The Commentariat -- March 24, 2014
** Paul Krugman: "The drift toward oligarchy continues," thanks in large part to Republican policies. ...
... CW: I wonder where the conservatives are who hate this. After all, those so-called intellectuals & scribes who work at think tanks & winger rags are mostly ordinary working people. Yes, they know who's buttering their bread, but at some point, aren't they too going to revolt against policies that are directly hurting them? They can't all be so stupid or so shortsighted as to think advocating for Koch-friendly policies will be to their ultimate benefit. Where is the outrage on the right?
CW: Here's what I wrote on March 19 (or maybe 18): Ben Casselman of Nate Silver's new FiveThirtyEight venture susses out whether or not more Americans are trying to sustain themselves in minimum- & low-wage jobs. If Casselman's analysis -- which makes at least one ridiculous assumption & expresses complete ignorance of factors contributing to low wages ("Economists aren't sure"), then I am singularly unimpressed with Silver's product. ...
... Here's Krugman yesterday: "Timothy Egan joins the chorus of those dismayed by Nate Silver's new FiveThirtyEight. I'm sorry, but I have to agree: so far it looks like something between a disappointment and a disaster.... Unfortunately, Silver seems to have taken the wrong lesson from his election-forecasting success. In that case, he pitted his statistical approach against campaign-narrative pundits, who turned out to know approximately nothing. What he seems to have concluded is that there are no experts anywhere, that a smart data analyst can and should ignore all that. But not all fields are like that -- in fact, even political analysis isn't like that, if you talk to political scientists instead of political reporters. So, for example, before glancing at some correlation and asserting causation, you really should talk to the researchers." ...
... CW: It seems that Silver, like that other wunderkind Ezra Klein (and perhaps Glenn Greenwald, too), has bitten off more than he can chew. However, I wouldn't worry too much if their teenaged-style rebellions against their buttinsky MSM editors are failures. These are smart guys. A big flop can be a big learning experience -- if the flopper is indeed smart enough to heed the lesson.
Walter Dellinger, in a Washington Post op-ed, argues that access to contraception is a "test of equality." He recounts some of the arguments in Griswold v. Connecticut. ...
... Brian Beutler: The Hobby Lobby "case will test what's more sacred to this court: Corporate imperatives or so-called religious liberties."
Carrie Brown & Tal Kopan of Politico: "President Barack Obama said on Monday that Europe and the U.S. are 'united' on Ukraine, kicking off a series of talks with foreign leaders this week aimed at exerting pressure on Russia. Obama spoke briefly to the press with Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam after landing Monday morning. Obama later met with President Xi Jinping of China at the U.S. ambassador's residence here." ...
... Kathleen Hennessey of the Los Angeles Times: "The fight over control and influence in Ukraine should not be seen as a Cold War-era battle, President Obama said in an interview released Monday as he opened a European trip certain to be dominated by discussion of the West's response to Russia's annexation of the Crimean peninsula." ...
... Reuters: "Barack Obama arrives on Monday morning in the Netherlands, where he will try to gauge how far European allies are willing to go to stop Moscow from moving deeper into Ukraine after annexing Crimea. The US president is visiting Europe for talks with fellow leaders of the Group of Seven industrial democracies, when he will try to persuade them to increase pressure on Russia."
Carol Morello & Karen DeYoung of the Washington Post: "U.S. and Ukrainian officials warned Sunday that Russia may be poised to expand its territorial conquest into eastern Ukraine and beyond, with a senior NATO official saying that Moscow might even order its troops to cross Ukraine to reach Moldova."
Stephanie Simon of Politico: "Taxpayers in 14 states will bankroll nearly $1 billion this year in tuition for private schools, including hundreds of religious schools that teach Earth is less than 10,000 years old, Adam and Eve strolled the garden with dinosaurs, and much of modern biology, geology and cosmology is a web of lies. Now a major push to expand these voucher programs is under way from Alaska to New York, a development that seems certain to sharply increase the investment." ...
... Katie Halper of AlterNet, in Salon, on how school vouchers provide taxpayer-funded teaching of goofy conservative/religious ideas. One example: the Great Depression was a hoax.
Evie Salomon of CBS "News": "This past week marked the 46th anniversary of the My Lai massacre, in which 504 unarmed Vietnamese civilians were massacred by U.S. troops in 1968. It's one of the most shameful chapters in American military history, and now documents held at the Nixon Presidential Library paint a disturbing picture of what happened inside the Nixon administration after news of the massacre was leaked. The documents, mostly hand-written notes from Nixon's meetings with his chief of staff H.R. 'Bob' Haldeman, lead some historians to conclude that President Richard Nixon was behind the attempt to sabotage the My Lai court-martial trials and cover up what was becoming a public-relations disaster for his administration."
Senate Races
Nate Silver: "We think the Republicans are now slight favorites to win at least six [Senate] seats and capture the chamber. The Democrats' position has deteriorated somewhat since last summer, with President Obama's approval ratings down to 42 or 43 percent from an average of about 45 percent before. Furthermore, as compared with 2010 or 2012, the GOP has done a better job of recruiting credible candidates, with some exceptions." ...
... Alex Roarty of the National Journal: "In an unusual step, the executive director of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee on Monday issued a rebuttal the famed statistician's prediction -- made a day earlier -- that Republicans were a 'slight favorite' to retake the Senate. Silver was wrong in 2012, the political committee's Guy Cecil wrote in a memo, and he'll be wrong again in 2014. 'In fact, in August of 2012 Silver forecast a 61 percent likelihood that Republicans would pick up enough seats to claim the majority,' Cecil said. "Three months later, Democrats went on to win 55 seats."
Beyond the Beltway
Christie's Lawyers Clear Christie. Michael Barbaro of the New York Times: "With his office suddenly engulfed in scandal over lane closings at the George Washington Bridge, Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey two months ago summoned a pair of top defense lawyers from an elite law firm to the State House and asked them to undertake an extensive review of what had gone wrong. Now, after 70 interviews and at least $1 million in legal fees to be paid by state taxpayers, that review is set to be released, and according to people with firsthand knowledge of the inquiry, it has uncovered no evidence that the governor was involved in the plotting or directing of the lane closings." CW: See? I knew Christie was totally innocent & now that's an indisputable fact. Hope New Jersey taxpayers are satisfied. "The investigation's most significant obstacle was the lack of access to the three figures at the center of the lane closings -- [Bridget] Kelly, the author of the infamous 'time for some traffic problems in Fort Lee' email; Bill Stepien, the governor's former aide and campaign manager; and David Wildstein, a Christie ally at the Port Authority — who all declined to be interviewed." CW: Eh. Details, details.
News Ledes
Seattle Times: "Fourteen people are confirmed dead from the massive mudslide in Snohomish County, after searchers found six more bodies this afternoon."
New York Times: "A federal jury on Monday found five associates of the convicted swindler Bernard L. Madoff guilty on 31 counts of aiding one of the largest Ponzi schemes in history. The case centered around whether or not the employees had committed securities fraud and other deceptive acts to knowingly mislead auditors and investors in Madoff Securities. The trial in the United States District Court in Manhattan went on for more than five months...."
Chicago Tribune: "More than 30 people were injured this morning when a CTA Blue Line train ran into a platform at O'Hare International Airport and came to rest on an escalator, an accident that could close the station for up to 24 hours...."
New York Times: "Russia and Russian state companies have increased the economic pressure on the new pro-Western government in Kiev over the past week, closing the border to most trucks, shutting a Ukrainian factory in Russia and yet again raising the price of natural gas." ...
... AP: "A Ukrainian air force commander is being held after his base in Crimea was stormed by pro-Russian forces, and the acting president called for his release Sunday."
New York Times: "Japan will announce Monday that it will turn over to Washington more than 700 pounds of weapons-grade plutonium and a large quantity of highly enriched uranium, a decades-old research stockpile that is large enough to build dozens of nuclear weapons, according to American and Japanese officials."
AP: "A court in Egypt on Monday sentenced to death 529 supporters of ousted Islamist President Mohammed Morsi on charges of murdering a policeman and attacking police, convicting them after only two sessions in one of the largest mass trials in the country in decades. The verdicts are subject to appeal and would likely be overturned, rights lawyers said. But they said the swiftness and harshness of the rulings on such a large scale underlined the extent to which Egypt's courts have been politicized and due process has been ignored...." CW: Sounds like an attempt to legalize mass murder.
Washington Post: "President Obama has ordered a sharp increase in U.S. Special Operations forces deployed to Uganda and sent U.S. military aircraft there for the first time in the ongoing effort to hunt down warlord Joseph Kony across a broad swath of central Africa."
Washington Post: "Observers on a Chinese search plane on Monday spotted some 'suspicious objects' in the southern Indian Ocean -- two large floating objects and many smaller white ones -- as the search for the missing Malaysian Airline flight entered its third week." ...
... The Guardian has live updates. ...
... UPDATE. Washington Post: "Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak said Monday that the missing Malaysia Airlines plane was lost in the southern Indian Ocean, effectively removing all hope that it might have survived the still unexplained diversion from its flight path more than two weeks ago. Reading from a prepared statement, Najib said new information from satellite data showed that the plane's last location was 'in the middle of the Indian Ocean west of Perth,' a city on Australia's west coast." ...
... UPDATE 2. Los Angeles Times: "The British company whose satellite data helped direct search efforts for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 toward the south Indian Ocean said about two weeks ago that it had received 'routine' and 'automated' signals from the missing Boeing 777.... While the Boeing 777's transponders and communications systems were disabled, the airplane's satellite terminal was still on, "pinging" to try to maintain a connection with a satellite."
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A review by the FT's Martin Wolf of Mariana Mazzucato's new book, "The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs. Private Sector Myths." She makes the point that Wolf amplifies that research needs deep pockets and a long view. In a world in which financialization looks to turn any profit into cash as quickly as possible, the private sector has lost the will to provide profound innovation.
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/32ba9b92-efd4-11e2-a237-00144feabdc0.html#axzz2wd7uaqcO
Is there any place I can go to find 'a man wearing dreadlocks to sell IBM business systems' north of Jamaica? Nice visual, Marie.
I don't have a lot of bandwidth at my current location, so suffice it to say that education is much more than a place where the bookstore sells pennants. And learning is far more than the rote recitation of facts.
Re: the Christi investigation: Da poo is gonna fly when our Kelly girl and the rest of the crew will dump their do-do. I wonder whether Christi made some kind of deal with them––not to disclose certain nefarious goings on with them if they keep their mouths shut about his hand in this.
Here's a local story about poo of a different order. A day care center in New Haven that is subsidized in part by the city that cares for inner city children is headed by a woman who saw a problem and took it upon herself to solve it. She became aware that many of the children would come to her on Monday mornings with diaper rash; by Friday they would leave for the weekend with clean bums. The center provides diapers and the children get changed often. After she noticed a mother changing her child's diaper–-throwing the solids down the toilet, then putting the diaper back on the child she concluded many of these mothers simply couldn't afford the number of diapers that were needed. When a child has a bad rash, they cry a lot which can lead to abuse. So–––this woman started a Diaper Bank––people volunteered to collect funds from donors and ask stores to donate diapers. She also managed to get the actual diaper manufactures to donate large supplies. The project has been so successful she had to find a place to store all these diapers.
I love stories like this.
The Hobby Lobby lobby lobbing its argument at the Supreme Court for relief from the ACA in the name religious freedom provides conservatives with a two-fer.
First, it's another way of picking up the "government can't tell us what to do" banner and waving it to mad cheering from the wingnut peanut gallery, haters of all things government (except any money or support or special assistance they personally receive from taxpayers), and second, it taps into the Christians are Victims of Religious Intolerance trope.
Neither claims have merit since, in fact, the government, by dint of the social contract we all agree to, at least tacitly by living here, can tell us to do all kinds of things. We need a license to drive. We have to be insured. We have to pay taxes, etc, yadda, yadda, yadda. So this "government can't tell ME what to do" crap is the bunk, especially considering all the breaks corporations get from said government.
As for the religious freedom yowling, Brian Beutler, in the link Marie provides, nicely parses the problems the right-wing Christians on the Court will have dancing around that claim while upholding the sanctity of the protections provided to corporations. If, on one hand, the act of incorporation keeps stockholders and corporate boards at a remove from liability, you can't then say that that veil of protection can then be pulled aside to allow controlling interests in the corporation to insert their personal beliefs into the world--the company and its employees--outside the board room.
Looked at from another angle, I can easily posit a variation on the religious freedom claim that would have guaranteed that this case never came within shouting distance of the Court.
Let's say that Hobby Lobby was owned by devout Muslims and they wanted to say that religious freedom allowed them to force all their employees to abide by certain tenets of Sharia Law or some aspects of the Koran, that Muslim religious beliefs gave them an exemption from federal laws they didn't agree with.
How far do you think that argument would go? Scalia would insist that anyone trying to bring that case before the Court be put in irons.
So, unless they find a way to do some fancy dancing, this case, which will pit the Court's love for corporations against their solicitousness toward Christianity, could turn out to be a kind of Masochism Tango for the wingnut justices.
(Sorry about that "Hobby Lobby lobby lobbing thing"...you just don't get a chance like that very often.)
The schadenfreude faeries are out in force to diss Nate Silver's latest outing. I have to agree with Marie, though, that it's not always a bad thing to crash and burn early on if it forces you back to the drawing board in hopes of a better mousetrap.
But Silver's political prognostications have been a pretty decent mousetrap so far, despite his 2012 prediction being a bit off (you can't really say "wrong" because a 61% chance is just that. It doesn't preclude the possibility that things could go the other way. A 39% chance isn't great but it's not crazy impossible either. Had he said there was a 90% chance that Republicans took the Senate and they didn't, then I'd say, to quote Rodney Dangerfield, "Hoo....are you lost. You're WAY off.").
But despite his website being off, he's still pretty good on the political end which gives me the willies, thinking that the barbarians could take over both houses of Congress. My brain is spinning thinking of what the gorillas will try first. They'll have about 75 bills to repeal the ACA ready for filing within the first 20 minutes after the election. Then voting in Democratic districts will be outlawed, followed by passage of laws attempting to reverse Roe v Wade. Jowl Boy will be majority leader and Louie Gohmert, Speaker of the House.
Democrats and the president have to put it in gear. There's too much at stake to throw hail marys and hope for the best, otherwise Obama actually CAN spend most of his time playing golf, and the rest of us can ponder life in The Inferno.
We'll find out if Dante was soft-pedaling how bad it is.
Marie: "I wonder where those conservatives are who hate this?"
Indeed, a question for the ages, certainly the central question of our own. Thomas Frank and many other have wrestled with it and managed no more than a draw, but I'd add this: As you say, the way we've structured our economy, virtually everyone is beholden to those with the money, whether it be corporate or individual. It's an arrangement so embedded in our social and intellectual life that it has become a part of our psychology. While people occasionally see and feel imperfections in our economic arrangements (more so in economic downturns), we are so enmeshed in our web or economic ties, we take them for granted and are moved to conclude, if we think about them at all, like Alexander Pope in his apologia for the Great Chain of Being that "Whatever is, is right."
Yes, we do have guns, gays and God out there motivating the Right, but that argument has its limitations; it does not tell us why people of at least adequate intelligence, like those employed at "think" tanks, don't actually think, that is, don't question assumptions.
First, it does not pay them to do so. Because they do have remunerated positions, they feel the system works; it's worked for them and along with their paycheck, they receive the sense of smug satisfaction I detect in most of the Right's "intellectual" product. Second, I suspect most "think" tanks on the Right don't hire deep thinkers.
Thinking too deeply in a place supported by a system that can't tolerated having its assumptions questions would get you fired.
Ken,
What you've described, "... an arrangement so embedded in our social and intellectual life that it has become a part of our psychology...we are so enmeshed in our web or economic ties, we take them for granted and are moved to conclude, if we think about them at all, like Alexander Pope in his apologia for the Great Chain of Being that 'Whatever is, is right.'", is a textbook example of ideology at work.
Ideology operates best at a subconscious level where those in thrall to it don't see it's workings at all and make the same assumption Pope seems to arrive at in your quote. The Great Chain of Being is an equally good example of how a hierarchical system is granted, through the centuries, the kind of privileged intellectual acceptance that obliterates other points of view, another hallmark of ideology.
This isn't to say that there are some who are slaves to ideology and an enlightened few (we here, for example) who are not. There are few who engage in political discourse who do not rely, to some extent, on ideological positions. The trick is whether you use it (as a source of assumptions, hopefully not ingested without a certain amount of introspection) or whether it uses you (a corollary being whether those who are hip to its uses manipulate others with it--a standard MO on the right).
And this is part of what is wrong with Kansas. Because ideology works best as an invisible agent of a particular culture, really, the informing agent, the urge to look under the hood and question its operation rarely makes its way to the surface. So even if conservative ideology operates against the best interests of many who subscribe to it, those people are reticent to vote against it, because, that's the way it should be.
They take Pope's idea one step further into Tautology Land:
"Whatever is right, is right."
Right?
Hey, any fans of the Good Wife out here?
Was that a crazy episode last night, or what? Looks like the investigation into the governor's ballot box stuffing is off for a bit.
Malaysian Missing Plane Newsflash:
Chinese satellites have found a thing in the ocean.
It might be square shaped.
Then again, it might not be.
Ken and Akhilleus: As long as the system takes care of most people's basic requirements, it will be tolerated, especially if it incorporates the idea that motivation+work can allow an individual to improve his lot. When that idea gets discredited, all bets are off. In the early 30's prior to the engagement of the New Deal, with unemployment way up and many people desperate for hope, there was a real threat that the US would opt for a US version of Italian fascism, which at the time looked sort of successful. At the same time, industrialists and large landowners (and many Republicans) were extremely worried that New Deal empowerment of labor would trend towards communism, or at least socialism, which many at the time thought different names for the same thing. Many people really questioned whether democracy + individualism had run its course in the American experiment. And back in those days, there were virtually no government supports for people to fall back on. I believe that had it not been for the war production buildup starting in the late thirties, and ensuing war employment (followed by the great lift of the GI Bills and other federal programs), the US could have experienced serious social upheaval.
Times today are nowhere near as bad, but if the great mass of Americans starts to realize that they will always be hand to mouth, while a small (really small) percentage of the population accrues more and more of the nation's output, you will not see a revivification of the idea that work+motivation = growth. You will see demand for fairness. The problem will be (a) who gets to define what is fair and (b) how fast will people demand it be brought about.
The good news is that we are a rich country with still plenty going for us. The (main) bad news is that many of our elected national office holders don't seem to have the smarts or the desire to address this big problem in a constructive manner. Perhaps the coming pain will make them smarter.
Akhilleus: No surprise here. If I may put it this way, you're right, of course.
And all this rightness reminded me of an sf novel I read in high school, "They'd Rather Be Right" by Mark Clifton. As is often the case these days, I remembered the title and author by was hazy on the contents so I looked it up.
Wikipedia's precis: "Two professors create an advanced cybernetic brain, which they call "Bossy." Bossy can "optimise your mind...and give you eternal youth into the bargain, but only if you're ready to abandon all your favourite prejudices." However, when given the choice of admitting they were wrong and therefore being able to benefit from Bossy's abilities, most people would rather be right, and Bossy's ability to confer immortality is almost made ineffective by mankind's fear of 'her'."
Maybe the lesson of this otherwise trivial novel , what most consider the worst of all Hugo winners, stuck with me.
Slavish devotion to ideology and the blinding fear it generates is nothing new, it seems. One would think it hardly qualifies as fiction.
But one can, indeed must, also hope.
Patrick,
Motivation+hard work has been a standard meme for hundreds of years, at least since the advent of the industrial revolution. For the most part, it hasn't been operational, for the vast majority of Americans, for 50 years and counting. So how long does a myth have to be dead before it's not believed anymore?
Yes, we are a rich country, but, as you point out, the number of Americans who actually share in and enjoy those riches is way down the negative powers of 10 scale, probably below 10 to the minus 6.
That's pretty goddam bad.
But all those tens of millions of people above that benchmark continue to vote Republican. So, when do they "get it"? When do they start voting their interest? When do they realize that motivation+hard work in the current conservative paradigm gets them nothing but the back of some rich asshole's hand and a warning to keep voting the same way?
My sense is that many of them would rather die, and I mean DIE, than admit that liberals have been right all along and their conservative adepts (self-proclaimed, of course) are wrong.
Dead wrong.
I have written about Cathy McMorris Rogers numerous times for numerous reasons. Now it seems as though a Todd Winer, former aide to Rogers, has provided damaging information to investigators who are charging Rogers on an ethics charge. Lesson here–-maybe--be nice to your staff even though they screw up because when they leave they could screw you royally.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/25/us/politics/ethics-panel-releases-details-of-charges-against-republican-leader.html?_r=0<
P.S. @Ak: Yes, "The Good Wife"–––pull back the sheet and feel the shock.
AK and PD, love it when a primetime soap opera (Good Wife) brings in facets of political realty. While the ending was a shocker, it seems that the ballot box stuffing investigation may not happen ~ or, wait for it . . . . a twist we did not see coming.