Krugman

Nicely addresses the crucial point:

Which brings us to the privatizers' Catch-22.

They can rescue their happy vision for stock returns by claiming that the Social Security actuaries are vastly underestimating future economic growth. But in that case, we don't need to worry about Social Security's future: if the economy grows fast enough to generate a rate of return that makes privatization work, it will also yield a bonanza of payroll tax revenue that will keep the current system sound for generations to come.

Alternatively, privatizers can unhappily admit that future stock returns will be much lower than they have been claiming. But without those high returns, the arithmetic of their schemes collapses.

It really is that stark: any growth projection that would permit the stock returns the privatizers need to make their schemes work would put Social Security solidly in the black.

And I suspect that at least some privatizers know that. Mr. Baker has devised a test he calls "no economist left behind": he challenges economists to make a projection of economic growth, dividends and capital gains that will yield a 6.5 percent rate of return over 75 years. Not one economist who supports privatization has been willing to take the test.

But the offer still stands. Ladies and gentlemen, would you care to explain your position?

The Social Security Trustees, to their immense shame, have scored various models using these contradictory assumptions -- that stocks will grow and the economy won't.

I'm still waiting for someone to hammer it home with the reverse calculation that Krugman discusses earlier in the column -- assuming stock returns are 6.5% - 7%, what long run rate of growth does that imply, and what impact would that have on the solvency of the trust fund. The "I'm pretty sure it's true" answer is that it'll make it more than solvent for all eternity, but I'd like to see someone lay it out.

Wanker of the Day

Fred Barnes

Timetable

Until reading this I had rather mixed feelings about the necessity for a timetable for leaving Iraq. What I do think is important - and it's time for the press to start asking - is just how permanent our designs on Iraq are? Why are we building the Biggest Baddest Embassy Ever and a bunch of permanent military bases? The elephant in the living room is of course the high probability that even if things work out wonderfully, and the security situation improves, the Bushies still intend to maintain a significant permanent presence in Iraq. Is that true? I don't know. But it's time for somebody to start asking.

Still, as upyernoz points out, if you lack a timetable (one filled with caveats and conditions and whatnot is fine) then it's difficult to ever credibly withdraw without granting the insurgents (or Michael Moore of course) the "credit."

When Hacks Collide

Kurtz and Gallagher still going at it.
I hate when I have to side with howie.

Success

For those following my tech problems (exciting stuff, I know), on the 2nd try I managed to get a functional 2.5" USB hard drive enclosure which is currently on good speaking terms with my computer, so I can get all the stuff I need off the hard drive before the computer goes to repairland.

It's actually quite a cool gadget. If you have an old laptop with a functioning disk drive, just pop it out and put it into one of these $20 or so gadgets and you have an instant little external drive for backups or whatever.

Stupid is as Stupid Does

Jesse has a bit of fun with Luskin's latest idiocy, but let me address the profound stupidity of this passage:

And Bush is right — according to the National Center for Health Statistics, at age 65 the median African American male lives 14.6 more years, compared with 16.6 more years for whites. That means African Americans have 2 fewer years to collect their Social Security benefits than whites do, even though they pay the same amount of taxes during their working lives.

Uh, no. "African Americans" don't have 2 fewer years to collect. The African-American male who survives the median time after 65 has 2 fewer years to collect than the white male who survives the median time after 65. And, unless these people had exactly the same lifetime salary profile they didn't "pay the same amount in taxes." If we're kind to Luskin and acknowledge that we know what he probably meant, he's still wrong -- on average African-Americans don't pay the same amount of taxes during their working lives as do white Americans.

And, of course, at some point he dropped the "male." Regularly overlooked in all of this is even if we buy the bogus claim that social security is a bad deal for African-American males because they don't live as long as white males, it's important to remember that African-American females have a higher life expectancy at birth than white males, and only a couple of years lower life expectancy than the entire white population.

Education Secretary Demands Removal of Vermont from Nation’s Textbooks

Scary stuff:

Washington, January 31– Following on her protest last week against a PBS cartoon character’s visit to Vermont, where he encounters a lesbian couple, Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings announced at a press conference today that her department was not engaged in a “trivial” or “merely symbolic” campaign against a children’s television program.

“Buster Bunny is not the problem,” said Spellings. “Though I note with some dismay that Buster travels the country accompanied only by his father because his parents are divorced, and I do not see why our children should be subjected to yet another glamorization of the divorce lifestyle. No, the problem is Vermont itself. It is Vermont to which I object. Christians everywhere should be outraged that it was represented in this children’s program.”

Spellings proceeded to unveil the Department of Education’s proposed map of the “forty-nine God-fearing United States,” with the “territory of Vermont” represented by a lightly shaded area. “Until such time as Vermont sees fit to rejoin the rest of the nation in condemning gay ‘civil unions,’” Spellings said, reading from a prepared statement, “we propose that Vermont be visually expelled from the heterosexual Union. We further propose that the nation’s students be instructed that Vermont is no longer a real state, and that they will not be responsible for remembering its capital, which is not only obscure but French-sounding as well.”

There is No Crisis

Organize yourself a nice SOTU house party and help with the pushback.

...to be clear, you don't actually have to watch the SOTU.

Tivo Blogging

It's nice to see that Tivo is finally getting smart and opening up their platform for developers. I've never been one who believed in "convergence" - that one day your TV and computer would become the same appliance. Watching TV and doing computer stuff just are not all that similar activities, even though they both have nice shiny screens. But, with wireless technology it's rather obvious that your TV and your computer should be able to talk to each other, and a Tivo-type device is an obvious intermediary.

Hoped for features:

Full access to and control of Tivo's scheduling directly. You can currently schedule things online through Tivo's server, but that's of limited value as your Tivo only checks in once per day. (Apparently it phones home more often than that if you're networked)

Sending video back to your Tivo. Current "Tivo to go" only lets you download recorded shows. Ideally you'd be able to send anything, but at the very least you should send back things you've downloaded.

Cheap Snark

Who knew Mickey Kaus was running the German welfare program...

Bombshell

Last night's little quote from The Queen of All Iraq wasn't just about the usual Miller-bashing, it was actually a bombshell revelation. Here we have a New York Times reporter going on the record saying that according to a source, the Bush administration was in talks with Chalabi about a position in the new Iraqi government. So, in one neat little package we learn that the Bush administration backs Chalabi and has significant influence over appointments in the new government, once it exists.

Isn't this important?

Repeat, Judith Miller on Hardball:

We now are told, according to my sources, that the administration has been reaching out to Mr. Chalabi, to offer him expressions of cooperation and support and according to one report he was even offered a chance to be an interior minister in the new government.

Frightening

There have been people commenting recently about the latest generation's increasing comfort with authoritarianism. I don't know if that trend is true, but these poll results should scare us all:

Yet, when told of the exact text of the First Amendment, more than one in three high school students said it goes "too far" in the rights it guarantees. Only half of the students said newspapers should be allowed to publish freely without government approval of stories.

"These results are not only disturbing; they are dangerous," said Hodding Carter III, president of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, which sponsored the $1 million study. "Ignorance about the basics of this free society is a danger to our nation's future."

The students are even more restrictive in their views than their elders, the study says.

When asked whether people should be allowed to express unpopular views, 97 percent of teachers and 99 percent of school principals said yes. Only 83 percent of students did.

Facts Schmacts

Look, I'm all for the notion that speed gets in the way of accuracy at times in blogging, in the same way that no matter how careful you are if you host a 3 hour daily radio program you're bound to get a few things wrong at times, and the notion that egregious errors are generally spotted and pointed out by readers. But, blogs are not "self-correcting" - you actually have to, you know, make corrections. And, especially if you operate a comment-free blog, your errors are not necessarily going to be pointed out to the rest of the world. And, more importantly, when you do stuff which is journalism-like, instead of pundit-like -- that is, passing along information from sources, then there's a wee bit of obligation to try to verify that information.

Conservative bloggers engage in faith-based blogging. They say the "blogosphere is self-correcting!" and this absolves them from any responsibility to actually acknowledge or correct their errors. Wankers.

Prior to Hinderaker's presentation, the week before the November elections, I visited the Powerline site. To my surprise an Oct. 27 post covered alleged voter fraud in Racine, Wis., my hometown. The charges involved the registering of illegal aliens to vote. The story seemed outrageous, so I made a few phone calls to check it out.

What I discovered was troubling. There was no factual basis for the voter fraud allegations. Powerline posted the story based on the word of a single individual employed by the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR). This was hearsay at best, posted as "news" at a time when voter registration efforts by the Democrats and 527 groups were coming under fire by conservatives.

At class I asked Hinderaker if posts to Powerline were fact-checked. He was dismissive of the question, so I asked if he was aware that the Racine voter fraud story was inaccurate. He stated that he was not, slapped his hands together and stated that the blogosphere was all about speed and therefore did not allow for fact-checking. Mr. Hinderaker went on to say, "Our readers let us know when we get it wrong."

And therein lies the cautionary Catch-22: Bloggers may serve as media watchdogs, but who will watch the blogs? Do you have time to fact-check what you read online?

Let me be perfectly clear. I believe bloggers of all political and social stripes have much to offer. They provide a pulpit for the average citizen and a dizzying variety of insights on a wild array of topics. But blogs can also be ideologically driven, presenting hearsay as fact without apology.

Extremists on both the right and the left would love nothing more than to lend their blog-of-choice credibility beyond its due. The blogosphere is the perfect vehicle for disseminating ideologically driven rants against people and policy. There are no checks and balances, no fact-checkers, no code of ethics, no professional associations or peer review. It is illustrative, and sadly ironic, that the blog lionized for breaking the Rathergate story does not fact-check its posts and apparently has no intention of doing so.

I don't agree with the last bit. There are checks and balances and fact-checkers and peer review. But, at the end of the day bloggers have to correct themselves no matter how much criticism they get from readers and other blogs. And, people should really stop comparing the reality of blogs with the ideal of journalism - as we learned during the Jayson Blair fun, fact checkers are not apparently a key feature of the New York Times reporting process.

The End of AT&T

Not sure what exact significance this has, but it nonetheless somehow seems to be significant.

After 128 years as an independent company, since just after the invention of the telephone that's the centerpiece of its business, AT&T will be absorbed into its offspring SBC Communications in a stock-and-cash deal valued at $16 billion.

SBC also will be assuming about $6 billion in AT&T's net debt, bringing the total value of the deal to $22 billion.

SBC, announcing the deal Monday, said it could find value in AT&T even with the decline in its traditional long distance business. Shares of AT&T fell about 5.6 percent in early trading Monday morning while shares of SBC were down slightly.

The deal marks the end of several eras, one that started with company founder Alexander Graham Bell, and another that began when a federal judge split the original company into eight separate entities in 1984.

Useless

There's nothing particularly offensive about this letter from PNAC suggesting that we increase the size of our military. But, nor was there any good reason for "even the liberal" Peter Beinart to add his signature to the list.


...steve suggests that prime fighting age Beinart enlist.

The Latest Conservative Wanker

Thomas Woods, author of "The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History." A sampling of his profound thoughts:

A commitment to "the unvarnished truth" would also presumably include Dr. Woods' description of current American foreign policy as "war after war against the enemies of Israel, at American expense."

It would also include Dr. Woods' belief that Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon was planning to "use the distraction of [an American] war with Iraq … [as] an opportunity to carry out the ethnic cleansing of the two million Palestinian Arabs living in the occupied West Bank and Gaza."

It would also include Dr. Woods' memorable insistence that the September 11 attacks were "bound to" happen to us because of "the barbarism of recent American foreign policy" in "attempt[ing] the hubristic enterprise of running the world – and not even on Christian principles."

The Queen of All Iraq Speaks II

"We now are told, according to my sources, that the administration has been reaching out to Mr. Chalabi, to offer him expressions of cooperation and support and according to one report he was even offered a chance to be an interior minister in the new government."


holy crap

The Queen of All Iraq Speaks

Part I:

"those people who said there were large sections of the country that wouldn't be able to vote... that couldn't vote... that turned out not to be the case..."

Anyone Recording MSNBC

Heard a variety of interesting (but not entirely consistent) reports about what Judith Fucking "The Queen of All Iraq" Miller said to Chris Matthews just recently. If anyone can put together a transcript...

...looks like it repeats at 9. Tivo set...

Evening Thread

Enjoy.

Hercules Down

Horrible. Possibly very horrible.


...good. Reuters is saying up to 15 killed which, while horrible, is much less horrible than it could have been.

Wanker of the Day

Hindrocket.


...oh lordy, it was a late entry, but I believe Gregg Easterbrook deserves "honorable mention" (and probably lifetime achievement in wankery as well).

Afternoon Thread

have fun

Morning Monkey Mail

Just curious, but seeing the Wellstone Center posted on the left menu,
has anyone connected the political dots, showing how the late senator
was bilked out of his cumulative FICA contributions, because he had no
eligible survivors?
How ironic, defrauded by the very Ponzi scheme he so dearly loved.

Sunday Bobbleheads

Document the atrocities.

Late Night

Enjoy

Saturday Night

Enjoy.

Twofer

Well, you can only win once per day, but now apparently the perfesser thinks that Ted Kennedy's speech=Trent Lott praising Thurmond's run for president as a segregationist.


Perhaps some of you trolls can point to the parts of Kennedy's speech that fit the bill. I couldn't find them...

New Thread

Have fun.

Tell Sony They Suck

John has a request.

...mission accomplished, for now...

Wanker of the Day

Glenn Reynolds.

Morning Thread

Yeah, the picture links are broken. I don't know if comcast is broken or if decided I was using too much bandwidth... looking into it...

Late Night

Enjoy.

Special Treatment for Gannon?

According to sources, Jeff Gannon's real name is not, in fact, Jeff Gannon. According to the same sources, his White House press credentials list him as "Jeff Gannon" - they let him use his pseudonym -- even though married female reporters, who use their maiden name professionally, are given credentials with their married name and aren't allowed to be credentialed under their maiden names...


...not sure why this isn't clear, but the point is that he's allowed to be credentialed under his professional pseudonym even though women whose "professional pseudonyms" are their maiden names aren't.

Early Evening Thread

Have fun.

Friday Catblogging

Bonus Catblogging

I'm off to NYC to talk about stuff on this panel and socialize. Feel free to drop by and say hi.

Until then, you're on your own...

Talon/Gannon

Why do these guys have White House press credentials?


Jeff Gannon, or more correctly "Jeff Gannon," is such a hack.

Wanker of the Day

Jeff Jarvis.

Elections

I do find the wall to wall Iraq election coverage (of Iraqi expats anyway) rather surreal, mostly because the Afghanistan election was largely ignored.

R-E-S-P-E-C-T

Cheney in Auschwitz:

Cheney stood out in a sea of black-coated world leaders because he was wearing an olive drab parka with a fur-trimmed hood. It is embroidered with his name. It reminded one of the way in which children's clothes are inscribed with their names before they are sent away to camp. And indeed, the vice president looked like an awkward boy amid the well-dressed adults.

Like other attendees, the vice president was wearing a hat. But it was not a fedora or a Stetson or a fur hat or any kind of hat that one might wear to a memorial service as the representative of one's country. Instead, it was a knit ski cap, embroidered with the words "Staff 2001." It was the kind of hat a conventioneer might find in a goodie bag.

It is also worth mentioning that Cheney was wearing hiking boots -- thick, brown, lace-up ones. Did he think he was going to have to hike the 44 miles from Krakow -- where he had made remarks earlier in the day -- to Auschwitz?

Morning Thread

Chat away.

Disclosure

Since this is the new hot thing let's have a flashback to something which was ignored by almost every outlet (Minn. Star-Tribune a notable exception).

Governor Gray Davis wasn’t the only one the sleaze traffickers were set on destroying last week either. A drama played out, mostly under the radar, regarding the 11th-hour charges of "touching" and a "connection" to "sex sites" against the Rev. Canon Gene Robinson, the new, openly gay bishop in the Episcopal Church. The fact that the charges surfaced literally minutes before the bishops were to vote on confirming Robinson as a bishop—after weeks of bellowing outcries from conservatives and lots of media attention—was enough to give off the whiff of a smear campaign. But throw in the identity of who broke the non-story and what his connections are, and the stench becomes totally unbearable.

The nasty business began on Monday. As it happened, that afternoon on my radio program I was interviewing Diane Knippers, president of the Institute on Religion and Democracy, an orthodox Christian group. The IRD stands against "radical forms of feminism, environmentalism, pacifism, multi-culturalism, revolutionary socialism, [and] sexual liberation," and includes a subgroup, Episcopal Action, that opposes gay unions and was fiercely opposed to having Robinson become a bishop. Shortly after our spirited exchange, the vote on Robinson’s fate was postponed, because the charge had surfaced that a gay-youth group he had worked with had links from its website to porn, and, in a separate charge, that a man claimed Robinson inappropriately touched him.

Still on the air, I did a search and found that the source in the media that "broke" the "sex site" story was Fred Barnes in the conservative Weekly Standard, on its website. (Barnes is also a Fox News commentator, which explains why Fox seemed to be breaking it first on television.) I then realized that, in researching Knippers, I’d noticed how Barnes had been named to the board of the Institute on Religion and Democracy, which made his dubious hit on Robinson not only unseemly but a conflict of interest, to say the least.

...

It’s curious that the orthodox group on whose board Barnes sits, the Institute for Religion and Democracy, is bankrolled by Richard Mellon Scaife and others who funded the smears about the Clintons. I talked about Barnes’ connection to the group on my program, and it was reported on a few websites—pushed by the blogger Atrios—but the only mainstream media outlet to pick it up, as far as I can tell, was the Minneapolis Star Tribune, which connected all the dots in a stinging editorial, headlined "The Anatomy of Smear."

There's no clear line for any of these things. But, there are common sense ones.

Bille Recants

Some of you may remember the prose stylings of Billie Miller.

Apparently, after receiving lots of letters to the editor...

here
here
here
here
here
here
here
here



she recanted.

Another One on the Take

Better and better...

One day after President Bush ordered his Cabinet secretaries to stop hiring commentators to help promote administration initiatives, and one day after the second high-profile conservative pundit was found to be on the federal payroll, a third embarrassing hire has emerged. Salon has confirmed that Michael McManus, a marriage advocate whose syndicated column, "Ethics & Religion," appears in 50 newspapers, was hired as a subcontractor by the Department of Health and Human Services to foster a Bush-approved marriage initiative. McManus championed the plan in his columns without disclosing to readers he was being paid to help it succeed.

Responding to the latest revelation, Dr. Wade Horn, assistant secretary for children and families at HHS, announced Thursday that HHS would institute a new policy that forbids the agency from hiring any outside expert or consultant who has any working affiliation with the media. "I needed to draw this bright line," Horn tells Salon. "The policy is being implemented and we're moving forward."

Paul Newman in '06?

Taking on Lieberman? That's the buzz...

Hacktackular!

Proud member of the White House press corps, Jeff Gannon, plagiarizes White House and RNC news releases.

That Liberal Media

NYT:

WASHINGTON, Jan. 27 - The Bush administration has decided to abandon the effort by Michael K. Powell, the outgoing chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, to relax the regulations that have prevented the nation's largest media companies from growing bigger and entering new markets, government officials and industry lawyers briefed about the decision said today.

In a final slap at Mr. Powell, the Justice Department will not ask the United States Supreme Court to consider a decision last year by a federal appeals court in Philadelphia that sharply criticized the attempt to deregulate the rules and ordered the commission to reconsider its action.

Big media companies have been urging the administration to get involved in the case. But its decision not to recommend that the Supreme Court take the case sharply reduces the odds that the justices would intervene. The court had set next Monday as a deadline for the parties to file their initial papers in the appeal.


...


The deregulation of the rules had been advanced by most of the television networks and many large media companies, including the News Corporation, the Tribune Company, the Gannett Company and The New York Times Company.

Moore Bull

I usually don't push stuff I write for Media Matters, but I thought this item deserved some expanding on. It's an article of faith in wingnuttia that Hong Kong has a flat tax, or something very close to it, on income, that this flat tax on income is responsible for Hong Kong's relatively high growth over the years, as well as responsible for filling the coffers of their Treasury.

Sadly, No! Stephen Moore, whose nonsense in today's WSJ I comment on at the link above, has along one dimension been slightly more honest than some of his fellow citizens of wingnuttia. He at least admits that Hong Kong doesn't actually have a flat tax, but rather a dual system in which people can, if they so desire, opt in to the simpler "flat tax" regime if they so whish. You see, in wingnuttia, what people most care about is saving an hour or two doing one's taxes, and not how much they're actually going to pay to the government. In fact, they're willing to literally sacrifice thousands of dollars in order to avoid spending a few hours filling out what is still a simple tax form. Or so Moore claims.

The truth is, Hong Kong has a surprisingly progressive tax code, with very very generous personal and dependent allowances relative to the US code. And, the much-touted "flat tax" is really what Moore (correctly) describes as an "alternative maximum tax." The maximum rate you can pay on your taxable income is 16% -- and if you're taxed at 16%, you cannot take the personal and dependent allowances, which are very generous.

Moore and his fellow travellers frequently claim that this standard rate tax is so popular that everyone uses it because it's simple. Moore claimed in the WSJ that "nearly every worker" chooses the "flat tax." This just isn't true. Most Hong Kong workers don't pay any taxes at all -- precisely because of the generous personal allowances that Moore thinks are oh so complicated to take. And, the flat taxers? The ones who are faced with the effective single rate? Less than 1.5% of workers. 1.5% only equals "nearly every" in wingnuttia.


It appears to be true that Hong Kong's income tax code is fairly simple, but not because it's "flat."


And as for Hong Kong as a tax paradise? 32% of tax revenues come from... a corporate profits tax. In the US it's about 7.5% (strictly speaking, earnings are taxed, but you get the idea).

idiots.

Apples and Oranges

I'd be more than happy for one of the truly lovely people at Cato to correct me, but I'm almost positive that this calculator is presenting Social Security benefits in real terms and expected benefits in private accounts in nominal terms.

If I'm wrong, I'm happy to correct. If I'm right.... hack-chooooooo!


...perhaps one of Matt's good friends at Cato can clear this up...


... oh, okay, I think I see what the issue is. It never occurred to me that the 4% annual salary growth could be real annual salary growth. So, if you graduate college at age 22 and earn $38,000 on your first job your final annual income on retirement will be about $210 grand.


Yea, that's typical for the population...snark


UPDATE: In csae it was clear (I thought it was), I was wrong and they are in fact comparing everything in real dollars.

Elite

Greg Beato tells us more than we need to know about Maggie Gallagher.

Wanker of the Day

Stu Rothenberg.

Afternoon Thread

Have fun.

A 'B'?

The horrors.

I haven't read the item in question, but for the record I did teach a class at Haverford College once, but otherwise had no affiliation...

Chile Privatization Sucks

So, people who stayed in the government pension scheme are doing twice as well as people who went into the private scheme, largely because brokers are taking a third or so in fees.


One reason privatization in Chile seemed like a good idea to begin with (I mean, aside from Uncle Milton's fantasies) was that previously the pension system was being systematically looted by people in government. So, yes, if the option is George Bush looting Social Security, which he pretty much promises to do every time he claims that SS hits a problem in 2018, and private accounts, then give me private accounts. But, there are, thankfully, other options.

Consider this:

Dagoberto Sáez, for example, is a 66-year-old laboratory technician here who plans, because of a recent heart attack, to retire in March. He earns just under $950 a month; his pension fund has told him that his nearly 24 years of contributions will finance a 20-year annuity paying only $315 a month.

"Colleagues and friends with the same pay grade who stayed in the old system, people who work right alongside me," he said, "are retiring with pensions of almost $700 a month - good until they die. I have a salary that allows me to live with dignity, and all of a sudden I am going to be plunged into poverty, all because I made the mistake of believing the promises they made to us back in 1981."

A 20 year annuity. If he lives that long -- boom, broke. Nothing.

Feith's Out

Some good news.


I suppose we should be thankful that the "stupidest fucking guy on the face of the Earth" no longer wields such power.

Morning Thread

Chat away.

Wanker of the Day

Kathryn Jean Lopez.

Hack vs. Hack

Gallagher vs Kurtz.
What fun...

Where's it From?

The Social Security document Max linked to earlier is apparently of ambiguous origin. The document properties list tells us that the institution was "House of Representatives." The file has been placed on Senator Man-on-Dog's website. Parts are an exact match to a Cato produced document by Andrew Biggs, who is currently working for the SSA.

Joementum Out of Office

Like Kos, my instinct is to stay away from primary contests as much possible. But, if there's a decent CT politician who is eyeing a Senate seat there, my guess is that online fundraising wouldn't be too much of a problem.

Bush Mocks Seniors, Praises Thomas

First, he makes fun of seniors.

Then he praises Bill Thomas for his creative suggestion that SS benefits be tied to race and gender.

But I think it's constructive that Chairman Thomas, who will be charged with having a bill come out of the Ways and Means, is thinking creatively, is willing to figure out ways to bring people along.

Bill O'Reilly Lies Again

What will we tell the children?

Dumb as Rocks

In the Republican's Social Security propaganda sheet, the manage to contradict themselves on pages 4 and 5.





Page 4 itself is a lie. Social Security has never been a pure Pay as you go system, though it was for a long time "mostly" a pay as you go system, but that changed drastically in 1983 in the Saint Ronnie and Uncle Alan supported reform. Benefits this year, and in future years, can be paid from current taxes and from accumulated trust fund assets.

And, page 5 proves this point, with all that lovely sexy revenue exceeding costs.

Lost in Space

That Liberal Media

From the Hill:

Times insiders say Safire turned down Publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr.’s offer to succeed Daniel Okrent as the newspaper’s ombudsman.

oy

Link:

Jan. 26 (Bloomberg) -- As many as 30 people were killed when their Marine transport helicopter crashed in Western Iraq, CBS News reported, citing unidentified military officials.

The helicopter crashed at about 1:20 a.m. local time near Ar Rutbah, west of the Iraqi capital, the U.S. military said earlier in an e-mailed statement, without providing information on casualties. Military spokesmen contacted by telephone and e-mail in Baghdad and Fallujah declined to provide details.

The crash killed everybody on board, and the military is trying to establish whether the helicopter was shot down or crashed for another reason, CBS said.

As of 10 a.m. New York time yesterday, a total of 1,371 U.S. military personnel have been killed in Iraq since the March 2003 invasion, according to Pentagon figures. One U.S. soldier was killed today and two others wounded when insurgents attacked their patrol north of Baghdad, the U.S. military said.

Morning Thread

Chat away.

Playing Against Type for Once

Let me just say that I found Hillary Clinton's rhetoric on abortion perfectly fine, except to the extent that she's justified the media and right created caricature of the Democratic party position on abortion (which is an important, but at least slightly secondary issue).


According to the Times:

"We can all recognize that abortion in many ways represents a sad, even tragic choice to many, many women," Mrs. Clinton told the annual conference of the Family Planning Advocates of New York State. "The fact is that the best way to reduce the number of abortions is to reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies in the first place."

This is skillfull rhetoric. I'm sure abortion is a "tragic choice to many, many women," as long as the person making that judgment (that it's tragic) is the woman herself and not me, Hillary Clinton, Spongedob Stickypants, or Antonin Scalia. I also think it's a not-so-tragic but desired choice for many others. Reducing unwanted pregnancies is the best way to reduce abortion. All of these things are not especially controversial. I believe they're actually pretty much the stock positions of noted advocate of fetus-slaying, Planned Parenthood president Gloria Feldt.

I don't have a problem with people who don't like abortions. I have a problem with people who want to outlaw them. I have a bigger problem with people who want to restrict access to/education about contraception and the "morning after pill" and who want to outlaw abortion.

I have a huge problem with people who think that Democratic politicians need to declare that people who have abortions are moral failures.


I have no problem with people who don't like abortion. I have no problem with people who think that the number of abortions should be reduced by finding ways to reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies. I have no problem with people who think that those who have abortions have committed an evil act, as long as they don't demand that I feel the same way or aggressively try to shame those who have them.

As long as you don't believe that politicians or judges should be trying to stop legal abortions, there is no tension between your political beliefs and the beliefs of the mainstream of the Democratic party.

But, if you're a relatively informed voter who thinks the best way to reduce abortions -- especially abortions internationally, not just locally -- is to vote for the anti-contraception, abstinence-only teaching, global gag rule supporting, Antonin Scalia loving Bush administration, then frankly I don't give a shit what you think. I have no desire to reach out to you. That is, if you're relatively informed and you believe these things then I assume your "pro-life" position is motivated by something other than the simple desire to reduce abortions. The number of abortions went down under Clinton administration policies, and up under Bush-administration ones.

I question the value of "softening abortion rhetoric" as a political ploy, because as far as I can tell the rhetoric was always softened and playing into this game is just... playing into the game. But, aside from the framing issue there was nothing wrong with what Clinton said -- but more importantly, nor was there anything remarkable about it.

Gallagher

I think Josh Marshall gets the Maggie Gallagher "payola" revelation about right:

Which suggests a point. Were they really worried that Gallagher would come out for free love without the cash incentive? Neither she nor Williams is really known for their independent streak. In Gallagher's case -- and to some degree in Williams' too -- this seems less like a matter of payola than a Bush administration make-work program for third-tier GOP pundits.

The larger point, of course, is that even the 3rd and 4th string pundits on the Right manage to get a little extra scratch. As a self-described 2nd string pundit (face it, there aren't many of us) for the Left, I'm still waiting for my scratch...

Missing

Bush administration initiatives to improve African-American life expectancy. Discuss.

To recap, life expectancy at 65 is fairly close for blacks and whites (2 year gap roughly). Much of the difference is due to differences is infant, childhood, and for males, young adult mortality.

Such people pay little or nothing in social security taxes. Many of them, however, receive social security survivor benefits.

Bush has yet to address the high infant mortality rate of African-Americans. Discuss.

Anyone making the argument that social security is "unfair to blacks" without pointing out these facts is a liar. Studies have shown that overall the rate of return for African-Americans is as good or better than for the overall population, when disability, survivor benefits, and level of contribution are taken into account. Your mileage may vary, depending on your income, date of death, and other life circumstances.

Enemies of the State

The Poor Man has compiled a useful little list.

Newspeak

Well, it appears we're doomed.

In unrelated news, 5 soldiers died in Eurasia Oceania.

Evening Thread

Chat away.

Open thread.

Continue.

Armstrong Williams

Link:

Outgoing Education Secretary Rod Paige ordered an investigation into whether Williams should have disclosed the deal, and a member of the Federal Communications Commission has called for a similar investigation.

But Williams said the FCC has no jurisdiction over him because he is not a licensed broadcaster.

"That is just a witch hunt," Williams said.

Sadly, No!

Section 317 of the Communications Act, as amended, 47 U.S.C. § 317 requires broadcasters to disclose that matter has been broadcast in exchange for money, service or other valuable consideration. The announcement must be made when the subject matter is broadcast. The Commission has adopted a rule, 47 C.F.R. § 73.1212, which sets forth the broadcasters' responsibilities for sponsorship identification

Section 507 of the Communications Act, as amended, 47 U.S.C. § 508 requires that when anyone pays someone to include program matter in a broadcast, the fact of payment must be disclosed in advance of the broadcast to the station over which the mater is to be carried. Both the person making the payment and the recipient are obligated to disclose the payment so that the station may make the sponsorship identification announcement required by Section 317 of the Act. Failure to disclose such payments is commonly referred to as ``payola'' and is punishable by a fine of not more than $11,000 or imprisonment for not more than one year or both. These criminal penalties bring violations within the purview of the Department of Justice.

Thus, for example, if record companies or their agents pay broadcasters to play records on the air, those payments are legitimate if the required sponsorship identification message is aired. If it is not aired as required by the Communications Act and the Commission's rules, the broadcast station will be subject to enforcement action.

If record companies, or their agents, are paying persons other than the licensee to have records aired, and not disclosing that fact to the licensee, the person making such payments, and the recipient, are subject to fine, imprisonment or both.

Sadly, No! Copyright Sadly, No! productions.

CREW Files Bar Complaint Against Gonzales

Crew:

CREW Files Bar Complaint Against Attorney General Nominee Alberto Gonzales
Gonzales misrepresented role in assisting President Bush escape jury duty

WASHINGTON, DC – Today, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) filed a complaint with the Office of Disciplinary Counsel of the State Bar of Texas requesting an investigation into misrepresentations White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales made in a written response to a question posed to him by the Senate Judiciary Committee which is considering Gonzales’s nomination for Attorney General.

The complaint alleges that Gonzales inaccurately portrayed his role in appearing before a Texas court when President Bush, then Governor of Texas, was summoned for jury duty. Gonzales has claimed that although he appeared in court with the Governor, he merely observed the defense counsel make a motion to strike the Governor from the jury panel and then when asked by the Judge whether the Governor had any views on this, replied that he did not.

In marked contrast, Michael Isikoff, reporting for Newseek, has written that the defense lawyer, prosecutor and judge involved in the case all recall the incident differently. In their version, Gonzales asked to have an off-the-record conference in the judge’s chambers where Gonzales then asked the judge, David Crain, to strike Mr. Bush from the jury, arguing that the Governor might one day be asked to pardon the defendant. Isikoff writes that Judge Crain found Gonzales’s argument “extremely unlikely” but out of deference, agreed to allow the motion to strike, which the defense lawyer then made.

CREW’s complaint alleges that by misstating the facts surrounding the conversation in the judge’s chambers Gonzales may have violated 18 U.S.C. §1001, which makes it a federal crime to make false statements to a congressional committee. The complaint further alleges that Mr. Gonzales has violated two Texas Rules of Disciplinary Procedure: 8.04(a)(2) which prohibits lawyers from committing crimes that reflect adversely on their honesty or trustworthiness; and 8.04(a)(3) which prohibits lawyers from engaging in conduct involving dishonesty, fraud, deceit or misrepresentation.

CREW’s Executive Director Melanie Sloan stated, “The marked contrast between the version of events Mr. Gonzales provided to the Senate Judiciary Committee and the version told by the three other individuals involved – the prosecutor, the defense lawyer and the judge – is enough to require the State Bar of Texas to investigate this matter.” Sloan continued, “Violations of the bar rules can lead to disbarment. The Senate should delay voting on Mr. Gonzales’s nomination until this matter is cleared up or face the prospect of having an Attorney General who has lost his bar license.”
*****
Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) is a non-profit, progressive legal watchdog group dedicated to holding public officials accountable for their actions. www.citizensforethics.org

Wanker of the Day

The Corner's Jim Robbins.

I hate these people.

Gollum

It's nice to see my good friend Donald Luskin gets dumber by the day.

I heartily recommend his investment advice to all of my Republican friends.

That Speech I helped write Was Great!

Media Matters on Krauthammer and Kristol's ethical lapses.

Weekly Standard editor William Kristol lauded President George W. Bush's inauguration speech as "powerful," "impressive," and "historic," both in an article for the January 31 print edition of The Weekly Standard and as a FOX News political contributor during FOX's live coverage of Inauguration Day. Washington Post columnist and FOX News contributor Charles Krauthammer, also during FOX News' live Inauguration Day coverage, called Bush's speech "revolutionary" and compared it to fomer President John F. Kennedy's 1961 inaugural address. But Kristol and Krauthammer were consultants for Bush's speech -- a fact that neither disclosed.

Out of their Asses

Yes, I believe the economy has changed so much that the deficit projections have fallen by two thirds.

WASHINGTON -- The Congressional Budget Office is predicting the government will accumulate another $855 billion in deficits over the next decade, excluding the costs of President Bush's Social Security plan and ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The report, described by a congressional aide who spoke on condition of anonymity, was being released Tuesday, the same day administration officials were expected to describe President Bush's request for fresh $80 billion request to pay for military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan this year.

The deficit projections for the years 2006 through 2015 is almost two-thirds smaller than what congressional budget analysts predicted last fall, but the drop is largely due to estimating quirks that required it to exclude future Iran and Afghanistan war costs. Last September, their 10-year deficit estimate was $2.3 trillion.

The numbers also exclude plans to make the tax cuts permanent and the inevitable AMT rejiggering.

...haha, oh Lordy, "required it to exclude future Iran and Afghanistan war costs."

Bobo's World

oy.

Morning Thread

Chat away.

A Stately Pleasure Dome

We're going to spend $1.5 billion on an embassy in Iraq!

It also was expected to include money for building a U.S. embassy in Baghdad, which has been estimated to cost $1.5 billion.

schweeeeeeet!

Oh, yeah, and $78.5 billion on some other stuff.

...in comments, Don Juan reminds us what else is expected to cost $1.5 billion:

DUI Coverup

So, the future AG probably lied to the committee about this.

Bush's summons to serve as a juror in the drunken-driving case was, in retrospect, a fateful moment in his political career: by getting excused from jury duty he was able to avoid questions that would have required him to disclose his own 1976 arrest and conviction for driving under the influence of alcohol (DUI) in Kennebunkport, Maine—an incident that didn't become public until the closing days of the 2000 campaign. (Bush, who had publicly declared his willingness to serve, had left blank on his jury questionnaire whether he had ever been "accused" in a criminal case.) Asked by Sen. Patrick Leahy to describe "in detail" the only court appearance he ever made on behalf of Bush, Gonzales—who was then chief counsel to the Texas governor—wrote that he had accompanied Bush the day he went to court "prepared to serve on a jury." While there, Gonzales wrote, he "observed" the defense lawyer make a motion to strike Bush from the jury panel "to which the prosecutor did not object." Asked by the judge whether he had "any views on this," Gonzales recalled, he said he did not.
While Gonzales's account tracks with the official court transcript, it leaves out a key part of what happened that day, according to Travis County Judge David Crain. In separate interviews, Crain—along with Wahlberg and prosecutor John Lastovica—told NEWSWEEK that, before the case began, Gonzales asked to have an off-the-record conference in the judge's chambers. Gonzales then asked Crain to "consider" striking Bush from the jury, making the novel "conflict of interest" argument that the Texas governor might one day be asked to pardon the defendant (who worked at an Austin nightclub called Sugar's), the judge said. "He [Gonzales] raised the issue," Crain said. Crain said he found Gonzales's argument surprising, since it was "extremely unlikely" that a drunken-driving conviction would ever lead to a pardon petition to Bush. But "out of deference" to the governor, Crain said, the other lawyers went along. Wahlberg said he agreed to make the motion striking Bush because he didn't want the hard-line governor on his jury anyway. But there was little doubt among the participants as to what was going on. "In public, they were making a big show of how he was prepared to serve," said Crain. "In the back room, they were trying to get him off."

One judge, two lawyers, on the record...

Bobo's World

Link:

Some Mississippi lawmakers are scheduled to speak Thursday to the Council of Conservative Citizens, an organization that the Southern Poverty Law Center calls "a patently white supremacist group."

Bill Hinson of Pearl, president of the Great Southern chapter of CCC, announced on the group's Web site that "several House and Senate members" are to speak.

He wouldn't tell The Associated Press the names of lawmakers or where the event is taking place, although AP learned it will be at a south Jackson fish house.

Hinson said he wouldn't release details of the meeting because, "we've had so much negative publicity."

He said the CCC does not make an issue of race.

"Our chapter is more focused on taxation, Southern heritage," Hinson said. "I guess you could call us the Christian right, something like that."

You be the judge...

The Democratic Agenda

Harry Reid has set out the Democratic agenda in the Senate. Steve Soto gives the rundown.

Heh

link:

The failure of the coverage leading up to the invasion of Iraq was the failure to be wary of the powerful, the failure to listen to those who are not our own. Stories about an imminent Iraqi threat, which turned out to be false, were splattered across the pages of the nation's most prominent newspapers. There were voices, important voices, that questioned the assertions, but they were largely unheard because the media ignored them. This failure was also, and perhaps more important, a failure to honor the moral contract that journalists have with viewers and readers to be truthful, even when it means challenging conventional wisdom and ferreting out unpleasant facts.

Those who defend the prewar coverage argue that reporters are only as good as their sources. They say they reported accurately the falsehoods leaked to them by those who sought to wage war. By making such an argument they are also saying they are morally neutral, that they are little more than conduits for lies, half-truths and truths all rolled into one unintelligible message. They forget the contract.

There is a concerted attempt to destroy this contract. Balance and objectivity have become code words to propagate the insidious and cynical moral disengagement that is destroying American journalism. This moral disengagement gives equal time, and sometimes more than equal time, to those who spread falsehoods and distort information. It tacitly sanctions the dissemination of lies. It absolves us from making moral choice. It obscures and often shuts out the truth.

This sophistry has come to characterize the circus that goes by the name of journalism on cable news shows. Facts on television are largely interchangeable with opinions. The television reporter, like a game show host, makes sure each warring party has his or her time to vent. The veracity of what is said is irrelevant. But the disease of moral neutrality is no longer confined to the poseurs on television, who are, after all, entertainers posing as journalists. It is seeping into those organizations that are still attempting to report the news. Objectivity is not the same as moral disengagement. Balance does not mean giving everyone the same space. We are more than dutiful court stenographers. Journalists have a contract with viewers and readers. This contract was broken. We must make sure it is not broken again.

Indeed.

Norm's Smile

Norm Coleman not only got a lovely new smile, but also allowed his dentist to post the before and after pictures as an advertisement for his services. I'd like to know when Norm got his lovely new smile -- especially if he were in office at the time, and whether whatever arrangement he made with the dentist to allow his mug to be used for this purpose violated any ethics guidelines...

Blog Bad

What Jesse leaves out of this post is that it's only the right wing bloggers who are obsessed with the notion that blogs are "self-correcting" and "more accurate than the MSM" [argh, please kill that acronym] and "big media's being destroyed by bloggers!!!" and "I'm not a blogger I'm a freelance distributed journalist" and "Bl0gggerzzz r00l!"

While left wing bloggers are highly critical of the media, it's rarely in that self-aggrandizing and demonstrable false kind of way.

blogging's great, but get over yourselves.

Private Accounts

It's nice to know that when the White House tells the press to obey, they obey.

good kids! turkee for you!

Race-Based Social Security Formulas

Another great Republican idea.

Though, inadvertently, Thomas is getting at one of the great values of Social Security -- its value as an annuity. It's insurance against long life*, and it doesn't suffer from the adverse selection problem that normal annuity markets do.


*to be clear, long life is a good thing, but what's not good is the uncertainty about time of death. From a financial planning perspective, given nest egg at retirement of x and expected years until death y you'd like to spend x/y annually and have exactly 0 dollars at the moment of death (assuming away any bequest desires). But, since you don't know when you're going to die exactly, absent an annuity you face the prospect of dying with extra money in the bank, "wasting" it, or living longer than expected and being flat broke.

Suckers

I love DiRita. His statements always include a bit of rather obvious weaselly legalese. The most recent:

DiRita denied that Rumsfeld controls a secret group of spies. "There is no unit that is directly reportable to the Secretary of Defense for clandestine operations as is described in The Washington Post," he said in a statement. "Further, the Department is not attempting to 'bend' statutes to fit desired activities, as is suggested in this article."

In other words, the unit doesn't report directly to Rumsfeld and we don't think we're bending the statutes.

Wow

83%. That's a lot.

During the past few years the US has become dependent, not so much on millions of investors around the globe but on a few individuals in a few of the world's central banks.


In 2003, the most recent year with full international statistics, central banks financed 83 per cent of the US current account deficit, with Asian central banks accounting for 86 per cent of flows.

A similar picture is emerging for 2004. Despite a good start to the year, when the private sector was a large net purchaser of dollar assets, central banks came to the rescue again. The People's Bank of China has let it be known that China increased dollar reserves by $207bn (€159bn) in 2004, financing nearly a third of the US current account deficit, estimated at $650bn.

Self-interest has supported much of this flow of cash. The US has lapped up cheap finance to fund its unquenchable appetite to spend. Asian governments have until now been keen to oblige, in order to keep their currencies from appreciating. But all investors have their limits and they may start worrying about their degree of exposure.

If new official flows to the US were to be curtailed, the dollar would plunge, creating a huge hole in the accounts of central banks holding dollars.

"The risk exposure for Asian central banks is already great," concluded Matthew Higgins and Thomas Klitgaard of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York in a recent paper.

Post-Football

Have fun.

Patriots vs Steelers.

How could any true-blooded American not back the Patriots?

Iggles!

About time.

bite me, Rush

DRM

Well, the Tivo to Go DRM system has already been demolished using a fairly easy quick technique. Yet again, another anti-piracy system which will do nothing to stop piracy and just make life more annoying for the average consumer who won't bother to learn these tricks...

And, no, this isn't a pro-piracy post, just an anti-pointless-DRM-post.

(no link, you can find it yourself...)

Kotlikoff's Out

This is starting to be rather reminiscent of the runup to the Iraq war. One by one intelligent but misguided people finally wiped the fairy dust out of their eyes and realized that going to war was actually a bad idea. I've never understood what Max describes as Kotlikoff's decades-long jihad against Social Security, but despite that I never thought of him as a hack either. Apparently he isn't.

Iggles!

Go!

Russert

Josh Marshall points us to this comment by Timmeh:

MR. RUSSERT: Many specific questions about Social Security. Right now we have a cost-of-living increase, a COLA increase, that is tied more to wages than actual inflation. It is inaccurate by everyone's estimation. Should that be adjusted in order to be accurate and specifically related to inflation?

About this Josh wrote:

But how about Russert's statement on the wage-indexing of Social Security benefits as opposed inflation-indexing? Russert said this method is “inaccurate by everyone’s estimation. Should that be adjusted in order to be accurate and specifically related to inflation?”

Somehow I thought that was up for debate?

Actually, I think Russert's crime here is more being an idiot, not that he's falsely asserting there's no debate (though he does that too).

I'm pretty sure Russert is conflating the issue of wage indexing with frequent assertions that that CPI overstates the true increases in cost of living. But, those complaints aren't about the CPI being "tied more to wages," they're just complaints that the CPI isn't being measured very well for a variety of reasons. As for that issue, my "pulled out of my ass" opinion is that even if the CPI does tend to overstate the cost of living for the population as a whole, it likely understates it for old people for whom health care expenditures are a pretty important component.

The wage index issue is about whether intial retirement benefit levels should be indexed to the CPI instead of the wage index. Subsequent increases are based on the CPI, meaning that your lifetime payout schedule is dependent on the year you retire...

Statistical Discrimination

The past couple of decades gave rise to the Dinesh D'Souza "rational racism" crowd. They argue that in a world of imperfect information, discrimination is a perfectly rational response to differences between racial groups, and as such, since it isn't rooted in bigotry per se, it just isn't something to get upset about.

In other words, if you know nothing about a person other than his skin color, and you know (let's stipulate for purposes of discussion that what you "know" is correct) that people with that skin color are more likely to steal from their employers, then it's simply rational for you to be less likely to employ people who have that skin color. Even though you recognize that not all people who have that skin color steal from their employers, given that you can't look into the soul of that person, and you know that people of that skin color, for whatever reason, are more likely to steal, your decision is justified.

Moving this to the subject of gender discrimination, let's consider the general assertion that a big part of the gender wage gap can be explained by different labor force participation decisions. Short version: women have babies and therefore have more frequent out of labor force spells. Especially for employers who invest a lot of job-specific human capital in their workers, this is bad. They hire you, they train you, and then you take off for a couple of years. And, skills can depreciate rather quickly in some fields. So, it'd be perfectly rational for employers to be less likely to hire (though it's much more difficult to get away with discrimination at the hiring stage) and promote women because their investment ends up being wasted.


So, if you're female you face barriers to advancement by "rational" employers, even if you have no plans to have babies and drop out of the workforce. But, this fact also impact your decisions -- if you expect that career advancement for you is going to more difficult than for men, then all else equal you're going to invest relatively less in your career and relatively more in other aspects of your life. Some women who would, if they were treated the same as men, not drop out of the labor force (either not having babies or having babies but having their husbands drop out), instead do so. Since the expected discrimination is factored into their decision making process, they're more likely to drop out of the labor force because the career is expected to be less rewarding (financially, spiritually, whatver).

This is (one reason) why simplistic arguments (and simplistic empirical work) about the impact of education/job experience on the gender wage gap are flawed. These choices are endogenous -- factors (discrimination) which influence female wages are also factors which influence education/job tenure choices.

Pinker

I've never read The Blank Slate, and I try not to comment too much on things I haven't seen/read/etc... But, in all of the commentary on it I've been amazed at how silly the whole book sounds -- it exists in an alternative universe where numerous straw men of Pinker's creation actually exist.

Echidne informs us that Pinker seems to think the gender wage gap is something not seriously studied by economists. This mirrors the frequent assertions that academics are too scared to study the impact of race on various life outcomes, and thus bold folks like Murray are forced to do the dirty work. It's bullshit in both cases, but there's nothing like pretending you're Bold and Controversial and Suffering Under the Tyranny of Women and Minorities who are Preventing the Truth From Coming Out to sell books.

Another disturbing thing is that Pinker doesn't rely on peer-reviewed high level work by academic economists, but on right wing hack work. This is another area where our side suffers from the much discussed hack gap. One reason think tank publications get wider discussion than academic work is that it's more accessible. It's written with a more mainstream audience in mind, and since it's unencumbered by requirements to address alternative theories, it doesn't cloud the beautiful minds of journalists looking for a simple story.

If *I* had some money thrown at me to start a think tank-type organization, what I would do is set up a foundation which would provide grant money to liberalish academics which would free them up to spend some time marketing their research to a more mainstream audience.

Freedom™

mmmm... Freedom™...

Summers

I hadn't said anything about the Harvard/Summers situation because without having a transcript of his comments I really didn't know what to say.

And, now that the New York Times has decided it's yet again another opportunity to put Charles Murray into print, the entire discussion has officially jumped the shark...

...okay, short version of what I had decided to write:

From what I can piece together from the various news accounts, it sounds like Summers was giving a stock Econ 101 lecture on the topic of discrimination. Such a lecture, as with many things in Econ 101, isn't meant to bring students to the current cutting edge of thought on a topic, and nor is it designed to provide them with any conclusions on the subject. Instead, it's to provide an introduction to how economists think about approaching the subject, providing simple theoretical frameworks into which some empirical factoids can be fit.

But, Summers wasn't lecturing a bunch of 18 year old freshman.

Sunday Bobbleheads

Document the atrocities.

Evening

Have fun.

Snow

Much.

Ethics

I would imagine that if you're a TV pundit/columnist/editor and you're discussing the president's recent inaugural speech, it's probably appropriate to disclose that you helped shape it.

Erect Purple Frog

Radical Cleric SpongeDob Stickypants links to a children's website which prominently features an erect purple frog.

The site describes the frog as:

The local "tough guy," this boistrous bully makes life miserable for everybody else, especially Tad. He has a habit of always eating—even in the middle of picking on folks, he's snatching bugs. Along with Bubble Gum, Bully is the unwitting agent for carrying out Cottonmouth's schemes.

Morning Thread

Chat away.

The Liberal Media -- Primetime Edition

Yesterday, Media Matters examined the guests on the 3 cable nets from 7am-5pm on 1/20. Today they covered it from 5-11 on the same day.

Substitute Cat Blogging

Wiley and Gizmo will return as soon as I get a cable. Until then, here's Chilis, the cat owned by my tall blonde Venezuelan friend from St. Louis:

Memories... how they fade so fast...

Sniff. I'll miss them.

Jan 21, 2005 — WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The White House has scrapped its list of Iraq allies known as the 45-member "coalition of the willing," which Washington used to back its argument that the 2003 invasion was a multilateral action, an official said on Friday.

The senior administration official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the White House replaced the coalition list with a smaller roster of 28 countries with troops in Iraq sometime after the June transfer of power to an interim Iraqi government.

The official could not say when or why the administration did away with the list of the coalition of the willing.

Late Night

Have fun.

Cat Blogging

Sorry...can't find the USB cord. Cats will appear as soon as it does...

Evening thread.

wahhh

The conservamediaborg had started to go after CBS over their "liberal bias" because they dared to put Kennedy on as the sole guest last Sunday on Face the Nation. Of course, Face the Nation has had a Republican-stacked guest list since the election.


...apparently Russert and friends are unconcerned with things like "balance." Sunday's guest list:

Ambassador John Negroponte, Rep. Bill Thomas, Stephen Hayes and Robin Wright
NBC News

TivoBlogging

Matt Haughey of PVRblog has a good post up about how ridiculous notions of IP in the digital age are really stifling innovation.

Lawsuits are killing innovation. It's a common story in the world of technology. Any time a company produces a disruptive technology that does something cool, they have to have a legal department that is bigger than their engineering unit to survive, and that sucks for business, sucks for customers, and sucks for the technology industry. I work around lawyers all day and I wish this was a bigger issue with the public.

Anything that helps customers enjoy TV, movies, or music is a target for lawsuits. We saw it with the Rio mp3 player (what, exactly, was illegal about playing a mp3 on a portable player?). We saw it with ReplayTV and TiVo. We see it in the entire DVD region-coding disaster that gets region-free players pulled from the US Market. The content company dinosaurs are so wed to their antiquated business models that they'll send off their legal department to attack at the slightest provocation (this includes imagined potential profit losses).

At this point, TiVo has a lot of customers and a lot of supporters in the US. I believe if anything, they need to move more of their resources into technology innovation and damn the torpedoes -- continue to make technology that makes customers happy, regardless of what Hollywood thinks. I believe if there is a concerted effort by the content industry to kill TiVo, it would not be successful like it was with ReplayTV, as there are just too many (happy, well-off, voting) TiVo customers to grapple with, much less the court of opinion that rarely goes to Hollywood's advantage.

TiVo, every day it's looks more and more like you're finally on the ropes, but it's time to start fighting back.

Agreed. And, all the technology companies involved in this stuff should find ways to band together and present a united front, mobilizing some of their happy customers on their behalf as well.

One of the most ridiculous "features" that many (all?) mp3 player manufacturers have is that they prevent you from uploading mp3s from them back to a computer. This is an incredibly annoying feature, which of course does absolutely nothing to prevent illegal piracy. I mean, you can pass the things around on USB thumb drives or burn them to CD or email them or whatever. MP3 players basically are USB thumb drives with a bit of software and an earphone jack.

At this point, if I were, say, Apple, I'd be just daring the industry to go after me on something like that. Just pull it out of the next firmware release and see what they do.

wahhhh

Go have a bit of fun seeing people smack Tim Graham around over his ridiculous complaining about the media coverage of the Armstrong Williams affair.

Frankly, this story hasn't gotten enough coverage -- and for some reason no one seems too concerned about the Bush administration's clear violation of federal law.

Dot Sex

It's really annoying when there's someone who thinks he's happened upon a truly new and breathtakingly simple solution which is neither new nor breathtakingly simple.

Despite the best filters, pornography could still find its way onto children's computer screens -- but perhaps not for long.

A Maryland lawmaker believes he has come up with a simple, cost-free way to block online pornography, television station WBAL reported.

Even the most innocent, innocuous commands while searching the Internet can turn up sites that make parents blush and dive for the delete button, the station reported.

The solution? Calling porn what it is by adding ".sex" to the end of the Web site address.


...

What took so long? Why didn't anybody think of this before?" he said others say.

Well, others have and they realize it's completely unenforceable and just generally a really bad idea. The wee problem is, of course, defining what sexually explicit materials are. And, it'll have a chilling effect because even mostly "non-sexually explicit sites" would have to be concerned about ocassionally crossing that line, not to mention what to do about medical and other advice sites.

I think it's a great idea to have a voluntary porn domain. It won't solve the problem entirely, but I'm sure a big chunk of the pornosphere would happily migrate there. But, mandating it just isn't going to work.

The WSJ Knows Something No One Else Does

Michael Powell Out?(sub. req.)

The bad news is that we are told that Michael Powell, one of Washington's better bureaucrats, is calling it quits today after four years at the helm of the Federal Communications Commission. You read it here first.

All Class

I'm sure we'll hear about this for months:

Nor has the other side forgotten Kerry. When the former candidate emerged on the West Front of the Capitol yesterday morning and his smiling image was broadcast, the crowd booed and groaned. One man could be heard to call out, "Loser!" Kerry took his seat alongside an old friend, Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), and quickly got to the task at hand: projecting both equanimity and magnanimity.

They Get Letters

The Ridgecrest Daily Independent:

Newspaper shouldn't print Liberal voices

Editor:

Thank Goodness for such literate and intelligent men as Julius Wolfson, Derek Cooper, Ron Scott and May Shaw.

I just can't understand why more good conservatives haven't spoken out against the dangerous opinions of rabble-rousers such as Phyllis Lilly, Linda Robin and that R C Johnson person. Why does The Daily Independent print the degenerate views of poisonous Liberals who hate freedom?

As Mr. Scott points out, the glorious Constitution is there to protect the rights of Christians to profess their faith. This country was founded by good Christians and the Constitution guarantees our right to express our religion.

It just is completely beyond me how we have allowed Liberals to deny us this guaranteed right.

Oh, they raise ridiculous arguments like other (false) religions would be "upset" if they were forced to pray alongside the righteous in schools or council meetings.

Surely those others would appreciate the opportunity to be saved. As God's chosen people, we Christians have the right to express our religion and praise tolerant, patient and merciful God, and I don't want to read any more letters from Liberals suggesting non-believers should be allowed to express their superstitions just because we Christians can express ours.

The Founding Fathers were God-fearing men and never intended the first Amendment to promote other superstitious beliefs.

Ridgecrest used to be filled with right-minded, polite and decent people.

I can't believe the vicious slander of some people who have the nerve to portray or suggest Jesus behaved as a Liberal.

Jesus makes his position very clear. The wisdom of an "eye for an eye" would never occur to a Liberal.

Liberals are always talking about peace at any price, when Jesus said: Do not think I have come to bring peace, but a sword.

Liberals hate people who have managed to raise their station in life, and instead insist on giving money away to the irresponsible: Store yourselves treasures for Heaven for where your treasure is, there your heart is also.

No one can serve two masters, either your are a good conservative with God or you are not with God. Remember: A bad tree cannot bear good fruit.

Billie Miller

Ridgecrest

Wanker of the Day

Well, it's an hour early - this is really tomorrow's wanker, but nonetheless....


Cal Thomas!

Deep Thoughts By Dick Cheney

One of these is real:


a) We don't want a war in the Middle East, if we can avoid it.



b) A good way to threaten somebody is to light a stick of dynamite. Then you call the guy and hold the burning fuse up to the phone. "Hear that?" you say. "That's dynamite, baby."

The Liberal Media

Just a typical day.

Eff the Furriners

To the extent that anyone actually watched, I imagine Bush's speech, which I finally forced myself to read, went over like a lead balloon.

We went to war with Iraq because they had weapons of mass destruction. In the aftermath of 9/11 a lot of otherwise semi-sensible people were too easily led down the path of supporting the endeavor. When weapons were not found, ex post it became a humanitarian mission about spreading freeance. A large number of those people who supported the Iraq war, and now sorta feel badly about it, have consoled themselves with this idea, with some of them doing so inbetween suggestions that we just "mow the whole place down."
But, the US generally, and the Republicans specifically, don't really want to expend blood and treasure to go help out a bunch of furriners. They don't want to spend any treasure to help out Americans. Most I think would prefer to mow the rest of the entire world down, or at least wish it just wasn't there at all.

I'm starting to think that people voted for Bush so that he could make things right, and thus justify their support for him and his little adventures in the first place. But, Bush is going to continue to do things very wrong -- and this inaugural speech was a sign of that.


And, yes, troll repellent, freeance is truly a wonderful thing and we should take steps to encourage it. I wish we were.

Shorter Tom Friedman

Who's up for another 18 holes?

Open Thread

All yours.

SpongeDob Stickypants

Wolcott has an excellent idea. Let it be so.

SpongeDob Stickypants.

Afternoon Thread

Have fun.

Wanker of the Day

Howard Kurtz: Atrios

Funny, I don't remember liberal pundits making an issue of this during Clinton's first inaugural, when American soldiers were fighting and dying in Somalia.

The first soldiers were killed in Somalia on August 8, 1993.

(thanks to reader p)


... yeah, I goofed. Apologies all around. First KIA was in January before the inaugural.

We're All Terrorists Now

Even the Florida Marlins:

"I thought that we already appropriated money to help them move to Vegas," he said. "I was very disappointed that they publicly announced the negotiations and discussions with Las Vegas, and I don't negotiate with terrorists."

What the hell is with Republicans.

(thanks to reader j)

Idiots

What the hell was the Nation thinking running this cartoon.

Morning Thread

Chat away.

You Link It, You Own It, II

Scott Rosenberg takes issue with my previous "You Link It, You Own It" post. I mean, basically I just agree with him - he just posted the longer version of what I wrote, fleshing it out a bit. There are lots of ways to link to something, and obviously if you link to it with the caveat "this is bullshit" you aren't "owning it." And, nor did I mean "you own it" in a legal sense. I just meant that in the context of "credibility," one major credibility issue is how credibly you act as a filter for every bit of information on the internets that floats across your transom. If I link to something saying "go read this" then I've put my stamp of approval on it. It's bullshit to come back two hours later and say "uh, well, I didn't write it, I just linked to it... not my problem."

And, quite importantly, there's an obvious distinction between blogroll-type links and links in posts. Drudge links to about every major media site in the world -- he's obviously not responsible for all of their content. But, a link in a post without a note of skepticism or a word of caution is an implied endorsement. I'm responsible for directing people to good information -- if I send them to nonsense on a regular basis I'll catch shit, unless I'm a conservative blogger in which case I'll win awards. I know that insitutional web sites always worry that they'll be held accountable for every single link on their page, and that's just silly - they shouldn't be. But drawing attention to a media outlet with large amounts of content and drawing attention to a particular story are entirely different things.


I'd say one of my better blogging qualities is that my bullshit detector and my "too good (or too bad) to be true" detector work pretty well. I've linked uncritically to a few stupid things over the years, but on the whole my record's pretty good.

The Sheriff -- Transcribed

I never actually had a chance to listen to Mike Signorile's sheriff interview. But, here's the transcript -- it's even funnier than I expected.


The most hilarious bit comes near the end, where Mike's thanking the guy and trying to get him off the phone, and then suddenly... the sheriff has a question.

M: Thanks for giving us this interview today, sir. It--
H: Can I say one more thing?
M: Yes.
H: Okay. Do you want to describe what homosexuals do to each other?
M: Are you asking me a question?
H: Yeah. Why don't we just, you know, if it's not such a terrible thing, a despicable thing, just in common language, let's put up here[?] what these gays do to each other.
M: Well, you know what they do, sir? They fuck, just like straight people fuck. That's what they do. Okay? You know, straight people--
H: --All I'm saying is [unintelligible]
M: You know, you put your dick in your wife's vagina and a lot of you Christian conservatives also put your dicks in other women's cunts when you're not -- you know, when you're married, and are hypocritical. So gay people, yeah, they fuck just like you fuck. That's what they do. And for many of them it's an act of love--
[crosstalk]
M: And for others of them, just like many of you heterosexuals, it's an act of sheer pleasure, because we live in a free society.
H: Well, tell Congressman Rangel and Senator Hillary Clinton-- You give them my regards.
M: I certainly will, sir. Thank you for joining us today.
H: Okay. Goodbye.

Someone has issues...

Regrets

That sounds about right.

Late Night

Have fun.

Torture Lou

For old times' sake.

Lie Back and Think of Bobo

An E&P columnist has a bit of fun with our dear Bobo.

Sgt. Falafel O'Reilly

There's a reward for anyone who can corroborate O'Reilly's claim to have seen combat in Central and South America.

What He Says

Big Media Matt:

At the same time, this is a chance to get out of the defensive crouch on Social Security and start attacking. A plan that doesn't have the support of the House Ways and Means Chairman or the Senate Finance Committee Chairman is in no danger of passing in the near future. Democrats would be well-advised to spend less time focusing on defending their position and more time launching vituperative attacks on the Bush view. It would be a shame to just let Bush wiggle out of this without paying a major price.

Indeed. The president's agenda is going down in flames. Time to keep punching.

I'm starting to think we may hear as much about social security privatization in the state of the union address this year as we heard about MARS in the last one.

Wanker of the Day

Hugh Hewitt.

Afternoon Thread

Savor that new thread smell.

Reid on Social Security

The President's plan is a dead horse not because of partisan politics but because it is a privatization plan based on massive benefit cuts, risky Wall Street accounts and $2 trillion in new debt. It will undermine Social Security at a time when we should be looking to strengthen the program and help Americans save.

And if a 50 percent benefit cut is not enough, now we learn Republicans are aiming to push even deeper cuts for America's women. Any suggestion that women do not deserve the same benefits as men is just plain wrong.

Retirement security is America's promise to all its workers, and I will ensure that promise is kept.

More Max

Max has a few more things to say about Social Security. Go read and then return.

I really want to highlight something that he writes because it's something which I don't think has actually penetrated the skulls of our ethical media. While it's difficult to talk about the "Bush plan" when no such plan actually exists, the media don't seem to understand that an element of the possible plans is that actual government benefits will be reduced by the amount in your private accounts. In other words, they aren't just talking about cutting guaranteed benefits - they're talking about reducing your actual benefit by the amount you pull out of your account.

Tivo to Go

It's arrived! It's arrived!

And there was much rejoicing throughout the land.

Dead Horse

I think that's what Mr. Thomas will find in his bed.

House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Bill Thomas (R-Calif.) predicted yesterday that partisan warfare over Social Security will quickly render President Bush's plan "a dead horse" and called on Congress to undertake a broader review of the problems of an aging nation.

Thomas, one of Capitol Hill's most powerful figures on tax policy, is the highest-ranking House Republican official to cast doubt on the president's plan for creating individual investment accounts. He said that as an alternative, he will consider changes such as replacing the payroll tax as Social Security's financing mechanism and adding a savings plan for long-term or chronic care as "an augmentation to Social Security payments."

Not quite sure what this is about. I caution any Dems about getting suckered into a "bipartisan plan" to "reform" the system which will be magically switcherooed by DeLay's goons on the conference committee.

No Crisis

There is no crisis in Social Security.

Owned

Poor Arnold Kling. Max demolishes him.

Morning Thread

Have fun.

He Cavorted With Terrorists

The latest justification for war, from Condi, courtesy of the Daily Show...

Both Right

Some people argue that we should respect Martin Frost for doing what he had to do to win a tough congressional race. Accepting that argument for the moment -- I do! I'm all for Democrats doing what they have to do to win. And, I can respect skillful politicians who know how to win in districts which are basically against them.

But, while those people should potentially be respected for doing what they need to do to win in their districts, that doesn't mean they should run the party. I don't know why that needs to be explained.

And, perhaps more importantly, this line of reasoning praises cynical politicians for their election-winning strategy. But, um, as far as I noticed, none of the Republican-lite politicians who faced significant challenges actually won their races. And, what they did do was a twofer -- They LOST and they helped discredit their party. Thanks!


Again, congrats on doing what you needed to do to win your district. But, you know what? That doesn't mean you're the right person to run the party. And, even more importantly - YOU LOST.

Indeed

heh

Sorta Weird

The wingnutosphere is all excited about this column written by "LTC Tim Ryan, Commander, Task Force 2-12 Cavalry, First Cavalry Division in Iraq."

Here we have "Lieutenant Colonel Tim Ryan, the commander of the 223rd military intelligence."

And, here again we have an LTC Ryan being accused of behaving rather inappropriately towards someone who came forward with torture allegations:

The Army has already dealt with one case of abuse by soldiers stationed at Samarra. At a recent court-martial in Fort Hood, Texas, four enlisted soldiers from the 4th Infantry Division in Samarra were convicted of manslaughter for forcing two handcuffed Iraqi men to jump off a bridge over the Tigris River during an interrogation. One of the Iraqis drowned. The soldiers' commanding officer, a lieutenant colonel that regularly worked with agents of the 223rd, was administratively disciplined for helping to cover up the incident.

Not long after Marciello left him, Ford said, Madera, accompanied by an unknown male captain, entered Ford's tent and told him to get ready because he was going to be "medevac'd" to Germany immediately. "What the hell is going on here?" Ford remembered demanding, but Madera told him to "be quiet," that he "had to leave," and that she would explain once they were airborne. She escorted him to a waiting Humvee that took them to the base airstrip, where a C-130 was warming up on the tarmac.

"Madera ordered me to lie down on a gurney that had been in the rear of the Humvee so she could strap me down. I again asked what was going on, only this time a lot more pissed off. I said that I was perfectly able to walk." Ford said Madera insisted, telling him it was the order of "[Lt. Col. Timothy] Ryan and Artiga" that he be "bound and secured" when taken "out of country." "I saw that I had no choice and finally said OK, anything just to get the fuck out of there," Ford recalled. With the help of the male captain, who Ford said identified himself as a medical officer, Madera strapped him to the gurney.

Just then, Ford claimed, Ryan, Artiga's superior officer, pulled up in his Humvee and walked over to where Ford was lying on the gurney. "He looked down at me and said, 'Don't worry. We are going to get you the best treatment available.' I was enraged at that point, and it was a good thing I was strapped down. I just stared back at Ryan with looks that I hoped could kill, but I didn't say nothing. What was the point? He had won that round."

Ryan did not respond to interview requests for this story.

anyway, no clue what that all means.


...here's his bio. Anyway, I just found it weird that there were two Lieutenant Colonels named Tim Ryan who were identified as being part of different units. Maybe the military peeps can make sense of it.


Tank!



w