Things I at One Time Wanted to Blog About...

Things I at one time wanted to blog about:

Arms and influence: The last throes : Vice President Cheney's statement that the Iraqi insurgency was in its final throes was so odd that it raises the question of why he said it. The signs are all there that the various insurgent groups are not being crushed: the number and lethality of attacks; the estimated size of the insurgent organizations; the continued inability of the Iraqi army to operate on its own against them; continued security measures based on the supposition that the insurgents have infiltrated the police, army, and other parts of the government.... Why did Cheney say what he did? Frankly, I don't know.... I don't think his motives are necessarily the important issue.... His statements complicate the work of others.... Cheney's comment distorts the decision-making process, making a hard job even harder.

PressThink: Transparency at the Post: Q & A with Jim Brady of Washingtonpost.com : "So if you're a responsible reporter and you call up the RNC spokesman and get the response to Gore's speech, you're just going to have to accept that when the spokesman tells you something kinda sorta plausible but fundamentally untrue you're going to attribute it, quote it accurately, and run it. Now you're involved in the propaganda machine yourself, but it happened as a result of trying to be balanced and responsible and 'avoid the impression of...' -- Jay." Unless, of course, you write the follow-up paragraph, based on a little research easily accessed in these days of digital databanks, which says, basically, "The RNC response is fundamentally untrue." Now, I grant you, nine out of 10 reporters don't do that -- even though it is not that hard to take that extra step. I learned that woeful fact in 2004, running Campaign Desk, the predecessor to CJR Daily. And every time we saw it, we called them on it -- usually to no avail. But my point is, that is the way out of what you describe as Downie's dilemma ... or Sue Schmidt's dilemma ... or Harris's dilemma ... or Howell's dilemma. What's depressing is that none of them get it. Posted by: Steve Lovelady at January 22, 2006 07:40 PM | Permalink

TPMCafe || Politics, Ideas & Lots Of Caffeine: It may not be readily apparent to people why an image of an 18th century coffeehouse is appropriate adornment for a new media enterprise. The intended reference, I believe, is to the ideas expressed in Jurgen Habermas' The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgois Society. Before checking it out with Google I was under the impression that this was an essay I'd read in school. It seems, though, that it's a whole book I must have read excerpts of.... The most important feature of the public sphere as it existed in the eighteenth century was the public use of reason in rational-critical debate. This checked domination by the state, or the illegitimate use of power. Rational-critical debate occurred within the bourgeois reading public, in response to literature, and in institutions such as salons and coffee-houses. Habermas sees the public sphere as developing out of the private institution of the family, and from what he calls the 'literary public sphere', where discussion of art and literature became possible for the first time. The public sphere was by definition inclusive, but entry depended on one's education and qualification as a property owner. Habermas emphasizes the role of the public sphere as a way for civil society to articulate its interests. Good stuff. Eventually, though, things took a turn for the worse.... The key feature of the public sphere - rational-critical debate - was replaced by leisure.... Habermas argues that the world of the mass media is cheap and powerful. He says that it attempts to manipulate and create a public where none exists.... We still need a strong public sphere to check domination by the state and non-governmental organizations. Habermas holds out some hope that power and domination may not be permanent features. A serious problem indeed. TPM Cafe, one hopes, is part of the solution.... [T]he site does involve a system for quality-rating comments, so maybe things will get ugly...

Limbo: Roberts%u2019 Rules of Guile : According to the Portland Oregonian, last August Senator Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) had a conversation with then-Supreme Court nominee John G. Roberts Jr., after which Wyden pronounced himself convinced that %u201Cin cases dealing with end-of-life care, [Roberts] would "start with the supposition that one has the right to be left alone." This was important, because Oregon is the only state in the Union that permits physician-assisted suicide.... A final decision on the issue came down just yesterday, with the high court ruling 6-3 in favor of Oregon, upholding its 1994 Death With Dignity law.... So, how did the new chief justice--whom a reassured Wyden eventually chose to confirm--vote in this landmark case of individual rights versus government intrusion? Well, he was one of the three dissenters, joining ultraconservatives Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia in arguing that Ashcroft's efforts to criminalize the dispensing of life-ending drugs was legally appropriate.... Trusting George W. Bush's nominees can prove to be as difficult as trusting the prez himself.

The Big Picture: The Psychology Behind Common Investor Mistakes : Behavioral finance, a relatively new area of financial research, has been receiving more and more attention from both individual and institutional investors. Behavioral finance combines results from psychological studies of decision-making with the more conventional decision-making models of standard finance theory. By combining psychology and finance, researchers hope to better explain certain features of securities markets and investor behavior that appear irrational.... Six common errors of perception and judgment.... Overconfidence.... What, if anything, can investors do about the general tendency toward overconfidence?.... Trade less.... Fear of Regret.... Cognitive Dissonance.... How can you adjust for the tendency to avoid or deny new, conflicting information?... investment discipline.... Anchoring.... Representativeness.... Myopic Risk Aversion...

KR Washington Bureau | 01/11/2006 | Knight Ridder's Alito story: Factual and fair : On Dec. 1, Knight Ridder's Washington bureau sent a story analyzing the record of Judge Samuel Alito to our 32 daily newspapers and to the more than 300 papers that subscribe to the Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service. Written by Stephen Henderson, Knight Ridder's Supreme Court correspondent, and Howard Mintz of the San Jose Mercury News, the story began: "During his 15 years on the federal bench, Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito has worked quietly but resolutely to weave a conservative legal agenda into the fabric of the nation's laws."... Henderson and Mintz cataloged the cases by category - employment discrimination, criminal justice, immigration and so on - and analyzed each one with help from attorneys who participated on both sides of the cases and experts in those fields of law. They interviewed legal scholars and other judges, many of them admirers of Alito. They concluded that, "although Alito's opinions are rarely written with obvious ideology, he's seldom sided with a criminal defendant, a foreign national facing deportation, an employee alleging discrimination or consumers suing big business." You might find this neither surprising nor controversial. Alito, after all, was nominated by a president who said that his ideal Supreme Court justices were Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, the high court's most reliably conservative members. You'd be wrong. Within days, the Senate Republican Conference circulated a lengthy memo headlined, "Knight Ridder Misrepresents Judge Alito's 15-year record."... Fact-based reporting is the lifeblood of a democracy. It gives people shared information on which to make political choices. But as people in new democracies risk their lives to gather such information, in this country fact-based reporting is under more relentless assault than at any time in my more than 40 years in Washington.... I invite you to reach your own conclusion about Knight Ridder's Alito story...

battlepanda: Why are our Intro to Econ classes failing us?: How is it possible for a guy like RJ to, for all intents and purposes, not believe in economics? He certainly is intelligent, and more importantly intellectually curious. He was even curious enough about economics at one point to take an intro to Econ class at college. Amherst College, which is among the best schools in this country... this class, Econ 11, was tailored precisely to function as a freestanding introduction to economics...

Singularity! - A Tough Guide to the Rapture of the Nerds

It's hard to talk about what "liberalism" is as a philosophical doctrine because there are at least four:

1. There's the "let's not celebrate St. Bartholomew's Day this year" liberalism--the liberalism of fear.
2. There's the "let's try lots of different things on an individual and a group level and then learn from each other's mistakes" liberalism--the liberalism of uncertainty, and of the consequent value of social diversification.
3. There's the "this liberal order stuff has worked *much* better than anything else we've tried" liberalism--the liberalism of conservativism.
4. There's "stairmaster liberalism"--the liberalism of John Stuart Mill in which adulthood is reached only by exercising your mental decision-making muscles, which can only be properly done in a liberal order.