J. Bradford DeLong's Grasping Reality with a Prehensile Tail

Julian Sanchez on the Republican Party: Expect the Craziness to Get Worse Before It Gets Better

He has some very smart things to say:

The Politics of Ressentimentt: The word he wants is ressentiment:

Ressentiment is a sense of resentment and hostility directed at that which one identifies as the cause of one’s frustration, an assignation of blame for one’s frustration. The sense of weakness or inferiority and perhaps jealousy in the face of the “cause” generates a rejecting/justifying value system, or morality, which attacks or denies the perceived source of one’s frustration. The ego creates an enemy in order to insulate itself from culpability.

Conservatism is a political philosophy; the farce currently performing under that marquee is an inferiority complex in political philosophy drag.... [T]he pathology of the current conservative movement is... specific and  convoluted. Palin irritates the left, but so would lots of vocal conservatives if they were equally prominent—and some of them are probably even competent to hold office. Palin gets to play sand in the clam precisely because she so obviously isn’t. She doesn’t just irritate liberals in some generic way: she evokes their contempt.... Think back to the 2004 RNC—which I happened to be up in New York  covering. After witnessing three days of inchoate, spittle-flecked rage from the people who had the run of all three branches of government, some wag (probably Jon Stewart) puzzled over the “anger of the enfranchised.” And it would be puzzling if the driving force here were a public policy agenda, rather than a set of cultural grievances.... The secret shame of the conservative base is that they’ve internalized the enemy’s secular cosmopolitan value set and status hierarchy—hence this obsession with the idea that somewhere, someone who went to Harvard might be snickering at them.

The pretext for converting this status grievance into a political one.... Check out the RNC’s new ad on health reform, taking up the Tea Party slogan “Listen to Me!” There’s almost nothing on the substantive objections to the bill; it’s fundamentally about people’s sense of powerlessness in a debate that seems driven by wonks.... [C]onsider the study Ryan Sager highlighted a while back, showing that many SUV owners don’t merely think their choice of vehicles is harmless or morally neutral, but positively virtuous.... [T]his is classic ressentiment: It’s not just that SUVs are great in themselves because they somehow “embody” some set of ideals. They’re good just because they symbolize an inversion of the “anti-American” values of critics. Second, think what it reveals that people feel the need to construct these kinds of absurd rationalizations—to make their cars heroic.... It betrays an incredible sensitivity, not to excessive taxes or regulations on the vehicles, but to the feeling of being judged....

Even if conservatives retook power, they wouldn’t be able to provide a political solution to a psychological problem.... It effectively says: We cede to the bogeyman cultural elites the power of stereotypical definition, so becoming the stereotype more fully and grotesquely is our only means of empowerment. To see how the difference between ressentiment and simple schadenfreude matters, consider Palin one more time.  If the goal is just to antagonize liberals, making her the Republican standard-bearer seems tactically bizarre, since ideally you want someone who isn’t so repugnant to independents as to be unelectable. If the animating force is ressentiment,  the leader has to be a loser to really deserve the role. Which is to say, expect the craziness to get worse before it gets better.

In Which John Sides Wants to Flush the Tank on the New York Times and the Washington Post

As you know, I agree:

The Monkey Cage: What We Have Learned from the Health Care Debate: [R[]eporters start in with “news analysis” like this silliness from John Broder in Sunday’s New York Times. Here, climate change is framed around what Obama can or cannot accomplish, complete with portentous questions like:

Can Mr. Obama surmount those problems in his latest effort to save the world?...

A while back, I posted about a Ted Lowi essay in which he characterized this sort of news coverage as “unbelievably primitive.” And it is. Understanding policymaking means taking Congress seriously.... Policy change is not solely a matter of presidential will or skill.... Yglesias and others have rightly pounded away at the notion that policymaking should somehow be framed around the president’s goals, actions, and standing. This frame gets the policymaking process wrong, and it arguably hurts our understanding of the policies themselves, whose details are subordinated to armchair quarterbacking about the president’s decisions or lack thereof. At its worst, you get this stunning contempt from David Broder for the fact that making policy is a process and that the point of the process is to (try to) make the right decision:

...the urgent necessity is to make a decision — whether or not it is right...

I know the usual excuses: presidents are visible figures, they make for easier news stories, public policy is boring, the horse race is fun, etc. I actually think that it’s not that much of a stretch for journalists...

But it's not one they are their editors want to undertake, is it?

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

The Republican Party Needs Help

Please, everybody, send money to David Frum and Bruce Bartlett. They appear to be pretty much the only people willing to put themselves in political-intellectual harm's way to try to return the Republican Party to its best self. And they need help.

Eric Kleefeld watches the train wreck:

GOP House Candidate: 'I Hate Big-Tent. I Hate Inclusiveness. And I Hate Outreach': Allen West, a Republican candidate for the swing seat of the 22nd Congressional District in Florida, is making a bold declaration against the party becoming more open to moderation. "There are three words I hate to hear used. I hate big-tent. I hate inclusiveness. And I hate outreach," West told the Weekly Standard, in a new profile piece. "I think you stand on the principles that make you great, which transcend everybody in America, and people will come to it." West previously ran for the seat in 2008, losing to incumbent Democrat Ron Klein by 55%-45%, in a district that Barack Obama carried by 52%-48%.

West is a retired Army colonel, who was forced into his retirement after a 2003 incident in which he, as the Standard puts it, "conducted a harsh interrogation" on an Iraqi police officer, in which West fired his gun near the man's head.

That's four words, anyway...

A Conspiracy so Immense...

David Weigel:

The John Birch Society to Co-Sponsor CPAC: The 51-year-old ultra-conservative group, once ostracized by the right, is co-sponsoring the 2010 Conservative Political Action Conference.

JBS will have a double booth with half dedicated to offering educational and promotional materials and the other half housing a TV studio that will stream live video from the booth and broadcast onto JBS LibertyNewsNetwork.tv, a website that will feature archived JBS video and live video streams.

This doesn’t really surprise me...

Is it wrong to want an opposition party not dominated by cuckoos?

We Welcome Their Hatred!

In one month I have been called a follower of Joe McCarthy by the Volokh Conspiracy, and now a follower of Heinrich Himmler and Lavrenti Beria by Lou Dobbs.

It's nice to know that you are having an impact.

Spencer Ackerman watches Lou Dobbs so I don't have to:

ATTACKERMAN: Lou Dobbs, literally two seconds later: “By the way, Ezra Klein is the fellow that put together Journolist, that little group that has really turned into the, I guess you could call them the Brownshirts of the Left, or — can we say that? — or would we call them the KGB...

New York Times Crashed-and-Burned-and-Smoking Watch

Yes, Tom Friedman is that big an amoral idiot.

Daniel Larison:

Eunomia » Friedman’s Jihad: Thomas Friedman’s new column reminded me of the line from Casino Royale: “Arrogance and self-awareness rarely go hand in hand.” In the same column in which he complains that Westerners treat Muslims as nothing more than objects and deprive them of agency and responsibility, he urges on the mass slaughter of said Muslims by other Muslims to get them to stop believing “bad things.” In short, he won’t credit them with being morally responsible agents until they embark on a bloody religious war of his design.... Maybe Muslims should be expressing more outrage over jihadist atrocities, but Friedman is demanding impassioned reaction from hundreds of millions spread out across four continents in response to events that are mostly abstract and far removed from them.... Unless I miss something, the only way Friedman is going to get the war he wants is for jihadists to become much more numerous and widely distributed throughout Muslim-majority countries so that every Muslim society can be terrorized and then react against the attackers. That would mean a dramatic increase in terrorism worldwide and all of the attendant excesses that various national governments would engage in to combat these threats.... If jihadists have been making gains, it is partly because we have provided them abundant provocations and attacks to use as fodder for their propaganda. These policies have radicalized entire populations. That is what wars do: they radicalize and intensify political and/or religious beliefs, and they typically empower maximalists and fanatics. As destructive as the conflicts he would wish upon all Muslims would be, the end result could still very well be a larger population of deeply radicalized people, which would be disastrous for the welfare of all these societies and likely damaging to the security of the U.S. and allied nations.

Spencer Ackerman:

ATTACKERMAN » No, This Time You Suck On This: [W]hat problem can’t be solved by the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people worldwide, egged on from the sidelines by a newspaper columnist? I love how later in the column Friedman can’t understand why there was “no meaningful condemnation emerging from the Muslim world” about select atrocities committed by Muslims. Well, maybe when the most important foreign affairs columnist for the world’s most important newspaper gets a boner from the prospect of mass Muslim deaths, maybe those leaders are going to worry about playing into his hands.... [W]e Jews have a Yiddishism, shanda ver der goyim, which at its heart is the very human impulse to say, “Stop airing our dirty laundry in public for the outsiders to see and use against us.” Maybe Friedman ought to think on this for awhile. You know, strategically. Like he gets paid oodles of cash to do. Finally, he ought to think harder about just the online takfirism problem that occasioned this blithe call for bloodshed, since online extremism is something that plays into the hands of U.S. intelligence and law enforcement capabilities. If that’s the way al-Qaed-ism is moving, maybe that’s not such a terrible thing from our perspective. Let’s neither diminish nor overstate threats.

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

Frank Foer of the New Republic Owes Ezra Klein a Big Apology...

And he needs to decide whether he is going to be an editor who exerts even a minimal effort to maintain quality or not

Health Care Reform Watch: Senator Joe Lieberman Humiliates Himself Yet Again...

Wow! Just wow!

Greg Sargent FTW, who writes:

VIDEO: Watch Lieberman Endorse Medicare Buy-In Three Months Ago: Here’s some video of Joe Lieberman only three months ago.... Lieberman discussed the Medicare buy-in a meeting with the Connecticut Post in September, according to an article in the paper at the time, as TPM noted today. But the article only paraphrased Lieberman. I asked the paper to send over the video, and it’s worth watching, because it gives you Lieberman’s actual quotes... at odds with the Lieberman camp’s claim today.... Lieberman appeared to go further than the current Senate deal, which would expand Medicare to those aged 55-64, saying he supported the idea of expanding it to people aged 50 and over. Lieberman referenced his proposal along these lines during the 2006 campaign, and added:

My proposals were to basically expand the existing successful public health insurance programs Medicare and Medicaid.... When it came to Medicare I was very focused on a group — post 50, maybe more like post 55. People who have retired early, or unfortunately have been laid off early, who lose their health insurance and they’re too young to qualify for Medicare. What I was proposing was that they have an option to buy into Medicare early and again on the premise that that would be less expensive than the enormous cost. If you’re 55 or 60 and you’re without health insurance and you go in to try to buy it, because you’re older … you’re rated as a risk so you pay a lot of money...

Lieberman['s]... tone is clearly positive and approving... yet another sign, as if you needed one, that Lieberman’s current opposition to the Senate proposal doesn’t appear to have any roots in a genuine policy disagreement.

"Anyone Telling You Uncertainty About Climate Change Is a Reason for Inaction Is Either a Fool or a Scoundrel"

There is one set of circumstances in which uncertainty is a reason for inaction: (a) the measures you would take would be expensive, (b) the measures you would take will be irreversible, and (c) you will get a lot of new information soon to help you judge the situation better.

That set of circumstances does not apply here.

Mark Kleiman:

Precaution, uncertainty, insurance, and morality: [G]reater uncertainty argues for more caution--more willingness to accept certain current losses to avoid possible large future losses--not less. That’s because it’s easier to adjust to small changes than it is to large ones, so damage is likely to increase more-than-proportionally as the size of the change increases. Assume some climate model predicts that... temperature would rise 3° C by 2100. If the model were very accurate and precise, that might be 3°± 1°. If the mechanisms involved remain obscure and the data unclear--as is the case today – that might be 3°± 5°.... Given how bad a 3° increase would likely be, if we knew for sure that would be the outcome in the face of inaction there would be a strong agument for making big and expensive policy changes to prevent it from happening. And if we knew that for sure, it would be very hard politically to argue against doing something about the problem. By contrast, 3°± 5° means that proponents of inaction get to say “We’re not even sure there’s any problem at all.” That makes the political case for action much weaker. But it makes the logical case for action much stronger....

[A]n 8° C average temperature increase... rendering much of the tropics virtually uninhabitable and, quite plausibly, hitting various triggers for positive-feedback effects such as the melting of the polar ice caps, which would reduce the amount of solar energy reflected back into space, and the melting of the Siberian permafrost, which would release a huge amount of methane, a potent greenhouse gas.  (Most systems are more stable in the face of small changes than they are in the face of large changes.)  Thus a primary increase of 8° might really mean an increase even larger than that: an increase that might not be reversible even if greenhouse-gas emissions were then sharply curtailed. That would be the kind of disaster to which some version of the precautionary principle reasonably applies....

Ordinarily, it is the proponents of action who bear the burden of persuasion.  But in this case political inaction means, in effect, licensing a massive gamble.... [N]one of the arguments for the freedom of economic activity appl[y]... there is simply no “invisible hand” mechanism that directs private action in such a situation in the direction of the public interest.

The willingness of some politicians and pundits to bet the planet on the claim that climate scientists are talking through their hats, which involves the larger claim that they have managed to assemble an enormous conspiracy to perpetrate a hoax, calls either their intelligence or their morals into serious question.  And that goes for the journalists and media moguls who treat their ravings as if they represented simply one side in a reasonable argument.

If anyone tries to tell you that uncertainty about climate change is a reason for inaction, he’s either a fool or a scoundrel. Probably a bit of both.

What Could Be More Cowardly that to Surrender Your Theory in the Face of Facts?

I thought there was something very, very wrong with George Mason's Charles Rowley when he began trashing Avner Greif for no reason.

Now Henry Farrell and company watch the wreckage...

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UPDATE: A correspondent tells me that there is now a Godwin's Law violation there--something about how John McCain's ideology is the same as that of the Nazis. I'm not going to look...

James Kwak Is Now Grand Heresiarch of the Ancient, Hermetic, and Occult Order of the Shrill!!

A Partisan Post: You Have Been Warned

That is all.

Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Kwak R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn!!

This Is a Congressional Joke

Senator Mitch McConnell, that is:

Brian Beutler:

Is This a Congressional Joke?

Senator Conrad voted for Medicare Part D. Senator Gregg voted for the Bush tax cuts. Of the $36 trillion Auerbach-Orszag present-value fiscal gap through 2080 $11 trillion is due to the Bush tax cuts and $6 trillion is due to Medicare Part D. Eliminate those two fiscal policy mistakes, and our long-run (out to 2080) fiscal problem is half the size.

Isn't the easiest thing--and the most obvious thing, and the most constructive thing--Senators Conrad and Gregg could do in order to help fix the deficit is for them to stop making it worse? Isn't the obvious thing for them to resign, and as they resign to tell Americans that they should never elect senators like them again?

Yet now come Senators Kent Conrad and Judd Gregg dressed up in the feathers of deficit hawks:

Colloquy Between Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad and Budget Committee Ranking Member Judd Gregg On the Bipartisan Task Force on Responsible Fiscal Action Act

December 10, 2009

Mr. Conrad: This is the headline from "Newsweek" December 7. In fact, it was a cover story: "How Great Powers Fall. Steep debt, slow growth, high spending kill empires -- and America could be next." If you go to the story -- and, by the way, interestingly enough, this is on December 7, Pearl Harbor day. If you go into the story that's in the magazine, it says -- and I quote -- "This is how empires decline. It begins with a debt explosion. It ends with an inexorable reduction in the resources available for the Army, Navy, and Air Force ... If the United States doesn't come up soon with a credible plan to restore the federal budget to balance over the next five to 10 years, the danger is very real that a debt crisis could lead to a major weakening of American power." All we have to do is look at the facts. This shows the debt of the United States from 2001 projecting to 2019....

I hope people are listening. I hope they're paying attention. I hope our colleagues are. A group of us yesterday introduced legislation to confront this debt threat head-on. There are now 31 cosponsors of that legislation: 18 Republicans, 13 Democrats....

It is going to take a special process, a special commitment of the members here and representatives of the Administration to develop a plan that gets us back on track. And it is going to take a special process to bring that plan to this floor for a vote, up or down. That holds, I believe, the best prospects for success. I believe this is a defining moment for this Chamber, for this Congress, for this Administration....

Mr. Gregg: Mr. President?

The Presiding Officer: The Senator from New Hampshire.

Mr. Gregg: It is an honor to join with the Chairman of the Budget Committee. We've worked together for awhile and have a piece of legislation which accomplishes the goals as they have been outlined by the Senator from North Dakota, and that's good news. And really the outpouring of support here in the Senate -- over 31 co-sponsors in just a very short time -- is a sign they are willing to move in this area, and that's good news. Right now in this country, after the possibility of a terrorist getting a weapon of mass destruction and using it against us somewhere here in the United States, the single biggest threat that we face as a nation is the fact that we're on a course toward fiscal insolvency...

I am--in normal times--a deficit hawk. I think the right target for the deficit in normal times is zero, with the added provision that when there are foreseeable future increases in spending shares of GDP we should run a surplus to pay for those foreseeable increases in an actuarially-sound manner. I think this because I know that there will come abnormal times when spending increases are appropriate. And I think that the combination of (a) actuarially-sound provision for future increases in spending shares and (b) nominal balance for the operating budget in normal times will create the headroom for (c) deficit spending in emergencies when it is advisable while (d) maintaining a non-explosive path for the debt as a whole.

But when I look at Senators Conrad and Gregg, I don't recognize fellow members of my species. They may be glueing the feathers of deficit hawks onto themeselves, but they are birds of a very different order--doves, turkeys, chickens, whatever, but I hope they are dodos.

Jon Chait FTW!!!!

He writes about the Conrad-Gregg deficit commission:

The Deficit Commission Bill Is Here, And It's Insane: Let me get this straight. You have a commission proposing a package of highly unpopular legislative changes. And, in addition to having to surmount the 60-vote barrier in the Senate, which is nearly insurmountable for major legislation and which was avoided for both of the last two major deficit-reducing bills, it's also going to impose a new supermajority requirement in the House and a 78% threshold in the commission itself? To say that this procedure "is designed to get results" shows a very odd understanding of American political institutions. Conrad and Gregg seem to think that instituting major reforms in the public interest is rare because the threshold for passing legislation is too low. Thus they've designed a process that creates new and higher supermajority requirements, on an issue where getting even 51% to sign on is probably impossible. And if that fails, maybe they'll conclude the process was too easy. Next time they could also require the commission members to create a cold fusion reactor or retrieve a magical ring from inside a volcano.

No, no, Jonathan! You have it wrong! The commission will have to destroy the deficit by throwing themselves and it into the erupting volcano!

Paul Krugman on the New Candidate for the Worst Washington Post Editorial Ever

Paul Krugan:

Things free trade doesn’t do: There are a lot of good things you can say about international trade. But it does not, repeat not, do anything to alleviate a shortage of overall demand. Yes, if you liberalize trade countries will export more. But they will also import more. If you’re worried about C+I+G+X-M, it’s a wash, because X and M rise equally. Which makes this WaPo editorial on things Obama should be doing about jobs truly bizarre. Even if the proposed trade deals with Korea and Colombia were remotely big enough to bear mentioning in the context of the crisis — which they aren’t — they wouldn’t be job creation measures. But then, the bit about reducing minimum wages is equally off point, because the level of wages has nothing to do with the overall employment problem.

OK, they don’t like Obama’s policies. But these are ridiculous alternatives.

Shut the Washington Post down. Shut it down now.

And let me say that now that the Sixteen-Year-Old's PSAT scores have come back, it is very clear to us that Princeton Review is a much better test prep company than Stanley Kaplan.

Could We Just Bury the Washington Post Now?

Why oh why can't we have a better press corps? I mean, it hasn't even crashed and burned. It's dead and rotted: a source of smell and disease.

Matthew Yglesias

Matthew Yglesias: Fred Hiatt Wants The Washington Post to Go Out of Business: FWhat other explanation could there be for deciding that he wants to run an op-ed by Sarah Palin about how Obama should “boycott” the Copenhagen conference? And, no, that’s not a link to the op-ed. That’s a link to a post at The Awl excerpting an email about the op-ed that the Post’s PR team sent out. Strangely it doesn’t read “we don’t consider ourselves to be in the business of providing reliable information to our readers.”

By contrast, the Financial Times has an interesting op-ed about what Copenhagen negotiators could learn from the Montreal Protocol that reduced use of CFCs to prevent the opening of a dangerous hole in the ozone layer. Gray, one notes, is an honest-to-God Republican—White House counsel in George HW Bush’s administration, Ambassador to the European Union under George W Bush. But he’s a well-informed person with a background in relevant issues and a desire to present good-faith arguments to the public.

Jeremy Schulman:

Wash. Post publishes falsehood-laden Palin op-ed that is contradicted by scientists, temperature data, and ... the Post itself: The Washington Post has published an op-ed by Sarah Palin.... [W]hat was Jones talking about? The Washington Post has actually explained it on its news pages. In a December 5 Post article, David A. Fahrenthold and Juliet Eilperin reported that Jones "wrote a colleague that he would 'hide' a problem with data from Siberian tree rings with more accurate local air temperature measurements." In other words, four days after two Washington Post science reporters explained that Jones was saying that he replaced problematic tree ring data with "more accurate" data from actual temperature measurements, the Post op-ed page allows Palin to claim that Jones was somehow concealing a decline in temperatures that never actually existed...

Duncan Black:

What's It For?: I can never quite get a handle on just what the Washington Post people - its publishers, Fred Hiatt, etc... - think that it's for? Is it about providing a product people want to buy/advertisers want to advertise in? It is about informing readers, giving them factual information and analysis they want? Are these missions in conflict or do they coincide? And why does it take bloggers to point out how absurd they are? Where are all the journalists who spend their days bitching about bloggers? Don't they care that the product they're defending is basically s---?

In Which Thers Arms Himself for the Climate Wars' Intellectual Battles of Wits...

Ahem:

Thus wroth against the deniers he put on the gift of the god,
Which Hephaistos had wrought for him by his art.
First on his legs he set the fair greaves fitted with silver ankle-pieces,
Next he donned the cuirass about his breast.
Then round his shoulders he slung the bronze sword silver-studded;
lastly he took the great and strong shield,
And its brightness shone afar off as the moon's....
And forth from its stand he drew his father`s spear, heavy and great and strong:
That spear could none other of the Akhaians wield...

Thers:

Eschaton: Here are the places I personally go when I want the lowdown on the most current wingnut lies about climate change, particularly, nowadays, to do with the email theft. List not remotely definitive (I'm in the humanities, dammit). Deltoid -- Tim Lambert is worth reading for his own stuff, but the real fun is the comments, where you'll see silly denialist trolling avant la lettre. Tomorrow's bullshit, today! And just as quickly debunked. DeSmogBlog: Don't miss the Crock of the Week. SwiftHack is a good repository. Real Climate, and responses: here, here, here. This Nature editorial. George Will, filleted. And I like Eli's site.

May I Say that Stanley Fish Is Certifiably Insane?

This has got to belong in the New York Times crashed-and-burned-and-smoking watch:

Stanely Fish: My assessment of the book has nothing to do with the accuracy of its accounts. Some news agencies have fact-checkers poring over every sentence, which would be to the point if the book were a biography, a genre that is judged by the degree to which the factual claims being made can be verified down to the last assertion. “Going Rogue,” however, is an autobiography, and while autobiographers certainly insist that they are telling the truth, the truth the genre promises is the truth about themselves — the kind of persons they are — and even when they are being mendacious or self-serving (and I don’t mean to imply that Palin is either), they are, necessarily, fleshing out that truth. As I remarked in a previous column, autobiographers cannot lie because anything they say will truthfully serve their project, which, again, is not to portray the facts, but to portray themselves...

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

James Fallows Says That the Washington Post Has Bet Its Reputation on a Losing Card

A good piece by Jim Fallows. I do disagree with two of his points: First, I do not think that the Washington Post is "trying their best in difficult conditions."

Fallows:

They could study this in journalism schools: NYT v WaPo on climate emails: I am trying to avoid gratuitous NYT/WaPo comparisons, because like all publications they are trying their best in difficult conditions. I subscribe to both and wish them both well. But their respective front-page stories on the same subject -- two days ago in the Post, and this morning in the NYT -- present a very interesting contrast. Both stories are about the leaked/stolen emails from the University of East Anglia....

The two stories are worth reading in full, and side-by-side.... A very frequent criticism of the mainstream press is that reporters are hesitant to say, "This is true, and that is false." Instead, they usually feel safest in the "critics contend" zone.... Eg, "Critics contend that the health-care reform bill will require the elderly to face 'death panels'; Administration officials disagree."

In this case one big-time paper, the Post, sticks with "critics contend," while the other presents a contrast between "decades of peer-reviewed science" and politically-motivated opposition. Moreover, the NYT presents the controversy as something that might get in the way of deliberations in Copenhagen; while the Post presents it as a scandal in which "wonky" emails may not constitute "proof" that climate change is a "lie or a swindle" but still justify introducing "lie" and "swindle" as possibilities....

[T]he papers are betting their reputations with these articles. The Times, that climate change is simply a matter of science versus ignorance; the Post, that this is best treated as another "-Gate" style flap where it's hard to get to the bottom of the story. While I don't claim to be a climate expert, the overwhelming balance of what I've read convinces me that the Times's approach is right...

Second, I don't think that the Washington Post is betting its reputation: I don't think it has a reputation to bet.

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

The Blogosphere Is Truly Marvelous...

But sometimes it tells me things that man was really not meant to know.

Henry Farrell:

Crooked Timber: I’m a bit hesitant to link to this (as I’m not an elderly right wing economist, I’m worried I might be accused of “belittling the other”), but it’s super-duper awesome! Charles Rowley, familiar to long time CT readers for his ruminations on the corruption of the profession of political science... and his bizarre attack on Avner Greif... now has his own blog. It’s everything that one might possibly hope for. My favorite so far is the bit telling us that:

the massive fist of free market ideas once again will smash through the false consciousness of Keynesian dreams, and voters will rush to elect leaders such as Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan

‘cos it’s a level of rhetorical styling that I haven’t seen since I used to pick up the newsletter of the Maoist International Movement (the title is a bit of a misnomer; the cadres all seem to hang out in Ann Arbor, Michigan) when I was a graduate student in statistics boot camp. But the Obama=Sykes, Larry Summers=Fagin post runs a very close second...

Hoisted from Archives: A Short Dialogue on Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company

Stephen Bainbridge writes, apropos of (as best I can see) nothing at all:

ProfessorBainbridge.com: I don't read Kos or Brad DeLong or, for that matter, Brookings Institute position papers very often...

Let me say that in my view this is a serious mistake: reading people with whom one does not already agree is, after all, the only way one can can become smarter. Otherwise one becomes stupider every day.

As it happens, I do read Professor Bainbridge, and occasionally it provokes thoughts that I value--of which I think this is the best:

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A Short Dialogue on Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company

John of Salisbury: I see that Brad DeLong is getting smacked down from the left and from the right.

Thrasymakhos: Something that would make the world a better place if it happened more often, but about what, exactly?

John of Salisbury: Well, DeLong wrote down an off-the-cuff list of ten "constitutional moments" when American judges had changed the law. Fourth on his list is:

• The post-Civil War empowering of corporations with exorbitant privileges of citizenship and limited liability at the expense of government regulators and creditors.

Justinian: And?

Edward Coke: Nathan Newman accused him of Amnesia on the Death of Reconstruction--when the Grant administration was trying to suppress the anti-Negro terrorist insurgency in the U.S. South in the 1870s, the Supreme Court betrayed it and broke the legal tools it was using. Because the Supreme Court threw its weight onto the scales, Newman argues, the terrorists won.

Thrasymakhos: And what does DeLong say?

John of Salisbury: He wimps out. Something about the Supreme Court being a bit player--the main actors being executive and legislative.

Thrasymakhos: But the Supreme Court was active?

John of Salisbury: Very.

Thrasymakhos: Seems like Nathan has a fair point.

Justinian: And what else?

John of Salisbury: This is interesting. I can't claim to fully understand it. From the right, Stephen Bainbridge cheered on by Glenn Reynolds, takes aim at DeLong's example number 4:

I assume that DeLong's talking about the post-Civil war cases [like Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company].... Congress substituted the word "person" for the word "citizen" [in the text of the Fourteenth Amendment] precisely so that the provisions so affected would protect not just natural persons but also legal persons, such as corporations, from oppressive legislation.... (Admittedly... the legislative history is not uncontroverted.)...

The... cases establishing the corporation as a legal person with constitutional rights were (a) required by the legislative history of the 14th amendment and (b) made good policy sense. Hence, my conclusion that's you're "wrong" was intended to suggest that # 4 doesn't belong on your list. It was also intended to suggest that your rehetorical claim that the post-Civil War cases provided corporations with "exorbitant" privileges was, frankly, over the top. I should have thought that was apparent...

Justinian: I don't understand. Is Bainbridge defending the ruling of the Supreme Court in Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company because the Court had a choice as to how to rule and chose the just result--the one that made "good policy sense"--or because the Court had no choice as to how to rule, being contrained by the plain meaning of the text?

Thrasymakhos: Neither.

Justinian: Neither?

Thrasymakhos: Neither. Notice that Bainbridge claims not that the Court was constrained by the meaning of the text, but by the legislative history of the amendment. He can't claim that the text requires his interpretation: it doesn't. And notice that Bainbridge cannot claim that justice alone--the fact that this interpretation would make "good policy sense"--is sufficient to justify his interpretation. That would mean that good judges are "activists" because they can make choices, and Bainbridge is certain that good judges aren't activists.

Edward Coke: No, that's not it at all. What good judges do is that they understand the law at a deeper level than other people. They see more clearly than others what the law always meant--but what their predecessors were too blurry-eyed to see.

Thrasymakhos: But the Fourteenth Amendment was then only sixteen years old.

Edward Coke: But the real Constitution--the Constitution that is true justice--had always included a Fourteenth Amendment. The drafters in 1787 had simply failed to see that it did. The life of the law, after all, is reason. The law that is written down is simply crystalized reason itself, to the extent that we can understand and follow it. So it had to be the case that true justice required and the properly-interpreted Fourteenth Amendment required that corporations be persons with the right to the equal protection of the laws. Anything else would be unreasonable.

John of Salisbury: Are you Edward Coke or G.F.W. Hegel?

Justinian: But this "required"? How can claims made about legislative history that are "not uncontroverted" "require" anything?

Edward Coke: Got me.

Justinian: How does this Fourteenth Amendment read?

Edward Coke: Like this:

Section. 1. All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens.... No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

Section. 2. Representatives shall be apportioned... counting the whole number of persons in each State....

Justinian: So if you have more corporations in your state, you get more representatives in the legislature?

John of Salisbury: No, no, no! "Persons" in Section 2 refers only to human beings...

Edward Coke: And "persons" at the start of Section 1 refers only to human beings...

John of Salisbury: Only "persons" at the end of Section 1 refers to legal persons, i.e. corporations, as well as human beings...

Justinian: If anybody had tried to place such a strained interpretation on one of my laws...

John of Salisbury: Yes. Justices Hugo Black and William O. Douglas had things to say about Bainbridge's "required":

Wheeling Steel Corporation v. Glander , 337 U.S. 562 (1949): Mr. Justice DOUGLAS, with whom Mr. Justice BLACK concurs, dissenting.

It has been implicit in all of our decisions since 1886 that a corporation is a 'person' within the meaning of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Santa Clara Co. v. South. Pacific R. Co.... [I]t wrote no opinion on the point.... There was no history, logic, or reason given to support that view.... The Fourteenth Amendment became a part of the Constitution in 1868. In 1871... Mr. Justice Woods (then Circuit Judge) held that 'person' as there used did not include a corporation.... [I]n 1873. Mr. Justice Miller... adverted to events 'almost too recent to be called history' to show that the purpose of the Amendment was to protect human rights--primarily the rights of a race which had just won its freedom....

[W]hat was clear to these earlier judges was apparently plain to the people who voted to make the Fourteenth Amendment a part of our Constitution.... There was no suggestion in [the amendment's] submission that it was designed to put negroes and corporations into one class and so dilute the police power of the States over corporate affairs....

[H]ow strained a construction it is of the Fourteenth Amendment so to hold.... It requires distortion to read 'person' as meaning one thing, then another within the same clause and from clause to clause....

History has gone the other way..... But now that the question is squarely presented I can only conclude that the Santa Clara case was wrong and should be overruled...

Edward Coke: And things get worse. If you look in Justice John Marshall Harlan's opinion in Santa Clara Co. v. South. Pacific R. Co. you see no holding that a corporation is a "person." The Court does not reach the question:

Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company: The special grounds of defense by each of the defendants were: (1) That its road... a... franchise... derived from the United States, cannot, without their consent, be subjected to state taxation. (2) That the provisions of the constitution and laws of California... are in violation of the fourteenth amendment... denying to it the equal protection of the laws....

Mr. Justice FIELD overruled the first of the special defenses... but sustained the second.... The propositions embodied in the conclusions reached in the circuit court... belong to a class which this court should not decide unless their determination is essential.... [If not,] there will be no occasion to consider the grave questions of constitutional law....

[T]he court below might have given judgment... upon the ground that the assessment... included property... the state board was without jurisdiction to assess.... As the judgment can be sustained upon this ground, it is not necessary to consider any other questions...

Justinian: So Harlan writes explicitly that the Supreme Court is not deciding this question, and people like Bainbridge assert that the Supreme Court did decide the question?

Edward Coke: Yep.

Justinian: Wow.

[Pause]

Justinian: But Bainbridge talks about the legislative history. He says the legislative history requires his reading of the Fourteenth Amendment.

John of Salisbury: Now we get to the interesting case of Roscoe Conkling. Roscoe Conkling claimed that the drafters of the Fourteenth Amendment had used the word "persons" in the equal protection clause so that subsequent courts could use it to protect corporations from legislatures--and that the drafters had kept this secret throughout the ratification process, and that he was only now in 1882 revealing the true meaning of what the states had ratified.

Justinian: Under what theory of ratification is a Court "required" to adopt a secret meaning of a law--a meaning unknown to those who adopted it?

Edward Coke: Got me.

Justinian: If Roscoe Conkling had written an extra clause on the original of the Amendment text in invisible ink, and the Amendment had then been ratified, would Bainbridge say that the invisible ink text was a valid part of the Constitution?

Edward Coke: Got me.

Justinian: Is Bainbridge serious when he writes that this claim by Conkling "requires" that judges adopt Conkling's reading of the Fourteenth Amendment?

Edward Coke: Apparently.

Thrasymakhos: It gets worse: Conkling appears to have misquoted his own diary, and to have done so deliberately: Howard Jay Graham (1938) "The 'Conspiracy Theory' of the Fourteenth Amendment," Yale Law Journal.

Justinian: Your modern jurisprudents appear to be a scurvy lot.

Edward Coke: I cannot disagree.

John of Salisbury: It's your fault.

Edward Coke: My fault?!

John of Salisbury: Yes. You started this practice of pretending that what judges wanted to do was in fact what precedent demanded that they must do. You with your "Great Charter" business--the rights of Englishmen against arbitrary arrest dating back to 1215. If anybody had shown up before Queen Elizabeth I demanding that someone she held in the Tower be released because of the "Great Charter"--well you, you as her Speaker blocked a proposed reaffirmation of it, didn't you? But you wanted to curb the power of a Scottish-born king, and pretending that Magna Carta had always been good law since 1215, and that it had always applied not just to barons with knights in the field but to all crown subjects was just the tool you needed. Modern lawyers have a nasty habit of making false claims about the past--that such and such a reading is "required" because of the past--in the hope that their claims will be true about the future. And it's your fault.

Justinian: I'm still stuck at this "required by the legislative history" business...

Thrasymakhos: It doesn't make "sense." It's not supposed to make sense. It's simply a way of avoiding admitting that the post-Civil War Supreme Court made choices about how American corporate law was to develop, and those choices could have gone different ways...

The Trained Idiocy of the Washington Press Corps

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

In America today to actually know something about the world, public policy, or government disqualifies you from covering the White House for a major media organization. Thus what they produce is worse than uniformative: it is positively destructive.

Matthew Yglesias is on the beat:

Matthew Yglesias: Information Matters: Something worth mentioning about the White House pool... the conventional American media... to achieve its veneer of objectivity... [requires a] ridiculous level of policy ignorance. Which is how you get things like this embarrassing exchange between The Washington Post’s readers and [Frank Ahrens,] a badly overmatched Washington Post financial reporter, who doesn’t seem to know anything about tax policy, or how to admit you’re wrong, or how to just confess ignorance...

And here is the chat:

Balloon Juice: Taxes are killing us.:

The US at 26.1% pays less tax than any other industrialized country except Japan at 25.8%. Sweden is at 50.2%, the UK at 35.8%, and Spain at 35.5%, for example. BTW each of these three countries had higher growth (average per capita growth 1995 – 2005) than we did. 2.5%, 2.4% and 3.1% resp. compared to our 2.1%. Also Japan’s was 1% growth.

Frank Ahrens: But did you know our corporate tax rate is among the highest in the world? That makes a real difference if you’re a business and you’re thinking about locating in the U.S. or, say, India.

[....]

""But did you know our corporate tax rate is among the highest in the world?": Dead wrong. Our nominal tax rate of 35% is among the highest, but because of loopholes our real tax rate of 18% is among the lowest real corporate tax rates.

Frank Ahrens: Back atcha...

Wall Street Journal Crashed-and-Burned-and-Smoking Watch

I remember my first noticing current Wall Street Journal editorial page editor Paul Gigot back when I joined the Clinton Treasury. "But... he's lying!" I said. "Yes," said the Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs. "Deal with it."

Sixteen years later, and Paul Gigot is still lying:

Problems with CBO Stimulus Report: [Jared] Bernstein claims vindication on the basis of a new Congressional Budget Office report that finds that 600,000 to 1.6 million more people are employed and GDP is 1.2% to 3.2% higher than if Congress had done nothing. After rehearsing some of our greatest hits—"It's hard to imagine a more complete repudiation of Keynesian stimulus than the evidence of the last year's job market"—Mr. Bernstein says that we're "more interested in scoring political points" than acknowledging the stimulus reality. We stand by our economic judgment....

A word about that CBO report: It sets up a nonfalsifiable standard for judging the Administration's policies by using large macroeconomic forecasting models, including a Keynesian "multiplier" that says each dollar government injects into the economy yields more than a dollar in output.... No one ever doubted that the stimulus spree would create or "save" some jobs.... But that $1 has to come from someone or some business in the private economy that might have put it to more productive, job-creating uses.... These new jobs that aren't created don't get picked up in Bernstein-CBO econometric models, but their loss leaves the economy less prosperous overall. What can be measured with greater, if not perfect, accuracy is how many new jobs are being created across the economy, and how many people want to work but can't find a job...

To the extent that there is an argument here--and I am not sure that there is--it is Eugene Fama's fallacy:

Fama's Fallacy, Take I: Eugene Fama Rederives the "Treasury View": The problem is simple: bailouts and stimulus plans are funded by issuing more government debt.... The added debt absorbs savings that would otherwise go to private investment.... [S]timulus plans do not add to current resources in use. They just move resources from one use to another.... I come back to these fundamental points several times below...

Greg Mankiw tried to defend Fama:

Fama's arguments make sense in the context of the classical model... presented in Chapter 3 of my intermediate macro textbook.... [W]ether one leaves the classical model behind to embrace the Keynesian model is a judgment call...

But, as Greg writes in chapter 3 of his intermediate macro textbook, the classical model

assume[s] that the labor force is fully employed...

Does anybody think that this is a good assumption to make right now?

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

And would there be any social loss if the WSJ were shut down tomorrow morning, and all its subscribers shifted over to the FT?

Washington Post Crashed-and-Burned-and-Smoking Watch

The Washington Post's Perry Bacon, Jr. really is the worst reporter ever.

I cannot transcribe or even copy-and-paste any of it. It is too horrible.

Shut it down. Shut it down now.

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

A Decision the George W. Bush Administration Has Never Explained

This seemed inexplicable at the time, and is even more inexplicable now:

U.S. forces missed chance to get bin Laden: WASHINGTON, Nov 29 - The U.S. military could have captured or killed Osama bin Laden in 2001 if it had launched a concerted attack on his hideout in Afghanistan, according to a report prepared for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

The report, written by staff working for the Democratic majority on the committee, said the al Qaeda leader’s escape was a lost opportunity that altered the course of the war and paved the way for insurgencies in Afghanistan and in Pakistan. ”Removing the al Qaeda leader from the battlefield eight years ago would not have eliminated the worldwide extremist threat,” the report said. ”But the decisions that opened the door for his escape to Pakistan allowed bin Laden to emerge as a potent symbolic figure who continues to attract a steady flow of money and inspire fanatics worldwide.”

U.S. soldiers and Afghan militia forces launched a large-scale assault on the Tora Bora mountains in 2001 in pursuit of bin Laden, believed to be hiding in the region with supporters after the Taliban government was removed from power. U.S. military leaders allowed Afghan militiamen to spearhead the assault and bin Laden managed to escape. The report said U.S. commanders rejected requests for more troops to launch a rapid assault in the area, relying instead on air strikes and the Afghan militias to lead the attack and Pakistan’s Frontier Corps to seal off escape routes. ”The vast array of American military power, from sniper teams to the most mobile divisions of the Marine Corps and the Army, was kept on the sidelines,” it said.

The report was especially critical of military leaders under former President George W. Bush, including former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his top military commander, retired General Tommy Franks. Democratic Senator John Kerry, the chairman of the committee, has argued the Bush administration missed a chance to get bin Laden and his top lieutenants in Tora Bora just months after the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States...

American Enterprise Institute Total Fail...

And "Chip" chimes in with a defense of Alan Sloan, and a demonstration of yet more... "quote mining" by AEI senior fellows James Glassman and Kevin Hassett:

When Allan Meltzer Ceased Being a Real Economist...: Chip said...

Here is the full quote from Alan Sloan http://www.tcsdaily.com/discussionForum.aspx?fldIdTopic=7385&fldIdMsg=11145:

One of the maxims of investing is that if something sounds too good to be true, it probably is too good to be true. Which brings us to one of the hottest business books around, Dow 36,000 (Times Books, $25) by James Glassman and Kevin Hassett. I don't normally review books, but Dow 36,000 has lots of buzz, as we say in the trendsurfing business. With good reason. Hassett is a former senior economist with the Federal Reserve Board, Glassman is a smart writer who for the past six years produced a fine business column for The Washington Post. More than that, Glassman and Hassett have a head-turning thesis: that over the long term, U.S. stocks are no riskier than your grandmother's boring Treasury bonds and that the Dow, far from being overvalued, should be around 36,000. So you see why the book is buzzworthy. It's also schizophrenic. It has wonderfully clear explanations of financial theory, excellent advice on general investing approaches. But it's also got seriously flawed parts, where the authors assert claims with mathematical precision but actually play fast and loose with numbers.

My problem with Dow 36,000 has nothing to do with the fact that the Dow has fallen more than 1,000 points from its all-time high on Aug. 25. Stomach-churning, but for long-term investors, a mere blip. My problem is that even if you accept the thesis that U.S. stocks are no riskier over the long term than Treasury bonds--which I don't--you have to torture the numbers to justify 36,000 as a reasonable price for the Dow today.

Glassman and Hassett turn this into:

One of the hottest business books around.... It has wonderfully clear explanations of financial theory [and] excellent advice on general investing approaches.

So add Alan Sloan to Burton Malkiel on the list of those grossly and mendaciously misrepresented be the back cover of Dow 36000.

---

By contrast, the blurbs from Arthur Louis http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/1999/12/07/BU105598.DTL, Jim Jubak, and Allan Meltzer all appear to be fair...

More on American Enterprise Institute Quality, and Kevin Hassett and James Glassman's "Dow 36000"

In comments, John rescues the honor of Princeton's Burton Malkiel by pointing out where Kevin Hassett and James Glassman's claim that Malkiel had called their book "a well-written treatise that cannot be dismissed..." actually came from:

When Allan Meltzer Ceased Being a Real Economist...: John said...

Thanks for posting that photo. I am getting a kick out of reading those blurbs and the use of ellipses.

Burton Malkiel's blurb says: "Dow 36,000 is a provocative and well-written treatise that cannot be dismissed...."

What Burton Malkiel actually said: "Dow 36,000 is a provocative and well-written treatise that cannot be dismissed as easily as many of its critics have suggested. But what is at stake here is much more important than a debate among economists. This is a book with the goal of giving investment advice. For this reason I believe Dow 36,000 is a dangerous book that may lead some investors who can ill afford the significant risks of equity investments to throw caution to the wind."

When Allan Meltzer Ceased Being a Real Economist...

Those of us who liked Allan Meltzer's history of the Federal Reserve were shocked when he showed up this summer as a Republican hack, writing:

http://gopleader.gov/UploadedFiles/10-30-09_Meltzer_memo.pdf: There is no greater recognition of the failure of the stimulus program to create jobs than the efforts to mislead the public into believing the program had saved thousands, or millions, of jobs. One can search economic textbooks forever without finding a concept called “jobs saved.” It doesn’t exist for good reason: how can anyone know that his or her job has been saved? The Administration can make up any number it pleases. The number has no meaning...

As I wrote at the time:

If the concept of "jobs saved" does not exist, how come [in his Monetary History of the United States] Milton Friedman says that an extra $1 billion of open market operations in late 1931 would have stopped the Great Depression in its tracks?...

It has now been pointed out to me that the rot is at least a decade old: Allan Meltzer gave a truly remarkable blurb to Kevin Hassett and James Glassman's Dow 36,000 a decade ago:

As you will all recall, there are three big things very wrong with Dow 36,000:

• It's arithmetic is simply wrong: they use the earnings yield where the valuation formulas say to use the dividend yield.

• It is extremely hazardous to confidently predict the complete evaporation over the next three-to-five years of a market phenomenon--the equity return premium--that has been around for more than a hundred.

• Should the equity return premium ever collapse, it will collapse not with a fall in the required return on stocks to the current real Treasury bond required return, but by a convergence of both stock and bond returns to some intermediate value.

Allan Meltzer should have known better. Indeed, I suspect that at the time he did know better.

Everyone Working for the Washington Post Should Hide Their Head in Shame

UPDATE: Yes! Another source of misinformation gone!!

A correspondent sends me a link to Robert Macmillan, Washington Post closing remaining U.S. bureaus.

Thank you, God...

---

And the thing should be shut down immediately. Just saying.

Howard Gleckman on George "It's My Business to Lie as Much as Possible" Will:

TaxVox: the Tax Policy Center blog :: Off to the Big House: Penalizing Non-Buyers of Health Insurance:

“Democrats health bills depend on forcing individuals to buy insurance or face severe fines or imprisonment.”

George Will, Nov, 19, 2009

Before we spin off into a Thanksgiving reprise of last summer’s death panel lunacy, let’s be clear. Nothing in Will’s statement is true.... if you don’t get coverage, you pay. But “severe fines,” as Will claims? Hardly. Under the Senate bill, someone who refuses to buy would pay an initial annual penalty of $95. Will probably spends more than that for one of his bow ties.  And imprisonment? Give me a break. There is no such penalty in either bill. The  argument, as I understand it, is that those who don’t buy insurance and refuse to pay the fine could be charged with criminal violation of the tax laws.... Some of the tax cheats recently caught up in the UBS scandal got a few months for failing to pay millions of dollars in back taxes, but I have never heard of anyone being sent up the river for failing to pay $95 in taxes. More likely, the IRS would garnish their wages for the 95 bucks. Not exactly hard time in the big house. In truth, the problem is not that the penalty is too harsh. It is that it is much too weak...

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

Mark Halperin Should Be Fired by Time Magazine Today

That is all.

Jason Linkins: Mark Halperin's Mary Landrieu Photoshop: Pure Class:

Department of "Huh?"

When you praise Idi Amin, you've gone beneath the bottom of the barrel and out into the earth...

Xeni Jardin::

Hugo Chavez, cannibalism apologist: Is Bruce Vilanch writing for Hugo Chavez now? 'Cause the Venezuelan leader's comedy material is pretty good lately: now he's a cannibalism apologist. In a recent speech, Chavez praised Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe, Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and the late Ugandan dictator Idi "Butcher of Uganda" Amin. Said Chavez: "We thought he was a cannibal... I don't know, maybe he was a great nationalist, a patriot." (thanks Antinous)

The Biggest Entitlement Spending Cut in History--and "Deficit Hawks" Are Running Away from It - Health-care reform's grand bargain

It's buried in the health care bill. We think it has teeth--and the Congressional Budget Office agrees:

Ezra Klein - Health-care reform's grand bargain: This is how health-care reform controls costs. It is, at its base, a grand bargain: The coverage expansion gets liberals to agree to, and even advocate for, cost controls they would never otherwise consider. A 6 percent growth target? A super-MedPAC -- now called the Independent Medicare Advisory Board -- that reforms Medicare to save money and whose recommendations are fast-tracked and protected from the filibuster? Hundreds of pages of changes to payment rates and experiments in value-based purchasing and coordinated care efforts? This stuff is very, very real, and it goes into effect very quickly. You may think it's impossible for Congress to cut costs in Medicare and the government will just go bankrupt, but even you'd have to admit that this is what it would look like if the government was cutting costs in Medicare.

If this piece of the bill was passed on its own, it would be the most important cost control bill ever considered by the United States Congress. But you could never have passed it on its own. You needed the coverage to make the grand bargain work. Republicans like to call this bill a trillion-dollar experiment to expand the health-care system, and in some ways, it is. But it's also a multitrillion-dollar experiment to cut costs in the health-care system, and it deserves credit for that, and support from fiscal conservatives. It's easy to talk about cutting costs, but this is the chance for people to actually do it.

So why aren't the world's deficit hawks--the Blue Dogs, the (honest) Republican legislators who care about the country, the Concord Coalition, et cetera, et cetera--all out there hosanna-ing about the health care reform bill?

In the case of the (honest) Republican legislators who care about the country, they probably are--but it is hard to observe an empty set. But the rest? Where are they

James Fallows Is Really Shrill! (Why Oh Why Can't We Have a Better Press Corps? Edition)

He watches the U.S. press corps cover Obama's trip to Asia, and judges it:

Manufactured failure #2: the press, Obama, Asia: I wasn't in touch with Howard French or Tish Durkin (to say nothing of Amb. Jon Huntsman) before we all expressed the same amazed and negative reaction at the way our colleagues had missed the main point of what just happened in America's relations with a very important part of the world. We're all familiar with one "crisis of the press," the business collapse. This is a different kind of crisis, though it makes the business crisis worse: the distortion of reality by compressing every complex issue into the narrative of the DC-based "horse race." As you can tell, this really bothers me...

Can We Please Have a Very Different Republican Party?

Justin Elliot of TPM on the Republican Party's Official Newspaper:

Wash Times Editor: I Was Forced To Attend A Moon Church Mass Wedding: Washington Times editorial page editor Richard Miniter is filing a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission against the paper today, alleging discrimination based on age, disability, and religion -- being forced to attend a Unification Church mass wedding -- and he will ask the government to enjoin the Times' assets, his lawyer tells TPM....

Larry Klayman, Miniter's attorney, tells TPM. "What we're seeking to do is to freeze everything right now...."

A spokesman for the Times did not immediately respond to a call seeking comment.

A former Wall Street Journal editorial page writer and author of multiple books, Miniter was hired as editorial page editor and vice president of opinion at the Times in March. The article announcing his hire described it as "the latest of a series of dramatic moves to boost the newspaper's global impact." Besides the mass wedding charge, Klayman alleges Miniter and other employees who were over 40 were victims of age discrimination. Finally, he claims Miniter was forced to work when he was having severe heart problems. During a health scare earlier this year, Miniter was brought out of the newsroom on a stretcher, newsroom sources say.

All of these allegations will be included in the EEOC complaint, Klayman says. He adds that there is a dispute over Miniter's employment status at the paper, and the paper is improperly continuing to use his name on its masthead...

Washington Post and CNN Crashed-and-Burned-and-Smoking Watch

Shut 'em both down now. Please. The stupid--it BURNS!!!!

Duncan Black:

Eschaton: Slutty Schoolgirl? Really? I thought the Newsweek cover was obviously a poor choice even if right wingers were getting a bit overwrought in their criticisms. But they also include a slutty Palin schoolgirl doll? What the fuck? Of the CNN piece Digby talks about, Wolf Blitzer twittered:

CNN Jessica Yellin did a very good report in SitRoom on Sarah Palin and her sexuality -- the fact that she's good looking. Did you see it?

Sweet Jeebus.

Julie Millican:

Newsweek should worry more about how to solve its problem with sexism: There are a lot of legitimate reasons to criticize Sarah Palin, her new book, and her policies, but... Newsweek's November 23 issue... on its cover a photo of Palin in short running shorts and a fitted top... this photograph may have been completely appropriate for the cover of the magazine for which the picture was apparently intended, Runners World. But Newsweek is... certainly not reporting on Palin's exercise habits. Like her or not, Palin is a former governor and vice presidential candidate. She deserves the same respect every single one of her male counterparts receives when they are featured on the cover of the magazine. I must have missed the cover of Vice President Joe Biden in short shorts or of Mitt Romney in a bathing suit.

Newsweek's sexist treatment of Palin doesn't get any better... illustrating Christopher Hitchens' piece on "Palin's base appeal"... Sarah Palin-as-a-slutty-schoolgirl doll.... What kind of message is the magazine trying to send here?

This is just the latest in a pattern of the media's sexist coverage of female politicians...

Digby:

Hullabaloo: I'm honestly at a loss for words about [CNN]. How many ways can one short segment be offensive? First of all, it was very thoughtful of Yellin to agree that other female politicians "don't act like men" even though they have "played the old pantsuit rules" of the workplace and don't "embrace their femininity." (This means, evidently, that they keep their "femininity under wraps" by not showing off their "gams.")

However, Yellin might have considered that most professional women have enough problems getting people to listen to what they say rather than staring at their legs, so they don't find it all that useful to show them off. Even Palin, before she became a celebrity, said that she wore those glasses and put her hair in a bun so people wouldn't obsess over her looks. It's hard to believe that someone like Jessica Yellin would be so dismissive of women's difficulties... but then she's a television personality, not a serious professional, and for women in show business being sexy is paramount. I guess this makes sense for her.

But there's another dimension here. Most of the women she names as being frumpy, sexless and "unfeminine" are quite a bit older than Palin. They have ascended to the heights they have in middle age, after putting in many years working their way up the ladder. In their 50s and 60s most of these women are not going to don short shorts... they are selling their brains, experience, wisdom, hearts and commitment, which are really hard to market in a pair of Daisy Dukes.... Perhaps the gasbags and newsreaders in the infotainment complex find that distasteful or boring, but the women at least should probably think twice about perpetuating these stereotypes...

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

Duty, Honor, Country

I just don't understand why people think John McCain is in any sense a patriot. I just don't.

Ta-Nehisi Coates:

A Really Small Human Being - Ta-Nehisi Coates: Sarah Palin on why she's still in 10th grade, or rather gave Katie Couric an interview:

The A.P. says that in the book, Mrs. Palin also accuses the McCain campaign of keeping her away from reporters, which fed a perception that she was ignoring the media. She writes that she sat down with Katie Couric in part because she felt sorry for her, after Nicolle Wallace, a McCain aide, said Ms. Couric suffered from low self-esteem.

I still think the greatest charge against John McCain is that, in his world, Palin could have been president. A man who claims to put "Country First" was actually willing to put that country in Sarah Palin's hands. It's still incredibly shocking.

Washington Post Crashed-and-Burned-and-Smoking Watch

Michael Fletcher and Neil Irwin are an embarrassment to the Washington Post.

Think of that.

Let's turn the mike over to Tim Fernholz:

TAPPED Archive | The American Prospect: President Obama has announced his intention to hold a Jobs Summit at the White House, reacting to the high unemployment rate and increasing dissatisfaction with his economic policies. Sure, fine, get the folks together, hopefully some actual results will come out of it. But reading the Washington Post story about it almost made me spit out my coffee:

Congressional Democrats have been pressing the White House to do more to create jobs. But hemmed in by exploding budget deficits and criticism from Republicans that the $787 billion economic stimulus plan enacted in February has been ineffective, the White House has been reluctant to embrace any sweeping new initiatives.

In recent weeks, Obama has taken smaller steps to continue stimulating the economy. Last Friday, the president signed legislation that extends unemployment insurance benefits by up to 20 weeks and renews an $8,000 tax credit for first-time home buyers while expanding eligibility. Earlier, the administration backed a $250 payment to senior citizens as a means of stimulating economic activity.

Congress is pressing the White House to do more to help the labor market, and the president is taking steps when he signs legislation? Someone is having a laugh. The cult of the presidency has obscured the fact that Congress is the biggest obstacle to new job-creating policy.

Do Congressional leaders think that the president would veto a jobs tax credit if they passed one, or refuse to sign a package of fiscal aid to states? It's a sad day when Congress is apparently sitting around and fretting until the White House comes to do the legislating for them. Of course, I understand the value of having the White House publicly pulling for a piece of legislation, and importance of coordinating with the executive branch, but it is still crazy to suggest that Obama is the one gumming up the process here.

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

Politico Crashed-and-Burned-and-Smoking Watch

Yet another journamalistic enterprise that we would all be better off without, and that in a just world would dry up and blow away immediately. Menzie Chinn has the mike:

Econbrowser: Politico Does Economic Analysis...: Be afraid; be very afraid.

From "'Created or saved' doesn't add up", by Joseph Lawler:

...[t]he "created or saved" numbers are meaningless. The administration purposefully devised the metric to be nebulous. Without a counterfactual, showing the trend of unemployment in the absence of the stimulus, it is impossible to know how many jobs the stimulus saved.

But this is completely counter to what I learned in economics, and how, for instance, the CBO conducts analysis. I assume Mr. Lawler doesn't dispute the impartiality of the CBO (but who knows?). Here's the way real macroeconomists conduct analysis:

As the President has discussed, analysis done within the Administration has shown how his tax cuts have substantially offset the series of adverse shocks that have been buffeting the economy. Simulations of a conventional macroeconomic model show that, without the tax cuts, the level of real GDP would have been about 2 percent lower in the middle of 2003. About 1.5 million fewer people would have jobs today. The job market is not what we would like it to be right now, but it would have been worse without the Administration's actions. One can view the short-run effects of these tax cuts from a classic Keynesian perspective. The tax cuts let people keep more of the money they earned. This supported consumption and thus helped maintain the aggregate demand for goods and services. There is nothing novel about this. It is very conventional short-run stabilization policy: You can find it in all of the leading textbooks.

The writer is Greg Mankiw, discussing in 2007 a particular fiscal measure, namely the 2003 tax cuts.... I know counterfactuals and math are hard to fit on a bumper sticker. But one would hope that in an 800-plus word essay on economics (even if in Politico), some economic content could be included...

I Must Be Doing Something Right! (Attempted Tail Gunner Brad Smackdown Watch)

Aha! Juan Non-Volokh accuses me of Climate Change McCarthyism. I am one of those who:

selectively edit their comment threads...

The first reaction to Juan came 32 minutes later by "bailey":

Wow. We’re really defining McCarthyism down these days, aren’t we?

Indeed we are.

I should admit defeat and slink away. There is no way I will ever be able to top "bailey."

I will, however, say just one thing: I must confess that I am surprised to see a contributing editor to National Review--that hotbed of bigotry where even in the twenty-first century no Jews need apply to run the place--trying to use "McCarthyism" as a slur. I had thought that to work at National Review you had to like Tail Gunner Joe, and like him a lot. After all:

There is one thing that the American people know about Senator McCarthy; he, like them, is unequivocally anti-Communist. About the spokesman for American liberalism, they feel they know no such thing.

In Celebration of a DMCA Takedown Notice: I Link to Elizabeth Kolbert on “SuperFreakonomics”

Well, this is new. My first ever DMCA takedown notice--from HarperCollins, publisher of Levitt and Dubner's Superfreakonomics. While other publishers these days are happy to have sample chapters of their authors' works read and distributed on the internet, not so with HarperCollins.

One thing I can do in response is--tit-for-tat--to remove my praise of and link to E.M. Halliday's Understanding Thomas Jefferson: there are other better (albeit longer) Jefferson biographies published by firms that have not sent me DMCA notices: read them instead.

I urge everybody--authors and readers alike--to just say no to HarperCollins in the future.

A second thing I can do is to link to Elizabeth Kolbert's review of Superfreaknomics in the New Yorker:

“SuperFreakonomics” and climate change: Then, almost overnight, the crisis passed.... By 1912, autos in New York outnumbered horses, and in 1917 the city’s last horse-drawn streetcar made its final run. All the anxieties about a metropolis inundated by ordure had been misplaced.

This story—call it the Parable of Horseshit—has been told many times, with varying aims. The latest iteration is offered by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, in their new book, “SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes, and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance”.... Levitt and Dubner tell the horseshit story as a prelude to discussing climate change: “Just as equine activity once threatened to stomp out civilization, there is now a fear that human activity will do the same.” As usual, they say, the anxiety is unwarranted. First, the global-warming threat has been exaggerated; there is uncertainty about how, exactly, the earth will respond to rising CO2 levels, and uncertainty has “a nasty way of making us conjure up the very worst possibilities.” Second, solutions are bound to present themselves: “Technological fixes are often far simpler, and therefore cheaper, than the doomsayers could have imagined.”

Levitt and Dubner have in mind a very particular kind of “technological fix.” Wind turbines, solar cells, biofuels—these are all, in their view, more trouble than they’re worth. Such technologies are aimed at reducing CO2 emissions, which is the wrong goal, they say. Cutting back is difficult and, finally, annoying. Who really wants to use less oil? This sounds, the pair write, “like wearing sackcloth.” Wouldn’t it be simpler just to reëngineer the planet?... “Once you eliminate the moralism and the angst, the task of reversing global warming boils down to a straightforward engineering problem,” Levitt and Dubner write....

Neither Levitt, an economist, nor Dubner, a journalist, has any training in climate science—or, for that matter, in science of any kind. It’s their contention that they don’t need it. The whole conceit behind “SuperFreakonomics” and, before that, “Freakonomics,” which sold some four million copies, is that a dispassionate, statistically minded thinker can find patterns and answers in the data that those who are emotionally invested in the material will have missed.... Levitt and Dubner claim to have solved the mystery of why crime, after soaring in the nineteen-eighties, dropped in the nineteen-nineties.... They also have proved—at least to their own satisfaction—that names like Ansley and Philippa will be popular for girls in the coming decade, that reading to your kids doesn’t matter, and that drunks should be encouraged to drive rather than walk.

Given their emphasis on cold, hard numbers, it’s noteworthy that Levitt and Dubner ignore what are, by now, whole libraries’ worth of data on global warming. Indeed, just about everything they have to say on the topic is, factually speaking, wrong. Among the many matters they misrepresent are: the significance of carbon emissions as a climate-forcing agent, the mechanics of climate modelling, the temperature record of the past decade, and the climate history of the past several hundred thousand years. Raymond T. Pierrehumbert is a climatologist who, like Levitt, teaches at the University of Chicago. In a particularly scathing critique, he composed an open letter to Levitt, which he posted on the blog RealClimate....

But what’s most troubling about “SuperFreakonomics” is... [t]hough climate change is a grave problem, Levitt and Dubner treat it mainly as an opportunity to show how clever they are.... Among the many likely consequences of shooting SO2 above the clouds would be new regional weather patterns (after major volcanic eruptions, Asia and Africa have a nasty tendency to experience drought).... There are eminent scientists—among them the Nobel Prize-winning chemist Paul Crutzen—who argue that geoengineering should be seriously studied, but only with the understanding that it represents a risky, last-ditch attempt to avert catastrophe. “By far the preferred way” to confront climate change, Crutzen has written, “is to lower the emissions of greenhouse gases.”...

To be skeptical of climate models and credulous about things like carbon-eating trees and cloudmaking machinery and hoses that shoot sulfur into the sky is to replace a faith in science with a belief in science fiction. This is the turn that “SuperFreakonomics” takes, even as its authors repeatedly extoll their hard-headedness. All of which goes to show that, while some forms of horseshit are no longer a problem, others will always be with us.

Truly a Dark Age for Economics in the Midwest...

When last we saw the University of Chicago's Eugene Fama, he was mistakenly claiming that the NIPA savings-investment identity had as its consequence that increases in government spending necessarily could not boost employment and production.

It is hard to characterize the level of this mistake. I would like to say freshman-level, but my freshmen don't make it.

Now comes Eugene Fama again to make the false assertions that: (a) developed-country growth sped up after 1980, and (b) China's boom since the Southern Expedition of Deng Xiaoping is due to modern finance.

Paul Krugman watches the train wreck:

The lost generation - Paul Krugman Blog - NYTimes.com: Matthew Yglesias catches Eugene Fama making a strange assertion:

Beginning in the early 1980s, the developed world and some big players in the developing world experienced a period of extraordinary growth. It’s reasonable to argue that in facilitating the flow of world savings to productive uses around the world, financial markets and financial institutions played a big role in this growth...

The assertion about developed countries is, of course, entirely wrong. From Angus Maddison’s dataset:

And as Matt points out, the giant success story in the developing world was China, where the driver was the end of Communism — not modern finance. Actually, it’s even more absurd to give finance the credit than Matt realizes: China has not been experiencing net inflows of capital, partly because it has maintained capital controls, effectively insulating itself from the whole finance thing.

So why does Fama believe that something wonderful happened around 1980? Part of it, I suspect, is that in his milieu the politically correct thing is to pretend that nothing good happened until Reagan came along...

Washington Post Company Crashed-and-Burned-and-Smoking Watch

Why oh why can't we have a better press corps? Shut it down right now. If it were going to educate and inform the public, API would not be doing it, would they?

Zachary Roth:

Newsweek And Oil Lobby Team Up To Host Climate Change Event With Lawmakers: Newsweek magazine is teaming up with an oil-industry lobbying group to host an event on climate-change and energy issues involving lawmakers, just as the Senate gets set to take up legislation on the subject.

The panel discussion, entitled "Climate and Energy Policy: Moving?," will feature Jack Gerard, CEO of the American Petroleum Institute, and, as moderator, Newsweek columnist Howard Fineman, according to an email invitation sent by a Newsweek business staffer and obtained by TPMmuckraker.

"Newsweek is pleased to be co-hosting this panel discussion with API," says the email, which adds that "notable members of the United States House of Representatives and the United States Senate" have been invited. The event is scheduled to be held December 1 in a Senate meeting room...

Grave moral fault attaches to everyone who enables the Washington Post company, including people who buy test prep services from Stanley Kaplan.

Just say no.

The Financial Times Needs to Exercise Some Quality Control...

When Ned Phelps wrote:

A fruitless clash of economic opposites: In the theory wars, which are as much wars over policy choices, two very bad kinds of theories are driving out good theories. Keynesian economics, which had been nearly forgotten inside the macro field, has found new voices from outside. They take the position that fiscal “stimulus” of all kinds is effective against slumps of all causes...

An editor should have asked: "Who are you talking about who takes the position that fiscal 'stimulus' of all kinds is effective against slumps of all causes?" And then should have killed the column.

Paul Krugman:

On not listening: OK, no point in reading any further.

Nobody, and I mean nobody, holds that alleged position. The position held by Keynesians — by the way, if Keynesian economics has been “nearly forgotten inside the macro field”, someone should tell Greg Mankiw that he’s an unperson — is that fiscal stimulus is necessary only under certain special conditions. Namely, when you’re up against the zero lower bound, and conventional monetary policy is useless, fiscal stimulus may be your best option.

And we are at the zero lower bound right now, for the first time in 70 years. That’s why fiscal stimulus is on the agenda — not because Keynesians believe that deficit spending is always and everywhere the best policy.

But this complete misrepresentation by Phelps — it doesn’t even rise to the level of caricature, since it bears no resemblance to what people like me are saying — is characteristic. For the most part, the opponents of stimulus just don’t listen; they have this image of the idiot Keynesian so fixed in their minds that they can’t be bothered to pay any attention to the actual arguments.

You might have thought that the worst economic crisis since the 30s, a crisis that should not have happened according to non-Keynesian models, would prompt at least a little intellectual curiosity. But no.

Dictatorships and Double Standards: Jeet Heer Has a Ludwig Von Mises Quote...

An example of classical liberalism's elective affinity with authoritarian politics?

Ludwig:

It cannot be denied that Fascism and similar movements aiming at the establishment of dictatorships are full of the best intentions and that their intervention has, for the moment, saved European civilization. The merit that Fascism has thereby won for itself will live on eternally in history. But though its policy has brought salvation for the moment, it is not of the kind which could promise continued success. Fascism was an emergency makeshift. To view it as something more would be a fatal error...

So now I have to add Ludwig Von Mises, Liberalism to the pile...

---

UPDATE: Yes, Ludwig von Mises does indeed do it: he does claim that the reason Mussolini's thugs murdered Giacomo Matteotti was that they were driven to do it out of horror at the crimes committed by the Russian Bolsheviks. It's an old line: they are the monsters, and it's only because they are the monsters that they force us into a situation in which we must act monstrously:

Ludwig von Mises, Liberalism, 1.10: The Argument of Fascism: Only when the Marxist Social Democrats had gained the upper hand and taken power in the belief that the age of liberalism and capitalism had passed forever did the last concessions disappear that [social democracy] had still been thought necessary to make to the liberal ideology. The parties of the Third International consider any means as permissible.... The frank espousal of a policy of annihilating opponents and the murders committed in the pursuance of it have given rise to an opposition movement.... The militaristic and nationalistic enemies of the Third International felt themselves cheated by liberalism. Liberalism, they thought, stayed their hand when they desired to strike a blow against the revolutionary parties while it was still possible to do so....

The fundamental idea of these movements—which, from the name of the most grandiose and tightly disciplined among them, the Italian, may, in general, be designated as Fascist—consists in the proposal to make use of the same unscrupulous methods in the struggle against the Third International as the latter employs against its opponents. The Third International seeks to exterminate its adversaries and their ideas in the same way that the hygienist strives to exterminate a pestilential bacillus.... The Fascists, at least in principle, profess the same intentions.... Only under the fresh impression of the murders and atrocities perpetrated by the supporters of the Soviets were Germans and Italians able to block out the remembrance of the traditional restraints of justice and morality and find the impulse to bloody counteraction. The deeds of the Fascists and of other parties corresponding to them were emotional reflex actions evoked by indignation at the deeds of the Bolsheviks and Communists. As soon as the first flush of anger had passed, their policy took a more moderate course and will probably become even more so with the passage of time....

Now it cannot be denied that the only way one can offer effective resistance to violent assaults is by violence. Against the weapons of the Bolsheviks, weapons must be used in reprisal, and it would be a mistake to display weakness before murderers. No liberal has ever called this into question.... The great danger threatening domestic policy from the side of Fascism lies in its complete faith in the decisive power of violence.... What happens, however, when one's opponent... acts just as violently? The result must be a battle, a civil war. The ultimate victor to emerge from such conflicts will be the faction strongest in number.... The decisive question, therefore, always remains: How does one obtain a majority for one's own party? This, however, is a purely intellectual matter. It is a victory that can be won only with the weapons of the intellect, never by force. The suppression of all opposition by sheer violence is a most unsuitable way to win adherents to one's cause. Resort to naked force—that is, without justification in terms of intellectual arguments accepted by public opinion—merely gains new friends for those whom one is thereby trying to combat. In a battle between force and an idea, the latter always prevails. Fascism can triumph today because universal indignation at the infamies committed by the socialists and communists has obtained for it the sympathies of wide circles. But when the fresh impression of the crimes of the Bolsheviks has paled, the socialist program will once again exercise its power of attraction on the masses.... There is... only one idea that can be effectively opposed to socialism, viz., that of liberalism....

It cannot be denied that Fascism and similar movements aiming at the establishment of dictatorships are full of the best intentions and that their intervention has, for the moment, saved European civilization. The merit that Fascism has thereby won for itself will live on eternally in history. But though its policy has brought salvation for the moment, it is not of the kind which could promise continued success. Fascism was an emergency makeshift. To view it as something more would be a fatal error.

The kindest thing that can possibly be said, I think, is that Ludwig von Mises here demonstrates as little clue to what fascism is all about as he elsewhere demonstrates he understands about capitalism, social democracy, or--indeed-liberalsim.

The Republican Party on Now Republican House Candidate Doug Hoffman: He "Lacks the Integrity and Abilities Needed to Be Elected to Anything"

The Republican County Chairs of New York say: "Doug Hoffman lacks the integrity and qualities needed to be elected to anything -- let alone Congress."

Eric Kleefeld:

Flashback: GOP Used To Badmouth Hoffman, Said He Had No Integrity: Now that the national Republican Party has gotten behind Conservative Party candidate Doug Hoffman in the NY-23 special election -- following the withdrawal of moderate GOP candidate Dede Scozzafava -- it's fun to remember that the Republicans didn't always feel so fondly about Hoffman.

As The Hill reported a month ago, NRCC spokesman Paul Lindsay said that Scozzafava was the right candidate, who was picked by the local party leaders and had an appeal to the district's voters.... "Fortunately, the local Republican county chairs had the foresight to see that Doug Hoffman lacked the integrity and qualities needed to be elected to anything -- let alone Congress."

And the ex-Republican candidate Dede Scozzafava joins her county chairs in opposing Doug Hoffman:

Republican Scozzafava Endorses Democrat After Exiting N.Y. Congressional Race: Republican Dede Scozzafava endorsed her former Democratic opponent Sunday in the race for an upstate New York congressional seat, shaking up the contest for the second day in a row after exiting the race Saturday. 

Scozzafava dropped out after Conservative Party candidate Doug Hoffman experienced a late-in-the-game surge. The move was expected to consolidate GOP voters behind Hoffman on Tuesday. But on Sunday, Scozzafava backed Democrat Bill Owens -- the announcement was made in a statement sent out by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. 

"I am supporting Bill Owens for Congress and urge you to do the same," she said. "In Bill Owens, I see a sense of duty and integrity that will guide him beyond political partisanship. He will be an independent voice devoted to doing what is right for New York. Bill understands this district and its people, and when he represents us in Congress he will put our interests first." 

Hoisted from the Archives: Why Are Conservatives at the American Spectator so Scared of Albert Einstein? (June 16, 1997)

I was (as penance for my sins) reading back issues of the American Spectator in the Berkeley library, and I came across a marvelously funny column by its Washington correspondent, Tom Bethell: "Doubting Dada Physics," in the August 1993 issue (pp. 16-17). The column's subject is:

...[a] solitary genius [Petr Beckmann]... publish[ing] his own ideas and discoveries at a time of growing intellectual corruption in the academy... [who] undermined Einstein's theory of relativity, and... show[ed] how physics could be returned to the classical foundation from which it was dislodged at the beginning of the twentieth century.

Now three things make the column funny:

• Relativity was not the most important disruption of "classical" nineteenth-century physics. Quantum mechanics provoked a much bigger and much spookier revision of the classical and common sense world view. From Bethell's perspective--given his ultimate political goal--he is shooting at the wrong target.
  
• Special relativity is one of the best-confirmed theories in history. Every time you run an electric motor, every time a cosmic ray particle falls from the sky, every time physicists fire up a particle accelerator, every time you use the Global Positioning System to figure out where you are, you confirm special relativity. Theories that "disagree" with special relativity do so only around its very edges, by making different predictions about the results of experiments that cannot have been run yet, or that we will never be able to run.
  
• Our intuitions about time and space are derived from our own experience, living as we do on a planet and moving at velocities much, much lower than the speed of light. It makes little sense for Bethell to raise these intuitions to the status of "the most basic precepts of science... the alpha and omega of the material world--the irreducible character of time and space": as little sense as it would for someone living on the great plains to deny the existence of oceans.

It is not clear to me from Bethell's column whether Beckmann understands relativity or not; it is clear that Bethell does not understand what he is attacking--and that he is attacking it because of what he presumes are the moral and political implications of relativity physics. He is thus in the position of saying the opposite of Galileo--instead of "And yet it moves," he is closing his eyes to a huge amount of experimental evidence and saying, earnestly if incoherently, "and yet it stands still."

But there are unfunny parts to the column as well.

First, conservatives who dislike Einstein do so for one of two reasons:

• Because the admission that measurements of time and space depend on the motion of the observer is in their minds' somehow tied up with the erosion of traditional cultural "absolutes," and scientific truth should be sacrificed to cultural order whenever necessary. In Bethell's article is a whiff of the silencing of Galileo Galilei, the burning of Giordano Bruno, or Trofim Lysenko's sending Russian geneticists to the GULAG: you get the sense that Bethell would be opposed to the teaching of relativity even if he believed it was true.
  
• Because Einstein was a Jew: the meme of anti-Einstein thought in modern conservatism is a legacy of anti-semitism.
  

<[>Opposition to relativity for politico-cultural reasons and opposition to relativity as a legacy of anti-semitism are usually inextricably mixed. Neither is attractive. In Bethell's article, you can see: (i) the hint that Einstein's purpose in proposing his obviously absurd theory was to attack traditional cultural and aesthetic forms; (ii) the hint of a conspiracy of silence among physicists to prop up Einstein's reputation for sinister purposes; (iii) the claim that relativity's attraction to "intellectuals" arises because it is "abstruse... deliciously disrespectful... marvelously baffling to the bourgeoisie." All three of these have roots in anti-semitic visons of the secret conspiracy of over-clever but deceptive Jews--"rootless cosmopolitans" who lack the earthy common sense and grounding in the soil of the Volk--out to undermine the faith and social order of the simple Christian folk.

Second, Bethell spends most of his time as a political columnist--and his political judgment is as bad as his scientific.

I've attached the bulk of the column below. Statements that are simply wrong are in red.

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...[a] solitary genius [Petr Beckmann]... publish[ing] his own ideas and discoveries at a time of growing intellectual corruption in the academy. Above all, he is likely to be remembered for having undermined Einstein's theory of relativity, and for showing how physics could be returned to the classical foundation from which it was dislodged at the beginning of the twentieth century.

Ever since he learned relativity theory, Beckmann felt there must be something wrong with it. when he retired from teaching, he returned to the subject, spending several years on a book called Einstein Plus Two. He now believes that relativity theory "has been confirmed only in a narrow sector of physics, leads to logical contradictions, and is unable to derive results that must be postulated, though they are derivable by classical methods." He also believes that the theory is definitely falsified by the aberration of light from binary stars....

The problem that Einstein tried to solve, the new problems that arose with his solution, and Beckmann's brilliant resolution of all these difficulties, are not so difficult as they may sound. In fact, mystification has greatly enhanced Einstein's reputation. I hasten to add that Beckman is a great admirer of Einstein, whose famous equation of energy and mass, E=MC-squared, is unaffected by all this; in fact, it was derived independently of relativity.

By the mid-nineteenth century, the evidence that light travels in waves had become overwhelming [in fact, light travels in particles--individual packets--photons*]; wave theory accounted for refraction, polarization, and many other phenomena of light. The great puzzle was to understand what medium it travels in. Sound needs air; light needs... what? It can travel through a vacuum, through interstellar space. But if it is a wave, there must be an oscillating medium, [but because it isn't a wave, the problem doesn't arise] however rarified. The medium was called the "ether" and the great challenge for nineteenth-century physicists was to detect it.

The most famous experiment was carried out by Michelson and Morley in 1887. Since the earth must be moving through this ether in its orbit around the sun, it should be possible to detect an "ether wind," just as it is possible to feel the wind by putting your hand out a moving car. Albert Michelson, the first American to win the Nobel Prize in physics, designed the apparatus to measure it. But despite repeated attempts, no ethereal breeze could be detected.... This "null result" threw the world of physics into disarray. A wave without a medium!

Enter Einstein, fresh from the Bern patent office. He posited that there was no medium, and that the speed of light is the same in all directions irrespective of the motion of any apparatus set up to detect it. His famous 1905 paper, setting forth the special theory of relativity, demonstrated that if these odd assumptions are made, everything can be shoe-horned in mathematically. But it was odd. If a sound wave moves toward you at 750 miles an hour, and you walk towards it at 5 mph, you will detect the sound approaching at 755 miles an hour [you will not: the speed will be slower than 755 mph because of relativistic effects, but only infinitesimally slower because your speed is infinitesimal (one six hundred millionth or so) relative to the speed of light]. Observation agrees with common sense. The same is true of all other waves one can think of. But not electromagnetic phenomena (including light), said Einstein [relativity applies to all relative motion, whether involving electromagnetism or not]. The velocity of light was accorded a privileged, absolute status. Move toward the light source, and you will detect the light approaching you at the same speed as someone who is standing still.

That was where the absurdity came in. To preserve the absolute nature of the speed of light, space and time had to be distorted. Two twins are the same size: If A moves, he see B smaller than himself. But B likewise sees A as smaller than himself. Which is absurd. Reality becomes observer-dependent, [reality is still there, and is unchanged: any observer can easily figure out what the time and space perceptions of any other observer are] in opposition to the most basic precepts of science. The alpha and omega of the material world--the irreducible character of time and space--were sacrificed in order to preserve an absolute velocity [how would anyone know that intuitions about the irreducible character of time and space acquired while always moving at velocities so low that relativistic effects are infinitesimal would still apply to high-velocity situations?]. But velocity is nothing but space (distance) divided by time! This was Dada Physics. (It's interesting that the Dada movement "having as its program the discovery of authentic reality through the abolition of traditional cultural and aesthetic forms," came right after the general relativity theory [1915].)

Beckmann says that most students of physics shrug and accept relativity theory--theirs is not to quarrel with the sainted genius of the twentieth century. Some have private reservations. Among intellectuals in general, the theory has been much admired: so abstruse, so deliciously disrespectful of the eternal verities, so marvelously baffling to the bourgeoisie. It doesn't interfere with the daily routine, makes no practical difference to the Newtonian world. [it makes a big difference: to understand why a magnetic field exerts a force on a moving but not a stationary electron requires special relativity]. But it does upset its theoretical underpinnings. Wonderful! The Muddled Majority who fell so reassured by their common-sense understanding of the world just don't realize that things aren't what they seem to be at all.

Pondering the theory in the late 1950s at Prague's Institute of Radio Engineering, Beckman concluded that there had to be a medium for light, and in an offhand comment, a student named Pokorny, a (then) devout Communist, suggested the correct answer, as Beckmann is now convinced: the medium for electromagnetic waves is the local gravitational field--dense near the sun, attenuated in outer space [this does give rise to a problem: there are gravitational waves: what is their "oscillating medium"?]. On Earth, the local field is that of the Earth itself. The point is, the Earth's gravitational field moves along with the earth. So that was why Michelson-Morley could detect no ether wind. It was like sitting in a jet as it goes down the runway, holding a toy propeller in your lap and expecting the wind to turn the blades. Absurd--the air in the cabin is moving forward with the plane.

But wait! The earth also rotates on the axis, and there is good reason to think that the gravitational field does not go around with the Earth. Imagine this field as a hoop skirt on a woman with a circular waist. As she walks forward the skirt moves with her. But then, as she walks, she pirouettes, and now her body will slip around inside the skirt.

If this analogy is correct, the Michelson-Morley experiment might have been able to detect a fringe-shift after all--but a much smaller one.... It could easily be detected on the space shuttle, because the shuttle goes through the gravitational field much faster than the Earth....**

---

* There is a quantum amplitude associated with each photon's possible paths and interactions: there is a quantum amplitude associated with every particle's possible paths and interactions. The propagation and interference of the quantum amplitude give rise to interference, and other "wave-like" phenomena. But there is nothing special about the behavior of light as opposed to, say, electrons.

** Bethell goes on to say that the fact that light travels from New York to San Francisco faster (by about 40 nanoseconds) than from San Francisco back to New York is experimental disproof of relativity. He is, of course, wrong.

This "puzzle" is, however, of some interest because it shows that our instruments are now so sensitive that even the rotation of the earth leads special relativity to make a difference that we can measure. In the frame of reference of the center of the earth light travels from New York to San Francisco faster than from San Francisco to New York because the earth is spinning: in the time it takes light to go from New York to San Francisco, the earth's rotation has carried San Francisco about twenty feet toward New York. In the frame of reference of the center of the earth light travels from New York to San Francisco faster than back the other way because the New York to San Francisco leg covers a shorter distance.

In a frame of reference moving with New York and San Francisco during the 1/30 of a second that it takes light to go from one to the other and back, the two journeys take equal times and cover equal distances. How is this possible? Because for any "now" in New York, the corresponding "now" in San Francisco is an event that takes place--has a time coordinate--about 20 nanoseconds earlier in the moving frame of reference than is the "now" in the center-of-the-earth reference frame. In 20 nanoseconds a modern 200-megahertz computer chip processes four instruction cycles.

So does light go from New York to San Francisco in a shorter time than it comes back, or doesn't it? From the perspective of the global positioning system--which uses a center-of-the-earth based frame of reference--the answer is "yes." From the perspective of the frame of reference of the guy-in-New York, the answer is "no."

Bill Galston Says: The Obama Administration Should Adopt Bad Economic Policies

It is remarkable:

More Signs Of Trouble For 2010: Still, Democrats must ask themselves whether there’s anything they can do over the next year--for example, a meaningful shift toward fiscal restraint--to reduce the intensity level of the conservative assault. If not, the combination of an energized opposition and an electorate battered by high unemployment, slow growth, and the perception of out-of-control spending could set the stage for an ugly outcome...

A "meaningful shift toward fiscal restraint" means an unemployment rate that is likely to be not steady at around 10% a year from now but rising toward 12%.

Even if one is as narrow-minded as Bill Galston and focuses not on what are good policies but what policies are politically advantageous, adopting policies to raise the unemployment rate does not seem to be the kind of thing one should advocate, does it?

Does Bill Galston ever talk to any economists?

Does Bill Galston even know any economists?

The Cato Institute Needs to Exercise Some Quality Control

As long as it employs utter fools like Chris Edwards, the smart people who work there will have a hard time being taken seriously.

Just saying...

Think about it. Think hard about it.

New Republic Crashed-and-Burned-and-Smoking Watch

INSTAPUTZ:

INSTAPUTZ: Prescient:

It may take years, or even decades, for Democrats to relearn the lessons we thought, naively, they had learned for good under Clinton. But one day, Joe Lieberman's warnings in this campaign will look prophetic. And the principles he has espoused will once again guide the Democratic Party. It will be the work of this magazine, to whatever small degree possible, to hasten that day.

The New Republic, January 19, 2004, "Our Choice"

Can We Please Shut the Republican Party Down This Evening?

Henry Kissinger once said, people say: "It has the added advantage of being true." For today's Republican standard bearers like Meg Whitman, that is no longer the case: telling the truth never crosses their minds, and the idea that something being true might be an advantage for it is completely foreign to them.

Brian Leubitz watches Meg Whitman try to become governor:

Calitics:: Oh, It's Going to Be Like That?: George Skelton catches a few, ahem, tall tales in some of Meg Whitman's radio spots.  

"Did you know," Whitman asks radio listeners, "that in the last 10 years, state spending has gone up 80%?"

It doesn't take much digging to learn that general fund spending "in the last 10 years" has risen just 27%, according to finance department data. Adjusted for inflation and population growth, spending actually has decreased by 16.6%.

(LA Times 10/29/09)....

Meg Whitman has a story for the people of California. A story that bears no resemblance to the more complicated reality, but it's simple: California's state government spends too much. That somehow California is just tossing around money because the numbers are big. Yet, despite the numbers that Whitman would like to show you, here are the real numbers. California is 26th in per capita state spending with about $5,000 per capita. And that's from FY 2007, the high water mark where eMeg's ads were proclaiming out of control spending. (Data from Kaiser Foundation). Since that time, we've slashed and burned through our budget. We're spending substantially less money, and providing a lot fewer services. But, we can't all keep up with those spend happy states like Oklahoma (#18), Louisiana (#9), Alabama (#7) and Alaska (#1).

So, it's going to be more of the same crap. Lies, deceptions, and half-truths. Yup, a real change candidate, that Meg Whitman.