robust series of debates. Mark McKinnon, a McCain adviser who has said he would rather recuse himself than help his candidate against Obama, has suggested that the two candidates campaign together, staging Lincoln-Douglas-style debates across the country — a proposal similar to the offer that Kennedy reportedly wanted to make if he ran against Barry Goldwater in 1964.

In the end, Obama's challenge to the media is as significant as his challenge to McCain. All the evidence — and especially the selection of these two apparent nominees — suggests the public not only is taking this election very seriously but is also extremely concerned about the state of the nation and tired of politics as usual. I suspect the public is also tired of media as usual, tired of journalists who put showmanship over substance ... as I found myself doing in the days before the May 6 primaries. Obama was talking about the Republicans, but he could easily have been talking about the press when he said, "The question, then, is not what kind of campaign they will run; it's what kind of campaign we will run. It's what we will do to make this year different. You see, I didn't get into this race thinking that I could avoid this kind of politics, but I am running for President because this is the time to end it."

Politics will always be propelled by grease, hot air and showmanship, but in the astonishing prosperity of the late 20th century, we allowed our public life to drift toward too much show biz, too little substance. Yes, the low-information signals — the bowling and tamale-eating — are crucial; politicians have to show that they are in touch with the lives of average folks. But a balance needs to be struck between carnival populism and the higher demands of democracy, and as a nation, we haven't been very good lately with the serious part of the program. As a result, there is a festering sense — I've seen it everywhere I've traveled this year — that the country is in "the ditch," as Clinton said. A general-election campaign between John McCain and Barack Obama doesn't need any hype. It won't be boring. The question is whether we, politicians and press alike, will grant this election — and electorate — the respect that it deserves.

New York Times Death Spiral Watch: Bill Kristol Edition (May 07, 2008) - Editing Anyone (Politics)

Outsourced to Matthew Yglesias:

Editing Anyone?: Bill Kristol's column from Monday:

In a New York Times/CBS News poll in late February, Obama was defeating John McCain 50 to 38. Two months later, the Times/CBS poll had McCain and Obama tied. The poll that came out yesterday showed Obama reopening a lead over McCain — but clearly over this period a vulnerability for Obama was exposed.

As Noam Scheiber notes it's a bit curious of Kristol to have left out the precise numbers from the new poll. But what it says is that Obama hasa lead of 51 to 40 which is identical to Obama's previous lead. I'm hardly shocked to see Kristol playing some funny games, but shouldn't there be some kind of editing of the Times columnists? Surely the NYT has it within its powers to be aware of the results of its own polls and get its writers to characterize the trends accurately.

Washington Post Death Spiral Watch

Outsourced to Kevin Drum:

The Washington Monthly: THE REPUBLICAN WAR ON SCIENCE....Michael Gerson today:

There are few things in American politics more irrationally ideological, more fanatically faith-based, than the accusation that Republicans are conducting a "war on science."

....For the most part, these accusations are a political ploy — actually an attempt to shut down political debate. Any practical concern about the content of government sex-education curricula is labeled "anti-science." Any ethical question about the destruction of human embryos to harvest their cells is dismissed as "theological" and thus illegitimate.

The disingenuousness here is breathtaking. Yes, liberals and conservatives have different views about sex education and stem cells, but those aren't even close to being the core issues in the liberal critique of the Republican war on science. The core issues, rather, are global warming denialism; creationism and intelligent design; the Gingrich-era shutdown of OTA; the promotion of phony cost-benefit analysis; and politically motivated lying about things like Plan B, breast cancer links to abortion, and condoms and STDs. Gerson surely knows this, but chooses to ignore all these genuine issues because his goal isn't to talk about science at all. What he really wants to talk about is a conservative trial balloon of fairly recent vintage: namely that liberal support of abortion rights and genetic screening constitutes a "new eugenics" in which science trumps morality and Dr. Mengele has the last laugh on all of us. Liberals' blind support of science über alles, he concludes ominously, is leading them into a "war on equality."

Good luck running that up the flagpole, Michael. Better than flag lapel pins, I suppose. In the meantime, what do you think about global warming, evolution, and condoms?

New York Times Death Spiral Watch: David Brooks Edition

John Sides pulls out his sarcasm, and lets loose:

The Monkey Cage: Demography Is Not King, or Why David Brooks Is a Hedgehog, Not a Fox: In this recent piece, David Brooks sees a nation divided:

some social divides, mostly involving ethnicity, have narrowed. But others, mostly involving education, have widened. Today there is a mass educated class. The college educated and non-college educated are likely to live in different towns. They have radically different divorce rates and starkly different ways of raising their children. The non-college educated not only earn less, they smoke more, grow more obese and die sooner....

The ensuing segmentation has reshaped politics. We’re used to the ideological divide between Red and Blue America. This year’s election has revealed a deep cultural gap within the Democratic Party, separating what Stuart Rothenberg calls the two Democratic parties.

In state after state (Wisconsin being the outlier), Barack Obama has won densely populated, well-educated areas. Hillary Clinton has won less-populated, less-educated areas. For example, Obama has won roughly 70 percent of the most-educated counties in the primary states. Clinton has won 90 percent of the least-educated counties. In state after state, Obama has won a few urban and inner-ring suburban counties. Clinton has won nearly everywhere else.

What is wrong with this characterization? First, Brooks uses aggregate-level data (from counties) to infer the individual-level behavior of voters. This is the ecological fallacy. When you look at actual exit polls from some recent primaries, the results are far less stark. In Pennsylvania, voters without a college degree favored Clinton, 58-42. Voters with a college degree favored Clinton too, 51-49.... Somehow I don’t see the “deep cultural gap.”...

[W]hile college-educated Democrats tend to be more liberal than other Democrats... the gap... is not growing.... Moreover, what divide does exist doesn’t really seem to matter much on Election Day: Democrats are highly loyal regardless of their level of formal education. Which is, by the way, why we should expect current divisions among Democrats to be pretty much mended by November.

Why does Brooks make mistakes like this?... Brooks knows... that the world can be easily divided into groups (preferably two) and these groups are really, really different for each other.... Unfortunately, Brooks’ mode of pop sociology obscures far more than it reveals, and forces him to bend the facts to suit this thesis. See also Sasha Issenberg’s famous take-down of the red/blue state piece.

The sad thing is, David Brooks actually appears to read and enjoy social science, and can even talk about it reasonably well.... But in columns like this, he seems content to ignore the data.... If it’s asking too much for Brooks to spend half an hour with the National Election Studies before writing a column like this, then consider this my job application. David Brooks, I will make pretty graphs and easy-to-read cross-tabulations for you. Just say the word...

Why oh why can't we have a better press corps?

Washington Post Death Spiral Watch

Why oh why can't we have a better press corps? Washington Post, um, "reporters" Perry Bacon Jr. and Shailagh Murray to why the Washington Post has only four years to live.

Outsourced to Ezra Klein:

EzraKlein Archive | The American Prospect: Nothing is misspelled, and the grammar all seems in order, but something seems wrong with an article headlined "Dueling Appeals On Taxes From Obama, Clinton" that never explains what the dueling tax appeals are. We hear something about Obama wanting more rebates (how much? for who? when?) and we're told that "Clinton has her own tax-cut proposals that benefit the middle class" (how do they work? how is middle-class defined? how do they benefit?), but neither proposal is ever described. Instead, we get a lot of horserace stuff, like "Obama appeared to acknowledge that Clinton's populist economic message is finding a receptive audience in Indiana" and "he is hoping that victories here and in North Carolina would build pressure on Clinton to exit the race for the party's nomination." I bet if you asked The Washington Post whether they covered policy debates, they'd point to articles like this one to prove that they do. But using policy as a way to write a horserace story doesn't really count.

New York Times Death Spiral Watch

Outsourced to Matthew Yglesias:

Fair and Balanced: Sweet Iraq panel from the NYT. It's got Richard Perle and Danielle Pletka and Frederick Kagan and Paul Bremer. That's four out of the nine slots! Plus you've got Ken Pollack, and what Spencer Ackerman describes as "non-liberal members of the reality-based community like Paul Eaton and Anthony Cordesman and Nate Fick." Representing American liberalism in even the liberal New York Times is Anne-Marie Slaughter all by her lonesome -- can't let too many hippies congregate on one op-ed page.

Why oh why can't we have a better press corps?

Nine years and counting before the end, unless the New York Times changes course. Nine years.

I Think the Atlantic Will Rue the Day It Let Jeffrey Goldberg onto Its Part of the Internet

Jonathan Schwarz rips Goldberg into shreds and gobbets with his sarcastic claws--and then eats the gobbets:

A Tiny Revolution: Jeffrey Goldberg Battles Manfully Against Internet's Glaring Flaws: Journalist Jeffrey Goldberg has a new blog at the Atlantic. This is great news, because Goldberg is one of the few people anywhere willing to grapple with the horrible weaknesses of the internet. For instance, here's Goldberg writing in Slate in October, 2002 in support of the Iraq war:

There is not sufficient space…for me to refute some of the arguments made in Slate over the past week against intervention, arguments made, I have noticed, by people with limited experience in the Middle East (Their lack of experience causes them to reach the naive conclusion that an invasion of Iraq will cause America to be loathed in the Middle East, rather than respected.)

Yes--Goldberg would have demolished the ridiculous arguments against invading Iraq, if only there were enough space on the internet. Man, he would have ripped them to shreds! But that's the problem with the online world, one that no one but Goldberg is willing to face: the internet has an extremely limited space for words.

Goldberg ran into exactly the same roadblock in one of his first posts:

I was telling Andrew about an on-line mugging I experienced at the hands of a person named Matt Haber, who is associated with the New York Observer...What bothered me about Mr. Haber's post was not its insults (a couple of which were funny) but that he repeated a discredited accusation made by an ethically-challenged journalist about my reporting without having sought my comment.

You can understand how frustrated Goldberg would be by this. Matt Haber had quoted Ken Silverstein of Harper's saying that Goldberg's pre-war Iraq reporting "relied heavily on administration sources and war hawks (and in at least one crucial case, a fabricator)."

God, it would be SO GREAT if there were some invention that would give Goldberg enough room to demonstrate with evidence that Silverstein is ethically-challenged and his claim has been discredited. Even better would be if this invention allowed Goldberg to easily direct readers' attention to such evidence elsewhere, thereby "linking" his post to it.

Perhaps someday science will provide us with such a glorious new means of communication. Certainly if it ever exists, Jeffrey Goldberg will make full use of it. He hates being forced to baldly assert things as fact and expect everyone to take his word for it. But given the internet's terrible shortcomings, he has no other choice.

IT'S A COMMON PROBLEM: Other people who desperately wanted to explain themselves but just didn't have the space include Madeleine Albright and Saddam Hussein.

Why oh why can't we have a better press corps?

Party of the Damned

Dan Froomkin shows us what the print Washington Post could be, if anybody working for it had any ovaries:

Party of the Damned: As the Bush presidency staggers to an end, it's hard to say who has less to brag about: the president or the journalists who cover him. So it's fitting that the last White House Correspondents' Association dinner of the Bush era -- the ultimate celebration of chumminess between the most powerful people in the world and those who are supposed to hold them accountable -- was a dispiriting, mostly humorless affair.

President Bush phoned in his appearance, uttering a few topical one-liners but leaning primarily on greatest-hits footage from previous performances -- and wrapping up with a cartoonish but crowd-pleasing "conducting" of the Marine band. Comedian Craig Ferguson essentially apologized in advance for his understated headlining performance -- a far cry from the withering diatribe delivered by Stephen Colbert two years ago.... [T]he only time he really showed teeth was to attack the no-show New York Times. "The New York Times unfortunately did not buy a table," he said. "They felt that this event 'undercuts the credibility of the press.' It's funny, you see, I thought that Jayson Blair and Judy Miller took care of that. What? . . . Did I go too far? Now let me try this: Shut the hell up, New York Times, you sanctimonious whining jerks!"...

Key members of the White House's torture-management team-- Cheney, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, former secretary of state Colin Powell -- along with leading torture apologists -- Attorney General Michael Mukasey, CIA Director Michael Hayden, former White House spokesman Tony Snow and current spokeswoman Dana Perino -- were fawned over as honored guests....

Watch it yourself if you dare. Here is video of the red carpet arrivals and the entire dinner. Here is the Bush performance and the Ferguson performance. Here is footage of the swampy hell that was the Bloomberg after-party.

Michael Scherer writes for Time that Bush "rose to offer C-SPAN viewers another reason to doubt political journalists' ability to be anything but cowardly suck-ups to presidential pomp. In recent years, this event has been known mainly for the fantastic performance in 2006 of Stephen Colbert, the Comedy Central host, who addressed the crowd with a withering critique of both the failures of President Bush and the media. . . . Neither the press nor the president had a rebuttal to Colbert, then or now, so he was simply not invited back and officially forgotten. Ever since, the dinner had been a far less newsworthy affair. As is tradition, the president stood to do a short stand up act, which included the retelling of an old joke about Vice President Dick Cheney watching Bush through a peephole in the Oval Office door while masturbating. Such is the state of Washington humor....

[W]hat did British actor Rupert Everett thinks about the dinner? "'Hideous,' he said flatly. 'One of the most hideous events I've ever been to.'"...

Meanwhile. . . . Mark Mazzetti writes in the New York Times: "The Justice Department has told Congress that American intelligence operatives attempting to thwart terrorist attacks can legally use interrogation methods that might otherwise be prohibited under international law. The legal interpretation, outlined in recent letters, sheds new light on the still-secret rules for interrogations by the Central Intelligence Agency. It shows that the administration is arguing that the boundaries for interrogations should be subject to some latitude, even under an executive order issued last summer that President Bush said meant that the C.I.A. would comply with international strictures against harsh treatment of detainees.

"While the Geneva Conventions prohibit 'outrages upon personal dignity,' a letter sent by the Justice Department to Congress on March 5 makes clear that the administration has not drawn a precise line in deciding which interrogation methods would violate that standard, and is reserving the right to make case-by-case judgments. 'The fact that an act is undertaken to prevent a threatened terrorist attack, rather than for the purpose of humiliation or abuse, would be relevant to a reasonable observer in measuring the outrageousness of the act,' said Brian A. Benczkowski, a deputy assistant attorney general, in the letter, which had not previously been made public. . . . Some legal experts critical of the Justice Department interpretation said the department seemed to be arguing that the prospect of thwarting a terror attack could be used to justify interrogation methods that would otherwise be illegal.

"'What they are saying is that if my intent is to defend the United States rather than to humiliate you, than I have not committed an offense,' said Scott L. Silliman, who teaches national security law at Duke University....

Legal blogger Sandy Levinson writes that there is "a certain logical paradox here: The very fact that the some US interrogator would suggest that some particular conduct is 'reasonable' in some situation would, by definition, mean that there is not 'universal' condemnation of the practice. This is especially true if one accepts the DOJ argument that 'The fact that an act is undertaken to prevent a threatened terrorist attack, rather than for the purpose of humiliation or abuse, would be relevant to a reasonable observer in measuring the outrageousness of the act.' Once one allows what might be termed 'purity of utilitarian motive' to dominate the analysis, the game is over, for there will always be those who will argue that it is worth doing practically anything to forestall any 'terrorist attack.'"

Phillip Carter blogs for washingtonpost.com: "Among the more Kafkaesque arguments proffered by the Bush administration for its coercive interrogation (or torture) regime is this: Cruel, inhuman or degrading acts are not torture if they're done with good intentions."

Gitmo Watch

Jess Bravin writes in the Wall Street Journal (subscription required): "When military prosecutors enter Guantanamo's heavily guarded courtroom Monday, they can expect to face a spectacle: their former boss, in uniform, testifying against them. Col. Morris Davis, for two years the chief Guantanamo prosecutor, is expected to testify that the operation he once led has been infected with political agendas and corrupted by the Achilles' heel of military justice -- unlawful command influence. The Bush administration's military commissions plan has careered through internal disarray, administrative setbacks and legal debacles since the president announced it in November 2001, and still has yet to conduct a single trial. But Col. Davis's appearance may be the strangest twist yet. 'It's not that I'm sympathetic to the detainees or say they should get a free pass,' says Col. Davis, now director of the Air Force Judiciary. 'But I do think they are entitled to a fair trial.'"

Why Oh Why Can't We Have a Better Press Corps?

A correspondent emails me:

Gmail - [JournoList] WSJ: Newspaper Circulation Drop Sharpens: ANDREW LAVALLEE: April 29, 2008; Page B1: Most of the nation's biggest newspapers saw circulation tumble at an increased rate, a sign that the migration of readers online may be picking up speed.... [A]verage weekday circulation at 534 daily newspapers fell 3.6% for the six months ended March 31, compared with the year-earlier period.... Sunday circulation fell even more, losing 4.6% on average....

Nearly all of the 10 biggest newspapers in the U.S. posted circulation declines.... The New York Times' average weekday circulation fell 3.9% to 1.08 million. It saw an even steeper drop in Sunday circulation, which was down 9.3% to 1.48 million. "This was a decline that we planned and budgeted for," said New York Times spokeswoman Diane McNulty. The company has eliminated "bonus days," in which the Sunday paper was delivered to weekday subscribers, and has cut back on discounted and advertiser-paid distribution as it attempts to grow more-profitable circulation, she said. In that shift, she added, "We do expect to see some copy decline"...

The New York Times--between David Brooks, Tom Friedman, William Kristol, Ben Stein, Judy Miller, Elizabeth Bumiller, Larry Rohter, Michael Cooper, and a host of others, I know that I feel icky every time I pick up my New York Times and realize that my money is helping to feed them.

Perhaps the scariest person around is New York Times spokeswoman Diane McNulty, whose claim that a 9.3% decline in Sunday circulation was a decline "that we planned and budgeted for."

Jonathan Weisman Strikes Again!

Ah. Page A1 of the Post. The death spiral continues:

McCain Offers Tax Policies He Once Opposed: Now that he is the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, however, McCain is marching straight down the party line. The economic package he has laid out embraces many of the tax policies he once decried: extending Bush's tax cuts he voted against, offering investment tax breaks he once believed would have little economic benefit and granting the long-held wishes of tax lobbyists he has often mocked....

To supporters, McCain has simply seen the light and now understands the power that business tax relief has to spur economic growth and innovation. Said J.D. Foster, a former Bush White House and Treasury tax policy expert, now at the Heritage Foundation: "It's logical that he wouldn't be repeating the arguments he made then. We all learn from experience."

To critics, it is political pandering. "It's just part of the new John McCain that's taking on the conventional wisdom that in tight races, you have to energize the base and win by 50.000001 percent," Chafee said. "I was frankly surprised that he's kept it up after securing the nomination. I thought he'd move to the center, and I haven't seen it"...

First time I have ever seen anybody describe J.D. Foster as a tax policy "expert." Lobbyist, yes. Apparatchik, yes. Ideologue, yes. But expert? Never seen that before...

Why oh why can't we have a better press corps?

Paul Krugman Tells Us to Go Read Joe Klein from 2005

Here's Klein. The occasion is that he recycled the title of his column. The Democrats, you see, are always shrinking:

The Incredible Shrinking Democrats: There was a cheap metaphor to be had in the remarkable moment when Safia al-Souhail, who had just voted in the Iraqi elections, and Janet Norwood, whose U.S. Marine son was killed in Iraq, embraced during the President's State of the Union speech last week.... [N]othing should detract from the emotional truth of the moment, the magnitude of Norwood's loss, the exhilaration of al-Souhail's ballot. Yes, disentanglement will be difficult. And, yes, we shouldn't "overhype" the election, as John Kerry clumsily suggested. But this is not a moment for caveats. It is a moment for solemn appreciation of the Iraqi achievement--however it may turn out--and for hope.

The Democrats are having trouble with graciousness these days....

This was a symptom of a larger disease: most Democrats seemed as reluctant as Kerry to express the slightest hint of optimism about the [Iraqi] elections. Congressional leaders Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi diminished themselves....

Reid's claim that George W. Bush would reduce Social Security benefits 40% was hogwash. The President has merely stated the obvious, that reductions will be necessary. Reid also made the absurd comparison between Bush's very conservative investment-account proposal and Las Vegas gaming tables. Finally, there was the boorish and possibly unprecedented hooting of the President....

The day after the President's speech, the party's congressional leaders gathered at the Franklin D. Roosevelt memorial to carp. How 70 years ago! "Progressive" Dems—-and I use the term advisedly, since liberals seem more interested in preserving the past than in discovering the future—-are right to admire Roosevelt. But the Roosevelt they worship is a bronze sculpture, frozen in time. The real F.D.R. was a gutsy innovator. The current Democrats resemble nothing so much as the Republicans during the 25 years after Roosevelt's death-—negative, defensive, intellectually feeble, a permanent minority... undifferentiated opposition [to Bush] is obtuse and most likely counterproductive. The Democrats' current crudeness is a function of their desperation, and the imminent ratification of Howard Dean, the least charming presidential candidate in recent memory, as their party chairman only serves to punctuate the problem.

All of which leaves Bush with a lot of room to lead. His speech last week was striking... with the exceptions of his empty call for a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage--a congressional nonstarter, but a sop to religious conservatives--and his continued refusal to support federal funding for new stem-cell-research lines.... There is... a profitable discussion to be had between "ownership" Republicans and "third-way" Democrats about transforming the stagnant bureaucracies of the Industrial Age... the stunned and churlish Democrats are refusing...

Why oh why can't we have a better press corps?

Washington Post Death Spiral Watch

Outsourced to Roy Edroso:

alicublog: THE OVERCLASS STRIKES BACK. George F.---ing Will today:

After 1962, when New York City signed the nation's first collective bargaining contract with teachers, teachers began changing from members of a respected profession into just another muscular faction fighting for more government money.

August 1, 2007: "Firefighters, Scientists And Teachers Top List As 'Most Prestigious Occupations,' According To Latest Harris Poll."

Will, forever the callow young lord whose noblesse oblige turns to viciousness when the servants ask for a raise, probably never knew what normal people still (thank God) remember: disrespect for the nobler enterprises of society is one of the real signs of social collapse.

Washington Post Death Spiral Watch (Richard Cohen Edition)

Outsourced to Matthew Yglesias:

Cohen on McCain: He Can Do Know Wrong : Via Somerby and Lemieux, Richard Cohen has a war is peace moment:

And so it will be the job, the obligation, the solemn task of the next president to restore that trust. John McCain could do it. He's an honorable man who has fudged and ducked and swallowed the truth on occasion—about the acceptability of the Confederate flag, for instance—but always, I think, for understandable although not necessarily admirable reasons.

To be simplistic about this, you're looking here at a press that's hopelessly in the tank for John McCain.

To try to be a bit more charitable, you're looking here at a press that's hopelessly invested in the doomed epistemology of character. We can't know what lurks in the hearts of pols, but we can make inferences based on their behavior. But all politicians' behavior is mixed. So we (and by "we" here I mean "Richard Cohen") read that behavior through our preexisting beliefs about their character. And since we "know" that McCain is honorable, he fudges and ducks and swallows etc. for "understandable" reasons, whereas other, lesser politicians are just soulless scumbags. Of course McCain's reasons are understandable -- he wants to win! -- but they're just the same reasons everyone else has. They pander, he's understandable. They lie, he fudges. It's all senseless.

Which is, I suppose, just another way of observing that we're looking at a press corps that's hopelessly in the tank for John McCain.

Why oh why can't we have a better press corps?

Washington Post Death Spiral Watch (George F. Will Edition)

Outsourced to Mark Thoma:

Economist's View:: George Will tries to talk about Fed policy, but if you don't understand the Fed's goals - and he doesn't - then the analysis of policy will be based on a faulty premise and reach incorrect conclusions. George Will thinks:

The Fed's mission is to preserve the currency as a store of value by preventing inflation. ... The Fed should not try to produce this or that rate of economic growth or unemployment

But that's wrong. As Mishkin says:

In a democratic society like our own, the ultimate purpose of the central bank is to promote the public good by pursuing a course of monetary policy that fosters economic prosperity and social welfare. In the United States, as in virtually every other country, the central bank has a more specific set of objectives that have been established by the government. This mandate was originally specified by the Federal Reserve Act of 1913 and was most recently clarified by an amendment to the Federal Reserve Act in 1977.

According to this legislation, the Federal Reserve's mandate is "to promote effectively the goals of maximum employment, stable prices, and moderate long-term interest rates." Because long-term interest rates can remain low only in a stable macroeconomic environment, these goals are often referred to as the dual mandate; that is, the Federal Reserve seeks to promote the two coequal objectives of maximum employment and price stability.

How concerned is George Will about the working class and employment? Should we use monetary policy to try to stimulate employment even if there's a chance of inflation? Not in George Will's world:

A surge of inflation might mean the end of the world as we have known it.

He ends his column by putting his analytical skills to work:

If Congress cannot suppress its itch to "do something" while markets are correcting the prices of housing and money, Congress could pass a law saying: No company benefiting from a substantial federal subvention ... may pay any executive more than the highest pay of a federal civil servant ($124,010). That would dampen Wall Street's enthusiasm for measures that socialize losses while keeping profits private.

First he tells us - incorrectly - that the Fed's sole job is to "to preserve the currency as a store of value." But now he tells us that government should not intervene when markets are "correcting the prices of housing and money." So which is it, do we let markets correct the price of money or not?

He doesn't think the Fed should do anything to help the working class stay employed, but that didn't stop him from trying to make the case in his last column that Democrats, Barrack Obama in particular, follow a "doctrine of condescension toward those people":

What had been under FDR a celebration of America and the values of its working people has become a doctrine of condescension toward those people...

That is, of course, a crock, but what is the condescension here? I think making up Fed goals to support a policy that ignores working class' needs is the condescending act.

Why oh why can't we have a better press corps?

Why Oh Why Can't We Have a Better Press Corps? (New Republic Edition)

Matthew Yglesias protests: Is everyone really an Anti-Semite?

He writes:

Matthew Yglesias: Everyone an Anti-Semite: For reasons I can't quite comprehend, even some pretty hardened T[he ]N[ew ]R[epublic]-haters seem to see Leon Wieseltier as making a positive contribution to the world. Certainly, some very good stuff appears in the back of the book over there, but the man's own work is a kind of writing-as-thuggery. Anyways, it seems I have to add my colleague Andrew Sullivan to the ever-growing list of people TNR deems motivated by hatred of Jews. The context -- Bill Kristol sitting in his partisan hack armchair and determining that Barack Obama's Christian faith is insincere:

And now for the grossly undialectical bit. The ink on the Times was not yet dry when Andrew Sullivan rushed to the defense of his idol, I mean Obama. When one types all the time, sooner or later everything will be typed, and so Sullivan, in his fury against Kristol, typed this: "A non-Christian manipulator of Christianity is calling a Christian a liar about his faith." Ponder that early adjective. It is Jew baiting. I was not aware that only Christians can judge Christians, or that there are things about which a Jew cannot call a Christian a liar. If Kristol is wrong about Obama, it is not because Kristol is a Jew. So this fills me with a certain paschal wrath. Nice little blog you have there, Obama boy. Pity if frogs or locusts should happen to it. Let my people be!

Um . . . really . . . noting the irony of Kristol's attack is now "Jew-baiting"? We seem to be defining our problems down here. But in Wieseltier's view, this is the equivalent of enslaving the entire people of Israel. And Wieseltier himself is, I guess, Moses? How preposterous. And this isn't a blog post -- Wieseltier has, nominally, an editor who ought to be able to engage in some quality control.

Now Andrew Sullivan is many things, many of them loathsome. But he is not an anti-semite.

The managing editor of the New Republic is Frank Foer, whom I would once have said had a better than even chance of being the first managing editor since Michael Kinsley to leave the job with a reputation.

IMHO, if everyone reading/subscribing to the New Republic were to stop this evening, and start reading/subscribing to some one or more than one of the Nation, the American Prospect, or the Washington Independent, then the world would be a better place and they would be better informed as well. So I encourage everybod to do so.

Our Political Press

Atrios on those whom our press corps condemns as "out-of-touch":

Eschaton: Deep Thought: After his disastrous campaign misstep of putting swiss cheese on a cheese steak, John Kerry won 81% of the vote in Philadelphia.

Why oh why can't we have a better press corps?

Why Oh Why Can't We Have a Better Press Corps? (New York Times Edition)

At least four years late:

The Torture Sessions: Ever since Americans learned that American soldiers and intelligence agents were torturing prisoners, there has been a disturbing question: How high up did the decision go to ignore United States law, international treaties, the Geneva Conventions and basic morality? answer, we have learned recently, is that -- with President Bush's clear knowledge and support -- some of the very highest officials in the land not only approved the abuse of prisoners, but participated in the detailed planning of harsh interrogations and helped to create a legal structure to shield from justice those who followed the orders.

We have long known that the Justice Department tortured the law to give its Orwellian blessing to torturing people, and that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld approved a list of ways to abuse prisoners. But recent accounts by ABC News and The Associated Press said that all of the president's top national security advisers at the time participated in creating the interrogation policy: Vice President Dick Cheney; Mr. Rumsfeld; Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser; Colin Powell, the secretary of state; John Ashcroft, the attorney general; and George Tenet, the director of central intelligence.

These officials did not have the time or the foresight to plan for the aftermath of the invasion of Iraq or the tenacity to complete the hunt for Osama bin Laden. But they managed to squeeze in dozens of meetings in the White House Situation Room to organize and give legal cover to prisoner abuse, including brutal methods that civilized nations consider to be torture.

Mr. Bush told ABC News this month that he knew of these meetings and approved of the result.

Those who have followed the story of the administration's policies on prisoners may not be shocked. We have read the memos from the Justice Department redefining torture, claiming that Mr. Bush did not have to follow the law, and offering a blueprint for avoiding criminal liability for abusing prisoners.

The amount of time and energy devoted to this furtive exercise at the very highest levels of the government reminded us how little Americans know, in fact, about the ways Mr. Bush and his team undermined, subverted and broke the law in the name of saving the American way of life.

We have questions to ask, in particular, about the involvement of Ms. Rice, who has managed to escape blame for the catastrophic decisions made while she was Mr. Bush's national security adviser, and Mr. Powell, a career Army officer who should know that torture has little value as an interrogation method and puts captured Americans at much greater risk. Did they raise objections or warn of the disastrous effect on America's standing in the world? Did anyone?

Mr. Bush has sidestepped or quashed every attempt to uncover the breadth and depth of his sordid actions. Congress is likely to endorse a cover-up of the extent of the illegal wiretapping he authorized after 9/11, and we are still waiting, with diminishing hopes, for a long-promised report on what the Bush team really knew before the Iraq invasion about those absent weapons of mass destruction -- as opposed to what it proclaimed.

At this point it seems that getting answers will have to wait, at least, for a new Congress and a new president. Ideally, there would be both truth and accountability. At the very minimum the public needs the full truth.

Some will call this a backward-looking distraction, but only by fully understanding what Mr. Bush has done over eight years to distort the rule of law and violate civil liberties and human rights can Americans ever hope to repair the damage and ensure it does not happen again.

Four years ago, this would have been a useful editorial. Today? And not even now can they nerve themselves to call for the impeachment of George W. Bush.

Cowards.

Stupidest Man Alive Nomination: Larry Kudlow

One would think that National Review would want to maintain a smidgeon of a reputation, and hence at least edit Larry Kudlow for his biggest howlers. But no.

Eschaton reader js informs Atrios of the stupidity:

Eschaton: Fixing the Internets: Larry Kudlow:

Uncapping the payroll tax reveals still another cultural misstep by Sen. Obama. He apparently has a difficult time understanding that nowadays, a veteran fireman or a veteran cop, married to a veteran schoolteacher, will make well over $100,000. In fact, they can make close to $200,000. Yet Obama still wants to go ahead and tax both the first and last payroll dollar of this group at a very high marginal tax rate by uncapping the Social Security (FICA) tax.

The FICA cap is an individual cap, unaffected by income earned/payroll taxes paid by your spouse.

Why oh why can't we have a better press corps?

Why Oh Why Can't We Have a Better Press Corps? (ABC News Edition)

Shut down ABC News now. Replace it with another local-access public channel, and so improve quality.

Henry Farrell expresses my thoughts exactly:

: We the undersigned deplore the conduct of ABC%u2019s George Stephanopoulos and Charles Gibson at the Democratic Presidential debate on April 16. The debate was a revolting descent into tabloid journalism and a gross disservice to Americans concerned about the great issues facing the nation and the world. This is not the first Democratic or Republican presidential debate to emphasize gotcha questions over real discussion. However, it is, so far, the worst.

For 53 minutes, we heard no question about public policy from either moderator. ABC seemed less interested in provoking serious discussion than in trying to generate cheap shot sound-bites for later rebroadcast. The questions asked by Mr. Stephanopoulos and Mr. Gibson were a disgrace, and the subsequent attempts to justify them by claiming that they reflect citizens' interest are an insult to the intelligence of those citizens and ABC's viewers. Many thousands of those viewers have already written to ABC to express their outrage.

The moderators' occasional later forays into substance were nearly as bad. Mr. Gibson's claim that the government can raise revenues by cutting capital gains tax is grossly at odds with what taxation experts believe. Both candidates tried, repeatedly, to bring debate back to the real problems faced by ordinary Americans. Neither moderator allowed them to do this.

We're at a crucial moment in our country's history, facing war, a terrorism threat, recession, and a range of big domestic challenges. Large majorities of our fellow Americans tell pollsters they%u2019re deeply worried about the country's direction. In such a context, journalists moderating a debate--who are, after all, entrusted with free public airwaves--have a particular responsibility to push and engage the candidates in serious debate about these matters. Tough, probing questions on these issues clearly serve the public interest. Demands that candidates make pledges about a future no one can predict or excessive emphasis on tangential "character" issues do not. This applies to candidates of both parties.

Neither Mr. Gibson nor Mr. Stephanopoulos lived up to these responsibilities. In the words of Tom Shales of the Washington Post, Mr. Gibson and Mr. Stephanopoulos turned in "shoddy, despicable performances." As Greg Mitchell of Editor and Publisher, describes it, the debate was a "travesty." We hope that the public uproar over ABC's miserable showing will encourage a return to serious journalism in debates between the Democratic and Republican nominees this fall. Anything less would be a betrayal of the basic responsibilities that journalists owe to their public.

Why Oh Why Can't We Have a Better Press Corps? (ABC Edition)

From all accounts ABC disgraced itself at last night's debate in a manner much worse than the manner in which the substance-free and ignorant network questioners usually disgrace themselves.

Greg Mitchell:

Clinton-Obama Debate: ABC Decides Top Issues Facing Americans Are Gaffes, Flag Pins and '60s Radicals: In perhaps the most embarrassing performance by the media in a major presidential debate in years, ABC News hosts Charles Gibson and George Stephanopolous focused mainly on trivial issues as Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama faced off in Philadelphia. Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the health care and mortgage crises, the overall state of the economy and dozens of other pressing issues had to wait for their few moments in the sun as Obama was pressed to explain his recent "bitter" gaffe and relationship with Rev. Wright (seemingly a dead issue) and not wearing a flag pin while Clinton had to answer again for her Bosnia trip exaggerations. Then it was back to Obama to defend his slim association with a former '60s radical -- a question that came out of rightwing talk radio and Sean Hannity on TV, but delivered by former Bill Clinton aide Stephanopolous. This approach led to a claim that Clinton's husband pardoned two other '60s radicals. And so on...

Tom Shales:

In Pa. Debate, The Clear Loser Is ABC: When Barack Obama met Hillary Clinton for another televised Democratic candidates' debate last night, it was more than a step forward in the 2008 presidential election. It was another step downward for network news -- in particular ABC News.... Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopoulos, turned in shoddy, despicable performances...

I propose that everybody associated with the debate at ABC leave journalism and find another job where they can be socially productive--replacing bunnies as animal testing subjects for cosmetics comes to mind as perhaps the best use...

New York Times Death Spiral Watch: ar, Peter Goodman, Friedman Would Have Welcomed the Fed's Intervention in Bear Stearns

Peter Goodman of the New York Times writes that Milton Friedman "would surely be unhappy with this turn" of events as the Federal Reserve intervenes in financial markets to cushion the impact of things like the collapse of Bear Stearns.

No, Peter Goodman, you are wrong. Friedman would have welcomed the Fed's intervention in Bear Stearns as a way of preventing a downward move in the deposit-currency ratio and thus a fall in the money stock.

On a deeper level, I really think that Peter Goodman of the New York Times gets Milton Friedman wrong. Milton Friedman said that prosperity springs from markets as long as:

• The government is not allowed to establish and maintain islands of monopoly power.
• The government stabilizes the money stock and keeps the economy liquid--keeps the stock of assets people can readily spend growing at a steady pace.

Had Peter Goodman actually read anything Milton Friedman wrote about the Great Depression, Goodman would know that when Milton Friedman "attributed the worst economic unraveling in American history to regulators," he placed special stress on Depression-era regulators' refusal to move aggressively to handle bank failures--in Friedman and Schwartz's The Great Contraction, the moment when a normal recession becomes the Great Depression comes about when the Bank of United States fails and the Federal Reserve refuses to step in to handle the situation. Friedman was very much pro-bailout as far as bank depositors were concerned when a failure to do so would lead to a systemic reduction in the money stock.

And Friedman's line was always not that market are perfect, but rather that while markets can and do fail governments have more common and worse modes of failure--except for a narrow range of core functions: rule of law, systemic financial stability, increasing-returns infrastructure, et cetera.

There are tens of thousands of people--left, right, and center--who know Milton Friedman's work, and who would not have committed the elementary error of writing "Friedman... would surely be unhappy with this turn" of government--chiefly the Federal Reserve--working to contain and stem the current financial crisi.

So why is ink given to Peter Goodman, far out of his depth? Why oh why can't wett have a better press corps?

Reconsidering Milton Friedman's Legacy: A Fresh Look at the Apostle of Free Markets: Joblessness is growing. Millions of homes are sliding into foreclosure. The financial system continues to choke on the toxic leftovers of the mortgage crisis. The downward spiral of the economy is challenging a notion that has underpinned American economic policy for a quarter-century — the idea that prosperity springs from markets left free of government interference. The modern-day godfather of that credo was Milton Friedman, who attributed the worst economic unraveling in American history to regulators, declaring in a 1976 essay that “the Great Depression was produced by government mismanagement.”...

Just as the Depression remade government’s role in economic life, bringing jobs programs and an expanded welfare system, the current downturn has altered the balance. As Wall Street, Main Street and Pennsylvania Avenue seethe with recriminations, a bipartisan chorus has decided that unfettered markets are in need of fettering. Bailouts, stimulus spending and regulations dominate the conversation. In short, the nation steeped in the thinking of a man who blamed government for the Depression now beseeches government to lift it to safety. If Mr. Friedman, who died in 2006, were still among us, he would surely be unhappy with this turn....

Mr. Friedman’s brand of libertarianism rested on the assumption that economic and political freedom were one and the same. It meshed with and fed the cold war thinking of his time, as the United States offered up capitalism as liberty itself in contrast to the authoritarian Soviet Union. Among professional economists, Mr. Friedman’s analytical mastery was near-universally admired.... His greatest contribution came the following decade, when Mr. Friedman dismantled the consensus view that inflation was a tolerable byproduct of high employment. He demonstrated that high inflation would eventually cost jobs, as businesses were discouraged to invest by the higher wages they had to pay.

“This triumph, more than anything else, confirmed Milton Friedman’s status as a great economist’s economist, whatever one may think of his other roles,” Paul Krugman, an economist (and a New York Times columnist) wrote last year in The New York Review of Books.

Mr. Friedman captured the era with a new formulation known as monetarism: that the government should gradually and predictably inject cash into the financial system, and then let the market figure out where it should go. “Any honest Democrat will admit that we are now all Friedmanites,” Lawrence H. Summers, the Harvard economist and former Clinton administration Treasury secretary, wrote in an appreciation published in this newspaper when Mr. Friedman died. “He has had more influence on economic policy as it is practiced around the world today than any other modern figure”...

Paul Krugman has his own complaint about Goodman:

Paul Krugman: [O]n behalf of economists everywhere, I want to protest about [Goodman's] description of [Friedman's] natural rate hypothesis:

He demonstrated that high inflation would eventually cost jobs, as businesses were discouraged to invest by the higher wages they had to pay.

This is deeply unfair to Friedman -- it makes a quite profound insight sound like nothing more than a rant.

Here's how I described the natural rate hypothesis in the NYRB piece:

He argued that after a sustained period of inflation, people would build expectations of future inflation into their decisions, nullifying any positive effects of inflation on employment. For example, one reason inflation may lead to higher employment is that hiring more workers becomes profitable when prices rise faster than wages. But once workers understand that the purchasing power of their wages will be eroded by inflation, they will demand higher wage settlements in advance, so that wages keep up with prices. As a result, after inflation has gone on for a while, it will no longer deliver the original boost to employment. In fact, there will be a rise in unemployment if inflation falls short of expectations.

What would Friedman be thinking now, if he were still alive? He would be worried about regulatory overreach. He would be conflicted because he would also be well-aware that organizations capable of generating systemic risk need to be regulated in some way in order to diminish the scope for moral hazard (hence Friedman's calls, at times, for extremely strict banking regulation: 100% reserve banking, in fact).

He would mostly, however, be focused on two graphs of the behavior of the money stock:

And he would have been approving of Federal Reserve policy as long as it kept both these lines from either (a) falling or (b) exploding upward.

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New York Times Death Spiral Watch: Tanta of Calculated Risk Is Extremely Unhappy

Downright shrill. It is Gretchen Morgenson on home equity lines:

Calculated Risk: HELOC Nonsense: [Morgenson's] whole article... depending on Kratzer's unsourced assertion of "common fees" and his innuendoes about lender valuations... begs the question: this is "unfair" because the equity is there, even though the lenders say the equity isn't there. There isn't one homeowner quoted who actually got an appraisal or AVM that shows something other than the bank's valuation. Kratzer seems to think the bank is obligated to pay for a new appraisal and send you a copy when they lower your line limit. For him, I got bad news: that would, indeed, bring average closing costs on HELOCs up to 300 bps....

Claiming or implying that the only reason a lender can or should reduce or freeze a HELOC is when the borrower's ability to repay has changed is not just a total misunderstanding of federal banking regulations, it's dumb. The "HE" in "HELOC" stands for Home Equity. This is not just any old revolving line of credit, it's secured credit.

If you have problems with paying a grand or two for a line of credit you may never use, I suggest not doing it. If you wish to consider that you paid an option fee and your option expired, well, you can feel like one of the professional hedgers. If you think any closing costs you paid should be refunded to you because you're now "out of the money," I posit that you do not understand finances enough to get quoted in a newspaper.

Why do banks reduce or cancel home equity lines rather than just raising the interest rate? Because they fear that the borrowers who will stick around at a higher interest rate are just the guys the bank will ultimately end up losing money on: bad risks.

New York Times Death Spiral Watch

This is just so embarrassingly bad. On so many levels:

David Brooks: The Great Forgetting: They say the 21st century is going to be the Asian Century, but, of course, it’s going to be the Bad Memory Century. Already, you go to dinner parties and the middle-aged high achievers talk more about how bad their memories are than about real estate. Already, the information acceleration syndrome means that more data is coursing through everybody’s brains, but less of it actually sticks. It’s become like a badge of a frenetic, stressful life — to have forgotten what you did last Saturday night, and through all of junior high.

In the era of an aging population, memory is the new sex.

Society is now riven between the memory haves and the memory have-nots. On the one side are these colossal Proustian memory bullies who get 1,800 pages of recollection out of a mere cookie-bite. They traipse around broadcasting their conspicuous displays of recall as if quoting Auden were the Hummer of conversational one-upmanship. On the other side are those of us suffering the normal effects of time, living in the hippocampically challenged community that is one step away from leaving the stove on all day.

This divide produces moments of social combat. Some vaguely familiar person will come up to you in the supermarket. “Stan, it’s so nice to see you!” The smug memory dropper can smell your nominal aphasia and is going to keep first-naming you until you are crushed into submission.

Your response here is critical. You want to open up with an effusive burst of insincere emotional warmth: “Hey!” You’re practically exploding with feigned ecstasy. “Wonderful to see you too! How is everything?” All the while, you are frantically whirring through your memory banks trying to anchor this person in some time and context.

A decent human being would sense your distress and give you some lagniappe of information — a mention of the church picnic you both attended, the parents’ association at school, the fact that the two of you were formerly married. But the Proustian bully will give you nothing. “I’m good. And you?” It’s like trying to get an arms control concession out of Leonid Brezhnev.

Your only strategy is evasive vagueness, conversational rope-a-dope until you can figure out who this person is. You start talking in the tone of over-generalized blandness that suggests you have recently emerged from a coma.

Sensing your pain, your enemy pours it on mercilessly. “And how is Mary, and little Steven and Rob?” People who needlessly display their knowledge of your kids’ names are the lowest scum of the earth.

You’re in agony now, praying for an episode of spontaneous combustion. But still she drives the blade in deeper, “That was some party the other night wasn’t it?”

You lose vision. What party? Did you see this person at a party? By now, articulation is impossible. You are a puddle of gurgling noises and awkward silences. After the longest of these pauses, she goes for the coup de grâce: “You have no idea who I am, do you?”

You can’t tell the truth. That would be an admission of social defeat. The only possible response is: “Of course, I know who you are. You’re the hooker who hangs around on 14th Street most Saturday nights.”

The dawning of the Bad Memory Century will have vast consequences for the social fabric and the international balance of power. International relations experts will notice that great powers can be defined by their national forgetting styles. Americans forget their sins. Russians forget their weaknesses. The French forget that they’ve forgotten God. And, in the Middle East, they forget everything but their resentments.

There will be new social movements and causes. The supermarket parking lots will be filled with cranky criminal gangs composed of middle-aged shoppers looking for their cars. As it becomes clear that a constant stream of blog posts and e-mails decimates the capacity for recall, people will be confronted with the modern Sophie’s choice — your BlackBerry or your mind.

Neural environmentalists will emerge from the slow foods movement, urging people to accept memory loss as a way to reduce their mental footprint. Meanwhile, mnemonic gurus will emerge offering to sell neural Viagra, but the only old memories the pills really bring back will involve trigonometry.

As in most great historical transformations, the members of the highly educated upper-middle class will express their suffering most loudly. It is especially painful when narcissists suffer memory loss because they are losing parts of the person they love most. First they lose the subjects they’ve only been pretending to understand — chaos theory, monetary policy, Don Delillo — and pretty soon their conversation is reduced to the core stories of self-heroism.

Their affection for themselves will endure through this Bad Memory Century, but their failure to retrieve will produce one of the epoch’s most notable features: shorter memoirs.

Why oh why can't we have a better press corps?

Kerry Howley on China

She is driven into shrill unholy madness by the stupidity that is the Weekly Standard:

: The whole [Weekly Standard] thing is nonresponsive to Brzezinski's argument, but it's the last sentence that strikes me as weirdly dismissive. In 1978, the majority of rural Chinese were living at subsistence, the way the majority of Burmese live now. A third of the rural population--260 million peopl--lived under the poverty line, meaning that they were not adequately fed or clothed even in a good year.

By 1997, the number of people living under the poverty line had been slashed by 200 million. A Chinese person born in 1960 could expect to live until 41, give or take. Kids born today will, on average, live 30 years longer. No other society has ever undergone such a dramatic transformation in two decades. The fact that we can even talk about restrictions on Chinese Internet access implies a massive improvement in wellbeing.

There is a serious lack of imaginative capacity among pundits who can, in a sentence, brush this kind of thing aside. Bangladeshis vote for their corrupt leaders and legally worship whatever God they wish. In what substantive sense is a kid born in Dhaka (GDP per capita: $2300) better off than a kid born in Beijing ($7700) or Singapore ($31,400)? Free to do what? Almost anywhere, prosperity brings with it the ability to educate your children, to enjoy a modicum of leisure, to leave. What's freedom of exit worth if you can't afford a plane ticket?

I get the sense, reading this kind of analysis, that China hawks have stopped conceptualizing the Chinese as people. They're just political objects defined by a checklist of political freedoms they do and do not have. The ability to educate yourself, to pay a doctor to treat your sick children, to take in a film, to do the things people do -- none of that is on the list. I've written before on how silly it is to act as if Internet access means nothing if political material is blocked, as if all the entertainment and connection communication affords is meaningless unless directed at political change. This is just that same mistake writ large --every Chinese person is an activist whose life is worthless without the right to participate in the political process. It just exposes an incredible ignorance about the way people live.

None of this is to excuse the Chinese government for its many ghastly crimes, or to suggest that it does not continue to stand in the way of prosperity in meaningful ways, or to argue that prosperity is the only good that matters. But you don't need to denigrate the alleviation of hunger to criticize political tyranny. 'd feel a little less put off by all the self-congratulatory China-bashing if the punditocracy's understanding of freedom were less romanticized, less dismissive of the more mundane liberties afforded by a full stomach and regular income.

In 2004, while I was still in Burma, floods in neighboring Bangladesh killed 1000 people and left 10,000 more without any possessions. The Western press treated the whole thing as an unfortunate natural disaster--sad, but no one's fault, really. And yet floods are completely predictable in Bangladesh--there is a reason they call it Monsoon Season--and that kind of devastation is the result of poverty rooted in economic mismanagement. Price controls strike me as just as criminal as religious discrimination, and a country with the good sense to get rid of them doesn't need to hear that preventing starvation is a "poor substitute" for anything.

Washington Post Death Spiral Watch: Prius vs. George F. Will

Why oh why can't we have a better press corps? Cecil Adams reports:

The Straight Dope: Are electric cars really more energy efficient? Do "green" vehicles have a worse impact on the environment than a Hummer?: An HEV uses around 0.48-0.74 kilowatt-hours per mile, while PHEVs in electric mode and BEVs use 0.18-0.46 kWh per mile. By contrast, a conventional car getting 25 MPG uses 1.35 kWh/mile. To put the issue in more familiar terms, a PHEV or BEV offers fuel economy equivalent to as much as 188 miles per gallon.... PHEV and BEV cars... their energy can come from renewable sources... if the energy source is fossil fuel, installing state-of-the-art emission controls on a few big power plants is way easier than installing them on hundreds of millions of motor vehicles. What's more, since many electric plants use natural gas, CO2 emissions from power generation are a modest 1.27 pounds of CO2 per kWh -- 1.9 pounds per productive kWh once we account for losses during battery charging and so on. Compare that to gasoline, which produces the equivalent of 3.9 pounds of CO2 per productive kWh.

What about the Prius and its allegedly grim environmental impact? The cause of the controversy seems to be a report called "Dust to Dust" by Oregon-based CNW Marketing Research. The report claims a Prius has a higher lifetime energy cost than a Hummer, an assertion cited by George Will in 2007 in his syndicated newspaper column. But the report is ludicrous. It evidently was self-published, lists no authors, quotes no technical literature, never explains its methodology, and contains numerous unsupported and often bizarre assertions. (Sample: a Prius will have a life span of only 109,000 miles whereas an H1 will last for 379,000 miles, apparently the basis for the contention that the Hummer%u2019s per-mile costs are lower.) Only a fool or a commentator with an ax to grind would take such nonsense seriously...

Really Scary Austrianism at National Review

I wake up this morning to this, from Paul Krugman:

Rottenness: Treasury secretary Andrew Mellon, according to Herbert Hoover:

Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers, liquidate real estate.... It will purge the rottenness out of the system. High costs of living and high living will come down. People will work harder, live a more moral life. Values will be adjusted, and enterprising people will pick up the wrecks from less competent people

Larry Kudlow, via Angry Bear:

Recessions are therapeutic. They cleanse excess from the economy. Think about excessive risk speculation, leverage, and housing. Recessions are curative: They restore balance and create the foundation for the next recovery...

And here is PGL of Angry Bear:

Angry Bear: The Labor Market Over the Past 15 Months: [The] E[mployment-to-]P[opulation ratio] has declined from 63.4% as of December 2006 to 62.6% last month. In the early part of 2007, the unemployment rate didn't move much as LFP fell from 66.4% to 66%. In other words -- Paul [Krugman] is right in saying that the deterioration in the labor market has been going on for a while.

In fact, it is so bad that even Lawrence Kudlow has to concede the obvious point:

The unemployment rate went up to 5.1 percent. Non-farm payrolls have fallen for three straight months. Private payrolls have fallen four straight months. And the entrepreneurial small-business-oriented household survey is below its November peak, showing a loss of 678,000 jobs. These are relatively mild job losses so far. So one can hope this will be a relatively mild recession. But frankly, no one knows for sure.... Recessions are therapeutic. They cleanse excess from the economy. Think about excessive risk speculation, leverage, and housing. Recessions are curative: They restore balance and create the foundation for the next recovery.

Yes -- Kudlow thinks recessions are good things as the job you just lost was an "excess." In fact, he is calling for economic policies that would make the recession worse:

[T]he U.S. dollar, which some are now calling the U.S. peso, should be appreciated in order to curb inflation.

Dollar appreciation might have a very modest impact on the inflation rate but it would have a significant impact on net export demand. And given that Mr. Kudlow apparently never learned international macroeconomics, let's remind him that appreciations tend to lower net exports. One would think such idiotic comments would have the editors of the National Review take the curative step of