A little wonky

This is a brief lesson in lying with statistics--to yourself.

Did You Know? ----> More Than 48 Million Americans Remain Uninsured herit.ag/UKS1mL #fullrepeal
— Heritage Foundation (@Heritage) September 13, 2012

NEW DATA: Obamacare lowered uninsurance rate in 2011 thkpr.gs/Sc2WSH #icymi
— ThinkProgress (@thinkprogress) September 13, 2012

The Census Bureau's report on income, poverty, and health insurance coverage came out and the Heritage Foundation and Center for American Progress's Think Progress responded almost simultaneously, giving us an instructive picture in how reality gets its coloring.

To Heritage, the news is unambiguously bad:

Despite a small reduction in the uninsured by 1.4 million from 2010 to 2011, 48.6 million, or 15.7 percent of Americans, remain without health insurance.

Another area of disappointment comes from the number of uninsured young adults: 27.7 percent of the uninsured fall in this age group. While this group saw a decrease of 2 percent—partially due to Obamacare’s extension of coverage to dependents up to age 26—it is much less than President Obama and his Administration promised. In August, the President claimed, “Nearly 7 million young people have health insurance because they’re able to stay on their parents’ plans.”

But for CAP, it's terrific:

Thanks to Obamacare, the uninsured rate in the U.S. dropped in 2011 to 15.7 percent from 16.3 percent in 2010, and 1.4 million Americans have health insurance now who did not have coverage a year ago, according to data from the Census Bureau. 2011 was the first year in more than a decade in which the number of people with private health insurance remained steady. “Our main finding is coverage increased between 2010 and 2011,” said David Johnson, chief of the Census’s Chief, Social, Economic, and Housing Statistics Division.

A key factor that drove down the number of people without insurance — 48.6 million people last year compared to 50 million in 2010 — is a provision in the Affordable Care Act allowing young adults to remain on their parents’ insurance plans up to age 26. A study in June estimated that 6.6 million young adults have taken advantage of this regulation. About 40 percent of the drop in the uninsured rate for those 19-25, which feel the most of any age group, is because of young adults keeping their parents’ insurance coverage.

So is 1.4 million a big number or a small number? That would depend on how you look at it. Compared to 48.6 million, the number of Americans who still don't have health insurance, it's pretty small; but if you think of it as a down payment on the Affordable Care Act, when hardly any of the act's provisions are yet in place, it's not bad. And if you look at it as the first definitive change in the trendline that got started in 1987, when the statistics first began to be collected and the big number was 30 million, it's a pretty good sign.

Diagram of the Eye, Sloane 981, f. 68 (© The British Library) . From Medieval Fragments.

More seriously, perhaps, was President Obama lying about the number of 19-to-25s staying on their parents' plans? Is his seven million a rounding up of CAP's 6.6 million, and why doesn't Heritage know about the latter?

The reason Heritage doesn't know is that it isn't looking: they simply subtracted the 2011 number from the 2010 number to find how many fewer young adults were without insurance and got the "disappointing" 539,000. But this has no necessary relationship to the number of young people on their parents' plan, which includes people who were insured through their parents in 2010 and then stayed that way after turning 19 (or 23 if they were college students) in 2011; those who were insured by their employers or bought their own until the new law came into effect; and those who were just uninsured.

That was the number sought in a study by the Commonwealth Fund, which found that

between November 2010 and November 2011, an estimated 13.7 million young adults ages 19–25 stayed on or joined their parents' health plans, including 6.6 million who likely would not have been able to do so prior to the passage of the Affordable Care Act. 

Presumably some six million of those would have been insured in some other way--by an employer, on an individual policy, or on Medicaid--so that they aren't reflected in the Census Bureau figures on the newly ensured.

It's funny Heritage didn't notice, because they're worried about precisely that possibility:

as Heritage’s Drew Gonshorowski warns, there are unintended consequences from these “gains” in coverage: The net effect may hide the substitution effect. He writes, “In the case of insuring more young people, recent analysis shows that Obamacare encourages young adults to enroll in dependent coverage and drop their own coverage, causes employers to stop offering coverage, and will likely increase premiums.”

But they don't notice that it's already happened on a very large scale. And guess what? It certainly hasn't caused employers to stop offering coverage (why? because they have employees who are 26 years old and up, sucker) and it hasn't increased premiums. Of course. And ThinkProgress got it right.

Red line district

Odd remark from Mitt Romney:

On “Meet the Press” on Sunday, Mr. Romney declared that the progress of Iran’s nuclear program was Mr. Obama’s “greatest failure” in foreign policy.

Is that meant as praise? Just short of 190 kg of 20% uranium? (Not that that isn't enough to be pretty evil with if that's what you have in mind.) Obama's predecessor allowed North Korea to accumulate a stockpile of six to eight actually built nuclear weapons, and that's nowhere near the top of his list of foreign policy failures.

Centrifuge array. From Nature 464, 32-33 (4 March 2010)

The story we're looking at is not about Romney, but his old buddy Binyamin Netanyahu, who is thought to be particularly anxious to see him replace the shvartser person currently in the White House. Netanyahu plunged into the US campaign on Tuesday to announce that

“Those in the international community who refuse to put red lines before Iran don’t have a moral right to place a red light before Israel.”

Funny, you don't look like a philosopher. What's that supposed to mean? Poetically, I get the non-rhyme between open, sonorous "red line" and clipped "red light", and the rhyme between "right" and "light", and all those lovely r's, but what are they trying to do? Asking Israel not to start a needless and dangerous war is something you must earn the right to?

Consider a parallel argument I'd be more sympathetic to:

States that use capital punishment don't have a moral right to prosecute murders.

They don't have a right to prosecute murders in the first place, it isn't something they do to gratify themselves after work; it is work, whether they are stained with the blood of executions or not. It is a moral obligation. Similarly, it is a moral obligation to try to stop the IDF from attacking Iran if you think it is a catastrophically bad idea, independent of whether or not you also try to stop the Iranian government from building a nuclear weapon, or do it in the way Binyamin Netanyahu wants you to.

Those who refuse to do what I want don't have a moral right to criticize me.

Those who refuse to keep the toilet paper hanging behind the roll don't have a moral right to use dishrags instead of sponges.

I don't believe Iran is going to build a nuclear weapon, and I really don't think Israel is going to attack Iran.  I'd like to dare Israel to go ahead and try—in the worst case it would do less short-term harm to Iranian people than the sanctions do and at best Netanyahu might destroy himself in a Rumpelstiltskin rage. If I were in Obama's position, though, I might not want to take the chance.

There you go.

Klaus Müller in Augsburg as Brecht's "betrunkenes Rumpelstilzchen" Herr Puntila.

Is there intelligent life in Langley?

Like many others, I was startled to learn about the Government Accountability Institute (toujours GAI, toujours GOP!) and its discovery that our president appears to have missed quite a lot of his daily intelligence meetings. Indeed, I had no clear idea that the meetings even existed—though who could ever forget George W. Bush and "All right, you've covered your ass now"? (Happy September 11, by the way!)

From NSPT4Kids.

I did know that Obama gets his President's Daily Brief (PDB) by iPad, and that that is supposed to be the finest product our intelligence services put out, and having to have a meeting about it every day seemed like a little bit of overkill, when you could always just read it and make a quick phone call if you had a question; and I wondered, idly, if the meetings had been instituted for a reading-challenged President Bush ("What do you mean you told me Osama was determined to attack?" "It was in the PDB! It was in the headline!").

This is not the case, but the facts are available, and almost as entertaining. The daily meetings were cooked up after the 1980 election of Ronald Reagan. Richard J. Kerr and Peter Dixon Davis, director and deputy director of the Office of Current Intelligence at the CIA, came up with the idea as they faced

another new administration, another foreign policy team, another group to which we had to prove ourselves all over again....

We knew that in the confusion of changing administrations, establishing daily intelligence support at top levels of a wary new leadership might just as likely be resisted as welcomed. At the same time, this new group valued intelligence; the question was whether they thought CIA was up to the task. How would we be received by a palace guard that at times had appeared downright hostile?

President Carter immediately put the president-elect on the receiving list for the PDB, and Richard Allen, the designated national security advisor for the incoming administration, established contact with Kerr and Davis, insisting that they work with him directly and not through the DCI. They had a number of meetings with Reagan when Reagan spent a week in Washington in mid-November, and more importantly perhaps meetings with the new vice president, George H.W. Bush, who naturally, as an ex-DCI himself, had a soft spot for the Agency.

Bush had ruminated on several occasions about the need to bring Reagan into the current analytic stream as quickly as possible. He felt it was imperative that the newly elected president receive daily briefings based on the PDB, and--even more important--that a professional intelligence officer be present to answer any questions, provide background information, and follow up on whatever intelligence needs Reagan might have. Bush knew from firsthand experience that filtering went on as an intelligence product moved through the White House staff and on to the President. He also knew that to make intelligence relevant the Agency needed regular feedback from its key customers.

It seemed a good opportunity, given Bush's candor and friendly disposition toward the Agency, to make a bold recommendation: because he was scheduled in a few hours to ride along with Reagan to Andrews Air Force Base, perhaps he might want to urge his new boss to request that such daily briefings be provided him personally during the period he remained in California pending the inauguration. Bush told Davis he would give it a try.

I really like the between-paragraphs sleight of hand where they're making a "bold recommendation" to Bush to arrange for what Bush has just said was "imperative" (how bold can it have been? Waiter says to customer, "May I make a bold suggestion? I'd like to bring you the item you ordered"). Kerr and Davis are likely hiding from themselves, as much as from us,  how much this story is about greed, for turf and for access.

From FamilyEducation.

Be that as it may, the proposal worked out, and Davis was summoned right away to Pacific Palisades to start the briefings, spending a week in California while Kerr did the editorial work in DC, and then switching. Now they don't even try to hide their glee:

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the briefing process was the relationship that developed between both of us, on the one hand, and those we briefed. Often during briefings, or while we waited during telephone calls or other visitations, we overheard conversations between Reagan or Bush and potential cabinet members or advisers. We listened to discussions of their strengths and weaknesses, complaints and personal exchanges that clearly were not meant for outsiders' ears....

Equally striking was the degree to which we were given a free hand during this two-month period of direct contact with a top leadership that would eventually include Secretary of Defense-designate Caspar Weinberger and Secretary of State-designate Alexander Haig as well as Reagan, Bush, and Allen. We had little supervision from officials within the CIA or the Carter administration.

Another interesting feature of this period was that, to our knowledge, Reagan, Bush, and Allen did not receive formal, regular briefings from any other part of the government. There were contacts with State and Defense, but nothing like the type of regular contact we had established. The lack of contact between us and William Casey, who was to become DCI, was also noteworthy. At most, Kerr would exchange "good morning" greetings with Bill Casey, to whom he had been introduced by Reagan.

Interesting indeed! And then after the inauguration, it just carried on:

By Inauguration Day, the daily briefing system was so well established that it seemed natural to all involved that it would simply continue. The question hardly arose; it seemed a fait accompli. At President Reagan's direction, the service was to be provided also to Secretary of State Haig and Secretary of Defense Weinberger. (George Shultz and William Clark became recipients when they replaced Haig and Allen, respectively.) The Agency had finally obtained the continuing, high-level access it had been seeking since 1961.

And on, and on, until evidently Barack Obama decided he was big enough to read the Brief sometimes without assistance.

What the intrepid briefers told President Reagan about Ayatollah Khomeini's key-shaped cake,  or Colonel North's adventurous method of funding Nicaragua's anti-democratic insurgency are not disclosed: this is an account only of the important matters, of who sat next to whom on the bus to Six Flags, and did she really give him his ring back?

“If President Obama were participating in his intelligence briefings on a regular basis then perhaps he would understand why people are so offended at his efforts to take sole credit for the killing of Osama bin Laden,” Cheney told The Daily Caller in an email through a spokeswoman.

No, if that's what they talk about—Cheney's feelings—then he's already going too often.

Eugene de Blaas, The Friendly Gossips, 1901. WikiPaintings.

Climate hope and climate change

Updated 9/24/2012
(Not really updated; I just wanted to pretty it up before inviting some friends over.)

I twitter-follow the Heritage Foundation, just by way of being able to say I don't shut my ears to thinking outside my comfort zone, and of course in the hope of some cheap laughs, but they really surprised me today:

The Second Coming of Cap and Trade?herit.ag/NiRlEJ
— Heritage Foundation (@Heritage) September 9, 2012

It turns out that they've been hearing rumors that healing the planet is still on the agenda. Carol Browner, the former EPA head, told a panel during the DNC  that

court victories have created momentum that might make industry-specific cap-and-trade plans more palatable than the prospect of facing new regulations. Though comprehensive cap-and-trade legislation might be off the table for now, Browner said that dynamic opens opportunities for piecemeal progress on cap-and-trade. (The Hill)

Naturally, Heritage is somewhat cool (globally cool?) to this prospect:

Such talk is certainly bad news for the energy and manufacturing sectors, which have borne the brunt of Obama’s regulatory hyperactivity. But revived prospects for cap-and-trade might well hearten the environmental lobby, which has criticized President Obama for (supposedly) ignoring global warming despite his declaration that the 2008 election “was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.”

Landing puffins on Matinicus Rock, Maine. Photo by Steven Kress.

That quote is getting to be quite a Republican favorite, by the way;  Romney specifically called it out for mockery in his convention speech:

President Obama promised to begin to slow the rise of the oceans and heal the planet. MY promise...is to help you and your family.

In fact, President Obama neither declared that it had been done nor promised to do it. Rather, he expressed the pious hope that we might someday see that it had been done:

...generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless; this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal; this was the moment when we ended a war and secured our nation and restored our image as the last, best hope on earth. (Barack Obama, St. Paul, June 3 2008)

To Republicans, the notion of slowing the rise of the sea level is ridiculously grandiose, like King Canute, because they can't grasp the simple science of it. But you can see from the context that Obama doesn't think of it as any harder in principle than providing health care or pulling the troops out of Iraq, and of course he's right.

When the Heritage writer starts listing what the administration does on behalf of the environment so people will recognize what a horror it is, the "environmental lobby" may indeed find it "heartening" (allowing for the distortion in the way the costs are calculated—of course most of these measures will have a net positive effect over the long run):

• his regulatory record bespeaks allegiance to drastic and unwarranted cutbacks in emissions of carbon dioxide—the supposed source of looming environmental cataclysm ["drastic"? "unwarranted"? "supposed"? just the facts, please, I can do my own adjectives];
• the consulting group ICF International estimates that 20 percent of America’s coal power plants could be retired as soon as 2020 because of the Administration’s regulatory actions [is that all? never mind, it's a start];
• the EPA’s newest mercury and air toxics rule alone could cost as much as $100 billion per year, according to the Electric Reliability Coordinating Council [or $9.6 billion per year according to the EPA, but what's a 900% exaggeration among "industry insiders"?];
• Whether the President overtly pursues a costly cap-and-trade scheme remains to be seen. But there’s no question that his Administration is aggressively imposing regulations that have much the same effect—i.e., inflating the cost of fossil fuel energy in order to reduce some of the disadvantages of solar and wind power [one can only hope].

Yippee! I want to shout. Sign me up for some of that!

Arctic tern. Photo by Carsten Evergang/PA Wire, The Irish Times.

Cheap shots 9/9

Saint Willard of Bloomfield Hills, feast March 12, patron of corporate persons.

Bored man of the chair

Clint Eastwood is a retroactionary! It's been months since I heard such a clear case as this from his celebrated performance piece, of which the text has been kindly transcribed by the Washington Post:

I remember three and a half years ago, when Mr. Obama won the election. And though I was not a big supporter, I was watching that night when he was having that thing and they were talking about hope and change and they were talking about, yes we can, and it was dark outdoors, and it was nice, and people were lighting candles.

They were saying, I just thought, this was great. Everybody is crying, Oprah was crying.... I was even crying. And then finally -- and I haven’t cried that hard since I found out that there is 23 million unemployed people in this country.

Now, the implication here seems to be that Eastwood wept when he heard that there were 23 million unemployed, did not weep so hard again for some time, and then wept again, with Oprah, on Election Night 2008. * However, he could not have learned that number for the unemployed until around May 2012, which is when Romney began using the phony statistic.** So it makes sense only if you assume that he can experience life in reverse time.

*Compare, "The RNC was totally bizarre; I haven't been so weirded out since Fellini died."
**Actually, there are about 12.5 million unemployed; you get 22 million by adding on those who have part-time jobs and would like to work full-time. May is when an ad using the number 23 million was released by the Romney campaign, the earliest use I have been able to find.

Chair Dance I. By JennaisFine.

Annals of copy editing

From Friedman's Sunday column:

It's a bizarrely un-Timesian copy editing mistake that makes you wonder what Obama is supposed to have done—tried and failed to fund the DNC? Presumably there was a proposal in support of technical training that got blended in the Friedman mind with the floating mantra to which it corresponds and the copy editor just got lost: that collision between comma and parentheses (one or the other has to be deleted) is his or her distress signal. Mantra overboard!

Manta ray by Roman Sock.

Is he dumb?

Digby (in a piece you should bookmark for its breakdown of the Obama vs. Romney tax plans) notes this comical response (via) and asks one of those questions:

On NBC’s “Meet The Press,” Romney dodged multiple questions about which deductions or credits he’d target, saying only that he’ll get rid of “some of the loopholes and deductions at the high end” while seeking to “lower the burden on middle income people.”

Pressed for one specific example, Romney replied, “Well, the specifics are these which is those principles I described are the heart of my policy.”

Is it possible that Mitt was just a figurehead at Bain? Because he just doesn't seem like he kind of guy who put together complicated deals to me.

Yes, it's possible. Or a rainmaker, with his high-class connections. That's certainly a Palinesque sentence structure there.

But I think it's a mistake to think of the Big Men as putting together the deals in any case; they've got servants for that. They fly around from lunch to lunch, strut in front of the TV cameras, and make Tough Decisions, they play golf and work on their autobiographies, they leaf through the deals and peer at the budget, looking for lines to quarrel with ("What is this $75 for refreshments, you're giving them caviar?").

They're the ones who bully and whine the loudest while others focus on efficiency or elegance or skirting the law; they are the spirit of Plausible Deniability. They may not be dumb, technically, but they're very, very limited.

Thank you for your service stations

Romney's explanation for why he failed to mention the troops in his convention speech—

When you give a speech you don’t go through a laundry list, you talk about the things you think are important...

—is as they say taken out of context to make it sound funnier than it is, but it's when you put it back into context that it starts telling you something about who Romney is, and fairly damning:

...and I described in my speech, my commitment to a strong military unlike the president’s decision to cut our military. And I didn’t use the word troops, I used the word military. I think they refer to the same thing.

In the first place, he does consult a laundry list, as you see, as do they all, but only Romney feels constrained to lie about it, which shows the degree to which his lying has become practically a reflex, something he can't quite control. Anyway, he feels he did manage to check off the troops even though he didn't use the word.

In the second place, however, no, they don't refer to the same thing. What he had to say about the military in his speech, aside from a reference to dead troops and their unitedness (in reproachful contrast to those divisive Democrats despicably dividing us by race, social class, and party affiliation*), is this:

[Obama's] trillion dollar cuts to our military will eliminate hundreds of thousands of jobs, and also put our security at greater risk.... [while Romney's] America, that united America, will preserve a military that is so strong, no nation would ever dare to test it.

Policy-wise, what he's talking about has nothing to do with troops; it's about equipment that the Pentagon doesn't even want, but certain senators do, along with the contractors that keep them in campaign funds. When he speaks of "our military" he means the number one client of some of his "job-creating" colleagues, the corporate Thing. And then if corporations are people, the military is people too, including soldiers, sailors, and marines, but that doesn't say anything about their needs (such as adequate pay and benefits, just like factory workers, and a claim on the so-called American Dream), and there's no evidence that he cares about those at all, only that the corporate Thing should be impregnable, like Palpatine's Death Star; it might as well be peopled by droids (which would make somebody a ton of cash).

So that—finally—he's lying about that too. He knows very well that he didn't mention the troops in the speech but he doesn't want to admit, so he cooks up this story about how he mentioned them but we just didn't notice.

*It's one of the best rhetorical tricks they've got: "There are two kinds of people in this world, dividers like those damned Democrats, and uniters like me."

Bits o' Bama

Voting for a third party and hoping that Obama is defeated because you think that it will result is The Great Progressive Awakening is like hoping you get cancer because you’d like to lose a few pounds. (TBogg, September 4)

Daily Mail, April 19 2012.

Questions you thought Obama never got asked

Obama gave Jessica Yellin on CNN an interview in which he answered a lot more questions than you might have imagined on the subject of drone strikes, here. I heard about it at Columbia Journalism Review, where there is another, less forthcoming interview.

He doesn't confirm or deny the Kill List, beyond noting that what you see in the papers is not always exactly true, which you probably already guessed. I do wonder how this works. Assuming that Scott Shane is not simply writing fiction on the one hand, but is nothing like an eyewitness on the other, what exactly is it that he gets wrong?

Are Shane's anonymous informants eyewitnesses who are giving him a distorted picture, whether to glorify themselves or the president or to cover their asses against some accusation, perhaps actionable? Is he confusing things himself, because he mishears or because what he hears doesn't match some stereotype he's working with?

I can't make myself imagine a true story that would be similar to Shane's story but different enough to make Shane wrong. (You fool, what is this Thomas Aquinas crap? The president only reads Kierkegaard when he's deciding whom to kill!)

Also from a narratological standpoint, I have no trouble accepting Obama's assurances that the drone strikes are ordered with excruciating care for the protection of the innocent, or of whomever they consider to be innocent. He could be wrong, and there's no question but that the protections fail from time to time, but he's not lying, for whatever that's worth, because why would he? Like Thomas Friedman cares?? It's because he cares himself that he chooses to talk about it. 

I'll be getting to this again and again over the next weeks. But when you're wondering why those cowardly journalists never ask Obama some particular question or other, keep in mind that somebody may actually have done so.

Update 9/9:

Emptywheel's take on the interview is in a headline that bites like the Onion,

Obama Looking for Structures to Ensure He Abides by Rule of Law

as in "I'll stop myself from violating the Constitution if I have to pursue myself to the ends of the earth," and expands the point pretty fairly, I think:

He’s looking for structures and institutional checks to make sure we don’t go down that slippery slope where we forget rule of law. And yet his Administration has repeatedly avoided the one mandated by the Constitution: courts.

Which, according to his own logic, means he’s not using the tool that would best work to keep us safe from terrorism.

Freddie Bartholomew as Little Lord Fauntleroy, 1936, from Stars Color. A much more imaginative account of the picture is found at the unhappily short-lived homepage of the Ministry of Information for the Free Democratic Peoples Republic of Koskovia.

The speech

There were so many really great speeches at the DNC, in such a wealth of different styles, that one started feeling a little sorry for the Republicans, with their plastic faces and Freddie Bartholomew delivery, and their need to repeat the exact Luntz-tested verbage (though I have to admit the Democrats have something of that too, and I sure wish they would start working on an alternative, say, to "marry who they love").

And some no doubt felt that President Obama's speech at the end was a bit of a letdown, sober and un-oratorical, after all those fireworks. But to me the very sobriety was climactic, like the poet speaking at the end of Schumann's Kinderszenen, and then he did give it its big peroration, only very quickly, after that gorgeous apostrophe to "you", meaning us, the people, the agents of change. Tom Junod did a beautiful analysis of this at Charlie Pierce's place.

There were two things I really needed to hear that I heard. One was in the discussion of energy policy, and was really pretty cold comfort:

unlike my opponent, I will not let oil companies write this country's energy plan, or endanger our coastlines, or collect another $4 billion in corporate welfare from our taxpayers. We're offering a better path - a future where we keep investing in wind and solar and clean coal; where farmers and scientists harness new biofuels to power our cars and trucks; where construction workers build homes and factories that waste less energy; where we develop a hundred year supply of natural gas that's right beneath our feet.... And yes, my plan will continue to reduce the carbon pollution that is heating our planet - because climate change is not a hoax.   More droughts and floods and wildfires are not a joke.   They're a threat to our children's future. (Transcript by New York Daily News)

Cold comfort in that he seems to see carbon reduction only as a happy byproduct of the quest for energy independence (including "clean coal", safe hydrofracking, and why not unicorns on treadmills?). But at least he remembered to stick it in there, and gave it much of a paragraph.

The other thing was that appeal to Lincoln that has been much spoken of:

And while I'm proud of what we've achieved together, I'm far more mindful of my own failings, knowing exactly what Lincoln meant when he said, "I have been driven to my knees many times by the overwhelming conviction that I had no place else to go."

Remember sunny George W. saying he couldn't think offhand of any mistakes he'd made?  Obama can think of plenty—he just isn't allowed to discuss them in public. But seriously, that means young Abdulrahman al-Aulaqi. It means all the thousands of immigrants that have been hunted down and deported by an insanely overreactive Immigration and Customs Enforcement. It means awful things, no doubt, of which we know nothing and will perhaps never know anything. But just that he feels it—that he's not so psychopathic he can't feel it—means something to me.

Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority, still more when you superadd the tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority. There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it.

The mitigating factor is that of self-awareness, which Lincoln had in abundance, and psychopaths wholly lack, and it makes enough of a difference.

Airborne Elephant Watch: Egypt! (addendum)

Eggs Definitely Look Better with Mustaches. By Ben at LikeCool.com.

 Friedman manages to admit his error, sort of:

I was critical of Egypt’s new president, Mohamed Morsi, from the Muslim Brotherhood, for attending the Nonaligned Movement summit meeting in Iran. I argued that he was giving legitimacy to an Iranian regime that had crushed the very kind of democratic movement that brought Morsi to power. But Morsi surprised me, for the better, by using his visit to Tehran to call out the Iranian leadership for supporting Syria’s “oppressive” regime. The Iranians were livid. You can be sure that, on other days, Morsi will say and do things that will give us indigestion. We still need Egypt’s strategic support in the region. It still needs our economic aid. But a more democratic, Muslim Brotherhood-led Egypt will not behave like the automatic ally it was before. We’ll need a new kind of relationship. It will be complicated.

Or, in the more spaciously crazy terms of his blog, Really Tom Friedman:

So it’s complicated. Which is why, last week, when I said Mohammed Morsi was handing the keys to the revolution over to the mullahs at the used-revolution dealership and it turned out he was just getting valet parking at a brand-new restaurant called Pimp Slap the Islamic Republic, I was mistaken. What Morsi took Iran to task about, well, who can remember?

The soldiers have turned down the Sidi Touré and explained that the Egypt-Iran kerfuffle was over Syria. Which I knew already, but have put my fingers in my ears to avoid hearing again.

I guess he really got face on his egg, heh-heh.

Democrats

Updated 9/6/2012
Updated 9/10/2012
 
After we turned off the TV, all contented with the sense of being Democrats alongside Deval and Julián and Michelle and all these other extraordinarily warm and agreeable people, I moved on to bedtime reading--Trollope again, this time political (Phineas Finn, the Irish Member), and by some kind of special grace ran right into this, from Mr. Monk, the mellowing Radical:

Mr Monk was in the Cabinet, and of all the members of the Cabinet was the most advanced Liberal. "Lady Glencora was not so far wrong the other night," Mr Monk said to him. "Equality is an ugly word and shouldn't be used. It misleads, and frightens, and is a bugbear. And she, in using it, had not perhaps a clearly defined meaning for it in her own mind. But the wish of every honest man should be to assist in lifting up those below him, till they be something nearer his own level than he finds them." To this Phineas assented -- and by degrees he found himself assenting to a great many things that Mr Monk said to him.

Isn't that exactly right? And isn't it startling, given the way we've been given to understand 19th-century liberalism as an entirely different kind of animal, all about free trade? No, free trade was just a route, now outdated, to a principle, not a principle in its own right--at its deepest, liberalism has always been the same thing.

Nantyglo Ironworks, near Brynmawr, Wales, artist unknown. From Thomasgenweb.

Update 9/6
Note the subtle notice of what's wrong with liberalism: it's timid and anti-revolutionary, afraid of the word "equality" and asking you to take care of the person "beneath" you, not get your own from the idler above, it's focused on you, not on the needy; it invites you to get a little bit patronizing. So mock yourself! It's what we are...

Update 9/10
I mean timid, patronizing maybe, but not selfish. That's important.

Stagnation, futility, and silliness

Updated 9/7

"Why did God put Barack Obama on this earth?" asks David Brooks, but (luckily) he doesn't really want to know. He wants to know how Obama would answer the question, in an elevator speech, which is not analogous to elevator shoes, or to elevator music, but rather means a sales pitch so concise that it's over by the time your interlocutor jumps out of the elevator (hands clapped over her ears, no doubt, and three stops too early).

Elevator Patent by Elisha Otis, 1861. From the Paul R. Williams Project.

He had such a pitch, once, Brooks believes:

Obama was here to heal our politics, to move us beyond the stale debates and the childish partisanship that lead to stagnation, futility and silliness.

This purpose did not survive contact with reality.

I guess not, stale debates and childish partisanship being virtually our whole life. Now he needs something new, and Brooks has some proposals, three to be exact:

• A too cool, which would be doubling down on efforts to halt climate change, which Brooks feels would be "obtuse" in our present economic climate—sure, everybody loves polar bears, the Maldives, and wheat, but can we afford them?
• A too hot, which is repairing the broken capitalist system, which Brooks thinks would not mobilize the "moderates", meaning I believe those who would have to pay if they capped the tax deduction on mortgage interest—it can't be that broken, for Pete's sake.
• And a just-Brooksie right, namely adopting the Bowles-Simpson plan for cutting the deficit, which would be just as huge as the other two, and just as serious, and "would galvanize a new center-left majority" of practically everybody, in the most exciting coalition since John Anderson was elected president. Oh, wait.

So far this just looks like garden-variety concern trolling, but it you look at it in the wider context of all Brooks's recent writing, there's something bigger going on.

What it is, I think, is that growing realization, as I said before, that Edmund Burke would be voting for Obama this year, and that Brooks, if he is to have any intellectual honesty, will have to do the same.  Not because Obama is a conservative, which he isn't, but because he's not revolutionary, nihilist, bomb-throwing, as those other guys are: he's a progressive conservatives need not fear (it'll just sting a bit when you sign that check to the IRS, and only those get asked that can clearly afford it).

Brooks doesn't know it himself yet, but he is marching through the stages of grief. First it was denial, in the remarkable "Prisms" column, when he talked himself into seeing Romney as a sort of Obama and Obama as a kind of Romney, so that voting for Romney might still make some kind of sense; then anger, when he started bad-mouthing first Paul Ryan, then Romney himself.

Now it's bargaining, as he begs Obama to give him some ground: please, support just one really dreadful policy, so I don't feel like an idiot.

So we've got two to go, hysteria and apathy if I'm not mistaken (just kidding). I'll keep you posted.

Elevator design by Konrad Kyeser, 1405. From Wikipedia.

9/7/2012

He's still bargaining:

The country that exists is not on the right track. It has a completely dysfunctional political system. What was there in this speech that will make us think the next few years will be any different? America will only be governable again if there is a leader who breaks the mold and reframes the debate. Romney is unlikely to do that, and Obama’s speech didn’t offer much either.

He has no expectations of Romney, and can barely bring himself to mention him. But can he vote at all?

Most unusual Labor Day message

Today, we celebrate those who have taken a risk, worked hard, built a business and earned their own success.

— Eric Cantor (@GOPLeader) September 3, 2012

See, it's Labor Day. And where does labor come from? Why, from job creators! If they didn't make the work we wouldn't have anything to do. So that's why it's a holiday.

Next up, July 4th, we're going to celebrate the true blue institution of the British monarchy and the Tory party, without which Independence would be nothing more than a word.

Brooks made a funny (addendum)

David Brooks. Image by Driftglass.

I knew it! Or, more accurately, I knew something; Brooks has not actually come out and endorsed Obama as the Burkean conservative in the race, but he has come approximately halfway:

But there is a flaw in the vision the Republicans offered in Tampa. It is contained in its rampant hyperindividualism. Speaker after speaker celebrated the solitary and heroic individual. There was almost no talk of community and compassionate conservatism. There was certainly no conservatism as Edmund Burke understood it, in which individuals are embedded in webs of customs, traditions, habits and governing institutions.

Not that that's exactly true: there was plenty of talk about family at the convention, for one thing. I'll never get over Rick Santorum riffing on his father's hard workingman's hands while his extreme makeup job made it look as if he himself was made of marzipan. And there was tons of church, as well, at least from Mr. and Mrs. Romney, and anecdotes of the churchy helping one another out.

What Brooks really objects to in these conservatives is on display in his opening paragraph:

America was built by materialistic and sometimes superficial strivers. It was built by pioneers who voluntarily subjected themselves to stone-age conditions on the frontier fired by dreams of riches. It was built by immigrants who crammed themselves into hellish tenements because they thought it would lead, for their children, to big houses, big cars and big lives.... Many Americans, and many foreign observers, are ambivalent about or offended by this driving material ambition. Read “The Great Gatsby.” Read D.H. Lawrence on Benjamin Franklin.

 Compare Burke, in his speech on Conciliation with America (1775), criticizing

vulgar and mechanical politicians... a sort of people who think that nothing exists but what is gross and material; and who therefore, far from being qualified to be directors of the great movement of empire, are not fit to turn a wheel in the machine. But to men truly initiated and rightly taught,…ruling and master principles, which, in the opinion of such men as I have mentioned, have no substantial existence, are in truth every thing, and all in all.... (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

It's that—of course Brooks has nothing against them, my no, salt of the earth, but—they're not very classy. Think a lot about money, less about the higher things such as the writings of Burke and Oakeshott. And apparently not joining things in the good old style; what we're looking at is a kind of right-wing Bowling Alone perspective.

The list of great communitarian conservatives of history goes like this: George Washington, Alexis de Tocqueville, Abraham Lincoln, and Condoleeza Rice. I'll just take a pause here, maybe for quite a long time.

Photo by Kilgub.

Airborne Elephant Watch: Tehran!

Thomas P. Friedman (I don't know why I keep calling him that, his middle initial is L) leapt into it at the last minute yesterday as if terrified of missing an opportunity to be totally wrong, as he was, chiding Egypt's president Morsi for attending the meeting of the Non-Aligned Movement in Tehran:

Excuse me, President Morsi, but there is only one reason the Iranian regime wants to hold the meeting in Tehran and have heads of state like you attend, and that is to signal to Iran’s people that the world approves of their country’s clerical leadership and therefore they should never, ever, ever again think about launching a democracy movement — the exact same kind of democracy movement that brought you, Mr. Morsi, to power in Egypt.

Flying Elephants. By Tattoomaus78 at DeviantArt.

Because what Morsi signaled to Iran's people turned out to be quite different, more along the lines of the world disapproves of their country's clerical leadership and democracy movements of the kind that brought him to power are eminently praiseworthy, especially in Syria—the Iranian foreign minister walked out, while poor little president Ahmadinejad squirmed, I guess, on the dais next to the fulminating Egyptian.

“The Syrian people are fighting with courage, looking for freedom and human dignity,” Mr. Morsi said, suggesting that all parties at the gathering shared responsibility for the bloodshed. “We must all be fully aware that this will not stop unless we act.”

Mr. Morsi, pointedly, did not mention unrest in Bahrain, possibly to avoid offending Saudi Arabia, which has helped Bahrain’s monarchy suppress the uprising.

Then the Secretary-General of the United Nations, Ban Ki-Moon, noted that the Holocaust really did take place. Actually virtually all educated Iranians, including the country's 25,000 Jews, are aware of this; the purpose of mentioning it was to remind them that Ahmadinejad doesn't care whether people think he is educated or not—the nation's crude, embarrassing brother-in-law. Ban also scolded the leaders for inattention to human rights and for lack of transparency in their nuclear affairs, and a splendid time was had by all.

None of this will persuade Friedman, of course. He's so committed to working out his model of who's bad and who's good that he can't think about anything getting better. But Morsi is fast replacing old Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in my heart as favorite post-Islamist politician. His current démarche on the subject of Syria, cutting Iran in (as is self-evidently necessary) and therefore inevitably cutting the US out, seems like the first idea anybody has had about Syria that could lead to a reduction in the number of killings instead of a further increase.

And Friedman? Suck. On. That.

From The Garlic.

Brooks made a funny

...and a pretty good one, too, in some respects. It's a parody campaign biography of Willard Mitt Romney that takes everything we know about him and turns it into classic American silliness:

Mitt Romney was born on March 12, 1947, in Ohio, Florida, Michigan, Virginia and several other swing states. He emerged, hair first, believing in America, and especially its national parks. He was given the name Mitt, after the Roman god of mutual funds, and launched into the world with the lofty expectation that he would someday become the Arrow shirt man.

The tone of the thing is meant to be affectionate fun-poking, I think--

Always respectful, Mitt and Ann decided to elope with their parents. They went on a trip to Israel, where they tried and failed to introduce the concept of reticence. 

 But it keeps sliding into a certain asperity:

Romney was a precocious and gifted child. He uttered his first words (“I like to fire people”) at age 14 months, made his first gaffe at 15 months and purchased his first nursery school at 24 months. The school, highly leveraged, went under, but Romney made 24 million Jujubes on the deal.

Thalia, Muse of Comedy and Idyllic Poetry, by Jean-Marc Nattier. From Wikipedia.

Brooks really has some comic talent, as you'll remember, maybe, from Bobos in Paradise. The famous 2001 Atlantic article, "One Country, Slightly Divisible",  in which he tried to illustrate our culture war by contrasting the lifestyles of blue Montgomery County, Maryland, and red Franklin County, Pennsylvania, where it turned out that he had made up all the examples of Franklin County lifestyle, was terrible journalism, but terrific shtik.

Indeed, it was famously through his humor that he got his first horse on the wingnut welfare carousel--a college parody of William F. Buckley, Jr., delighted the old man and earned Brooks an internship at the National Review.

So it's odd to see him here misjudging his tone, if I understand it correctly, seesawing between the tease and the out-and-out insult and back:

Some people say he retreated into himself during these years. He had a pet rock, which ran away from home because it was starved of affection. He bought a mood ring, but it remained permanently transparent.

Is it just the long disuse of those comedy muscles, since he became everybody's expert on political philosophy, that makes them hard for him to control? Or is it maybe that he's coming to realize that Edmund Burke would have voted for Obama (and not as the lesser of two evils, but enthusiastically)?

Burke really would, you know. Which doesn't mean I won't. Here's a little reading before the next class.

Edmund Burke. From Wikipedia.

How do you spell "psychopath"?

T-O-M S-M-I-T-H.

That's the Pennsylvania Republican candidate for Senate who believes that abortion should be against the law with no exceptions.

Pressed by a reporter on how he would handle a daughter or granddaughter becoming pregnant as a result of rape, Smith said he had already "lived something similar to that" in his family.

"She chose life, and I commend her for that," he said. "She knew my views. But, fortunately for me, I didn't have to ... she chose the way I thought. Don't get me wrong, it wasn't rape."

When a reporter asked Smith to clarify what kind of situation was similar to becoming pregnant from rape, the candidate responded, "Having a baby out of wedlock."
He added, "Put yourself in a father's position. Yes, it is similar."

Put yourself in a father's position! To the young woman it might seem altogether different, being impregnated by someone you chose to, umm, fuck, and by someone who overcame you violently when you chose not to, but why should a father think about those petty details?

And then that ominous "fortunately for me, I didn't have to..." No need to ask why it wasn't fortunately for her, it wouldn't have occurred to him to ask. But what didn't he have to do that he would have had to do if she not "chosen the way I thought"? Kill her? Ban her from the house and turn her portraits to the wall? Clap her in a convent and keep her there until the little package of sin was delivered?
 

Note: Vixen Strangely already pretty much said what I wanted to say, but I still wanted to say it.

The Mahagonny convention

As the Republican establishment holds its breath in Tampa waiting for tropical storm Isaac to decide what it wants to do, I couldn't help remembering another hurricane, the fictional one that threatens to ravage the city of Mahagonny at the end of act 1 of Brecht's and Weill's great opera. It is the scene in which Mahagonny turns toward the Republican ideology—toward the deregulation of everything except for the crime of lacking money.*

The American tenor Elliot Palay as Paul Ackermann (aka Jimmy Mahoney) in the act 1 finale of Joachim Herz's production of Der Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny at the Komische Oper in East Berlin 1977. Titles provided by Elliot Palay. 

*As in: if abortion is illegal, rich girls will still have abortions; they'll just go to Switzerland to get them, as their foremothers did before them.

"The real world looks a lot like the Simpson-Bowles commission"

I'm afraid a man who says something like that about how the world looks (Our Mister Brooks) is a man with a jaundiced eye and possibly worse afflictions. Liverish. Sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought, but not thought at a very high level.

Portrait of Alan Simpson, with Erskine Bowles as a boil erupting from the Senator's shoulder. By Donkey Hotey, 2011.

Here's a Shorter Brooks for today (two for the price of one!):

1. I pick Paul Ryan because he knows that rising Medicare costs are the most scariest urgent problem facing our country!

2. But that is like so last Tuesday! Medicare, Medicare, Medicare, it's all he ever thinks about! Get a grip, Congressman, and do your duty!

All because—apparently Brooks just heard about it for the first time—Ryan refused to sign off on the Bowles-Simpson plan for deficit reduction (which Brooks insists on calling "debt reduction") in 2010, and refused precisely because it failed to do anything about rising Medicare costs, thereby showing his willingness to

sacrifice the good for the sake of the ultimate....

Paul Ryan has a great campaign consciousness, and, when it comes to things like Medicare reform, I agree with him. But when he voted no on the Simpson-Bowles plan he missed the chance to show that he also has a governing consciousness. He missed the chance to do something good for the country, even if it wasn’t the best he or I would wish for.

There's something about the Bowles-Simpson Commission, by the way, that hardly anybody left or right has seemed to understand very clearly: it was certain to fail from the outset, as certain as if the president had planned it that way. If the president did plan it that way, I would not be in the least shocked; indeed, I kind of hope he did, since that would tend to suggest that he knows what he's doing.

Because if a great part of the Science of Government (if not absolutely the whole, as Dickens had it) consists of the art of perceiving HOW NOT TO DO IT,  then the bipartisan commission, with its distinguished members chosen from inside and outside the legislature, and its solemn mandate, is the very archetype of the vehicle through which it is not done.

What even Dickens did not understand is that sometimes not doing it is really much the best plan. Thus in 2010, when the great cry came up from the bobbleheads across the land to do something about the deficit ("Mr. President, tear down this deficit!"), actually doing it would have seriously harmed our already badly wounded economy; but not doing it became extremely difficult as the legislators and eventually even the print press began taking up the cry.

I don't want to get into whether President Obama could or could not at this point have said, "No, actually Dr. Krugman is right about this one, we need a bigger deficit just now." He certainly had realized that Republicans in Congress wouldn't vote for anything with his name on it unless they were tricked into it in some extremely subtle way. He seems to have felt up against one of those Tough Decisions, which means a bad decision taken when you didn't want to think about a good one.

So the president set up his best defense: not just a bipartisan commission, but a bipartisan commission endowed with special powers. It had a blank check, as it were, endorsed by Congress, which agreed that any plan coming out of the commission should be regarded as law, as if the Congress had already specifically voted for it.

This provided what you could call an extra degree of fail-safe, in that in the unlikely event that Bowles-Simpson really did come up with the plan, Congress could immediately begin on the process of denying that that was what they had meant at all, and starting all over again. *

In the end this was not necessary, as Bowles-Simpson were able to tie themselves into knots without any outside help, thanks partly to Representative Ryan, and no proposal ever emerged from the committee's stringent rules, although one of them did get publicized a great deal. Instead we are now living with a different case of tricking Congress into voting for something it absolutely does not want, the famed "fiscal cliff" which is somehow going to have to be bridged by the lame ducks after the election.

I do wish my emoprog colleagues would stop referring to the Bowles-Simpson "plan" as representing what what that crypto–Gold Bug Barack Obama really wants, though. I'm sure he thinks the deficit ought to be tightened up, just as soon as everybody has lots of money and the tax receipts start rolling in, but not before then, and not with such a nasty instrument.

By the same token, I wish the Central Committee of the Panditry would ban their members from using it as the symbol of some kind of lost centrist paradise where for one brief shining moment everybody agreed to sacrifice themselves to a vision of the world as Tom Friedman wants it to be. It's just a piece of used ordnance in the war of How Not to Do It, that has served its embarrassing purpose and can now be forgotten.

For that matter, so is Paul Ryan. He's the vice presidential candidate, for Pete's sake! He used to be philosophically useful to the panditry as an example of how Republicans Have Intellectuals Too. He used big words and never got cranky if your attention kind of drifted away, and he had his famous budgets, these beautifully bound little pamphlets—say, what do you suppose was in those things?**

*Can God make a stone so big She can't roll it? Good question. Can Congress create a trigger so ineluctable they can't wriggle their way out from in front of it? No.

**Tthe House Budget Committee website offers richly produced propaganda for them, in written and video forms. Wikipedia's article on The Path to Prosperity links to PDFs of two of the pamphlets, which are more in your PowerPoint format, with substantial sections of ordinary prose.

AP photo.

To Brooks, the old symbolic Ryan was something you could really chew on as you thought about your next column, having so many little affinities with yourself, also a more or less clubbable Republican intellectual, and then because his subject was budgetry—eew!—you wouldn't go so far as to find out what he actually thought about anything. Math is for kids who go to public school. But now that he's descended into the fray of the presidential campaign, Brooks must look at any rate at his biography, and is inevitably somewhat shocked, shocked to find that there is negativity—negativity!—in this nominee. Poor Brooksie, you've got a lot of surprises coming in the next few months.