Kevin Drum

Friday Cat Blogging - 15 October 2010

| Fri Oct. 15, 2010 12:07 PM PDT

Back in the day, both Inkblot and Domino used to stroll around on top of the fence between our house and our neighbors. The only way they could get up, though, was to jump onto the air conditioning unit first and then jump from there to the fence. That all ended a couple of years ago when we got a new air conditioner, which was too high and too rounded for them to get to. The days of fence walking were over.

Until now! But I'm stumped about what's going on. For about the last week or two they've been roaming along the fence again. Our first thought was that they were going into our neighbor's yard and jumping up from there, but Domino never goes over there. The air conditioning unit hasn't changed, and I'm pretty sure it's just too high for them to jump on. They always appear from the southeast corner, but there's nothing there that would help them make the jump. So what's going on?

One of these days I'll be outside and catch them in the act, and when I do I'll report back. In the meantime, here they are patrolling the fence. Don't you feel safer already?

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Better Than a Radar Detector

| Fri Oct. 15, 2010 11:37 AM PDT

In the "news you can use" category, a study by Quality Planning, a San Francisco firm that services the auto insurance industry, provides us with a list of the cars most and least likely to get you a ticket. Here are the lists:

Why is the Toyota Camry the 2nd most ticketed model? That's a stumper. The rest make a little bit of sense, though the numbers seem surprisingly high. Why would a Mercedes SL get ticketed at a wildly higher rate than, say, a Corvette or a Porsche? As for the "cautious" list, Quality Planning, after noting eight of the top ten were either an SUV or a minivan, guesses that "carrying passengers, and possibly younger passengers in car seats, makes a noticeable difference in how one drives." Maybe so. Complete list here.

Is Gridlock Good?

| Fri Oct. 15, 2010 10:06 AM PDT

Bruce Bartlett celebrates divided government:

Too bad we didn’t have more gridlock in 2001 through 2006, when Democrats retook the House and Senate; it might have saved the country from two unnecessary wars, a lot of dead servicemen and women, a vast amount of spending that the country couldn’t afford, and the intentional destruction of the government’s revenue-raising capacity so that a debt crisis has become almost certain in the not-too-distant future.

Hard to argue with that! But I'm not so sure about this:

Democrats had the bad luck to retake complete control right at the beginning of the second greatest economic crisis in our history. Unfortunately, they played their cards badly. They didn’t have the guts to push a fiscal stimulus plan as large as their economic advisers said was necessary, then they immediately stopped talking about the economy and unemployment, turning their attention instead to health care reform, energy and the environment, and a host of other issues.

I think President Obama and Democrats in Congress are being punished less for economic conditions beyond their control than a perception that they didn’t care enough about the Number One problem affecting the country — slow growth and high unemployment. If they had put aside the rest of their agenda and focused like a laser on restoring the economy to health, they would be in far better shape politically, even if actual economic conditions were no better today.

The premise behind this is that Obama and the Democrats could have done a lot more to improve the economy. But I'm not convinced of that. A bigger stimulus? Sure, that would have helped, but even if they had been gutsier, political pressure wouldn't have allowed them to pass a $2 trillion bill. It would have been more like $900 billion, or maybe $1 trillion at best. That would have helped, but it's nowhere near big enough to have made a dramatic difference. Unemployment would still be sky high.

The only other thing I can think of that the administration screwed up seriously is mortgage reform. Again, though, that would have been politically difficult even if they had played all their cards perfectly. Like it or not, the American public hates the idea of seeing their neighbors get bailed out from stupid mortgages. It makes them feel like saps: we scrimped and saved and bought a house we could afford and we're getting nothing. Joe and Betty down the street lived the high life, took out a NINJA loan they knew was way more than they could afford, and now they're getting a taxpayer-funded bailout and living easy. That's not a vote getter.

I think Bruce way overestimates the value of perception. Sure, a better communications strategy might have helped. Getting healthcare done faster might have helped. Beyond that, though, people are mostly reacting to actual pain, and there's surprisingly little Obama could have done about that. A gigantic stimulus and more aggressive action from the Fed might have done the trick, but Republicans and centrist Dems flatly wouldn't have allowed the former and the president has no leverage over the latter. Failing that, balance sheet recessions just take a long time to work through. There's not a lot Obama could have done to change that.

The New Normal

| Fri Oct. 15, 2010 9:29 AM PDT

I didn't see last night's debate between Harry Reid and Sharron Angle, but the consensus seems to be that both speakers were terrible. However, Angle may have benefited from galactically low expectations. "Angle repeatedly found herself in verbal cul-de-sacs which she only escaped by returning to well-rehearsed talking points," said Politico's Jonathan Martin, "all the while blurring over some of her controversial statements or ignoring questions about them altogether." And the Las Vegas Sun's Jon Ralston more or less agreed: "Angle won because she looked relatively credible, appearing not to be the Wicked Witch of the West."

So I guess that's where we are. Freakish candidates are now held to such low standards that all they have to do is surprise us by not sounding like they belong in a locked mental ward. Welcome to 2010.

Barack Obama and the Chamber of Secrets

| Fri Oct. 15, 2010 8:46 AM PDT

Ezra Klein doesn't think that Democratic attacks on the Chamber of Commerce are doing them any good:

A MoveOn.org poll showing that voters respond negatively when asked, "If a candidate is backed by anonymous or corporate groups, which run ads that mask their identity, does that make you more likely to vote for that candidate?" doesn't prove otherwise. You can poll any attack line or boast in isolation and voters will like it. What would prove — or at least suggest — otherwise is evidence that these attacks are swinging voters toward the Democrats. But if anything, the opposite is happening.

I agree, but I'd offer up two responses. First, it's too early. The anti-Chamber campaign has only been active for a few days. That's far too short a time to see any effect even if it's a good electoral strategy. Second, I think of this in much longer terms. It might or might not help in the November midterms, but Democrats really need to let the public know that the Chamber should be thought of the same way as the NRA: an extremely aggressive special interest group with huge amounts of cash and a hyper-partisan outlook. Getting that message out successfully doesn't mean the Chamber would be defanged. The NRA, after all, is still famously powerful. But it does mean that it might lose some of its influence among centrist leaners, who still think of the Chamber as a vaguely reliable souce of civic worthiness and don't realize what Tom Donohue has turned it into. That's useful stuff for future elections whether or not it does any good this year.

California Propositions

| Fri Oct. 15, 2010 3:00 AM PDT

I know that only a small slice of my readers live in California, so I hope the rest of you will indulge me while I go through my periodic review of California ballot initiatives today. There are nine of them up for a vote next month, so this is going to be a bit of a long post.

As longtime readers know, I'm generally unhappy with the entire initiative process (reasons here), so keep this bias in mind as you continue reading. This doesn't mean I oppose everything, but it does mean that even things I basically approve of have to pass a pretty high hurdle before I'll vote for them. (With this in mind, if you'd like to see a more conventional take on this year's ballot from a liberal perspective, check out the Courage Campaign's ballot guide here.)

  1. Marijuana Legalization: MAYBE. Let's be honest: nobody needs my help with this one. If you're in favor of legalizing pot, vote Yes. If not, vote No. I'm a little embarrassed to admit this, but I probably won't make up my mind about Prop 19 until I'm actually in the voting booth and ready to push the button.

    On the merits, the big problem with Prop 19 is that it puts California squarely in opposition to federal law. However, this strikes me as a feature, not a bug, since I think it might just be time for a few fireworks. Prop 19 also shares one of the drawbacks of all initiatives, namely that it sets its rules in stone and allows the legislature very little scope to change them if things don't work out. And there's no question that allowing every county in California to write its own marijuana laws could create a fair amount of chaos. What's more, there's also the fact that legalizing marijuana won't just create more casual marijuana users, it will almost certainly also create more heavy users. That's not a good thing.

    So there really are a few things to be careful about here. On the other hand marijuana is, overall, basically a pretty damn safe drug, and the dangers of increased use are modest enough that there's really not much excuse for the state prohibiting grown men and women from using it if they want to. What's more, a perfect legalization measure is unlikely to ever come along, and the California legislature won't work up the stones to deal with this any time soon either. As initiatives go, this one isn't bad.

  2. Redistricting Reform: YES. Two years ago we passed Proposition 11, which took redistricting of state districts out of the hands of the legislature and put it in the hands of a "citizen commission." There were two modest downsides to this: (a) the way the commission was set up is a little bit squirrelly, and (b) there's a lot of evidence that redistricting reform is unlikely to have a big effect.

    Still, I recommended a Yes vote on Prop 11 and I recommend extending it this year to congressional districts. Having legislatures draw their own boundaries is crazy, and we've passed up a bunch of opportunities in the past to fix this. This one isn't bad — the "citizen commission" may be a little squirrelly but it's not obviously biased in favor of either party — and even if it makes only a small difference, small is better than nothing.

    (Also note that this is the kind of thing the initiative process is actually designed for. It's not ballot box budgeting, it's not something trivial that doesn't belong in the constitution, and it's not something the legislature is likely to tackle on its own.)

  3. Park Surcharge: NO. This initiative increases the vehicle license fee by $18 and applies the revenue to maintaining state parks. It's a hard one to vote against since it's fully self-funding and fiscally defensible, but we just can't keep doing stuff like this. Every year we pass ever more initiatives that set up special funds or earmark revenue for special purposes or demand that the legislature allocate spending in a certain way. Then we complain that the budget is a mess. We really have to stop doing this, even in a good cause.

  4. Prohibit State Raids of Local Funds: NO. This one is a little hard to vote against too. It's yet another long-term domino effect of Proposition 13, which not only lowered property taxes but essentially made Sacramento the final arbiter of how to allocate them. As a result, sometimes the state allocates money in ways that local communities resent, like giving more money to schools or using transportation money to pay off state transportation bonds. I sympathize. But you know what? Them's the breaks. Voters wanted lower property taxes in 1978, and one of the results is that local communities lost a big chunk of their funding and gave up a lot of fiscal control to Sacramento. I think that was a bad trade, but if voters ever decide to agree with me the answer is a full-scale overhaul of Prop 13, not constant piecemeal attempts to tie the legislature's hands and continue our collective fantasy that tax cuts have no consequences.

  5. Eliminate Greenhouse Gas Limits: NO. This is a no-brainer. The legislature passed AB 32, the Global Warming Act, four years ago, and it mandates a range of measure to cut greenhouse gases and encourage the use of renewable energy sources. It's extremely popular, as it should be, except with a few big oil refiners who are trying to buy themselves an initiative that would, in practice, repeal it forever. It's a bad idea.

  6. Repeal Business Tax Cut: NO. Another tough vote. These tax cuts were unnecessary, we can't afford them, and they were passed only as part of horsetrading with Republicans in order to enact a budget a couple of years ago. But look: ugly or not, these are the kinds of deals legislatures need to be able to make.

    But I'd be lying if I didn't admit that I might vote Yes once I actually get into the privacy of the voting booth. Special interest tax cuts like these are pretty indefensible in a state with a $19 billion budget hole.

  7. Pass Budgets With a Simple Majority: YES. It is almost clinically insane that California requires a two-thirds vote to pass our annual budget. The whole point of a supermajority requirement is that it be reserved for only a few specific matters of special concern. The annual budget is the exact opposite of that. For good or ill, of course it should only require a simple majority.

  8. Require Two-Thirds Vote To Increase Local Fees: NO. Proposition 13 is most famous for lowering property taxes, but it also established a two-thirds vote requirement for future tax increases of any kind. But what about fees? Those can be raised with only a majority vote, and both the state and local communities often use fees to charge businesses for safety and cleanup programs — for example, levies on beverage containers to pay for recycling programs or fees for cleaning up oil spills and fighting air pollution. Needless to say, oil, tobacco, and alcohol companies don't much care for this, and Prop 26 is their way to put a stop to it. But even if they have a point about the fuzzy boundary between taxes and fees, flatly eliminating the ability to charge corporations for the damage they incur goes too far. (I say "flatly eliminate" because in practice no fee increase can ever get a two-thirds vote and they know it.) The last thing we need is another initiative from rich special interests that effectively ropes off yet another budget area from legislative control. It's madness.

  9. Eliminate Redistricting Reform: NO. This would undo redistricting reform completely. Obviously I'm against that.

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Quote of the Day: Impeachment!

| Thu Oct. 14, 2010 10:07 PM PDT

From Thoreau:

What are your predictions? I’m tempted to say “Serious predictions only”, but it’s not clear what the actual line between fantasy and reality is here...

The topic here is, "What excuse will some insane tea party faction in the House use to bring impeachment charges against Barack Obama?"

Since we're going for style points here, I'm putting my money on a scenario in which South Carolina decides to nullify the healthcare reform law and prohibit its enforcement. Obama nevertheless directs the IRS office in Charleston to dispatch tax delinquency notices to uninsured residents. Governor Nikki Haley instructs the state police to barricade the IRS in order to prevent it from delivering outgoing mail, at which point Obama sends in Army troops to reopen the office. This is taken as a tyrannical abuse of federal power, and Rep. Joe Wilson files immediate impeachment charges. The impeachment bill passes with 220 votes — 201 from the Tea Party, 18 from the rump Republican Party, plus Bobby Bright — and is sent to the Senate. Chief Justice John Roberts presides, wearing robes decorated with the scales of justice stitched in gold lame, but Tea Partiers and Republicans eventually rally only eight Democratic supporters and the charges fail by a single vote. Mary Landrieu, who spends the entire trial vacillating loudly and publicly about the weight of history, eventually provides the one-vote margin of victory and immediately commissions a book about her experience, Keeping Faith: How One Woman Made a Difference in Trying Times.

Or something like that.

School Testing Followup

| Thu Oct. 14, 2010 3:05 PM PDT

Yesterday I wrote a gloomy post about education, suggesting that despite decades of punditry that identify heroes and villains with abandon, "You can go down the list of every ed reform ever touted, and they either can't scale up, turn out to have ambiguous results when proper studies are done, or simply wash out over time." I've been meaning for a while to post something else on this subject, because Bob Somerby has been beating this drum for a while. Here's Bob:

NAEP scores for black kids and Hispanic kids are way up, in reading and math, in the past dozen years....But so what? Everyone agrees to avoid discussing these large score gains, even as we wring our hands about school reform and savage America’s teachers, along with their infernal unions. We think we understand Kevin’s view of this matter; a few months ago, he said those score gains don’t mean all that much because they haven’t been matched in NAEP testing at the 17-year-old level. (In that sense, they might be said to “wash out over time,” although the kids recording the higher scores haven’t turned 17 yet.) That said, the score gains at earlier ages are very large — and yet, we all agree to ignore them, seeming to find them unworthy of exploration.

NAEP scores are widely considered pretty reliable, and we've been conducting NAEP tests for several decades. So what do they show about gains among black kids? The basic chart is on the right. The data comes from this report, which provides both reading and math scores for black, white, and Hispanic kids at three different age levels since 1971.

I don't really want to spin this any particular way. I just want everyone to see the basic data so we're working from similar baselines. Roughly speaking, there were substantial gains at all grade levels between 1971 and 1988. After that, there was a decade of stagnation.

Then, after that, there was a decade of qualified progress. I say "qualified" because it's hard to draw any firm conclusions from it. Since the late-nineties, 9-year-old black kids have improved their reading scores 18 points. Ten points on the NAEP is roughly a grade level, so that's pretty impressive. 13-year olds improved nine points. 17-year olds improved two points.

What does that mean? I just don't know. The gains among 9-year-olds are genuinely extraordinary (white kids also improved during this period, but only by seven points). Two grade levels is a huge difference. But half the improvement washed out in just the next four years. And in the four years after that the rest of it washed out. Reading scores among 17-year-old black kids have been flat for two decades. Ditto for white and Hispanic kids.

Now, this doesn't mean that whatever happened in 1999 doesn't matter. School reforms generally start at the elementary level and work their way up. So maybe we just haven't had time for the reforms of the past decade to show up among 17-year-olds. It's also true that dropout rates confound the data gathering at higher age levels.

But I'd be lying if I didn't say that I'm skeptical. It's true that there's some evidence in the data that the gains of the 70s and 80s were staggered: age 9 first, then age 13, then age 17. But only partly. Generally speaking, all three cohorts progressed at the same time. This time around we aren't seeing it. 9-year-old black kids improved their reading scores by a stunning 14 points in the single period between 1999 and 2004. These are the 13-year-olds of the next testing period, but 13-year-olds only gained three points between 2004 and 2008.

So.....I'm not sure where to go from here. Bob is right that test scores1 among 9-year-old black kids have made impressive progress over the past decade, and this gets largely ignored by a media that seems interested only in dramatic tales of heroic reformers and evil teacher's unions. On the other hand, none of this progress matters much unless those improvements are persistent. If the gains all wash out by the time kids graduate from high school, they haven't done any good.

So that's the data. It shows what it shows, and the story is partly encouraging and partly not. It's also unfinished (data always is), and in any case, I don't know of anyone who's adequately explained why we've seen such impressive elementary school gains over the past decade. Without that, we hardly know what our next steps ought to be. Caveat emptor.

1Math scores have shown similar patterns: big gains at age 9, smaller gains at age 13, and very small gains at age 17.

Politics as Entertainment

| Thu Oct. 14, 2010 12:18 PM PDT

James Fallows watched the O'Donnell-Coons debate on TV and concluded that Christine O'Donnell is a true creature of the 21st century:

Sarah Palin was wounded by Katie Couric and Charlie Gibson in their 2008 interviews because she seemed at some level aware of what she didn't know.....[But] in this debate tonight, O'Donnell has not seemed uncomfortable for one second — even in her most obvious dodge, about whether she really thinks evolution is a "myth." The difference is, she is a talk show regular. Among the many things wrong with talking-head gab shows, which have proliferated/ metastasized in the past generation — they're cheap to produce, they fill air time, they make journalists into celebrities, they suit the increasing political niche-ization of cable networks — is that they reward an affect of breezy confidence on all topics and penalize admissions of complexity, of ignorance on a specific topic, or of the need for time to think.

Paul Waldman pleads for the media to fight back:

One of the simple tactics I used was to ask my opposing number to get specific about whatever sweeping claim they were making. Simply saying, "Can you tell us what exactly you're talking about?" was often enough to win the argument, because as often as not there really wasn't anything in particular....Christine O'Donnell got stumped on a question like this at a debate yesterday when she was asked what Supreme Court decisions she disagreed with, which presumably came because she had given the standard Republican line about the tyranny of liberal judicial activists.

This isn't just a plea for campaigns to be more focused on policy. Every candidate makes choices about what he or she believes the important issues are, and focuses the campaign on those issues. They regularly get away with making vague yet wildly overstated claims about them, and they ought to tell voters just what they're talking about.

But Paul, details are boring! And elitist. And besides, if you start asking about them then people won't come on your show anymore. Politics has always been as much entertainment as anything else, and today the entertainment comes in glorious, 24/7, high-def color. Why would anyone want to interfere with that?

Quote of the Day: Secret Corporate Donors

| Thu Oct. 14, 2010 11:28 AM PDT

From Chamber of Commerce lobbyist Bruce Josten, explaining why they keep the names of their donors secret:

Corporations, as I said, have employees, vendors, suppliers, and shareholders of all political stripes. They’re not trying to alienate anybody. They’re looking for representative organizations, such as mine and thousands of others, to be an express organization to advocate for them on their behalf.

Whatever else you can say about the flap over the Chamber's funding sources, this is a notably unpersuasive argument. Josten is essentially saying that rich corporations want the ability to hound and attack anyone in the political sphere they don't like, but want to be protected from being hounded and attacked by others. That's nice work if you can get it, but I don't think most Americans will be sympathetic. If you want to be in the arena, then you need to be in the arena. Being a corporation doesn't — and shouldn't — endow you with a special exemption from being attacked if you take controversial political views.

UPDATE: Chamber CEO Tom Donohue, as usual, puts things more bluntly: "I want to give them all the deniability they need," he says. And he does.