Everybody Laughs at Broder

A bit of Groucho

2009-10-17T18:40:00.001-04:00

WaPo Equivalence: Wingnut 'Deathers', Dems who criticize insurance industry

2009-08-09T16:13:00.002-04:00

And guess which side they come down harder on?

Yep - the Dems. It would be funny if it weren't so sad.

After the pox-on-both-houses setup ("If this moment is squandered, it will be a sad indictment of the political system -- and there will be plenty of blame to go around"), the WaPo's lead editorial today summarizes the piles of craziness we've heard from the wingnuts about healthcare - euthanasia! government-run hospitals! compiling enemies' lists! - in a mere eight lines.

Then it spends the rest of the editorial - 43 lines, over five times as much ink - in dumping on Nancy Pelosi for criticizing insurance company practices, and - get this! - on Obama for not doing enough to prepare "some patients who have become accustomed to getting every test or procedure they want" that they may have to settle for the most effective procedure, rather than the one they want.

One, two, three: awwwwww.

And of course, regardless of the insurance companies' willingness to acquiesce to a bill where they "accept all applicants and generally charge the same amount, in exchange for a requirement that all individuals obtain insurance," the fact is that now, in the absence of a bill, they're still practicing insurance as they always have: by not insuring people that need it, by dropping people from their rolls the minute they need to be insured, and by refusing to pay claims that their policy covers.

Why the Dems shouldn't run against what the vile practices the insurance companies are doing now, and will continue to do way into the future if this bill doesn't pass, in order to drum up support for the bill, is certainly lost on me. But even yielding that point to the WaPo, for sake of argument, it's crazy that they find this five times as worthy of criticism as the wingnuts' outright insanity.

It's as if the WaPo has decided: it's okay for conservatives to be batshit crazy - we expect it of them, and it's not worthy of much comment. But if the Dems commit much more mundane political offenses, we'll jump on them with both feet.

The WaPo Keeps Giving Op-Ed Space to Amity Shlaes

2009-08-09T16:09:00.002-04:00

Today's paper. No, I'm not gonna link. Just felt the need to point out that the WaPo continues to give op-ed space to this fraud. It's already hard to take the WaPo seriously, but such things make it even harder.

Broder: Bush's Worst Moral Failing Was...

2009-01-18T08:05:00.003-05:00

No, you're not going to believe this.

In [Bush's] valedictory interview...I listened in vain for any admission of what I and others consider the greatest moral failing of the Bush presidency -- his refusal to ask any sacrifice from most of the American people when he put the nation on a wartime footing after the Sept. 11 attacks.

To Broder, that was a bigger moral failing than "Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo [and his response to] Hurricane Katrina and the neglect of the environment and the working class." And he doesn't even mention the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis killed in the past six years.

Who are these people - these "I and others" that Broder knows? What sort of Body Snatchers pods did they emerge from?

Sometimes, all you can do is shake your head at the idea that someone like this has such a prominent role in our national discussion. The day when "Dean" Broder's too senile to string sentences together into the semblance of an op-ed column can't come too soon.

L'il Debbie's Prescription Overlooks the Obvious...

2008-11-30T17:12:00.003-05:00

...which, of course, would be a rejuvenation of the WaPo's sorry-ass op-ed page.

Howell, as she edges towards the door (thank Og), has ten suggestions for improving the paper, or at least ensuring that future waves of cutbacks don't cut quality. None of them mention the op-ed page - and surely each of the op-ed regulars must be drawing a comfortable salary.

We've been over this ground before, of course. Broder and Will are 100% reputation, 0% quality; somebody should've pointed out 15 years ago that these Op-Ed Emperors have no clothes. Robert J. Samuelson's beat is economics, but he doesn't actually know anything about economics. Richard Cohen is not only totally muddleheaded, but takes up a 'liberal' spot on the op-ed page without actually being one. Michael Gerson is a partisan hack who writes about The Decency of George W. Bush. Anne Applebaum seemed clueless that she was having a hard time deciding, this year, between two vastly different and irreconcilable worldviews. And so forth.

But the big thing is, quality opinion writing on national and international affairs isn't a scarce resource. Lots of people are doing quality punditry for free, out in the blogosphere. And even the well-known bloggers that are getting paid (I'm thinking of people like Kevin Drum, Ezra Klein, Matt Yglesias, Steve Benen, and others who are being paid strictly to blog for magazines like the Atlantic, the American Prospect, the Washington Monthly, Mother Jones, and so forth) are almost certainly getting paid way less than the op-ed regulars at the Washington Post.

And people like Matt and Ezra and Steve and Kevin and Hilzoy produce far better analytical writing each week than the WaPo op-ed regs, and actually add to your knowledge to boot. How often do you learn something new in a WaPo op-ed?

So here you have one truly terrible - and presumably pretty expensive - section of the newspaper, that could be greatly improved quite easily, and save lots of money at the same time. If you're thinking of ways to maintain the WaPo's quality and readership in an era of newspaper budget and staff cuts, how could you possibly miss this?

Bye-Bye, Deborah Howell!

2008-11-30T17:07:00.002-05:00

Don't let the door hit your sorry ass on the way out. Buried deep in today's Apologist column:

Now that I've listened to readers for more than three years (my term is over at year's end)

Isn't that great news? The WaPo can only be improved by her departure.

Special Thanksgiving Sex Change Post

2008-11-27T14:35:00.002-05:00

Genderanalyzer says:

We guess http://davidbroder.blogspot.com/ is written by a woman (52%), however it's quite gender neutral.

:Looks in pants:

Yep, still got male bits down there.

Reminds me of this, from Doon:

The boy grew silent. Something was troubling his mother - something she chose to deny rather than explain. And he knew she knew he could perceive them - had she not been his teacher? Had she not made it her own goal, to educate her son in the Boni Maroni Ways and Means?

True, such training was unusual for a boy; the Boni Maroni order was, after all, principally composed of women.

Perhaps I am a woman, Pall thought.

But his heightened powers of observation were able to discern, between his legs and hidden from the casual observer by the clothing of his race, those telltale organs that confirmed his intuition that he was indeed a male-man.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

George Will as Epicenter of Fairness Doctrine Paranoia

2008-11-14T10:03:00.002-05:00

People (Steve Benen, Kevin Drum, Matt Yglesias) keep wondering where the recent wingnut fixation with the Fairness Doctrine comes from. The answer is, it seems to come from George Will, with an assist from Charles Krauthammer.

George Will, August 17:

Two Democratic priorities in the next Congress would placate two factions that hold the party's leash -- organized labor and the far left. One is abolition of workers' right to secret ballots in unionization elections. The other is restoration of the "fairness doctrine" in order to kill talk radio, on which liberals cannot compete. The doctrine would expose broadcasters to endless threats of litigation over government rules about how many views must be presented, on which issues, by whom, for how long and in what manner.

George Will, September 18:

Unless McCain is president, the government will reinstate the equally misnamed "fairness doctrine." Until Ronald Reagan eliminated it in 1987, that regulation discouraged freewheeling political programming by the threat of litigation over inherently vague standards of "fairness" in presenting "balanced" political views. In 1980 there were fewer than 100 radio talk shows nationwide. Today there are more than 1,400 stations entirely devoted to talk formats. Liberals, not satisfied with their domination of academia, Hollywood and most of the mainstream media, want to kill talk radio, where liberals have been unable to dent conservatives' dominance.

Charles Krauthammer, October 31:

What will you get [if Obama wins]?
...
(2) The so-called Fairness Doctrine -- a project of Nancy Pelosi and leading Democratic senators -- a Hugo Chávez-style travesty designed to abolish conservative talk radio.

It's hardly a surprise that Michael "The Decency of George W. Bush" Gerson would pick up on a theme already pushed by Will and Krauthammer.

WaPo Likes Gerson Column So Much, It Runs It Twice

2008-11-07T13:16:00.003-05:00

The Gerson column, "The Decency of George W. Bush," ran on the op-ed page on Wednesday, and again today.

Guess the WaPo really wanted to drive home the point that our Torturer-In-Chief, a man responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and the exile of millions more, a President who used his office to gut both the Fourth Amendment and the age-old protections of habeas corpus, who turned the prosecutorial arm of the Federal government into the sort of partisan operation more typically associated with banana republics, is really a decent man.

That's quite an interesting definition of 'decency' they have.

Hiatus, Redux

2008-11-06T12:11:00.002-05:00

I feel like the Blogger Who Cried Wolf here, having twice before had short hiatuses as we planned for adoption travel that, for one reason or another, didn't work out.

This one appears to be the real thing, as in, we've been told to make travel reservations to Moscow. (The adoption agency gets us from Moscow to the city where the orphanage is, and back again.)

This may be a near-permanent hiatus for this blog - even aside from this belated entry into parenthood, there's a limited number of times one can say the same things about how awful Broder is. Ditto the rest of that crew.

I feel like I've done it, and it's hard to bring myself to skewer Broder once more when, twice in one week, he blames McCain's bad behavior on Obama's decision not to do weekly town-hall debates. It's hard to ridicule Gerson's hackery one more time when he writes about "the decency of George W. Bush" (I'm not making this up - that's an actual quote!) as he did yesterday; it's tiresome to tell Robert J. Samuelson to fuck off yet one more time because, yet one more time, he's proposed raising the Social Security eligibility age; and the avalanche of "the Dems had better guard against overreaching" columns, such as Ruth Marcus', yesterday, is already boring beyond words.

But I'll be around. I'll pop up in comments at all the usual places - CogBlog and Matt's and Ezra's and Brad DeLong's and Ryan Avent's blogs and places like that. I'm a political junkie, and I doubt that parenthood will change that.

Hey, We Won!!!

2008-11-05T06:19:00.002-05:00

Well, whaddaya know.

Great shout-out to Nate Silver in this morning's xkcd. In the mouse-over text, natch.

WaPo; McCain Is An "Idiot Wind"

2008-10-31T06:57:00.003-04:00

Looks like McCain's pressing of the Obama-Khalidi connection has even made Fred Hiatt say he's had enough. The header of today's lead editorial:

An 'Idiot Wind'
John McCain's latest attempt to link Barack Obama to extremism

That pretty much sums up the editorial.

But I think we need Bob Dylan to sum up McCain:

Idiot wind, blowing like a circle around my skull,
From the Grand Coulee Dam to the Capitol.
Idiot wind, blowing every time you move your teeth,
You're an idiot, babe.
It's a wonder that you still know how to breathe.

Ruth Marcus: Forget Substance - Tone Is Everything

2008-10-29T12:24:00.005-04:00

Marcus:

Barack Obama this week unveiled the closing argument of his presidential campaign. It seemed more like a reminder of his unfinished business.
I'm not referring to Obama's specific plans. Policy goodies such as health care and renewable energy, billions for this and credits for that, are inherently future "deliverables," contingent on election.

Well, of course not. You're a pseudo-centrist WaPo pundit. You'll take advantage of any excuse to discuss intangibles rather than issues, and where the opposing candidates or parties stand on them. Substance isn't your forte. To steal from Edie Brickell, "shove me into shallow waters" should be your motto.

I'm talking, rather, about Obama's entrancing promise of ushering in a new politics, one that rises above entrenched partisan rifts to unite a divided country.
...
But this is not -- although it could have been -- the way that candidate Obama has run his campaign or the message he has run it on. I believe he sincerely would have preferred that it be different: more elevated and more honest, less beholden to party orthodoxy and less slashing toward opponents.

Yet Obama has run a rather standard Democratic campaign, largely obeisant to party constituencies and allergic to difficult choices. Run it brilliantly, yes, but not with much more than a passing hint of the new politics he envisions. Better angels, it seems, do not make the best campaign strategists.

Accepting his party's nomination in Denver, Obama decried the use of "stale tactics to scare voters." A few weeks later, he was airing ads warning that John McCain wanted to privatize Social Security and would slash seniors' benefits almost in half. You can't get much staler than that.

Stale, perhaps. But was it true?

I know, Ruth, that's substance. Sorry. But McCain has, in fact, been on record for quite some time as favoring Social Security privatization. And that would involve benefit cuts now, or in the near future.

Certainly, McCain did not shy away from the cheap shot or the divisive argument; the palling-around-with-terrorists, Obama-as-socialist themes were not the elevated campaign that he, too, pledged to run.
I don't blame Obama for responding in kind as much as I bristle at his simultaneous posture that he is above that sort of gutter politics.

What gutter politics? What Obama has consistently demonstrated is that he's a counterpuncher. He doesn't pick any fights, but if he's attacked, he uses the attack itself as the basis of his counterattack. It's hardly going into the gutter to use an opponent's own attack, his own words, against him.

Even more, I question his assumption that the pressures that led him to such campaign tactics will somehow melt away after the election. What evidence is there that a President Obama would govern differently than candidate Obama campaigned?
...
Does he have some magical, Republican-whisperer ability to quell a political opposition that will be determined from Day One to frustrate his program and regain power?

This is where Obama's counterpunching will stand him in good stead. If he makes a good-faith effort to reach across to Republicans, and pass the programs we need to fix America's problems in a bipartisan manner, and the GOP filibusters his every move, then you can bet he'll figure out how to use that fact against them - and have the support of the American people as he does so.

Would a President Obama press policies -- on teacher accountability, on climate change, on trade -- that discomfit Democratic Party interest groups? Does he have the spine to stand up to the inevitably overreaching demands of congressional Democrats?

1) He has in the past.

2) Even more important, I bet he's got the spine to stand up to - or simply ignore - the ridiculous demands of the Beltway pundit class. They always want Dems to demonstrate their fortitude by standing up to someone else - usually working Americans - but never to them.

I suspect Marcus, Broder, Samuelson, Cohen, Applebaum, and all the rest of that crowd, are in for a surprise in January.

Anne Applebaum, WaPo's Stupidest Pundit?

2008-10-29T06:10:00.005-04:00

Since I've written this critique of Anne Applebaum in comments at Brad DeLong's blog, I should publish it in my own, too.

Anne Applebaum, yesterday:

I am one of these elusive independent female voters, and I have the credentials to prove it. For the past couple of decades, I've sometimes voted Democratic, sometimes Republican. I'm even a registered independent, though I did think of switching to vote for John McCain in 2000. But because the last political party I truly felt comfortable with was Thatcher's Conservative Party (I lived in England in the 1980s and 1990s), I didn't actually do it.

Since 1994 at the very latest, the enormous philosophical gulf between the two parties has been self-evident. To be an independent, undecided voter over that much time is to be torn, for all those years, between two fundamentally incompatible worldviews, both in terms of policy and their respective approaches to politics.

One expects that sort of cluelessness from a low-information undecided voter, but the only reason to put Applebaum on an op-ed page is if she happens to be one of the sharper tools in the shed. And boy howdy, does she ever fail that test.

I go back to the morning after the 2004 election for the moment I became totally convinced of her cluelessness:

The worst possible outcome would be, and will always be, a repeat of Florida 2000: lawyers, spin doctors, courts and protests that would drag out the result past this evening. That is because a disputed outcome, whoever is doing the disputing, would do far more damage to the country in the long term than anyone's worst Bush nightmare or anyone's worst-case Kerry scenario, whether a declaration of war against Syria or the nationalization of private medicine.
...
Let's face it: If it's really that close, as it was in 2000, either candidate could plausibly be declared the victor. And the best outcome for the country will always be for the apparent loser to concede and for the nation to hand victory, quickly, to whoever the apparent winner might be.

It's hard to see how a smart person could look back at Florida 2000, look again at the total mess we'd made of Iraq in 2003-4, and somehow be convinced that the former was worse than the latter.

Getting back to Applebaum today:

The larger point, though, is that if I'm not voting for McCain -- and, after a long struggle, I've realized that I can't -- maybe it's worth explaining why, for I suspect there are other independent voters who feel the same. Particularly because it's not his campaign, disjointed though that has been, that finally repulses me: It's his rapidly deteriorating, increasingly anti-intellectual, no longer even recognizably conservative Republican Party. His problems are not technical; they do not have to do with ads, fundraising or tactics, as some have suggested. They are institutional; they have to do with his colleagues, advisers and supporters.

If the qualities of the GOP are the deal-breaker for Applebaum, then once again, this GOP has pretty much been the same party for quite a few years now. Even the pseudo-intellectual overlay that Gingrich provided has been absent for some time. This isn't a party with any new ideas, just more tax cuts for the rich in a time of mounting deficits, fewer regulations in an era where the lack of oversight of everything from baby food to our financial markets has been our undoing, and of course more saber-rattling when our troops are still tied down in two interminable wars, with no way out.

This is only a surprise to Anne Applebaum.

Another thing I liked about McCain was the deliberate distance he always kept from the nuttier wing of his party and, simultaneously, the loyalty he's shown to a recognizably conservative budgetary philosophy. Fiscal conservatism, balanced budgets, sober spending -- all of these principles have been brushed away as so much nonsense for the past eight years by Republicans more interested in grandstanding about how much they hate Washington. McCain was one of the few who kept talking about them. He was also one of a shockingly few to understand that there is nothing American, let alone conservative, about torture, and that a battle for civilized values could not be won by uncivilized means.

McCain may talk about balanced budgets, but the rest of us noticed that McCain switched from a critic to an endorser of the Bush tax cuts a few years back. That completely undermines the sincerity of his talk about balanced budgets. Applebaum apparently didn't notice. Nor did she notice when McCain cozied up to the nuttiest of the widely-known right-wing preachers, the late Jerry Falwell, a few years ago, nor did she notice when he followed that act by befriending the equally nutty Rod Parsley and John Hagee. So much for keeping distance from the wingnuts. And while he was willing to speak against torture, it seems his vote was MIA in that battle.

One can only conclude that Applebaum let herself be completely taken in by posturing. Again, one expects that of low-information voters. Applebaum has failed to distinguish herself from that class.

WaPo: "Should lower-paid workers help subsidize those averaging $56,650 at GM?"

2008-10-27T20:31:00.003-04:00

Of course not, says the WaPo.

They should help subsidize those averaging $30 million at Morgan Stanley.

Duuuuuuh.

WaPo to Frum: Go Ahead, Hack Off All Over Our Outlook Section

2008-10-26T06:41:00.005-04:00

Hope you don't mind the new verb form: to hack off is to spout a bunch of nonsense that is so far from objective truth that nobody besides a party hack would be caught dead saying stuff like that.

Which brings us to GOP hack David Frum's lengthy piece in today's Outlook section.

The first half is an unobjectionable argument for the GOP letting McCain sink or swim on his own, and putting all its resources into close Senate races. I've got no dog in that fight.

The second half of the piece is about what the GOP should say to the voters to win those races, and that's where the hackery comes in.

That's especially true because of two unique dangers posed by the impending Democratic victory.
First, with the financial meltdown, the federal government is now acquiring a huge ownership stake in the nation's financial system. It will be immensely tempting to officeholders in Washington to use that stake for political ends -- to reward friends and punish enemies. One-party government, of course, will intensify those temptations. And as the federal government succumbs, officeholders will become more and more comfortable holding that stake. The current urgency to liquidate the government's position will subside. The United States needs Republicans and conservatives to monitor the way Democrats wield this extraordinary and dangerous new power -- and to pressure them to surrender it as rapidly as feasible.

If you're going to talk about the dangers of one-party government rewarding its friends and punishing its enemies, then remind me, David, of your opposition to: Tom DeLay's K Street Project, the steering of Iraq contracts to GOP-friendly firms who were never held accountable when billions just plain disappeared, the use of the Department of Justice as a partisan cudgel, the staffing of the Coalition Provisional Authority with Heritage Foundation interns, and so forth.

And also remind me of how the current GOP minority has used its filibuster power to rein in Dem power grabs, such as SCHIP expansion and a minimum wage hike.

I have no doubt that if the Dems are in power for long enough, they'll abuse it. But this is nothing but projection - Frum knows what his side did, and automatically assumes the Dems will approach government the same way.

Eventially, maybe. But now? Gimme a break. There's nothing in what we've seen in the past two years to suggest that Pelosi and Reid are iron-fisted rulers, pushing unpopular legislation through Congress. Quite the opposite: they've pushed legislation favored by large majorities of the public, but have lacked the ruthlessness to turn it into law.

There's just no connection between reality and the dangers Frum describes.

Second, the political culture of the Democratic Party has changed over the past decade. There's a fierce new anger among many liberal Democrats, a more militant style and an angry intolerance of dissent and criticism. This is the culture of the left-wing blogosphere and MSNBC's evening line-up -- and soon, it will be the culture of important political institutions in Washington.
Unchecked, this angry new wing of the Democratic Party will seek to stifle opposition by changing the rules of the political game.

And what color is the sky in this world?

It's not that there aren't angry people on the left; of course there are. It's just that we tend to get angry about things like the thousands of Americans and Iraqis dead in a needless, senseless war; the fact that the U.S., by far the richest country in the world, is the only advanced democracy that doesn't provide health care for all of its citizens; the giveaway of hundreds of billions of dollars to the people in our society who already have the most; and acts of torture committed in the name of the United States of America.

The GOP gets angry about trivia, and often fictitious trivia at that: lapel pins, Bill Ayers, Obama being a Muslim or a terrorist or a socialist or a Nazi.

There's a big difference about being angry about major injustices, and being angry for the sake of being angry.

I don't blame Frum for taking advantage of the forum the WaPo gives him to push his hackery. He's a party hack; hackery what he does. The problem here is the WaPo giving him an acre of space in its Outlook section to spread bullshit memes like this. Frum is entitled to his opinions, but not every opinion deserves the assist it gets by being put in the WaPo opinion pages. It's the WaPo Outlook editors who've dropped the ball here.

Broder: Save the Endangered Rising GOP Stars!

2008-10-26T05:29:00.000-04:00

Broder:

[GOP Sen. John Sununu] has a fan club on both sides of the aisle and is talked about in Republican circles as a potential presidential candidate.

The youngest member of the Senate has found himself running for reelection in one of the toughest years that Republicans have faced since 1974 -- when Democrats elected their big class of "Watergate babies."

His timetable is in serious jeopardy.

All together, now: Awwwwwwwwwww.

Sununu, like McCain, has struggled to convince voters that while he voted 90 percent of the time for Bush policies, he really is independent. He cites his opposition to an early Bush energy bill and his successful fight to add civil liberties protections to the Patriot Act.

It's a bit harder than it used to be a party-line man in Washington, then pass yourself off back home as an independent on the basis of a handful of votes. Maybe he should have just not voted with Bush 90% of the time.

The Corner, Unhinged

2008-10-25T14:38:00.003-04:00

Starting at the top and working down:

Apparently the Obama campaign reduced some security setting on their website, so now it's possible to enter your name as "Saddam Hussein" and donate money with your credit card. Mark Steyn is outraged at the fraudulent contribution possibilities. Dude: the credit card numbers are a bit harder to fake, and they have names and addresses that go with them.

K-Lo is still excited about some new Fred Thompson video. Maybe it would help my insomnia - it's worth a shot.

Stanley Kurtz has an outraged but unintelligible post about Obama, the New Party, and a website called "Fight the Smears." Does anybody really know what he's talking about? Does anybody really care? If so, I can't imagine why...

Stanley Kurtz is also all over the "Obama-Ayers-Khalidi connection" like flies on horseshit. So if horseshit is your thing, you know where to go.

Ken Adelman's become one of Obama's most unlikely endorsers. Jonah sez: "I just wish he'd offer something that approached an intellectually defensible explanation. Because this ain't it." "This" being:

Granted, McCain's views are closer to mine than Obama's. But I've learned over this Bush era to value competence along with ideology. Otherwise, our ideology gets discredited, as it has so disastrously over the past eight years.

McCain's temperament -- leading him to bizarre behavior during the week the economic crisis broke -- and his judgment -- leading him to Wasilla -- depressed me into thinking that "our guy" would be a(nother) lousy conservative president. Been there, done that.
I'd rather a competent moderate president.

Seems straightforward enough to me. Dunno what Jonah's having a hard time grasping.

Andy McCarthy also goes batshit about the "Obama-Ayers-Khalili connection." As the old caving ditty goes:

I smell batshit, oh yes batshit,
it's not rat shit, it's batshit for sure,
it's not cat shit, and it certainly isn't horse manure.

Bonus points for guessing the tune.

In Maggie Gallagher's tiny brain, people who want gays to have the right to get married are marriage opponents, and people who want to prevent them from getting married are marriage supporters.

And in other news, war is peace, freedom is slavery, and ignorance is strength.

At least Maggie's discussing an actual issue of some significance in the lives of real human beings, even if she's on the wrong side of it. That's more than can be said for her fellow Cornerites, who are off chasing bizarre conspiracy theories and the like.

And finally (i.e. that's about as much Corner insanity as a guy should inflict on himself at one sitting), Andy McCarthy angrily defends having been more gullible than Michelle Malkin, with respect to the McCain volunteer who falsely claimed to have been attacked by a large black man. Sucks to be a sucker, doesn't it? Skepticism is good.

The WaPo 'Gets It' on ACORN and Vote Fraud/Suppression

2008-10-25T08:46:00.004-04:00

Pleasant surprises in the unsigned editorials are always welcome.

What Mr. McCain's alarmist attack ignores, however, is the enormous gulf between improper voter registration -- whether fraudulent or merely erroneous -- and actually committing fraud at the ballot box. Evidence of fraudulent voting is scant, though there is always a risk. But there is a far greater risk of citizens entitled to vote being turned away from the polls -- and the real threat to the "fabric of democracy" is the McCain campaign's effort to stir up unfounded suspicions of massive voter fraud, casting unwarranted doubt on the legitimacy of the election.

Emphasis mine. Good on ya, WaPo.

Banks Buying Other Banks With Bailout Money

2008-10-24T19:48:00.003-04:00

Nobody seems to be saying much about this. But I really don't understand why we just threw $250 billion at a group of large banks to unlock the credit markets, if we're going to let them use it to buy up other banks instead:

Several major U.S. banks are leaning toward spending a portion of their federal rescue money on acquiring other financial firms rather than for issuing new loans, the primary purpose of the government's $250 billion initiative to invest in banks.

There is a growing consensus among Treasury and other federal officials that allowing healthy banks to use the money to acquire banks in jeopardy of failing could stabilize the economy and bolster confidence in banks. This could also save money for the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.

Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. confirmed yesterday that some banks may use the capital they receive through the Treasury program to buy weaker banks and that this could benefit the financial system.
In an appearance on "Charlie Rose," Paulson said acquisitions were "not the driver behind this program. The driver is to have our . . . healthy banks be well-capitalized so they can play the role they need to play for our country right now."

Healthy banks?? We were bailing out healthy banks?? WTF?

When the Treasury's program was announced last week, some bank executives said they didn't need the money and resented the federal intrusion. But in a number of earnings calls and interviews in recent days, several bank executives were more receptive.
The federal deal is relatively sweet in financial terms -- it requires banks to pay 5 percent interest annually on the investment over the first five years -- and some bankers said they would not pass it up.

I thought Paulson was supposed to drive hard bargains with troubled banks, rather than offering deals to healthy banks that were too good to pass up.

And of course, there's the "too big to fail" problem:

According to some analysts, an excess of mergers and acquisitions in the financial sector over the past decade created too many institutions deemed "too big too fail," meaning that the government would be obliged to rescue them if they faltered. Now, some worry the government's program will continue to drive that trend.
"I think it's a very serious problem, and I think it's part of a general failure to enforce antitrust laws in the last few years," Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz said at a hearing of the House Financial Services Committee yesterday. "So one of the things I think is part of your exit strategy is that we have to think about breaking up some of the big banks," added Stiglitz, a Columbia University professor.

I think I have at least a sketchy understanding of what this is all about, but the "bailout" is making absolutely no sense to me. Except for the possibility that it's really just one more way for the Bushies to throw money at the rich. I hate to be cynical about it, but I feel like I'm running out of alternatives.

WaPo: The Importance of Bringing Home the Boodle

2008-10-24T19:41:00.002-04:00

It had better be a long time before the WaPo jumps on the pork-and-earmarks bandwagon, if they're going to write editorials like this one. The importance of bringing home the boodle is front and center in their endorsements in all three area Congressional races on the Virginia side.

Gerson: McCain's Thwarted Greatness, Redux

2008-10-24T11:53:00.004-04:00

Gerson:

John McCain won the nomination of his party, in large part, as a vindicated prophet.

I think this is called the "Jeane Dixon effect." If you make enough prophecies, some of them are bound to be right, and the gullible forget about the predictions that bombed, such as McCain's claims that the Iraq war would be quick and easy, and that we would be greeted as liberators.

Hell, McCain can't even predict the past: less than three months ago, he claimed we were greeted as liberators.

Of course, with McCain having been on every side of every issue, one would have to hope that he'd gotten a few right, just by blind chance.

Gerson, mirroring Krauthammer, does the same "the surge worked" dance. Once again: no, it didn't. The program was: (1) increase troop levels (2) to reduce the violence to make space for (3) political reconciliation that will provide the foundation for (4) a reduction in violence not dependent on American troops (5) that will enable us to gradually withdraw without having to worry about whether Iraq will blow up again.

The Surge is still stuck in Step 2. Claims that the Surge has succeeded, Mike, are your brain on amnesia, gullibility, and wingnut Kool-Aid. Any questions?

Gerson, again mirroring Chucko, criticizes Obama's opposition to the Surge. But that raises the question: was it a good gamble at the time? Was there any reason not to believe it was one more Bush 'Hail Mary' pass to try to pull victory from defeat (or at least forestall his critics for another year), regardless of its chances for success?

What was supposed to be different about the surge? Oh, that's right" "Clear, hold, and build." But we were told we'd already been doing that for 15 months:

Casey also found himself at odds with others in the administration. Once, when he had called the number of civilian personnel who had volunteered to serve in Iraq "paltry," Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice had chided him. General, she had said, you're out of line.
On another occasion, in late 2005, he butted heads with Rice after her testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, in which she offered a succinct description of the U.S. military strategy in Iraq -- "clear, hold and build: to clear areas from insurgent control, to hold them securely and then build durable Iraqi institutions."
"What the hell is that?" Casey asked his boss at U.S. Central Command, Gen. John P. Abizaid.
"I don't know," Abizaid said.
"Did you agree to that?"
"No, I didn't agree to that."
When Rice next came to Iraq, Casey asked for a private meeting with her and U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad.
"Excuse me, ma'am, what's 'clear, hold, build'?"
Rice looked a little surprised. "George, that's your strategy."
"Ma'am, if it's my strategy, don't you think someone should have had the courtesy to talk to me about it before you went public with it?"

So why should anyone have given any credence to the idea that a little more 'clear, hold, build' than we had already supposedly been doing for well over a year would have worked?

If the Administration hadn't been lying to us (yeah, the Administration you were working for at the time, Mike), we might have known, in January 2007, that we hadn't been pursuing a 'clear, hold, build' approach, so actually trying it might actually reduce the violence.

But blaming others for not seeing through your own bullshit, Mike, is bullshit.

McCain Regains Krauthammer...So What?

2008-10-24T07:04:00.003-04:00

Chucko:

Contrarian that I am...

No, really - that's the opening of his column today.

That's how our favorite knee-jerk neocon sees himself. Contrarian.

Epic fail right there, dude.

I stand athwart the rush of conservative ship-jumpers of every stripe -- neo (Ken Adelman), moderate (Colin Powell), genetic/ironic (Christopher Buckley) and socialist/atheist (Christopher Hitchens) -- yelling "Stop!" I shall have no part of this motley crew. I will go down with the McCain ship. I'd rather lose an election than lose my bearings.

Good for you, Chucko. So, what are those bearings?

McCain the "erratic" is a cheap Obama talking point. The 40-year record testifies to McCain the stalwart.

Wonder if Steve Benen's list of McCain flipflops during this campaign season has broken into three figures yet. (I think Benen stopped maintaining that list a few months ago, when he became the Washington Monthly blogger-in-residence. But if it hadn't been for that, the list would go well beyond the 76 flipflops listed there. As Benen pointed out just yesterday, McCain's reversed himself five times on his balanced-budget promise. He started off saying he would balance the budget by 2013, then he wouldn't, then he would, then wouldn't, then would, now wouldn't.)

McCain, the stalwart. Yeppers.

McCain's critics are offended that he raised the issue of William Ayers. What's astonishing is that Obama was himself not offended by William Ayers.

If we're going to dive into that well, McCain's not offended by Gordon Liddy, who was willing to firebomb buildings and assassinate people for Richard Nixon.

But the real criticism of McCain here was his attempt to make the election turn on such trivia, rather than our current economic tsunami, or Iraq and national security, or global warming, or health care. At this point, nobody's got any doubt as to which candidate is more focused on the issues that will make a difference in Americans' lives.

Who do you want answering that phone at 3 a.m.? A man who's been cramming on these issues for the past year, who's never had to make an executive decision affecting so much as a city, let alone the world?...Or do you want a man who is the most prepared, most knowledgeable, most serious foreign policy thinker in the United States Senate?

McCain's such a well-prepared, deep thinker on foreign policy that he was advocating invading Iraq in the fall of 2001, despite knowing little about it, and despite its lack of connection to the then-recent attacks on America. He thought we'd be greeted as liberators, and that the Iraq war would be quick and easy.

There's little indication that McCain has more than a cartoon view of the world, that his understanding goes much deeper than "Og smash!" He's the sort of guy who'd have been willing to commit troops to Georgia, even as we barely had enough desperately overworked, overstretched troops to cover our commitments in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Krauthammer identifies Georgia as a test that McCain passed and Obama flunked, but Obama recognized the limits of our military power, while McCain was oblivious to them. Seems like a slamdunk to me - the other way.

And no, Chucko, the Surge still hasn't worked. We knew we could reduce violence temporarily by throwing troops at the problem, but eventually we'd have to reduce our commitment. The whole point was to create a window for political reconciliation, which our man Maliki has been adamantly opposed to, knowing we've got his back. The conflicts are still there. The 'success' of the Surge has merely obligated us to keep 150,000 troops in Iraq until doomsday to keep the lid on things. That's not success. Sorry, Charlie.

Ramesh Ponnuru in the WaPo: All Wrong

2008-10-23T06:14:00.004-04:00

For some inexplicable reason, the WaPo has given Corner denizen Ramesh Ponnuru space on its website to editorialize. Here's his latest:

The prevailing media take on Senator Biden has been that he is a wise statesman with the charming if unfortunate habit of committing gaffes. I suspect that if Biden were not a liberal Democrat and had not spent decades in Washington, journalists would be considerably more negative: that they would portray him as something of a buffoon.

During the campaign, Biden's been flying under the national radar, much like Edwards in 2004, giving speeches around the country that the national press has little reason to play up.

Palin's a whole 'nother story, of course: she's the star on the GOP side, right now. If she and McCain appear together, people start leaving once she's done speaking and McCain starts.

If that's a double standard, that's just life in the fast lane. And that's where Ponnuru's going:

His latest gaffe was to say on Monday that some foreign power would "test" Obama early in his term and that people would not, at first, think that Obama had reacted well to that test. The McCain campaign pounced on it, but the press has played it down: The story rated five paragraphs on p. A4 of yesterday's Washington Post.

The wingnuts are trying to play this one up; so is Palin. As a Dem, I'm all for that; I'm still trying to figure out what's so bad about this statement.

Somehow I think it would be a bigger story if Gov. Palin had said something similar--or had said, as Biden has, that "J-O-B-S" is "a three-letter word," and that FDR went on national television after the stock-market crash.

Maybe, Ramesh, you should sum up the national coverage of Troopergate, and be glad the media have been as kind to Palin as they have. Anyway, at this point, Palin's said so many crazy things that such gaffes would be lost in the white noise.

I don't think that the double standard in the coverage is purely a function of liberal-media or inside-Washington bias. But whatever the reasons for it, the double standard exists--and the press ought to be tougher on Senator Biden.

Ramesh, if you want to argue that the press should be paying more attention to Biden, and give more ink to both the good and the bad, you might have an argument. Your real problem there, though, is that you're running against your own candidate's star quality. But Biden's been drawing little coverage, period, so why should his occasional gaffe be any different?

P.S. Biden also proposed sending $200 million, "no strings attached," to Iran after September 11. Ever hear about that? Didn't think so.

Yep, stupid idea. But at the time, Iran was helping us in the War on Terror, as has been well documented. And $200 million is chump change in international relations anyway.

This is the essence of a 'gaffe,' something that sounds bad but really isn't particularly. And it's seven years old. So why should the press be pushing this one? Ramesh, if you think it's a story, you've got the National Review at your disposal, don't you? Go for it.

This Morning's Broder and Will

2008-10-23T05:36:00.003-04:00

For once, Broder isn't at all bad. He visits the campaign offices of McCain and Obama in the longtime GOP stronghold of Wooster, Ohio. Things are quiet at the McCain office, but the Obama office is running full-tilt.

George Will, on the other hand, is his usual sloppy self. He's upset that leftists like Sen. Charles Grassley think that maybe universities that have accumulated endowments in the billions should perhaps be required to spend some of that money making sure that students who are admitted to those universities can afford to go there.

And he's also upset that California legislators want to require large California foundations to report the race, gender and sexual orientation of their trustees, staff and grant recipients.

He says this sort of thing will cost far more than the $700 billion of our bailout. I'm serious:

Hundreds of billions of dollars that the political class would have liked to direct for its own social and political purposes have been otherwise allocated. That allocation, by government fiat rather than by market forces, must reduce the efficiency of the nation's stock of capital. Which in turn will reduce economic growth, and government revenue, just as the welfare state -- primarily pensions and medical care for the elderly -- becomes burdened by the retirement of 78 million baby boomers.

As government searches with increasing desperation for money with which it can work its will, Willie Sutton Moments will multiply. Government has an incentive to weaken the belief that the nation needs a vigorous and clearly demarcated sector of private educational and philanthropic institutions exercising discretion over their own resources.

So the frequently cited $700 billion sum is but a small fraction of the cost, over coming decades, of today's financial crisis. The desire of governments to extend their control over endowments and foundations is a manifestation of the metastasizing statism driven by the crisis. For now, its costs, monetary and moral, are, strictly speaking, incalculable.

I'd have to say he's kidding, except he isn't.

This is what happens when one gives the equivalent of lifetime tenure to national pundits. George Will can't say anything sufficiently idiotic to knock him from his perch.

Gerson: Beware of Radical Democrats!

2008-10-22T06:14:00.004-04:00

Gerson:

Following an electoral victory, Obama is likely to face a massive challenge: The least responsible, least respected, least popular political institution in America -- the Democratic-led Congress -- would also be the most emboldened. Democratic leaders with large majorities would be pushed by conviction and hubris, and pressured by Democratic constituencies, toward divisive measures that punish and alienate businesses, seek backward-looking political vengeance and impose cultural liberalism. This predictable story of overreach, backlash and bitterness easily could destroy Obama's presidency, even before his first achievements -- unless he can suddenly find the ability to shape, tame, even fight, the self-destructive tendencies of his own party.

We're talking about a Democratic Party that's still afraid of its own shadow. If the Dems wake up two weeks from now with a dozen new Democratic Senators, and 40 new Dems in the House, they'd still not have the instinct for boldness; they'd still be worried about moving too far, too fast, and offending the voters that elected them, or the pundit class, or someone.

There's no Lyndon Johnson here, ready to arm-twist extensive legislation through the Senate. There's only Harry Reid. There's no lefty equivalent of Newt Gingrich in the House, only Nancy Pelosi - constrained by Steny Hoyer (D-K Street) and his Blue Dogs.

If we were to see the total collapse of the GOP as we know it in the next few years, it would still take five years afterwards for the Dems to realize they had a clear field ahead of them, and get up the gumption to pass the sorts of programs they'd like.

Lay off the hallucinogens, Mike. For your own good.

Samuelson: None So Blind

2008-10-22T04:46:00.004-04:00

Because Robert J. Samuelson's column, "Young Voters, Get Mad" is desperately in need of one. Plus some basic honesty. His column begins:

To: Voters Under 35

Subject: Your Future

Recommendation: Get Angry
You're being played for chumps. Barack Obama and John McCain want your votes, but they're ignoring your interests. You face a heavily mortgaged future. You'll pay Social Security and Medicare for aging baby boomers. The needed federal tax increase might total 50 percent over the next 25 years.

"Social Security and Medicare." If there's one phrase that is a dead tipoff that a 'centrist' pundit is lying to you, that's it. Conflating Medicare and Social Security as fiscal problems is like lumping together North Korea and, who knows, maybe Monaco as foreign-policy problems.

Social Security is a non-problem. The trust fund whose purpose is to insure the baby boomers is currently expected to run out in 2049, when most of them will be dead anyway, and when it does, the revenue stream from the existing payroll tax will pay for benefits that are as good as beneficiaries get today.

Here's what to do about Social Security: check back in 10 years to make sure any problems are still decades away. And in the meantime, deal with pressing challenges like climate change, health care, jobs, the economy, education - real stuff.

There are three basic ways of reducing the costs of Social Security and Medicare: increase eligibility ages; trim benefits; and require recipients to pay more for their Medicare benefits (higher premiums, co-payments or deductibles). In his talk, Obama effectively rejected all three.

And good on him. Medicare is a problem, because in America, health care costs for everybody keep on going up. But that's unique to America, among the advanced democracies.

Once, just once, I'd like to see a WaPo pundit seriously consider what other countries in our peer group, so to speak, are doing to keep health care costs in check. Because as Ezra Klein points out in "The Health of Nations" (read it if you haven't), they're doing a damned good job of it, while providing pretty good care to everyone. And they're doing it in a variety of different ways. The main thing that seems to save money, as Ezra notes here, is integration.

Unified systems that handle all aspects of health care for a particular group of people don't have the tremendous inefficiencies that pile up at every step of the way in a non-system like ours, where "it's your insurance company negotiating with an urgent care ward that sends you to a hospital who prescribes a follow-up with a private specialist who tells you to pick up a prescription at the drug store of your choice which gives you a reaction which sends you to the emergency room which then puts you in touch with yet another private specialist," to quote Ezra again.

Even domestically, private integrated health care systems like Kaiser Permanente and public ones such as the Veterans' Administration do a much better job of containing costs than the rest of the health care sector does. And across the pond, entire nations that have single-payer systems pay 40% to 60% of what we do on health care, per capita, to cover everybody.

There can be no "rewriting of the social contract" without benefit cuts, because paying today's benefits inevitably involves much higher taxes, massive deficits or draconian cuts in other government programs. Even with sensible benefit cuts, taxes will have to rise and there will be pressure on other programs.

The problem is, we've got a screwy health care system that's unlike what anyone else in the world has. And Samuelson isn't even aware of that. He pretends to write knowledgeably about this topic, apparently without having ever stuck his head out of the U.S. and seeing how the rest of the world works, without ever getting an clue of just how abnormal and dysfunctional our system is by comparison.

Samuelson is ignorant. Ignorance can be cured, but one has to pull one's head out of one's ass first.

One more thing:

People live longer; they can work longer.

No.

Many of us can work longer. I sit at a computer all day; my work doesn't tax my body at all. I can work a long time.

My father-in-law spent most of a lifetime crawling around industrial refrigeration units. By 62, his body was worn out and used up. If he'd had to work until 65, I'm not sure he'd have made it. Plenty of other people on the bottom level of our service economy are on their feet all day - waitresses, the people who change the sheets and towels in hotel rooms, the women who clean and empty the wastebaskets in my office building, and the like. Just because they live longer, doesn't mean their legs don't give out just as soon.

I doubt that Samuelson even sees these people as they do their jobs, though he surely benefits from their labors. He clearly doesn't think about them. In his mind, people like him are typical. But they're not.

As the saying goes, there are none so blind as those who will not see. And there are few better examples than Robert J. Samuelson.

Sorry, Saxby! You Forgot to Register Saxby-Chambliss.Com!

2008-10-21T20:27:00.004-04:00

Neil (the Ethical Werewolf) Sinhababu got there first. Check it out - it's pretty good!

Because I Was Bored, I Went Down To The Corner

2008-10-21T11:21:00.005-04:00

And who did I run into?

John J. Miller, pimping an author who writes fiction about the War On Terror. Fictional universes are great - wingnuts can create alternate realities where the GWOT can be won militarily, and the libruls, who are always wrong, get their comeuppance.

Whatever fantasy flicks your Bic, dude.

Mark Steyn says the Corner's readership is noticing the dearth of posting as The End approaches.

Well yeah, because unlike fictional fantasy worlds where the libruls get their comeuppance, reality kinda sux for the wingnuts right now. Too bad, so sad.

Amy Holmes notes, "Drudge is reporting that Oprah may be offering to help Obama produce his half hour infomercial." From this, she spins a hypothetical where (a) Obama accepts the offer, and (b) Oprah forces her employees to work on the infomercial, whether they want to or not. She then discusses how crummy Obama and Oprah would be if they were to do this.

The appropriate response seems to be to discuss what we'd think of Amy Holmes if she had sex with goats in public, since that hasn't happened either.

Maggie Gallagher demonstrates that she doesn't understand the concept of a 'Kos Diary' - that there's really no difference between a Kos diarist whose diary hasn't been promoted to the front page, and a random left-of-center blogger that nobody's ever heard of.

Maggie, dear, anybody can write those things. And does. It's "from The Daily Kos" in the exact same sense that, if I post a comment on the WaPo website about one of their articles, that comment is "from the Washington Post." This is really quite old news. Please do something about that learning curve.

In consecutive posts, Jonah Pantload celebrates "the well-deserved beat down of Jacob Weisberg's amazingly silly epitaph of libertarianism," and, demonstrating the Corner's commitment to libertarian conservatism, Maggie Gallagher roots for California's Prop 8, which would deny marriage rights to gays.

Argue it out amongst yourselves, guys, and get back to us afterwards.

And via Byron York, Sarah Palin says “Rose the teacher” is among those who can expect to have their “dreams dashed by the Obama tax increase.” Aside from coaches of major sports at big universities, how many teachers earn over $250K per year? Good luck finding one. But if York's skeptical, he isn't saying.

Broder, Bush, and Katrina

2008-10-20T09:01:00.005-04:00

Krugman resurrected this September 4, 2005 Broder column from the wastebasket of history, so I thought I'd just quote some of the good parts.

It took almost no time for President Bush to put his stamp on the national response to the tragedy that has befallen New Orleans and the Gulf Coast.

All too true - just not exactly in the way Broder meant.

We cannot yet calculate the political fallout from Hurricane Katrina and its devastating human and economic consequences, but one thing seems certain: It makes the previous signs of political weakness for Bush, measured in record-low job approval ratings, instantly irrelevant and opens new opportunities for him to regain his standing with the public.

Well, that would be the important part, wouldn't it? The "devastating human and economic consequences" of Katrina, for Broder, are only the backdrop for what it might do for Bush's approval ratings.

Of course, Broder was just a wee bit off about that, too.

The challenges posed by this natural disaster are in some ways even more difficult than those of the terrorist attack, with anger and frustration now being expressed about the response of governments at all levels. But for a president who believes that actions speak louder than words, this is an advantageous setting.

'Nuff said.

More L'il Debbie: "Journalists Question the Powerful"

2008-10-19T07:21:00.006-04:00

Gimme a fuckin' break, Debbie.

Once there's a new president -- or governor or city council chairman -- one of the dominant rules of journalism kicks in: Question authority. Journalists love a good fight or a scandal. Republican readers today forget the aggressive coverage The Post gave to Clinton in the Monica Lewinsky affair.

And readers of a more liberal persuasion remember all too well that the WaPo's coverage of the Lewinsky scandal in 1998 was far more aggressive and all-encompassing than the WaPo's coverage of all the Bush scandals put together - scandals that were much more serious. Question authority? When it comes to Bush, the WaPo has given him the benefit of every doubt. (Until just the past few months, when it's admitted - too late to need to actually do any investigative reporting - that his Presidency has been an unmitigated disaster.)

Journalists question the powerful, often side with the underdog and love the new more than the old. The new politician is more interesting. Bill Clinton over George H.W. Bush. George W. Bush over Al Gore. That shows in Post political coverage this year. Barack Obama is the new thing. So is Sarah Palin. They get more ink.

Yeah, I remember how intensely the WaPo scrutinized Bush when he first took office. (Oh, wait.)

OK, let's give the WaPo a do-over. Take the new and interesting Sarah Palin's Troopergate scandal, which one would think would have entirely disqualified her from being the Vice-President. It was a one-day story in the WaPo. Guess that new candidate doesn't get such aggressive coverage after all.

One of the great things about journalism in this country -- yesterday and today -- is that it's hard to suppress a story that needs to be done.

Like the way the WaPo ignored, for many months, the story of the seven U.S. Attorneys who were fired because they weren't willing to prosecute essentially nonexistent vote-fraud cases in 2006. Or the way the WaPo yawned at the Scooter Libby trial, and Bush's pardon of Libby.

When I came to this job in October 2005, I heard more from Democrats who thought The Post was in George W. Bush's back pocket. The Post was "Bush's stenographer." Now I hear mainly from Republicans who think The Post is trying to elect Barack Obama president.

The WaPo was Bush's stenographer. Nobody's bothering to write in about it anymore, because Bush is pretty much irrelevant right now; nobody's paying attention to whether the WaPo is Bush's stenographer anymore, because it doesn't matter.

There's a reason I call Deborah Howell the Washington Post Apologist.

Simple Answers to Simple Questions, L'il Debbie Edition

2008-10-19T06:27:00.004-04:00

Deborah Howell, the WaPo Apologist, asks:

But then along comes a financial crisis, and where besides major newspapers and their Web sites can readers get authoritative coverage of what is engulfing us?

The answer would be: blogs.

I hate to tell you, Debbie, but until just this past week, when the WaPo finally published a fairly comprehensive explanation of the current financial meltdown, it had been MIA in that department. (I'd made my feelings known to Howell via email and phone messages.)

Unfortunately, this came two weeks after the final Congressional votes on the bailout.

At the time that Congress was considering the different bailout packages, the WaPo was completely useless. It took the position that we should hand over a rather astronomical sum of money to the Serious People to give to the Big Non-Banks, and anyone who objected was wrongheaded. Our comprehension wasn't required, only our checkbook.

What understanding of the crisis I had was gleaned entirely from blogs: from DeLong and Krugman, from Atrios and Calculated Risk. It helped that Brad DeLong had been writing about the housing bubble for years, and that Atrios had been writing about the Big Shitpile of toxic securities since sometime last year. (I'd love to know when he first used the term.)

The truth is, whenever a newsworthy issue could use a bit of intelligent analysis, I turn to blogs, not newspapers. What newspaper has explained the problems with our current healthcare system, the impact of the various candidates' proposals, and what other countries are doing, nearly as well as Ezra Klein has done all by himself?

During the past week or so, as McCain and the wingnuts have been trying to make an issue of ACORN, who has done a better job of explaining the facts than TPM? (And who was on the closely related story of the U.S. Attorney firings back at the beginning of 2007, when the WaPo and most of the major media outlets were saying there was no story there?)

As gasoline prices continue to fluctuate wildly, where are the media outlets that have had a decent discussion of the potential benefits of improved mass transit, and the roadblocks to those benefits (like parking requirements) like I've been reading over the past few months at Matt Yglesias' and Ryan Avent's and Atrios' and Ezra's blogs?

Blogs have been stepping up on all of these issues, and on many more, while our 'elite' newspapers have been dropping the ball.

Michael Demmons Hammers the Kraut

2008-10-17T12:10:00.005-04:00

I have no idea who Michael Demmons is (other than some guy John Cole trusts enough to turn the keys of Balloon Juice over to), or whether he even read Krauthammer's column this morning before writing this post at Balloon Juice. Either way, I'm gonna outsource the rest of this post to him.

Krauthammer:

Let me get this straight. A couple of agitated yahoos in a rally of thousands yell something offensive and incendiary, and John McCain and Sarah Palin are not just guilty by association -- with total strangers, mind you -- but worse: guilty according to the New York Times of "race-baiting and xenophobia."

Demmons:

You might be excused if you said placing Obama’s face on a $10 food stamp with a bucket of fried chicken, watermelon, ribs, and Kool-Aid was an isolated act.

When a major right-wing network calls Michelle Obama, “Obama’s Baby Mama,” you could dismiss it as as an overzealous producer who just thought it was funny and didn’t mean it to say that black women are just baby machines for black men. You could, I suppose.

You might even get a pass if you thought a Web site that depicted Obama and the word “Waterboard Him” was just created by an obscure group that didn’t represent all Republicans – although you would be wrong.

If a picture of Obama was Photoshopped to make him look a little bit like Osama Bin Laden, you could pass it off as the work of a few idiots on the right. It could be, right?

Supporters who carry racist Obama Monkey Dolls to your rallys are people who don’t represent your campaign. You could argue that.

Of course, this is just a moron on the fringe, right?

What about when a high-level Republican fundraiser sends out an email that includes a joke with the punchline, if an airplane carrying Obama and his wife were blown up “it certainly wouldn’t be a great loss, and it probably wouldn’t be an accident either.”? Sure, you could pass it off as the act of a random dumbass.

If, in response to your question, “Who is Barack Obama?” someone yelled “Terrorist!” you could say that was just one idiot in the crowd and was not indicative of the general sentiment. It’s plausible.

In fact, you could cite dozens of examples of these racist, divisive, dillusiuonal attacks on Barack Obama and conclude that they are just elements of the fringe and don’t represent mainstream Republicans.

Sooner or later though, you will have to acknowledge that this “fringe” is very widespread. You’ll have to come to grips, eventually, with the fact that this “fringe” has become the very definition of the your party.

Chuckles, I think Michael Demmons nailed your sorry ass.

Shorter Broder: Bush Beat McCain, Obama Did Nothing

2008-10-17T05:50:00.006-04:00

It's easy for Broder to dump on Bush now, now that he's essentially irrelevant:

The public distemper with George Bush is so pervasive now that nearly all the candidates running on the Republican ticket -- not just McCain but senators and representatives who thought they were well ahead -- have seen their poll numbers turn sickly.
During the debate, when Obama accused McCain of offering nothing but a continuation of Bush's policies, McCain protested, "I am not President Bush. If you wanted to run against President Bush, you should have run four years ago. I'm going to give a new direction to this economy in this country."
But his protestations are in vain. So far as the voters I've interviewed are concerned, there has been only one economic policy for the past eight years, and it bears Bush's name. Even now, with the bankruptcy of that policy, the Republican White House is calling the signals.

It's a bit late to admit Bush's failings, old man. He's been a terrible President for seven years and nine months; you conveniently overlooked that fact until seeing it would show McCain in a better light, and Obama in a worse one:

Given the near-impossibility of McCain's position, Obama should be enjoying a near-waltz through every possible challenge.

And:

McCain's real opponents in this race are the economic collapse and the shattered political reputation Bush has inflicted on Republicans.
But Obama has done his part by avoiding any errors and presenting a minimal target to the opposition.

McCain's lost because he's been fighting against history. Obama's won by doing nothing. Just call him Fortinbras.

I think we've heard this meme before, but mostly from hacks like Gerson. Looks like Broder's finding his level.

In a fairly detailed look at Wednesday night's debate, Broder managed to say nothing about what was, for many commentators besides yours truly, the defining moment - the abortion discussion. How do you say:

Despite the fact that he was playing on the Democrats' turf, McCain made a spirited case for himself on all these subjects.

when McCain basically looked like he wanted to bite through somebody's jugular over the idea of a "health of the mother" exception to a late-term abortion ban? Yeah, it was 'spirited,' alright - in about the same way that Ozzy Osbourne biting the head off a bat was 'spirited.'

And the notion that Obama has an easy ride in this race? I don't think so. In order to win this thing, Obama still has to be the least angry, the least aggrieved, black man in America. Like Jackie Robinson in that first incredibly difficult season, he's had to maintain his composure at all times, under all circumstances. He makes it look so easy. But that doesn't mean it didn't take a lot of work to make that happen.

McCain Lost Pro-Choice GOP Women Right About Here

2008-10-16T08:47:00.001-04:00

Gerson: History's Unfair To McCain

2008-10-15T12:18:00.003-04:00

Aaaaawwwwwwwwwww.

Shorter Gerson: We're in an economic crisis, and people turn to Dems in an economic crisis. McCain's a great man and has run a fine campaign, but couldn't have been expected to win under those circumstances. To win, Obama just had to look good while doing nothing.

Dude, you're sooooooooo kidding. But you're only fooling yourself and other Kool-Aid drinkers.

Previous to this economic free fall -- and after his transformative vice-presidential choice -- McCain was about tied in a race he should have been losing by a large margin. The public clearly had questions about Obama's leadership qualities. But the McCain campaign also proved itself capable of constructing an effective narrative: Obama as lightweight celebrity, McCain as maverick reformer. Until history intervened.

Golly - McCain's team was able to construct an effective narrative. That definitely qualifies him for the White House, doesn't it? I'm sure impressed. Maybe our next President should be a bestselling novelist, what with narrative being so important.

As a political tool, narrative is genuinely important. But it's got to match up closely enough with reality that everybody plausibly fits with their places in your narrative. Otherwise, the whole thing falls to pieces.

The problem for McCain was, he abandoned his "maverick reformer" ways when he endorsed Bush for President in June 2004. I should make myself clear, though: even a maverick reformer is quite reasonably expected to endorse the Presidential candidate of his own party. But from that point forward, McCain turned into a good GOP soldier and reliable supporter of the Bush/GOP party line. Wrapping Bush around McCain's neck wasn't going to be much of a challenge for the Dem nominee, whoever s/he turned out to be.

And then reality intervened, which gave McCain a chance to demonstrate he was both a maverick reformer and an experienced, steady leader in a crisis.

Following the onset of the crisis, McCain was left with flawed options. He reasonably chose to work for a responsible bailout while hoping the markets would stabilize quickly. Instead, the bailout proved politically unpopular and the markets gyrated like the Pussycat Dolls.

Try again, Mike: like I said, you're only fooling yourself. How about: McCain first said the fundamentals of our economy were strong, then continued campaigning while Congressional negotiatiors tried to reach a deal, and Obama listed four points that he said belonged in any bailout plan. Then when Congress was near a deal, McCain 'suspended' his campaign (but not really), then barged in on the negotiations, causing the deal to fall through. When it was reassembled and put to a vote the following week, McCain took credit for its passage prior to the vote where it was defeated. He later took credit for killing the deal, and was not particularly visible when the deal was revised to the form that passed Congress.

In short, he's been on every possible side of the bailout issue. No steady leadership, no maverick reformer, no nothing.

Then McCain raised Obama's past association with William Ayers -- a valid attack if properly raised....But this accusation naturally looks small compared to the nation's outsized economic fears.

So why was he raising it? The problem wasn't that it was valid - the problem was, it was trivial. Nobody held a gun to John McCain's head and forced him to treat it as a major issue. He did that all on his own. History gave him a Churchillian moment, and he chose to be small. He could have demonstrated leadership and independence by coming up with a coherent alternative to the Bush bailout plan. He didn't. His bad.

Obama's task has been easier. He needs only to ride a historical current instead of fighting it. And this plays to his greatest political strength: the easy, laid-back self-assurance of a 1940s crooner. During the financial crisis Obama has contributed nothing of note or consequence.

Early on, he listed four points that belonged in a bailout plan, and stuck with them. He was a consistent supporter of the Paulson-Dodd-Frank bailout plan. A number of Blue Dog Democrats credited Obama with changing their votes to support the bailout plan that passed Congress, after they'd voted against the first House bill. That may not be leadership worthy of Churchill, but it is far above and beyond what McCain has demonstrated.

Couldn't resist this bit of catnip:

Can anyone doubt that the past political association of McCain with a right-wing terrorist would attract some attention?

Yes, I sure can:

AP: McCain was on the board of directors of the U.S. Council for World Freedom, part of an international organization linked to former Nazi collaborators and ultra-right-wing death squads in Central America.

Sarah Palin's hubby was a member of a right-wing secessionist political party.

Neither of these facts has gotten much play. This is not a complaint on my part: on the scale of the issues we're dealing with, these are small potatoes. We don't have time for 'issues' like these, just like we don't have time for our political discussion to be about Bill Ayers. Gerson's wrong, that's all.

Maybe [McCain] is a great man running at the most difficult of times.

And maybe the images in the funhouse mirrors are reality, and what we see every day is the illusion. But I wouldn't bank on it.

Steven Pearlstein Loses An Argument With Himself

2008-10-14T10:51:00.005-04:00

After reading his column today, I have to disagree not just with Pearlstein, but with Josh Marshall.

Before I wade into this, let me say that I think Pearlstein's generally pretty sharp. It helps that he's on the business pages, rather than on the op-ed page; he hasn't been infected by the stupidity virus that's rampant in the opinion pages of the A section. But today's column is another story.

He starts off by giving Paulson an extended 'attaboy' for playing this crisis well and confounding his critics, particularly in the latest installment.

But then he turns around and dumps on the execs of the banks that received the biggest infusions of cash:

In putting several trillion dollars in government funds on the line, the country has now done just about everything that Wall Street could have asked to address the financial crisis. The question now, as John Kennedy might have put it, is what Wall Street is ready to do for its country. So far, the answer is not much.
After getting their closed-door briefing yesterday from Paulson on the government's latest initiatives, Wall Street's finest literally ran from the Treasury to their waiting limousines, bypassing a media scrum eager to convey any scrap of wisdom or insight.
Court reporters will tell you they can always tell the innocent from the guilty on these kinds of perp walks, and the Wall Street crowd yesterday looked particularly guilty, unable even to conjure up a soothing word to a nation fretting over its shrunken 401(k)s, or a simple thank you to taxpayers for having saved their bacon. Their silence and invisibility throughout this crisis attests to the moral and political bankruptcy of a financial elite that is the perfect match for the financial bankruptcy they have now visited upon their investors, their creditors and their customers.
After yesterday's "historic" meeting, we are told by industry apologists that we are supposed to be grateful to nine leading banks for having "volunteered" to accept additional capital from the Treasury, along with a government guarantee for newly issued bank debt, even if it means having to accept a dilution of existing shares and a few harmless restrictions on their operations.
Pardon me if I'm less than blown over by this munificent offer, but it hardly seems commensurate either with the severity of the current crisis or the depth of the banks' culpability in fomenting it.
If Wall Street were truly serious about convincing Main Street that we're all in this together, its top executives would have stepped before the cameras yesterday and promised not to cut lines of credits to long-standing business customers who have never missed a payment.
They would have committed themselves not to foreclose on any homeowner who is willing and able to refinance into a new, government-guaranteed, fixed-rate mortgage set at 85 percent of the current value of the property.
They would have offered to suspend dividend payments until capital levels had been restored to pre-crisis levels.
They would have given us their solemn promise not to advise clients to hold on to their own investments while quietly dumping whatever they can from their own portfolios and shorting every security in sight.
With the Treasury now desperate for help in managing its new rescue efforts, they would have volunteered, at no cost to taxpayers, the services of some of those investment bankers and financial wizards who now don't have much else to do.
And the maharajas of finance could have set a wonderful example if they had all gotten together and agreed to work for a dollar a year until the crisis has passed.
There's a word that captures the instinct to take these kind of bold moves in the midst of a national crisis -- it's called leadership. We've seen quite a bit of it these past few weeks from public officials like Hank Paulson, Ben Bernanke, Tim Geithner, Sheila Bair, Nancy Pelosi, Barney Frank, John Boehner -- even George Bush. Wall Street, by contrast, has served up a nothing sandwich, a lack of leadership that's been stunning.

When he's right, he's right - but what did he expect? These guys are paid to be greedy, to get the best deals possible. What Pearlstein's rant demonstrates is that Paulson was a lousy bargainer, and negotiated a really, really sucky deal on our behalf.

Paulson could have extracted that commitment about maintaining lines of credit to good customers. He could have gotten that nonforeclosure commitment. He could have demanded and received their commitment to suspend dividends until the crisis was clearly history. (In fact, Paulson went the opposite direction here by taking preferred rather than common stock, since the value of preferred stock is almost entirely a function of its first claim on dividends, rather than a function of the success of the company.) Paulson could have required that the execs of these firms keep their total compensation packages in the six-figure range, at least until the emergency has passed. And so forth.

He did none of these things. He drove a lousy bargain. Anyone who expects the lords of Wall Street to do these things out of generosity or patriotism or public-spiritedness, has got to be crazy. They're in it for the bottom line. If they aren't required to do good by law or contract or clear self-interest, they almost invariably won't.

And those who were telling us, a couple weeks back, just what a ferocious bargainer Paulson would be (I'm looking at you, Brad DeLong and Kevin Drum) - guess we found out otherwise.

Richard Cohen's Burning Questions

2008-10-14T09:25:00.003-04:00

Like I said last week, if we flipped Richard Cohen to the side of the angels, it would just mean we'd have one truly muddle-headed pundit embarrassing our side. But since he and most of his readers think he's some sort of librul, I guess he already does that. So never mind.

But that brings us to Cohen's column this morning. He's got questions he's just dying to ask the candidates if he were moderating one of the debates. A few of them are decent questions, but boy howdy, do they get lost amidst the fluff. Here's some of the questions he'd ask Obama:

Senator Obama, we all know that lobbyists are not the problem in
Washington; it's the incessant need of politicians to raise campaign funds. Yet
you broke your pledge to accept public financing for your campaign. By doing
that, didn't you contribute to this problem? And a follow-up: If you broke your
word on this, how can we be sure you won't break your word again?

Senator Obama, given the problems facing our country -- a worldwide
financial crisis; a looming recession; the prospect of nukes in Iran and North
Korea; and Pakistan, which already has nukes, coming apart -- isn't it reckless
of you to think that, at your young age, with your limited experience, you can
manage it all?
Senator Obama, did you ever tell Bill Ayers to his face that what he did
was wrong?
Senator Obama, you are sooooooooo cool. Can you tell us, please, the last
time you lost your temper and what about? You have two minutes.
Senator Obama, do you ever wake up in the middle of night for anything?
Senator Obama, have you ever been in therapy? If so, how did it make you feel?

And here's what he'd ask McCain:

Senator McCain, reportedly you have been told to avoid looking at Senator
Obama during debates because he infuriates you and you could lose your temper.
Is this because of Obama's age or his manner or something else entirely?
Senator McCain, ... given your age, isn't [the Presidency] all too much?
Senator McCain, I have a question regarding Sarah Palin: How could
you?
Senator McCain, do you ever wake up in the middle of the night and wonder
if history will forgive you for Sarah Palin?
Senator McCain, you are 72 and have had skin cancer several times. Given
that -- not to mention the usual exigencies of life -- how could you pick a
running mate who is so dismally qualified for the presidency? And please, for
the sake of your own reputation, not to mention your mortal soul, don't say
anything about the Alaska National Guard.

To be fair, Cohen did ask some substantive questions. But they were the exception.

Hiatt: McCain's Gone Crazy, But Only Because Obama's Just As Bad

2008-10-13T19:18:00.004-04:00

Hiatt:

And as the McCain campaign grew uglier last week -- casting Obama as dangerous, dishonest and un-American -- it was tempting to imagine the campaign McCain might have waged if he had based it on the respect for his opponent, and for the process, that he had long professed.

You may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one...

So let's imagine this hypothetical campaign about the issues. When there's daylight between McCain and President 23%, it's just as often to Bush's right (even deeper tax cuts, even more targeted to the rich, and even more of a hair trigger for war) as towards the center. Obama v. McCain reduces to a generic-D-vs.-generic-R campaign, in a country that's lost its stomach for more Republicanism.

Let's face it, Fred, that just wasn't gonna happen. For several cycles now, Americans really have preferred the Dems' positions to those of the GOP. Hence the standard GOP playbook:

1) Make the race about the candidates, rather than the issues.
2) But for safety's sake, (a) bamboozle the public about the degree of difference between Dems and the GOP on the major issues, and (b) bring up or invent a host of bullshit issues, and make the election about them. This feeds into:
3) Slime the Dem candidate. (The bullshit issues in (2b) were selected with this in mind, of course.)
4) Feed the gullible pundits a few anecdotes demonstrating the GOP candidate's 'character,' and watch them lap it up and sell the American people on it for you.

Now that we've gotten that out of the way, on to the main entree:

I'm sure, in the crazed intensity of a presidential campaign, it's easy to start believing your consultants and television ads -- believing that the other guy is dangerous and that only you can save the country. That must be especially true when the other guy is insulting you. The mud flies both ways in this campaign, with Obama and his allies relentlessly pounding McCain as out of touch, erratic, dishonest and, over and over again, dishonorable.

Nice try, Fred, but anyone watching this thing knows that, when it comes to character issues, Obama has strictly been a counterpuncher. Hit Obama with a flock of 'celebrity' ads, and he'll take advantage of the fact that McCain doesn't know how many residences he owns. Claim he's responsible for teaching sex ed to kindergarteners when the 'sex ed' was more the 'good touch, bad touch' stuff, and he'll make sure the world knows just how dishonest McCain has been, just how low McCain has stooped.

This is NOT about Obama, Fred, not even tangentially. Did McCain release that 'celebrity' ad because the Obama campaign had engaged in character attacks? No, he did so because Obama had had a very successful trip to Europe and the Middle East, and McCain's team was looking for a way to turn the huge crowds in Europe against him. The mud may be flying both ways, but only because Obama hasn't let attacks on his character go unchallenged.

And honor is at the core of McCain's self-image. He's been running for president, more on than off, for almost a decade, but his determination hasn't had much to do with a highly defined ideology, program or set of policies. What underlies his ambition are values: service, patriotism, duty, honor.

It may be that it's easier for such a campaign to get blown off course. In an exceptionally pro-Democratic year, against an exceptionally unflappable opponent, it's not surprising that a campaign without bedrock policy goals would try first one thing, then another, with one of those things being character assassination.

Think about that, Fred: you're saying here that if honor is the core of your self-image and your campaign, you're more likely to behave dishonorably under stress than if you and your campaign were all about the issues.

Pardon me, but that makes no fucking sense at all.

But that's the sort of stuff you wind up saying, Fred, when you try to excuse the inexcusable.

WaPo: Palin "Does Not Come Off Well" In Troopergate

2008-10-13T10:54:00.006-04:00

As I read the WaPo editorial on Troopergate, I kept waiting for it to say that an abuse of power of this sort shouldn't just disqualify Palin from being Veep, but from holding any executive office now or ever again.

Instead, there's this mishmash of faint condemnation:

Meddlesome Sarah Palin does not come off well....Palin's decision to repudiate her earlier pledge to cooperate fully with the inquiry does not offer assurance about how she would conduct herself as vice president....Palin's refusal to cooperate...reflects poorly on her. So, too, does Ms. Palin's mischaracterization of the report....It's unfortunate that Ms. Palin does not understand -- or chooses not to acknowledge -- the seriousness of the mess she helped create.

The weird thing is, the WaPo is pretty clear on what she did:

[T]he report...shows her and her husband pursuing a personal vendetta against the trooper, Mike Wooten, despite repeated warnings that they were impermissibly intruding into internal -- and already concluded -- disciplinary issues.

The amount of attention that the newly elected governor, her husband and her subordinates -- her personnel director, attorney general and chief of staff, among others -- devoted to getting Mr. Wooten fired was extraordinary. Within a few weeks of Ms. Palin's inauguration, her newly installed public safety commissioner, Walter Monegan, was summoned to a meeting with the governor's husband, Todd Palin, at which the "First Gentleman" pressed Mr. Monegan to reexamine the already concluded disciplinary case against Mr. Wooten. The governor herself called Mr. Monegan, e-mailed him and met with him in person to discuss her unhappiness with Mr. Wooten's continuation on the force. Equally extraordinary was the Palins' persistence in the face of warnings that their intervention could run afoul of personnel rules and risked creating precisely the kind of public uproar that ensued.

That's right - she used every tool at her disposal as the Governor of Alaska to pursue a personal vendetta, continuing to lean on underlings to fire her ex-brother-in-law, no matter how many times they said they weren't going to because it was morally wrong, probably illegal, and could expose everybody involved to lawsuits.

And the WaPo thinks that this just "reflects poorly on her," as if other things that show her in a more favorable light could balance the slate. But they can't.

In our system of government, no one, not even the President of the United States, is supposed to be above the law. But this behavior is that of a medieval sovereign saying, "I am the law." This is the sort of behavior that should disqualify Sarah Palin from high office, in the mind of any person who believes in our Constitutional system of government.

But given that the WaPo has been dismissing similar behavior for the past seven years and nine months, I guess it's expecting a bit much to expect them to start taking it seriously now.

Congrats, Paul Krugman!!

2008-10-13T09:08:00.001-04:00

Winner of this year's Nobel Prize in Economics.

Muddled Thinking About Negative Ads

2008-10-12T08:44:00.004-04:00

The WaPo also gave Outlook front-page space to a Vandy poli-sci prof named John G. Geer to explain why negative ads are actually good. I can't question his main thesis:

First, negative ads are more likely than positive ads to be about the issues.

Second, negative ads are more likely to be specific when talking about those issues.

Third, negative ads are more likely to contain facts.

And finally, negative ads are more likely to be about the important issues of the day.

I can't help but note the distinction from "the issues" in the first two points, and "the important issues of the day" in the last one. McCain's ads about Obama's association with William Ayers are "about the issues," they're "specific when talking about those issues," and they "contain facts." The problem is, they're not "about the important issues of the day."

And this is where the problem is. Negativity in political ads and other political exchanges is absolutely essential, if by 'negativity' we mean criticism of one's opponent's stands on relevant issues, and pointing out the problems with those positions.

But when it involves the attempt to displace the genuinely serious issues with bullshit issues, or to create bullshit issues out of thin air, that's a whole 'nother thing.

Geer basically ignores this distinction, which is really at the heart of the question he raises.

To Geer: Dude, you're a poli-sci professor. This is your day job. Be better at it.

And I'd suggest that the WaPo Outlook editor learn to distinguish analysis that clarifies issues from analysis that further muddles them, but some things just ain't gonna happen.

Another WaPo "Shape of Earth: Views Differ" Moment

2008-10-12T08:34:00.006-04:00

Ross Douthat blames the financial crisis on George Bailey, for providing mortgage lending to people who couldn't quite afford it. The WaPo puts this nonsense front-and-center on the Outlook front page. McClatchy provided a thorough debunking of this notion yesterday, and it's not like they were exactly the first ones to do so.

Shorter WaPo: "Shape of Earth: Views Differ."

Broder, the Official Pundit Rules, and Neo-Hooverism

2008-10-12T08:01:00.005-04:00

Broder says that when Obama becomes President, his advisors will surely tell him that he must rein in his preferred programs on account of the huge deficits created by the bailout, and the Blue Dogs will fight for 'pay as you go' rules. Needless to say, Broder doesn't mention the Pentagon's upcoming proposal to increase defense spending by $450 billion over the next 5 years, but then, as others (I'd link if I could remember who) have reminded us lately, defense spending never counts as real spending with these clowns: health care for children has to be paid for, but wars and fighter jets don't.

Brian Beutler says, "Somewhere, buried deep in the stacks of the research library at NBC headquarters is a book of bylaws for American punditry, and one of those bylaws holds that a successful pundit must try--whenever possible, and for reasons unclear--to box politicians into the position of opposing desperately needed entitlement programs and other deficit spending." I'd add the words "non-military" before "deficit spending," and Dean Broder surely writes the bylaws, but other than that, he's nailed it.

And, in keeping with those bylaws, Broder doesn't even consider the prospect of Keynesian countercyclical spending to minimize the effects of the recession we're surely headed into. As Matt points out, this is no time for neo-Hooverism. The pundit class really has no grasp of economics. Lord knows I'm not an economist, but even I understand that much. Along those lines, Moody's has a nice chart rating the bang for the buck that different countercyclical measures would create, which Matt posts here.

Krauthammer Fiddles While Rome Burns

2008-10-10T05:14:00.003-04:00

The Dow's plunged to 8,500 (wasn't it at 13,000 earlier this year?), the credit markets are freezing up, and Krauthammer wants to talk about Ayers and Rezko and Wright.

My basic take on Krauthammer has been that, unlike many of the WaPo op-ed writers, he's really a pretty smart guy; it's just that he's bought into a wildly different set of assumptions about reality. If you're writing from a world where the sky is green, the water orange, and the trees are purple, you're going to approach things in a different way than if you're a resident of this reality.

But it's hard to envision the alternate universe where Ayers and Rezko and Wright tell us a great deal about Obama, but Mccain's associations (e.g. the flock of lobbyists running his campaign) and Palin's (e.g. crazy anti-witch preacher) tells us nothing about them. Even in good times, this would be sheer political hackery.

But it's not good times. We're in the midst of a worldwide financial crisis unprecedented in my 50+ years. We can let Krauthammer decide, as the hurricane rages, that Obama would hang the pictures all wrong on the living room walls. Too bad the hurricane won't blow Chuckles right off of the nation's op-ed pages.

Gerson: Liberals Are Huge Tax Cutters

2008-10-08T05:54:00.004-04:00

Gerson's column this morning is titled, "Health Insurance For All: How the GOP Can Frame the Issue."

Look, Mike: people don't give a flip if you can frame the issue, if McCain's health insurance plan doesn't actually work for the people who'd actually need health insurance the most. And Ezra's long since said all that needs to be said about that.

But Mike, you said something else that got me thinking: "Obama breathlessly reveals that the McCain credit "wouldn't go to you. It would go directly to your insurance company." Since the credit is intended for the purchase of health insurance, where else should it eventually go?"

Let's say I currently pay $12,000 in Federal taxes. Under McCain's plan, I get a $5,000 "tax credit." How much do I pay under his plan? $12,000. It just goes somewhere specific now - it goes to pay for my health insurance. (Which is what that money's already effectively doing, since I'm insured through my employer.) How's that a "tax credit," Mike?

By this standard, any government spending is a "tax credit." "Hey, we're giving you a $400 tax credit, and spending it on Interstate highways for you!" "We're giving you a 6.2% payroll tax cut, and putting it into Social Security for you!" "We're giving you a $2300 tax credit, and using it to buy you a piece of the Wall Street bailout!"

Yeah, Mike, I'm sure that's what most people mean by a "tax credit."

Ain't enough rolleyes for stuff like this.

The Scary Thing About Ruth Marcus...

2008-10-07T12:20:00.004-04:00

...is that she's really one of the better regular columnists on the WaPo op-ed page. I'd put her on the borderline dividing the best one-third from the worst two-thirds.

That doesn't say much for the WaPo op-ed page.

Take this morning's column, "Whose Health Plan?.

The month before a presidential election isn't the best time for reasoned debate about complicated policy.

There's never a good time for the Post to cover policy in a serious way, is there? I remember asking at one of those WaPo online chats over the summer, just when they were going to get to the policy discussions. The gist of the answer was 'not yet - the voters aren't paying attention yet.' So now that the campaign's in full swing, that's a bad time too.

What'll probably happen - I say this because I've seen this happen in numerous previous election cycles - is that they'll have one Huge Policy Piece about each candidate, that will run for pages and pages. It'll be a big, indigestible lump that few people will have the time to read over their morning coffee, but they'll be able to say, 'see - we covered policy,' then rush back to the safety of the horse race.

But back to Marcus.

Overall, Barack Obama's health-care plan is preferable to John McCain's. Obama's approach -- which would require employers to provide insurance or pay into a fund, subsidize those unable to afford coverage on their own and set up new purchasing pools -- would cover more people and would help those who have the hardest time obtaining insurance.

At least she says that. Because the rest of the column is all about defending McCain's health plan. By the end, you'll barely remember that she thought Obama's was better.

But McCain's plan is not the ill-intentioned monstrosity of Obama's ominous portrayal. In important ways, it would be an improvement over current law, making a health insurance system that is now tilted in favor of the rich significantly more progressive.

The central aspect of McCain's approach is to eliminate the existing tax preference for employer-sponsored health care. Under the current system, employees don't pay tax on the value of the health insurance they receive from employers, even though most individuals buying insurance on their own don't get that break and have to purchase insurance with after-tax dollars.

That was yesterday. (Actually, the day before. Jeez, Ruth, can't you keep up?) Currently, the McCain campaign's going to cut Medicare and Medicaid by $130B/year to pay for the $5000-per-family tax credit. (They say they'll only cut waste, fraud, and abuse. Ain't no way - Medicare has a 1% overhead.)

Fortunately, Ezra wrote a post today demolishing Marcus' column. The economics of health care is his area of expertise, so and it damned sure isn't mine, so I'm happy to outsource this to him.

One thing Ezra points out at some length is Marcus' (and McCain's too, by the way) complete and total misrepresentation of Obama advisor Jason Furman's tax credit proposal. McCain and Marcus would both have you believe that Furman's plan and McCain plan are quite similar, but Ezra makes it clear that the only resemblance is that both involve a tax credit.

It's one thing for a typical politician (can we assume that McCain's 'straight-talking maverick' cred has already dissipated?) to misrepresent his own policy proposals to his advantage. But the only thing I can think of is that Marcus essentially took McCain's website at its word, and didn't bother with fact-checking.

Ruth, this is your day job. And it's really not a tough one. Could you at least try to do it right?

Flipping Richard Cohen (Why Bother?)

2008-10-07T09:28:00.004-04:00

Richard Cohen actually has a half-decent column in today's WaPo:

In spite of it all, much of the media saw a credible performance. I could quote the hosannas of some of my colleagues, but I spare them the infamy that will surely follow them to their graves. (The debate's moderator, Gwen Ifill, used the occasion to catch up on some sleep.) Many of my colleagues judged Palin simply as a performer and inferred that her performance would go over well in homes with aboveground swimming pools.

A perfect example is the Wall Street Journal, whose (conservative) editorial page has been absolutely fixated on a strict (Scalian) reading of the Constitution. Did it wonder what in the world Palin meant by the authority she found in the Constitution to increase the role of "the vice president if that vice president so chose to exert it in working with the Senate"? What? Oh, never mind. The Journal chivalrously ignored the matter. Palin is excused from knowing the limits of the office she seeks.
In effect, columnists, bloggers, talk-show hosts and digital lamplighters have adopted the ethic of the political consultant: what works, works. It did not matter what Palin said. It only mattered how she said it -- all those doggones, references to her working-class status (net worth in excess of $2 million), promiscuous use of the word "maverick," repeated mentions of "greed and corruption on Wall Street" (Who? Be specific. Give examples. Didn't anyone here go to school?) and, of course, that manic good cheer.

Although he can't completely lay off the Kool-Aid:

I will end with its conservative columnist of years past -- the estimable William Safire. In 1996, he called Hillary Clinton "a congenital liar." It was a head-snapping characterization that, alas for Clinton, has defined her for the ages and that she stubbornly vindicates from time to time.

Yeah, we know about the sniper fire in Bosnia. But if Clinton's said as many whoppers in public since 1992 as Palin's said in her 15 minutes in the spotlight, I'd like to see the evidence. Yet even Cohen's not calling Palin a "congenital liar" - just an underachiever who's been graded on one hell of a curve.

The point I'd like to make is, if Cohen were suddenly to turn into the liberal he thinks he already is, this is as good as it gets. He's still a muddleheaded writer and thinker, as are so many of his colleagues on the WaPo op-ed page - Broder, Will, Samuelson, Applebaum, Gerson (who is also a partisan hack, plain and simple), and of course Hiatt. I'd be embarrassed, really, to have them on my side in a debate of any consequence.

Flipping any of these people to the side of the angels doesn't produce any real gain: it just turns muddleheaded conservatives and center-right people (whether they think of themselves that way or not) into muddleheaded left-of-center people.

They really all simply need to be gone. If they want to share their opinions with the world, they can start their own blogs, and see how long anybody bothers to read them. But their lack of intellectual clarity is frankly more embarrassing to their philosophical allies than it is an intellectual threat to their opponents.

Cry "Havoc" and Release the Brownshirts of American Politics

2008-10-07T09:21:00.003-04:00

Damn.

Palin's routine attacks on the media have begun to spill into ugliness. In Clearwater, arriving reporters were greeted with shouts and taunts by the crowd of about 3,000. Palin then went on to blame Katie Couric's questions for her "less-than-successful interview with kinda mainstream media." At that, Palin supporters turned on reporters in the press area, waving thunder sticks and shouting abuse. Others hurled obscenities at a camera crew. One Palin supporter shouted a racial epithet at an African American sound man for a network and told him, "Sit down, boy."
...
Palin, speaking to a sea of "Palin Power" and "Sarahcuda" T-shirts, tried to link Obama to the 1960s Weather Underground. "One of his earliest supporters is a man named Bill Ayers," she said. ("Boooo!" said the crowd.) "And, according to the New York Times, he was a domestic terrorist and part of a group that, quote, 'launched a campaign of bombings that would target the Pentagon and our U.S. Capitol,' " she continued. ("Boooo!" the crowd repeated.)
"Kill him!" proposed one man in the audience.

Tribalism. Pure, unadulterated tribalism.

Can we stop talking about the "angry left" now?

Kudos to Dana Milbank for covering this side of Palin's support.

Anne Applebaum, Meet Sally Quinn, David Broder, and the Village

2008-10-07T05:34:00.003-04:00

Occasionally, I forget how truly dumb Anne Applebaum is. Then she reminds me.

A specter is haunting this presidential election -- the specter of "Washington." Not Washington the city of museums and monuments, and not Washington the home of 588,000 mostly ordinary people, but "Washington" the metaphor: Washington, the bastion of elites who look down on the rest of America; Washington, the embodiment of the East Coast liberal establishment that scorns outsiders from the provinces. So frequently have we heard this idea invoked in recent days that I think it's time to dissect it a bit more closely. Increasingly, I am convinced that it alludes to something that doesn't exist at all.

Sally Quinn, November 1998:

Emanuel, unlike the president, had become part of the Washington Establishment. "This is one of those extraordinary moments," he said at the fund-raiser, "when we come together as a community here in Washington -- setting aside personal, political and professional differences."
Actually, it wasn't extraordinary. When Establishment Washingtonians of all persuasions gather to support their own, they are not unlike any other small community in the country.
...
But this particular community happens to be in the nation's capital. And the people in it are the so-called Beltway Insiders -- the high-level members of Congress, policymakers, lawyers, military brass, diplomats and journalists who have a proprietary interest in Washington and identify with it.
They call the capital city their "town."
And their town has been turned upside down.

With some exceptions, the Washington Establishment is outraged by the president's behavior in the Monica Lewinsky scandal. The polls show that a majority of Americans do not share that outrage. Around the nation, people are disgusted but want to move on; in Washington, despite Clinton's gains with the budget and the Mideast peace talks, people want some formal acknowledgment that the president's behavior has been unacceptable. They want this, they say, not just for the sake of the community, but for the sake of the country and the presidency as well.
In addition to the polls and surveys, this disconnect between the Washington Establishment and the rest of the country is evident on TV and radio talk shows and in interviews and conversations with more than 100 Washingtonians for this article. The din about the scandal has subsided in the news as politicians and journalists fan out across the country before tomorrow's elections. But in Washington, interest remains high. The reasons are varied, and they intertwine.

1. THIS IS THEIR HOME. This is where they spend their lives, raise their families, participate in community activities, take pride in their surroundings. They feel Washington has been brought into disrepute by the actions of the president.
"It's much more personal here," says pollster Geoff Garin. "This is an affront to their world. It affects the dignity of the place where they live and work. . . . Clinton's behavior is unacceptable. If they did this at the local Elks Club hall in some other community it would be a big cause for concern."
"He came in here and he trashed the place," says Washington Post columnist David Broder, "and it's not his place."
"This is a company town," says retired senator Howard Baker, once Ronald Reagan's chief of staff. "We're up close and personal. The White House is the center around which our city revolves."

And the "Washington" in question was NOT the "the city of museums and monuments," and not "Washington the home of 588,000 mostly ordinary people," but "Washington" the "bastion of elites," the embodiment of the East Coast establishment.

It isn't a liberal establishment, and I have no idea whether it looks down on ordinary Americans, or whether it's just so removed from them that it doesn't have any idea what life is really like for them. But it's there. It's the place where David Broder dines on quail with Karl Rove and his wife. This is the "Village" that Atrios and others refer to.

Glad we got that settled. Now, back to Applebaum:

Washington, however stuffy it may once have been, is no longer in need of "a little bit of reality from Wasilla Main Street." ... Washington needs people who think like national politicians and not like spokesmen for the local business executives who fill their reelection coffers and the local party hacks who plan their campaigns. Let's be frank: The "bailout" bill was passed last week not because members of Congress decided it would work but because it was stuffed with the pork, perks and tax breaks without which no piece of legislation, however important to the nation as a whole, can now pass. Maybe it's unfair to call that "small-town" thinking, but it sure is small-minded. And small-mindedness, not snobbery, is the dominant mind-set of 21st-century Washington.

Don't get me wrong; populism can be a fine thing...

Did she just say that, or did I imagine it? Did she really confuse "populism" with stuffing a bill full of perks and tax breaks that business elites want, but do nothing for the average citizen?

Let's be clear: that bailout bill wasn't passed last week because it extended unemployment benefits, or because it promised any infrastructure spending that would have created new jobs as we head into a downturn, or because it would have eased the bankruptcy laws, or because it would have extended SCHIP health care benefits to more uninsured children, because it didn't do any of these things. Instead, its extraneous provisions comforted the already comfortable, and did nothing for the afflicted. 'Populism,' my ass.

If there are two defining aspects to the "Washington" mindset, they are (1) that elites should make the decisions for the good of America, which will routinely require them to have to ignore what the mass of Americans want and need; and (2) the vapors they get at the thought of 'class warfare' on behalf of ordinary people, even as they advocate a top-down class war against them.
Social Security and Medicare, which so many depend upon, must always be cut, because a little pain is needed to right the ship of state - but higher taxes on the rich? Sacre bleu! The pain must not be felt by the elites.

And in the recent bailout legislation, the Village disgust with the idea of limiting compensation of the Wall Street executives that had sailed our financial system onto the rocks was palpable. But the idea of using the bailout as a vehicle for assisting average Americans in these troubled times was hardly mentioned.

Yes, this "Washington" has completely lost touch with the lives of ordinary Americans. And Anne Applebaum has absorbed "Washington's" attitudes so completely that she cannot see that it even exists.

Outsourcing Mallaby On Financial Deregulation

2008-10-06T15:10:00.003-04:00

Sebastian Mallaby:

The key financiers in this game were not the mortgage lenders, the ratings agencies or the investment banks that created those now infamous mortgage securities. In different ways, these players were all peddling financial snake oil, but as Columbia University's Charles Calomiris observes, there will always be snake-oil salesmen. Rather, the key financiers were the ones who bought the toxic mortgage products. If they hadn't been willing to buy snake oil, nobody would have been peddling it.

Who were the purchasers? They were by no means unregulated. U.S. investment banks, regulated by the Securities and Exchange Commission, bought piles of toxic waste. U.S. commercial banks, regulated by several agencies, including the Fed, also devoured large quantities. European banks, which faced a different and supposedly more up-to-date supervisory scheme, turn out to have been just as rash. By contrast, lightly regulated hedge funds resisted buying toxic waste for the most part — though they are now vulnerable to the broader credit crunch because they operate with borrowed money.

Kevin Drum says pretty much what I would have:

First, Phil Gramm's 2000 Commodity Futures Modernization Act (supported, unfortunately, by the Clinton administration) was specifically designed to "protect financial institutions from overregulation" — primarily by leaving the market for credit default swaps completely unregulated. There may be several underlying causes for the credit crisis, but this is surely one of the very big ones.
Second, after the LTCM debacle of 1998, Alan Greenspan (and, sigh, Robert Rubin) produced a report suggesting that we should "encourage," "promote," and "consider" guidelines that might prod financial institutions into reducing their drunken sailor approach to leverage. But they declined to produce actual regulations to that effect. In fact, as I noted the other day, in 2004 the SEC issued a rule allowing big investment banks to increase their allowable leverage ratios. That turned out not to be such a good idea.
Third, there was a bipartisan failure to regulate the mortgage market into a semblance of rationality. Just the opposite, in fact, as lawmakers pressed Fannie Mae to insure ever dodgier loans and Alan Greenspan encouraged Americans to take advantage of ever cheaper mortgage rates.

Plus there was the repeal of Glass-Steagall in 1999 (also Gramm's idea, and also, unfortunately, supported by the Clinton team).

While the Clinton team's fingerprints are definitely present here, there's a big difference between being too spineless or pro-business to stop bad stuff like this, and being the ones pushing it in the first place. Equating the two is like equating Neville Chamberlain and Adolf Hitler.

When You Can't Tell Broder and Rich Lowry Apart...

2008-10-05T15:36:00.008-04:00

Lowry's "Starburst" post:

I'm sure I'm not the only male in America who, when Palin dropped her first wink, sat up a little straighter on the couch and said, "Hey, I think she just winked at me." And her smile. By the end, when she clearly knew she was doing well, it was so sparkling it was almost mesmerizing. It sent little starbursts through the screen and ricocheting around the living rooms of America. This is a quality that can't be learned; it's either something you have or you don't, and man, she's got it.

Broder today:

[Lindsey Graham and others] conceivably could have wound up on his ticket, had [McCain] not been captivated by the governor of Alaska.

"Captivated"? Jeez. And McCain had only met Palin, what, twice before he chose her? It must've been the starbursts.

Going into the debate, the fear among Republicans was that Palin would look as shaky as she did in some of her answers to Katie Couric and Charlie Gibson...[but she] appeared cool as a cucumber, comfortable with her talking points and unrattled by anything that was thrown at her.

Geez, Broder - even Saturday Night Live noticed what a difference it made that Ifill wasn't asking any followup questions, and Palin 'answered' the questions with whatever non sequitur talking points she damned well pleased. And I suspect that most of the country had the sense that Palin had nothing behind her talking points - that what you heard was the sum total of her knowledge on those topics.

But it created a mystery of its own. Why in the world has the McCain campaign kept Palin under wraps from her debut at the Republican National Convention until this debate? What were they afraid of?
I asked that question of Steve Schmidt, the McCain campaign manager, and he disputed the premise. Schmidt said that Palin has answered "hundreds" of questions -- which will come as news to the reporters who have been traipsing around the country with her. Going into the debate, she had done exactly three television interviews -- with ABC, CBS and Fox -- and not held a single news conference.

Graham, who has traveled the world with McCain and knows him as well as anyone, was more forthcoming when I put the question to him. "I think they thought she needed time for briefings on the issues that were new to her," he said. But then he added: "This campaign will go down in history as stupid if they don't unleash her now."
That is an understatement.

You'd think that even a senile geezer like Broder could see that anytime Palin speaks, unscripted, or has to answer questions by even a mildly persistent questioner, there's no telling what she'll say. She really is the gift that keeps on giving.

Please, please, unleash Sarah Palin!

By the way, this is my 100th post here at Everybody Laughs At Broder. (Big deal!)

Update: James Fallows' and Brad DeLong's Broder smackdowns are also worth reading.

Eve Fairbanks in the WaPo: the GOP Is Getting Crazier

2008-10-05T08:16:00.004-04:00

I've got tons of stuff to do today, and a Redskins game to watch, so for now I'll outsource the well-deserved ridicule of Broder to BarbinMD and DemFromCT over at the Great Orange Satan.

But this Outlook piece by TNR's Eve Fairbanks about the GOP freshman class, amazingly enough, tells it like it is. (Ignore the positive spin of the "Audacity of Nope" headline.)

But McCain's triumph actually hid the fact that, at the lower levels of the party, the emerging center of gravity is more conservative, not less. In the House, such young members as Jeb Hensarling (Tex.), Mike Pence (Ind.) and their ideologically purist soulmates on the Republican Study Committee (which absorbed most of the GOP freshmen) began to influence the party's agenda from the right, clamoring to make pork-busting the GOP's focus, demanding legislation to lower taxes and even mounting a prank revolt on a war-funding bill in May, just to flex their muscles. "The American people thought Republicans weren't acting like Republicans," Hensarling explained.

Across the Capitol, Hensarling's ideological allies in the Senate, Jim DeMint of South Carolina and Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, hauled their own caucus rightward, forcing appropriations freezes, waylaying an intelligence authorization bill that required the administration to report on its secret CIA prisons and killing the moderate immigration reform bill backed by Bush and McCain. DeMint recently launched a political action committee that donates only to senators who have their right-wing bona fides in order. Over the last two years, these new-guard conservatives -- all of whom were awarded a perfect "100" rating from the American Conservative Union in 2007 -- have arguably fashioned themselves into the most listened-to Republicans on Capitol Hill.

The bailout bill was the new guard's biggest show of force yet. Hensarling's Republican Study Committee ("The Caucus of House Conservatives," proclaims its Web site) gave those GOP freshmen the political cover to buck their leadership. They made it clear that their revolt was more over principle than over details, a stand on behalf of what one GOP Hill staffer calls "true, rock-ribbed, hard-core conservatism." Hensarling derided the bailout as the "slippery slope to socialism," while his ally Tom Feeney (Fla.) insisted that the crisis was actually produced by a failure to adequately venerate deregulation. Another young Turk, Thaddeus McCotter (Mich.), even compared the bailout to the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. (I suppose that makes George W. Bush a communist. I told you these guys were audacious.)

Not every Republican is happy about the rise of the new conservatives. Washington Post political reporter Dan Balz wrote last week of "a veteran of a past Republican administration" who "could barely spit out his contempt Monday for the actions of the House Republicans. 'They would rather be right in their views -- that ideology counts more, that ideology is crucial in any decision -- rather than making incremental progress.' "

But Republicans like that guy will have to get used to the growing influence of the conservatives. They have enthusiasm and demographics on their side. Moderate Republicans are getting offed all along the Eastern seaboard; eager grassroots activists are nominating right-wingers such as New Mexico's Steve Pearce and Virginia's Jim Gilmore in Senate primaries; and the American Conservative Union's congressional ratings dramatically show which way the wind is blowing. The Republicans who are retiring this year got an average ACU rating of 78 in 2007, placing them squarely between conservatism and centrism. But by my calculations, the Republican freshmen -- the vanguard of the generation that will be replacing these fleeing moderates -- got an average rating of 97.

If you're a true, rock-ribbed, hard-core conservative, you're probably happy about all this. As a card-carrying moderate weenie, I'm not, obviously. But it's not just the policies of the GOP's new guard that spell trouble; it's the attitude. What these young Turks do share with McCain is a taste for the grand gesture and the attention-getting stunt, the determination not to go gently into defeat and the psychological pleasure derived from creating a whole lot of political Sturm und Drang. After their May revolt on the war-funding bill, House Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.) challenged Mike Pence about why on Earth his faction had bolted on what was supposed to be bipartisan legislation. "Never stop fighting," Pence replied.

But all this drama, fun as it is, doesn't make you look like you're ready to be at the governing wheel. (See McCain, John, and recent polling.) And it's this attitude -- the thrill of doubling down on ideology, of damning those torpedoes -- that helped get people such as Pearce and Gilmore nominated in states that obviously won't support their degree of conservatism. They'll probably lose in November, and Republicans will be two Senate seats closer to being ideological irritants rather than the Democrats' serious rivals.

We in the netroots have observed for some time that, as Dems pick up House and Senate seats in swing states and districts, we could be on the verge of (for the GOP) a vicious cycle where the attrition of the saner Republicans makes the GOP increasingly crazily right-wing, further alienating conservatives with even an ounce of sanity, and continuing the cycle.

But as far as I can tell, this is the first time the MSM has taken significant note that this is where the GOP may be headed.

And more important, Fairbanks' piece explodes the "we need bipartisanship, and both sides are equally to blame that we don't have it" meme. She portrays a GOP that can't be reasoned with. We've known that's true, but to see that in the Outlook section of the WaPo, written by a Joe Lieberman Weekly correspondent - well, dayum. Maybe the WaPo will someday catch up with reality after all.

Gerson: Bush Is the Hero of the Banking Crisis

2008-10-04T08:10:00.004-04:00

"The Leader Who Stood The Tallest." Words fail me, so I'll let Gerson speak for himself.

One advantage of a crisis is the illumination it sheds on the main figures of American politics -- like a strobe light on a dark dance floor, catching all involved in characteristic, sometimes embarrassing poses.

True dat.

[T]he largest figure revealed in the light of the financial crisis has been President Bush. Americans may be tired of strategic boldness, but Bush clearly is not. When Paulson and Bernanke came to the president in mid-September, warning of an imminent financial meltdown, Bush's reaction was typical. He told Paulson not to worry about the politics and to propose whatever was economically necessary. It would have been easier for the administration to produce symbolic, easily passable legislation. Bush chose to go to the root of the problem -- toxic debt in the financial system. The plan was not perfect and was later improved. But charges that it is somehow timid or irrelevant are absurd. Seven hundred billion dollars amounts to about 5 percent of all mortgage debt in America -- about one-third of all subprime debt.

Three things:

1) Just because it's big, doesn't mean it will accomplish its intended purpose. Ever hear of "throwing money at a problem," Mike?
2) "Bush" didn't choose anything. Bush has no idea what's going on here. All he's doing is trusting that what Paulson and Bernanke tell him is true.
3) All Bush has left is the hope that someday, history will evaluate him more kindly than the vast majority of people would do now. If the credit markets freeze up on his watch, despite Congress having passed whatever legislation he sent them, that would be one disaster too many: his reputation would never recover. Bush has little choice here but to do what the grownups tell him to do.

Bush's ambition, bias toward action and indifference to political pressure are sometimes criticized. But his greatest failures -- such as the Katrina response and the initial strategy of the Iraq counterinsurgency campaign -- have come when he ignored those instincts. The troop surge resulted when he followed them. And Bush's economic ideology -- a belief in markets, combined with a recognition that intervention is sometimes necessary to make markets work -- seems well suited to the current crisis.

Please. Bush's economic ideology - regulation is bad - got us into this. It wasn't all his fault - Phil Gramm laid most of the groundwork before Bush was inaugurated - but Bush has been President for nearly eight years. His crew didn't see this coming, didn't do anything to make this moment less likely, and did their best to cut regulation of the financial markets beyond the extent that it had already been done.

With months remaining in his term, Bush's influence is not what it once was. But if his rescue plan eventually passes, there will be reason for thanks that Bush, rather than McCain or Obama, is president at this moment -- even if few offer that thanks.

The bill that Paulson proposed was probably the worst possible bill that had a decent chance of at least being a temporary Band-Aid for our credit crisis. (Which is all I expect it to be, even in its final form.) Obama's economic team could have come up with something better in about five minutes - and that's got nothing to do with Obama personally. The same would be true of any credible Democrat's economic team, had they been President at this moment - Gore, Kerry, Edwards, Biden, either Clinton, Richardson, Dodd, you name it.

Maybe they could have even kept a crisis from happening in the first place, if they'd been President for the past few years. How you perform in a crisis is really quite secondary, if you were in a position to keep things from getting to a crisis stage to begin with, but didn't.

McCain Loses Charles Krauthammer

2008-10-03T08:12:00.005-04:00

My head just exploded.

Krauthammer's Hail Mary Rule: You get only two per game. John McCain, unfortunately, has already thrown three...In an election in which all the fundamentals are working for the opposition, he feels he has to keep throwing long in order to keep hope alive. Nonetheless, his frenetic improvisation has perversely (for him) framed the rookie challenger favorably as calm, steady and cool. In the primary campaign, Obama was cool as in hip. Now Obama is cool as in collected. He has the discipline to let slow and steady carry him to victory. He has not at all distinguished himself in this economic crisis -- nor, one might add, in any other during his national career -- but detachment has served him well...he's got both a first-class intellect and a first-class temperament. That will likely be enough to make him president.

He's not an Obama fan, repeating BS about Obama having "an alarming lack of self-definition -- do you really know who he is and what he believes?" when that's been clear for most of the past two years, and claiming that, in the primaries, Obama "rose above the crowd on pure special effects: dazzling rhetoric, natural charisma, and a magic carpet ride of transcendence and hope." And having been against the Iraq War from the beginning, Chuckles. That may seem trivial, but it was rather important to millions of Dem primary voters.

But still, McCain losing Krauthammer...who knew that was even possible?

R.I.P. Ed Brinkman

2008-10-03T06:51:00.004-04:00

Ed Brinkman was one of the mainstays of the v.2.0 Nats, the 1961 expansion team that replaced the original Senators who became the Minnesota Twins. I grew up on that team: Frank Howard, Mike Epstein, Ken McMullen, Paul Casanova, Bernie Allen, Doug Camilli, Tim Cullen, Joe Coleman, Jim Hannan, Del Unser, Dick Bosman, Casey Cox, Darold Knowles...Our Wondrous Nats, as WaPo sports columnist Shirley Povich called them.

That team would later leave town and become the Texas Rangers, which of course played a role in our current national debacles by being a key steppingstone for George W. Bush on his way to the Texas governorship, and, ultimately, the Presidency. But long before all that, there was still this ballclub that wasn't very good, but was still fun to root for.

Quote(s) of the Day

2008-10-01T08:30:00.004-04:00

"I've always had 100%, absolute truth, and that's been my life of putting my country first. And I'll match that record against anyone's, and I'm proud of it, and an assertion that I've ever done otherwise, I take strong exception to."
-John McCain, September 30, 2008

"And you can believe me, because I never lie, and I'm always right."
-George Leroy Tirebiter, 1970

Yglesias Asks: Where's Corporate America?

2008-09-30T14:14:00.004-04:00

Damned good question.

especially on the right, normally when there’s an issue that’s perceived to be important to American business, corporate America makes its views known and conservative legislators, when asked to jump, say “how high?”

But as Matt points out, GOP legislators clearly aren't being given pro-bailout marching orders by the Chamber of Commerce or the National Federation of Independent Businesses. Yet the members of such organizations are supposedly the first wave of casualties in a credit crunch.

As Matt acknowledges, this doesn't mean the crisis is fictitious. But it sure makes you wonder what the game is, doesn't it?

My WAG is that the lobbyists for the C-of-C, the NFIB and all the rest, were in from the beginning on the whole Lucy-and-the-football stunt that the GOP was pulling over the past few days: get the Dems to Be Responsible, sucker them into a bad compromise, then pull out, stick them with the blame, and run against them. They felt safe in assuming a bailout was coming, so they were willing to protect their own, rather than needlessly make them vote for a very unpopular bill.

Like I say, this is no more than a wild-ass guess. But it wouldn't surprise me to find out that it was true.

My Email to Steny Hoyer

2008-09-30T09:22:00.004-04:00

Yep, Steny's my Congresscritter. I sent him this email this morning:

Dear Rep. Hoyer,
The EESA has failed. Time to forget bipartisanship, and pass a strictly Democratic alternative.

If you try to compromise with the GOP, all you get is a bad bill (like the EESA in its present form) that will spend hundreds of billions, but may not actually fix the problem. (How WAS it supposed to work, anyway?) And they may not vote for it anyway, as you found out Monday.

Not to mention, the American people will see it as a bailout for Wall Street, but not a bailout for THEM.

So get the Dem caucus together, and see if everyone can agree on a bill that (a) will work, in the sense of keeping credit from freezing up, and (b) helps the American people directly as well.

Bush can't veto a bill like that, because he says we need a bailout NOW. A veto would make a liar of him. And I bet this is one time when the Senate Republicans don't dare filibuster. So a strictly Dem bailout bill can be enacted. You've got the leverage - USE it!

a) A bill that would work: the 'Swedish plan.' They faced a similar situation in 1992, and it worked. Ask Brad DeLong or Paul Krugman or a host of other economists for details.

b) Helping the American people: extended unemployment benefits, expanded food stamps, spending on infrastructure, maybe even include the SCHIP expansion.

Then pay for it all with a tax on the super-rich - e.g. a 45% bracket on incomes above $10 million.

Think you and your fellow Congresscritters can sell that to the American people? It should be a much easier sell than the current EESA. And I can't see why any actual Dems would be against it. This should be doable. So do it!

Cheers,
[low-tech cyclist]

Just putting in my 2¢ worth. I've sent variations on this to Sens. Cardin and Mikulski.

Yeah, I know - I'm bailout-obsessed. But right now, it seems more important than dissecting WaPo op-eds.

No Bailout, For Now

2008-09-29T15:04:00.005-04:00

It looks like there may not be a bailout until after the election:

Rep. John Boehner (R-Ohio) just told The Post's Paul Kane there will be no more votes today on the $700 billion Wall Street bailout rejected earlier this afternoon by the House.

The members have left the House and headed to the airports for a scheduled recess. Boehner said he had no idea when there could be a new vote.

The House is now supposed to be adjourned until at least after the elections.

It's hard to bring the Congresscritters back, once they're gone.

Roll call tally here.

Bush: Right Down There With Nixon

2008-09-29T12:41:00.003-04:00

For decades, 26% has been my gold standard for a President who'd lost the support of all but the hard core. This was Nixon's level of support throughout most of the Watergate year of 1974. Everybody in the world knew Nixon was lying and covering up, except for those Americans who clung to a state of denial due to party loyalty.

So when the three most recent polls all have Bush's approval rating at 26-27%, it's a landmark. Here's the polls, dates that they were in the field, and their Bush approval ratings:

USAT/Gallup - Sept 26-27 - 27%
CBS/NYT - Sept 21-24 - 26%
FOX - Sept 22-23 - 26%

Nixonian. In more ways than mere approval ratings.

Broder's Fiscal Inanity

2008-09-28T13:26:00.004-04:00

Broder is upset that neither candidate said how he was going to trim his proposals to take into account the cost of the Big Bailout.

[Obama and McCain] were even more evasive when Lehrer pressed them to say how they would adjust their ambitious plans to accommodate the budgetary effects of that massive government expenditure.

It was Never-Never Land, as Obama and McCain struggled to avoid the full implications of this economic policy calamity. McCain finally threw out the possibility of a freeze on all federal expenditures except defense, veterans' care and entitlements -- but Obama immediately objected, citing his eagerness to boost early childhood education.

Perhaps the next two debates will offer opportunities to pin these artful dodgers down on how they would operate under the burdens the Bush administration will leave behind. Otherwise, the voters may go to the polls with only the vaguest idea of the truly tough choices the next president will face.

Broder also expressed his deep displeasure that Congress hasn't proposed to pay for the bailout with a tax hike.

Ha ha! Just kidding! Broder, of course, did no such thing. Broder's perfectly OK with this Administration's and this Congress' simply borrowing $700 billion for the Big Bailout, then sticking the next Administration with the bill.

But that Administration, of course, had better be fiscally prudent, on account of the debt that they're being stuck with.

That's how fiscal responsibility works in Broder's universe. If there's any sort of rhyme or reason to this, other than "Democrats are expected to be fiscally responsible, but Republicans aren't," I sure don't see it.

Broder Thinks McCain Was the Alpha Male in Friday's Debate

2008-09-28T06:35:00.004-04:00

No, really!

It was a small thing, but I counted six times that Obama said that McCain was "absolutely right" about a point he had made. No McCain sentences began with a similar acknowledgment of his opponent's wisdom, even though the two agreed on Iran, Russia and the U.S. financial crisis far more than they disagreed.

That suggests an imbalance in the deference quotient between the younger man and the veteran senator -- an impression reinforced by Obama's frequent glances in McCain's direction and McCain's studied indifference to his rival.

Whether viewers caught the verbal and body-language signs that Obama seemed to accept McCain as the alpha male on the stage in Mississippi, I do not know.

Sorry, Broder, but this was McCain desperately trying to be alpha male, and totally failing. Ignoring a would-be challenger only works as an alpha-male strategy if the challenger can genuinely be brushed off, like a grownup ignoring a kid who wants to be a part of the grownups' conversation. But as the Bush years have demonstrated, ignoring intelligent, able people is a sign of serious weakness, not strength.

Of course, Broder regarded Bush as an alpha male, long after Bush conclusively demonstrated he wasn't. Gotta wonder what color the sky is, in Broder's world.

Some Questions for the Dem Leadership About the Bailout

2008-09-27T10:02:00.004-04:00

OK, now some questions for Obama, Pelosi, Reid, Hoyer, Dodd, Frank, and any other Dem leaders who are in on the talks.

1. Do you really think you're going to get a lot of GOP cover for your bailout plan, unless it's something that doesn't do anything to directly help anyone not on Wall Street?
2. You realize how the American public feels about this bailout, right?
3. You know you're going to Be Serious and pass a bailout plan that Bush won't veto, right?
4. And when you do, you know that the GOP will run against both you and Bush at the same time, right?

Good. Now:

5. So why don't you stop worrying about getting Bush's support, or about getting GOP votes, and put together the best, most populist bailout package you can possibly come up with - one that may not get any GOP support, but one that you're not afraid to sell to the American people?

Then, one of two things will happen:

A) It'll pass, and you'll have saved the day and helped the American people in all sorts of good ways. This isn't a very likely outcome, but you'll have tried - on your terms.

Or:

B) The GOP will have proven to the American public that denying any relief to the people is more important than saving our economic system. Which is the absolute truth, of course. Then you can run against the GOP for Not Being Serious about the bailout, and hating the American people, too. Politically, it just doesn't get any better than that.

So, what would such a bailout look like?

Mandate the restructuring of mortgages in all cases where banks loaned people more than they could have reasonably been expected to pay. (IMHO, this is all the bailout that is needed: this puts real value back in all those questionable mortgage-backed securities, which is the key to unlocking everything else.)
Include the outline of a new regulatory regime to cover anything remotely bank-like.
Repeal as much of the Bankruptcy Act of 2005 as you can get that K-Street pawn, Steny Hoyer, to go along with.
Include the 'second stimulus' package of extended unemployment benefits and so forth, targeting people who will spend the money because they have little choice.
Include the SCHIP expansion that the GOP defeated last year. Repeal Bush's 2003 tax cut on dividends and capital gains to pay for it.
To the extent that the bailout still involves paying more for questionable securities than any private investors are willing to do, also do the following:
Increase income and estate tax rates on the rich and super-rich to pay for the bailout.
Demand transparency of any firm that Uncle Sam overpays for assets from: if you aren't in enough trouble to open your books in order to be rescued, then you aren't in enough trouble to be rescued.
Do all the other things that are in the Dem bailout package already: an equity stake, limits on CEO compensation, and all that.

Seriously, guys, forget selling this to the GOP. Sell this to America. Be freakin' Democrats for once.

Some Questions About the Bailout

2008-09-27T09:44:00.004-04:00

Yesterday, the WaPo gave page A-4 entirely over to ask and answer "8 Questions About the Debates." The debates are important, of course, but the bailout is freakin' HUGE.

But can they make space for "8 Questions About the Bailout"? Fuck, no.

So here's a few of mine. Mind you, this is the list I'd like to see the WaPo run. I've got a few additional questions, as a Democrat, for the Democratic leadership, but I'll put them in a separate post.

1. What happens if we do nothing, and why?
2. How will Paulson's (or the Democrats') bailout proposal keep that bad stuff from happening?
3. Is it the end of the world if Congress waits until after the election to deal with the bailout?
4. Who is getting bailed out, and why them? If Lehman's already gone bust, Bear Stearns, AIG, and Fannie/Freddie have already been bailed out, Merrill Lynch has been bought by Bank of America, and Warren Buffett's just put $5 billion into Goldman Sachs, that just leaves Morgan Stanley, and they can't possibly need $700 billion worth of rescuing, right?
5. Why $700 billion? How'd they come up with that? ("It's not based on any particular data point," a Treasury spokeswoman told Forbes.com Tuesday. "We just wanted to choose a really large number." OK, I guess we know the answer to that one.)
6. The Paulson and Democratic bailouts both depend on Uncle Sam paying a good deal more for mortgage-backed securities (MBS) than anyone else wants to pay for them. What sort of sense does this make? The assumption seems to be that, post-bailout, they'll be worth enough so the government will come out OK in the end. Does Uncle Sam really know more about how to value these things than the market does, especially given that a year ago, Uncle Sam didn't even see this coming?
7. Why not do a bottom-up bailout, by mandating a nationwide renegotiation of excessive mortgage rates? To the extent that the underlying problem is a big pile of MBS which may not have much value because people are unable or unwilling to make the payments, just force a writedown that enables people to make the payments. (If your house payments are greater than, say, 38% of what your income was at the time you got the loan, then mandate the conversion into a 30-year fixed mortgage with the payments set at the 38% level.) This would cost the government nothing, but it would keep people in their homes, and it would stabilize the value of the mortgage-backed securities at a decent level, thereby unfreezing the credit markets. The holders of the MBS would take a bit of a writedown, but right now those securities are nearly worthless.
8. Rather than borrowing the $700B for the bailout, why don't we decide upfront who's going to pay for it through tax increases? Why should Joe and Jane Sixpack be stuck with the bill down the road by default if the bailout doesn't miraculously pay for itself?
9. Why is the GOP so strongly opposed to restructuring people's mortgages, even when they favor a bailout for the banks?
10. How would the Boehner plan work? (Would it work?)
11. James Galbraith has proposed a plan. How would it work, and would it work?
12. If we're going to commit to spending $700 billion, there are probably a number of alternative plans that might accomplish the underlying objective of preventing the credit markets from freezing up. Why isn't the discussion ranging a bit wider than it is?

Instead, what we get is Serious People Are Doing Important Things That Must Be Done, That Will Cost a Lot of Your Money, But That You Wouldn't Understand. It's the perfect Broder-Hiatt crisis.

How Should We Pay For the Big Bailout?

2008-09-20T14:10:00.006-04:00

Rich people got us into this; rich people should pay for it.

That may seem simplistic, but ask me if I care. There's no reason why Joe and Jane Sixpack should pay for the Big Bailout.

So how should we pay for it, and how can we get Dem Congresscritters to think in terms of sticking the upper class with the bill for their own party?

Let's attack the first question first. Here's some ideas:

1) Super-high income tax brackets. Currrently, the tax rates top out at 35% for income over $357,701. Let's let the brackets keep on going, maybe like this:

40% on income over $1 million,
50% on income over $5 million,
60% on income over $20 million,
70% on income over $80 million,
80% on income over $250 million, and
90% on income over $1 billion.

Let the rich people and their GOP toadies whine, and see how much sympathy they get.

2) Same thing with the estate tax. Currently the estate tax amounts to a flat 45% tax on everything over the first $2 million. So how about:

50% on all assets over $10 million,
60% on all assets over $50 million,
70% on all assets over $ 200 million,
80% on all assets over $500 million, and of course,
90% on all assets over $ 1 billion.

3) Tax short-term capital gains prohibitively; tax long-term capital gains like regular income.

If you hold onto a stock or other security n days before selling it, your tax rate is (99-n)%, or your regular income tax rate, whichever is greater.

So if you buy and sell a security the same day, the government gets 99% of the gain. If you hold it for 35 days, the tax rate on your gain is 99-35 = 64%. If you hold it for 90 days, you'll almost surely pay your regular income tax rate on it, because 99-90=9%, and that's surely less than your regular income tax bracket.

And let's make sure this applies to all financial investment instruments - common and preferred stocks, derivatives, securitized packages of loans, you name it. If there's a market for them, we tax 'em.

4) Impose a transaction tax on security transfers, maybe 1/10 of 1% of the sales price of the security.

If the stock market's mostly a big casino, let's skim a bit off the top to help pay for the Big Bailout.

No, I don't know how much these taxes would raise. I guess there's calculators for these things somewhere, but I can't seem to Google them. At any rate, the amounts should be adjusted to reflect the more pessimistic guesses at how much Uncle Sam will be in the hole as a result of cleaning up after the Masters of the Universe.

Now, how do we get the Democratic leadership in Congress to buy in to this, rather than just say, "sure, bail 'em out, we don't care where the money comes from."

Damned if I know. Anybody got any ideas?

Krauthammer On Bush's 'Equanimity'

2008-09-19T07:11:00.021-04:00

Chuckles:

When I asked President Bush during an interview Monday to reflect on this oddity, he cast himself back to early 2001, recalling what he expected his presidency would be about: education reform, tax cuts and military transformation from a Cold War structure to a more mobile force adapted to smaller-scale 21st-century conflict.

But a wartime president he became. And that is how history will both remember and judge him.

Getting a jump on history, many books have already judged him. The latest by Bob Woodward describes the commander in chief as unusually aloof and detached. A more favorably inclined biographer might have called it equanimity.

In the hour I spent with the president (devoted mostly to foreign policy), that equanimity was everywhere in evidence -- not the resignation of a man in the twilight of his presidency but a sense of calm and confidence in eventual historical vindication.

So he's good at fooling himself, Chuckles.

Wouldn't it have been helpful of him to share this equanimity with the rest of us over the past several years? Instead, he's used the fear card over and over again to attain his political ends.

In doing so, he was not only an amoral political manipulator - he was Osama bin Laden's #1 ally.

The goal of terrorism, after all, is to terrorize. And Bush, by keeping the American people wound up about the terrorist threat for years, worked bin Laden's will.

By contrast, the Clinton Administration's concern about terrorism is clear in retrospect. But they fought their war behind the scenes. Their track record in fighting terrorism can be debated, but the American people weren't terrorized during Clinton's Presidency.

If the 1990s seemed like a "holiday from history" to you, Chuckles, it's because Clinton was doing his job.

It is precisely that quality that allowed him to order the surge in Iraq in the face of intense opposition from the political establishment (of both parties), the foreign policy establishment (led by the feckless Iraq Study Group), the military establishment (as chronicled by Woodward) and public opinion itself.

Or it might have just been that Bush himself had nothing to lose by rolling the dice one more time. Bush wasn't going to pay the price, in blood and treasure, of the escalation of the war. For him, it was a risk-free gamble: if the surge worked, he'd gain some vindication. If it didn't, he'd look little worse in the eyes of history than he otherwise would have.

And the argument over the surge still comes down to this: the Iraq War has been a freakin' disaster, for both America and Iraq. Mitigating somewhat the disaster you went out of your way to bring about (speaking of playing the fear card) isn't exactly something to brag about. It's saying to Iraq: we cut your arm off, but we finally managed to keep you from bleeding to death.

The surge then effected the most dramatic change in the fortunes of an American war since the summer of 1864.

So much for Normandy and Midway.

Besides, the reduction in violence in Iraq was mostly due to two things: (1) the Anbar Awakening, the fortunes of which are discussed on the DoD website as early as September 2006 - four months before Bush announced that the surge was coming; and (2) al-Sadr's cease-fire of August 2007, which, according to various news articles, owed its success to black-arts techniques (intelligence and special forces operations) that would have worked with or without the surge.

Besides, unlike Normandy and Midway, the surge has yet to accomplish its ultimate objective of political reconciliation. Even after two years of good behavior by the Anbar Awakening groups, Maliki still refuses to incorporate them into Iraq's security forces, and refuses to give the Sunnis any share of power in his government. Similarly, Maliki regards the Sadrists as military opponents to be crushed, rather than political adversaries to be negotiated with.

Absent a political reconciliation, Iraq's in trouble as soon as we pull out - so we've got to stay there indefinitely to prop up Maliki's tinhorn dictatorship.

The Union victories of the summer of 1864 led almost inevitably to the defeat of the Confederacy. Nothing like that can be said about the surge.

Krauthammer: 9/11 "Came Out Of the Blue"

2008-09-19T07:11:00.018-04:00

For the past 150 years, most American war presidents -- most notably Lincoln, Wilson and Roosevelt -- have entered (or reentered) office knowing war was looming. Not so George W. Bush. Not so the war on terror. The 9/11 attacks literally came out of the blue.

Literally, but not figuratively, Chuckles.

Bush got that "Bin Laden Determined To Strike In U.S." PDB five weeks before 9/11, and told the briefer that he'd covered his ass, now he could run along. This was just weeks after Bush had attended a European summit at which there had been heightened concern about the possibility of a terrorist attack from the air.

OK, that was after Bush took office, if you want to nitpick, Chuckles. So, what warnings did Bush have as he took office in 2001?

The outgoing Clinton Administration did its best to warn the incoming Bushies that they should prepare to be focused on terrorism. The Bushies may not have wanted to hear it, but they were warned. They chose not to know.

And even before that, there had been the bombings of our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, the attack on the U.S.S. Cole in the fall of 2000, and of course the original attack on the World Trade Center towers in 1993. Plus there was a significant instance of domestic terrorism, the Oklahoma City bombing of 1995.

These things were in the papers. We all knew about these attacks. And presumably Bush, during the transition, was briefed about attacks that had failed, such as the Millennium Bombing plot of 1999/2000.

Maybe Bush didn't see the approaching threat of terrorism. But that's not because the signs weren't there, or because he wasn't warned.

No, Chuckles, it was because Bush was a fucking idiot.

Broder Gets Lost In the Horse Race Again

2008-09-19T07:11:00.011-04:00

Shorter Broder: the important thing about the current financial meltdown is that it's bad for McCain.

The larger effect [of the events on Wall Street] is the psychological damage to an electorate already struggling to maintain any optimism about the country and its future. For all the excitement Palin has generated, the national mood is still a major barrier for McCain and the Republicans.
There may be other external events that jolt the presidential race -- and the debates are still to come. But for now, Wall Street and its woes are causing big problems for John McCain.

Bolding mine. Good job of keeping your eye on the ball, Broder. Can't have anyone thinking that what's happening is important in and of itself; what's important is the horse race.

George Will, Low-Information Voter

2008-09-19T07:11:00.004-04:00

What else can one make of this?

Palin is as bracing as an Arctic breeze and delightfully elicits the condescension of liberals whose enthusiasm for everyday middle-class Americans cannot survive an encounter with one.

I guess Will has missed her habitual lying, her running a small town like a martinet, her refusal to cooperate with a governmental investigation, her firing of officials who refused to participate in her personal vendettas against members of her family, and her seeking of hundreds of millions of dollars of Federal handouts for genuinely worthless and idiotic projects.

Or maybe those are the sort of small-town American values that Will finds so refreshing. Hard to tell.

Another 'Light Posting Ahead' Warning

2008-09-16T15:58:00.004-04:00

As I mentioned a few weeks back, my wife and I are trying to adopt a child from Russia. The prospective trip I mentioned then fell through, but we just got another call from the adoption agency. We may be traveling in a couple of weeks, and posting is likely to be light while we're getting ready to go.

None of this is certain, as we learned the week before last. But we've got photos (damn, that kid is cute!) and a medical report (confusing, but that's the norm in Russian adoptions) this time, which is more than we had the last time.

If this goes through, we'd be traveling to Tomsk, which is the other side of Kazakhstan, and just this side of Mongolia.

McCain's Acceptance Speech - The Unexpurgated Version

2008-09-16T10:42:00.003-04:00

This is a bit off my usual beat, but this little glitch during McCain's speech got almost no media attention for some reason:

Thanks to The Margins of Error for pointing this out.

Cliff May Stands Up For Concern Trolling

2008-09-16T06:20:00.003-04:00

Nothing all that terrible on the WaPo op-ed page today: maybe yesterday's events have everyone talking some sort of sense for once. But yesterday I wandered over to The Corner and found this Cliff May nugget:

Helping Hands [Cliff May]

I was just listening to Karl Rove on Fox News Sunday offering serious and, I would think, useful advice to Obama on how to win the election.

And earlier, I was reading this piece by Peggy Noonan telling Democrats the strategies they need to adopt in order to prevail.

I could find other examples without trying hard.

Do Democrats ever do this – offer serious and useful counsel to their enemies?

I don’t think so.

Beyond "abandon your worldview," I'm not sure what advice we could give.

But does Cliff May really believe this is "serious and useful counsel"? Gimme a break.

He doesn't link to Rove, but here's some excerpts from Noonan's piece:

There is no denying that Mr. Obama is in a bad place, that he must now be considered the underdog, that he's wearing Loser-Glo. The slide started with the Rick Warren interviews in August, just as America was starting to pay attention. Verdict? McCain: normal. Obama: odd.

And what color is the sky in your world, Ms. Noonan?

Then Mrs. Palin, and the catastrophe of the Democratic and media response to her. Books will be written about this, but because it's so recent, and so known, we're almost not absorbing how huge it was, and is. Here was the central liberal mistake: They used the atom bomb just a few days in. They used it so brutally, and yet so ineptly, in a way so oblivious to the true contours of the field, that the radiation blew back over their own lines. They used it without preliminary diplomatic talks, multilateral meetings or Security Council debate. They just went boom. And it boomeranged.

The atom bomb was personal and sexual perfidy, backwoods knuckle-draggin' ma and pa saying, Tell the neighbors the baby's ours. Then the ritual abuse of the 17-year-old girl. Then the rest of it—bad mother, religious weirdo. (On this latter it must be noted that Mrs. Palin never told a church that the Iraq war was God's will; she asked them to pray that it was God's will. It wasn't the sound of Republican hubris, it was the sound of Christian humility: We can't know the mind of God, we can only pray we are in accord with it.)

Except that the baby coverup story was nothing more than an internet rumor. Even to this day, the most notable voices publicizing it have been GOP partisans like Noonan. The abuse of Bristol Palin never happened, except in the heads of the Republicans who decided to play the victim card anyway.

And even the prayer - if you aren't open to God's letting you know that he doesn't bless your planned course of action, if you're not going to change what you're doing, no matter how big a clue-by-four God smacks you in the head with - then your prayers are just a bullshitting of God, mankind, and yourself.

But getting back to the main theme: this isn't "serious and useful counsel." This is the usual GOP mudslinging, thinly masquerading as advice. I'm not sure it even rises to the level of concern trollery; it's just simple trollery for the most part.

Anyway, there's a reason Dems don't offer similar advice to Republicans: we don't have any corner on wisdom, but we aren't that full of shit.

Same S***, Different Pundit

2008-09-15T06:15:00.006-04:00

"Nobody in the game of football should be called a genius. A genius is somebody like Norman Einstein."
-Joe Theismann

Shorter Norman Ornstein: the next President will need to cut Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, and he'll need the help of Washington insiders to get that done.

The key initiatives have to come in reforming our large entitlement programs -- Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid -- to cope with explosive growth in the number of older people. Change to these programs would mean pain for large numbers of voters.

Yep, same drum, different banger. You're not 'serious' unless you cut the programs that most Americans count on.

You know what, Norm? Social Security is fine. Medicare and Medicaid face problems, but it's because of the explosion in health care costs, not the explosion in older people. The rest of the advanced democracies have solved this problem, while providing health care to everyone. If you were a genius, or even a reasonably smart person, rather than an AEI hack, you'd look across the Atlantic, or even north of the border, and see how different countries are managing this feat.

The question you should be asking is, "how come we're the only country that can't do this?"

But you're an AEI hack, and you're just one more well-paid foot soldier in the WaPo's war on Social Security and Medicare.

Can't ignore your conclusion, Norm:

The change that Washington needs will require the deep deployment of people who know how to move the levers of power from the inside. The presidential bully pulpit is a powerful weapon in a president's arsenal. But it's no substitute for knowing how to get things in Washington.

Yeah, we've noticed. Maybe that's why it's time to cut you guys out of the action.

A Question or Two for Palin's Evangelical Supporters

2008-09-14T20:13:00.005-04:00

(Not that any of them are likely to read these questions, but WTF.)

1) You guys are falling all over her like she was the second coming of the Left Behind series, or some such. You've definitely decided she's One Of You, and whatever minor faults she might have, she's just peachy with you overall.

2) You have to have noticed by now that she's a habitual liar. She's lied about (a) her support for earmarks in general, she's lied over and over again about (b) the Bridge to Nowhere, she's even lied about (c) having been to Iraq (and Ireland too, for what it's worth), and if she hasn't outright lied about selling the state jet on eBay, she's certainly (d) gone out of her way to leave the impression that she sold the plane on eBay, which she hadn't.

3) Each of those constitutes what the Commandments (you know, Exodus 20, Deuteronomy 5, Moses coming down from Mt. Sinai with stone tablets*) call 'bearing false witness.' Doesn't that bother you?

Especially because:

4) If you folks can't be trusted to tell the truth about the things of this world, how can you possibly expect anyone to believe you about things that aren't of this world?

.

*When a not particularly religious gay man thinks your memory needs jogging about the basics of your faith, maybe your memory needs jogging about the basics of your faith.

You might want to read what he says about evangelicals and torture, too. If I may be so crass as to use this choice of words, you're not exactly doing great things for the Lord's 'brand.'

Michelle Malkin Might Want To Rethink These Words

2008-09-14T17:37:00.007-04:00

Y'all remember Graeme Frost, the seventh-grader that the Dems put on the air last fall to give their response about SCHIP. And you remember his quick Swiftboating by the wingnuts, complete with wingnut bloggers skulking around the shrubbery of his home, trying to peep through windows. But I'd forgotten that Michelle Malkin quoted Mark Steyn with approval when Steyn* said this:

The Democrats chose to outsource their airtime to a Seventh Grader. If a political party is desperate enough to send a boy to do a man’s job, then the boy is fair game. As it is, the Dems do enough cynical and opportunist hiding behind biography and identity, and it’s incredibly tedious.

I'm not sure I even need to comment. What are McCain and Palin running on, other than "biography and identity"? And funny how, all of a sudden, any close investigation or questioning of their Vice Presidential candidate is sexist or something.

An eleven year old kid is expected to take whatever's thrown at him if he dares to speak out in public, but according to Malkin, a 44 year old woman who's running for the nation's second-highest office...should be exempt from the usual oppo research , and MTV and US Magazine shouldn't dare say bad things about Alaska's Hothouse Flower. Lord help her if a lefty version of Karl Rove, Steve Schmidt, or Tucker Eskew were ever sicced on her.

I guess all of a sudden, politics is supposed to be beanbag after all!

Ms. Malkin, will you be my situational ethics tutor? I want to learn this art from a master!

*Words in italics added after the fact. Don't ask me how I didn't notice that she was quoting someone else. It doesn't affect the point, fortunately, but facts are still important to get right. It makes me wonder what Steyn has been saying about Palin Protection lately, though.

The Soft 'POP' You Just Heard Was the Sound of My Head Exploding

2008-09-14T16:53:00.003-04:00

The TPM header reads: McCain's Lying Has Gone Too Far, According To ... Karl Rove!

Regular posting will resume after I gather and reassemble the scattered pieces of my brain.

OK, LTC, What's Your Solution For Our Schools?

2008-09-14T10:00:00.004-04:00

If I'm going to tell George Will that the schools he's so in love with are nice, but aren't a solution, it's only fair to ask: hey, bucko, you got any better ideas?

Glad I asked. Because as a matter of fact, I do. It's deceptively simple, too:

Good jobs.

Study after study after study, across the decades, has shown that the main determinant of how kids do in school is how their parents are doing. So let's fix that.

If we're living in a world where big corporations simply use up their employees and spit them out when they've extracted all the value they can get, then of course we're going to have problems with our schools. If Mom and Dad both need to work just to pay the bills, and they have to be available to put in overtime whenever the boss says so, then the schools aren't going to be able to fill the void their absence leaves. If kids come from environments where not many people work, and the jobs those people have are dead-end jobs, then they're going to wind up on the streets. Maybe Cristo Rey can rescue some of those kids, but it's a losing battle.

We need jobs where parents work hard for eight hours a day, then go home and look after their kids. We, as a society, have to say that employers only have a claim on a limited number of hours, so that those employees have plenty of time to raise their children, so they can be family members and community members the rest of the time.

We need for those jobs to pay enough so that a single parent can support a kid or two on one job, or so that one parent working full-time and one parent working part-time can support a family without difficulty.

We need universal health care so that parents don't have to worry about making sure their kids get to the doctor, and so that the parents themselves can stay healthy and stay productive. Not to mention, so that increases in health costs don't come out of Mom and Dad's paychecks.

We need enough decent jobs so that people who would like a job but have given up looking, come back into the workforce. We need enough decent jobs so that people whose lives have been only marginally connected to the working world become regular workers, and pass those habits to their kids. Not to mention, so that they believe education's not a waste of time and energy, and lean on their kids to learn in school. To shrink the void that the streets fill.

There's one additional thing, unrelated to jobs, that might also help. This 'War On Drugs' business - can we admit that it's been a failure, that the WOD itself is what makes illegal drugs such a profitable enterprise, and that drug money is what makes the streets more compelling than the schools - not to mention, what causes too many young black men to end up dead or in prison, instead of raising their children.

Schools work in the context of a society that supports their mission. Absent that supportive society, the occasional Cristo Rey will rescue some high-risk kids, but it'll be rescue work, and it'll be swimming against the current. What we need to do is get the current flowing in the right direction, to reduce the number of kids that need to be rescued in the first place. And we do that by creating jobs, and making sure they're good ones. And pulling the rug out from under the inner-city drug kingpins.

may continually throw some of the players into prison, but that they're replaced just as quickly? And that the

Shorter George Will: There Are Magical Solutions To What Ails Our Schools

2008-09-14T09:38:00.003-04:00

Will's got another piece today about Little Inner-City Schools That Could. Schools like this are great, as individual schools. The last school like this Will described had a former business big-wheel as its head, and teachers who graduated from a bunch of Ivy League and equivalent schools.

The problem with this sort of school, as I pointed out last time, is replicability. There are only so many energetic business executives (or educators who could have prospered in that route) to go around, and there are only so many bright young grads from elite colleges who are willing to teach at inner-city schools.

In today's column, Will dodges that question by simply not talking about how Cristo Rey Jesuit High School is run. He says Cristo Rey can do what it does "because it is not shackled by bureaucracy or unions, as public schools are." I'm all for the Jesuits opening and running as many schools like this as they can manage. But even the Jesuits can only run and staff a certain number of schools (they're opening more schools like Cristo Rey in other cities), especially in a world where the number of Catholics entering holy orders continues to decrease.

So good for Cristo Rey, good for the Jesuits, and good for all the inner-city kids that these two dozen schools on this model will rescue from dead-end lives. But let's not kid ourselves that this is a solution to our schools' problems.

Shorter Broder: Next President, Unlike This One, Will Have To Tame the Deficit First

2008-09-14T08:18:00.003-04:00

Yep, after eight years of Bush's and Cheney's wars and tax cuts growing the deficit, Broder says the next President will have to clean up after the elephants, rather than address other national priorities.

the next president, whoever he is, will probably inherit a budget that is at least $500 billion out of balance -- a record sum that will limit his ability to do any of the wonderful things being promised daily in the upbeat rhetoric of the campaign.

It's big, but it's not a record in any sense besides the nominal. The (humongous PDF) FY09 budget historical tables projected a FY09 deficit of about $407 billion, which would have been about 2.7% of GDP. So let's assume that $500 billion will be about 3.4% of GDP. As a percentage of GDP, that's smaller than two of Bush's deficits, smaller than all four of Bush Sr.'s deficits, smaller than five of Reagan's deficits, and smaller than both of Ford's deficits.

On the other hand, it's bigger than all of Carter's deficits and all of Clinton's deficits. Especially since Clinton racked up four surpluses.

There's a lesson there, for anyone with ears to hear. Not that many from the media are likely to point it out.

At any rate, Obama's main goals aren't to provide 'goodies,' even if they will ultimately improve the lives of Americans. He wants to get the U.S. out of Iraq, which will save us about $100 billion a year, starting a couple years down the road. That helps reduce the deficit. He wants to deal with global warming, through fully auctionable cap-and-trade permits. Dealing with global warming is far more urgent than dealing with the deficit (seems worth bolding, since the Broders of the world can't quite grasp this notion), but the cap-and-trade permit auctions will bring money into the Treasury, so they help reduce the deficit too.

Obama also wants to bring us closer to universal health care. With any luck, Congressional Dems will win this debate, and create a genuinely universal system that enables the government to get a handle on costs, just as England, France, Germany, Canada, the Scandinavian countries, etc., etc. have done. So that would also be a twofer.

McCain, on the other hand, wants to hand out even more tax cuts to rich people on top of what Bush has already passed. He would explode the deficit.

So if Broder's all so hep on fiscal responsibility, he's got one pretty good choice, and one absolutely catastrophic choice. But he's too 'evenhanded' to say so.

Shorter Luskin: Americans Only Believe the Economy Is Bad Because Obama and the Media Told Them So

2008-09-14T07:28:00.006-04:00

And the Outlook section editor gave the Stupidest Man Alive a pile of space to expand on that thesis, in a piece titled, "Quit Doling Out That Bad-Economy Line."

Overall, the pessimists are up against an insurmountable reality: In the last reported quarter, the U.S. economy grew at an annual rate of 3.3 percent, adjusted for inflation. That's virtually the same as the 3.4 percent average growth rate since -- yes -- the Great Depression.
Why, then, does the public appear to agree with the media? A recent Zogby poll shows that 66 percent of likely voters believe that "the entire world is either now locked in a global economic recession or soon will be." Actually, that's a major clue to what started this thought-contagion about everything being the worst it has been "since the Great Depression": Politics.
Patient zero in this epidemic is the Democratic candidate for president.

Numero Uno: People are very good judges about how their own lives, and those of their friends and neighbors, are faring. If they say the economy sucks, it's probably because it sucks for them and for people they know and come into contact with.

Numero Two-o: How "the economy" is doing isn't worth a damn to most people. If their paychecks aren't getting bigger, if gas prices have skyrocketed and food prices are going up, if their health insurance leaves gaping holes and they might lose it if they actually use it for anything major, if they're behind in their payments on a house whose value is plunging, then how 'the economy' is doing is meaningless.

The disconnect between the state of 'the economy' and the statistics that give a clue as to how most Americans are actually doing - let alone the polls that show they think the economy's in the crapper - just shows how poorly 'the economy' serves Joe and Jane Sixpack. Don Luskin and his friends are doing great; what's your problem?

Numero Three-o: according to Gallup, people already thought the economy sucked last winter, when it looked like Hillary would still win the nomination. Kinda hard to blame that on Obama.

There's a whole bunch of other horseshit there, but I'll leave it to the economists in the blogosphere to do a more thorough dissecting of Luskin's garbage. I'll just leave you with one more Luskin quote:

McCain campaign adviser and former U.S. senator Phil Gramm was right in July when he said that our current state "is a mental recession."

Yeah, Americans are just imagining the problems they're dealing with. Snap out of it, America! Just ignore what your household budget is telling you - you're doing fine.

Update, Monday morning: I forgot to quote Luskin's " "Turmoil" in the debt markets? Sure, but we've seen plenty worse" remark. With Lehman in Chapter 11, AIG on the ropes, and the possibility of a pretty serious cascade failure of major investment houses, I think it's safe to say that no, those of us too young to have lived through the Depression haven't seen worse.

The Point Is, Palin Didn't Know Any Of Them

2008-09-13T10:19:00.004-04:00

Dear Chuckles: the point isn't that Sarah Palin wasn't sure which "Bush Doctrine" Charles Gibson meant. It's that she clearly didn't know what it was by any definition. It's not even clear she knew that there was a "Bush Doctrine" until Gibson asked her that question.

As the always excellent James Fallows points out, Palin clearly knows less about foreign affairs than someone who simply follows the news reasonably closely.

And, Chuckles, let's look at those four "Bush Doctrines" you listed. The first, in June 2001, originated from you. But few besides your devoted fans ever heard of it, so can we dispense with that?

The last one you give, "the idea that the fundamental mission of American foreign policy is to spread democracy throughout the world," has long since been laughed out of the public dialogue. Bush has completely abandoned his earlier, exceedingly modest attempts to nudge authoritarian allies towards democracy or even towards less repression of critical speech. They were clearly window dressing at the time, but they gulled those who wanted to be gulled (not naming any names, Chuckles) that Bush's "behave, or I'll ram 'democracy' down your throat" approach to the world was part of a broader push for actual democracy, rather than a transparently flimsy justification for saber-rattling and war.

So nobody takes that one seriously anymore, and the idea that "If I were in any public foreign policy debate today, and my adversary were to raise the Bush doctrine, both I and the audience would assume -- unless my interlocutor annotated the reference otherwise -- that he was speaking about the grandly proclaimed (and widely attacked) freedom agenda of the Bush administration" is total bullshit. Nobody with any connection to the real world would assume such a thing.

You might, Chuckles, but few have accused you of being particularly tethered to the real world.

The second one, the "Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists...[f]rom this day forward any nation that continues to harbor or support terrorism will be regarded by the United States as a hostile regime" doctrine from just after 9/11/01, was (your choice) superseded by the third Bush Doctrine you name, or died a quiet death when Pakistan became Osama bin Laden's safe harbor, which it remains to this day.

The third one, the one used to justify the Iraq war, was of course the one that Gibson was referring to: the notion that we could initiate preventive war against another nation, well before there was any reason to believe they constituted an imminent threat to any other country. That one was not only used to justify the Iraq invasion, but was also alive and well last year when the Bush Administration was saber-rattling at Iran. The threat from Iran wasn't going to be imminent during the remainder of the Bush Administration, but factions within that Administration (can you say Cheney? I knew you could!) wanted to bomb, bomb Iran anyway.

So even if we assumed that Palin actually had any sort of clue about the Bush Doctrine, that's the one she would have had to consider the operative one.

But she obviously had no clue at all. The question implicit in Palin's confused look wasn't "which Bush Doctrine?" but "there's something called a Bush Doctrine?"

Give it up, Chuckles.

And you too, Michael Abramowitz.

Broder Thinks Both Candidates Will Deliver Change

2008-09-07T15:41:00.003-04:00

What an idiot.

ST. PAUL, Minn. -- Change is coming, change you can count on.

That is the simple, central message from the two presidential nominating conventions held in Denver and St. Paul during the past two weeks.

Whether it is Barack Obama or John McCain going to the White House in January, the new president will understand that his mandate from the voters is to cleanse Washington of its excessive partisanship and attempt to break the gridlock that has prevailed on almost all the big issues.

The good news is that Obama and McCain, for different reasons, have about as good a prospect of achieving that change as any two politicians you could find.

McCain wasn't able to cleanse his own convention of its excessive partisanship. If he can't manage that feat in what's basically a political infomercial choreographed by his own people, then it's a safe bet he's not going to even try to 'break the gridlock' in Washington.

Besides, even if McCain can 'break through the partisan gridlock,' his policies won't change anything: like it or not, his policies really are a Bush third term. What's the point of breaking the gridlock, just to do more of the same bad stuff?

And oddly enough, that's the sort of thing that actually matters to people. Broder may be interested in process, but people have tangible concerns they want addressed. Think they'll care if gridlock is broken, if the result is another big tax cut for the rich?

On the flip side, there's no guarantee that Obama will bring change, either, and only Rip van Broder, who's apparently slept through the past 20 years, has no idea why. Everyone else paying attention knows that 41 GOP Senators can, and likely will, sink Obama's legislative agenda, by refusing to let bills come to a vote.

It's called 'blocking cloture,' and the GOP Senators are masters of the art. Next slow day, I'll have to write about cloture and filibusters, because the Dems don't have to take this stuff lying down, the way Harry Reid did these past two years; the question is whether Obama will be any better.

The fact that Broder doesn't even raise the issue of filibusters, but assumes that Obama's desire to bring change can somehow make it happen, shows just how out of touch the old man is. He's still very much frozen in the 1970s and 1980s, when neither side routinely blocked the other side's legislation from coming to a vote. Now that the GOP does so automatically, Broder can't acknowledge it, because it would involve acknowledging that the GOP is primarily to blame for obstruction and gridlock, and Hilzoy channels Broder to explain how that would throw the world out of balance. Read her.

The Triviality of the WaPo Op-Ed Page

2008-09-07T15:18:00.003-04:00

Hoagland and Ignatius both decided to focus on the families - the candidates' families, of course - today, and "meaningless drivel" seems a kind description of what they wrote. Let's leave it at that.

Over at the Great Orange Satan, DemFromCT ably summarizes today's George Will column, so that I don't have to:

If you read the right things, and follow the right sports teams, you might well be "better off" than you were four years ago, so don't bother to ask that question. Economics is only statistics and people spend too much time whining about them.

Couldn't have said it better myself.

Whatever happened to Will, anyway? Sure, he's always been a wishy-washy royalist conservative (the National Lampoon parodied Newsweek a quarter-century ago, and a column by "George Fwill" was titled "Why I Love the Feudal System"), and his columns have often had a tendency to wander a bit. But these days, his columns not only tend to wander pointlessly, but there's little spark of wit along the way, just the occasional swipe at people or institutions on the left, which isn't the same thing.

For years, I'd been basically ignoring Will because he didn't really seem to have anything new to say, and he wasn't saying it particularly well. But even pundits like Broder and Samuelson at least have a point that they're making, even if it's usually wrongheaded, and have some structure to their columns. Will's so bad, he makes those guys look good by comparison. Yet among the WaPo op-ed columnists, his reputation's probably second only to Broder's.

Laughing With Broder, For Once

2008-09-05T21:51:00.005-04:00

At about the 1:40 mark. Credit where credit's due, dammit.

Oh yeah: the Russia trip has fallen through, for reasons that will likely remain unclear. Stuff like this happens when you're trying to adopt. So while we're back to where we were two weeks ago - waiting for a referral - we've gotten our packing lists together, gotten our vaccinations, taken care of a number of things that will stand us in good stead when we finally do travel.

Anyway, blogging may return to something like normal for awhile.

The Onion 1, Debbie Howell 0

2008-09-05T15:25:00.005-04:00

Debbie Howell, a few weeks back:

Obama's Edge in the Coverage Race
Democrat Barack Obama has had about a 3 to 1 advantage over Republican John McCain in Post Page 1 stories since Obama became his party's presumptive nominee June 4. Obama has generated a lot of news by being the first African American nominee, and he is less well known than McCain -- and therefore there's more to report on. But the disparity is so wide that it doesn't look good.

In overall political stories from June 4 to Friday, Obama dominated by 142 to 96. Obama has been featured in 35 stories on Page 1; McCain has been featured in 13, with three Page 1 references with photos to stories on inside pages. Fifteen stories featured both candidates and were about polls or issues such as terrorism, Social Security and the candidates' agreement on what should be done in Afghanistan.

This dovetails with Obama's dominance in photos, which I pointed out two weeks ago. At that time, it was 122 for Obama and 78 for McCain. Two weeks later, it's 143 to 100, almost the same gap, because editors have run almost the same number of photos -- 21 of Obama and 22 of McCain -- since they realized the disparity. McCain is almost even with Obama in Page 1 photos -- 10 to 9.

The Onion, two days ago:

Top Story On John McCain Run Out Of Obligation
NEW YORK—Although his lack of charisma and charm has lately prevented the Arizona senator from grabbing front-page headlines, the tenets of journalistic objectivity made it necessary today to publish a top news story on Republican presidential candidate John McCain.

...
Sources confirmed that the primary placement of the McCain article also serves to bolster the publication's reputation as a legitimate paper of record, one that is above being swayed by the hypnotic effect of other, more dynamic public figures who are younger, more visually pleasing, and more adept at garnering media attention.

"Featuring this article was a bold move, and the result is—though completely uninteresting—quite impressive," media critic Tim Keller said. "They have printed a headline that includes McCain's name, put it in a bolded, 48-point font size, and accompanied it with a significant amount of text and a large color photograph of the senator. It takes a strong sense of professional responsibility to commit to something like this."

"Granted, nobody's actually going to read the story," Keller added.

The completion of the article, however, proved far more difficult than expected. Approximately two-thirds of the way through, the legitimate news content grew thin, and several last-ditch efforts were made to increase the length of the story, including a crude listing of pertinent or interesting facts and background information on McCain.

The Real Samuelson DorkCard

2008-09-03T21:41:00.004-04:00

Hey, I'm drunk, because the adoption trip seems to be in limbo. So it seemed like a good time to take a weed-whacker to Robert J. Samuelson's latest, "The Real Economic Scorecard."

[T]he conventional wisdom [that the economy sucks for most people] is wrong or, at least, misleading. Here's a more accurate assessment. For most Americans, living standards are increasing, albeit slowly, over any meaningful period.

Median family incomes did increase between the early 1970s and the early 1990s. But one huge factor in that trend was stay-at-home moms going from the norm to a dwindling minority. While this has been a good thing for women's equality, as a society we've traded time for money.

Median incomes also increased during the Clinton years, because we had a President with a clue. Median incomes have been stagnant during the Bush years.

Here are three reasons why [the conventional wisdom on the economy is wrong] (space precludes mentioning others):
First, comparisons are made to an artificially high benchmark -- the late 1990s "tech bubble."

Fair enough. So he compares the pre-'tech bubble' year of 1997 with...the pre-'housing bubble' year of 2004, right? Nope, he compares 1997 with 2007. Three years before the top of one bubble, with the top of the next bubble.

That's gonna get you some balanced comparisons, alright.

Strike one.

Second, immigration distorts commonly cited statistics.

Again, based on the 1997-2007 comparison; compare 1997-2004 or 2000-2007, and his 'evidence' vanishes.

Strike two.
Third, the census figures understate income gains by not counting fringe benefits.
And the biggest culprit is health insurance costs. But that isn't an income gain. That isn't any sort of gain. There's no added benefit that came with that. So how are workers better off as a result?

They aren't. Strike three, he's outta there.

Good thing space precluded him from bringing up even dumber arguments.

Random Thought About Sarah Palin

2008-09-02T00:14:00.003-04:00

This is getting a bit off my usual beat, but:

If Sarah Palin is telling us the truth, then there she was, this April, (a) pregnant at age 43, (b) due in less than a month, (c) with a Down's Syndrome baby, and (d) leaking amniotic fluid at 4:00 a.m., on the day she's due to give a big speech in Dallas.

So she: (e) doesn't go to a hospital, (f) gives the speech, (g) still doesn't go to a hospital, (h) boards a plane from Dallas, TX to Anchorage, Alaska, (i) doesn't go to a hospital in Anchorage, but (j) drives 45 minutes to a local hospital just outside Wasilla, where she'd been mayor.

Gambling with the life of her unborn baby, as well as her own to a lesser extent, at every step of the way.

Excuse me, but what definition of 'pro-life' is this consonant with?

And then, to quash the rumors that the baby wasn't really hers, but was instead her daughter's, she doesn't release medical records that would have documented her pregnancy and delivery, thereby quashing the rumors without drawing further attention to her daughter. Instead, she announces to the world that her daughter is pregnant now.

Excuse me, but what definition of 'pro-family' is this consonant with?

Just wondering, you know? I'm sure it would gall Palin to have the privacy of her medical records invaded, but if it's your medical records on display, versus your child's life on display - don't you take the hit yourself?

Yeah, that's what I thought.

What's wrong with this woman? The possibility that the 'babygate' rumor is true - that she faked pregnancy so her daughter's pregnancy could be covered up - is starting to look like the explanation that shows her in the best light, given the possibilities.

Broder's 'Disappointed' With Obama's Speech, and For Really Stupid Reasons

2008-08-31T06:39:00.004-04:00

If Broder had been in another solar system for the past couple of years, this column might have made sense. It's as if he missed Ted Kennedy's cancer, this year's bruising primary fight, the tremendous advantage of generic Democrats over generic Republicans in the polls, and of course McCain's attack on Obama as a lightweight 'celebrity.' Let's roll tape:

Barack Obama, on the climactic night of the conclave, gave an acceptance speech that was no match for the keynote address he delivered at the 2004 convention in Boston. Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois, introducing his colleague again here, said that first one "changed politics in America."
No one is likely to argue that the speech here "changed politics in America." His jibes at John McCain and George Bush were standard-issue Democratic fare, and his recital of a long list of domestic promises could have been delivered by any Democratic nominee from Walter Mondale to John Kerry.

Well, of course. The last thing Obama could have done was to give another brilliant speech of the 2004 variety, heavy on inspiration and ideals, but light on specifics. Nothing would have reinforced McCain's point half as well. But the speech Obama gave left McCain & Co. with little to say.

And about those domestic promises: as I pointed out yesterday, America still has every problem it had in 2004 and 2000, plus a few more. And the solutions haven't really changed either. Hell, most of the things Mondale would have tried to do as President haven't yet been accomplished: we've had only one Democratic President since then, and he was hamstrung with an exceedingly partisan GOP Congress that wanted to make sure Clinton left no legacy of accomplishments.

And maybe the Obama/Dem case against McCain, Bush, and the GOP is familiar to you, old man, but the fact is that the Dems haven't bludgeoned home their case against the Republicans the way the GOP has done to the Dems over the years - nowhere close.

In fact, they have rarely made this case at all - that the fruits of the GOP of the Bush Administration haven't been just a couple of major failures (Iraq, Katrina) but otherwise a decent job of governance, but have rather been an across-the-board epic failure.

Obama made that case, and said it was time for the GOP to own the failure.

Here's why I think it matters. One of the major questions about Obama, of whom so little is known, is whether he is really serious about challenging the partisan gridlock in Washington or whether his election would simply bring on the regular wish list of liberal policies.

But the Denver speech, like many others he has given recently, subordinated any talk of fundamental systemic change to a checklist of traditional Democratic programs.

That 'checklist of traditional Democratic programs' would represent fundamental change to the people of America if they were actually enacted.

As for challenging the partisan gridlock, it's been clear for 15 years just what the source of the gridlock is. Bush didn't have much trouble getting legislation through Congress in 2001-06, and was even (unfortunately) able to pass some major bills (like FISA) in the current Congress. But during the Clinton Administration, the GOP blocked everything they could, both as minority and then majority in Congress. And in the present Congress, they played the obstruction game to the hilt on the Pelosi/Reid legislative agenda, most of which was supported by vast majorities of the American people.

Ultimately, the only way to compromise with people who aren't interested in compromising is to beat them. That's life in the big city, but Broder's totally oblivious to that reality.

Obama's disappointing speech also reflected what I had thought was the one conspicuous failure of the convention program -- the missed opportunity to introduce the country to others in the younger generation of Democrats than just Obama and his dazzling wife, Michelle.

The convention hall was full of bright, attractive men and women serving as governors or mayors or in other posts. Obama knows many of them from his campaign travels, and he gave the keynote spot to one of them, Virginia's Mark Warner.
But the prime-time spots on the convention program went to Sen. Ted Kennedy, Sen. Hillary Clinton, former president Bill Clinton and Sen. Joe Biden, the vice presidential nominee. All are comfortably familiar figures to members of my generation, and all are part of a Washington that is hardly the favorite of most voters.

Maybe the nets could cover some of the many speakers, such as Montana Gov. Brian Schweitzer, who were powerful new voices. But the reality was that Ted Kennedy, fighting to stay alive, could not be shunted to a lesser time slot. Nor could Hillary Clinton, who ran the strongest second-place nomination campaign in Democratic history. Nor could Bill Clinton, our most recent ex-President, whose Presidency now looks like a golden age. Nor could Joe Biden, Obama's veep nominee.

No, the problem here was one of coverage. That ball's in your court, Broder.

[Obama] is not the first Democrat who has promised a new day. Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, in different ways, tried to change Washington, and both wound up frustrated. The status quo forces -- the interest groups, many in Congress and parts of the media -- all are powerful.

The only time a new president can really change Washington is when he makes it the central message of his campaign, as Ronald Reagan did in 1980.

Reagan's skill was his rhetoric; hence the label "The Great Communicator." After the 2004 Obama speech, Democrats thought they had found one of their own. It's too bad that fellow didn't make it to Denver.

I'd say he did, actually. If Broder had been paying attention, he would have heard this:

These are the policies I will pursue. And in the weeks ahead, I look forward to debating them with John McCain.

But what I will not do is suggest that the Senator takes his positions for political purposes. Because one of the things that we have to change in our politics is the idea that people cannot disagree without challenging each other's character and patriotism.

The times are too serious, the stakes are too high for this same partisan playbook. So let us agree that patriotism has no party. I love this country, and so do you, and so does John McCain. The men and women who serve in our battlefields may be Democrats and Republicans and Independents, but they have fought together and bled together and some died together under the same proud flag. They have not served a Red America or a Blue America - they have served the United States of America.
{snip}
I know there are those who dismiss such beliefs as happy talk. They claim that our insistence on something larger, something firmer and more honest in our public life is just a Trojan Horse for higher taxes and the abandonment of traditional values. And that's to be expected. Because if you don't have any fresh ideas, then you use stale tactics to scare the voters. If you don't have a record to run on, then you paint your opponent as someone people should run from.

You make a big election about small things.

And you know what - it's worked before. Because it feeds into the cynicism we all have about government. When Washington doesn't work, all its promises seem empty. If your hopes have been dashed again and again, then it's best to stop hoping, and settle for what you already know.

...[But c]hange happens because the American people demand it - because they rise up and insist on new ideas and new leadership, a new politics for a new time.

America, this is one of those moments.

Obama is right: the GOP has repeatedly done its best in recent years to turn big elections on small things, distracting the American people from the real issues at hand. Now, if the GOP keeps playing that game, Obama can use that to reinforce his argument that the GOP is fundamentally unserious.

Broder, you ancient royalist tool, you and your compatriots in the media have refused to do what you could to see that elections were about issues, no matter how deep your professed desire was for that to happen. Obama has done your work for you here. And that should, with any luck, "change politics in America."

Maybe you don't see it, but it was right there in front of you.

Gerson the Ignorant

2008-08-30T07:45:00.007-04:00

Thank you, WaPo, for moving Michael Gerson's column to the Saturday paper, thereby giving me an easy target to ridicule on a Saturday morning. He'd like to think he's trashing Obama's acceptance speech the other night, but he's only making himself look bad, of course.

In substance, Barack Obama's convention speech could easily have been given by Al Gore or John Kerry -- and, in various forms, was given by Kerry and Gore. It was all in there: the lunchbox economic populism -- based on the assumption that most Americans are filling their lunchboxes with scraps from Dumpsters. The attacks on corporations, millionaires and other sinister job creators. The touching faith in the power of diplomacy.

Well, you know what, Mike? America still has every problem it had in 2004 and 2000, plus a few more: global warming, which your old boss, George W. Bush, conceded was real but never did anything about, is now clearly upon us. New Orleans is still a mess from Katrina, and we can only hope and pray that Gustav goes somewhere else. We got attacked on September 11, 2001, in part because we had a President that was focused on rogue states and ignored terrorism - as demonstrated by his using the terrorist threat as an excuse to invade Iraq, where we're still bogged down, 4,000 American lives, hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives, and a trillion dollars later. Meanwhile, people are losing their jobs, the values of their houses that they can't pay the mortgages on are plummeting, banks are failing, and we're back to the era of mammoth deficits that we'd supposedly left behind forever by the end of the Clinton Administration.

And the result of all this is that Americans, by a wide margin, prefer a generic Democrat to a generic Republican. Maybe it bothers you that Obama's policies are largely generic Democratic policies, but that's what America wants - has wanted for years, in fact, but has been denied by your crew.

Your friends have fucked. things. up. It's that simple, Mike.

Generic Republican ideas - wars, tax cuts for the rich, less regulation - have gotten us into this mess. So maybe it's time to try generic Democratic ideas, to get us out again.

And some of the attacks were simply unfair. Is it really credible to blame McCain for a tripling of oil imports during his time as senator?

Unfair? Awwwwwwwww. Look who's talking about unfair: a shill for a party of smear merchants. Awwwwwwwww.

What is unquestionably fair is to point out that John McCain has voted against everything that might've reduced our dangerous dependence on oil and other fossil fuels: he's voted against higher fuel efficiency standards for cars. He's voted against wind power and other renewables. he abandoned the carbon cap-and-trade proposal that used to have his name on it.

He didn't create the entire problem, but he damned sure did his best to make sure we did nothing about it. As Obama said the other night, it's time for the GOP to own the failure.

What does it mean that McCain "won't even follow [bin Laden] to the cave where he lives" -- that McCain is cowardly? that he knows where bin Laden hides, and won't tell the rest of us? that he doesn't believe in fighting al-Qaeda?

Apparently, Gerson doesn't know that McCain, who said he'd follow bin Laden to the gates of hell, also said this:

KING: If you were president and knew that bin Laden was in Pakistan, you know where, would you have U.S. forces go in after him?

MCCAIN: Larry, I'm not going to go there and here's why, because Pakistan is a sovereign nation.

To the gates of hell, but not past the gates of Pakistan. If bin Laden's in a sovereign nation that won't capture bin Laden itself, and won't let us in, then McCain says our hands are tied.

Now excuse me, but isn't that why we invaded Afghanistan - because they wouldn't let us pursue bin Laden in their country?

There was a bit of a flap about this when McCain said it. Did Gerson entirely miss it? Apparently so.

At any rate, Obama doesn't think these circumstances tie our hands. He believes we need to bring bin Laden to justice, even if he does happen to be hiding in Pakistan.

Obama said nothing interesting about race in America at a moment when that might have been expected. He made no serious effort to reach out to religious conservatives, something that now seems more like a ploy than a project. He offered no creative policy proposals that might transcend partisan divisions.

Maybe Gerson listened to a different speech than I did. The one I listened to (last night via YouTube, since I was sound asleep when Obama's speech began on Thursday night) mentioned some preacher from Georgia at the Lincoln Memorial - who the fuck could that have been, Mike? was that too subtle for you? - and pointed out some things to learn from his example. And if reducing the number of unwanted pregancies, which Obama also mentioned, isn't a place to find common ground with religious conservatives and transcend partisan divisions, then maybe religious conservatives should admit that all their talk about abortion is mere posturing.

Oh, wait: that's not a creative policy proposal. It's a perfectly mundane Democratic idea - part of the backbone of Dem beliefs since Clinton's "safe, legal, and rare" formulation 16 years ago - that the GOP has done its best to keep America from actually trying.

The Democratic ticket [now] offers the purest message of partisan aggression and class resentment.

I guess only the GOP is supposed to practice partisan aggression, and only the rich are supposed to practice class resentment. Whatever, Mike.

The weird thing is, the speech that inspired this "partisan aggression" bullshit is one that went after McCain and the GOP on the issues, rather than attacking their character. If you can't take being on the receiving end of a vigorous debate on the issues, Mike, maybe you should give up politics and take up shuffleboard. Because that's what politics ideally should be about - that's what politics looks like when it's being played cleanly, rather than with all the mud your side slings.

Mike, you claim to be a religious sort of guy. So if GOP attacks on Obama based on Ayers, Rezko, 'celebrity' status, and so forth, don't bother you, but attacking McCain on the issues does, then hear the word of the Lord from Chapter 25 of Deuteronomy:

13 Do not have two differing weights in your bag—one heavy, one light. 14 Do not have two differing measures in your house—one large, one small. 15 You must have accurate and honest weights and measures, so that you may live long in the land the LORD your God is giving you. 16 For the LORD your God detests anyone who does these things, anyone who deals dishonestly.

That's right, Mike: God says not to apply different measures to one side than you would to the other. Seems like a simple enough message. But I don't think you believe it - to you, God is just another cudgel to use on the other guy.

God's bigger than that, Mike. And you're smaller.

Light Posting Ahead. Then Probably a Short Hiatus.

2008-08-27T14:42:00.003-04:00

Life events are intervening in your blogger's life. My wife and I may shortly be headed over to Russia, ~~to keep John McCain and Dick Cheney from re-starting the Cold War~~ for the first of two trips to adopt a child. (First trip, you meet the child; second trip, you complete the adoption and bring him home.)

This has of course been planned for awhile - we've had a home study done, we've completed a dossier (which is basically a mammoth pile of paperwork to satisfy the assorted governments and agencies), gotten our fingerprints taken way more times than should have been necessary, and waited. Then you get a call from the adoption agency, and you get ready to drop everything.

So expect light posting for the next couple of weeks, and then none at all while we travel.

The Perpetuation of Fantasy Columnists

2008-08-27T05:34:00.004-04:00

Robert J. Samuelson's fetid pile of worthless verbiage this morning, "The Rise Of Fantasy Politics," probably wouldn't even make decent compost. Let's roll:

By all rights, we should be having a fierce debate over the role of government. What should it do, for whom and why? What can we afford? Who should pay? These questions would suggest a campaign that seriously engages the future. Instead, we have a bidding war between candidates to see who can promise the most appealing package of new spending programs and tax cuts.

The funny thing is, implicit in the differences in McCain's and Obama's policy positions is a pretty fierce debate over the role of government. Obama wants to greatly expand the availability of affordable health insurance through governmental means; McCain wouldn't. Obama's cap-and-trade plan not only goes further than McCain's in its targets, but its permits would be fully auctionable, which would raise a lot of revenue. McCain's permits probably wouldn't be auctionable, and he doesn't seem like he understands that cap-and-trade means mandatory caps, so it's doubtful that he's all that invested in his own proposal. Obama wants to implement a very mild addition to Social Security revenue, appropriate to a program that's hardly in any trouble. McCain wants to privatize it.

The debate's there, Bob. You're just not covering it.

As we watch the conventions, we should recognize that we've entered an era of fantasy politics. Like fantasy football and baseball, fantasy politics is an exercise in make-believe that is intended to keep its players occupied and to make the winners feel good.

I quote from James Fallows' 1996 piece, "Why Americans Hate the Media":

In the 1992 presidential campaign candidates spent more time answering questions from "ordinary people"—citizens in town-hall forums, callers on radio and TV talk shows—than they had in previous years. The citizens asked overwhelmingly about the what of politics: What are you going to do about the health-care system? What can you do to reduce the cost of welfare? The reporters asked almost exclusively about the how: How are you going to try to take away Perot's constituency? How do you answer charges that you have flip-flopped?

And in the 16 years since, nothing's changed. Except that pundits are more likely to slam candidates for trivializing the race - after the newspapers they write for have failed to cover the substantive proposals they've put forward.

This blog's only been up for a few short weeks, but it's already a recurring theme here. It's the perpetuation of fantasy columnists, with their apparent lifetime tenure, and their protection from all the slings and arrows that affect normal people. Speaking of which, Samuelson says:

Eligibility ages for Social Security and Medicare should gradually rise to 70; people now live longer and should work longer.

Bob, I'll put this as politely as I can: go fuck yourself with a piece of rusty rebar.

As I was saying in comments the other day, people like Samuelson, who make more than 97% of Americans do while sitting at a desk, have no problem proposing benefit cuts, raising the eligibility age, and other 'hard choices' that would be hardest on those who are usually the ones who get stuck with the shit end of the stick.

People like him don't know people like my wife's parents, who both barely made it to 62 before they had to retire because their bodies just couldn't take any more.

When people like Samuelson start talking about 'hard choices' for Social Security, they're very lucky I'm not in the room with them. Not that I'd hit anyone (I'm well past that point in life), but when the wave of my anger hit them, they'd feel like they'd been punched in the gut.

But I'm jumping ahead. Samuelson's impetus for raising the retirement age:

Last week, I viewed "I.O.U.S.A.," an 87-minute documentary exploring the grim budget outlook. In many ways, unbalanced budgets define the political deadlock. The persistence of deficits over so many years (42 of the past 47) can have only one basic cause: Politicians of both parties prefer spending to taxing.

Or it might be that, even when a President attacks the problem of unbalanced budgets head-on, balances four budgets in a row, and leaves office with the prospect of long-term budget surpluses ahead, his Vice-President can't get elected because the punditocracy turns the election into a referendum on Love Canal, brown suits, sighs, inventing the Internet, and who'd you rather have a beer with.

As everyone knows, the disconnect will worsen, because aging baby boomers will bloat outlays for Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. These programs already total nearly two-fifths of the $2.9 trillion federal spending in 2008.
The mismatch between the government's existing spending commitments and the present tax base is so great that we cannot simply tinker a little with government. By 2030, federal taxes could rise 50 percent if all spending programs are kept on automatic pilot, Andrew Yarrow notes in his book "Forgive Us Our Debts."
That would be, I think, an unconscionable burden on workers (the main taxpayers) and a huge threat to the economy. Over the years, I've suggested changes to minimize these dangers. Eligibility ages for Social Security and Medicare should gradually rise to 70; people now live longer and should work longer. Medicare premiums for middle-income and richer retirees should increase; the young shouldn't bear most of the expense of growing health-care costs.

Social Security, as I (and half the blogosphere) have been reiterating, is not facing any sort of crisis. The only point of lumping it in with Medicare and Medicaid is to confuse the issue.

But what of Medicare and Medicaid? It seems that all the other advanced nations have universal health care. And oddly enough, they only spend about half as much as we do on health care costs. Maybe Samuelson could take a look at how France and Germany, England and Canada, and countries like that, control health care costs? Maybe there's some lessons to be learned from our peer group here?

Apparently not. That's the sort of pundit Robert J. Samuelson is: a guy who knows less than you do, and is happy to share it with you.

Government programs that have outlived their usefulness or are wasteful should end: farm subsidies and Amtrak, for instance.

I can't argue with him on farm subsidies. But we subsidize cars by building a huge network of highways. At a time when we know energy costs are going to keep on going up, and when we know we can't afford to keep pumping carbon into the atmosphere, then maybe, just maybe, we ought to subsidize public transportation nearly as much as we've been subsidizing cars all these years.

That's just stupid.

The rest of his column kinda drivels on like that. And sure, the deficits are big, but dammit, the Dems fixed this problem once already, and pundits like Samuelson didn't exactly scream to the heavens when the Bushies broke it again. This time, Dems get to fix other things first. Otherwise, they might never get the chance.

Income, Poverty, and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States: 2007

2008-08-26T13:04:00.003-04:00

The PDF is here. (I've got a hard copy, neener neener neener.) Paul Krugman and Ezra Klein have already posted about it. Krugman thinks median household income in 2007 is less than it was in 2000; I've already pointed out that the difference between the Census Bureau's estimates for those two years isn't statistically significant. (Since posts at the NY Times have to be reviewed before they appear, my comment there isn't visible yet.)

Unfortunately, I've got to get back to work, and I won't have time this afternoon to play with the numbers in the IPHI report, as we cognoscenti (i.e. geeks) call it. But if you've got time on your hands, and are even half as geeky as I am, click the link and dive right in.

Another Day, Another Disingenious AEI 'Scholar'

2008-08-26T06:02:00.004-04:00

Why, exactly, does the WaPo give op-ed space (and legitimacy) to disingenious nutcases like the AEI's Michael Rubin?

Bush has been a polarizing figure, but most senators realize that partisanship should never trump national security. In early 2007, evidence mounted that the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps was planning terrorist activities in Iraq. An August 2007 National Intelligence Estimate found that "Iran has been intensifying aspects of its lethal support for select groups of Iraqi Shia militants" and that "Explosively formed penetrator (EFP) attacks have risen dramatically." The next month, the Senate considered a bipartisan amendment to designate the Revolutionary Guard Corps as a terrorist organization, an important step to aid nonviolent efforts to deny it funds and financing. Biden was one of only 22 senators to vote against it. "I voted against the amendment to designate Iran's Revolutionary Guard as a terrorist organization because I don't trust this administration," he said. Distrust of the U.S. president is the nature of politics, but skepticism about foreign dictators and their Brown Shirts is the backbone of judgment.

Look, we know what the game was here, Mike. Our military had every bit of authority it needed to respond to terrorists in Iraq. What it didn't have was the authority to hit Iran. The purpose of this designation was to give them Congressional cover if they should choose to do so, but without the public spotlight that a debate over a formal AUMF resolution would have brought with it.

Because either the Revolutionary Guard is an arm of the Iranian government, or it isn't. Presumably it is. If so, then declare Iran itself a terrorist state, not just the Revolutionary Guard, and if you want to bomb-bomb-Iran, have the guts to say so, and push for an AUMF. Don't dump on better men than yourself because they had the guts to say 'no' to such a chickenshit approach. Don't pretend that this was simply about calling a spade a spade, because it damned sure wasn't.

Fred Hiatt Thinks We Need To Fix Social Security (Part 2)

2008-08-25T13:20:00.004-04:00

Fred Hiatt had an online chat today. I took advantage of the opportunity:

Me: Why does The Washington Post's editorial board have such a jones for "fixing" Social Security? If it's broke, it ain't very: the Congressional Budget Office says the trust fund's not expected to run out for another 40-plus years, which means its demise hasn't gotten any closer during the past 15 years. The trust fund has a better than 20 percent chance of outlasting the youngest Boomer's 100th birthday. The 75-year actuarial imbalance amounts to 0.38 percent of GDP, or 1.06 percent of taxable payroll. That's really not very big. And you mention none of this in this morning's "Social Security on Ice" editorial.
Meanwhile, we've got much bigger problems to deal with in the same time horizon. Climate change is much more in need of being addressed quickly, and the long-term consequences are considerably more severe. We're paying a much bigger share of our GDP on health care costs than the European and East Asian democracies are, and that's going to bust the Medicare trust fund. But for some reason, you guys harp on "fixing" Social Security to a much greater degree than these other problems. What's the deal?
Fred Hiatt: We agree that health care costs, and the looming Medicare deficit, are a bigger problem than the Social Security deficit--and will be harder to fix. When you put them both together, the US is on an unsustainable path that will put huge burdens on younger workers to take care of more and more retirees. What we've said is, if SS is easier to fix, let's at least do that, because the longer you wait, the harder it gets--and if we can't do that, it doesn't bode well for fixing the more complicated ones.
Me: Isn't that a universally applicable argument in favor of dealing with more trivial problems before dealing with more substantive problems? Why should the next president burn a good deal of his political capital on a fight regarding Social Security that doesn't need to be fought for at least five years, when time's a-wastin' on climate change and health care costs?
Fred Hiatt: Look, if Congress would enact a serious cap and trade or carbon tax bill, that would make us happy too--as we've said probably more times than our readers care to recall. We don't argue to do the trivial first. What we do say is, to NOT do Social Security because Medicare is more serious is also a silly argument. SS needs fixing, the longer you wait the harder it gets, so why wait? (Plus, in a Washington that worked better, the outlines of a SS compromise would be pretty obvious to most.)

Durn, he just twists every which way, doesn't he? Let's count the twists and twirls:

1) Lumping Social Security in with Medicare: "[w]hen you put them both together, the US is on an unsustainable path..." yada yada yada.

Look, if a 170 pound man and a 500-pound man get on a scale together, it's clear that the 170-pound man and the 500-pound man need to get their combined weight under control. Hiatt's answer is to write a pile of editorials recommending that the 170-pound man face up to painful choices regarding diet and exercise.

2) Social Security as test run for dealing with more major problems: I responded to that, and Hiatt retreated to:

3) "We don't argue to do the trivial first. What we do say is, to NOT do Social Security because Medicare is more serious is also a silly argument."

OK, then, let's take up fixing Social Security after passing effective climate change legislation, and after controlling health care costs. I'm good on that. So why's the Washington Post editorial page been far more relentless in its advocacy of 'fixing' Social Security than it has on health care and climate change? It hasn't been saying, "deal with climate change and health care costs first, but it shouldn't lose sight of Social Security." It's been maintaining a relentless 'fix Social Security' drumbeat for years.

4) "SS needs fixing, the longer you wait the harder it gets, so why wait?" Bzzzzt! The longer we've waited, the harder it hasn't gotten: the point on the horizon when the Trust Fund will run out, keeps on receding. As long as it keeps doing so, it doesn't need fixing at all.

5) "The outlines of a SS compromise [are] pretty obvious."

Here's my 'obvious' solution: wait until the Trust Fund is expected to run out in only 35 years, then write legislation to be triggered when the expected exhaustion date is 30 years away. Then if we never reach that date, we never have to 'fix' anything.

I doubt that remotely resembles Hiatt's 'pretty obvious' compromise. But then, Hiatt's a dumbass. But you knew that.

Fred Hiatt Thinks We Need To Fix Social Security (Part 1)

2008-08-25T10:06:00.004-04:00

The unsigned editorial, "Social Security On Ice" is subtitled, "The presidential candidates appear eager to avoid a serious debate about how to fix it," which is as much as one needs to know.

As Hilzoy pointed out (and I reiterated) the other day, the CBO has just stated the following facts about Social Security:
1) The expected date of the Trust Fund's exhaustion has moved back to 2049, over four decades away. (In other words, over the past 15 years, the expected date of exhausting the Trust Fund has gotten further away from the present, rather than closer.)
2) Even if those reserves get exhausted, benefits supportable by ongoing Social Security tax revenues after that time will be greater, adjusted for inflation, than they are now.
3) The expected 75-year shortfall amounts to 0.38 percent of GDP, or 1.06 percent of taxable payroll.

And let me add one more:

4) The CBO says there's about a 25% chance that the youngest Baby Boomer will turn 100 before the Trust Fund is exhausted. (Social Security was designed as a pay-as-you-go program, which would work fine if our population grew at a steady rate. The whole point of having a Trust Fund on top of the regular tax revenue was to deal with the bulge in the U.S. population distribution known as the Baby Boom.)

But the Washington Post is fixated on 'fixing' Social Security, whether it needs it or not, whether it's urgent or not. Last year, the WaPo commenced a series of 'ideas primary' editorials. Five of the first 15 addressed, yep, the need to fix Social Security. They're obsessed.

This Wasn't In the WaPo, But...

2008-08-25T06:08:00.002-04:00

From the Politico:

"If you're a little bit critical of Barack Obama, you get really a pie of vilification right in the face," Cohen said, adding that his liberal critics "were born too late, because they would have been great Communists."

As Markos said, "Remember, Richard Cohen is supposed to be one of the Washington Post's 'liberals'."

One of My Favorite Fiction Writers Gets (McCain and) Arizona Wrong, Part 2

2008-08-24T17:57:00.004-04:00

I'm sure J.A. Jance knows the people of Arizona far better than I do, since I've spent essentially no time there. But I've been reading Rick Perlstein's Before the Storm lately, so when Jance writes a piece titled, "In Arizona, We're Not Afraid to Stand Alone," I can't help but remember Perlstein's account of how greatly the rugged individualists of Arizona were empowered by tax dollars funneled from Washington.

The government created army bases in Arizona Territory to fight the Indian Wars of the 1860s and 1870s, which pumped revenue into the territory through Army contracts and soldiers' paychecks; the building of the Roosevelt Dam, beginning in 1905, caused the population of Phoenix to double, thanks to the construction contracts; Federal outlays for highways, health, and vocational education made up 15% of Arizona's economy in the 1920s, and of course there were reclamation projects to subsidize farmers and ranchers; in the New Deal, $342 million of Federal tax dollars were pumped into the state, and only $16 million was collected in return; and so forth and so on: according to the conservative Tax Foundation (they're the guys who brought you Tax Freedom Day), between 1981 and 2005, Arizona received anywhere between $1.08 and $1.29 in Federal largesse for every $1 they paid, with the median figure being $1.18.

So when Jance says:

The neverending tide of illegal immigrants coming across the Mexican border is a huge problem in Arizona, and it's often part of the complications in the stories I write about my fictional Cochise County sheriff, Joanna Brady. In real life and fiction both, the burden of federally mandated and unreimbursed emergency health care has put a terrible strain on local hospitals and has resulted in the closing of several trauma centers.
People in Arizona are mad as hell about that. They believe that if the feds order something, they need to pay for it. And the Constitution says that the federal government will provide for the common defense -- but who's protecting the rights of the landowners whose property is being trampled and whose livestock is being damaged by the uncontrolled entry of illegal migrants crossing the border on foot and in vehicles?

I can't argue that the dollars Arizona gets from Washington need to be better matched to the costs incurred by particular Arizona institutions and localities, as well as individual Arizonans, BUT the fact remains that Arizonans are coming out way ahead overall.

It's easy to pretend to be a state full of rugged individualists when you're floating on a sea of Federal dollars. Is it true that every rancher who grazes his livestock on BLM lands wants the Federal government to get the hell out of his life, or does it just seem that way?

One of My Favorite Fiction Writers Gets McCain (and Arizona) Wrong, Part 1

2008-08-24T11:42:00.010-04:00

I hate, I absolutely hate, to say bad things about J.A. Jance. I've read every single one of her excellent Joanna Brady mysteries, which I love, including the most recent one which was released just last month.

But it looks as if I must. Because Ms. Jance has a longish piece in today's Outlook section about McCain and Arizona, and a lot of it is, quite frankly, full of shit.

"What I know about McCain reminds me of a lot of people I've known in my home state over the years. He seems to be a straight shooter," Jance says. Well, we've all known a lot of people who were good at giving the impression that they were straight shooters. I'm sure Arizonans know the breed just as well as the rest of us do.

And that's exactly what McCain is - someone who's done a good job of conveying the impression of being a straight shooter. But he's not: here's Steve Benen's list of McCain's flipflops - 74 and counting. By the time a man is 70 years old, and running for the Presidency to boot, he ought to know where he stands on most things. He shouldn't be reversing himself on literally dozens of positions on major issues like Iraq, Gitmo, tax cuts, and Social Security.

Jance adds that McCain "has what we in Arizona like to call cojones, and from what I know of Arizonans, that's something they like and respect in a leader."

We all do. But most of us like it if those cojones are tempered with a sense of the possible.

Jance's fictional sheriff, Joanna Brady, has to deal with limitations all the time, and it's one of the things that lends a sense of realism to her books. There are always numerous demands on Brady's small police force, and limited staff, vehicles, money, you name it, to deal with those demands.

It's the same in the wider world. If you're President, and you've decided to throw every available soldier into Iraq, that means you've got nothing left for the next emerging crisis, whenever and wherever it raises its head. To then say, "We're all Georgians now" isn't demonstrating one's cojones, but is rather an exhibition of meaningless bluster. It sounds good, but if he'd already been President, he wouldn't have been going to the aid of the Georgians any more than Bush did, because he, like Bush, would have had no troops to go to their aid with.

As Si Kahn once sang, "It's not the fights you dream of, but those you really fought."

Jance: "Like my parents, he's...someone who's not afraid of hard work and who's determined to get the job done."

Pardon me, Ms. Jance, but what evidence is there that McCain's a hard worker? One of the distinguishing features about McCain as Senator and Presidential candidate is how little he works to understand difficult issues - even those, like Iraq, that are supposedly in his wheelhouse.

He's demonstrated his ignorance about who's for and against whom in Iraq, lumping Sunni and Shi'ite opponents of the U.S. occupation into an imaginary alliance that neither side is interested in. In an interview, he disagreed with an interviewer who pointed out that he was going to limit carbon emissions through the use of mandatory caps, apparently not realizing that that's what the 'cap' part of his own 'cap-and-trade' proposal really means. And these are just two of many for-instances. If he was a hard worker, he'd know these basics about his own proposals, and about the issues he takes most seriously. I have to believe he's not.

Finally, Jance says:

Some people complained that he moved here for the sole and calculated purpose of starting his political career in a place where his second wife's family connections could help make that happen. But how is that different from generations of miners who were also "opportunists" when they came to this patch of desert looking for better jobs or better lives -- the same way my father did?

McCain's real bit of opportunism was wooing and winning the daughter (and eventual sole heir) of a very rich man, while still married to his first wife. There he was, a man in his forties, putting the moves on a woman in her early 20s, who just happened to be worth more money than most of us can imagine, while he was still married to wife #1.

In the long-ago words of SNL's Chico Escuela, "Charlie Hustle, you bet."

Yeah, that's just a wee tad different from moving to Arizona for the dry desert air, or in the hopes of striking it rich with a copper mine claim.

Broder's Alternate Reality

2008-08-24T08:25:00.003-04:00

This year, Broder's vacationing in New Hampshire rather than Michigan. But it's still the same old crap.

I'll skip over the usual 'I talked to real people who see things just the same as I do' nonsense, and go directly to this gem:

Sununu, Norm Coleman in Minnesota and Gordon Smith in Oregon are three relatively young senators the GOP hopes can survive this difficult year and provide a base for the future. All three stress their independent credentials, while their opponents try to categorize them as Bush clones.

But somehow, even a veteran political reporter such as Broder is incapable of marshaling any evidence to indicate which story is closer to the truth. With a job that consists of writing two op-ed columns a week, you'd think he could look up some cloture votes on the Internet or something. I guess when you're as old as Broder, that's just too much work. (I'll try to do that later.)

But only in Broderland are these three "a base for the [GOP's] future." Even though these three only occasionally deviate from the party line, that's still too much deviation for them to be regarded as trustworthy. They're still the outliers who are tolerated because they're holding off the Democratic deluge - at least for now. But nobody in the GOP leadership sees these guys as the core of the party's future.

The Beltway pundits are in love with the idea of centrism, so they drool over the least evidence of moderate Republicans.

There aren't any. Get over it.