Friday, August 31, 2012
Same Song & Dance
Romney promises the same economic disaster as Bush: cut taxes for the rich, increase the defense budget, soak the poor and middle class to transfer wealth to the rich. Will the country allow itself to get sucker punched again?
Thursday, August 30, 2012
William Lee Miller - Two Americans (2)
I enjoyed this breezy joint biography of Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower. The author pairs the two Presidents as rising from obscurity in the Middlewest, Kansas and Missouri, born just 7 years apart.
I have always been intrigued by the Eisenhower brothers. There were six of them, and they were all very successful, not just Dwight David. They all came from a lower Middle Class background and a small town in Kansas.
The same with Truman. The author makes the point others have made that Truman's service commanding men in World War I, the famous Battery D, that gave him the confidence that he command men. Eisenhower, the famous desk general, learned his leadership skills at West Point and years of service before World War II made him famous.
I have always been intrigued by the Eisenhower brothers. There were six of them, and they were all very successful, not just Dwight David. They all came from a lower Middle Class background and a small town in Kansas.
The same with Truman. The author makes the point others have made that Truman's service commanding men in World War I, the famous Battery D, that gave him the confidence that he command men. Eisenhower, the famous desk general, learned his leadership skills at West Point and years of service before World War II made him famous.
Lying Ryan
The Five Biggest Lies of Paul Ryan's Convention SpeechThe Incredible Disappearing George W. BushThe Incoherence of Antonin ScaliaThe Dopey Literalism of the Republican Convention's 13 ScreensYes, National Review, the GOP Has a Race ProblemThe GOP Officially Decides Cities Are Un-AmericanWorkers of the NFL, Unite!The Nasty World of Paul RyanMy Last Best Try at Explaining the Ryan PickThe Sad Spectacle of the GOP’s Fact-Free Foreign Policy.
.The Most Dishonest Convention Speech ... Ever?
by Jonathan Cohn
You’re going to read and hear a lot about Paul Ryan’s speech on Wednesday night. And I imagine most of it will be about how Ryan’s speech played—with the party loyalists in Tampa, with the television viewers across the country, and eventually with the swing voters who will decide the election.
I’d like to talk, instead, about what Ryan actually said—not because I find Ryan’s ideas objectionable, although I do, but because I thought he was so brazenly willing to twist the truth.
At least five times, Ryan misrepresented the facts. And while none of the statements were new, the context was. It’s one thing to hear them on a thirty-second television spot or even in a stump speech before a small crowd. It’s something else entirely to hear them in prime time address, as a vice presidential nominee is accepting his party’s nomination and speaking to the entire country.
Here are the five statements that deserve serious scrutiny:
1) About the GM plant in Janesville.
Ryan’s home district includes a shuttered General Motors plant. Here’s what happened, according to Ryan:
A lot of guys I went to high school with worked at that GM plant. Right there at that plant, candidate Obama said: “I believe that if our government is there to support you … this plant will be here for another hundred years.” That’s what he said in 2008.
Well, as it turned out, that plant didn’t last another year. It is locked up and empty to this day. And that’s how it is in so many towns today, where the recovery that was promised is nowhere in sight.
It’s true: The plant shut down. But it shut down in 2008—before Obama became president.
By the way, nobody questions that, if not for the Obama Administration’s decision to rescue Chrysler and GM, the domestic auto industry would have crumbled. Credible estimates suggested that the rescue saved more than a million jobs. Unemployment in Michigan and Ohio, the two states with the most auto jobs, have declined precipitously.
2) About Medicare.
Ryan attacked Obama for “raiding” Medicare. Again, Ryan has no standing whatsoever to make this attack, because his own budget called for taking the same amount of money from Medicare. Twice. The only difference is that Ryan’s budget used those savings to finance Ryan’s priorities, which include a massive tax cut that benefits the wealthy disproportionately.
It’s true that Romney has pledged to put that money back into Medicare and Ryan now says he would do the same. But the claim is totally implausible given Romney's promise to cap non-defense spending at 16 percent of gross domestic product.
By the way, Obamacare's cut to Medicare was a reduction in what the plan pays hospitals and insurance companies. And the hospitals said they could live with those cuts, because Obamacare was simultaneously giving more people health insurance, alleviating the financial burden of charity care.
What Obamacare did not do is take away benefits. On the contrary, it added benefits, by offering free preventative care and new prescription drug coverage. By repealing Obamacare, Romney and Ryan would take away those benefits—and, by the way, add to Medicare's financial troubles because the program would be back to paying hospitals and insurers the higher rates.
3) About the credit rating downgrade.
Ryan blamed the downgrading of American debt on Obama. But it was the possibility that America would default on its debts that led to the downgrade. And why did that possibility exist? Because Republicans refused to raise the debt ceiling, playing chicken not just with the nations’ credit rating but the whole economy, unless Obama would cave into their budget demands.
4) About the deficit.
Ryan said “President Obama has added more debt than any other president before him” and proclaimed “We need to stop spending money we don’t have.” In fact, this decade’s big deficits are primarily a product of Bush-era tax cuts and wars. (See graph.) And you know who voted for them? Paul Ryan.
5) About protecting the weak.
Here’s Ryan on the obligations to help those who can’t help themselves:
We have responsibilities, one to another – we do not each face the world alone. And the greatest of all responsibilities, is that of the strong to protect the weak. The truest measure of any society is how it treats those who cannot defend or care for themselves. … We can make the safety net safe again.
The rhetoric is stirring—and positively galling. Analysis from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities shows that 62 percent of the cuts in Ryan budget would come from programs that serve low-income people. And that’s assuming he keeps the Obamacare Medicare cuts. If he’s serious about putting that money back into Medicare, the cuts to these programs would have to be even bigger.
Among the cuts Ryan specified was a massive reduction in Medicaid spending. According to a report by the Kaiser Family Foundation and Urban Institute, between 14 and 27 million people would lose health insurance from these cuts. That’s above and beyond the 15 million or so who are supposed to get Medicaid coverage from the Affordable Care Act but wouldn’t because Romney and Ryan have pledged to repeal the law.
I realize conservatives think that transforming Medicaid into a block grant, so that states have more control over how to spend the money, can make the program more efficient. But Medicaid already costs far less than any other insurance program in America. And even to the extent states can find some new efficiencies, the idea that they can find enough to offset such a draconian funding cut is just not credible.
Update: I clarified the passage on Medicare.
.The Most Dishonest Convention Speech ... Ever?
by Jonathan Cohn
You’re going to read and hear a lot about Paul Ryan’s speech on Wednesday night. And I imagine most of it will be about how Ryan’s speech played—with the party loyalists in Tampa, with the television viewers across the country, and eventually with the swing voters who will decide the election.
I’d like to talk, instead, about what Ryan actually said—not because I find Ryan’s ideas objectionable, although I do, but because I thought he was so brazenly willing to twist the truth.
At least five times, Ryan misrepresented the facts. And while none of the statements were new, the context was. It’s one thing to hear them on a thirty-second television spot or even in a stump speech before a small crowd. It’s something else entirely to hear them in prime time address, as a vice presidential nominee is accepting his party’s nomination and speaking to the entire country.
Here are the five statements that deserve serious scrutiny:
1) About the GM plant in Janesville.
Ryan’s home district includes a shuttered General Motors plant. Here’s what happened, according to Ryan:
A lot of guys I went to high school with worked at that GM plant. Right there at that plant, candidate Obama said: “I believe that if our government is there to support you … this plant will be here for another hundred years.” That’s what he said in 2008.
Well, as it turned out, that plant didn’t last another year. It is locked up and empty to this day. And that’s how it is in so many towns today, where the recovery that was promised is nowhere in sight.
It’s true: The plant shut down. But it shut down in 2008—before Obama became president.
By the way, nobody questions that, if not for the Obama Administration’s decision to rescue Chrysler and GM, the domestic auto industry would have crumbled. Credible estimates suggested that the rescue saved more than a million jobs. Unemployment in Michigan and Ohio, the two states with the most auto jobs, have declined precipitously.
2) About Medicare.
Ryan attacked Obama for “raiding” Medicare. Again, Ryan has no standing whatsoever to make this attack, because his own budget called for taking the same amount of money from Medicare. Twice. The only difference is that Ryan’s budget used those savings to finance Ryan’s priorities, which include a massive tax cut that benefits the wealthy disproportionately.
It’s true that Romney has pledged to put that money back into Medicare and Ryan now says he would do the same. But the claim is totally implausible given Romney's promise to cap non-defense spending at 16 percent of gross domestic product.
By the way, Obamacare's cut to Medicare was a reduction in what the plan pays hospitals and insurance companies. And the hospitals said they could live with those cuts, because Obamacare was simultaneously giving more people health insurance, alleviating the financial burden of charity care.
What Obamacare did not do is take away benefits. On the contrary, it added benefits, by offering free preventative care and new prescription drug coverage. By repealing Obamacare, Romney and Ryan would take away those benefits—and, by the way, add to Medicare's financial troubles because the program would be back to paying hospitals and insurers the higher rates.
3) About the credit rating downgrade.
Ryan blamed the downgrading of American debt on Obama. But it was the possibility that America would default on its debts that led to the downgrade. And why did that possibility exist? Because Republicans refused to raise the debt ceiling, playing chicken not just with the nations’ credit rating but the whole economy, unless Obama would cave into their budget demands.
4) About the deficit.
Ryan said “President Obama has added more debt than any other president before him” and proclaimed “We need to stop spending money we don’t have.” In fact, this decade’s big deficits are primarily a product of Bush-era tax cuts and wars. (See graph.) And you know who voted for them? Paul Ryan.
5) About protecting the weak.
Here’s Ryan on the obligations to help those who can’t help themselves:
We have responsibilities, one to another – we do not each face the world alone. And the greatest of all responsibilities, is that of the strong to protect the weak. The truest measure of any society is how it treats those who cannot defend or care for themselves. … We can make the safety net safe again.
The rhetoric is stirring—and positively galling. Analysis from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities shows that 62 percent of the cuts in Ryan budget would come from programs that serve low-income people. And that’s assuming he keeps the Obamacare Medicare cuts. If he’s serious about putting that money back into Medicare, the cuts to these programs would have to be even bigger.
Among the cuts Ryan specified was a massive reduction in Medicaid spending. According to a report by the Kaiser Family Foundation and Urban Institute, between 14 and 27 million people would lose health insurance from these cuts. That’s above and beyond the 15 million or so who are supposed to get Medicaid coverage from the Affordable Care Act but wouldn’t because Romney and Ryan have pledged to repeal the law.
I realize conservatives think that transforming Medicaid into a block grant, so that states have more control over how to spend the money, can make the program more efficient. But Medicaid already costs far less than any other insurance program in America. And even to the extent states can find some new efficiencies, the idea that they can find enough to offset such a draconian funding cut is just not credible.
Update: I clarified the passage on Medicare.
Krugman on the Republican Convention
from Paul Krugman
August 30, 2012, 7:13 am1 Comment
Wibbly-wobbly
It wasn’t the biggest thing in Paul Ryan’s speech, but many people are wondering why Ryan keeps using the closed Janesville GM plant to illustrate the failure of Obama’s policy — when the plant actually closed under George W. Bush.
One possibility is that the Serious, Honest Conservative is actually unserious and breathtakingly dishonest. Alternatively, he’s branched out from Ayn Rand, and is now also listening to this guy:
People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but actually — from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint — it’s more like a big ball of wibbly-wobbly… timey-wimey… stuff.
.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
August 29, 2012, 5:36 pm45 Comments
The Snooker Factor
Kudos to William Saletan for admitting that Paul Ryan snookered him:
I hate to admit it, but Krugman nailed me on this one. I was looking for Mr. Right—a fact-based, sensible fiscal conservative—and I tried to shoehorn you into that role.
The key thing to understand it that Ryan very deliberately played into that fantasy; he’s not just a flim-flam man (and note the date on that column — it has always been obvious if you were willing to see), he’s someone cynically playing on the goodwill of self-proclaimed centrists.
Now, when will the various Pete Peterson fronts that gave him an award make a similar admission?
.
August 29, 2012, 9:40 am108 Comments
Unconventional
No, I didn’t watch it. In the immortal words of Barbara Bush, why should I waste my beautiful mind on that?
Still, I get the essence. The GOP campaign is based on five main themes, three negative and two positive.
Negative:
The claim that Obama denigrated businessmen, saying that they didn’t build their own firms — which isn’t true.
The claim that Obama has gutted Medicare to pay for the expansion of health insurance — which isn’t true.
The claim that Obama has eliminated the work requirement for welfare — which isn’t true.
Positive:
The claim that Ryan has a plan to balance the budget — which isn’t true.
The claim that Romney has a plan for economic recovery — which isn’t true. (The Economist: “The Romney Programme for Economic Recovery, Growth and Jobs” is like “Fifty Shades of Grey” without the sex).
August 30, 2012, 7:13 am1 Comment
Wibbly-wobbly
It wasn’t the biggest thing in Paul Ryan’s speech, but many people are wondering why Ryan keeps using the closed Janesville GM plant to illustrate the failure of Obama’s policy — when the plant actually closed under George W. Bush.
One possibility is that the Serious, Honest Conservative is actually unserious and breathtakingly dishonest. Alternatively, he’s branched out from Ayn Rand, and is now also listening to this guy:
People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but actually — from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint — it’s more like a big ball of wibbly-wobbly… timey-wimey… stuff.
.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
August 29, 2012, 5:36 pm45 Comments
The Snooker Factor
Kudos to William Saletan for admitting that Paul Ryan snookered him:
I hate to admit it, but Krugman nailed me on this one. I was looking for Mr. Right—a fact-based, sensible fiscal conservative—and I tried to shoehorn you into that role.
The key thing to understand it that Ryan very deliberately played into that fantasy; he’s not just a flim-flam man (and note the date on that column — it has always been obvious if you were willing to see), he’s someone cynically playing on the goodwill of self-proclaimed centrists.
Now, when will the various Pete Peterson fronts that gave him an award make a similar admission?
.
August 29, 2012, 9:40 am108 Comments
Unconventional
No, I didn’t watch it. In the immortal words of Barbara Bush, why should I waste my beautiful mind on that?
Still, I get the essence. The GOP campaign is based on five main themes, three negative and two positive.
Negative:
The claim that Obama denigrated businessmen, saying that they didn’t build their own firms — which isn’t true.
The claim that Obama has gutted Medicare to pay for the expansion of health insurance — which isn’t true.
The claim that Obama has eliminated the work requirement for welfare — which isn’t true.
Positive:
The claim that Ryan has a plan to balance the budget — which isn’t true.
The claim that Romney has a plan for economic recovery — which isn’t true. (The Economist: “The Romney Programme for Economic Recovery, Growth and Jobs” is like “Fifty Shades of Grey” without the sex).
Tuesday, August 28, 2012
Factless Conservatives
Conservatism Monday, Aug 27, 2012 02:31 PM CDT
A new scientific paper suggests political conservatives more likely than liberals to bend reality to their beliefs
By Chris Mooney
Last week, the country convulsed with outrage over Missouri Republican Rep. Todd Akin’s false suggestion that women who are raped have a special bodily defense mechanism against getting pregnant. Akin’s claim stood out due to its highly offensive nature, but it’s reminiscent of any number of other parallel cases in which conservative Christians have cited dubious “facts” to help rationalize their moral convictions. Take the twin assertions that having an abortion causes breast cancer or mental disorders, for instance. Or the denial of human evolution. Or false claims that same-sex parenting hurts kids. Or that you can choose whether to be gay, and undergo therapy to reverse that choice. The ludicrous assertion that women who are raped have a physiological defense mechanism against pregnancy is just part of a long litany of other falsehoods in the Christian right’s moral and emotional war against science.
In fact, even as Akin reaped a whirlwind of disdain and disgust, a new scientific paper has appeared with uncanny timing in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science, underscoring what is actually happening when people contort facts to justify their deep-seated beliefs or moral systems. Perhaps most strikingly, one punch line of the new research is that political conservatives, like Akin, appear to do this significantly more than political liberals.
In recent years, the field of moral psychology has been strongly influenced by a theory known as “moral intuitionism,” which has been championed by the University of Virginia psychologist Jonathan Haidt. Dealing a blow to the notion of humans as primarily rational actors, Haidt instead postulates that our views of what is right and wrong are rooted in gut emotions, which fire rapidly when we encounter certain moral situations or dilemmas — responding far more quickly than our rational thoughts. Thus, we evaluate facts, arguments and new information in a way that is subconsciously guided, or motivated, by our prior moral emotions. What this means – -in Haidt’s famed formulation — is that when it comes to evaluating facts that are relevant to our deep-seated morals or beliefs, we don’t act like scientists. Rather, we act like lawyers, contorting the evidence to support our moral argument.
But are we all equally lawyerly? The new paper, by psychologists Brittany Liu and Peter Ditto of the University of California-Irvine, suggests that may not actually be the case.
In their study, Liu and Ditto asked over 1,500 people about their moral and factual views on four highly divisive political issues. Two of them — the death penalty and the forceful interrogation of terrorists using techniques like waterboarding — are ones where liberals tend to think the act in question is morally unacceptable even if it actually yields benefits (for instance, deterring crime, or providing intelligence that can help prevent further terrorist strikes). The other two — providing information about condoms in the context of sex education, and embryonic stem cell research — are ones where conservatives tend to think the act in question is unacceptable even if it yields benefits (helping to prevent unwanted pregnancies, leading to cures for devastating diseases).
In the experiment, the subjects were first asked about their absolute moral beliefs: For instance, is the death penalty wrong even if it deters others from committing crimes? But they were also asked about various factual aspects of each topic: Does the death penalty deter crime? Do condoms work to prevent pregnancy? Does embryonic stem cell research hold medical promise? And so on.
If you believe some act is absolutely wrong, period, you shouldn’t actually care about its costs and benefits. Those should be irrelevant to your moral judgment. Yet in analyzing the data, Liu and Ditto found a strong correlation, across all of the issues, between believing something is morally wrong in all case — such as the death penalty — and also believing that it has low benefits (e.g., doesn’t deter crime) or high costs (lots of innocent people getting executed). In other words, liberals and conservatives alike shaded their assessment of the facts so as to align them with their moral convictions — establishing what Liu and Ditto call a “moral coherence” between their ethical and factual views. Neither side was innocent when it came to confusing “is” and “ought” (as moral philosophers might put it).
However, not everyone was equally susceptible to this behavior. Rather, the researchers found three risk factors, so to speak, that seem to worsen the standard human penchant for contorting the facts to one’s moral views. Two of those were pretty unsurprising: Having a strong moral view about a topic makes one’s inclination toward “moral coherence” worse, as does knowing a lot about the subject (across studies, knowledge simply seems to make us better at maintaining and defending what we already believe). But the third risk factor is likely to prove quite controversial: political conservatism.
In the study, Liu and Ditto report, conservatives tilted their views of the facts to favor their moral convictions more than liberals did, on every single issue. And that was true whether it was a topic that liberals oppose (the death penalty) or that conservatives oppose (embryonic stem cell research). “Conservatives are doing this to a larger degree across four different issues,” Liu explained in an interview. “Including two that are leaning to the liberal side, not the conservative side.”
There is a long-standing (if controversial) body of research on liberal-conservative psychological differences that may provide an answer for why this occurs. Conservatives, Liu notes, score higher on a trait called the need for cognitive closure, which describes a feeling of discomfort with uncertainty and the need to hold a firm belief, a firm conviction, unwaveringly. Insofar as a need for closure pushes one to want to hold coherent, consistent beliefs — and makes one intolerant of ambiguity — it makes sense that wanting to achieve “moral coherence” between one’s factual and moral views would also go along with it. Conservatives, in this interpretation, would naturally have more conviction that the facts of the world, and their moral systems, are perfectly aligned. Liberals, in contrast, might be more conflicted — supportive of embryonic stem cell research, for instance, but nourishing doubts about whether the scientific promise we heard so much about a decade ago is being realized.
In documenting an apparent left-right difference in emotional reasoning about what is factually true, the new paper wades into a growing debate over what the Yale researcher Dan Kahan has labeled “ideological asymmetry.” This is the idea that one side of the political spectrum, more than the other, shows a form of biased or motivated assessment of facts — a view that Kahan rejects. Indeed, he recently ran a different study and found that liberals and conservatives were more symmetrical in their biases, albeit not on a live political issue.
The question of why some researchers find results seeming to support the left-right asymmetry hypothesis, even as others do not, remains unresolved. But the new paper by Liu and Ditto will surely sharpen it. Indeed, Kahan has already weighed in on the paper, acknowledging that it provides evidence in support of asymmetry, but observing that in his view, the evidence against asymmetry from other research remains more weighty.
The upshot, for now, is that it’s hard to deny that all people engage in goal-directed reasoning, bending facts in favor of their moralities or belief systems. But — to butcher George Orwell — it may also be true that while all humans are biased by their prior beliefs and emotions, some humans are more biased than others.
A new scientific paper suggests political conservatives more likely than liberals to bend reality to their beliefs
By Chris Mooney
Last week, the country convulsed with outrage over Missouri Republican Rep. Todd Akin’s false suggestion that women who are raped have a special bodily defense mechanism against getting pregnant. Akin’s claim stood out due to its highly offensive nature, but it’s reminiscent of any number of other parallel cases in which conservative Christians have cited dubious “facts” to help rationalize their moral convictions. Take the twin assertions that having an abortion causes breast cancer or mental disorders, for instance. Or the denial of human evolution. Or false claims that same-sex parenting hurts kids. Or that you can choose whether to be gay, and undergo therapy to reverse that choice. The ludicrous assertion that women who are raped have a physiological defense mechanism against pregnancy is just part of a long litany of other falsehoods in the Christian right’s moral and emotional war against science.
In fact, even as Akin reaped a whirlwind of disdain and disgust, a new scientific paper has appeared with uncanny timing in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science, underscoring what is actually happening when people contort facts to justify their deep-seated beliefs or moral systems. Perhaps most strikingly, one punch line of the new research is that political conservatives, like Akin, appear to do this significantly more than political liberals.
In recent years, the field of moral psychology has been strongly influenced by a theory known as “moral intuitionism,” which has been championed by the University of Virginia psychologist Jonathan Haidt. Dealing a blow to the notion of humans as primarily rational actors, Haidt instead postulates that our views of what is right and wrong are rooted in gut emotions, which fire rapidly when we encounter certain moral situations or dilemmas — responding far more quickly than our rational thoughts. Thus, we evaluate facts, arguments and new information in a way that is subconsciously guided, or motivated, by our prior moral emotions. What this means – -in Haidt’s famed formulation — is that when it comes to evaluating facts that are relevant to our deep-seated morals or beliefs, we don’t act like scientists. Rather, we act like lawyers, contorting the evidence to support our moral argument.
But are we all equally lawyerly? The new paper, by psychologists Brittany Liu and Peter Ditto of the University of California-Irvine, suggests that may not actually be the case.
In their study, Liu and Ditto asked over 1,500 people about their moral and factual views on four highly divisive political issues. Two of them — the death penalty and the forceful interrogation of terrorists using techniques like waterboarding — are ones where liberals tend to think the act in question is morally unacceptable even if it actually yields benefits (for instance, deterring crime, or providing intelligence that can help prevent further terrorist strikes). The other two — providing information about condoms in the context of sex education, and embryonic stem cell research — are ones where conservatives tend to think the act in question is unacceptable even if it yields benefits (helping to prevent unwanted pregnancies, leading to cures for devastating diseases).
In the experiment, the subjects were first asked about their absolute moral beliefs: For instance, is the death penalty wrong even if it deters others from committing crimes? But they were also asked about various factual aspects of each topic: Does the death penalty deter crime? Do condoms work to prevent pregnancy? Does embryonic stem cell research hold medical promise? And so on.
If you believe some act is absolutely wrong, period, you shouldn’t actually care about its costs and benefits. Those should be irrelevant to your moral judgment. Yet in analyzing the data, Liu and Ditto found a strong correlation, across all of the issues, between believing something is morally wrong in all case — such as the death penalty — and also believing that it has low benefits (e.g., doesn’t deter crime) or high costs (lots of innocent people getting executed). In other words, liberals and conservatives alike shaded their assessment of the facts so as to align them with their moral convictions — establishing what Liu and Ditto call a “moral coherence” between their ethical and factual views. Neither side was innocent when it came to confusing “is” and “ought” (as moral philosophers might put it).
However, not everyone was equally susceptible to this behavior. Rather, the researchers found three risk factors, so to speak, that seem to worsen the standard human penchant for contorting the facts to one’s moral views. Two of those were pretty unsurprising: Having a strong moral view about a topic makes one’s inclination toward “moral coherence” worse, as does knowing a lot about the subject (across studies, knowledge simply seems to make us better at maintaining and defending what we already believe). But the third risk factor is likely to prove quite controversial: political conservatism.
In the study, Liu and Ditto report, conservatives tilted their views of the facts to favor their moral convictions more than liberals did, on every single issue. And that was true whether it was a topic that liberals oppose (the death penalty) or that conservatives oppose (embryonic stem cell research). “Conservatives are doing this to a larger degree across four different issues,” Liu explained in an interview. “Including two that are leaning to the liberal side, not the conservative side.”
There is a long-standing (if controversial) body of research on liberal-conservative psychological differences that may provide an answer for why this occurs. Conservatives, Liu notes, score higher on a trait called the need for cognitive closure, which describes a feeling of discomfort with uncertainty and the need to hold a firm belief, a firm conviction, unwaveringly. Insofar as a need for closure pushes one to want to hold coherent, consistent beliefs — and makes one intolerant of ambiguity — it makes sense that wanting to achieve “moral coherence” between one’s factual and moral views would also go along with it. Conservatives, in this interpretation, would naturally have more conviction that the facts of the world, and their moral systems, are perfectly aligned. Liberals, in contrast, might be more conflicted — supportive of embryonic stem cell research, for instance, but nourishing doubts about whether the scientific promise we heard so much about a decade ago is being realized.
In documenting an apparent left-right difference in emotional reasoning about what is factually true, the new paper wades into a growing debate over what the Yale researcher Dan Kahan has labeled “ideological asymmetry.” This is the idea that one side of the political spectrum, more than the other, shows a form of biased or motivated assessment of facts — a view that Kahan rejects. Indeed, he recently ran a different study and found that liberals and conservatives were more symmetrical in their biases, albeit not on a live political issue.
The question of why some researchers find results seeming to support the left-right asymmetry hypothesis, even as others do not, remains unresolved. But the new paper by Liu and Ditto will surely sharpen it. Indeed, Kahan has already weighed in on the paper, acknowledging that it provides evidence in support of asymmetry, but observing that in his view, the evidence against asymmetry from other research remains more weighty.
The upshot, for now, is that it’s hard to deny that all people engage in goal-directed reasoning, bending facts in favor of their moralities or belief systems. But — to butcher George Orwell — it may also be true that while all humans are biased by their prior beliefs and emotions, some humans are more biased than others.
Monday, August 27, 2012
Sunday, August 26, 2012
Lying Mitt
Robert Reich.Chancellor's Professor of Public Policy, University of California at Berkeley; Author, 'Beyond Outrage'
GET UPDATES FROM Robert Reich
..Romney's Lying Machine
Posted: 08/24/2012 11:05 am React Important
I've been struck by the baldness of Romney's repetitive lies about Obama -- that Obama ended the work requirement under welfare, for example, or that Obama's Affordable Care Act cuts $716 billion from Medicare benefits.
The mainstream media along with a half-dozen independent fact-checking organizations and sites have called Romney on these whoppers, but to no avail. He keeps making these assertions.
Every campaign is guilty of exaggerations, embellishments, distortions, and half-truths. But this is another thing altogether. I've been directly involved in seven presidential campaigns, and I don't recall a presidential candidate lying with such audacity, over and over again. Why does he do it, and how can he get away with it?
The obvious answer is such lies are effective. Polls show voters are starting to believe them, especially in swing states where they're being repeated constantly in media spots financed by Romney's super PAC or ancillary PACs and so-called "social welfare" organizations (political fronts disguised as charities, such as Karl Rove and the Koch brothers have set up).
Romney's lying machine is extraordinarily well financed. By August, according to Jane Mayer in her recent New Yorker article, at least 33 billionaires had each donated a quarter of a million dollars or more to groups aiming to defeat Obama -- with most of it flooding into attack ads in swing states.
In early August, "Americans for Prosperity," one of the nonprofit front groups masquerading as a charity, and founded in part by billionaire right-wingers Charles and David Koch, bought some $27 million in ad time on spots now airing in eleven swing states.
So Romney's lying machine is working.
But what does all this tell us about the man who is running this lying machine? (Or if Romney's not running it, what does it tell us about a man who would select the people who are?)
We knew he was a cypher -- that he'll say and do whatever is expedient, change positions like a chameleon, eschew any core principles.
Yet resorting to outright lies -- and organizing a presidential campaign around a series of lies -- reveals a whole new level of cynicism, a profound disdain for what remains of civility in public life, and a disrespect of the democratic process.
The question is whether someone who is willing to resort to such calculated lies, and build a campaign machine around them, can be worthy of the public's trust with the most powerful office in the world.
Saturday, August 25, 2012
Isaac
Hurricane Isaac disrupts the first day of the Republican convention in Tampa. Breaks my heart. :)
Friday, August 24, 2012
Red Books vs. Blue Books
.The Red State-Blue State Divide, As Seen by Amazon Books
Timothy Noah
Timothy NoahSenior Editorview bioThe Two Americas Paul Ryan, Numbers Guy? The Red State-Blue State Divide, As Seen by Amazon Books August 23, 2012
2:14 pm
God Asks Akin To Quit RaceAmazon has a fascinating “election heat” map listing the 100 best-selling “red” (i.e., conservative) and “blue” (i.e., liberal) books, and also calculating, based on the number of sales in each state for the top 250 red and blue books, which states are majority-red and which are majority-blue. The map, which is updated hourly, delivers some bad news—or at least it did when I checked it at 12:45 p.m.
1) America is significantly more red in its reading patterns than in its voting patterns. Only New York, Massachusetts, and Vermont sell more blue books than red ones. Everywhere else sells more red books except Minnesota and Maryland, where it’s a tie.
2) My book (The Great Divergence: America's Growing Inequality Crisis And What We Can Do About It), at 82, only barely makes the list of 100 best-selling blue books, while Joe Stiglitz’s book on the same subject is way up at 8. Hey Joe, how ’bout redistributing some sales my way?
Amazon’s methodology is far from perfect. Winner-Take-All Politics, a book about politics and income inequality by Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson, is misclassified as a red book, which it most definitely is not. The many volumes of Robert Caro’s Lyndon Johnson biography are classified as blue books, even though they portray the author of the Great Society as a bit of a monster. I’d say Caro’s books are unclassifiable, reluctant though I am to give up his many book sales for the blue team, which can use all the help it can get. Also unclassifiable is Christopher Hitchens’s final volume of collected essays, Arguable, which is here placed in the red column (where he ranks 82nd, like me).
The most striking finding of all is what the red-book list shows about conservative readers' tastes. Books hating on Obama are very popular—The Amateur, by the bottom-feeding Ed Klein, ranks first, Obama’s America, by Dinesh D’Souza, ranks, fourth, and so on. But books that say nice things about conservative politicians are almost wholly absent. Most surprising of all, No Apology, the campaign manifesto of Mitt Romney—the man Republicans will nominate next week as their presidential candidate—was ranked dead last, at 100, when I first checked. When I checked again, the list had been recalculated. This time, it didn’t make the list at all.
The Scary Ryan
Op-Ed Columnist
Galt, Gold and GodBy PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: August 23, 2012
So far, most of the discussion of Paul Ryan, the presumptive Republican nominee for vice president, has focused on his budget proposals. But Mr. Ryan is a man of many ideas, which would ordinarily be a good thing.
In his case, however, most of those ideas appear to come from works of fiction, specifically Ayn Rand’s novel “Atlas Shrugged.”
For those who somehow missed it when growing up, “Atlas Shrugged” is a fantasy in which the world’s productive people — the “job creators,” if you like — withdraw their services from an ungrateful society. The novel’s centerpiece is a 64-page speech by John Galt, the angry elite’s ringleader; even Friedrich Hayek admitted that he never made it through that part. Yet the book is a perennial favorite among adolescent boys. Most boys eventually outgrow it. Some, however, remain devotees for life.
And Mr. Ryan is one of those devotees. True, in recent years, he has tried to downplay his Randism, calling it an “urban legend.” It’s not hard to see why: Rand’s fervent atheism — not to mention her declaration that “abortion is a moral right” — isn’t what the G.O.P. base wants to hear.
But Mr. Ryan is being disingenuous. In 2005, he told the Atlas Society, which is devoted to promoting Rand’s ideas, that she inspired his political career: “If I had to credit one thinker, one person, it would be Ayn Rand.” He also declared that Rand’s work was required reading for his staff and interns.
And the Ryan fiscal program clearly reflects Randian notions. As I documented in my last column, Mr. Ryan’s reputation for being serious about the budget deficit is completely undeserved; his policies would actually increase the deficit. But he is deadly serious about cutting taxes on the rich and slashing aid to the poor, very much in line with Rand’s worship of the successful and contempt for “moochers.”
This last point is important. In pushing for draconian cuts in Medicaid, food stamps and other programs that aid the needy, Mr. Ryan isn’t just looking for ways to save money. He’s also, quite explicitly, trying to make life harder for the poor — for their own good. In March, explaining his cuts in aid for the unfortunate, he declared, “We don’t want to turn the safety net into a hammock that lulls able-bodied people into lives of dependency and complacency, that drains them of their will and their incentive to make the most of their lives.”
Somehow, I doubt that Americans forced to rely on unemployment benefits and food stamps in a depressed economy feel that they’re living in a comfortable hammock.
But wait, there’s more: “Atlas Shrugged” apparently shaped Mr. Ryan’s views on monetary policy, views that he clings to despite having been repeatedly, completely wrong in his predictions.
In early 2011, Mr. Ryan, newly installed as the chairman of the House Budget Committee, gave Ben Bernanke, the Federal Reserve chairman, a hard time over his expansionary policies. Rising commodity prices and long-term interest rates, he asserted, were harbingers of high inflation to come; “There is nothing more insidious that a country can do to its citizens,” he intoned, “than debase its currency.”
Since then, inflation has remained quiescent while long-term rates have plunged — and the U.S. economy would surely be in much worse shape than it is if Mr. Bernanke had allowed himself to be bullied into monetary tightening. But Mr. Ryan seems undaunted in his monetary views. Why?
Well, it’s right there in that 2005 speech to the Atlas Society, in which he declared that he always goes back to “Francisco d’Anconia’s speech on money” when thinking about monetary policy. Who? Never mind. That speech (which clocks in at a mere 23 paragraphs) is a case of hard-money obsession gone ballistic. Not only does the character in question, a Galt sidekick, call for a return to the gold standard, he denounces the notion of paper money and demands a return to gold coins.
For the record, the U.S. currency supply has consisted overwhelmingly of paper money, not gold and silver coins, since the early 1800s. So if Mr. Ryan really thinks that Francisco d’Anconia had it right, he wants to turn the clock back not one but two centuries.
Does any of this matter? Well, if the Republican ticket wins, Mr. Ryan will surely be an influential force in the next administration — and bear in mind, too, that he would, as the cliché goes, be a heartbeat away from the presidency. So it should worry us that Mr. Ryan holds monetary views that would, if put into practice, go a long way toward recreating the Great Depression.
And, beyond that, consider the fact that Mr. Ryan is considered the modern G.O.P.’s big thinker. What does it say about the party when its intellectual leader evidently gets his ideas largely from deeply unrealistic fantasy novels?
Galt, Gold and GodBy PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: August 23, 2012
So far, most of the discussion of Paul Ryan, the presumptive Republican nominee for vice president, has focused on his budget proposals. But Mr. Ryan is a man of many ideas, which would ordinarily be a good thing.
In his case, however, most of those ideas appear to come from works of fiction, specifically Ayn Rand’s novel “Atlas Shrugged.”
For those who somehow missed it when growing up, “Atlas Shrugged” is a fantasy in which the world’s productive people — the “job creators,” if you like — withdraw their services from an ungrateful society. The novel’s centerpiece is a 64-page speech by John Galt, the angry elite’s ringleader; even Friedrich Hayek admitted that he never made it through that part. Yet the book is a perennial favorite among adolescent boys. Most boys eventually outgrow it. Some, however, remain devotees for life.
And Mr. Ryan is one of those devotees. True, in recent years, he has tried to downplay his Randism, calling it an “urban legend.” It’s not hard to see why: Rand’s fervent atheism — not to mention her declaration that “abortion is a moral right” — isn’t what the G.O.P. base wants to hear.
But Mr. Ryan is being disingenuous. In 2005, he told the Atlas Society, which is devoted to promoting Rand’s ideas, that she inspired his political career: “If I had to credit one thinker, one person, it would be Ayn Rand.” He also declared that Rand’s work was required reading for his staff and interns.
And the Ryan fiscal program clearly reflects Randian notions. As I documented in my last column, Mr. Ryan’s reputation for being serious about the budget deficit is completely undeserved; his policies would actually increase the deficit. But he is deadly serious about cutting taxes on the rich and slashing aid to the poor, very much in line with Rand’s worship of the successful and contempt for “moochers.”
This last point is important. In pushing for draconian cuts in Medicaid, food stamps and other programs that aid the needy, Mr. Ryan isn’t just looking for ways to save money. He’s also, quite explicitly, trying to make life harder for the poor — for their own good. In March, explaining his cuts in aid for the unfortunate, he declared, “We don’t want to turn the safety net into a hammock that lulls able-bodied people into lives of dependency and complacency, that drains them of their will and their incentive to make the most of their lives.”
Somehow, I doubt that Americans forced to rely on unemployment benefits and food stamps in a depressed economy feel that they’re living in a comfortable hammock.
But wait, there’s more: “Atlas Shrugged” apparently shaped Mr. Ryan’s views on monetary policy, views that he clings to despite having been repeatedly, completely wrong in his predictions.
In early 2011, Mr. Ryan, newly installed as the chairman of the House Budget Committee, gave Ben Bernanke, the Federal Reserve chairman, a hard time over his expansionary policies. Rising commodity prices and long-term interest rates, he asserted, were harbingers of high inflation to come; “There is nothing more insidious that a country can do to its citizens,” he intoned, “than debase its currency.”
Since then, inflation has remained quiescent while long-term rates have plunged — and the U.S. economy would surely be in much worse shape than it is if Mr. Bernanke had allowed himself to be bullied into monetary tightening. But Mr. Ryan seems undaunted in his monetary views. Why?
Well, it’s right there in that 2005 speech to the Atlas Society, in which he declared that he always goes back to “Francisco d’Anconia’s speech on money” when thinking about monetary policy. Who? Never mind. That speech (which clocks in at a mere 23 paragraphs) is a case of hard-money obsession gone ballistic. Not only does the character in question, a Galt sidekick, call for a return to the gold standard, he denounces the notion of paper money and demands a return to gold coins.
For the record, the U.S. currency supply has consisted overwhelmingly of paper money, not gold and silver coins, since the early 1800s. So if Mr. Ryan really thinks that Francisco d’Anconia had it right, he wants to turn the clock back not one but two centuries.
Does any of this matter? Well, if the Republican ticket wins, Mr. Ryan will surely be an influential force in the next administration — and bear in mind, too, that he would, as the cliché goes, be a heartbeat away from the presidency. So it should worry us that Mr. Ryan holds monetary views that would, if put into practice, go a long way toward recreating the Great Depression.
And, beyond that, consider the fact that Mr. Ryan is considered the modern G.O.P.’s big thinker. What does it say about the party when its intellectual leader evidently gets his ideas largely from deeply unrealistic fantasy novels?
Wednesday, August 22, 2012
Monday, August 20, 2012
More Republican Lies
Republicans lie with seeming impunity. Will this one stand?
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August 19, 2012, 4:31 pm205 Comments
by Paul Krugman
Unethical Commentary, Newsweek Edition
There are multiple errors and misrepresentations in Niall Ferguson’s cover story in Newsweek — I guess they don’t do fact-checking — but this is the one that jumped out at me. Ferguson says:
The president pledged that health-care reform would not add a cent to the deficit. But the CBO and the Joint Committee on Taxation now estimate that the insurance-coverage provisions of the ACA will have a net cost of close to $1.2 trillion over the 2012–22 period.
Readers are no doubt meant to interpret this as saying that CBO found that the Act will increase the deficit. But anyone who actually read, or even skimmed, the CBO report (pdf) knows that it found that the ACA would reduce, not increase, the deficit — because the insurance subsidies were fully paid for.
Now, people on the right like to argue that the CBO was wrong. But that’s not the argument Ferguson is making — he is deliberately misleading readers, conveying the impression that the CBO had actually rejected Obama’s claim that health reform is deficit-neutral, when in fact the opposite is true.
More than that: by its very nature, health reform that expands coverage requires that lower-income families receive subsidies to make coverage affordable. So of course reform comes with a positive number for subsidies — finding that this number is indeed positive says nothing at all about the impact on the deficit unless you ask whether and how the subsidies are paid for. Ferguson has to know this (unless he’s completely ignorant about the whole subject, which I guess has to be considered as a possibility). But he goes for the cheap shot anyway.
We’re not talking about ideology or even economic analysis here — just a plain misrepresentation of the facts, with an august publication letting itself be used to misinform readers. The Times would require an abject correction if something like that slipped through. Will Newsweek?
.
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August 19, 2012, 4:31 pm205 Comments
by Paul Krugman
Unethical Commentary, Newsweek Edition
There are multiple errors and misrepresentations in Niall Ferguson’s cover story in Newsweek — I guess they don’t do fact-checking — but this is the one that jumped out at me. Ferguson says:
The president pledged that health-care reform would not add a cent to the deficit. But the CBO and the Joint Committee on Taxation now estimate that the insurance-coverage provisions of the ACA will have a net cost of close to $1.2 trillion over the 2012–22 period.
Readers are no doubt meant to interpret this as saying that CBO found that the Act will increase the deficit. But anyone who actually read, or even skimmed, the CBO report (pdf) knows that it found that the ACA would reduce, not increase, the deficit — because the insurance subsidies were fully paid for.
Now, people on the right like to argue that the CBO was wrong. But that’s not the argument Ferguson is making — he is deliberately misleading readers, conveying the impression that the CBO had actually rejected Obama’s claim that health reform is deficit-neutral, when in fact the opposite is true.
More than that: by its very nature, health reform that expands coverage requires that lower-income families receive subsidies to make coverage affordable. So of course reform comes with a positive number for subsidies — finding that this number is indeed positive says nothing at all about the impact on the deficit unless you ask whether and how the subsidies are paid for. Ferguson has to know this (unless he’s completely ignorant about the whole subject, which I guess has to be considered as a possibility). But he goes for the cheap shot anyway.
We’re not talking about ideology or even economic analysis here — just a plain misrepresentation of the facts, with an august publication letting itself be used to misinform readers. The Times would require an abject correction if something like that slipped through. Will Newsweek?
.
Ryan the Unserious
Op-Ed Columnist
An Unserious ManBy PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: August 19, 2012
Mitt Romney’s choice of Paul Ryan as his running mate led to a wave of pundit accolades. Now, declared writer after writer, we’re going to have a real debate about the nation’s fiscal future. This was predictable: never mind the Tea Party, Mr. Ryan’s true constituency is the commentariat, which years ago decided that he was the Honest, Serious Conservative, whose proposals deserve respect even if you don’t like him.
But he isn’t and they don’t. Ryanomics is and always has been a con game, although to be fair, it has become even more of a con since Mr. Ryan joined the ticket.
Let’s talk about what’s actually in the Ryan plan, and let’s distinguish in particular between actual, specific policy proposals and unsupported assertions. To focus things a bit more, let’s talk — as most budget discussions do — about what’s supposed to happen over the next 10 years.
On the tax side, Mr. Ryan proposes big cuts in tax rates on top income brackets and corporations. He has tried to dodge the normal process in which tax proposals are “scored” by independent auditors, but the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center has done the math, and the revenue loss from these cuts comes to $4.3 trillion over the next decade.
On the spending side, Mr. Ryan proposes huge cuts in Medicaid, turning it over to the states while sharply reducing funding relative to projections under current policy. That saves around $800 billion. He proposes similar harsh cuts in food stamps, saving a further $130 billion or so, plus a grab-bag of other cuts, such as reduced aid to college students. Let’s be generous and say that all these cuts would save $1 trillion.
On top of this, Mr. Ryan includes the $716 billion in Medicare savings that are part of Obamacare, even though he wants to scrap everything else in that act. Despite this, Mr. Ryan has now joined Mr. Romney in denouncing President Obama for “cutting Medicare”; more on that in a minute.
So if we add up Mr. Ryan’s specific proposals, we have $4.3 trillion in tax cuts, partially offset by around $1.7 trillion in spending cuts — with the tax cuts, surprise, disproportionately benefiting the top 1 percent, while the spending cuts would primarily come at the expense of low-income families. Over all, the effect would be to increase the deficit by around two and a half trillion dollars.
Yet Mr. Ryan claims to be a deficit hawk. What’s the basis for that claim?
Well, he says that he would offset his tax cuts by “base broadening,” eliminating enough tax deductions to make up the lost revenue. Which deductions would he eliminate? He refuses to say — and realistically, revenue gain on the scale he claims would be virtually impossible.
At the same time, he asserts that he would make huge further cuts in spending. What would he cut? He refuses to say.
What Mr. Ryan actually offers, then, are specific proposals that would sharply increase the deficit, plus an assertion that he has secret tax and spending plans that he refuses to share with us, but which will turn his overall plan into deficit reduction.
If this sounds like a joke, that’s because it is. Yet Mr. Ryan’s “plan” has been treated with great respect in Washington. He even received an award for fiscal responsibility from three of the leading deficit-scold pressure groups. What’s going on?
The answer, basically, is a triumph of style over substance. Over the longer term, the Ryan plan would end Medicare as we know it — and in Washington, “fiscal responsibility” is often equated with willingness to slash Medicare and Social Security, even if the purported savings would be used to cut taxes on the rich rather than to reduce deficits. Also, self-proclaimed centrists are always looking for conservatives they can praise to showcase their centrism, and Mr. Ryan has skillfully played into that weakness, talking a good game even if his numbers don’t add up.
The question now is whether Mr. Ryan’s undeserved reputation for honesty and fiscal responsibility can survive his participation in a deeply dishonest and irresponsible presidential campaign.
The first sign of trouble has already surfaced over the issue of Medicare. Mr. Romney, in an attempt to repeat the G.O.P.’s successful “death panels” strategy of the 2010 midterms, has been busily attacking the president for the same Medicare savings that are part of the Ryan plan. And Mr. Ryan’s response when this was pointed out was incredibly lame: he only included those cuts, he says, because the president put them “in the baseline,” whatever that means. Of course, whatever Mr. Ryan’s excuse, the fact is that without those savings his budget becomes even more of a plan to increase, not reduce, the deficit.
So will the choice of Mr. Ryan mean a serious campaign? No, because Mr. Ryan isn’t a serious man — he just plays one on TV.
Sunday, August 19, 2012
Ryan the Snake
by Maureen Dowd
WHAT happens when you realize you are the machine you’re raging against?
Tom Morello, the Grammy-winning, Harvard-educated guitarist for the metal rap band Rage Against the Machine, punctured Paul Ryan’s pretensions to cool in a Rolling Stone essay rejecting R&R (Romney ’n’ Ryan) as R&R (rock ’n’ roll).
“He is the embodiment of the machine that our music has been raging against for two decades,” Morello writes, adding: “I clearly see that Ryan has a whole lotta ‘rage’ in him: A rage against women, a rage against immigrants, a rage against workers, a rage against gays, a rage against the poor, a rage against the environment. Basically, the only thing he’s not raging against is the privileged elite he’s groveling in front of for campaign contributions.”
In my experience, when a presidential candidate needs some outside force to animate him — Michael Dukakis needed Kitty, Bob Dole needed C-Span, Willard needs Paul — it spells doom.
The fresh Gen X vice-presidential contender — like Sarah Palin, he favors the exclamation “awesome” — has had mixed reviews in his debutante cotillion.
Howard Fineman wrote in The Huffington Post that “Ryan turns out, upon closer inspection, not to be a purifying ideologue, but rather a young, power-hungry, ladder-climbing trimmer.” The self-styled deficit cutter backed W.’s deficit-exploding agenda, and the tut-tutting critic of the Obama stimulus grabbed for the president’s stimulus money.
Neocons and Tea Partyers, however, continued to rhapsodize. Grover Norquist told Bloomberg’s Al Hunt that Ryan would be the Dick Cheney of economic and tax policy. And that’s a compliment.
The comparison is apt. Ryan looks like a bonus Romney son, as Dan Quayle did with Bush senior. Republicans find the tableau of two rich white guys — same shirts, different generations — comforting. With W. and Cheney, the usual order switched and the vice-presidential candidate played the role of surrogate dad.
Where Ryan is like Cheney is in tone: at first blush, the Wisconsin congressman emanates a thoughtful, reassuring reasonableness, talking to reporters and sometimes Democratic lawmakers. Cheney’s deep voice, like the headmaster of a boys’ prep school, seemed moderate and measured, too, at first. But it is deceptive. Both men are way, way out there.
It is, to use a phrase coined by French doctors, la belle indifférence, or “the beautiful calm” of hysterical people. But the closer you look, the uglier it gets.
Just as Cheney, hunter of small birds and old friends, once defended cop-killer bullets and plastic guns that could slip through airport metal detectors, so Ryan, deer hunter, championed concealed guns and curtailing the background check waiting period from three days to one.
Just as Cheney was always willing to cough up money to guerrillas in Nicaragua and Angola but not to poor women whose lives were endangered by their pregnancies, so Ryan helped pay for W.’s endless wars while pushing endless anti-abortion bills, like one undercutting an exemption from the ban on using federal money for abortions in cases of rape or incest, and narrowing the definition of rape to “forcible rape.”
What on earth is nonforcible rape? It’s like saying nonlethal murder. Why redefine acts of aggression against women as non-acts of aggression?
Even Catholic bishops, who had to be dragged toward compassion in the pedophilia scandal, were dismayed at how uncompassionate Ryan’s budget was.
Mitt Romney expects his running mate to help deliver the Catholic vote and smooth over any discomfort among Catholics about Mormonism. (This is the first major-party ticket to go Protestant-less.) Yet after Ryan claimed his budget was shaped by his faith, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops deemed it immoral.
“A just spending bill cannot rely on disproportionate cuts in essential services to poor and vulnerable persons,” the bishops wrote in a letter to Congress.
The Jesuits were even more tart, with one group writing to Ryan that “Your budget appears to reflect the values of your favorite philosopher, Ayn Rand, rather than the Gospel of Jesus Christ.”
The nuns-on-the-bus also rapped the knuckles of the former altar boy who now takes his three kids to Mass. As Sister Simone Campbell, executive director of the Catholic social justice group Network, told MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell, it’s sad that a Catholic doesn’t understand that “we need to have each other’s backs. Only wealthy people can ever begin to pretend that they can live in a gated community all by themselves.”
Even Ryan’s former parish priest in Janesville weighed in. Father Stephen Umhoefer told the Center for Media and Democracy, “You can’t tell somebody that in 10 years your economic situation is going to be just wonderful because meanwhile your kids may starve to death.”
Beyond the even-keeled Ryan mien lurks full-tilt virulence. A moderate demeanor is not a sign of a moderate view of the world.
WHAT happens when you realize you are the machine you’re raging against?
Tom Morello, the Grammy-winning, Harvard-educated guitarist for the metal rap band Rage Against the Machine, punctured Paul Ryan’s pretensions to cool in a Rolling Stone essay rejecting R&R (Romney ’n’ Ryan) as R&R (rock ’n’ roll).
“He is the embodiment of the machine that our music has been raging against for two decades,” Morello writes, adding: “I clearly see that Ryan has a whole lotta ‘rage’ in him: A rage against women, a rage against immigrants, a rage against workers, a rage against gays, a rage against the poor, a rage against the environment. Basically, the only thing he’s not raging against is the privileged elite he’s groveling in front of for campaign contributions.”
In my experience, when a presidential candidate needs some outside force to animate him — Michael Dukakis needed Kitty, Bob Dole needed C-Span, Willard needs Paul — it spells doom.
The fresh Gen X vice-presidential contender — like Sarah Palin, he favors the exclamation “awesome” — has had mixed reviews in his debutante cotillion.
Howard Fineman wrote in The Huffington Post that “Ryan turns out, upon closer inspection, not to be a purifying ideologue, but rather a young, power-hungry, ladder-climbing trimmer.” The self-styled deficit cutter backed W.’s deficit-exploding agenda, and the tut-tutting critic of the Obama stimulus grabbed for the president’s stimulus money.
Neocons and Tea Partyers, however, continued to rhapsodize. Grover Norquist told Bloomberg’s Al Hunt that Ryan would be the Dick Cheney of economic and tax policy. And that’s a compliment.
The comparison is apt. Ryan looks like a bonus Romney son, as Dan Quayle did with Bush senior. Republicans find the tableau of two rich white guys — same shirts, different generations — comforting. With W. and Cheney, the usual order switched and the vice-presidential candidate played the role of surrogate dad.
Where Ryan is like Cheney is in tone: at first blush, the Wisconsin congressman emanates a thoughtful, reassuring reasonableness, talking to reporters and sometimes Democratic lawmakers. Cheney’s deep voice, like the headmaster of a boys’ prep school, seemed moderate and measured, too, at first. But it is deceptive. Both men are way, way out there.
It is, to use a phrase coined by French doctors, la belle indifférence, or “the beautiful calm” of hysterical people. But the closer you look, the uglier it gets.
Just as Cheney, hunter of small birds and old friends, once defended cop-killer bullets and plastic guns that could slip through airport metal detectors, so Ryan, deer hunter, championed concealed guns and curtailing the background check waiting period from three days to one.
Just as Cheney was always willing to cough up money to guerrillas in Nicaragua and Angola but not to poor women whose lives were endangered by their pregnancies, so Ryan helped pay for W.’s endless wars while pushing endless anti-abortion bills, like one undercutting an exemption from the ban on using federal money for abortions in cases of rape or incest, and narrowing the definition of rape to “forcible rape.”
What on earth is nonforcible rape? It’s like saying nonlethal murder. Why redefine acts of aggression against women as non-acts of aggression?
Even Catholic bishops, who had to be dragged toward compassion in the pedophilia scandal, were dismayed at how uncompassionate Ryan’s budget was.
Mitt Romney expects his running mate to help deliver the Catholic vote and smooth over any discomfort among Catholics about Mormonism. (This is the first major-party ticket to go Protestant-less.) Yet after Ryan claimed his budget was shaped by his faith, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops deemed it immoral.
“A just spending bill cannot rely on disproportionate cuts in essential services to poor and vulnerable persons,” the bishops wrote in a letter to Congress.
The Jesuits were even more tart, with one group writing to Ryan that “Your budget appears to reflect the values of your favorite philosopher, Ayn Rand, rather than the Gospel of Jesus Christ.”
The nuns-on-the-bus also rapped the knuckles of the former altar boy who now takes his three kids to Mass. As Sister Simone Campbell, executive director of the Catholic social justice group Network, told MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell, it’s sad that a Catholic doesn’t understand that “we need to have each other’s backs. Only wealthy people can ever begin to pretend that they can live in a gated community all by themselves.”
Even Ryan’s former parish priest in Janesville weighed in. Father Stephen Umhoefer told the Center for Media and Democracy, “You can’t tell somebody that in 10 years your economic situation is going to be just wonderful because meanwhile your kids may starve to death.”
Beyond the even-keeled Ryan mien lurks full-tilt virulence. A moderate demeanor is not a sign of a moderate view of the world.
Gerald Posner - Case Closed
After visiting the JFK site in Dallas I had to read this definitive account of the assassination. The book is relentless in laying down the facts. Lee Harvey Oswald alone killed President Kennedy. There was no conspiracy. Elemenets in the Mafia hated JFK. Castro had reason to kill JFK. Dragging the CIA and Lyndon Johnson into it is ridiculous. The atmosphere in Dallas in 1963 was highly toxic. Nevertheless, Oswald did it and he acted alone. There were no other shooters.
Oswald was a dedicated Marxist. He had temporarily defected to the Soviet Union where he met his wife Marina. He visited Mexico City shortly before the shooting attempting to get to Cuba. He admired Castro. Oswald was disturbed, volatile, and downright crazy. He was the lone shooter and he acted alone.
The thing that struck me the most was what a clear shot Oswald had. Look down from his perch on the 6th floor of the Texas School Book Depository and you see that he had a clear shot. It was relatively easy. Everything went right. Things could have happened to prevent the shooting that day. The motorcade passed by during the lunch hour which allowed Oswald to set up his sniper's nest. He was able to walk into the building with his rifle disguised as "curtain rods." He had just gotten the job on October 16th. If he had not gotten the job the assassination never could have happened. Accidents of history. Unfortunately everything went right for Lee Harvey Oswald on November 22, 1963 and so everything went wrong for the world.
The precise motive for the shooting died when Jack Ruby shot Oswald. Ruby was a nut case. He also acted alone. Ruby was crazier than Oswald. Viewed from 49 years later, the whole thing is amzing that it ever happened.
I was going to maybe read other books on the assassination of JFK. I am not inclined to do so now. Books alleging a conspiracy have proliferated since 1963. This book convinces me that Oswald did it. He was the lone gunman and he acted alone. There was no conspiracy. The whole thing is tragically a freak of history. Case closed.
Oswald was a dedicated Marxist. He had temporarily defected to the Soviet Union where he met his wife Marina. He visited Mexico City shortly before the shooting attempting to get to Cuba. He admired Castro. Oswald was disturbed, volatile, and downright crazy. He was the lone shooter and he acted alone.
The thing that struck me the most was what a clear shot Oswald had. Look down from his perch on the 6th floor of the Texas School Book Depository and you see that he had a clear shot. It was relatively easy. Everything went right. Things could have happened to prevent the shooting that day. The motorcade passed by during the lunch hour which allowed Oswald to set up his sniper's nest. He was able to walk into the building with his rifle disguised as "curtain rods." He had just gotten the job on October 16th. If he had not gotten the job the assassination never could have happened. Accidents of history. Unfortunately everything went right for Lee Harvey Oswald on November 22, 1963 and so everything went wrong for the world.
The precise motive for the shooting died when Jack Ruby shot Oswald. Ruby was a nut case. He also acted alone. Ruby was crazier than Oswald. Viewed from 49 years later, the whole thing is amzing that it ever happened.
I was going to maybe read other books on the assassination of JFK. I am not inclined to do so now. Books alleging a conspiracy have proliferated since 1963. This book convinces me that Oswald did it. He was the lone gunman and he acted alone. There was no conspiracy. The whole thing is tragically a freak of history. Case closed.
Some Books ARE Better Than Others
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June 21, 2012, 7:00 pm119 Comments
Reading and Guilty Pleasure
By GARY GUTTING
As we move into the summer season of beach and hammock reading, many of us reach for books that we describe as “guilty pleasures.” This notion has become an important category in our thinking about literature. Two prominent examples are NPR’s regular feature “My Guilty Pleasure” and Arthur Krystal’s recent New Yorker essay, “Easy Writers: Guilty pleasures without guilt.”
.Reading Krystal’s subtle and savvy piece, it struck me that our talk of guilty pleasures involves two controversial assumptions: that some books (and perhaps some genres) are objectively inferior to others and that “better” books are generally not very enjoyable. Combined, the two assumptions lead to a view under which, to pick up Krystal’s metaphor, we think of books the way we often think of foods: there those that are “good for you” and those that merely “taste good.” Here I want to reflect on the viability of these two assumptions.
Are some books objectively better than others, or are literary preferences ultimately just matters of subjective taste? In our democratic society, many take a relativist position: you can’t argue about taste, because there are no standards that allow us to establish higher quality as an objective fact. If I think that Proust’s “In Search of Lost Time” is a magnificent probing of the nature of time and subjectivity and you think it is overwritten self-indulgent obscurantism, we both have a right to our opinions. So doesn’t it follow that each opinion is only relatively right (right for me, right for you)?
This is a difficult question in principle, but I doubt that it’s of much practical significance. In fact, even the most vehement supporters of relativism as a general theory make absolute judgments when they start talking about specific cases.
We often appeal to relativism as a general theory to soothe incipient disputes about the relative value of “serious” and “popular” genres. If a friend and I are verging on an uncomfortable dispute about the merits of literary fiction compared to mysteries or thrillers, we may avoid conflict by saying, “Different people just like different things; we shouldn’t try to impose our views on others.” But once we return to our preferred genres, we are perfectly happy to make strong judgments about, say, the superiority of David Mitchell to Jonathan Franzen or of Raymond Chandler to Mickey Spillane. Regarding the books we really care about, few of us are relativists about quality.
It’s plausible, in fact, that the standards we appeal to in support of comparative judgments within a genre (complexity, subtlety, depth, authenticity and so on) could just as well be used to judge one genre, overall, better than another. I suspect it’s just a democratic preference for tolerance that keeps many of us from this path. In any case, as I’ve noted, much of the discussion about “guilty pleasures” assumes a domain of higher quality “serious” fiction that is superior to but less enjoyable than “lower” forms of fiction.
But when we think this way, what do we mean by “enjoyment”? Sometimes, as Krystal points out, we mean escape from the grubby difficulties of real life into a more enticing fictional world. But Jane Austen or Thomas Mann (or even Homer or Chaucer) can as effectively take us away from our daily cares as can Ken Follett or John Grisham.
Seemingly more plausible is the idea that serious fiction is not enjoyable because it is difficult, requiring intellectual effort to untangle complexities of plot and syntax, to appreciate obscure allusions, or understand deep philosophical themes. Literature of previous centuries is likely to pose problems simply because of unfamiliar modes of expression or cultural contexts; and more recent literary fiction—beginning with the great modernists like Proust, Eliot and Joyce—often seems deliberately constructed to be hard for readers.
Room for Debate: Is Fiction Changing, for Better or Worse?.But why should we think that what is hard to read is not enjoyable? Here there is a striking difference between the way we regard mental and physical activities. Running marathons, climbing mountains and competing at high levels in tennis or basketball are very difficult things to do, but people get immense enjoyment from them. Why should the intellectual work of reading “The Sound and the Fury” or “Pale Fire” be any less enjoyable? If I take pleasure only in the “light fiction” of mysteries, thrillers or romances, I am like someone who enjoys no physical activities more challenging than walking around the block or sitting in a rocking chair. Vigorous intellectual activity is itself a primary source of pleasure—and pleasure of greater intensity and satisfaction than that available from what is merely “easy reading.”
Fans of popular genres implicitly recognize this when they insist that their favorite books deserve the same sort of detailed attention we give to canonical classics. That’s why we find Library of America editions and articles in professional journals on writers like Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett and H. P. Lovecraft. Sometimes the attention is misplaced, and the high-powered analysis is more a matter of reading into the text than extracting from it. But the sign of a superior text of whatever genre is its ability to continue rewarding—with pleasure—those who work to uncover its riches.
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June 21, 2012, 7:00 pm119 Comments
Reading and Guilty Pleasure
By GARY GUTTING
As we move into the summer season of beach and hammock reading, many of us reach for books that we describe as “guilty pleasures.” This notion has become an important category in our thinking about literature. Two prominent examples are NPR’s regular feature “My Guilty Pleasure” and Arthur Krystal’s recent New Yorker essay, “Easy Writers: Guilty pleasures without guilt.”
.Reading Krystal’s subtle and savvy piece, it struck me that our talk of guilty pleasures involves two controversial assumptions: that some books (and perhaps some genres) are objectively inferior to others and that “better” books are generally not very enjoyable. Combined, the two assumptions lead to a view under which, to pick up Krystal’s metaphor, we think of books the way we often think of foods: there those that are “good for you” and those that merely “taste good.” Here I want to reflect on the viability of these two assumptions.
Are some books objectively better than others, or are literary preferences ultimately just matters of subjective taste? In our democratic society, many take a relativist position: you can’t argue about taste, because there are no standards that allow us to establish higher quality as an objective fact. If I think that Proust’s “In Search of Lost Time” is a magnificent probing of the nature of time and subjectivity and you think it is overwritten self-indulgent obscurantism, we both have a right to our opinions. So doesn’t it follow that each opinion is only relatively right (right for me, right for you)?
This is a difficult question in principle, but I doubt that it’s of much practical significance. In fact, even the most vehement supporters of relativism as a general theory make absolute judgments when they start talking about specific cases.
We often appeal to relativism as a general theory to soothe incipient disputes about the relative value of “serious” and “popular” genres. If a friend and I are verging on an uncomfortable dispute about the merits of literary fiction compared to mysteries or thrillers, we may avoid conflict by saying, “Different people just like different things; we shouldn’t try to impose our views on others.” But once we return to our preferred genres, we are perfectly happy to make strong judgments about, say, the superiority of David Mitchell to Jonathan Franzen or of Raymond Chandler to Mickey Spillane. Regarding the books we really care about, few of us are relativists about quality.
It’s plausible, in fact, that the standards we appeal to in support of comparative judgments within a genre (complexity, subtlety, depth, authenticity and so on) could just as well be used to judge one genre, overall, better than another. I suspect it’s just a democratic preference for tolerance that keeps many of us from this path. In any case, as I’ve noted, much of the discussion about “guilty pleasures” assumes a domain of higher quality “serious” fiction that is superior to but less enjoyable than “lower” forms of fiction.
But when we think this way, what do we mean by “enjoyment”? Sometimes, as Krystal points out, we mean escape from the grubby difficulties of real life into a more enticing fictional world. But Jane Austen or Thomas Mann (or even Homer or Chaucer) can as effectively take us away from our daily cares as can Ken Follett or John Grisham.
Seemingly more plausible is the idea that serious fiction is not enjoyable because it is difficult, requiring intellectual effort to untangle complexities of plot and syntax, to appreciate obscure allusions, or understand deep philosophical themes. Literature of previous centuries is likely to pose problems simply because of unfamiliar modes of expression or cultural contexts; and more recent literary fiction—beginning with the great modernists like Proust, Eliot and Joyce—often seems deliberately constructed to be hard for readers.
Room for Debate: Is Fiction Changing, for Better or Worse?.But why should we think that what is hard to read is not enjoyable? Here there is a striking difference between the way we regard mental and physical activities. Running marathons, climbing mountains and competing at high levels in tennis or basketball are very difficult things to do, but people get immense enjoyment from them. Why should the intellectual work of reading “The Sound and the Fury” or “Pale Fire” be any less enjoyable? If I take pleasure only in the “light fiction” of mysteries, thrillers or romances, I am like someone who enjoys no physical activities more challenging than walking around the block or sitting in a rocking chair. Vigorous intellectual activity is itself a primary source of pleasure—and pleasure of greater intensity and satisfaction than that available from what is merely “easy reading.”
Fans of popular genres implicitly recognize this when they insist that their favorite books deserve the same sort of detailed attention we give to canonical classics. That’s why we find Library of America editions and articles in professional journals on writers like Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett and H. P. Lovecraft. Sometimes the attention is misplaced, and the high-powered analysis is more a matter of reading into the text than extracting from it. But the sign of a superior text of whatever genre is its ability to continue rewarding—with pleasure—those who work to uncover its riches.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Thursday, August 16, 2012
Wednesday, August 15, 2012
The Exact Same People
The exact same people who blew the surplus, exploded our debt and crashed our economy are still using this crisis as an opportunity to gut our social safety net and transfer trillions more in wealth to the rich. Amazing.
Ryan the Con Man
by Jason Linkins
Paul Ryan Only Passed 2 Bills Into Law In More Than A Decade
.Paul Ryan, Capitol Hill's Most 'Serious' Man
Posted: 08/14/2012 1:29 pm Updated: 08/15/2012 1:00 am
If there's one word that's become associated with Wisconsin Representative and vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan over his long tenure in Washington, D.C., it is "serious." Ryan is credited, up and down, with being a "serious" man. His reputation for seriousness precedes him in every fresh encounter on Capitol Hill and every booking on Sunday morning's political chat shows. And more amazingly, that reputation lingers long after those encounters have ended, despite each new pile of evidence to the contrary. He's as pure a product as the Beltway Bubble has ever produced.
A no less Serious man than Erskine Bowles has deemed Ryan worthy. "I'm telling you, this guy is amazing. I always thought I was okay with arithmetic. This guy can run circles around me, and he is honest, he is straightforward, he is sincere, and the budget he came forward with is just like Paul Ryan: It is a sensible, straight-forward, honest, serious budget, and it cut the budget deficit, just like we did, by $4 trillion," said the co-chair of the Simpson-Bowles commission, a panel so deadly serious that its mission was not even undermined by its other chair's repeated references to the tits on milk cows, the way kids wear pants today, or whatever else poured forth from Alan Simpson's mouth.
Ryan the Serious is so serious, in fact, that Bowles didn't risk offending by mentioning the needlesome fact that Ryan voted against Simpson-Bowles, dooming it to failure. Seriously. More on that in a minute.
But as the above example shows, Ryan has managed to establish this reputation and earn a disproportionate share of forgiveness by doing a lot of things right. For example, he is rare among congresscritters in that he does not behave like a jackass, and steers well clear of the sorts of behaviors that his colleagues evince on a regular basis. You won't catch Ryan sending out tweets that read as if a small child has smashed a Blackberry into pulp, a la Chuck Grassley. He's kind and self-effacing, and he presents himself humbly for approval. Unlike, say, Chuck Schumer, you don't get the sense that you're putting your life in any particular peril if you accidentally find yourself between him and an available teevee camera. And as so many of his colleagues -- Michele Bachmann and Allen West come immediately to mind -- earn attention by feeding the "What did he/she just say?" outrage machine, Ryan keeps to his quiet, wonky knitting. He raises his hand, waits to be called upon, has read the morning's lesson plan.
And if nothing else, people know precisely where Ryan stands. He's engineered the GOP's long-term fiscal gameplan and has positioned himself as its exclusive representative -- from a marketing standpoint, he's the creator, steward and face of the brand. And he's earned important buy-in: Let's recall that Grover Norquist sees the 2012 presidential contest as a battle to install Romney as Ryan's amanuensis: "We are not auditioning for fearless leader. We don't need a president to tell us in what direction to go. We know what direction to go. We want the Ryan budget ... Pick a Republican with enough working digits to handle a pen to become president of the United States." This is the strength Ryan brings to the Romney ticket -- he dispels the fear that Romney, left to his own devices, might lapse back into his moderate tendencies. Ryan is as planted as Romney is malleable. When you distance yourself from Ryan -- or run from him, as more than a few downticket GOP strivers are already doing -- there's no threat that he's going to pop up in the bushes behind you.
Ryan also has charts. And graphs. Which would be enough to make him serious without any of the other stuff. (And they're not charts about carbon emissions and surface temperatures, which could threaten one's serious credentials in Washington by branding one an earthy crusader.)
But if you've done any significant amount of time inside the Beltway, you've probably learned that the Bubble People have an altogether different set of standards for what qualifies as "serious." And if you're smart, you've learned to cross to the other side of Pennsylvania Avenue when you see "serious" people strolling up the sidewalk. Here in the Bubble, "serious" people thought that Iraq was an existential threat to civilization, and that (despite the fact that they were such an astounding danger!) taking them out would be a quick, orderly, cheap venture -- a few short weeks of combat followed by Paul Bremer copping the Usain Bolt pose at Sahat Al Tahrir while the locals swooned.
People who want to be thought of as Serious learn that what the Bubble People want is for someone to reaffirm their beliefs. Here in Washington, the Bubble People live in a constant state of deficit panic. They consider things like limiting the benefits packages of career civil servants to be a "lofty goal." Elizabeth Warren's campaign to alert consumers to the "tricks and traps" found in the fine print of credit card contracts and loan agreements is deemed to be "simplistic and hyperbolic." And those who would advocate for the end of New Deal entitlement programs, like Social Security and Medicare, are deemed to be "serious," because they are making "the tough choices."
It does take a certain amount of courage to advocate whole-heartedly to strip what few benefits the working class derives from the government and leave them with nothing, but it's hardly a "tough choice" to hurt vulnerable people who've no clout in Washington at the urging of those who do -- and who typically pay area homeless a meager allowance to stand in line for them ahead of congressional hearings.
At the risk of self-plagiarizing, let's run down what we know about Ryan's collection of Tough Choices. Ryan claims, as Romney recently has, that he can affect growth by closing loopholes, but he has never specified which loopholes, and as we're learning from the Tax Policy Center, there aren't enough loopholes to close to achieve the desired ends. (Hence, you're stuck raising taxes on the middle class, or scuppering the entire government, or both.)
His plan to balance the budget is to not balance the budget. He's considered a "deficit hawk" -- but as he's put his rubber stamp on all of the Bush administration's budget-busting initiatives, that's a lot like calling an arsonist a fire-fighter. As Jacob Weisberg learned, to some chagrin, Ryan's budget plan "projects an absurd future, according to the Congressional Budget Office, in which all discretionary spending, now around 12 percent of GDP, shrinks to 3 percent of GDP by 2050."
Beyond that, of course, no one has any idea what programs Ryan would eliminate to achieve his "3 percent of GDP" discretionary budget dystopia. That's probably because the correct answer to the question is "nearly everything" and providing that answer would probably lead to voters outside of the goldbug/tenther set to decide that he is insane.
But in Washington, Ryan gets a pass for never specifying what he would do. This leaves it to others to attempt to game out what might be brought about by his roadmap. Typically, they assume that Ryan's budget plan will reflect Ryan's various opinions on those government programs that he doesn't favor, so they might choose to zero out agencies like the EPA, or federally funded education programs, or the National Park Service. Or they may simply take Ryan's budget cuts and apply them in some sort of uniform fashion, and show the hits that various government services might take if Ryan's cuts were applied proportionally across the board.
When this happens, Ryan complains that his opponents are imputing things that he has never said. The Beltway media takes his side. His opponents never get a pass. That's the benefit of being thought of as a Serious man.
Of course, that's only one of the many ways Ryan has gotten a pass. As much as the Beltway media lionizes the "Chairman's Mark" that was produced by Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles during their work on the "Simpson-Bowles Committee," the failure to get their supposedly meaningful deficit reduction plan to Congress, and thus to the president's desk, is widely seen as President Obama's fault.
In the Beltway Bubble's popular scenario, Obama "abandoned" a product that was never produced. After the Simpson-Bowles Commission foundered, Ryan reacted to criticism of his own plan by accusing the president of using "a rhetorical broadside to distract from the fact the president isn't proposing solutions." But Obama was the one who revived the entire idea of a deficit commission after the Senate's legislative attempt at creating one was undone by the GOP co-sponsors bailing on the idea. And it's not beyond the realm of reason that Obama would have endorsed the plan that the Commission was steaming toward, provided it tinkered with its prescriptions for Social Security. After all, as National Economic Council director Gene Sperling noted, Simpson-Bowles was set on levels of revenue-raising more generous than what Obama himself proposed. Sperling made the distinction between Ryan's roadmap and the cogitations of the Simpson-Bowles committee fairly legible:
"His budget has become the poster child for an extreme budget that puts all the burden on the middle class and the most vulnerable," Sperling said.
"It includes no revenue, when the core of Bowles-Simpson was a balance of revenue and entitlements savings, and a principle that you don't put much burden at all on the most vulnerable in our society."
Unfortunately for Sperling, the fact that Simpson-Bowles strove to not "put much burden at all on the most vulnerable in our society" is pretty much why it's deemed to be less legendary here inside the Bubble. These choices, they were not "tough" enough. Neither were the choices laid out in the "Grand Bargain" that was almost made between President Obama and House Speaker John Boehner. Let's take care to remember what this "Grand Bargain" entailed:
Obama had proposed to Republicans a "grand bargain" that accomplished a host of individual things that are unpopular on their own, but that just might pass as a huge package jammed through Congress with default looming. Obama offered to put Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid cuts on the table in exchange for a tax hike of roughly $100 billion per year over 10 years. Meanwhile, government spending would be cut by roughly three times that amount. It's no small irony that the party's dogmatic opposition to tax increases is costing the GOP its best opportunity to roll back social programs it has long targeted.
Republicans are now banking on a smaller deficit reduction deal that would still make major cuts, somewhere in the range of $2 trillion.
What was Ryan's role in all of this? The New York Times reported today that he was behind the scuttling of the deal:
Mr. Ryan's enormous influence was apparent last summer when Representative Eric Cantor, the second most powerful House Republican, told Mr. Obama during negotiations over an attempted bipartisan "grand bargain" that Mr. Ryan disliked its policy and was concerned that a deal would pave the way for Mr. Obama's easy re-election, according to a Democrat and a Republican who were briefed on the conversation.
Now, one might as well note that both Cantor and Boehner have denied the claims made by the Times' sources. But there's a larger point to be made here. That "Grand Bargain?" It was offered, and very nearly accepted. And yet the media has completely spaced on this, to the extent that Obama's role as a Grand Bargainer -- in which he signed onto increasing Medicare's eligibility age, among other things -- is consistently denied. Yet Ryan's plan, with all its undefined choices about where the budget axe is to fall -- the details of which, if they exist al all, remain locked with Ryan's cranium -- gets the credit for being the "serious" one.
All of the past benefits of the doubt that Ryan has received are going to serve him in good stead now that he's been selected to provide Mitt Romney with the core identity and policy specifics that Romney was unable or unwilling to provide himself. And already the media has proclaimed how "serious" and "brave" the political conversation to come will certainly be, now that Ryan's here to ensure it.
This is, in some ways, a fair assessment. To have a legitimate debate on the long-term policy direction of the nation, it surely helps to have Ryan in the mix, full-throatedly endorsing his vision of the future, even if its painted with the broadest brush. In turn, the Obama campaign will have ample opportunity to clarify its own. There's tremendous potential now for a debate to draw palpable lines and make clear contrasts between the two major party candidates.
But it comes at a cost: It means that very little time will be spent on the near-term economic crisis -- its rampant unemployment catastrophe, its continually unfolding foreclosure emergency -- or the widespread suffering that America is enduring. Yes, there will be sops to the current disaster: Romney will promise a brighter future ahead, Obama will suggest his opponents mean to return to the past. But contending directly with the present will likely be avoided in any way, save in the abstract. As far as the two competitors are concerned, the present-day suffering only speaks to whether or not one of them deserves to be president.
This is the biggest gift that Ryan has given the Bubble People. He's infused the race with a set of notions that extend to everyone a permission to look past and gloss over our present calamitous circumstances, and to do so with the assurance that they are really working hard to contend with all the 'substance-like substance' that Ryan brings to the race. To be sure, the Beltway Bubble media cut and run from the American people and their lingering suffering a long time ago. There's no currency, after all, in having access to poor people. Ryan's entry into the race, however, allows them to feel just as Serious and as Brave and as Tough as he is. As opposed to feeling like failed cowards. For that, their gratitude to Ryan will be fulsome, in every sense of the word.
Paul Ryan Only Passed 2 Bills Into Law In More Than A Decade
.Paul Ryan, Capitol Hill's Most 'Serious' Man
Posted: 08/14/2012 1:29 pm Updated: 08/15/2012 1:00 am
If there's one word that's become associated with Wisconsin Representative and vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan over his long tenure in Washington, D.C., it is "serious." Ryan is credited, up and down, with being a "serious" man. His reputation for seriousness precedes him in every fresh encounter on Capitol Hill and every booking on Sunday morning's political chat shows. And more amazingly, that reputation lingers long after those encounters have ended, despite each new pile of evidence to the contrary. He's as pure a product as the Beltway Bubble has ever produced.
A no less Serious man than Erskine Bowles has deemed Ryan worthy. "I'm telling you, this guy is amazing. I always thought I was okay with arithmetic. This guy can run circles around me, and he is honest, he is straightforward, he is sincere, and the budget he came forward with is just like Paul Ryan: It is a sensible, straight-forward, honest, serious budget, and it cut the budget deficit, just like we did, by $4 trillion," said the co-chair of the Simpson-Bowles commission, a panel so deadly serious that its mission was not even undermined by its other chair's repeated references to the tits on milk cows, the way kids wear pants today, or whatever else poured forth from Alan Simpson's mouth.
Ryan the Serious is so serious, in fact, that Bowles didn't risk offending by mentioning the needlesome fact that Ryan voted against Simpson-Bowles, dooming it to failure. Seriously. More on that in a minute.
But as the above example shows, Ryan has managed to establish this reputation and earn a disproportionate share of forgiveness by doing a lot of things right. For example, he is rare among congresscritters in that he does not behave like a jackass, and steers well clear of the sorts of behaviors that his colleagues evince on a regular basis. You won't catch Ryan sending out tweets that read as if a small child has smashed a Blackberry into pulp, a la Chuck Grassley. He's kind and self-effacing, and he presents himself humbly for approval. Unlike, say, Chuck Schumer, you don't get the sense that you're putting your life in any particular peril if you accidentally find yourself between him and an available teevee camera. And as so many of his colleagues -- Michele Bachmann and Allen West come immediately to mind -- earn attention by feeding the "What did he/she just say?" outrage machine, Ryan keeps to his quiet, wonky knitting. He raises his hand, waits to be called upon, has read the morning's lesson plan.
And if nothing else, people know precisely where Ryan stands. He's engineered the GOP's long-term fiscal gameplan and has positioned himself as its exclusive representative -- from a marketing standpoint, he's the creator, steward and face of the brand. And he's earned important buy-in: Let's recall that Grover Norquist sees the 2012 presidential contest as a battle to install Romney as Ryan's amanuensis: "We are not auditioning for fearless leader. We don't need a president to tell us in what direction to go. We know what direction to go. We want the Ryan budget ... Pick a Republican with enough working digits to handle a pen to become president of the United States." This is the strength Ryan brings to the Romney ticket -- he dispels the fear that Romney, left to his own devices, might lapse back into his moderate tendencies. Ryan is as planted as Romney is malleable. When you distance yourself from Ryan -- or run from him, as more than a few downticket GOP strivers are already doing -- there's no threat that he's going to pop up in the bushes behind you.
Ryan also has charts. And graphs. Which would be enough to make him serious without any of the other stuff. (And they're not charts about carbon emissions and surface temperatures, which could threaten one's serious credentials in Washington by branding one an earthy crusader.)
But if you've done any significant amount of time inside the Beltway, you've probably learned that the Bubble People have an altogether different set of standards for what qualifies as "serious." And if you're smart, you've learned to cross to the other side of Pennsylvania Avenue when you see "serious" people strolling up the sidewalk. Here in the Bubble, "serious" people thought that Iraq was an existential threat to civilization, and that (despite the fact that they were such an astounding danger!) taking them out would be a quick, orderly, cheap venture -- a few short weeks of combat followed by Paul Bremer copping the Usain Bolt pose at Sahat Al Tahrir while the locals swooned.
People who want to be thought of as Serious learn that what the Bubble People want is for someone to reaffirm their beliefs. Here in Washington, the Bubble People live in a constant state of deficit panic. They consider things like limiting the benefits packages of career civil servants to be a "lofty goal." Elizabeth Warren's campaign to alert consumers to the "tricks and traps" found in the fine print of credit card contracts and loan agreements is deemed to be "simplistic and hyperbolic." And those who would advocate for the end of New Deal entitlement programs, like Social Security and Medicare, are deemed to be "serious," because they are making "the tough choices."
It does take a certain amount of courage to advocate whole-heartedly to strip what few benefits the working class derives from the government and leave them with nothing, but it's hardly a "tough choice" to hurt vulnerable people who've no clout in Washington at the urging of those who do -- and who typically pay area homeless a meager allowance to stand in line for them ahead of congressional hearings.
At the risk of self-plagiarizing, let's run down what we know about Ryan's collection of Tough Choices. Ryan claims, as Romney recently has, that he can affect growth by closing loopholes, but he has never specified which loopholes, and as we're learning from the Tax Policy Center, there aren't enough loopholes to close to achieve the desired ends. (Hence, you're stuck raising taxes on the middle class, or scuppering the entire government, or both.)
His plan to balance the budget is to not balance the budget. He's considered a "deficit hawk" -- but as he's put his rubber stamp on all of the Bush administration's budget-busting initiatives, that's a lot like calling an arsonist a fire-fighter. As Jacob Weisberg learned, to some chagrin, Ryan's budget plan "projects an absurd future, according to the Congressional Budget Office, in which all discretionary spending, now around 12 percent of GDP, shrinks to 3 percent of GDP by 2050."
Beyond that, of course, no one has any idea what programs Ryan would eliminate to achieve his "3 percent of GDP" discretionary budget dystopia. That's probably because the correct answer to the question is "nearly everything" and providing that answer would probably lead to voters outside of the goldbug/tenther set to decide that he is insane.
But in Washington, Ryan gets a pass for never specifying what he would do. This leaves it to others to attempt to game out what might be brought about by his roadmap. Typically, they assume that Ryan's budget plan will reflect Ryan's various opinions on those government programs that he doesn't favor, so they might choose to zero out agencies like the EPA, or federally funded education programs, or the National Park Service. Or they may simply take Ryan's budget cuts and apply them in some sort of uniform fashion, and show the hits that various government services might take if Ryan's cuts were applied proportionally across the board.
When this happens, Ryan complains that his opponents are imputing things that he has never said. The Beltway media takes his side. His opponents never get a pass. That's the benefit of being thought of as a Serious man.
Of course, that's only one of the many ways Ryan has gotten a pass. As much as the Beltway media lionizes the "Chairman's Mark" that was produced by Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles during their work on the "Simpson-Bowles Committee," the failure to get their supposedly meaningful deficit reduction plan to Congress, and thus to the president's desk, is widely seen as President Obama's fault.
In the Beltway Bubble's popular scenario, Obama "abandoned" a product that was never produced. After the Simpson-Bowles Commission foundered, Ryan reacted to criticism of his own plan by accusing the president of using "a rhetorical broadside to distract from the fact the president isn't proposing solutions." But Obama was the one who revived the entire idea of a deficit commission after the Senate's legislative attempt at creating one was undone by the GOP co-sponsors bailing on the idea. And it's not beyond the realm of reason that Obama would have endorsed the plan that the Commission was steaming toward, provided it tinkered with its prescriptions for Social Security. After all, as National Economic Council director Gene Sperling noted, Simpson-Bowles was set on levels of revenue-raising more generous than what Obama himself proposed. Sperling made the distinction between Ryan's roadmap and the cogitations of the Simpson-Bowles committee fairly legible:
"His budget has become the poster child for an extreme budget that puts all the burden on the middle class and the most vulnerable," Sperling said.
"It includes no revenue, when the core of Bowles-Simpson was a balance of revenue and entitlements savings, and a principle that you don't put much burden at all on the most vulnerable in our society."
Unfortunately for Sperling, the fact that Simpson-Bowles strove to not "put much burden at all on the most vulnerable in our society" is pretty much why it's deemed to be less legendary here inside the Bubble. These choices, they were not "tough" enough. Neither were the choices laid out in the "Grand Bargain" that was almost made between President Obama and House Speaker John Boehner. Let's take care to remember what this "Grand Bargain" entailed:
Obama had proposed to Republicans a "grand bargain" that accomplished a host of individual things that are unpopular on their own, but that just might pass as a huge package jammed through Congress with default looming. Obama offered to put Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid cuts on the table in exchange for a tax hike of roughly $100 billion per year over 10 years. Meanwhile, government spending would be cut by roughly three times that amount. It's no small irony that the party's dogmatic opposition to tax increases is costing the GOP its best opportunity to roll back social programs it has long targeted.
Republicans are now banking on a smaller deficit reduction deal that would still make major cuts, somewhere in the range of $2 trillion.
What was Ryan's role in all of this? The New York Times reported today that he was behind the scuttling of the deal:
Mr. Ryan's enormous influence was apparent last summer when Representative Eric Cantor, the second most powerful House Republican, told Mr. Obama during negotiations over an attempted bipartisan "grand bargain" that Mr. Ryan disliked its policy and was concerned that a deal would pave the way for Mr. Obama's easy re-election, according to a Democrat and a Republican who were briefed on the conversation.
Now, one might as well note that both Cantor and Boehner have denied the claims made by the Times' sources. But there's a larger point to be made here. That "Grand Bargain?" It was offered, and very nearly accepted. And yet the media has completely spaced on this, to the extent that Obama's role as a Grand Bargainer -- in which he signed onto increasing Medicare's eligibility age, among other things -- is consistently denied. Yet Ryan's plan, with all its undefined choices about where the budget axe is to fall -- the details of which, if they exist al all, remain locked with Ryan's cranium -- gets the credit for being the "serious" one.
All of the past benefits of the doubt that Ryan has received are going to serve him in good stead now that he's been selected to provide Mitt Romney with the core identity and policy specifics that Romney was unable or unwilling to provide himself. And already the media has proclaimed how "serious" and "brave" the political conversation to come will certainly be, now that Ryan's here to ensure it.
This is, in some ways, a fair assessment. To have a legitimate debate on the long-term policy direction of the nation, it surely helps to have Ryan in the mix, full-throatedly endorsing his vision of the future, even if its painted with the broadest brush. In turn, the Obama campaign will have ample opportunity to clarify its own. There's tremendous potential now for a debate to draw palpable lines and make clear contrasts between the two major party candidates.
But it comes at a cost: It means that very little time will be spent on the near-term economic crisis -- its rampant unemployment catastrophe, its continually unfolding foreclosure emergency -- or the widespread suffering that America is enduring. Yes, there will be sops to the current disaster: Romney will promise a brighter future ahead, Obama will suggest his opponents mean to return to the past. But contending directly with the present will likely be avoided in any way, save in the abstract. As far as the two competitors are concerned, the present-day suffering only speaks to whether or not one of them deserves to be president.
This is the biggest gift that Ryan has given the Bubble People. He's infused the race with a set of notions that extend to everyone a permission to look past and gloss over our present calamitous circumstances, and to do so with the assurance that they are really working hard to contend with all the 'substance-like substance' that Ryan brings to the race. To be sure, the Beltway Bubble media cut and run from the American people and their lingering suffering a long time ago. There's no currency, after all, in having access to poor people. Ryan's entry into the race, however, allows them to feel just as Serious and as Brave and as Tough as he is. As opposed to feeling like failed cowards. For that, their gratitude to Ryan will be fulsome, in every sense of the word.
Sunday, August 12, 2012
The Kennedy Assasination
Last Thursday I was able to visit the Kennedy Museum in Dallas and do the tour of the infamous 6th floor of the former Texas Schoolbook Depository and see the window thru which Lee Harvey Oswald shot President Kennedy on Noverber 22, 1963. It is a chilling experience. What struck me most of all is what an easy shot Oswald had. With the rifle he had at his disposal, hitting his mark was a cinch even if he wasn't the greatest shot in the world. History turned forever on that early afternoon 49 years ago. Now I am reading the Gerald Posner account of the crime called CASE CLOSED. The book is absorbing. Oswald's story is engrossing. More later.
Saturday, August 11, 2012
Why Ryan?
by Paul Krugman
Galt / Gekko 2012
Paul Ryan for VP — or, as Romney said in the press conference, “the next president of the United States”. I did say Galt/Gekko, not Gekko/Galt.
There is, I gather, lots of horse-race speculation: It’s a disaster! No, it changes the conversation away from Bain and those missing tax returns! I have no idea who’s right.
What I do know is that anyone who believes in Ryan’s carefully cultivated image as a brave, honest policy wonk has been snookered. Mark Thoma reviews selected pieces I’ve written about Ryan; he is, in fact, a big fraud, who doesn’t care at all about fiscal responsibility, and whose policy proposals are sloppy as well as dishonest. Of course, this means that he’ll fit in to the Romney campaign just fine.
As I said, I have no idea how this will play politically. But it does look like a move from weakness, rather than strength; Romney obviously felt he needed a VP who will get people to stop talking about him.
.
Galt / Gekko 2012
Paul Ryan for VP — or, as Romney said in the press conference, “the next president of the United States”. I did say Galt/Gekko, not Gekko/Galt.
There is, I gather, lots of horse-race speculation: It’s a disaster! No, it changes the conversation away from Bain and those missing tax returns! I have no idea who’s right.
What I do know is that anyone who believes in Ryan’s carefully cultivated image as a brave, honest policy wonk has been snookered. Mark Thoma reviews selected pieces I’ve written about Ryan; he is, in fact, a big fraud, who doesn’t care at all about fiscal responsibility, and whose policy proposals are sloppy as well as dishonest. Of course, this means that he’ll fit in to the Romney campaign just fine.
As I said, I have no idea how this will play politically. But it does look like a move from weakness, rather than strength; Romney obviously felt he needed a VP who will get people to stop talking about him.
.
Saturday, August 4, 2012
The Library of America
I have the fall edition of Library of America catalogue. I could spend a lot of money with this publisher. They publish gorgeous books by the best American writers.
Friday, August 3, 2012
The iPad
I've been working with my iPad this week. Hence, the short posts. This could get addictive.
Thursday, August 2, 2012
A Poker Hand
On this day in 1876 Wild Bill Hickok was shot to death in Deadwood, South Dakota, at a poker table holding the legendary "Dead Man's Hand" which is 2 pair: black 8's and black aces. Here's to you, Wild Bill. Hope you didn't lose out on a big pot!
Wednesday, August 1, 2012
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