The Ape Man

Recapping the Last 10 Years of Republicanism

2011-07-11T08:48:00.001-07:00

This all actually happened. In fact, I left out a bunch of stuff.

The Texas Republican money machine used sham companies to steal a bunch of cash on the spot energy markets (and from third-world countries) in the late 1990's and early 2000's, funneling the money to the political career of George W. Bush. Bush became President, boosting the fortunes of Texas money men and Fox News alike, but the sham companies suddenly collapsed in a cloud of dust when the recession of the early 2000's hit.

Then terrorists attacked New York and Washington and after a quickie invasion of Afghanistan, the GOP laundered some useless intelligence through the British and used their version of the information to drum up support for a much larger-scale invasion of Iraq, a country with no ties to the attacks on the US. At first the invasion appeared to be going well, so the Republicans staged a ceremony on the deck of an aircraft carrier and Fox News anchors (and Chris Matthews) spent a week talking about how Bush looked great in his uniform.

Then after the invasion went pear-shaped and started to become unpopular, the Republican administration began blaming British intelligence for their shoddily sourced "dodgy dossier" but maintaining that the Iraq invasion was still a success. The GOP lost Congress and then the Presidency amidst a rapidly collapsing financial system and two failed wars, each with several satellite countries nearby in various stages of unrest and collapse.

Then when the Democrats took over the White House, the GOP licked its wounds and Fox News returned to its Clinton-era mode of scandal-hyping and rumormongering, implying among many other things that the new president was not an American, that he was secretly a muslim sympathetic to terrorists, that he was a Communist who would destroy the free enterprise system and turn the economy over to black people as slave reparations, and that he planned to use universal health care bills to convert the Unites States to Nazism.

Now we find out that over this entire period Fox News' parent company has been spying on numerous British government officials including the Prime Minister, accessing his bank records, impersonating officers of the court and even Brown himself, and bribing active duty police officers to collect personal information on Brown from police computers.

The best part:

In October 2006, the then editor of the Sun, Rebekah Brooks, contacted the Browns to tell them that they had obtained details from the medical file of their four-month-old son, Fraser, which revealed that the boy was suffering from cystic fibrosis.

Stay classy, GOP.

ATS Rentals Review

2011-01-29T12:20:00.000-08:00

I recently rented a Sony camera from ATS Rentals. The way it works is that you order online and ATS ships the equipment to a location you choose. This was imperative for me because I was not able to transport equipment to Tampa in a cost-effective way, so I had the camera shipped to my uncle in Orlando, who kindly drove up to assist me with the film.

The process was extremely easy and sending the package back was a breeze. UPS actually lost track of the return shipment for a period of time, but ATS contacted me and once I gave them the information from my UPS drop receipt they told me not to worry about it and that it was between them and UPS. A few days later I got a message that it had all been resolved.

I left some of my own equipment in the box and ATS even shipped it back to me! It was a great experience and I'd recommend them, just as they were recommended to me by award-winning Athens, GA filmmaker Chris Ethridge.

If I had to complain about something, I'd like it if you could search their site by feature set so that I could browse all the cameras with similar features (1080p capabilities plus external microphone, for example) without having to look through other cameras that don't fit my needs.

Michael Mandel on Innovation

2011-01-27T07:17:00.000-08:00

Michael Mandel breaks down the State of the Union's focus on technological innovation, arguing that the US should focus on areas where we already possess a big competititve advantage over the rest of the world.

I'm not really in a position to evaluate the wisdom of that position, but I do think it's worth looking at the bigger picture here. American commentators are constantly fretting that "health care spending" and "education spending" are consuming larger and larger shares of our national income. Supposedly this constitutes an "unsustainable" trajectory that will eventually bankrupt us.

However, if you look at the macroeconomic situation that's actually being described by these measures, what's happening is that the economy of the richest, most prosperous country in the world is being devoted more and more to hospitals, universities, and research facilities. It's hard to see why that's a problem; in fact it's basically what you'd expect to happen.

I personally don't see the US as facing a choice between clean energy research and biomedical research - I think we can do both and do them well. But the big problems with these things come on the production and consumption side, not the development side.

The problem with our medical system isn't that it's expensive - it's that a lot of the stuff we spend money on isn't actually useful medical care. Ditto education spending - it's not that we need to spend less money, it's that we need to address the areas of our education system that don't work very well.

Of course the most useless and wasteful spending in in government actually also happens to be the area where we pour the lion's share of our federal R&D money - military technology. The US could shift 70% of its military R&D to trying to create leprechaun unicorns and still get more out of those dollars while remaining the largest and most advanced military in the world for the foreseeable future.

In Praise of Vagueness

2011-01-26T11:56:00.000-08:00

Matthew Yglesias notes today that a number of commentators are chiding Obama for being too vague in the State of the Union and not offering enough specific policy proposals.

I'm all for bold strokes, but on issues like tax policy there just isn't anything to be gained by laying out a detailed plan. The President can describe the basic principles that would lead him to support and sign a tax reform bill, but anything more specific than that gives his opponents something to shoot at before his supporters have time to load their rifles.

The State of the Union is usually a place to describe goals, not tasks. One of the worst things about Bush's SOTU speeches is that he routinely threw in specific tasks he wanted to accomplish and then he would just sort of abandon them later for no obvious reason.

Remember Mars?

Blogs I'm Reading

2011-01-25T19:54:00.000-08:00

Just coming out of a long blogging hibernation, and still quite focused on editing the film, I nonetheless am going to try to return to general-interest blogging and I thought the State of the Union would be a good opportunity to let you know what I'm reading and will probably be commenting on in the near future.

I don't really have much to say yet about the SOTU myself except that I found it unusually good and that I continue to be impressed by Obama's clarity and incisiveness at the podium. Certainly a contrast to Paul Ryan who evoked nothing so much as LaVar Burton reading from a YA novel set on Capitol Hill.

Here's who I'll be watching for reactions:

Matthew Yglesias

One of my favorite bloggers from way back when, MY has boucned around a bit but has found a good niche as the Center for American Progress' "name" political blogger. He's good on almost everything and great on applied political philosophy and other generalist-type topics.

Progressive Fix

Readers who know politics might be surprised to see Raul Groom's alter ego linking to Will Marshall, who's something of a pariah in true lefty circles, and for good reason. But I've always found Marshall's analysis cogent and sober-minded, unlike so many who call themselves "centrist" and "pragmatic." The time may well be coming that the Will Marshalls of the world can again find common cause with those of us on the true left. At the very least, the PPI doesn't put out the same old crap most Liebermanite orgs push on us.

Pandagon

Issues of feminism and misogyny don't get a lot of mainstream airtime these days, but feminine self-determinism and human rights are still at the forefront of the progressive agenda, and Amanda Marcotte is one of the leading lights of my generation's feminist movement. She's often bombastic, sometimes petty, but always sharp and uncompromising in pointing out the absurdities and injustices of our male-dominated culture.

Center of the Universe

Warren Mosler is best known as the idiosyncratic creator of a long-running line of high-performance cars, but he's also a finance wizard and one of the brightest stars of the school of economics often called "Modern Monetary Theory" or MMT. Closely aligned with L. Randall Wray's Center for Full Employment and Price Stability Mosler offers daily takes on everything from Federal Reserve policy to currency and commodity markets.

I hope some of you come to enjoy reading these sites as much as I do in the coming year. Leave your own suggestions in comments!

Me and Angelo Dundee

2011-01-14T11:04:00.000-08:00

So...

[that's a joke - apparently I say "So..." at the beginning of every interview question I ask. What can I say? I'm a pro.]

As you probably know if you're reading this blog (which was defunct until very recently) I've recently filmed an interview with Angelo Dundee, the great trainer of fifteen world champions including Muhammad Ali.

It was a great experience, and once I'm done with all this editing I hope to post a longer description of everything that happened in Tampa. Right now, though, I'm focused on getting the clips cut down, the sound in place, etc.

Since that process will probably take some time, I thought I would provide a short, rough clip for everyone to see that indeed I DID conduct the interview and did not just con everyone out of a bunch of money. The clip is of Angie describing his introduction to the world of boxing via the great trainers he worked with as a kid, including Chickie Ferrara, Ray Arcel, and others.

You'll notice the sound is really bad - that's because I haven't cut in the sound from the good mic; this is the multidirectional Panasonic on-camera mic that records things like me scratching my eye. The final version should sound much better (fingers crossed.) Also the full 1080/60p resolution was too much for blogger so this version is considerably lower resolution than the final cut will be.

This clip is a little over a minute - the whole interview is around two and a half hours. Further updates as developments warrant. Thanks a lot for your support everybody!

A Man Drives a Plane

2010-02-19T10:58:00.000-08:00

A lot of liberals, myself included, have made note of the hypocrisy of militaristic conservatives who don't seem to see why a white man flying a plane into a government building is a form of terrorism.

That's obviously one point to be made here - if a black guy trying to ignite a bomb in his underpants deserves to be treated as a violent form of political expression, then so does a white guy who crashes his plane into the IRS. But it's worth asking the question - what good does such an attitude do us in either case?

Perhaps instead of arguing that white Christians who spout some half-baked political bullshit before murdering should be labeled terrorists, we should be asking whether dark-skinned Muslims who spout some half-baked political bullshit before murdering should be thought of, in most cases, simply as criminals.

Why Not Lennox?

2010-02-18T06:18:00.000-08:00

Not blogging recently because of a number of long-term projects eating up my time not least among them my long-term "chasing kids, cooking dinner, then eating too much and passing out after reading two paragraphs of a book" project.

One of my more productive projects right now is my attempt to put together a documentary about the Patterson Era in the heavyweight division. I've watched every meaningful heavyweight championship fight from 1956-2002 (and I'm currently holding my nose through the insignificant ones). I've plowed through books by Arthur Mercante, Sr., Angelo Dundee, Ferdie Pacheco, and a laundry list of other boxing people who can't write a lick but have eight million stories to tell.

During that time, I've become consumed by one question: why is Lennox Lewis so lightly regarded, historically speaking? Here is a man who held some form of the heavyweight title for almost the entire period from 1993 (when he beat Tony Tucker to become the WBC champ) to 2003, when he stopped Vitali Klitschko on cuts and retired with the Patterson belt. He fought absolutely everyone there was to fight, and was beaten twice - two early knockouts to second-tier fighters whom Lennox would later rematch and destroy.

"Who was the best?" and "Who has the best resume?" are not the same question. Kobe Bryant may well retire with a better resume than Michael Jordan; few will ever argue that Kobe is better than MJ.

Still, and discussion of athletes must begin with the question of who did the most in his career. During the Patterson era, there's no question the top dog is Ali, for so many resons. But after that, doesn't the discussion have to quickly turn to Lennox Lewis? Who did more?

Not Holmes, who put together a great run from 1978 (when he squeaked by Ken Norton to win the WBC title) to 1983 (when he squirmed away from a tough, slick but strategically hopeless Tim Witherspoon). First of all, you don't get to Valhalla by ducking guys, and Holmes ducked more than his share at the end of his reign. He would have been better off fighting the best and taking his medicine when it came in the form of Mike Tyson than burdening the world with those two mindbendingly strange and boring decision losses to Michael Spinks. (Seriously, watch those fights if you want to know how something can be "mindbendingly strange" and also "boring" at the same time. On second thought, don't.)

Certainly not Mike Tyson or Evander Holyfield; good fighters who also happened to be Lennox Lewis' age and who between them turned in three stink-bomb performances against Lewis. Holfield's first Lewis fight resulted in one of the great screw-job points draws in boxing history, allowing him to keep his belts after a fight he clearly lost and also allowing him (and thus his handlers, who included Don King) to command a larger share of the purse in the rematch (also a convincing Holyfield decision loss, this time scored that way.) The less said about Tyson's effort against Lewis the better. Suffice it to say that the fight was a tactical mismatch and that Tyson gave no sign in the fight that he ever could have contended with Lewis at any point in the latter's reign.

Floyd Patterson himself had a good career, but only a silly old white-haired ex-trainer who watched him beat Ingemar Johansson to end the 358-day reign of the only white heavyweight champion of the Patterson era would ever try to make the case that he was better than Lennox Lewis. Lewis would have destroyed Patterson, who was small and easy to knock down even for his era.

So more and more the focus of what I'm doing is falling on Lennox Lewis rather than the rest of the era. I'm not super-excited about that because there are already some Lennox docs out there that do a decent job telling his story (though none of them are particularly good films), but that's the direction things seem to be going in nonetheless.

Just thought I'd share.

To Sleep, Perchance to Dream

2009-10-28T21:00:00.000-07:00

When I was in the eleventh grade I voiced a theory, whose hypothesis I had subjected to the usual rigorous four-second cogitation period, that all poetry was about death. The idea greatly upset my English teacher; naturally I immediately adopted the half-baked argument as if it were revealed scripture.

The following year I wrote a paper on the role of sleep (and its obvious analog, death) in Updike's "The Centaur." My thesis had, as far as I could tell, no support of any kind in the existing critical literature.

To fulfill the requirements of the assigment, I invented sources that said the things I wanted them to say. I even invented a quote by George Bernard Shaw, an excellent, witty and believable one.

My teacher caught me without much trouble. Here, readers who did not grow up as babyfaced white boys in the south in the 1980's probably are wincing in anticipation of some great cataclysm of shame and disgrace.

Those who did grow up as I did are smiling a knowing, self-satisfied smile. There was, of course, no comeuppance. My teacher never directly confronted my about my deception, instead setting up a farce of a "supplemental final exam" in which she provided me with the research materials to write an essay on no notice. I have no idea what asinine, patronizing tripe I chose as my thesis. I knew it would satisfy my teacher.

I did not speak to the assembled graduates and well-wishers the day I received a diploma I did not deserve, despite the fact that a spontaneous groundswell of support had surfaced among the senior class for my inclusion in the list of presenters. The administration, in their only policy move made during my tenure for which I have an iota of respect, nixed the idea of allowing a known swindler and con artist to address a crowd of four hundred of central Virginia's best and brightest.

Incidentally, I stand by the lies I told. Updike WAS writing about a man drifting in and out of consciousness. The fact that this central fact was ignored by critics for decades doesn't change its salience.

High school WAS stupid, an endless parade of nonsense that no sane person would ever countenance. It was a time of slumber, in which the various manifestations of the self interact with one another in absurd, obviously counterproductive ways. Some things are sorted out Nothing is learned.

Now, years later, we drift off to sleep. With all our poetry and music, dripping with false significance, what do we know even of this small death, to which each one of us has traveled and returned countless times?

The question had not been taken up by English speakers to any great degree in 1994, and to my knowledge the field remains in a state of advanced disrepair. The most universal psychological phenomenon on earth is, for practical purposes, still largely a closed book.

It bears thinking about.

Selah

Time and Tide

2009-08-12T20:35:00.001-07:00

Uncle Kevin came by some time ago to comment on the previous post. He made several points that were important and incisive.

The Afghan/Pakistan region is currently one of several in which an wide confederacy of actors are operating against whom we have complaints.

[...]

It is merely the case that Afghanistan is a useful place with which to do battle with this confederacy. The local civilians merely get in the way, or are useful as methods with which to engage the confederacy.

The first bit is self-evidently true and is substantially confirmed by Filkins' account. The reason the war in Afghanistan was not a completely crazy idea a la Iraq is that Afghanistan/Pakistan really IS a reasonably convenient place to engage the coalition of groups we generally refer to as "al Qaeda." It is also self-evidently true that the United States has altogether legitimate grievances with this coalition.

However, as Uncle Kevin and I seem to at least partially agree, it is not self-evidently true that it is a good idea to use third-world battlefields to engage this coalition in a proxy war in the way that we did with the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Even if we grant paleoconservatives their fairly well-accepted assertion that American "projection of power" was crucial in bringing about the fall of Soviet communism, it would certainly seem logical that combating a diffuse transnational group of intelligence, counterintelligence, and sabotage experts would require a different approach than did combating the USSR.

After all, in a resource war based on petroleum, narcotics, and illegal weapons smuggling, is it really that hard to imagine that a coalition of wealthy hard-liners in Tehran, Sana'a, and Mogadishu might be able to outlast a group of wealthy hard-liners in Houston, Washington, and New York? The US military is big and scary, but it doesn't have any idea how to stop these guys, who have billions of dollars and are able to "project power" merely by convincing some poor grieving person that the best way to honor their brother's memory is to blow up a bus.

And of course it is always the civilians who bear the real cost of war, though even the sort of semi-idyllic bribery-based warlordism I described in my earlier post was and is bad enough for the Afghan population. It should probably be specifically conceded that the war in Afghanistan HAS indeed brought real benefits to some segments of the Afghan population.

Continued US operations there will kill more people, but more importantly (from a purely self-interested POV, anyway) they will be a giant waste of time.

New ideas, please. We're losing.

Warblogging: Serious and Unserious

2009-07-02T19:43:00.000-07:00

Serious first...

While I was traveling recently I picked up Dexter Filkins' "The Forever War" in Dulles while I was on a medium-sized layover, and it's an excellent book. Anyone who is interested in Iraq and Afghanistan, and really even in modern war generally, should read it. Filkins is not a leftist by any stretch, and anyone could probably find information in the book to support their political leanings if that's what they were looking for, but quite apart from any ideological importance the book bears witness to war as it really is and that's worth reading no matter what your convictions.

Now, putting on my Dirty Fucking Hippie hat:

It's once again my duty to point out as we read about the most recent improvement to the Awesome War of Good Neighborliness that the war in Afghanistan, despite being substantially less stupid on its face than the war in Iraq, is unlikely to ever produce any outcome that could reasonably be described as "good" and that any operation undertaken today is likely to have the long-term effect of killing a large number of people for no real reason at all.

If you read through the linked article, you might notice two things. One is that some pretty important strategic realities are papered over with Newspeak (emphasis mine):

That mistrust [of the Marines by the local Afghan population] stems from concern over civilian casualties resulting from U.S. military operations as well as from a fear that the troops will not stay long enough to counter the Taliban.

First of all, this use of the term "concern" reminds me of the way dentists love to use the word "discomfort" to mean "pain." "Discomfort" is when you're shifting in your bus seat because your ass is sweaty. A steel drill boring into your tooth is painful.

In the same way, if someone kills your brother with a big-ass bomb, and you happen to run into the bomber on the subway, it's unlikely the ensuing dialogue will prominently feature the word "concern." Presumably you'd be angry. In a murderous rage, even.

Meanwhile, it seems unlikely to me that the people who are "concerned" over the large number of locals being killed by the Marines are the same folks worried that the Marines won't stick around long enough to finish the job. It seems more likely that those are two distinct groups with distinct interests, who need to be approached in (at least) two different ways.

The second thing you might notice upon reading the article is that in an article of some 1500 words, one paragraph is spent actually describing the goals of the mission:

Once basic governance structures are restored, civilian reconstruction personnel plan to focus on economic development programs, including programs to help Afghans grow legal crops in the area. Senior Obama administration officials say creating jobs and improving the livelihoods of rural Afghans is the key to defeating the Taliban, which has been able to recruit fighters for as little as $5 a day in Helmand.

I'm tempted to say that the first clause in this graf is doing all the work, but actually I don't think that's the case. My limited but not totally impoverished knowledge of asymmetric warfare suggests to me that when the US military really focuses on restoring "basic governance structures," the results are usually pretty good. Marines grumble a lot when they're asked to do "nation building" (later caricatured in the article as eating goat and drinking tea with locals), but the results, tactically speaking, can often be surprisingly impressive.

The problem, almost always, comes next - "helping Afghans grow legal crops" and the like. International agricultural development is pretty good at solving technical problems - reducing transaction costs through the use of scrip, etc. - but it's not great at solving problems like "the entire economy of this country is based on the production of an illegal crop." There's just no sustainable path forward for Afghanistan to join the international economy as a normal agro-export country.

When the US leaves, whether that's in ten months or ten years, Afghanistan will revert to its natural state as a poor, landlocked country with a weak central government and constant warring factions that mostly operate by bribing each other's soldiers to change sides before any real battles can happen. If great powers would leave the place alone for fifty years, maybe something better would come along, but in the meantime it's all just wishful thinking.

The Afghani economy, outside of opium and pot production, doesn't really exist. Subsistence agriculture, a little wheat. . . there's just no there there. No platoon of Marines, however well-trained and well-intentioned, is going to fix that fundamental problem.

What they can do is kill a bunch of people for no good reason. And that, their training and intentions notwithstanding, is what they will do.

Raul's Reflection #5

2009-06-17T17:21:00.000-07:00

One of the functions of wisdom is to serve as a corrective against certain tendencies. This is one reason that ideas that are said to be "timeless" are not so at all. While people are conditioned in a certain way, a wise saying may truly be wise - helping to bring humankind away from old patterns and into a new phase of thought and action.

When "wisdom" becomes merely a saying, which reinforces the way people already tend to think, it ceases to be wisdom and becomes at best a useless plaything and at worst an obstacle to further development.

A strong medicine, taken for too long after the passing of an illness, may make the patient sicker than he was to begin with.

Obama's Cairo Speech

2009-06-10T04:47:00.000-07:00

Let me start this off by saying that I've been pleased by the first six months or so of the Obama administration. Obama is to my right on most issues, but then, that's elected officials for you. People to my left tend to get locked up in psych wards rather than elevated to political office, so I've gotten used to that.

Though there are lots of things I think Obama could be handling better for the most part he seems to be doing a decent job with a rough situation.

In that context let me also say that the Cairo speech last week was a pretty decent attempt to lay out some basic common ground between US foreign policy thinking and the thinking of the rest of the world's people who tend to take a dim view (as I do) of most of the core tenets of US foreign policy.

That said, there was one part of the speech that gave me a case of the disappointed-headshakes, which was paradoxically the part of the speech that's being most characterized as an "antiwar" sentiment.

Near the beginning of the speech, Obama had this to say:

The situation in Afghanistan demonstrates America's goals and our need to work together. Over seven years ago, the United States pursued al-Qaida and the Taliban with broad international support. We did not go by choice. We went because of necessity. I'm aware that there's still some who would question or even justify the offense of 9/11. But let us be clear. Al-Qaida killed nearly 3,000 people on that day.

Which is pretty standard boilerplate for US foreign policy discussions over the last eight years. The statement's main drawback is that it has only a very vague relationship with reality.

The truth is, the war in Afghanistan was a war of choice. We didn't HAVE TO go invade Afghanistan. It is undeniably true that many people (including many people who are generally antiwar) felt at the time, just a few weeks after the attacks on New York and Washington, that we had no option other than to invade. But that simply wasn't the case. There are many paths we could have taken with regard to pursuing the goals set forth at the start of the Afghanistan invasion.

This is one case among many where the really transcendent awfulness of the Bush administration has screwed up the entire context of our discourse. The Iraq invasion wasn't just a "war of choice." It was a self-evidently absurd and boneheaded policy choice that was at the time completely unmoored from any rational, ethical or moral foundation.

Compared to the Iraq invasion, though, Afghanistan is generally thought of in the US as "Bush's good war." So it generally gets the sort of treatment that it got in Obama's Cairo speech.

I just want to make a couple quick points about this. At a very minimum, if we're going to talk about whether a decision was correct or not we should compare the consequences to the probably consequences of the main alternative course of action (in this case, pursuing the 9/11 terrorists through an international criminal investigation rather than through military action), and also to what might have happened if we had done nothing.

The three primary goals set out in the early weeks of the war were the goals of apprehending Osama bin Laden, disrupting and restricting the activities of Islamist guerillas operating in Afghanistan, and ousting the Taliban in favor of a democratic, representative government.

On the first goal, obviously we failed utterly as bin Laden is as far as anyone knows still at large. It can't really be known whether he could have been apprehended by an international criminal justice effort but it's certainly the case that he wouldn't be less in custody than he is now. In fact, it's fairly clear we could have gotten the same result if we had done nothing.

On the second goal, people generally assume that the Afghanistan invasion has done a lot to restrict the movement of guerillas in Afghanistan, but the one specific investigation of that question that I know of (Hy Rothstein's "Afghanistan and the Troubled Future of Unconventional Warfare") concludes that the picture is at best mixed. The US effort in Afghanistan has been remarkably, and foolishly, focused on blowing things up rather than building the kinds of human networks that make it difficult for terrorist groups to operate, and thus it's not very clear how much we've really improved things with the invasion. Once again we can say that the international criminal investigation probably would have achieved at least the same result, if not a better one, and that doing nothing at all would not have been demonstrably worse than invading.

As for ousting the Taliban, we did that, but we never managed to replace them with anything particular, and thus in the judgment of most of the experts I've read if we were to withdraw from Afghanistan today the Taliban or some Taliban-like group would regain control of the country fairly quickly. This is the one area where you can say pretty definitively that the invasion came closer to achieving the goal than could have been achieved by doing nothing or by conducting a criminal investigation. It's not nothing, but given the costs of the invasion, high on the US side and immense on the Afghanistan side, it's pretty thin gruel.

Now, it's not logically impossible for something to have been completely necessary and yet failed to achieve any substantive positive results. There's an argument to be made that the Afghanistan war was necessary and correct despite having failed. It's just that I'd like to see someone actually MAKE that argument, instead of it constantly being assumed to be self-evidently true that a failed war was a good idea.

The Death of George Tiller

2009-06-03T04:26:00.001-07:00

I rarely post about abortion. It falls squarely under the "dumb stuff I can't believe we're still arguing about" category.

However, after the death of George Tiller, by most accounts an extremely compassionate, courageous women's health care provider, I thought I would toss my basic thoughts on the matter out into the ether.

Many years ago, there was a consensus in this country that if a woman was pregnant she should be forced to carry the child to term and deliver it. There were laws against seeking abortions and laws against providing them.

As the rights of women advanced throughout the 60's and 70's, this consensus broke and eventually the Supreme Court recognized an affirmative right of doctors to provide abortions. Now, abortion is legal, and a comfortable majority of Americans consistently agree in polling that abortions should be legal and available to women who need them.

That's the state of play, though the large, vocal committed minority of people who want to make abortion illegal again do their best to obscure it. It is close to unthinkable that the old consensus, grounded as it was at least in part in the view that women were not fully citizens, will ever reemerge.

It's certainly possible that through the use of terrorist violence - gunning doctors down in church, say - some especially unbalanced abortion prohibitionists will be able to intimidate some doctors into ceasing to provide these procedures. What's much less possible is that Americans will ever again come around to the belief that women should be forced to carry to term pregnancies that they desire to terminate.

Given the roots of the anti-abortion coalition in the "born-again" social engineering movement sometimes called "evangelical christianity," I know as well as anyone that they will continue to fight on with whatever means are at their disposal - it is not in them to look around, consider the situation, and back down.

Count me as one lonely voice trying to wake a few of them up.

This one's over. You lost. If this truly is an inhuman horror, it is one that, despite your ironclad conviction to the contrary, your God can clearly abide.

Pick a different battle. The world is full of injustice.

Harsh Technique Blogging

2009-05-04T06:00:00.000-07:00

Haven't updated in a while; for that reason I'm sure my readership has dwindled to the point where I'm basically telling this to myself. That's fine; I'm writing it mostly to get it out of my head where it's driving me a little crazy.

Tons of discussion once again of "the torture debate," which I put in quotes because from my perspective I haven't seen a lot of debate, just various people rehashing various ludicrous justifications, going around and around and periodically congratulating each other on how wonderful it is that in a free society we can have open discussion and blah blah blah.

Here's how I see it. The United States of America, a government that to an almost unique degree in human history depends upon the consent of the governed, tortured people as a matter of government policy. We put people in small, dark boxes with insects crawling on them. We strapped them to boards and poured water in their faces until they broke down crying and pleading in abject fear of death by drowning. We told people we had their children in custody and threatened to mutilate their childrens' genitals.

I could go on, but really, there's no point. This happened, in part at least, because the people who authorized these policies believed that if and when these practices came to light, a significant slice of the American electorate would have trouble coming to a clear conclusion about whether such conduct is wrong, and that as a result they would get away with it.

We have seen throughout the last several years that in fact these policymakers were correct in their belief. Given enough arm-waving and bloviation about ticking time bombs and other such nonsense, many Americans do in fact appear to be able to integrate the knowledge that the United States tortured people with their image of the United States as a just and lawful nation.

This problem has no immediate solution. People who lack the moral faculties to conclude that torturing people is wrong cannot develop these faculties by continuing to run their mouths about it, or by staining the pages of academic journals with beard-stroking foolishness. What is needed is a serious exercise in self-reflection and contemplation, which can happen only in the hearts of the people who need it.

The best the rest of us can do is to stop enabling this pathetic fiction that these people are engaged in something other than evil. I am not saddled with a Manichean view of humanity and thus I can say this without fear that I am saying that these people are evil. In each person's life constructive and destructive forces are at work always. The work of conscious, terrestrial humankind is to strive to enable the good within us and to control the evil.

Occasionally it is good for people to be shocked into looking in the mirror and seeing what they are really like. It may make them angry; they may dislike the mirror or the person who held it up, rudely, to their face in a vulnerable moment.

On TV, the great perils we face are gigantic, inhuman menaces like terrorism, global warming, pandemic disease. In real life what threatens humanity is that we will be too feckless, too deluded to look in the mirror and face who we are, and what may happen to us as a result.

Time is short. Start today.

Warren Mosler and the Value of Money

2009-03-04T16:31:00.000-08:00

In this discussion on an Yglesias thread I was reminded by another commenter of the fascinating work of one of the big three modern economists who have most shaped the way I think about economics. Kuttner is one, Taleb is another, and this guy, Warren Mosler, is the third.

The linked post is called "The Natural Interest Rate is Zero," but what it's really about, like most of Mosley's work, is how the relationship between a government and its currency is fundamentally different from every other entity's relationship with that currency.

The point he makes many times that is really quite interesting when you turn it over in your mind is that if you pay the government with cash, whether you're paying taxes or buying securities, the government shreds the money.

He does a good job going into some of the implications of that fact, but it's also fun to just sit and thing about it.

Honest Men

2009-03-03T15:44:00.000-08:00

I once heard someone say "An honest man never won anything in a fight." I think what the guy was driving at was something akin to "Nice guys finish last." He meant it, in other words, as a statement about the value, or lack thereof, of honesty.

It occurred to me today while I was out walking that there's another, more interesting way of looking at the statement. It could be a statement about the value, or lack thereof, of fighting.

The Power of El Rushbo

2009-03-03T06:19:00.000-08:00

In my life as a Richmonder I've had occasion to know many a Rush Limbaugh fan. There are lots of reasons to like listening to Rush - I'll admit I used to find him mildly entertaining myself back in the day. But there is a certain type of person who really LOVES Rush, who is fanatically devoted to him and cannot allow himself to understand that the vast, vast majority of the "commentary" that Rush offers is just made-up inflammatory nonsense.

I knew a guy back when I was first starting out in the computer biz who was one of these Limbaugh dittoheads. His name was Nick and he was a little angry guy who was reasonably intelligent but not particularly curious and who had a massive Napoleon complex that required him to tell everyone what to do and how to do it at all times.

I remember once he gave me a ride somewhere in his little dirty white sedan and he had Rush's radio show on in the car. I, being young and arrogant myself, sort of thought that everyone must listen to Rush the same way I did - appreciating his cracked perspective, but understanding that his views didn't represent any coherent, serious political philosophy.

I made an offhand comment that somehow revealed my point of view, and Nick blew up. It was instant and impressive - his face got red, spit flew from his mouth, and he began an impromptu tirade about how I had been brainwashed by the liberal media to believe that Rush was a fool when in fact he was the only sane man in the entire media landscape.

It's important to reiterate - Nick was screaming at someone who, at that point in his life liked Rush Limbaugh. To him, nothing less than fanatical, unquestioning devotion was sufficient to separate me from the massing communist hordes poised to tear the country apart with their fascist campus speech codes and capricious environmental regulations.

Over time, as the old Republican base of old-style racist white male voters has aged and begun to die out, the GOP has become increasingly dependent on guys like Nick whose worldview is ENTIRELY shaped by talk radio, and Rush in particular.

The dilemma for the GOP is that there just aren't enough guys like Nick. As the years roll on, the Republicans are going to lose more and more elections as long as they cling to a narrative that most of the population finds moronic. The trouble is, Dittoheads now represent a decent chunk of the Republican coalition. They vote at a high rate, so it's possible that Rush Limbaugh fans represent a large plurality of the Republican electorate in many elections. If those people were to desert the party suddenly, the Republicans would be doomed.

Unfortunately, unless they can leave Rush behind somehow, or at least marginalize him to the point where he is no longer the de facto leader of the party, they're doomed anyway. I hope they keep him around - an extended run as a permanent minority party seems like the proper fate for the modern GOP.

Grief #1

2009-02-27T08:13:00.000-08:00

It's now been a full two weeks since I received the news that my good friend Nathan had died.

So far I would take a bit of issue with the idea of the "stages" of grief, at least as I've heard of them. I definitely see that the early days of knowing of his death were characterized primarily by a refusal to admit, emotionally to myself, that he was gone.

These days I'm definitely very angry. However, my experience of the anger is in a sense an expression of denial. It is not that I feel angry at Nathan for dying, or even for taking his own life. I feel angry in the way that we used to feel angry together, an unfocused, juvenile dissatisfaction with the obvious cravenness and parsimony of the world and the people in it. I feel angry so that I can be close to the ferocious, passionate intensity that made it so hard for me to reach out to Nathan while he was alive, to drink it in one last time.

So I am angry with my kitchen for being messy, and at my family for expecting me to do my job and clean it up. I am angry with my parents for all the things they ever said to me that I didn't want to hear, and also for all the things that they didn't say to me that I needed to hear. I'm angry with my high school teachers for not understanding me. I'm angry at my high school crushes for not falling in love with me. I'm angry with my cats, the trees in my yard, my muddy lawn, my cracked driveway, and my ridiculous heap of a car.

I wish I could write all this on a card and tape it to my chest so that the people who cross me in minor, insignificant ways over the coming weeks will understand that yes, there IS a reason why this normally easygoing guy is looking like he might punch them for blocking his path in the produce section of the grocery store.

The reason is because when I stop being angry and go back to being myself, then Nathan will really be gone. And I'm not there yet.

Raul's Reflection #3

2009-02-26T05:04:00.000-08:00

When someone says "I don't understand" it is usually assumed that he is describing something he has tried and failed to do.

It's worth remembering that he may be describing something he has succeeded in doing.

Raul's Reflection #2

2009-02-24T10:03:00.000-08:00

People often say "the road to hell is paved with good intentions." Pessimists like the phrase because it confirms their pessimism. Cynics like it because it excuses their intellectual laziness.

I myself, being an optimist, like the phrase too. Who, after all, would want to travel to hell on an unpaved road?

Pennywise, Pound Feckless

2009-02-24T08:00:00.000-08:00

I liked this Yglesias post on Obama rolling the Blue Dogs, but it seemed like he buried the lede a bit.

I'd like to see a whole post on the phenomenon of GOP and right-wing Dem "fiscal conservatism."

The plain fact is, for decades the people in US government with a reputation for fiscal conservatism (that is, the GOP and their righty-Dem pals like Ben Nelson) maintain that reputation by spending as much time as possible on television scolding Americans about why they cannot have useful, well-run government services because those programs cost too much money, despite the fact that most of the programs they say this about do not add anything significant to the deficit, either this year's budget or the budget 10 years from now.

Yet these same politicians are always, ALWAYS the ones arguing in favor of truly wasteful, budget busting spending - giant, failed wars whose purpose no one can explain, for example. They are always front and center telling us why we can't do anything to contain medical costs, despite the fact that our country wastes more money on unneeded administrative costs and unhelpful, mass-production medical treatments than most other countries spend on anything, period.

In short, "fiscal responsibility" in the modern media environment is a sham. The people who cultivate a reputation for it are con artists with big PR budgets. The people who really value fiscal conservatism - that is, real Democrats - know that it is but one of many important principles of governance, so they are not able to compete with the hucksters who pretend, when it's convenient to do so, that it is the most important thing in the goddamn universe.

Obama's right that the right path to fiscal health is a repair of the broken finance sytsem, a return to full employment, medical reform, and fewer giant failed wars whose purpose no one can explain.

If you do those things, there is no way to run a crippling deficit in the richest country in the world by spending too much money studying how much methane is released by cow farts.

In Defense of the Compromise

2009-02-08T15:59:00.000-08:00

[Cross posted at Yglesias' House]

At the risk of sounding like a centrist morally bankrupt appeaser (and I hope a cursory reading of my work over the years would dispel the notion that I’m USUALLY singing such a tune, regardless of what you think of my POV at this instant) I think this is one of those moments where we’re all getting a bit hot and bothered because we’re refusing to see this in terms of political interests rather than policy principles.

I was as disappointed as anyone to see that so much aid to the states had been cut. Just about all liberals seem to be in agreement that such a thing makes no sense. I am in wholehearted agreement with that assessment, and I also share a lot of the angst over some of the smaller cuts that were made as well.

But the reality is that Senate rules and recent Senate practices make it the case that a committed minority of at least 40 Senators can block legislation. The current GOP Senate caucus constitutes such a committed minority.

What the Democrats did in this case was allow a detachment of the Democratic caucus made up of members who, for whatever reason, don’t like the stimulus that much but who are willing to go along with it if they get something out of it to get together with a detachment of Republicans who don’t like the stimulus that much but who are willing to go along with it if they get something out of it.

What I’m hearing from a lot of liberals is that the Democrats should instead have forced the GOP into a game of chicken where we would have risked deep-sixing this stimulus bill on the theory that some Republicans would cave anyway, and that if they didn’t we could try to ram it through under budget rules. That may well have worked. But we can’t know. More importantly, OBAMA can’t know. And that’s why, obviously, he’s going to prefer this shitty compromise to a coordinated PR high-wire act that could doom his presidency if it were to fail.

The bottom line is that passing this bill strengthens (in this order) Obama, wishy-washy center-right pseudodemocrats like Ben Nelson, and wishy-washy center-right Republicans like Olympia Snowe. Is that a perfect outcome, even in political terms? Hell, no. But guess what? The people who have the power to decide what happens with this bill are Obama, wishy-washy center-right pseudodemocrats like Ben Nelson, and wishy-washy center-right Republicans like Olympia Snowe.

That’s life in 2009. To change it, we need a powerful Democratic President and more and better Democrats. Full stop.

I’m all for bringing this all up again when Nelson or any of the other “moderate” Dems are running in Democratic primaries down the road. They should of course face angry Democrats in those primaries, and if the Democrats of their states are angry enough, we’ll throw them out and get some real Democrats.

But right now, at least by all appearances, THIS fight is over. And we won. Let’s act like it.

Raul's Reflection #1

2009-01-21T10:05:00.000-08:00

To be thought of as a good man is no great feat. Simply ask the people you know what it is that they think a good man is like, and then be like that.

This requires no special talents or training, but there is one catch. Being consumed by your task of seeming to be good, you will of course never find any time to actually learn how to be good, much less practice what you have learned.

The Money and His Fool

2009-01-20T00:00:00.000-08:00

---------------
The Money and His Fool

by Raul Groom

January 20th, 2009
Richmond, Va

Parting is all we know of heaven and all we need to know of hell. ~Emily Dickinson, "Parting"

Staring at this passage on a cold black night, with the frozen void yawning menacingly above me, I find it hard to believe the words were not written specifically to describe the retirement of the forty-third President of the United States. George W. Bush departs the White House to the same cheers that greet a used-up third-year NFL quarterback in a big-market city like Miami or LA as he's carried to the sideline on a stretcher, his brain quivering spasmodically from the one final hit that ended his brief, unremarkable run at the top of the world. The cheers denote neither appreciation for the man's service nor glee at his demise. The people cheer for no other reason than that the backup is coming in. Someone else is finally in charge.

Inside each fan's lusty yawp of exaltation is a kernel of melancholy, of recognition that something has gone terribly wrong and cannot be put right. A franchise, a city, a people have been driven into catastrophe and ruin for no other reason than that they chose as their leader a man who was not up to the task. One inept person brought low a great machine that had, once upon a time, seemed poised to roll over the world and every damn thing in it.

"The fool and his money are soon parted," it is said. Perhaps in simpler times the equation was so straightforward. In George W. Bush's last wild days as our lame-duck president, we are seeing what happens when the money is parted from its fool.

No president, it should be admitted, controls the economy. High finance is a strange beast, and in a panic any economy, even a well-run one, can founder upon the rocks of uncertainty and fraud. Yet we have seen enough even at this early date to say that the state we find our economy in now is a direct and indeed predictable result of years of happy talk and easy money allowing the wise old men to pretend that the worst, most feckless presidency of all time would have no consequences.

Call it the housing bubble, call it the Bush Bubble, call it what you like - it has burst. The so-called "real economy" lurches to a halt even as the virtual economic wizards unfreeze the credit markets they themselves froze up, with the government picking up the tab for their tireless service of the national interest. Great American retailers run aground so abruptly and completely that major newspapers run well-sourced articles within weeks detailing the degree to which everyone knew all along that the company sucked eggs and could never reform.

It turns out eight years of laughing at the daily spectacle of a glaringly unfit man signing off on every major decision made by the richest, most powerful country in the world has a cost. Fortunately for the Bushes, as always, it is not they who will bear the direct brunt of their profligacy. Instead the grateful taxpayers will bear it, for after all it was their money Bush tirelessly safeguarded by lowering nominal income tax rates. The devoted soldiers will bear it, too, for after all it was their interests Bush zealously represented by making sure that the giant wars where they bleed and die can never end. And the nameless dead will bear it most of all, men and women and children across the world, for after all they can't complain.

The Boy King stands tonight, for one last night, at the head of the most successful political dynasty in American history. Upon the railways of their ancestors the Bush Boys - Jeb, George W., and the old man - did build this endless croaking machine of death and terror that has ruled us for as long as anyone can remember. One would imagine, looking at the wide expanse of history, that it would rule us still tomorrow. But it is not to be.

In the end, one flaw held back Samuel P. Bush's generations-long plan for impenetrable military hegemony over the destiny of the free world. His line could not overcome its own genetics, siring an increasing cacophony of shockingly inarticulate winos with no business running a diner in Connecticut, and culminating in the elevation - to the Presidency of the United States, no less - of the greatest fool ever to set foot on the American political stage.

It is here, at the moment of Bush's elevation to the presidency, that history begins to look a bit murky. Beginning with Bush's highly unusual and unconvincing declaration of victory after the 2000 election, the journalistic record loses whatever tenuous grasp on reality it enjoyed before that moment. Bush's wizardry with the press - unusual, to say the least, for a man with no verbal skills of any kind - was once regularly discussed with great wonder by the enormous glowing heads that invade American television every Sunday like an absurd bloviating platoon of coiffed marines.

It is only now, looking back at his record from a slightly wider angle, that we get a clear sense of why it has been so difficult to record with any true vision the years in which Bush has been President. Bush destroyed the old hoary scold of investigative journalism, much as Nixon had tried and failed to do, by being so awful that he could not usefully be described in any objective way.

Certainly no article that appears on Bush's last day in office in any respectable print daily will include a serious accounting of Bush's ignoble feats these last eight years. It is impossible to provide a balanced view of a record that appears as a Jamaican slum would appear if it were plopped down at the doorstep of a great American city, his achievements an absurd and pathetic shanty town in the shadow of the vast panoramic skyline of his towering failures.

You and I, of course, are bound by none of the strictures of reasonable commentary. We can be serious. The record shows that Bush has started two wars and achieved not a single publicly stated prewar goal in either conflict. Troops remain in harm's way with no timeline for withdrawal. Uncounted thousands lie dead in the streets, casualties of American bombs, American guns, and American stupidity in a region of the world already inclined to view Americans with suspicion before George W. Bush took office.

The record shows that Bush took office an unserious, inconsequential intellect and that he will exit it that way. Taken as folksy comic relief during the 2000 campaign against Al Gore, Bush's many weird verbal gaffes remain by far his most significant contribution to the annals of Presidential speech. His greatest moment in the national consciousness found him holding a bullhorn atop a pile of rubble that used to be the World Trade Center, yet a cursory review of the audiotape reveals that not only did Bush not say anything noteworthy that day, he couldn't even figure out how to work the bullhorn.

Indeed, the record shows that Bush failed to handle any of the major crises of his Presidency with any visible aplomb, and that no management decision he ever made can be credibly said to have done anyone but himself a lick of good. When the Enron funny-money machine that had bankrolled his Texas political career collapsed in a puff of smoke, he couldn't figure out what to do, so he just stopped returning his former benefactors' calls. When the top federal law enforcement agencies approached him with credible evidence that terrorists were plotting a strike inside the United States, he let John Ashcroft push ahead with his plan to crack down on Internet porn.

When a terrorist network holed up on the Afghanistan/Pakistan border turned out to be tough to pin down and eliminate, Bush let the old, crazy Reaganites running the Pentagon talk him into invading Iraq on the pretext that Saddam was reconstituting weapons of mass destruction. Bush avoided any conflict this fanciful notion had with the information-gathering being done done by his own intelligence services by simply declining to read any of their reports.

When a hurricane devastated a major American city, Bush spent the first few days blaming the city's problems on the mayor, then flew into town just long enough to give a reassuring speech about rebuilding. Eventually, of course, he let the federal reconstruction effort die on the vine. Bush reflected on that incident recently when asked if he made any mistakes during his Presidency - he lingered particularly over the question of whether perhaps an earlier and more forceful empty, punchless gesture of support by the most powerful man in the world would have made for better television.

The record shows that through it all Bush remained a hero in the eyes of the press, until six years into his rule things hit an unexpected bump. Democrats took control of both houses of Congress in a historic bloodbath for the governing party. The daily carnival that is American news does make its money off the fortunes of wimps and losers, and at this defeat the bloom finally began to fade and tumble from George W. Bush's rose. In the light of this dawn of renewed press skepticism of our Commander in Chief, some cracks were revealed in the foundation of Bushism. People in the US, it turned out, were not particularly impressed with the worst president of all time.

The record shows that from the ashes of Bush's legend arose an electoral landscape so toxic to Republicans that a wise old avuncular war hero with a triple-digit approval rating among TV pundits went on to lose the Presidency to a black man from Chicago named Barack Hussein Obama, and the election was such a blowout that Minnesota mistakenly elected a beloved comedian to the United States Senate for the simple reason that he was not a big fat Republican idiot.

It is this aspect of Bush's legacy that can produce in even his most ardent detractors at least some glint of appreciation and respect. George W. Bush's last jest as our King Fool is this one - having crudely blundered away a century of shrewd tactics and meticulous planning by the architects of the greatest Machiavellian conspiracy of all time, Bush now takes aim at the very plutocratic power structure that made it all possible in the first place. To put it plainly, Samuel P. Bush's war machine would be rolling through Asia by now had its stewards not given the keys to their late patriarch's idiot inbred great-grandson, whose useless head manifests no more sense than those lifeless grinning skulls within the family's whitewashed mausoleum.

Bush's guilt is indisputable, his culpability limitless. No punishment could exceed the horror of his crimes - even a deranged rant such as this one leaves so many of his misadventures on the cutting room floor. Torture, rampant spying on American citizens, crumbling national infrastructure; none make the cut. To even scratch the surface of Bush's many assaults on decency and goodness is to begin a book of many volumes, whose completion is in the dim and hazy future.

Yet if there is still, at long last, anything that remains high and fine about the American experiment, it is that while we ridicule our failed tinpot dictators into obscurity and humiliation, while we blacklist them from every respectable discussion and remember their toadying visages only in stock footage running over somber documentary montages about abuse of power, whlie we despise them unto death. . . we do not hang them.

Bush will live out his days. We, his subjects for eight years, owe him nothing more, but we owe him that. He was, as they say, the President. George W. Bush 's ancestors, thanks to him, will one day be forgotten. His children, no thanks to him, will one day be forgiven. But the man himself will rot in hell forever. What he did not kill he ruined, and what he did not ruin, he cheapened. He was the worst kind of hack and the vilest brainless monster any of us has ever seen.

He will not be missed.

Newspeak of the Week - Conservative Firebrand

2008-12-10T11:14:00.000-08:00

A conservative firebrand is someone who is always willing to speak out against the powerful - on behalf of people who are even more powerful.

How to Read a Windows Registry

2008-12-05T10:11:00.000-08:00

The main challenge when reading the Windows registry is telling the difference between useful keys and malware and bloatware keys that can be - and should be - safely removed.

I have developed an easy system for making this judgment. If you are not sure whether a key is something useful or something that shouldn't be there, delete it! Then reboot and check the registry for that key. If it comes back, it shouldn't be there. If it doesn't come back, it's a useful key.

Amanda Marcotte - Misogynist!

2008-12-02T18:35:00.001-08:00

Ok, not really. But it's a very rare occasion that I get to call out one of my favorite feminist bloggers for underreacting to a feminist outrage. I am, after all, a dude.

However Amanda M rushed through her viewing of this amazing music video:

and she has this thing completely backwards.

Amanda M writes on Pandagon:

The song leaves me cold (I was amused to read that Ben Folds produced it, and then congratulated myself for relatively consistent taste), but the video is pretty looking, and owes a lot to the creepy scenes with the Master of Ceremonies in “Cabaret”.* It seems like the least controversial thing ever.

Differences of taste aside (this is one of the best songs I've heard in a LONG time, though I will admit the production on the vocals is a bit grating and hard to understand on first listen), this song is not "controversial" so much as it is intentionally horrifying and disgusting to record executives.

It's a song, basically, about the clash between the consumerist male fans that her label wants to attract, and her core of female fans, the "Expert Double X's." Note the headbanging-blonde nod to Smells Like Teen Spirit at the end, another breakout single that decried the corruption - by violent, uncomprehending brutes - of the community that had sprung up around the band.

At the end of this video, the men who symbolize the label's target market are moved to violence by the spectacle of the cabaret show they are witnessing, which violence escalates into a full-scale saturnalia of food throwing (a reference to the last scene of "Bugsy Malone," itself another dig at the scarf-wearing kid gangsters in the US and UK where she performs), and sexual conquest (including a release of repressed homoerotic energy as is common at gatherings of violent homobigot thugs).

In the end the cabaret troupe is destroyed by infighting while the spectators are all slain by the monstrous, useless rabble the band's success has unleashed upon them.

So, you could imagine how the label execs might be rubbed the wrong way. But of course to actually vocalize the source of their dismay, they would have to A)confront the very assumptions that make them record execs in the first place and B)give enough of a shit about the music itself to actually listen to it enough to figure out what the hell it's saying.

Instead, they decided to go with "her tummy is uncommercial."

Honestly, it's one of the most unusual and darkly hilarious examples of record company ignorance - and impotence, given that she split from them over the incident and they will now not even get to reap the financial rewards of her almost inevitable success as a solo artist - that I've ever seen.

Bravo to Amanda Palmer for recording this song. The world needed to see what the record industry is really like.

NewSpeak of the Week: Democracy

2008-11-29T10:54:00.000-08:00

Democracy: Government by the people of rich nations, for the rich of any nation, of the people of poor nations.

Afghanistan War - Still Awesome!

2008-11-25T16:54:00.001-08:00

Illuminating article on The Awesome War of Good Neighborliness, our righteous and wonderful invasion of Afghanistan.

It's still pretty much assumed that only crazy people opposed the Afghanistan invasion. After all, it was so obviously necessary and good.

Yet the war has accomplished none of its objectives, and continues to do so. It killed an untold number of people, and continues to do so. It has created rising instability in nearby nuclear-armed countries, and continues to do so.

This is what awesome wars look like. Not like that shitty war in Iraq.

Maybe from this it begins to look less crazy that some of us tend to oppose even obviously awesome wars.

Bad Ideas are Good for You!

2008-11-19T11:40:00.000-08:00

In Blogistan there is much talk of the War of Ideas. Our mentality about certain aspects of the conversation is dominated by this metaphor of war. In some ways, the metaphor is apt, and useful for thinking about certain things.

We have to be careful, though, how literally we take the analogy. Ideas cannot fight each other as such. To the degree they do fight each other directly, they fight out in the world, as people try to implement them - good ideas succeed and propagate, while bad ideas fail and die out. That's closer to the idea of natural selection than war.

In mass media (including the Internet) ideas compete via the adversary system - certain people become advocates of certain ideas, and those people use various forms of leverage (rhetoric, market power, community-building, etc.) to advance their viewpoint.

The leap we often make, to the great detriment of our understanding of the dynamic power of the human mind, is to identify ourselves with the ideas we advance and defend, and our enemies with the ideas they advance and defend.

It's a natural enough tendency. The trouble is, people are large - they contain multitudes. Everyone has areas of their mind that function very well, and other areas of their mind that are underdeveloped and ineffective. Our good ideas come from the areas that work well, bad ideas from the less developed areas. The way you tell the difference is through a vigorous expression and defense of ALL your ideas, the good and the bad.

The trouble comes when people assign so much emotional weight to their ideas that they cannot accept that all their ideas might not be good. They become perceptively dead, spending all the energy that should be going towards development on defending their current view of the world.

Meanwhile their opponents see this and use it as an excuse to calcify their OWN opinions into beliefs - "if we are opposing THOSE people who are so obviously deluded and wrong, we must be right!"

Never forget that to whatever degree humankind can benefit from a true War of Ideas, it is a war that rages inside of the mind of the individual. If you cannot, at the end of a decade, look back over your life and survey a veritable wreckage of bankrupt thought and action, you have wasted ten years of your life.

Advance and defend your ideas unto their death, but no farther.

Staying Home

2008-11-18T10:55:00.000-08:00

I found this Yglesias post about the possible social effects of a prolonged economic downturn particularly interesting. As most of you probably know, I voluntarily left my career a year ago to become a stay-at-home parent/househusband. The reason it made a lot of sense is that my wife's income was vastly higher than mine, and secondarily because I do all the cooking anyway.

Despite the fact that there are quite a few households where the woman earns more money than the man, it's still quite rare, for cultural reasons, for the man to stay home. It's certainly possible that economic pressure may drive some change in this area, since two working parents of small children who have a big disparity in income can often realize an increase in their standard of living if the lower-earning partner stays home.

Such a shift would be good for me, since not only is it true that cultural baggage leads to fewer people doing it that way, the basic lack of stay-at-home dads makes being a stay-at-home dad a somewhat isolating experience.

I work, basically, in an all-female world. The men I meet are understandably wary of me because I spend a ton of time with their wives while they're at work, and to the degree that they want to befriend me it doesn't work very well because our schedules don't fit together. On the other side of the coin, when some moms from the preschool get together for 'girls night' they don't invite me, for obvious reasons.

I'm fortunate that I maintain some friendships with a group of mostly younger single guys, and I get together with them once or twice a week to drink beer and play cards and watch sports and play video games. But not everyone has that option - it's largely a luxury of men who live in the city they grew up in, as I do.

All in all, the work of stay-at-home parenting is very rewarding, but the social life that comes with the job is lonely and challenging, even treacherous. It seems likely that there will be some sort of tipping point where a significant enough increase in the rate of stay-at-home fatherhood leads to a social structure in the stay-at-home parent world that has more of a place carved out for men.

Until then, it must be said that for most men the job just isn't that appealing.

Anatomy of an Urban Myth

2008-11-17T11:52:00.000-08:00

Through the Internet, and specifically through the website Snopes.com, people have come to understand a lot better the general concept that stories that are claimed by many reasonable and otherwise trustworthy people to be true are nonetheless false.

I personally learned through Snopes many years ago that a story that I had actually propagated myself was in fact an urban myth. The way it happened is instructive.

One day I was sitting around in an apartment in college when my buddy Tony brought out a tin of cookies. He told a story about how his Mom had sent him these cookies that she had baked from a recipe his aunt had gotten via a long, involved story similar to the one that you can find at this Snopes page.

The cookies, as I recall, were extremely good, as the cookies represented in this story must be if the story is to be plausible. And I went around for quite some time, many years in fact, telling people that I had firsthand knowledge of the story's accuracy. That is, until in 2002 a kind friend pointed me to the aforementioned Snopes page. Ouch.

Of course, you can see pretty clearly in hindsight that what I actually had was fourth-hand knowledge (Tony's Aunt tells Tony's Mom who tells Tony who tells me) of a story I had made zero effort to verify. The reason I felt like I had firsthand knowledge is because I had tasted the cookies. But "I ate some awesome cookies!" is not evidence of anything.

In the case of cookies, these sorts of things are fairly harmless. But in the case of things like alleged Iranian arms smuggling, the consequences actually can be quite dire.

I happen, for whatever reason, to know a lot of people both IRL and via email/IM relationships who work, in some capacity, within the orbit of the Pentagon (in all but one case, it's as contractors, not actual Pentagon personnel.) A LARGE percentage of these people, more than half, have told me some sort of story about how they had firsthand knowledge of the accuracy of administration claims that the Iranian government was smuggling arms into Iraq in support of anti-American fighters there.

It's very frustrating to have these conversations because it's very difficult to find a gentle way of telling someone that despite the fact that I trust and respect them and don't actually think they are lying, nonetheless I give their anecdote zero value and continue to believe that the story their anecdote supports is in fact false.

But at the risk of reopening old wounds, folks, it just isn't the case that the Iranians have any significant role in supplying anti-American fighters in Iraq.

You can see in this article how well-meaning people, having come across some tantalizing-sounding (and, crucially, privileged) piece of data, would be eager to pass along their newfound "knowledge" to others. Obviously there were Iranian arms found in weapons caches used by Iraqi fighters. But without any detail or context, you simply can't draw meaningful conclusions about such information. It's less than useless because it's quasi-information that is nothing but an encouragement for everyone to leap to the same ill-supported conclusion all at once.

We got into Iraq just that way. We were fortunate we didn't get into Iran that way as well. "Data" is not the plural of "anecdote," even when the anecdote is about an official US enemy.

George Will is a Nincompoop

2008-11-14T08:31:00.000-08:00

Yglesias posted a little while back on a topic that I think is tangentially related to the discussion that Uncle Kevin, T and I were having on the previous two threads.

There's a whole genre of middlebrow conservative commentary that seems to be largely devoted to churning out windy blather meant to paint purely tactical political calculations as brave defenses of bedrock conservative principles.

This is no new phenomenon - the quotation "Politics is a strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles" is attributed to Ambrose Bierce well over 100 years ago, and the sentiment is probably as old as politics itself.

It's unusual and mildly humorous, though, the degree of transparency and lack of self-awareness evident when people like George Will pretend that, as Yglesias quotes: "[Mitch] McConnell opposes public financing of presidential campaigns on Jeffersonian grounds."

Look, I understand that part of a partisan commentator's job is to put things in a philosophical context. Liberals do that when we talk about the grand importance of counting every person's vote, making sure that everyone who has a right to vote is able to vote if they want to, etc. That's all fine.

If I write that the reason I want every vote counted in Decatur, Georgia because disfranchisement of blacks is a cancerous blight on our national honor, etc. etc., I'm being a good liberal commentator. If I pretend that's the reason that Jim Martin wants to make sure every vote is counted in Decatur, Georgia, I'm being a nincompoop.

Is Conservatism Obsolete?

2008-11-13T06:45:00.001-08:00

Uncle Kevin had a good point in comments:

You would think that at some point someone would notice that the liberals are guilty of excess and the conservative are guilty of abject failure. There is a difference. One needs moderation, the other needs elimination.

I'm sympathetic to that point of view. With regard to the Republican party in its current incarnation, and to Conservatism as a brand, there is a lot of truth to it.

I would caution that there is a real reason that conservatism (as opposed, for the purposes of this comment, to Conservatism) exists. When solutions are implemented, those solutions invariably have flaws. Those flaws alienate people.

Chuck Klosterman wrote a brilliant article about his quixotic opposition to instant replay review in sports where he says: "And the reason I am willing to overlook what's obvious is because I would rather understand an old problem than feel alienated by a flawed solution. Which, I suppose, is precisely what conservatism is."

That's exactly right, in my view. And there's nothing invalid about the basic sentiment "I realize the old way sucked, but I liked it better." I feel that way about the BCS, for example.

The problem, electorally speaking, for modern Republicans is that at this point there's very little for them to push back against other than extremely ephemeral cultural factors that are only loosely connected to public policy. The main liberal development of the last 30 years is incremental cultural acceptance of same-sex romantic entanglements. Other than that, liberals haven't really accomplished anything significant since the 1960's.

So what Conservatism is left with is a pastiche of unconnected resentments - armchair Cold Warriors still seething over the raw deal Nixon got, aging Wall Street wannabes still bent out of shape over imaginary welfare queens, repressed sex fiends pissed off that Clinton banged a bunch of chicks, etc. There's just no significant constituency anymore for rolling back Great Society programs or busting up the excesses of the New Deal.

I guess what I'm driving at is, we're on the precipice, barring an almost unthinkable catastrophe, of the next great series of liberal policy developments in American society. From those developments will likely spring a new generation of conservatives who didn't much like the way things turned out. That's inevitable, and it's the way things are supposed to work. It's just been so long that what was once honest conservatism has morphed into this ridiculous Conservative homunculus that has no real purpose other than keeping toads like Jim Gilmore in cheap suits.

I, for One, Welcome Our New Ant Overlords

2008-11-12T11:07:00.000-08:00

People seem to be talking past each other quite a bit on whether or not, as conventional wisdom would have it, the United States is a "center-right nation." The question is sort of clumsily put, but nonetheless there is a lot of pontification on the subject at the moment and people seem to be drawing contradictory conclusions.

One reason for this confusion is a common but little-known analytic effect that has to do with the coarseness or fineness of one's view of the situation.

It's important, first of all, to make it clear that when I say "coarse" and "fine" I'm speaking in a purely non-pejorative sense. "Coarse" does not mean "crude" here. Here's a broad example:

Imagine you were an alien trying to answer the question "what's Earth like?" The first thing you might do is look at the earth from very far away. This would give you the reasonable, correct impression that the Earth is mostly water, and that in general the Earth is dominated by marine activity - water plants, fish eating water plants, swimming predators, etc.

If you took a closer look and actually came down to Earth, though, you'd find that Earth also includes a vast, technologically developed species that lives entirely on land. You would probably conclude from this that Earth is best described in terms of the activity of human beings, despite the fact that this seems to contradict your previous evaluation.

If you took a still finer view of the situation, you would realize that in fact in terms of the sheer AMOUNT of activity the Earth is dominated by two species - ants on land and krill in the oceans. Of course at a microscopic level all this would be dwarfed by bacteria and protozoans...

Which one of these answers (if any) would be most useful to your imaginary alien species depends largely on the context - that is, WHY you wanted to know what the Earth was like. But regardless of which answer you decided was best, they are not contradictory in any meaningful sense. They are all true.

The same is true of "how conservative is the US electorate?" question. The coarsest possible way of investigating this question is perhaps "if you asked everyone in the US whether they are conservative, moderate, or liberal, how would they answer?" And in that case it's been true for many years that far more people would say they are conservative than would say they are liberal.

At a slightly finer level, you could look at people's voting patterns and assign their electoral choices "Left," "Right" and "Moderate" and see how they voted - that would probably reveal, in a sense by definition, that people are pretty evenly split between liberalism and conservatism.

Or you could go down much finer to an actual policy level and assign various policies a place on the political spectrum and see how much support they got. In this last case you would find that Americans are mostly wooly-headed leftists, because in general popular opinion is very supportive of government spending, non-interventionist foreign policy, and other things that are associated with the political left. Just about the only left/right policy question that consistently comes down on the conservative side is "do you want taxes to be higher?" and even then if you structure the question in a certain way ("do you want other people's taxes to be higher?") you get a "liberal" answer.

The funniest part about all of this is that it reveals perhaps the most mundane conclusion possible - that the most effective way to remain popular as a politician in the US is to be thought of as generally "conservative," be identified with whichever party is popular at the time, and to pursue generally liberal policies while keeping taxes low on the large majority of the population.

George W. Bush governed this way - and it worked in the sense that he got reelected. Unfortunately in the medium-term, all his policies turned out to be giant failures, so now he's really, really unpopular.

So in conclusion, you can see that in America you should get elected when your party is popular, then implement policies that work out well. Not exactly an earth-shattering conclusion.

Dreaming of the Mountain

2008-11-10T04:46:00.000-08:00

Last night I dreamed I was attending some seminar but when it let out I realized I had no way to get home. In the dream I lived in a place called Werth. I asked a middle-aged guy there how to get to Werth and he sort of looked at me skeptically and told me it was only about six miles but that "Rocky Mountain" was in the way.

I sat down on the curb and thought about what to do as darkness and cold descended to chase away the warm evening sunlight.

NFL Parlay Picker - Week 10

2008-11-09T07:24:00.000-08:00

I'm thoroughly tired of football; both my fantasy teams are skidding with Tony Romo out (I'm a combined 2-4 in my two leagues since Romo went out, after starting the season a combined 11-1), and rooting for the Browns is like being repeatedly kicked in the nuts by a karate master.

Even so, I feel an odd obligation to continue churning out 4-way parlay picks. So here goes, a last-minute entry for week 10:

ATLANTA -1 over New Orleans

New Orleans is one of the teams that moves sports commentators to engage in what Matt Yglesias once called (in the context of individual NBA players) as "The Consistency Fallacy." They look really good one week, then quite bad the next week. We often see this described as "the Saints need to find consistency from week to week." But really, all teams exhibit this sort of variance around their mean output. Absent some clear evidence that the Saints are exhibiting an UNUSUAL level of variance in their level of play from week to week, we're safe in concluding that a team like this is... an average team.

Meanwhile the Falcons are pretty good; their running game is awesome and their defense is good enough. Falcons grind out a clear but close win here.

EAGLES -3 over Giants

This is a weird-looking pick, because the Giants look consistently great while the Eagles are sort of hit-or-miss. But at home, badly needing a win, I think the Eagles will have a fairly easy time creating running lanes against a speedy but not especially powerful Giants front 7.

PITTSBURGH -3.5 over Colts

No idea why this line is so low. The Colts have looked TERRIBLE against good teams, with the exception of last week against New England where they just looked half-bad in a win. Hate to pick Pitt but this looks like easy money.

Green Bay -2.5 over MINNY

Old-school conventional wisdom says that a game like this is a clear-cut Minnesota win. A team that runs the ball very well and stops the run very well against a team that wants to pass and can't stop the run. But I have a feeling this is one of those games that goes the other way, on turf, midseason, lots of points and the game turns on a big mistake by a Minnesota QB in the fourth quarter.

Plus I can't bring myself to parlay FOUR home faves against each other. Seems like death.

In the Annals of Chutzpah..

2008-11-06T16:03:00.000-08:00

... surely John Boehner will have his own chapter.

Today Boehner released a statement assailing a president-elect Obama for his choice of Chief of Staff on the grounds that the selection betrays a lack of bipartisan comity.

He also joins the legion of boneheads who have no idea what the word "ironic" means.

I Propose Free Wine!!!

2008-11-05T19:18:00.000-08:00

A few Democratic bloggers have magnanimously pointed out that despite people's current conviction (which may well hold up on reflection, or it may not) that McCain ran an especially slimy campaign, he in fact did engage the public on a lot more substantive issues than Republican presidential candidates generally have in the modern era.

One substantive issue McCain brought up a lot was earmark spending. He often brought it up in the context of the federal budget and the deficit, and in this context Obama rightly pooh-poohed the idea that earmark spending is a significant part of the federal budget picture.

Even so, there is a significant issue there. The earmark system DOES invite corruption, and it almost guarantees that the dollars are not being spent entirely on things that are truly in the national interest. That's not really a controversial point. The problem is, what do we do about it? Answering THAT question is the thorny part, and McCain never made a serious effort during the campaign to provide that answer.

In my view, the main root of the earmark spending system is the difference in financing structure between the federal budget and state budgets - namely that the federal budget can meet its general budget obligations by borrowing money from the private sector, while state governments are usually prohibited from doing so. The inability to borrow money creates a slightly perverse incentive structure in state governments with regard to certain types of expenditures.

Put a bit more simply, imagine you're running the government of, say, Montana, and you learn that there's some rare goat that's going to die out if you don't build a retaining wall along the edge of some canal somewhere. Not being a goat-hater, you'll probably want to do something about it. But if you have a budget shortfall and there is a decision about whether to cut the goat wall or lay off some police officers, well, bye bye Mr. Goat.

So in theory that's why we have earmark spending. In such an instance, the Governor of Montana goes to the senior senator from Montana and he says "dude, you gotta get me a half million dollars for this goat wall." The senator goes through the process needed to insert the goat wall money into a budget bill and eventually the goat wall gets built and the goats are saved.

Of course in this instance I've chosen to spend the imaginary money on something that could reasonably be construed as being in the national interest - saving a rare subspecies of goat. In reality, a lot of earmark spending cannot reasonably be construed that way. The "Bridge to Nowhere" in Alaska is a famous example - it was purely a giveaway to Alaskan construction companies.

The problem is, no matter how much people may hate the idea that their tax money is going to some sweetheart construction deal in the middle of the wilderness, there's not a lot they can do about it. The only people who really have control over the process are getting much more benefit out of it (in terms of financial benefit to their state economy) than they are giving away (in terms of the impact on the federal tax rates of their constituents: essentially none), which means that all the decision-makers are essentially in a room together going

Governor: I propose free wine!
Senator: I second!
Governor: All in favor?
Both: AYE!

One big solution that's often proposed for this is the so-called Line Item Veto. This would allow the president to veto individual spending projects that he or she deemed to be not in the national interest. The problem with that solution is that it just paints another layer of politics over the process. The president is no more likely, in actual practice, to use his power responsibly than a senator or congressperson, especially given our Electoral College system that establishes a handful of states as "battlegrounds" where presidents must curry favor if they hope to be reelected.

Another solution would be some sort of nonpartisan review board to review earmark spending to determine if it serves a legitimate purpose, and ensure that the process of disbursing the money is fair. That sounds reasonable enough to me in the abstract, but one would imagine it would be a nonstarter with the vast majority of congresspeople, since it would reduce their power to please their constituents.

I'd be interested to hear from anybody who has ideas on this topic. I imagine there must be some innovative stuff out there regarding how to see that earmark spending becomes fairer and more effective dollar-for-dollar. I just don't know what it is, or where to find it.

At a Loss

2008-11-05T06:17:00.000-08:00

I feel I should make a post about how I feel today, but I'm not feeling too eloquent. I did look back at something I wrote before the 2004 election, when I thought Kerry was going to win. Some of it is funny and still kind of apt. I don't mean for it to be a buzzkill - Raul Groom is intended to be taken with a large pillar of salt, after all.

The coming years are not going to be as much fun as we like to think. There will be no wild bacchanals where we trumpet the rolling back of the army of repressed sex fiends and psychopaths who have hounded us for as long as we can remember, and probably longer than that. Jim Morrison will not rise from the grave to proclaim the Age of the Lizard, and there will be no National Catharsis Booth where you can line up and pay $6.50 to kick George W. Bush squarely in the nads as many times as you can afford. But while it pains me to say it, alas, all of this may be A Good Thing.

Not that such shenanigans wouldn't make for a rollicking good Saturday afternoon, mind you. I can think of few things more potentially satisfying than to tie up John Ashcroft and force him to watch as I rolled the pages of the King James Bible, one by one, into huge bomber joints and chain-smoked them until he passed out from the contact buzz or I had burned all the way down through the Book of Job, whichever came first.

But despite what TV and the Ghost of Ronnie Ray-Gun would love for us to believe, life is not about wandering cheerily from one manufactured diversion to the next, sipping chardonnay and toasting the good health of our partners in conspicuous consumption. Life is work, a raging, roiling sea of work, and we take our pleasures where we can, in between turns in the field plowing and thinking of the Seventh Generation. The other option is to sit, drunk and bloated at sowing time, in the hopes of reaping what we do not sow, and if you leaf very far into good King James' Double Wide Rolling Papers, you'll find out what happens to swine like that in the end.

Voter ID

2008-11-03T16:08:00.000-08:00

I've mostly suspended posting because I'm deathly afraid I will write something stupid that will jinx Obama and lead to four more years of McSame.

However, I got into a bit of a dustup with some friends over voter ID requirements and I wanted to put out a PSA because there's a massive amount of confusion about them.

Prior to the 2000 election, in almost all cases the procedure for voting was that you walk into your polling place, find your name on the rolls, sign the blank that says "I'm me!" and vote.

After the 2000 election, which of course was rife with problems, Congress passed the Help America Vote Act, a portion of which was designed to standardize and modernize elections to avoid the "butterfly ballot" problems that depressed the Gore vote in Florida and eventually led to the inauguration of George W. Bush.

Unfortunately another portion of HAVA was an attempt by Republicans to get the camel's nose under the tent on Voter ID laws. Federal law now states that the FIRST time you register to vote in a federal election you must provide identification to the registrar, and if you don't you are then required to show ID at the polling place.

That's all the federal law says. If you are not voting for the first time, or if you provided a photo ID at the time of registration, you can still vote the old way - walk in, sign the box that says "I'm me!" and walk into the voting booth and cast a normal ballot.

On the matter of STATE law, there are some states where this is no longer the case. In most cases the ID requirements are superbroad, allowing virtually anything that could remotely be construed as ID, such as a utility bill or a bank statement, but of course if you live in one of those states you should check the state government's webpage for a list of acceptable ID.

The following states require a voter to present SOME form of identification, but do not require a picture ID, and require voters not showing any ID to vote via provisional ballot:

Alabama
Alaska
Arizona
Colorado
Montana
Ohio
South Carolina
Washington (State)

There are two states that have ironclad PICTURE ID requirements: Indiana and Georgia. Both allow provisional ballots to be cast by people without ID, but in Georgia you must provide a photo ID to the registrar within two days of the election.

In Florida, the law is weird and arcane and despite the fact that based on my reading of the law you don't have to show ID, I recommend that Florida voters just cave and show ID.

In all other states, you can still vote the old way. Although many states (including my state of Virginia) have laws allowing poll workers to request identification, you can refuse to provide photo ID and just sign the box that says "I'm me!" The only circumstance in which this is not advisable is if you are, in fact, someone else.

People ask me a lot "Why is this so important to you?" Well, there are a lot of reasons. The most important is probably just that I think proper administration of voting procedures are important to democracy and I chafe when somebody tells me I have to do something that is not, in fact, required of me.

The second, perhaps more substantive reason, is that I think the end effect of HAVA and other provisions allowing poll workers to ask for ID is that a generation from now, someone will propose a federal ID law and people will not resist it because they will think "I thought that's the way it already was!"

As for WHY I don't like voter ID laws, those arguments have been made at length elsewhere and I'd be happy to have a discussion on that another time. For now, let me announce again that I, a Virginia voter who has voted before in a federal election, I will not be showing ID at the polls. If you live in one of the states that allows you to vote by normal ballot, and you oppose voter ID laws as I do, I invite you to exercise your rights and do the same.

For everyone else, just show ID! Your poll workers will appreciate that you aren't like that annoying dude with the silly T-shirts.

NFL Parlay Picker - Week 9

2008-11-02T08:08:00.000-08:00

BROWNS -1.5 over Ravens. Because the world is not so evil that the Browns will be swept by the Ravens.

RAMS +3 over Arizona. Because I've been saying Arizona is overrated and it keeps burning me, to the point where my instinct is now to pick against them. And my instincts are always wrong.

Green Bay +4 over TITANS. Because the Titans have to lose sometime.

DENVER -3.5 over Dolphins. Because it's at Mile-High.

McCain's Name Nowhere to be Seen at Palin Rally

2008-11-02T06:45:00.000-08:00

They say that history repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce. So my question is, when did the McCain/Palin campaign happen the first time?

The other sign handed out to supporters read “Florida is Palin Country,” but those signs were neither paid for by the Republican National Committee nor the McCain campaign. In small print, the signs were stamped with the line “Paid for and authorized by Putnam for Congress" — as in, the re-election campaign of Florida congressman Adam Putnam, whose district skirts Polk City.

Palin/Putnam 2012!

What Studs Terkel Meant to Me

2008-11-01T16:53:00.000-07:00

I would love to be able to profess a greater familiarity with Studs Terkel than is actually the case. I have been exposed to him to the degree that probably most people have - I have picked up his work from time to time, enjoyed it, and moved on. I never bothered to make a considered study of the man during the portion of his life that overlapped mine. Now, he is gone. I have no easy explanation for the effect that hearing of his death had on me. Studs Terkel was, I now know, an important part of my life.

It was Hunter S. Thompson who made me want to write to begin with. But the Good Doctor made me want to write about a life that never existed; a parody of a bent and dangerous ethos that in reality I left behind long ago, and which was mostly an act to begin with.

Studs Terkel made me want to live life and copy it down as best I could. He reminded me that in the details of my small and meager existence there is monumental truth and joy that passes through me and into the lives of everyone arund me, weaving us all into the great web of history that sustains the human experiment against the howling winds of evolutionary oblivion.

Studs Terkel made me proud to be myself. For that I will remember him until I, too, have gone from this life. I hope that by then someone can say the same of me.

GI Joe is a Communist!

2008-10-31T22:00:00.000-07:00

This Ezra Klein article caught my eye yesterday, but with all my various Halloween responsibilities I wasn't able to blog about it until this morning. The point in the linked article I was most interested in was this bit:

"Interestingly, self-identified conservative officers often supplied moderate responses when asked about spending on Social Security, health care, and education."

The reason this caught my eye is because it reminded me of a point often made by Stan Goff, the retired Special Forces officer turned radical author and activist. Goff argues in his book Full Spectrum Disorder that contrary to conventional leftist belief, the military is a fertile ground for ideas about restructuring of the domestic economic framework because the military is essentially a socialist collective.

I've always felt conflicted about this; though I'm certainly a socialist, I'm not sure I think that a socialist democracy based on a military model of socioeconomic organization is necessarily the type of socialist democracy I'd want to live in.

In any case, here is some evidence that what Goff is saying may in fact be true. The whole article is interesting; I recommend it.

The American Prospect's Election Night Guide

2008-10-31T18:48:00.000-07:00

I found this to be kind of cool.

Some of it is just silly:

"Vigo County, Indiana: This county, which includes the city of Terre Haute, has correctly predicted the winner of the national election every year since 1960."

This is fairly meaningless; there are enough counties in the US that you can find counties whose voting patterns seem to "predict" the ups and downs of the stock market, but if you tried to trade on that information you would lose money. Using historical results that way is called "trending" and it's completely invalid.

However, there's a lot of good stuff in here including a rundown of some competitive House races. This is a great Playbill for political junkies planning election night parties.

Of Course Not!

2008-10-31T05:25:00.000-07:00

This audio clip (YouTubed because I couldn't embed the NPR audio) is pretty amazing:

The context here is that Eagleburger was sent on NPR by the McCain campaign to make the case that McCain should be president. You can hear in his voice that he's struggling with how to deal with the question of whether he thinks Palin is prepared to be president, and for a moment he tries to stop himself. But in the end, he can't think of anything else to say besides "of course not."

One thing this demonstrates is the fact that like Bush, McCain tends to select people for jobs based on how much he trusts them rather than whether he has any reason to believe it's the right person for the job. McCain's campaign is flagging, but it's not as if there's no one in the known universe who is still willing to go on NPR and say "McCain is awesome and so is Sarah Palin!" In fact, it's entirely possible that Eagleburger was willing to do that.

Unlike Bush, McCain is not enough of a "political man" (to use Nixon's term) to make sure the people loyal to him to understand what it is he's asking them to do. That's something you can see with a person like Scott McClellan, who in hindsight we know had serious misgivings about how he was handling his job as press secretary. He wasn't totally comfortable saying the things he was saying, but the Bush people (and I understand Cheney may be an important piece of this; it's hard to know) made damn sure McClellan knew what his job was, and since he was loyal to the president, he did it.

Say what you will about Bush (and I have!), but the man has a head for politics and understands how to convert a team of loyal supporters into a coherent political strike force. With McCain you have a man who, like Bush, has no real interest in actually governing, but who has no real interest in campaigning either.

If I had to guess, I'd say McCain probably has been wishing for some time that someone else had won the GOP nom. His heart's not in this campaign, and the wheels are coming off.

So Many Silly Wingnuts, So Little Time

2008-10-30T13:00:00.001-07:00

I chuckled when I saw this next piece, because it actually occurred to me while I was Fisking the George Newman Op/Ed to wonder why the WSJ didn't just get a Club for Growth hack to put his name on the article instead of using some who-dat fake economist from the eighties.

In the end, I assumed that the WSJ had made a considered judgment that someone less tainted by past moronity would be a more credible messenger for their howling misstatements, but it was a bit strange - putting out ridiculous pseudoeconomic gobbledygook during election season is the Club for Growth's entire raison d'etre.

As it turns out, a more probable explanation is that the Club for Growth already had something in the works with the National Review, which appeared today in the form of an article by antigovernment maniac Pat Toomey.

To Fisk Toomey's article would be redundant - it's basically the same dick in a box with a different bow.

I was particularly tickled by this part, though (emphasis mine):

Hoover’s Revenue Act of 1932 raised the top marginal income tax rate from 25 percent to a whopping 63 percent and imposed new and increased excises taxes.

[...]

Obama has vowed to inflict much of the same damage.

Toomey is referring to Obama's plan to raise the top marginal income tax rate from 37.9 percent to 39.6 percent, an increase of 1.7 percentage points. Hoover raised the top marginal income tax rate by 38 percentage points.

These two acts are about as similar as drinking water from a drinking fountain and shooting yourself in the face with a fire hose.

Unreal America

2008-10-30T12:43:00.000-07:00

I really like the point Yglesias is making here. His longer post is interesting in its own right, but I'd boil the main idea down to this reminder:

To liberal white men like myself, McCain, Bush and Palin's "real Americans" business certainly is frustrating. We may even get angry about it. But it's also a laugh line. It's funny that McCain and Palin would try to imply that we're not real Americans and that our votes shouldn't count.

To black people, or to women, or to anybody whose history in this country includes a substantial period when they really weren't considered by law to be real Americans, and their votes really didn't count, well, it just isn't funny at all. In fact, it's irresponsible and disgusting and the GOP should take a lesson from this election and just stop it.

The rest of us, of course, should not hold our breath.

Obama Talks Cabinet

2008-10-30T10:43:00.000-07:00

Obama, when asked if he would appoint Republicans to serve in his cabinet, said that he would.

Chuck Hagel is mentioned specifically in the article; as I've said before I think he will probably be offered something. However, while I agree with Obama that "national security in particular should be nonpartisan" (quoting the NYT's paraphrase there), I don't think it makes sense, if you are going to replace Robert Gates immediately, for a Democrat to appoint a Republican to replace a Republican to head DoD. There are plenty of qualified Democrats.

As for the specific question of whether Gates should be kept on, I see the logic. But I also agree with Yglesias that the main question here is not whether Gates has done a good job but whether Gates would enthusiastically support Obama's plans for Iraq and Afghanistan. That's a call that Obama will have to make after sitting down with Gates and talking things over with him. Whatever Gates' qualifications for the job, if he's not willing to do what the President wants him to do, he's out.

And that's as it should be, partisanship aside.

McCain Trying to Win, or Just Manage His Defeat?

2008-10-30T08:51:00.000-07:00

I made repeated pledges after embarrassing myself in 2004 to never make sweeping predictions before an election. So far be it from me to say that this means that John McCain is going to lose.

However, I see no real way of interpreting the news that McCain is spending money on robocalls in Arizona except to say that he seems to be diverting at least some attention to the goal, not of winning the election, but of managing his defeat in such a way that the stench of defeat doesn't affect his electoral prospects in future statewide elections in Arizona.

As Yglesias has pointed out many times, even if current polls show the race close in Arizona, it makes no sense to spend money there because any election in which Arizona is close is an election in which Barack Obama is going to win by, like, a gajillion votes.

Meanness for Meanness' Sake

2008-10-30T07:33:00.000-07:00

This is an element of Bush-era Republican politics that I just don't get - freezing people out of campaign events because they aren't supporters.

I understand if you're very worried about protesters you want to be extra careful, and I also understand that you don't want your opponents' signs or apparel at your event. But when you're having an event at, say, Penn State, and the President of the university is a "big Democrat," the longstanding norm is that what you do is have him up on stage to wave at the crowd and then you make a little quip about how he's a Democrat but he's OK and he smiles and he leaves and yuk yuk yuk. The chances that the Penn State prez is going to scream "war criminal" or do anything to disrupt the event is just vanishingly remote.

The fact that McCain, and particularly Palin, are unable to bring themselves to observe these sorts of niceties suggests something very troubling and unstatespersonlike about their temperaments.

A Message for the Palin 2012 Exploratory Committee

2008-10-30T03:34:00.000-07:00

By now the blogosphere is abuzz with the news that Sarah Palin said she's interested in running for President in 2012.

She's surrounded, I think it's clear, by sycophants who are all convinced that she's the presumptive GOP nominee in 2012. And I think it will be easier for her to hear it first from someone like myself who, I think we can all agree, is not really a real American.

Ms. Palin:

You are currently involved in a campaign that has been, by any reasonable measure, a giant failure. A big reason for that failure is that the fundamentals of the election don't favor Republicans, but another important factor has been the seemingly endless string of monumental, boneheaded errors on the part of the guy at the top of the ticket, John McCain.

Yet among all those missteps, one stands out above all the others for its utterly inexplicable idiocy. It is, in a way, the gaffe from which all the other gafffes proceed.

Sarah Palin, YOU were that gaffe.

That is all.

George Newman: Assume a Can Opener

2008-10-29T11:28:00.000-07:00

Via Pandagon we find this wonderful article in the Wall Street Journal by George Newman. In the article, which is titled "The Markets are Weak Because the Candidates are Lousy," Newman throws the kitchen sink at his topic, bringing in a vast array of disparate arguments.

Unfortunately one thing Newman never gets around to is presenting even the tiniest shred of evidence that the article's titular contention, that the market is weak because the candidates are bad, is actually true.

Even so, the supporting points are ridiculous enough in their own right that I thought the article was in need of a thorough Fisking, so here goes. I'm going to paraphrase most of Newman's points because I want to be less likely to run afoul of fair use.

Investors have heard enough from both candidates in the last month or two to conclude that prospects for a flourishing, competitive, growing and reasonably free economy in a McCain administration are bad, and in an Obama administration far worse. (In fact, the market's bearish behavior over the last couple of months pretty closely tracks Barack Obama's gains.)

This is a good one. Newman doesn't present a graph or any actual data to support the idea that the market's bearish behavior closely tracks Obama's gains. I'm sure that a reasonable person could look at such a graph and conclude there was some relationship... but I have a feeling the graph would make pretty clear that the conventional wisdom, which holds that a tanking stock market tends to help the party not in control of the White House, is a lot more likely than Newman's apparent belief that the stock market is afraid of Barack Obama.

Anyway, that's as close as Newman ever gets to supporting his thesis that Obama's success is causing the market to tank. From here on, he figures we're all on board with this assumption and he begins to explain WHY the prospect of an Obama administration is causing your 401(k) to pull a Shrinky-Dink.

Claim #1: Obama will double the minimum wage and index it to inflation, causing inflation, unemployment, and loss of corporate profits.

Status: FALSE

Currently the federal minimum wage is $6.55 an hour. Due to legislation signed by President Bush, It's already scheduled to increase to $7.25 an hour in July of 2009. Obama's campaign has called for an increase to $9.50 an hour by 2011. For those without calculators, twice $6.55 (the minimum wage now) is $13.10. Twice $7.25 (what the minimum wage will be if Obama does nothing to raise the minimum wage) is $14.50.

Furthermore, as has been discussed on this blog several times, the idea that increasing the federal minimum wage would lead to big increases in unemployment is outdated. It is unlikely that increasing the minimum wage to $9.50 per hour would have any measurable, direct effect on the unemployment rate.

Claim #2: Obama will appoint a "militant labor boss" as head of the Dept of Labor, and outlaw a secret ballot in strike votes.

Status: Strangely, wildly and unnecessarily false

I searched around for a while to see if I could come up with someone who could plausibly be called a "militant labor boss" and who is also on the short list for Labor Secretary under Obama. My conclusion was that he must mean Richard Trumka, currently President of the AFL-CIO and Obama's presumptive Secretary of Labor. Trumka is a "militant labor boss" to whatever degree any union leader could be described that way - he made his name on the radical notion that a company that offered its employees pensions and health benefits as part of their compensation should have to pay its employees pensions and health benefits. So what Newman is really objecting to is that the Department of Labor would be headed by... a labor leader.

As for the "secret ballot" thing, I'm not sure why Newman characterized Obama's plans this way. No one wants to take away the secret ballot for strikes. There is a vibrant debate about whether it's desirable to switch away from the secret ballot method of actually organizing a union in the first place, but this controversy (known as 'card-check'" in shorthand) has nothing to do with strikes.

Claim #3: Obama will appoint George Soros to head the Treasury Department, and Soros will impose "double taxation" on multinational corporations that will cause them to flee the US.

Status: Unclear, and wildly unrealistic

How to set tax rules for corporations that operate in more than one country is an age-old problem, and new approaches are always being considered. In recent years the old conventional thinking that corporate income should not be taxed twice has come under some scrutiny, and there are other possible ways of calculating income for MNE's that would result in a higher effective tax rate. It's possible, though I'm not aware of it, that Soros has weighed in on some aspect of this question and `that's what Newman is referring to.`

The problem with all of this is that George Soros, a 78 year-old multibillionaire former hedge fund tycoon who spends almost all of his time overseas, has about as good a chance of becoming Obama's Treasury secretary as does George Newman.

Claim #4: Attorney General Charles Ogletree will spend a trillion dollars on slavery reparations.

Status: Ludicrously nonsensical

Of the claims we've reviewed so far, this one is, in a way, the closest to being true. It's at least remotely possible that Obama could appoint Charles Ogletree as Attorney General, and Ogletree has indeed opined in favor of slavery reparations.

Of course, as Attorney General, Ogletree's authority to "champion" budget outlays of any kind would be... none. So it's hard to see how his views on this topic are relevant, especially since, um, he hasn't been nominated to anything at all yet.

Claim #5: Obama will "virtual[ly] outlaw" arbitration, causing corporations to have to spend more money on legal bills and suffer the same terrible fate as the asbestos defendants.

Status: Mostly true

Hey, this one's pretty much correct! Newman is talking about something called "pre-dispute binding mandatory arbitration." If you look at your credit card application forms that you signed when you got your credit card, you will probably see a section dealing with PDBMA. What this section says is that if you have a dispute with the credit card company, you can't take them to court. Instead you enter a proceeding run by a company hired by the company you're in the dispute with, and you have to abide by their decision.

It's true that if this practice is outlawed, corporations will have to spend more in court fees.

None of this has anything do with asbestos.

Claim #6: Health and Human Services Secretary Hillary Clinton would, erm, wait a minute...

Status: Srsly?

Hillary Clinton, currently a United States Senator and recent runner-up for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination, will not be your next Secretary of HHS. I will not debate this.

Claim #7: Obama will create a cabinet-level position devoted to requiring companies to pay women equal pay for equal work, causing corporations to be forced to pay their female employees more.

Status: Hopefully true?

I'm skeptical this will really happen, but hey, here's hoping this is the nut and Newman is the blind squirrel.

Claim #8: Obama will impose a "windfall profits" tax on oil companies, leading to catastrophic results for "exploration, supply and prices."

Status: Categorically, 100% false

We'll work backwards here. The impact of a windfall profits tax on American oil companies on the price of oil would be... none. The impact of a windfall profits tax on the overall supply of oil would be... none. The impact of a past windfall profits tax on future decisions of oil companies to explore for oil would be... none.

Thanks for playing.

Claim #9: The nationalization of health insurance would force insurance companies to cover medical expenses that they currently don't cover.

Status: True

So, there's one terrible result Newman got right: Health insurance companies will lose profits because they will be forced to actually pay the claims that are submitted to them instead of rejecting them.

I'm suddenly rethinking my support of Obama.

Claim #10: Under Energy Czar Al Gore, five million high-paying union jobs will be created, thus destroying five million existing low-paying, nonunion jobs.

Status: Uh, what?

First of all, this is not how job creation works. Second of all, this is bad why? Oh, right, the deficit. Subsidizing those five million jobs will cost, like, tens of billions of dollars, according to these figures which I just made up.

Can't do that - we need that money to keep fighting in Iraq! My mistake.

Claim #11: There are many very serious people who believe the things that George Newman is saying.

Status: Sadly, no.

When you saw the name "George Newman" you probably thought, as any humble person would, "I don't know who that is because I don't keep up with economics closely enough to keep track of all the top minds in the field."

In fact, you have never heard of George Newman because no one has ever heard of George Newman. He's some guy with an MBA who used to be fairly big in the field of user satisfaction metrics, about 20 years ago.

I'd bet money that Newman didn't even write this; some right-wing think tank wrote it and shopped it around to all the academics they knew to see if they could get someone to put their name on it.

Apparently the biggest name they could get to attach his reputation to this nonsense was... George Newman. And maybe that's all you really needed to know.

Malkin Complains It All

2008-10-29T05:43:00.000-07:00

Allowing myself the slightest bit of premature schadenfreude, I headed over to Michelle Malkin's blog (no links to Malkin; if you are interested you can google her) to see what she and the rest of the unhinged wingnuttosphere were wailing about these days.

What I found was kind of interesting; she was complaining about slanted media coverage of the race. When I saw that I was kind of disappointed; after all, the press really is in the tank pretty seriously for Obama in this election. There are plenty of absurd examples of massively unprofessional conduct by the press corps in covering and especially commenting on the race. For example, to my mind McCain supporters were right to fret about Gwen Ifill's conflict of interest in moderating the POTUS debate when she had a book coming out in January with the word "Obama" in the title

Looking closer, though, it became clear that Malkin is not actually complaining about any of that stuff. She's complaining about stuff like this, in which the following chain of events transpired:

1) A source gave the LA Times a videotape asking that the LA Times report on the contents of the videotape, but not release the actual videotape.
2) The LA Times reported on the contents of the videotape, but did not release the actual videotape.

According to right-wingers, the LA Times knows that if a videotape of Barack Obama making some comments about someone that nobody has ever heard of were to see the light of day, his candidacy would suddenly be reduced to rubble. Even though it's known what was said on the tape, and has been known for months, it would still be explosive to actually witness Obama making the comments that no one gives a damn about.

I guess I understand the right's feelings of impotent rage; I felt that way about Bush for a while after November 2004. But that doesn't mean I can't think it's pretty hilarious.

Shooting People is Against the Law

2008-10-28T11:20:00.000-07:00

One of the few useful things I ever learned in a government class was that contrary to folk belief, it is usually a crime to do violence to someone even if they are committing a crime themselves.

There are a lot of people who think that if you were upstairs in your house and you saw someone walking across your front lawn with a TV that they just got done taking from your house, and you shot them in the back with a rifle, you would get some sort of medal.

In fact you would be charged with a felony, including perhaps attempted murder.

Apparently a certain fan of Mr. John McCain was absent that day.

Authorities in northeast Ohio say a teenager was shot and wounded by a man who said he wanted to stop the boy and another from taking his John McCain yard sign.

...

Local Republican and Democratic officials say campaign signs are disappearing frequently and people are frustrated.

Hey, I know the feeling. You know what I like to do when I'm frustrated? I like to play video game soccer! So if you're the type of person who likes to, say, shoot at teenagers when you're frustrated, allow me to suggest investing in an XBox and giving it a try my way.

Stevens Guilty

2008-10-27T13:21:00.001-07:00

Ted Stevens has been convicted on seven counts of filing false disclosure forms and faces up to 5 years in federal prison.

Anyone who still wants to bet Stevens to win, I'll give you +660. But I don't recommend it.

Whither the GOP Moderates?

2008-10-27T11:29:00.000-07:00

Yglesias takes a look at The New Yorker's Connie Brucker taking a look at the fact that Chuck Hagel no likey the Republicans too much anymore.

Hagel chose not to seek reelection to his Senate seat, so he's likely to be offered a job in an Obama administration, should Obama win the presidency. Colin Powell will be offered a job of some kind although since it would probably not be at the level of Sec of State he may choose to stay in the private sector.

It's too early to be counting money, since we haven't won anything yet, but it's worth noting that if the White House changes hands, the moderate Republicans who have been eating Karl Rove's shit for the last eight years are likely to defect.

McZogMentum!

2008-10-27T07:23:00.000-07:00

Lots of talk about how McCain is looking pretty good in the Zogby poll. I would say there's no reason to believe Zogby isn't right. But McCain is grasping a bit here.

Check out what Zogby actually said about his latest round of polls.

"McCain is well within striking distance in each of the six states in which he trails. None of Obama's leads are outside the margin of error. However, unless McCain can take one of the big states won by John Kerry in 2004, such as Pennsylvania, he needs to win these six states. He might be able to survive the loss of Nevada, but probably not any of the others."

I actually had a lot of fun over at 270towin.com trying to find ways for McCain to win the Presidency while losing one of those states. The closest I could come to something plausible was McCain somehow flipping Pennsylvania, where he is currently behind by double digits in every public poll, or Michigan, which would involve the old sitcom "Candidate Pulls Out of Race, Propelling Him to Victory!" twist.

So, um, yeah. Not over yet, but don't believe anyone who tells you the Zogby poll looks like good news for McCain.

NFL Parlay Picker - Week 8

2008-10-26T06:57:00.000-07:00

Another short one this week - worked last week.

Buffalo -1 over MIAMI
This smacks of Obvious Game, but so much so that I can't resist.

Atlanta +9.5 over PHILADELPHIA
I like the money line in this game. Odd line.

CAROLINA -4 over Arizona
Not buying the Cards against decent D's on the road.

Indianapolis +4.5 over TENNESSEE
Tennessee's got to lose sometime. This seems a good candidate. I actually picked this the opposite way, but upon writing the blurb I reversed it. Good times.

You Forgot Poland!!!

2008-10-24T19:56:00.000-07:00

Actually, I forgot Alaska.

Ted Stevens is many things. He is the longest-serving Republican currently in the Senate. He is a gigantic laughingstock on the Internet, the result of some unfortunate comments he made about the Internet being a series of tubes, which would occasionally become clogged, perhaps with trucks. He is a legendary appropriations force and was the muscle behind the infamous Bridge to Nowhere.

He is also massively corrupt, apparently, having concealed approximately a quarter million dollars worth of gifts he received from various power interests over the years. He is currently on trial on federal corruption charges, and this seems to be dampening his support in a state where he has never received less than two-thirds of the vote in any statewide general election.

Stevens should be toast, but the Alaskan Democratic Party is not replete with battle-hardened politicians. Instead it is replete with people like Mark Begich, the two-term mayor of Anchorage. Begich has been handed the race on a silver platter and will probably win it, but he'll be vulnerable in six years, to put it mildly.

Stevent +250

Rock Bottom

2008-10-24T11:52:00.000-07:00

Auguste and I have a bit of a joke where I IM him every week or so and say "I thought I couldn't be surprised by the awfulness of the lunatic right wing, but this is the worst thing I've ever heard of."

And every time, I really think it's the final time and I can't be surprised again. Yet when this story of the "Carved B" mugging came out, I was really sickened by the cynicism of the left, that so many of us were immediately calling the story a hoax when, to my mind, there was a good chance that some crazy mugger had actually done this.

As usual, I was wrong and the people who thought that there is no depth to which crazy right-wingers will not stoop were right.

This time is really the last time. Never again, Auguste! Never again will I be surprised. Until next week, I guess.

S&P Limited in Futures Rout

2008-10-24T04:35:00.000-07:00

There is a feature of electronic futures markets called a "limit-down" that dictates that certain indices are not permitted to fall beyond a certain point in overnight trading. This is sort of the financial equivalent of a circuit breaker tripping to avoid a fire.

The S&P 500 got down-limited last night.

Here's some advice - change your 401(k) password to something random, then forget it. You shouldn't be looking at it more often than once a quarter. Seriously.

Movement In Minnesota

2008-10-23T10:53:00.000-07:00

In the last three days, U of Wisconsin and the Minneapolis Star Tribune have both released polls that show Franken with a substantial lead over Norm Coleman. I'm still skeptical, but who am I to blow against the wind? Anyone who wanted to bet Franken should have done it yesterday.

Coleman +140

Eleventh-Hour Senate Roundup - New Hampshire

2008-10-22T12:04:00.000-07:00

In New Hampshire, John Sununu is contesting a rematch of his 2002 win over Jeanne Shaheen. Sununu got only 51% of the vote in an extremely heavy Republican year, so he was expected to be in trouble this time. And he is!

Shaheen has all but closed the deal in this one as she was able to successfully tie Sununu to George W. Bush. New Hampshire was the only state to "flip" from Bush in 2000 to Kerry in 2004, and of course Bush has only become less popular in the intervening four years.

Sununu +230

Eleventh-Hour Senate Roundup - North Carolina

2008-10-22T11:54:00.000-07:00

Finally, we get to the good stuff. Liddy Dole was once considered bulletproof, but she's been running consistently behind Kay Hagan and figures to be on her way out. It's not totally clear why Dole is vulnerable; she's a heavy hitter and has always been fairly popular in North Carolina, but her approval ratings have been declining this year and she hasn't cracked 50% approval in a while.

If McCain manages to right the ship and win NC by a large margin, Dole might be able to come back. But as of now she looks like she's done.

Dole +190

Eleventh-Hour Senate Roundup - Georgia

2008-10-22T11:44:00.000-07:00

Saxby Chambliss is arguably the worst legislator in the Senate. His positions on policy issues are the sort of frank boobery that you expect to hear from your drunk neighbor across the street, and he's the worst kind of Machiavellian viper there is.

All that said, it's Georgia, and Chambliss' meager poll showings are too good to be true, and Jim Martin is nobody to get excited about.

Chambliss -170.

Eleventh-Hour Senate Roundup - Kentucky

2008-10-22T11:35:00.000-07:00

Kentucky is probably the best example of the monumental trouble the GOP is in this cycle. Mitch McConnell has been in the Senate since 1985 and won reelection in 2002 by about a forty billion votes. He's also the Senate Minority Leader. In other words, he should be cruising to victory.

Instead, McConnell is locked in a tough fight with Bruce Lunsford, who's not even a particularly accomplished politician. For that reason, it seems likely that McConnell will close the deal, but his weakness is a sign of larger forces at work.

McConnell -220

Eleventh-Hour Senate Roundup - Mississippi

2008-10-22T11:28:00.000-07:00

The race between Ronnie Musgrove and Roger Wicker offers nothing for liberals to get excited about - Musgrove is your basic red-state pseudodemocrat. He was governor of Mississippi from 2000 to 2004 but lost his reelection bid after divorcing his first wife while in office.

Roger Wicker, who is technically the incumbent (having been appointed to Trent Lott's seat after Lott retired), is not a particularly distinguished candidate, but neither is Musgrove. The state favors Wicker and there's no real reason to think he'll blow it, although the race remains close.

Wicker -120

Eleventh-Hour Senate Roundup - Texas

2008-10-22T11:22:00.000-07:00

In deep-red Texas, John Cornyn shouldn't have any trouble retaining his seat, but for some reason he's having trouble shaking off a challenge from Rick Noriega, a career military man who is currently a member of the Texas House.

It's still hard to imagine Cornyn losing this one (the Texas Democratic party hasn't won anything significant in a long time), but it will be interesting to see what the DSCC decides to do here. If they keep putting money into the race they can probably keep it respectable, but they probably can't win.

I have Cornyn at about -470.

Eleventh-Hour Senate Roundup - Minnesota

2008-10-21T20:32:00.000-07:00

This race has arguably the best backstory of any race in recent memory. Al Franken was a close friend of the late Paul Wellstone, who died while campaigning for reelection in 2002.

Republicans, led by Rush Limbaugh with an assist from Fox News Channel, used misleading footage from Wellstone's funeral to create the false impression that the funeral had been used as a political rally. Public revulsion at the "politicization" of the popular Senator's funeral propelled Norm Coleman to victory over standin Democratic nominee Walter Mondale.

Franken was outraged by this turn of events, and made the incident the emotional centerpiece of his otherwise jocular 2003 book Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right. He then hatched plans to run for Coleman's seat in 2008.

Here we are, and it's been tough sledding for Franken. There are a bunch of candidates in the race, including Dean Barkley of the Independence Party, and Barkley is eating up about 18% of the vote in most polls, with Franken and Coleman splitting most of the remaining votes fairly evenly.

The optimist in me would love to say that if people are this close to accepting a comedian as their Senator, most of the work is already done. But Coleman's not unpopular enough that a loss makes a lot of sense here. Obama's up big in Minnesota which should help, but I've got Coleman -120 to retain his seat. Sorry, Al.

Eleventh-Hour Senate Roundup - Oregon

2008-10-21T20:17:00.001-07:00

In Oregon, Gordon Smith has been in the Senate for a little over a decade after taking over Republican Mark Hatfield's seat when he retired in 1996.

This race wasn't expected to be hot as Smith seemed to be pulling away when polls were taken in August, but Jeff Merkley closed the gap in September and two of three October polls show him with a small but significant lead (the third poll has him tied.)

It's an interesting race as Oregon is a quite polarized electorate, with liberal Democratic voters in the dense areas and conservative Republicans in the rural parts of the state. Gordon Smith is quite conservative and Merkley, currently the speaker of the Oregon House, would likely rate as more liberal than the median Democratic Senator, were he to win the race.

Obama's strength in Oregon is bad news for Smith, who is probably cooked. He's no better than +180 and that's likely generous. Merkley's been known to have his missteps, so it's not out of the question he could blow it, but Oregon should be rid of its last Republican holding statewide office come January.

Eleventh-Hour Senate Roundup - Republican Seats in Trouble

2008-10-21T07:30:00.000-07:00

So, previously we looked at 22 races that are clear holds - 10 for Republicans and 12 for Democrats. That means that there are 12 races that are either competitive or where a pickup by the opposing party is all but assured; all of them are for seats currently held by a Republican.

We'll start with the easy ones.

In Colorado, Mark Udall is running strong to take over for retiring Senator Wayne Allard.

In New Mexico, Tom Udall (no relation) is cruising to victory and will take over for Pete Domenici, who is retiring amidst allegations that he improperly pressured a US Attorney to bring frivolous vote fraud lawsuits on the eve of the 2006 midterm elections, eventually leading to the firing of said US Attorney after he refused to cave in to Domenici's pressure.

In Virginia, Mark Warner, a very popular Democratic ex-governor, is running against Jim Gilmore, a very unpopular Republican ex-governor. It's not clear why Gilmore bothered, unless he's just become a professional opponent like some punch-drunk palooka taking four-round beatings from hot prospects in return for meager paychecks.

So those three races represent a net gain of +3 for Democrats; that means that the worst-case scenario for Democrats is that they would
have 54 seats in the Senate as of January 2009. However, it's likely under that scenario that Joe Lieberman would be kicked out of the party, leaving the Democratic caucus at 53.

The other races warrant a more in-depth analysis, which I will get to in a series of posts later this evening.

Cheer Up the Poor, Sad Little Internet Poll

2008-10-21T06:53:00.001-07:00

Doing research for an upcoming post, I found this pathetic Zimbio poll asking people to predict the result of the Thad Cochran vs. Erik Fleming Senate race in Mississippi.

Though the poll is over a month old, I was apparently the first person to happen upon the page and vote. I found that to be incredibly sad. It reminded me of the end of AI where we see Teddy doomed to sit on the ocean floor with Cute Robot Kid until the end of time.

So go forth, readers, and vote! Make this poll's day!

Eleventh-Hour Senate Roundup - Incumbents & Holds

2008-10-21T06:20:00.000-07:00

In 2006 when I was still writing for Liberal Avenger I did a series handicapping the Senate races as we approached what turned out to be a Democratic takeover in both houses of Congress.

Having an infant in the house, I haven't had the time this year, but I wanted to run down what's going on in the various races at least once before the election, so people can get a clear idea of what's in play and what's not.

We'll start with the clear holds. There are eight races in which a Republican incumbent is cruising to reelection: Wyoming (John Barrasso), Kansas (Pat Roberts), Oklahoma (James Inhofe), Tennessee (Lamar Alexander), Alabama (Jeff Sessions), Mississippi (Thad Cochran) South Carolina (Lindsey Graham), and Maine (Susan Collins.) There are two races in which a Republican is running for a safe seat that's been vacated by another Republican. One is Idaho, where former governor Jim Risch is running for Larry "Wide Stance" Craig's open seat, and the other is Nebraska, where Mike Johanns is running to succeed the retiring Chuck Hagel.

There are twelve races in which Democratic incumbents are cruising to reelection: Montana (Max Baucus), South Dakota (Tim Johnson), Iowa (Tom Harken) Arkansas (Mark Pryor), Louisiana (Mary Landreiu), Illinois (Dick Durbin), Michigan (Carl Levin), West Virginia (Jay Rockefeller), Delaware (Joe Biden's expiring contract), New Jersey (Frank Lautenberg), Rhode Island (Jack Reed), and Massachusetts (John Kerry.)

Next, the competitive races...

All. Races. Tighten. (Long version)

2008-10-20T16:02:00.000-07:00

All. Races. Tighten. Here's One Reason Why.

It's a truism in politics that all races tighten, but the reasons why are not particularly well understood. Here's one possible reason - check out the "enthusiasm gap" portion of today's WaPo-ABC Tracker release:

Obama continues to benefit from an "enthusiasm gap," but McCain has narrowed the divide this week. 64 percent of Obama's backers are "very enthusiastic" about his candidacy; among McCain's, it's 40 percent (up from 31 percent before the final debate).

The release is obviously implying that there is some causative* link between the final debate and the change in the enthusiasm numbers, but I imagine that in any race with a big enthusiasm gap, the candidate with less enthusiasm probably enjoys a big bump in the final weeks of the campaign. Obviously you can be enthusiastic about canvassing, making phone calls, organizing, or any of the other fabulous things people do early in campaigns.

But if you're not one of the people who does these things (and most people don't) there is usually little reason to feel enthusiastic about a presidential candidate in September. Meanwhile, there's probably some hard limit to the number of people you can get to feel enthusiastic about a presidential election. Some people aren't turned on by politics in that way.

I would imagine Obama is close to his natural limit already - there's obviously been an unusual level of buzz about him for some time. Meanwhile a lot of McCain supporters are still feeling sluggish, but as the election approaches you expect more and more of them to move into the "excited" column as long as someone, somewhere is telling them that McCain has a shot to win.

Currently if you look at the poll weighting data (even that of Republican-leaning pollsters like Rasmussen,) it is expected that a large plurality of the voters who would show up to an election if it were held today are Democrats. Given Obama's giant lead on most questions dealing with both substantive issues and "character and values" questions, that means Obama will win - the primary reason most McCain voters are voting for McCain is because he's a Republican, and that reason doesn't hold a lot of sway with independent voters.

What McCain needs to tighten the race is for Republicans who don't currently plan to show up to vote to get excited about the race in the last two weeks. It's likely to happen. . . and if the trend on the enthusiasm question is real and not just statistical noise, it's already happening.

Stay vigilant - it ain't over.

NFL Parlay Picker - Week 7

2008-10-19T05:38:00.000-07:00

Short version today.

Tennessee -9 over KC - Big spread, but bigger problems for KC trying to move the ball against a d-line that outclasses their o=line so heavily.
GREEN BAY +1.5 over Indy - Suddenly Indy is favored against the Pack at Lambeau? Not so fast.
CAROLINA -3 over NewOrleans - New Orleans won't do enough against Carolina's quality D.
Cleveland +7.5 over WASHINGTON. Because I'm going to this game and we're going to win, goddammit!

UPDATE: I hit it, despite the fact that the Browns lost. So, every silver lining has a touch of grey, I guess.

Live From New York, It's, Er...

2008-10-16T07:18:00.000-07:00

As far as I can tell, this video is not intended as a parody of a horrible political ad.

Beyond that, I can't think of much else to say about it.

Yglesias Gets it Right

2008-10-15T15:54:00.000-07:00

Matthew Yglesias today makes an important but underappreciated point, namely that it's been known for some time that a lot of social dysfunction in the United States is related to our sky-high poverty rates.

A lot of right-wing commentary is devoted to pushing the thinly-veiled idea that poor Americans with certain ethnic backgrounds (that is, black and brown people) are inherently unworthy of a decent standard of living because they just aren't valuable enough members of society. In the end, though, that's a pretty bass-ackwards way of looking at things. We know that children who grow up in poverty are less likely to achieve in school or do any number of things that would put them in a position to contribute successfully to the economy.

So even if it were true, as white supremacists maintain, that American blacks will never be as successful per capitaas American whites because American whites are genetically superior, this still doesn't constitute a coherent reason not to try to eliminate poverty. It's a non-sequitor, quite apart from being ridiculous hate-based psudoscience with no grounding in objective fact.

Which leaves us to fall back on the more antiseptic, quasi-libertarian idea that the government shouldn't help people out of poverty because this constitutes stealing from rich people, which is immoral. But this only makes sense if you take a painfully static, short-run view of econonomic success. It may be true that raising taxes on a person who makes $250,000 per year puts that person in a worse financial situation next year, or for the next five years, or whatever.

But if a person making $250k/year pays a few extra thousand in taxes to support anti-poverty programs for a few years and this results in more effective schools (because poor kids are hard to educate), cleaner, safer cities (because poverty brings with it a lot of squatting, property crime, etc.) and lower health insurance premiums (because poor people get sick more), it's pretty easy to see that at a certain level of progressivity you can make sure that the welfare state actually provides pretty good value for the vast, vast majority of the population. It's still a bad deal for the odd super-rich person who never desires to visit anywhere that is currently beset by poverty-related problems, but for the other 99.9% of the population, anti-poverty programs are a much better value than most of the other roles of government.

A Few Thoughts on Derek Anderson

2008-10-15T08:04:00.001-07:00

Football folks, especially fantasy football folks, are now full of questions for Browns fans on the subject of our strange QB situation. The most common thing I'm hearing/being IMed is "so is DA good again now?"

This is a situation that happens with a lot of players, especially QB's, when they come into the league. They put up a couple of extraordinary performances, leading fans to believe "this guy is God." Then reality hits.

The truth is, even the best QB is going to have situations in which he's good, and situations in which he struggles. A consistent, high-quality player has few situations that bother him and lots that excite him. A lesser player has more of the former and fewer of the latter (that's tongue-twisty.)

Last year, Derek Anderson benefited from some key advantages. The two most important were:

1) Better than expected offensive line play

and

2) Low-quality opposing defenses.

These are two advantages that any quarterback would love to have. In Derek Anderson's case, they become even more important because of the type of QB that he is - a tall, athletically limited pocket passer with little game experience.

In the NFL, the quarterback position is particularly difficult because of the athletic abilities of defensive linemen. Imagine walking into a large ballroom and finding it packed with enormous, fantastically athletic men who can all easily outrun you AND outweigh you by 50+ pounds. Half of the men want to kill you, and the other half are going to try to get in their way for a few seconds first.

In the middle of the dance floor is a small object. Your task is to pick up this object, perform a short but technically tricky series of dance steps to wind up in a predetermined spot (that is, a spot where all those giants know in advance you are required to run to) then look around for an open area of the ballroom to toss the object.

Note that we've left out the element of actually completing passes. If you're an immobile QB, just the task of setting up is a tricky proposition, unless you have fantastic protection from the line. That's what DA got last season - both because his offensive line really was quite good and because most of the defenses the Browns faced were not that good.

Indeed, if you look at DA's signature performances last year, most of them came against struggling defenses. Cincinnati, St. Louis, Miami, Seattle, all had horrible defenses last year, and DA and his line were able to expose them.

This season, of course, the Browns play a slew of very good defenses - Steelers twice, Ravens twice, Eagles, Washington, Giants, Jags and Titans. Three of those games have already happened, and the Browns' offense has looked terrible in the first two (Ravens and Steelers) and exemplary in the third (Giants.)

The reason the Giants got handled so easily by the Browns is that while the Giants are a very good defense, by far their strongest unit is their defensive line, and the D-line was totally neutralized by the Browns O-line. Without penetration by the front four, the Giants defense lacks playmaking ability.

This week, playing at Washington, Anderson and the line get a big test. The Washington pass defense is pretty good, but they don't rely on a great pass rush to get it done - they are oriented more toward forcing incompletions than getting sacks (this is the modern Bill Belichick theory of pass defense, which evolved from the more pass rush-focused ideas of his predecessor Bill Parcells.)

That means Anderson will have to focus this week on something he traditionally hasn't been especially good at - going through progressions and making the easy throw to an open receiver rather than trying to muscle the ball into a small seam in coverage. If he has a couple of bad series, he can't get impatient - he has to stick to the game plan and trust that things will open up. If he forces the ball, the defense will pounce, and we'll be back to "Bad Derek" again.

If you look at the Vegas line, this matchup issue seems to be priced in - the Browns are considered a two-score underdog despite the great performance on Monday night. That's correct - DA still hasn't shown he can execute against solid defense.

All of which is a long way of saying I'd keep DA benched this week if you have a decent second option, but if he does manage to put up decent numbers in Washington, the sky's the limit the rest of the way.

NFL Parlay Picker - Week 6

2008-10-10T10:47:00.000-07:00

Identified five games I like this week, so the hard part was selecting 4.

I eventually decided not to select was Jax +3.5 over DENVER. It just felt odd picking 4 road teams, so I replaced it with Atlanta at home.

Another one I didn't select was Green Bay +1 over Seattle; I like the Pack a ton in this game and don't really understand the line. Betting public also likes GB in this game, so it's what's known as an Obvious Game. Stay away.

New England +5 over SAN DIEGO

I understand that New England is stumbling a bit, but let's not forget; this is still Belichick vs. Norv Turner.

Dallas -5 over ARIZONA

The Cowboys have been overpriced all season, but I like this one. Zona's not that good.

ATLANTA +3 over Chicago

I've been reluctant to accept that Michael Turner is for real, but I think this is the week that he proves it, at home against a tough Chicago D. UPDATE - Turner looked like garbage, actually, but Atlanta still won. WIN

Miami +3 over HOUSTON

It seems like Miami's horribleness last season is being priced in here. They are certainly good enough that they shouldn't be giving points to a winless team in week 6. UPDATE - Miami lost on a horrible defensive lapse at the end, but they covered when the Texans missed a 2PT conversion after the go-ahead TD. WIN

Saturday TARP Blogging

2008-10-04T06:15:00.000-07:00

I stuck the toddler in front of Monster's, Inc. this morning so that I could read the full text of the bill that has been approved by Congress and offer my readers (all five of you!) a basic summary. Trouble is, I can't seem to find a revised version. I understand the core of what's being done is the same as the old one but I'd like to see the new version. Anyone seen a PDF of the new bill?

NFL Parlay Picker - Week 5

2008-10-03T10:21:00.000-07:00

So, making picks this week was harder for me than in previous weeks; there are a ton of odd and unpredictable matchups. From now on the picks are in order from strongest to weakest.

Tennessee -1 over BALTIMORE
The Joe Flacco era continues, this time against the best all-around defense in the NFL. Good luck with that.

Washington +6 over PHILADELPHIA
Still no respect for the Skins, and as for the Eagles, they have no running game to speak of without a healthy Westbrook. How will they move the ball against a decent pass defense?

Tampa Bay +3 over DENVER
Am I backing Brian Griese at Mile High? Remind me why I'm doing that. Ah yes. The Broncos pass defense is so terrible they will make Brian Griese look like, well, like someone good. That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

Buffalo +1 over ARIZONA
Great matchup for the Bills. They have a very good pass defense, and they are playing a team that can't run it but throws it pretty well. Also Arizona's pass D is fairly bad, and their run D isn't anything to get excited about. Plus, betting against the Cardinals usually works out pretty good.

Fantastic Feat Day Accounting

2008-10-01T07:23:00.001-07:00

Yesterday was Fantastic Feat Day, a holiday observed by exactly one person.

To my mind, it has always seemed as if a lot of fantastic sports feats have occurred on September 30th. I've gone into some of them in previous posts, including the Greatest Fight of All Time, which occurred on September 30th, 1975 and which is commonly called the Thrilla in Manila.

On October 1st, for that reason, I like to do a roundup of the sports world and find out if anything interesting happened.

Unfortunately this year September 30th fell on a Tuesday after the end of the baseball season but before the start of the playoffs, so the pickings are slim. No boxing, no football, no baseball, no basketball. In fact there were very few sporting events of consequence at all yesterday.

So I guess this year was a bit of bust.

The Liquidity Crisis

2008-09-28T20:16:00.000-07:00

I realized after discussing the liquidity crisis today that I really hadn't read an explanation of the banking crisis that I thought was particularly good. Doesn't mean it isn't out there, but I hadn't seen it.

So, long story short, I gave it a crack. I'm no expert, but I have a basic undergrad background in economics and I think I basically get it. There are probably some details that I've screwed up so I welcome constructive/destructive criticism. If someone points out something substantive I can fix in the analysis, I will try to clean it up.

First, read this.

This page gives a good discussion of a liquidity crisis in corporate finance. A macroeconomic "high finance" liquidity crisis is essentially the same thing, only happening with large banks. As in everything in high finance, high-finance liquidity crises are more complex.

One key reason high-finance liquidity crises are much more complex and potentially disastrous than regular corporate liquidity crises is the meshed nature of the problem. When one big bank experiences a liquidity crisis, the bank seeks relief from its creditors in the same way a regular company would. But if the bank's creditors are close to a liquidity crunch themselves, they aren't really capable of making the calculation described in the linked example. The cost of forcing the illiquid firm into bankruptcy and allowing the illiquid firm to borrow additional money while you wait for them to shape up is the same - your own bank enters a liquidity crisis because you needed the cash from the illiquid firm to make your own debt payments.

Once this happens, the banking system has become a bag in search of a bagholder.

That bagholder in this case is the traditional banks, which are theoretically capable of absorbing the problem due to their tightly regulated debt-asset ratios that are much, much more favorable than those of the investment banks that are failing.

What Paulson and Bernanke are saying, and maybe they are right and maybe they are wrong, is that the traditional banking system may not actually be strong enough to absorb the fallout from a liquidity crisis that destroys the investment banking system.

If they ARE right, then it's correct for the government to step in, because the alternative is that they are on the hook as the bagholder for the ENTIRE banking system, unless they want to allow a whole hell of a lot of money to just disappear into thin air.

So that's the impetus for trying to bail out the entire investment banking system - because it's cheaper than bailing out the entire traditional banking system. Once again, of course Bernanke and Paulson could be wrong. But that's their argument, and at least in Bernanke's case he has no real personal stake in the call other than wanting to be right.

Now, that doesn't speak to HOW to step in. In fact, it doesn't even prove you SHOULD step in. There are other questions in that regard. One that's very important is "Is what we are doing going to work?"

On that I think there's great cause for skepticism. Even if Bernanke and Paulson think that there's very little reason to believe their plan will work, if they are worried that the banking system may fail they will obviously feel a strong subjective responsibility to try SOMETHING.

The Paulson plan does, on its face, make sense. If the investment banking system is failing, the problem is large but finite. All you have to do is provide enough liquidity to allow the failing firms to make it to the point where they've successfully taken enough of their "problem debtors" through the process described in the linked example that they've made it out clean on the other side.

The problem is, the original Paulson plan is not a particularly good deal for Treasury, because they are taking on a lot of risk and they aren't really on the hook to reap any windfall for that risk if the plan works and the banks recover. All they get in that case is the interest on the money they loaned out (which isn't nothing, but it's not commensurate with the amount of risk that's being taken on.)

The compromise the House Democrats cobbled together was a pretty good one in that regard – they are essentially buying a mix of toxic mortgage securities (which may be perfectly decent at the price they are paying, or they could be worth much less than the price they are paying) and stock options (which theoretically could wind up being worth a great deal of money, giving the government at least some upside in exchange for the big risk they are taking.)

The main problems remaining are tied up in the question of the actual solvency of the investment banks. If there are a significant number of INSOLVENT investment banks, meaning that they actually have more debts than assets, then there's not a heck of a lot that can be done.

The big problem for the next president is going to be what to do when the 700 billion allows the banking system to, say, limp along for a year before slipping into another liquidity crisis. If that happens, we'll be at a real crossroads because no one will want to accept that we wasted all that money, but you also have to draw the line somewhere.

Now that a deal has been reached, we'll never really know, at least anytime too soon, whether this deal was necessary. We'll know fairly soon whether it was sufficient.

APS

A Foundation I Can Believe In

2008-09-28T05:07:00.000-07:00

The Poor Man breaks down bipartisanship.

Folks who are offended by graphic language (HILARIOUS graphic language) should not click through.

NFL Parlay Picker - Week 4

2008-09-26T08:02:00.000-07:00

I missed week 3 because of my sister's wedding, but rest assured that I would have won my parlay had I picked one.

Anyway, this week's picks:

CAROLINA -7 over Atlanta

Matt Ryan - shaky QB. Carolina - good defense, playing at home. Atlanta's running game is the wild card here, but I smell a blowout.

Washington +11 over DALLAS

Seriously, a 2-1 team with a decent defense is +11 in a rivalry game? This stinks to high heaven. Something corrupt is afoot here. I am picking this game just so I can complain about it when a shaky call results in a last-minute TD to put Dallas up 34-17.

Buffalo -8 over ST LOUIS

St. Louis is winless against the spread this season, but so far Vegas is slow to adjust. This line should be double digits. The Rams are atrocious. Here's a fun stat - the modern NFL average for yards surrendered per opponent's passing play is about 7. A very good defense gives up about 6 yards per pass. A very bad defense gives up 8 yards per pass. The 2008 Rams are giving up 9.6 yards per passing play. It's almost impossible to overstate how crappy that is. It's very crappy! In fact, what Buffalo receivers are available in my fantasy league?

Denver -8.5 over KANSAS CITY

This is exactly the wrong pick, but I don't see a better one. I actually like the money line on this game as this seems like a letdown game for Denver after a couple of emotional wins.

NFL Parlay Picker - Week 2

2008-09-12T10:34:00.000-07:00

Well, my picks last week were Teh Suck. But the nice thing about picking parlays is that you don't get way behind when you miss a bunch of picks. It's the same as missing one pick! Just try again the following week. So here goes.

CHIEFS -3 1/2 over Raiders

JaMarcus Russell on the road, against a hated rival. I predict a sub-50 passer rating and a double-digit loss.

Bears +3 over PANTHERS

Last week, the Panthers eeked out a last-second road win over a discombobulated Charger team while the Bears had their way with the Colts at the RCA dome. I'm much more impressed with the latter performance. Yes, I'm backing Kyle Orton on the road. No, I do not have a good excuse for this other than a gut feeling that the Bears are MUCH better than people realize. Let's move on.

REDSKINS +1 over Saints

This line has moved two points during the week, which tells you that the gambling public is massively backing the Saints. The gambling public is very stupid! I'll help Vegas balance that action and predict the Skins win this one outright, getting a late turnover to seal an ugly victory.

Colts +1 over VIKINGS

This is the pick that scares me a bit, because the Colts let Matt Forte run wild on them last week, and I don't like betting against Adrian Peterson. At the same time, I've gotta stick with my idea that the Bears are better than we realize, which means the Colts home loss in Week One doesn't look like quite such a stinker.

How Modern Capitalism Works - A Screed

2008-09-12T06:30:00.000-07:00

You see a ton of bloviation at all times online about the market capitalist economic system. People on the left often see it as a necessary evil, or even a villain of sorts. Folks on the right revere it as some sort of God. This stuff gets even worse, devolving into the coarsest sorts of crass propaganda, during elections.

Yet it's not particularly often that you see someone, from blog commenters all the way up to highly paid economics commentators who work for big publications, actually describe how the modern capitalist system works. It's an interesting system, and worth discussing!

The rightist view of the market system is that it's essentially perfect, and they are right. Well, right in a sense. The market system is a perfect model for rational behavior in the market run. What that means is that as long as there aren't any significant externalities (that is, factors that the model doesn't account for) and we're dealing with a sufficiently short run of time, then the market system does its job, without any need for outside intervention.

There was a time, many decades ago, when the government regularly tried to monkey with the price system, and the results were not very encouraging. Even the big success stories of government price manipulation (rent control is an example) had negative consequences that offset at least some of the gains.

Fortunately, it's now quite rare that the government actually tries to intervene in the price system as such. There are certainly crisis moments when things go horribly wrong. During the California blackouts, for example, FedGov should have intervened to fix a price system that had completely failed and was being gamed by a malign actor, Enron. But for the most part, the government now stays out of the price system. And that's good!

Big, modern capitalist countries, however, do have an important role for government. In fact, there are many important roles. The anarcho-libertarian idea that government can just "butt out and let the market handle it" neglects the fact that there are major areas of modern capitalist economies that have nothing to do with the price system. "The market" doesn't apply! Not every store is a supermarket, and not every market is like the market for wheat.

For instance, finance markets have to be tightly regulated. Ron Paul is right in that if you did away with the central bank and went back to the gold standard that you wouldn't need tight regulation of financial markets. Unfortunately that describes an economic system that no longer exists and makes no sense in the modern world. It can't happen. So it's a bit silly to talk about it as if it could.

So in finance you need government for oversight, and also for insurance. That's one of the big, important roles government plays in the economy - the role of bagholder. The idea is that the government is supposed to prevent breakdowns in the financial system. When that oversight fails, the government is left holding the bag. If you didn't have that, the people left holding the bag would be whoever didn't have the power to hand the bag off to someone else (which generally means poor people.)

Right now you see that, of course, with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. These were government entities originally designed to grease the wheels of the mortgage system, and they were privatized on the theory that this would make them run more efficiently. In that sort of situation, if the privatization experiment fails (as it has done) then the government has to step in because you can't allow a giant piece of the finance system to just fail. If you did, it would cause investors (we often say "foreign investors" but really it's all investors; nothing's stopping Merrill Lynch from putting its money into German bonds instead of American ones) to pull capital out of the US economy, further destabilizing the system until it collapsed.

Another important government role, and one that gets a lot less intelligent attention in the press, is that of dynamic technology investor. There is a sort of pleasing myth about market capitalism that it is a "great driver of innovation." Even leftists who are grumbling about the excesses of evil capitalists will often make some basic obeisance to this idea. Unfortunately, it's not really true in the sense that most people seem to mean it.

In a market system, competition for "rents," which is the word economists use for the money you make over and above what you would make if did something else instead of what you're doing now, is fierce. That fierce competition does drive innovation - rent-seeking innovation! In the short run, firms try to position their capital such that they will continue to collect rents and make profits.

The problem is that in the long run, eventually this model of capitalism will run aground. Rent-seeking innovation doesn't create any long-term benefits to the economy. Those long-term benefits have to come from technological innovation.

Advances in technology were why Malthus' predictions of famine and doom never came true. Most people who pay attention to economics know that. What people don't know is that market economies systematically underinvest in long-term technological innovation. Left to its own devices, technology doesn't move fast enough because everyone is using their money to seek rents, and not enough people are using their money to develop new technology.

In the US, we have a couple of dynamic areas where the government plays a big role. One is the university system, in which state governments run big higher education institutions, turning out vastly more scientists and other technological innovators than would otherwise be the case, and then paying some of them to do academic research.

The other is the Pentagon system, which includes DoD but also other high-tech government entities such as NIH and CDC, where the government pays scientists directly (or through the university system, e.g. MIT) to develop technology the government wants, and then grants licenses to private companies to manufacture and market the results.

These dynamic innovation investments are really, really expensive, and a lot of them are, depending on your perspective, wasteful. (For example, the new jet fighter the Pentagon developed is completely unnecessary for war fighting.) But the money needs to be spent on something. It's an important part of the economy.

The main argument for serious people to have is how much of the government's innovation bankroll should be spent on what type of innovation. Right now, in my view, we spend way too much on tanks and boats and not enough on creating an engineering infrastructure for switching off of fossil fuels. But my view isn't necessarily correct - we should, like, vote about it or something!

In a functioning public square (unlike the silly TV-driven media environment we have) it would be questions like these that we would have in mind when we were driving to the polls to elect leaders. The long-term impact of who called whom a naughty name is, I would imagine, much less.

Too bad for us.

GOP Predators Take Aim at People in Financial Distress

2008-09-11T10:27:00.001-07:00

(via Atrios)

The Republicans in Michigan have announced a bold new strategy for keeping poor people from voting - they are going to challenge the voting rights of people whose homes are in foreclosure.

If experience is any guide, they will do this overwhelmingly to black people.

If you're a Republican reading this, don't worry, I know that you can easily justify this, so save your breath. But if there are any non-Republicans thinking of voting Republican this cycle, just make sure you understand what exactly it is you're voting for.

NFL Parlay Picker

2008-09-07T05:37:00.000-07:00

A couple years ago Stevo and I used to try each week to pick a 4-team NFL parlay. A parlay is a bet where if all four of your picks come through, you get a large payout (but not nearly so large that it makes it worth it to actually bet them - the book gets a big premium on parlays.)

As far as I remember, neither of us ever hit one, which means... we're due!

So this year I'm going to give it another go. For the non-handicacppers in the audience, the format of the picks is [winner] [spread] OVER [loser], with the home team in CAPS. Thus if I'm picking the Colts to beat the Browns in Cleveland and cover an eight-point spread, that would be Colts -8 OVER BROWNS.

I'll also give a mini-explanation as to my reasoning for the pick.

Tampa Bay +3 OVER NEW ORLEANS

I like the Tampa bay running attack and their defense.

St. Louis +9.5 OVER PHILLY

Philadelphia is aging and overrated while St. Louis is much healthier than they were last year during their run of misery. 9 1/2 points is too many.

PITTSBURGH -6.5 OVER Houston

The Steelers are ferocious in home openers.

SAN FRANCISCO +1 OVER Arizona

It seems like with a veteran QB and good running game San Fran is put together pretty well to win home games against marginal teams like Arizona.

Baseball Trivia

2008-09-06T20:16:00.000-07:00

Since the football season is about to kick off and crowd out my interest in baseball for a while, I thought I'd post a trivia question that concerns one of my favorite odd baseball statistics. I like the stat because it is a record that, among all records in all of sports, has the least chance of ever being broken despite there being no specific practical reason that it can't be broken.

The trivia question is this:

The record for most grand slams in a career by a major league pitcher is held by six men, all of whom hit two grand slams in their career. One of those six men did it in a special way. What is his name, and what was unusual about his grand slams?

Answer tomorrow.

UPDATE: As t mentioned in comments, the man's name is Tony Cloninger, and on July 3rd, 1966 Cloninger hit two grand slams in a single game for the Atlanta Braves. The reason this record will never be broken is that the likelihood of a pitcher hitting three home runs in a single game is miniscule (pitchers rarely come to the plate more than three times in a game, and they can't hit) and since a single-digit percentage of home runs are grand slams, the likelihood that a pitcher will hit three grand slams in a game in the next hundred years is probably somewhere on the order of 10e-5.

The really wild part about Cloninger is that he actually was on deck with two runners on when the #8 batter struck out to end the game. Had the previous batter walked, Cloninger would have had a shot for a third grand slam. `That's probably as close as any pitcher will ever come to three.

Imagine the Possibilities

2008-09-06T07:17:00.000-07:00

One thing I think that's happened to us as Democrats in the last 8 years is that we've developed a habit of constantly being on guard for all the slings and arrows that fate (aka Karl Rove) is inevitably going to loose in our general direction.

Far be it from me to discourage anyone from staying vigilant. I'm not predicting anything this election, as my handicapping record for 2002 and 2004 was not particularly good. (In 2006 I was more accurate - it was a good year for optimists.)

Based on what I'm seeing on weather.com's radar map, I think a lot of us blue folk are sitting inside riding out a rainstorm this morning. So allow me to suggest that for as long as this storm lasts we forget about all the terrible things that could derail the Obama/Biden ticket and just sit inside and listen to that calm place inside us that can see things the way they ought to go and just... imagine the possibilities.

That is all.

Deep Thought of the Day

2008-09-05T19:44:00.000-07:00

Anarchy is the foundation of all government.

McSpeech

2008-09-05T04:31:00.000-07:00

Not much to say about the speech that hasn't already been said. The parts about his war record were pretty inspiring, even to someone like me who's disinclined to be too impressed by warrior stuff. His description of those experiences was heartfelt and quite moving.

Everything else was serviceable but weak and artless. The Maurice Morris of speeches. Overall I give it a C+; in part because my expectations were quite low going in and I felt he could get a C as long as the wheels didn't come off.

The wheels didn't come off. That's about all there was to it.

Big McSamey Ad Bombs

2008-09-02T13:37:00.000-07:00

Following up on the earlier post "Poll Drollery," here's a new ad from the Obama campaign (via Atrios:)

McSame

It's not an awesome ad, but I like the part with McCain bragging about voting with Bush over 90% of the time. And of course I approve of the direction of the attack. More please!

John McCain, Backup QB

2008-09-02T10:46:00.001-07:00

There's an old principle in football that the most popular guy among fans on any team is almost always the backup quarterback. Almost no matter how successful the starter is, there is always a large and vocal contingent of fans who think the backup should be starting. If the starter ever gets hurt in a game, these fans will cheer at the sight of the second-stringer entering.

Unfortunately for the hopes and dreams of these folks, there are usually good reasons that the backup is the backup and the starter is the starter. After a few games with the #2 guy at the helm, those reasons start to surface, and people realize things were not so bad under the top guy. It can be easy to get used to tight spirals and laser-beam medium-range throws to the point where you sort of forget why those skills are important.

It doesn't take too many quarters of watching a noodle-armed backup throwing two-yard square-ins to the tight end to remember that, while pluck and derringdo are laudable characteristics, it's often nice to have a skilled professional at the helm, somebody with a big arm who knows how to use it.

For all John McCain's positive qualities, there's a reason the guy lost to George W. Bush. He's got backup-quality skills. He's fun to root for! But you know deep down you don't really want him running the team.

Cynicism

2008-09-02T07:38:00.000-07:00

One thing that I find interesting is that in our culture, we have an accusation that gets flung around a great deal both on the national stage (generally, journalists accusing politicians, or each other) and in interpersonal relationships "down here."

That accusation is that of "cynicism."

What's interesting and even humorous is that I'd bet if you polled 100 people who regularly use the word, very few (single digits would be my guess) could give a particularly useful or informed definition of the word.

I say that not at all as a "people are stupid" sort of observation - indeed, what prompted this post was that I read an article that contained an accusation of cynicism and I wondered "what does that actually mean?" I had to look it up on Wikipedia.

Equally interesting is the stuff about the Greek philosophical school called "the Cynics." Read about it, but remember that often modern history tends to record information about philosophical schools that reflects degenerated forms that came after the original teacher's school had disbanded.

Poll Drollery

2008-09-02T07:15:00.000-07:00

I'm normally loathe to play the "this poll shows that X voting block is a crucial battleground" game because just about any poll, including a poll of people's favorite breakfast cereals, can be overlaid on a two-way presidential race and made to seem significant.

However, I do think that this particular poll concerning overall voter attitudes gives a good idea of what the task is for Obama in this race.

via ThinkProgress.org

Basically, 64% of people are concerned that McCain will pursue policies similar to Bush's. That's a large enough chunk that you have to figure things are looking good for Obama. However, when you break it out into "very concerned" and "somewhat concerned," the "very concerned" number is under 50%.

Obama's campaign should be focused more or less exclusively on getting those 17% of people who are "somewhat concerned" over into the "very concerned" category.

The nice part about this strategy tactically is that these people are almost by definition predisposed to the idea that McCain is like Bush. After all, they are "somewhat concerned" about it already. A big McSamey ad-bomb should sway at least a few of them who might be wondering if their concerns are enough to push them to vote for Obama.