Robert's Stochastic thoughts

2012-01-29T12:18:00.001+01:00

Language:A Key Mechanism of Control
Bleg

In this excellent essay Timothy Egan wrote

“Language: A Key Mechanism of Control.”

[skip]

Today, if you listen carefully to any Gingrich takedown, you’ll usually hear words from the control memo.

I've noticed this too. But what's with this old fashioned listening business. If I were computer literate, I would write a script which counted the number of times words listed in "Language:A Key Mechanism of Control" appear in transcripts of Gingrich's speech (especially when he isn't reading a prepared speech).

To be fair, the same script could count the frequency in speech by others. I never read the whole memo. I feel totally sure that Gingrich is still relying on it. The proof, one way or the other, is out there.

Has this been done (link please). If not do it (script and link pretty please with strawberries on top)

2012-01-28T15:12:00.002+01:00

Matthew Yglesias goes over to the shades of grey side

I think. I haven't read the post. I just read a post on the post by Drum and flipped out.

Drum wrote

Matt Yglesias notes a tension in lefty thought today: the stuff we all support (better healthcare, more teachers, childcare, new infrastructure, etc.) is in the non-manufacturing sector, and yet we all cheer when President Obama calls for increased focus on manufacturing. So which do we want? More people working in manufacturing or more people working in service and construction industries? It's hard to have both, after all.

I support high employment in manufactuging. The reason is that I believe that people are paid more if they work in manufacturing than if they work in other sectors. These labor market rents are not considered by employers when deciding how many people to hire. The aim isn't just a sustainable trade balance but also "good jobs for good wages." The evidence supporting the hypothesis that high wage sectors provide better jobs (not just compensating differentials) to the same workers is overwhelming.

Yes economists argued for decades that this can't be true and that our models show that people are paid (counting non pecuniary amenities) based on their ability. But believing in those models is like believing in Phlogiston. They don't fit the facts. If there are labor market rents, then the logic of propmoting manufacturing employment is clear. People get something for nothing if they switch from employment in services to employment in manufacturing -- well the data show they lose big if they move the other way. This happens when the shift can't possibly be a sign that the manufacturing employer learned that they weren't as able as they seemed, because it happens when whole plants are closed.

Two decades ago, there was an interesting academic debate on the topic. I claim it was settled. The people who were wrong (as usual) just changed the subject and ignored the data (as usual). Google scholar Larry Katz. In any case, you have to admit that we might want higher employment in one sector because of labor market rents. The argument that the market knows best requires the assumption that the labor market clears. That is that there is no unemployment. I promise you that this is clear.

" It's hard to have both, after all." Huh ?!?!? Have you noticed that the unemployment rate isn't exactly zero right now ? More generally that the employment/population ratio varies a lot and we might want it to be high. I will consider this to be just a slip (mostly). But one point is that, if the labor market doesn't clear, then we don't have any reason to think that we prefer employment to unemployment but don't prefer employment in one sector to employment in another. There are models in which one can prove that the government shouldn't favor one sector. They are models in which there is 0 unemployment. Relying on them is not a good idea.

On more narrow topics.

I don't think you can understand the widespread leftist and centrist support for infrastructure spending without considering the unemployment rate. Some might think that we should spend more on average over the next decades, but others think we should pull spending forward so that we spend more now and less in the future -- that the point of spending now is that we will have non falling down bridges then and won't have to spend then. Supporters of more infrastructure spending now and in the future can agree with supporters of more infrastructure now and less in the future about what to do now. But it just isn't true that Obama says he supports high government spending now and in the future.

Also the supporters of high spending on education and infrastructure don't argue that it is an substitute for manufacturing -- that our goal is to be able to recite Shakespeare we drive our foreign made cars down nice new highways. Rather it is that infrastructure and education are needed for high manufacturing productivity so that the effect will be that employment now in infrastructure and education will cause higher manufacturing employment in the future.

Finally (whew) there are sectors other than manufacturing, infrastucture, education and health care. For example FIRE. It is very easy to argue that we would be better off if fewere people worked in financial services (Yglesias argues this frequently). One might suspect that they are working away separating fools and their money, that is they would be out of a job and their clients would be better off if those clients decided to buy and hold the market portfolio instead of trying to beat the market and losing. This is definitely your view and Yglesias's view. But somehow you forget it when discussing sectors other than manufacturing. This was not a slip. This was contrarian BS.

Or how about real estate. And now that I mention it construction of housing. One might think we would be better off with smaller houses and more manufacturing, infrastructure education and health care. One might note that the current policy isn't neutral but involves huge subsidies for the mortgage interest deduction. One might be Matthew Yglesias proving that Matthew Yglesias wrote that post as a contrarian dweeb.

Or how about insurance ? Some people think we could get just as much health insurance with much lower employment and cost if we had single payer or a public option or Medicare buy in. The evidence for this view is overwhelming. One of those people is named Matthew Yglesias. But he forgot about the bloated private health insurance industry when aiming to channel his inner Kinsley and write some pointless contrarian BS.

He knows better. You know that your devastating critique is just one of many valid devastating critiques. His post was a provocation. That is, he is going over not to the dark side but to they many shades of grey side.

2012-01-28T12:23:00.000+01:00

ResurgentRomney quotes Steve Singiser on ResurgentRomney ?

"The evidence lies, as it often does"

2012-01-27T08:47:00.000+01:00

Mitt Romney LDS yes LSD no

Wolf Blitzer asking Romney to repeat the charge.

“I haven’t seen the ad, so I’m sorry, I don’t get to see all the TV ads,” Romney said. “Did he say that?”

The fact that Gingrich did say something like that is a bit awkward for Gingrich, and has been for quite a while. But there was plenty of awkward to go around: Turns out the ad Romney said he’s never heard of is running on the radio from his campaign — and Romney’s voice, in Spanish, is on the end saying he approved it.

This Time Mitt Romney said something which is true (I think I will devote this blog to reporting all of his non-lies -- plus other things as I want to blog freequently).

It depends on what the definition of "seen" is. He has heard the ad, but sticking to LDS and not LSD he hasn't seen it man. The problem is that, like Bill Clinton, he is too clever by half. His denial is technically true, but gives the impression of very deliberately misleading. It adds the insult of outsmarting Wolf to the injury of trying to mislead us.

In fact, his campaign's defense is that he made an honest mistake (better than a much too clever dodge).

“We’ve had about 85 web videos, radio ads, and TV spots that have been up and running which he has reviewed and approved,” Fehrnstrom told TPM. “He doesn’t recall every single one of them,

So Romney doesn't remember the claims he has made in public. According to Fehnstrom he has reckless disregard for the truth, not the sort of character flaw which would lead him to deny that his campaign made a claim in a TV ad without mentioning that it made the claim (which is substantially true) in a radio ad.

Fehrnstrom also mentions Politifact (see post below)

"Politifact looked at that ad, they looked at that specific claim, and they rated it mostly true.”" Here I agree with Politifact. Gingrich contrasted English with an un named "language of the Ghetto". Everyone infers that this other language is Spanish, but he didn't use the word. So the Romney campaign's claim is "mostly true" rather than just plain true, because they paraphrased (accurately I'm sure) rather than translating word for word.

2012-01-26T16:28:00.000+01:00

Politifact

When is true not true ?

It isn't just private sector jobs growth. They also rate

"Right now, American oil production is the highest that it’s been in eight years." Mostly true. The post concludes

"Obama was correct when he said that "right now, American oil production is the highest that it’s been in eight years." We think he may have overstated his administration’s role in achieving that, but not wildly so. We rate the claim Mostly True."

To summarize "Obama was correct ... Mostly True."

Huh ?!?

I also disagree with this one

http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2012/jan/16/mitt-romney/mitt-romney-tweets-more-americans-have-lost-their-/

“more Americans have lost their jobs under Barack Obama than any president in modern history”
The alleged fact check.

Romney’s claim is accurate if you count from every president’s first day in office to his final day
...
we arrive at a ruling of Mostly False."

Wow. Mostly false ? The claim as stated and quoted is accurate. But it doesn't mean what Romney wants to think it means. So an "accurate" statement is "mostly false."

Fact checkers should check facts.

2012-01-26T16:10:00.000+01:00

The claim that Bill Adair doesn't blow goats is mostly true

He wrote this

In our first couple of years, we treated many of those claims very literally. If someone said jobs had gone up since a governor was in office, and we found the numbers backed it up, the statement earned a True.

About a year ago, we realized

what ? That the whole idea of fact checking is a mistake ? That true statements of fact aren't true ?

I e-mailed

I think very highly of Politifact. I congratulate you for the integrity it took to revise a very controversial half true rating for a claim of fact which you noted and note is accurate. I am not satisfied and will be one of God knows how many on all sides who object.

I think that if a claim of fact is true, it should be rated true. The supposed implicatoni or implied causal hypothesis is not your business.

You wrote "In our first couple of years, we treated many of those claims very literally." I read that as ""In our first couple of years, we fact checked." I think the post goes on to explain that you decided that fact checking wouldn't, by itself, eliminate the effectiveness of deceptive rhetoric on the political debate, you felt you could and should save the world, so you decided not to stick to fact checking.

OK but rename yourself "politifair" or "politicontraposthocergopropterhoc" or something. I like fact checking. You have decided that factual accuracy isn't the key issue. I liked Politifact exactly because of what it was for its first two years.

You agree that all of the quoted text is true. You couldn't decide if you should rate it half true or mostly true. You don't see how absurd your explanation is.

Also you discuss time pressure "20 minutes." You assume that you just couldn't get your fact check out an hour after the speech. What possible legitimate journalistic purpose is served by rushing so much ?

You note that you decided that the rating depended on context. I think this is a repudiation of fact checking and absolutely disagree. But before looking at the context, you had narrowed the options down to "half true" or "Mostly true". And you admit it. You decided that based on evidence which was, at the time, a forecast in your imaginations. How did you type the post without wondering whether to resign your position ? I ask for information.

Finally if the context is needed to make a quote complete enough to check, then the context must be quoted as part of the claim being checked. As it is, you put up a statement which, you agree, is 100% true but rate it mostly true, because of other text which you don't present as part of the claim of fact to be checked and do present as part of the claim of fact to be checked. Your position is that the quoted statement is true, but it is a misleading quote because necessary context was removed, by you.

2012-01-22T06:58:00.001+01:00

Mitt Headroom

2012-01-18T06:33:00.000+01:00

What is the name of this crook?

Is it ok if someone reliably lies all the time ? Logically one can get the truth out of a reflexive liar by take a yes or no question Q and asking "If i were to ask you Q what would you say?"

I think journalists should try this with Romney. He lies more than I imagine possible even taking into account that he lies more than I imagine possible.

For example, he just broke down and admittedthat he pays about 15% of his income in taxes. I should have concluded that he doesn't pay about 15% of his income in taxes. Instead, I had to wait for the great Josh Marshall and Reuters (who are doing a great job lately) to explain to me that he probably pays much less by receiving incipome in tax paradises.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/2012/01/is_it_even_15.php?ref=fpblg

Mitt Romney should run for President of the Cayman islands where he pays his tiny taxes (don't tell him that they are a colony of the UK and don't elect their head of state -- Queen Elisabeth doesn't pay taxes at all).

2012-01-14T14:37:00.000+01:00

Pete Townshend and Paul Ryan - Behind Blue Eyes II

No one knows what it's like to be the bad man
To be the sad man
Behind blue eyes

No one knows what it's like to be hated
To be fated
To telling only lies

But my schemes
They aren't as empty
As my conscience seems to be

I have vouchers only lonely
health care is purchased
it's never free

No one knows what it's like to cut these programs
Like I do
And I blame you

No one cuts back as hard on their seniors
None of your tax and dough
goes to you

But my dreams
They aren't as empty
As my conscience seems to be

I have vouchder only lonely
health care is purchased
it's never free

When my fist clenches, I am a tightwad
Before I spend it and have to tax.

If I smile tell me some bad news
Before I laugh and act like a fool

And if you swallow lies so evil
Put your welfare down the hole

But if you shiver I won't give you a blanket
Keep you warm let you wear my coat

No one knows what it's like to be the bad man
To be the sad man
Behind blue eyes

2012-01-14T04:44:00.000+01:00

Top Ten Things Wrong with "Let's Provide the New York Times With a List of our Top Ten Lies"

The bad Kevin Drum who is a knee jerk defender of the MSM seems to have stolen the good Kevin Drum's password again. Drum beats Brisbane, but feels the need to introduce his endorsement of ohn Quiggin's proposal with a string of Obamanations.

Not in any particular order and I have no idea if I will get to 10.

1 OK this is the howler. Drum endorses Quiggin's proposal that the Times have a list of frequently lied about facts. To introduce this endorsement, he makes an absurd ridiculous attack on that which he is about to do. "Are we really as willing to allow the Times to be the supreme arbiter of truth as we think?" WHAT !!!!! The question is whether the Times should print something. Drum asserts that if we allow reporters to assert something, then we make them the supreme arbiters of truth. He makes many claims of fact in this post. Who made him the supreme arbiter of truth. I ask Drum (and demand an answer) "Do you assert that you, Kevin Drum, are the supreme arbiter of truth or do you admit that you made a totally bogus nonsensical argument ?" I see no third alternative. How the hell did Drum manage to decide that saying it is OK for someone to make a claim of fact is the same as declaring that person the supreme arbiter of truth ? OK really he didn't. But how the hell could a person as intelligent as Kevin Drum write such nonsense ? I am asking for information and actually almost hope that I might get an answer.

2. Setting up a straw man. Drum notes that many of Brisbane's critics were not thrilled when Politifact named the Democrats' claim that Republicans had voted to end Medicare the lie of the year. How can they disagree both with Brisbane and with Politifact ? Drum asserts that Brisbane's critics wrote that political reporters should report that a claim made by a public figure was the lie of the year. There is no other possible justification for his argument. I must have missed that critic of Brisbane. All the criticisms I recall stopped with the proposal that a claim be labeled false. None proposed that political beat reporters should evaluate relative falsehood of falsehoods (the "of the year" part). The comparison is obviously totally invalid.

3. But aside from the "of the year" part, there is also the "lie" part. The vast majority of Brisbane critics (among the dozens whose criticisms I read) argued that political reporters should report that false claims are false. Not all false claims are lies, there are also honest mistakes. To call a statement a lie, one has to make an inference about the beliefs of the person who made that statement. People often think they can do this without reasonable doubt (people are in prison for perjury). But I really don't recall any specific case of a Brisbane critic thinking that a beat political reporter should write that a statement is a lie and therefore state that it wasn't an honest mistake.

4. But aside from the "lie" and the "of the year" parts, some Brisbane critics (at least one him being me) don't think that beat reporters should even write that a claim made by a public figure is false. It is enough to report the documented facts in the public record which would be cited in an effort to prove that the claim is false. If the conclusion is obvious, it would be redundant for a beat political reporter to state it. if it is not obvious, it would be improper editorializing. Say on global warming, if a politician says that there is no consensus on the science, a reporter could look up the survey in which roughly 98.5% of people who have published in the peer reviewed climate literature are reported as saying they believe in anthropogenic global warming (a half assed effort to cite from memory as the preceding would clearly not be acceptable in serious journalism which this blog sure isn't). The reader might conclude that consensus means 100% so the reporter's claim of fact confirms the politicians claim. The reader might note that the reporter just reported the claim by (I don't know who but he or she better get the cite) that there was such a study and also assume that it was fudged.

To me the question asked by Brisbane is whether assertions of fact which meet New York Times standards of reliability (not 100% which is impossible but waaay over 99%) can be made in articles on politics even though they contradict claims made by prominent people.

I can see two sub questions. One is whether they can be reported if they are important enough (aside from evaluating the prominent person who made the contradicted claim) and realiable enough (also including the prominent person's claim as evidence against them) to be reoported in that article. I see no possible justification for deleting a claim from an article, because one learns a prominent person said something which contradicts it and even though the prominent person's claim does not substatially alter the balance of evidence. I am also sure that this would happen (except for the fact that beat political reporters do not report on facts relevant to the political debate except for what candidates and campaigns said and wrote, local color and a few quotes from normal people in the crowd -- the implausible part is that they would report on facts in the public record relevant to the policy debate not that they would delete those facts if reporting them proved a politician's claim false).

The second question is whether a claim of fact which is reliable (even counting the politicians word as some evidence against) should be considred relevant enough to report of it contradicts something the politician said. This is, I think, the real question. I think the answer is that of course it should be reported and it is shocking that Brisbane asked the question.

For the case of Mediscare, I would have no problem if politifact quoted the text of the House budget resolution which describes the voucher program which Republicans name "Medicare." I don't think any Democrats would mind a debate over whether that program is reformed Medicare as Republicans and Politifact argue or a fundamentally different program from Medicare which Republicans chose to name Medicare. I have no problem with reporting facts which tend to undermine the Democrats claim that Republicans voted to end Medicare, because a debate about whether the Republicans so called "Medicare" is or isn't Medicare is a useful debate about reality and proposed policy.

My problem with Politifact (and the part of Politifact that I just love and can't resist) is the pants on fire graphic. Politifact doesn't just report relevant facts. It draws colorful conclusions. I really enjoy that. Hell I skip the rest and just go to the pants on fire posts. But I don't propose that the Grey Lady turn into the orange, yellow and red flaming lady. I'm no sure that this is what anyone at all criticizing Brisbane advocated and I can remember no such advocacy. I think the comparison of what Brisbane's critics recommend and Politifacts pantsing people is a red, orange and yellow herring.

5. Ballance ( (c) Chris Cilizza)"I've sort of ignored the whole kerfuffle because the quality of the conversation on both sides was pretty willfully obtuse, " Drum is free to ignore whatever he wants, but he provides no support for his accusation. For one thing, the false symmetry suggests that there are significant numbers of people on both sides. One the Brisbane side I counted Brisbane and one of n commentors on his post. For another, Drum seems to argue one of three things 1) all contributions before Quiggins were pretty willfully obtuse 2) one should ignore interesting arguments because other people reach the same conclusions via pretty willfully obtuse arguments 3) MSM basher bashing is always right whether or not it has anything to do with reason logic or evidence. I choose box number 3. Look there is no need for Drum to explain why he hasn't already posted on a topic when posting on a topic. why did he go out of his way to insult someone or other ? Yes I know see answer three. Plus you did click "Obamanation" didn't you ?

6. And yet, if you insist on real-time fact checking being done in news stories, then you have to do exactly what John suggests. What is "real time" ? Drum sees a choice between instant fact checking and quoting without fact checking. He assumes that reporters just must report what candidates said yesterday whether or not they have time to check the facts. Clearly it would be intollerable for readers to not learn what candidates say in "real time." Also "real time" does not mean "in tomorrow's paper." It is computerspeek and has nothing to do with the times of the New York Times. Drum's rule is that it is better to be fast than accurate. I think I am being entirely fair.

7. An omission. Drum passed up a chance to repeat one of his best points. Brisbane argued that it will become harder for political reporters to check facts, because they will be spending almost all of their time on the bus. The assumption is that it is more important to report on a speech from the site (and not a video feed) and to report local color than it is to check claims of fact. As Drum has argued (linking to Chait) there is no justification for this in the age of digital communication. In fact, real time fact checking (really real time) is possible (bloggers do it) but only by people surfing the web.

8. "There's fairly broad agreement that quoting public figures saying something wrong about Subject X in a news story, and then correcting the record on Subject X only in a follow-up fact-checking piece, is a lousy practice. After all, everyone reads the A1 story, but very few people read the A17 fact check. The current system just doesn't work." What is this current system of which you speak ? I agree that would be no good, and I certainly agree that Brisbane asserted that it is the current system. But it isn't. There are page A17 fact checking pieces, but there are many repeatedly made false claims which are never checked in page A17 fact checking pieces. I suppose I should try to find 10 examples of false claims of some importance made with some frequency such that there is no such fact check. But no way will I do the work. The way to do it is to look at non MSM fact checkers noting things such as Al Gore never claimed he invented the internet and such like, then look for the MSM page A17 articles noting the same facts. In my heart, I am sure that many false claims are not corrected even on page A17. Brisbane suggests that there is ample fact checking, just not in the same article in which the claim is reported. I don't agree. He presented no evidence. You present no evidence. The very clearly implied assertion that there is a debate about the location but not the amount of fact checking is highly controversial and completely unsupported by evidence. To be fair, I admit that I didn't bother to do the huge amount of work to support the competing claim which I made based on my heart.

9. The repeated presentation of the Politifact pants on fire graphic strongly suggests that this is what Brisbane's critics demand. I can recall no basis at all for this insinuation. Yes this is objections 2, 3 and 4 warmed over. It is hard to get to 10.

10. Why the hell did you type 10 ? If you had typed 9, I would be done by now. If you had typed 8, I would still have a shred of dignity.

2012-01-03T06:46:00.001+01:00

Johannas von Quiggin take note

Rick Santorum has no use for the Ivy League, or the economists produced therein. (He also expressed doubts about the Republican reliance on economists from the "Australian school." Likely he meant the "Austrian school,

Read more: http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/rick-santorum-iowa-6631492#ixzz1iN4F8gbO .

Uh this isn't one of the three Republican hopefuls who are notoriously ignorant and gaffe prone.

I don't want to hear any whining about Howard or gloating over "Howard's End." He would look like a love child of Albert Einstein and Rosa Luxemburg in this crowd.

2011-12-19T22:15:00.000+01:00

Mr Ballance Himself Has an interesting column

The Ballance balance pun which I flog relentlessly is due to Chris Cillizza who is not to be blamed for the fact that an editor ignored the rules he chose for a corruption scorecard and added Jack Ballance for balance.

He wrote a very odd column about the House Republicans blocking the payroll tax cut extension ostensibly because they like the payroll tax cut so much.

It is (as usual) a column about the political debate, but Cillizza waits till the second to last paragraph to quote a Democrat (a quote which includes as few words as, and no more words than, are this parenthetical comment includes).

This is actually non ballance. Cillizza doesn't quote Democrats because he argues with the Republicans himself. Still it is odd to read so much nonsense without reading anyone noting that it is nonsense.

2011-12-18T04:02:00.000+01:00

Watch this arabic language McDonalds ad. To understand Arabic views of US capitalism, gender relations, Big Macs and Meat Loaf, ... oh hell just watch

2011-12-17T17:30:00.001+01:00

The Presidential Campaign has Been Going on too Long

I read "MIT" as "Mitt" here "MIT’s Light Speed Camera Captures Photons Moving" then I immediately thought that, maybe with this new miracle technology they can freeze Romney's policy positions and capture him mid flip flop.

And it's 2011.

2011-12-11T17:39:00.001+01:00

All evidence from the debates notwithstanding, there is a Republican with a brain.

Asif Mandvi, reporter for the "Daily Show," tried to prank Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi, asking for a sample of her urine. She immediately forked it over, though it was only apple juice -- yazakchattiest.

I want a brokered convention.

2011-12-11T15:56:00.003+01:00

QOTD

the plan added up to an actual elimination of Medicare even though Ryan planned to spray-paint "Medicare" on an old railroad bridge in Janesville and point to it and say, "See? Medicare is still there."

Oh hell, to save pixels, the quote of every day is just whatever Charles Pierce wrote that day.

How does he write that well ? Did he sell his soul to the devil ? If yes, did he make a good bargain ?

2011-12-10T17:54:00.003+01:00

The Kinsley gaffe to top all Kinsley gaffes

Michael Kinsley noted that politician's gaffes occur when they accidentally say something which is true, universally known to be true, and damaging to themselves.

Ex Senator Rick Santorum just said "Science should get out of politics." I am willing to bet that his aids told him to say "politics should get out of science" and argue that schools only teach about Darwin because of politically correct affirmative action for 19th century rich English gentlemen.

But ooops little Ricky said what he really thinks. Science should not mess with his political program or his religion (of course in his mind there is no distinction).

By the way, I have long been a huge fan of Michael Kinsley (including back when I only knew of him as the new anonymous author of TRB). So writing the post below was painful.

2011-12-10T04:20:00.004+01:00

Brad is right. I was wrong. Michael Kinsley has become a reflexively contrarian twit who can't manage to avoid contradicting himself.

Kinsley wrote a blog post here

"For every group Obama takes to task, he also has a “to be sure” passage in which he tries to make clear that he’s not talking about you. But if you listen to the music, not the words, you might well think otherwise."

So Kinsley feels free to ignore the words. After sneering at Obama for "to be sure" he dares to write

"this distinction is hard to maintain if you’re simultaneously suggesting that there is something ill-gotten about most rich people’s gains."

Note the weasel word "suggesting." Kinsley has just noted that Obama said the opposite of what he writes Obama was "suggesting." Positive proof that a claim is false doesn't matter, because as a pundit, he can always ignore what Obama said and write about what he thinks unattentive listeners might have thought he said. So ignoring the text when interpreting is a form of sophistication, because the really hard challenge is to figure out how people who don't pay attention to the facts hear things.

Then at length Kinsley plagiarizes while pretending he is criticizing

"conflating actual crooks and the innocent affluent makes it hard to claim that raising their taxes isn’t punishment for some form of misbehavior. Taxes are not a punishment; they are a source of necessary revenue. But if you tie them to the financial scandal, they sound pretty punitive."

Notice that he has gone from discussing what some might think Obama said if one ignored what he actually said, to ignoring what Obama said. Having admitted that the claim immediately above is totally false, Kinsley asserts that Obama suggested it. Read down a few lines, and it becomes something Obama did with no qualifications. In a few sentences black has become white and up has become down.

Does Kinsley really think Washington Monthly readers are dumb enough to fall for that ?

He goes on to say that the middle class must be hammered. He pretends to forget that Obama proposed doing so this summer. The claim that this must be done is just something that everyone who is anyone accepts. There is no need to present evidence.

Also it is outrageous to say that a family with income of $250,000 is borderline rich, because Kinsley has totally lost touch with the vast majority of people in the USA (and don't even think of the world).

update: I just realized that Kinsley criticized Obama on the grounds that an income of $250,000 does not make a family rich and for not asking (in this speech as opposed to his policy proposals) for sacrifices from the middle class. Again, the two criticisms contradict each other. No matter what Obama said, Kinsley must be wrong, just based on logic.

update 2: Welcome Thomaites. I didn't like the Kinsley post, but it is criticism at its best compared to the work of the title, abstract and illustrations guy at The Washington Monthly.

"To be sure" Kinsley's conclusion isn't harsh. He concludes that the speech was not "a really great speech" but now the illustration and teaser suggests that Obama is the reincarnation of Robespierre.

Chrome's automatic URL completer often has trouble deciding if I want to go to The Washington Post or The Washington Monthly. Today, I have trouble deciding to which organ of the absolute faith in Ballance and cutting social security it sent me.

I commented. Much below is redundant.

I have long defended you from criticism at my friend Brad DeLong's blog, but I think I will now give up and admit that he was right.

First income of $250,000 makes one incredibly rich by any reasonable standard. The fact that you are spoiled doesn't mean that the top 3% isn't rich.

Second Obama has described extremely painful spending cuts and significant tax increases in great detail. You earn a place with T Friedman by insisting that Obama do what he has already done.

You may have forgotten everything that happened last summer, but a responsible columnist would have googled it.

Finally, you agree with Obama's policy proposals. You note that he always adds a "to be sure" to explain that he is not lumping honest people together with crooks. Indeed you snear at him for doing exactly that. You also snear at him for not doing that.

Put the criticism from the sentence including "to be sure" along with the criticism that Obama didn't make the distinctions you make and you find that logic alone proves that you are wrong.

Basically your problem is you know a banker whose feelings are hurt. You admit that it is absurd, ridiculous and nonsensical to critice Obama because of this tragic event,then go on to do so.

I think your fundamental problem is that you are envious. Obama is President. He clearly knows more than you do. He makes serious policy proposals which I can't remember the last you made. He writes better than you do. He has carisma. That is soooo unfair.

I admit, in advance, that I envy you, partly because you write infinitely better than I do.

Also, of course, you must be contrarian.

So now I have to admit (to Brad) that he was right and I was wrong. And I hate that.

2011-12-10T01:37:00.002+01:00

An inside the inside of insider baseball post

I have noticed some people claiming on the web that those who jokingly pretend to believe the Mickey Kaus has sex with goats have had our comeuppance, since the accusation began when he speculation that John Edwards had had sex with someone other than Elisabeth Edwards and, lo and behold, Kaus was right.

This history of the goat sex joke is innaccurate. It was started by Duncan Black with this post

Kaus - Sleeps With Goats

In my eyes, I have to say, it's likely that it's true. Any claims by Kaus to not have carnal knowledge of goats will just be more evidence that the man is a liar.

posted April 29 2004 when Black learned that Kaus made unfounded accusations against John Kerry, that's Kerry with a K not Edwards with an E (the one without the great hair who windsurfed).

2011-12-10T01:17:00.002+01:00

He just can't help himself.

Dana Milbank fires both barrels at Newt Gingrich in this column. He doesn's speculate about erotic activities with pigs*, but I'm sure that's only because of the 700 word limit.

But even here, he just has to throw in a bit of Ballance

Kevin Drum of Mother Jones recently dug up a 1978 Gingrich quotation lamenting that “one of the great problems we have in the Republican Party is that we don’t encourage you to be nasty.”

Thanks to Gingrich, this is no longer a problem, in either party.

Milbank presents no evidence that Democrats are sufficiently nasty. In fact he doesn't quote a single Democrat. He doesn't argue that they have gotten nastier since 1994. There is no need to present evidence that Obama is nastier than Johnson, because the phrase "in either party" is automatically valid and need not be supported by any evidence.

I almost suspect that it is an unconscious tic. It could be that Milbank wrote and wrote, then realized that he had criticized only a Republican and added the totally unsupported swipe at the Democrats. But it is also possible that he claims that both sides share a fault as automatically and unconsciously as he breaths.

* pigs not goats as I am discussing the nastiness of Johnson and not Mickey Kaus's approach to journalism.

2011-12-10T00:29:00.003+01:00

A Better Press Corps

Mary Ann Milbourn writing about extended unemployment insurance in the Orange County Register shows how it's done.

Meanwhile, the proposed unemployment extension would continue the current 99 weeks of benefits now available to the long-term unemployed. There would be no additional benefits for the so-called 99ers, who have exhausted their 99 weeks.

Not everyone understands this. Some people (sorry no links just memories) clearly think further extension means extension to a 100th week. The actual fact isn't a deep dark secret (I knew it) but it is usually not reported in articles about the latest twists and turns in Congress.

I sure didn't know any of the following and wonder why I don't get information like this in The Washington Post

Congress faces a Dec. 31 deadline for extending the benefits. If they are not extended, California Employment Development Department officials estimate 95,000 unemployed workers who are collecting benefits on their last tier of so-called FedEd aid would face an immediate cutoff.

Benefits for others who are on one of the four other federal unemployment extensions would end as soon as they complete the tier they currently are on, said Loree Levy, an EDD spokeswoman.

As of October, 970,000 unemployed workers in California had been out of work more than 26 weeks and were collecting on one of the five tiers of extended benefits.

Levy said that ultimately 1.5 million unemployed Californians will be affected. Without the federal extensions, the newly unemployed will only eligible for the standard 26 weeks of state benefits.

That's 132 words of solid information. Not a lot of trees killed. Why am I amazed ?
Now I know the effect of the bill on people in California. To find out about the other 49 states, DC, Puerto Rico, and Guam I will have to find other serious newspapers.

2011-12-08T22:21:00.002+01:00

There she goes again. This is my second post on an article by Rosalind S. Helderman on the payroll tax.

This time, she doesn't mention the totally false argument that the payroll tax holiday reduces the balance of the Social Security trust fund. I guess this is an improvement compared to mentioning it and failing to note that it is absolutely false, but I still think a correction of the false claim which she repeated (neither in her own name nor for attribution) without noting its falsehood is in order.

My complaint this time is with this paragraph

Democrats believe the tax cut could help stimulate the economy by giving consumers more of their paychecks to spend. But many Republicans believe it’s a short-term gimmick that will not spur economic development and would complicate efforts to do a total rewrite of the tax code that would result in lower rates.

She does not have ESP. She can't know what Democrats or many Republicans *believe* but only what they claim.

Personally, I suspect that some of those Republicans oppose the bill, because they think it could help stimulate the economy. The cited arguments (after the removal of the one which is based on a false claim of fact which she noted earlier) make no sense. To call something a gimmick is not to argue against it. To argue that short term policy must be bad is to assume that the current economic situation is normal. And there is no chance of said total rewrite and everyone knows it.

But, if I were a reporter, not a blogger, I would not feel free to speculate about what is in peoples' minds and, unlike Helderman stick to reporting what comes out of their mouths.

2011-12-08T13:11:00.004+01:00

Fiction In the Washington Post

I don't want to make this a daily feature but Anthony Faiola and Michael Birnbaum made it hard for me to get past The Washington Post (my home page) without an angry blog post. In what is supposed to be a news article, they make a false claim of fact. They do not point to any supporting evidence (nor could they as their claim is plainly false) nor do they quote even a self appointed expert.

Their claim that "Europe’s crisis now is as much political as economic. It stems from a legacy of overspending and overborrowing, but ..." is false. Spain and Ireland were running budget surpluses and had a debt to GDP ratio lower than Germany's. Italy had a primary surplus and declining debt to GDP ratio. Germany happens to be the one and only country allowed to adopt the Euro in spite of not meeting the Maastricht conditions (which shows how stupid those rules were).

Now, I suppose that the claim is vague enough to be not proven false -- they didn't write public "overspending and over borrowing." Indeed the root cause of most of the crisis, here in Europe as well as in the USA, ws a combination of banking deregulation and banker's errors.

Here I think the problem is that they consider the sentence which I truncated to be a claim that the problem isn't just over public spending and under taxing by Greece and Portugal. They go on to criticize Germany "but ... it also reflects a lack of investor faith in the will of financially solid nations such as Germany to unite behind their troubled neighbors to shore up the currency union." so they can't say that the German position is total nonsense. That would be unBallancelicht.

But the German claims are false.

update: I posted before finishing the article. They go on to write "That plan called for treaty changes to set a limit for budget deficits at 3 percent of gross domestic product and a cap on debt of 60 percent of GDP — effectively mandating good fiscal governance." I submit that the word "good" should not appear in an article presented as news not opinion. I also happen to think that, right now, the "good" fiscal governance would cause a severe recession and would be "good" to exactly the extent that "good" means "horrible" and "idiotic." The demands of Ballance make it simply impossible to cover the debate without accepting the assumption that austerity is always good.

2011-12-07T03:41:00.003+01:00

Ballance in the Washington Post part way too many.

Facts have a known liberal bias. Therefore, a ballanced political reporter must not mention facts which undermine arguments made by politicians, at least not if the politicians are Republicans

In this article Rosilind Helderman twice mentions the claim made by conservative Republicans that the payroll tax holiday undermines social securities finances. She never mentions that it has no effect on the social security trust fund. The change is that instead of the Social Security Administration collecting taxes and using the money to buy Treasury securities, the Treasury gives the same securities to the Social Security Administration.

I remember this and found proof here in the second url returned by my first google search. This is not an obscure fact. It makes nonsense of the following from the article:

1

What might normally be a no-brainer for most congressional Republicans is being resisted by many tea-party-conscious members who oppose what they consider a short-term gimmick that would worsen the federal deficit and siphon money from Social Security.

and

2

Many conservatives argue the tax cut will undermine Social Security — which is funded through payroll taxes paid by workers and employers —

To prevent Social Security from losing tax revenue, Congress mandated that revenues be transferred from the general fund to the Social Security trust funds to make up for the tax reduction. This is provided for in section 601 of the Tax Relief Act, which reads in part, "There are hereby appropriated to the Federal Old-Age and Survivors Trust Fund and the Federal Disability Insurance Trust Fund established under section 201 of the Social Security Act (42 U.S.C. 401) amounts equal to the reduction in revenues to the Treasury by reason of the application of subsection (a). Amounts appropriated by the preceding sentence shall be transferred from the general fund at such times and in such manner as to replicate to the extent possible the transfers which would have occurred to such Trust Fund had such amendments not been enacted."

Now the Conservative Republicans might (and have) argued that the trust fund is meaningless. In that case, a payroll tax can't undermine the finances of Social Security. Also the when the trust fund reaches zero, nothing will change, so it is nonsense to call that bankruptcy of Social Security.

Also, furthermore and besides, dog bites man and Mitch McConnell lies (in the same article).

“I think most Americans, most Republicans, are very reluctant to raise taxes on anyone during this economic crisis that we find ourselves in,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) saidTuesday.

The polls prove that this claim is false. Also note how he equates Americans and Republicans. Again, the inconvenient massive polling data can't be mentioned, because it is unprofessional to note facts which contradict politicians' claims. I really don't know if Democrats are offered the same courtesy of hiding their lies. They don't lie as often.

2011-11-24T00:13:00.002+01:00

Lying Liar Lies about Lies

Romney strategist shows reckless disregard for the truth (which should be the headline under surprising news stories such as "Area Dog Bites Man").

Stuart Stevens, a senior Romney strategist [skip]

What about the tough response from Politifact? [pants on fire - Robert ]

"Do you know how many times they did that to Barack Obama in 2008?" he said. "Quite a few.

In fact in 2008 Politifact rated 2 (two) Obama claims "pants on fire." Now when I was in elementary school we defined a "few" as "more than two but not a lot" so two is not quite "a few".

Since 2008, Politifact has rated two more Obama claims "pants on fire." In contrast they have rated 8 Romney claims "pants on fire" already. They only began following him relatively recently. In the relatively recent past, Romney's winning pants on fire ratings at more than 3 times Obama's rate. And Obama is President.

He still has work to do to catch Michelle Bachman and "chain e-mail" (and I haven't checked who else). I'm sure he will manage.

2011-11-20T10:23:00.002+01:00

The DFHs are Going Too Far

I have my vices. Lots of them. One is occasionally reading the Rude Pundit. But these OWS hippy flower children have ruined everything. His Rudeness has gone all earnest and sincere.

I can't take it anymore.

Are rude blankets tax deductible ? Whatever happened to proudly lowering the level of debate ?

2011-11-19T16:21:00.002+01:00

Jeopardy

Slim and none.

Question after the link.

Which people are richer than Bill Gates ?

2011-11-18T21:33:00.003+01:00

Beyond Parody

Does Steoen Colbert have the world's easiest job or the hardest ?

He decided to parody

a request for an advisory opinion sent to the FEC on behalf of Karl Rove’s American Crossroads which stated: “While these advertisements would be fully coordinated with incumbent Members of Congress facing re-election in 2012, they would presumably not qualify as ‘coordinated communications.”

Is that easy as just reading it or hard as going faster than light ?

update: He did it

The Colbert Report
Get More: Colbert Report Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,Video Archive

I am now much closer to believing the CERN to Grand Sasso Neutrino result.

Also Buddy Roemer is desperate for publicity.

2011-11-15T07:02:00.002+01:00

OK it's official -- Obama is determined to do the opposite of anything Krugman advises.

President Obama says aloha to Hawaiian shirt tradition at APEC conference

Kugman obvously thought that, since Obama is from Hawaii, he could recommend Hawaiian shirts without getting a smack in the face (I mean he didn't even mention that Obama used to smoke pot).

Liquidity Traps And Hawaiian Shirts

Hempton’s suggestion:

[Bernanke] should not only announce that the Fed is buying Italian debt. He should do it whilst wearing an Hawaiian shirt and carrying a marijuana pipe. (I would even buy him the pipe…)

OK, it turns out that I have some inside information: in his academic days, Bernanke actually DID have a taste for Hawaiian shirts, often wearing them to the office. I don’t know about the marijuana bit.

Unfortunately, when he went to the Fed they turned him into a central banker.

2011-11-08T15:31:00.003+01:00

Department of WTF !?!?

The usually well informed Jonathan Bernstein writes

"the Bush years [snip] the Minerals Management Service [snip] I’m not aware of cases of fraud and corruption"

Uh Jonathan try googling
"Minerals Management Service" prostitutes
or
"Minerals Management Service" cocaine

Someone call MediaMatters

http://mediamatters.org/blog/201109280006

Actually don't. If they read that post at the Ten Miles Squared, their heads might explode.

2011-11-06T01:29:00.003+01:00

Forget the Women's world Cup. We are beating the Japanese where it really counts

Robot Soccer

Also I've never seen so many players sent off for flagrant fouls. I think my countryrobots have been studying the strategy of my country of residence

2011-11-06T01:11:00.002+01:00

When will Robotic Beings Rule the World ?

While the final triumph of the robots is inevitable (they keep getting better and better while we just add flab). Their candidates -- Mondale, Dukakis, Gore and Kerry -- haven't done so well.

They have sunk to the level of trying to trick us about what won in 92 and 96 by naming their top candidate "Big Dog"

They need to work on the irritation hornet's nest sound (marginally worse than the Dukakis X37) but still much more convincingly alive than Mitt Romney. No ?

2011-11-06T00:55:00.003+01:00

Shorter meets QOTD

QOTD "The election seems to pit the immovable object against the irresistible force — except, kind of, the opposite."

Shorter Jon Chait

The election pits the removable object against the resistible force

Longer shorter Jon Chait

The election pits the removable obstruction of Republican sabateurs against the feeble force of Obamanian technopopulism.

We also have a candidate for "Worst URL ever"

http.../is_nate_silver_wrong.html

joins

http.../i_water_dry"

http.../is_the_pope_shi'ite"

http.../do_the_Woods_Shi_in_the_Bear"

http.../does_the_Sun_rise_in_the_South_by_Southwest.

and

http.../download_free_virus

in the final bonus "no way am I gonna click that even if you pay me" round.

2011-10-20T18:44:00.003+02:00

Josh Marshall wins the internet

Yeah yeah I know "dog bites man" but this post is for the ages

THE PRODUCERS

What if you ran for president to boost your book sales numbers and somehow found yourself the frontrunner for the nomination even though you'd never set up an actual campaign? Ask Herman Cain.

Because of the title.

Satire is dead.

2011-10-17T17:50:00.002+02:00

Comment on Drum on the 60 vote Senate

Kevin Drum wrote

Like it or not, the reality of congressional politics has changed. The Senate is now a 60-vote body, and it's the vote on a cloture motion that's the important vote. For all practical purposes, the cloture vote is the vote on the bill. So my complaint would be just the opposite of Fallows's. Instead of insisting on a Schoolhouse Rock version of reporting, I'd prefer it if the media routinely reported on the actual reality of legislation today. If you want to report accurately, you should (a) report the cloture vote as a vote on the bill itself, (b) you should make clear that 60 votes are required to pass a bill, and (c) you should report the partisan breakdown of the voting — something that used to be routine but now only occasionally appears in reports of legislative activity.

Bottom line: The real-life practice of politics in America has changed over the past decade. Reporting should change along with it.

Note that he says the key votes to be reported are not votes on the bill itself but on cloture motions. His proposal is not to change reporting as reality changes (so to use "Cloture motion" in the place of "bill," but rather to use the word for the event which used to occur but didn't in this case to refer to the other thing which happened in this case.

They have to report on votes on Cloture motions, but that doesn't mean they shouldn't say they are reporting on cloture motions. Would Drum think it OK to say the Senate voted against a banana ? Why not talk about what happened using the word for what happened rather than a nice familiar word which happens to refer to something which didn't happen ?

At his blog, I have a long comment which I cut and paste below.

I vaguely recall some poll which demonstrated that most US adults don't know that it takes 60 votes in the Senate to end a filibuster.
http://www.people-press.org/20...
26% correctly answered 60.

However, I agree with Fallows on the specific matter. I think the headline should have included the word "cloture" or "filibuster." I think all headlines of all articles which report on cloture votes and or filibusters should include the word "cloture" or the word "filibuster."I'd even contest your claim that your position is that reporting should change. Political reporters are now reporting cloture votes not votes to pass the bill. Yet they use the same old words. Most of our fellow citizens demonstrably do not know that the way the Senate (dis) functions has changed. Political reporters have failed to report the breaking news that the Senate fundamentally changed in January 2007. This isn't new but it is still news to most US adults. It should be reported until the public knows about it. That means people should be confronted with ugly words which they don't understand so that some of them will learn what the words mean and what has been done to their republic.

I understand that your aim was to argue exactly what I have argued. But I think that avoiding the words "cloture" and "filibuster" is not the way to teach people that they are the keys to understanding official Washington's failure to function in 2009 and 2010. It would be better to avoid the words "bill", "pass" and "approve." These are old concepts which are rarely useful these days. They should be used rarely while filibuster and cloture should be used often.

Do you think someone should say he was late to work because the roads were packed with carriages or say that the roads were packed with Chariots ?

2011-10-17T12:35:00.003+02:00

Second post on Drum on Filibusters

(this is not a filibuster -- no one has to read all this junk before they can decide something)

Druum advocates reporting votes on cloture as votes on the bill. Basically he opposes "tediously explaining the evolution of the filibuster in every story, something that probably isn't really practical anyway,"

I throw a cow below.

I haven't read all the comments to your first post on Fallows and the Senate 60. I am here to cut and paste my comment to my personal blog. I note that the post was also condemned at Balloon Juice
http://www.balloon-juice.com/2011/10/16/even-the-liberal-kevin-drum/#comments

I don't think the post was poorly expressed. I think you are giving substantively bad advice to journalists. My problem with this post is identical to my problem with the earlier post. You accept the principle that if something is not new, then it is not news. I consider this principle to be inconsistent with responsible journalism. I think a fact is news if it is important and most people don't know it. It is simply a fact that most US adults don't know the rules of the Senate. Therefore, it should be reported as news.

I support "tediously explaining the evolution of the filibuster in every story, something that probably isn't really practical anyway," It certainly is practical. Yes it would cost ink and paper, but the space could be found by removing some horse raice, political strategy, and perceptions of public perceptions garbage. Also the Washington Post is not People or Playboy. Entertaining the reader is not supposed to be its only goal.

I will give an example of the sort of journalism which I want. Bakc in the 80s a poll showed that a small fraction of US adults knew that the Reagan administration supported the government in El Salvador and the rebels in Nicaragua. The New York Times then began writing about "the US supported government of El Salvador" and "the US supported contra rebels in Nicaraugua". The second phrase slid over the detail that, some years, such support was banned by Congress (it identified the US government with the Reagan administration). But the point is that a fact which should be but wasn't well known was reported again and again.

I think the problem with both posts is that you assume that an undesirable feature of journalism is how things must be. So you just accept the journalistic attention span such that an fact, however important it might be, is not reported and reported and reported for years until the public knows it.
The WaPo was certainly following the standard norms of journalism wihen it failed to report that the latest Republican filibuster was one more example of extraordinary and (I think) unprecedented obstructionism. But your commenters object to those standard norms of journalism. Replying that journalism we advocate would be "tedious" just doesn't do it. nor does "probably not practical." If it is not practical, you are right, but you present no evidence for your claim nor any sign of careful thought. You just note that that is not the way it is done. But we argued that it is the way it should be done. This post does not reply to our argument. It doesn't even engage our argument.

But enough about you. I think the posts are related to four problems with US journalism (except for that exception). Journalists are afraid of irritating readers by patrnonizing them, journalists are out of touch with normal people who follow the news only casually, journalists are aiming to impress other journalists by telling the other journalists something they don't know, and journalists assume that, while the general public is ignorant, their readers are well informed.

I consider the fourth. Here I note that newspapers can and should and don't test the idea that their readers are generally well informed already by polling their subscribers asking about beliefs on matters of fact.n Heeyyyy Mother Jones could do that. They could at least look up Pew polls which show they are wrong (maybe not if they work at the WaPo). But more importantly, they could remind their readers that lots of people don't know the facts and give them water cooler amunition. Most people learn about public affairs from friends. Journalists should consider the way in which their repeatedly reporting a fact makes it more likely that their well informed readers will mention it to people who don't read newspapers.

2011-10-16T02:57:00.002+02:00

I hate hate hate the new Thinkprogress format. I can't seem to comment on Yglesias.

He waved a red flag in front of this bull with a post on "The Copernican Revolution in Macroeconomics." I am too upset to read the part on macroeconomics, but I assert that his claims about Ptolomaic and Copernican astronomy are totally incorrect.

the Copernican Revolution in astronomy. Not the potted 7th grade story of linear progress, but the tale told in Thomas Kuhn’s somewhat revisionist book.

The way this went was as follows. Ptolemaic astronomy started with the observation that “the planets” (including the sun and the moon) seem to revolve around the earth. It assumed they moved in circular orbits, and made predictions based on that. As people bothered to pay attention, it became clear that this theory gives you the wrong predictions. So people developed the ad hoc concept of “epicycles.” The planets moved in circles-within-circles, with equations developed to account for the actual position of the planets. With more and more observations, the calculations became more and more complicated and a lot of people were unhappy with the increasingly messy picture. Then along comes Copernicus who as a young man had been involved in some neo-Platonist cults featuring sun-worship and a heliocentric worldview. He notes that if you reinterpret the heavens as centered around the sun, you can derive a considerably more parsimonious and theoretically elegant account of positions of various heavenly bodies. All the epicycles are gone! Victory.

Yglesias's final claim of fact is simply totally undeniably 100% false. Copernicus did not eliminate all epicycles. The Copernican model has epicycles.

Ask the Wikipedia

For philosophical reasons, Copernicus clung to the belief that all the orbits of celestial bodies must be perfect circles[2] and to a belief in the unobserved crystalline spheres. This forced Copernicus to retain the Ptolemaic system's complex system of epicycles, to account for the observed deviations from circularity and to square his calculations with observations.

Now that wasn't so hard was it ? I understand that it is hard to get the facts straight on a breaking story about what was published in a book in 1543, but I think that claims of fact should be accurate and if it is not worth botherin to get them right then it is not worth making them.

Furthermore, Ptolemaic astronomy started with Ptolemy who included epcicycles and much more complicated things. The claim made by Kuhn and many many others that Ptolemaic astronomy got more and more complicated is supported by absolutely zero primary evidence.

http://rjwaldmann.blogspot.com/2011/04/more-on-ptolemy-and-copernicus-it-is.html

The unsupported claim is accepted as true, because it has been made in so many secondary sources, but there is no document from the time of Copernicus or earlier which demonstrates that Ptolemaic models were made more complicated after Ptolemy'ss original model. In contrast, there is evidence that Ptolemy's original model was used by Copernicus.

The claim that the Ptolemaic model was fiddled to fit the data, because the original model didn't work is not supported by any legitimate historical evidence.

I have not read the post after the quoted passage. I am too upset and afraid my head will explode.

2011-10-05T10:30:00.003+02:00

Second post on One article in the Washington Post.

Using the uninverted pyramid approach, I will discuss something which actually matters this time. The last in first out feature of blogs helps.

The Washington Post had two articles on their latest poll. The first focused on the Presidential horse race. The second noted that US adults disapprove of congress and then went on to discuss other results. At the very end of the second article (the part I read only after writing an indignant post about standard errors) follows

Obama’s proposal to raise taxes on millionaires to help close the deficit enjoys wide public support — three-quarters of adults, including majorities of independents, moderates, conservatives and Republicans, back it.

Among the few groups that don’t favor such tax increases are Republicans who strongly support the tea party movement; they oppose the proposal by more than two to one.

This isn't news to anyone who pays attention to polls anymore, but it is more newsworthy than the observation that most US adults have noticed that Congress is not functioning. Importantly, opinion leaders don't pay any attention to polls even when discussing public opinion.

It is widely argued that Obama has decided to fire up the base with populist proposals which will increase turnout of Democrats and liberals but reduce his support among moderates and independents. In fact, his populist proposal is supported by a majority of self identified Republicans and conservatives. Obama is moving towards the center of public opinion. He is also firing up the base.

I have long complained that the MSM failed to report the strong majority support for a more progressive tax code (revealed by dozens of polls on the question dating back to the early 90s). They are now reporting it -- at the very end of articles. I think that under reporting of the strength of left populism is a systematic error partly caused by the self interest of opinion leaders.

Even now, many people (including the usually reasonable Charlie Cook) consider a proposal with majority support among conservatives the result of a decision to give up on winning the support of moderates. This is crazy.

I think part of what is going on is that people naturally approximate the infinite dimensions of opinion with one dimension left vs right. If you average over issues and people, the average US adult is to the right of Obama (he believes in evolution and global warming and is skeptical about the death penalty. It bothers him when he violates due process right. Etc). Even two dimensions are enough to find one where Obama is to the right of the average American. The average American is eager to soak the rich. Obama prefers soaking the rich to the alternative, but he'd really rather reform health care and regulate greenhouse gas emissions.

Another part of what is going on is that political reporters lose touch with the USA outside the beltway. In official Washington raising taxes on the rich above Clinton era levels was (until yesterday) an extreme left wing position. In the general population it is a centrist position. On this issue, the median voter is far to the left of the median congressman,the median political operative, and the median pundit.

Finally there is the "opinions on optimal re-election strategy differ -- both sides have a point" problem. There are people who call themselves Democratic strategists who argue that running on a soak the rich platform is bad strategy (Penn-Schoen no not the PR firm the ... yes the PR firm and the P stands for politicians). This approach would clearly cause increased turnout of liberals and Democrats. If one assumes they must have a point, one must assume that it will cause moderates and independents to vote Republican or make Republcians more likely to vote. Therefore one must conclude that moderates and independents will vote against a proposal supported by a majority of moderates and independents or that Republicans and conservatives will be outraged by a proposal supported by a majority of Republicans and conservatives. This is crazy. But there is the methodological a priori that both sides must have a point, so it must be true.

2011-10-05T09:41:00.003+02:00

Paul Kane's and Scott Clement's understanding of statistics is essentially as low as possible.

They wrote

Only 3 percent of Americans said they “strongly approve” of the performance of lawmakers on Capitol Hill — essentially as low as possible, given the poll’s margin of error of four percentage points.

That is they said that mathematical statistics proves that we can't agree on anything. They definitely asserted that it is "essentially" impossible for 100% to agree on somethnig.

The problem is that pollsters have reported nonsense standard errors for so long that journalists have been convinced of something absurd.

In fact, the variance of the mean of a sample from a binomial distribution depends on the true probability -- in this case the fraction of the population which strongly approve of the performance of Congress. To be modest, pollsters always present the highest possible standard error corresponding to an evenly divided population. To be honest, I think they report the largest plausible standard errors due to sampling alone to hide the fact that poll responses deviate from actual voting for reasons other than sampling error.

In any case the standard error corresponding to 3% is 100% times the square root of (0.03*0.97/(smple size) or roughly 0.55%. The convention is to report a number plus or minus 2 standard errors so 3% plus or minus 1.1%. This would be a 95% interval if the distribution were normal. Using the normal approximation, one can reject the null that the true fraction of strong approvers of Congress is zero at the 95% level.

Of course if one has any sense at all, one rejects that nul at the 100% level not the 5% level, since some people said they strongly approve of Congress. The normal approximation works very well even for fairly small samples so long as the true probability is close to 0.5. Obviously it doesn't work whenever it gives an x% level which includes the hypothesis that no one in the population would say something which someone in the sample said.

But that is an advanced topic.

Next topic English. An obviously false statement is not made true by adding the qualifier "essentially." The fact is that some US adults strongly approve of our Congress. This is appalling, but they really exist. The word "essentially" was used to assert that this mere fact is negligible. This contempt for mere facticity reminds me of Hegel (them's fighting words where I come from).

Hegel did have a point. A historical movement can turn into its opposite. So the theory of statistics has become a way for some people to dismiss inconvenient data as "essentially" non-existent.

2011-10-04T11:21:00.003+02:00

Who Said it

"The peace-at-any-price party would no doubt muster strong at the Congress. That party would fain leave Russia alone in the possession of the means to make war upon the rest of Europe,"

Karl Marx

2011-10-04T11:09:00.002+02:00

Who said it ?

"Everything for me and nothing for anyone else, for such is the vile maxim of the masters of mankind"

Adam Smith

2011-10-04T10:53:00.002+02:00

I really hate the new ThinkProgress format. For one thing, I can't comment on Matt Yglesias anywhere that anyone reads. I can't stand this.

Commenting here.

Now he's messing with Orwell. I agree entirely with this post which argues that language can't be neutral. Rather the decision by the MSM or establishment or whoever that some phrasing is neutral is, and must be, a political act. It is not possible to balance without a fulcrum.

However, he quotes Rorty criticizing Orwell. In theory, I believe that all writers should be criticized, but I can't let this pass without counterargument.

Critiquing George Orwell, Richard Rorty notes that in practice, newspeak tactics fail. “Ethnic cleansing” was developed by thugs during the Bosnian Civil War as a newspeak term that was supposed to replace “genocide” with a phrase (“cleansing”) that has positive affect. The practical impact was to turn “ethnic cleansing” into a chilling term that connotes genocide.

Rorty's argument is nonsense. The world is not Oceania. Rorty proved that attempted brainwashing fails if the people whose brains you intend to watch have a free press and free debate. Newspeak was enforced through terror. It was not a tool to convince people. Rather it was a tool to humiliate them. In 1984, Orwell didn't suggest that it would work without the thought police. Minitrue without Minilove was not considered in that book.

The above paragraph may be unfair to Rorty. The error is referring to abuse of language as Newspeak. This invokes 1984, which did not consider abuse of language separate from terror. The word "Newspeak" is not in quotation marks, so it might be Yglesias's error not Rorty's. Notably, the ethnic cleansers did not have total power over the debate concerning Bosnia. They didn't even in Serbia proper which, soon after the coining of "ethnic cleansing" set a new record for consecutive days of protest. The issue was the Belgrade municipal election. Milosovic is a depraved criminal, but even in his wildest dreams, he wasn't Big Brother.

The relevant work by Orwell is "Politics and the English Language." To claim that the case of "ethnic cleansing" disproves Orwell, Rorty must argue that the abuse of language discussed in "Politics and the English Language" is effective so the side that abuses language wins debates it should lose. But this has nothing to do with the actual essay. Orwell asserted that all sides abuse language. There was no prediction.

More importantly, Orwell didn't write much about the effectiveness of abuse of language in "Politics and the English Language." He described the abuse of language at length. He described damaging consequences for the thought of the speaker. I think he argued that people can manage to avoid thinking clearly by abusing language. I don't recall (I am analysing from memory) any claim that the listener or reader can be infected even if the listener tries to resist.

I can't recite the essay from memory and I might have missed something, but I don't recall anything contradicted by the case of "ethnic cleansing."

2011-09-28T22:24:00.002+02:00

Hirohito Award Winner

In honor of the emperor who, on 14 August 1945, said "the war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan's advantage" I award Steve Benen this weeks Hirohito award for humorous hypobole.

He is brilliant. The contenders are down to

as an objective matter, I suspect most fair-minded observers would agree that Louie Gohmert isn’t terribly bright.

and

Dick Morris ... maybe it’s time for The Hill’s editors to start taking a closer look at his pieces.

Why oh why do we have to put up with Obama instead of the political genius Bill Clinton who trusted Dick Morris to keep his finger on the national pulse and explain how to obtain high approval ratings ?

2011-09-28T14:14:00.002+02:00

Jon Chait has a very good post on the class and perceptions of class war.

He notes that the vast majority of US adults support higher taxes on the rich while elite commentators assert that such a proposal appears to the Democratic base but repels moderates. They are half right, it has 66% support among members of a party's base. That would be the level of support for the Buffet rule among self identified
Republicans.

How can people like Brooks and Penn be so totally wrong about something so simple ?

I have my usual comment

This is an excellent and important post. I have long been puzzled by the huge disconnect between public opinion on tax progressivity and elite opinion about public opinion on tax progressivity. As you note, overwhelming enthusiasm for increasing the share of taxes paid by the rich is not new. Gallup has found that majorities over 60% say the rich pay less than their fair share of taxes in every poll on the subject starting in the very early 90s. Yet somehow the elite only just noticed.

The influence of CEOs and other super rich people is clearly part of the explanation. I think it is also true that actual tax proposals involve increasing taxes on the rich but not super rich. Many elite opinion leaders are, by normal peoples' definition rich. But they (or do I mean you ?) don't feel that way.

Also media corporation CEOs are particularly influential. I think this happens even if they try not to influence reporting and commentary.

Here I think a key issue is that it isn't enough for people to carefully prevent their personal self interest from influencing anything they say and write. My idea of what happens is that one person proposes higher taxes on incomes over $250,000 and the listener winces. I am very very acutely aware when a proposal is not welcome, even if the other person is careful to be polite and non-commital.

HerI think it would be useful to ask people about facts in the public record. We can't compare tax rates which people support to the objectively right tax rate. But we can ask people what is the median household income, what is the 95th percentile etc. Then we have the true numbers (they are just statistics). We can actually ask and compare with reality both do that corrected for SMSA specific price levels (it is a hassle but it can be done).

I guess that the elite will guess vastly higher than accurate dollar amounts. As for the correction for prices, I'm dead solid certain that the elite will claim that DC and NYC are vastly more expensive compared to the country as a whole than would anyone who looked at actual prices (including the cost of housing). Of course, price indices are, like optimal tax rates, and unlike household dollar income levels, a matter of constant controversy.

I think that when the elite think of normal typical Americans, they think of a family with an income somewhere from $100,000 to $150,000 per year, that is two to three times the median family income. It would be easy to understand how opinions about opinions are out of touch with reality if opinions about plain facts are out of touch with reality.

Note I use "elite" to refer to power and influence and not to any sort of ability at all (you started it, you mentioned Penn).

2011-09-27T15:01:00.003+02:00

Richard Cohen removes all doubt.

His sole aim in life is to make Duncan Black's head explode. Why else would he write of Rich Perry

"The big lug may not have much of a brain, but he sure has a heart."

Uh Richard, as you should know, it is possible to be stupid and selfish, lazy and vile.
Just look in the mirror.

OK I got that out before my brain splattered on my screen (I thought I might be collateral damage).

2011-09-24T15:44:00.005+02:00

Proof from the Great Orange Satan Itself that the ghey is satanic and they won the week

It is true that Brack Hussein Obama and Elisabeth "Class war" Warren-court received even more votes than gaysatan. This re-enforces my point.

2011-09-24T14:43:00.002+02:00

Earth is Room Enough

Neutrinos and the end of Privacy

Isaac Asimov was there.

See also

With Folded Hands

Rhodomagnetism and Cold Fusion.

Science fiction.

"So?" Underhill was staring again, somehow fascinated by those gnarled and scarred and strangely able hands. "What, exactly, is rhodomagnetics?"
He listened to the old man's careful, deliberate answer, and started his little game again. Most of Aurora's tenants had told some pretty wild tales, but he had never heard anything to top this.
"A universal force," the weary, stooped old vagabond said solemnly. "As fundamental as ferromagnetism or grav-itation, though the effects are less obvious. It is keyed to the second triad of the periodic table, rhodium and ru-thenium and palladium, in very much the same way that ferromagnetism is keyed to the first triad, iron and nickel and cobalt."

[skip]

"A rhodomagnetic component was proved essential to maintain the delicate equilibrium of the nuclear forces. Consequently, rhodomagnetic waves tuned to atomic frequencies may be used to upset that equilibrium and produce nuclear instability.

Unreproduceable alleged science

Cold fusion refers to a proposed nuclear fusion process offered to explain a group of disputed experimental results first reported by electrochemists Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons. [skip] The small tabletop experiment involved electrolysis of heavy water on the surface of a palladium (Pd) electrode.

Paladium is the secret.

(OK so "With Folded Hands" was written in 1947 so the idea was that Palladium had something to do with fission not fusion, but that's only off by 2 letters). I had more typos working from memory.

I'm not suggesting that either Asimov or Williamson sold his soul to the devil in order to forecast the news decades later. It's just that many strange things appear in the news (which is massive) and in science fiction. Also, I wish I had had a blog in 1989.

2011-09-24T14:33:00.000+02:00

B^3
Berkeley Big Brother

Good thing there is no way this could be abused.

2011-09-24T13:54:00.000+02:00

D^3

(dumping on Daniel Davies)

Excellent in parts. Well written as always. But with one incorrect and irrelevant aside.

Points (not in order)
1) On average bankers aren’t as bad as murders (I agree)
2) Not all bankers share any of the blame (I agree)
3) Many borrowers lost their heads as well as their houses (agreed).
4) You can bail out banks with deficit spending (I agree except for the detail that, in the USA, bailing out banks reduced the Federal debt).
5) No true Scotsman admits that there are Scottish bankers (I’m not an expert).
6) Even if property is not theft it should be evenly distributed (I passionately agree).
7) making good policy proposals depend on dubious claims of fact is unwise (I very passionately agree).
8) Bankers do not bear a very large share of the blame for the recession (huhhh wahhhhh ? how can anyone think that. Also what does that have to do with the rest of the post).

Brad DeLong makes a much better argument than the one that came to my mind (see below). His point is that no one made bankers keep mortgage based garbage on their books. Faith in the financial system collapsed when bankers and others discovered that some bankers had done so counter to all sound principles of banking such as originate and distribute, find a greater fool, first you pillage then you burn.

Sure other bankers did all the right things (and neither pillaged nor burned). But if you don’t know who blew over 100% of their equity betting on a bubble, it doesn’t do you any good to know that some bankers didn’t.

This was far far away (Lehman, Bear Sterns) or long long ago (AIGFP which isn’t even a bank) but it happened and many people are paying the price.

My weaker point is that, in the unfortunate paragraph about what happened which mars your nice post on people being mean to you and sound egalitarian political strategy, you assume that house prices are exogenous. A housing bubble just happened for some reason.

Look over the Atlantic again. There was no similar bubble during the 20th century. People will chase trends and inflate bubbles and all that, but something changed sometime around Y2K. I think that banking and finance generally changed. Option ARMS and a housing bubble acting together did not cause Countrywide to abandon all lending standards. They did that because investment banks were willing to buy and package all the garbage mortgages they initiated. OK the blame is shared by rechless homebuyers, non-bank mortgage companies, ratings agencies, AIGFP and some smart hedge fund managers who made money with legal but socially costly tricks (Magnetar). But there have always been reckless homebuyers and they never managed to bring down the US economy. Those of us who aren’t bankers refer to the rest of the lot as “bankers”

Note “the lot” not “you lot” IIRC you were one of the first to warn of the danger back when you worked at the bank of England before you went over to the dark side private sector, where I’m sure you did just as good a job but couldn’t publish your insights.

2011-09-24T09:51:00.002+02:00

Why can't we have a better pres corps part Aleph null

Amy Sullivan correctly notes that silly people have been saying that Obama has a problem with Jewish Americans for 3 years in spite of all of the proof to the contrary.

She also makes a blatantly false, pants on fire, four Pinoccios false assertion on a point of fact.

"...Obama ... when he delivered a speech in May calling on Israel to return to its pre-1967 borders, "

This claim is totally utterly false. Neither in May nor in any other month did Obama call on Israel to return to its pre-1967 borders. The text of his call is not disputed. It is also totally unoriginal. He called on negotiations on mutually agreed changes to the 67 borders. This was also Clinton's position. I think Bush's to, to the extent he pretended to believe in peace talks at all. Anyone who followed the controversy and can remember simple facts for four months knows that Sullivan's claim is false.

The horrible thing is that I am sure she is not lying. I don't know if she fell for easily refuted Republican lies, forgot in four months, or thinks that what Obama actually said is immaterial because in politics perceptions are realities (and heaven forfend that journalists inform the public about the facts when all statements on a subject from one party are false -- that would be unBallanced.

Also, Sullivan's main point is that Jewish Americans don't support politicians entirely based on the degree to which they agree with the Israeli government of the day (or even entirely based on whether they serve the interests of Israel as the Jewish American sees them). Good thing she isn't a protocols of the elders of Zion anti-semite or a neoconservative. But then she assumes the opposite of what she just spent an article proving, saying that Obama will not have a problem with Jewish Americans because he opposes a declaration of Palistinian statehood.

I'd like to see some polling comparing the views of Jewish and Christian Americans on that particular question. More generally, I'd like to know if Jewish or Christian Americans are more likely to agree with, say, AIPAC. I promise you that I don't have a firm prior.

So what the hell is going on ? I'm sure that Sullivan once new that Obama didn't call for Israel to return to its 1967 borders. I'm sure that she knows that Jewish Americans are not all much concerned about Palistinians (and almost none are obsessed by Palestinians). So why does she feel obliged to stick to a narrative which she knows (or knew) is false ?

That is not a rhetorical question and I will try to answer it. I think the key to understanding the nonsense in her post is that both the plainly false claim on a matter of fact in the public record and the conventional but silly speculation about what matters to Jewish Americans are in asides in which she concedes that both sides have a point. The post principally argues that Jewish Americans don't take marching orders from Netanyahu or any Kristol. But to be balanced, she feels the need to concede that the people she criticizes aren't totally 100% completely wrong (I agree that they aren't). I think this means that she does not feel responsible for the concessions. The idea seems to be that if one agrees with her general take, spin, slant and main conclusion then one just can't criticize her.

If I am right, then this is terrible. It means (as we all know) that persistent disciplined liars can get their lies to be treated as facts. If they are careful to avoid saying the truth, then their statements must all be 100% rejected or lies must be partially accepted. So the fact that Obama didn't call for Israel to return to its 1967 borders is less important than the need to agree with Republicans about something. The most frustrating part is that Karl Rove clearly explained his strategy "you don't attach their weaknesses. You attract their strengths" and journalists feel duty bound to make sure that it works.

Note I am not saying that all Republicans lie all the time. I am just saying that some Republicans lie all the time as a matter of principle. If its true, then they don't waste their soundbite and miniquote saying it, because the journalist will say it if they don't. OK I don't have absolute rock solid proof that any Republican other than Karl Rove lies all of the time as a matter of principle, but he is very influential and made his approach very very clear.

2011-09-24T06:46:00.005+02:00

Commenting on Weisberg Commenting on Suskind

Weisberg wrote

Issues of accuracy, fairness, and integrity come up nearly every time Suskind publishes something. Key sources claim they've been misrepresented and misquoted, that basic facts are wrong,

Then his only criticism of "The Price of Loyalty" is that it is too kind to co-author John O'Neill.

I comment.

I didn't know that anyone unaffiliated with the Bush administration had such a negative view of Suskind's earlier books. This is a sign of the risk of relying on partisan media. The liberal blogosphere loved them (I'm sure that Jane Hamsher likes the current book -- but I haven't checked). I don't really blame myself. I'm just a citizen, so I don't have to read conservatives, centrists or firebaggers if I don't want to. And I don't.

That said, let's look only at "The Price of Loyalty." O'Neill is a co-author of that book not just a source. The description of O'Neill had to be negotiated by Suskind and O'Neill. And O'Neill had a huge pile of bargaining chips since someone in the Bush administration had responded to his request for information by sending him a huge pile of confidential documents.

update 2: I'm sure you won't read to the end of this diatribe, but you really must read the note after the end of Weisberg's article

Correction, Sept. 22, 2011: Because of a production error, the article originally featured a photograph of former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill with a caption identifying him as Ron Suskind.

I'm fairly sure that was a mistake, but my reaction is "Bad production assisting but oh what a critic."

Now consider this extremely dishonest butchered quote from your post "every time Suskind publishes something. Key sources claim they've been misrepresented and misquoted, that basic facts are wrong, " In the case of "The Price of Loyalty" you claim only that one of the co-authors is flattered. Notably all claims that sources were misquoted and/or misrepresented have been proven false. The sources are on disk as quoted in official (but normally secret) records.

I admitted that my quote was totally dishonest. I elided a key word which is absolutely necessary to make your statement true "nearly." But I have to admit that my BS detector is set off by weasel words like "nearly." You didn't have to use it. You could have discussed his sole authored books. You could have noted that "The Price of Loyalty" does not count, because O'Neill had to approve the text,, Suskind had access to usually secret official records and the people he criticized had access to the exact same records.

Any sneaky removal of context in "The Price of Loyalty" would be immediately detected by White House staffers tasked with searching for the quotes in computer readable files and checking the context.

Your view seems to be that "The Price of Loyalty" is an exception to the rule. But you slide over that fact using the weasel word "nearly" and then just not discussing the accuracy of claims of fact in "The price of Loyalty" or the description in it of anyone who isn't a co-author. For a few extra pixels, you could have avoided using a weaselly qualifier and avoided sliding over evidence related to your main claim without mentioning it.

Why didn't you just say that "The Price of Loyalty" is an exception and then provide the very simple explanation of why it is an exception as I did ? It's almost as if you would rather see if you can slip something past your readers.

Later Weisberg lists demonstrable errors of fact in "The Confidence Men." Weisberg's treatment of *his* sources is not reasonable. I have read about many errors on the list in articles which explicitly note that they were noted by the Obama administration. Basically White House staffers seem to have been assigned to look up howlers in the book. Weisberg gives no hint that he didn't discover all of the errors he lists on his own. Now journalism is different from academics, but, where I work, he would be required to cite his sources.

Compare

"W.H. details errors in Suskind book"
Ben White in Politico 9/19/11

An administration official sent along a partial list under the headline "The Suskind Book Game: 'Too Big to Fact Check?'" From the list of alleged errors: "1.) Suskind wrote that Larry Summers needed Senate confirmation to lead the National Economic Council. 2.) Suskind wrote that Secretary Geithner served as 'Chairman' of the New York Fed. 3.) Suskind wrote that Gene Sperling served as 'an assistant Treasury Secretary.' 4.) Suskind wrote that Geithner had 'never been an undersecretary' at Treasury. 5.) Suskind wrote that the acronym for the Bank for International Settlements is 'BASEL.' 6.) Suskind wrote that Gene Sperling played tennis at the University of Michigan."

and

Don't Believe Ron Suskind
Jacob Weisbert Slate 9/22/11

Suskind has now turned his egregious writing and dubious technique on the Obama administration in his new book, Confidence Men. Once again, his work is strewn with small but telling errors. Here are a few: The Federal Reserve is a board, not a bureau (Page 7); Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner was previously president, not "chairman," of the New York Fed (Page 56); he was, however, an undersecretary of the treasury, which Suskind makes a point out of saying he wasn't (Page 172); Horatio Alger was an author, not a character (Page 54); Gene Sperling didn't play tennis for the University of Michigan, because he went to the University of Minnesota (Page 215); the gothic spires of Yale Law School, built in 1931, are not "centuries old" (Page 250); Franklin D. Roosevelt did not say of his opponents, "I welcome their hate" (Page 235). What FDR said at Madison Square Garden in 1936, was "I welcome their hatred." That nuance wouldn't matter if it weren't such a famous line, but getting it wrong is the political equivalent of an English professor misquoting Hamlet's soliloquy.

That is an entire paragraph. There is no citation of anything -- no hint that Weisberg had any help from anyone in finding those errors some of which were described in public 3 days before his article was published. And with attribution to the White House. It's easy to look good if you present someone else's work as your own.

Weisberg's post has had a dramatic effect on my opinions both of Ron Suskind and of Jacob Weisberg.

I hasten to add that I am fan of Robert Rubin and a Rubin-hater hater (you don't want to read what I write about Matt Taibbi).

update: I am writing as I am reading. Weisberg is more silly than I imagined possible. Now he is saying that Suskind got claims of fact wrong because of a non denial denial (or maybe two).

Suskind hangs a lot on a line from Larry Summers about the economic team being "home alone." Summers, too, has vehemently disputed Suskind's characterization, telling Politico, "The hearsay attributed to me is a combination of fiction, distortion, and words taken out of context."

Note that Summers's statement is consistent with the statement "I did say '... home alone ...' and that quote was taken out of context. The context was 'A 'quote' B' "(for A and B such that it is obvious that the meaning of the quote was not distorted by removal of context). I mean really when in the history of journalism has the fact that a public figure says he was quoted out of context (without describing the context at all) been considered damaging to a journalist ? I consider Summers' statement to be a confirmation that he did, indeed, say something like that. I am sure that, if hooked up to a lie detecter, Weisberg would say he agrees with me. I am sure he would not stand by his claim about what Summers's said if hooked up to a lie detector. There is no doubt in my mind that Weisberg is being dishonest.

Or to put it another way -- I think Weisberg's post contains an interesting mix of accuracy and originality. And if you know exactly what I mean.

(note also the citation for a fact not in the public record -- cite to prove a claim is true, don't cite if it is clearly true and one might be given credit)

That is a very classic non denial denial. Note that Weisberg asserts that this is a denial of the specific claim that Summers said "

update II The Icing on the Cake. I have now read to the very end (reproduced below)

should no longer be treated as a "controversial" journalist as much as a disreputable one. His fellow journalists no longer trust him. Readers shouldn't either.

Correction, Sept. 22, 2011: Because of a production error, the article originally featured a photograph of former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill with a caption identifying him as Ron Suskind.

Why oh why can't we have a better press corps with better production assistants who don't draw attention to a journalist's conflation of two different co-authors

2011-09-20T13:50:00.004+02:00

Silly Comments on an Important CNN Poll

This poll shows plurality support for Obama's jobs proposal and majority support for all components of the proposal. The difference is clearly due to large numbers of people who said they didn't have a judgment of the whole proposal, presumably becaue they didn't know what was in it.

Importantly there is strong support for sending money to state governments so long as it is associated with the words "teachers", "first," and "responders" but not "fungible." A 2009 poll showed low support for sending money to state governments when it was associated with the word "deficits" (an irrelevant point on an old forgotten poll, respondents may have thought that running a deficit was a condition for getting ARRA money while the question just observed that states governments had deficits).

One outlier is a bare majority supports "increasing federal aid to unemployed workers." Being insatiable, I assert that the question was miss phrased. "increasing" is ambiguous. Does it mean compared to current policy (99 weeks of UI) or compared to current law (26 weeks of UI after the current temporary bill expires).
How is one to answer if one thinks that current policy should continue ? I'm sure that most respondents interpreted the question as more generous than current (temporary emergency) policy. The vague wording might have been chosen to lump together continuation of benefits in weeks 27-99 and hiring subsidies for the long term unemployed. But the effect, I think, is to convince people that the issue under debate is UI for 100 or more weeks.

Also to be really really twitty, the poll asks "How much do you blame the Federal Reserve Bank for economic conditions today." I would answer "not at all, because no such entity exists". I don't blame the Federal Reserve Board much either. This question refers to something which doesn't exist, or ambiguously to one of many Federal Reserve banks. I don't have such a mild view of all employees of the Federal Reserve Banks of Dallas, Minneapolis and, I think, St Louis. I am thinking of the three Presidents (not, pace Ronald Suskind, their chairmen).

I am very sure that fewer people would have blamed the Federal Reserve Board (by the way "Infrastructure Bank" sounds like the worst product name since "Edsel.")

2011-09-19T01:21:00.002+02:00

Comment on, among others, Steve Benen, on David Brooks.

How is David Brooks absurd -- let me count the ways.

Here he slips into assuming that the poor are made poor by their sins. This is a typical conservative assumption and it is demonstrably absurd.

I think his logic is to consider "voters" to be singular -- to be one entity capable of collective sin. "voters" sinned, because some borrowed and some lent recklessly. So the "voters" brought suffering upon itself. This is a typical error of Rousseau, Hegel and Marx and of communists and fascists. Brooks being an intellectual imports it.

But he makes two other absurd claims. First he ignores Congress. It is simply not true that "When you are the president in a financial crisis, you have the power to pave roads and hire teachers." That requires spending money which can only be disbursed as appropriated by Congress. Pretending to cut Obama slack, Brooks has declared him responsible for all of the actions of Republicans in Congress. He doesn't argue that they bear no blame (he can't) so he pretends that they don't exist. This is pure partisan hackery.

He also presents himself as an expert on macroeconomics. He claims, as if it were obvious, that the Federal Government can ameliorate the suffering due to a recession but can't turn the economy around. The data beg to differ. The Federal Government changed a slack economy with high unemployment to a booming economy almost instantly during WWII. It also turned a growing economy into a depressed econonomy in 1937 (and back again in 1938). There is no evidence pre WWII that recessions have a life span -- the probability of a recovery starting in a month did not increase as the recession got older. Since WWII there hasn't been a recession without a policy response, and there hasn't been an effort at stimulus which wasn't quickly followed by a recovery.

Brooks might argue that this is not true when the economy in recession is also in a liquidity trap -- that the effective policy is cutting interest rates which can't be cut any more (and never mind 1933, 1937, 1938 and 1942). But he doesn't. He just assumes that stimulus ameliorates but can't cure.

He also just asserts that cutting taxes and deregulation causes higher growth. There is almost exactly zero evidence that cutting taxes causes higher growth. Deregulation (in large part via bills signed by Bill Clinton) caused the crisis by allowing bankers (and non bank mortgage companies) to sin against the Gods of sound banking.

There are almost no actual economists who agree. Many think that fiscal stimulus doesn't stimulate at all. Others think more can and should be done. Almost none think policy so far was about right (I think Narayana Kocherlakota might be the only one). Notably, Obama doesn't claim that the Federal Government has done all it can. He rejected Brooks' defence of himandCongress and proposed the jobs act.

Frankly the only explanation of the column is that Brooks is trying to make Krugman's head explode.

2011-09-13T08:12:00.002+02:00

Congressional Republicans are worse than Jacob Weisberg imagines possible even when he takes into account the fact that they are worse than he imagines possible.

Opinions on whether tax cuts are stimulus spending differ. Jacob Weisberg does not have a point.

Weisberg wrote a generally good article "Republicans Vs Economics" but he made one gross blatant error, obviously when he tried to argue that not all powerful Republicans are know nothings, cynics or both.

That's not to say that everyone who rejects Obama's stimulus spending is a default-welcoming ignoramus. Libertarians or libertarian-leaners don't necessarily think stimulus won't grow the economy; they just worry that it will grow the government at the same time and that it won't ever shrink back. But they don't mind stimulus tax cuts, which reduce the resources available to government. Rep. Paul Ryan, for instance, the government-slashing chairman of the House budget committee, has argued that stimulus spending is an evanescent sugar high that produces no lasting economic benefit.

His standard was support for tax cuts as stimulus. His example was Paul Ryan. He argued that Ryan called "stimulus spending" sugar high economics. He should have checked. In fact, Ryan called using tax cuts as stimulus sugar high economics

From The Hill

“I’m not a Keynesian, so I don’t think sugar-high economics works,” the Wisconsin Republicans said at a policy discussion hosted by The Hill and sponsored by No American Debt, an advocacy group. “We’ve sort of proven this already, a number of times. Temporary tax rebates don’t work to create economic growth ..."

By Weisberg's chosen standard, the Congressional Republican who he claims is neither a cynic nor a know-nothing is one or the other (or both).

When will reporters learn that they sometimes have to choose between admitting that both sides don't have a point and making fools of themselves ?

Now I'm sure Weisberg would find this post puzzling. If I am not satisfied by an article entitled "Republicans Vs Economics" which asserts that many top Republicans want to hurt the country (in the short run) what would satisfy me ?

Simple, a journalist who does not assert that temporary extension of the payroll tax holiday is a spending increase not a tax cut. That is, a journalist who checks a source before paraphrasing from memory (or desperation for Ballance given the gross liberal bias of the facts).

2011-09-11T16:35:00.003+02:00

From the Washington Post

Obama scores well against terrorism

Peter Wallsten
National security has gone from being Obama’s big weakness to his area of policy strength, polls find.

I note that evidence has some effect on public opinion . I also note that the President gets the credit and the blame (the buck stops there). Obama didn't get distracted by a desire to invade a country his father neglected to conquer, but I don't think he did anything special and good.

But what strikes me is that the www.washingtonpost.com headline and abstract guy (or gal or team) has officially decided that the facts don't matter -- that they report only opinions and not facts. The word "polls" is tacked on second to last. The distinction between what is true and what a majority of US adults think is not consider worthy of large type. "policy strength" means "publicly perceived policy strength." The distinction between perceptions and objective reality was ignored.

Somehow the rule that newspapers should report facts not opinions has lead to them reporting opinions not facts -- a discussion of the facts is perceived as expressing the reporter's (or editor's) opinions. Since everything is debated, every claim is an opinion. Of course, I'm just following Colbert and noting that the facts have a clear liberal bias.

In contrast, it is OK to report the fact that most respondents in a poll believe p or the fact that the inside the beltway conventional wisdom is q. But widely shared opinions are the most dangerous opinions. An eccentric error leads to debate, a shared error leads to ... well invading Iraq and austerity in a liquidity trap and all sorts of stuff.

This can have dramatic effects. Newspapers do not regularly report that views on the shape of the Federal budget differ and that the US public is totally wrong. The idea that huge amounts of money is spent on foreign aid with limited results can't be contested by noting that the amount of money spent is one fortieth the average guess by an US adult, because that simple fact published in the Federal Record has a liberal bias.

2011-09-03T22:51:00.002+02:00

I think Matt Yglesias has gone completely around the bend and said it is the Fed's fault that we can't have nice things and clean air.

I don’t have any defense to offer of yesterday’s decision by President Obama to evade implementation of EPA recommended ozone regulations, ...

You don’t have to like it, but you do have to understand that it’s the case. As a matter of practical politics, to make progress on the environment you need healthy macroeconomic conditions. Which is part of my case for why everyone on the left needs to care more about monetary policy. ... And precisely because it’s not true that environmental regulations are job killers, environmentalists need to care about the Federal Reserve.

This is my comment on his blog.

I have been apologizing for my repeated nearly identical criticisms of your posts on monetary policy, but your obsession with monetary policy is reaching extremes that would make Milton Friedman blush.

First note that the current monetary policy is by far the most radically dedication to expansion of any monetary policy at least since the Fed was founded. All earlier efforts to pump up the economy are dwarfed by the Fed's current (ongoing) efforts.

Second note that you simply assume that the Fed can deliver full employment. You don't even bother to argue this. OK fine I'm sure you understand economics much better than Keynes (what the hell did he know anyway) and I understand that anyone who advocates even more expansionary monetary policy must agree with your definite undeniable assertion made right in this post) that it will solve all of our problems *especially* if they have specifically written otherwise.

But third you do understand that the leader of our particular coalition (let alone the leader whomever it might be of the other one) can't "put in place a Fed team". He can nominate people who will never work for the Fed, because the confirmation vote will be filibustered.

Consider the case of Peter Diamond.

Oh by the way, you noted that it was very brave and a bit reckless to argue that a Nobel Memorial prize winner is wrong. But now you are just assuming that he is wrong. You don't even bother to argue. Your position is that if full employment would be good, it is Obama's fault that he didn't nominate two more people to the Fed so that the Senate not approving them would cause full employment.

Do you even understand how absurd the argument in this post is ?

Oh something else. There is still overwhelming popular support for environmental protection. The argument that the people won't support tougher smog standards because of the unemployment rate is unsupported by any evidence on public opinion. In contrast you assume that at the NAIRU people understand that employment does not depend on anti-pollution (or fiscal or trade) policy. Obviously the argument that this is bad because it will cost jobs was made when the unemployment rate was 5%. Your argument is based entirely on the assumption that the US voting public shares your views on macroeconomics. They don't (the most popular proposal for what to do to help the economy was "cut government spending).

Finally note that Paul Krugman argues, convincingly, that this is a very good time to force firms to spend on anti pollution technology because we are in a liquidity trap. His argument makes sense. If firms aren't hiring because they don't have customers (check) making them spend more for the same output makes them spend more (output limited by demand) so increases aggregate demand and employment. In general anti-pollution efforts should reduce real wages (if the cost of clean air is not counted in the CPI bundle -- it increases correctly measured real wages) but not affect unemployment. Right now, it will cause higher employment. Now you might argue that the public doesn't believe Krugman, but the public doesn't believe you that, if the Fed achieves its stated aims, then pollution regulations don't reduce jobs (lump of labor fallacy wins the day) *and* the public supports tighter regulation of pollution.

OK a challenge. Find economists who are prominent in the profession who agree with you that the problem (ozone or unemployment directly) is due to the Fed. Many will criticize the Fed but, I think, none will say that the Fed could make things fine. To be clear, Scott Sumner is not a prominent economist (he's a well known blogger but not prominent in the field). Joe Gagnon is not prominent except that he got a lot of attention with, well exactly the argument you are making.

There is this stupid but on the web ranking of economists.
http://ideas.repec.org/top/top.person.all.html

Gagnon is ranked number 1279
I am ranked 1348 (have you ever heard of me except in your comments thread and at Brad DeLong's blog ?
Peter Diamond is ranked 63 (he's the one with whom you chose to argue about what the Fed can achieve).

Scott Sumner is not ranked in the top 5% of economists. I can't find him in the top 10% either. His works convince me that this is *the* Scott Sumner
http://ideas.repec.org/f/psu244.html

beyond my comment.

I add that it if isn't unemployment, it is inflation. First it isn't known that looser monetary policy reduces the long run average rate of unemployment. Second, it does cause higher inflation. I don't see the problem with higher inflation, but people hate it. The argument that pollution controls add to inflation is just as convincing to the public as the argument that they cost jobs. Also it is true, but I won't stress that point, because the debate is about politics.

I have been looking at Pollingreport. I don't have anything particular to add but I note two things
First there are a lot of questions where the pollster asserts that anti pollution regulation hurts the economy. I can see that if the question is phrased economy vs environment that the economy would get more support when we are in a recession. But that doesn't mean that Republicans can convince people to accept that framing (pollsters can when polling but look at the record of political consultants who talk about framing).

Second I don't see a pattern in simple questions for tighter or looser environmental regulation (except that there is always a majority for tighter regulation). But I wouldn't as I didn't find a long time series. The very recent numbers look normal to me.

Third, there clearly has been an increase in global warming skepticism. I think this is a Fox News and partisan Republicans issue. The Republicans used to accept the fact of global warming. Now Republican leaders don't. The lemmings follow. I see no role for the economy. In particular the public is totally wrong about whether most scientists agree on global warming but this has nothing to do with smog *or* with polls of public opinion on smog.

Finally, Yglesias seems to me to be generally not only very smart but also very reasonable and reality based. I just don't know what it is with him and the Fed. I dunno maybe the Fed was rude to him or something.

2011-09-03T17:04:00.002+02:00

Ballance reaches new heights

The Fannie/Freddie took over agency (FHFA, that is, DeMarco) is going to sue major banks for fraud. The claim is that employees of the major banks lied about the mortgages underlying securities sold to Fannie or Freddie. No one seems willing to claim that this fraud did not occur. Also, the banks were saved by Federal intervention. Also the bankers are paying each other huge bonuses. Finally the banks have huge piles of cash which they aren't lending. It might seem hard to argue that the suit is a bad idea.

But where there's a will there's a way. For Ballance, Brady Dennis, Steven Mufson and Zachary A. Goldfarb present the case for letting banks keep money which, by law, belongs to the Federal Government.

Argument 1) what is good for the banks is good for us

Some financial analysts said the lawsuits come at a particularly bad time because bank lending is already sluggish. They warned that the lawsuits could sap capital from banks, leaving them with even less money to lend, and further weaken the economy.

Some financial analysts need to be told about supply and demand. Low volume can be a sign of low supply of loans with many liquidity constrained agents eager to borrow but with banks afraid to lend because they don't have capital or reserves or something. This isn't the current problem. Banks and other firms have huge amounts of money sitting around. Did you notice the interest rates on Treasuries ? There is low volume of lending because firms have excess capacity and don't want to invest, many consumers are not credit worthy no matter how much money one has sitting around (zero real return is better than loaning to someone with an underwater mortgage) and solvent consumers are not inclined to ramp up consumption much (consumption is like that).

These "financial analysts" are not reasonable independent economists (more on that below).

Argument 2) I will just quote "Others argued that Fannie and Freddie were sophisticated investors who helped shape the very securities they purchased." What ?!? if Fannie and Freddie issued the securities, why did they purchase them. The whole point of hte law suit is that not all mortgages are equal (and the ones the banks sold to Fannie or Freddie are not like the ones the banks said they were selling). Argument 2 is based on the assumption that all mortgage backed securities are the same, not similar, the same (the *very* securities). This is pathetically grossly false. Sure Fannie and Freddie issued a lot of mortgage backed securities. The Fed bough over $ T worth of them. The Fed has been making huge mega gigantic profits.

Everyone knows that different mortgages have different risk of delinquency. For some reason Brady Dennis, Steven Mufson and Zachary A. Goldfarb feel the need to pretend to take seriously someone who claims that all mortgages are the same. I'm sure they aren't stupid. I'm sure that they feel that to be responsible journalists, they have to quote an obvious lie without noting that it is a lie (actually, as far as I can tell, adding the "very" which makes the claim totally false as opposed to merely deceptive). Why do they feel they have to do that ?

OK sourcing. Who are these "financial analysts" ? Who said that Fannie and Freddie issued the securities they bought ? How about some names. How about one name ?

One former top executive at a financial institution that bought and sold mortgage securities, and who spoke on the condition of anonymity, criticized the suits, saying that “the whole thing has gotten ridiculous and out of hand. The banks are big boys. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are big boys. The people who invested in private securities are big boys.”

Uh doesn't the Washington Post have a policy on granting anonymity ? For one thing aren't they supposed to explain why they granted it ? What is the explanation ? A former top executive is afraid he might be fired by his former employer if he said that it shouldn't be forced to pay lots of money to the Federal Government ? The source demanded anonymity, because he is ashamed of the nonsense he is spouting. Why aren't the Post's intrepid reporters ashamed to quote him (or, hah sure, her) ? Why did an editor allow anonymity ?

Then "Added another bank official: “These are folks that were involved in creating these securities. The idea that Fannie and Freddie were victims in this, it defies credibility.”" More anonymity ! Also a lie. The claim would be true if "these securities" were replaced with "securities of this general type." The whole argument of the plaintiff is that securities of this general type are fundamentally different. The anonymous quote is a material lie.

No one is quoted by name in the article arguing against the suit. Note there is no hint in the entire article about who the "financial analysts" who think the suit will hurt the economy might be. The assertion is supported by no evidence at all -- not even a source who was granted anonymity counter to Washington Post policy. I assume someone made that argument (I am not accusing Brady Dennis, Steven Mufson and Zachary A. Goldfarb of journalistic fraud). However, I suspect that the analysts are (or were previously) employed by big banks. The only anonymous sources quoted arguing against the suit (for other nonsense reasons) have a clear conflict of interest.

By the way, the article goes on to note that the securies in question were not assembled by Fannie or Freddie. This is obvious, but Brady Dennis, Steven Mufson and Zachary A. Goldfarb should have noted that the facts they describe contradict the assertion made by one of their two anonymous sources.

The part I find most frustrating is that I'm sure Brady Dennis, Steven Mufson and Zachary A. Goldfarb consider the article a no holds barred call em as they see em (various other sports metaphor) description of what crooks the bankers were. But for some reason, they feel obliged to quote BS and lies (respectively) from two people ashamed to let people know their names.

Couldn't they just write "we could find no one willing to be quoted by name defending the banks." ? That appears to be the case. It is news. Why not report it ?

2011-09-03T05:44:00.002+02:00

I am about to criticize Obama's messaging.

Jon Chait wrote

The political struggle here will be between Obama's desire to present these measures as separate ideas, against the Republican desire to lump them together under the rubric of "stimulus." The endgame will involve a debate over the Republican Party's decision to block Obama's plan. How that plan is defined -- middle class tax cuts, infrastructure, re-training, or simply "stimulus" -- will determine who wins that debate.

I agree, so I think a better speech would propose middle class tax cuts, more middle class cuts and still more middle class tax cuts (plus maybe tax increases for rich people). To be clear not just the whimpy little payroll tax holiday extension but also bringing back the $800 a family Obama tax cut and uh something else. But all taxes so it is simple enough for people to understand.

2011-09-02T17:03:00.002+02:00

Josh Marshall has a very good (as usual) post on the terrible employment numbers and Obama's big job speech.

He notes "The limitation on the president's plan should be the reality of anti-government turn of public opinion not the prospect of willing cooperation from his Republican foes." I have been arguing this for months (Krugman say does not seem to accept the limit due to the extreme unpopularity of further stimulus).

The same point was made by Jon Chait and a similar point (with bonus hack gap) by Matt Yglesias. It seems everyone knows.

I do find two words in Marshall's post a bit odd "small" and "bore" with context

" small bore jobs initiatives (payroll tax holiday, etc.)"

A payroll tax holiday is an inefficient stimulus with small employment bang for the deficit buck. However, it does not have to be small bore. A complete payroll tax holiday -- no tax not for employers either -- would be a mega gigantic bore initiative.

The initiative which Obama has proposed again and again is, indeed, small bore -- a 2% of payroll reduction of the payroll tax. but it is small bore because that was what the Republicans would accept in exchange for extension of Bush tax cuts on family income over $250,000. Some how extending the plainly insufficient holiday has become the upper limit of conceivable temporary payroll tax cuts. How did that happen ?

Similarly, it is agreed by all people who have run the numbers that the medium term budget deficit can't be handled by raising taxes on the rich. It is noted that this is one fourth the size of budget changes needed to stabilize the debt to GDP ratio. Wait how did I get a number (one fourth) out of a sign (raising). Well it is just agreed that the highest conceivable tax rates on the rich are the Clinton rates -- that the biggest possible tax increase is to allow Bush tax cuts to expire.

Now note that we are not talking about proposals that might be approved by Congress. So why not a large bore tax cut for the non rich combined with a large increase in taxes on the rich (to reduce the increase in the deficit without damaging the recovery since the marginal propensity to consume of the rich is tiny) ?

OK seriously people don't care much about the deficit, so the maybe just going up to Clinton rates for the rich would be the best political theater (say the increase is permanent so the 10 year deficit would decrease yada yada).

Somehow limits due to Congress are allowed to limit political theater too. Why ?

2011-08-31T05:51:00.001+02:00

Wish I'd said that meets come on Matt tell us what you really think

One way to think about conservative ideology formation in America is that many prominent conservative writers, such as National Review’s Jonah Goldberg, are kind of dim-witted and thus need to come up with principles that allow them to write about diverse issues without having any insight into anything.

2011-08-28T03:17:00.002+02:00

Constituents Jeer Rep. Dan Lungren’s (R-CA) Support Of Bush Tax Cuts For The Rich

At a town hall last Wednesday attended by ThinkProgress, Rep. Dan Lungren (R-CA) was asked why he supports the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy since America has lost millions of jobs since its passage. When Lungren deflected, saying that everyone benefits from the Bush tax cuts and that Obama supported extending them, , several people began jeering him. Lungren, who at one point threatened to leave the Carmichael town hall, said he doesn’t know of any economists who support raising taxes during a recession.

Lungren should have been asked why leaders of his caucus want to increase taxes during a recession. He defines allowing a temporary tax cut to expire as a tax increase. Paul Ryan definitely argued against extending the payroll tax holiday. Other prominent Republican congressmen have gone mealy mouthed when asked, but, as far as I know, no Republican has endorsed not increasing the payroll tax during a recession.

If they have any problem with raising a tax not paid by rich people during this recession, now would be a great time to tell us.

Also the bit about Bush's tax cuts helping everyone first assumes that deficits never create any problems (so why not just eliminate all taxes) and second feebly attempts to mislead those who might have forgotten that the question was about the Bush tax cuts for the rich (the one's whose extension Obama opposed) not about the Bush tax cuts which apply to non rich people too (whose extension Obama supported). His claim about Obama is false as stated. He could only have made a true claim by distinguishing the cuts for the rich alone from the cuts for non rich people too. Obviously he'd rather pretend to be unable to understand plain English than do that.

Basically he took the Molotovian approach and interpreting "for the rich" as an assertion that Bush tax cuts were all strictly for the rich and not as a qualifier. To clarify my violation of Goodwinsky's law, the other case of such a dodge was the claim Stalin's foreign ministry made about the correct way to interpret the Yalta treaty.

2011-08-24T20:17:00.002+02:00

Kevin Williamson managed to get links from almost all the guys I really wish would link to me by arguing tthat Perry's rejection of science doesn't matter (and besides the liberals he doesn't quote by name do it too so there). I don't know who Williamson is, so I decided that he is a genuinely amazingly remarkably stupid person.

That's what makes the fact that he was one of few linkers who didn't fall for the Krugman Google+ hoax so depressing.

I still think that he is an idiot. However, there seems to be lots of worse idiots out there.

2011-08-22T01:43:00.002+02:00

Opinion leaders share opinions on Washington Post opinion leaders

Mark Sumner

George Will spent last week moaning about how Kennedy lost the Cold War and this week making comparisons between Chris Christie and Woodrow Wilson. Has anyone done a Turing Test on Will's writing lately? I do believe this stuff is being cranked out by tacking together random urls from Wikipedia with a handful of javaScript. This is one step from gibberish -- and not always one step in the right direction.

Jon Chait

Reading a Charles Krauthammer column used to be a challenging exercise. To be sure, it frequently involved sophistry, but the deception was always clever. You read through the column nodding your head until the conclusion, and you'd have to read through it a second time to discover the trick, like a condition which was possibly true in the third paragraph had become necessarily true by the seventh. It was like having your money taken by a skilled three card monte artist. But those days are long gone, and now Krauthammer just hits you ever the head and takes your wallet.

Come on Mark and Jon tell us what you really think.

2011-08-20T23:09:00.002+02:00

Bring back Ballance all is forgiven.

I have accused the Washington Post and, especially, the www.washingtonpost.com headline person(s) of Ballance, but I really wish they would make their hatred of Rick Perry a little less obvious.

Perry’s ‘Texas miracle’ helped by government

Michael A. Fletcher 9:23 PM ET

The federal government’s role in the state’s prosperity contrasts with the “go-it-alone” image cultivated by Texas Gov. Rick Perry, who credits lack of government interference with fostering a business-friendly environment.

Call em like you see em sure, but please please look at something other than Rick Perry before you make me puke.

2011-08-13T01:29:00.002+02:00

The Cyberdog Wrote These Posts

The Cyberdog devoured Paul Krugman's comments and won't allow comments on two of his posts.

So here they are.

How can we convince S&P to downgrade stock ?

Krugman is surprised that people say that S&P downgrade had a big effect, since the price of the downgraded securities has increased. It turns out that their evaluation of Treasury securities matters for stock prices and not the prices of Treasury securities. This is a parody of post hoc ergo propter hoc. It oculd be worse, at least the timing is right even if the signs are wrong.

I am reminded of assessments of the effects of QEII. The policy consisted of buying 7 year Treasury notes. Their price went down. To me that suggests that the policy didn't work. But some (e.g. Martin Feldstein) decided that one should look at the price of stock to determine the effect of purchases of 7 year notes. He isn't quite at the level of the people Krugman denounces, because he was casual about the timing. It was enough that two things happened in the same half year to convince him.

Krugman notes that the words "British economist John Maynard Keynes" are used without any reference to the writings (or speaches) of British economist John Maynard Keynes.

Mike Shedlock blames Keynes for over generous pensions, over large defence bailouts and, coddling bankers (we alll know how much Keynes liked bankers). This is quite funny. I propose a rule. How about requiring that assertions about the beliefs and proposals of John Maynard Keynes be based on quotes of Keynes.

Sad to say, I was pretty sure that Krugman wouldn't totally appreciate the comment by the time I read all the way down to "Comments are no longer being accepted." Krugman does not discuss Keynes. Instead he discusses "the Keynesian model" and goes on to explain

Keynesianism, in particular, is not about chanting “big government good”. It’s about viewing recessions through the lens of an economic model under which temporary increases in government spending can, under certain circumstances, help reduce unemployment. Indeed, not all recessions call for fiscal stimulus; it’s the special conditions of the liquidity trap that make it essential now

That's not Keynes. Keynes mentioned the liquidity trap twice in "The General Theory of Employment Interest and Money" but it was not at all central to his theory. I have no trouble identifying the leader of the school of thought whose doctrine is monetary policy except when in a liquidity trap then use fiscal policy" -- Paul Krugman. "It all depends on whether we are in a liquidity trap" is Krugmanian not Keynesian. I mean Keynes didn't even get to any mention of nominal quantities until after the chapter entitled "The General Theory Restated."

2011-08-10T12:20:00.005+02:00

New Frontiers of Spam

I received an e-mail with the wonderfully paranoid subject header

"Re: The Federal Reserve Cartel: Freemasons and The House of Rothschild - by Dean Henderson"

(note the Re: which means "this is spam")

It turned out to be a teaser for this message

"Anybody need a kombucha scoby? I got some. Free to a good home."

What is a kombucha scoby ? Hmm it sounds zoogleal.

I have no idea how one can separate people from their money by offering paranoid Rothschild haters a free kombucha scoby. I will investigate further (that's it get people to investigate further -- reach through their monitors and eat their brainnss).

OK goes to a site about "John Biggs" who claims to be a journalist and hawks watches. Clearly either he is a spammer or can't manage internet security. Either way his claim " After spending four years as an IT programmer, I switched gears and became a full-time journalist" does not convince me.

2011-07-30T07:07:00.003+02:00

Technology and Economic Transformation

Old Economy: everyone is employed taking in each other's laundry

New technology: washing machines -- will we all be unemployed

Services to the rescue: in particular financial services

New Economy: Everyone takes in everyone else's money laundering.

I was talking to myself about Iowa because I saw a dumb film about a small town guy in the big city of Cedar Rapids (including the obligatory fancy wedding reception with a cake with a little sugar statue of the bride and of the other bride because ha ha Iowa has gay marriage unlike California).

I said to myself (I am patronizing and pedantic with myself when I'm not blogging) Iowa is a farm state. That doesn't mean most people are farmers but if you look at the Iowa current account most of the money flowing in is in exchange for corn and stuff (or is Federal subsidies). Then I wondered if that is true or if more flows in in exchange for financial services. What is the gross flow of interstate financial services in the USA ? Anyone doubt it is larger than GDP ?

By the way, the film was about FIRE -- in particular a convention of insurance agents. I think the it was made on a bet -- that sounds like the most boring thing in the world -- can we make a film about it with sex and violence ? Sure you can.

I'm not telling you the title, not because I fear you will buy tickets to the film (which I liked) but because it was just what was on channel 4 of UA9688 IAD to FCO.

2011-07-28T05:51:00.003+02:00

Following Krugman

Another economist's front lawn
(Krugman was first to implement this blogging strategy )

2011-07-27T06:35:00.002+02:00

Today's Washington Post False claim on a point of fact

Terri Rupar wrote

House Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), the party's vote counter, began his talk by showing a clip from the movie, "The Town", trying to forge a sense of unity among the independent-minded caucus.
One character asks his friend: "I need your help. I can't tell you what it is. You can never ask me about it later."

"Whose car are we gonna take," the character says.

Brian Beutler comments

A couple things. First, that's not the complete movie quote. Here's the complete quote:

Doug MacRay: I need your help. I can't tell you what it is, you can never ask me about it later, and we're gonna hurt some people.
James Coughlin: ...Whose car we takin'?

Second, having rallied their troops with the clip of a scene of two guys agreeing to a revenge attack, the man who rises to the moment for GOP leaders is...Rep. Allen West.

It's not clear if House Republicans fed an edited script to the Post, if the Post omitted the "hurt some people," line themselves, or if GOP leadership actually edited the clip itself when it was screened.

In any of the three cases the Post's reporting is inaccurate. The least bad would be case three in which, to report the facts correctly, the Post would have to have written "by showing an [edited clip] clip from the movie." To be OK the post should have explained that the clip was edited to remove the explicit reference to criminal violence. The

2011-07-26T14:15:00.002+02:00

This article by Dan Balz (which I think is supposed to be news) perfectly illustrates how the Washington Post has gone terribly wrong.

Similar plans, similar goals, but no deal

"It’s clear why there is no deal" is the headline on www.washingtonpost.com.

The article is perfectly Ballanced. It treats Obama and Boehner identically, but the key point is that the content of proposed bills is not mentioned at all. It is an analysis of a policy debate with no mention of policy.

The key sentence " Only when it is shown that neither Boehner’s nor Reid’s plan can get out of Congress can real negotiations for a compromise begin" shows that Ballz has decided that policy has no place in a discussion of why there is no agreement.

Reid's plan is not a "compromise" it is a complete 100% concession to all of the Republican's demands. However, just because it is the current position of the leading congressional Democrat, "a true compromise" must be somewhere between it and the Republicans' current proposal.

Balz didn't write the headline, but it is a fine headline. It is clear to everyone why there is no deal -- collectively Republicans won't take yes for an answer. None is willing to compromise or even appear to compromise. Many are unwilling to vote to increase the debt ceiling. No matter how completely Democrats surrender, give in and cave, some Democratic Representatives will have to vote for a debt ceiling increase. Therefore Boehner will appear to have compromised. Therefore he won't be speaker long.

The Post's rule that one must never admit that one party deserves all of the blame is absolutely rigid. That reporting have some connection with reality is a lower priority.

2011-07-26T05:11:00.003+02:00

It had to happen. Ezra Klein (now supervising 3 others) is beginning to note false claims of facts in Washington Post news stories.

...Lori Montgomery reports that “counting money not spent on wars that the nation is already planning to end is widely viewed as a budget gimmick, and House GOP leaders have been reluctant to include it as savings.”

There’s some truth to this argument, as I’ll explain in a minute. But the GOP is trying to have it both ways. Boehner uses the Congressional Budget Office’s deficit estimates. He doesn’t subtract trillions because he doesn’t believe the agency’s war-spending estimates are faulty. Nor do I remember him calling the savings from Paul Ryan’s budget — which Boehner voted for — fake.But the Congressional Budget Office counts trillions in war spending in its budget baseline, and Ryan’s budget cut a trillion dollars from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

Montgomery's claim is false. Republicans are not reluctant to count such savings when it is convenient for them. Their current refusal to count them shows that they have no respect for the truth and are psychopathic liars.

Also Montgomery has no respect for the truth and is willing to report lies without mentioning that they are lies.

I'd say the struggle is joined. I expect Klein to end up fired like Froomkin, but he was just promoted.

I might add that Montgomery made an editorial comment in a news story. She did not source her claim that "counting money not spent on wars that the nation is already planning to end is widely viewed as a budget gimmick." I think she has chosen to state her own opinion as news. Notably she did no such thing when Republicans counted such savings.

I don't know about her. She could be a smart unscrupulous partisan Republican. It is more likely that she is ignorant and determined to achieve Ballance. Either way her conduct is outrageous.

2011-07-25T03:43:00.003+02:00

I have been typing this in comments various places. I think that Obama does not really want a grand compromise and just wants to convince the very serious villager people that he tried to give them what they want and Republicans wouldn't let him.

I think this hypothesis gets some support from the agreed fact that Obama's proposed tax increases changed from 800 B to 1.2 T from Thursday to Friday. The administration's explanation is based on the gang of six and getting to 50 in the Senate and stuff. I like the think the issue was that there was a risk of Boehner saying yes.

It is true that Boehner was making crazy proposals such as "Boehner, for instance, wanted further cuts to Medicaid, a trigger that would repeal the individual mandate and the Independent Payment Advisory Board if the entitlement cuts didn’t come through"

There is no possible justification for the proposed elimination of the new powers of the IPAB. The declared aim is to cut entitlement spending. The new more powerful IPAB would do that. The deal is that if the Democrats don't agree to new cuts, then the old cuts will be repealed.

The Republicans who campaigned as defenders of Medicare and now present themselves as defunders of Medicare can't manage to avoid contradicting themselves. But I would have thought that they would manage to avoid contradicting themselves in one proposal.

It is totally clear that the house Republican caucus views the question of us vs them -- they couldn't make it clearer that they don't give a damn about the deficit or health care or anything and are against anything Obama supports.

2011-07-24T12:22:00.002+02:00

Ballance's last stand

Dan Balz writes what I'm sure he considers a very hard hitting column about what's wrong with the debt ceiling negotiations. He concludes the problem is the House Republican Caucus

But it’s clear that House Republicans are the principal obstacle to any grand bargain that includes substantial new revenue. Their rigid opposition runs contrary to public opinion,

But the impressive thing is that even when assigning blame, Balz feels the need to assert a false equivalence. Actually I'm not sure he felt anything. I think it is likely that he does this without thinking or imagining that there is an alternative. He wrote

Republican opposition to tax increases is an article of faith for the party, but many GOP lawmakers, particularly the freshman who came in with the support of the tea party movement, are more rigidly opposed than ever. Similarly, many Democrats, who have won elections attacking Republicans over Social Security and Medicare, remain strongly opposed to cuts in those programs.

He could also have written

Republican opposition to tax increases is an article of faith for the party, but many GOP lawmakers, particularly the freshman who came in with the support of the tea party movement, are more rigidly opposed than ever. Similarly, many Republicans, who have won elections attacking Democrats over Medicare, remain strongly determined to cut that program and eliminate it if possible.

The last campaign wasn't so long ago. Balz knows perfectly well that Republicans claimed that the PPACA cut Medicare benefits (when they didn't suggest that it established death panels). He also knows that the public disagrees with the Republicans on taxes and he must know that the public strongly agrees with the Democrats on Medicare and Social Security. What is the justification for the word "similarly." Why did Balz type that word ? It is not needed. It is not true. Did he even consider the possibility of not claiming that two things which are fundamentally different are similar ?

Notice one asymmetry. Republicans have "faith" Democrats' support for Medicare and Social Security must be based on political calculation. The possibility that people actually sincerely think that cutting those programs is a bad idea is not conceivable even though the vast majority of people in the USA sincerely think that cutting those programs is a bad idea.

Also

Negotiators have just days to show progress, with the onus on the speaker to show that he can cajole his colleagues into accepting a plan that can pass the Senate.

At only two syllables "onus" un-punches above its weight. Is Balz saying that Boehner has that responsibility -- that if he doesn't have the cojones to cajole he is in the wrong -- or is he going horse race and saying that if his caucus causes default he will suffer politically ? Does Balz even distinguish his preferences from those of the voters in his own mind.

He is enthusiastic about proposed cuts to Medicare, Social Security and Medicare. On those issues he doesn't mention public opinion, which doesn't count since the public don't agree with the very serious people.

I honestly suspect that we are watching Obama play 11-dimensional chess, which involved the sacrifice of "principle" (a knight of course) and "telling the truth about what he thinks of spending cuts when in a liquidity trap" (have to call it a pawn although the truth about economics isn't even a pawn in his game). He has managed to get the Republicans to do the one thing which villagers won't forgive -- turn down a chance to cut Medicare and Social Security. The Republicans have betrayed the entitleds' anti entitlement crusade. This will not be forgotten.

On the other hand, the public will have to forgive Obama's spinelessness as the alternative is worse.

In the country of the blind, the one eyed 11-dimensional chess player is re-elected.

2011-07-20T05:50:00.003+02:00

I was right and Stiglitz and Krugman were wrong. Mike Konczal was wrong too. He sent me back to this post

Astute readers will notice that the action of government officials using public funding sources to provide makeshift backstops for losses of the banking sector to clear the balance sheets of toxic assets to “unlock the frozen credit market”, without having to go to Congress for funding, was also a central feature of Geithner’s PPIP plan, with FDIC stepping up to the plate once the GSEs went bust.

In fact FDIC didn't step up to the plate. For all I know, Geithner might have secretly dreamed of using the PPIP to make the FDIC bear risk and, ex ante, transfer tens of billions to shore up private banks. But the PPIP didn't force the FDIC to do anything. The FDIC kept a veto and used it.

To be fair, one might say that the FDIC stepped up to the plate but didn't swing at any sucker pitches and walked.

Also Konczal was and is very right that the GSE bailout cost a ton, because the GSE's were used to covertly bail out private entities. For some reason they bought a lot of toxic waste at prices no one else was willing to pay at the time when Paulson was desperate to bail out banks and dealing with a recalcitrant congress. A good move I guess (I think he saved the world economy) but not evidence that the government sponsoring was the source of problems -- rather it was key to a painful but necessary solution.

2011-07-16T19:01:00.002+02:00

The Usual

Mike Konczal quotes Matt Yglesias and I lose it as always.

I think very very highly of both of them.

First, you note that we won't be in a liquidity trap forever (the qualifier "in a moving economy" is key and "moving" does not mean "with growing GDP" but "with a non trivially positive federal funds rate").

I will discuss Yglesias as quoted here (I haven't clicked that link) and other things of his I read a while ago. I note that he does not deal with the issue of a liquidity trap *at all*. In particular he assumes that a higher inflation target implies higher inflation. This is not necessarily true. I can certainly imagine a world in which the Fed can't convince people that it will drive unemployment below the NAIRU when we reach it (probably after current FOMC members' terms are over) and in which it is both true and believed by investors that the FED can't do anything except manipulate short term safe interest rates. In that world, a higher declared inflation target would have no effect. An analogy might make things clear and, anyway, is fun. My inflation target is 5%. This target has not saved the economy. No one cares hat I want inflation to be, because I can't get the inflation I want. Do people really believe that the FOMC can ? If you answer yes, explain why ?

Money sitting around depends critically on what one means by money. It does not refer to retained earnings of firms which are not invested in fixed capital. That wealth is lying around, but it isn't in the form of money. They hold bonds, so what matters is the real interest rate not the inflation rate. Notably, medium term real interest rates haven't moved since Bernanke mentioned QE2 at Jackson Hole and increased for months starting when actual purchases of 7 year notes began.

The cost of holding money as opposed to other assets is the nominal interest rate. Yglesias proposes a higher federal funds rate (same real rate given higher inflation). This is a very odd form of expansionary monetary policy (I mean backwards). Wouldn't it be better to stay at the 0 bound, achieve inflation somehow, and have a lower real interest rate ? I mean Yglesias's plan for expansionary monetary policy is called contractionary monetary policy by everyone else. To stop money from lying around one needs a positive nominal interest rate. I don't think higher interest rates are what the economy needs.

The argument about mortgages is valid. It is not simple.
Many mortgages are ARMs (and especially many underwater mortgages) but many are fixed rate mortgages. I think the key question is why don't people with fixed rate mortgages refinance ? My guess is that a lot of it is unsophisticated sluggishness. But if people aren't sophisticated, they won't understand that they should base their consumption decisions on the spread between interest rates on TIPS and nominal Treasury securities will they ? I sure don't.

The people who's spending will be increased by inflation are people who are forward looking but can't refinance, because their mortgage is underwater or loaning to them was silly to begin with or their incomes have tanked. So you need people who are much much more sophisticated than average (so they look at real interest rates) *and* made huge mistakes. There are lots of such people, but not lots compared to US population.

With actual inflation slowly slowly mortgages will resurface (cease to be underwater). House prices rise with the general price level other things equal. That will help. Significantly in 2020 or so.

I think that Yglesias noted that monetary policy is very important, affects the distribution of wealth, was set for over a decade by a very hard core Randian and is ignored by progressives (basically by progressives who remember the 70s). So he studied it. But it is, as you note, tricky right now. It is hard to leave boring knowledge just sitting around waiting for the end of the liquidity trap. But it is also reality based.

2011-07-16T06:09:00.003+02:00

Ballance all time winner

The column is pure fantasy. Both sides share the blame, because Jeff Greenfield chose to write fiction. I am not exaggerating. His article is set in the future.

I don't think it is possible to satirize Greenfield. I can't imagine a more devastating illustration of the utter intellectual depravity of radical centrism.

2011-07-03T15:59:00.002+02:00

Ballance In a Cramped Spot

Surely, I thought, Dana Milbank can't fit ballance into a column denouncing Karl Rove

"Stephen Colbert, Karl Rove and the mockery of campaign finance"

I am so naive

"The corporate cash tends to come from a small number of private businesses owned by extreme liberals or conservatives looking to elect like-minded candidates."

OK Dana name the extreme liberals. I think the standard for being an extreme liberal is to donate to Democrats. Maybe also to be denounced by Glenn Beck. I'm pretty sure he is thinking of George Soros who was an enthusiastic supporter of the most rapid possible transition towards capitalism in his native ex-Austro-Hungarian empire. Opposing Bush is enough to be a dangerous lefty if one is needed to achieve Ballance.

Also, I wonder where Milbank got his data -- the column mainly stresses that the donations are secret. He asserts that the cash "tends" to come from closely held businesses owned by individuals and not from publicly traded corporations. How does he know that ?

It is hard to criticize liberals in a column about how the Roberts court and Rove have decided that the rich should have more ability to influence elections. So Milbank criticizes some un named and, I assert, fiction extreme leftist billionaires.

The sad thing is that I'm sure Milbank considers this a hard hitting column in which he pulls not punches (for which he will have to pay with several sneer at both your houses columns). I'f fairly sure that the dig at imaginary "extreme liberals" was made half consciously. He knows that conservatives argue that George Soros is a powerful extremist (when they are not asserting that ACORN can steal elections). He knows that the accurate claim that billionaire political extremists are all right wing will be contested (progressive billionaires fight AIDS not the GOP). So he inserted a plainly false claim to avoid debate.

We can't have debate in the Post can we.

2011-07-03T10:51:00.002+02:00

Wow ?

The Washington Post has an on-line "poll" which asks

"Do you agree with Democrats who say that Republicans are sabotaging economic recovery for political gain?"

The results as of now are

Yes. 64%
No. 36%

This is in no way a scientific poll, but that is a pretty shocking result (I clicked yes myself).

2011-06-15T10:05:00.003+02:00

In an important post Brian Beutler, in effect, asks "who are you and what have you done with Glenn Kessler."

I generally respect Kessler, but I think he refuses to stick to fact checking when he covers the Medicare debate. I also think he should either drop the Pinocchios or apply them consistently*.

The topic is a DSCC advertisement on Republicans and Medicare which Kessler denounced very strongly and awarded the maximum four Pinocchios.

I think that Beutler buries his main point. In a discussion with Beutler, Kessler conceded that one of the claims of fact which he marked as outrageously false is, in fact, true.

As summarized by Beutler, the advert said that " Republicans want 'to take needed health care coverage away from our seniors.'" Beutler notes that the House Budget resolution repeals most of the health care reform bill (keeping most of the Medicare cuts in the bill) and therefore repeals the closing of the Medicare plan D doughnut hole. Thus the Republicans undeniably take health care coverage away from seniors. Clearly the question of whether it is needed is a matter of opinion and firm statements on such questions are perfectly standard in political debate.

According to Beutler who is summarizing a conversation with (I think) Kessler

"The Post mostly grants this, but says it's wrong for Democrats to place so much focus on it. "In any case, it is a stretch to focus on this provision (and a couple of other issues) and then make a sweeping claim that leaves the impression that all seniors would be affected immediately. "

In other words "The Post" concedes that the claim of fact which they denounced as false is true. They argue that the truth is false, because the statement is phrased in a way which could be misinterpreted. It is clear that the phrasing was chosen to convince current Medicare recipients that they would lose more than the Medicare plan D doughnut hole. But phrasing a claim to maximize the effect is not stating a falsehood.

The Post's position is that, while the claim is technically true, that's not what really matters. In other words their fact checking is based on the principal that the truth or falsehood of claims of fact isn't fundamental.

I don't know what is happening. I think that part of what is going on is that Kessler is confusing "inflamatory" and "false." He considers the claim that Republicans voted to take health care coverage away from current recipients bad for the discussion, so it is false even if it is true. I also suspect that he strongly believes that the Medicare budget's growth should be restrained and he is allowing his views on the proper decision to affect his opinions about the accuracy of claims made in the debate.

The good news is that only a few bloggers are paying attention. It is clear that at least two fact checkers (Kessler and someone at Politifact) consider the claim that Republicans are trying to repeal and replace Medicare to be the "death panels" of 2011. It is clear that Democratic operatives don't care what fact checkers write. In this case, I think the operatives are correct on the merits, but, beyond that, I am pleased that they aren't afraid of the Washington Post.

*A large fraction of my problems with Kessler have to do with the, very striking and effective, awarding of Pinocchios. He definitely does not award them consistently. He noted in a fact check of Romney's campaign launching speech that he had awarded 4 Pinocchios to one of Romney's claims, objected to many other claims, and awarded 2 Pinocchios in the end. This just isn't fact checking. Making some true claims and some false claims must be scored as making some false claims. Fact checkers must check which claims to check -- they just can't assess which fraction of total claims of fact made by a person is accurate. Removing two Pinocchios for other claims (many of which Kessler asserted were false) is clearly inconsistent with the whole idea of fact checking and the stated definition of the Pinocchio scale.

2011-06-12T23:17:00.003+02:00

New Frontiers In Granting Anonymity

In a New York Times article on how a slight relaxation of the US-Cuban trade embargo is helping Cubans, Victoria Burnett blazes and new trail and sets a new standard in granting anonymity

A State Department official, who requested anonymity because the policy is politically delicate, said that “additional people-to-people contact and enhanced economic independence from the state” helped to “undermine repression.” In an e-mail responding to questions, the official said such benefits outweighed concerns about “the Cuban government profiting indirectly.”

So "A State Department official" demanded anonymity in order to defend current policy by stating the totally obvious.

The embargo loving Cuban American lobby is strong. Of course, Cuban Americans are no longer united. I was sent to the article by anti embargo Cuban American Matthew Yglesias.

2011-06-10T23:57:00.001+02:00

Bridget from ashville nc wins the internet

"I found Pawlenty on Google, so gov doesn't need one."

2011-06-06T18:10:00.002+02:00

Ballance at the Washington Post all time winner

This beats the original Ballance

When allegedly "Fact checking Mitt Romney’s announcement speech"
Glenn Kessler quotes Romney

“President Obama sees a different America, and he's taken us in a different direction. A few months into office, he traveled around the globe to apologize for America.”

then writes

Romney wrote a whole book on this theme, titled “No Apology,” so maybe it’s hard to let go. But we previously gave four Pinocchios to the notion that Obama ever went on any kind of “apology tour.”

This is just one of many assertions made by Romney and contested by Kessler.

Then we get to Kessler's bottom line

Two (2) Pinocchios !

So evidently all the other alleged falsehoods are nega-falsehoods or something.

Here I think a large part of the problem is the Pinocchio graphic. Kessler is clearly not willing to apply his stated scale (it may be that the four Pinocchios were incorrectly assigned not the two, but there is no way to eliminate a falsehood by saying other unrelated things many of which are plainly false too).

It is very clear that his fact checking is contaminated with the sort of policy which prevents many political journalists from dealing with questions of fact. I think he believes that he just can't award the Republican front runner four Pinocchios (or at least not at the very beginning of his official campaign). Therefore, his assessment of factual accuracy depend on who made the claim.

This is particularly distressing, since Kessler awarded HHS sect Sebelius three Pinocchios for a claim which he basically acknowledged was true, because he considered it "outrageous."

As Jack Webb would say "just the facts man."

(For the kids in their thirties and stuff, Jack Webb was an amazingly wooden actor who played a police officer in the ultra-boring TV series "Dragnet." He often said "just the facts ma'am." For some reason he never said "just the facts sir." Sexism on TV was extreme back in teh good old days (TV is still sexist but less blatantly so).

2011-06-06T16:58:00.003+02:00

Is there a present for fact checking in US journalism ?

Fact checking is a new and exiting alleged feature of US journalism. The AP is now sending out fact checking articles. The Washington Post has a regular fact checking column. The existence of fact checking separate from reporting on what public figures say is, in itself, a shocking confession that political journalists haven't been doing their job. The apparent view is that, in addition to all of the commentary on the horse race, on political strategy and on reporters' impressions of what sort of impressions ordinary people will have, there is room for a little bit of discussion of the facts.

The problem is that fact checking is a radical break with business as ususal. It was absent for a simple reason. To be frank, the problem is that Republicans lie a lot more than Democrats do. Objective reporting therefore is perceived as liberal bias. As Colbert said, the facts have a clear liberal bias (like all of the very best parody, his statement was barely a parody).

Like many people, I was upset when Politifact (pioneers in the daring new experiment in fact based journalism) gave a pants on fire rating to a DCCC ad mostly because of accurate claims of fact in the ad, partly because the alleged fact checker considered the implied policy recommendation bad policy (the alleged fact check included the observation that Republicans have argued that it is necessary to reform Medicare to keep it from going bankrupt -- this was not related to any factual claim in the ad which was allegedly being fact checked). Oh and because of a name -- the ad said Republicans had voted to end Medicare and they have named their proposed voucher program "Medicare." The fact checker actually wrote that claming they had voted to end Medicare "as we know it" would have been OK. Think of that. The qualifier "as we know it" just means "if we don't allow them to redefine terms at will." How can it be required for factual accuracy.

Then I was very upset when Glenn Kessler awarded Sect Sebelius three Pinocchios for a statement which he basically acknowledged was true, because it was also "outrageous."

Now Kessler awards just two Pinocchios to Romney even though he had awarded just one of Romney's claims of fact four Pinocchios in the past. Good of him to note that fact, but this means he has clearly stated that fact checking as we know it is not about the relationship between claims of fact and facts, because it is not acceptable to reach the conclusion that a relatively sober and respectable Republican lies like a dog.

Go with the facts or go with the approved narrative. Compromise is ridiculous.

2011-06-06T04:21:00.003+02:00

Weiner's weiner query

OK I get it. I will not delete the silly post below. I was wondering why everyone is convinced that the alleged tweet with the link to the crotch shot allegedly on yfrog was, in fact, a tweet. The reason is that Patior76USA retweated it. Now I understand.

Confused query below.

There is an alleged tweet containing a link to a yfrog account and a digital photograph of a man's crotch in very tighty whiteys which was allegedly at that link. It is agreed that both the tweet and the photograph are not on their original alleged locations on the allgedly world wide alleged web.

I have read (somewhere on the web I forget where) that the alleged Yfrog screen capture was photoshopped -- that it has nothing to do with anything that was ever hosted on Yfrog.

On the other hand, everyone seems to agree that the alleged tweet was a tweet -- that it went out on twitter and that it was sent from Weiners twitter account.

How do we know that the alleged tweet was ever on twitter ?

I ask for information. I'm pretty sure I'm missing something and there is some convincing evidence. Please inform me in comments (or by e-mail).

As far as I know (obviously not very far) the only evidence is a *.jpg which is alleged to be a screen capture.

My preferred explanation of all of the data is that Patriot76usa photoshopped that alleged screen capture, that neither he nor Weiner tweeted the link. That the alleged tweet was never a tweet.

The implausible 1 to 5 seconds would be an explanation of why no one else saw the tweet there is no need to explain how Weiner (or his staff) managed to get the tweet off of twitter so fast if it was never on twitter.

The alleged Yfrog screen capture has been discussed. I have read (somewhere on the web) a confident claim that it was photoshopped made by someone who explained what sounds like evidence and claims expertise (you know somewhere on the web).

But the claim that the alleged tweet was indeed a tweet and isn’t a photoshopped image passed off as a twitter feed screen capture isn’t even being discussed.

One possible explanation is that Weiner said his facebook account was hacked. Weiner’s defenders seem determined to argue that he is not only non-lewd but also tech savvy (they even argue that he wrote “facebook,” because hacking the facebook account was a step towards hacking the twitter account for some reason).

What if the first he learned of the alleged tweet and alleged YFrog hosting of the photo cam from biggovernment.com ?

It seems to me that the idea that either Patriot75USA is telling the truth or something was hacked follows very logically from Weiner’s stated guess of what happened. But why assume that he must know what happened (so his hypothesis is true or he is lying) ? I mean he’s looks very geeky but he is a congressman not a technopunk.

2011-06-06T04:01:00.005+02:00

Washington Post Headline Guy part MMMCCLCCVI

This is an interesting article which contains positive proof that neither The New York Post nor Politico is a serious journalistic enterprise (knock me over with a wrecking ball).

However, the headline makes a definite assertion on a controversial matter of fact. The claim is also almost certainly false. WWW.Washingtonpost.com is in a weak position to lecture others about journalistic standards.

The headline is

"Recipient of lewd tweet criticizes New York Post story via Twitter".

Along with the first two words in the article "Gennette Cordova" this asserts that Gennette Cordova received the lewd tweet in question. Gennette Cordova has very defninitely asserted that she never saw the photo in question. The person who claims to have detected the tweet says it was deleted after 1 to 5 seconds.

Even assuming that Cordova has negative credibility so her claims are likely to be lies, one must also assume that she checks her twitter feed constantly in order to assert that she received the tweet.

Update DailyKos too

Update DailyKos too

Georgia Logothetis wrote

Representative Weiner is on the defensive for once following a porn star and a young girl who received the lewd tweet

Unless I am confused the "young girl" is Gennette Cordova who is 21 and, therefore, a young woman. Also she says she never saw the photo. I interpret this as equivalent to saying she never received the tweet.

My comment on the Washington Post article follows.

This is a very good article. However, it has a very bad headline. Farhi quotes Cordova extensively and reports no evidence that she has been other than perfectly honest. Notably the responses from the New York Post and Politico make it clear that neither is a legitimate journalistic operation.

However, the headline definitely asserts, as a 100% proven fact, that Cordova is a liar. She claims she never received the tweet. The person who claims to have discovered the tweet patriot76USA says it was deleted after 1 to 5 seconds on the twitter stream. The only evidence that Weiner ever sent any such tweet is a jpg file which is alleged to be a screen capture. The only evidence that the photograph was ever hosted in Weiners Yfrog account is another *.jpg file also alleged to be a screen capture.

The claim that Cordova received the tweet is contested. The assertion that she did, made without any qualification or a shred of evidence, is not serious journalism.

The Washington Post should run a correction.

2011-06-03T03:05:00.004+02:00

Probably Not First

Probably not one of the first thousand, but I just noticed the Washington Post's article and abstract describing who will edit the New York Times

I've criticize the www.washingtonpost.com headline and abstract person, but, I think that his or her comment on the choice of an editor (yes and editor) is a word of part.

Wow.

ps I guess there will be more sympathetic coverage of Anthony Weiner's claim that his twitter feed was hacked in the Post.

2011-05-24T16:51:00.002+02:00

Will be Fooled Again, but not by Time Pawlenty

Looks like Pawlenty has as much faith in Krugman as I do and considered this post "Will be Fooled Again" a guarantee

So my guess is that any day now someone else will get the nod. Actually, Mitch Daniels would have gotten the Ryan treatment if he had run — and down the road pundits would have been shocked, shocked to find that Bush’s budget director, who did as much as anyone to explode America’s debt, is not actually sensible or moderate. Now unrequited centrist love will have to find a new object for its affections — but whoever it is, we can confidently predict that he will disappoint those expectations.

I even think it is possible that villager pundits read that post and decided not to be fooled this time (just to spite Krugman).

In any case, Pawlenty is now neck and neck with Gingrich for the least successful campaign launch ever.

WonkBook (been there done that -- many times)

The Associate Press (in a news article) !

Certified villager Dana Millbank !!!

The correct Who reference is this one

Come to think of it, how can Krugman be such a Who fan and such a Paul Ryan non fan without ever linking to that "Behind Blue Eyes" (or did he and I missed it)

2011-05-24T01:57:00.007+02:00

Huffington Post, New York Times, St Paul Pioneer Press Tag Team on Pawlenty

Huffington Post -- Michelle Goldberg:

Tim Pawlenty and Michele Bachmann sought pardons for a major campaign donor now accused of fleecing faith-based charities in a Ponzi scheme. The 2012 presidential hopefuls should answer for helping make Frank Vennes Jr. respectable,

New York Times - MICHAEL D. SHEAR:

In The St. Paul Pioneer Press, the Pawlenty announcement article ran on the obituary page.

The truth is always the first casualty.

Somehow I think that maybe the Pawlenty administration didn't leak to the Pioneer Press

Update: AP piling on too ! Yes it turns out that truth was the first casualty. Pawlenty's tell the truth campaign starts out with lies (not the AP's word but, you know they are the AP). Totally unballanced.

By the way, two preemptively disgraced candidates from Minnesota ? What's in the water up there. This is the state that tried to give us Presidents Humphrey, McCarthy (Eugene not Joseph -- remember "Stay clean for Gene" ? The children's crusade ? you had to be there (Also "Not to be confused with US senator Joseph Raymond McCarthy" isn't the worlds worst epitaph, but it isn't the best either)) ,Mondale, and Stassen (now that hurts -- my spell checker doesn't recognize Stassen -- he ran for president roughly a thousand times).

2011-05-18T10:36:00.001+02:00

Who are you and what have you done with Glenn Kessler.

[ed note I decided not to post this back in the day so it has been sitting as an unpublished draft for a while. Kessler's giving Romney two Pinocchios for, among other things, a claim which Kessler has awarded four Pinocchios in the past, provokes me into posting it]

Recently Glenn Kessler fact checked an obviously true statement by Katherine Sebelius, asked experts who confirmed that it is true, described it as outrageous and awarded her three pinocchios.

There are a number of unanswered questions about the Ryan Medicare plan. It has not been fleshed out with legislative language, and that has allowed opponents to assume the worst about it. Certainly, serious questions have been raised about what the proposed changes would mean for people facing suddenly high health costs. But the budget debate in Washington is fierce enough that senior officials should avoid the temptation to make outrageous charges.

Sorian’s statement is clearly a pullback, and that earns the secretary some credit. But this is in some ways akin to the false claim that Obama wanted to create “death panels” in the health care law.

Sebelius could have chosen to highlight the trade-offs people might face, or questioned the vagueness of Ryan’s proposals to deal with people who can’t afford to pay their bills. Instead, she decided to present a highly inflammable comment as a statement of fact — that there was “no question” people would run out money “very quickly” and then they would “die sooner.” She should be ashamed.

Three Pinocchios

OK lets see. Kessler denounces Sebelius for not taking into account a magic asterisk which isn't in the plan she discussed. Evidently she must assume that something will be done, which will cost nothing and provide health care. This is insane. Kessler demands that the debate on a proposal start when it is fleshed out. This is a terrible proposal. One point of debate is to guide the fleshing out of proposals.

He presents no evidence which contradicts Sebelius's claim. He argues by analogy "akin" and says her statement is bad for the debate. This is not fact checking.

Outrageously, he denounces Sebelius for a non quote in which he patches together snippets of two words each. This is unacceptable. The facts asserted by a fact checker must be above suspicion. I think Kessler should adopt a rule of no paraphrases. He should, I'd say he must, stick to quotes (possibly with ellipses indicated with three dots). It is unacceptable that a fact checker puts words in someone else's mouth.

Enough about Kessler what about me ? Why am I so late to this ? Well I knew the post would upset me and everyone was writing about it so I tried to resist. The double standard of treating Boehner's clearly false claims as arguable and treating Sebelius's clearly true claim as outrageous so its as if it were false, because facts don't matter to the Post's fact checker is just too much.

I see this as a tragic fall. For a while, I don't remember if it is weeks or months, Kessler allowed the facts to influence his fact checking. But facts have a clear liberal bias. They can't have that at the Post, so he has decided to comment on tone and call it fact and to note then dismiss false claims of fact.

I no longer hope that the Washington Post will become a newspaper again. It is a Ballancepaper where the facts are not allowed to interfere with reporting.

Here I think he has made

2011-05-17T23:01:00.002+02:00

Chutzpa Alert

On Meet the Press Newt Gingrich said

I follow the model that Rick Perry and others have used to create more jobs in Texas. You know, Texas two out of the last four years created more jobs than the other 49 states combined.

Gingrich has figured out a nice mathematical trick. Note that in two out of the last four years employment declined. This means that to outdo "the other 49 states combined" a state had to have a lower decline. This is easy. In 2008 and 2009 almost every state (if not every single state the only possible exception is California) had better employment growth than the other 49 states combined.

Gingrich is so dishonest that he doesn't even bother to learn the facts. But he isn't stupid. He understands the basic concepts such as positive and negative numbers *and* he understands that he can use them to trick most of the people most of the time.

He also knew not to add that Texas had fewer unemployed people than the other 49 states combined. This is just as true and just as informative as his claim. But it's too obvious that combining the other 49 states is a way to make Texas look good.

I admire his audacity.

2011-05-16T20:45:00.003+02:00

I don't disagree with Paul Krugman on many issues but I tend to disagree on the question of Obama's spine.

I am an Obot and I know it. Also Krugman is demanding because he knows that some of his readers work in the White House. Still he slid over a well know fact in this column.

Six months ago President Obama faced a hostage situation. Republicans threatened to block an extension of middle-class tax cuts unless Mr. Obama gave in and extended tax cuts for the rich too. And the president essentially folded, giving the G.O.P. everything it wanted.

That wasn't the most recent hostage taking. There was another hostage situation in which Republicans threatened not to extend the continuing resolution. The next day reaction to the deal was that Obama didn't just fold, he folded over backwards. The reason is the headline cut in nominal spending (compared to the standard $0.00 in continuing resolutions) was even larger than the Republican leadership originally proposed.

Then someone read the fine print and discovered that the vast majority of the cuts were fake. That to get the headline number and the headlines, the Republicans accepted cuts to budget for the completed Census (the Obama administration brought in the numbers on time and under budget) and elimination of authorized spending which had already been indirectly blocked by another bill.

Even with the tax cave, Obama got something in exchange for giving Republicans tax cuts for the rich -- extra tax cuts for the non-rich. Since Krugman's concern about the fiscal 2011 deficit (and mine) is that it is too small, this was a good outcome, because it is stimulating the economy. Spending increases work better and tax cuts for the non rich work much better than tax cuts for the rich, but the final deal was better than the Republican proposal.

Skipping to the last paragraph, Krugman quotes only one side in a controversy "According to Harry Reid, the Senate majority leader, Mr. Obama has told Democrats not to draw any “line in the sand” in debt negotiations. " This is true. It is also true that according the Sherrod Brown, Obama declared in the same private meeting that he was holding firm.

One might wonder if reports on the meeting tell us more about Reid and Brown than about Obama. Treating Reid as Obama's press secretary is eccentric. It is standard practice to make it always all about the President. Brown's claim received little publicity (I read it somewhere on the web -- oh I see at a rival newspaper). But, technically, Obama is Obama and Reid is Reid.

By the way, I am also a Reidbot, but they are different people.

Update: Correction. Above I suggested that the apparent Obama cave on the continuing resolution was mostly smoke and mirrors, because "the vast majority of the cuts were fake." I was wrong wrong wrong. Turns out that about 108% of the cuts were fake, that is more than all of them. More than 100% is not "the vast majority." I apologize for my error. I do wonder why Krugman neglected to mention that Obama totally Pwned the Republicans.

2011-05-15T23:47:00.002+02:00

I don't usually read articles like this one by Jason Horowitz, in eht Washington Post

It is a discussion of Cherri and Mitch Daniels. I am interested in little asides which I consider to be direct assaults on all standards of decent journalism. To save space I will just discuss the first violation of the most fundamental rules of news reporting.

"The governor’s political enemies — those who are eager to box out a promising contender with a reputation for fiscal seriousness, establishment backing and intellectual heft"

The assertions about the alleged reputation for fiscal seriousness etc are absolutely not supported by any evidence presented in the article. I think this should not be allowed by Washington Post editors. It is bad enough to quote anonymous sources, but here there is no hint of a source.

Horowitz does not explain what convinces him that Daniels has that reputation. He may consider it obvious that a Bush administration OMB director must have a reputation for "fiscal seriousnes" (for the same reason that Dick Cheney is reputed to be a a pacifist).

My objection is not due to the fact that I consider it absolutely proven beyond all doubt that Daniels has no fiscal seriousness whatsoever. The same objection would be valid if Horowitz had written "a reputation for fiscal non-seriousness."

They are really two objections. First a claim of fact (that Daniels has such a reputation) is made with no supporting evidence whatsoever.

Second, even if the claim is true, it is a claim about opinions. I think Horowitz is definitely not allowed to write "I think that Daniels is fiscally serious." He sure can't write that without presenting some evidence of fiscal seriousness, but he also can't write that after presenting evidence, because he is supposed to be a reporter.

But reporting on someone's reputation is worse. If reporters reported their personal opinions, there would be a debate of sorts. If they report what is the conventional wisdom, there is no debate. This is worse. This would be terrible if the alleged reputation corresponded to what most people with some information on the subject say. It would be terrible even if those people were all sincere and and none are political operatives claiming to personally believe what they want the public to believe. It would still be opinion not evidence.

But, in fact, it is possible for such anti-jouranlism to be manipulated. It is possible for most reporters to think that the conventional view is wrong and yet for all of them to report the conventional view and not their personal opinion that it is wrong.

I guess the reader can tell how rarely I read such articles from the fact that I express total shock and dismay for the way things obviously are. But I was shocked. Honestly.

2011-05-14T22:14:00.002+02:00

I tried to comment here but blogger wouldn't let me

My comment.

You get a very respectful link from Krugman, and, thus my congratulations. However, I am even more of a non-monetarist than he is, and I totally disagree with your reading of recent data.

You wrote

a key lesson of recent years is that monetary policy overwhelms fiscal policy. Thus, from 2008-2009 when monetary policy was effectively tight the easing of fiscal policy didn't quite pack much of a punch. Similarly, in late 2010, early 2011 when there was not much fiscal stimulus, but some monetary policy easing under QE2 there was some improvement in the pace of recovery.

Notice how vague the claims are. He didn't type any numbers -- say GDP growth rates or employment growth rates.

I think your perception of macroeconmic events is not related to reality. After the ARRA there was the most rapid accelration of GDP growth over 2 quarters since 1980 and also the most rapid acceleration of GDP growth over 3 quarters. Rapidly declining employment turned into rapidly increasing employment (even ignoring the census).

After the fact estimates of the effects of the ARRA by experts (one of whom chaired the CEA and is biased) are similar to forecasts. Also monetary policy was (by now conventional standards) as loose as it can be, since the now conventional measure is the federal funds rate not growth of monetary aggregates.

Sure the general public considers the ARRA a failure, but that is because they don't compare it to a VAR forecast. The view that it worked as well as expected but was half the right size is absolutely consistent with the data. The public doesn't have the same view of QE2, because they haven't noticed it (frankly it is very hard to notice it).

Your claim about what happened after QE2 is similarly absolutely incomprehensible to me. I note the general view that a shift in monetary policy affects national income and product accounts after "long and variable lags" -- Milton Friedman. The general view is about 6 months after the shift. So standard views on when monetary policy should have an effect place the effect either in 2011 Q1 (very disappointing) or 2011 Q2 (in course). Note that 7 year real interest rates are almost exactly the same as they were when Bernanke first mentioned QE2 and higher than they were after the final announcement of what and how much would be bought.

Also you skipped 2008-9. There was a megahuge expansion of monetary base utterly unprecedented in US monetary history. M1 and M2 massively increased. GDP fell sharply. If one more were necessary, this was the utter final refutation of the quantity theory of money (which I consider to have been utterly finally refuted in the early 80s).

I don't see how anyone can have lived through the past 2 years and think that monetary policy trumps fiscal policy. I would have thought that the utterly overwhelming evidence that points the other way would have convinced everyone (maybe even Friedman himself). I really don't understand how anyone can still be a monetarist.

I didn't mean to be rude, but well whatever, I'll just let it hang out. To me monetarists are like Ptolemaic astronomers (note I have a lot of respect for Ptolemy http://bit.ly/lKt8bK). It fit the data for a while, but now we know that other models fit better.

2011-05-12T21:03:00.000+02:00

Freedom Is Slavery

Michael Gerson has a weird column explaining why he isn't a libertarian. He wrote

"The freedom to enslave oneself with drugs is the freedom of the fish to live on land or the freedom of birds to inhabit the ocean — which is to say, it is not freedom at all."

This is odd and not just because there are penguins (not to mention albatrosses who, like penguins touch land only to nest). It is odd because the bit about the birds and fish is not needed. "enslave oneself ... is not freedom" is a tautology. No need for inaccurate ethology. Also the analogy is terrible. I mean birds are free to dive into the see and stay down. They just choose not to. It isn't like using heroin at all.

But what about "the freedom to enslave oneself," literally. I am an economist so I am able to turn off common sense and explain how this outcome is not efficient because of the inalienability of human capital -- that is because we lack the freedom to enslave ourselves. One might argue that the 13th amendment is a restriction on individual liberty. If I want to sell myself into slavery (say starting in a month because I want to party for a month -- well given how much I'm worth maybe party for a weekend) I can't. Hence the title.

The problem is that people other than drug addicts wouldn't sell themselves into slavery (in developed countries including ones with gaping holes in the social safety net such as the USA and Italy). Also the word "slavery" is an analogy.

I prefer another analogy which, I think, is useful to justify both the 13th amendment and restrictions on the sale of addictive drugs (notice no hint that I defend prosecution of the users who are victims). Back in the good old days, people who distinguished liberty and license (as Gerson does) meant something different by liberty. We would call it independence. It was something like we Puritans (or Irish or Greeks or Genevans or whatever) must be free, which means we must have our colony where we can force everyone to do what we say. The unit which was to be free was not the individual but the nation or the faith or some such.

Also families. Freedom meant that the head of the family was free to do what he wanted with himself, his wife and his children. The unit was the family. That freedom seems to us to be arbitrary power over others. We still sure don't accept the idea that freedom means 2 year olds are presumed to be the best judges of their own interests.

Now we just assume that we are one person and Robert today is the same entity as Robert tomorrow. We have forgotten that you can't step in the same river twice. We are the same knife with 2 new handles and one new blade. The idea that I, Robert_now have absolute rights to do whatever I want to him Robert_in2012 is natural, but it is not necessarily valid.

This is the problem with allowing people to sell themselves into slavery or free trade in meth. This allows us to exercise arbitrary power over the future inhabitants of our skins.

Thus arbitrary authority can be justified in (at least) two ways. First "of oourse that's what freedom means -- it's obvious -- just as it was obvious that men were free to beat their wives -- uh come on it's totally different. They were wrong and we are right about whom should be under my arbitrary control, just look at my birth certificate (long form) the vital records show that I am the same person. I have the same name. You are probably about to claim that the Republicans plan to eliminate Medicare and replace it with something else with the same name -- what the hell does the sweet smell of a rose have to do with anything ?" in otherwords refutation by huffing and puffing.

Second that it is reasonable to assume that we are the best judges of our own interests using "our own" in the conventional sense so that means the best interests of our future selves too. Roughly the claim is that our present selves and our future selves have the same interests so we agree, that is we have time consistent preferences. This is an assertion in psychology. It is not just huffing and puffing. It is, however, just like saying the earth is flat as the hypothesis is easily tested and long since refuted.

In particular, no one who has ever been addicted to anything has any doubt at all that we and our future selves are, sometimes, bitter enemies trapped in the same skin(I think the literature on time inconsistent preferences was founded by people who were trying to quit smoking, who couldn't think of anything else and who found a way to be free while in chains even as Epictetus did).

2011-05-12T14:56:00.000+02:00

Postjudice: N antonym of prejudice. Prejudice occurs when one is willing to decide a question before looking at the evidence. Postjudice occurs when one is not willing to decide a question after looking at the evidence no matter how strong the evidence is.

Washington postjudice ambiguously refers to postjudice in Washington and to the Washington Post. It will only be possible to disambiguate these two meanings when the Post allows the evidence to outweight Ballance.

Two examples. Glenn Kessler displays prejudice
Glenn Kessler displays postjudice.

2011-05-12T04:03:00.000+02:00

Google Challenge

one of the characteristic rhetorical moves of reality based conservatives. They are few, so the sample is small, but the trick seems to be a mixture of moving to abstraction and setting up straw men. So the line is Simpson is ignorant, but the liberal strawman who says demographics has nothing to do with social security is wrong too. Or Ryan's plan cause earlier deaths and would not balance the budget, but the liberal strawman who insists that Medicare not be reformed at all is wrong too.

I will not try to find three other examples of the trick 1) the fact that this conservative (person, proposal, claim, theory, hypothesis) is demonstrably absurd doesn't answer all remotely related questions and 2) there must be some liberal who thinks something stupid about a remotely related question so I will debate him (or her) without necessarily finding even a nut in a comment thread to quote.

Time Stamp 3:15 AM Rome time.

OK back time stamp 48 minutes that I will never be able to regain later. I feel like a fool. I shouldn't even have thought of possible abusers of the rhetorical trick other than David Brooks. Also googling I find lots of conservatives dump on him too. Comes with the territory I guess.

This was harder than I thought it would be. Part of the problem is that I am limited to reality based conservatives and there aren't many left. Also google can't handle something as abstract as "a conservative says something stupid, a reality based conservative tries to distract by talking about the broader question and criticizing a liberal straw man"

After some efforts I tried googling "straw man" "david brooks"

my brooks is often criticized for setting up straw men. This criticism is very valid in this case
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/25/opinion/25brooks.html
where the column opens with a full paragraph of setting up straw men (plus Rumsfeld).

OK I think I've found the Treasure trove. Crooks and Liars David Brooks hashmark.

First click is pure paydirt. Brooks responds to criticism of Breitbarts slander of Shirley Sherrod by refuting the liberal straw man who says all conservatives are racist. Note no quote of even a nut in a comment thread (such as myself). Note move to total abstraction leaving Breitbart and the case under discussion as fast as possible.

http://crooksandliars.com/taxonomy/term/554,138,538

OK here the conservative(s) are the majority on the Citizen's United decision. Brooks decides the issue is total fundraising and notes that Obama raised a lot of money. He's moved from citizens united to political fund raising in general and is arguing that Democrats raise money too. I count it

http://videocafe.crooksandliars.com/heather/david-brooks-tries-gloss-over-effects-citi

This is it. The reason I searched only for Brooks and the example I had in my mind when claiming that Salam's post fits a broader pattern. Brooks on Ryan. The issue is whether there should be a discussion of Medicare and not whether Ryan's proposal is a good proposal. Evidently liberal straw man thinks there shouldn't be any discussion of any possible reform (that's why liberal straw man hated the ACA -- damn liberal straw man reminds me of Jane Hamsher).

http://crooksandliars.com/taxonomy/term/4325,538

OK here's another (I admit my second example is weak).

http://videocafe.crooksandliars.com/heather/david-brooks-defends-liz-cheney-liberals-c

That shouldn't have taken so long. Basically I count all but one C&L post on Brooks which I read. The one which didn't fit the pattern is about how a Republican Senator kept his hand on Brooks's inner thigh for a whole dinner party -- no straw men there and admirable specificity (he didn't say if it was his left or right inner thigh and no I'm not saying that only a man feeling Brooks up can make him notice the specific and mere facticity).

2011-05-12T01:55:00.000+02:00

Conservatives Should Hate Wall Street

Conservatives deeply resent the fact that they are more numerous than liberals in the general population but a small minority of several different elites. They mix denunciation of affirmative action with (successful) demands for affirmative action for conservatives. They suggest that this pattern is due to discrimination or possibly a conspiracy.

They refuse to consider the obvious explanation and the solution to their problem. The solution is to regulate finance so tightly that it isn't highly profitable. Their problem is that, when people decide what career to seek, the first decision is whether to go for the big bucks.

I'm so old that I remember when people tried very hard to get into Medical school to get the big bucks. This was terrible for patients, but seems appealingly naive. For decades it has been clear that one goes to Wall Street for the big bucks. I can remember an article in Business Week in the 80s which presented a few young MBAs as practically saints because they were going off work in management of manufacturing corporations instead of heading to Wall Street.

Everyone knows that this helps explain the shortage of conservatives in academics, and journalism. To aim for such a career is to accept a lower income than possible. That attracts people who consider going for the big bucks to be selling out.

At some level, if a lot of people go into business you just have to expect those who don't to be less pro-business than average. But it depends on the business. Wall Street gives huge rewards to people who can convince others that they are very smart -- it skims the cream. Many people who consider plain old business to be socially useful think that Wall Street is parasitic (I raise my hand).

Conservative's main problem is a shortage of smart conservatives working outside of Wall Street. Wall Street is their deadly enemy.

Now one hope for conservative intellectuals is that Finance is moving towards rewarding people who beat the market and not people who convince super rich people that they are smart -- hedge fund managers not managers of investment banks. This means that the reward comes from actual measured (mark to market with a short time horizon peso problematic) performance and not sucking up to rich people (including especially older investment bankers). Notably, Hedge fund managers donated to Democrats, at least until Democrats decided it was necessary to regulate them.

There is a similar dynamic among lawyers. The main way to go for the big bucks is be an associate for a high powered corporate law firm. Basically to work for clients with deep pockets. Top lawyers who don't want to do that tend to be left of center. Many of them end up in politics. Some become flamboyant trial lawyers who move to politics, at least until their mistresses get pregnant.

Of course there is a deeper problem. Conservative ideology is nonsense and it is hard for smart people to fail to notice.

I don't have a very high opinion of IQ tests, but I would be interested in IQ as a function of declared ideology. I assume this would reflect the effects of formal education on declared ideology and measured IQ. The causal path is conservatism leads to low spending on schools which leads to low measured IQ. I may be falling into the ecological fallacy better knows as the David Brooks fallacy, as I am thinking of average ideology and IQ by state (the differences in both are dramatic).

But I would be much more interested if the same comparison was made among elites. What do you think is the average IQ of Republican and Democratic Senators ? How about representatives.

You can probably do Presidents in your head. Hmm lets see Obama genius, Bush II idiot, Clinton genius, Bush I average, Reagan idiot, Carter somewhat above average, Ford idiot, Nixon smart, Johnson smart, Kennedy very smart. I'm sure this is not Wall Street and corporate law selection. I think it is the cult of Reagan which causes one of the Republican party's principles to be "ignorance is strength."

2011-05-11T15:09:00.002+02:00

I blame myself. The headline tempted me and I read a Washington Post Editorial

I accept that they are right of center, but couldn't they at least be interesting (OK I blame myself again expecting something interesting from a committee).

They note that US manufacturing can now compete with Chinese manufacturing. They mention exchange rates in passing, before getting to the expression of ideoloty

"the U.S. commitment to free trade and flexible capital and labor markets — while politically and economically difficult to sustain — pays off over the long term. "

"flexible" means "less regulated". "flexible" US capital markets were fun in the short run and almost destroyed the economy in the long run.

Then they suggest that labor market "rigidities" cause low productivity in Europe.

"Europe, too, as the Boston Consulting Group report notes, because of that continent’s failure to reform its labor markets and raise worker productivity. Germany’s Siemens recently announced a $170 million investment that will enable it to build gas turbines more cheaply in Charlotte than in Shanghai.

" Here there is no mention of the level of labor productivity which is very high in Europe.

Throughout the Post editorial board ignores prices when it discusses costs. It is cheaper to produce in Charlotte than in Germany partly because a Euro costs $1.43 not say 80 cents.

Notably rapid employment growth in the USA is proof that "flexibility" is good as is a jobless recovery. For roughly the same rate of GDP growth the USA is A OK whether it has more rapid labor productivity growth or less rapid labor productivity growth -- that is if it has increasing productivity or rapid employment growth. Mathematically the conclusion must follow from all data provided there isn't another Wirtschaftwun der (sp ? who cares -- it's bad enough that I'm praising their regulations and unions, like hell I will learn how to spell their words).

Exchange rates are boring. The fact that a weak currency increases competitiveness is counterintuitive, and regulation and trade unions are bad by defnition. The conventional wisdom of the ruling elite. At least tea partiers come up with new expressions of ideology. I feel that I have read the editorial dozens of times before.

2011-05-08T17:40:00.001+02:00

What is Inflation

Paul Krugman notes that wage growth has slowed and asks why are very serious people worried about inflation. I comment.

Your effort to discuss inflation is doomed, because people don't agree on the meaning of the word "inflation." There's been some progress since 1923 when Reichsbank Presiident Rudolf Havenstein wrote the mortal book entitled (in translation) "There Has Been No Inflation In Germany," but not by much.

Most people in the USA use "inflation" to refer to increased prices and assume that inflation does not cause increased nominal wages. They will not be surprised by the graph. That's what they imagine when they say inflation is a problem. Most US adults would not object of told "inflation reduces the amount of goods workers can buy with their salaries." They hate inflation (considering 10% inflation by far the biggest problem for the USA in the 70s) exactly because they assume that price increases don't cause wage increases even in the long run.

Evidently the idea is that lower inflation (and they ask economists how to achieve it) means higher real wages and the same employment. Then in a sick twist the older New Keynesians (Fischer, Taylor, Gordon) argue that central banks are tempted to cause surprise inflation, since lower real wages are clearly desirable.

Most people who fear the inflation monster under their beds don't fear a wage price spiral, they don't hope for a wage price spiral. They think higher inflation means lower real wages forever which are not compensated by any benefit such as higher employment ever.

The debate is schizoid because economists and not totally ignorant policy makers accept the public view that inflation is hugely costly (assuming complete nominal wage rigidity) and also assume that high inflation is persistent and hard to eliminate because they know how nominal wages really respond to inflation.

At the moment this is all irrelevant (as you note) since core inflation is low, wage inflation is low and a higher relative price of petroleum really does reduce US aggregate real income. But the current insanity is made more likely by the general inflation insanity. Basically policy makers know that high gasoline prices make people vote against incumbents and they demand that Bernanke save them from the effects of increased Chinese demand for petroleum.

2011-05-06T04:12:00.001+02:00

Paul, Ryan Avent

I've typed some very harsh things about Ryan Avent recently (in e-mails) so I think I should say that I think this essay is brilliant.

He is criticizing Paul Ryan who is a very easy target, but he writes very well.