Matt Yglesias

Endgame

By Ryan McNeely

How I wish there were more than twenty-four hours in the day:

– You might as well face it: they’re addicted to Bush.

– How the GOP could kill health care reform without repealing it.

– Swearing to uphold the Constitution while advocating secession? And when is impeachment going to be taken “off the table”?

– Ezra Klein’s excellent interview with Kent Conrad.

– “Breitbart lied about Shirley Sherrod. Now he’s lying about the NAACP.”

– Unsurprisingly, there are problems with some military commission convictions.

– Barney Frank and Felix Salmon now back Elizabeth Warren for CFPB.

– James Clyburn pokes fun at the Vice-President.

In honor of Netroots Nation, Viva Las Vegas.

Climate Counterfactuals

Brad Plumer has a nice post about climate change counterfactual scenarios asking various “what ifs” and wondering whether they could have led to a bill.

I’ve been interested in various aspects of counterfactual since college when I read Niall Ferguson’s excellent book Virtual History, studied David Lewis’ work on the metaphysics of counterfactuals, and did a philosophy of history class with Robert Nozick. To make a long story short, the upshot of that kind of analysis is that it really depends how you specify your counterfactual. If you want to ask “would a McCain administration have led to a better outcome for climate legislation,” in other words, you need to ask yourself “why in this scenario would McCain have won the election?” After all, it’s very hard to imagine a scenario in which the 2008 congressional elections come out the exact same way but Barack Obama somehow loses. In the real world, the same dynamics that powered Obama to victory also drove the election of Kay Hagan and Tom Perriello and Mark Begich and any number of other downballot candidates. A scenario in which Democrats win landslide congressional victories but Obama loses would have to entail something pretty odd happening and the precise nature of what that is would have a big impact on subsequent events.

Something similar happens when you ask about “what if climate had gone before energy.” During 2007 and 2008 both Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama fairly strongly signalled personal preferences for energy reform as a higher priority than health reform, I judgment that I also share. But Obama reversed course on this for reasons having to do with the different status of the issues inside the progressive political coalition. So there’s a difference between asking “would the outcome have been different if the underlying coalition dynamics that drove Obama’s choice had been different” (plausibly yes) and asking “would the outcome have been different if Obama made an idiosyncratic effort to swim against the tide of coalition dynamics” (almost certainly not).

The best-specified counterfactual I can think of that leads to a more successful outcome actually has nothing to do with the specific political dynamics of the climate debate. That would be something like “what if decisive Federal Reserve action had led to substantially more robust economic growth in the second half of 2009 and the first half of 2010?” Had that happened, public opinion on Barack Obama and all Obama-related policy proposals would be more positive. What’s more, narrative about the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act would be much more positive. So GOP rejectionism on the Affordable Care Act would have been a tactical failure and rejectionism on ARRA would have been a strategic failure, and you’d see many more voices from within the conservative coalition urging people to adopt a more cooperative stance to shed the “party of ‘no’” stance.

That’s my view. Which is in part a long-winded way of saying that I’m detecting at Netroots Nation a self-critical vibe within the green community that I don’t really think is justified. In terms of what political advocacy organizations can be reasonably expected to achieve, the climate change groups have been extremely effective. But a whole set of other problems related to the economy have dragged their program down. Much the same could be said about immigration reform, which has also been the victim of a political dynamic that’s extrinsic to the immigration issue silo.

The association of progressive reform with the Great Depression sometimes confuses people about this, but if you look at the timeline correctly you’ll see that even though the 1933-37 period was “part of” the Depression it was actually a period of extremely rapid economic growth following four years of epic collapse and preceding a secondary recession. That “everything was terrible and then FDR came in and conditions improved rapidly” dynamic was highly supportive of the president’s legislative agenda.

The Missing Circuit Court Nominees

One of the mysteries of the Obama administration, discussed a bit but not really resolved at an excellent panel on judicial issues I attended this morning, is why he’s been so slow to put names forward to fill vacancies on the federal courts. It’s true that there’s been a fair amount of obstruction, but the obstruction has been facilitated by the White House’s lackadaisical attitude toward the issue.

Part of what I wonder here is isn’t the failing a broader institutional one. After all, Democrats had eight years of George W Bush to draw up lists of potential nominees — it should have been possible for the Senate caucus, in consultation with outside groups, to produce on day one a list of well-vetted candidates that the Majority Leader and the Judiciary Chairman were prepared to go to bat for.

Who Will Read War & Peace in the Future?

Ta-Nehisi Coates writes about his father and War and Peace:

My Dad read War and Peace before he went off to Vietnam. He must have been about 16, a poor black kid trying to find his way out of Philadelphia. By the time he came to Tolstoy, he’d seen his father alive for the last time. He’d come home, as a six-year old, and seen all of his home set out in the street. He’d lived in a truck for a week, and he’d come to believe that if he stayed in Philly, he would be killed. Still awaiting him was the murder of two of his older brothers, the service, the Panthers, and a tribe of children.

What moves someone like that to Tolstoy? What allows you to cross that long, dreamy bridge from the ghettos of America to the parlors of old Russia?

I think to anyone who’s read and loved Tolstoy, it’s clear enough that the answer is simply that his work has a universal appeal. It works for a 17 year-old prosperous white kid from Manhattan in the late 1990s and it works for a 16 year-old black kid from Philadelphia in the late 1960s. But the main theme of Coates’ post is that he finds himself unable to get in to War and Peace. And I wonder how hard it must be these days. The explosion of digital culture is, on net, a very good thing. But it necessarily crowds out some activities and one of the things it must do the very most crowding-out of is one’s capacity to read giant honking novels. I find it hard to imagine myself undertaking a project on the W&P/Moby Dick/Brothers Karamazov scale in the era of ubiquitous connectivity. I think this is something we may just be losing as a society.

The Tolstoy-curious may want to consider attempting something less daunting—Hadji Murat, Death of Ivan Ilych, or Family Happiness.

What Next?

By Ryan McNeely

Matt is completely correct about how climate change legislation ultimately died: basically Republican politicians who claim to care about climate change won’t support any attempt to actually deal with climate change. The big question right now seems to be “what should people who care about the issue do” to affect the debate? Matt discussed civil disobedience yesterday, but due to the complicated politics of the issue it’s a bit hard to decipher where the swing votes really are. I guess the two potential strategies would be to try to rally Democrats to become more engaged on the issue (read: make the Congress generally more progressive) or to de-politicize the issue, go after reasonable conservative elites and try to get them to basically shame moderate Republicans into following the logic of their own stated positions.

I noticed on the CAP graph of state per capita emissions that eight of the ten states with the highest emissions were McCain states, and often strong McCain states (in fact, three high emission states are three of only five states where Obama underperformed Kerry). Plus, Obama won Indiana — one of only two high emission states won by the President — by an extremely narrow margin. Here’s a chart plotting the rank of each state’s Obama vote share vs. the per capita CO2 emissions:

Now, this is not a very rigorous metric — it simply ranks the states in order rather than comparing actual vote spreads to actual emissions. And it doesn’t get at the true veto points (Senators) but rather looks at presidential vote strength. Finally, there are some outliers — for example, maybe Idaho’s Senators could be bought-off somehow, as Idaho has the fourth lowest emissions but was Obama’s fourth worst state.

But there’s definitely a relationship here. And I think one can potentially draw the conclusion that, moving forward, climate change is destined to become an even more partisan issue. If that’s the case, the strategy for dealing with the problem wouldn’t materially differ from the strategy for advancing any other progressive agenda item — activists should simply try to make the Congress more Democratic and more progressive.

F*ck Tea

A number of people have asked me about the stylish F*ck Tea t-shirt I had on last night, it came to me courtesy of The Agenda Project (which has cool slogans: “What if someone told you that politicians were the least important part of politics”) and you can find for sale here along with other anti-Tea Party swag:

On the back it says “Progress is the real American Party,” which I think is correct. The United States was founded fairly explicitly on a set of liberal ideals—pragmatic egalitarian cosmopolitan individualism is the American creed and the progressive movement is largely about trying to make those ideals a reality. John Boehner’s view that human freedom somehow reached a peak in the 1950s and that therefore a reactionary politics is going to be liberatory is absurd.

CBO Scores Stark Public Option Proposal

Rep Pete Stark got the Congressional Budget Office to score a new version of the old public option idea, and the results underscore the point that such an option would be a good idea:

CBO estimates that the public plan’s premiums would be 5 percent to 7 percent lower, on average, than the premiums of private plans offered in the exchanges. The differences between the premiums of the public plan and the average premiums of private plans would vary across the country because of geographic differences in the plans’ relative costs. Those differences in premiums would reflect the net impact of differences in the factors that affect all health insurance premiums, including the rates paid to providers, administrative costs, the degree of benefit management applied to control spending, and the characteristics of the enrollees. [...]

CBO and the staff of the Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT) estimate that the proposal would reduce federal budget deficits through 2019 by about $53 billion. That estimate includes a $37 billion reduction in exchange subsidies and a $27 billion increase in tax revenues that would result because a greater share of employees’ compensation would take the form of taxable wages and salaries (rather than nontaxable health benefits). Those changes would be partly offset by an $11 billion increase in costs for providing tax credits to small employers. (The proposal would have minimal effects on other outlays and revenues related to the insurance coverage provisions of PPACA.)

They write that “[t]he bulk of those budgetary effects would occur in the second half of the decade.”

Ultimately, however, I think this kind of technical analysis actually misses the public options greatest deficit-reducing potential. This is that, basically, if you’re able to really make the Affordable Care Act work and turn it into something people like then it’s possible to imagine down the road a world in which means-tested ACA coverage is provided to people who are 69 or 75 or 82 or 97, which would be more fiscally sustainable than the Medicare model. But you can’t just kind of wave your hand and make this happen, you would need to prove to people that ACA really works and delivers health benefits people like the way Medicare does. And the best way to make that happen is to incorporate some kind of public option or Medicare buy-in scenarios in to the ACA mechanism and ensure that people aren’t being left to the tender mercies of the insurance industry.

The Mosque Exclusion Zone

One last point about Newt Gingrich’s objections to building a mosque “near Ground Zero” on the grounds that the United States ought to more closely resemble Saudi Arabia. What, exactly, is the proposed rule here? No mosques south of Canal Street? None in Manhattan? Or is that two blocks away is too close but somehow three blocks away he’d find unobjectionable?

Lame Duck Paranoia

(cc photo by kevindooley)

I think Kevin Drum is absolutely right to dismiss the paranoid conspiracy theories coming from Charles Krauthammer and others regarding the idea that somehow the entire Obama agenda is going to be passed during the lame-duck session of congress even if there are huge Republican wins in the election. Among other things, nothing about the lame-duck session magically eliminates filibusters.

But the fact that we’re even having this conversation does highlight the point that it’s pretty darn odd to have such a long time between when the election happens and when the newly elected members take office. I’m not a fan of the extended presidential transition period either, but that’s kind of built into the larger architecture of a system of government that features too many presidential appointees and not enough civil servants. For congress, however, I don’t see why there should be any transition at all. If you’re declared winner of a House or Senate race, you should become the member for the district or state right away. This isn’t 1807, members don’t need months and months to pack up all their belongs for an extended wagon trip to DC.

Mobilizing Real Resources

This is sort of a post about nothing, but I think punditocratic discussions of stimulus (whether fiscal or monetary) have been misleading in some respects that can be illustrated via the suggestion that we ought to think of the issue as one involving real resources rather than money.

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The Death of Comprehensive Climate Legislation

Before the circular firing squads begin about the demise of comprehensive climate legislation, I think the main thing you need to understand analytically is that CO2 emissions vary widely on a region-by-region basis in the United States. Consequently, any bill that proposes to price emissions is going to have regional implications as well as ideological ones. Depending on how you structure the pricing scheme, you can make these implications come out different ways, but you can’t avoid the fact that these implications will exist. The upshot is that it’s not possible to enact such legislation on a purely partisan basis. Any feasible scheme will give some states represented by Democrats the shaft while being beneficial to some states represented by Republicans.

If you click the image below you’ll go to a CAP interactive letting you play around with the per capita emissions from different states and you’ll see the point:

The upshot of this is that the key actors in preventing the emergence of a comprehensive bill are the mysterious vanishing Republican cap-and-trade supporters. For example, I’m old enough to remember when John McCain was the Republican nominee for President of the United States:

As for the cap-and-trade program itself, McCain’s basic targets and mechanisms are roughly in line with what others have proposed. He would aim for 1990 emission levels by 2020, and 60 percent below 1990 levels by 2050. That long-term target falls short of the “80 percent by 2050″ recommended by the IPCC and beloved of climate activists, but the short-term target is roughly in line with what’s offered in the Lieberman-Warner bill and Barack Obama’s plan.

The fact that McCain and other Republicans supported the goal of reducing carbon emissions and support carbon pricing as the means of reducing carbon emissions is the whole reason anyone ever thought reducing carbon emissions via carbon pricing was feasible. When they decided—for no clear reason—that they no longer held this view, they doomed the idea to defeat. So what we’re left with is some other smaller-bore legislative ideas and regulation under the Clean Air Act. We need to move forward with both, but the reality is that we’re left with a very bad situation.

The Meticulous and Fair Tucker Carlson

From the beginning of Jonathan Strong’s series of articles about JournoList for the Daily Caller, he’s consistently misrepresented the content of the emails he’s writing about. In response, I’ve consistently pushed strong to not only publish his “reporting” on the content of the emails but also the emails themselves so that Strong’s readers could see the evidence for themselves. Given that this would cost Strong nothing, his refusal to do so speaks volumes about the dishonesty of the enterprise he’s engaged in. Now, Strong’s boss, Tucker Carlson, has put out a statement about his publication’s coverage of the story that only compounds the dishonesty:

Tucker’s note doesn’t bother to mention the actual questions that have been raised: That his stories have misstated fact, misled readers, and omitted evidence that would contradict his thesis. He doesn’t explain how a thread in which no journalists suggested shutting down Fox News can be headlined “Liberal journalists suggest government shut down Fox News.” He doesn’t tell us why an article about the open letter that originated on the list left out the fact that I subsequently banned any future letters from the list. He doesn’t detail why his stories haven’t mentioned that one of his own reporters was on the list — his readers would presumably be interested to know that the Daily Caller was part of the liberal media conspiracy.

Instead, Tucker says, well, trust him. “I edited the first four stories myself,” he writes, “and I can say that our reporter Jonathan Strong is as meticulous and fair as anyone I have worked with.”

This is absurd. If Carlson has never worked with non-liars, then I guess that’s a sad fact about Carlson’s life. But I doubt it. Rather, Carlson just seems to be about as dishonest as Strong and intends to double down on it. But again the point remains: If the JList thread about Fox News is newsworthy enough to merit an article, isn’t it newsworthy enough for the Caller’s audience to read the thread? The reason for this selective release is that the headline doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.

Fortunately, no other employer seems inclined to follow the Washington Post’s lead and give in to this absurd bullying by punishing its employees for having drifted into Carlson’s field of vision. Consequently, I end up simply feeling bad for (a) Dave Weigel, and (b) the conservative reading public, which Carlson is in the process of duping for no good reason. I’ve seen vaguely parallel conspiracy theories develop on the left from time to time (the legend of Grover Norquist’s Wednesday meetings comes to mind) but never one propounded so cynically or transparently.

Endgame

By Ryan McNeely

Can’t nobody stop the juice so baby tell me what’s the use?

– Michele Bachmann lays out the GOP agenda if they re-take the majority: “I think that all we should do is issue subpoenas and have one hearing after another.”

– Daily Caller confirms that it will not give its readers access to the source material of its reporting.

– Tough talk from Tim Dickinson on the death of the climate bill.

– Sharron Angle calls a press conference and then refuses to answer any questions from the press.

– The lesson of Blanche Lincoln’s doomed Senate campaign.

– Public option opponents have to continue to deal with the pesky fact that it’s good policy.

– Old Man and the Sea and To Kill a Mockingbird, fine. But something like Portrait of the Artist would not be materially different from prison.

Nelly, “Hot in Herre.”

Civil Disobedience

I was at a climate change panel this morning which featured wide-ranging discussion of a number of important issues. But one thing that frustrated me was that after moderator Amanda Terkel raised the issue of “civil disobedience” the panelists commenced a discussion that was focused on the idea of “protests.” That sort of makes it sound like the famed civil disobedience of the Civil Rights Movement consisted of earnest and well-meaning protestors standing outside segregated lunch counters holding signs about the moral wrongness of such rules.

This is, of course, wrong. There were protests and sign-holdings associated with the Civil Rights Movement, but the core of that era’s civil disobedience was, well, civil disobedience. People actually going and doing illegal stuff and forcing the authorities to come out and stop them. The idea was to (a) demonstrate the extreme depth of the commitment the activists possessed, (b) dramatize the injustice of Jim Crow in a visceral way, and (c) create an atmosphere of social crisis such that fence-sitters could no longer say “well, this just isn’t a good time to address these issues.” The movement was causing trouble, and would have to be dealt with by either crushing it with repression or else addressing its concerns.

I’m not certain that an equivalent strategy would be useful or appropriate for the climate change issue. But I think it’s at least worth thinking about. And it would entail doing something very different from simply organizing legal rallies and marches or staged phony arrests.

The Change We Need

Here’s Joe Gagnon on what the Fed could and should be doing to boost the national economy. I don’t share 100 percent of Gagnon’s confidence that this would work, but even if it didn’t work the downside risk is essentially zero. If it somehow “worked too well” and the price level became unduly elevated, you could just turn around in the other direction.

And here’s Scott Sumner with much the same points. Paul Krugman has more.

It’s very disappointing to me that we’re not hearing more about this from politicians and political pressure groups. Every progressive organization and politician I’m aware of is currently focused on the need for jobs. But virtually none of them are focused on these kinds of measures even though they provide the most practical path forward given the gridlock of the legislature and the fact that the monetary authorities “move last” in the fiscal-monetary dance anyway.

The Gingrich Plan for al-Qaeda Victory

I think the ethical wrongness of Newt Gingrich plan for the United States to deliberately imitate Saudi Arabia’s lack of religious freedom and begin explicit discrimination against American Muslims is plenty of reason to condemn it. But it is worth highlighting the catastrophic national security implications of these ideas.

Consider al-Qaeda—a relatively tiny and not especially terrifying group of people. And yet, they are able to wreak considerable havok, kill people, and disrupt free societies. This is bad. In the future, we would like to reduce the threat they pose by isolating these people and neutralizing them. They, in contrast, would like to mobilize the world’s vast Muslim population in a grand ideological battle with liberal societies. Under the circumstances, it is absolutely crucial that we bend over backwards—as even George W Bush tended to recognize—to avoid framing 9/11 as part and parcel of some broad American conflict with Muslim peoples or the Islamic religion. Our framing is that America is a diverse, pluralistic, free, and open society that we are determined to revenge. Our theory is that liberalism is an political system that can accommodate a wide array of people and faiths. To abandon that theory is as repugnant as it is foolish.

Indeed, as Jamelle Bouie observes this has been part of our strategic concept since as far back as the 1797 Treaty of Tripoli:

As the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion; as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquillity, of Mussulmen; and, as the said States never entered into any war, or act of hostility against any Mahometan nation, it is declared by the parties, that no pretext arising from religious opinions, shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.

In most respects, of course, the United States has become a much more tolerant and open-minded place since the late-18th century. But Gingrich, Sarah Palin, and others are carving out an exception.

Heritage Inaction for America

By Ryan McNeely

This is very inside-the-beltway, but the Heritage Foundation recently incorporated a 501(c)(4) organization — Heritage Action for America — presumably as a right-leaning counter to the Center for American Progress Action Fund, which hosts this blog.

Here are the four things that Heritage Action has used as its launch issues to mobilize conservatives to act:

Take Action: Big-government global warming legislation will destroy jobs and weaken the American economy.  Tell your Senators to reject any energy legislation that would harm the economy.

Take Action: Senators cannot fulfill their constitutional duty of “Advice and Consent” with incomplete information.  Tell the Senators on the Judiciary Committee to delay a vote on Kagan’s confirmation until they have received and evaluated all the relevant documents.

Take Action Now: In June, Congressman Steve King of Iowa filed a petition that would force the U.S. House of Representatives to vote on repealing Obamacare.  We must repeal Obamacare, now!  Tell your Member of Congress to sign the petition to repeal Obamacare.

Take Action Now: Senators must know that America should not enter into a treaty that weakens our defensive capabilities and sovereignty.  We need to stop the New START Treaty, now!  Sign the petitionto make your voices heard.

The only thing on this list that remotely resembles an affirmative agenda item — barely — is to “repeal Obamacare,” which is unpopular and will not happen. And this is from a “think tank”! The list simply represents a stalwart defense of the status quo and an embodiment of the “party of ‘No’” philosophy. I understand that conservatives are currently out of power, so they can’t set the agenda, but maybe just promoting a single idea would help assuage fears that the conservative movement is not ready to govern?

Opposition in Search of a Rationale

By Ryan McNeely

Last April, President Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev signed the New START (Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty), which provides for mutual reductions in redundant strategic nuclear arms. It’s a major accomplishment, and while Cold War-era nuclear concerns have lost the sexiness they once had, this treaty smartly goes right to the heart of the issue of terrorists potentially obtaining a nuclear weapon.

The problem is that even though the treaty is not a significant departure from the old START (which President Reagan negotiated, George H.W. Bush signed, and the Senate ratified with a vote of 93-6), and even though it’s unanimously supported by military and security experts, some conservatives are casting about for any reason to oppose ratification simply to hand a defeat to the Obama administration. It’s politics of the worst sort.

I wanted to draw attention to comments made by former Sen. Tom Daschle at CAP, who rightly argues that this line — the line of legitimate issue-based opposition vs. simple partisan posturing — is a line that “conservatives in elected office are close to crossing in an institutionalized fashion in their desire to retake power.” He also explained that those who claim to be most “hawkish” on Iran continue to take steps that actually increase the likelihood of Iran obtaining a nuclear weapon:

The administration also won sanctions from the U.N. Security Council against Iran directed at halting that country’s nuclear weapons program. Daschle and Cirincione agreed that ratifying New START was critical to maintaining international pressure on Tehran. Failure to ratify to the treaty would, they argued, lead to doubts among our allies about our commitment to preventing nuclear proliferation and strengthen Iran’s position.

“American credibility on nuclear issues would evaporate,” Daschle said, adding that problems might not be limited to Iran in the long term. “Countries belonging to the NPT would ask a very simple question: ‘If the U.S. is unwilling to live up to its commitments, why should we live up to ours?’”

I happen to think Mitt Romney’s amateur, uninformed op-ed in the Washington Post – see Fred Kaplan’s takedown here and Sen. Lugar’s comments here – ought to seriously cripple his presidential chances. But, he’s clearly concluded that Republican primary voters may actually reward the attempt to hand President Obama a defeat at literally any cost.

A Paper About Nothing

Getty images

By Ryan McNeely

Avinash Dixit (Princeton Professor, emeritus) has published a charming paper examining the economics of “The Sponge” episode of Seinfeld, where the contraceptive sponge is being taken off the market and Elaine is suddenly confronted with a finite supply of sponges. Dixit explains that “Every time she dates a new man, which happens very frequently, she has to consider a new issue: Is he “spongeworthy”? The purpose of this article is to quantify this concept of spongeworthiness.” The paper is extremely technical, but uses familar concepts and pop culture references to explain quantitatively rigorous economic decision-making functions. And here I think we can learn another lesson:

The idea for the research came about as Prof. Dixit, a fan of the show, recently caught a rerun of the sponge episode. The author of “Investment Under Uncertainty” decided to draft his paper and showed it to a few colleagues. He held off on releasing it, but since publishing it on his site says the reaction has been “entirely favorable.” Traffic on his site indicates that since he published the Seinfeld paper last month, it has been downloaded “100 times more than any of my serious work.”

This doesn’t surprise me in the least. I had never read one of Prof. Dixit’s papers until now, and I’m a student studying economics and public policy at the school where he taught. More academics should in fact incorporate references to real-world or fictional examples of the phenomena they are describing in order to enhance the interest and effectiveness of their work. Note that Dixit did not “dumb down” any of the actual economic modeling in his paper, he simply explained the models succinctly using an episode of Seinfeld.

Deep down, Dixit understands the inaccessibility of most academic work: “Sometimes, I sit and read all these academic papers…They can be extremely long, 70 pages or more. I sit there, and I think of Elaine when she was watching ‘The English Patient’ and she just busts out that it’s too long. Sometimes, I can relate.” I’m glad Dixit overcame his initial hesitancy to publish a paper that would appeal to a mass audience, because now I’ve learned something. People can’t learn from a paper if they don’t read it.

It’s Getting Hot in Here

Another excellent column from David Leonhardt. I’ll just leave you with this scary excerpt: “According to NASA, 2010 is on course to be the planet’s hottest year since records started in 1880. The current top 10, in descending order, are: 2005, 2007, 2009, 1998, 2002, 2003, 2006, 2004, 2001 and 2008.”

The House of Representatives has already passed a bill that would constitute a decent start on grappling with this problem. And you can easily imagine 50 Senators voting for such a bill as well. But you really can’t imagine 60 Senators voting for such a bill at this point. Instead, we’re hoping that maybe—just maybe—it’ll be possible to scrap something together that at least moves forward rather than backwards. It’s a sad time and a great moral failing on the part of many of the political and economic elites in the United States.

My Dialogue With Jonathan Strong of The Daily Caller

I’m mentioned in Jonathan Strong’s latest exposé on how liberal pundits have liberal views on politics, with today’s edition dedicated to revealing that liberals don’t like Sarah Palin. Since Strong writes about one of my emails, you might wonder why he didn’t reach out to me for comment. The answer is that Strong actually did reach out to me for comment, and I offered to comment, but then he simply dropped the thread of our dialogue. So in the spirit of reprinting people’s emails, here goes.

On July 21 at 8:41 AM Eastern, I sent him an email with the subject line “Another day, another lack of primary source documentation”:

I wrote you about this yesterday, but I continue to be curious as to why it is that you’re writing this series of stories based on misleading descriptions of excerpts of JournoList emails where you don’t post the full text of the emails online anywhere.

best,

Matthew Yglesias

Then at 4:07 PM Eastern, Strong finally replied:

Mathew,

I was hoping to chat with you for a few minutes this afternoon regarding Journolist. If you could call me at 202-506-2027, I would appreciate it.

Best,

Jonathan Strong

So at 4:18 PM Eastern, I wrote back:

I’m on a flight to Las Vegas right now, so it’s not a good time to talk, but I can answer emails.

Then he replied at 4:30 PM:

ok.

The day McCain picked Palin, you started a new thread with the subject, “The line on Palin”.

The post said, “John McCain picked someone to help him politically, Barack Obama picked someone to help him govern.”

This thread came in the midst of many threads that discussed which attacks would work best politically on Palin.

What did you mean with the words, “The line on Palin”? Like, the best line to use? Your line? A line you found insightful?

And at 5:02 PM, I responded:

Before I answer, I’d be curious as to whether with this next story you plan to publish the full texts of the emails you’re reporting on or is this going to be another set of misleading paraphrases?

Sent from my iPad

Strong didn’t reply. Which is too bad, since I think his story could have been enhanced by me answering his question. And I really don’t know what harm it would have done him to tell me in advance that this would be another article that’s curiously lacking in primary source documentation. Both Strong’s lack of interest in releasing his full primary sources and his lack of interest in getting commentary from me speak, I think, to the nature of his operation.

As for my email, I think all one has to understand is that during the 2008 campaign season my blog, as a publication, was operating under various restrictions related to our 501(c)4 tax status, to our then-current understanding of the Bipartisan Campaign Finance Reform Act (since modified by the Citizens United decision), and by CAP/AF internal policies. Consequently, I had some opinions relevant to the campaign that were not fit for publication on the blog and that I voiced in other venues, including emails to people. One such opinion was that the selection of Sarah Palin was an irresponsible and politically motivated act. I thought—and continue to think—that the line Strong quoted is a reasonably pithy formulation of the point. I also think the basic idea is and was extremely widespread, and while I’d be happy to take credit for persuading progressive America writ large to run with the idea, it’s actually quite obvious. Palin, as it turns out, was ultimately something like the most politically damaging VP pick of all time so obviously McCain’s political gambit didn’t work out. Still, an irresponsible political gambit is what it was.

Can Anyone Play This Game?

Macroeconomic Advisors on yesterday’s monetary policy oversight hearings: “On policy, [Bernanke's] discussion seemed even less balanced than that of the minutes. It was as if he was a bit out with touch of the Committee too! The oversight committee once again mostly passed on the opportunity to pose probing questions on the conduct of monetary policy. Sadly, only 14 percent of the questions were on monetary policy.”

I think the joyous benefits of the independent central bank are failing to materialize and in Europe and Japan things are even worse. But nothing about the United States Congress inspires faith in their ability to handle this either. Only 14 percent! At the monetary policy hearing!

Newt Gingrich Calls On United States to Adopt Saudi Arabian Standards of Religious Freedom

What an odd and repellent man:

There should be no mosque near Ground Zero in New York so long as there are no churches or synagogues in Saudi Arabia. The time for double standards that allow Islamists to behave aggressively toward us while they demand our weakness and submission is over.

Why on earth would we adopt this standard? There are no synagogues in the Vatican City, and yet we have Catholic churches all over the place. That’s because the United States of America isn’t a small city-state run by a religious leader. In Denmark, they have a state-sponsored church, but we don’t have a state-sponsored church because in the United States we have a strong belief in a brand of religious pluralism that’s served both the country and religion well. Saudi Arabia is notorious for its lack of freedom of religion, but we don’t improve anything by mimicking Saudi Arabia’s flaws.

One gets the sense that Gingrich’s reasoning is so weak here because he actually has no idea why it would make sense to prevent mosque-construction in Lower Manhattan. He just knows that this has become a far-right cause celebre and he likes to ride the far-right wave. If the far-right wants anti-Muslim bigotry, then he’ll provide it. But he’s an “ideas guy” so he has to try to think up a reason.

“Opportunistic Disinflation”

Via Scott Sumner, Paul McCulley discusses the strange theory of “opportunistic disinflation” that was bandied about in Fed circles in the late 1980s:

Simply put, the theory said, the Fed should not deliberately induce recessions to reduce inflation, but rather “opportunistically” welcome recessions when they inevitably happen, bringing cyclical disinflationary dividends. A corollary of this thesis was that the Fed should pre-emptively tighten in recoveries, on leading indicators of rising inflation, rather than rising inflation itself, so as to “lock-in” the cyclical disinflationary gains wrought by recession. While the label “opportunistic disinflation” was a clever one, the Fed had actually been practicing the policy for a long time. Indeed, former Philadelphia Fed President Edward Boehne elegantly described the approach at a FOMC meeting in late 1989:

“Now, sooner or later, we will have a recession. I don’t think anybody around the table wants a recession or is seeking one, but sooner or later we will have one. If in that recession we took advantage of the anti-inflation (impetus) and we got inflation down from 41/2 percent to 3 percent, and then in the next expansion we were able to keep inflation from accelerating, sooner or later there will be another recession out there. And so, if we could bring inflation down from cycle to cycle just as we let it build up from cycle to cycle, that would be considerable progress over what we’ve done in other periods in history.”

In other words, maybe the Fed isn’t undershooting its 2 percent inflation target. Maybe it’s secretly decided that it dreams of reducing the 2 percent target to a 1 percent target and wants the labor market to remain anemic until this curve drops even lower. Sumner notes that the phenomenon of the “jobless recovery” starts occurring at precisely the moment when the Fed adopts this doctrine.

The Shame of the Daily Caller

I’d encourage everyone to read this Ann Althouse post on today’s bogus Daily Caller story about JournoList. Her bottom line: “The Daily Caller’s article is weak. And I’m inclined to think the material in the Journolist archive is pretty mild stuff.”

What’s maddening about this whole issue is that of course it’s impossible to prove a negative. The closest one can come, however, is reasonable inference. The Caller appears to have access to a very large proportion of JournoList emails and they can’t come up with anything that withstands cursory scrutiny. Nor are they willing to simply publish the full text of the pilfered emails they’re writing about, forcing their audience to instead rely on Jonathan Strong’s deliberately misleading writeups.

At some point conservatives need to ask themselves about the larger meaning of this kind of conduct—and Andrew Breitbart’s—for their movement. Beyond the ethics of lying and smear one’s opponents, I would think conservatives would worry about the fact that a large portion of conservative media is dedicated to lying to conservatives. They regard their audience as marks to be misled and exploited, not as customers to be served with useful information.