George Newman: Assume a Can Opener

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

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

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

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?

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!

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

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!!!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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)

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

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...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(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

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

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

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

Anarchy is the foundation of all government.

McSpeech

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

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

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

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

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.

Brilliant!*

I'm always at a bit of a loss to know how to react when a candidate I'm supporting does exactly what I think he should do. On the one hand, hey! Great! I think it's a good idea!

On the other hand, after all, it's me! I'm an idiot! What does it say if Obama's strategists have the same ideas I do?

In any case, I love this ad from the Obama camp, sort of reacting-by-way-of-not-reacting to the Palin pick.



I think if I had to sum up the proper approach to Palin for the Obama campaign (and particularly for Biden) it would be summed up in these few words:

Pretend She Isn't There

This ad does a good job with that. In the end, Palin's main upside for McCain is that she makes a somewhat tricky attack target. If McCain were winning the race, and the Dems were hungry for weak points to attack, that would be a problem. But that's not the situation we're in. In strategic thinking, one of the most fundamental axioms that people violate again and again (often to their great detriment) is "When the plan is working, stick to the plan." That applies here.

The thing to keep in mind, from a strategic point of view, is that aside from all the specific problems with Palin the VP candidate, this is a fundamentally weak pick. It's not, as some have analogized, a hail mary pass. John McCain is not down five with ten seconds left. It's more like a well-known type of mistake in poker where, early in a big, long tournament, a beginner will get dealt a strong hand and crazily push all his chips into the middle. The downside of getting called down by an even stronger hand is big, but that's not the real problem (risk is part of poker, after all) - the real problem is, even if the move works, you're really not in THAT great of shape.

McCain is gambling at the wrong time, in the wrong way, on the wrong cards. The best move for the Obama camp is to just... let him.

Chickenshit Republicans

ThinkProgress links to a Washington Post report alleging via anonymous sources that US Congressman Walter Jones (R-NC) is a big fan of Vincent Bugliosi's arguments that George W. Bush should be prosecuted for murder.

The reason that this is coming via anonymous sources is that Jones wants to "lay low" until after the 2008 elections. This is just a great example of the cowardice and fecklessness of the Republican Party. If it is indeed true that Walter Jones believes that the President of the United States of America should be tried for treason but that this idea should not be promoted during election season because it might have an impact on the vote... What exactly is it that Walter Jones believes elections are for?

In fact I think we can draw a further and in a way more disgusting conclusion here. Jones probably doesn't even view calling for the prosecution of a sitting president as a particularly grave matter. Basically, he used to like Bush, but now he thinks Bush sucks, so... Prosecute!!! There is never a sense with Republicans that they recognize that certain decisions are serious and should only be arrived at after careful reflection, and even then with great reluctance and with a heavy heart.

George W. Bush SHOULD be impeached, for any number of crimes. But beware of flighty, opportunistic lightweights like Walter Jones - just because Jones calls for Bush's impeachment doesn't mean he's not still a complete ass. He is.

The Friedman-ization of Obama

Matthew Yglesias points us to a very interesting discussion between Fareed Zakaria and Barack Obama where they touch on a lot of broad ideas about foreign policy that are discussed less often than they should be.

Unfortunately unlike Matt I think the overall impression I get from Obama during the interview is basically negative; I think he's undergoing a process in which he's getting "briefed" by staff on foreign policy doctrine and he's essentially becoming converted to the Beltway consensus on a lot of these issues.

A lot of people on the antiwar left (and yes, that describes me) are going to get really upset about this, and accuse Obama of selling out. But I want to explain, by way of a baseball analogy, why I am not going to get too upset about a lot of this stuff.

Imagine if you were toiling away in some minor-league player personnel office in some second-rate city when you got a call from a major-league club asking you to come in for an interview. And when you get there you find that there's a lot of other candidates there who are far more likely than you to get the job, and you sort of accept that things aren't going to work out but you're excited just to have the opportunity.

Then you nail the interview, a couple of the top candidates for the job wind up dropping out for personal reasons, and before you know it you're reporting for duty as a GM in the major leagues. It's so far beyond your expectations you've got permasmile, even though you're managing the roster of a small-market team with very little money and no real shot to win the title.

At the end of the season, your phone rings again. It's the Yankees. They want to get you out to New York City because you're on the short list to take over as General Manager of the most storied franchise in American sports.

You get the job and you show up during the offseason to hit the books and learn about the players, the contracts, the facilities, all the little details you need to know to run a baseball operation. While you're at it, a lot of the other guys in the organization show up to brief you on various aspects of the Yankees' franchise.

What you find in these little informal bull sessions shocks you. All the mistakes you learned to avoid coming up, these guys are making, and then some. The organization is bloated with waste, shot through with inexact, sloppy procedures and intellectually bankrupt ideas. You're too polite to tell anybody yet, but you realize once you take over things are seriously going to have to change.

But then, a funny thing happens. Something is eating at you. This is The Yankees. Surely they can't be doing everything wrong? A lot of these guys were around for the last run of greatness the franchise had - they have to know something. The more you think about it, the more some of the things these guys are telling you start to make sense.

By the time you start your first season, all of the things that made you a great GM for the Blue Jays are gone, replaced by the Yankee values that have produced a recent run of disappointing teams.

At some point, there will come a moment of realization that in order to fulfill your destiny, you have to get back to what made you right for the top job in the first place.

We're far, far away from that moment for Obama. It's likely to come in 2010 or 2011, when things in Iraq have gone seriously to hell and he has to decide whether to double down (what his people will be urging him to do) or get the hell out (what he should do - and eventually will have to do anyway), but it's certainly not going to come during the campaign.

For now, we watch him channel Tom Friedman, bite our tongues, and win this thing. We can talk in January about how to influence him during his moment of crisis, when it comes.

Obama, Iraq, and the Left

I love moments like this when the real politics of foreign policy can be discussed openly by the Democrats because we aren't at each other's throats all the time about which is or is not ON THE SIDE OF EVIL!!!

That's why I have to echo Yglesias' point:

As best I can tell, it's wrong to assume that there's a real fact of the matter as to what it is Obama is planning to do about Iraq when he becomes president. At the moment, he's running for president and would like as wide a swathe as possible of people to believe that he agrees with them.

Of course this very thing is what a lot of people despise about politics - that candidates don't honestly elucidate their positions during the campaign. But that's politics and it isn't going to change just because we might want it to, or because we get angry about it. There are real reasons politicians don't do this - if they did, they would lose. Too bad.

What political thought requires of an informed voter is not just a factual knowledge of what a candidate says and does, but also the ability to think through the factors that might be influencing a candidate when and if he or she eventually does take office.

That goes beyond just looking at who will be advising the candidate in office to thinking about what the actual facts of the situation will be when Obama takes office.

If Obama comes into the White House in January, he is of course going to find an Iraqi system that is far, far more screwed up than has been acknowledged publicly by the Bush Administration. One of the things that will be the most screwed up is the record-keeping - Obama and his people will simply have no reliable way to quickly construct an accurate picture of what is happening in the war zone, especially since Republican operatives are famously unwilling to pass along information and analysis to Democrats when the Dems are taking over from the GOP.

In such a situation, an Obama administration that had committed to having all troops out of Iraq by such-and-such a date would almost certainly immediately begin walking the deadline farther and farther into the future with the explanation that "we didn't realize how far gone the place really was." In other words, the promise would be one that could, under most foreseeable circumstances, be quickly broken by Obama.

Now there is a subtle point that very few people have discussed so far in this election. The Iraq War is currently viewed in the media as primarily an issue for the Democratic base, and that Obama thus should use his position on the war to rally his supporters. But that's backwards. Currently a huge, huge majority of the country opposes the current US campaign in Iraq and wants it to end. However, many of these people are not leftist or even particularly antiwar - they just rightly don't see the point of continuing to fight in Iraq.

When Iraq comes up in the campaign, remember that it is primarily these right-leaning war opponents Obama will be speaking to. We lefties have every right to demand our red meat in this campaign, but we need to be realistic about the fact that it's going to come primarily in the context of other issues.

South Korea and Iraq

Dick Morris is Stupid.

That fairly unadventurous point aside, I'd like to make a quick point or two about Korea.

The history of the Korean War is not particularly well known, but neither is it particularly hard to grasp. After World War II, The United States and Soviet Union set up competing regimes in the southern and northern ends of Korea, respectively, with the goal of eventually reuniting the country under a single government.

For various reasons, the reunion never happened and the North (backed by the Soviets) attacked the South (backed by the US) in open war in 1950. By 1951 the war was an unresolvable stalemate, and after lots of people died for no good reason, eventually the Soviet client regime and the US client regime had to be maintained more or less forever.

Figures of great stature on the right,including 2008 GOP nominee John McCain, frequently cite Korea as a favorable example of the possibilities of US power in Iraq, despite the following facts:

1) The circumstances surrounding the Korean War are in no sense similar in any way to the circumstances surrounding the Iraq invasion;
2) The outcome of the Korean War was a famously bad outcome and remains a gigantic blemish on the resume of an American president (Truman) whose record has come to be viewed more favorably in recent decades than it was at the time;
and
3) No outcome resembling that of the Korean War could ever come about in Iraq in any way that anyone could possibly imagine, unless they were very drunk and possibly high on crystal meth.

In other words, John McCain and Dick Morris' bright idea about Iraq is nonsensical, undesirable, and impossible.

Don't forget though, McCain is Very Strong on Foreign Policy.

Free Will Blogging

As I've become integrated into Mom Culture over the past 8 months and I've started to develop some friendships, I have started to get into some substantive discussions about people's fundamental views of the world.

One topic that tends to come up a lot when you discuss philosophy is the idea of "free will." People will always take one of two positions on this topic, either that free will exists or that it doesn't. Invariably the rationale behind the person's POV on the topic rests on a series of busts to the alternative idea - that is, a person who believes free will doesn't exist will give examples of human behavior that cannot comfortably be explained by free choice, and vice versa.

It's always been interesting to me that it breaks down like that, since "free will" is not actually a thing that can exist or not exist in a binary sense. "Free will" is a name we give to a certain type of model of human behavior, and thus it "exists" to whatever degree it is useful as such a model.

Put another way, free will is not actually something you have but something you do.

So how do we make use of free will? Well, the human brain is capable of understanding and mastering the forces that induce it to behave in programmed, conditioned ways. A person who can't help drinking too much can, through a variety of techniques, learn not to drink at all, or to drink less, or to make less risky choices when drinking, etc.

The recovering drunk is not then "free" in the sense of having limitless options as to how to act - a drunk who goes out to a bar with his old drinking buddies is likely to revert to past conditioned behaviors and drink too much, for example.

At the same time, personal experience of human consciousness renders absurd the argument that human beings cannot everchoose between one set of behaviors and another. People do, at certain times, consciously weigh the risks and benefits of multiple options, choose to go down one path or another, and then face the results. The idea that this experience is some sort of illusion is difficult to defend without a spiraling into generalities and unfounded claims.

Human behavior cannot be explained by one particular static model as if the brain were just a very sophisticated sort of abacus. At the same time, the biology of the nervous system shows plainly that much day-to-day behavior is controlled by essentially programmed responses that are never processed by the brain's higher reasoning centers.

In other words, human beings can behave in ways that could be usefully described as "free" - under certain conditions. Maximizing the number and quality of the moments in which a person is truly free to choose her path is a matter of preparation, and practice.

In the East, particularly in the Muslim world, the idea that conditioned behaviors exist and can be integrated with the "free" mind through study and mental exercise has been discussed by scholars both secular and religious for many hundreds of years, and the amount of research on the subject is vast.

Yet in the West we still make little study of this idea, preferring instead to argue about which dead philosopher is right about his antiquated, binary view of how the mind functions.

Your Liberal Media

Atrios had a post up yesterday that was both intentionally AND unintentionally snarky.

The intentional snark had to do with the hiring, by the supposedly center-left Atlantic Monthly, of unrepentant war propagandist Jeffrey Goldberg" (that link also via Atrios) as their newest blogger. And indeed, the hiring of the fantastically discredited Goldberg is odious beyond measure for ANY publication, let alone a supposedly liberal-leaning one.

But the last sentence of the post caught my eye and got me to thinking. Atrios says "Still I look forward to to a lively discussion with fellow Atlantic blogger Yglesias."

Now, I like Matt Yglesias and I read his blog every day. But it's worth noting that Yglesias ALSO advocated for a war that led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. He's since repented, but he supported the war more or less unreservedly at the time.

In fact, if we look down the list of bloggers that are employed by the Atlantic, we find:

Andrew Sullivan, who supported the war but has since softened and is now an advocate of withdrawal (though he never really reversed himself on the original question of the Iraq invasion, relying primarily on what Yglesias and others have called "The Incompetence Dodge.")

Ross Douthat, who supported the war VERY enthusiastically and continues, as far as I know, to support it, but who has sort of forgotten that Iraq exists in recent months.

Megan McArdle, who supported the war very enthusiastically and continues, AFAIK, to support it, but who has sort of forgotten that Iraq exists in recent months.

Marc Ambinder, who supported the war but who has no clear position on it now that I can tell.

Clive Crook, who wrote for the Economist at the time and thus wasn't signing his work, but seems to be a former war supporter who has since repented.

Finally there's James Fallows, who opposed the Iraq invasion from the beginning, and of course Goldberg.

At this point the American population can be divided more or less into thirds on the question of the Iraq war. One third of Americans opposed the war from the beginning and still oppose it. One third of Americans supported the war at the time but have since changed their minds (or at least started advocating withdrawal) and one third supported the invasion but still support it.

So if they were trying to track with the attitudes the general population, the Atlantic's blog editors would fire Goldberg and Sullivan and replace them both with wooly-headed leftists. That's not going to happen, clearly.

One obvious (and shopworn, certainly) way of looking at this is just to note that it tells you something about the "liberal media" in the US that an actual liberal publication like the Atlantic is substantially to the right of the American population on this issue. But since economic status plays a big role in shaping political opinions, it's unavoidable that you elite opinion is going to be to the right of the general population, and that what's "centrist" to elites is actually pretty conservative to the electorate as a whole.

What's more peculiar to me is this. Where on the political commentary spectrum would you find a publication that actually tracks closely with US public opinion on Iraq? What publication is a third war opponents, a third supporters, and a third "regretful supporters?"

That publication, as far as I can tell, doesn't exist. You basically go straight from center-right establishment pubs like The Atlantic and The New Republic to true publications of the left such as Harper's, The Nation and Z Magazine.

It seems strange that the "publish opinions that apppeal to the widest possible readership" niche would be one that would be more or less vacant in the political commentary market.

I unfortunately have no substantive analysis to offer on this point other than to note that it is, in fact, odd.

Sixteen Percent!!!

There's an AP report out today (via Google's recommend frame) that says, among other things, that terror attacks were up sixteen percent in Afghanistan in 2007. I'm seeing a lot of commentary, especially on TV, about how this means that the war in Afghanistan, and by extension the war on terror, is not working.

Now, I hate to spend time throwing cold water on a report like this, since it appears to lend support to a position - that the war in Afghanistan is neither as successful nor as obviously correct as is generally believed - that I subscribe to.

But this is a pretty stupid way to measure success in a war. Indeed, latching on to one statistic or even a set of statistics and trumpeting movement one way or the other as evidence of a strategy's success or failure is almost never useful in any context, and least of all perhaps in the context of a counterinsurgency campaign, whose aims are primarily political and thus difficult to measure.

A version of this idea (as it pertains to big-city police work) was explored with some grace and eloquence by the television show The Wire, particularly in the fourth and (from what I'm told - I am still waiting for the DVD) fifth seasons.

The dilemma for the press, in a nutshell, is that it's very difficult to do hard reporting on complex topics without resorting to just writing up rundowns of various statistics. So even a well-meaning, professional press is going to fall back on this kind of thing some of the time.

Unfortunately, public institutions are necessarily run by people whose livelihoods depend on favorable depictions in the press, which leads those people (and by extension, the institutions) to focus on the short-term improvement of various benchmarks at the expense of serious long-term strategic thinking about how to actually fix systemic problems.

As failed counterinsurgency wars rage on and on, this sort of perverse incentive structure gets expanded to the point of absurdity. In the beginning of 2008, for example, Iraq war supporters were trumpeting statistics showing a decline in violence lasting several months as evidence that "The Surge Is Working!"

Looking only at the six-month trend in question, one could be forgiven for ascribing some credibility to this interpretation, but looking at it in a wider context the whole thing can be seen to be rather silly. The idea, apparently, is that by inserting more soldiers into Iraq, the US will be able to reduce violence to the point that it can start... reducing the number of soldiers in Iraq.

The Afghanistan narrative we see here is the other side of that coin. In Afghanistan, a fairly small detachment of US forces (around 25,000) is working to protect government officials while also patrolling the country engaging various terror groups. Although an uptick in terrorist violence certainly isn't a sign that this strategy is working, it would hardly be cause for celebration if such patrols result in a reduction in terrorist violence in 2008.

After all, in both Afghanistan and Iraq the ostensible goal of the US mission is to eventually be able to leave. To do that without just admitting defeat, the systemic problems preventing political unity and pluralism in those countries must be fixed.

But since no one has any idea how, when, or why that would ever happen, we just watch the numbers, shake our heads, and continue the slaughter.

Because I Can

I'm reviving The Ape Man. Stay tuned.

APS

The Silent Saudis

The sleeping giant, at least politically speaking, in the Middle East right now is Saudi Arabia. They've endured the Iraq war, which they were privately adamantly opposed to, without much public protest. Now that the very worst has come about in Iraq, and Bush has made it clear that he's not interested in fixing the problems, Saudi Arabia is probably going to have to make some kind of move. From SA's perspective, a weak Shi'ite government in Iraq with widespread instability and political violence is the absolute nightmare scenario, and Bush is now saying that he plans to continue to prop that government up indefinitely.

So it is against that backdrop that, via Captain's Quarters of all places, I notice an article in this morning's Post reporting that the Saudi ambassador to the US has abruptly quit.

The Post speculates that it might have something to do with the ill health of the Saudi foreign minister, but the Saudi foreign minister has been in ill health for a long, long time. In the Ape Man's view, it's far more likely to have something to do with the recent closed-door meetings in Riyadh among leaders of Gulf oil states. From the Taipei Times on Monday:

Saudi King Abdullah warned on Saturday that the situation in the Middle East -- from the Palestinian territories to the Gulf -- was potentially explosive and likened it to a powder keg.

"Our Arab region is surrounded by dangers," said the monarch at the opening of a summit for leaders of the oil-rich Arab Gulf countries. "It is like a keg of gunpowder waiting for a spark to explode."

Palestinians were fighting among themselves, and Iraq "is about to slip into the darkness of strife and mad struggle," and so is Lebanon, King Abdullah said.

Following the Saudi monarch's speech, the leaders began a closed session.

The summit will discuss how to head off escalating dangers that threaten to spill over into the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries, including the spiraling sectarian violence in Iraq and the nuclear standoff that pits a defiant Iran against the West.

So the timeline, basically, is that on Monday King Abdullah gave a speech about how the Middle East is a powder keg and something must be done. On Tuesday the Saudi ambassador to the US abruptly resigned and fled the US.

It's hard to speculate, knowing so little, about what might be going on. One thing we can say is that the Saudis are probably very worried right now that the war in Iraq could spill over into the arabian peninsula. That's a given.

The subtler question I would ask is whether the Saudis are becoming worried that their longstanding relationship with the United States is being threatened by the Iraq war, and are taking steps to break off the relationship before the US can do it first.

Although Saudi Arabia is still said to hold a huge percentage of proven world oil reserves, that is somewhat misleading. Since the Iraq war has driven oil prices above $50 a barrel with no clear end in sight, Venezuela now has more oil than Saudi Arabia, since a lot of their oil is unrecoverable below that cost. Sustained high oil prices help the kingdom financially, but hurt it politically.

A smart way to deal with this problem would be an operational alliance with Venezuela, through which the Saudis could retain (albeit jointly with Venezuela) an important world political perch. The problem, of course, is that Venezuela is an official US enemy, and Saudi Arabian overtures to Chavez would not be met with enthusiasm from US officials.

Chavez, for his part, has been doing his best to create a network of alliances with oil states across the globe, using some pretty interesting tactics. I'll go into what some of those have been another time, but suffice it to say that Nigeria, Equatorial Guinea, South Africa, and Iran (all oil states) have been brought into Chavez' orbit to some degree.

It's possible, and again this is speculation, but it's possible that Saudi Arabia has decided at long last that US military power being in a weakened state due to the Iraq war, and US political power being more or less nonexistent, the time is ripe to switch allegiances and cast their lot in with Veneuzuela and Iran. An alliance with Iran would seem unlikely to those who tend to see everything in the Middle East through the "Sunni vs. Shiite" lens (the Saudis are Sunni Arabs, while Iran is ruled by Shiite Persians), but both countries have a major interest in containing the Iraq war within Iraq's borders AND in maintaining the operability of the Strait of Hormuz as a viable export path.

As always, interest trumps principle.

Routine and Systematic Torture

Guardian UK| Routine and Systematic Torture Is at the Heart of America's War On Terror

If there is one topic I wish I could go back and make more noise about, it's the Jose Padilla case and the issue of habeas corpus erosion generally over the last five years. I wrote a post a couple days ago over at The Liberal Avenger that sums up my feelings on the matter, but this article in the Guardian does a nice job from a more traditional journalistic angle.

President Bush maintains that he is fighting a war against threats to the "values of civilised nations": terror, cruelty, barbarism and extremism. He asked his nation's interrogators to discover where these evils are hidden. They should congratulate themselves. They appear to have succeeded.

Indeed.

The Ape Man is Back

Inspired by Auguste's new project, The Guns of Auguste, I've decided to reopen The Ape Man for business.

Stay tuned.